Dear Selma,
I read with interest your comments addressed to Dr.Santosh.
They refer, to some extent, to my write-ups.
I would like to react to them briefly.
You wrote: > Recently I borrowed a copy of Spinoza from the library
determined to read about consciousness and modes
(didn't get very far :-),
*Good. America will give you a chance to read everything.
Our students of Philosophy find him difficult to read.
<<...that traditional philosophy itself has
become obsolete in light of advances made by science.
*You are wrong on this point. Let me repeat here that the principle of
causality has not "become obsolete in light of advances made by science".
It is first principle of reason and has not only phenomenal but also
ontological validity. Dr.Santosh is not denying its validity as far as the
empirical field is
concerned. He is confusing different theistic or atheistic positions with
metaphysical
principles. This principle transcends experience.
Stochastic and non-equilibrium processes (Casimir effect)
and vacuum fluctuation do not contradict the principle of causality and are
not creation 'ex nihilo'. For
virtual particles do not literally come into existence spontaneously "out of
nothing". Rather the energy locked up in a vacuum fluctuates spontaneously
in such a way as to convert into evanescent particles that return almost
immediately to the vacuum. The microstructure of the quantum vacuum is a sea
of continually forming and dissolving particles which borrow energy from the
vacuum for their brief
existence. A quantum vacuum is thus far from nothing, and vacuum
fluctuations do not constitute an exception to the principle that whatever
begins to exist has a cause. Further, creation ex nihilo contradicts the
first law of thermodynamics.
Therefore, Science cannot speak
of vacuum fluctuation as 'creation ex nihilo'. Theology speaks at the
ontological level.
As J.Barrow and F.J.Tipler comment, "It is, of course, somewhat
inappropriate to call the origin of a bubble Universe in a fluctuation of
the vacuum 'creation ex nihilo,' for the quantum mechanical vacuum state has
a rich structure which resides in a previously existing substratum of
space-time, either Minkowski or de Sitter space-time. Clearly, a true
'creation ex nihilo' would be the spontaneous generation of
everything--space-time, the quantum mechanical vacuum, matter--at some time
in the past. It cannot be a quantum transition 'out of
nothingness'".
It is certainly metaphysical nonsense. Creation from nothing is grounded in
Revelation
and philosophical argument.
Regards.
Fr.Ivo
