awesome book that gets a little tangly and might exceed someones boggle factor but is very convincing. this is a small portion.
Every thousand years or so, there comes a thinker whose life is as striking as his or her intellectual output is stunning. Viewed from this perspective, it is remarkable indeed that within a period of 300+ years, the world was to witness the convergent odysseys of four titans of thought who set the agenda for the study of reality at every level. This is the period I like to call the Golden Age of human thought. Between them, Avicenna of Persia (980-1037), Moses Maimonides of Egypt (1135-1204), Thomas Aquinas of Italy (c.1225-1274) and Madhvacharya of India (c.1238-1317) created a magnificent monument of thought that underpins the very possibility of the scientific enterprise. It was the mother of all Theories of Everything, one that was validated both by its inherent logic and the success of modern science.
The point of departure for these thinkers, let's call them the Four, was simply that things exist. From this bare fact their minds soared to the greatest insight possible to the human mind - the realization that things exist only because there exists One who cannot not-exist, who exists without beginning or end or any conceivable limitation. The very essence of this Being is to BE - there is no question of was or will be for It always IS. Thus we speak of "It" as "He who IS", the "I AM." Each one of the Four considered this "equation of God" to be THE fundamental truth:
Avicenna: In God alone, essence, what he is, and existence, that he is, coincide. God's essence is to exist. "The essence of the Necessary Existent [God] can be no other than existence."
Maimonides: "His existence is identical with his essence and his true reality, and his essence is his existence."
Aquinas: "There is a being, God, whose essence is His very act of existing."
Madhvacharya (Commentary on verse 17 of the Isavaya Upanishad Basya): "'SO AHAM ASMI.' This is the great ineffable name of God, 'I am that I AM' 'That Supreme Being (asau) which indwells in Asu is the I AM.'"
The great discovery of divine self-existence, the "God equation" of Essence=Existence that has inspired hundreds of writings, is foundational for the Matrix. From it flows a dynamic vision of reality rooted in a living, ever-active and infinitely creative source and conserver of everything that was, is and will be. By working out all the implications of this "equation", the Four arrived at all their other findings: the world is real and rational, the human person can think and know, every phenomenon has an explanation given that infinite Intelligence is the ground of all things.
Why is the Matrix important for science? Well, for modern science to work, for the very possibility of a scientific method that bears fruit in theory and experiment, we must make certain basic assumptions about the nature of the world. For instance, we can't "do" science in the sense of seeking out underlying causes and laws if we didn't believe that the world operates with causes and laws. Nor could we pursue our inquiries if we didn't think our minds are capable of making deductions and reaching valid conclusions.
But why should we believe any of these assumptions to be true? And how did we come up with them in the first place? Did scientists discover them like they discovered Pluto or invent them like they invented jet engines? The fact of the matter is that science and the scientific method didn't drop out of nowhere. There's a framework of thought behind science that goes beyond the methods of science. It's a set of pre-scientific and pre-philosophical insights accepted by the first scientists.
We call them "meta-scientific" and by that we mean a principle or reality that is fundamental to science but cannot be tested with the methods of science. The domain of the meta-scientific includes:
things that have no physical characteristics (e.g., consciousness, abstract thought),
claims that can be proved or disproved by reasoning but not by experiment (e.g., are our minds capable of knowing?) and
questions about the nature of existence (e.g., what does it mean for something to "be").
A classic meta-scientific issue is the belief that the universe exists. This can only be assumed by science and not proven because every physical experiment will necessarily assume the world exists. A proof for the reality of the world (as laid out by Madhvacharya, for instance) is necessarily meta-scientific. The Matrix does two things. It:
affirms the meta-scientific principles that were later adopted by science and then
builds a case for accepting the truth of these principles.
To put it another way, it supplies science with its foundations and provides the ground on which these foundations can be laid. Most scientists are too busy (as they should be) building on the foundations to worry about the foundations themselves. But if we assume (as science does and must) that there's rationality in the world embodied in the laws of nature, then we should know if and why this assumption is true and what it implies. It's here that the Matrix takes us beyond the assumption itself to the ultimate reality on which it is founded.
The importance of the Matrix becomes apparent when we consider the idea of scientific laws. The notion of fundamental laws of nature is now a commonplace in science. But where did the idea of such "laws" come from? Not from atheists or materialists. Intellectually it originated in the idea of a divine Mind who instituted immutable laws of nature (as even critics of the concept of laws of nature admit). Paradoxically, the scientist who today reflects on these laws talks of the Mind of God. So here are the two sequences: historically, the idea of God led to the idea of fundamental laws; currently, the idea of fundamental laws leads to the idea of God.
his outcome is that there is a god, but not a biblical god per se. awesome writer and won the templeton award.
