this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
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Atheism

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I've always heard that it takes a long time for new science to penetrate to the awareness of the general public. Centuries even. I think the physics of the 20thcent. will create a kind of atheistic mysticism in humanity over the next century or two. Einstein referred to spacetime and that it is "complete". There are four dimensions, three spatial and one temporal. We readily understand that places in space have permanence: the top of a mountain is always THERE even if nobody is looking at it. But we do not often think of time in such a way. Well, that is a bias due to our experience of the universe - but the universe is not like we experience it in many ways that have been revealed by twencen physics, eh? In the field of quantum physics, we are confronted with entanglement and the Bell Inequalities and the EPR Paradox. One of the solutions to the paradoxical nature of "wave function collapse", identified by Bell himself, is hard determinism: there is only one 4D, complete, spacetime and we are in it. We can analyze probabilities all we like, but regardless: there is ever only a single outcome possible - the eternal one that is crystallized in this 4D universe eternally. So what of causality and free will? It sure FEELS like we are rolling the ball, placing our bets, choosing our choices - this is the mystical koan of our existence - that we are creative agents in the unitary 4D universe we inhabit. Where does any supernatural consideration possibly fit into that?

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