Is God dark matter?

Great Debates
21

Dr. Matrix said:

quote:

Umm. quasar,

That was friedo that you quoted.

You are right, I was quoting Friedo.
quote:

I’m not so sure the universe comprises everything that exists. Everything we can detect, yes. I’ll assume this for the sake of arguement, but this is getting shaky.

What we got here is a problem of semantics, as far as the concept of the universe goes.

The way I see it:

The universe is a dynamic entity in constant expansion, thus at this moment it is bigger than it was when I started typing. Into what does it expand to? Empty space? If so, shouldn’t empty space be part of the universe initially?

What I’m trying to get at is this: the whole idea for developing the term UNIVERSE is to create a single concept which encompasses all that exists, no exclusions. Hence, if you say that matter or whatever else you want to propose
(spiritual beings, naked 5-dimensional women, astral projections ) exists outside of the borders of the universe, then what you now call universe wouldn’t be but a single component of the real, absolute, all-encompassing universe.

According to that, everything that exists resides inside the universe. If god exists–whatever his true nature is–He does so within the universe. If He didn’t, He would not exist, He couldn’t have created the universe in the first place and you couldn’t be reading this post.

quote:

You can say something cannot be both made of atoms and an electromagnetic wave, but some things, such as neutrinos and imaginary beings are neither.

Actually, neutrinos have been proven to have mass. And yes, they are considered to account for part of the missing mass of the universe–i.e., dark matter. Since we are arguing that God could possibly be dark matter, He could very well be neutrinos.

A brief recap on the proposed entities that lay a claim to being dark matter, i.e., matter that is undetectable to us pathetic humans, follows:

MACHOs or massive compact halo objects–if memory serves–could be black holes, brown dwarfs or extrasolar planets.

WIMPs or weakly interacting massive particles are proposed to be neutrinos, gravitons, and the such. That is, small wavelike particles which rarely interact with ordinary matter.

Please correct me if any of these assertions are wrong.

quote:

God is not part of the model of the universe.

Exactly, but if He were dark matter He should.

22

That’s transubstantiation, which is the Catholic belief (Christian, too, IIRC) that bread and wine (wheat and grape traditionally, I believe) are made into the body and blood of Jesus Christ, which is the being of God made into flesh.

So, while Jesus is God’s physical presence on Earth (while he was alive, anyway), God Himself is not a physical being. All this IIRC. I may well be wrong.

23

Christian and Catholic both, eh?

Among Christians, transubstantiation is held to by Roman Catholics; Lutherans believe in consubstantiation, which is, um, different somehow from transubstantation. And then there’s the Zwinglian view, and the Calvinist view, and…well, generally, I believe non-Lutheran Protestants aren’t buying any of the substantiations. I don’t know what Eastern Orthodox Christians’ view on the matter is. WAG, something close to the Roman Catholic.

24

I usually define the universe as everything that could potentially be detected. If you want to define it instead as everything that exists, I’m OK with that.

::sigh:: OK, listen up. WHEITHER NEUTRINOS HAVE MASS IS NOT MY POINT. (Sorry for shouting.) Forget neutrinos, take muons instead. I was trying to give examples of things that are not made of atoms or EM waves. I wasn’t trying to give examples of massless things. I was trying to show your premise “He can only be either a massive Entity, i.e., made of atoms, or an electromagnetic wave.” is flawed, because there are things that are neither made of atoms nor EM waves, like muons for example.

25

Consubstantiation, from what I remember from CD3 (junior year religion class), is that the bread and wine undergo a spiritual change, but they do not physically become the body and blood of Christ. Sort of a . . . taking the bread and wine to be representativeof Christ’s body and blood, while we Catholics take it to be the actual stuff.

26

Well, consubstantiation means that it’s still “really” bread and wine, but “really” Body and Blood too. It just requires jumping through one less theological hoop to get there. Calvin held to a “memorialist” stance, IIRC, though how his position differs from Zwingli escapes me. Any Calvinists lurking that could clarify?

Anglicans believe in “the Real Presence” which signifies that in some Mysterious Way ™ God enters into the Christian to nourish and cleanse him as he consumes the bread and wine, which are not changed but consecrated for the purpose. (A very spastic way of defining what the church purposefully leaves vague, to accommodate the greatest number of believers.) Methodists, to the best of my understanding, hold a similar doctrine but make a point of not making a big deal of it.

Orthodox doctrine (again, upon information and belief) essentially accepts the Anglican viewpoint under different terminology. Something happens other than a memorial meal, but it is a Divine Mystery ™ and not to be put into human categories. Or something very close to that.

27

Dr. Matrix…does that make neutrinos Catholic? :smiley:

28

How many neutrinos in a pint of Love?

29

The problem here, is that you need to use two separate definitions of “Universe” in the same argument. In order to say that God is part of the Universe, you must define the Universe as “all that exists”. However, if you’re referring to the cosmological theories with the “missing mass”, then you must define the Universe as those theories do, i.e., as “all that can be detected”. It’s possible that what physicists call the Universe, that 3+1 dimensional manifold which is currently expanding, isn’t the whole story, and that there’s something beyond where God exists, but current theories do not attempt to describe that place beyond.

To add yet another example of a real thing that is neither matter nor energy: A computer program. The computer that runs it, and the device which stores it, are both matter, and energy is required to allow those material devices to function, but the program itself is neither. If anything in current scientific thinking can encompass spirits (not that that’s likely, anyway), it’s information theory.

Yet another problem with this argument: We’ve probably already found the cosmological dark matter. Current models of the Universe, supported by all available evidence, suggest that there’s a nonzero cosmological constant, and that that constant is precisely the right size to flatten the Universe, the role for which the dark matter was considered necessary. And before you start trying to say that maybe the cosmological constant is God, there’s a greater chance that God is the wad of year-old bubble gum stuck underneath this desk. The cosmological constant isn’t nearly complex enough to conceivably be an intelligent entity (which I think we can assume that God is), and that wad of gum is far more sophisticated.

30

My understanding of this issue, and I’m willing to be set straight if I’m in error here, is that dark matter is also given double duty beyond flattening the universe. From what I remember reading, there is insufficient mass detected to keep galaxies stable, hence some dark matter is still necessary even beyond the cosmological constant, whose force is minimal in a structure as small as a galaxy. Now, since we seem to be detecting planetary bodies willy-nilly, that may be a step toward closing the dark matter gap, but I don’t think the question has been put to bed quite yet.

31

Well, granted, his automatic equation of mass with atoms was flawed (and obviously so, ever since we first split an atom) but I think what was really meant was narrowing things down into the categories of matter and energy.
In any case, depending on how much mass they have, neutrinos COULD be that missing dark matter.
And hey, they can zip right through a light-year of lead. Maybe God is made up of them. It would provide his x-ray vision…

32

quasar:

Just a point: In Jewish belief, G-d is entirely non-physical. Not electromagnetism, not mass, nothing physical. Pure spirit.

Now, resume your debate…

33

So how does intangible spirit interact with the physical world?
(same problem as for people who think that a “soul” runs the brain’s hardware)

34

Kyberneticist:

He wills it, and it happens. Or have you forgotten that the being we’re talking about is G-d?

Chaim Mattis Keller