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New Ager Deepak Chopra test drives God 2.0

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At SFGATE:

The primary difficult with God isn’t belief–more than 80% of US responders tell pollsters that they believe God exists. The problem is that God is irrelevant, providing few if any practical benefits in daily life. In an age of faith the circumstances were in God’s favor. When people got sick or died, had a run of bad luck, committed immoral acts, received unexpected rewards, or couldn’t have children–the list of situations was endless–God was invoked to explain why. In one way or another, the deity was interwoven into the fabric of daily life.

In a new book, The Future of God, my pivotal argument is that God only has a future if he (or she) becomes useful once more. We can think of this as God 2.0. Such as shift would have to happen on a level different from faith. Modern secular society isn’t going to reverse history and return to prescientific ways. A new avenue has to open, and it has. We are facing unprecedented circumstances in which God suddenly becomes relevant. These new circumstances extend into many areas of our existence.

– Millions of people have experienced a lack of meaning in a lifestyle devoted to money, career, and success.

— Isolated individuals are unable to resolve the enormous problem of climate change, despite their best intentions. More.

Maybe the government will fund God 2.0 for mental health and environment reasons? It’s quite clear that no claim is being made that God actually exists, outside people’s heads, but that manipulating the idea of God may be a useful therapy.

What’s really interesting is the historically forgetful claim that “Modern secular society isn’t going to reverse history and return to prescientific ways.”

That has happened many times in history, and seems to be happening today, as polio workers, for example, are killed in Pakistan by “insurgents” and  militants wage war against “Western education,” which for all practical purposes means education generally, in Africa.

It happened, famously, after the collapse of the Roman Empire when roving vandals destroyed irreplaceable manuscripts of ancient learning, including science.  Of course, if one can recover earlier knowledge, one can pick up where others left off – but that’s no help to those who endure the intervening years.

Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose

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Comments
News, I think Aurileo Smith was highlighting your unsubstantiated correlation (you make so many), between the collapse of good western christian reason, and the invasion of the unreasoning eastern hordes. Just because some uneducated, misogynistic, religious zealots don't like science, doesn't mean all misogynistic, religious zealots do.rvb8
December 14, 2014
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Funny that Deepak Chopra, given that he supposedly knows something about the Theistic implications of Quantum Mechanics, is buying into this sort of 'God of the Gaps' argument,,,,
In an age of faith the circumstances were in God’s favor. When people got sick or died, had a run of bad luck, committed immoral acts, received unexpected rewards, or couldn’t have children–the list of situations was endless–God was invoked to explain why. In one way or another, the deity was interwoven into the fabric of daily life.
,,, because, if anything, contrary to what Chopra seems to be saying that quote, advances in Quantum Mechanics has revealed, far from God being a remote Being who doesn't care about us, God to be more involved in what happens in this world than ever before. For instance, back in the 'age of faith' all Christians had, as far as knowledge goes, only philosophical arguments to know that God sustained this universe. Such as Aquinas's Third Way,,,
Aquinas' Third way - video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V030hvnX5a4
In other words, God Is the best explanation for why anything at all exists. But now, instead of just relying on Aquinas's (and others) ancient philosophical argument(s), Theists can now point to the fact that Quantum Mechanics has been extended to falsify local realism (the idea that the universe is not dependent on any beyond space and time causes) without even using quantum entanglement to do it:
Quantum Magic’ Without Any ‘Spooky Action at a Distance’ – June 2011 Excerpt: A team of researchers led by Anton Zeilinger at the University of Vienna and the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information of the Austrian Academy of Sciences used a system which does not allow for entanglement, and still found results which cannot be interpreted classically. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110624111942.htm Falsification of Local Realism without using Quantum Entanglement - Anton Zeilinger - video http://vimeo.com/34168474 Contextuality is 'magic ingredient' for quantum computing - June 11, 2012 http://phys.org/news/2014-06-weird-magic-ingredient-quantum.html
Put more simply, a photon is not a self existent entity but is always dependent on a 'non-local', beyond space and time, cause to explain why it acts the way it does within space-time. i.e. God 'sustains' the universe! Perhaps an easier way than Quantum non-locality to show that the 'God of the Gaps' is fallacious is by showing that Aquinas's ancient first mover (unmoved mover) argument is also now verified by quantum mechanics:
Aquinas’ First Way – (The First Mover – Unmoved Mover) - video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qmpw0_w27As Aquinas’ First Way 1) Change in nature is elevation of potency to act. 2) Potency cannot actualize itself, because it does not exist actually. 3) Potency must be actualized by another, which is itself in act. 4) Essentially ordered series of causes (elevations of potency to act) exist in nature. 5) An essentially ordered series of elevations from potency to act cannot be in infinite regress, because the series must be actualized by something that is itself in act without the need for elevation from potency. 6) The ground of an essentially ordered series of elevations from potency to act must be pure act with respect to the casual series. 7) This Pure Act– Prime Mover– is what we call God. per Michael Egnor's blog
Or to put it much more simply:
"The ‘First Mover’ is necessary for change occurring at each moment." Michael Egnor – Aquinas’ First Way - per ENV
And in confirmation of ‘the first mover’ argument, in the following video Anton Zeilinger, whose group is arguably the best group of experimentalists in quantum physics today, ‘tries’ to explain the double slit experiment to Morgan Freeman:
Quantum Mechanics - Double Slit Experiment. Is anything real? (Prof. Anton Zeilinger) - video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayvbKafw2g0
Prof. Zeilinger makes this rather startling statement in the preceding video that meshes perfectly with the ‘first mover argument’::
"The path taken by the photon is not an element of reality. We are not allowed to talk about the photon passing through this or this slit. Neither are we allowed to say the photon passes through both slits. All this kind of language is not applicable." Anton Zeilinger
If that was not enough to get his point across, at the 4:12 minute mark in this following video,,,
Double Slit Experiment – Explained By Prof Anton Zeilinger – video http://www.metacafe.com/watch/6101627/
Professor Zeilinger states,,,
"We know what the particle is doing at the source when it is created. We know what it is doing at the detector when it is registered. But we do not know what it is doing in-between." Anton Zeilinger
Verse and Music:
Acts 17:28 For in Him we live, and move, and have our being; as also certain of your own poets have said, ‘For we are also His offspring.’ ROYAL TAILOR - HOLD ME TOGETHER - Music Videos http://www.godtube.com/watch/?v=KLZZZLNX
supplemental note:
A Short History Of Quantum Mechanics and Consciousness Excerpt: 1. Consciousness either preceded all of material reality or is a ‘epi-phenomena’ of material reality. 2. If consciousness is a ‘epi-phenomena’ of material reality then consciousness will be found to have no special position within material reality. Whereas conversely, if consciousness precedes material reality then consciousness will be found to have a special position within material reality. 3. Consciousness is found to have a special, even central, position within material reality. 4. Therefore, consciousness is found to precede material reality. Four intersecting lines of experimental evidence from quantum mechanics that shows that consciousness precedes material reality (Wigner’s Quantum Symmetries, Wheeler’s Delayed Choice, Leggett’s Inequalities, Quantum Zeno effect): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uLcJUgLm1vwFyjwcbwuYP0bK6k8mXy-of990HudzduI/edit
bornagain77
December 14, 2014
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Reply to Aurelio Smith: True and many only survive because they were hidden off Ireland, or so we are told. In short, there is no simple onward march of knowledge anywhere, including Islamic countries today. That is what troubles me about Chopra's too-easy assumption.News
December 14, 2014
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God 2.0 appears to contain an assumption that God 1.0 version is defined by Chopra's age of faith. This is a sweeping assumption about human experiencing and an ill-defined position concerning 'faith'. What constitutes 'faith' for Chopra is the pop-cultural disconnection (and misunderstanding) from the history of science and from the more extensive history of human experiencing. Chopra simply does not have a defensible view against faith as opposed to some new paradigm in which faith has no existential meaning, and no phenomenological meaning. The generational version could be God 49.99.9, just shy of 1 update to a intermediate fix leading to God 50.0 build, a stable release, a major jubilee version for human experiencing. Can one build 'from scratch' with no real dependency on previous code? Is this seen in nature? Is this seen in the history of humans? Even considering the discarding of nonevidentiary phenomena? Do we have sufficient evidence to believe new paradigms do not entail 'old' stuff ... residuals, artifacts, hidden variables, underlying fundamental principles? The future of God as dependent on or in human utility, and expatiating in the continuum of subjective-objective reality, can not divorce faith without a new language also divorced from our historical ontology?redwave
December 14, 2014
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Is God 2.0 more internet savvy?Mung
December 14, 2014
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This News item reminds me of Edmund Husserl's Ideas, or an Husserlian take on Chopra's Future of God. Here is a brief summary from Stanford Philosophy: "The notion of lifeworld was already introduced in the posthumously published second volume of Ideas, under the heading of “Umwelt”, to be translated as “surrounding world” or “environment”. Husserl there characterizes the environment as a world of entities that are “meaningful” to us in that they exercise “motivating” force on us and present themselves to us under egocentric aspects. Any subject taking the “personalistic attitude” builds the center of an environment containing such objects. "On Husserl's view, it is precisely this “subjective-relative lifeworld”, or environment, that provides the “grounding soil” of the more objective world of science (Husserliana, vol. VI, p. 134), in the twofold sense that (i) scientific conceptions owe their (sub-)propositional content and thus their reference to reality to the prescientific notions they are supposed to “naturalize” and that, consequently, (ii) when things get into flux in science, when a crisis occurs, all that is left to appeal to in order to defend new scientific approaches against their rivals is the prescientific lifeworld, as manifested in our according intuitive acceptances (for references cf. Føllesdal 1990a, pp. 139 f). This view offers an alternative to the “naturalistic” stance taken by many analytic philosophers today." (Beyer, Christian, "Edmund Husserl", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2013 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = .)redwave
December 14, 2014
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God will suddenly make himself visible to everyone. Revelation 6 (ESV)
12 When he opened the sixth seal, I looked, and behold, there was a great earthquake, and the sun became black as sackcloth, the full moon became like blood, 13 and the stars of the sky fell to the earth as the fig tree sheds its winter fruit when shaken by a gale. 14 The sky vanished like a scroll that is being rolled up, and every mountain and island was removed from its place. 15 Then the kings of the earth and the great ones and the generals and the rich and the powerful, and everyone, slave and free, hid themselves in the caves and among the rocks of the mountains, 16 calling to the mountains and rocks, “Fall on us and hide us from the face of him who is seated on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb, 17 for the great day of their wrath has come, and who can stand?”
I'd say God's existence doesn't depend on us or what we think.bb
December 14, 2014
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