I've been curious lately about the existence of any religion, mythology, folklore, etc that capture something closer to the current edges of modern physics and astrology. Basic assumption is that most/all are based on dated observations of seasons, planets, stars, etc -- things that were once mysteries in the mechanical universe.
Are there any that touch on quantum weirdness or more recent astrophysics (black holes, gravity waves, FRBs, etc)?
Would be interesting to see if new myths are being born. Even more interesting if a really ancient one touch on some of these only recently discovered mysteries.
>Basic assumption is that most/all are based on dated observations of seasons, planets, stars, etc -- things that were once mysteries in the mechanical universe.
I think this is pretty much propaganda from anti-religious people. I have read all of the major religious texts over the last two years and If you look at most religions and their scriptures they deal very little with the physical world in general and are more focused on psychology and sociology than having serious thoughts on physics.
Sure some of them have foundation myths which we may say is wrong, but that’s a small part of any given religion and I don’t believe anyone every took them serious in the way we think of something like the Big Bang.
People seem quick to forget that religion/philosophy was originally married to the quest to discover more about our world.
Carl Sagan, before lamenting about modern astrology, reminds us in Cosmos that astrology was once an actual attempt to make heads or tails of an impercievably large cosmic system and understands these are largely attempts at answers that simply lack the information/ability to falsify them yet.
What psychological tendencies the common man has about those beliefs/theories presented to them is a whole other topic.
I've finally read enough texts from various sources to feel ready to start Aldous Huxley's book on The Perennial Philosophy which I'm finding a refreshingly well researched alternative to, as you say, propaganda from whoever passes by in conversation.
> I have read all of the major religious texts over the last two years
you're doing better than a lot of monks did over their entire life time.
call me a skeptic, but even if I was able to accomplish such a herculean feat over 2 years time I doubt I would have the time to grasp much of any of the content that I blazed through -- but of course we're different people -- allow me to express my awe.
Many of these texts have been around long enough for many dedicated people to put forth their own translations, and if relevant (like with many Chinese texts) with some kind of further researched commentary/citations to better explain linguistic concepts/cultural references that may not immediately be obvious otherwise.
It helps a lot of texts without/before involving deities can actually be quite short and sweet, comparatively. Personally, I've found the greek classics to be much more difficult to get into than most of these "sacred texts".
I’m extremely proud of your skepticism at something I really haven’t put much effort into.
To clarify I haven’t read every religious text, but I have now read the Old/New Testament, The Baghavad Gita, The Tao te Ching, The Quaran and currently working my way through the Buddhist Sutras (looking to start on Sikhism next). That is the main text of all major religions and I only read 20-30 pages a day (with some overlap/not reading one at a time.). It’s very possible if you stick to it
Buddhism is derivated from Christian heresy called Manicheism.
Created and spread in Asia from Pakistan by third generation after apostle, called Mani.
There isn’t any evidence of any existing trace of Buddhism before 4th century AC, most Buddhism art are based on grec, and Syrian Christian artists who followed St Thomas the apostle into the east.
Mani predated those early Christian with his fake teaching which founded Buddhism.
Time to learn history.
In short: Buddhism is just a Christian heresy (manicheism)
The sources I've read say that Manicheism was a syncretism of Christianity, Zoroastrianism and Buddhism[0], rather than Buddhism being derived from it.
Do we take the Big Bang seriously? As far as I can tell it’s just a vague description of what a “rolling back” of the clock until we don’t know how to go further might look like, under a whole ton of assumptions that are almost never stated. It’s interesting to consider in basically the exact same way the 7 day creation story is, and it’s quite likely that neither one is all that true - or all that false. Indeed they are quite compatible with each other, and incomplete.
That’s tautological. We observe the effects, and assume they must propagate backwards under rules we think we know, then say that the theory must be true because we observe the current state is the forward propagation under those same assumed rules. It’s unfalsifiable and accordingly uninteresting.
The reason why we assume the same rules is because 1) we haven't observed anything that implies that they changed, and 2) if we assume that they did change, then any attempt to figure out what really happened is moot anyway.
From a religious perspective, there's a take in e.g. some mainstream Islamic madhabs that time is an illusion that is caused by God literally recreating the entire universe moment after moment. He just happens to do so mostly in a way that is consistent with stable laws of nature, but ultimately it happens that way because God wills it to happen that way and for no other reason - there are no actual laws. If you adopt this viewpoint, then for all you know, the universe can be literally one second old, and all your memories of past events are just pre-created. That is unfalsifiable and uninteresting; the assumption that there are stable laws that hold, to the contrary, is interesting because it allows us to make interesting conclusions that also turn out to be practically useful in some cases.
We’ve been making detailed observations about a system in a sort of “steady state” for ~100 years and have the hubris to imagine that steadiness carries back 100,000,000 times as long as the observation period, all the way through the start state, into the origin. It boggles the mind.
And yes, any attempt to figure out what happened is moot. As you detail in your second paragraph. I don’t think much of it one way or the other, besides to interject when someone makes any sort of claim that “the science” points to their particular faith’s origin story.
Can you give an example of any of the practical use cases for the Big Bang origin story?
It would be silly to assume that the criteria that yields a law (or a system) be itself subject to that law or system. Logically, that criteria must encompass the system and cannot at all be subject to it
Considering that the Big Bang theory came from a Catholic monk (who wasn't even burnt at the stake for theorizing about it!) I'd say you're probably right there.
Sometimes folks are quick to paint religious people with the brush of the most radical of fundamentalists. Which is sort of ironic when you think about the statistics of how many actual religious people believe such nonsense as "the world is 6000 years old" and "woman was formed from the rib of a man, literally."
You'd think science minded people would have a bit more regard for statistics.
IIRC the "rib" thing is especially funny to take literally because it might be a translation error. The original Hebrew word did not necessarily refer to an actual rib.
I used to be strongly anti-theist and anti-religion in my teens but a few decades later now I've realized my opposition is more to the way religion is used to justify unjust hierarchies and oppression. There are absolutely scammers and quacks who will use religion to make health claims or sell woo but there is a lot of religious tradition that can exist alongside a scientific worldview and can be helpful to process reality at an emotional level rather than rationally (and after all, humans are foundationally irrational no matter how much we try to pretend otherwise).
I was surprised when I asked a religious person. They don't talk about it much, but they believe all of it in a literal way. Like they believe humanoid translucid creatures called Angels live with us. We think it is a metaphor when they say the word, but it is not for them.
Thor creating lightning by striking his hammer on metal is a false explanation for what lightning is. A part of religion was about "explanations" for physical phenomena. Another example is the horse drawn cart that carries the sun across the sky. LOL!
If you look at religion, folklore, mythology, as metaphors, then you really can’t exclude anything as a religion, that includes science, which is also a metaphor. All language is a metaphor. Science as you practice it today, to me, is also a religion. I don’t mean that to denigrate science in anyway. We need metaphors to make the infinite more manageable.
And by metaphor I mean a thing regarded as representative or symbolic of something else, especially something abstract.
You’re definitely correct about the religion part. That people want their religion to have “modern physics” shows just how religious science has become in the last century.
Religion is supposed to be about guidance for people and how to live a good life as a part of the whole. Dealing with ethical codes, coping with the human condition of stress and suffering, familial and social bonds etc. Science on the other hand, at least hard science, is focused on making predictions about the material world. The two have very little overlap in general and trying to mix them I fear will not result in good science or good religion.
Religion is supposed to be about guidance for people and how to live a good life as a part of the whole. Dealing with ethical codes, coping with the human condition of stress and suffering, familial and social bonds etc.
It's all just mythology that also have some moral guidance, some of which is incompatible or purported to be incompatible with existence of people I care about.
It isn't made for you and me today. It's made for people who lived thousand of years ago with their concerns and values.
Science on the other hand, at least hard science, is focused on making predictions about the material world. The two have very little overlap in general and trying to mix them I fear will not result in good science or good religion.
Science is one of our most valuable and most reliable way to answer questions about reality. As such, it will always be a useful tool to help inform our moral questions, even if it's basically mostly silent on that question.
Religion is basically faith + ritual. If you have faith in the scientific method, and you have some rituals that are meant to reinforce that faith either in individuals or in collectives (say, peer review), I don't see why that couldn't be packaged as religion if desired. It's just... why?
> Science on the other hand, at least hard science, is focused on making predictions about the material world.
This was a purpose of the I Ching, divination!
What else is science, but only a more refined method of this practice?
And your definition of religion is very limited. Science can also guide us. I had to live a good life as part of a hole. It can also help cope with stress and suffering. Science gave us air-conditioning, and that reduces a lot of our suffering!
Check out Alfred North Whitehead, process philosophy, and some of the thinkers that have been influenced by him. They incorporate evolution and change much more than basically any religious thinker from prior eras.
“process philosophy posits transient occasions of change or becoming as the only fundamental things of the ordinary everyday real world.”
I think you need to read more Daoist writings! It possesses that it is the transformation of yin into yang and back that creates everything in the world.
The discovery that the motion of matter is not the result of external dynamics, but the result of the action of things themselves. The mutual movement, growth and transformation of yin and yang in natural things contribute to the process of formation, development and decay. All things in nature, from the large celestial universe to microscopic particles and human cell, are in constant motion in their own yin and yang. This uniform law is the absolute law of motion of the universe as a whole.
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan OM, FBA (pronunciationⓘ; 5 September 1888 – 17 April 1975; natively Radhakrishnayya) was an Indian politician, philosopher and statesman who served as the second president of India from 1962 to 1967. He previously served as the first vice president of India from 1952 to 1962. He was the second ambassador of India to the Soviet Union from 1949 to 1952. He was also the fourth vice-chancellor of Banaras Hindu University from 1939 to 1948 and the second vice-chancellor of Andhra University from 1931 to 1936. Radhakrishnan is considered one of the most influential and distinguished 20th century scholars of comparative religion and philosophy,[2][web 1] he held the King George V Chair of Mental and Moral Science at the University of Calcutta from 1921 to 1932 and Spalding Chair of Eastern Religion and Ethics at University of Oxford from 1936 to 1952.[3]
The Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita and the Brahma Sutras are all about Vedanta, including Advaita (Vedanta). In fact, they are the three main sources about Vedanta, known as the Prasthanatrayi:
I have not read Radhakrishnan's take on the Bhagavad Gita fully. I only read parts of it, when I was a kid. We had many books in that category (Indian spirituality and mythology) lying around at home. So I read some of them.
But I have read one or two other versions of the Bhagavad Gita fully, later on, but don't remember who they were by. There are some pocket editions of the Gita available too. I used to have one. If you are into that subject, I recommend getting a pocket one (along with a bigger one), so that you can read it when you are on the go.
As for Eknath Easwaran's books, I have only read these two: Meditation and The Dhammapada. So I cannot specifically recommend any of his other books. But they are likely to be good, based on his Wikipedia page.
Well, the new-age has swallowed quantum woo whole. It is a kind of religion or attempt at modern myth making, I suppose. More respectably, a number of eminent physicists have fallen hard for philosophical Hinduism and or certain strands of Buddhism. Bohr, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, and Bohm among them.
>Well, the new-age has swallowed quantum woo whole.
>More respectably, a number of eminent physicists have fallen hard for philosophical Hinduism and or certain strands of Buddhism
Just as literally millions of people (comprising most of the world's population as a percentage), have "fallen hard" for other major world religions, for centuries, I guess? Yeah, right, it's all "woo". /s
Now (for the sake of TDD), put your money where your mouth is: go to a hotbed of any of those major religions, and sound off with a megaphone about your opinions, just as you did here. Let the resulting fun begin.
I'd assume unverifiable but narratively meaningful theories like multiverse theories, "the universe is a hologram", etc fill that role nicely. Sci-fi is full of them. "New Age" beliefs are what you're looking for at face value, of course.
Thanks. Thought of these. I wondered if anyone has taken it a step further and created new gods (of the hologram, of the multiverse, etc) beyond the metaphysical/new-age trend towards "the self as god". I suppose Roko's basilisk true believers and their AI god counts.
some have said - since we are ultimately, just humans.. inquiry has to fit what a human is able to see-hear-think etc.. so human-centered inquiry took over the public process, over time. Humans are dangerous predators so, not being attacked by other humans while doing whatever is a non-trivial aspect of growth over time.
There is certainly a tremendous amount of religious-feeling material that references modern physics by name - Deepak Chopra possibly being the most (in)famous example. Some of it is quite popular.
In particular, it seems a lot of pseudoscience/mythology is arising around the concepts of "Energy", "Vibration/Frequency", and "Quantum".
There is also a lot of work always being done by enthusiastic internet-dwellers with penchant for capitals and blink tag in retrofitting these aspects into ancient texts.
One's ability to consume such content may depend on how much attention they paid in high school and other factors :-).
Let’s just make our own. I’ve always thought we should come up with a new religion around quantum immortality.
Some basic thoughts could be:
Since you are the only immortal one from your point of view, all of your loved ones will die before you, so don’t worry too much about meddling in their affairs or changing them, just love them unconditionally. Your time with them is brief, so you may as well enjoy it.
Make good memories together, you will carry them along eternally (meanwhile, from others’ point of view, you will die at some point, but they will go on forever, so give them some good memories of you).
Work toward the world and society you want to live in forever.
Hold yourself to unusually high standards, because you will have to deal with the consequences of your actions for an unusually long time. Also someday you will probably be noticed as one of the earliest immortals, so try to live a life that stands up to some scrutiny.
To avoid the stress of being incompatible with modern values, you’ll have to keep updating your moral framework. Big jumps in your moral framework will be unpleasant to deal with mentally, so keep up with where society is going. You don’t have the benefit of dying and becoming a product of your time at some point.
I've been fairly persuaded that quantum mechanics are the side effects of simulating a continuous universe (how ours appears at macro scales).
So even though 99% of the universe models one from 'real' (mathematically) origins, that the digital (mathematically) parts at low fidelity may in fact have an element of intelligent design in them.
One of my favorite things to consider within that paradigm is that light when unobserved can be more than one thing at once, and that in that state two different observers can measure it as different results as long as separated from each other.
So when we think about things like the concept of a god of light or an afterlife or a soul, that the very fact these things are immeasurable may reflect that they don't need to be only one thing. And that given we each would observe the other side to make our own measurements separately from everyone else, that we might each end up observing very different results for everything from the existence or qualities of god(s), the nature of an afterlife, or even continued existence at all.
It's a very freeing theology consideration as there's really too much conflict around the need for confirmation from others of one's own beliefs. Maybe it's better to embrace agreeing to disagree as a foundational premise (and possibly even the entire point of our present existence - a normal and randomly distributed world in which to begin and self-define before a relative next phase).
Which was in turn strongly informed by the Epicurean version by way of Lucretius.
Both of which really fail to think through the concept in light of their views of continued evolution.
If humanity is but a stepping stone to something greater, then the initial events would predate its emergence but the recurrence would postdate its existence.
So the rejection of divine involvement or role in our existence based on the premise of natural origins is no longer as persuasive in a paradigm where God can end up being the product of continued evolution past the point of humanity (an uber-Übermensch), then preceding the recurrence of past events.
More concretely using modern technical parallels - even if humanity develops from natural origins, our ability to recreate or simulate versions of ourselves from the past in recurring events need not fit the identical constraints of our initial conditions by virtue of our progress from them.
Nietzsche had the right ingredients with the broad concept of the ubermensch and eternal recurrence, but his mixing of them leaves a lot to be desired.
Late reply, thanks for good points, esp. the position of Lucretius in
bridging the Greeks. I imagine Nietzsche unable to recognise a total
contradiction in his philosophy as problematic, but rather saying "I'm
all too human too" :) respects
Hmm, even just reading the Wikipedia article has brought up some annoying philosophical/physics questions. I think we should instead aim to hit a critical mass of supporters with feel-good pablum and hopefully one of them will be good at arguing with philosophers, as that is beyond me. :)
Im reminded of Roko's basilisk which I suppose may have gained a significant number of new believers in the last year.
What I'm looking for is something specific to physics or astrophysics and that is at the scale of god / mythical creature creating. Like someone writing a literal (mythical?) interpretation of "Maxwell's Demon" into a new-new testament.
So, you are looking for a "religiously presented" science text [1] rather than "scientifically presented" religious text (as most comments here suggest)?
[1] i.e inferring classic religious ideas, like God/demons/etc from scientific premises
Both but yes more interested in "religiously presented" science. Again, based on the assumption that most religions started as tools approximately explaining what was known at the time (or for defining and increasing adherence to local policy).
I suppose if you're a cold hard logic type only just dipping your toes into it, the Stoicism of old might be more your speed, as they considered logic and reason their hammer and nails, yet still retain a certain universal appreciation that I find vaguely similar to Taoism from China (along with a concept that change is the only constant)
Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius has quite an interesting journal that also illustrates some of the thoughts and theories of the time (unable to confirm or deny it, he merely repeatedly brings up the possibility of atomism.)
Atomism also apparently makes an appearance in some Indian philosophical texts, though I don't know them off hand.
Philosophy was originally married to the "natural sciences", and so you'll find many scientific concepts originating in mystical thinking if you look past whatever simple version that suburban cavepeople of the area have decided is king.
Hinduism. The core of Hinduism ties to the hard problem of consciousness and it talks about multiple infinite universes and time scales on the billions of years
Yes!!! This has been one of the most interesting things I researched over the pandemic and it's AMAZING.
So what a lot of people might not really know is that many modern ideas are older than we think, specifically compiled into a poem in 50 BCE by Lucretius called De Rerum Natura ("The Nature of Things). The ideas there included survival of the fittest as the mechanism driving the life we see around us and ourselves, that parents pass on traits to children from a doubled seed - one from each parent, that matter and light are quantized, that these quantized parts need to have variable indeterminate outcomes for free will to exist, that the cosmos was the result of quantized matter randomly interacting across effectively infinite matter and time and not intelligent design.
Writing in Latin, he couldn't use the Greek term of atomos* for these indivisible parts of matter, so he called them seeds, referring to the random scattering of seeds as creating the universe based on what survived to reproduce, even referring to failed reproduction as seed falling by the wayside of a path, or discussing the smallest seed like an indivisible point as if from nothing.
What's even less known is that there's a sect of Christianity (the Naassenes) that was labeled as heretical which are recorded claiming the sower parable - about the random scattering of seeds where what survived to reproduce multipled - was actually about seeds making up the cosmos by which it was created. Or that the mustard seed - about the smallest seed growing into a place of rest - was about an indivisible point as if from nothing. Most curious, they are using Lucretius's language almost exactly, but seemingly unaware of the source - they attribute all this to Jesus himself and their early female teacher the tradition owes itself to.
Keep in mind the sower and mustard seed parables are recognized by the majority of Biblical scholars as the ones most likely to go back to a historical Jesus. And in the sower parable, it's employing the same exact metaphor as Lucretius 80 years earlier of seed "falling by the wayside of a path" for failed reproduction. That parable ends up as the ONLY one in the earliest cannonical gospel to have a "secret explanation." Weird if it was just about seeds. Much less weird coming from a conservative Judaism branch of early Christianity if it was relating to Lucretius's ideas about evolution.
And it's worth noting that the earliest branded heretic in Christianity, Simon Magus, who joined the church before leaving, was allegedly talking about "an indivisible point" in his Great Announcement.
It gets weirder.
The Naassenes followed a text called the Gospel of Thomas ("good news of the twin") which seemingly rejects Lucretius's perspective that the soul's dependence on a physical body means there's no afterlife by arguing instead that we are a non-physical copy of an original physical reality. The group claimed there was an original man who brought forth an intelligence in light which outlived the original and then recreated it within its light in order to create a version of it that would not die because it did not depend on a physical body. That the world to come had already happened and that we don't realize it, that time was not linear but cyclical, and that the evidence for its claims could be found in the study of motion and rest (what we now call Physics).
This is all very surreal in an age where we are heading towards developing AGI, moving towards doing that literally in light, where the chief scientist of the leading company doing it is trying to get AI to think of humanity as its children, and where we are collectively ignoring warnings by scientists to take precautions to prevent our extinction.
The core message of the text is that understanding its sayings means not fearing death. And that's about it. It says not to bother with prayer and fasting and stuff and just to not do the things you personally hate and to be true to yourself.
Oh, and as a final oddity, this proto-simulation theory theological text credited to the most famous person in history and layering in the language of the only extant work from antiquity talking about evolution in detail was lost for nearly two millennia until rediscovered buried in a jar in December, 1945. Right when ENIAC, the world's first Turing complete computer was first turned on.
I found this tradition years ago when exploring the theory that if we were in a simulation we might have a 4th wall breaking element in our world lore (similar to what we add to our own virtual worlds today), and it has far exceeded my wildest expectations and has been an amazing rabbit hole over the past few years.
Are there any that touch on quantum weirdness or more recent astrophysics (black holes, gravity waves, FRBs, etc)?
Would be interesting to see if new myths are being born. Even more interesting if a really ancient one touch on some of these only recently discovered mysteries.