Cosmic Singularities: On the Nothing & the Sovereign
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Professor Mary-Jane Rubenstein gives a talk on the concepts of Nothingness and Sovereignty through theological and astrophysical sources. Until very recently, the creation myth of secular modernity has been the big bang hypothesis: the expansion of our universe out of a single point. Physicists concede that in its traditional form, this story performs an uncanny recapitulation of Christian creation theology: the universe bursts forth suddenly, in a flood of light, out of nothing. As many contemporary thinkers have argued, however, the “nothing” of Christian orthodoxy is neither scripturally nor doctrinally self-evident; rather, it is the product of ontopolitical efforts to secure the sovereignty of God. This lecture traces the twinned concepts of sovereignty and nothingness through theological and astrophysical sources, arguing that even rabidly atheistic appeals to the ex nihilo end up enshrining a figure of absolute power. Ultimately, it suggests that far from supporting an absolute beginning, quantum and multiverse cosmologies undermine the logic of nothingness and sovereignty by means of chaos and entanglement.
Comments
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Intelligent, beautiful, and funny. An exemplary woman. I would be happy to have her or a woman like her as my wife.
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I am just throwing it out there but what if the Hubble Telescope was a magic show prop for a group of clandestine artists who got off on imaginative graphic renderings of a Universe that only existed in the minds of those artists? Food for thought.
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Am I the only one that finds her insanely attractive?
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I suggest reading Oxford mathematician John Lennox's book on Hawkings and his other arguments from the evidence of science for the existence of God. Mary-Jane has a voice and manner that reminds me of Rachael Maddow but intellectually she is definitely deeper -- though maybe just a left wing in regards to the grievance philosophy of feminism. Her book should, therefore, be well received by the humanities and liberal arts.
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Where are her lectures on Kierkegaard?
https://iasext.wesleyan.edu/regprod/!wesmaps_page.html?crse=012585&term=1101 -
what a speach, what a gourgues woman, im in love again, i really !
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After all is said and done, we're still back with the pre-Socratics whereby the universe begins in chaos, indeed, maybe even the "chaotic foam-like spray below the quantum", and we're left searching for the arche, their notion of singularity. The models have become more sophisticated, but the impetus is the same. I agree, a cosmogony without sovereignty would have to re-visit the very notion of ex nihlio, and would of necessity resemble a more humanistic world view, one where neither religion nor techne rule the day, or for that matter, rule anything at all.
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Perhaps it's just me but, speaking as a 'rabid atheist', I see little point in examining what it does or does not say in the bible.
48m 56sLenght
35Rating