Posted by Roberta Grimes • September 02, 2023 • 12 Comments
Understanding Reality
Praise the Lord, my soul. Lord my God, you are very great!
You are clothed with splendor and majesty.
The Lord wraps himself in light as with a garment;
He stretches out the heavens like a tent and lays the beams of his upper chambers on their waters.
He makes the clouds his chariot and rides on the wings of the wind.
He makes winds his messengers, flames of fire his servants.
He set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved.
You covered it with the watery depths as with a garment; the waters stood above the mountains.
But at your rebuke the waters fled, at the sound of your thunder they took to flight;
They flowed over the mountains, they went down into the valleys, to the place you assigned for them.
You set a boundary they cannot cross; never again will they cover the earth.
He makes springs pour water into the ravines; it flows between the mountains.
They give water to all the beasts of the field; the wild donkeys quench their thirst.
The birds of the sky nest by the waters; they sing among the branches.
He waters the mountains from his upper chambers; the land is satisfied by the fruit of his work.
He makes grass grow for the cattle, and plants for people to cultivate—
bringing forth food from the earth: wine that gladdens human hearts,
oil to make their faces shine, and bread that sustains their hearts.
The trees of the Lord are well watered, the cedars of Lebanon that he planted.
There the birds make their nests; the stork has its home in the junipers.
The high mountains belong to the wild goats; the crags are a refuge for the hyrax.
– (Psalm 104 1-18)
One evening eighteen years ago, before I gave up on television, my husband called me to our bedroom to check out the start of a PBS special. And a young astrophysicist said something that profoundly seized my mind. I remember that moment so vividly! This is the only thing that I can recall from 2005, other than fleeing Hurricane Katrina up the west coast of Florida and actually then ending up moving to Texas. It must have been early on a late-summer evening, from the way the light was falling in the room. Edward had called to me to come and check out what he was about to watch, so he was sitting comfortably against the headboard but I was perched just on the foot of our bed because I was ready to reject what was on offer and head right back to my office. A PBS special was beginning. They were running some beautiful pre-roll of the universe, and a young-sounding astrophysicist was about to speak. What he said was, “For some reason, mathematics can be used to study the universe.” I swear! He said, “For some reason.” And I was thunderstruck.
I have wondered during the intervening years whether I would have been as affected if he had not begun with that odd question. Remove his “for some reason,” and you have just a plain declarative sentence. But add it, and the listener’s own mind immediately wonders what that reason might be. I moved from perching on the end of the bed to sitting against the headboard myself. I watched that whole PBS special, although I cannot now recall the first thing about it. But those first three words the presenter had said were a revelation to me. Think about it! What reason could there be why we can use mathematics to study the universe? I for one was sure that I knew the reason, which was why I found that astrophysicist’s question to be so flat-out astounding. It felt like materialist science’s long-awaited concession that God has to be behind it! Because I had known since I was in high school that math is a human-invented science. So that young astrophysicist had just informed us that the universe also must be invented. And if humans didn’t invent it, then who did?
There are math-people and there are non-math people, and I am emphatically a non-math person. By the time I was in the second semester of Algebra II in high school, I had decided that this would be my final math course unless someone could convince me that I might need to use higher forms of math later on. And more and more I was coming to suspect that no higher math was likely to be useful in the legal career that I was planning, so one day I stayed after class and asked my Algebra II teacher whether math was a discovered or an invented science. That seemed to be a crucial question! But my teacher gave me an impatient look, as if I might be trying to trick her, and she told me that math was an invented science. I thought, “Aha! Well, forget that!” And I never took another math course. (Actually, I have more recently learned that my question was not as foolish as that teacher seemed to think it was.)
So there I was in 2005, all those many years later, hearing a bright young scientist wondering why math can be used to study the universe. And if math is invented, then so indeed must the entire universe be invented as well, which seemed to me, even eighteen years ago, to be a pretty good proof of the existence of God. And then I came across another excellent Hillfaith video which makes that point better than I ever could. In fact, math is everywhere in science, to the point where it almost feels safe to say that math is the language of science, every bit as much as math is the language of God. Math is the way in which God built reality, and certainly God could not have used math to build reality if God were not the ultimate mathematician. Coming to see God that way as an afterlife researcher, eventually I came to regret my rash decision not to take calculus in high school. I should at least have tried to understand what higher mathematical concepts were about! Yes, the sight of mathematical equations on a chalkboard still gives me hives and a headache combined. But if math really was God’s language, then for years I wished that I had at least tried to learn it.
But is math in fact God’s language? For a long time, I was sure that it was. And as I thought about it, I could envision God with what must have been multiple heavenly chalkboards, first working out the language that was going to become higher mathematics, and then using that language to work out reality. And you can imagine the God that I must have had in mind back then, with such a long beard that He would have had to repeatedly throw it over His shoulder to keep it out of His way. He had to invent mathematics first, and God could have done that easily. With chalkboards and not whiteboards. This was long before whiteboards! Big chalkboards, as befitted a gigantic God. I never imagined any of this concretely, but had I imagined it, this is what I would have had in mind.
And then, at about the time that I was giving up on television, I was coming to understand that my old vision of God was altogether wrong. Ditch the beard. Ditch the notion that God would need something ponderous like mathematics with which to create reality. By the turn of this century, most afterlife researchers were coming to realize that Max Planck’s insights of a century before had been right, and consciousness is primary. Indeed, consciousness is all that exists, and reality is fundamentally non-physical. The more deeply we moved into the study of consciousness as primary and pre-existing, the more obvious it seemed to all of us that no other understanding of reality is possible. The more we studied what the dead were telling us, and especially the more we listened to what non-physical beings and our own spirit guides were telling us, the more the words of the first quantum physicists made sense. We are swimming in nothing but Consciousness!
Dr. Planck said, “There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the matrix of all matter.” Physicist Sir James Jeans simply said, “The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.”
Well, of course! God had no need to dream up mathematics in order to create reality! God is in fact the highest aspect of Consciousness, the very essence of pure Mind, and God could simply think all of reality into existence and maintain it in existence micro-instant by micro-instant, simply by Mind alone. Sir James Jeans was right. And maintaining the universe simply as a thought would be so much easier for God by far than what is actually happening, which is this kind of show-your-work situation where all of reality is constructed according to mathematical principles, so it can therefore be studied by us mathematically. Which fact brings us back to that young astrophysicist’s question of eighteen years ago.
If God never needed to use mathematics as God’s own tool by which to create and maintain this universe, then why can mathematics be used to study the universe? Why is the reality that God thought up deliberately created and refined in such a way that it obeys mathematical laws? Ah. That is the real question! And I invite your proposed answer in the Comments section. As for me, I can think of only one answer. I think that God wants us to have the ability to think it all through with our own earth-limited minds, and to seek and then to find the Creator behind it all. God made reality not as something random and without meaning, but as a set of puzzles that you and I have the ability to solve. Mathematics. Higher mathematics. And then the universe, in all its manifold complexities. All of this could have been thought up and maintained by a less loving God in each micro-instant as an entirely random thought, and much more easily for God. But that has never been God’s plan!
Our frame-verse was first sung at least three thousand years ago. Most weeks’ frame verses are just related to the post in some way, and are meant to entertain you; but this verse is an integral part of this post’s message. A thousand years before the birth of Jesus on earth, people were already making sense of God’s wisdom in arranging reality so they could live supported and sustained by it, and also so they could seek, find, and to at least some extent begin to comprehend and find God’s love in it. And if you will read Psalm 104 while seeing its message as God’s earliest call to people as it was being received and understood, and as it was then being first sung back to God in love and joy, it can bring tears to your eyes.
The best evidence for the existence of God is the fact that you are alive and you are comprehending these words.
As a further case in point, we have been discussing the Origin of Life debate between materialist scientists and scientific free-thinkers. On that front, things are heating up! And since we have been following that debate in recent weeks, I think it might be fun to follow James Tour’s new challenge to materialist scientists. He is giving ten materialist research scientists sixty days to come up with just one of five definitive proofs that materialism has a meaningful approach to understanding the origin of life. And the materialists themselves are even invited to be their own judge! My goodness, how rigged in the materialists’ favor could Dr. Tour’s quite honorable new contest possibly be? I am confident that nevertheless there is no way that the materialist scientists can win Dr. Tour’s new contest. I have done considerable research into the origin-of-life problem, and even if a spark of life can be ignited in some random way – lightning is the most likely method – for life to be sustained even briefly would be such a complex process that for life ever to have arisen randomly and then been randomly sustained and developed to the point of turning into the complex life forms that we see all around us, and that indeed we are ourselves, is close to inconceivable. But it is going to be fun to watch these chosen materialist scientists try to win Dr. Tour’s bet. If, indeed, they even will be willing to try! Let’s hope that of the ten that he has challenged, at least a few will be as honorable as he is, and will try to provide even one of the many more than five elements that would be necessary to sustain and develop life past that first unlikely spark. I’ll keep you posted!
He made the moon to mark the seasons, and the sun knows when to go down.
You bring darkness, it becomes night, and all the beasts of the forest prowl.
The lions roar for their prey and seek their food from God.
The sun rises, and they steal away; they return and lie down in their dens.
Then people go out to their work, to their labor until evening.
How many are your works, Lord! In wisdom you made them all;the earth is full of your creatures.
There is the sea, vast and spacious,teeming with creatures beyond number—
living things both large and small.
There the ships go to and fro, and Leviathan, which you formed to frolic there.
All creatures look to you to give them their food at the proper time.
When you give it to them, they gather it up; when you open your hand, they are satisfied with good things.
When you hide your face, they are terrified;
when you take away their breath, they die and return to the dust.
When you send your Spirit, they are created, and you renew the face of the ground.
May the glory of the Lord endure forever;may the Lord rejoice in his works—
he who looks at the earth, and it trembles, who touches the mountains, and they smoke.
I will sing to the Lord all my life; I will sing praise to my God as long as I live.
May my meditation be pleasing to him, as I rejoice in the Lord.
But may sinners vanish from the earth and the wicked be no more.
Praise the Lord, my soul. Hallelujah! – (Psalm 104 19-35)
Dear Roberta. A few comments to make. I like the statement form the Psalm that God wraps Himself in light as a garment, be cause that is one of the conclusions of my research. God is pure immarerial consciousness, but wraps Himself in light so as to be seen by the eyes of our spirits, which would otherwise sense our connection to God in a soft way as droplets of water in the sea that is Gods consciousness, what I also term the Universal Field of Consciopusness (i.e., Gods mind).
The questions you posed about the fit between math models and physical principles, adn weather we invent math, or instead it was already created by God and is there for us to discover, were addressed in a paper I published a couple of years ago. Here is the Abstract:
God, Mathematics, and the Physical Sciences
Jack H. Hiller
Abstract
There are two classic philosophical questions that have seemed irresolvable: (1) When a mathematician defines a new branch of mathematics, or even discovers a theorem, is such definition or discovery truly creative, or merely a discovery of what already existed in the sense that Platonic realism holds mathematics is eternally real with no reliance on minds for existence? (2) Why does mathematical modeling for physics work so well, such as, for example, the Schrodinger wave equation? This note argues that both questions are well answered when the inquiry posits that there is God who created both “real” and material existences. ( Scientific GOD Journal |March 2021 | Volume 12 | Issue 1 | pp. 66-67 Hiller, J. H., God, Mathematics, and the Physical Sciences )
But I need to add a qualifier here. The models of math that work so well only address limited, constrained features of reality– there is no math model capable of covering all of what goes on, even if tghere werfe a super super computer to do the calculations– and even if any such super super computer were put to work, then there would hacve to be a Super sup sup computer to include what the super supr computr was calculating as a subset of reality, ad infinitum. Also, most models which employ calculus do not compute exact results, but instead work approximations, and often the approximations are mundane guesses that need to be iterated to refine results over stages of calculations, i.e., the math here is not elegant, but works approximations.
Oh my goodness, my dear Jack, now I know why I am definitely not a math person – all of this is very far beyond me! But thank you very much for sharing it, since others will do better at making sense of it. 🙂
My dear Roberta,
After I received my Ph.D. in musicology, I was nevertheless unable to find a job in this field (one university replied they had 700 applicants; imagine that!). One day I asked God what I am supposed to do with my doctorate. A clear message came, which led me to do a 20-year research project into the world of numbers and which led me to discover a new number theory, which is still controversial, as I shatter certain established conventions about e.g. prime numbers (1 is prime and 2 is not, for example, while in math they argue exactly the other way around for reasons which seem quite limited to me).
To make a long story short: numbers definitely point to an intelligence beyond humans, and when you study just our solar system and the amazing numbers involved, which the brothers Richard and Robin Heath did, you discover that numbers are very much part of the movements of the heavenly bodies, and are related to water, the Moon, the Sun, women’s monthly periods, pregnancy durations, expansion rates of gasses, phi, etc. But astronomers ignore such relationships or brush them aside as coincidence.
I came to this conclusion: numbers and mathematics, in a way, “precede” God, that is to say, they are part and parcel of just what God is, just as the male and female aspects of God are not an invention or creation, but just a given, an inescapable God-given. It’s just the way perfection is.
Numbers have dual characteristics of two types (visible-invisible, as well as yin-yang). There are 81 stable chemical elements, and the reciprocal of 81 unlocks the numerical series from zero to infinity. Dr.Plichta discovered a numerical code hidden in the isotopes of the elements. Prime number reciprocals have such amazing characteristics with so many numerical phenomena happening all at the same time. I was totally flabbergasted myself!
Numbers and math are such an integral part of who and what God is so that it is fully integrated into the creation. God therefore says to Moses: “I am who I am” (other slightly different translations possible, but the meaning remains the same).
We have ten fingers; no coincidence. Some use a decimal system and others a 12-based system; actually, they are happening at the same time and are totally integrated. The Fibonacci series can reveal numbers and intersections that are totally logical, even though the series itself seems not totally logical. These intersections can be applied to prime number reciprocals as well. I have even discovered ratios in prime number reciprocal seciosn separated by many zeroes that reveal the square root value of whole numbers (un unthinkable feat thus far!).
God is consciousness; I fully agree. But this consciousness as ONE is the master of all creation, and this includes math and numbers. Our solar system alone has been compared to a clockwork even the best Swiss watchmakers cannot duplicate.
Sending you my love, hugs and blessings,
Adrian
Oh my dear Adrian, another wonderful whole math treatise! How wonderful – thank you so much!! I think that those who love math really do deeply love it, and it delights me to see it. You and Jack do make me smile!
May I add: Johan Martineau, Dr. Peter Plichta as my “mentors”.
My dear Roberta,
After I received my Ph.D. in musicology, I was nevertheless unable to find a job in this field (one university replied they had 700 applicants; imagine that!). One day I asked God what I am supposed to do with my doctorate. A clear message came, which led me to do a 20-year research project into the world of numbers and which led me to discover a new number theory, which is still controversial, as I shatter certain established conventions about e.g. prime numbers (1 is prime and 2 is not, for example, while in math they argue exactly the other way around for reasons which seem quite limited to me).
To make a long story short: numbers definitely point to an intelligence beyond humans, and when you study just our solar system and the amazing numbers involved, which the brothers Richard and Robin Heath did, you discover that numbers are very much part of the movements of the heavenly bodies, and are related to water, the Moon, the Sun, women’s monthly periods, pregnancy durations, expansion rates of gasses, phi, etc. But astronomers ignore such relationships or brush them aside as coincidence.
I came to this conclusion: numbers and mathematics, in a way, “precede” God, that is to say, they are part and parcel of just what God is, just as the male and female aspects of God are not an invention or creation, but just a given, an inescapable God-given. It’s just the way perfection is.
Numbers have dual characteristics of two types (visible-invisible, as well as yin-yang). There are 81 stable chemical elements, and the reciprocal of 81 unlocks the numerical series from zero to infinity. Dr.Plichta discovered a numerical code hidden in the isotopes of the elements. Prime number reciprocals have such amazing characteristics with so many numerical phenomena happening all at the same time. I was totally flabbergasted myself!
Numbers and math are such an integral part of who and what God is so that it is fully integrated into the creation. God therefore says to Moses: “I am who I am” (other slightly different translations possible, but the meaning remains the same).
We have ten fingers; no coincidence. Some use a decimal system and others a 12-based system; actually, they are happening at the same time and are totally integrated. The Fibonacci series can reveal numbers and intersections that are totally logical, even though the series itself seems not totally logical. These intersections can be applied to prime number reciprocals as well. I have even discovered ratios in prime number reciprocal seciosn separated by many zeroes that reveal the square root value of whole numbers (un unthinkable feat thus far!).
God is consciousness; I fully agree. But this consciousness as ONE is the master of all creation, and this includes math and numbers. Our solar system alone has been compared to a clockwork even the best Swiss watchmakers cannot duplicate.
Sending you my love, hugs and blessings,
Adrian
Dear Adrian. Generally agree with your perception about the nature of God and His mathematics. Re the conventional prime numbers– the classic definition is neither right not wrong as conventionally defined. If you find interest in a system in which 2 is excluded, that does not make the conventional definition wrong. Your are defining a new set, say the set in which all prime numbers as conventionally defined, but excluding 2, i.e., the prime set with 2 excluded; appears you may have obtained interesting results this way, but it is a needless argument to say the conventional prime number set is wrongfully defined.
To Jack: Have you read my book? The entire numeric system is either prime (1 being the first), even (2 being the first) or odd (3 being the first); this is clearly shown by Dr. Plichta and my elaboration of it. It shows a system, not some definition of what is prime or what is not. That becomes clear from the totally logical system.
I choose faith!!! As opposed to details (math)
But if Jesus knows the number of hairs on my head,
math cannot be totally ignored.
Actually math is an exquisite method of discovering
God what He gave us: 🌎 We are in the throes of climate change, because we thought there was some way around it
2 degrees makes a catastrophic difference!
Nothing on earth lacks a purpose. Nothing is incidental.
Love binds all the details together The heart of the mind
Quantum Mechanics uncovers Consciousness.
And God put a piece of Himself in us. Our souls!
Devotion to God is the natural response to what God has freely given us.When I see the intricate
patterns on birds, I know God made their beauty lovingly for us
To kneel down is to thank God
My dear sweet Erica, please don’t worry about the climate at all! My husband has studied this issue pretty exhaustively, and he has come to the conclusion that there really is nothing for us to be concerned about, so since he is a scientist as well, I kind of relax at this point. It certainly is true, as he says, that all the predictions of catastrophe so far have come to nothing!
What about Nikola Tesla, suppositively using the divine codes, 3, 6, and 9 to
create with? I am not sure if it is true, but, I have read where he did use numbers and claimed that 3, 6, 9 were the divine codes…
Litsa
Wow, my dear Litsa, that is remarkable! I have never known what to make of numbers, nor of all the stories that there are about numbers, and here you give us yet another numbers story that I have never heard. Who knows, really?