Poul Anderson's cosmic sf;
his dynamic philosophy of life;
religious issues addressed in his works;
Aycharaych's fake religion in The Day Of Their Return;
recent discussion on this blog.
Is there an Unmoved Mover? If so, would it be a person? Motion is change of position but "motion" can also mean change in general.
I suggest that an interaction between change (energy) and resistance to change (inertia) is essential to reality, therefore does not require any external explanation. If nothing changed, then nothing would happen, whereas, if everything changed at every moment, then nothing would remain in existence from one moment to the next. Both energy and inertia are necessary for existence. Interactions progress from relatively inert inanimate matter to relatively dynamic life and consciousness.
A complete synthesis between energy and inertia would be something changeless but ever-new, transcending time, but that could not be conscious because consciousness involves a subject-object relationship and an object is recognized as distinct from the subject only when it is perceived to have remained independently existent over a period of time. Time requires change. The most dynamic energy-inertia interaction is creative consciousness.
4 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And I believe there is an Unmoved Mover because I don't believe the cosmos is an eternal series of monoblocs "exploding" into Big Bangs and then collapsing again into monoblocs which explodes over and over. At some "point" in time I believe God created matter which then became the monobloc which became the origin of the first Big Bang.
Sean
Sean,
But, if God can always have existed, then why not a beginningless cosmic cycle or a periodic quantum fluctuation between nothing and being instead?
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
But I simply don't find "...a beginningless cosmic cycle" plausible or convincing. I simply can't believe MATTER could have existed from all eternity and have been un-created. It makes far more sense to me to belive God, or the Unmoved Mover, if you like, created matter at a point in time.
Sean
Sean,
There is no impossibility about beginningless matter. It is not contradictory. The conservation law entails that any past event changed the form, not the quantity, of energy.
Paul.
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