The Theodicy

by Marinus Jan Marijs

Theodicy, the concept:
“Theodicy in its most common form, is the attempt to answer the question of why a good God permits the manifestation of evil. Theodicy attempts to resolve the evidential problem of evil by reconciling the traditional divine characteristics of omnibenevolence, omnipotence, and omniscience, in either their absolute or relative form, with the occurrence of evil or suffering in the world. Unlike a defense, which tries to demonstrate that God’s existence is logically possible in the light of evil, a theodicy provides a framework which claims to make God’s existence probable. The term was coined in 1710 by German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz in his work, Théodicée, though various responses to the problem of evil had been previously proposed.” (Wikipedia)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
“Alvin Plantinga’s version of the free will defense is an attempt to refute the logical problem of evil: The argument that the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God in an evil world is a logical contradiction. Plantinga’s argument is that “It is possible that God, even being omnipotent, could not create a world with free creatures who never choose evil. Furthermore, it is possible that God, even being omnibenevolent, would desire to create a world which contains evil if moral goodness requires free moral creatures. “While Plantinga’s free will defense has received fairly widespread acceptance among philosophers, many still contend that it fails to adequately resolve the problem of evil. Additionally, the defense only addresses moral evil, not natural evil.”

Jerry L. Walls, in his ”Why Plantinga must move from Defence to Theodicy”, writes: ”In his numerous writings on the “free will defence” Alvin Plantinga has taken pains to emphasize that he is not engaged in theodicy. In God, Freedom and evil for instance, Plantinga wrote as follows: ”Quite distinct from a free Will Theodicy is what I shall call a Free Will Defence. Here the aim is not to say what God’s reason is (for permitting evil), but at most what God’s reason might be.”
God freedom and Evil (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1977), 28.

This leaves us with the question: “Is it possible not only to present a defence with gives a possible unspecified reason (which need not be at all plausible, mere possibility is enough), but make an attempt to present a theodicy which is substantive and detailed, logical consistent, not just plausible but of a rational persuasion?” An internally consistent theory that explains how God and evil can possibly coexist and if possible why.
To answer this complex and difficult question, this problem has been subdivided
into 60 + questions.     ↓

The concept of a transcendent kosmic force
Albert Einstein (1879-1955): “Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe-a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble.”
“Einstein to P. Wright, 24 January 1936. Einstein Archive, reel 53-337.”

Max Planck (1858 – 1947), founder of quantum physics, Nobel Prize 1918:
“Nothing prevents us, and the momentum of our knowledge requires it… to interrelate the order of the universe and the God of religion. For the believer, God stands at the beginning of their speeches; for the physicist, at the end of them.”

Erwin Schrödinger (1887 – 1961), discoverer of wave mechanics, Nobel Prize 1933:
“The finest masterpiece is the one made by God, according to the principles of quantum mechanics…”

John Von Neumann: “There probably is a God. Many things are easier to explain if there is than if there isn’t.” As quoted in ‘John Von Neumann: The Scientific Genius Who Pioneered the Modern Computer, Game Theory, Nuclear Deterrence and Much More’ (1992) by Norman Macrae, p. 379

The concept of a transcendent kosmic force (usually identified as God) is to be found in many cultures. The term “God” is used with a wide variety of different meanings:

God is: A first cause, the prime mover, the ground of being, the Absolute, the one without a second, the Godhead, Brahman, the Dharmakaya, Jehovah, personifications of the forces of nature, an immanent god, a transcendent force, a pantheistic God, a panentheistic God. There is polytheism such as the angels of Judeo Christian faith and the devas from Hinduism and Buddhism. As well as a noninterfering Deistic God, an interfering Theistic God. A personal God or an impersonal Kosmic force. Creator of the universe, the incorporeal divine an eternal Spirit an infinite Mind.
But even within the bible the concept of God changed dramatically:
From a revengeful God to a God of justice, to a God of forgiveness.
So there are many different concepts some (but certainly not all) are mutually exclusive. The use of the term “God” however can be tied-up with traditional meanings that are associated with that term.
In the theological meaning of the word, it refers to the following characteristics: If it is a force that created the world, than it must be very powerful, if it is a force that created the extraordinary fine-tuning of the world, Click here for more details than it must be very intelligent, if it is a force that created the order in the world, than it must be very good.

Deism or theism (non-interventionist or interventionist)
Deism holds that God created the universe but does not intervene with the functioning of the natural world in any way, allowing it to run according to the laws of nature. Constructive elements of deist thought included: God exists and created the universe and God gave humans the ability to reason.

Theism holds that God created the universe and does intervene with the functioning of the natural world and holds the view that all observable phenomena are dependent on but distinct from one supreme being. Theists seek support for their view in rational arguments and appeals to experience. Arguments for God’s existence are of four principal types: Cosmological, ontological, teleological, and or moral. A central issue for theism is reconciling God, usually understood as omnipotent and perfect, with the existence of evil.

A personal God or an impersonal God
“I believe in God. In fact, I believe in a personal God who acts in and interacts with the creation. I believe that the observations about the orderliness of the physical universe, and the apparently exceptional fine-tuning of the conditions of the universe for the development of life suggest that an intelligent Creator is responsible.”
“I believe in God because of a personal faith, a faith that is consistent with what I know about science.”
“Being an ordinary scientist and an ordinary Christian seems perfectly natural to me. It is also perfectly natural for the many scientists I know who are also people of deep religious faith.”
–William D. Phillips, who won the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics for development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light.

And Albert Einstein: “I cannot conceive of a personal God who would directly influence the actions of individuals, or would directly sit in judgment on creatures of his own creation. I cannot do this in spite of the fact that mechanistic causality has, to a certain extent, been placed in doubt by modern science. [He was speaking of Quantum Mechanics and the breaking down of determinism.] My religiosity consists in a humble admiration of the infinitely superior spirit that reveals itself in the little that we, with our weak and transitory understanding, can comprehend of reality. Morality is of the highest importance — but for us, not for God.” (Albert Einstein, The Human Side, edited by Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman, Princeton University Press.)

Albert Einstein:”The idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I am unable to take seriously.” (Albert Einstein, Letter to Hoffman and Dukas, 1946.)

These quotes by two Nobel prize winning theoretical physicists show the different concepts. As illustrated above 33% of scientists say they believe in God, while 18% believe in a universal spirit or higher power (together 51%). The belief in a personal God is called theism. The belief in an impersonal spiritual power is called deism.
The question: “Is there a personal God or an impersonal spiritual power”, is directly related to the Theodicy. Many who accept a transcendent kosmic force but reject the concept of a personal God because of the presence of evil in the world.

Theism presumes an interfering God. 

Deism presumes a noninterfering God.

Theism                                                – Deism                           – Mysticism

Does God intervene with the functioning of the natural world?
Yes, on a personal level                       – no                                 – on a collective scale

Can human beings know God?
only by supernatural manifestations     – via reason and the       – by revelation
                                                               . observation of nature
What is the nature of God?
A personal God                                     – an impersonal God     – a transcendent kosmic force

Is the fine-tuning done by God?
Yes                                                         – only at the beginning  – mainly via secondary movers

Does God answer prayers?
Yes                                                         – no                               – contact with a kosmic force
                                                                                                      . transforms meditator

Belief in a divine force
based on faith                                        – based on reason         – based on inner experience

Belief in miracles?
Yes                                                         – no                                – interaction between higher
                                                                                                       . ontological forces and the
                                                                                                       . physical world
Main characteristic:
devotional                                              – rational                        – spiritual

Perceived as:
anthropomorphic                                   – non-anthropomorphic  – ground of being

Form of theology:
dogmatic theology                                 – natural theology          – phenomenological theology

Property of being:
immanent and transcendent                 – transcendent               – immanent and transcendent

Arguments for the existence of a transcendent Kosmic force
{The difference between the physical Cosmos and the ontological multilevel (Pythagorean) Kosmos is that the physical Cosmos is only the lowest level of the ontological multilevel (Pythagorean) Kosmos}.

The idea is that the order in the natural world has a transcendental origin, a kind of intelligence that has organised the universe.
This idea is not only adopted by those who are incapable of sophisticated thinking, but also by the most brilliant minds:

Albert Einstein:”I see a pattern, but my imagination cannot picture the maker of that pattern. I see a clock, but I cannot envision the clockmaker. The human mind is unable to conceive of the four dimensions, so how can it conceive of a God, before whom a thousand years and a thousand dimensions are as one?”
(The Expanded Quotable Einstein, Princeton University Press, 2000 p. 208.)

“I believe that the observations about the orderliness of the physical universe, and the apparently exceptional fine-tuning of the conditions of the universe for the development of life suggest that an intelligent Creator is responsible.” William D. Phillips, who won the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics for development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light.

Fred Hoyle (British astrophysicist): “A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.” Hoyle, F. 1982. The Universe: Past and Present Reflections. Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics: 20:16.
And:
“I do not believe that any scientist who examines the evidence would fail to draw the inference that the laws of nuclear physics have been deliberately designed with regard to the consequences they produce inside stars. If this is so, then my apparently random quirks have become part of a deep-laid scheme. If not, then we are back again at a monstrous sequence of accidents”
Hoyle, F, in ‘Religion and the Scientists’ (1959).

Alan Sandage (winner of the Crawford prize in astronomy. He determined the first reasonably accurate values for the Hubble constant and the age of the universe. He also discovered the first quasar.): “I find it quite improbable that such order came out of chaos. There has to be some organizing principle. God to me is a mystery but is the explanation for the miracle of existence, why there is something instead of nothing.” Willford, J.N. March 12, 1991. Sizing up the Cosmos: An Astronomers Quest. New York Times, p. B9.

George Greenstein (astronomer): “As we survey all the evidence, the thought insistently arises that some supernatural agency – or, rather, Agency – must be involved. Is it possible that suddenly, without intending to, we have stumbled upon scientific proof of the existence of a Supreme Being? Was it God who stepped in and so providentially crafted the cosmos for our benefit?” Greenstein, G. 1988. The Symbiotic Universe. New York: William Morrow, p.27.

Arthur Eddington (astrophysicist): “The idea of a universal mind or Logos would be, I think, a fairly plausible inference from the present state of scientific theory.” Heeren, F. 1995. Show Me God. Wheeling, IL, Searchlight Publications, p. 233.

Vera Kistiakowsky (MIT physicist): “The exquisite order displayed by our scientific understanding of the physical world calls for the divine.” Margenau, H and R.A. Varghese, ed. 1992. Cosmos, Bios, and Theos. La Salle, IL, Open Court, p. 52.

There are basically two distinct ways of approaching the transcendent:

1) The indirect way: The scientific mathematical way by objectively looking at the structure of the physical world and mathematically determine whether the order that is manifest can be the result of chance and has some physical origin. Or if not whether the order that is manifest can be the result of some transcendent force.
2) Another way of approaching the transcendent directly through phenomenological psychological introspection.

The evidence based upon the scientific mathematical way deals with the extraordinary complexity of the physical world, the orderliness of the physical universe, and the exceptional fine-tuning of the conditions of the universe for the development of life which cannot be explained by chance and natural selection only.

The evidence based upon the phenomenological psychological and spiritual introspection deals with qualia, consciousness, intuition, inspiration, revelation and mystical union which cannot be explained by physical factors.
Both these approaches point in the direction of a transcendent reality and ultimate to a the existence of a transcendent kosmic force.

Description and that which is described
Many of the traditional religious concepts have been attacked for their implausibility, however many of the stories within religious writings are declared symbolic/ allegorical even by the early church fathers such as St. Augustine. (Leibniz: ”I confess that oft-times expressions which are extravagant, and as it were poetical, have greater force to move and to persuade than correct forms of statement.”) Also the fact that the concept of a flat earth or the earth resting upon an elephant which rest on the back of a giant turtle and then turtles all the way down obviously has no basis in reality, does not mean that the earth doesn’t exist. Many spiritual stories are written in a poetic and/ or mythic narrative way and should not be interpreted literally. Many who attack the value of religious writings commit the fallacy of Presentism (in literary and historical analysis).

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
“In literary and historical analysis, presentism is a mode of literary or historical analysis in which present-day ideas and perspectives are anachronistically introduced into depictions or interpretations of the past. Some modern historians seek to avoid presentism in their work because they believe it creates a distorted understanding of their subject matter. The practice of presentism is a common fallacy in historical writings.

Presentism and moral judgments
Presentism is also a factor in the problematic question of history and moral judgments. Among historians, the orthodox view may be that reading modern notions of morality into the past is to commit the error of presentism. To avoid this, historians restrict themselves to describing what happened, and attempt to refrain from using language that passes judgment. For example, when writing history about slavery in an era when the practice was widely accepted, letting that fact influence judgment about a group or individual would be presentist, and thus should be avoided.

Critics respond that to avoid moral judgments is to practice moral relativism, a controversial idea. Others argue that application of religious standards has varied over time as well. Saint Augustine, for example, holds that there exist timeless moral principles, but contends that certain practices were acceptable in the past because they were customary, while they are neither customary nor acceptable at present. David Hackett Fischer, for his part, writes that while historians might not manage always to completely avoid the fallacy, they should at least try be aware of their biases, and write history in such a way that they do not create a distorted depiction of the past.”

Verifiability of the transcendence
Albert Einstein:”It is very difficult to elucidate this [cosmic religious] feeling to anyone who is entirely without it. . . The religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished by this kind of religious feeling, which knows no dogma and no God conceived in man’s image; so that there can be no church whose central teachings are based on it … In my view, it is the most important function of art and science to awaken this feeling and keep it alive in those who are receptive to it.” (The Expanded Quotable Einstein, Princeton University Press, p. 207.)

With the arrival of modernism a mechanistic worldview became the dominant way of looking at the world. The reason for this is simple: iI you find a mechanism then most of the time this leads to an understanding of a process. This brought empirical science and technological development which would revolutionise society. In the ninetieth century this mechanistic worldview, evolved into a materialistic philosophy called naturalism. However in the twentieth century many of the new developments in science, mathematics, physics, cosmology, and so on, could no longer be explained by a mechanistic worldview:
—Logical positivism was challenged by Kurt Gödel and his incompleteness theorems which showed the limits of logical positivism.

—Quantum theory was incompatible with a simple mechanical worldview.

—Within cosmology the steady state model, was replaced by the so called Big Bang model which had a beginning in time, and a mechanical worldview could not explain how this process started, and how the cosmological constants where so extremely fine-tuned.

—Within psychology, behaviourism was now seen as naïve simplistic.

—Within biology Neo-Darwinism, despite its brilliance, cannot find a solution for some major problems: how did life originate, how to explain the extraordinary complexity of the cell, which is a factory of Nano-technology. See:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zU7Lww-sBPg

Austrian evolutionary theorist Gerd B. Müller who is an Austrian biologist, professor at the University of Vienna where he heads the Department of Theoretical Biology in the Center for Organismal Systems Biology, did point out the “Explanatory deficits of Neo-Darwinism”(2016):

—-Phenotypic complexity (the origin of eyes, ears, body plans, i.e., the anatomical and structural features of living creatures);

—-Phenotypic novelty, i.e., the origin of new forms throughout the history of life (for example, the mammalian radiation some 66 million years ago, in which the major orders of mammals, such as cetaceans, bats, carnivores, enter the fossil record, or even more dramatically, the Cambrian explosion, with most animal body plans appearing more or less without antecedents); and finally

—-Non-gradual forms or modes of transition, where you see abrupt discontinuities in the fossil record between different types.

As Müller has explained in a 2003 work (“On the Origin of Organismal Form,” with Stuart Newman), although “the neo-Darwinian paradigm still represents the central explanatory framework of evolution, as represented by recent textbooks” it “has no theory of the generative.” In other words, the neo-Darwinian mechanism of mutation and natural selection lacks the creative power to generate the novel anatomical traits and forms of life that have arisen during the history of life.

And while DNA proved the existence of the Darwinian tree of life, and the common ancestry; the baffling complexity of DNA (the human genome of 3.1 billion letters) defies every explanatory hypothesis of how it came into being.

This seems to indicate that other factors are necessary to explain the enormous gaps in our knowledge. A possible explanation could be that there are transcendent forces which play a role: Next to the mathematical data which has been put forward here above, there is also the phenomenological data such as qualia, consciousness, creativity, intuition, inspiration, revelation and mystical experiences which cannot be accounted for in neurological mechanisms.

Science and God
With the development of science, new insights into the structure of the physical world became available and with it new technology that would revolutionise society. With its empirical methods and mathematical proofs it produced extremely accurate cognitive models of reality.
Religious writings with their poetic descriptions, mythological imagery, symbolic and multi interpretable stories did seem to lack the clarity one finds in science. So the question arose “is religion still relevant?” In spite of the enormous success and great quality of science it became clear however that it had little to say about morality and spirituality. Science was thought of as value free (which paradoxically is a value judgement itself) and did not include moral judgements such as the value of a human life, were not seen as scientific statements. Physicists used their knowledge to build nuclear weapons and became responsible for the mass murder on hundreds of thousands humans. Chemists produced zyklon b that killed millions of people. Science also didn’t give answers to existential questions such as to the meaning and purpose of life. Religion deals with questions relating to morality, the social structure of society, the meaning and purpose of life and questions related to the transcendent and God. The understanding that science and religion are not necessarily adversaries is shown by the following:
“A survey of scientists who are members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, (the AAAS is the world’s largest general scientific society and includes members representing all scientific fields) conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press in May and June 2009, According to the poll, just over half of scientists (51%) believe in some form of deity or higher power; specifically, 33% of scientists say they believe in God, while 18% believe in a universal spirit or higher power. These numbers haven’t changed much over the last 100 years either, despite the numerous discoveries in evolution and biochemistry over the years.”

Einstein was not an atheist, explaining at one point: “I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal god is a childlike one….. but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervour is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being.” Isaacson, Walter (2008). Einstein: His Life and Universe. New York: Simon and Schuster, pp. 390.

Albert Einstein:”In the view of such harmony in the cosmos which I, with my limited human mind, am able to recognise, there are yet people who say there is no God. But what makes me really angry is that they quote me for support for such views.” (The Expanded Quotable Einstein, Princeton University Press, p. 214.)

Albert Einstein: ”The most beautiful and most profound experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their primitive forms – this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.”
( Albert Einstein – The Merging of Spirit and Science.)

“The finest emotion of which we are capable is the mystic emotion. Herein lies the germ of all art and all true science. Anyone to whom this feeling is alien, who is no longer capable of wonderment and lives in a state of fear is a dead man. To know that what is impenetrable for us really exists and manifests itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, whose gross forms alone are intelligible to our poor faculties — this knowledge, this feeling … that is the core of the true religious sentiment. In this sense, and in this sense alone, I rank myself among profoundly religious men.” Albert Einstein, as quoted in ‘After Einstein: Proceedings of the Einstein Centennial Celebration’ (1981) by Peter Barker and Cecil G. Shugart, p. 179.

Albert Einstein:”The individual feels the futility of human desires and aims and the sublimity and marvellous order which reveal themselves both in nature and in the world of thought. Individual existence impresses him as a sort of prison and he wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole. The beginnings of cosmic religious feeling already appear at an early stage of development, e.g., in many of the Psalms of David and in some of the Prophets. Buddhism, as we have learned especially from the wonderful writings of Schopenhauer, contains a much stronger element of this.” (Albert Einstein, The World as I See It, Philosophical Library, New York, 1949, pp. 24 – 28.)

Albert Einstein: ”In my view, it is the most important function of art and science to awaken this religious feeling and keep it alive in those who are receptive to it.” (Albert Einstein, 1930.)

Albert Einstein: ”But science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion. To this there also belongs the faith in the possibility that the regulations valid for the world of existence are rational, that is, comprehensible to reason. I cannot conceive of a genuine scientist without that profound faith. The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” (Albert Einstein, 1941.

Atheism
Belief in God by Nobel prize winners:
It’s been suggested that the majority of the scientists are atheists, while among scientists there is a substantial number of atheists, but among Nobel laureates, the number who believe in a God in the universe is remarkably high.
According to “100 Years of Nobel Prize (2005)”, a review of Nobel prizes awarded between 1901 and 2000, many of the Nobel Prize Laureates, have identified themselves as religious in its various forms, as opposite to Atheists, agnostics, and freethinkers:

Nobel Prize winners between 1901 and 2000 and their religious preference:
Self-identified as: Religious (belief in God) – Atheists, agnostics, and freethinkers
Nobel Prizes number / %                            – Nobel Prizes number / %
Physics 140 Nobel Prizes / 95.3%              – 7 Nobel Prizes / 4.7%
Chemistry 118 Nobel Prizes / 92.9%          – 9 Nobel Prizes / 7.1%
Medicine 153 Nobel Prizes / 91.1%            – 15 Nobel Prizes / 8.9%
Economy 36 Nobel Prizes / 94.8%             – 2 Nobel Prizes / 5.2%
Religious denominations includes Christianity in its various forms, but also other religions.
Source: Baruch A. Shalev, 100 Years of Nobel Prizes (2003), Atlantic Publishers & Distributors
(A statistical analysis and interpretation of the more than 700 Nobel prizes given in the fields of Chemistry, Physics, Medicine, Peace, Literature, and Economics between 1901 and 2000, —the first 100 years of the awards existence.)

“According to biographer Walter Isaacson, Einstein was more inclined to denigrate disbelievers than the faithful. Einstein said in correspondence, “The fanatical atheists…are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who—in their grudge against the traditional ‘opium of the people’—cannot bear the music of the spheres.” Although he did not believe in a personal God, he indicated that he would never seek to combat such belief because “such a belief seems to me preferable to the lack of any transcendental outlook.”

Darwin himself, in his second edition of the Origin, had written in the conclusion:
“I believe that animals have descended from at most only four or five progenitors, and plants from an equal or lesser number. Analogy would lead me one step further, namely, to the belief that all animals and plants have descended from some one prototype. But analogy may be a deceitful guide. Nevertheless all living things have much in common, in their chemical composition, their germinal vesicles, their cellular structure, and their laws of growth and reproduction. We see this even in so trifling a circumstance as that the same poison often similarly affects plants and animals; or that the poison secreted by the gall-fly produces monstrous growths on the wild rose or oak-tree. I should infer from analogy that probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which life was first breathed by the Creator.”

— Charles Darwin: “Another source of conviction in the existence of God, connected with the reason, and not with the feelings, impresses me as having much more weight. This follows from the extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe including man with his capacity of looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity. When thus reflecting, I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man; and I deserve to be called Theist.”
Charles Darwin – Autobiography (1876) —Chapter XIV: “Conclusions”, page 428.

“Darwin still believed that God was the ultimate lawgiver, and later recollected that at the time he was convinced of the existence of God as a First Cause and deserved to be called a theist. This view subsequently fluctuated, and he continued to explore conscientious doubts, without forming fixed opinions on certain religious matters. Though reticent about his religious views, in 1879 he responded that he had never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God.” (Wikipedia)

“Theistic evolution are views that regard religious teachings about God as compatible with modern scientific understanding about biological evolution. Theistic evolution is not a scientific theory, but a range of views about how the science of evolution relates to religious beliefs .Supporters of theistic evolution generally harmonize evolutionary thought with belief in God, rejecting the conflict thesis regarding the relationship between religion and science – they hold that religious teachings about creation and scientific theories of evolution need not contradict each other.” (Wikipedia)

Albert Einstein: “For science can only ascertain what is, but not what should be, and outside of its domain value judgments of all kinds remain necessary. Religion, on the other hand, deals only with evaluations of human thought and action: it cannot justifiably speak of facts and relationships between facts. According to this interpretation the well-known conflicts between religion and science in the past must all be ascribed to a misapprehension of the situation which has been described.
For example, a conflict arises when a religious community insists on the absolute truthfulness of all statements recorded in the Bible. This means an intervention on the part of religion into the sphere of science; this is where the struggle of the Church against doctrines of Galileo and Darwin belongs. On the other hand, representatives of science have often made an attempt to arrive at fundamental judgments with respect to values and ends on the basis of scientific method, and in this way have set themselves in opposition to religion. These conflicts have all sprung from fatal errors.” (Albert Einstein, 1941.)

Monistic materialism
Monistic materialism or naturalism which excludes a transcendent principle, is the dominant worldview in the western world, but within philosophy there are several alternative philosophical views. Philosopher J.J. Poortman distinguished six different metaphysical views of the world, which he named from Alpha to Zeta:
Alpha: Monistic materialism, the view that only one kind of stuff, i.e. matter, ultimately exists in this universe.
Beta: The view that only matter exists, but that there are different kinds of matter (hylic pluralism), specifically that God and other spiritual beings are created of a finer kind of matter, not visible to our scientific instruments.
Gamma: That only matter exists, with the exception of one single entity which is not material. This entity may be God, Brahman, etc. This is the view held by Poortman himself.
Delta: The view that two separate kinds of material and one kind of spiritual, immaterial entity exists, for example the early Christian and Gnostic belief that man was made of body, soul and spirit, where the first two are different forms of matter and the spirit is immaterial.
Epsilon: A view in which matter and mind are totally separate things. This view was for example held by René Descartes in his cogito ergo sum statement, see mind dualism.
Zeta: Monistic idealism or illusionism, where matter is seen as some kind of emanation of God or another spiritual being. Especially this classification applies to the Brahman of the Hinduism.

(While it is often assumed that modern scientists have a monistic materialistic philosophy, this is not necesarily the case; the majority of mathematicians, and a great number of theoretical physicists are Platonists, which is a form of dualism.)

Logic, mathematics and phenomenology
Paul Davies: “Mathematics is built up step by step in the mathematical sequence. You start out with statements which seem to be self-evidently true which everybody accepts, and these are called axioms. I’ll give you a simple example from geometry; between any two points in space it must be possible to draw a straight line. From a collection of statements like that you can build up ever more elaborate theorems. One that we learn at school is Pythagoras’s theorem, and we accept that Pythagoras’s theorem was true because we accept the axioms on which it’s based, and every step in between is a logical step, it’s a provable step, and that’s why we can be so sure of mathematical theorems.”

Phenomenology; Dealing with the direct perception and its phenomenological description, the aim is not to put forward a series of logical arguments to support a conclusion, but to give an accurate description of these perceptions. It deals with first person perspectives, and introspective data that is important, but is normally not accessible for scientific research.
In a search for an insight into the nature of reality, both approaches; logic and phenomenology are necessary.

God and the Godhead
Within some spiritual traditions a differentiation has been made between the divine within time and space, and the divine that transcends time and space
                                                                     God – Godhead
                                         Within time and space – Transcending time and space
Platonic:                                        The demiurge – The unmoved mover
Western philosophy:                                     God – The Absolute
Christian faith:      Divine force (The Holy Ghost) – God
Buddhism:                                       Dharmakaya – Svabhavakaya
Hinduism:                                                 Ishvara – Brahman
Plotinus:                                       The world soul – The One (without a second)
Leibniz:                               The created monads – The uncreated monad
Eckhart:                                                        God – Godhead
Judaism:                                                Jehovah – Elohim

The question ”if God created the world, than what created God?” can be answered: That what created the world transcends time and space, so it has no beginning, so it is uncreated.
To those who object to “the uncreated” as a concept, one can remark that it was used already in science: Before the big bang was discovered, physicists believed in a steady-state universe which had no beginning in time and was presumed to be uncreated.

An evolutionary God
“It appears that mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent inherent in every atom. The universe is also weird, with its laws of nature that make it hospitable to the growth of mind. I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God. God is what mind becomes when it passes beyond the scale of our comprehension.”
–Princeton University quantum physicist Freeman Dyson.

The concept of an evolutionary God is to be found in different spiritual traditions: Within Christianity a socinianic God (Socinianism was also known as Unitarianism), in Buddhism the Dharmakaya, Aurobindo’s supramental while Teilhard de Chardin a Jesuit paleontologist, in “The Phenomenon of Man” argued for evolution aiming at the “Omega Point”. This off course does refer to the divine force and not to the Absolute, which transcends space and time and by its very nature cannot be evolutionary. The idea that God develops with the creation is relevant for the theodicy, because the question why doesn’t God interfere can then be answered by saying that this will take place at the “Omega Point”, and the processes that follow: Supramentalisation and divinisation, to which Christ referred to as the coming of the kingdom of God.

The concept of evil
The concept of evil is related to the traditional divine characteristics of omnibenevolence, omnipotence, and omniscience. An important question is whether these divine characteristics are seen in either their absolute or relative form.

(From: The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy):
“The logical consistency of each of the divine attributes of classical theism has been challenged by both adherents and non-adherents of theism. Consider the divine attribute of omniscience. If God knows what you will freely do tomorrow, then it is the case now that you will indeed do that tomorrow. But how can you be free not to do that thing tomorrow if it is true now that you will in fact freely do that thing tomorrow? There is a vast array of replies to this puzzle, but some philosophers conclude that omniscience is incompatible with future free action and that, since there is future free action, God—if God exists—is not omniscient.

Another objection to the coherence of theism has to do with the divine attribute of omnipotence and is referred to as the stone paradox. An omnipotent being, as traditionally understood, is a being who can bring about anything. So, an omnipotent being could create a stone that was too heavy for such a being to lift. But if he could not lift the stone, he would not be omnipotent, and if he could not make such a stone, he would not be omnipotent. Hence, no such being exists. A number of replies have been offered to this puzzle, but some philosophers conclude that the notion of omnipotence as traditionally defined is incoherent and must be redefined if the concept of God is to remain a plausible one.”

“Plantinga maintains that divine omnipotence involves an ability to do anything that is logically possible, but it does not include the ability to do the logically impossible.
According to Plantinga’s Free Will Defense, there is evil and suffering in this world because people do immoral things. People deserve the blame for the bad things that happen—not God. Plantinga writes,

The essential point of the Free Will Defense is that the creation of a world containing moral good is a cooperative venture; it requires the uncoerced concurrence of significantly free creatures. But then the actualization of a world containing moral good is not up to God alone; it also depends upon what the significantly free creatures would do.

We might wonder why God would choose to risk populating his new creation with free creatures if he knew there was a chance that human immorality could foul the whole thing up. C. S. Lewis offers the following answer to this question: “Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata—of creatures that worked like machines—would hardly be worth creating. The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other…. And for that they must be free. Of course, God knew what would happen if they used their freedom the wrong way: apparently He thought it worth the risk.”

According to Plantinga’s Free Will Defense, God could not eliminate the possibility of moral evil without at the same time eliminating some greater good.

“Some scholars maintain that Plantinga has rejected the idea of an omnipotent God because he claims there are some things God cannot do—namely, logically impossible things. Plantinga, however, doesn’t take God’s omnipotence to include the power to do the logically impossible. He reasons as follows. Can God create a round square? Can he make 2 + 2 = 5? Can he create a stick that is not as long as itself? Can he make contradictory statements true? Can he make a rock so big he can’t lift it? In response to each of these questions, Plantinga’s answer is “No.”

Natural disasters and manmade evil
While it can be argued that manmade evil happens because humans have free will, one can also ask questions about natural disasters?
Why are there Infectious diseases? Let’s look at the following example: The bacterial flagellum: this bacteria is a complex molecular machine.

Diagram of a germ’s motor and flagellum

This amazing miniature motor, is a motorized bacterium. Dr Scott Minnich of the University of Idaho, a world expert on the flagellar motor, points out that:
”The bacterium swims about with a whip-like cord called a flagellum (plural flagella), driven by a fantastic motor embedded in the outer shell. The flagellar motor is powered by proton flow, and closely resembles microscopic electric motors, powered by electron flow. The motor generates waves in the cord, which drive the germ forward. A bacterial flagellar motor has the amazing quality of combining speed with efficiency. These extremely efficient motors can quickly stop, start, change speeds, and reach a top speed of about 100,000 rpm (revolutions per minute)! The cell is propelled up to 15 body-lengths per second at top speed. It is also very versatile, because it has forward and reverse gears, enabling the germ to reverse direction within a quarter of a turn.”

Microscopic design

“To view the Bacterial flagella you need an electron microscope, because they are 25 nanometres (one millionth of an inch) in diameter.
Minnich, S., Bacterial flagella: spinning tails of complexity and co-option.
The entire flagellum assembly is extremely similar to an organelle that Yersinia pestis, the bubonic plague bacterium, uses to inject toxins into cells. They both form from the same set of genes. But this secretory apparatus, as well as the plague bacterium’s drilling apparatus, are a degeneration from the flagellum. Minnich says that although it is more complex, the motor came first, so it couldn’t have been derived from them”.
Minnich, S., Bacterial flagella: spinning tails of complexity and co-option.

If the chronology is correct, then the plague bacterium which killed many humans was a degeneration from a bacterium which had a distinct positive function. Therefore this is not an argument which points to evolutionary based progression. It rather points to intelligible design which started malfunctioning because of mutations.
For more information on the  timeline, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G581HlqXSFg

Infectious diseases:
“One of the major objections atheists raise to the existence of God is the presence of pathogenic microorganisms. Why would God create infectious organisms to plague human beings and other animals? In this section, we will examine two classes of infectious disease—those caused by bacteria and those caused by viruses.” (Rich Deem)

“Bacteria are single celled prokaryotes (organisms that lack a nucleus, or other membrane-bound organelles), which are mostly free-living. Bacteria are indispensable to the biomes of the world, recycling carbon and minerals from dead organisms. Bacteria are typically present at greater than 107 organisms/g in soil and makeup the vast majority of the earth’s biomass (greater than 1030 organisms). In addition to their role as recyclers, some bacteria can fix carbon as photoautotrophs or chemoautotrophs. Many bacteria serve as the first trophic level in a food chain. In addition to free-living bacteria, many are commensal and/or symbiotic, living beside or within other organisms. For example, human beings are hosts to at least ten times the number of bacterial cells than their own cells. Most of these bacteria inhabit our intestines, where they serve to metabolize unused energy substrates, prevent the growth of harmful species, and produce vitamins such as biotin and vitamin K. Because of the nature of microbial activities, these organisms are required for the existence of sentient creatures. The question then arises, “What about pathogenic bacteria?” It turns out that pathogenicity is the function of a poor host-microbe response. Bacteria that have been adapted to their hosts are non-pathogenic, since killing or harming your host does not facilitate your own survival. So, the existence of pathogenic bacteria are not the result of God’s creation, but the result of mutation and transfer to a less adapted host. Because of bacteria’s high reproductive rate and mutation rate, it is not possible to prevent the development of pathogenic species. So, the presence of pathogenic bacteria on earth is a result of processes that are required to recycle biological materials.” (Rich Deem)

[Richard L. Deem received his bachelor of science degree in biological sciences at the University of Southern California. He received his master of science degree in microbiology from California State University, Los Angeles, and has been working in basic science research since 1976. He has authored and co-authored a number of studies, included several areas of molecular biology and genetics, immunology, inflammatory bowel disease, natural killer cells, and infectious diseases. In addition, he has presented his work at a number of national and international scientific meetings].

Why are there earthquakes?
“If one were to examine atheist literature, one would think that these are capricious “acts of God” that serve no purpose to life on earth. Of course, the implication (never directly stated) is that earthquakes are a physical flaw in the “design” of the earth and that if God had really designed the earth, He could have done much better. Let’s look at the reason earthquakes happen to see what could have been done to eliminate that cause.” (Rich Deem)
“The reason for the existence of earthquakes is that the earth’s continental crusts are floating on the earth’s molten mantel. Since the continents are floating, the plates that make up the continents tend to run into one another When they slip past one another, the grinding of the plates results in the release of a large amount of energy, causing the plates to shake. So, there are a few ways to “fix” the “problem.” We could just eliminate the mantel and make all the continents fixed in position. On the surface, it sounds like a good idea. In fact, all other rocky planets in the Solar System have no molten core, and, therefore, no seismic activity. However, it turns out that a molten interior of the earth is absolutely essential to the existence of life. The independent rotation of the molten interior of the earth results in a magnetic dynamo that produces a charged field (magnetosphere) around the earth. This magnetic field produces the Van-Allen radiation shield, which protects the Earth from radiation bombardment. If this shield were not present, life would not be possible on the Earth.” (Rich Deem)

“Tectonic activity —When the earth was first created, it was molten and the surface was uniform in height. As water was delivered to earth (through the accretion process) and condensed, the planet became a waterworld—completely covered by a global ocean. Tectonic activity resulted in giant earthquakes and volcanoes that formed land masses over the earth. In addition, without continuing tectonic activity, the land masses would have returned to the ocean through erosion. Getting rid of the water cycle (to prevent erosion) is not an option, since fresh water is required for life. So, not only is the underlying cause of tectonic activity required to shield the earth from radiation, but the process itself is required for the formation and maintenance of continental land masses. It turns out that the number and strength of earthquakes is significantly less now compared to when the earth was first formed. This is primarily due to the reduction of radioactive materials in the earth (estimated to be one-fourth of what it was when the earth first formed). So, one could say that God has already reduced the suffering caused by earthquakes to the minimum level required for the existence of advanced life on earth.” (Rich Deem)

Why (deadly) radiation?
“Get rid of radiation?—Maybe God could have designed the universe without any deadly radiation? It turns out that the production of electromagnetic radiation is absolutely necessary to the ordinary functioning of the universe. Nuclear fusion, the process by which stars produce light and heat (and radiation) is necessary for the existence of life. In addition, the materials needed to produce rocky planets (and “rocky” organisms) is produced through this process. So, changing the weak nuclear force to preclude the generation of short-wavelength electromagnetic radiation, would prevent the formation of rocky planets and life altogether. In addition, it is the decay of radioactive materials that keep the earth’s interior molten, allowing for the existence of the magnetosphere to protect the earth from deadly radiation.” (Rich Deem)

Why Tsunamis?
“Tsunamis—When earthquakes occur under the oceans, the plate’s movement dissipates its energy through the ocean in the form of waves known as tsunami. When these waves make landfall, they can be up to 100 feet high and travel inland for several miles. The 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean caused widespread devastation to surrounding coastal areas, while killing over 200,000 people. A very large tsunami struck Japan, following a massive earthquake in 2011. We have already discussed the problems involved with stopping earthquakes and have determined that stopping them would result in a greater evil (lack of continental land masses and excessive solar radiation on the surface of the earth). So, it is not possible to eliminate all tsunamis without causing greater damage.” (Rich Deem)

Why Volcanic eruptions?
“Volcanoes are a relatively minor source of “natural evil,” since very few people are impacted by their eruptions. Living on or near a smoking, rumbling mountain can’t be said to be a really smart thing to do. However, since people can be forced from their homes or killed because of choosing to live near volcanoes, we must try to eliminate this form of natural evil. Unfortunately, volcanic activity has the same underlying cause as earthquakes—tectonic activity. In fact, with the map of worldwide volcanic activity, the same problems involved in eliminating this “evil” are encountered compared to eliminating earthquakes. Volcanism during the past has been much more severe than it is today. For example, the Columbia River basalt flows 12-17 million years ago produced 41,000 cubic miles of lava flow. So, God has reduced the level of volcanism at this time to the minimum amount required to sustain advanced life on earth. Therefore, we reject the elimination of volcanic eruptions as being possible on a world that contains sentient creatures.” (Rich Deem)

Why Landslides?
“There are landslides during almost every rainy season (mostly December through February). For California, the Landslides usually follow fires that remove the plant growth, whose roots tend to hold the soil in place. Without the plants, the soil is more susceptible to erosion during heavy rainfall, resulting in a landslide. Dozens to hundreds of people in California are left homeless and a few are killed by landslides every year. Removing the water cycle is not an option, since all life needs water. Making all the land flat would be eliminate landslides, but would require some major tweaking of plate tectonics. There is no natural process that would produce completely flat continents (which are actually mountains raised thousands of feet above the sea floor). Besides, a completely flat continent would experience flooding, since there would be no effective way to drain the land after a storm. Eliminating the water cycle or making continents flat would result in greater evils than putting up with a few landslides every year.” (Rich Deem)

Why Floods?
“Killing an average of 146 people each year in the United States, flash floods are another natural evil, which should be eliminated according to atheists. We have already discussed the problem caused by eliminating the water cycle. Since this is not an option, there are only a few other means to prevent floods. Some floods are the result of land being nearly flat and thus being unable to drain following major storms. Other floods occur when excess rain causes rivers to overflow their banks into the surrounding area. The solution to the flatness problem would be to create hills and mountains. However, these features often result in landslides. It is unclear how atheists propose that both floods and landslides be eliminated simultaneously.” (Rich Deem)—“Most people think that floods are evil and have no redeeming properties. In fact, some rivers throughout the world used to flood every year. The flooding brought much needed silt and minerals to the surrounding land, making it more fertile. However, people didn’t like the inconvenience of having to rebuild their houses every year. So, we dammed the rivers or built levees to control their flow in the rainy season. The result was that the land now needs to be fertilized, since the natural means of soil renewal has been eliminated.” (Rich Deem)

Why Hurricanes/Cyclones/Typhoons?
“Hurricanes (Atlantic Ocean) and cyclones (Indian Ocean) and typhoons (Northern Pacific Ocean) are tropical storms that gain energy in warm waters to produce sustained winds over 100 mph. They are a particular problem to tropical areas, since storms generated in more northern latitudes cannot generate such high energy, due to the lower temperatures of the water/land over which they form. So, the problem is a function of the uneven heating of the earth’s surface. How could this uneven heating problem be fixed? The earth is heated by the Sun, a single star. If the earth could be heated by three sources (one at the equator, and one at each of the poles), the heating could be made relatively even. The problem is that such a solar system could not exist anywhere in the universe. Since stars must be a minimum size, three stars circling each other could never illuminate a planet evenly, since their revolutions would place them in different locations at different times. It is unlikely that such a solar system would contain any planets, since gravitational interactions would likely eject all planets within the habitable zone. In fact, very few binary star systems would house planets, because gravitational resonances would tend to eject planets from the system. So, given the laws of physics, planetary heating is always going to be uneven, causing hurricanes and cyclones north and south of the equator. The tilt of the planet does effect the evenness of heating on a planet. A planet with an obliquity of 90° would experience extreme weather, with one side perpetually frozen and the other extremely hot. An obliquity of 0° would result in perpetually frozen poles, at which ice would continue to accumulate until the planet lost most or all of its oceans to frozen ice caps. It turns out that the earth’s 21.5° obliquity is optimal for maintaining habitable conditions throughout nearly the entire planet, without allowing accumulation of ice at the poles. So, it appears that the evenness of heating of planet earth is already optimal, and cannot be significantly improved.” (Rich Deem)

Why Tornadoes?
“Tornadoes represent some of the most destructive forces in the world. Winds in violent tornadoes can exceed 200 mph. Although most tornadoes occur in the Midwest part of the United States, they can occur in numerous locations throughout the world. Tornadoes are also ultimately caused by uneven heating, which results in local atmospheric pressure changes, causing a horizontally rotating mass of air. Rising air within a thunderstorm pulls this rotating air vertically, resulting in the familiar funnel shape, which causes destruction at its point of impact on the ground. Given the laws of physics, it is not possible to prevent storms from forming or travelling over land. In addition, the vast majority of storms are good—allowing life (i.e., sentient beings) to exist on the land. So, it is not possible to prevent hurricanes and tornadoes without negatively impacting the ability of higher organisms to exist on land.” (Rich Deem)

Why Fires?
“Fires cause extensive damage throughout the world. Living in California, there are wildfires every year that cause millions of dollars in destruction and usually a few fatalities. Atheist William Rowe used the example of fire as natural evil, in which lightning started a fire in a forest, which eventually burned a young deer that suffered for several days before dying. Surely, a good God would want to prevent the suffering caused by fires. As you learned in your elementary science classes fire requires three things—fuel, heat and oxygen. In most cases, the fuel is plant material. Obviously, God cannot eliminate plants, since all life is dependent upon the food and sequestered energy produced through photosynthesis. Eliminating heat is problematic, since the entire universe operates on the basis of thermodynamic laws. Without our Sun producing massive amounts of heat through nuclear fusion, life would be impossible on earth. Even preventing excessive heat on earth is problematic for our technological society. Much of our electricity, plus heating our homes and vehicle travel (automobile, airliner, train, etc.) requires combustion. Although occasional fires are started through lightning strikes, most destructive fires are caused by arson—moral evil. So, eliminating natural sources of heat would not prevent the majority of suffering caused by uncontrolled fires. One cannot eliminate oxygen from the environment, since nearly all of life requires oxygen for metabolism. There are some anaerobic (non-oxygen requiring) microorganisms, but such metabolic mechanisms tend to produce energy much less efficiently (which is why there are no anaerobic higher animals). Essentially, the metabolic processes of all life are equivalent to combustion and require the physics that allows fire to exist. So, eliminating fire would have prevented life on earth.” (Rich Deem)

Why Genetic diseases/cancer?
“The human population suffers from numerous genetic diseases, which occur as a result of random mutation. Some genetic diseases are retained within a population in response to selective pressure. For example, Sickle-cell disease developed in Africa in response to the malaria threat. Malaria was extremely deadly, wiping out entire populations. However, the Sickle-cell mutation results in individuals being resistant to Malaria. Those who are homozygous die at a younger age, although heterozygous individuals suffer little or no morbidity. So, this genetic disease was not designed by God, but grew out of a mutation selected on the basis of population survival.
Other genetic disorders and cancers probably do not have survival advantage, but are just due to random mutation. So, we would not say that God designed any genetic diseases
The error rate for copying DNA is actually quite small. Human genomic mutation is among the lowest of all eukaryotes, estimated to be ~2.2×10-9 per base per generation The rate of DNA replication is ~60 bases/sec, which is very fast. If it were not that fast, then cells would not reproduce fast enough for humans to even exist. There is a trade-off in speed vs. accuracy. For example, bacteria replicate at ~500 bases/sec, but have an error rate ~1×10-8 per base. So, the ten-fold increase in speed for bacteria results in a 10-fold decrease in accuracy. Given the laws of physics and the nature of quantum events, it is not possible to design a biological machine that operates with 100% accuracy. In fact, many biological systems are operating right up to the maximum theoretical limits. So, given the laws of physics, it is not possible to create an organism that does not possess at least a small mutation rate. Therefore, genetic mutation and disorders are inevitable for any reproducing biological species.” (Rich Deem)

Why viruses?
“Viruses are obligate intracellular parasites that use cellular machinery to reproduce their nucleic acid. Unlike bacteria, which are indispensable to higher life forms, it was originally believed that viruses serve few if any positive functions to promote advanced life. So, where did these viruses come from? Scientists have two main theories. One says that viruses were once free living cellular microbes that began to infect eukaryotes (and other prokaryotes). Once these microbes became intracellular, they were free to evolve by losing functions to the cellular machinery they had hijacked to perform necessary cellular functions. The other theory says that cellular machinery mutated to acquire independent reproductive activity. However, many viruses use specialized enzymes and different nucleic acids (RNA vs. DNA), suggesting that they were not derived from the host. In addition, since Darwinian evolution is fully capable of losing information through natural selection, I think the first theory to be a superior explanation of viral origins. In addition, the recent discovery of giant viruses with up to 900 gene products suggest that they may have evolved from more complex organisms. So, it seems likely that viruses are merely highly specialized bacteria that have lost much of their cellular machinery to become obligate intracellular parasites. Given the laws of thermodynamics there is probably no way to get rid of viruses other than direct interference when they arise.
Recent scientific studies point to viruses being involved in the ocean’s nutrient cycle. In fact, studies estimate that there are ~1030 viruses in the ocean. Since there are “only” 1080 baryons in the entire universe, this number shows the enormity of viral influence in the marine environment. Although viruses probably impact terrestrial environments less than marine ones, ultimately, most of the earth’s terrestrial biomass ends up in the ocean. Since most of these studies are relatively recent, we should probably expect to see more evidence for the positive role of viruses in carbon recycling in the future.” (Rich Deem)
(The “Rare earth hypothesis” is relevant relating to these questions).
Click here for more details

The theodicy deals with the question if there is a God why is there evil? In case of natural evil the data here above seems to indicate that most of what we call natural evil in this world, is absolutely required for life to exist at all.
Because the physical processes that cause natural disasters are the same ones required for the proper functioning of the universe and the existence of sentient life.

Human and animal suffering
A possible solution to the theodicy could be that the process in time has some ultimate goal of which humans take part in and which could not be attained if evil and suffering where eliminated, then it could be argued that this process which seems without justice, would be justified in the long run. But what could this ultimate goal be? A possible ultimate goal of this process could be if this process would lead to the possibility for humans to get access to higher ontological levels (traditionally called the heavens) which otherwise was impossible. In these higher ontological levels there would not be any evil or suffering and a quality of life which is of such a magnitude that everything else is pale in comparison. This not as a theological speculation, but as an already perceived reality by mystics in their peak experiences, their mystical states. This then on a time scale which isn’t limited.
Such a process of course would only be just if those who were the victim of evil or suffering would take part in the end result. This necessarily would mean that those who would take part in this end result must have a non-physical component (traditionally called soul or spirit) otherwise they could not take part in it.
It has been said that this could be the case with humans, but this wouldn’t justify animal (non-human) suffering because they don’t have a non-physical component (traditionally called soul or spirit). However this is a presumption which is not necessarily correct.
To quote Leibniz: “Animals have souls, but men have spirits or rational souls.” This of course is a philosophical point of view, so the question is what are the arguments or data that support Leibniz statement.
The argument could be that qualia (a term used in philosophy to refer to individual instances of subjective, conscious experience. The importance of qualia as a concept in the philosophy of mind comes largely from the fact that it is seen as posing a fundamental problem for materialist explanations of the mind-body problem.) are aspects, functions of the “soul.”
The reality of consciousness could give some additional arguments: If consciousness is identical to the ground of being, the “Absolute” as many spiritual traditions claim, then it is not produced by the brain, but by the soul, which consists of subtle non-physical energy fields that connect with the “ground of being” and thus make consciousness in a biological system possible.
This would indicate that all conscious beings including animals have subtle energies and these subtle energies survive the dead of the physical body and take part in a kosmic process that transcends physical life.

Disease, the emotional and the rational side
G. W. Leibniz in ‘Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil’:
“When one considers also the fragility of the human body, one looks in wonder at the wisdom and the goodness of the Author of Nature, who has made the body so enduring and its condition so tolerable.
That has often made me say that I am not astonished men are sometimes sick, but that I am astonished they are sick so little and not always. This also ought to make us the more esteem the divine contrivance of the mechanism of animals, whose Author has made machines so fragile and so subject to corruption and yet so capable of maintaining themselves: for it is Nature which cures us rather than medicine”
This statement of Leibniz goes to the heart of the problem, confronted with illness and its deep psychological effects, people very often complain about the weaknesses of the human body. This emotional reaction is very understandable. But looking at the extraordinary complexity of this biological system, the Nano-technology in the cell, the enormous amount of information within the DNA and so on, one gets on a rational side a total different outlook.

The death of biological systems
The mortality of humans is one of the great psychological problems. But let’s look for a moment what would happen if the human body grew older and didn’t die, its functions would diminish, the senses would lose their excellence and so on, it would be a bad alternative to dying.

Morality
The well-known philosopher Jürgen Habermas says the following about the question of religion and its relation to morality:
“Universalistic egalitarianism, from which sprang the ideals of freedom and a collective life in solidarity, the autonomous conduct of life and emancipation, the individual morality of conscience, human rights and democracy, is the direct legacy of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. This legacy, substantially unchanged, has been the object of continual critical appropriation and reinterpretation. To this day, there is no alternative to it. And in light of the current challenges of a postnational constellation, we continue to draw on the substance of this heritage. Everything else is just idle postmodern talk.” (Jürgen Habermas – “Time of Transitions”, Polity Press, 2006, pp. 150-151, translation of an interview from 1999.)

“Religion is not something that will be outgrown as a result of modernisation and rationalisation. Religion, based in the lifeworld of its participants, is an important and enduring source of morality. This contribution is particularly important, as religion gives a voice to the marginalised in society, to the ‘vulnerable forms of communal life” (Habermas 2008.)

“Just who has imposed on the suffering human race poison gas, barbed wire, high explosives, experiments in eugenics, the formula for zyklon b, heavy artillery, pseudo-scientific justifications for mass murder, cluster bombs, attack submarines, napalm, intercontinental missiles , military space platforms and nuclear weapons? If memory serves it was not the Vatican.”
– David Berlinski, The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions.

Has religion been the cause of most wars in history? The general impression even among religious people, is that religions are responsible for a great number of wars. Recently two academic studies have been published, which throws light on the role of religiously motivated and sanctioned violence in the world. These are:
• Encyclopedia of Wars (2004) edited by American historians Charles Phillips and Alen Alexrod.
• The Encyclopedia of War (2012), edited by Gordon Martel, emeritus professor of history at the University of Northern British Columbia and adjunct professor at the University of Victoria. Martel is a specialist in the history of modern warfare.

Both of these studies produce a careful, comprehensive listing of all wars that have occurred throughout human history, and ascertain which proportion of these wars were, in fact, religious in nature.
• The three-volume “Encyclopedia of Wars” compiled by Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod chronicles 1763 wars overall, of which 123 (7%) are classified by the authors as being religious wars. The encyclopedia also explains that the number of people killed in these conflicts amounts to only 2 percent.
• The five-volume “The Encyclopedia of War” edited by Gordon Martel us the criteria that armed conflict must involve some sort overt religious action, the encyclopedia concludes that just 6% of the wars listed throughout human history can be labelled as religious wars.

The claim “religion has been the cause of most wars throughout history” does not stand up to historical scrutiny.

What are most wars fought over?
Jimmy Akin: “Religion is a powerful motivator, and thus is often invoked in wartime, but the real reasons most wars have been fought have nothing to do with it. Instead, they have to do with political control–either allowing certain political leaders to gain or remain in power (e.g., who is the rightful heir to the throne) or they have to do with gaining political control of resources (e.g., land, money, food supplies, transportation and trade routes) or they have to do with a particular leader’s ambitions (i.e., being remembered as a great man, or not being remembered as a weak man). When leaders aren’t being totally naked about those things, they dress them up with national pride or religion, but ultimately they are not at the root.
Most modern wars such as: The American Revolution, The French Revolution, World War I, World War II, Vietnam, Korea; None of these wars were fought for religious reasons. In fact, the death toll of World War II is estimated to be somewhere between 50 and 70 million, making it the deadliest conflict in all of human history.”

Rabbi Alan Lurie explains: “History simply does not support the hypothesis that religion is the major cause of conflict. The wars of the ancient world were rarely, if ever, based on religion. These wars were for territorial conquest, to control borders, secure trade routes, or respond to an internal challenge to political authority. In fact, the ancient conquerors, whether Egyptian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, or Roman, openly welcomed the religious beliefs of those they conquered, and often added the new gods to their own pantheon. Medieval and Renaissance wars were also typically about control and wealth as city-states vied for power, often with the support, but rarely instigation, of the Church. And the Mongol Asian rampage, which is thought to have killed nearly 30 million people, had no religious component whatsoever.”
(Is Religion the Cause of Most Wars?, Huffington Post)

But isn’t suicide terrorism religious motivated?
Dr. Robert Pape who is professor of Political Science and director of the Program for International Politics at The University of Chicago. Dr. Pape specializes in international security affairs. In his book “Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism” (Random House, 2005) he compiled extensive data on suicide terrorism, including a database with all 315 suicide bombing attacks around the world from 1980-2003. The research, published in this new book shows how the strategic, social and personal motivations work together to encourage suicide terrorism.

Book abstract:
“The American public and America’s politicians seem convinced that the major problem between Arab countries and the United States are caused by adherents to Islam and that religions belief in “holy wars.” Pape set out whether this conclusion was correct. He collected extensive information on suicide bombings committed between 1980 and 2003 around the world. This data was entered into a database for analysis. What Pape discovered disproved the relationship between Islam, or religion in general, and the bombings. Pape found that 96 percent of the suicides were part of a larger coherent political or military campaigns whose specific goal was to compel democracies to withdraw their military forces from territories the suicide bombers regard as their homeland.”
Pape has collected and analysed the data meticulously, the data shows that religious fervour, doesn’t explain the phenomenon. The behaviour of the enemy that provides the targets, and of foreign occupation as a motivating factor.
==========
Extract from the US hardcover edition of “Dying to win: the strategic logic of suicide terrorism” by Dr. Robert Pape:
The Growing Threat
“Suicide terrorism is rising around the world, but there is great confusion as to why. Since many such attacks — including, of course, those of September 11, 2001 — have been perpetrated by Muslim terrorists professing religious motives, it might seem obvious that Islamic fundamentalism is the central cause. This presumption has fuelled the belief that future 9/11’s can be avoided only by a wholesale transformation of Muslim societies, a core reason for broad public support in the United States for the recent conquest of Iraq.
However, the presumed connection between suicide terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism is misleading and may be encouraging domestic and foreign policies likely to worsen America’s situation and to harm many Muslims needlessly.
I have compiled a database of every suicide bombing and attack around the globe from 1980 through 2003 — 315 attacks in all. It includes every attack in which at least one terrorist killed himself or herself while attempting to kill others; it excludes attacks authorized by a national government, for example by North Korea against the South. This database is the first complete universe of suicide terrorist attacks worldwide. I have amassed and independently verified all the relevant information that could be found in English and other languages (for example, Arabic, Hebrew, Russian, and Tamil) in print and online. The information is drawn from suicide terrorist groups themselves, from the main organizations that collect such data in target countries, and from news media around the world. More than a “list of lists,” this database probably represents the most comprehensive and reliable survey of suicide terrorist attacks that is now available.
The data show that there is little connection between suicide terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism, or any one of the world’s religions. In fact, the leading instigators of suicide attacks are the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, a Marxist-Leninist group whose members are from Hindu families but who are adamantly opposed to religion. This group committed 76 of the 315 incidents, more suicide attacks than Hamas.
Rather, what nearly all suicide terrorist attacks have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland. Religion is rarely the root cause, although it is often used as a tool by terrorist organizations in recruiting and in other efforts in service of the broader strategic objective.
Three general patterns in the data support my conclusions. First, nearly all suicide terrorist attacks occur as part of organized campaigns, not as isolated or random incidents. Of the 315 separate attacks in the period I studied, 301 could have their roots traced to large, coherent political or military campaigns.
Second, democratic states are uniquely vulnerable to suicide terrorists. The United States, France, India, Israel, Russia, Sri Lanka, and Turkey have been the targets of almost every suicide attack of the past two decades, and each country has been a democracy at the time of the incidents.
Third, suicide terrorist campaigns are directed toward a strategic objective. From Lebanon to Israel to Sri Lanka to Kashmir to Chechnya, the sponsors of every campaign have been terrorist groups trying to establish or maintain political self-determination by compelling a democratic power to withdraw from the territories they claim. Even al-Qaeda fits this pattern: although Saudi Arabia is not under American military occupation per se, a principal objective of Osama bin Laden is the expulsion of American troops from the Persian Gulf and the reduction of Washington’s power and influence in the region.”

The primary driver is nationalism and rebellion against occupation, not religion or Islamic fundamentalism.

“Every suicide terrorist campaign has had a clear goal that is secular and political: To compel a modern democracy to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland.”

“Professor Pape answers these questions with analysis grounded in fact, not politics.
For both policy makers and the general public, Dying to Win transcends speculation with systematic scholarship, making it one of the most important political studies of recent time.”
Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism
Robert Pape
Random House, 2005
352 pp.

What about the Inquisition?
“As for the Inquisition, much of the modern stereotype was largely made up by Spain’s political enemies, and later by anti-Christians. The Inquisition only had authority over professing Christians, and the Inquisition trials were often fairer and more lenient than their secular counterparts. Often the only penalty given was some sort of penance such as fasting. Over a period of 350 years, historians such as Henry Kamen (Kamen, H., The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision, Yale University Press, 1999) estimate only between 1,500 and 4,000 people were executed for heresy.
The Salem witch trials constitute the best-known example of religiously motivated violence. However, fewer than 25 people were killed in the trials, falling far short of the ‘perhaps hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions’ that the late Carl Sagan wrote about.
Christianity’s ‘religious crimes’ are far less horrendous than atheists would argue; that atheism, not religion, is responsible for mass murders. In fact, ‘atheist regimes have in a single century murdered more than one hundred million people’. Even adjusting for changes in population size, atheist regimes are responsible for 100 times more death in one century than Christian rulers inflicted over five centuries. However, while it can easily be shown that crimes committed in the name of Christianity are not sanctioned by its teaching, the bloodbaths of the atheist regimes are consistent with an atheist, evolutionary outlook. Indeed, atheists have no moral basis to say that anything is right or wrong.”
 
While the Spanish Inquisition was responsible, for the death of between 1,500 and 4,000 people over a period of 350 years,
let’s say 10 to 12 people a year, atheist regimes in the first half of the 20th century killed
1 to 1,2 million people a year.
In fact, the death toll of World War II is estimated to be somewhere between
10 and 12 million people a year.

R. J. Rummel, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Hawaii. In his work “Lethal Politics and Death by Government”, he gives the following data:

Non-Religious Dictator Lives Lost:
Joseph Stalin – 42,672,000
Mao Zedong – 37,828,000
Adolf Hitler – 20,946,000
Chiang Kai-shek – 10,214,000
Vladimir Lenin – 4,017,000
Hideki Tojo – 3,990,000
Pol Pot – 2,397,000
The historical evidence once more is quite clear: That “religion is the cause of most wars” has no basis in historical fact.

The concept of justice
How do we reconcile the wars, the atrocities, the cruelties?
Here we go back to an evolving God, a Creator that develops together with its creation (developmental sequences show hundreds of parallel transformative developments). Together they form a total of twelve ontological transformations that take place. If we take part in this development by transforming on an individual psychological basis (Click here for more details).
And on a collective social level (Click here for more details,) we can take part in a kosmic process by which injustice and evil are eliminated, and where social systems are developed to help the sick, the poor and the elderly.
Furthermore there is a hidden process to which many mystics have hinted; mental activity is not only active in the physical processes that take place in the brain but also in the subtle energetic processes.
These energies, which facilitate the felt experience, the understanding, the esthetic, the subjective inner experience, and the secondary qualities.
The experiences of color, beauty , and meaning all belong to these non-physical subtle energies. These energies, when they are recurrent and of the same kind tend to cluster and get their own momentum. They form clusters in the collective unconsciousness. When these clusters reach a certain energy level they are going to have an influence on collective processes. It is for this reason that mystics have said that it is not only wrong to do evil or to speak evil but also to think evil.

Sociologist Peter L. Berger characterized religion as the human attempt to build order out of a chaotic world. He believed that humans could not accept that anything in the world was meaningless and saw theodicy as an assertion that the cosmos has meaning and order, despite evidence to the contrary. Berger presented an argument similar to that of Weber, but suggested that the need for theodicy arose primarily out of the situation of human society. He believed that theodicies existed to allow individuals to transcend themselves, denying the individual in favor of the social order.(Wikipedia)

Within Judaism there is the concept that ten righteous people can save the whole of humanity; with Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Desmond Tutu this can point in the right direction. These where all highly religious persons of extraordinary quality.

Next to the moral issues, there is also the way in which religious narratives are written down, usually as allegory, metaphorical, poetical or with the personification of forces. They are transmitted to convey religious or idealized experience, to establish behavioural models, and to teach a higher way of moral functioning.
In modern society there is sometimes strong criticism to the worldview that has been put forward in these scriptures. This however has to be placed into a historical developmental framework.
Some points of view that are primitive by modern standards, could be highly developed in the time period when they were put forward.

How do we reconcile that there are so much man-made disasters, like War and many other forms of great social injustice? Certainly not by postulating some abstract theological proclamations.
The point here is not only that prominent atheists changed their mind about their not believing in a belief. The point is also that they wanted to study the data, the arguments and the logical conclusions that follow. It is for this reason that their argumentation is here extensively quoted.

It can be argued that modern scientific investigations and mathematics have shown that there is fine-tuning → intelligent design → a divine creator.
If that is the case than the question why doesn’t God interfere, is answered by experiments of great precision and sophistication, and on a rigorous and consistent mathematical formalism: There is an interference of an incomprehensible great order.

Then how do we reconcile that there are so much man-made disasters, like War and many other forms of great social injustice?

There are many cases of ethnic cleansing, the mass murder on non-combatants and the many wars and huge forms of social injustice.

The psychological and social origins of these human-made conflicts can be identified, and they are within human capacity to resolve. Not with the aim to find some theological excuse, but to solve this because of the moral unacceptability of these human-made conflicts and our responsibility to our fellow human beings.

It took 13.79 billion years before the cosmological fine-tuning did brought us here, it took 3.8 billion years of (guided) evolutionary fine tuning to bring modern humans in existence. Because of this fine-tuning we as humans are now in a position to work together with this Kosmic creative force and transform society.

It is necessary to identify the different individual and collective developmental lines, the developmental phases, the sequences they follow, the ontological and lateral developments, and to see how the transformations from level to level can be realised. It is necessary to eliminate psychopathologies, discrimination, fallacies, polarizing, intolerance, regression and violence with the aim of transforming society.

Within Christianity there is the concept of teleological processes which lead to a kosmic transformation, ending in an Omega point after which there is no injustice. So many Christians ask:” But why is it delayed?”.
It is now clear that to reach this Omega point a development in time is necessary. This because the different ontological levels have to be activated one by one before it is possible to generate the feedback loops that will connect the highest ontological level, the divine to the lowest ontological level, the physical world.

The following remarks, mostly verbal, by Kurt Gödel are recorded in Hao Wang’s supplemental biography of Gödel, A Logical Journey, MIT Press, 1996. References are to the quotation numbers in the text.
“Our total reality and total existence are beautiful and meaningful . . . . We should judge reality by the little which we truly know of it. Since that part which conceptually we know fully turns out to be so beautiful, the real world of which we know so little should also be beautiful. Life may be miserable for seventy years and happy for a million years: the short period of misery may even be necessary for the whole”. [9.4.20] (Kurt Gödel)
Kurt Gödel was an Austrian, and later American, logician, mathematician, and philosopher. Considered with Aristotle to be one of the most significant logicians in history, Gödel made an immense impact upon scientific and philosophical thinking in the 20th century
(Paul Davies: “I think Gödel was certainly the greatest logician since Aristotle, maybe the greatest logician of all time”).
John Wheeler about Gödel: “If you call him the greatest logician since Aristotle you’re downgrading him compared to his true measure.”

Free will
Free will is directly related to consciousness: Instincts, behaviour patterns and other unconscious patterns are algorithmic, which are so to speak automatisms that are outside the domain of conscious experience.
Whether one acts on these patterns is of course a conscious decision in which there is free will.
The denial of the existence of free will, complete determinism, would mean that people cannot chose between good and bad and would make morality, the choice between good and bad, impossible and this would mean that people would not be responsible for their actions and decisions.
Free will means that causal determinism is false, that unlike robots or other machines we can make choices that are genuinely free.
(From Wikipedia:) “American philosopher Alvin Plantinga presented a version of the free will defence which argued that the coexistence of God and evil is not logically impossible, and that free will further explains the existence of evil without threatening the existence of God.“

Free will defense
As an alternative to a theodicy, a defence may be offered as a response to the problem of evil. A defence attempts to show that God’s existence is not made logically impossible by the existence of evil; it does not need to be true or plausible, merely logically possible.
American philosopher Alvin Plantinga offers a free will defence which argues that human free will sufficiently explains the existence of evil while maintaining that God’s existence remains logically possible.
He argues that, if God’s existence and the existence of evil are to be logically inconsistent, a premise must be provided which, if true, would make them inconsistent; as none has been provided, the existence of God and evil must be
Free will furthers this argument by providing a premise which, in conjunction with the existence of evil, entails that God’s existence remains consistent.” (Wikipedia)

Plantinga’s Free Will Defense
(From The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy:)
“What might God’s reason be for allowing evil and suffering to occur? Alvin Plantinga has offered the most famous contemporary philosophical response to this question. He suggests the following as a possible morally sufficient reason: God’s creation of persons with morally significant free will is something of tremendous value. God could not eliminate much of the evil and suffering in this world without thereby eliminating the greater good of having created persons with free will with whom he could have relationships and who are able to love one another and do good deeds”.

The thought is that God allows some evils to occur that are smaller in value than a greater good to which they are intimately connected.

From The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
“According to Plantinga, libertarian free will is a morally significant kind of free will. An action is morally significant just when it is appropriate to evaluate that action from a moral perspective (for example, by ascribing moral praise or blame). Persons have morally significant free will if they are able to perform actions that are morally significant.”

Plantinga’s Free Will Defense explains why God allows moral evil, it does not explain why he allows natural evil.

“Since the logical problem of evil claims that it is logically impossible for God and evil to co-exist, all that Plantinga (or any other theist) needs to do to combat this claim is to describe a possible situation in which God and evil co-exist. That situation doesn’t need to be actual or even realistic. Plantinga doesn’t need to have a single shred of evidence supporting the truth of his suggestion. All he needs to do is give a logically consistent description of a way that God and evil can co-exist. Plantinga claims God and evil could co-exist if God had a morally sufficient reason for allowing evil. He suggests that God’s morally sufficient reason might have something to do with humans being granted morally significant free will and with the greater goods this freedom makes possible. All that Plantinga needs to claim is that they are logically possible (that is, not contradictory).
They may not represent God’s actual reasons, but for the purpose of blocking the logical problem of evil, it is not necessary that Plantinga discover God’s actual reasons”. (From The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

To develop to the greatest degree or extent possible, humans need to have consciousness. One just has to look at the fragmentary consciousness in dreams, or the unconscious reflexes, how limited one’s possibility for growth is without consciousness.
Without consciousness there would be no science, art, morality, spirituality, understanding, love, compassion and so on. About 70.000 years ago there existed only about a few thousand humans on the African plains which wouldn’t have survived without consciousness.

There is a direct connection between consciousness and free will, it is consciousness that makes free will possible.

Qualia and consciousness
Qualia is a term used in philosophy to refer to individual instances of subjective, conscious experience.

Sir James Jeans wrote: “The stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the Universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter… we ought rather hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter.” (Wikipedia)

Jeans, in an interview published in The Observer (London), when asked the question:
“Do you believe that life on this planet is the result of some sort of accident, or do you believe that it is a part of some great scheme?”
replied:
“I incline to the idealistic theory that consciousness is fundamental, and that the material universe is derivative from consciousness, not consciousness from the material universe… In general the universe seems to me to be nearer to a great thought than to a great machine. It may well be, it seems to me, that each individual consciousness ought to be compared to a brain-cell in a universal mind.”

Erwin Schrödinger (1887–1961), the famous physicist, had this counter-materialist take:
“The sensation of colour cannot be accounted for by the physicist’s objective picture of light-waves. Could the physiologist account for it, if he had fuller knowledge than he has of the processes in the retina and the nervous processes set up by them in the optical nerve bundles and in the brain? I do not think so.” Schrödinger, Erwin (2001). What is life?: the physical aspects of the living cell. (Repr. ed.). Cambridge [u.a.]: Cambridge Univ. Press.

While qualia are related to physical brain-states, they are not identical to brain states.
Qualia are non-physical.

An update of the state of affairs in academic research relating to consciousness:
by Deepak Chopra, MD and Stuart Hameroff, MD, Anesthesiology, Psychology, Center for Consciousness Studies, The University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona:
“The nature of consciousness, the reality it conveys, and our place in the universe remains unknown. Since ancient times, two types of views have approached these problems. In Western science and philosophy, consciousness is strictly a by-product of brain activity, the reality it perceives is not to be trusted (‘Plato’s cave’, Descartes’ ‘brain-in-a-vat’, Dennett’s ‘multiple drafts’). On the other hand, in Eastern philosophy, consciousness is primary, the fundamental basis for reality.

William James popularized consciousness at the turn of the 20th century, but behaviorist psychologists then focused on quantifying brain function. Because consciousness is unmeasurable, it became a ‘dirty word’ in academic circles. Meanwhile in physics, the ‘conscious observer’ was invoked to account for quantum state reduction, or ‘collapse of the wave function.’ This was a pragmatic solution to the ‘measurement problem’, but one which put consciousness outside science.

Around the early 1990s, great scientists Francis Crick, Sir Roger Penrose and others seriously addressed consciousness. As the topic became more acceptable, the first interdisciplinary conference ‘Toward a Science of Consciousness’ was held in 1994 in Tucson, Arizona, where then-unknown philosopher David Chalmers set the tone. He talked about how problems like memory, learning, attention and behaviour were relatively easy compared to the really ‘hard problem’ of how and why we have conscious experience. We could have been non-conscious, robot-like ‘zombies’ with no inner life. How and why do we have feelings and awareness? This was the ‘hard problem’.

Regarding the ‘hard problem’, Koch, Tononi and their physicist colleague Max Tegmark have embraced a form of panpsychism in which consciousness is a property of matter. Simple particles are conscious in a simple way, whereas such particles, when integrated in complex computation, become fully conscious (the ‘combination problem’ in panpsychism philosophy). Tegmark has termed conscious matter ‘perceptronium’, and his alliance with Koch and Tononi is Crick’s legacy and a major force in the present-day science of consciousness. Their view of neurons as fundamental units whose complex synaptic interactions account for consciousness, also supports widely-publicized, and well-funded ‘connectome’ and ‘brain mapping’ projects hoping to capture brain function in neuronal network architecture.

In his 1989 book “The Emperor’s New Mind”, Sir Roger Penrose took a quite different approach. He questioned whether consciousness was indeed computation, as is commonly assumed. Penrose explained that computers lack understanding, and some additional non-algorithmic, ‘non-computable’ factor was required. That factor, he suggested, involved ‘collapse of the wave function’–an event in which quantum superpositions terminate by a particular type of state reduction due to an objective threshold in the fine scale structure of the universe (‘objective reduction’, ‘OR’). That last step is a big one, but as Penrose later said (quoting Sherlock Holmes) “when you eliminate the impossible, whatever’s left must be correct, no matter how seemingly improbable”.

Penrose accounted for quantum superposition, e.g. particles in two locations simultaneously, as separation in underlying space-time geometry. If a separation were to continue, each possibility would form its own universe–the ‘multiple worlds hypothesis’. But Penrose reasoned space-time separations were unstable, and would reduce, or collapse to particular states at time t by an objective threshold (objective reduction, OR) given by a form of the uncertainty principle, t = h/EG (h is the Planck-Dirac constant). Each such OR event selects classical reality, and is accompanied by conscious experience. In one audacious proposal, Penrose addressed consciousness and the measurement problem by reconciling quantum mechanics with general relativity.

The OR conscious connection to space-time geometry struck many as consistent with Eastern philosophy, or spiritual approaches, in that conscious events (or their ‘proto-conscious’ precursors) are ubiquitous (though Sir Roger himself has never drawn that comparison). OR events are also consistent with discrete ‘moments’ in Buddhist practices, and ‘occasions of experience’ suggested by early 20th century philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. Rather than a property of matter, OR views consciousness as a sequence of discrete events, like (conscious) frames in a movie, rearrangements in the fine scale structure of reality.

Penrose OR occurring in random environments (i.e. decoherence) would be accompanied merely by non-cognitive, proto-conscious experience without meaning or understanding. Like the panpsychist combination problem for particles, full, rich OR conscious events would require combination, integration or ‘orchestration’ of superpositions prior to OR. How could this occur in the brain?

Penrose teamed with anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff to develop the ‘Orch OR’ theory based on microtubules, lattice polymers inside brain neurons, a deeper level, finer scale processing than is generally considered. Orch OR suggests microtubule quantum superpositions are ‘orchestrated’ (‘Orch’) by memory, synaptic inputs and natural resonances to enable functional quantum computation until time t = h/EG, resulting in Orch OR events accompanied by meaningful conscious experience. Microtubule states selected in Orch OR events (e.g. in pyramidal neuron dendrites and soma) can modulate synapses and trigger axonal firings to control behavior. Orch OR has explanatory power.

But from its inception in the mid-1990s, Orch OR has been viewed skeptically, as the brain was considered too ‘warm, wet and noisy’ to avoid thermal decoherence. In 2000, physicist Max Tegmark developed a formula for microtubule quantum states, and calculated a decoherence time of 10-13 secs at brain temperature, far too brief for physiological effects such as EEG (e.g. ~10-2 secs). However (with apologies to Shakespeare’s Hamlet) ‘something was rotten in Tegmark’s formula’. For example his superposition separation distance was 7 orders of magnitude greater than that proposed in Orch OR. When corrected, microtubule decoherence time was recalculated as 10-4 secs (far longer, but still too brief for EEG).

The Tegmark article and its rebuttal pitted theory versus theory. However beginning in 2006, evidence for warm quantum coherence has been demonstrated in photosynthesis, bird navigation, olfaction, and….microtubules. Nanoneurobiologist Anirban Bandyopadhyay has found quantum resonance (gigahertz, megahertz and kilohertz) in single brain microtubules, and microtubule bundles inside active neurons, with microtubule quantum coherence as long as 10-4 secs (10 kilohertz). Microtubule quantum vibrations appear to resonate over different scales, and can interfere, e.g. ~10 megahertz, to generate slower ‘beat frequencies’ seen as EEG rhythms. Microtubule coherence for 10-7 secs is thus sufficient for Orch OR, and 10-4 secs coherence has already been demonstrated. Recent studies show anesthetics act in microtubules to selectively erase consciousness, rather than membrane proteins as is commonly assumed.

Orch OR appears to be on firm ground, and will be well represented at the Tucson conference. Sir Roger Penrose will give the keynote address, and Hameroff and Bandyopadhyay will speak in a session with Tegmark following Koch and Tononi. Deepak Chopra will defend Eastern spiritual approaches in a session with John Searle, and Sam In the conference opener, Chalmers and Dennett square off on the ‘hard problem’.”
References:
Chalmers DJ (1996) The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, New York: Oxford University Press.

Emerson D, Weiser B, Psonis J, Liao Z, Taratula O, Fiamengo A, Wang X, Sugasawa K, Smith A, Eckenhoff R, Dmochowski I (2013) Direct modulation of microtubule stability contributes to anthracene general anesthesia, Journal of the American Chemical Society 135 (14): 5398.

Hagan S, Hameroff S, Tuszynski J (2001) Quantum computation in brain microtubules? Decoherence and biological feasibility Physical Reviews E 65:061901.

Hameroff S, Penrose R (2014) Consciousness in the universe: A review of the ‘Orch OR’ theory. Physics of Life Reviews 11(1):3978
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1571064513001188

Koch C (2012) Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist, MIT Press

Penrose R (1989) The emperor’s new mind – A search for the missing science of consciousness. Oxford Press

Sahu S, Ghosh S, Ghosh B, Aswani K, Hirata K, Fujita D, Bandyopadhyay A (2013a) Atomic water channel controlling remarkable properties of a single brain microtubule: Correlating single protein to its supramolecular assembly, Biosensors and Bioelectronics, 47:141-148.

“Erwin Schrödinger was a Nobel Prize-winning Austrian physicist who developed a number of fundamental results in the field of quantum theory, which formed the basis of wave mechanics: He formulated the wave equation (stationary and time-dependent Schrödinger equation) and revealed the identity of his development of the formalism and matrix mechanics. Schrödinger proposed an original interpretation of the physical meaning of the wave function.” (Wikipedia)

“Schrödinger had strong interests in Eastern religions, pantheism and used religious symbolism in his works. He also believed his scientific work was an approach to the godhead. He also wrote about the nature of consciousness:
Erwin Schrodinger: “The multiplicity (of consciousness) is only apparent. This is the doctrine of the Upanishads. And not of the Upanishads only. The mystical experience of the union with God regularly leads to this view, unless strong prejudices stand in the way”. As quoted in ‘The Eye of Shiva: Eastern Mysticism and Science’ (1981) by Amaury de Riencourt.

Erwin Schrodinger: “Multiplicity is only apparent, in truth, there is only one mind… “The Oneness of Mind”, as translated in ‘Quantum Questions: Mystical Writings of the World’s Great Physicists’ (1984) edited by Ken Wilber.

Erwin Schrodinger: ”Consciousness is never experienced in the plural, only in the singular. Not only has none of us ever experienced more than one consciousness, but there is also no trace of circumstantial evidence of this ever happening anywhere in the world. If I say that there cannot be more than one consciousness in the same mind, this seems a blunt tautology — we are quite unable to imagine the contrary…“ “The Oneness of Mind”, as translated in ‘Quantum Questions: Mystical Writings of the World’s Great Physicists’ (1984) edited by Ken Wilber.

Erwin Schrodinger: “In itself, the insight is not new. The earliest records, to my knowledge, date back some 2500 years or more… the recognition ATMAN = BRAHMAN (the personal self equals the omnipresent, all-comprehending eternal self) was in Indian thought considered, far from being blasphemous, to represent the quintessence of deepest insight into the happenings of the world. The striving of all the scholars of Vedanta was after having learnt to pronounce with their lips, really assimilate in their minds this grandest of all thoughts.
Again, the mystics of many centuries, independently, yet in perfect harmony with each other (somewhat like the particles in an ideal gas) have described, each of them, the unique experience of his or her life in terms that can be condensed in the phrase: DEUS FACTUS SUM (I have become God).
To Western ideology, the thought has remained a stranger… in spite of those true lovers who, as they look into each other’s eyes, become aware that their thought and their joy are numerically one, not merely similar or identical…” “The I That Is God” as translated in ‘Quantum Questions: Mystical Writings of the World’s Great Physicists’ (1984) edited by Ken Wilber.

Erwin Schrodinger: “The plurality that we perceive is only an appearance; it is not real. Vedantic philosophy… has sought to clarify it by a number of analogies, one of the most attractive being the many-faceted crystal which, while showing hundreds of little pictures of what is in reality a single existent object, does not really multiply that object…” “The Mystic Vision” as translated in ‘Quantum Questions: Mystical Writings of the World’s Great Physicists’ (1984) edited by Ken Wilber.

Erwin Schrodinger: “It is not possible that this unity of knowledge, feeling and choice which you call your own should have sprung into being from nothingness at a given moment not so long ago; rather this knowledge, feeling, and choice are essentially eternal and unchangeable and numerically one in all men, nay in all sensitive beings. But not in this sense — that you are a part, a piece, of an eternal, infinite being, an aspect or modification of it… For we should then have the same baffling question: which part, which aspect are you? what, objectively, differentiates it from the others? No, but, inconceivable as it seems to ordinary reason, you — and all other conscious beings as such — are all in all. Hence, this life of yours… is, in a certain sense, the whole… This, as we know, is what the Brahmins express in that sacred, mystic formula… ‘Tat tvam asi’ — this is you. Or, again, in such words as ‘I am in the east and in the west, I am below and above, I am this whole world.’
Thus you can throw yourself flat on the ground, stretched out upon Mother Earth, with certain conviction that you are one with her and she with you … For eternally and always there is only now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end.”
“The Mystic Vision” as translated in ‘Quantum Questions: Mystical Writings of the World’s Great Physicists’ (1984) edited by Ken Wilber.

Suffering, human morality and human response
The aspiration to understand the human condition and especially human suffering resulted in the intellectual aim to solve the theodicy. Human suffering however is far more than only an intellectual problem. It has next to its intellectual side, its psychological, social, moral and spiritual dimension.
The intellectual has to do with comprehension, understanding
‘The psychological’ has to do with perception, experiencing ‘the social’ has to do with relations with others
The moral has to do with justice, goodness And the spiritual has to do with meaning, significance and ultimate concern.
Suffering which so touches deeply the lives of people can be approached from different directions philosophical, one’s intellectual view, trying to  understand suffering, how to place it and how to react on it. An important part is to prevent suffering on a collective scale by higher moral standards, in stopping wars, generate a good healthcare system, social systems, humanitarian aid, transcending egocentrism with compassion, meaning not only seek happiness for one self but to generate the happiness of all sentient beings. It is to make the unhappy happy rather than the happy happier.

Religion has different approaches to suffering:
“The ‘Four Noble Truths’ of Buddhism are about dukkha, a term usually translated as suffering in the Dharma. Suffering is greatly defined in Buddhism and hold a key role in attaining the supreme bliss Nirvana, The nature of suffering, recognising its cause and cessation of suffering is quintessential in the practice of Buddhism, the way leading to its cessation (is the Noble Eightfold Path).

Buddhism considers liberation from suffering dukkha and the practice of compassion (karuna)and mindfulness (Sati) as basic for leading a holy life and attaining the nirvana thus, elimination of suffering by attaining Buddhahood.

Hinduism holds that suffering follows naturally from personal negative behaviours in one’s current life or in a past life (see karma in Hinduism). One must accept suffering as a just consequence and as an opportunity for spiritual progress. Thus the soul or true self, which is eternally free of any suffering, may come to manifest itself in the person, who then achieves liberation (moksha). Abstinence from causing pain or harm to other beings (ahimsa) is a central tenet of Hinduism. Suffering is thought to be an inclusive effect of human experience. Beyond this, Hindus are looking to achieve enlightenment and end human suffering by answering questions about life. This will lead to a unity in God as well as find the meaning of their suffering, ultimately achieving bliss.

Christianity also believes that human suffering plays an important role in religion. Suffering is only to be thought a positive experience in the case of achieving a higher meaning of life, such as Jesus suffering for the lives of other Christians. Suffering is the time to find God and value faith while doing so. This allows Christians to face reality of human experience with suffering and find an understanding in the divine.

According to the Bahá’í Faith, all suffering is a brief and temporary manifestation of physical life, whose source is the material aspects of physical existence, and often attachment to them, whereas only joy exists in the spiritual worlds. In the words of `Abdu’l-Bahá, “All these examples are to show you that the trials which beset our every step, all our sorrow, pain, shame and grief, are born in the world of matter; whereas the spiritual Kingdom never causes sadness. A man living with his thoughts in this Kingdom knows perpetual joy. The ills all flesh is heir to do not pass him by, but they only touch the surface of his life, the depths are calm and serene.” (Wikipedia)

Psychology and suffering
“Suffering and pleasure are respectively the negative and positive affects, or hedonic tones, or valences that psychologists often identify as basic in our emotional lives. The evolutionary role of physical and mental suffering, through natural selection, is primordial: It warns of threats, motivates coping (fight or flight, escapism), and reinforces negatively certain behaviours (see punishment, aversives). Despite its initial disrupting nature, suffering contributes to the organization of meaning in an individual’s world and psyche. In turn, meaning determines how individuals or societies experience and deal with suffering.” (Wikipedia)

Relief and prevention of suffering in society
“Since suffering is such a universal motivating experience, people, when asked, can relate their activities to its relief and prevention. Farmers, for instance, may claim that they prevent famine, artists may say that they take our minds off our worries, and teachers may hold that they hand down tools for coping with life hazards.  Information from scientific discoveries is funnelled into the development of engineered products that benefit humanity.
In certain aspects of collective life, however, suffering is more readily an explicit concern by itself. Such aspects may include public health, human rights, humanitarian aid, disaster relief, philanthropy, economic aid, social services, insurance, and animal welfare. To these can be added the aspects of security and safety, which relate to precautionary measures taken by individuals or families, to interventions by the military, the police, the firefighters, and to notions or fields like social security, environmental security, and human security.” (Wikipedia)

Intellectualisation and compassion
It should be said that no amount of theological sophistication related to the theodicy, can replace the compassion one should feel for those who suffer.

Heaven and hell
One of the central questions in human existence, is whether there is life after death. This is relevant for the theodicy as an afterlife opens up the possibility see evil in the physical world in the context of a larger Kosmic process.
A source of evidence relating to this question is in what is called “near-death experiences”. These are experiences of persons who met the criteria for clinical death. They undergo experiences, often seen as experiences of the world that awaits them after death. A large numbers of persons report that they had such experiences. A Gallup poll taken in 1982 found that eight million Americans (about five percent of the adult population ) had a near-death experience (NDE). In these out-of-body experiences in which a person views his or her own body “from outside” and perceives its surroundings, sometimes at a considerable distance from the location of the person’s body; meeting “beings of light” sometimes including friends and relatives who died previously. NDE’s have been reported throughout recorded history and from all cultures.

If there is a life beyond the physical life, than the question is what then what will that environment in that case be? Speculation and beliefs about life after death have existed through much of human history. Within religion there is the traditional concept of being raised at some day in the future, that meaning that there is a considerable amount of time between the physical death and “being raised”. That interpretation has considerable difficulties. Another interpretation would be that if the souls of the departed are to be fitted out immediately with non-physical resurrection bodies, these difficulties are greatly alleviated. The “out of the body” experiences support this last interpretation.

If there is life after death, the nature of that afterlife has been the subject of great theological debate:

Thomas Talbott in ” Heaven and Hell in Christian Thought”:
“According to a relatively common view in the wider Christian culture, heaven and hell are essentially deserved compensations for the kind of earthly lives we live. Good people go to heaven as a deserved reward for a virtuous life, and bad people go to hell as a just punishment for an immoral life; in that way, the scales of justice are sometimes thought to balance. But virtually all Christian theologians regard such a view, however common it may be in the popular culture, as overly simplistic and unsophisticated; the biblical perspective, as they see it, is far more subtly nuanced than that.
When we turn to the theological and philosophical literature in the Christian tradition, we encounter, as we would in any of the other great religious traditions as well, a bewildering variety of different (and often inconsistent) theological views. The views about hell in particular include very different conceptions of divine love, divine justice, and divine grace, very different ideas about free will and its role (if any) in determining a person’s ultimate destiny, very different understandings of moral evil and the purpose of punishment, and very different views about the nature of moral responsibility and the possibility of inherited guilt.”

The traditional concepts of heaven and hell generate some very serious questions relating to the theodicy and the goodness of God.

First of all some believe that God will reject unremorseful sinners after a given deadline, normally thought of as the moment of physical death, and punish them forever after. This would mean that the mistakes humans make in one lifetime will have very negative consequences for eternity. This would be so out of proportion that by any standard it would neither be good or just.

Then there is the question what about those who never commit any evil, such as those who die in infancy or those who, because of severe brain dysfunction or some other factor, never developed properly? These, according to Augustine, deserve to be condemned. Such a point of view is very extreme and wouldn’t point to divine goodness or divine justice.

And those who have unknowingly violated a divine command?—and if so, to what extent are they responsible for their wrong doings?
Some theologians have said that one cannot be responsible for what one doesn’t know.
This could be correct but leads to the absurdity that if people sin unknowingly they can go to heaven, and that if people sin knowingly they can go to hell, then bringing knowledge relating to morality and good behaviour leads to the situation that more people would go to hell?!

Some believe that one needs to be baptised to go to heaven. Being baptised symbolically means to one’s soul is purified. If one takes this idea literally and one holds that someone who is baptised goes to heaven, and someone who is not baptised goes to hell, then this will lead to absurd conclusions. One can see this easily from the following hypothetical situation: Two children are born and die within half an hour after birth. One child is born in a street where a priest is living and is baptised and goes to heaven, the other child lives many miles away from a priest or dies in such a way that its body cannot be recovered and for that reason dies before it is baptised and goes to hell. One sees the absurdity.

All these traditional concepts of heaven and hell lead to the following question:
How could any sin that a finite being commits in a context of ambiguity, ignorance, and illusion, deserve an infinite penalty as a just recompense?

Some say that justice requires punishment, other religious writers insist that justice requires something very different, namely reconciliation and restoration.

Now one might, draw a number of faulty conclusions because we humans tend to think of irreparable harm within the context of a very limited time-frame, a person’s life on earth, and could argue “that God, if he exists, would deal with a much larger picture and a much longer time-frame than that with which we humans are immediately concerned.” Then there is also the Universalist Rejection of Everlasting Separation which states that an almighty God will triumph in the end and successfully reconcile to himself each and every human being.

The phenomenology of the transcendent worlds
The investigation of the concept of heaven and hell (free from theological speculation), can be based on out of the body experiences. During an out of the body experience one briefly enters the non-physical worlds, the first world one usually enters is what is called the astral realm. If one has had several hundreds out of the body experiences during his or her physical life, these can serve as an example of the kind of development someone can go through after dead. The level of development of the person who has passed away determines the speed of development in the afterlife. A low development means a relative slow developmental process in the afterlife.
The reason for this is after death a purification process takes place by which habitual processes which are emotionally loaded, are being eliminated as becomes clear from out of the body experiences and mystical development during ones physical existence. This purification process can be observed during out of the body experiences and mystical development within one’s physical existence.

Whiteman J.H.M. a professor of mathematics who had about 550 out of the body experiences, wrote about his out of the body experience in the astral realm: “This is an experience in which there is a considerable degree of rational reflection and precise observation on the part of the separated observer. But phenomena are somewhat disagreeable, or apparently irrational, and atoned for only by their intellectual interest and the remarkable bodily freedom typical of separations. We have hardly any power to improve conditions or become liberated to higher ones. In brief there is rational reflection, but no rational control over unharmonized influences”.

Emotionally conditioned responses can hold someone temporarily in a lower world, but if these conditioned responses are worked out, one automatically goes to a higher world. That someone would stay forever in a lower world, is certainly not the impression one gets if one has had a great number of out of the body experiences. The regulating influences on the higher levels are eventually stronger than the after-effect of lower emotions. It is more or less a kind of self-recuperation of the soul. One gets the idea that someone who is highly developed will stay several hours or days on a lower, so called astral level, and others perhaps years before they go to the higher worlds. The accessibility of the higher worlds, can in some regards be compared with the accessibility of the higher mental abilities. Someone who is dominated by emotions will have great difficulties to think clear, and someone who thinks in habitual patterns, will have difficulties in functioning intuitively.

To be able to go to a higher plane of existence one has to activate higher energies within oneself, because similar energies attract each other, resonate with each other. And different energies push each other away.

Because similar subtle (non-physical) energies attract each other, resonate with each other, someone who is in an out of the body state, be it temporarily or permanent after death, shall, when being full of compassion and sympathy, attract the same kind of energies and therefore create a positive environment in the higher ontological worlds.
And someone who is full of negative emotions such as hatred and anger will attract the same kind of energies and therefore create a negative environment in the higher ontological worlds.

This was the origin of the concept of heaven and hell, which is not only a Christian concept but is also to be found in other cultures and traditions. See for example Plutarch’s “De sera numinis vindicta”.
Within parapsychology the out of the body experiences that are described are mostly very positive. But a small amount, about 3 to 10 % report a negative out of the body experience. But striking instance of this is the minimal role played by judgment and damnation in modern NDE’s.

The concept of a personal God who condemns people to hell for eternity has no basis in reality. It is the mental activity of humans which generates their own environment in the afterlife, with no involvement of the Divine whatsoever.

Is it really a serious proposition that a kosmic force that generated the Big Bang billions of years ago, would even be involved in punishing, without compassion human individuals? The widespread theological view, which states that billions of people will eventually be lost forever, is a travesty, an absurd grotesque misrepresentation and an insult to the Divine.

Perhaps because one wanted to change human behaviour and society, this idea of eternal (that is to say everlasting) condemnation, this overstatement, was used in the hope that people would change for the better. But this idea has had a very negative effect, many decent human beings lived in fear because of this theological fiction.

That leaves us with the question that if there are negative afterlife experiences than how long will they last? Suppose someone has a very negative state of mind, and therefore creates a negative environment. When this person changes this into a positive state of mind of compassion, sympathy and so on, this will also have the result that the energy quality of the environment changes in a very positive way.
Because old habits die hard, one can fall back, but eventually one will succeed in functioning permanently on a higher level.
To quote C. S. Lewis: “The gates of hell are locked from the inside.”

The theory that is put forward here solves the main problems with which so many theologians struggled, and of course it is related to the theodicy. Furthermore there is a lot of supporting evidence: 10 % of the world population has had one or more out of the body experiences (of which about 5 % a near death experience), this makes it possible to do cross-cultural research in this matter.

There are several ontological levels of existence (traditionally called heavens) so the transformation from one level to a higher level repeats itself on higher levels.

Teleology (the aim of creation)
Paul Davies (British astrophysicist: “The laws [of physics] … seem to be the product of exceedingly ingenious design… The universe must have a purpose”. Davies, P. 1984. Superforce: The Search for a Grand Unified Theory of Nature. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984), p. 243.

Arno Penzias (Nobel prize in physics): “Astronomy leads us to a unique event, a universe which was created out of nothing, one with the very delicate balance needed to provide exactly the conditions required to permit life, and one which has an underlying (one might say ‘supernatural’) plan.” Margenau, H and R.A. Varghese, ed. 1992. Cosmos, Bios, and Theos. La Salle, IL, Open Court, p. 83.

Roger Penrose (mathematician and author): “I would say the universe has a purpose. It’s not there just somehow by chance.”
Penrose, R. 1992. A Brief History of Time (movie). Burbank, CA, Paramount Pictures, Inc.

Ed Harrison (cosmologist): “Here is the cosmological proof of the existence of God – the design argument of Paley – updated and refurbished. The fine tuning of the universe provides prima facie evidence of deistic design. Take your choice: blind chance that requires multitudes of universes or design that requires only one…. Many scientists, when they admit their views, incline toward the teleological or design argument.”
Harrison, E. 1985. Masks of the Universe. New York, Collier Books, Macmillan, pp. 252, 263.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
“A teleology (from Ancient Greek telos, meaning roughly “end” or “purpose”, and -logia, meaning “study of, discourse”) is an account of a given thing’s end or purpose. The notion of natural teleology is that natural entities have intrinsic teloi or ends, irrespective of human use or opinion. For instance, Aristotle held that an acorn’s intrinsic telos is to become a fully grown oak tree. In the late 18th century, Immanuel Kant used the concept of telos as a regulative principle in his Critique of Judgment. Teleology was also fundamental to the speculative philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Contemporary philosophers and scientists are still actively discussing whether teleological talk is useful or accurate in doing modern philosophy and science. For instance, in 2012, Thomas Nagel proposed a neo-Darwinian account of evolution that incorporates impersonal, natural teleological laws to explain the existence of life, consciousness, rationality, and objective value. Other example is chaos theory and its notion of attractor.”

From Encyclopædia Britannica: “In the late 19th century, controversy centred on whether the phenomena of growth, regeneration, and reproduction characteristic of living organisms could be explained in purely mechanistic terms. The vitalism of Hans Driesch, a German biologist and philosopher, according to which an Aristotelian entelechy, or immanent agency, must be postulated in every organism, found little support after his death. There remains, however, the question of whether biological processes can be explained in purely physicochemical terms, or whether the problems of structure, function, and organization necessitate some kind of teleology. Organismic conceptions, such as those espoused in the mid-20th century by Ludwig von Bertalanffy, an Austrian-Canadian theoretical biologist, have thrown these issues into a new perspective.”

Notable supporters:
Plato:
“In western philosophy, the term and concept of teleology originated in the writings of Plato. In the Phaedo, Plato through Socrates argues that true explanations for any given physical phenomenon must be teleological. He bemoans those who fail to distinguish between a thing’s necessary and sufficient causes, which he identifies respectively as material and final causes”. (Phaedo 98-9) (Wikipedia)

Aristotle:
“Aristotle’s Four Causes give special place to each thing’s telos or “final cause.” In this, he followed Plato in seeing purpose in both human and sub-human nature. Aristotle argued that Democritus was wrong to attempt to reduce all things to mere necessity, because doing so neglects the aim, order, and “final cause,” which brings about these necessary conditions”. (Wikipedia)

Hegel:
“Teleology was made central to speculative philosophy by Hegel and in the various neo-Hegelian schools. Hegel conceived of the ‘totality’ of mutually antagonistic world-views and life-forms in history as being ‘goal-driven’, that is, oriented towards an end-point in history. (Wikipedia)

Leonhard Euler:
“Leonhard Euler Swiss mathematician and physicist, considered to be one of the greatest mathematicians of all time:”Since the fabric of the universe is most perfect and the work of a most wise Creator, nothing at all takes place in the universe in which some rule of maximum or minimum does not appear … there is absolutely no doubt that every affect in the universe can be explained satisfactorily from final causes, by the aid of the method of maxima and minima, as it can be from the effective causes themselves … Of course, when the effective causes are too obscure, but the final causes are readily ascertained, the problem is commonly solved by the indirect method…” As quoted in The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (1986) by John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler, p. 150.

As John Eccles neurophysiologist who won the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on the synapse explains: “Wallace felt that human intelligence could only be explained by the direct intervention of Cosmic intelligence” (Eccles, 1989, p. 235).

Francisco Ayala:
“Biologist philosopher Francisco Ayala has argued that all statements about processes can be trivially translated into teleological statements, and vice versa, but that teleological statements are more explanatory and cannot be disposed of. Ayala, Francisco (1998) “Teleological explanations in evolutionary biology.”

J. B. S. Haldane:
“Haldane said, “Teleology is like a mistress to a biologist: he cannot live without her but he’s unwilling to be seen with her in public.”. Hull, D., Philosophy of Biological Science, Foundations of Philosophy Series, Prentice–Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1973. And: Mayr, Ernst (1974) Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Volume XIV, pages 91–117.

Ernst Chain:
“Ernst Chain shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology with Alexander Fleming and Howard Florey for his work on penicillin, the world’s first antibiotic, which has saved the lives of perhaps as many as 200 million people. Chain’s role was to figure out a way of isolating and purifying penicillin. Concerning Darwin’s theory of evolution, Chain wrote: “It is, of course, nothing but a truism, and not a scientific theory, to say that living systems do not survive if they are not fit to survive. “To postulate, as the positivists of the end of the 19th century and their followers here have done, that the development and survival of the fittest is entirely a consequence of chance mutations, or even that nature carries out experiments by trial and error through mutations in order to create living systems better fitted to survive, seems to me a hypothesis based on no evidence and irreconcilable with the facts.”
“This hypothesis wilfully neglects the principle of teleological purpose which stares the biologist in the face wherever he looks, whether he be engaged in the study of different organs in one organism, or even of different subcellular compartments in relation to each other in a single cell, or whether he studies the interrelation and interactions of various species. These classical evolutionary theories are a gross oversimplification of an immensely complex and intricate mass of facts, and it amazes me that they were swallowed so uncritically and readily, and for such a long time, by so many scientists without a murmur of protest.”
(Chain, 1971, “Social Responsibility and the Scientist in Modern Western Society,” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, Spring 1971, Vol. 14, No. 3, pp. 367).

Norbert Wiener:
“Julian Bigelow, Arturo Rosenblueth, and Norbert Wiener have conceived of feedback mechanisms as lending a teleology to machinery. Wiener, a mathematician, coined the term ‘cybernetics’ to denote the study of “teleological mechanisms.”
Cybernetics, or control and communication in the animal and machine’ (1948) “Cybernetics is the study of the communication and control of regulatory feedback both in living beings and machines, and in combinations of the two. In the cybernetic classification presented in “Behavior, Purpose and Teleology”, teleology is feedback controlled purpose. “
Rosenblueth, Arturo; Wiener, Norbert; Bigelow, Julian (Jan 1943). “Behavior, Purpose and Teleology”. Philosophy of Science 10 (1): 21. doi:10.1086/286788. JSTOR 184878.

And Conway, Patrick (1974). Development of volitional competence. MSS Information Corp. p. 60. “This classification system was criticized and the need for an external observability to the purposeful behavior was established to validate the behavior and goal-attainment. The purpose of observing and observed systems is respectively distinguished by the system’s subjective autonomy and objective control. “
George, Frank Honywill; Johnson, Les (1985). Purposive behavior and teleological explanations. Gordon and Breach. pp. xII.

Niels Bohr: “Drawing an analogy with the complementarity relation that obtains in atomic physics, Bohr applied the language of complementarity to this dual-aspect approach to understanding organisms. Bohr envisioned an analysis employing teleological notions as basic concepts, irreducible to the language of physics and chemistry. He predicted that mutually exclusive teleological and mechanistic approaches would be jointly necessary for an exhaustive understanding of life.” The Influence of Niels Bohr on Max Delbruck Revisiting the Hopes Inspired by “Light and Life” by Daniel J. McKaughan.

Werner Heisenberg. Heisenberg considered that non-random, intentional, and, therefore, teleological elements may be present in the process of evolution (Heisenberg, Werner. “Elementary Particles and Platonic Philosophy.” 1965, 242) and within bacteria. Recent evidences seem to underpin Heisenberg’s idea about the presence of non-random, teleological elements in the process of evolution.
Philosophy Study, ISSN 2159-5313
September 2012, Vol. 2, No. 9, 631-649 Biological Autonomy Attila Grandpierre Chapman University Menas Kafatos Chapman University.

Wolfgang Pauli. Pauli proposed purposiveness/ teleology and emphasized his discomfort with Neo-Darwinism in a letter to Delbruck: “Probably the situation is a complex one and beside the holy chance there exist processes with a directed goal and also causal influences of the environment on inherited properties on the way over the cytoplasma.” Letter by Pauli to Delbruck of February 4, 1954. Letter 1712 in von Meyenn (1999), p. 452. Meyenn, K. von, (ed.) (1999): Wolfgang Pauli. Wissenschaftlicher Briefwechsel, Band IV, Teil II: 1953–1954. Berlin, Springer.

Carl G. Jung. Carl G. Jung experienced a class of events which are not at all causal but final or teleological.

Alfred Adler: “Alfred Adler’s “Individual Psychology”, stresses explicitly the teleological principle for psychotherapy.” (Wikipedia)

Ludwig von Bertalanffy. Von Bertalanffy: “There is, however, another and even more important aspect of general system theory. Concepts like those of organization, wholeness, directiveness, teleology, and differentiation are alien to conventional physics. However, they pop up everywhere in the biological, behavioural and social sciences, and are, in fact, indispensable for dealing with living organisms or social groups. Thus, a basic problem posed to modern science is a general theory of organization. General system theory is, in principle, capable of giving exact definitions for such concepts and, in suitable cases, of putting them to quantitative analysis.” Von Bertalanffy (1956) “General System Theory”.
In: General Systems, Yearbook of the Society for General Systems Research, vol. 1, 1956.

Ervin László: “General systems theory is the scientific exploration of “wholes” and “wholeness” which, not so long ago, were considered metaphysical notions transcending the boundaries of science. Hierarchic structure, stability, teleology, differentiation, approach to and maintenance of steady states, goal-directedness — these are a few of such general system properties.” Ervin László, Introduction to Systems Philosophy (1972).

Physicist Paul Davies: “It is often said that physicists invented the mechanistic-reductionist philosophy, taught it to the biologists, and then abandoned it themselves. It cannot be denied that modern physics has a strongly holistic, even teleological flavour.” Cosmic Blueprint: New Discoveries In Natures Ability To Order Universe by Paul Davies.

The cosmological fine-tuning that makes biological life possible can be seen as a teleological process.

“Teleologists ….agree that the delicate balance of cosmological and physical conditions necessary for intelligent life does cry out for some sort of interpretation which will render it intelligible…. Theistic philosophers view this sensitive nexus of conditions as evidence of wider teleology and therefore indicative of a cosmic Designer.”
The Teleological Argument and the Anthropic Principle. William Lane Craig.

A theodicy that explains the existence of evil based upon some ultimate good in the future seems to need some form of teleology.

“A modern variation of the teleological argument is built upon the concept of the fine-tuned Universe: According to the website Biologos: “Fine-tuning refers to the surprising precision of nature’s physical constants, and the beginning state of the Universe. To explain the present state of the universe, even the best scientific theories require that the physical constants of nature and the beginning state of the Universe have extremely precise values.” Also, the fine-tuning of the Universe is the apparent delicate balance of conditions necessary for human life. In this view, speculation about a vast range of possible conditions in which life cannot exist is used to explore the probability of conditions in which life can and does exist. For example, it can be argued that if the force of the Big Bang explosion had been different by 1/1060 or the strong interaction force was only 5% different, life would be impossible. In terms of a teleological argument, the intuition in relation to a fine-tuned universe would be that God must have been responsible, if achieving such perfect conditions is so improbable.” (Wikipedia)

The Big Bang, creation by a transcendent source, or just popped up?
Big Bang theory, which posits the creation of all matter and time ex-nihilo, explains material effects (matter, time, and natural laws) using an immaterial cause (creation ex-nihilo).
“Perhaps the best argument…that the Big Bang supports theism is the obvious unease with which it is greeted by some atheist physicists. At times this has led to scientific ideas…being advanced with a tenacity which so exceeds their intrinsic worth that one can only suspect the operation of psychological forces lying very much deeper than the usual academic desire of a theorist to support his or her theory.”
–Imperial College of London astrophysicist Christopher J. Isham, who is Britain’s leading quantum cosmologist.

“Astronomers now find they have painted themselves into a corner because they have proven, by their own methods, that the world began abruptly in an act of creation to which you can trace the seeds of every star, every planet, every living thing in this cosmos and on the earth. And they have found that all this happened as a product of forces they cannot hope to discover…. That there are what I or anyone would call supernatural forces at work is now, I think, a scientifically proven fact.”
–Astronomer, physicist and founder of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies Robert Jastrow.

The Big Bang is the most widely accepted scientific theory of how the universe developed into its present state.
However initially this theory met a lot of resistance. The idea that the universe had a beginning in time was in sharp contrast with the steady state model which was universally accepted until that time. If the universe had a beginning in time, then there was a moment of creation. And if there was a creation, what did initiate that? This brings us to the cosmological argument for the existence of God:
The evidence indicates that the universe at some point in the past exploded out of nothing into what we know today.

The traditional theological argument:

Anything that has a beginning (such as our universe) cannot be eternal and therefore must have a cause beyond and/or behind it. The Scottish skeptic David Hume admitted as much when he wrote, “I never asserted so absurd a proposition as that anything might arise without a cause.” This truth can be put into the following series of logical statements:

• Everything that begins to exist must have a cause
• The universe began to exist
• Therefore, the universe had a cause

This leads to the conclusion that there must be a transcendent cause for the Big Bang. This line of argumentation is often called the cosmological argument for the existence of God.

However, this has been attacked by asking the question, “If everything needs a cause, then who caused God?”– but only those things that have a beginning need a cause. God, or more precise The Absolute, which is outside space and time has no beginning and is uncaused. This is Leibniz idea of the uncreated monad.
Another proposed possibility for the coming into existence of the universe are theories that presuppose things can arise and come into existence without a cause.

“However, this fails when studied closely. The Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem has scientifically proven that even if our universe is just a tiny part of a so-called “multiverse” composed of many universes, the multiverse must have had an absolute beginning. In other words, it also requires a cause.

As for the quantum mechanics, it is simply not true that things begin to exist from nothing in a quantum mechanics environment. Anything arising results from fluctuations in the quantum vacuum, which is not “nothing” by definition. Instead, it comes from energy that is locked in the vacuum, which is a sea of fluctuating energy governed by physical laws having a physical structure. No evidence suggests that things come into being from nothing in quantum mechanics.” (author unknown)

To sum up, a total universe that can arise and come into existence without a cause, is not supported by prove or a sound theory.
And there is a totally different fact, the extraordinary high ordering of the initial conditions of the Big Bang, as is clear from the consequences from the second law of thermodynamics and the fine-tuning of the universe.
It is especially the fine-tuning of the Big Bang that makes it impossible that it just popped up. Roger Penrose’s calculation is that the probability of the occurrence of a universe in which life can form is at least 10 to the power of 123 to 1 {1:1010(123) }
As to the expansion rate after the big bang, this is so incredibly fine- tuned: We’re not talking about merely a one or two percent reduction in the universe’s expansion rate. Stephen Hawking writes: “If the rate of expansion one second after the big bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, the universe would have re-collapsed before it ever reached its present size.”
Stephen Hawking, The Illustrated A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam, 1996), 156.

On the other side, if the expansion rate had been a mere fraction greater than it was, galaxies, stars and planets could never have formed, and we wouldn’t be here.

A substantial number of scientists, among whom several former atheists came to the conclusion that this is evidence for the existence or some form of intelligence capable of manipulating or designing the basic physics that governs the Universe.

Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Einstein is probably the best known and most highly revered scientist of the twentieth century, and is associated with major revolutions in our thinking about time, gravity, and the conversion of matter to energy (E=mc2). Although never coming to belief in a personal God, he recognized the impossibility of a non-created universe.
The Encyclopedia Britannica says of him: “Firmly denying atheism, Einstein expressed a belief in “Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the harmony of what exists.” This actually motivated his interest in science, as he once remarked to a young physicist: “I want to know how God created this world, I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know His thoughts, the rest are details.” Einstein’s famous epithet on the “uncertainty principle” was “God does not play dice” – and to him this was a real statement about a God in whom he believed. A famous saying of his was “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”

Multiverses as alternative explanation
Multiverses as alternative explanation for fine-tuning
“The multiverse (or meta-universe) is the hypothetical set of infinite or finite possible universes (including the Universe we consistently experience) that together comprise everything that exists: The entirety of space, time, matter, and energy as well as the physical laws and constants that describe them. The various universes within the multiverse are sometimes called parallel universes or “alternate universes”. Wikipedia

“The multiverse hypothesis is a source of debate within the physics community. Physicists disagree about whether the multiverse exists, and whether the multiverse is a proper subject of scientific inquiry. Critics such as Jim Baggott, David Gross, Paul Steinhardt, George Ellis and Paul Davies have argued that the multiverse question is philosophical rather than scientific, that the multiverse cannot be a scientific question because it lacks falsifiability, or even that the multiverse hypothesis is harmful or pseudoscientific.” (Wikipedia)

Not only does the multiverse hypothesis lack the characteristics of a scientific theory (which is that it is testable and falsifiable). But it is also in violation with Occam’s razor, the principle of parsimony. “{Occam’s razor (also written as Ockham’s razor and in Latin lex parsimoniae, which means ‘law of parsimony’) is a problem-solving principle devised by William of Ockham (c. 1287–1347), who was an English Franciscan friar and scholastic philosopher and theologian. The principle states that among competing hypotheses that predict equally well, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected. Other, more complicated solutions may ultimately prove to provide better predictions, but—in the absence of differences in predictive ability—the fewer assumptions that are made, the better.}” (Wikipedia)

Albert Einstein: ”Although it is true that it is the goal of science to discover rules which permit the association and foretelling of facts, this is not its only aim. It also seeks to reduce the connections discovered to the smallest possible number of mutually independent conceptual elements.” (Albert Einstein, 1941.)

Luke A. Barnes a postdoctoral researcher at the Sydney Institute for Astronomy, University of Sydney:
“We conclude that the universe is fine-tuned for the existence of life. Of all the ways that the laws of nature, constants of physics and initial conditions of the universe could have been, only a very small subset permits the existence of intelligent life.
Will future progress in fundamental physics solve the problem of the fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life, without the need for a multiverse? There are a few ways that this could happen. We could discover that the set of life-permitting universes is much larger than previously thought. This is unlikely, since the physics relevant to life is low-energy physics, and thus well-understood. Physics at the Planck scale will not rewrite the standard model of particle physics. It is sometimes objected that we do not have an adequate definition of `an observer’, and we do not know all possible forms of life. This is reason for caution, but not a fatal flaw of fine-tuning. If the strong force were weaker, the periodic table would consist of only hydrogen. We do not need a rigorous definition of life to reasonably conclude that a universe with one chemical reaction (2H?H2) would not be able to create and sustain the complexity necessary for life.
Alternatively, we could discover that the set of possible universes is much smaller than we thought. This scenario is much more interesting. What if, when we really understand the laws of nature, we will realise that they could not have been different? We must be clear about the claim being made. If the claim is that the laws of nature are fixed by logical and mathematical necessity, then this is demonstrably wrong | theoretical physicists find it rather easy to describe alternative universes that are free from logical contradiction (Davies, in Manson, 2003). The category of “physically possible” isn’t much help either, as the laws of nature tell us what is physically possible, but not which laws are possible. It is not true that fine-tuning must eventually yield to the relentless march of science. Fine-tuning is not a typical scientific problem, that is, a phenomenon in our universe that cannot be explained by our current understanding of physical laws. It is not a gap. Rather, we are concerned with the physical laws themselves. In particular, the anthropic coincidences are not like, say, the coincidence between inertial mass and gravitational mass in Newtonian gravity, which is a coincidence between two seemingly independent physical quantities. Anthropic coincidences, on the other hand, involve a happy consonance between a physical quantity and the requirements of complex, embodied intelligent life. The anthropic coincidences are so arresting because we are accustomed to thinking of physical laws and initial conditions as being unconcerned with how things turn out. Physical laws are material and efficient causes, not final causes. There is, then, no reason to think that future progress in physics will render a life-permitting universe inevitable. When physics is finished, when the equation is written on the blackboard and fundamental physics has gone as deep as it can go, fine-tuning may remain, basic and irreducible. Perhaps the most optimistic scenario is that we will eventually discover a simple, beautiful physical principle from which we can derive a unique physical theory, whose unique solution describes the universe as we know it, including the standard model, quantum gravity, and (dare we hope) the initial conditions of cosmology. While this has been the dream of physicists for centuries, there is not the slightest bit of evidence that this idea is true. It is almost certainly not true of our best hope for a theory of quantum gravity, string theory, which has ”anthropic principle written all over it” (Schellekens, 2008). The beauty of its principles has not saved us from the complexity and contingency of the solutions to its equations. Beauty and simplicity are not necessity.
63 Finally, it would be the ultimate anthropic coincidence if beauty and complexity in the mathematical principles of the fundamental theory of physics produced all the necessary low-energy conditions for intelligent life. This point has been made by a number of authors, e.g. Carr & Rees (1979) and Aguirre (2005). Here is Wilczek (2006b):”It is logically possible that parameters determined uniquely by abstract theoretical principles just happen to exhibit all the apparent fine-tunings required to produce, by a lucky coincidence, a universe containing complex structures. But that, I think, really strains credulity.”
The Fine-Tuning of the Universe for Intelligent Life Luke A. Barnes
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1112.4647v2.pdf

Oxford physicist Roger Penrose says that the multiverse is “worse than useless” as explanation of the finely-tuned initial conditions because the multiverse predicts hyper-exponentially more tiny universes than large ones like ours.
The concept of a multiverse is the greatest violation of Occam’s razor in existence.
The key issue though is that for the multiverse to be an adequate explanation for the fine-tuning it requires the conjunction of several hypotheses for which we lack any empirical evidence.
Oxford physicist Roger Penrose was interviewed for the BBC, where he exclaims that “it’s not even a theory … it’s a collection of hopes”.

The complexity of DNA
“…The capacity of DNA to store information vastly exceeds that of any other known system: it is so efficient that all the information needed to specify an organism as complex as man weighs less than a few thousand millionths of a gram. The information necessary to specify the design of all the species of organisms which have ever existed on the planet…could be held in a teaspoon and there would still be room left for all the information in every book ever written…” – Dr. Michael Denton (Australian microbiologist).

“There are good reasons to believe in God, including the existence of mathematical principles and order in creation. They are positive reasons, based on knowledge, rather than default assumptions based on a temporary lack of knowledge.”
–Geneticist Francis Collins, the leader of the Human Genome Project and currently the director of the National Institutes of Health in the United States.

…..By Dr. Francis Collins
Special to CNN Editor’s note: Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D., is the director of the Human Genome Project. His most recent book is “The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.”
ROCKVILLE, Maryland (CNN) – “I am a scientist and a believer, and I find no conflict between those world views”….“As the director of the Human Genome Project, I have led a consortium of scientists to read out the 3.1 billion letters of the human genome, our own DNA instruction book. As a believer, I see DNA, the information molecule of all living things, as God’s language, and the elegance and complexity of our own bodies and the rest of nature as a reflection of God’s plan”.

Harold Clayton Urey (April 29, 1893 – January 5, 1981) was an American physical chemist whose pioneering work on isotopes earned him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1934 for the discovery of deuterium.
Urey a founder of origin-of-life research, describes evolution as a faith which seems to defy logic: “All of us who study the origin of life find that the more we look into it, the more we feel that it is too complex to have evolved anywhere. We believe as an article of faith that life evolved from dead matter on this planet. It is just that its complexity is so great, it is hard for us to imagine that it did.” Christian Science Monitor (Jan. 4, 1962), 4.

Chris Williams, Ph.D., Biochemistry Ohio State University:
“As a biochemist and software developer who works in genetic and metabolic screening, I am continually amazed by the incredible complexity of life. For example, each of us has a vast ‘computer program’ of six billion DNA bases in every cell that guided our development from a fertilized egg, specifies how to make more than 200 tissue types, and ties all this together in numerous highly functional organ systems. Few people outside of genetics or biochemistry realize that evolutionists still can provide no substantive details at all about the origin of life, and particularly the origin of genetic information in the first self-replicating organism. What genes did it require — or did it even have genes? How much DNA and RNA did it have — or did it even have nucleic acids? How did huge information-rich molecules arise before natural selection? Exactly how did the genetic code linking nucleic acids to amino acid sequence originate? Clearly the origin of life — the foundation of evolution – is still virtually all speculation, and little if no fact.”

{Abiogenesis: “The supposed development of living organisms from non-living matter. Also called autogenesis, spontaneous generation.}”

James Tour: The Origin of Life Has Not Been Explained
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4sP1E1Jd_Y

James M. Tour is an American synthetic organic chemist, specializing in nanotechnology. Tour is the T. T. and W. F. Chao Professor of Chemistry, Professor of Materials Science and Nano Engineering, and Professor of Computer Science at Rice University in Houston, Texas, United States.

Origin-of-life researcher Leslie Orgel points out:
“The self-organization of the reductive citric acid cycle without the help of ‘informational’ catalysts would be a near miracle…It is hard to see how any..[of the potentially self-replicating] polymers that have been described up to now…could have accumulated on the early earth…[It is] to appeal to magic.”
“Life is composed of many more-complex molecules than cytochrome c. Murray Eden of Massachusetts Institute of Technology calculated a probability of ~10-313 to spontaneously bring polypeptide sequences together into functional proteins. Simple self-sustaining life requires ~1,500-2,000 gene products, and Hoyle estimated a probability of ~10-40,000 to obtain 2,000 enzymes in a random trial. Physicist Harold Morowitz has calculated that if a large batch of bacteria in a sealed container is heated so every chemical bond is broken, then cooled slowly to allow the atoms to form new bonds and come to equilibrium, there is a probability of ~10-100,000,000,000 that a living bacterium will be present at the end”.
“How low a probability do mathematicians believe makes an event essentially impossible? Émile Borel has estimated 10-50; and William Dembski has calculated a lower limit of 10-150, based on the number of elementary particles in the universe and the age of the universe. Yet the probability of abiogenesis is far, far less than either figure”.

Could the genetic code have been spontaneously generated? Biologists J. T. Trevors and D. L. Abel conclude:
“The argument has been repeatedly made that given sufficient time, a genetic instruction set and language system could have arisen. But extended time does not provide an explanatory mechanism for spontaneously generated genetic instruction. No amount of time proposed thus far, can explain this type of conceptual communication system. It is not just complex. It is conceptually complex.”

These probability arguments are irrefutable.

Even in defending abiogenesis, biologist Francis Crick acknowledged in 1981:
“An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to be satisfied to get it going.”

David Berlinski an American philosopher:
“THE DISCOVERY of DNA by James D. Watson and Francis Crick in 1952 revealed that a living creature is an organization of matter orchestrated by a genetic text. Within the bacterial cell, for example, the book of life is written in a distinctive language. The book is read aloud, its message specifying the construction of the cell’s constituents, and then the book is copied, passed faithfully into the future.

We do not understand, we cannot re-create, a system of this sort. However it may operate in life, randomness in language is the enemy of order, a way of annihilating meaning And not only in language, but in any language-like system –computer programs, for example.
The alien influence of randomness in such systems was first noted by the distinguished French mathematician M.P. Schutzenberger, who also marked the significance of this circumstance for evolutionary theory. “If we try to simulate such a situation,” he wrote, “by making changes randomly . . . on computer programs, we find that we have no chance . . . even to see what the modified program would compute; it just jams.(3)
[(3) Schutzenberger’s comments were made at a symposium held in 1966. The proceedings were edited by Paul S. Moorhead and Martin Kaplan and published as Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution(Wistar Institute Press,1967). Schutzenberger’s remarks, together with those of the physicist Murray Eden at the same symposium, constituted the first significant criticism of evolutionary doctrine in recent decades.]

Like the nucleic acids, proteins are alphabetic objects, composed of discrete constituents.
On average, proteins are roughly 250 amino acid residues in length, so a given protein may be imagined as a long biochemical word, one of many.
The aspects of an analogy are now in place. What is needed is a relevant contrast, something comparable to sentences and sequences in language. Of course nothing completely comparable is at hand: there are nosentences in molecular biology.
Nonetheless, there is this fact, helpfully recounted by Richard Dawkins: “The actual animals that have ever lived on earth are a tiny subset of the theoretical animals that could exist.” It follows that over the course of four billion years, life has expressed itself by means of a particular stock of proteins, a certain set of life-like words.

A COMBINATORIAL COUNT is now possible. The MIT physicist Murray Eden, to whom I owe this argument, estimates the number of the viable proteins at 10 to the 50th power. Within this set is the raw material of everything that has ever lived: the flowering plants and the alien insects and the seagoing turtles and the sad shambling dinosaurs, the great evolutionary successes and the great evolutionary failures as well. These creatures are, quite literally, composed of the proteins that over the course of time have performed some useful function, with “usefulness” now standing for the sense of sentencehood in linguistics.

As in the case of language, what has once lived occupies some corner in the space of a larger array of possibilities, the actual residing in the shadow of the possible. The space of all possible proteins of a fixed length (250 residues, recall) is computed by multiplying 20 by itself 250 times (20 to the 250th power). It is idle to carry out the calculation. The numbers larger by far than seconds in the history of the world since the Big Bang or grains of sand on the shores of every sounding sea. Another planet now looms in the night sky, Pluto-sized or bigger, a conceptual companion to the planet containing every sequence composed by endlessly arranging the 26 English letters into sequences 100 letters in length. This planetary doppelganger is the planet of all possible proteins of fixed length, the planet, in a certain sense, of every conceivable form of carbon-based life.

It would seem that evolution, Murray Eden writes in artfully ambiguous language, “was directed toward the incredibly small proportion of useful protein forms. . . ,” the word “directed” conveying, at least to me, the sobering image of a stage-managed search, with evolution bypassing the awful immensity of all that frozen space because in some sense evolution knew where it was going.

And yet, from the perspective of Darwinian theory, it is chance that plays the crucial –that plays the only role in generating the proteins. Wandering the surface of a planet, evolution wanders blindly, having forgotten where it has been, unsure of where it is going.” David Berlinski
{Murray Eden, “Inadequacies of Neo-Darwinian Evolution as a Scientific Theory,” in Mathematical Challenge to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution, ed. Paul S. Moorhead and Martin M. Kaplan (Philadelphia: Wistar Institute Press, 1967), 111}.

See further:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aA-FcnLsF1g

The complexity of the cell
When Darwin developed his theory of natural selection, the cell was seen as a very simple structure.
T.H.Huxley in 1869:”The cell is a homogenous globule of undifferentiated plasm.”
However the modern view of the cell is totally different:
“In the biological world of living things lie the most complex concepts of engineering known to mankind.” The Encyclopedia Britannica concedes, “A living cell is a marvel of detailed and complex architecture. . . . The information content of a simple cell has been estimated as around 1012 bits, comparable to about one hundred million pages of Encyclopedia Britannica.” The human body comprises a conglomeration of some 100,000,000,000,000 (10 to the 14th power) cells which work together in perfect harmony to maintain human life.”

“A living cell is a marvel of detailed and complex architecture. Seen through a microscope there is an appearance of almost frantic activity. On a deeper level it is known that molecules are being synthesized at an enormous rate. Almost any enzyme catalyses the synthesis of more than 100 other molecules per second. In ten minutes, a sizeable fraction of total mass of a metabolizing bacterial cell has been synthesized. The information content of a simple cell had been estimated as around 1012 bits, comparable to about a hundred million pages of the Encyclopedia Britannica.”—*Carl Sagan, “Life” in Encyclopedia Britannica: Macropaedia (1974 ed.), pp. 893-894.
See further  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aA-FcnLsF1g

Paul Davies, a theoretical physicist, “The origin of life. II: How did it begin?”
Science Progress (2001), 17: “Life is more than just complex chemical reactions.
The cell is also an information storing, processing and replicating system. We need to explain the origin of this information, and the way in which the information processing machinery came to exist.”

Richard Strohman, microbiologist, in David Suzuki and Holly Dressel, rev. ed.,
From ‘Naked Ape to Superspecies’ (Vancouver: Greystone Books, 2004), 172:
“Molecular biologists and cell biologists are revealing to us a complexity of life that we never dreamt was there. We’re seeing connections and interconnections and complexity that is mind-boggling. It’s stupendous. It’s transcalculational. It means that the whole science is going to have to change.”

Robert M. Hazen, geophysicist, Genesis: The Scientific Quest for Life’s Origin (Washington, DC: Joseph Henry Press, 2007), 9: “We [know] that the simplest living cell is intricate beyond imagining, because every cell relies on the interplay of millions of molecules engaged in hundreds of interdependent chemical reactions. Human brains seem ill suited to grasp such multidimensional complexity.”

Alonso Ricardo, biochemist, and Jack W. Szostak, geneticist, “The Origin of Life on Earth,” Scientific American (August 19, 2009), 54:
“Every living cell, even the simplest bacterium, teems with molecular contraptions that would be the envy of any nanotechnologist. As they incessantly shake or spin or crawl around the cell, these machines cut, paste and copy genetic molecules, shuttle nutrients around or turn them into energy, build and repair cellular membranes, relay mechanical,
chemical or electrical messages—the list goes on and on, and new discoveries add to it all the time.”

Gerald Kerkut, biochemist, Implications of Evolution
(New York: Pergamon Press, 1960), 152:
“The first assumption was that non-living things gave rise to living material.
This is still just an assumption. . . . There is, however, little information in favour of abiogenesis and as yet we have no indication that it can be performed.”

David E. Green and Robert F. Goldberger, biochemists, Molecular Insights into the Living Process (New York: Academic Press,1967), 407:
“The macromolecule-to-cell transition is a jump of fantastic dimensions, which lies beyond the range of testable hypothesis. In this area all is conjecture. The available facts do not provide a basis for postulation that cells arose on this planet.”

William Thorpe, zoologist, “Reductionism in Biology,” in Francisco Ayala and Theodosius Dobzhansky, eds.,
Studies in the Philosophy of Biology: Reduction and Related Problems
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1974), 116:
“I think it is fair to say that all the facile speculations and discussions published during the last 10-15 years explaining the mode of origin of life have been shown to be far too simple-minded and to bear very little weight. The problem in fact seems as far from solution as it ever was.”

Hubert P. Yockey, physicist and information theorist, “A Calculation of the Probability of Spontaneous Biogenesis by Information Theory,”
Journal of Theoretical Biology(Vol. 67, 1977), 396:
“The ‘warm little pond’ scenario was invented ad hoc to serve as a materialistic reductionist explanation of the origin of life. It is unsupported by any other evidence and it will remain ad hoc until such evidence is found. . . . One must conclude that, contrary to the established and current wisdom a scenario describing the genesis of life on earth by chance and natural causes which can be accepted on the basis of fact and not faith has not yet been written.”

Francis Crick, Nobel Prize-winning biochemist, “Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature.”(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981), 88:
“An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.”

Werner Arber, Nobel Prize-winning microbiologist, in Henry Margenau and Roy Abraham Varghese, eds., Cosmos, Bios, Theos (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1992), 142:
“Although a biologist, I must confess that I do not understand how life came about. . . . I consider that life only starts at the level of a functional cell. The most primitive cell may require at least several hundred different specific biological macro-molecules. How such already quite complex structures may have come together, remains a mystery to me.”

Laura F. Landweber and Laura A. Katz, “Evolution: Lost Worlds,”
Trends in Ecology and Evolution(Vol. 13, March 1998), 93-94:
“NASA’s recent announcement of the formation of an Astrobiology Institute to study life’s origins prompted Lenny Dawidowicz and Mitchell Sogin of the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, Massachusetts), to organize a NASA-sponsored workshop in October on “Evolution: A Molecular Point of View.” The meeting brought together researchers from diverse fields including geochemistry, palaeontology, molecular biology, developmental biology, and polymer chemistry to discuss the origin and diversification of life. . . .. . . Sherwood Chang (NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California) opened the program with the cautious reminder that any canonical scenario for the stepwise progression toward the origin of life is still just a “convenient fiction.” That is, we have almost no data to support the historical transitions from chemical evolution to prebiotic monomers, polymers, replicating enzymes, and finally cells.”

“If you equate the probability of the birth of a bacteria cell to chance assembly of its atoms, eternity will not suffice to produce one… Faced with the enormous sum of lucky draws behind the success of the evolutionary game, one may legitimately wonder to what extent this success is actually written into the fabric of the universe.” Christian de Duve.
“A Guided Tour of the Living Cell” (Nobel laureate and organic chemist)

It has been proposed that this points to a transcendent creative force; God who would be actively intervene in this biological process.

However the first order question is whether or not random mutation and natural selection can explain the origin of life and the complexity of the cell.

The second order question is when this is not the case, whether or not this process involves some as yet unknown self-organising properties of matter.

The third order question is when this is not the case, whether or not this process involves some transcendental force.

The fourth order question is if that is the case, what is the nature of this force, and if so how and when does it interfere, and with what aim.

Irreducible specified complexity in biological systems

“The most direct evidence that evolutionary theory is falsifiable may be the original words of Charles Darwin who, in chapter 6 of On the Origin of Species wrote: “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.” If empirical evidence supported this instance, it would be affirmation of the creationist argument in favour of irreducible complexity.” (Wikipedia – Objections to evolution)

“With this statement, Charles Darwin provided a criterion by which his theory of evolution could be falsified. The logic was simple: since evolution is a gradual process in which slight modifications produce advantages for survival, it cannot produce complex structures in a short amount of time. It’s a step-by-step process which may gradually build up and modify complex structures, but it cannot produce them suddenly.” (Wikipedia)

“William A. Dembski gives this definition: A system performing a given basic function is irreducibly complex if it includes a set of well-matched, mutually interacting, nonarbitrarily individuated parts such that each part in the set is indispensable to maintaining the system’s basic, and therefore original, function. The set of these indispensable parts is known as the irreducible core of the system.” (Wikipedia)

While the question of Darwinism can explain the complexity of biological systems is legitimate, after all it was Darwin’s own question it is difficult to substantiate this with evidence, because one has to prove a negative.

The biology of the gaps
“The “God of the gaps” is a theological perspective in which gaps in scientific knowledge are taken to be evidence or proof of God’s existence. The term was invented by Christian theologians not to discredit theism but rather to point out the fallacy of relying on teleological arguments for God’s existence. Some use the phrase to refer to a form of the argument from ignorance fallacy.” (Wikipedia)

In the nineteenth century mechanistic materialistic thinking became the dominant worldview, especially within biology with Darwinism. Darwinism proposed what one could call a mechanism and with it a way to understand a complex biological process. The combined effort of palaeontologists, geneticists and biologists forms a field that stretches out with many branches and sub-disciplines. After one and a half century of this endeavour some major problems are now visible:
– The origin of life.
– The complexity of the cell with its intracellular molecular nanotechnology.
– The extraordinary complexity of the DNA.
– How the brain and subjective experience are related.

Materialist’s attempts to close these explanatory gaps are arguably inadequate.

Franklin M. Harold, biochemist, The Way of the Cell: Molecules, Organisms and the Order of Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 251: “It would be agreeable to conclude this book with a cheery fanfare about science closing in, slowly but surely, on the ultimate mystery; but the time for rosy rhetoric is not yet at hand. The origin of life appears to me as incomprehensible as ever, a matter for wonder but not for explication.”

Freeman J. Dyson, physicist and mathematician, A Many-Colored Glass: Reflections on the Place of Life in the Universe (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2010), 104:
“The origin of life is the deepest mystery in the whole of science. Many books and learned papers have been written about it, but it remains a mystery. There is an enormous gap between the simplest living cell and the most complicated naturally occurring mixture of non-living chemicals. We have no idea when and how and where this gap was crossed.”

“As MIT linguist Noam Chomsky observes: Human language appears to be a unique phenomenon, without significant analogue in the animal world. If this is so, it is quite senseless to raise the problem of explaining the evolution of human language from more primitive systems of communication that appear at lower levels of intellectual capacity. … There is no reason to suppose that the “gaps” are bridgeable.“ Noam Chomsky, Language and Mind, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 59.

Evolution, Darwinism and Neo-Darwinism
Evolution is defined as the gradual development of something in time. Biological evolution is the process by which different kinds of living organism are believed to have developed from earlier forms during the history of the earth.

Darwin’s theory of gradual evolution over a long period by natural selection. This by those varieties of an organism which are slightly better adapted to the environment and hence more likely to produce descendants. Combined with the later discoveries of the cellular and molecular basis of genetics, Darwin’s theory of evolution has, with some modification, become the dominant unifying concept of modern biology.

Scientists are not disputing whether evolution occurred, but how evolution occurred. That evolution did occur is an established fact.

The question is nevertheless can random mutations and natural selection together explain the biological complexity? It is remarkable that the co-discoverer of evolution by natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace thought that additional factors were needed.
Nobel Prize-Winning Physicist Wolfgang Pauli on the Empirical Problems with Neo-Darwinism:
“Physicist Wolfgang Pauli, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1945, was a staunch critic of Neo-Darwinism. Here’s an article of an interest, “Pauli’s ideas on mind and matter in the context of contemporary science,” that documents his prescient criticisms. For example:
“As a physicist, I should like to critically object that this model has not been supported by an affirmative estimate of probabilities so far. Such an estimate of the theoretical time scale of evolution as implied by the model should be compared with the empirical time scale. One would need to show that, according to the assumed model, the probability of de facto existing purposeful features to evolve was sufficiently high on the empirically known time scale. Such an estimate has nowhere been attempted though.”

“In discussions with biologists I met large difficulties when they apply the concept of ‘natural selection’ in a rather wide field, without being able to estimate the probability of the occurrence in a empirically given time of just those events, which have been important for the biological evolution. Treating the empirical time scale of the evolution theoretically as infinity they have then an easy game, apparently to avoid the concept of purposiveness. While they pretend to stay in this way completely ‘scientific’ and ‘rational,’ they become actually very irrational, particularly because they use the word ‘chance’, not any longer combined with estimations of a mathematically defined probability, in its application to very rare single events more or less synonymous with the old word ‘miracle.”
Wolfgang Pauli. Wissenschaftlicher Briefwechsel, Band IV,Teil III: 1955–1956. Berlin, Springer.
Letter by Pauli to Bohr of February 15, 1955, letter 2015 in von Meyenn (2001), p. 105.

In order to achieve plausible evidence in favour of the Darwinian model, Pauli insisted that the probabilities for large-scale evolution need to be calculated realistically and consistent with mathematical probability theory. Pauli, W. (1954b): Naturwissenschaftliche und erkenntnistheoretische Aspekte der Ideen vom Unbewussten. Dialectica8, 283–301), p. 298.

‘Mathematicians and Evolution’; “The statistical probability that organic structures and the most precisely harmonized reactions that typify living organisms would be generated by accident, is zero.”– Ilya Prigogine (Chemist-Physicist) Recipient of two Nobel Prizes in chemistry I. Prigogine, N. Gregair, A. Babbyabtz, Physics Today 25, pp. 23-28.

“God is a mathematician of a very high order and He used advanced mathematics in constructing the universe.”
–Nobel Prize winning physicist Paul A. M. Dirac, who made crucial early contributions to both quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics.

Casey Luskin in ‘Mathematicians and Evolution’: “The truth is that mathematics has a strong tradition of giving cogent critique of evolutionary biology. After all, Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection is fundamentally based upon an algorithm which uses a mathematically describable trial and error process to attempt to produce complexity. Population genetics is rife with mathematics. In fact, one criticism of the alleged transitional fossil sequences for whales is that they represent evolutionary change on too rapid a timescale to be mathematically feasible. It seems that there is no good reason why those trained in mathematics cannot comment on the ability of the Neo-Darwinian mutation-selection process to generate the complexity of life.

One of the best known mathematical forays into evolution was the 1966 Wistar Symposium, held in Philadelphia, where mathematicians and other scientists from related fields congregated to assess whether Neo-Darwinism is mathematically feasible. The conference was chaired by Nobel Laureate Sir Peter Medawar. The general consensus of many meeting participants was that Neo-Darwinism was simply not mathematically tenable.”
The proceedings of that conference, Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution (Wistar Institute Press, 1966, No. 5), reports various challenges to evolution presented by respected mathematicians and similar scholars at the conference. For example, the conference chair Sir Peter Medawar stated at the outset:
“The immediate cause of this conference is a pretty widespread sense of dissatisfaction about what has come to be thought as the accepted evolutionary theory in the English-speaking world, the so-called neo-Darwinian Theory. … There are objections made by fellow scientists who feel that, in the current theory, something is missing … These objections to current neo-Darwinian theory are very widely held among biologists generally; and we must on no account, I think, make light of them. The very fact that we are having this conference is evidence that we are not making light of them.”
(Sir Peter Medawar, “Remarks by the Chairman,” in Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution (Wistar Institute Press, 1966, No. 5), pg. xi, emphasis in original).

Various scientists, including some mathematicians, proceeded to comment about problems with Neo-Darwinism:
“An opposite way to look at the genotype is as a generative algorithm and not as a blue-print; a sort of carefully spelled out and fool proof recipe for producing a living organism of the right kind if the environment in which it develops is a proper one. Assuming this to be so, the algorithm must be written in some abstract language. Molecular biology may well have provided us with the alphabet of this language, but it is a long step from the alphabet to understanding a language. Nevertheless a language has to have rules, and these are the strongest constraints on the set of possible messages. No currently existing formal language can tolerate random changes in the symbol sequences which express its sentences. Meaning is almost invariably destroyed. Any changes must be syntactically lawful ones. I would conjecture that what one might call “genetic grammaticality” has a deterministic explanation and does not owe its stability to selection pressure acting on random variation.” (Murray Eden, “Inadequacies as a Scientific Theory,” in Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution (Wistar Institute Press, 1966, No. 5), pg. 11).

“It seems to require many thousands, perhaps millions, of successive mutations to produce even the easiest complexity we see in life now. It appears, naively at least, that no matter how large the probability of a single mutation is, should it be even as great as one-half, you would get this probability raised to a millionth power, which is so very close to zero that the chances of such a chain seem to be practically non-existent.” (Stanislaw M. Ulam, “How to Formulate Mathematically Problems of Rate of Evolution,” in Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution (Wistar Institute Press, 1966, No. 5), pg. 21).

“We do not know any general principle which would explain how to match blueprints viewed as typographic objects and the things they are supposed to control. The only example we have of such a situation (apart from the evolution of life itself) is the attempt to build self-adapting programs by workers in the field of artificial intelligence. Their experience is quite conclusive to most of the observers: without some built-in matching, nothing interesting can occur. Thus, to conclude, we believe that there is a considerable gap in the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution, and we believe this gap to be of such a nature that it cannot be bridged within the current conception of biology.” (Marcel Schutzenberger, “Algorithms and Neo-Darwinian Theory,” in Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution (Wistar Institute Press, 1966, No. 5), pg. 75).

Casey Luskin in ‘Mathematicians and Evolution’: “These are potent arguments from academics qualified to assess the mathematical ability of a random / selective process to produce complexity. While evolutionary biologists and other types of biologists can yield many insights into evolutionary biology, scientists other than biologists, such as mathematicians, are most certainly qualified to comment on the feasibility of Neo-Darwinian evolution.”

See further: Unanswered Mathematical and Computational Challenges
facing Neo-Darwinism as a Theory of Origins: http://www.darwinsmaths.com/

There are a dozen different ways to view evolution. See Carter Phipps’ essay “The Real Evolution Debate”;
http://www.mcs-international.org/downloads/102_the_real_evolution_debate.pdf
The Neo-Darwinists (Dawkins, Gould, Dennett, E.O. Wilson)
The Progressive Darwinists (Carroll, Jablonka, Lamb)
The Collectivists (Bloom, Lynn Margulis, David Sloan Wilson)
The Complexity Theorists (Goodwin, Kauffman, Laszlo)
The Directionalists (Conway Morris, Gardner, Wright)
The Transhumanists (Ettinger, Gibson, Kurzweil)
The Intelligent Designers (Behe, Dembski, Johnson)
The Theistic Evolutionists (Miller, Peacocke, Polkinghorne)
The Esoteric Evolutionists (Blavatsky, Steiner, C. Wilson, Tarnas)
The Process Philosophers (Whitehead, Hartshorne, Griffin)
The Conscious Evolutionists (Teilhard de Chardin, Dowd, Marx Hubbard)
The Integralists (Aurobindo, Gebser, Wilber, Combs)

Anthropocentric world view
The theodicy is mostly asked in relation to human welfare and is anthropocentric in nature. However the aim of the underlying teleological process is directed to the development of higher ontological energies. This supersedes anthropocentrism and is Kosmocentric by nature, a process in which humans take part. These processes and the role of the physical world in them are reflected in extreme fine-tuning of the biological, physical side of humans giving rise to a anthropocentric world view, are in fact fundamentally focused on their spiritual nature.

Why not the creation of a perfect world?
The question has been asked if God created the world, than why didn’t he create a perfect world?
The answer might be that God did that, by creating the higher ontological worlds (traditionally called the heavens) who are not only described in religious writings, but can also been visited, perceived in an out of the body experience.
Polls that have been conducted show that about 5 to10 % of the population has had one or more out of the body experiences in their life.
In the higher ontological worlds there is no evil and no suffering.
According to many spiritual traditions these worlds were laid down top to bottom.
That means that these higher worlds did exist before the physical world was created.
Within theoretical physics David Bohm’s ontological interpretation of Quantum Theory, the physical world is called the explicit order, and the higher worlds are called the implicit orders. (The Undivided Universe: An Ontological Interpretation of Quantum Theory: David Bohm, Basil J. Hiley: Books.) The question could be then why is the physical world created with all its conflicts?
Several mystics, such as Plotinus, cabalist Luria, Sri Aurobindo and Teilhard de Chardin have put forward the idea that the Absolute, which transcends space and time, created relative reality by laying down inactivated ontological levels of existence (consisting of inactivated subtle particles) from the high causal level down, at which point the activation of the subtle energies on all levels starts from the lowest levels upwards until it fully activates the high causal level.
If the goal of this involutionary and evolutionary process is to develop subtle energies at the divine level (high-causal), then why is the physical world necessary?
What would have happened, if the involutionary force had created a whole stratification of levels of existence without the physical world?
The proposition is that the physical world was necessary to compactify the subtle energies to such an extent, that enough momentum was generated for this process to actually reach the highest level.

Involution and evolution
Basic foundation: Involution and evolution.

General description involution
Involution is a process by which the emanating force or potential gradually descends from the Spirit into different dimensions of reality, with the physical dimension being the last in the sequence.

Involution, or emanation, is central to the neo-platonic philosophy and can also be found in Platonism, Gnosticism, Manichaeism, the Kabbalah, Catharism, esoteric Christianity, Pythagoreanism, and some forms of Hinduism and Buddhism.
These different dimensions laid down after involution are undeveloped and not activated. The process of involution is followed by the process of evolution, which proceeds through successive stages.

Detailed description of the involutionary sequence
The teachings of Lurianic Kabbalah describe a cosmology of successive Worlds. The first world that emanated and thus had manifest existence was called ‘Olam ha-Tohu’ or ‘World of points’. This was a state which existed as unformed and unordered points. It was called the ‘World of points’ because at this time they were not related to each other but were in the state of unorganized (chaotic) atomic separateness.

A similar idea is the concept of karma within Jain philosophy which is described as follows: “Karmas are constituted of infinitely small ‘Karma particles’. These particles are made up of non-living particles (pudgals) and are scattered and free floating across the universe. When the soul acts with a passion such as attachment, anger, deceit, greed, etc. it attracts these. These particles on the soul are karma (karmas that do not obscure the true knowledge of the soul are known as Aghati karmas)”. (Wikipedia)

This puts the concept of karma clearly in the realm of subtle energies. This makes it possible to replace speculative metaphysics with (visually) observable data. What is called karma is formed by the clusters of subtle energies in the human aura. They can be observed visually as different groups of different colors. One can also observe their location in the total field, movement patterns and so on.

Evolution
The different dimensions that after involution exist are undeveloped and not activated.
The process of involution is followed by the process of evolution, which proceeds through successive stages.

On the physical level, we see an ever-increasing complexity of structures.

In terms of the subtle energies, we see the generation and activation of a series of levels of subtle energies, going from the physical world up to the high-causal level, the divine.
Although this emergence of the subtle energies starts at the lower levels, these energies cannot be reduced to the physical world. These subtle energies are capable of existing independently from the physical realm.

These different kinds of subtle energies exist not only in the world around us, but also within the human body, where they are much more concentrated and activated.

The activation of these subtle energies unfolds slowly, sequentially, one level after another, gradually obtaining consciousness at these levels. This activation and development of the subtle energies can only start at the lowest level, the emotional level.
This is clear not only from visually observing these subtle energies at different levels, but also from the sequence in which the different stages develop according to developmental psychology. The higher-level subtle energies cannot develop unless there is first adequate development at a lower level. However, permanently activated subtle energies representing a certain group within the totality of developmental lines (visible in the aura as a certain color) will lead to the gradual development of subtle energies of that particular color, and thereby of that group of related developmental lines at a higher level.

The ultimate meaning of life is to transform the involutionary power into an unfolding evolutionary upward process by which increasingly higher/deeper levels of subtle energies are activated.
Finally, the subtle energies on the highest level are activated and high-causal bhava samadhi on a collective level is permanently realized.

General description evolution in terms of ontological levels and subtle energies:
The Kosmic process of evolution starts after the emanation process. This means that the non-activated dimensions of Reality (‘ontological levels’) created in the involution, are now activated in reversed sequence. Because living beings need subtle energies to obtain consciousness, this is the beginning of Life. The end goal of this process is to fully activate all dimensions of Reality. To activate an entire ontological level collectively at once, apparently takes too much energy to succeed. Therefore individual development is necessary to gradually activate an entire ontological level before the next ontological level can be activated.

Ontological levels of existence
Levels of existence (phenomenology)
There is a description of A.P. Shepherd relating to the different levels of existence: “These worlds are dimensional levels and are not separate regions, specially divided from one other, so that it would be necessary to move in space in order to pass from one to another.
The highest worlds completely interpenetrate the lower worlds, which are fashioned and sustained by their activities.
What divides them is that each world has a more limited and controlled level of consciousness than the world above it.
The lower consciousness is unable to experience the life of the higher worlds and is even unaware of their existence, although it is penetrated by them. But if the beings of a lower world can raise their consciousness to a higher level, then that higher world becomes manifest to them, and they can be said to have passed to a higher world, although they have not moved in space ”.
A.P. Shepherd: “A Scientist of the invisible” 1954.

As to the number of levels of existence, if one takes into consideration that there are different levels, then the question could be how many different levels are there? It has been postulated that these different levels deal with increasing complexity, in which case the number of levels would be unlimited (if there is no highest number, there would always be a highest number plus one). But if different levels deal with increasing unity, the number of levels would be limited or even exactly fixed so to speak. If the different levels of existence were laid down by an involutionary process, than is the number of levels pre-given, determined.

Arguments for the existence of Ontological levels
Different levels of existence can be experienced psychologically as different levels of functioning and during Out of the body experiences as higher ontological worlds. The different developmental sequences represent the aspects of the lower and higher ontological worlds or in the case of developments within the physical world are made possible by the higher ontological worlds.

Subtle energies
The concept of non-physical subtle energies is relevant for different areas of research:
– Out of the body experiences/near death experiences;
– A comprehensive conceptual framework of parapsychology;
– The mind-body problem;
– The concept of higher, non-physical worlds;
– Mystical development;
– Transformations between developmental levels;
– Research relating to consciousness;
– The visual perception of a non-physical light during mystical experiences;
– Teleological forces;
– Research to the existence of (a) non-physical memory;
– A layered hierarchical structure of reality (ontological levels);
– Philosophical arguments/views related to dualism.
Click here for more details

The development of Subtle energies
Within the academic world there is a general agreement that in human development several different developmental lines can be distinguished. These can be divided in two broad categories, namely developmental lines at the individual level and at the collective level. Examples of the first category have been represented here These include aesthetic-, cognitive-, interpersonal-, moral-, and spiritual developmental lines. Examples of the second category have been represented here .These include worldviews and social systems.

Within human development, individual as well as in historical development, certain steps, stages and transitions can be observed. These processes of growth take place in a developmental sequence by which stratified levels within hierarchical systems are activated, one after (and above) another.

Looking at the individual developmental lines, developmental psychology shows that these different lines have a developmental sequence. During maturation higher developmental sequence are reached, step by step, towards higher waves of inclusion and transcendence to new possibilities, new capacities and the emergence of higher potentials.

It is clear that these lines with their developmental stages exists for they are academically demonstrated. However it seems to be a total mystery why these levels do appear and why these transitions or transformations from level to level do occur.

The solution presented here concerns the existence of a stratification of ontologically levels, each with a different kind of non-physical subtle energies.

In concordance with the (hierarchical) psychological development of a human being, the activation of the levels of subtle energies follows a (hierarchical) developmental sequence as well. The subtle energies levels develop from the lowest level of low astral energies, to the next level of high astral energies all the way up to the highest level of high causal energies. With every level the energy-potentiality of the subtle energies presented at that level increases a manifold, because they are active on distinctly different and higher ontological levels. To be able to activate a higher subtle energy level, the energy of a lower level has to build up in activity and intensity (lateral/horizontal growth) up to a certain threshold-point, after which the energy of the next higher level can be activated. This process repeats itself and moves up the gravitational center of a person.

This leads to the conclusion that the vertical activation of subtle energies is related to the term ‘transformation’, whereas the horizontal/lateral growth of subtle energies is related to the term ‘translation’.

Before giving a concrete example, the relation between developmental lines and different subtle energy groups has to be presented. When one observes subtle energies, it is clearly visible that only five distinct groups of subtle energies are available at the five mystical levels. Note that, these five distinct groups are also present at the lower levels of human development. The development of the five subtle energy groups starts on the second level (‘emotional level’), also called the astral level, and proceeds level by level up to the high-causal level. Each of the five main groups stands on its own and is not reducible to another of the five groups.
These five subtle energy groups form the basic subtle energy ‘streams’ through which subtle energies can grow along the developmental lines to high causal level. The different individual developmental lines can be grouped according to these five major subtle energy groups:

Red = affective development;
Yellow = cognitive development;
Green = interpersonal development;
Blue = moral development;
Violet = spiritual development.

The speed of development of subtle energies from level to level can vary in each of the five subtle energy groups. They form relatively independent groups, which corresponds with the well-known fact within developmental psychology concerning the relatively independent growth of different individual development lines (for example cognitive development is necessary but not sufficient for interpersonal development, which is necessary but not sufficient for moral development etc).

In summary, during development subtle energies are activated on a certain level. After a period of time, during the lateral / horizontal development, these subtle energies reach a critical point (a certain energy intensity), after which they activate subtle energy of the same kind (same color) on the next, higher level. When this happens, a transformation from one stage to another stage within a particular developmental sequence takes place.

So it is this activation and transformation of these subtle energies which drives this system towards ever higher waves of inclusion and transcendence, moving up from level to level.
This is the working principle, the force behind the development from stage to stage.
The following schema gives an impression of the stratification of ontological levels above each other and from left to right the growing complexity (the translation):

The essential role of the physical world
If the goal of this involutionary and evolutionary processes is to develop subtle energies at the divine level (high-causal), then why is the physical world necessary? What would have happened, if the involutionary force had created a whole stratification of levels of existence without the physical world?

A parallel evolution
The answer is to be found in a parallel evolution. An evolution that took place without a physical world. This has to do with the concept of ‘celestial beings’ that we can find in many spiritual traditions:
In Christianity they are called angels. In Judaism there is the concept of mal’akh.
In Zoroastrian theology there are the yazatas.
In the Hindu Scriptures we find the devas, ‘the shining ones’.
In Islam there is the concept of angels, beings created of light.
In Buddhism we also find descriptions of Devas.

What is important here is that these devas or angels are part of a separated evolution which is different from the evolution of humanity. They develop through the same levels of existence just as humans do, but they have no physical existence. It is important to note that the great spiritual traditions
like Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism and Christianity maintain that only humans (and not devas, angels, seraphim, gods or demigods) can realize enlightenment. Christ is above all the angels, the Buddha is above all the devas and so on. Only spiritual beings who have (had) a physical body/existence can reach a high-causal bhava samadhi level.

This means that without the physical world the involutionary force would not have enough power after its evolutionary return to reach its source fully activated. And so this is why the physical world was created: Without it, the divine involutionary force could not return fully energized to its source. Why can humans realize enlightenment while devas, angels and demigods cannot? The answer to this question has to do with differences in the subtle energy fields. While the subtle fields of the devas are much larger than those of humans, they are also much more diffuse. The effect of a physical body on the subtle fields enveloping it, is that these fields become highly concentrated. They are much denser than the fields of a deva. The human body with its chakra system is responsible for this condensing of subtle energy fields. This concentration of the energy fields increases their capacity to develop, particularly up and including the high-causal level.

Levels

Subtle energies that transcend the physical level are the carriers of consciousness and they form the connection between biological forms and the Absolute/consciousness. They are stratified over twelve ontological levels, ranging from the ‘etherical’-level up to the ‘high-causal’-level. With every level the energy-potentiality of the subtle energies present at that level increases, as they are active on distinctly different and higher ontological levels.

Levels of consciousness

An individual human consciousness proceeds through a series of stages. Each stage brings more possibilities to perceive and understand reality of its inner- and outer world at ever increasing depth. These levels are illuminated by various well demonstrated developmental lines in developmental psychology.

If one examines the historical archeological and anthropological data relating to the history of man, it becomes clear that the development that took place has progressed in several distinct collective developmental levels.

This development did not take place in a linear(ly) unfolding process, but in transformations that occur in quantum like, discontinuous leaps.

From these transformations new structures of consciousness did emerge, each with new (fundamentally different) ways of experiencing reality in ever-increasing levels of depth.

This is why Kosmic involution and evolution are necessary, because the activation of high-causal energies can only begin from a low level, thereby bringing the involutionary force highly enriched back to its source.

So the goal of life is to develop subtle energies at all levels, and finally to realize permanent high-causal bhava samadhi – the light body.

The ultimate goal of life is to transform the involutionary power into an unfolding evolutionary upward process by which increasingly higher/deeper levels of subtle energies are activated. Finally, the subtle energies on the highest level are activated and high-causal bhava samadhi (the light body) is permanently realized on a collective scale.

It is important to realize that the emanation process continues through time. This means an ‘emanation stream’ is still present from the High Causal level ‘down’ to the physical level. It doesn’t stop being present when the evolutionary journey starts.

The number of levels

Many philosophers mix up ontology and complexity and because of that they suppose that ontological levels are increasing in complexity. If that was the case, then the number of levels wouldn’t be limited because complexity has no upper limit (there is always the highest number + one). But ontological development deals with increasing union and not with increasing complexity. Abstract thinking is simpler than concrete thinking and intuition is without process and therefor even simpler than abstract thinking. Furthermore if there is involution than the ontological levels are pre-given. The phenomenological data indicates that the number of ontological levels is twelve.

Existence of secondary movers (devas)
“Gödel left in his papers a fourteen-point outline of his philosophical beliefs, that are dated around 1960. They show his deep belief in the rational structure of the world. Here are his 14 points:
1. The world is rational.
2. Human reason can, in principle, be developed more highly (through certain techniques).
3.There are systematic methods for the solution of all problems (also art, etc.).
4. There are other worlds and rational beings of a different and higher kind.
5. The world in which we live is not the only one in which we shall live or have lived.
6. There is incomparably more knowable a priori than is currently known.
7. The development of human thought since the Renaissance is thoroughly intelligible (durchaus einsichtige).
8. Reason in mankind will be developed in every direction.
9. Formal rights comprise a real science.
10. Materialism is false.
11. The higher beings are connected to the others by analogy, not by composition.
12. Concepts have an objective existence.
13. There is a scientific (exact) philosophy and theology, which deals with concepts of the highest abstractness; and this is also most highly fruitful for science.
14. Religions are, for the most part, bad– but religion is not.
In: Wang, Hao. A Logical Journey: From Gödel to Philosophy. A Bradford Book, 1997. Print. p.316.

“According to Aristotle, just as there is a First Mover (God), so, too, must there be spiritual secondary movers” (Angels). (Wikipedia)

Leibniz: “Animals have souls, but men have spirits or rational souls. Spirits include an infinite hierarchy of genii and angels superior to man, but not differing from him except in degree. They are defined by self-consciousness or apperception, by the knowledge of God and eternal truths, and by the possession of what is called reason, spirits do not, like souls, mirror only the universe of creatures, but also God. They compose the city of God”.

Alfred Russel Wallace, “For Wallace, life in all its varied abundance could only be explained by the actions of higher beings -“I believe it to be,” he said, “the guidance of beings superior to us in power and intelligence. Call them spirits, angels, gods, what you will”

The existence of intelligences, spiritual secondary movers (Angels) is supported by the two greatest logicians that ever lived, Aristotle and Kurt Gödel, and further by one of the greatest biologists, Alfred Russel Wallace. And then there were the founders of religions and Socrates who claimed to be communicating with them.

Supramentalisation
Supramentalisation is the Ultimate state of Transformation, the culmination of the entire planetary evolution. The process of Supramentalisation starts when the first individuals activate subtle energetic processes on the highest ontological level.
This will start a new involutionary process by which the now highly activated energies will be drawn down into the lower ontological levels. This downward process reaches all the way down to the physical body of the individuals who start this process.
After this process is activated in the first individuals it will become easier for others to take part in this process, because of the feedback loop and nonlocal resonance that is involved.
This will culminate in an entire collective planetary transformation, and this would eventually lead to a state of supreme divinisation involving the transformation of the entire Kosmos (the Pythagorean Kosmos, which means including higher Levels of existence).

“László stated in his book “You Can Change the World” that there is global choice for the coming world crisis, which could come in the form of a global breakdown centred on increasing fragmentation of economic inequality and a new arms race between rising powers. The other choice would be a global breakthrough led by international organizations. This would be by the linking of non-government organizations promoting sustainable development, using the Internet.
A Macroshift is defined as a popular movement to turn the tide from a global breakdown to a global breakthrough. László sees the years 2012-2020 as a critical period to change course as the coming crisis is taking shape in geopolitical current.” (Wikipedia)

The Kosmic story starts with involution (12 → 2):

General description involution
As written here above: Involution is a process by which the emanating force or potential gradually descends from the Spirit into the different dimensions of reality, with the physical dimension being the last in the sequence.

Involution, or emanation, is central to neo-platonic philosophy and can also be found in Platonism, Gnosticism, Manichaeism, the Kabbalah, Catharism, esoteric Christianity, Pythagoreanism, and some forms of Hinduism and Buddhism.

These different dimensions that exist after involution are undeveloped and not activated. The process of involution is followed by the process of evolution, which proceeds through successive stages.

Detailed description involutionary sequence
The teachings of Lurianic Kabbalah describes a cosmology of successive Worlds. The first world that emanated and thus had manifest existence was called ‘Olam ha-Tohu’ or ‘World of points’. This was a state which existed as unformed and unordered points. It was called the ‘World of points’ because at this time they were not related to each other but were in the form of unorganized (chaotic) atomic separateness.

A similar idea is the concept of karma within Jain philosophy which is described as follows: “Karmas are constituted of infinitely small ‘Karma particles’. These particles are made up of non-living particles (pudgals) and are scattered and free floating across the universe. When the soul acts with a passion such as attachment, anger, deceit, greed, etc. it attracts these. These particles on the soul are karma (karmas that do not obscure the true knowledge of the soul are known as Aghati karmas)”.This puts the concept of karma clearly in the realm of subtle energies. This makes it possible to replace speculative metaphysics with (visually) observable data. What is called karma is formed by the clusters of subtle energies in the human aura. They can be visually observed as different groups of different colors, their location in the total field, movement patterns and so on.

Erwin Schrödinger:“The goal of man is to preserve his Karma and to develop it further… when man dies his Karma lives and creates for itself another carrier.” Writings of July 1918, quoted in A Life of Erwin Schrödinger (1994) by Walter Moore.

Professor Brian D. Josephson (The Nobel Prize in Physics 1973):
Abstract: The problem of how life came into existence is a major challenge for biology. I shall argue for an explanation involving the idea that a more elementary form of life, not dependent on matter, existed prior to the big bang, and evolved at the level of ideas in the same way that human societies evolve at the level of ideas. Just as human society discovered how to use matter in a range of technological applications, the hypothesised life before the big bang discovered how to organise energy to make physical universes, and to make fruitful use of the matter available in such universes. In addition, our various creative abilities are in part expressions of aspects of this original life. Professor Brian D. Josephson
http://sms.cam.ac.uk/media/871489.

Josephson’s hypothesised that (non-Physical) life was present before the big bang. As it organised the physical universe it must be highly intelligent . This must mean that the (at first) unorganized particles on the non-physical levels were already activated and assembled into individual beings. This in a process that would presumably involve a developmental process that would start at level two (level 1, the physical world would be later created with the Big Bang) and then these intelligent beings {Aristotle’s spiritual secondary movers, (Deva’s, Angels)} would step by step, level by level develop themselves up to level 10 (2 → 10).

Then the process Josephson hypothesised would take place, the creation of physical matter in the Big Bang (10 → 1).

After that a human evolutionary process does start from the lowest level upwards
(1 → 12).

Then a lateral process would take place, (12 →) reaching Omega point.

After that a second involutionary process does start from the highest level downwards
(12 → 1), which brings the Divine power into the physical world a process called Supramentalisation (by Christ called: the coming of the kingdom of God)

When the activated Supramental energy reaches ↓ level 10 with the highest developed Deva energy, then a lateral process would take place, (10 →) and this Deva energy can now for the first time develop to level 12 (10 → 12).

After that, a third involutionary process starts coming from the highest level downwards
(12 → 1), a kosmic process called Divinisation.

Evolution
As written earlier, the different dimensions that exist after involution are undeveloped and not activated. The process of involution is followed by the process of evolution, which proceeds through successive stages.
On the physical level, we see an ever-increasing complexity of structures.

In terms of the subtle energies, we see the generation and activation of a series of levels of subtle energies, going from the physical world up to the high-causal level, the divine.
Although this emergence of the subtle energies starts at the lower levels, these energies cannot be reduced to the physical world. These subtle energies are capable of existing independently from the physical realm.

These different kinds of subtle energies exist not only in the world around us, but also within the human body, where they are much more concentrated and activated.

The activation of these subtle energies unfolds slowly, sequentially, one level after another, gradually obtaining consciousness at these levels. This activation and development of the subtle energies can only start at the lowest level, the emotional level.
This is clear not only from visually observing these subtle energies at different levels, but also from the sequence in which the different stages develop according to developmental psychology.
The higher-level subtle energies cannot develop unless there is first adequate development at a lower level.
However, permanently activated subtle energies of a certain group of developmental lines (visible in the aura as a certain color) will lead to the gradual development of subtle energies of that color, and thereby of that group of developmental lines at a higher level.

The ultimate meaning of life is to transform the involutionary power into an unfolding evolutionary upward process by which increasingly higher/deeper levels of subtle energies are activated.
Finally, the subtle energies on the highest level are activated and high-causal bhava samadhi is permanently realized.

General description evolution
The Kosmic process of evolution starts after the emanation process. This means that the non-activated dimensions of Reality (‘ontological levels’) created in the involution, are now activated in reversed sequence. Because living beings need subtle energies to obtain consciousness, this is the beginning of life. The end goal of this process is to fully activate all dimensions of Reality. To activate an entire ontological level collectively at once, apparently takes to much energy to succeed. Therefore individual development was necessary to gradually activate an entire ontological level before the next ontological level could be activated.

Momentum at level ten
The great spiritual traditions like Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism and Christianity maintain that only humans (and not devas, angels, seraphim, gods or demigods) can realize enlightenment. Christ is above all the angels, the Buddha is above all the devas and so on. Only spiritual beings who have (had) a physical body/existence can reach a high-causal bhava samadhi level.

So why can humans realize enlightenment while devas, angels and demigods cannot?

As written earlier, the answer to this question has to do with differences in the subtle energy fields. While the subtle fields of the devas are much larger than those of humans, they are also much more diffuse. The effect of a physical body on the subtle fields enveloping it, is that these fields become highly concentrated. They are much denser than the fields of a deva. The human body with its chakra system is responsible for this condensing of subtle energy fields. This concentration of the energy fields increases their capacity to develop, particularly up and including the high-causal level.

The implications are far reaching. The involutionary force which is able to connect to physical bodies will be able to reach highest level, the high-causal, the divine. By contrast, the involutionary force which was not connected with physical bodies – as is the case of the devas -in the evolutionary way upwards cannot reach beyond the high-subtle level. Then its losing its momentum.

This means that without the physical world the involutionary force would not have enough power after its evolutionary return to reach its source fully activated. And so this is why the physical world was created: without it, the divine involutionary force could not return fully energized to its source.

After the highest ontological level (level12) is activated , there starts a new descending process by which the a now extremely activated force or potential gradually but extremely fast descends from the Spirit into the different dimensions of reality, with the physical dimension being the last in the sequence. The so called Supramentalisation or what in Christianity is called the coming of the Kingdom of God, which will transform the whole planet and the Kosmos.

This process and its final goal is the aim of creation, and the ultimate Good that eluded the theologians there for failing to solve the theodicy.

A Kosmological process
So the question is what the Absolute (Godhead, Brahman, Svabhavakaya, ….) wanted when it created the world(s)?
The problem here is that the Absolute is beyond duality and every description of property or qualities is within duality, so one cannot say that the Absolute has a property called “Will”. However creation was a process in time and it is possible to see where this process will lead to: Not only to a greater complexity, but also to the development of higher ontological levels. This can even be experienced by mystics: The non-dual state of pure consciousness (oneness with the ground of being, turiya – turiyatita, sahaja-samadhi, nirodha, advaita and so on) is the state that was before the creation of the Kosmos. And the Glorification (Bhava samadhi, St Paul’s Damascus experience, the body of Light, the diamond body, the rainbow body and so on) is the state, that has been already temporarily realised by some mystics on an individual level, will be the permanent state of affairs in the future when all the ontological levels are activated on a collective level. This is when the final glorification of the cosmos, the transformation and divinization of matter in the Christological “fullness”, the kingdom of God, …. has been reached/ activated. These processes are of central importance related to the theodicy.
This will lead to a universal salvation for all sentient creatures without exception be it that those who committed evil acts will need to be purified and will only take part in this salvation after an extensive period of time.

Creation and fine-tuning
The idea of a creation was seen as a mythological story and was dismissed by scientists who postulated the idea of a steady state universe.

“The Steady State Theory (Hoyle,1948) implied that the universe has always appeared as it does today. The wide spread acceptance of the Big Bang theory by the1960s made it clear that such is not the case. Analysis of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) data indicates that the universe began in a hot dense state show that the global star formation rate has been declining for the past 5 Gyrs (Heavensetal.,2004). Old stars in the Galaxy are observed to be systematically deficient in metals compared to young stars, mirroring the evolution of metals in the broader universe. The universe has changed drastically since its formation, and these changes bear on the question of habit ability.” Guillermo Gonzalez: Galactic Habitable Zone.

With the discovery of the Big Bang scientists had to acknowledge that there was a moment of creation as well as the baffling fact of its fine-tuning, for example the expansion rate of the universe:
“This expansion rate is very specific in that it is based on the density of the universe and the gravitational pull caused by this density. With an increase in universal density on the order of just 1:1060, the gravitational pull would cause the universe to collapse on itself, while a density slightly lower by the same amount would cause the universe to expand at such a rate that galaxies would most likely never form at all, let alone contain life. This evidence suggests the influence of a calculating intentionality that engineered the large-scale structure of the universe in accordance with the laws of nature to support one or more life sites”.
(D. Halsmer, J. Asper, N. Roman, T. Todd, “The Coherence of an Engineered World,” International Journal of Design & Nature and Ecodynamics, Vol. 4(1):47-65 (2009)).

The creation of all matter at the Big Bang and the fine-tuning, cannot be explained by naturalistic principles. Even by many atheists the fine-tuning is the strongest argument for a transcendent force.
“If physics leads us today to a world view which is essentially mystical, it returns, in a way, to its beginning, 2,500 years ago. … This time, however, it is not only based on intuition, but also on experiments of great precision and sophistication, and on a rigorous and consistent mathematical formalism.“— Fritjof Capra In “The Tao of Physics “(1975), 19.

Albert Einstein:” What really interests me is whether God had any choice in the creation of the world”. In: Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler’s Gravitation.

Aristotle’s prime mover and secondary movers
“Aristotle argued that Democritus was wrong to attempt to reduce all things to mere necessity, because doing so neglects the aim, order, and “final cause,” which brings about these necessary conditions: “It is absurd to suppose that ends are not present [in nature] because we do not see an agent deliberating.” (Wikipedia)

“The unmoved mover (Ancient Greek: ho ou kinoúmenon kineî, “that which moves without being moved”) or prime mover (Latin: primum movens) is a monotheistic concept advanced by Aristotle, a polytheist, as a primary cause or “mover” of all the motion in the universe. As is implicit in the name, the “unmoved mover” moves other things, but is not itself moved by any prior action. In Book 12 (Greek “?”) of his Metaphysics, Aristotle describes the unmoved mover as being perfectly beautiful, indivisible, and contemplating only the perfect contemplation: itself contemplating. He equates this concept also with the Active Intellect. This Aristotelian concept had its roots in cosmological speculations of the earliest Greek “Pre-Socratic” philosophers and became highly influential and widely drawn upon in medieval philosophy and theology. St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, elaborated on the Unmoved Mover in the quinque viae. (Wikipedia) It is obvious, then, that the term “mover” is used of the first and of secondary movers not in an identical, but only in a proportional, sense; for the first mover is the cause of being and is himself unchanged, while secondary movers are causes of change and are themselves changed in their action. It is to this unique first mover that the argument concludes.” (Wikipedia)

and
G. W. Leibniz in ‘Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil’:
“……about the faculty to create. It may be that there are miracles which God performs through the ministry of angels, where the laws of Nature are not violated, any more than when men assist Nature by art, the skill of angels differing from ours only by degree of perfection……… As for miracles (concerning which I have already said something in this work), they are perhaps not all of one and the same kind: there are many, to all appearances, which God brings about through the ministry of invisible substances, such as the angels, as Father Malebranche also believes. These angels or these substances act according to the ordinary laws of their nature, being combined with bodies more rarefied and more vigorous than those we have at our command. And such miracles are only so by comparison, and in relation to us; just as our works would be considered miraculous amongst animals if they were capable of remarking upon them. The changing of water into wine might be a miracle of this kind. But the Creation, the Incarnation and some other actions of God exceed all the power of creatures and are truly miracles, or indeed Mysteries.”

Angels and fine-tuning
Angels, according to Augustine, were created before the firmament, and the heaven and earth were created after that, evolving from the second Principle or the Logos-the creative Deity.
Angels are described as a mental substance, which refers to the concept held by dualists and idealists, that minds are made-up of non-physical substance.

Modern data (statistics). Contemporary (2011) some 77 percent of the Americans do believe in angels, according to an AP-GfK poll.
The finding mirrors a 2006 AP-AOL poll, which found that 81 percent of the Americans believed in angels.

Belief in angels is actually quite widespread in certain parts of the world, While Italians and Croatians are on par with Americans, for instance, no more than a third of Danes believe in angels. The English are similarly low; just 36 percent believe in angels, according to Gallup.

Belief is primarily tied to religion, with 88 percent of Christians, 95 percent of evangelical Christians and 94 percent of those who attend weekly religious services of any sort, saying they believe in angels.

But belief in angels is widespread even among the less religious. A majority of non-Christians thinks that angels exist, as do more than 40% of those who never attend religious services.

The objections against the concept
“The modern attitude to angels tends to regard the traditional references and descriptions as symbolic, poetic, or representing an earlier world-concept. Contemporary religious movements have either completely obliterated all references to angels or where they remain have understood them in poetic or mythological terms. They feel that a belief in their existence is out of keeping with a modern approach to the world and God and cannot be reconciled with modern rationalism. But nevertheless modern Orthodoxy tends to demythologize them and reinterpret them without compromising the belief in their ontological status. Angels are interpreted symbolically and belief in their existence is not denied altogether. The degree of literalness of this belief varies from group to group. It is only among some of the communities, that the literal belief in angels, which for so long characterized religious thought, is still upheld.” ( Jewish virtual library)

One reason is that there are objections against the believe in angels, is the fear of superstition, from a modern point of view it seems weird, naïve and a lapse into mythical thinking.

This leaves us with the question whether there is some supporting evidence.

Notable supporters of the concept

Next to basically all founders of religion there are:

Socrates: “Plato gives a description of the speech given by Socrates as he defended himself in 399 BC against the charges of not believing in the gods in whom the city believes, but in other daimonia that are novel. In Plato’s Symposium, the priestess Diotima goes on to explain that “everything daemonic is between divine and mortal”, and she describes daemons as “interpreting and transporting human things to the gods and divine things to men; entreaties and sacrifices from below, and ordinances and requitals from above…” . In Plato’s Apology of Socrates, Socrates claimed to have a daimonion (literally, a “divine something”) that frequently warned him—in the form of a voice. .”(Wikipedia)
{Socrates, (c. 469 BC – 399 BC) was a classical Greek Athenian philosopher. Credited as one of the founders of Western philosophy, he is an enigmatic figure known chiefly through the accounts of later classical writers, especially the writings of his students Plato and Xenophon and the plays of his contemporary Aristophanes. Many would claim that Plato’s dialogues are the most comprehensive accounts of Socrates to survive from antiquity.
Through his portrayal in Plato’s dialogues, Socrates has become renowned for his contribution to the field of ethics, and it is this Platonic Socrates who lends his name to the concepts of Socratic irony and the Socratic method, or elenchus. The latter remains a commonly used tool in a wide range of discussions, and is a type of pedagogy in which a series of questions are asked not only to draw individual answers, but also to encourage fundamental insight into the issue at hand. Plato’s Socrates also made important and lasting contributions to the field of epistemology, and the influence of his ideas and approach remains a strong foundation for much western philosophy that followed. } (Wikipedia)

Plato: “For Plato, daimon, is a spiritual being who watches over each individual, and is tantamount to his higher self, or an angel; for Proclus, daimones are the intermediary beings located between the celestial objects and the terrestrial inhabitants.”(Wikipedia)
{Plato, (428/427 BC – 348/347 BC) was a philosopher in Classical Greece. He was also a mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the foundations of Western philosophy and science.
Plato’s sophistication as a writer is evident in his Socratic dialogues; thirty-six dialogues and thirteen letters have been ascribed to him. Plato’s writings have been published in several fashions; this has led to several conventions regarding the naming and referencing of Plato’s texts. Plato’s dialogues have been used to teach a range of subjects, including philosophy, logic, ethics, rhetoric, religion and mathematics. Plato is one of the most important founding figures in Western philosophy.} (Wikipedia)

Aristotle. Medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides about Aristotle:
“…This leads Aristotle in turn to the demonstrated fact that God, glory and majesty to Him, does not do things by direct contact. God burns things by means of fire; fire is moved by the motion of the sphere; the sphere is moved by means of a disembodied intellect, these intellects being the ‘angels which are near to Him’, through whose mediation the spheres [planets] move… thus totally disembodied minds exist which emanate from God and are the intermediaries between God and all the bodies [objects] here in this world.” —Guide for the Perplexed II:4-6, Maimonides
{Aristotle ; (384 BC – 322 BC) was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theatre, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology. Together with Plato and Socrates (Plato’s teacher), Aristotle is one of the most important founding figures in Western philosophy. Aristotle’s writings were the first to create a comprehensive system of Western philosophy, encompassing ethics, aesthetics, logic, science, politics, and metaphysics.
Aristotle’s views on the physical sciences profoundly shaped medieval scholarship, and their influence extended well into the Renaissance, although they were ultimately replaced by Newtonian physics. In the zoological sciences, some of his observations were confirmed to be accurate only in the 19th century. His works contain the earliest known formal study of logic, which was incorporated in the late 19th century into modern formal logic.
In metaphysics, Aristotelianism had a profound influence on philosophical and theological thinking in the Islamic and Jewish traditions in the Middle Ages, and it continues to influence Christian theology, especially the scholastic tradition of the Catholic Church. Aristotle was well known among medieval Muslim intellectuals and revered as “The First Teacher”.
His ethics, though always influential, gained renewed interest with the modern advent of virtue ethics. All aspects of Aristotle’s philosophy continue to be the object of active academic study today. Though Aristotle wrote many elegant treatises and dialogues (Cicero described his literary style as “a river of gold”) (Wikipedia).

Descartes. Terrence McKenna about Descartes: ”I believe it was on the 17th of August that year which was 1619…… on that night Descartes had a dream, and in the dream a radiant angel appeared to him and said, “The conquest of nature is to be accomplished through number and measure,” and in that moment René Descartes went from being a nobody to being the founder of modern science. Modern science was founded at the direction of an angel, and the angel showed how it was, and to this day modern science has made all of its strides through the application of number – mathematical analysis and measure. That is the secret of the scientific conquest of nature, and it was a secret that was imparted to René Descartes by an angelic entity”.
{Descartes, 31 March 1596 – 11 February 1650) was a French mathematician and writer who spent most of his adult life in the Dutch Republic. He has been dubbed the ‘Father of Modern Philosophy’, and much subsequent Western philosophy is a response to his writings, which are studied closely to this day. In particular, his “Meditations on First Philosophy” continues to be a standard text at most university philosophy departments. Descartes’s influence in mathematics is equally apparent; the Cartesian coordinate system — allowing reference to a point in space as a set of numbers, and allowing algebraic equations to be expressed as geometric shapes in a two-dimensional coordinate system (and conversely, shapes to be described as equations) — was named after him. He is credited as the father of analytical geometry, the bridge between algebra and geometry, crucial to the discovery of infinitesimal calculus and analysis. Descartes was also one of the key figures in the Scientific Revolution and has been described as an example of genius.
Descartes frequently sets his views apart from those of his predecessors. In the opening section of the Passions of the Soul, a treatise on the Early Modern version of what are now commonly called emotions Descartes was a major figure in 17th-century continental rationalism, later advocated by Baruch Spinoza and Gottfried Leibniz, Leibniz, Spinoza and Descartes were all well versed in mathematics as well as philosophy, and Descartes and Leibniz contributed greatly to science as well.} (Wikipedia)

Leibniz: “Animals have souls, but men have spirits or rational souls. Spirits include an infinite hierarchy of genii and angels superior to man, but not differing from him except in degree. They are defined by self-consciousness or apperception, by the knowledge of God and eternal truths, and by the possession of what is called reason, spirits do not, like souls, mirror only the universe of creatures, but also God. They compose the city of God”. (Leibniz: The Theodicy)
{Leibniz: (July 1, 1646 – November 14, 1716) was a German mathematician and philosopher. He occupies a prominent place in the history of mathematics and the history of philosophy.
Leibniz developed the infinitesimal calculus independently of Isaac Newton, and Leibniz’s mathematical notation has been widely used ever since it was published. It was only in the 20th century that his Law of Continuity and Transcendental Law of Homogeneity found mathematical implementation (by means of non-standard analysis). He became one of the most prolific inventors in the field of mechanical calculators. While working on adding automatic multiplication and division to Pascal’s calculator, he was the first to describe a pinwheel calculator in 1685 and invented the Leibniz wheel, used in the arithmometer, the first mass-produced mechanical calculator. He also refined the binary number system, which is at the foundation of virtually all digital computers.
In philosophy, Leibniz is most noted for his optimism, e.g., his conclusion that our Universe is, in a restricted sense, the best possible one that God could have created. Leibniz, along with René Descartes and Baruch Spinoza, was one of the three great 17th century advocates of rationalism. The work of Leibniz anticipated modern logic and analytic philosophy, but his philosophy also looks back to the scholastic tradition, in which conclusions are produced by applying reason to first principles or prior definitions rather than to empirical evidence.
Leibniz made major contributions to physics and technology, and anticipated notions that surfaced much later in philosophy, probability theory, biology, medicine, geology, psychology, linguistics, and computer science. He wrote works on philosophy, politics, law, ethics, theology, history, and philology. Leibniz’s contributions to this vast array of subjects were scattered in various learned journals, in tens of thousands of letters, and in unpublished manuscripts. He wrote in several languages, but primarily in Latin, French, and German.} (Wikipedia)

Alfred Russel Wallace. As mentioned before: “For Wallace, life in all its varied abundance could only be explained by the actions of higher beings:
-“I believe it to be,” he said, “the guidance of beings superior to us in power and intelligence. Call them spirits, angels, gods, what you will; the name is of no importance. I find this control in the lowest cell; the wonderful activity of cells convinces me that it is guided by intelligence and consciousness. I cannot comprehend how any just and unprejudiced mind, fully aware of this amazing activity, can persuade itself to believe that the whole thing is a blind and unintelligent accident. It may not be possible for us to say how the guidance is exercised, and by exactly what powers; but for those who have eyes to see and minds accustomed to reflect, in the minutest cells, in the blood, in the whole earth, and throughout the stellar universe—our own little universe, as one may call it—there is intelligent and conscious direction; in, a word, there is Mind.” “Myers suggested that our normal consciousness is only a fragment of our total soul, that a greater part of us is at work on the body, man-aging all the wonderful and complex machinery of the organism, and influencing us without our knowledge.” “Yes, that may or may not be true. But we must enlarge our vision. We must see more beings in the universe than ourselves. I think we have got to recognise that between man and the Ultimate God there is an almost infinite multitude of beings working in the universe at tasks as definite and important as any that we have to perform on the earth. I imagine that the universe is peopled with spirits—that is to say, with intelligent beings, with powers and duties akin to our own, but vaster, infinitely vaster. I think there is a gradual ascent from man upwards and onwards, through an almost endless legion of these beings, to the First Cause, of whom it is impossible for us to speak. Through Him these endless beings act and achieve, but He Himself may have no actual contact with our earth.”
Interview with Alfred Russel Wallace, New York Times, October 8, 1911.
Wallace concluded: “I now uphold the doctrine that not man alone, but the whole World of Life, in almost all its varied manifestations, leads us to the same conclusion—that to afford any rational explanation of its phenomena, we require to postulate the continuous action and guidance of higher intelligences; and further, that these have probably been working towards a single end, the development of intellectual, moral, and spiritual beings…”. Alfred Russel Wallace’s Theory of Intelligent Evolution, 113-14.
{Alfred Russel Wallace, (8 January 1823 – 7 November 1913) was a British naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist and biologist. He is best known for independently conceiving the theory of evolution through natural selection; His formulation of the theory of evolution by natural selection, predated Charles Darwin’s published contributions his paper on the subject was jointly published with some of Charles Darwin’s writings in 1858. This prompted Darwin to publish his own ideas in On the Origin of Species. Wallace did extensive fieldwork, first in the Amazon River basin and then in the Malay Archipelago, where he identified the Wallace Line that divides the Indonesian archipelago into two distinct parts: a western portion in which the animals are largely of Asian origin, and an eastern portion where the fauna reflect Australasia. He was considered the 19th century’s leading expert on the geographical distribution of animal species and is sometimes called the “father of biogeography”. Wallace was one of the leading evolutionary thinkers of the 19th century and made many other contributions to the development of evolutionary theory besides being co-discoverer of natural selection. These included the concept of warning colouration in animals, and the Wallace effect, a hypothesis on how natural selection could contribute to speciation by encouraging the development of barriers against hybridization.
Wallace was strongly attracted to unconventional ideas (such as evolution). His advocacy of spiritualism and his belief in a non-material origin for the higher mental faculties of humans strained his relationship with some members of the scientific establishment. In addition to his scientific work, he was a social activist who was critical of what he considered to be an unjust social and economic system in 19th-century Britain. His interest in natural history resulted in his being one of the first prominent scientists to raise concerns over the environmental impact of human activity.
Wallace was a prolific author who wrote on both scientific and social issues; his account of his adventures and observations during his explorations in Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia, The Malay Archipelago, is regarded as probably the best of all journals of scientific exploration published during the 19th century.} (Wikipedia)

Georg Cantor: “The mathematician Georg Cantor believed that his theory of transfinite numbers had been communicated to him from a “more powerful energy.” A divine voice, like the angel who in old paintings whispers the Word to the Evangelist or the Translator, whispered to Cantor the Theorems of Ordered Sets.” Stories of creation, by Ricardo Nirenberg
{Georg Cantor ; March 3, 1845 – January 6, 1918) was a German mathematician, best known as the inventor of set theory, which has become a fundamental theory in mathematics. Cantor established the importance of one-to-one correspondence between the members of two sets, defined infinite and well-ordered sets, and proved that the real numbers are “more numerous” than the natural numbers. In fact, Cantor’s method of proof of this theorem implies the existence of an “infinity of infinities”. He defined the cardinal and ordinal numbers and their arithmetic. Cantor’s work is of great philosophical interest, a fact of which he was well aware.
Cantor’s theory of transfinite numbers was originally regarded as so counter-intuitive – even shocking – that it encountered resistance from mathematical contemporaries such as Leopold Kronecker and Henri Poincaré and later from Hermann Weyl and L. E. J. Brouwer, while Ludwig Wittgenstein raised philosophical objections. Some Christian theologians (particularly neo-Scholastics) saw Cantor’s work as a challenge to the uniqueness of the absolute infinity in the nature of God – on one occasion equating the theory of transfinite numbers with pantheism – a proposition that Cantor vigorously rejected.
In 1904, the Royal Society awarded Cantor its Sylvester Medal, the highest honour it can confer for work in mathematics. It has been suggested that Cantor believed his theory of transfinite numbers had been communicated to him by God. David Hilbert defended it from its critics by famously declaring: “No one shall expel us from the Paradise that Cantor has created.” } (Wikipedia)

Kurt Gödel. As mentioned before: “Gödel left in his papers a fourteen-point outline of his philosophical beliefs, that are dated around 1960. They show his deep belief in the rational structure of the world. Here are his 14 points:
1.The world is rational.
2.Human reason can, in principle, be developed more highly (through certain techniques).
3.There are systematic methods for the solution of all problems (also art, etc.).
4.There are other worlds and rational beings of a different and higher kind.
5.The world in which we live is not the only one in which we shall live or have lived.
6.There is incomparably more knowable a priori than is currently known.
7.The development of human thought since the Renaissance is thoroughly intelligible (durchaus einsichtige).
8.Reason in mankind will be developed in every direction.
9.Formal rights comprise a real science.
10.Materialism is false.
11.The higher beings are connected to the others by analogy, not by composition.
12.Concepts have an objective existence.
13.There is a scientific (exact) philosophy and theology, which deals with concepts of the highest abstractness; and this is also most highly fruitful for science.
14.Religions are, for the most part, bad– but religion is not.

In: Wang, Hao. A Logical Journey: From Gödel to Philosophy. A Bradford Book, 1997. Print. p.316.
{Kurt Gödel: ( April 28, 1906 – Jan. 14, 1978.), mathematician, logician, and philosopher who obtained what may be the most important mathematical result of the 20th century: his famous incompleteness theorem, which states that within any axiomatic mathematical system there are propositions that cannot be proved or disproved on the basis of the axioms within that system; thus, such a system cannot be simultaneously complete and consistent. This proof established Gödel as one of the greatest logicians since Aristotle, and its repercussions continue to be felt and debated today. He subscribed to Platonism, theism, and mind-body dualism.
In his doctoral thesis “On the Completeness of the Calculus of Logic”, published in a slightly shortened form in 1930, Gödel proved one of the most important logical results of the century—indeed, of all time—namely, the completeness theorem, which established that classical first-order logic, or predicate calculus, is complete in the sense that all of the first-order logical truths can be proved in standard first-order proof systems.
This, however, was nothing compared with what Gödel published in 1931—namely, the incompleteness theorem: “On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems”. Roughly speaking, this theorem established the result that it is impossible to use the axiomatic method to construct a mathematical theory, in any branch of mathematics, that entails all of the truths in that branch of mathematics. (In England, Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell had spent years on such a program, which they published as Principia Mathematica in three volumes in 1910, 1912, and 1913.) For instance, it is impossible to come up with an axiomatic mathematical theory that captures even all of the truths about the natural numbers (0, 1, 2, 3,…). This was an extremely important negative result, as before 1931 many mathematicians were trying to do precisely that—construct axiom systems that could be used to prove all mathematical truths. Indeed, several well-known logicians and mathematicians (e.g., Whitehead, Russell, Gottlob Frege, David Hilbert) spent significant portions of their careers on this project. Unfortunately for them, Gödel’s theorem destroyed this entire axiomatic research program .} (Wikipedia)
……………….
The aim of this biographical information is primarily to show that the validity of the conjecture of the existence of realities beyond the physical world, higher ontological levels or beings, has been accepted by some of the greatest philosophers, logicians, mathematicians and biologists

The relevancy

It has been said that the only culture that doesn’t believe in the existence of angels, is the modern western culture, and this only in the last three centuries But even this is an understatement, because about between 30% and 80% of the people in the western world believes in the existence of angels. That makes the question of their existence at least socially relevant.

A conceptual framework

The concept of angels is clearly present within western culture. On Google the term “angel” gives, as I write this in 2018, about 1.610.000.000 results. Angels are represented in religion, mythology, folklore, literature, poetry, paintings and statues. Many people do believe in angels but this doesn’t prove their existence, nor does this give a clear idea about their presumed residence (heaven one could say, but that is a somewhat unclear location). And then there is the question, that if they exist and as they are presumed to be non-physical, what is it that they consist of. While there are many people who claim that they have felt the presence of angels, being warned by them, saved from danger or been given information that changed their lives, this does not answer the questions here above. As a poetic idea it expresses a certain aesthetic quality, but aesthetic has another validity claim than factual statements. Even if one accepts that people where in communication with angels (and one just has to look at the list above of the “Notable supporters of the concept” to take this at least into consideration), if these communications are not accompanied by visual perceptions, then these non-visual feelings of a presence, however valuable, do not give enough information to place all this in a coherent conceptual framework. Within theology the concept of angels is accepted, based upon tradition or the authority of scriptures. Within philosophy several prominent philosophers have tried to defend the existence of angels on logical grounds, which is more difficult. To connect the presumed existence of angels with science, would imply that one could demonstrate that a part of the physical world is influenced by their activities, verified with evidence and with no other explanation left

Ontological levels
From a philosophical point of view the existence of angels would imply ontological dualism or pluralism another world or worlds than the physical world). There is a great amount of academic discussion, with on one side monistic materialism and on the other end dualism, interactionism, parallelism etc. A starting point here would be that which cannot be placed in a materialistic worldview can still be proven to exist. In conjunction with philosophical arguments, there is the data of parapsychology, neurophysiology, psychology, research into perception and creativity which supports the dualist / interactionist point of view. One can find this support especially within consciousness research where the mind body problem is still the most important problem.

Within theoretical physics one finds a description of the different levels of existence from theoretical physicist David Bohm, he developed an ontological interpretation of quantum mechanics.
Bohm put forward a theory of an explicate order (the physical matter) and a series of implicate orders (each consisting of a different subtle non-physical matter).
In Bohm’s ontological interpretation of quantum theory we find a series of implicated orders: “Little reflection shows that the whole idea of implicate order could be extended in a natural way. For if there are two levels of implicate order, why should there not be more? Thus if we regard the super-implicate order as the second level, then we might consider a third level which was related to the second as the second is to the first. That is to say, the third implicate order would organize the second which would thereby become non-linear. (The Undivided Universe, David Bohm and Basil Hiley 1993).

Multiple ontological levels (heavens), holism (union) and non-locality (omnipresence) have been presumed to exist within mystical literature.

How to place the concept of super natural beings/angels in a modern world view
With the arrival of modernism and empirical science, long held world views like mythical world views etc. where replaced by mechanical world views. The enormous explanatory value of this new approach, the development of the scientific method and its practical applications would revolutionize society. Many of the long held views where now seen as outdated magical or mythical thinking. A more contemporary example is telekinesis. If there ever was a candidate of being called magical thinking it was the believe in telekinesis. While parapsychologists found supporting evidence for this phenomenon, this was mainly ignored.

All though many of the founders of this new approach like Newton, Leibniz, etc. still considered the spiritual world view as supreme, in the centuries to come the mechanistic worldview and monistic materialism became dominant. Heavens, angels, supernatural forces, creator god(s), and life after death etc. were, from a scientific point of view, seen as mythical which had no basis in reality. But with the beginning of the twentieth century and the arrival of quantum mechanics and the evolutionary cosmology, new insights into the nature of reality became available.

However within quantum mechanics there were several different interpretations:
1. The Copenhagen Interpretation: The act of observation creates reality, the collapse of the wave function is caused by a conscious observer. (this implies micro telekinesis) This is what one calls the classical interpretation of quantum mechanics.
2. The ontological interpretation of quantum theory, in which the physical world (the explicated order) is influenced by a series of implicate orders, each consisting of a different subtle non-physical matter. (this implies macro telekinesis)
3. The Wheeler interpretation, which holds that reality even on a cosmic scale (the whole universe) is created by the observing act (this implies macro telekinesis on a cosmic scale).
4. The Wigner interpretation: Physical objects have no attributes if a conscious observer is not looking at them (this implies macro telekinesis). This is called philosophical idealism.

Mysticism
Some of the leading Quantum physicists connected their findings to mysticism.
Albert Einstein: “I said before, the most beautiful and most profound religious emotion that we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. And this mysticality is the power of all true science. If there is any such concept as a God, it is a subtle spirit, not an image of a man that so many have fixed in their minds. In essence, my religion consists of a humble admiration for this illimitable superior spirit that reveals itself in the slight details that we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds.” Albert Einstein, as quoted in The Private Albert Einstein (1992) by Peter A. Bucky and Allen G. Weakland, p. 86.

Erwin Schrödinger. In his book “My view of the world”, Schrödinger outlined his mystical and metaphysical view as derived from Hindu Vedanta philosophy.

Niels Bohr wrote: ”For a parallel to the lesson of atomic theory…[we must turn ] to those kinds of epistemological problems with which already thinkers like Buddha and Lao Tze have been confronted, when trying to harmonize our position as spectators and actors in the great drama of existence” Bohr was influenced by Taoism which is Chinese mysticism. As a result of those influences, Bohr adopted the yin yang symbol as part of his family coat of arms when he was knighted in 1947.

Wolfgang Pauli. The Harvard historian Juan Miguel Marin noted also the “lucid mysticism,” a synthesis between rationality and religion” favoured by Wolfgang Pauli, that Pauli “speculated that quantum theory could unify the psychological/scientific and philosophical/mystical approaches to consciousness”. Pauli’s perspective was influenced by the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, whose views on reality were in turn influenced by Eastern religions. He further noted:
“Among contemporary quantum field theories, the important gauge theories are indebted to the work of [Hermann] Weyl and Pauli. Yet many physicists today would be shocked if they learned how Weyl and Pauli understood the concept ‘field’ when they wrote their classic articles. They were both immersed in mysticism, searching for a way to unify mind and physics. Weyl published a lecture where he concluded by favouring the Christian-mathematical mysticism of Nicholas of Cusa. Moreover, Pauli’s published article on Kepler presents him as part of the Western mystical tradition … For those who do not favour the Copenhagen interpretation and prefer the alternative proposed by David Bohm, I would suggest reading Bohm’s many published dialogues on the topic of Eastern mysticism … Eddington and Schrödinger, like many today, joined forces to find a quantum gravity theory. Did their shared mysticism have a role to play in whatever insights they gained or mistakes they made? I do not know, but I think it’s important to find out.” (Harvard historian Juan Miguel Marin).

Werner Heisenberg wrote: “There is a startling parallelism between today’s physics and the world vision of Eastern mysticism……one cannot always distinguish between statements made by Eastern metaphysics based on mystical insight and the pronouncements of modern physics based on observations, experiments and mathematical calculations.”

Eugene Wigner, a Nobel laureate, wrote that ”Philosophical materialism is not logically consistent with present quantum mechanics.”

David Bohm “was deeply influenced by Jiddu Krishnamurti, crediting him as a source for understanding the worldview he proposed in his interpretation of Quantum Mechanics that he put forth in Wholeness and the Implicate Order.“
—Juan Miguel Marin, “‘Mysticism’ in Quantum Mechanics: The Forgotten Controversy” in European Journal of Physics 30 (2009).

Arthur Eddington. In his Gifford Lectures (1927) on “The Nature of the Physical World” (1929). The last chapter dealt specifically with “Science as Mysticism.” He noted that any attempt to hold science and religion mutually exclusive cannot be achieved in view of their overlapping and changing frontiers. He describes the reductionistic identification “that the dance of atoms in the brain really constitutes the thought ...” as “out of keeping with recent … fundamental principles of physics”, and recalls that “Mind is the first and most direct thing in our experience; all else is remote inference.” Following up with a discussion of the problem of experience, he argues that the “mystical outlook” does face the hard facts of experience, whereas reductionists are “shirking one of the most immediate facts of experience, namely that consciousness is not wholly nor even primarily a device for receiving sense impressions.” Although these arguments for “natural” mysticism do not imply a religious mysticism, they mean that many objections lose their force.” In ‘Astrophysics and Mysticism: the life of Arthur Stanley Eddington’ December 2002 Ian H Hutchinson Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Creation
In the nineteenth century the general idea was that the universe had no beginning in time, that Matter always existed. The so called steady-state model. With the discovery of the big bang it was clear that the universe had a beginning in time. A point of creation.
Already two major theories had been developed that showed an evolution over a long period of time. One was Darwinism which showed a biological evolution over hundreds of millions of years, and the other stellar nucleosynthesis which produces higher elements like carbon, which are necessary for biological life. This process can take thousands of millions of years. However the creation of all matter in the Big Bang took place in only a fraction of a second. And not only that, it was a moment of extremely high order. The second law of thermodynamics is concerned with entropy, which is a measure of (thermodynamic) disorder.

“The law that entropy always increases, holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature”. Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1927).

Next to this there is what is known as fine-tuning of the universe. When scientists speak of the fine-tuning of the universe, they are generally referring to the extraordinary balancing of the fundamental laws and parameters of physics (also called (cosmological) constants) and the initial conditions of the universe. The values of these constants are such that the universe has just the right conditions to sustain life. The coincidence of all these constants being so life permitting is too amazing to have been the result of meaningless coincidences. These cosmological constants all work together to keep the universe perfectly fine-tuned in order to make life possible. So we have several evolutionary processes, such as biological evolution by natural selection and among others the development of higher chemical elements in stellar nucleosynthesis. Both processes generate complex structures after thousands of millions of years. And there is a totally different fact, the extraordinary high ordering, as is clear from the consequences from the second law of thermodynamics and the fine-tuning of the universe. It is here where we can place Aristotle’s First Mover and his secondary movers.

Can supernatural beings be the cause of changes in the natural world?
It is especially the fine tuning of the universe that made a substantial number of scientists, among whom several former atheists, come to the conclusion that this is evidence for the existence of some form of intelligence, capable of manipulating and/or designing the basic physics that governs the Universe.

Roger Penrose’s calculation is that the probability of the occurrence of a universe in which life can form is at least 10 to the power of 123 to 1 {1:1010(123)}
To quote: “the multiverse theory which states that our universe is one of many. It could be 10 to the 500th different universes or an infinite number of universes. In other universes, the physical constants are different and ours happens to be the one that is life permitting. This idea supposedly solves the problem of why our universe is so delicately and exquisitely fine-tuned to allow for intelligent, carbon based life to emerge and it also solves several other puzzling concepts in quantum physics. This is a problem that has concerned and worried many atheists because in a single universe, it is just too good to be true. The odds are truly incomprehensible. If there is a multitude of different universes, then our perplexing existence can comfortably be attributed to the atheists best friend, sheer dumb luck. The central purpose of these ideas is to explain how the universe could have created itself out of nothing”.

William Lane Craig provides the following perspective: “Now a similar problem afflicts the contemporary appeal to the multiverse to explain away fine-tuning. Roger Penrose of Oxford University has calculated that the odds of our universe’s “low-entropy “(high ordering) condition obtaining by chance alone are on the order of 1:1010(123), an inconceivable number. If our universe were but one member of a multiverse of randomly ordered worlds, then it is vastly more probable that we should be observing a much smaller universe. For example, the odds of our solar system’s being formed instantly by the random collision of particles is about 1:1010(60), a vast number, but inconceivably smaller than 1:1010(123). [The Road to Reality (Knopf, 2005), pp. 762-5]). Or again, if our universe is but one member of a multiverse, then we ought to be observing highly extraordinary events, like horses’ popping into and out of existence by random collisions, or perpetual motion machines, since these are vastly more probable than all of nature’s constants and quantities’ falling by chance into the virtually infinitesimal life-permitting range. Observable universes like those strange worlds are simply much more plenteous in the ensemble of universes than worlds like ours and, therefore, ought to be observed by us if the universe were but a random member of a multiverse of worlds. Since we do not have such observations, that fact strongly disconfirms the multiverse hypothesis. On naturalism, at least, it is therefore highly probable that there is no multiverse.
All this has been said, of course, without asking whether the multiverse itself must not exhibit fine-tuning in order to exist. If it does, as some have argued, then it is a non-starter as an alternative to design”. (by William Lane Craig).

There are several problems with the Multiverse theory, one is its extreme violation of the parsimony principle; Ockham’s razor (Latin lex parsimoniae) is the law of parsimony, economy or succinctness. It is a principle urging one to select among competing hypotheses that which makes the fewest assumptions and thereby offers the simplest explanation of the effect.

Another problem with the multiverse explanation is that the sustainability for biological life of the universe is in no way conducive to cosmic sustainability and no form of Darwinist selection process for cosmic evolution can be invoked.
Furthermore a mechanism for generating such universes needs to be explained.

Within the scientific community it has been said that the biggest difficulty for the concept of the existence of parallel universes is, that by definition they cannot be observed and they can be neither verified nor falsified. As this is absolutely necessary for a scientific theory, the Multiverse theory therefore is not a scientific theory.

Max Planck (Nobel Prize in Physics):
“We must assume that behind the world of phenomena exists a Superior Mind. This Mind is the Creator of the Universe”.

British mathematician-physicist-astronomer Sir James Jeans wrote in his 1929 work, ‘The Universe Around Us : “ Today there is a wide measure of agreement … that the stream of knowledge is heading toward a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears as an accidental intruder into the realm of matter, we are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter”.

Quantum theory and Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorem made clear that the nineteenth century mechanistic worldview and its positivistic philosophy was naïve realism.

Then how do we explain that supernatural beings can be the cause of changes in the natural world? The answer may be in John Archibald Wheeler’s statement: “Observer participancy is the mechanism for bringing physical reality into existence”.

As mentioned before:
Relevant to this discussion is a Lecture given by Professor Brian D. Josephson (The Nobel Prize in Physics 1973):
“The problem of how life came into existence is a major challenge for biology. I shall argue for an explanation involving the idea that a more elementary form of life, not dependent on matter, existed prior to the big bang, and evolved at the level of ideas in the same way that human societies evolve at the level of ideas. Just as human society discovered how to use matter in a range of technological applications, the hypothesised life before the big bang discovered how to organise energy to make physical universes, and to make fruitful use of the matter available in such universes. In addition, our various creative abilities are in part expressions of aspects of this original life.” Professor Brian D. Josephson
http://sms.cam.ac.uk/media/871489

GEORGE WALD, Nobel Laureate in Medicine and Physiology:
“It has occurred to me lately – I must confess with some shock at first to my scientific sensibilities – that both questions might be brought into some degree of congruence. This is with the assumption that Mind, rather than emerging as a late outgrowth in the evolution of life, has existed always as the matrix, the source and condition of physical reality – that the stuff of which physical reality is composed is mind-stuff. It is Mind that has composed a physical universe that breeds life, and so eventually evolves creatures that know and create.”

George Wald, 1984, “Life and Mind in the Universe”, International Journal of Quantum Chemistry: Quantum Biology Symposium 11, 1984: 1-15.

Phenomenology
Dealing with the direct perception and its phenomenological description, the aim is not to put forward a series of logical arguments to support a conclusion, but to give an accurate description of these perceptions.
Descriptions of perceptions of supernatural beings are to be found in many cultures, some of these descriptions go back thousands of years. The category that we describe here does not refer to:

Apparitions of humans – Angels as they have been described for example by the great Hebrew prophets are an entirely different order of beings than humans. They never were human beings.

Visions – they deal with form structures which are mostly personal and cultural specific, and not with the perception of concentrations of conscious subtle energies which is another kind of perception.

Guardian angels – this has to do with one’s own higher spirit which guards and protects us, and is an element of man’s own constitution and not an on its own standing being which is external to us.

Perceptions of beings within ourselves as in imagination or memory, who are internal to us, and not conscious beings which are external to us.

Idea patterns that are projected by the sub consciousness of the perceiver in an ideoplastic environment.

There are different levels of existence as for example been described within neo-platonic philosophy. While these different levels manifest themselves as psychological levels within a human, they are not only psychological structures which are individual and subjective. But also collective objective worlds. While humans take part in this different levels of existence, the direct visual perception of these different ontological worlds and its energetic processes is normally not available.
When humans get access to higher levels of consciousness, as is the case with mystics, prophets, seers, then the subtle energies, the higher worlds and their inhabitants become visible. These supernatural beings become visible as concentrations of subtle energies, objects in an ontological higher world. The way they are perceived is not as a vision, but by directly perceiving these light beings.

Some of the Hebrew prophets like the prophets Isaiah, Ezekiel and Daniel gave some elaborate descriptions of them.

Hierarchical organization
The Catholic Encyclopaedia tells us the following: “The treatise “De Coelesti Hierarchia”, which is ascribed to St. Denis the Areopagite, and which exercised so strong an influence upon the Scholastics, treats at great length of the hierarchies and orders of the angels. It is generally conceded that this work was not due to St. Denis, but must date some centuries later. Though the doctrine it contains regarding the choirs of angels has been received in the Church with extraordinary unanimity, no proposition touching the angelic hierarchies is binding on our faith. The following passages from St. Gregory the Great (Hom. 34, In Evang.) will give us a clear idea of the view of the Church’s doctors on the point:
We know on the authority of Scripture that there are nine orders of angels, viz., Angels, Archangels, Virtues, Powers, Principalities, Dominations, Throne, Cherubim and Seraphim. That there are Angels and Archangels nearly every page of the Bible tell us, and the books of the Prophets talk of Cherubim and Seraphim. St. Paul, too, writing to the Ephesians enumerates four orders when he says: ‘above all Principality, and Power, and Virtue, and Domination’; and again, writing to the Colossians he says: ‘whether Thrones, or Dominations, or Principalities, or Powers’. If we now join these two lists together we have five Orders, and adding Angels and Archangels, Cherubim and Seraphim, we find nine Orders of Angels.
St. Thomas (Summa Theologica I:108), following St. Denis (De Coelesti Hierarchia, vi, vii), divides the angels into three hierarchies each of which contains three orders. Their proximity to the Supreme Being serves as the basis of this division. In the first hierarchy he places the Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones; in the second, the Dominations, Virtues, and Powers; in the third, the Principalities, Archangels, and Angels.“
This hierarchical organisation corresponds with a twelve ontological levels model by which the lowest level is the physical world, and the levels two up to ten correspond to the angelic worlds. The two highest levels are the Divine worlds. ; {St. Paul tells us (Ephesians 1:21) that Christ is raised up “above all principality, and power, and virtue, and dominion”}; which indicates a higher level. The hierarchical organisation is based upon an ontological ranking. Next to this, there are the differences in spatial dimensions. The perception of these concentrations of conscious subtle energies leads to the seeing of what one calls angels or devas. They are perceived as just some tens of centimetres to hundreds of metres high. This gives an indication of their ontological level.

Epilogue
There are several philosophical views of which a great number postulate the existence of higher worlds or higher planes of existence. While monistic materialism denies other levels of existence, the following philosophical views allow for a reality beyond matter and implicate higher levels of existence.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
Substance dualism, the view found in the writings of Plato and Descartes that the universe is composed of two kinds of stuff, the physical and the stuff of soul, mind or consciousness.
Ontological pluralism: Pluralist philosophies include Plato’s Theory of Forms and Aristotle’s hylomorphic categories.
Hylomorphism a philosophical theory developed by Aristotle, who says that the intellect (nous), the ability to think, has no bodily organ .In fact, he says that it is not mixed with the body and suggests that it can exist apart from the body.
Psycho-physical parallelism: is usually associated with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a 17th-century German philosopher, scientist, and mathematician.
Double-aspect theory: Double-aspect theorists include: Baruch Spinoza, who believed that the Existence had two aspects, God and Nature, whereas most subsequent dual aspect theorists accept a duality of Mind and Matter. There is a dual-aspect interpretation of Immanuel Kant’s noumenon. Arthur Schopenhauer, who considered the fundamental aspects of reality to be Will and Representation. Gustav Fechner, Carl Gustav Jung, Wolfgang Pauli, John Polkinghorne, Thomas Nagel and David Chalmers who explores a double-aspect view of information (Wikipedia)
Synechism : Charles Sanders Peirce In an 1893 manuscript “Immortality in the Light of Synechism,” applied his doctrine of synechism to the question of the soul’s immortality in order to argue in the affirmative.
Objective idealism: Objective idealism accepts common sense Realism (the view that material objects exist) but rejects Naturalism (according to which the mind and spiritual values have emerged from material things), whereas subjective idealism denies that material objects exist independently of human perception and thus stands opposed to both realism and naturalism. Notable supporters: Plato, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Charles Sanders Peirce and Josiah Royce
Spiritualism (philosophy): The notion, shared by a wide variety of systems of thought, that there is an immaterial reality that cannot be perceived by the senses, as well as any systems of thought that assume a universal mind or cosmic forces lying beyond the reach of purely materialistic interpretations. Notable supporters: Plato, Aristotle, Henri Bergson, F. H. Bradley, René Descartes, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Josiah Royce.

To place the existence of angels in a modern world view is a not an easy task, possible fields of inquiry are presented:

– Cross-cultural evidence: This could be used to gather comparable data from different cultures in order to test hypotheses concerning the differences between cultural specific and universal, multicultural concepts.

– Consensus gentium: In many cultures there is a believe in the existence of angels. While that makes the question of their existence at least socially relevant, the unanimity of tradition, the existence of a ‘consensus gentium’ or agreement between all people (which was an ancient criterion of truth) is not an scientifically sound principle to prove the existence of phenomena, because widely upheld beliefs can be false. However, the cross-cultural data presented here can be a starting point for further investigation.

The question here is whether that which is referred to as angels or devas etc. is based on facts, and this question belongs to the cognitive group. The depiction of supernatural beings in mythology, folklore, literature, poetry, paintings and statues, belong to the aesthetic group which has its own validity claim, its own value as a form of art, but doesn’t prove factual existence.

– Theology: Postulates the existence of Angels and takes the witness of Scripture as absolute. Based on these premises it tries to construct a logical and coherent theory, but it doesn’t investigates its basic assumptions. While philosophy acknowledges logic, intuition and inspiration as sources of knowledge, theology also acknowledges revelation as a source of knowledge as well as communication with (a) supernatural entity(s), (f.e. angels). But the claims about the nature of the source of the revelation are difficult to substantiate.

– Ontological levels. The Neo-Platonists and many other philosophers developed theories about the different levels of reality.
ontological pluralism (philosophy),
the concept of heavens (religion),
out of the body experiences (empirical).
Bohm’s ontological interpretation of quantum theory we find a series of implicated orders (Theoretical physics)
If one postulates the existence of angels, this involves the existence of higher ontological levels as well. Any proof that higher ontological levels do exist would be relevant relating to the question of the existence of angels.

– Classical philosophical worldviews: Monistic materialism, which excludes higher ontological realities or beings, is the dominant worldview in the western world.
(However the majority of mathematicians and a great number of theoretical physicists are Platonists, which is a dualistic worldview, be it not necessary substance dualism) .There is a vast array of highly diversified philosophical views, which claim that mind and matter are two ontologically separate categories. Mind-body dualism claims that neither the mind nor matter can be reduced to each other in any way. Many of these philosophical views include higher ontological realities or beings
{Generally, any philosophical position, be it dualism, monism, atheism, theism, pantheism, idealism or any other, is compatible with spiritualism as long as it allows for a reality beyond matter (Encyclopædia Britannica)}

– Hylic pluralism: J. J. Poortman formulated the idea of a hylic pluralism of the plurality of matter, a model of the universe in which science and metaphysics are no longer contradictory. This vision was explained in his four volume work, “Vehicles of Consciousness.”
The plurality of matter, is relevant for our subject. In theology two points of view, concerning the concept of angels, are related to hylic pluralism:
1) angels are dimensionless, located in space but not extended, 2) angels have non-physical bodies, fields of subtle energy.
In reality the atman / monad of angels (their focus point of consciousness) is dimensionless, located in space but not extended, and their fields of subtle energy, are located in space and extended (if they are dimensionless points they cannot evolve, but if angels have non-physical bodies, fields of subtle energy, they can evolve).

– Worldviews / modern physics: The limits of a nineteenth century mechanistic worldview and logical positivism, which were at the heart of monistic materialism, were revealed by quantum theory and Gödel’s theorem. As indicated here above, the new worldview was less hostile to other approaches, which includes concepts of higher ontological realities.

– Mysticism and the perception of higher realities/ angels.
While the existence of angels are presumed within theology, within mysticism they are perceived.
Basically all the founders of religion, and other mystics claimed not only the existence of angels, but also being in contact with them.
So this isn’t the result of philosophical speculation, but direct perception, it was here where the concept of angels originated.
These were and are very private experiences that are normally not accessible to observation by others, and therefore these experiences are difficult to substantiate, but nevertheless they are the most direct way to obtain information about the subject.

– Life after death: The question if there is life after death, is also relevant for this subject. If it could be proved that the human spirit can life on after death in a non –physical world, then it would be a small step to accept that a non-human spirit can life in a non –physical world.

– Fine-tuning: It is especially the fine tuning of the universe that made a substantial number of scientists come to the conclusion that this is evidence for the existence of some form of intelligence capable of manipulating or designing the basic physics that governs the Universe.

“According to Aristotle, just as there is a First Mover (God), so, too, must there be spiritual secondary movers (Angels).” (Wikipedia)

The soul
Michael Egnor; a neurosurgeon and a professor in the Department of Pediatrics at Stony Brook University:
“…….the salient characteristics of the mind, such as intentionality, qualia, free will, incorrigibility, restricted access, continuity of self through time, and unity of consciousness (the ‘binding problem’) seem to be impossible to explain materialistically. Materialistic explanations for subjective mental states are not impossible merely because we lack experiments or evidence. Materialistic explanations for the mind are impossible within the framework of materialism itself, because mental properties are not physical properties. Nothing about matter as understood in our current scientific paradigm invokes subjective mental experience. The essential qualities on the mind are immaterial. Invocation of immaterial causation that incorporates subjectivity seems necessary for a satisfactory explanation of the mind.
Yet the 20th century has not been kind to materialist complacency. Quantum mechanics, in many of its interpretations, invokes an observer in order to collapse a waveform. Relativistic cosmology invokes creation ex-nihilo ……
But the 20th century has been very hard on materialism — creation of the universe ex-nihilo, the observer effect in quantum mechanics, the origin of life, the origin of biological information, the cause of the immaterial mind — all seem to belie materialist reduction”

Michael Egnor: The Evidence against Materialism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqHrpBPdtSI

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The immaterial mind, has traditionally been called the soul:
The soul, in many religious, philosophical and mythological traditions, is the incorporeal and, in many conceptions, immortal essence of a living thing.

There are a number of concepts which are related to the idea of a soul, and give some supporting evidence for the existence of the soul:

– Near death experiences: Together with out of the body experiences give strong supporting evidence that there is a “soul”. Direct phenomenological data.

– Silver cord: If astral projectors descriptions of a “silver cord” which united the “double” to the body should prove to be the actual state of affairs, then these “doubles” would be sights of something objectively present at the place where they are perceived.”

– Reincarnation: Ian Stevenson’s research gives strong supporting evidence for a spiritual part of a human being that is separate from the physical body.

– Qualia: While qualia are related to physical brain-states, they are not identical to brain states. Qualia are non-physical. They are directly or immediately apprehensible by the soul which is distinct from the body.

– Telepathy: Telepathy is considered to be the normal means by which the soul communicates in the afterlife. The accumulated Ganzfeld data, a.k.a. meta-analysis, since 1974-2010 are highly statistically significant and therefore, strong evidence for the existence of Telepathy.

– Clairvoyance: Clairvoyance is considered to be the normal means by which the soul perceives visually its surroundings in the afterlife.

– The aura: The existence of a subtle, non-physical energy field that surrounds and penetrate the physical body. This subtle, non-physical energy field constitutes the soul.

– The chakra’s: Points where the soul interacts with the body.

– Mind-body problem: This is still the most central problem in philosophy. The classic question of how is the soul connected with the body.

– Difference between human and artificial intelligence: If humans have a soul, than artificial intelligence /computers will lack some qualities which humans have which do belong to the soul, such as consciousness and understanding.

Life after death
It is easy to see that if there is no life after death, then there is no universal justice. The adversity of good people and the prosperity of the wicked (good people suffer and evil people prosper), shows a fundamental injustice in the physical world.
The concept of life after death in the Greek culture started in the axial period, while before ±700BC one finds very little more than some vague stories of Hades. A post-mortem persistence, a sort of shadowy spectral half existence beyond death.
It’s quite remarkable that in the old testament (written ±1300BC → 480BC) there is almost nothing written that refers to a life after death.

Modern academic research in the western world related to life after death, started ±1875. There were several fields of inquiry:

– Near death experiences: Together with out of the body experiences usually seen as the strongest supporting evidence that there is life after death. Direct phenomenological data.

– Apparitions: Many of the apparitions are collectively perceived, that is to say by two persons or more at the same time, and the apparition is seen according to the position one has in space, one sees the front of the face, the other the profile, which indicates an objective occurrence.

– Reincarnation research: Ian Stevenson’s research gives strong supporting evidence for reincarnation. Furthermore while reincarnation doesn’t solve the problem of the existence of evil, it solves the problem of justice: if humans reincarnate, let’s say tens or hundreds of times, than the imbalance between the quality of a person’s life compared to others will be seen over all this incarnations, on average the same.

– Telepathy: Telepathy is considered to be the normal means of communication in the afterlife.

– Clairvoyance: Clairvoyance is considered to be the normal means of visual perception in the afterlife.

 The aura: The existence of a subtle, non-physical energy field that surrounds and penetrate the physical body, and is the carrier of consciousness after death.

– Consciousness: A state of awareness which not identical to brain states. Consciousness is non-physical.
Erwin Schrödinger:“Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.”
As quoted in The Observer (11 January 1931); also in Psychic Research (1931), Vol. 25, p. 91.
These fields of inquiry on their own can’t be taken as evidence for the life after death, but in conjunction, the overall data provides powerful supportive evidence.

Miracles
“Amazing fine tuning occurs in the laws that make this [complexity] possible. Realization of the complexity of what is accomplished makes it very difficult not to use the word ‘miraculous’ without taking a stand as to the ontological status of the word.”
–George Ellis, the South African astrophysicist who was a collaborator on the Hawking-Penrose singularity theorems (regarding the Big Bang theory of the creation of the universe).

The producing of bread and fishes by Christ is a miracle because it is a creation out of nothing and as such “a violation of the laws of nature,” which is impossible according to materialists. In the big bang all matter in the universe, (including “the laws of nature,”) was created out of nothing. People remarked that if in biblical times miracles did happen, why they don’t happen in modern times?
The fine-tuning one finds in: cosmology, nucleosynthesis, chemistry, biology, DNA and in many other fields does seem to be now beyond the “laws of nature,” and by many scientists described as miraculous. Miracles can be explained as an interaction of a higher ontological level upon the physical world.
The idea is that this done by God itself, or by some Intelligent Agent superior to Man, or by a force from a higher ontological level.

Paradoxes and antinomies
Many of the religious stories or there interpretations contain inconsistencies or illogical statements or conclusions. For example the concept of “Original sin”.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: “Original sin, also called ancestral sin, is the Christian doctrine of humanity’s state of sin resulting from the fall of man, stemming from Adam’s rebellion in Eden. This condition has been characterized in many ways, ranging from something as insignificant as a slight deficiency, or a tendency toward sin yet without collective guilt, referred to as a “sin nature”, to something as drastic as total depravity or automatic guilt of all humans through collective guilt.”

This concept goes back to the paradise story. In this paragraph I will argue that the paradise story is actually about the descend of spirit and soul into a physical body.
This means that the interpretation of the paradise story as the basis for a culturally deeply engrained cultural belief about ‘original sin’ is wrong. It is not about a fundamental flaw by man but a leap into the physical world, necessary to activate subtle energies on levels 11 and 12 and making the Supramentalisation and Divinisation possible.

In this story Adan and Eve eat from a forbidden fruit and are expelled from paradise and become mortal, resulting in the fall of man. The traditional interpretation is that this led to evil, sin, suffering and mortality and is the main reason why people end up in hell.
If one takes this story literally, then this means the end of the theodicy. If two people eating from a fruit thousands of years ago, caused the damnation of humanity for all time, then God is by any standard neither just nor good.

However this story is obviously a mythological creation story in the face of an overwhelming amount of evidence pointing to an evolutionary history of man. The Garden of Eden symbolizes a transcendental reality where the soul and the spirit exist. It does not relate to a physical world, but represents a higher non-physical subtle reality. Both Christ and St. Paul use the word ‘paradise’ to refer to a supernatural world.

15 The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. 16 And the LORD God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; 17 but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.”

Here one finds for the first time the concept of immortality. If you eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil then you become mortal. From which follows the conclusion that one isn’t mortal, as long as one does not eat of this tree. This immortality proves that it is not a physical existence which is here described, because then, by definition, one is mortal.
But a descend from the higher ontological world into the physical world is necessary toward the ultimate goal of the Kosmos: the Divinisation.

18 The LORD God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.”19 Now the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. 20 So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds in the sky and all the wild animals. But for Adam no suitable helper was found.

Here we find the name “Adam”, who is according to the kabbalah the heavenly man, which portrays the divine in man: the divine spirit, the Atman, the monad, the highest aspect of the human being. According to the Kabbalah, Adam was clothed with light and not yet with meat, here therefore he is not considered to be physically.

21 So the LORD God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man’s ribs and then closed up the place with flesh. 22 Then the LORD God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man.23 The man said, “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called ‘woman,’ for she was taken out of man.”

From a higher aspect, the spirit, the monad (personified as Adam), now another aspect, the soul (personified as Eve) was created.

24 That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh. 25 Adam and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.

When the spirit is united with the soul, it leaves its origin, the divine. That they were both naked refers to the state were the spirit and soul are not being “clothed” with a physical body.

Genesis 3

The Fall
3 Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?” 2 The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, 3 but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.” 4 “You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. 5 “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” 6 When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. 7 Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.

The eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, symbolizes the pursuit of knowledge and further development, for which it is necessary that a physical body is been taken on. And by that one becomes mortal. The spirit and the soul become aware of the absence of a physical body.

8 Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the LORD God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the LORD God among the trees of the garden. 9 But the LORD God called to the man, “Where are you?” 10 He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.” 11 And he said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?” 12 The man said, “The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.” 13 Then the LORD God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”

The soul (Eve) draws the spirit (Adam) along toward materialization. Adam and Eve symbolize two aspects of one person. The snake symbolizes instinctive desire.

14 So the LORD God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this, “Cursed are you above all livestock and all wild animals! You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life. 15 And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.” 16 To the woman he said, “I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labour you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.” 17 To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’ “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life. 18 It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. 19 By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.” 20 Adam named his wife Eve, because she would become the mother of all the living.

When the spirit and the soul take on a physical body, they give birth to wishes and desires and that brings conflicts with it.

21 The LORD God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them. 22 And the LORD God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” 23 So the LORD God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. 24 After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.

The moment on which God, Adam and Eve clothes with garments of skin, indicates that they obtain a physical body.
This is also to be found in philosopher J.J.Poortman’s book Vehicles of consciousness: “……in the anthropological context, the text in Genesis in which we are told that ”the Lord made for Adam and for his wife garments of skin, and clothed them”(Gen. 3. 21). It is obvious that these were a primitive kind of ordinary garment of the type that the Neanderthal man is often depicted as wearing, made of skins of animals…..a “last garment” of man has been perceived by a number of writers in these “garments of skins”, in other words, man’s ordinary body as a whole (the skin was something that he had in common with the animals) in contrast to other more subtle bodies or garments. In this, the point of departure was the idea of a descent through the spheres, in which case the whole interpretation is clearly hylic pluralistic”.
(Hylic Pluralism, from “hyle” or “matter”, is the philosophical view accepting a plurality within matter, i.e. subdivisions conceived as a multiplicity of layers of matter, from ordinary (coarse) to finer, subtle strata of decreasing density).

That Adam and Eve are banished from the Garden of Eden symbolises that the spirit and the soul leaving a higher ontological world and descend into the physical world. When the spirit and the soul take on a physical body they cannot go back.
Their inability to go back is symbolised by the cherubim with a flaming sword.

The fall of man symbolises the spirit and the soul that incarnate in a human body, by which they become mortal.

Mystery and reason
Mystery is a spiritual truth that is incomprehensible to reason and knowable only through divine revelation.
There are several degrees:
– Intuition is a phenomenon of the mind, the ability to acquire knowledge without inference or the use of reason.
– Inspiration refers to an burst of creativity in a literary, musical, or other artistic endeavour.
– Revelation is the revealing or disclosing of some form of truth or knowledge through communication with a deity or another supernatural entity or entities.
– Mystic union with the Absolute, the Infinite, or God.
– Supreme identity, one with the Absolute, the Infinite.

Prayer / communication with the Divine
Albert Einstein: ”Though I have asserted above that in truth a legitimate conflict between religion and science cannot exist, I must nevertheless qualify this assertion once again on an essential point, with reference to the actual content of historical religions. This qualification has to do with the concept of God. During the youthful period of mankind’s spiritual evolution human fantasy created gods in man’s own image, who, by the operations of their will were supposed to determine, or at any rate to influence, the phenomenal world. Man sought to alter the disposition of these gods in his own favour by means of magic and prayer. The idea of God in the religions taught at present is a sublimation of that old concept of the gods. Its anthropomorphic character is shown, for instance, by the fact that men appeal to the Divine Being in prayers and plead for the fulfillment of their wishes.
Nobody, certainly, will deny that the idea of the existence of an omnipotent, just, and omni beneficent personal God is able to accord man solace, help, and guidance; also, by virtue of its simplicity it is accessible to the most undeveloped mind. But, on the other hand, there are decisive weaknesses attached to this idea in itself, which have been painfully felt since the beginning of history.” (Albert Einstein, 1941)

Prayer: God is seen as transcendent, meaning that he is outside space and outside time, but at the same time listening to prayer and reacting to the actions of his creatures (anthropocentric).
This leads in many cases to a very remarkable and very egocentric interpretation of the concept prayer, one prays in most cases for fulfilment of some personal and usually (but certainly not always) egocentric wish and this transcendent Kosmic force is supposed to intervene on one’s behalf. This is a rather primitive interpretation of the concept of prayer.
Or some people pray for world peace and after that, they support and vote for politicians or political parties who are willing to go to war, which isn’t some theoretical abstraction, but an international armed and organised conflict which is characterised by extreme aggression, economic disintegration, irrationality, social disruption and the killing of a great number of humans.

There are several levels of prayer:
1.Naïve prayer — mechanical, repetitive
2.Magical prayer — connected to magical thinking
3.Selfish prayer — prays for egocentric aims
4.Mythical prayer — mythical image of God
5.Compassionate prayer — prays for others
6.Communion prayer — non-verbal prayer
7.Meditative prayer — non-conceptual prayer
8.Spiritual prayer — contact prayer, deep insights.
9.Mystical prayer — contact prayer, deep inspiration
10.Kosmic prayer — contact with kosmic force, deep revelation
11.Union prayer — union with kosmic force
12.Oneness prayer — supreme identity

The effectiveness of prayer
There are several studies about the effectiveness of prayer, but the results remains inconclusive.

I once spoke in Amsterdam with a writer who wrote a book about the way people start relationships via modern forms of electronic media, the internet, Facebook and so on. For his book he interviewed over a hundred people. I asked him whether there was anything in that research that surprised him. He said:” Well I didn’t have a clear definition of “romantic” so I asked the people I interviewed if they say themselves as romantic (about 70 % said yes) and then asked what they meant by that term.” He subsequently collected the responses and analysing them to see some common factor, some definition of the word “romantic”. He said: “The general answer was: I want things, and I want someone who gives me those things.” He said that it shocked him deeply, that something which was seen as unselfish, was so deeply egocentric. One could say this more or less is the same about prayer.

The method of prayer however has a working principle which can be explained. When one transcends the mental/intellectual processes, one can enter into a stillness of mind (level 8) in which one can have intuitions/deep insights that have created science, mathematics, logic and philosophy. On a higher level (9) this stillness deepens in which one can receive inspiration, which is generated by a contact with a kosmic force. This is at the heart of all great art.
On a still higher level (10) one finds revelation. The meaning of prayer is to concentrate on one image with such an intensity that all other images disappear.
At the next level one finally lets go this last image and one enters at the level of union (11) with the divine.
This doesn’t mean that the divine is in a verbal communication with a human. In a union prayer one comes in contact with this transcendent force, not because this transcendent force reacts to a prayer but because it is always there and one just has to make contact with it. And this doesn’t fulfil ones wishes but will transform the way one is functioning.
At level (12) there is no longer a union between two elements but just oneness, supreme identity.

“The gift of mental power comes from God, Divine Being, and if we concentrate our minds on that truth, we become in tune with this great power.”–Nikola Tesla, the inventor and futurist scientist known for numerous inventions, but best known for his contributions to the design of the modern alternating current (AC) electrical supply system and the radio.

Level-specific intervention
If one accepts the data of fine-tuning then it seems clear that some transcendental force is involved in this.
This would include: The Big Bang, cosmology, nucleosynthesis, planetary systems (The rare earth hypothesis), the constants of nature, chemistry, biology, the cells, DNA and so on. More than 200 forms of fine-tuning have been discovered. These have one thing in common, they are all collective systems on a grand scale and over a great time span. But how about social structures, It would appear as if there is no fine-tuning directed by the prime mover or the secondary movers if you look for example at the existence of wars? However it is possible that there is an underlying process which is working on social structures, processes.
Something one could call “Level-specific intervention”, for example:

{Definition: Point of view regarding to war, an international armed and organised conflict which is characterised by extreme aggression, economic disintegration, irrationality, social disruption and the killing of a great number of humans}.

Here one sees a developmental sequence regarding to war. There are many of these developmental sequences which all have in common that they have the same developmental levels. These developments are collectively activated by subtle energies from higher ontological levels (secondary movers) and guided from a transcendent source (primary mover).

This level-specific intervention is a kosmic teleological process.

Timelessness and spacelessness and evolutionary processes
The timelessness as it is presented in mystical literature could not been placed in a Newtonian world view. With the arrival of the relativity theory, quantum mechanics and the Big Bang Cosmology this all changed:

Albert Einstein:”Physical objects are not in space, but these objects are spatially extended (as fields). In this way the concept ’empty space’ loses its meaning. … The field thus becomes an irreducible element of physical description, irreducible in the same sense as the concept of matter (particles) in the theory of Newton. … The physical reality of space is represented by a field whose components are continuous functions of four independent variables – the co-ordinates of space and time. Since the theory of general relativity implies the representation of physical reality by a continuous field, the concept of particles or material points cannot play a fundamental part, nor can the concept of motion. The particle can only appear as a limited region in space in which the field strength or the energy density are particularly high.” (Albert Einstein, 1950).

“When forced to summarize the general theory of relativity in one sentence:
Time and space and gravitation have no separate existence from matter.” (Albert Einstein)

The evolutionary process which is a process in time is generated from a source that transcends space and time, because in Timelessness and spacelessness, evolutionary development is impossible.

Macro management and Micro management
If one accepts that there is a Kosmic force, an intelligent creator (usually identified as God) that was involved not only in the creation of the world, but is also involved in maintaining the world, than the question is in what way? What is the level and detail of its involvement?
The involvement of God with the creation of the world can be supported by seeing God as the first cause that started the Big Bang (deism). But does this involvement mean maintaining creation (theism)? The fine-tuning shows that this involvement didn’t stop with the Big Bang for the simple reason that biological development started close to ten billion years after the Big Bang. (The earliest evidence for life on Earth comes from fossilized mats of cyanobacteria called stromatolites in Australia that are about 3.4 billion years old. Ancient as their origins are, these bacteria (which are still around today) are already biologically complex— they have cell walls protecting their protein-producing DNA, so scientists think life must have begun much earlier, perhaps as early as 3.8 billion years ago. But despite knowing approximately when life first appeared on Earth, scientists are still far from answering how it appeared. (author not given)

If there is fine-tuning of biological systems, which is obvious the case, then there must be something that does this fine-tuning and intervenes in the course of time.

According to Aristotle, there is a First Mover (God), and there must be spiritual secondary movers as well (angels). And according to Alfred Russel Wallace (a British humanist, naturalist, geographer, and social critic) angels where steering evolution.

Wallace concluded: “I now uphold the doctrine that not man alone, but the whole World of Life, in almost all its varied manifestations, leads us to the same conclusion—that to afford any rational explanation of its phenomena, we require to postulate the continuous action and guidance of higher intelligences; and further, that these have probably been working towards a single end, the development of intellectual, moral, and spiritual beings…”. Alfred Russel Wallace’s Theory of Intelligent Evolution, 113-14.

The general idea is that the creation of the Big Bang and the creation of the higher ontological worlds has been done by the First Mover (God), And that the fine-tuning has been done by secondary movers (angels).

That leaves us with the question: “If there is an interfering transcendental force or forces, what’s the level and detail of involvement?” The level of fine-tuning give direct insight in the level and detail of this involvement. Six levels of fine-tuning can be distinguished:

1.Cosmological fine-tuning
The Big Bang →

2.Stellar nucleosynthesis
Fred Hoyle

3.Geological fine-tuning
The rare earth hypothesis

4.Chemical fine-tuning
The fitness of the environment: Henderson

5.Biological fine-tuning
The complexity of D.N.A.

6.Sociological fine-tuning
Aesthetics, Cognition, Sociality, Morality, Spirituality

While the first 5 groups seem to be optimally fine-tuned, this is not the case for the 6.th group, the sociological group.
Social conflicts such as war, persecutions and atrocities, social inequality, wage inequality, gender inequality, racial inequality, health care disparities, and many more conflicts show that this is far from optimal.
So rephrasing the question: “Is the interfering of a transcendental force or forces (the fine-tuning) “macro management or micromanagement?” The first 5 groups deal with collective biological, chemical, geological, stellar, or even cosmic processes on a grand scale and can be seen as “macro-management”. While the fine-tuning deals with extremely balanced and delicate forces and elements, it is still macro- management because within it a large evolutionary variety is possible and visible.

The fine-tuning on a sociological level is an ontological fine-tuning in which different sequential developmental phases are activated. This involves a development in several distinct groups of development, each with a number of developmental lines. These are represented in more than a hundred individual developmental lines (Click here for more details) and more than a hundred collective developmental lines (Click here for more details). Both are depicted, represented graphically on this website.
Each of these developmental lines have a number of very distinct developmental levels which are activated one by one in a sequential manner. These are psychological, sociological, cultural, economic, technological etc. developmental sequences.
Within theoretical physics one finds a description of the different levels of existence from theoretical physicist David Bohm who developed an ontological interpretation of quantum mechanics.
Bohm put forward a theory of an explicate order (the physical mater) and a series of implicate orders (each consisting of a different subtle non-physical matter).
The Sociological fine-tuning is a participatory fine-tuning in which human should take part and which develops in time through several distinct stages.

While the fine-tuning deals with minute details, it is still Macro management.

The presence of an interfering transcendental force or forces this doesn’t mean that they are in ultimate complete control over events which they micromanages. The collective developmental process will need an activation from the highest ontological level with feedback loops all the way dawn to the physical world the so called Supramentalisation.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
“Teilhard de Chardin was a proponent of orthogenesis, the idea that evolution occurs in a directional, goal driven way, a teleological view of evolution. However, his view did not deny the capacity of evolutionary processes to explain complexity, and thus differs from Intelligent Design. To Teilhard, evolution unfolded from cell to organism to planet to solar system and finally to whole universe.
Omega point
According to Teilhard and Russian scholar and biologist Vladimir Vernadsky (author of The Geosphere (1924) and The Biosphere (1926)), the earth is in a transformative process, metamorphosing from the biosphere into the noosphere. Teilhard saw evolution as progressing through the physical and biological dimensions, with increasing complexity of species, with the appearance of human beings as the final step in that phase. Human beings, having the faculty not only of consciousness but an awareness of being conscious, then proceed to develop the mental realm of thought, the noosphere.
The next step for Teilhard was the socialization of humankind, in which our social development would lead us into one unified society. The culmination of evolution is the Omega point, a term Teilhard invented to describe the ultimate maximum level of complexity-consciousness, considered by him the aim towards which consciousness evolves. Rather than divinity being found “in the heavens,” he held that evolution was a process converging toward a “final unity,” identical with the Eschaton and with God. Thus, he saw the role of Christ in his Second Coming as initiating this ultimate convergence.”

Design (specified complexity)/ intentionality
Oxford English Dictionary, Design: “Argument from design n. Theol. an argument for the existence of an intelligent creator (usually identified as God) based on perceived evidence of deliberate design in the natural or physical world”.

“A life-giving factor lies at the centre of the whole machinery and design of the world.”
– John Wheeler (American physicist) Wheeler, John A. “Foreword,” in The Anthropic Cosmological Principle by John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler. (Oxford, U. K.: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. vii.

“It is, for example, impossible for evolution to account for the fact than one single cell can carry more data than all the volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica put together.”, “It now seems to me that the findings of more than fifty years of DNA research have provided materials for a new and enormously powerful argument to design.”
-Anthony Flew Professor of Philosophy, former atheist, author, and debater.

“Astronomy leads us to a unique event, a universe which was created out of nothing, and delicately balanced to provide exactly the conditions required to support life. In the absence of an absurdly improbable accident, the observations of modern science seem to suggest an underlying, one might say, supernatural plan.”
–Arno Penzias, winner of the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics.

“Here is the cosmological proof of the existence of God – the design argument of Paley – updated and refurbished. The fine tuning of the universe provides prima facie evidence of deistic design. Take your choice: blind chance that requires multitudes of universes or design that requires only one…. Many scientists, when they admit their views, incline toward the teleological or design argument.”
–Cosmologist and astronomer Edward Robert Harrison.

Then, last week, American scientists announced the discovery of radiation patterns in space that may mark the beginning of time itself. Said astrophysicist George Smoot, leader of the research team: “If you’re religious, it’s like looking at God. The order is so beautiful and the symmetry so beautiful that you think there is some design behind it.”

“Whatever caused the rapid expansion of the universe following the Big Bang–the same forces caused tiny ripples. Because if you try to do something too fast, you shake a little. God might be the designer. “
–Maclean’s, May 4, 1992 (the two above quotes are by astrophysicist and cosmologist George Smoot).

“There is for me powerful evidence that there is something going on behind it all. . . It seems as though somebody has fine-tuned nature’s numbers to make the Universe. . . The impression of design is overwhelming.”
–Physicist Paul Davies.

Optimal design or suboptimal design
“Proponents of intelligent design creationism, such as William A. Dembski, question the philosophical assumptions made by critics with regard to what a designer would or would not do. Dembski claims that such arguments are not merely beyond the purview of science: often they are tacitly or overtly theological while failing to provide a serious analysis of the hypothetical objective’s relative merit. Some critics, such as Stephen Jay Gould suggest that any purported ‘cosmic’ designer would only produce optimal designs, while there are numerous biological criticisms to demonstrate that such an ideal is manifestly untenable. Against these ideas, Dembski characterizes both Dawkins’ and Gould’s argument as a rhetorical . He suggests a principle of constrained optimization more realistically describes the best any designer could hope to achieve:
Not knowing the objectives of the designer, Gould was in no position to say whether the designer proposed a faulty compromise among those objectives… In criticizing design, biologists tend to place a premium on functionalities of individual organisms and see design as optimal to the degree that those individual functionalities are maximized. But higher-order designs of entire ecosystems might require lower-order designs of individual organisms to fall short of maximal function.” (Wikipedia)
— William A. Dembski, The Design Revolution: Answering the Toughest Questions About Intelligent Design

Constrained Optimization: Most (if not all) decisions are the result of an optimization problem subject to one or a series of constraints

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
“In mathematical optimization, constrained optimization (in some contexts called constraint optimization) is the process of optimizing an objective function with respect to some variables in the presence of constraints on those variables. The objective function is either a cost function or energy function which is to be minimized, or a reward function or utility function, which is to be maximized. Constraints can be either hard constraints which set conditions for the variables that are required to be satisfied, or soft constraints which have some variable values that are penalized in the objective function if, and based on the extent that, the conditions on the variables are not satisfied.”

A wasteful process?
One of the questions asked is that if the universe was designed, why is it such a wasteful process. It’s HUGE and most of it is empty space devoid of life. William Lane Craig: “But it’s one of the insights of the fine-tuning argument that the universe must in fact be very large, since the heavy elements like carbon of which our bodies are made are synthesized in the interior of stars and then distributed throughout the cosmos by supernovae explosions. But it takes billions of years for the stars to go through such a process, and all the time the universe is expanding. So the size of the universe is a function of its age, and that is a pre-condition of our very existence. So all that empty space is not at all a waste.”
For example a galaxy consists of about 10¹¹ stars, and the universe consists of about 10¹¹ galaxies, so why not just create only one galaxy instead of
10¹¹  galaxies? The answer is that this would have resulted in the universe’s recollapse long ago, long before life could develop.
And “Even on earth the process of life was very wasteful. The majority of species have gone extinct.” The extinct creatures that existed during those times were part of the eco-system that made the planet flourish, and many of them, even insects, had a crucial role in the overall eco-system.

William Lane Craig: “The implicit assumption seems to be that God wouldn’t create such extravagant waste. God is like a super-efficient engineer who wouldn’t engage in such waste. But you’ve got to be really careful about creating God in your own image and projecting your values onto Him. As I said to Quentin Smith, who originally raised the efficiency objection, God may be more like an artist than like an engineer, someone who delights in the extravagance of His creation, in far-flung, undiscovered galaxies, in flowers that bloom unseen on a remote mountain hillside, in beautiful shells lying in the ocean’s unexplored depths. I see no reason at all to think that God should be like the engineer rather than the artist. Efficiency, as I said, is a value only to someone with limited resources or limited time, or both. But God has unlimited time and resources, so why shouldn’t He be extravagant? Granted that your engineer would marshal his time and resources carefully; but suppose God isn’t (just) an engineer? Why would God waste all this space or waste this and waste that? the concept of waste is only applicable to someone who has limited resources and therefore needs to marshal those resources in an efficient way. But for a being like God who has unlimited resources, really the whole concept of waste as such doesn’t really apply. It is irrelevant.”

It is strange that some who use the argument of wastefulness, nevertheless accept the multiverse hypothesis.

The data relating to fine tuning refer to the precise balance of cosmological constants that allow the observable universe to exist as it does. These constants include the speed of light, the rate of expansion of the universe, the force of gravity, the nuclear strong force, the electro-weak force, and many other parameters of the observable universe. It is claimed that these constants exist in such a state of precise equilibrium that any variation to their values would have resulted in a drastically different universe. The fine tuning argument states that these values occurring in such a precise state by mere chance is extremely improbable, and that there must have been a creator to fine tune these values in order for our universe to exist as it does and for life to exist on Earth.
So the enormous scale of the universe is not wasteful but necessary.

Creation, fine-tuning, platonic forms and symmetries
If there is fine-tuning, then the question is how is it done? The physical structures that are created are laid down, structured, organised and supported by non-physical matrices, formative structures. With a certain mystical development one is able to visually observe these structures of non-physical force lines in a higher ontological space. They are generally seen as lines of light. These structures are on different spatial scale, from subatomic to cosmological scale.
They are reminiscent of platonic forms, be it evolving, and of multiple symmetries.
Many of them are structured by whom Aristoteles called “secondary movers”.

Werner Heisenberg theoretical physicist: “We will have to abandon the philosophy of Democritus and the concept of elementary particles. We should accept instead the concept of elementary symmetries.”
Quoted in E Maor, To infinity and beyond (Princeton 1991).

Werner Heisenberg: ”I think that modern physics has definitely decided in favour of Plato. In fact the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas which can be expressed unambiguously only in mathematical language.” Werner Heisenberg: Physics and Philosophy.
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The Theodicy

As a response to the problem of evil, a theodicy is distinct from a defence. A defence attempts to demonstrate that the occurrence of evil does not contradict God’s existence, but it does not propose that rational beings are able to understand why God permits evil. A theodicy seeks to show that it is reasonable to believe in God despite evidence of evil in the world and offers a framework which can account for why evil exists. A theodicy is often based on a prior natural theology, which attempts to prove the existence of God, and seeks to demonstrate that God’s existence remains probable after the problem of evil is posed by giving a justification for God’s permitting evil to happen. Defences propose solutions to the logical problem of evil, while theodicies attempt to answer the evidential problem.
Plantinga writes: “A defense must be an explanation that is likely to be true. But if this is right, how does a defense differ from a theodicy? The answer is that while a theodicy must specify reasons that would suffice to justify an omnipotent and omniscient being in allowing all of the evils found in the world, a defense need merely show that it is likely that there are reasons which would justify an omnipotent and omniscient being in not preventing the evils that we find in the world, even if we do not know what they are. A defense differs from a theodicy, then, in that a defense attempts to show only that some God-justifying reasons probably exist; it does not attempt to specify what they are.”
(From: The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Offering a theodicy is specifying properties that, it is claimed, would serve to justify God in allowing evils, rather than attempting to show that there are some unspecified properties that would do this.
To solve the theodicy the first question is, whether there is a transcendent Kosmic force (usually identified as God). The idea that the order in the natural world has a transcendental origin, a kind of intelligence that had organised the universe.

There are several indicators that there is such a transcendental force:

—-The phenomenological data: The varieties of mystical experiences which have to do with a direct contact with a transcendent force.

—-The data of artistic creativity: The evidence based upon the phenomenological psychological way by introspection deals with qualia, consciousness, intuition, inspiration and revelation which cannot be explained by physical factors. This points in the direction of a transcendent reality and ultimately to a the existence of a transcendent kosmic force.

—-The fine-tuning of the Big Bang, Roger Penrose’s calculation is that the probability of the occurrence of a universe in which life can form is at least 10 to the power of 123 to 1 {1:1010(123)}.

—-The cosmological fine-tuning of the constants of nature .

—-The fine-tuning of the solar system, Roger Penrose of Oxford University has calculated that the odds of our solar system’s being formed instantly by the random collision of particles is about 1:1010(60).

—-The fine-tuning of stellar nucleosynthesis, as mentioned before: “The second of Hoyle’s nucleosynthesis papers also introduced an interesting use of the anthropic principle, which was not then known by that name. In trying to work out the routes of stellar nucleosynthesis, Hoyle calculated that one particular nuclear reaction, the triple-alpha process, which generates carbon from helium, would require the carbon nucleus to have a very specific resonance energy and spin for it to work. The large amount of carbon in the Universe, which makes it possible for carbon-based life-forms of any kind to exist, demonstrated to Hoyle that this nuclear reaction must work. Based on this notion, Hoyle therefore predicted the values of the energy, the nuclear spin and the parity of the compound state in the carbon nucleus formed by three alpha particles, which was later borne out by experiment. This energy level, while needed to produce carbon in large quantities, was statistically very unlikely to fall where it does in the scheme of carbon energy levels.” (Wikipedia)

Hoyle later wrote: “Would you not say to yourself, “Some super-calculating intellect must have designed the properties of the carbon atom, otherwise the chance of my finding such an atom through the blind forces of nature would be utterly minuscule. A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.”
— Fred Hoyle, “The Universe: Past and Present Reflections.” Engineering and Science, November, 1981. pp. 8–12.

—-The fine-tuning of the planetary systems, the rare earth hypothesis: “In planetary astronomy and astrobiology, the Rare Earth hypothesis argues that the emergence of complex multicellular life on Earth (and, subsequently, intelligence) required an improbable combination of astrophysical and geological events and circumstances. The hypothesis argues that complex extra-terrestrial life is a very improbable phenomenon and likely to be extremely rare. The term “Rare Earth” originates from Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe (2000), a book by Peter Ward, a geologist and paleontologist, and Donald E. Brownlee, an astronomer and astrobiologist, both faculty members at the University of Washington. The Earth’s requirements for complex life are
1 The right location in the right kind of galaxy
2 Orbiting at the right distance from the right type of star
3 With the right arrangement of planets
4 A continuously stable orbit
5 A terrestrial planet of the right size
6 With plate tectonics
7 A large moon
8 An evolutionary trigger for complex life
9 The right time in evolution”
(Wikipedia)

—-The fine-tuning of chemistry: “Once we see, however, that the probability of life originating at random is so utterly miniscule as to make it absurd, it becomes sensible to think that the favourable properties of physics on which life depends are in every respect deliberate … . It is therefore almost inevitable that our own measure of intelligence must reflect … higher intelligences … even to the limit of God … such a theory is so obvious that one wonders why it is not widely accepted as being self-evident. The reasons are psychological rather than scientific.” Fred Hoyle.

—-The fine-tuning of biology: “Life cannot have had a random beginning … The trouble is that there are about two thousand enzymes, and the chance of obtaining them all in a random trial is only one part in 1040,000, (10 to the power of 40.000 to 1) an outrageously small probability that could not be faced even if the whole universe consisted of organic soup”. Fred Hoyle.

—-The fine-tuning of the cells, the extraordinary complexity of the cell with its intracellular molecular nanotechnology

—-The fine-tuning of DNA
As mentioned before: Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D., the director of the Human Genome Project: “As the director of the Human Genome Project, I have led a consortium of scientists to read out the 3.1 billion letters of the human genome, our own DNA instruction book. As a believer, I see DNA, the information molecule of all living things, as God’s language, and the elegance and complexity of our own bodies and the rest of nature as a reflection of God’s plan”.

These data cannot be explained by naturalistic/materialistic principles, and give evidence for a the existence of, and one could even say mathematical evidence of a transcendent kosmic force which interferes directly or indirectly with the world.
The next question is, if there is a transcendent Kosmic force (usually identified as God) how to resolve the evidential problem of evil by reconciling the traditional divine characteristics of omnibenevolence, omnipotence, and omniscience, in either their absolute or relative form, with the occurrence of evil or suffering in the world.
There are logical reasons to state that if God is omnibenevolence, omnipotence, and omniscience, then this must be in a relative form.

The concept of evil
There can be moral reasons that a God who is omnibenevolence, omnipotence, and omniscience, nevertheless permits evil to exist when that was necessary to achieve a greater good, or to avoid a greater evil.

According to Plantinga’s Free Will Defense, there is evil and suffering in this world because people do immoral things. People deserve the blame for the bad things that happen—not God. Plantinga writes:

“The essential point of the Free Will Defense is that the creation of a world containing moral good is a cooperative venture; it requires the uncoerced concurrence of significantly free creatures. But then the actualization of a world containing moral good is not up to God alone; it also depends upon what the significantly free creatures would do.
(From: The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

Natural disasters
The theodicy deals with the question if there is a God why is there evil? In case of natural evil the data here above seems to indicate that most of what we call natural evil in this world, is absolutely required for life to exist at all.
This is because the physical processes that cause natural disasters are the same ones required for the proper functioning of the universe and the existence of sentient life.

Manmade evil
If one looks at the nature of manmade evil one has to take into account that humans developed through certain developmental levels.
From instinct, reflex level through emotional level, then up to representational thinking, concrete operational thinking, formal operational thinking and post formal thinking. Next to this cognitive development there are also moral developmental levels, but in many cases people who should function at a high level of moral development, fall back to lower developmental levels, and by that they show immoral behaviour.
This developmental process, despite its drawbacks, shows as Thomas Aquinas already said (in libr. 2, Sent. Dist. 32, qu. 1, art. 1) “that the permission of evil tends towards the good of the universe.”

The concept of justice
How do we reconcile the wars, the atrocities, the cruelties?

Here we go back to an evolving God, a Creator that develops together with its creation. (The developmental sequences show hundreds of parallel transformative developments. Together they form a total of 12 ontological transformations that takes place in the course of time). If we take part in this development by transforming on an individual psychological basis but also on a collective social level, we can take part in a kosmic process by which injustice and evil are eliminated, and where social systems are developed to help the sick, the poor and the elderly.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: “An Origenist who maintains that all rational creatures become happy in the end will be still easier to satisfy. He will say, in imitation of St. Paul’s saying about the sufferings of this life, that those which are finite are not worthy to be compared with eternal bliss …..Origen, who maintains that good will predominate in due time, in all and everywhere, and that all rational creatures, even the bad angels, will become at last holy and blessed.”

Free will
“Both the Augustinian and the Irenaean approaches appeal to free will: The occurrence of moral evil (and, for Augustine, natural evil) is the inevitable result of human freedom. These views are based on the assumption that, because free will is good, both in itself and because it enables individuals to take responsibility for their own actions, God permits sin (moral evil) as the price of freedom. Although Augustine stressed the “fallenness” of the natural world, both he and Irenaeus paid tribute to its beauty, intricacy, and suitability as an environment for human life. Drawing on this understanding, the English theologian Richard Swinburne has argued that the regularities of natural events (which can harm human beings as well as benefit them) are a necessary condition of both an individual’s moral growth and his intellectual development. Thus although fires and floods are dangerous and destructive, they offer people opportunities to exercise virtues such as bravery and self-sacrifice and to take steps to make themselves safer in the future.” (Wikipedia)

A Kosmological process
If we try to solve the theodicy then we must realise that we are part of a larger process that is unfolding that, because of human cognitive limitations we do not easily comprehend. And that what we know is only a very small part of the universe. Leibniz: ”St. Augustine, however, does not despair of the possibility that the desired solution may be found upon earth; but this Father believes it to be reserved for some holy man illumined by a peculiar grace: ‘Est aliqua causa fortassis occultior, quae melioribus sanctioribusque reservatur, illius gratia potius quam meritis illorum’ (in De Genesi ad Literam, lib. 11, c. 4). Luther reserves the knowledge of the Mystery of Election for the academy of heaven.

Many forms of theodicy have been proposed, some Christian thinkers have rejected as impious any attempt to fathom God’s purposes or to judge God’s actions by human standards.

What is deceptive in this subject, is that one feels an inclination to believe that what is the best in the whole is also the best possible in each part.

The Stoics stated that evils must be endured with patience, or that they were necessary, not only to the well-being and completeness of the universe, but also to the felicity, perfection and conservation of God, who directs it.“

It has been said that to solve the theodicy one has to know the mind of God. And that this is impossible.                                                                                But mystics take part in a kosmological process and by that have insight into this process.

Teleology (the aim of creation)
The theodicy cannot be solved without taking into account the aim of creation, the teleology, the study of final causes. This means that there is a process which is necessary for human development. God allows suffering so that human souls might grow or develop towards maturation. In a gradual spiritual evolution until human beings reach a full state of God-consciousness.

Life after death
If there is no life after death, then there is no justice, which means that the theodicy cannot be solved. Because in the physical world there are evil people who prosper and good people who suffer. While the concepts relating to life after death entered into philosophy in the axial period (±500 BC), the systematic academic research started in about 1875 and in the 1970’s the Out of the Body Experiences and the Near Death Experiences became known to the general public. These last and Ian Stevenson’s reincarnation research did give strong support for the idea that there is life after death.
“The idea is that the hardships of this life, whether caused by natural evil or by moral evil, are as nothing compared with the rewards to come, and they are a necessary factor in preparing one for the afterlife through moral training and maturation. The English mystic Julian of Norwich (born 1342) resolved this problem by noting that part of the bliss and fulfilment of those who are saved will be that, at the Last Day, they will see the true reason why God has done all the things he has and the reason too for all the things he has permitted.“ {Encyclopædia Britannica}

Leibniz: ”Ascetics and true mystics can speak of this from experience; and even a true philosopher can say something thereof. One can attain to that happy state, and it is one of the principal means the soul can use to strengthen its dominion. It is thus that, being made confident by demonstrations of the goodness and the justice of God, we disregard the appearances of harshness and injustice which we see in this small portion of his Kingdom that is exposed to our gaze. Hitherto we have been illumined by the light of Nature and by that of grace, but not yet by that of glory. Here on earth we see apparent injustice, and we believe and even know the truth of the hidden justice of God; but we shall see that justice when at last the Sun of Justice shall show himself as he is.”

The development of Subtle energies
“The Irenaean approach to theodicy looks to the future and assumes an evolutionary perspective. In this account, the world is seen as a mixture of good and evil, an environment of growth and development in which humans can mature toward the perfection for which they were created by God, it has been argued that the world is a better place if people develop desirable traits of character—such as patience, and courage—by struggling against obstacles, including suffering. But if either of these things is the case, then the prevention of all evil might well make the world a worse place.”

A Soul-Making Theodicy
“One very important type of theodicy, championed especially by John Hick, involves the idea that the evils that the world contains can be seen to be justified if one views the world as designed by God as an environment in which people, through their free choices can undergo spiritual growth that will ultimately fit them for communion with God”. 

Hick’s basic suggestion, then, is that soul-making is a great good, that God would therefore be justified in designing a world with that purpose in mind, that our world is very well designed in that regard, and thus that, if one views evil as a problem, it is because one mistakenly thinks that the world ought, instead, to be a hedonistic paradise.”

From: The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

A Soul-Making Theodicy by Hick goes in the right direction but then the details have to be filled in. The physical world is created with the aim to generate an activation of subtle energies on the highest ontological levels. For which a compactification of subtle energies is necessary, and this can only be realised in the physical world.

Supramentalisation
This process is the teleological aim behind the whole of creation and the ultimate good. This concept is to be found in many spiritual traditions:
Lurianic Kabbalah                    : Tikkun‘ Olam (cosmic restitution)
Teilhard de Chardin                  : Omega point
Book of revelations 21:1-7       : A new Heaven and a New Earth
Christianity                               : Kingdom of God
Aurobindo                                 : Supramentalisation
Chassidism                              : The messianic Era
Islam                                        : Eternal Kingdom
Daniel 7:13-14                         : An everlasting dominion
Zachariah 14:1-7                     : The day of the Lord
Buddhism                                : End of the middle time/construction of a new world
Sunnis (Muntazar)                   : Return at the end of time
Aztecs (Quetzalcoatl)              : Quetzalcoatl’s return
Hopi (Pahana)                         : End of the current Fourth world, beginning
                                                              of the Fifth world
Central Asian nomads             : Spiritual rebirth of the entire human race
Hindu (Kalki)                            : Brings worldwide spiritual change
Hindu (Avatar)                         : Descent of the divine awareness
Shiite (Twelfth imam)               : Ultimate savior of mankind
Maya (Kulkulkan)                     : (God of) resurrection
Buddhist (Bodhisattva)             : Bring enlightenment to all sentient beings
Zoroastrian (Saoshiant)           : Find restoration, souls reunited with
                                                         everlasting immortality.
These widespread eschatological concepts, representing events on a collective scale, are strongly connected with the concept of a Messiah, an individual who is coming to the world for the sole purpose of bringing forward a collective, planetary and inevitably Kosmic Ultimate transformation.

Fine-tuning
G. W. Leibniz in his “Theodicy; Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil”, claimed that this world we live in, is the best of all possible worlds. Is it possible, he asked that there is no better plan than that one which God carried out?

“One answers that it is very possible and indeed necessary, namely that there is none: otherwise God would have preferred it.

But when one considers that God, altogether good and wise, must have produced all the virtue, goodness, happiness whereof the best plan of the universe is capable, and that often an evil in some parts may serve the greater good of the whole.”

Leibniz his view in this matter seems an absurdity if one looks at the suffering, the evil and the conflicts sentient beings endure.

However the fine-tuning of the universal constants and laws of physics, that govern the properties of our universe and the geological, chemical and biological fine-tuning puts Leibniz view in a new light, the world seems to be designed with such an extraordinary mathematical precision that the fine-tuning is seen as the strongest supporting evidence for the existence of a transcendent kosmic force.

Macro management and Micro management
If one accepts that there is kosmic force, an intelligent creator (usually identified as God) that was involved not only in the creation of the world, but is also involved in maintaining the world, than the question is in what way? How far reaches this involvement?
That God was involved with the creation of the world can be supported by seeing God as first cause that started the Big Bang (deism). But how far reaches this involvement in maintaining the creation (theism). The Fine-tuning shows that this involvement didn’t stop with the Big Bang for the simple reason that biological development started close to ten billion years after the Big Bang.

If there is fine-tuning of biological systems, which is obvious the case, then there must be something that does this fine-tuning and intervenes in the course of time.

According to Aristotle, there is a First Mover (God), and must there also be spiritual secondary movers (angels). (Wikipedia)

The general idea is that the creation of the Big Bang and the creation of the higher ontological worlds has been done by the First Mover (God), And that the fine-tuning has been done (mainly) by secondary movers (angels).

While the fine-tuning deals with minute details, it is still Macro management.
While there is an interfering transcendental force or forces this doesn’t mean that they are in ultimate complete control over events. This doesn’t necessarily mean micromanagement. The process will need eventually an activation from the highest ontological level with feedback loops all the way down to the physical world, the so called Supramentalisation. The intervention of the Divine which is searched for in the theodicy will take place when this Supramentalisation with its feedback loops is activated.
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Conclusion
These fields of inquiry on their own don’t solve the theodicy, but in conjunction, the overall data provides a solution.

If one claims that the solution to the theodicy could be that the Kosmic process in time has some ultimate goal of which humans take part in, and which could not be attained if evil and suffering where eliminated then it could be argued that this process, which seems without justice, would in the long run be justified if it would lead to the possibility for humans to get access to highest ontological levels (traditionally called the heavens) which otherwise would be impossible. In these higher ontological levels there would be a quality of life which is of such a magnitude that everything else is pale in comparison and without any evil or suffering. This not as a theological speculation, but as an already perceived reality by mystics in their mystical experiences, their mystical states. This on a time scale which is unlimited.
Such a process of course would only be just if those who were the victim of evil or suffering would take part in the end result. This necessarily would mean that those who would take part in this end result must have a non-physical component (traditionally called soul or spirit), otherwise they could not take part in it.