-About the author (wikipedia)
-Author's Official Wesite
-Dr. Schroeder speaking on cosmology: a 30 min. clip from the documentary, "Has Science Discovered God?"
Watch This! It's long, and poor video quality, but worth it.
" When we piece together these aspects of what the metaphysical might be, we find that the common ground held both by skeptic and believer is actually quite broad. All hold that an eternal non-thing preceded our universe; that our universe had a beginning; that intelligent design, even Divine intelligent design, is not necessarily perfect design. All agree that our universe operates according to laws of great power. One and only one facet of the metaphysical separates the skeptic from the believer. That is whether or not that which preceded creation is immanent and active in the creation. Believer says yes. Skeptic says no. But even on this point, the putative presence of the biblical God can be quite tenuous, and often not evident to the untrained eye.
We humans like to label things, to wrap our minds around a concept, to define and package it; in essence to limit it so that the concept finds harmony within our human definition of logic. But how does someone label or even think about that which is not part of our human world? Confining the metaphysical to a physical description totally misses the "meta" aspect.
And Jacob asked him, and said "Tell me your name." And he said "Wherefore is it that you ask after my name?" (Genesis 32:30)Le-olam - a Hebrew word with three root meanings: forever, and also hidden, and also in the world. This is my name forever hidden in the world. So how to recognize the presence of the metaphysical?
And (the people) will say to me "What is His name?" What shall I say to them? And God said to Moses, "I will be that which I will be." And He said thus shall you say to the children of Israel "I will be" sent me to you.....This is My name leolam. (Exod. 3:13-15)
On that day (the Eternal) shall be One and Its name One. (Zech. 14:9)That is to say, the Eternal is One.
The Eternal is One. (Deut. 6:4)
But don't think that this is the kind of one after which might come the quantities two, three, and four. Nothing as superficial as number is being revealed in these statements. Rather, the infinite metaphysical as perceived by the physical is an all encompassing, universal unity. A total oneness is as close as the several trillion neural connections in our brains can come in our quest to discern the infinite.
You shall know this day and place it in your heart that the Eternal is God in heaven above and on earth below; ain od. (Deut. 4:39)ain od - a Hebrew expression in this verse meaning there is nothing else (compare Deut. 4:39 with Deut. 4:35)
That is to say, there is nothing else. Nothing other than this singular totality.
Everything, everything with no exception, is a manifestation of an eternal unity, a transcending ubiquitous consciousness, which many label as God. When you touch that unity, you perceive and also experience the wonder within which you and all the rest of creation are embedded. As the rush of emotion sweeps through your body, your level of consciousness moves from the personal aspect of being self-aware and closes the gulf between the local physical and the universal metaphysical." (12-14)
"From particle to wave to energy to idea. That's the pattern from our perspective, from the inside of creation looking out. The flow is exactly in the opposite direction if we attempt to visualize the path from creation to us.
We experience the physical world of time, space, and matter. That is the information that our five senses access. But biblical religion and now physics claim there is more to nature than meets the eye (the ear, nose, etc.).Physics say there are possibly ten, eleven, or twenty-six dimensions. We cannot access all of them, but our inability to do so is not because they are mystical. A bit mysterious they may be, but mystical has nothing to do with the physics that led to these suppositions. One hundred years ago, no J.A. Wheeler would have dared to suggest that all we see about us is actually the expression of condensed information. He's have been dismissed as a mystic. But then one hundred years ago who would dreamt that the solid world is really 99.9999999999999 pe4rcent empty space made solid by hypothetical, force carrying, massless particles? And even that minuscule fraction of matter that is matter may not actually be matter, but wavelets of energy that we material beings sense as matter." (40)
"In the mid-1970s came the seminal discovery of Elso Barghoorn. He, like Wald, was at Harvard. Barghoorn assumed correctly that the first forms of life would be small, microbial in size. Using a scanning electron microscope, a tool able to identify minute shapes imperceptible to microscopes that probe images with visible light, Barghoorn searched the surfaces of polished slabs of stone taken from the oldest of rocks able to bear fossils. To the amazement of the scientific community, fossils of fully developed bacteria were found in rocks 3.6 million years old. Further evidence based on fractionation between th elight and heavy isotopes of carbon, a fractionation found in living organisms, indicated the origins of cellular life at close to 3.8 billion years before the present, the same period in which liquid water first formed on earth.
Overnight, the fantasy of billions of years of random reactions in warm little ponds brimming with fecund chemicals leading to life, evaporated." (51)
"When, in 1953, Stanley Miller, then a graduate student at The University of Chicago, produced a few amino acids through purely random reactions among chemicals found naturally throughout the universe, the scientific community felt the problem of life's origin had been solved. far from it. Subsequent experiments have failed to extend his results. Thermodynamics favors disorder over order. Attempting to get those amino acids to join into any sort of complex molecules has been one long study in failure. The emergence of the specialized complexity of life, even in its most simple forms, remains a bewildering mystery." (58)
"Life beats the odds of chaos over cosmos, but not by defeating the second law of thermodynamics. Nothing does that. Life wins by outwitting the second law. The chemistry of a biological cell is the same as the chemistry that forms sodium chloride. One set of rules for all. But unlike sodium chloride, which follows the rules by rote, life has somehow gotten hold of wisdom, of information, that taught it to take energy from its environment, to concentrate that energy, and with it to build and maintain the meaningful complexity of the biological cell.
Clearly, life scaled the mountain of complexity. What enabled these complex arrangements of carbon plus a few other elements to become so clever remains an enigma. When, as reductionists, we study the individual atoms, we find a sense of choice but no hint of cleverness. Yet somehow, the dust spewed into space by the nuclear furnace of a bygone supernova has become a human brain that learned to make nuclear reactors right here on earth." (59)
" ....we've seen that the universe exhibits the essence of a mind, a wisdom behind and even within matter. The universal wisdom, sometimes defined as God's presence, is the essence of the metaphysical as it projects into our finite, physical world. If, in fact, humans are created in God's image, as the Bible claims, the task of this and the coming chapters is to determine if mind - consciousness - precedes matter in man. This will be no small task in a culture seeped in what George Gilder refers to as "the materialist superstition," a world view in which emotions, mind, and all feelings of spirituality are the products of the spiritual body. The religion of materialism quintessentially believes that if you can't measure it, weigh it, stain it, and see it under a microscope, it does not exist. No one has yet to weigh a mind." (106)
"The wind blows and thousands of leaves shimmer in the sun. Your eyes see them all. A million, probably a billion, ion channels opening and closing along the ganglia of a million optic nerves leading from retina to thalamus and on to the visual cortex, cycling thirty times a second, as bioelectric signals, the information that records the motion of each of those leaves, reach into your brain. A myriad of chemical reactions, all in parallel, simultaneously recording the data.
Trees, eyes, the brain, from inert rocks and water via dumb unthinking random reactions? Logic alone tells you it could not have happened by chance. But the materialist superstition of this culture, the idea that if you can't measure it, it's not there, insists that chance be the explanation. And once a fact is imprinted on a mind, like th esong that a sparrow learns in its youth, that fact is yours for life. Believe it or not!
And yet here we are. A small part of a vast universe thinking about its origins, rummaging through steamer trunks in the attics of space and brain, trying to find the meaning of that which we call mind." (151)
"J.A.Wheeler likens the universe, all existence, to the expression of an idea, to the manifestation of information. This has the ring of quantum mechanics. The widely discussed quantum wave function that is attributed to each and every entity in the universe contains the information that totally describes that entity. The implication of Professor Wheeler's statement is not only that the wave function, which in street language refers to information, is a fundamental property of existence. The implication is much more profound: that information is the actual basis from which all energy is formed and all matter constructed. It sounds, at first cut, bizarre. But then, before Einstein's E=mc2 who would have guessed that the basis of all matter, solid, liquid, gas, in every corner of the universe, is something as ethereal as energy, the totally intangible, completely massless, wave/particle duality we label as a photon? The massless, zero-weight photon gives rise to the massive weight of the universe.
That bit of strange, illogical physics is a proven fact. An equally illogical aspect of our amazing universe may be on the horizon. As specious as it may seem at this moment, if Wheeler and others are correct, information may be the fundamental substrate of our universe, a substrate made visible when expressed as the energy and material and space of the universe. In a strong sense, our universe may be the manifestation of information." (153-4)
"In the Book of Genesis, in a passage related to the patriarch of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, we read, "And the Eternal said 'Shall I hide from Abraham that which I am doing....For I have known him for the purpose that he may command his children......'" (Gen. 18:17,19). Commenting on these verses, the thirteenth-century kabalist Nahmanides asked why is it written "I have known him"? Doesn't God know all persons? Nahmanides answered his own question. God knows all life, but the degree of Divine direction to an individual person depends on that person's individual choice on how close to God he or she wishes to be. A half century earlier, the medieval philosopher Maimonides made the identical observation in his Guide of the Perplexed (part 3, Chapter 51). Only the totally righteous have one -on one Divine direction, and even that guidance may not ensure a life free from pain and suffering. For the rest of us, chance and accidents do occur. It's our choice as to where we, as individuals, fall within that spectrum of behavior that stretches from intimate Divine direction to total random chance." (177)
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