Is There Eternal Necessary Being Or Is The Cosmos Pure Chance?L

[Lacewing]

I have to smile when I see such discussions, not because I consider myself knowledgeable or in any way wise but because we have these conversations from the point of view of discreet beings of an individual nature. We see ourselves variously as a body or a being expressed as or through an individual organism or one of a group or other conceptual impressions of what we are. I'm not sure of the exact number (indeed maybe no one really is) but we as human beings having these discussions are in fact a conglomeration of between 30 & perhaps 80 thousand billion cells, each individual cell working in a mindbogglingly complex cooperation to make up what we see ourselves as. How can we grasp the extent, nature, dimension or in fact any other quality of the cosmos when we can't even be aware of the real nature of our physicality even while operating & communicating through it as a complex entity that by necessity we have to consider something other than what it is in order to function coherently?

YES!!! Nicely said!

What comes to mind for me in reading this thread: The concepts of BEING and ORDER and INTELLIGENCE/AWARENESS are based on ourselves and our own confined and self-serving understanding and need. If we look at the way systems in nature work in collaboration or at odds with each other, (even if) perhaps for the purpose of success of those systems, we can see that TYPES of awareness and order are functioning... yet such are without the need for an identity. Nature is not directed by our rules and values. We typically personify and create and impose in our own image everywhere we go. Perhaps WE are the "gods" we have been warned about.

[AlexW]

The clarity of understanding we seek is quite obviously behind the atoms & thus profoundly inside us. . . . not in some vague philosophical sense but actually immanent as our real self (singular used intentionally). Throughout history we've been seeking the source of the fire by searching in the smoke!! Professionals of the physical sciences, cosmic or otherwise generally won't entertain this as a clear understanding of it would put them all out of work by the following morning!

Yes, I fully agree.
We look for knowledge of the unlimited/absolute using a tool - thought - that only works in the realm of the objective/relative (which it actually creates). Real understanding is NOT possible for the mind - thought can at best translate it into conceptual descriptions but real knowledge is direct, unmediated and has nothing to do with conceptual thought.
All interpretations are only "useful" to communicate truth via language (thought), but interpretations do not define it - they can only point at it...
Unfortunately many mistake the word for the thing just like they mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the moon... Thought can never do more than point - truth/reality is beyond.

[Peter_out]

Here are 3 quotes taken from Wikipedia

"The stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality: the universe begins to look more like a great thought than 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 & governor of the realm of matter." Sir James Hopwood Jeans in The Mysterious Universe 1930 page 137

Further: "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 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 .. . . . . What remains in any case is very different from the full-blooded matter & the forbidding materialism of the Victorian scientist. His objective & material universe is proved to consist of little more than constructs of our own minds. To this extent, then, modern physics has moved in the direction of philosophic idealism. Mind and matter, if not proved to be of similar nature, are at least found to be ingredients of one single system. There is no longer room for the kind of dualism which has haunted philosophy since the age of Descartes." Sir James Hopwood Jeans addressing the British Association in 1934

In The Universe Around Us 1929 Jeans works up to a painting analogy for the universe (my note)

"finite picture whose dimensions are a certain amount of space and a certain amount of time; the protons and electrons are the streaks of paint which define the picture against its space-time background. Traveling as far back in time as we can, brings us not to the creation of the picture, but to its edge; the creation of the picture lies as much outside the picture as the artist is outside his canvas. On this view, discussing the creation of the universe in terms of time and space is like trying to discover the artist and the action of painting, by going to the edge of the canvas. This brings us very near to those philosophical systems which regard the universe as a thought in the mind of its Creator, thereby reducing all discussion of material creation to futility. —"Sir  James Jeans in The Universe Around Us

In his description of the thing the ignorami now call the big bang he said: (I couldn't find it off hand so this is a paraphrase from memory) 'At a time in the past not unimaginably remote, when there was much more free energy than there is now an event or change took place which brought about the conditions we find in the universe today' Now I am by no means a devotee of Jeans but he was a mathematician & had the look of a rational realist yet he cut through the stumbling, pedestrian, blinkered versions of reality of his contemporaries to make the science of the cosmos look more like the Vedas than a PHD submission. A couple of years ago I wrote to Stephen Hawking saying that as he approaches the end of life he'd do well to go back to Jeans to set his mind & outlook in order for his impending dis-embodiment! I'd just heard him say he'd be damned if he'd die before discovering more about the universe & I was so embarrassed for him I thought it my duty to try to put him straight I received a reply from one of his underlings saying thank you for your letter but Prof Hawking is too busy to reply to all correspondence! He was proposing to send mini-probes out into space to make discoveries....what!! the edge of our galaxy is 25,000 light years away, the fastest object we've managed to hurl into space goes 25 miles a second, light travels at 186,000 miles a second, that's 7,440 times faster! The closest substantial galaxy to the edge of ours at the fastest speed yet achieved is one billion, three hundred & thirty one million seven hundred & sixty thousand years travel time away!! These folk are looked up to as the greatest minds of our kind. . . . either I've missed something or we've all been taken for a ride!