Abstract
Available written records suggest many human cultures hold or have held that there is more to reality than the observable physical Universe. Modern physics conforms to this pattern, postulating an invisible ‘wave function’ to explain observable phenomena. Many modern cosmologists appear to believe that the initial state of the universe was constrained in a way that dictated its evolution to its present state, which includes us. The Western Judaeo-Christian tradition attributes this constraint to an omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient being called God. God is believed to have eternally pre-existed the Universe and to be in essence completely distinct from and unlike the Universe. The standard Western theological model proposes that the only constraint on God is self consistency (1) . Here we explore the hypothesis that God and the Universe are the same reality, leading to the conclusion that ultimately physics and theology have the same subject and that the Universe is subject to no externally imposed constraint. The world of our experience is constrained only by self consistency as traditionally attributed to God. We explore this constraint in terms of a logical model based on the extension of practical finite computer networks into the transfinite domain first explored by Cantor and applied by to the foundations of quantum mechanics by von Neumann using the function theory developed by Hilbert (2). ---- 1 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica (translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province), Tabor Publishing, Allen, Texas, 1981. 2 von Neumann, J, Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1983.
Jeffrey Nicholls