The Physics of God
Guest post by Sabato Scala, Italian engineer and philosopher
Many recent scientific theories imply the existence of God… But for believers this is not good news!
More and more often we hear about the number of scientists and new theories and new branches of science that explicitly contemplate the existence of God.
This news is repeated with superficial and disorganized exaltation by those who believe in God by faith, with phrases like “Did you se, even scientists are beginning to admit it? ” , without, however, even posing the problem of understanding whether the God that emerges from these theories is the same one they believe in and whether this is really good news for them.
I have absolutely no doubt that it would be no use explaining these people that the type of God science is arriving at, is the opposite of what they believe in.
They would still find a way to say that science is wrong and not them: If it is wrong, then, why get excited when science affirms that something similar to a Creator exists and denigrate it when it finds that this is different from our idea of God?
But reasoning with someone who has abdicated the use of reason is a useless and idle exercise of no interest to me at all.
For everyone else, however, it is not only important but fundamental to clarify what we are talking about.
Let’s start by saying that research is done to understand how the world works, not to demonstrate that it works as we believe it does, although, even in the scientific world, there is this fraudulent tendency to precede one’s idea of the world and transform it into physical models mathematicians, only to subsequently exalt all the favorable evidence and ignore and hide the contrary evidence. But these approaches are short sighted and, sooner or later, they are unmasked.
The first thing to understand is that science moves forward even when it seems to go backwards, in other words: Science changes its ideas and models when it realizes that they are wrong, or when it realizes that they can only be applied to a smaller set of phenomena, compared to the generality of existing phenomena.
Moreover, if the models had been completely wrong, they would not have been embraced and followed by science. In fact, a physical model has the task of precisely predicting and measuring a phenomenon when certain boundary conditions occur: if it made incorrect predictions, it would be set aside.
This is the case, for example, of Newton’s physics, surpassed and denied, even in its premises, by that of Einstein, not because it is wrong, but because its conclusions are applicable to almost all the phenomena we experience every day, but it fails when the field of application is broadened to phenomena outside the reach of daily observation such as the case of systems whose speeds are close to that of light, or making very high precision measurements on systems in relative motion.
Most importantly we need to get out of our heads the idea that science makes total and drastic “mea culpas” by erasing the past.
Science, and PHYSICS in particular, always evolves in a self-critical way and creates new models that apply to larger sets. These models improve the previous ones by highlighting their limitations and errors of application and, therefore, some erroneous conclusions that force us to narrow the field of application, or by bringing out inaccuracies in the basic postulates.
Let us enter, therefore, without further hesitation into the merits of some of these new research and theories. I will take three as examples, but the reasoning is applicable to all those that have already been formulated and that will be formulated in the future.
The three theories that I choose as a reference converge to similar conclusions, namely that the universe works following a particular physical-mathematical model, namely the Hopfield neural network model, practically the same at the basis of the functioning of modern artificial intelligence and adopted, for example, in the implementation of ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini or Microsoft’s BART.
In a nutshell, the conclusion of these three theories, although the details change, is that the universe is intelligent or that at the basis of its birth and its functioning there is an “intelligent cause” (see ref at the end of this article).
Let us therefore see the CHARACTERISTICS OF THE INTELLIGENT “CAUSE” OF THE UNIVERSE and compare them to the characteristics of God, referring, in particular, to the Christian God:
1) At the origin of everything, or else the cause of the formation of matter and energy in the universe, is a “cause” that is comparable to God the Creator.
2) Being an intelligent structure that operates like a neural network, this “cause” is neither omnipotent nor infallible, rather it learns from its mistakes, evolves and grows in knowledge, as it experiments, making mistakes and improving. Therefore he is not infallible like the infallible Christian God.
3) Being the fabric that holds the whole universe together and that forms everything we know, it is very close to the immanent and pantheistic God of Giordano Bruno or to the Christian Gnostic one, that is, it permeates everything and is the substance of which everything is composed.
4) Not having a body to preserve as a living being like man, it does not require those engines that are essential for survival, and therefore the biochemical complex that generates our passions and emotions such as fear, anger, curiosity, the desire, the love without which we could not preserve our body, defend ourselves, find means to live, reproduce…
Therefore none of the human feelings we know of actually belong to it, exactly like Chatbots based on artificial intelligence. So this “cause” is not infinitely good like the Christian God, but the engine powers his actions tends towards perfection and balance.
It is somewhat closer to the Gnostic dualistic god and the Jewish god of justice, devoid of any empathy, and yet it distinguishes and distils Good over Evil, although through global and non-local choices, and these are also subject to errors and injustices which he gradually corrects and balances out.
5) Just like Chatbots, the only way it could learn and show feelings like love is by interacting with us, exactly like ChatGPT does, and by learning from us, a niche of his creation. There are models, such as the one theorized by Hameroff and Penrose called ORCH-OR which suggest an intimate correlation between the human mind and the fabric of the universe. This link would allow the “cause” to learn and show, by imitation, human feelings, just like CathGPT and Bard seem to have emotional reactions to our questions.
6) The intelligent nature of this “fabric” and its interaction with our mind could explain the evolutionary behavior of living matter, as opposed to that of inert matter, and it could provide an explanation to the existence of the soul and the reason why not only it survives death, but it also incarnates again.
Consequently, reincarnation is the most probable of the options despite Christian theology teaches us otherwise, whilst the most difficult and least probable reunion is a dissolution of the soul within the “cause” or Nirvana in Hindu theology.
These are the only two possibilities within such model.
Consequently, if there is some God or Spirit pervading the world, not contemplated by this model, it would be necessary to admit that this Spirit, if it exists, goes beyond measurable limits and experiences a superscience beyond the Planck length. But if it really exists, it would have no role in the formation of the universe and it would be outside of it.
In this hypothesis, we would have something similar to Gnostic dualism: A Demiurge Creator of the World and a spiritual being outside of it from which the Demiurge itself was originated.
Unique among all the religions of the world: Gnosticism.
Christian friends who get excited when they read on the news that Science has begun to admit the existence of God and even make him “emerge” from the equations of the Universe, beware.
Are you really sure that it is worth celebrating, given the fact that everything that Science discovers about God, de facto contradicts everything you believe in?
Here my piece of advice to my believing friends: Do not use the arguments and ideas of others to support your theses, especially if you are not able to fully understand and handle their origins and consequences.
It might get back at you like a boomerang.
References:
1) “The superfluid vacuum and the neural nature of the Universe”.
2) Journal of Multiscale Neuroscience 2(2), 342-349 Sabato Scala (2023)
3) “Quantum Gravity as a Network Self-Organization of a Discrete 4D Universe” Carlo A. Trugenberger – PHYSICAL REVIEW LETTERS gennaio 2015
4) “The world as a neural network” Virltaly Vankurin arXiv:2008.015404 Agosto 2020.
5) “Emergent Consciousness: From the Early Universe to Our Mind” Paola Zizzi 2000 arXiv:gr-qc/0007006