—“Is the universe open for free actions or divine interventions or other special divine actions? Are there reasons for the impossibility claims?”—

We have not yet eliminated the possibility. We certainly cannot seem to construct any test of such things. All tests we run that would require human control of outcomes have failed – spectacularly. We cannot even find one instance. But what if only the unintended can be caused by collective imagination? In other words, if you were a divinity why would you allow access to the resource? You wouldn’t. Ever.

So the reason for the claim of impossibility is not because we know it’s impossible, it’s because we want to stop charlatans, magicians, pseudoscientists, and liars from distracting us from that divine action that we can take if we are acting in full subconscious honesty (pure faith).

It is becoming increasingly possible to imagine that by some very, very, very subtle method, we can cause a ‘god’ to form out of the information we possess, our memories, our speech, our actions, and even our imaginings. And that this god like all such gods, is not in control of the physical universe, but that it does influence our actions and ambitions in the same sense that a super-intelligent but non-sentient mind would.

–“What is a free action? Which definitions of ‘free action’ are useful and adequate? What is a divine intervention? What other kinds of divine action are there?”—

Divine intervention can be explained if and only if it is demonstrated by human behavior. Free action is necessary for the simple reason that the information necessary to make a decision in a deterministic universe, isn’t possible for a person to possess, plus given the human propensity to err bias etc, means that all choice involves quite a bit of choice. The constraint on most human action however is resources and people with whom to cooperate, more than our own desire to act.

–“Which evidence is there for the existence of free actions (of a certain kind) and of divine interventions? (An evidence-based approach.)”—

What we call synchronicity does not seem, in all cases, to be explicable. It may be that some of us are just better at picking up subtle physical markers by accident (subconsciously) but that we cannot do anything when trying (consciously). It may be that those of us exposed to similar information deterministically will pursue similar objectives and take similar actions producing similar intuitions, producing similar imaginary content, and sensing similar extremely subtle information.

I am currently stuck on the problems we find in physical science at the very lowest level, and that we seem to be only aware of a subset of the universe that’s open to inspection by our senses. But this is a very small percentage of the energy and mass in the universe.

When I combine this with the silence in space, I am troubled that we are just very primitive in our understanding of space-time and transit through it by other than EMR and crude mass.

So

(a) the reason we push back on mysticism and divinity is to protect against charlatanism not because we cannot eliminate the possibility of either. In other words it is a moral imperative that we do not have another era of ignorance and mysticism.

(b) any existent (conscious or not) divinity would prevent us from conducting conscious experiments to take advantage of the resource he made available for us.

(c) We don’t know enough to eliminate the possibility of such an information system (god). And it looks like it is possible (despite the simplicity of the universe that we do understand) that there are phenomenon that transcend the limits of the physical world as we know it – at least to the extent of providing us some information.

(d) We can’t seem to find a single case despite trying (very hard) of any divine action that is not explicable by other means.

(e) We can’t disprove, and it is more likely, that any information system (god) would not evidence itself in the physical world except through our actions, imaginations, or hallucinations. And that we are looking for the wrong kind of evidence (physical) rather than the only kind that would be possible (experiential).

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute