Physical cosmologists .. including this arm-chair variety .. can attest that since the nascence of modern cosmology only about ninety years ago, astonishing information about the galactic and intergalactic environment of our home has come to us simply by looking anew. Let me put that remark in some context.
As a boy interested in science I happened upon George Gamow, who wrote Thirty Years That Shook Physics. It was the only one of Mr. Gamow’s books that our little town library had, so I was none the wiser about his remarkable output as the putative father of the Big Bang along with Georges LeMaître. Still, I got enough taste of looking heavenward for clues into fundamental questions to launch me on a lifelong quest.
These years later, like anyone else interested in the widest possible ‘tangible’ subject, I am impressed with the sheer corpus of learning that emerged once quasars were really taken notice of, as well as the microwave background which reminds us we’re far from thermal death in a scintillating if dissipating universe.
Quasars are perhaps the oldest of (barely) observable cosmic entities, and farthest away in a sphere of observability. Anything further out - if it exists (or indeed existed) - was long since past the ‘time horizon’ of light emission; yet we look for evidence of departing influences on the horizon itself. This ‘evidence’ in the here-and-now is information that would have been impressed on space-time over 13 billion years ago.
That’s so remote that much of the luminous output from radio emissions of such objects arrive in a spectrum that we are just able to measure. It might have been otherwise: the spectrum could have been so reddened as to be past detection in our day. Indeed we have surprising evidence that the expansion has (or had) been accelerating! Who knows whether by now the outermost reaches have even stopped expanding and begun collapsing?
The serendipitous fact that we are now in possession of instruments that can extract even minor pits and valleys in the microwave background is one version of the anthropic principle, accepted (begrudgingly by some) as a working heuristic for physical cosmology. The principle is that there’s something remarkably apt or fine-tuned about the universe in the near and far that made life even remotely possible and sustainable at this epoch, in these environs.
The principle admits of some variation, so there’s real interest in knowing whether the fine-structure constant, or Planck’s, or Hubble’s expansion coefficient or the background gravitational constant etc. were different - even if ever so slightly - elsewhere or further back in time.
I am not writing a reflection on the hazarded guesses of cosmology; but the above paints the background to something remarkable. All is seen by ‘light’ in any of its forms, and not of course by sound or touch or taste or other somatosensory perceptions. Some might suppose that detecting a gravitational wave is in the way of a ‘rumble’ - as close to a subsonic visceral feeling as anything. But it’s nothing like even the weakest geologic tremor.
The sensing of gravitational waves from a black-hole merger engenders displacement inside an apparatus of a tiny fraction of a proton diameter: within the uncertainty of its diameter when it is not motionless. What lends such a fleeting ‘detection’ its credence is not that it’s felt in any meaningful way, but that light is simultaneously seen from the embers of matter falling in with the black holes, or where entropy is ‘scraped off’. The synchronous wink in the heavens prompts the ‘aha,’ the eureka! of present-day Archimedes looking at the slightly buzzed proton instrument.
Psalm 19:1-4 has it this way: “The heavens are telling the glory of God; the vault proclaims the works of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge. They have no speech, they use no words; no sound is heard from them. Yet their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of creation.” Who can doubt that this psalmist was a long-time star-gazer.
Even if you’re no believer in sacred writ you have to acknowledge it is a lovely poetic description of the quest of modern cosmology, or the ways the universe speaks to us as we pose it the questions of groping ‘seers’. As more comes to us, the more our fogged heads light up. Stephen Hawking, not many years before he left this brief sojourn, guessed the outermost membrane of a black hole is a realm where time has stopped (or never started). For him now, time has even been transcended.
Where time never moved
Where time is not, the word ‘fluctuation’ rather loses its meaning; and yet Hawking muscled on ahead to seek a consequence of remnant quantum-fluctuations a little to the outside and to the ‘inside’ - whatever that means - of a black hole, and found a test for the extreme-case consistency of physics as we know it. If we have any idea from current speculation what’s in the surface of a black hole, Einstein’s relativity would predict a quiescent radiation, called Hawking radiation. It hasn’t been found (yet), which suggests that ‘vanilla’ general relativity may well break down at a black hole.
Since my teens I thought there had to be deeper connections between information theory (the science of signals and noise) and our grasp or use of light, as in quantum optics. Engineers have been able to arrest light as a standing wave in an ‘optical crystal’ or what’s called a vacancy band-gap, whereby light can be used as a sub-microscopic ‘tweezer’ able to manipulate single molecules and interrogate them for any kind of information, as well as ‘inform’ them with other things - for instance by depositing intercalated metal atoms, the agents of a flower’s vivid palette.
An assembly of molecules with collective properties invites a view of matter not so much as ‘material,’ as informed ‘matrix’ wherein the import or meaning of stuff is. To verge on the comical, this gives new meaning to the weight of an argument - one that can bear the heft or indeed moment of information, unlike much journalism. At any rate it leads to a view of what is at the surface of a black hole: not matter anymore, but quantized information for the reconstruction of matter, or its converse: entropy.
Consider the positively-charged ‘hole’ in a an ordered sea of electrons. I say ‘ordered’ because electrons in a substance that’s not completely ionized live within orchestrated molecular orbitals, orbitals that can be viewed as extending far beyond any one molecule, especially in the metallic state. A ‘hole’ is the absence of an expected electron in the ordered place where it ought to be, and can move around as if it were a particle with effective mass or inertial resistance to movement. There is an analogous duality between information and entropy: a tiny contribution to entropy or disorder is the negative of information within the expected order or signal.
Speaking of information in terms of a bit-string: a bit that is mutated by the disorder of noise can be regarded as ‘negentropy’, and it is no great step to view a measure of information itself as the negative of entropy. The term ‘negentropy’ was coined by computer mathematician and logician Von Neumann as place-holder for ‘information,’ and this makes a deeper sense than meets the eye.
Missing information
It has been aptly quipped that for all the enlightenment we live in an age of missing information. Surrounded by would-be information, we have less and less idea of what it means or we are missing. That can be why no-one really understands quantum mechanics, a physics of information. Even Erwin Schrödinger mentally vivisected his cat to demonstrate that his ‘wave mechanics’ is absurd if interpreted as much more than a guide to informational agnosticism or naivety. We’ll visit this again below.
Back in my college days I read an imaginative unpublished essay by one Clement Kent. Along lines similar to my instincts for treating quantum mechanics as a calculus of missing information, Mr. Kent thought we should think of imparted information as the transfer of momentum from photon to electric charge. In ‘standard model’ lingo it would be a transfer or impulse from a ‘carrier’ boson to the ‘receiver’ fermion. No information exists in a meaningful sense if there can be no momentum transfer, for then nothing is detectable. It is in effect an operational definition of content transfer.
This conception gives a nice rationale for the fact that phase-change fronts can travel faster than light, but information cannot: because the phase movement is only a ghostly harbinger of the business end: the transfer of momentum. Even if ‘mass’ is a nebulous property of a sea of Higgs bosons: our modern version of the ether, and if a disturbance in the Higgs field might disport itself at a near infinite phase velocity, neither mass-momentum nor information would proceed faster than light.
Einstein’s insight was that even the notion of an all-present field is not immutable and absolute: a field such as the gravitational field is a transient warping of space-time, which itself can be in flux and flexion, like local ripples around the fisher’s line while bobbing on an undulating sea. This very general notion of relativity gave tacit permission for people to explore modified forms of gravitational influence - so called MOND theories currently being wrestled-with, as Jacob wrestled with an angel.
Thanks to Einstein’s affine (sort of self-parameterized) differential geometric approach, measurers on earth are free to determine relative frames of reference without harm or inconsistency to their physics. But this limpidity hinges on an absolute: the frozen property of the photon. This ‘c’ being the constant of motion everywhere is equivalent to the statement that the photon itself has no mass and its own ‘proper frame’ has no time progression. Something timeless and in that sense unmoved underpins all informing movement.
The expression of this fact for any photon is dT = 0 with T or ‘Tau’ representing the frame’s ‘proper time.’ Meanwhile the ‘rest mass’ of a photon is zero; and still p, an effective momentum-from energy (E=cp) may be calculated, with energy determined by the light’s oscillatory frequency according to the empirical Planck law E=hf (h is Planck’s constant). Yet in its own frame the photon knows no oscillation or period!
This fact is so universal that it invades and underpins not only special relativity so-called, but general relativity too. In other words, wherever a photon has been or will be, it is ‘omnipresent’ in the sense that it is in all its loci at once. And yet to a receiver it has a frequency (or wavelength, albeit malleable under spatial inflation) - and can be absorbed at a moment in time. This is one heck of a ‘Gödel sentence’ of physics: a true thing that cannot be unpacked any further in the consistent terms of physics.
The conundrum of understanding even what is a photon is somewhat akin to oddities in mathematics, such as the ratio of zeroes having a value when it should not, or the sum of a narrow band of infinities having a meaningful ‘principal value’, or just the fact that say the square root of 1 minus the same root ad infinitum has the value 1/2 . In quantum mechanics the elusive photon is ‘captured’ by a universal constant of minimum action, where action has dimensions of momentum times distance or - equivalently - energy augmented by time-duration.
Planck’s constant h (or h = h/2pi) is this minimum of action, and the quantum of energy is h/T where T is the temporal period of an oscillation seen not by the photon, but the receiver. In the action h=ET taken up by the receiver in momentum transfer, its clock records T temporal units on receipt of one energy quantum E=h/T .
It proves unhelpful to regard the reception time as smoothly elapsed per se: just that the deposit in the receiver, of a quantum that was timeless, forces the receiver’s clock ahead in accordance with the energy received.
There remains a long debate on whether it’s meaningful to speak of time lapse when any particle (or photon) ‘tunnels’ past an impossible barrier, or during the so-called collapse of a particle’s quantum-mechanical wavefunction (wavefunction being tech-speak for world-descriptor) which is entailed by detection (also called measurement). We can’t imagine a clock model in tunnelling since there are no accessible sub-tunneling clocks that don’t form part of the barrier that’s tunneled-through.
Inconsistencies and reductionem ad absurdum
Such quandaries may never be resolved. In any self-consistent arithmetical system (as physics is) there are bound to be truths that cannot be demonstrated true within the system. Consistency of a logic does not empower it to prove as true all things that are true in it. This was long-since guessed when in argument people had to move to a meta or modal logic to escape zero-sum entrapments. The truth of it was proven by Kurt Gödel (so thank heavens this truth was not one of the Gödel sentences itself).
The ambitious project of Principia Mathematica by Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead came to an incomplete end with the authors’ realization that mathematics per se can never be complete, even if the mathematical order in or of the universe is determined and finite, like any creature. I am not informed whether they were entirely cognizant of Gödel’s proofs (of two incompleteness theorems); but I do recall that in their day Einstein had said there was no greater mathematical insight than in the mind of Gödel. Very probably Russell and Whitehead took notice of that.
Some few centuries before, a related thing was said, not about a Gödel to come, but about God who Was. It dawned on Anselm of Canterbury (originally of Bec, France, before that Aosta, Italy) that a descriptor of God, or ‘nomen’ as some have called it, is that “than which nothing greater can be conceived.” That is: conceived by not just a future Gödel (or disciple Turing, who found himself edified by Anselm and proved his logic sound), but conceivable by anyone, is this edgewise grasp of truth over all.
Here’s one intriguing aspect of the ontology this nomen carries: it is not a concept. Were it only a concept there would be a conceivably greater thing: something that has existence is more than a noetic concept. If nothing greater can be conceived, It is not limited to conceptual fancy. But another aspect that has largely been overlooked is the humanism. God, if the nomen makes sense, is accessible: conceivable without the necessary aid of direct self-revelation. This is (Christian) humanism because it elevates the regard of the mind of man to a remarkable status: that it has a capability shared in deeply significant measure with the creator, and with that purpose.
The food of mind is truth, even the truth that some truth-consistent ordinary predicate system cannot know itself: which means that the mind is not a Turing automaton. Roger Penrose glommed onto that insight long ago, although he is still trying to articulate mind in terms of something like an entity that can process the collapse of wavefunctions without losing its own special form of coherence.
Now I think that particular pursuit of what is mind cannot end in satisfaction, because wavefunction collapse is not ontologic but deeply epistemic - so deeply epistemic in the very ‘essence’ of mind as to appear ontologic. The wavefunction just describes the array of possible information that is knowable by measurement. It is analogous to naive description of a software ‘method’ (even one with self-modifying code subject to a computing environment); whereas the measurement is its real-time ‘instance’ characterized by what is being input, so that the measured state comports with the given inputs even if those are ‘entangled’ inputs.
For interest in this metaphysical philosophy of quantum mechanics, a worthwhile treatment is that of Sabine Hossenfelder (linked later) on the badly misnamed topic “super-determinism”. It’s an unfortunate name, for super-determinism is to slavish servomechanism what super-nature is to nature: hardly the same thing at all, and not more restrictive but less. Given that it reigns over the old baggage of determinism in a manner that allows pre-measurement freedom, it embraces causality without fate.
Wavefunction collapse
Far be it from me to suggest I have lights on this realm of inquiry brighter than Dr. Penrose, a physicist above the stratosphere. He sees in the ability to process ‘wavefunction collapse’ a signature of mind. But perhaps it is not radically demure to see the wavefunction itself more as a mental and shareable construct, which is merely updated when a measurement is made by someone.
I liked Dr. Penrose’s famous appeal to mathematical incompleteness to show that mind - which was able to grasp Gödel incompleteness and even prove it forwards and backwards - is no discrete-state automaton subject to that same incompleteness. But his later twist is to suppose what makes mind different is its ability to ‘work with’ wavefunction collapse even, as he would seem to suggest, in its brain circuitry. To me that has the features of like circular reasoning, or else a return to physical positivism.
I incline, along with the Gödelian approach, to integrate the appeal of the late David Bohm’s ‘hidden variables.’ I had the pleasure as a young upstart to meet Dr Bohm - known defender of causality - in his offices at the London Institute in 1979. There he humoured me with a private prelude to his book just about completed, on the ‘implicate order’ in relation to the quest for completeness that he called wholeness.
What I appropriated from this notion of ‘implicate order’ was not entirely what Dr. Bohm had in mind. It is fair to say that his thought was tending to the new age, or at least to Krishna language easily taken or mistaken as pataphysics. But there is something appealing to the role of mind as it ‘implicates’ order in the world from what it surmises and supports by measurement. Something ontological is implicated out there and even by participation ‘in here’ - but inescapably through the active and critical and supra-physical nature of mind itself.
This brings me back, circuitous though the path is, to Anselm of Canterbury formerly of Bec. Not to speak in immanentist terms, if his nomen for the ‘All in all’ has a corollary, it is that man shares in the mind of God. A first consequence of this ontology is that God is in principle discoverable by the human mind - as to existence and supremacy at the very least. And a second consequence by further corollary is that man’s mind is intimately related to this highest Object of its passive contemplation.
I say ‘passive’ not to discount what blessed Titus Brandsma called active mysticism (which he rightly considered indispensable to realism), but lest the word ‘active’ should make of God a manipulable object of thought: not the He “than which nothing greater can be conceived.” One is left cold if prayer-introductions propose God as something to be penetrated by us. If there must be an intention-shaping introduction (and often there should not), the humble bid is that God may deign to shed light where He has found us, or at least found us not totally wanting. “May the meditations of my heart be acceptable in Your sight.”
If man’s mind is intimately related to its highest Object, it is no great leap to see that mind must be created by the Supremum which it can only just grasp, for being creator is a greater conceivable. And though we glean an idea of the Supremum, this makes Him more than a concept, since again reality is greater than the mere concept of it.
Several important things follow. If we appreciate the characterization of personhood as both sentient mind and intimate purposeful presence, this very condignity of mind is a reflection of the mind that made it. In short I am a person because my creator is a Person par excellence: the very quintessence of Person: even with a sort of plurality or repetition for emphasis, while remaining One.
There is no circularity here. Once, I had a rather fruitless discourse with a troll who could not relinquish the mantra that I am my own cause .. something he even claimed was philosophically undeniable. But that is the same error as a Steven Hawkings saying that before anything was, there were the laws of physics. At best this dictum is a sort of bootstrap code for automata that have reached a stopping condition; it is not what we call rational. For there is no such thing as a law without its objects: if there are no ‘objects’ in the thingly sense, there is no discoverable law for them - certainly not an empirical one and still less a formal one.
Likewise, if I realize I have a beginning and before that simply was not, then nothing about me is my own cause or law for my existence. I am a contingent being, and so is any putative law of physics. Physics even much prides itself on being contingent.
What is undeniable is that I cannot find or discover the cause of myself either in myself or in other contingent things since they too go back to a point where there apparently was no-thing. But was there a ‘that’ - a that than which nothing greater can be conceived. Not a mere law: but law-giver. One such that even before human conceiving has emerged so as to grasp the meaning of the word, there is a non-contingent conceiving which becomes the form for conceiving. This ‘form’ if it exists (as I assert is discoverable), must be the bedrock truth of existence to which mind inevitably gravitates.
The plurality of mind as conversation
Returning to the unitary ‘plurality’ in this Singularity: I see even in myself a quantum of plurality, inasmuch as all thought goes on as a conversation - though often enough not a verbal or per se discursive conversation. Perhaps more the conversation of nods and ‘ahs’ exchanged by two companions listening to the same interlocutor or watching the same opera or documentary. There is a radically communitarian thing about thought, and this is why the inveterate skeptic is most to be pitied.
Mind - while it is healthy - is a conversation with the truth, going on in the manner of dogged inquiry of the truth. I picture in analogy the painstaking unravelling of some large encrusted ball of a map, patiently teased out at coruscated corners and mâché margins. This is daunting work, trying to record and hold in memory - personal or or cultural - what is spread out so precariously. For with every inch of truth gained, the whole seeks to curl itself back up by some law of entropy.
The activity of the brain is of course an underpinning of the exercise of mind. It is not necessarily sufficient, and potentially not all necessary - if the self and community awareness of anencephalics tells us anything, or the report of mental journeys for comatose patients or those who have come back from clinical death. But even here a certain law of minimum action is at work: the brain strives to invest the effort that seems necessary, while minimizing the dissipation or entropic production.
As with physical training, the organ that is well accustomed to exercise in a discipline it is trained for wastes less energy than in a discipline that’s new or foreign. The well-tried brain can venture to cover off more qualifications to thought, or it can essay to be more imaginative or creatively visionary in problem-solving while remaining well focused on the task at hand.
Usually success in this venture is also shown in an economy of the language used to express it during or afterwards. Indeed the mind that is given wings by this energy is able to model even its own adventitious movements for reflection later, or even adjustment immediately in self-modifying heuristics. This in turn even provides improvement of the content of thought in correspondence with discovered facts whether in probed nature or in discursive realms with other minds. Thus mind is able to supervene on mind.
The fact that ‘ironing out’ the secrets of nature is even possible, or that we persist in trusting that it is possible, is an absolute marvel of inspected nature and supervening mind combined. Of course, a basic sanity is necessarily presumed. Denial of reality - commented-on as mentioned by physicist Sabina Hossenfelder - doesn’t qualify as sane. Knowing this requires no degree in fundamental physics, as noted here by nurse John Campbell discussing objective reality in pharmacology and the healing sciences.
The proper use of reductio ad absurdum to a logical argument from premises is to realize that an absurd conclusion means that a premise or a clear interpretation or warranted application of it was faulty - not that reality has been shown undermined. Supposing the latter is either a sign of critically reduced sanity, or of a most inefficient use of mental energy.
Instead it should signal options for revision, such as a deficiency in what we took as an adequate description or characterization of some realm of reality. Thus if by quantum mechanics Schrödinger’s cat is required to be both dead and alive, something is clearly inadequate in the premises or axioms of quantum mechanics. This is so even if its machinery of derivation for many statistical collections of outcomes corresponds well to observations. No cat is ever observed both dead and alive; and Schrödinger himself used this argument to establish that his wave equation is nowhere near a complete foundation of sub-atomic physics.
Do they have an excuse?
Now then, we turn to the question of this essay. Is there sympathy for those who consider it an absurdity that the ground of reality be intangible, invisible, unmeasurable, and yet personal and mental and indeed amenable to sane mind or reason? I think there must be sympathy for their somewhat entrapped agnosticism.
Most of us spend our youth and most if not all of adult life experiencing reality all in the tangible. Although we praise or admire poetry, we are predominantly thingly. We are ‘of the earth:’ the first human name. Thus even if reality operates at a deep level such that all that we sense is by way of effects - even indirect effects - of impenetrable processes, it is natural to guess that reality is always limited to the tangible. Or, if it is not, that what is unseen is inconsequential - until we must deal with its consequences.
It is also natural to suppose that projecting personhood back beyond the most recondite aspects of reality is infantile anthropomorphism. To be sure, this is a supposition (for God may be deo-promorphic about man, as is believed); but the innate fear of nothingness after death - and so of death itself - lends it credence. If in death personhood is so evidently fleeting and impermanent, what warrant - other than the pathetic seeking of imaginary human presence after death - can there be for guessing instead that personhood and mind is ineluctable and eternal?
Like anyone else, I don’t offer compelling answers to the natural dubiousness of skeptics and agnostics: at least not compelling in some syllogistical sense. But then neither is there a compelling syllogism for the nothingness hypothesis, in which all meaning is vitiated, and that’s like dropping the battery out of our own clock: for we seem to be energized for meaning.
After all, if a compelling syllogism had been discovered in either direction, then everyone would be a believer, or everyone would have ended it all long ago. This latter point is another version of the anthropic principle. But it does allow sympathy to the one who has (almost) given up searching for anything beyond the senses; one who has just about resigned him or herself to a capitulation on any reason in the end to seek out meaning.
Now then, just because there is real sympathy: strongly identifying with this dilemma, which I poignantly experienced myself as a young physicist, it does not mean there are logical reasons for asserting there is no supernature. A theory even of ‘everything’, as it is styled in physics, is just that: a theory, and of every ‘thing:’ not of everything. Everything (or anything) of real import and meaning can vastly outstrip the scope of physics. Just learning why a person who last month was a fan of democracy should this week become a heartless tyrant is of greater import than making the next nuclear reactor a little more fail-safe.
This reaches to the moral realm, whereas supernature goes still further. But one step at a time. On the secular plane there are (surprisingly) many who contemplate what cannot be measured in the physical laboratory or observatory: other universes that took different ‘world-lines’ in their actual reality. Non hidden-variable QM interpretations allow for instant spooky ‘action at any distance’ (even well beyond messaging distance and time). And of course the alternate hidden variables types of theory accept - ahem - hidden variables, not amenable to detection.
To me the multiverse seems an absurd terminus for physical science per se, as it jettisons its fundamental predicate, namely testability. Persons who are hard-nosed skeptics on things spiritual, are ready to allow what cannot be comprehended as an explanation of where things go that didn’t go the way they did. But, let them have that. Why can they not imagine things simply have gone the way they have, within the knowledge (and even permission) of one ‘grand Selector of the Universe’ ?
I acknowledge that such a notion, or being, is nothing like a ground of existence that has the exemplary perfection of personhood in Its essence. But as ‘deism’ it’s already a good march away from meaningless stochastic physical randomness. And there are further steps well worth taking that hold high the diadem of reason. For if mind is the most ethereal of phenomena of which we are aware - so limpid as to imagine an invisible Higgs field that gives everything its inertial mass (bringing back under another name the famed ether), there is no a priori reason to insist that the ground of existence is unrelated to mind, or cannot somewhere at root be what it is to be mind.
The ‘unreasonable’ aptness of mathematical form in describing and relating and internally testing a vast swath of physical knowledge has been noted often, also by the most agnostic. What this emotive semiotic really conveys is not that order as found is outside the ken of reason, but that we should be quite amazed how orderly is the world and how complicit with human mental arithmetic. The untoward reasonableness of the universe (despite its still tantalizing puzzles) stands as ‘proof’ that what is behind it is something that is intimate with mind. Sirs James Jeans and Arthur Eddington thought so, and nothing has transpired to diminish the insight.
The alternative hypothesis is that it is what it is, and mind itself is an emergent property of life forms that have evolved to a high stature by way of random mutation and selection. But there’s at least one irreducible problem with this choice. Coordinated abstract reasoning is not something that popped up from lesser mental circuitry to advantage a creature for procreation: a creature competing for scarce resources while keeping itself and its mate and offspring alive day to day, hunting and gathering in cruel selective nature. The thinker would soon have been pummelled or beaten to the kill. Proof of that fact is played out on every school-ground.
What is ‘proof’ ?
It is easy to forget that the word ‘proof’ has several equally important meanings. Proof of something can mean a successful test which that something did not contradict or with which it stood consistent. I prove love for my wife by venturing to pour her a warm bath .. even though it is not very demonstrative. For another nuance, she may put my love to the proof by asking for a small sacrifice, like opting again for her preferred streaming show over mine. My compliance is not incontrovertible evidence, but a show of love that she may take as proof.
This is one usage under which believers can and do say that God has proven love for them. In this the existence of a merciful God is consistent with the evidence of a dramatically converted life from radical egotism to radical service after a Godly encounter the person reports having had. When even the terms of their language change with remarkable good effect, while there are no other signs that would be consistent with mere neurosis, true religion is a good explanation.
The absence of a compelling syllogism as proof for a truth is no argument against it. Even in a strictly self-contained “bug free” predicate system, consistency is not creative power: it is only negative power. That’s what Gödel established; for any true sentence that is a Gödel sentence will be true but not demonstrably so. It cannot be demonstrated as incontrovertible; and neither can its negation. Nevertheless, it will have plenty of ‘warrant’ because, like perhaps one of the famed conjectures yet unproven (and some may never be provable albeit true), it will not be found to be in contradiction to the truths that are known, properly understood.
One is not forced to believe it holds the truth; but it is entirely rational to do so.
Why, one may ask, do many skeptics accept various august conjectures of mathematics - which itself is limited to the confines of a predicate system - but cannot allow the warrant of innumerable lives in testimony of the goodness of God? Lives that are often lived on the margins, or in the nuanced middle between one claimed uber-system of political correctness and another, still bearing witness to an overriding dignity of man. Where does that come from? It is proof of something meta; something supervening and self-similar, as is mind.
Or consider the vista of a mountain range, seen from one’s promontory on one height: an array of sculptures complementing and referencing each other, bigger than life and yet carpeted with life in all its forms: deciduous, conifer, fruit and bramble, picked among by goats and cougars and bears and eagles, with breezes wafting through pass and vale bestirring the lustrous wending rivers below. This is no random scene, but a hand-crafted beauty. Only the soul can really see it.
There was an arduous period when over five years I struggled to pull together what comprised a dissertation, just for a Master’s degree. The focus was on the many varied tree arborizations of neurons in the brain, reducing their passive electrical properties to transmission networks of far greater complexity than any local or distributed internet-service-provider infrastructure. By about year four of this slog, which included the mathematical idealizations of many other ‘tree structures’, I found myself at a most curious point. I would be outdoors looking at trees, not being able to ‘see them’ as magnificent arms swaying in the breeze. I was even painfully aware of it.
The present world, immersed in the products and lingo of science and technology, has largely got to this point: not being able to see the beauty, still less its hand-craftedness. Even cosmologists peering on the widest panoply of winking pulsars, spinning white dwarfs, sudden supernovae or black-hole mergers, neutron star tangoes and ginormous quasars see a mess of scratch lines in spectrometers or fast-Fourier transformed chimera of radio bursts. How often does one of them get back to the ‘awe and wonder’ at the very life of all that symphony, which they might remember experiencing as a child looking upward or through their first telescope?
With our demands for ‘proof’ : proof that the thing in view is a solar-system asteroid and not a wandering interstellar object, we have lost the ability to see what else it is proving. That it is a remarkable creature, and there is a creator: One with mind by which and by whom we are gifted to grasp whatever He puts on display.