> Thus "the final laws of nature" would indeed govern "the whole of human
>experience," as well as "everything else" about our universe (as I take
nature
>to mean in this context), including all of the actions and revelations of God
>the Father, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit in the Bible and elsewhere.
One
>application is that when "the final laws of nature" are taken with this broad
>meaning, seeing God revealed in them is not just "natural theology" in its
>usual meaning, but seeing God revealed in anything He has created in this
>universe, including the Bible, miracles, promptings of the Holy Spirit, etc.
>
> Of course, there likely is the debatable implicit assumption by
>Weinberg that the final laws of nature will be mathemetical laws of a form
not
>too dissimilar to those we have already discovered. That is what would
seem to
>give significance to his statement that I quoted from page 245, "All our
>experience throughout the history of science has tended in the opposite
>direction, toward a chilling impersonality in the laws of nature." So one
>partial answer to Weinberg here is that there has been the selection effect
>that we have tended to discover the mathematical part of the laws of nature,
>and as mathematical laws these tend to be impersonal.
>
> Even a non-Christian like David Chalmers, in _The Conscious Mind_ I
>referred to last time, emphasizes that the phenomenal aspects of
consciousness
>do not seem to be implied logically by the present laws of physics (though
many
>others seem to disagree, such as Daniel Dennett). Now I think most of us
>believe that similar experiences, or at least similar physical goings-on in
the
>brain, lead to similar conscious awarenesses, so presumably there are laws
for
>consciousness that we have not formulated very precisely yet. It seems to me
>to be an open question of how mathematical such laws are, and how impersonal.
>
> And then one can go to miracles etc. that are recorded in the Bible. I
>think with Weinberg's meaning of "the final laws of nature," these laws would
>have to govern all of those miracles etc. as well. But of course the open
>question is how mathematical, and how impersonal, such laws would be. It is
>also by no means obvious that humans ever will be able to know the entirety
of
>such laws, for they might be too complicated (e.g., containing a
description of
>all that God has done in this universe, with this description not being
>compressible to a set of rules that we humans would call finite).
>
> On the other hand, the enormous simplicity of the mathematical laws we
>do partially understand does seem to show that the universe is much, much
>simpler than it might have been, and so it suggests that maybe the final laws
>of nature are indeed not too complicated, and maybe even simple enough to be
>knowable to man (at least if this knowledge is not taken to imply that man
can
>work out all the consequences of the laws: in a sense we know the laws of
>qusntum electrodynamics that govern virtually all of chemistry, though we
>certainly cannot work out all the consequences of these laws and so must
still
>continue to do chemistry experiments).
>
> Thus, in apparent agreement with Weinberg, I would regard "the final
>laws of nature" as being a complete description of the universe, including
all
>human experience (with the complete description being in a compressed form,
>just as "the set of all integers," with the background knowledge necessary to
>understand this phrase, is a complete compressed description without being an
>explicit list of all the integers).
>
> So maybe the distinction that Craig Rusbult and others have been
>searching for is rather that between the mathematical aspects of the final
laws
>of nature, and the other parts, though it is probably hopeless to try to make
>this distinction precise either. As a theist, I would certainly not want to
>concede any part of the laws of nature, such as the mathematical or the
>impersonal-appearing parts, as not being created, sustained, governed,
willed,
>planned, purposed, concurred, etc. by God, but there is the open question of
>whether the final laws of nature can be written entirely in mathematical
form,
>and whether they are simplest in this form.
>
> Don Page
>
I find it hard to picture holding in my own hands a book of rules that
governs EVERYTHING including myself--my immediate thoughts and future plans.
Such a theory would have to be a sort of bootstrap theory where everything
is a consequence of everything else--Geoffrey Chew was pushing a bootstrap
theory in particle physics in the 60's which was not successful.
The Bible would be the closest thing to such a book of rules, but even then,
the Bible itself does not bring the whole of reality into existence. It is
not the Word of God, contained in the Bible, but it is the word of God's
power, external to the Bible, which upholds all things and which brought the
whole thing into being.
On can use the example of Euclidean geometry and the five axioms which lead
to all the theorems as an example of such a bootstrap theory--BTW David
Hilbert has shown that one needs as many as twenty axioms rather than just
five to prove all the theorems. Therefore, any five independent theorems
will equally well serve as initial axioms from whence everything else is
derivable. However, all these results are abstract and the five axioms do
not bring any material reality into being.
The Weinberg-Salam theory, which successfully unified electromagnetic and
weak forces, needs an embarrassingly large number of parameters that the
theory itself cannot predict.
I do believe that there is such a book of rules which governs everything.
But such a book can only be in the hands of God. I find it the apex of
human pride to say that one day human efforts will write such a book.
Moorad Alexanian