The nature of the universe, whether God(s) exist, and how we define them

Cypress said:
Phoenyx said:
Agreed. As I mentioned before, I believe that things are the way they are because they want to be, but the only evidence I have for that is the fact that living things do what they want to do. Which suggests that I believe that the universe (or multiverse) is alive in some way. Have you read much on the subject of synchronicity, a term first first coined by psychologist Carl Jung, and fleshed out with his physicist friend Wolfgang Pauli? There's an article on their theory here:

How iconic psychiatrist Carl Jung and nobel-winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli bridged mind and matter | lefkadazin.gr
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Much to the annoyance of Einstein, some of the early pioneering quantum physicists like Pauli dabbled in Hinduism and Eastern religions and seemed to try to fuse science and religion Into a type of quantum mysticism.

That kind of speculation isn't much different than religion or metaphysics, and certainly never gained traction in the mainstream scientific community. But I still think that kind of speculation is perfectly reasonable to engage in.
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I think it's ironic that Einstein would be against it, considering he was Jewish and also Pantheist, by his own admission. Like you, I think it's a good thing that these different arenas cross pollinate, as it were. When any arena gets too rigid and refuses to consider ideas from another, I think it's not a good thing.
 
Into the Night said:
Phoenyx said:
I seldom get involved in discussions involving religion because people tend to believe that circular arguments are proof they are right all the time. However, there are a few people who are more open minded. As a Pantheist who believes that everything is God, no one I know would argue that God exists under this definition, but they -have- pointed out that this is not how they define God, so for -them- God doesn't exist because of how they define God. This subject of whether God exists and perhaps more importantly, how we define God, has been one I've found to be interesting but as it's significantly off the subject of this thread, I decided to make this new thread and put my response here.
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Paradox. Which is it, dude?
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Where do you see a paradox in what I said?
 
Into the Night said:
Phoenyx said:
Well, that depends on how one defines religion :-p. It wouldn't fit with the American Heritage Dictionary's first definition of the term:
**
The belief in and reverence for a supernatural power or powers, regarded as creating and governing the universe.
**
Source:
https://www.wordnik.com/words/religion

But the third definition gets close:
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A set of beliefs, values, and practices based on the teachings of a spiritual leader.
**

I've seen the definition without the second part there, that it's based on the teachings of a spiritual leader. We -all- have a set of beliefs and values, so that is certainly universal.

I'm curious, is there any evidence that Jesus actually said he was the Son of God? I saw a documentary called Zeitgeist which argued that it was more that his mythos was combined with the worship of the -Sun-, which gives an explanation as to why his day of worship is on Sunday, rather than the traditional Friday/Saturday as is customary for jews, which Jesus was. If you haven't seen the documentary and are curious about it, it's here:
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Dictionaries don't define any word. That is not their purpose.
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According to who? After a quick internet search, I found this, bolding the relevant part:

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In addition to its basic function of defining words, a dictionary may provide information about their pronunciation, grammatical forms and functions, etymologies, syntactic peculiarities, variant spellings, and antonyms.
**

Source:
What is the purpose of the dictionary? | answer-all.com
 
Phoenyx said:
According to who? After a quick internet search, I found this, bolding the relevant part:

**
In addition to its basic function of defining words, a dictionary may provide information about their pronunciation, grammatical forms and functions, etymologies, syntactic peculiarities, variant spellings, and antonyms.
**

Source:
What is the purpose of the dictionary? | answer-all.com
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Into the Night is an extremely stupid troll. He just says the same thing over and over and over.
 
Phoenyx said:
According to who? After a quick internet search, I found this, bolding the relevant part:

**
In addition to its basic function of defining words, a dictionary may provide information about their pronunciation, grammatical forms and functions, etymologies, syntactic peculiarities, variant spellings, and antonyms.
**

Source:
What is the purpose of the dictionary? | answer-all.com
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No dictionary defines any word. No dictionary owns any word. False authority fallacy.
 
Phoenyx said:
I think it's ironic that Einstein would be against it, considering he was Jewish and also Pantheist, by his own admission. Like you, I think it's a good thing that these different arenas cross pollinate, as it were. When any arena gets too rigid and refuses to consider ideas from another, I think it's not a good thing.
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I would be surprised if there is any direct quote from Einstein anywhere in which he calls himself a pantheist. A lot of people have always endeavored to put their own labels on Einstein, but I suspect the only thing he ever labelled himself was agnostic. Although the record was clear that he seemed to appreciate Baruch Spinoza's philosophy of a nature's god.

I would also be surprised if any quote from Einstein exists where he openly lends his support to psychological speculations like synchronicity. I have never heard that it achieved widespread traction in the physics community.

Though I might be wrong, and always willing to reconsider if presented with undisputed facts.
 
Cypress said:
I would be surprised if there is any direct quote from Einstein anywhere in which he calls himself a pantheist. A lot of people have always endeavored to put their own labels on Einstein, but I suspect the only thing he ever labelled himself was agnostic. Although the record was clear that he seemed to appreciate Baruch Spinoza's philosophy of a nature's god.
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I acknowledge that I have never seen a quote wherein he calls himself a pantheist. There is one that is fairly close though:

**
Scholars have categorized Albert Einstein as a pantheist, a word that has been subject to abuse. When Einstein was directly asked if he would define himself this way, he responded,

“Your question is the most difficult in the world. It is not a question I can answer simply with yes or no. I am not an atheist. I do not know if I can define myself as a pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. May I not reply with a parable? The human mind, no matter how highly trained, cannot grasp the universe. We are in the position of a little child, entering a huge library whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written those books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order, which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of the human mind, even the greatest and most cultured, toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranged, obeying certain laws, but we understand the laws only dimly. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that sways the constellations. I am fascinated by Spinoza’s pantheism. I admire even more his contributions to modern thought. Spinoza is the greatest of modern philosophers, because he is the first philosopher who deals with the soul and the body as one, not as two separate things.”

He was asked about pantheism because he often distinguished his version of God with the traditional theistic view of a personal God,

“I believe in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.”

In the most simplistic terms, pantheism means “All is God” and is often associated with the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza. It is the belief in a divine unity of natural laws. Scholars have noted that the word has been subject to “theological abuse” over the years. Theologians approach pantheism with a theistic mindset. That is, they take pantheism to mean a relatively well-defined knowledge of God similar to their own. But with pantheism, a well-defined knowledge of God would absurdly suggest a well-defined knowledge of ‘everything’, since everything is God in pantheism.
**

Source:
Albert Einstein | pantheism.com

Cypress said:
I would also be surprised if any quote from Einstein exists where he openly lends his support to psychological speculations like synchronicity. I have never heard that it achieved widespread traction in the physics community.
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I agree that synchronicity never achieved widespread traction in the physics community, but there's still time :-p. I know of 2 books that came out on synchronicity, the first in 1987 and the second in 1990. The first one appears to have more of a focus on physics than the second. They both mention a lot of interesting things. I actually read the 1990 book first and am currently working on the 1987 book.

If interested, here's some descriptions of them:
Synchronicity: The Bridge Between Matter and Mind [1987] | goodreads.com

Synchronicity: Science, Myth, and the Trickster [1990] | goodreads.com

I found both of these books due to my father, who had acquired them. There are many more books on synchronicity, from Carl Jung's book published back in 1952 all the way to books published recently such as this one:
Synchronicity: The Epic Quest to Understand the Quantum Nature of Cause and Effect [2020] | goodreads.com

goodreads.com has a list of books that have been labelled as containing synchronicity that helped me find all of these titles here:
Synchronicity Books | goodreads.com


As to Einstein, as far as I know, you are right that he never leant support to idea of synchronicity. That being said, he did apparently have various discussions with Carl Jung on physics. As a matter of fact, Jung says that Einstein inspired him to think of a connection between psychology and physics. In his own words:

**
Jung’s fascination with physics actually began early in his career as a result of a series of dinners with Albert Einstein between 1909 and 1912.

He later wrote that “It was Einstein who first started me thinking about a relativity of time as well as space, and their psychic conditionality…years later this stimulus led to my relation with the physicist Professor W. Pauli and to my thesis of psychic synchronicity.”
**

Source:
Jung, Einstein and Synchronicity | jungcurrents.com
 
Phoenyx said:
Ever since I was young, I found the nature of the universe to be a fascinating subject. I grew up in a family that was rather ambigous about God. My father has called himself an atheist in the past, although he's liked the concept of synchronicity and astrology, suggesting that there's actually something a type of 'behind the scenes' organization to things. My mother's been part of more than one religion in her lifetime. I personally had this idea that everything was connected and part of the whole and when I found the term Pantheism, which is essentially a religion with this idea, I settled on this for myself. I'm also a strong believer in sychronicity, have read a book on the subject and am currently working my way through another.

So this thread is essentially about the nature of the universe. I personally tell people that I believe in God, but Pantheist's idea of God with it being everything is not what many people associate with God being separate from their creation. Anyway, I made this thread because the subject of God(s) or the lack thereof came up in another thread whose subject had little to do with this, and I thought it'd be good to have a thread where this was in fact the main subject so that I could transfer any thread posts I was going to make there over here.

Anyone else who's interested in the subject of the nature of the universe and whether or not they believe that a God or Gods exists and how they define their God(s) may wish to make a comment or 2 here.
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Atheists see a birthday cake and I hope they can acknowledge it was the result of a baker's effort yet they look at the universe, which is exponentially more complicated than a birthday cake, but they don't believe its the result of a creators effort. It's seems though that the more educated people get the more stupid they become. Fascinating.
 
Yakuda said:
Atheists see a birthday cake and I hope they can acknowledge it was the result of a baker's effort yet they look at the universe, which is exponentially more complicated than a birthday cake, but they don't believe its the result of a creators effort. It's seems though that the more educated people get the more stupid they become. Fascinating.
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What is the creator of the universe like? Specifics, please. Thanks!
 
Cypress said:
There very well may be a higher organizing principle underlying the universe. But since we are basically
just souped-up chimpanzees, we might not have the cognitive capacity to fully comprehend it.

To me, the most important lingering unanswered questions are these:

Where did the physical laws of the universe come from? Prior to the big bang, nothing presumably existed, and nor did physics exist.

Why are there physical constants, and why do they take the values they do? Seemingly arbitrary numerical values which cannot be derived from first principles.

Why are the natural laws, the physical constants, and the geometry of the cosmos so finely-tuned in such a mathematically-improbable way to allow the development of complexity, life, and even conciousness?
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Why do you assume nothing happened before the big bang? It makes more sense that something huge happened to cause such a Big reaction!
 
Cypress said:
I would be surprised if there is any direct quote from Einstein anywhere in which he calls himself a pantheist. A lot of people have always endeavored to put their own labels on Einstein, but I suspect the only thing he ever labelled himself was agnostic. Although the record was clear that he seemed to appreciate Baruch Spinoza's philosophy of a nature's god.

I would also be surprised if any quote from Einstein exists where he openly lends his support to psychological speculations like synchronicity. I have never heard that it achieved widespread traction in the physics community.

Though I might be wrong, and always willing to reconsider if presented with undisputed facts.
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Redundant. If a 'fact' is disputed, it is no longer a fact. Facts by there very nature of being a fact means they are undisputed (at least as any conversation using them is concerned).

You are correct in that a lot of people make 'quotes' of Einstein that he never really made. Many have assigned all kinds of wacky religions to him. It is, in the end, just speaking for the dead...a fallacy.

Einstein in his own written notes never made any definitive religious statement. He simply approached it in much the same science itself does, which is completely atheistic. Science doesn't care whether a god or gods exist or not. It simply doesn't go there. Apparently, never did Einstein.
 
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Yakuda said:
Atheists see a birthday cake and I hope they can acknowledge it was the result of a baker's effort yet they look at the universe, which is exponentially more complicated than a birthday cake, but they don't believe its the result of a creators effort. It's seems though that the more educated people get the more stupid they become. Fascinating.
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Was the universe created? Perhaps it has no beginning at all. It has always existed, and always will.
 
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