A store front in Solana Beach
Solana Beach has placed a tribute to bicyclists in the middle of town. In big letters arranged in a circle at a wide expanse of sidewalk, it reads, “Life is like a bicycle - In order to keep your balance you have to keep moving.”
I rode my bicycle back home from Solano Beach today… plenty of time by the sea for thinking, especially about the next couple of paragraphs for the project I’m posting bit by bit on the BLOG. Today is another “by-day" in that project because this old retired guy couldn't resist the urge to get out on a bike on this perfect day. Photography is literally "writing with light." The light couldn't have been better than it was today for taking pictures.
The beach across from the Del Mar Racetrack.
The Library at the University of California, San Diego
Mission Bay
1 comment:
Dear Jerral
I am deeply intrigued by how Science and Spirituality are not separate: one is an essential tool to comprehend the other.
Recently in a book club where we were reading Jim Holt's Why does the World Exist, I summarized the book as follows:
NOTHING + GOD = SOMETHING (says the strict theist)
NOTHING + NOTHING = SOMETHING (says the strict atheist)
SOMETHING + NOTHING = SOMETHING (says the unsure spiritualist)
The Abrahamic religions, in their extremes, are symbolized by equation 1 above: first there was nothing, then God said “Let there be light,” and ex nihilo, created the Universe. God is omni-everything and supremely benevolent. Many scientists believe that this theistic view is not incompatible with their own mainstream scientific views.
Equation 2 describes the world-view of a strict atheist: in the beginning there was nothing, there is no need for a God, and voilà, we have the Universe, an utterly improbable yet possible happenstance. Matter emerges spontaneously from quantum fluctuations in a vacuum, the cosmic egg is created, the egg explodes, a super-massive expansion is followed by an accelerating inflation, one improbable thing leads to another, extreme randomness on galactic scales: quarks, protons, atoms, energy, carbon, complexity, replication, cells, life, evolution, natural selection, and man. Man, staring into his own past, himself a product of an exploding cosmic egg.
The third equation represents a spiritualistic view. It says: it is incongruous to suggest that in the beginning there was nothing, nothing is something, quantum fluctuations are not nothing, space itself is not nothing, space is traversable (in the 3D version of the movie Gravity, the audience dangles in space with the protagonist; that space is real), it is not an energy-vacuum, there always is something, and God is embedded inside the primordial something-ness. That something is conscious, intelligent, purposeful, all-encompassing, all-embodying, a universal consciousness, within which each of us is irreversibly and inseparably embedded, not differentiated, and each of us has the potential to attain a sense of oneness with that Universe of which 'we ourselves are a part.'
Just wanted to share this.
Warm Regards
Deb
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