Saturday, August 11, 2018

"the proper effect of God [and God alone] is . . . esse [(existence)] without qualification"


"Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations.  What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?"

     Stephen Hawking, A brief history of time, updated and expanded 10th anniversary edition (New York:  Bantam, 1998), 190, as quoted by Holmes Rolston III in "Divine presence—causal, cybernetic, caring, cruciform:  from information to incarnation," in Incarnation:  on the scope and depth of Christology, ed. Niels Henrick Gregerson (Minneapolis:  Fortress Press, 2015), 259 (255-287).
the problem . . . here [is] . . . how to get the mathematics embodied—not yet in any flesh, but . . . in matter-energy.  Mathematics per se does not cause anything.  There are worlds imaginable in mathematics that are never realized.
See also Holmes Ralston III, Three big bangs:  matter-energy, life, mind (New York:  Columbia University Press, 2011), 5-6:
Something is needed beyond the pure mathematics to compel it to exist in an actual world.  There are worlds imaginable in pure mathematics that are never realized" [(5, italics mine)].
     The heading comes from St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I.45.5.Resp., but could be taken elsewhere in that corpus, too.

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