God is in the fourth dimension.

[Glenn Lyvers]

I was reading some interesting commentary by Hud Hudson, in which he examines the principle benefits to theists for the belief in a fourth dimension.

 

Hudson comments that if God is perfect, there exists the classic idea that he would have created a perfect world, and Hudson acknowledges that it seems intuitively wrong to think this is as good as it gets.

 

A theist can say that because we only perceive the world in the 3rd dimension, then it is possible that the evils we see in the world are not evil at all - it is simply our perception, which is skewed due to our limitations. Of course this type of thinking comes with other problems.

 

Feel free to comment on the idea, but I'm posting to ask if anyone knows other articles like this - of religion and the fourth dimension.

 

Thanks.

[Moontanman]

While I prefer 11 dimensional brane theory I know I have absolutely no evidence to back it up. I have to say that humans are not limited to the 3rd dimension we perceive four dimensions quite well if we didn't we have have no sense of the past, future, movement or even time it's self. At the very least a god like being would have to exist in a 5 dimensional form but for god to really be aware of and control of absolutely everything possible would take 11 dimensions.

 

 

My BS Is just as good as your BS :surprise:

[modest]

Hudson comments that if God is perfect, there exists the classic idea that he would have created a perfect world, and Hudson acknowledges that it seems intuitively wrong to think this is as good as it gets.

 

Alexander Pope disagrees,

 

But errs not Nature from this gracious end,

From burning suns when livid deaths descend,

When earthquakes swallow, or when tempests sweep

Towns to one grave, whole nations to the deep?

"No," 'tis replied," the first Almighty Cause

Acts not by partial but by gen'ral laws;

Th'exceptions few; some change since all began

And what created perfect?"--Why then man?

If the great end be human happiness,

Then Nature deviates; and can man do less?

As much that end a constant course requires

Of showers and sunshine, as of man's desires;

As much eternal springs and cloudless skies,

As men for ever temp'rate, calm, and wise.

If plagues or earthquakes break not Heav'n's design,

Why then a Borgia or a Cataline?

Who knows but He, whose hand the lightning forms,

Who heaves old ocean, and who wings the storms;

Pours fierce ambition in a Cæsar's mind,

Or turns young Ammon loose to scourge mankind?

From pride, from pride, our very reas'ning springs;

Account for moral as for natural things:

Why charge we Heav'n in those, in these acquit?

In both, to reason right is to submit.

 

Better for us, perhaps, it might appear,

Were there all harmony, all virtue here;

That never air or ocean felt the wind,

That never passion discomposed the mind:

But all subsists by elemental strife;

And passions are the elements of life.

The gen'ral order, since the whole began,

Is kept in Nature, and is kept in Man.

 

<...>

 

Cease, then, nor Order imperfection name;

Our proper bliss depends on what we blame.

Know thy own point: this kind, this due degree

Of blindness, weakness, Heav'n bestows on thee.

Submit: in this or any other sphere,

Secure to be as bless'd as thou canst bear;

Safe in the hand of one disposing Power,

Or in the natal or the mortal hour.

All Nature is but Art unknown to thee;

All chance direction, which thou canst not see;

All discord, harmony not understood;

All partial evil, universal good:

And spite of Pride, in erring Reason's spite,

One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right.

 

Poets' Corner - Alexander Pope - Essay on Man

 

Allowing me to translate: the world only seems imperfect if you assume a perfect God created Nature for the purpose of serving humanity. If you assume God/the universe does not favor humans then there's nothing inherently 'un-perfect' about the world. It is... as it should be. It always struck me as incredibly arrogant to think of myself as something for which this universe was created. But... to each their own I guess.

 

~modest

[Glenn Lyvers]

Modest,

 

That's a very good point. I have often wondered why men assume the universe is for us (setting aside theology for such thoughts of course).

 

I don't want to digress too far but, there could be other creatures for whom it was made, and maybe we are a snack or something. I don't really think that, but anything is possible - and you are right, in so far as it is arrogant for use to proclaim we have the absolute answer - thus we are definitively the ones the universe were made for etc. (assuming anything was made of course).

 

I will ignore your notation "It always struck me as incredibly arrogant to think of myself as something for which this universe was created." Because to imply that you "always" thought that, would be to imply the secondary implicit idea, that you think the universe was "created" - and I would not want to point out anything that would seem to support you inadvertently suggesting you believe in creation. :surprise:

[Glenn Lyvers]

While I prefer 11 dimensional brane theory I know I have absolutely no evidence to back it up. I have to say that humans are not limited to the 3rd dimension we perceive four dimensions quite well if we didn't we have have no sense of the past, future, movement or even time it's self. At the very least a god like being would have to exist in a 5 dimensional form but for god to really be aware of and control of absolutely everything possible would take 11 dimensions.

 

 

My BS Is just as good as your BS :surprise:

 

I know... it's far fetched. I am not buying it either. I just find ideas like this interesting to think about.

[modest]

I will ignore your notation "It always struck me as incredibly arrogant to think of myself as something for which this universe was created." Because to imply that you "always" thought that, would be to imply the secondary implicit idea, that you think the universe was "created" - and I would not want to point out anything that would seem to support you inadvertently suggesting you believe in creation. :surprise:

 

No need to ignore, you can ask. I was raised Baptist and really became something of a hard-core Jesus freak as a youngster. And, yes, even in the height of my delirium I realized I was being arrogant to think the universe was created for the likes of me. I'm very agnostic now realizing that I currently have no way of explaining the existence of the universe. I realize no religion does either.

 

~modest

[freeztar]

I was reading some interesting commentary by Hud Hudson, in which he examines the principle benefits to theists for the belief in a fourth dimension.

 

Hudson comments that if God is perfect, there exists the classic idea that he would have created a perfect world, and Hudson acknowledges that it seems intuitively wrong to think this is as good as it gets.

 

A theist can say that because we only perceive the world in the 3rd dimension, then it is possible that the evils we see in the world are not evil at all - it is simply our perception, which is skewed due to our limitations.

 

The fourth dimension is commonly referred to as time. So, in this case, God=time. This is a much more interesting idea, imho, than what Hudson proposes (note: I haven't read his stuff and am basing this solely on what you have written - I'll go read it now though)

 

Of course this type of thinking comes with other problems.

Indeed. The first one that came to mind is that it makes morality obsolete. If "bad" things are due to our perception, rather than the inherent perfectness we can not perceive, then it seems, logically, that we could never do anything wrong (at least in 4 dimensional terms).

[lawcat]

I consider dimensions as references, so I would not go as far as to say that God is a dimension, or belongs solely in some dimension. References are for us, by us -- FUBU. :-) And, time is certainly a functional reference--the fourth dimension--for us by us; although, mass could just as well do the trick, or energy for that matter; or, in some contexts consciousness.

 

Whichever fourth dimension one adopts, we live in it, and perceiveit; otherwise it would be absurd to even refer to it.

 

I do not know many people who assume that universe is for us. But, the planet is for us--that is the general assumption; this planet is for us.

[modest]

I do not know many people who assume that universe is for us. But...

 

Followers of the Abrahamic religions (Jewish, Christian, Muslim) who follow the Torah/Bible/Tawrat historically believed the universe was created for man. For example, Gen. 1:14-19 says that the sun, moon, and stars were created to "give light upon the earth".

 

This seemed reasonable at the time because the universe was believed to be not much larger than the earth. People of the middle east of the time pictured the sky as something like an ocean above the atmosphere. Egyptians believed the sun sailed in a boat across the ocean of the sky during the day. Genesis describes something similar. The sky above the atmosphere being made of water. So, of course, the sky and all the lights in it were made for the earth. At least, that's what the book says :hyper:

 

We now know the universe is a very large place which existed for quite a long time before humans showed up. What percent of creationists currently believe the universe was created alongside the earth, to serve the earth, I don't know.

 

But, the planet is for us--that is the general assumption; this planet is for us.

Why do you say this? Do you have a scientific source to backup such a claim?

 

~modest

[Glenn Lyvers]

Freeztar...

 

The fourth dimension is commonly referred to as time. So, in this case, God=time. This is a much more interesting idea, imho, than what Hudson proposes (note: I haven't read his stuff and am basing this solely on what you have written - I'll go read it now though)

 

Of course you are right. However, in this particular case, Hudson is referring to spacial dimension. I'm sure you have read Flatland. He references this. I can write a little bit about it is you are unfamiliar.

 

Glenn

[lawcat]

 

 

Why do you say this? Do you have a scientific source to backup such a claim?

 

~modest

 

Why do you feel the need to say things out of jest?

[freeztar]

Freeztar...

 

 

 

Of course you are right. However, in this particular case, Hudson is referring to spacial dimension. I'm sure you have read Flatland. He references this. I can write a little bit about it is you are unfamiliar.

 

Glenn

 

Thanks for clarifying. Instead of blindly searching for the relevant text by Hudson, could you please link me to it? I'd like to read about this.

 

I haven't read Flatland, but I've read about it and understand the basic premise. Rethinking what I said before, I don't see why an extra dimension would be any less fascinating in time rather than space. I look forward to exploring this idea. Even as an atheist, this sounds like interesting reading.

[sman]

I don't want to digress too far but, there could be other creatures for whom it was made, and maybe we are a snack or something.

 

We are, in a way, the food of bacteria. They farm us the way we farm cattle. A particularly successful crop, but no more significant than that. I guess we could view creation as the formation of the eukaryotic cell, and God as the bacteria that had been living here 1000 million years prior - that's forever, really. When we're all gone they will persist. Alpha & Omega.

[CraigD]

I was reading some interesting commentary by Hud Hudson, in which he examines the principle benefits to theists for the belief in a fourth dimension.

I recalled hearing the name “Hud Hudson” before, and after browsing a bit from to this review of his book The Metaphysics of Hyperspace, was reminded where: He wrote a paper about how the four color theorem, or any finite-number-of-colors map coloring theorem, could be violated in infinitesimal cases (Scientific American 1/2003, p 25)

Feel free to comment on the idea, but I'm posting to ask if anyone knows other articles like this - of religion and the fourth dimension.

Though I can’t immediately cite any references, I think the idea that entities deemed supernatural, such as God, demons or gods, might be natural but have extent or perception in spatial dimensions beyond the usual 3, has been around since the mathematics necessary to easily describe spaces with more than 3 dimensions have been widely known, ca. the 14th century AD. Like many others, the idea began to become prominent to the point of knowledge outside of academia in the 19th century, reaching something of media sensation with the spiritualism crazes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a prominence I believe can reasonable be considered ongoing to the present day. One of the best known explorations of the idea is Edwin Abbot’s 1884 Flatland – A Romance of Many Dimensions, although Abbot (like most educated English people of his time, an Anglican clergyman) used his novel mostly as a satirical attack on religious orthodoxy, not a serious exploration of the existence of or nature of God.

 

Scientific acceptance of and interest in extra spatial dimensions appears to have largely vanished by the 1920s, due in large part to the embarrassing hoodwinking of several prominent scientists such as William Crooks, Alfred Russel, and Charles Richet, and psychologists and philosophers such as William James, by professional “spiritualist” con artists via such tricks as appearing to tie a knot in a loop of rope by moving it through extra dimensions. (see the wikipedia article section Spiritualism: Believers and skeptics, and reference from it)

 

The main scientific problem with extra spatial dimensions is explaining why, unlike the usual and obvious 3, ordinary objects can’t be rotated through them, or, in other words, why the 3 usual spatial dimensions are “preferred” over the extra dimensions, but not over each other. Such a preference is a profound and unprecedented violation of Galilean relativity, and, combined with a near absolute lack of experimental evidence, or even promising ideas for experiment designs, appears to me to have effectively killed the idea in Physics, until the rise of string theory in the 1970s.

 

Because, to date, the formalism of string theories require at least 9 spatial dimensions, these theories require their existence. The “preferred” problem is addressed in string theory by ”compactifying” the extra dimensions non-Euclidean ways (typically geometries like spherical ones, where a displacement of some critical value returns a body to it original location) to explain why rotations into them of macroscopic bodies are never observed.

 

In an Alternate View column of Analog magazine (I can’t quickly locate the issue – sometime in the 1990s, I believe by Jeffrey Kooistra), I read interesting speculation that the compact dimensions of string theory might not be as small as predicted, and might be observable with present day experiments, though I’ve encountered no follow up on this idea.

 

Even allowing for speculation such as Kooistra’s, such scientifically plausible (although many opponents of string theory would take issue with my use of the phrase “scientifically plausible”) geometries aren’t as attractive as an explanation for the “hiding place of the supernatural” as the simpler, non-compact extra dimensions Abbot and others (including, I suspect, Hudson, although I’ve not yet read him on the subject, but would very much like to – does anyone know of anything available electronically by him on the subject?) describe.

 

So, in short, I don’t think the idea of “the supernatural in extra spatial dimensions” (I think this is a more precise phrasing of what proponents of the idea such as Hudson mean) has any sound theoretical or experimental scientific support, though it remains a useful allegorical and plot vehicle in fiction.

[modest]

Why do you say this? Do you have a scientific source to backup such a claim?

 

Why do you feel the need to say things out of jest?

 

Keepin' ya on your toes. Mmmwwaaaa haaa haaa :thumbs_up

 

~modest :thumbs_do

[Glenn Lyvers]

It really is a fascinating idea. For those who do not know the flatland story premise, (this is a dumbed down version)

 

Imagine a world which exists in only 2 dimensions. Where there is no up or down. The creatures which live in this dimension can only move forward, backward, right and left. Due to the world they live in, they could not see what was above them, because for them, there is no above or below at all.

 

Now imagine a creature from the third dimension (you) looking down and seeing this world, existing on a table top of sorts. It is flat, and you can see everything from above, undetected by the creatures that live there. You can even see inside of their bodies, houses, ... everything.

 

You can enter that plane, but only by piercing it, and when you do, you too only have 2 dimensions within that plane. Therefore, you would appear only as a slice of yourself.

 

YouTube - Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIadtFJYWhw

 

Now consider that you are a square creature in that 2d world, and you hear a voice which seems to come from everywhere, even from within your own form. You have no concept of up or down, so you cannot see the being which is speaking to you, and which seems to be able to appear and disappear at will. This being seems to have special information or insight about your world, which you do not possess. What would you think of such a creature?

 

Now in 2D creatures have 4 primary directions (forward, backward, left, right) and in the 3rd dimension 2 more are added, up and down. In the 4th dimension of space, 2 more are added, anna and catta.

 

Imagine that a being spoke to you, in a voice that seemed to come from everywhere, even from within your body. You have no concept of anna or catta, or sense to perceive that direction, therefore you cannot imagine where it might be coming from. What would you think? By moving anna or catta, this 4th dimentional being could appear before you in 3 dimensions, and then disappear at will. You learn from the voice that this being has special insight about your world, maybe even the future... would that not be considered by many to be a God?

[CraigD]

It really is a fascinating idea. For those who do not know the flatland story premise, …

First, those who’ve not read Abbott’s Flatland should do so – it’s long in the public domain (available as Project Gutenberg text # 97 – that’s right, the 97th of the tens of thousands of documents digitized by PG since its founding in 1971!) and, at under 34,000 words, is modern novella length, about 1/3 of a typical modern novel, and though the 19th century English can make it a bit slower reading than usual, still a quick read.

 

Flatland is an influential book, much referenced and the model for many modern variants. My favorite to date is Rudy Rucker’s 2002 Spaceland, in which Abbott’s 2-D narrator “A Square” is replaced with the 3-D “everyman” human character “Joe Cube”, Abbott's 3-D interloper “Sphere”, with a scheming 4-D female “Momo”, and, as the story advances, a vast menagerie of 3 and 4-D supporting characters. It’s available in print and commercial e-book many places, and I recommend it highly – though be warned, as a mathematician/programmer/writer considered one of the founders of the cyberpunk genre, Rucker is as true to his style in Spaceland as in his other books.

 

Returning to this thread’s theological subject, neither Flatland nor Spaceland offer more than a rejection of established religion amounting to, I think “what everybody thinks is God is wrong, and God, if He/She/It exists, is Something we can only guess at, not just a higher dimensional being.” Flatland has only a brief denial of the idea that “God is in the fourth dimension”, ie:

Awestruck at the sight of the mysteries of the earth, thus unveiled before my unworthy eye, I said to my Companion, "Behold, I am become as a God. For the wise men in our country say that to see all things, or as they express it, OMNIVIDENCE, is the attribute of God alone." There was something of scorn in the voice of my Teacher as he made answer: "it is so indeed? Then the very pick-pockets and cut-throats of my country are to be worshipped by your wise men as being Gods: for there is not one of them that does not see as much as you see now. But trust me, your wise men are wrong."

while in Spaceland, it’s revealed that the founding “miracles” of many great and not-so-great religions are due to several millennia of meddling and visitations of decidedly un-divine 4-D visitors. From “Spaceland Notes” (many deep spoilers, so don’t read before reading the novel, unless you like that approach):

God is not a 4D being. God is much more. The God who made the ants isn’t an ant. The God who made 3D humanity isn’t 3D. God is greater than us, greater than the 4D beings, infinitely great. The Kluppers aren’t angels; we can keep the supernatural out of this. Humanity has indeed sometimes mistaken Kluppers and Dronners for angels and devils, but that’s not at all what they are.

 

Marvelous fictional vehicles that they are, from a scientific perspective, there’s little to suggest that the un-compact, more-or-less Euclidean extra dimensions of stories like Flatland and Spaceland exist. As Rucker certainly adheres to the hard SF tradition of “fashioning a consistent model” that doesn’t blatantly contradict known scientific theory, including soliciting the review and imput of a bevy of academic math/science friends, Spaceland has an unusual amount of scientific speculation as to how its events can be possible, although the explanation is purposefully obscured, by the narrator, Joe Cube, who is, in Rucker’s words, “stupid ... a clueless guy, struggling a bit, a Gen-Xer who’s trying to get rich without having any skills”. In short, without giving away more of the story than I already have, the “‘preferred’ problem” I mention in post #14 is explained via a physical mechanism akin to surface tension. All 3D spaceland objects, including the entire 3-D universe, actually have the same small but non-zero 4-D thickness, leading to some interesting twists, such as Joe’s inertial mass exceeding his gravitational mass after some “augmentation” of his body by Momo. However, this is plot-serving speculation only, with no more scientific validity than afforded by the above mentioned care taken to assure it doesn’t blatantly contradict know science.