Part A – A Personal Viewpoint of Reality

​ My view of reality is not a mystical one.  Instead, my view of reality is based on my limited understanding of the physical universe.  I consider our universe the product of a great transfer of energy from unknown processes and structures in the metaverse.  In my mind, the metaverse may have energetic structures that continuously clap together and result in what we know as a Big Bang – creating infinite universes in this way within the infrastructure of the metaverse.  Our Big Bang and the resulting expansion and cooling, a process still underway, resulted in the facts of particle physics that, at least for me, define reality today.  I am confused about the dual-arrow nature of space-time, and how all of the future and the past are considered to be like a roll of film along this dimension.  But in the context of this inflationary theory of the universe it may make sense when and if the universe one day fully collapses that reality is indeed like a reel of film, our lives and observations all preordered from the first instant of the Big Bang.  I think this process of a transfer of energy that creates an inflationary universe that eventually deflates and then disappears is an ongoing process and byproduct of the infrastructure of the metaverse resulting in infinite universes popping in and out of existence.  It is possible that humankind will never know the physics of these extra-universal structures or even the physics outside of our known four-dimensional view of reality, but it may be possible to describe the infrastructure of reality and the metaverse itself.

​ I have been thinking about reality since I was a small child, and have explored mystical and philosophical interpretations by engaging organized religion and doing the hard work of reading and understanding Greek and 19th century thinkers.  I am informed by real-life people including family and friends engaged in theology, books and historical accounts of the great thinkers and literary giants both East and West, and by science and the extraordinary physics and ontological work of todays’ geniuses like Brian Greene and Daniel Dennett.  Taken together these experiences give me a very high level of certainty that my view of reality is at least on solid footing. 

​Part B – A Personal Viewpoint of Being

​ I am here on this very rare planet after winning a lottery with the lowest of conceivable odds.  All of us that have lived, and even every sentient being, have won this lottery while infinite others have not.  All life is here on planet Earth as a result of infinite attributes of the properties of the physical world that, when combined in one place and one time, result in this life.  There is no purposiveness to my being except for the purposes in which I engage, and I have no expectations of myself that don’t exist as a matter of the state of things now, that is my time on Earth.  I am what I am and I am here because of a confluence of cosmic events, both cases having underlying physical sciences that have for me been much more informative about my own ontological state than personal introspection.

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Part C – The Unwinding of Science and Religion

​ John Polkinghorne address altruism briefly, in one sentence, in his tome Exploring Reality: The Intertwining of Science and Religion.  But altruism, and more specifically true reciprocal altruism is an important component of understanding reality and deserves more treatment in light of modern science on the subject.  Additionally, with regards to sociobiology, Polkinghorne challenges the reader as he does many times throughout his book to substitute mysticism for a more obvious and rational line of thought.  As a matter of course chapters 1-5 of the book are a broad attempt to use skyhooks whenever the opportunity arises to shoehorn mystical idealizations of reality into areas of the sciences that simply require continued research.  This seeming dismissal of the role that altruism plays, especially in unexpected ways, in determining our environment and ultimately our own reality is a useful example in Polkinghorne’s narrative for demonstrating that in these chapters ultimately he was not able to specifically pinpoint where science and religion intertwine at all.  In fact, an examination of altruism and epigenetics informs the religionist about issues of morality and human emotion, and not the other way around.

In Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene we learn about memes.  God and faith are identified as memes, which are bits of information that act like an infection replicating in our brains.  They propagate based on their survival value. 

We also learn about reciprocal altruism.  In a series of games and experiments Dawkins and other scientists have shown that even in the most bizarre natural systems cooperation of a “Tit for Tat” kind is required for normalization.  (230)  This cooperative, reciprocal altruism is accomplished in part by exercising the survival value of propagating certain memes.  From these ideas launched the modern day field of epigenetics which demonstrates that changes to DNA that are not related to chromosomes but instead to external and environmental factors play a crucial role in determining our behaviors and emotions at the cellular level.  As scientists consider the confluence of epigenetics and reciprocal altruistic behavior a picture of understanding human behavior such as love or intonating the “survival value” of music (Polkinghorne 54) begins to emerge.  We no longer need to rely on mystical interpretations of the feelings generated by Mozart’s Requiem or the complexities of love when they can probably be analyzed in a scientific framework.  These aspects of humanity are not mysterious or unknowable and therefore not likely to “(elude) Darwinian explanation” (54) and neither are they “engagements with the everlasting truth of being”.  (56)  Polkinghorne wishes for a divine explanation for these seemingly inexplicable phenomena where science is well underway formulating its own explanations.

​ Polkinghorne is a serious physicist that does not give short shrift to the realities of 21st century scientific progress.  He acknowledges that human evolution, environment, and genetics have played a role in the development of a normalized system of societies.  But he also writes about a layer of complexity in the physical world that has perplexed theologians for millennia where, in fact, explanations can be found in the scientific theories of today.  Since we can now quantify most of these phenomena that have traditionally been ascribed to the divine it may be that Polkinghorne’s argument for a first-cause god-concept isn’t useful any longer.  As he said himself, “The infinite nature of God is never going to be exhaustively contained in the finite categories of human thought.” (95)

References

Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press,.1989.

Polkinghorne, J. C. Exploring Reality: The Intertwining of Science and Religion. New Haven. Yale University Press. 2005.