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Philosophy of Religion !!!!

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Nothing - The Greatest Mystery Leibniz posed the question: "Why is there something rather than nothing?" Heidegger declared this to be the deepest and most far- reaching question of all. William James referred to it as the "darkest question in all philosophy." Nothing is more mysterious than "nothing". From it, everything else follows. For a long time, the concept of infinity was as mysterious as "nothing" but Georg Cantor revolutionized the human understanding of infinity. There has been no Cantor of "nothing". It remains the enigma it has always been. Simplistically, "nothing", unlike "something", seems to need no explanation. It requires no work and no creator. As soon as "something" appears, the questions flow. Where did "something" come from, what is it made of, where is it going, what, if any, laws does it obey, who or what made it? Will other "somethings" interact with the first "something", and so on. The gulf between nothing and something seems infinite and unbridgeable. People who claim that the issue is irrelevant because "God" has always existed and therefore there has never been a state of "nothing" have simply begged the question, and reformulated the original question in different words. We now have to answer why there is God rather than nothing. We are no further forward. How can "God" be more likely than "nothing"? God is the most complex entity conceivable. How can infinite complexity be more probable than nothing? Nothing requires nothing. God requires everything. Existence, rather than being improbable, should be inevitable, so the mystery of nothing has to be solved before that of God can begin. Some atheists say that the existence of "something" is a brute fact. After all, no one, no matter what they think, can deny that something exists. So, these people say, let's ignore the problem of "nothing".

They say that time, space, matter and energy began with the Big Bang and nothing can be said about what happened before that event. (Oddly, some then claim that the Big Bang was the result of a "vacuum fluctuation", thus demonstrating that something did in fact happen prior to the Big Bang.) To privilege "something" over "nothing", or vice versa, is to make it impossible to understand the true nature of the universe. The error lies in making "Being" the primary fact of the universe. The religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam are all guilty in this regard. Their starting point is perfect Being - God - which then creates more, but less perfect, Being - the "Creation" (most of which is perishable rather than everlasting, which is odd given that God the Creator is eternal). If this is false, and it certainly is, then every conclusion reached by these religions is also false. The higher wisdom of Gnosticism examines Leibniz's question more profoundly. It is implicit in the question "Why is there something rather than nothing," that "something" is completely different from "nothing" and in need of explanation in a way that "nothing" isn't. But is this seemingly infinite divide between "something" and "nothing" justified? Illumination teaches that "nothing" and "something" are as fundamental as each other, and inextricably linked. Neither can exist without the other. In fact, in a sense they are the same thing. How can that be? The next step in solving the problem belongs to G.W. Hegel, another towering figure in philosophy, and another secret Illuminist. Hegel was a proponent of the "dialectic." The dialectical process works like this: Step 1) We discover a "thing" in need of explanation and we make some statement about it e.g. "Something exists." We call this the thesis. Step 2) Further discovery and consideration reveals a contradiction, something that opposes the thesis. We call this the antithesis. The antithesis of "Something exists" is "Nothing exists". Step 3) The third step is called the synthesis, and it attempts to reconcile the thesis and antithesis. Hegel uses the word "aufheben" to describe this melding of thesis and antithesis. It's a difficult word to translate into English since it simultaneously contains meanings of "preserving", "cancelling" and "lifting up". So, the synthesis retains what is most true in the thesis and antithesis, removes what is most false, and raises up what is left into a higher truth. Step 4) The process does not end with this synthesis, which simply becomes a new thesis, and with which we start the process all over again. With each iteration of this dialectical cycle, we move forward, reduce contradiction, refine our concepts and get closer to what might be called absolute truth i.e. the truth that contains no self- contradiction and cannot be challenged. To an extent, the dialectic resembles the scientific method upon which so much of the world's most solid knowledge now stands. The scientific method creates provisional truths, which are rendered stronger and stronger by continual testing and refinement. Eventually, scientific hypotheses become scientific theories - which are effectively the laws of science. A clear connection also exists between the dialectic and the medieval art of Alchemy - the secret art first introduced by the Illuminati. Alchemy is about turning lead into gold.

Not in a physical sense (though some alchemists certainly thought it was possible), but in a metaphorical sense. To reach gold (perfect purity in symbolic terms) from the starting point of lead (base, impure, corruptible material symbolically) requires constant distillation, refining, removal of the impurities. This is the same as the dialectic - a continual refining to remove errors. As we reach higher and higher levels of synthesis, we ascend the scale of truth - we move from dirty, muddied, confused and confusing partial truths to incorruptible golden truths by which we can lead our lives. Truth, too, must be distilled and refined. Hegel analyzed Being and Nothing in the following way: 1) Being - the existence of things - is the thesis. 2) Non-being - the existence of nothing - is the antithesis. Using the ancient wisdom of the Illuminati, Hegel supplied the only concept that can stand as a valid synthesis of Being and Nothing - "Becoming." In a stroke, Leibniz's question is resolved. Something and nothing are just aspects of a higher truth. They do not have mutually independent reality. They are perpetual twins, locked in a dance of eternal becoming. The universe is never-ending becoming. As we will show in subsequent articles, "Becoming" answers every enigma, everything that is nonsensical about the old religions of "Being". The philosopher Nietzsche used a different but related word for "aufheben." His word - "sublimieren" - comes from the Latin word sublimare: "to sublimate". In German, sublimieren and aufheben are synonymous. Sublimation is the English word for sublimieren. Sublimation, in human terms, involves taking a primitive urge such as violence and turning it into something nobler. The "good" aspects of violence are retained (for example, will to win, forcefulness, pride, ambition, competitiveness), while the bad aspects are removed (e.g. destruction, cruelty, injury, callousness). What emerges is something in which everyone can take pride. Sport, for example, is often regarded as the sublimation of war. Can't we sublimate all of the ills of our society? The dialectic is all about sublimation, refining everything to take it to a higher, nobler level - to turn lead into gold all over the universe. Can we start from a universe of unpromising lead and make it into one of sublime gold? http://armageddonconspiracy.co.uk/The-Enigma-of-Existence(1361286).htm ***** In the 18th century, Laplace stated the Principle of Determinism: "If at one time, we knew the positions and motion of all the particles in the universe, then we could calculate their behavior at any other time, in the past or future." This is the basis of classical physics. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of quantum physics destroyed Laplace's aspiration since it tells us that we cannot simultaneously know the precise position and momentum of even one particle never mind all the particles in the universe. This isn't an experimental limitation, but a fundamental aspect of the quantum world. It accords with Max Born's insight that in the quantum world there are no exact answers, only probabilities. If a particle has no definite position and momentum and can be described only probabilistically then it simply doesn't exist as "something" in the classical sense. The world we live in on a day-to- day basis may seem solid, predictable and full of "somethings", but it is underpinned by a weird, shadowy foundation that gives way as soon as we touch it.

There is simply nothing tangible there. Does that not sound like the strange synthesis of something and nothing that we have been discussing? The Superposition Principle of quantum theory tells us that quantum particles can exist in a probabilistic cloud of different states that in classical terms would be mutually exclusive of each other. Only if and when the "wavefunction collapses" (to use the jargon) is one of the potential states definitely selected. Physicists have no idea what causes the collapse in flavor of one state over the others. We will explain in a subsequent article the answer to this conundrum. An atom consists of a nucleus surrounded by electrons. The nucleus is tiny and carries a positive charge. The domain of the negatively charged electrons is vast in comparison (about a billion times larger than that of the nucleus). In other words, between the nucleus and the surrounding electrons is an enormous space that is neither something nor nothing - but a strange probabilistic cloud, a superposition of all the different states that the electron can possess. The reason that human beings do not get pushed into the ground by gravity is that the negatively charged electron "cloud" surrounding the nuclei of the atoms of the ground repels the negatively charged electron clouds surrounding the nuclei of human feet (or those of shoes), and this effect is much more powerful than gravity. In other words, our way of life is dependent on the strange clouds of electron probability surrounding nuclei. The solidity of atoms, of matter in general, is an illusion. Atoms are not things - they are becomings. And humans, composed of atoms, are becomings too. The apparent solidity of our human lives would vanish if we could delve more deeply into ourselves. With every instant that passes we change. As the ancient Illuminist Heraclitus said, "There is nothing permanent except change." He also said that we can not step into the same river twice. With every passing second, cells in our body are dying. Some are being replaced, some are being repaired, some are vanishing for good. Our bodies are changing, our minds and memories are changing. We are continually becoming something new and different. Is the old man looking at a picture of himself as a newborn baby the same being as that baby? Or has he been on a path of becoming between those two points of his life? In scientific terms, human beings are made of the food and drink that they consume during their lives - nothing else. As an Illuminist said ironically, "A human being is a means of getting food and drink to talk." Every day what we take in through our mouths becomes us. We are mostly water. How can such a creature be considered a being?