The nature of reality

Submitted by jhwierenga on Mon, 07/30/2018 - 09:19

QO-adepts and adherents have different reasons for believing that the nature of reality is such that there are concepts which affect, and are in principle affected by, all their manifestations, throughout the universe.

For QO-adepts the case is clear: This is the way the universe works, as explained in the QO concept of natural law

For adherents of Christianity, the Biblical notion of the power of names amounts to the same thing. In the Bible, names are not merely labels. They are powerful things, in which the essence of the person or thing that they represent is embodied. We are accustomed to this usage in the term 'the Name of the Lord', which we understand to mean more or less the same as God Himself. However, the usage of the 'name' concept is far broader than that. In Jewish thought, names reside in heaven.

The connection between 'names' and 'the heavens' is present in the Hebrew words for them. The word for 'heaven' is shám (literally: there, on the other side), that for a name shém. The other side is the hidden side of our reality, the place we cannot see, the place where the essences are, not just of God but of the created things. To create, God calls out the names of the things that He wants to exist. God calls 'light' to create light, God calls 'Israel' to be a holy people, God calls you by your name to be His child. Your name is not just a label, it is your self, it is your purpose, all of which existed in heaven before the foundation of the earth and is revealed, to those that have eyes to see and ears to hear, when God calls it out. The Hebrew word for 'to hear' is shámá, it ends with the letter 'Ajin' (eye), the letter of him who sees, so that you could say that he who hears, sees what is on the other side. 

This Biblical view of reality appears somewhat strange to most contemporary Christians. That is more an indication of how ready the Church Fathers were to throw Jewish modes of thinking overboard and replace them by Greek ones, than anything else. Mainstream Christianity has no affinity with this way of thinking. It has no real explanation for it, resulting in a gap and therefore  an Occam score of at least 0100, relative to the explanation that God exists.

QO, on the other hand, supports this conception of reality very well, as outlined in the lemma "the power of Names".  Relative to the explanation that God exists, the QO explanation that names have real power has an Occam score of 0000.