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WHY DOES THE WORLD EXIST?

3/5/2013

 
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Why Does the World Exist?
    If you tend to wake up in the wee hours, a great way to get sleepy again is Why Does the World  Exist? by Jim Holt.  With the curious capacity to both dazzle and daze, after a chapter or two, you’re ready to go back to sleep.
    Holt went round the world consulting physicists and philosophers and in the last chapter, tells of a French TV show in which a priest, a scientist, and a Buddist monk are asked why the world exists.
    Priest: because God made it.
    Physicist: it sprang into existence out of a quantum fluctuation in the void.
    Buddist monk: it’s all illusion.
    Which pretty much leaves the reader unscathed. For me, one look at the sky on a clear night, or through a microscope at a water drop is enough .
    Holt considers consciousness, mind, self, and infinity, which comes in different sizes. We human beings, fleeting organic bubbles in the ocean of reality, are so habituated to beginnings and endings, we have trouble imagining infinity. As a 12-year-old, my neighbor, Georgie Legnos, who went to Greek School every day after PS 98, said, “If you get in a space ship (we all read Buck Rogers in the 25th Century)  and reach the end of space, what’s on the other side of that end?”  After that, infinity was easier to imagine than finity.
    So what does the Creator do? Create, naturally. Physicists are uncovering evidence—the “many worlds theory” for one—of new universes bursting into existence, and new souls, as Spinoza put it, “tiny regions in an infinite mind.”  And each soul can grow before rejoining the Creator, or shrink and wink out, sloughed off like dead cells in a human body. “The wages of sin is death.”  Nothing in Jim Holt’s mind-stretching book makes a case against anyone’s personal beliefs. Great book!

urbisoler
3/6/2013 04:27:15 am

"Nothing in Jim Holt’s mind-stretching book makes a case against anyone’s personal beliefs."
That depends.
Is Holt suggesting that there may be intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe? (many worlds theory.)
If so, then that brings to question the Christ story. Either the Christ story is a fabrication OR, from the Christian perspective, the intelligent life elsewhere must be "perfect", that is, not in need of salvation. (Can the Christ story exist in more than one world??)
You know, Stuart. You keep bringing up ideas that I stopped thinking about years ago. I stopped because there are no answers to these questions. Tell you what - suppose we contact each other after death and exchange ideas then. What do you say?

prisoner
3/6/2013 06:05:11 am

i think we're all a mistake of causality, that found ourselves hanging in an orbit that.we can,t walk out of : therefore we.re not free.

Martha
3/6/2013 07:01:39 am

Nice book review, Stuart!

Julietta
4/1/2013 02:01:19 am

Dear Stuart,
I recently listened to a radiolab podcast about whether the world is really made up of solid matter, or whether it is a more ambiguous cloud of illusion. Have a listen!

http://www.radiolab.org/blogs/radiolab-blog/2012/dec/31/solid-rock/

Much love!

autotronicseldh link
3/10/2015 04:46:36 pm

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    Author (Yuma, AZ, 1944)

    Being 90 years in this world,  with great kids,  great grandkids, great wives (two, one at a time) and great memories, I wonder why some people seem to have stopped loving the U.S.A.? I will wonder in print right here. If you wonder too, or can provide some answers, please comment.
                                   Stuart Hodes

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           With my friend, Nero.
                   April, 2012.
        Photo by Ray Madrigal

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