Cern Debate:

When I received the Nov 2010 copy of Scientific American in the mail I was startled by the headline for the lead story that was on the front page. It read: Hidden Worlds of Dark Matter - An entire universe may be silently interwoven with our own.Here is the link to the article. SA Nov 2010My belief as a Christian is that God’s so-called heavenly dimension is somehow, silently interwoven with our own, but is in some way that isn’t readily discernible to us, interlocked with our own. Obviously the article doesn't go anywhere near that sort of conjecture but just the same maybe science is drawing closer to painting a picture of our existence that is consistent with Christian thought.In addition there are physicists that study the nature of time. One that I find interesting is Julian Barbour. Here is the wiki page on him. Julian BarbourHere is an excerpt from that site.

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His 1999 The End of Time advances timeless physics: the controversial view that time, as we perceive it, does not exist as anything other than an illusion, and that a number of problems in physical theory arise from assuming that it does exist. He argues that we have no evidence of the past other than our memory of it, and no evidence of the future other than our belief in it. "Change merely creates an illusion of time, with each individual moment existing in its own right, complete and whole." He calls these moments "Nows". It is all an illusion: there is no motion and no change. He argues that the illusion of time is what we interpret through what he calls "time capsules," which are "any fixed pattern that creates or encodes the appearance of motion, change or history."

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Here is a link to articles about Barbour and his ideas. About Julian Barbour’s ideasOn that site is a quote from respected Canadian, (have to get that in there ) physicist Don Page who says this..

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Don Page, a cosmologist at the University of Alberta in Edmonton who
frequently collaborates with Stephen Hawking, raised his hand that day. "I think
Julian's work clears up a lot of misconceptions," says Page. "Physicists might
not need time as much as we might have thought before. He is really
questioning the basic nature of time, its nonexistence. You can't make technical
advances if you're stuck in a conceptual muddle." Strangely enough, Page feels
that Barbour might actually be too conservative. When physicists finally iron
out a new theory of the universe, Page suspects that time won't be the only
casualty. "I think space will go too," he says cryptically.

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If time and space are illusions then it seems likely that there is a greater reality that those illusions are a reflection of which leads to the idea that we aren’t alone. I read somewhere that we are essentially photon detectors with our five senses. If we had different senses it seems to me that we could detect another existence that would be totally foreign to this one and this one might even be invisible to us.Who knows what science will discover but it is interesting to ponder. I think that all this points out is that science will go where the evidence leads, and if it starts overlapping religious faith it will do so regardless of whether or not that is the accepted starting point.Edited by GDR, : left out linkEdited by GDR, : No reason given.

Amen to all of that. Would you consider yourself a pantheist? Isn't that what theists believe they do on one level or another now? Isn't prayer an attempt to reach our from our consciousness in order to communicate with that greater species namely God? I think in my previous post I was suggesting that science is getting closer to understanding what is beyond what we currently call the natural. Presumably another universe at this point would be supernatural but if science is able to identify it then presumably what was supernatural becomes natural.

I have wondered about dreams for years. In our dreams we can see and identify things visually but our eyes are closed. Our consciousness is asleep but we still have thoughts. Very strange.The more science advances the more it seems that the foundations of our perceived existence is totally non-intuitive.Here is an article on the research into other dimensions at the Fermilab. Other Dimensions and NeutrinosWhat would we experience if instead of being photon detectors we were neutrino detectors?