sucky expand on langhans views if you would, i reckon you've read most of his works and have a good grasp on it.
is his god benevolent, or is god the system ie pantheism?
thanks.
Langan postulates that God is an interchangeable term with reality. Assume the premisse "reality contains all that is real". Of course, this is a tautology, but a necessary one if we are to deduce the properties of reality. Langan expands the paradox of the self-containing set - the set that contains all sets but cannot be contained by any set - , which is one of the three great unsolved paradoxes of mathematics - the other two being the Riemann Hypothesis and whether prime numbers are infinite or not.
Since reality contains all that is real, then it is impossible to use inductive logic to infer all of reality, because causality itself is a limited property of reality, and thus can only explain part of it. If logic cannot explain all of reality, then what is logic? According to Langan, logic and causality are forms of perceptions between given particles of reality. In this context, the word "particle" is not used to categorize actual physical particles, but specific factors of reality that play the same role as the factors in mathematics.
We thus perceive reality in a specific way because our senses are limited, and they are limited because our senses are themselves the result of physical pocesses that interact in a specific way. This goes back to Aristotle, who postulated that our senses can only perceive parts of reality because they are bound to the rules of reality itself.
So reality has a lot to do with mathematics in the sense that both are axiomatically closed systems, and that all interaction between properties of the system are bound or "closed" and only have intrinsec meaning in the context of the system. Going by this, then there are infinite universes, all based on different axioms, and they are infinite because they are based on the ultimate premisse that reality contains containment itself, and thus cannot be contained by anything. Thus, the mathemactical concept of limit does not apply to reality at all.
This creates, according to Langan, even more startling deductions. Since reality contains all that is real, and since nothing can "escape" reality as whole, then a Human Being's conscience, feeelings continue to exist somehow after death, and, just like the matter that composes the physical body is re-integrated into the physical world, so are a person's thought, experiences and self-consciousness "recycled" through reality after the person dies.
So whya re there intelligent beings? Langan claims that all beings are "sensors" that reality(God) uses to evaluate itself and evolve. Since more intelligent beings posses a more refined comprehension of reality and a greater capacity to interfer with it than less intelligetn beings, then this is why the lives of more intelligent beings have more value than the lives of less intellient beings. This is why murdering a Human Being is a much, much graver offense than murdering a pig or a cow: you are eliminating a "sensor" that has more global value in the interpretation and evolution of reality than the other sensor. When asked if this means that high I.Q people have more value than low I.Q people, Langan replied that high I.Q people have more "contextual" value, but not more intrinsec value. He gave the example that the assassination of Einstein would represent a much greater loss to the comprehension and evolution of reality itself than the assassination of a street bum. The concept of value itself is tied with Darwinian evolution, and has no greater meaning outside of it. This brings us to carma. According to Langan, when you murder a Human Being, you suffer a great immediate de-valuement, because you have eliminated a sensor that reality uses to evolve itself. God hates that, and he renders the offender incapable of doing that again by limiting his capacity after death. Reincarantion as a lower being or being put in a state of stasis is one of the ways he does that. He does not do this to "punish" the offender, as the concept of punishment is primitive and lower than God: he does it to eliminate someone who is stopping his own comprehension and evolution.
So, according to Langan, there are not only souls, but also intelligent entities spread across all of reality. There might be beings that are so hyper-evolved that they comprehend and are 99.9999999999%+ as powerful as God. These beings might be so hyper-evolved and god-like that they might exist beyond time-space and have the capacity to manufacture entire universes from scratch. However, no matter how god-like they become, they will never be 100% of God, because that would represent a breach of the self-containment principle, which all reality is based upon. Since reality contains all that is real, then there is only one reality and one God, and these hyper-advanced entities are still contained by reality. becoming 100% like God would mean that they have become different realities, and reality, by definition, contains all and is not contained by anything.
I personally am an atheist, because I believe that there are a billion more interesting explanations for explaining the ultimate nature of reality than a creator God. Like Richard Dawkins said, accepting there reality results from a creator God is creating far more problems then the ones you're trying to explain. But in any case, Langan has so far provided the best support for theism that I have come across. Like I said, his theistic explanation for reality is so incredibly high-brow that it is unappealing for most religious people. As Langan himself has said "religion is God for still un-evolved sensors". Such is the World...
SUCKMYMUSCLE
