Apr 2nd, 2004, 12:19 PM
The chimp requested that I post an abstract of the theory, so here it is.
For the past few centuries, a rift has been growing between religion and science. The issues of heliocentrism and evolution have come and gone, but a much deeper conflict has received scant attention. Newton’s unveiling of the laws of physics in the seventeenth century gave birth to two new scientific schools of thought: determinism and reductionism. Determinism is the principle in which one concedes that a given set of conditions and motions will irrevocably result in a given set of consequences. Reductionism is the mode of thinking in which any process can be understood by being broken down into its constituent parts and motions. Coupling these two principles together, one must concede that an advanced intelligence could predict the future of the universe if it were able to know everything about the present characteristics and momenta of all of its particles. To provide an example for the laymen, if you have a set of ingredients and a recipe of instructions, by determinism and reductionism one could predict the final product.
Reductionism and determinism have a profound effect upon theology when they are applied to the human mind. Neuroscience and psychology have come to the point of understanding that virtually all aspects of human thinking can be rationalized by analysis of the brain’s composition and perceptions. This effectively denies the possibility of the orthodox belief that the soul steers one’s life through her daily routine. If there were some force that could be said to correspond to the soul guiding the body, it certainly would have been discovered now. Belief in the soul and free will have become so antiquated that belief in them has been utterly abandoned in modern science.
I have seen and experienced many remarkable things in this world which have imparted in me a powerful belief in God, and ultimately the soul. I have long held that science is the pen with which God drafted the history of the universe and human endeavor, so I refuse to allow the laity to pit religion against science in what seems to be mortal combat for domination. Thus I realized that religion must be wholly reinvented in order to survive the next leap into modernity.
Years ago I began to notice quirks in chronology when I felt that God was intervening into my life. Chance happenings and trivial circumstances would manifest themselves months later into profound consequences. I began to understand that in perspective of eternity, all of time is laid out at once like a book that has already been written. Curious of what else has been said along these lines, I began to study the metaphysical works of some of the great minds of Western thinking. Over the course of several years, I slowly began to uncover my own theory of how the soul maintains agency over the body without violating the laws of science.
While on leave of absence from my university education, I came to the conclusion that the central difference between my theory and orthodox religion is that I see the soul as eternal, while contemporary religion holds it to be merely immortal. That is, I concluded that the soul is without beginning and sits in transcendence of the passage of time. In my theory, the soul has always existed and will never perish. All the souls of human history, as well as the divine will of God, comprise what I call the ethereal collective. In an act of pure will, the ethereal collective forged the entire history of the universe at once, although this actually amounts to simply determining the forces of nature and the particle-antiparticle ratios of the big bang. Because all of time runs parallel to eternity, cause and effect relationships are much more skewed than in common perception. In Coeternalism there are metaphysical consequence and metaphysical aesthetic, both referring to when minor effects happen to set the precedent for some necessitated event. An example of metaphysical consequence would be a Hoosier soldier’s chance observation of a cigar roll that ended up being Confederate battle plans, it being the consequence of the North’s necessary victory in the Battle of Gettysburg three days later. An example of metaphysical aesthetic would be a song on the radio that triggers thoughts of a certain person with whom one is required to make contact. In Coeternalism, nothing is the product of chance. All of life and human history is a meticulously drawn work of art, and intricate story, replete with literary mechanics and poetic devices.
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) but it looks well thought out.
Linear Mode
