Charles Gidley Wheeler

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Dear Charles (Gidley) Good to read your web-site and hear of your enjoyment of the course at Durham. Has anything come of your plans for a visit north to Invergordon. Best wishes Ian Parkinson

It seems to me that the universe must necessarily be infinite in infinite ways (or dimensions, or aspects) and that if we use the name ‘God’ at all, we can only do so to refer to the infinite ‘all-that-is’. For if God is supposed to be outside Nature, ‘he’ must be separate from something else, and nothing that is said to be separate from another thing can be regarded as infinite.

This contradiction, I contend, is the flaw that runs through absolutist religions, particularly the constantly warring religions of Christianity, Judaism and Islam. It is the self-contradictory doctrine upon which they wholeheartedly agree, but upon which each relies to reassure its adherents that theirs is the only faith worth dying for.

There is currently a fad for belief in ‘Intelligent Design’ as a pseudo-scientific alternative to Darwinian evolution. It can be easily deflated. If you believe in an infinitely powerful and wise creator who stands apart from the universe, you are presented with a choice. Either you believe in a theistic God who intervenes in human affairs, or you believe in a deistic ‘intelligent design’ God who does not intervene. You can’t consistently believe in a God who intervenes in human affairs and yet does not intervene. But here’s the problem. Theism reduces God to a less than omnipotent creator who has to work miracles to keep his creation running in accordance with his will; while deism reduces God to a less than omniscient architect or designer who, having formed the universe out of nothing and issued immutable laws for it to follow, withdraws and leaves it to run on like a mechanism that never needs adjusting.

The contradiction implicit in believing either in an intelligent design God who does not intervene in events, or a creator god who does is, I think, particularly fatal for the Christian religion, as belief in intelligent design rules out belief in a flawed creation in which human beings need to be 'saved', while belief in a god who is careless enough to build into his creation original sin, eternal punishment and the need for salvation rules out the possibility of belief that the original design was the product of an omnipotent and omniscient intelligence.

It boils down to a logical inference that might be expressed as: ‘If design infinitely intelligent, then no need for miracles; and if miracles needed, then design not infinitely intelligent’.

The only way out of the impasse that seems rational to me is to accept Spinoza’s argument, in his philosophical masterpiece Ethics, that God and the universe are one and the same thing, that this ‘God-or-Nature’ is its own cause, and that it is infinite in infinite ways.

Because I view space-time as being all of a piece and infinite, I can’t go along with any theory that the universe ‘began’ in any way. Belief in a cosmological Big Bang that starts everything off is, I think, as absurd as belief in a divine creator, as it prompts infinite regress questions like ‘What went bang?’ and is a supposition based on mathematics which, as Kurt Gödel so elegantly demonstrated, is incomplete. (For an explanation, read Rudy Rucker’s Infinity and the Mind).

I much prefer the Chinese concept of Qi (Chi), the infinite energy that pervades, empowers and forms the infinite universe. It is a worldview that has persisted down the ages and in all cultures. The pre-Socratic philosophers Parmenides and Heraclitus, who said respectively that all is one and all is in flux, seem to me to be close to the same view. The Stoics identified Zeus with Nature, and Darwin echoed the same thought in his speculations about pangenesis. Einstein formalised Spinoza’s identification of God and Nature in his Special Theory of Relativity, which equates energy (E) with matter in motion (mc²); and the view that the universe is a single, infinite energy field seems to be confirmed by quantum mechanics, as Gary Zukav engagingly explains in The Dancing Wu Li Masters.

Unsurprisingly, absolutist religions abhor this view, as it denies the existence of individual souls, asserting that there is only one infinite Mind, of which our minds are mere temporal modes. This thought renders absurd all threats of eternal punishment and all promises of eternal bliss, and in doing so discredits the authority of priests, pastors, rabbis and mullahs, together with that of the various political systems to which they lend support.

Is there any point to such speculation? I think so, because a significant moral implication can be derived from the proposition that we are all one, in that once I have grasped it, it becomes obvious that to injure others is to injure myself.

This is a precept that applies on a universal scale and is effective and infallible in solving all problems of ethics or morals. Only when we have grasped it can we begin to develop the skill of living in peace and harmony with ourselves and the universe, and until we do, wars will continue.