This is the second time in my life that I've seen someone suggest materialists don't believe in energy lmao. How is that supposed to work? All materialists believe that matter moves around, right? And matter requires energy to move and interact and change directions and so forth, right?

I've never met a materialist who doesn't believe in energy. I have, however, met non-materialists who say materialists believe that. THAT'S what's truly mind-blowing. — flannel jesus

No matter does not move around. If my computer desk decides to move itself to the other side of the room, I will scream and run out of the door. Not many materialists are in agreement with Native Americans about the sacred land and the wrong of exploiting it. Matter constantly changes but the leaves do so much faster than rocks and neither the leaf nor a stone has the power of moving. So exactly how do you understand the energy of which you speak?

Materialists do not see reality like this...

The earth, in a very real sense, is our mother. We are born from this mother, from Gaia; we are extensions of the earth and the cosmos of which it is a part. This means that our conceptualizing and our spirituality also extend from the spiritual dimension of the cosmos and the earth. — Thomas Berry

I am not sure but I think the big divide between materials and the spiritualist is disagreement about the source of the energy that makes life possible.

NB: ... "yinyang" ... "atoms swirling swerving in the void" ... "E=mc²" ... "fermions & bosons", wtf are woo-ologists talking about? :sweat: — 180 Proof

You have done nothing but insult. Good reasoning requires following some laws of logic and your post is not a good example of that. Name-calling such as "woo-ologist" is destructive to the communication process that I expect of people in the philosophy forum.

"Everything" which causes changes is material, ergo "energy" is material, no? — 180 Proof

What are the differences between mater and energy?
MATTER
• Matter has mass.
• Matter takes up space (called volume).
Thus, matter is anything that has mass and takes up space.
ENERGY
• Energy is not like matter.
• Energy does not have mass.
• Energy does not take up space.
• Energy MOVES matter.
Therefore, energy is the ability to make things move.

https://grove.ccsd59.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2015/03/1.-Matter-Vs.-Energy-.pdf

No matter does not move around. — Athena

find me a materialist who would agree and you might have something there lol.

you illustrated his point with that link very nicely. I appreciate that.

I personally wouldn't word it as "energy is material", but I'm not prepared to say that's explicitly wrong either. In any case, it's clear that a contemporary "materialist" world view includes energy.

I prefer more descriptive terms like e.g. immaterial or disembodied or nonphysical or spiritual or magical ... to the umbrella term "supernatural".

Disembodied or incorporeal would be my least favorite here. If someone talks about "the text of War and Peace, but not the books it is printed on or the hard drives it is saved on," that seems like something that is "disembodied," but very different from the "magical." Economic recessions would be another example; they lack a body, but can be an object of scientific inquiry and we can attribute causes to them (e.g. "layoffs picked up in 2009 because of the recession.")

I think a process/computational/complex systems view works quite well to recover our intuition about some incorporeal entities, e.g. "the Japanese language," existing, even if there can be no well defined superveniance relationship between them and a discrete set of physical components.

"Everything" which causes changes is material, ergo "energy" is material, no?

Interestingly enough, I'm starting to think that this proposition is what is at stake as the sciences, particularly physics, try to define and define a place for the concept of information. The question of: "can what is not there be causally important," or can "properties that a system lacks," be essential for explaining phenomena. The range of possibilities seems essential for explaining things like the heat carrying capabilities of metals, or life, even though this range is not actual.

I think the thinking around it gets dicey, and very muddy, because there is a tendency to want to reduce relations to objects, whereas it seems like the process view is more relevant here. In the context of a process, what doesn't occur is important. It's like how you can't encode a message in just 1s, you need the possibility of 0s in a medium.

The question of: "can what is not there be causally important," or can "properties that a system lacks," be essential for explaining phenomena. The range of possibilities seems essential for explaining things like the heat carrying capabilities of metals, or life, even though this range is not actual. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Sounds like you're just talking about emergence

"Everything" which causes changes is material, ergo "energy" is material, no? — 180 Proof

Sounds rather Stoic and, therefore, preferable as such things go, to me at least. All that acts or can be acted upon are "bodies" and therefore part of Nature, or the Universe. There are different kinds of bodies, though.

The significance of the Stoic view is that it posits immanence; there ain't no supernatural or transcendent (I admit the Stoics may not have used the word "ain't"). We don't need no stinkin' supernatural or transcendent, in fact (they may not have used the word "stinkin'" either). Being part of Nature (the Universe), inextricably, all we can know is part of it.

The concept of energy and even what we know of the quantum world fits in rather well with Stoicism, I think, though not with its view that the pneuma (of which they would be a part, I think) is the intelligent, rational as well as generative guiding principle of the Universe.

It depends on how you define emergence I suppose. I do not mean classical emergence, where combinations of different substances somehow generate new terms that did not exist before. I think Jaegeon Kim dealt classic, substance based emergence a virtual death blow.

Prehaps emergence in the "more is different," sense you see at work in cellular automata. But then it's not really clear to me if this warrants the name emergence, or if it just obviates the idea of emergence, consigning it to the dust bin of history.

After all, it doesn't make sense to think of computations as being "composed of" smaller computations. To be sure, we have a step-wise element in computation (although steps can run in parallel), but this is necessarily change, a process occuring over a timelike dimension. √81 doesn't "emerge" from smaller units of composition, it is its own process.

It depends on how you define emergence I suppose. I do not mean classical emergence, where combinations of different substances somehow generate new terms that did not exist before. I think Jaegeon Kim dealt classic, substance based emergence a virtual death blow.

Prehaps emergence in the "more is different," sense you see at work in cellular automata. But then it's not really clear to me if this warrants the name emergence, or if it just obviates the idea of emergence, consigning it to the dust bin of history. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Examples from cellular automata, like the ol classic Glider, are just plain ol emergence in my book. I'm not really sure how that differs from "classical emergence" - I googled that term but couldn't find anything like a definition.

After all, it doesn't make sense to think of computations as being "composed of" smaller computations. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Ever?

I mean, I can think of plenty of situations where you can actually think of computations as being composed of smaller computations. Multiplication is composed of addition. Exponentiation is composed of multiplication. In software, functions call other functions that do tiny bits of the overall job. And literally everything in software is composed of assembly instructions / machine code, right? I guess I don't see why it doesn't make sense, it seems on the surface to make perfect sense.

Matter constantly changes but the leaves do so much faster than rocks and neither the leaf nor a stone has the power of moving. So exactly how do you understand the energy of which you speak? — Athena

Both leaf and stone are spinning on the surface of a giant sphere at a thousand miles per hour. They don't fly off of the earth because its mass is so great that it pulls them towards it. The earth is spinning around a star. The solar system is spinning in a galaxy. The galaxy is expanding with the universe... Going the other way, there's a bunch of atomic and quantum movement too, so I'm told.

Good reasoning requires following some laws of logic and your post is not a good example of that. — Athena

Silly projection.

What are the differences between ma[tt]er and energy? — Athena

Fermions and bosons. Nothing 'immaterial'. :roll:

Sounds rather Stoic and, therefore, preferable as such things go, to me at least. All that acts or can be acted upon are "bodies" and therefore part of Nature, or the Universe. There are different kinds of bodies, though. — Ciceronianus

:fire: Yes! Also sounds Democritean-Epicurean (& Lucretian).

Bickhart and Deacon have some good explanations of this I will try to find. The SEP article is rather lacking.

Nested functions are part of code, static instructions on how to run a computation. Of course you can concatenate functions, and in this sense it is quite possible to decompose more complex functions. But the relationship between nested functions is not analogous to the way superveniance relations work in metaphysics (what I was trying to get at, which perhaps wasn't clear). Computation is substrate independent. If we change out the tape in a Turing Machine for some other brand of tape with a different chemical composition the computations it runs remain the same.

In any event, the "computation" is the actual process of transforming the input into the output. To say nested functions are the computation is a bit like saying thought is neurons, rather than what the neurons do, or that the computation in a Turing Machine is the symbols on the tape plus the state instructions in the head (why run the machine then?) Now, could we say the computation is all the states the computer transitions through from input -> output? Maybe. But this is a process, prior states dictating future ones.

Just throwing in a few things, like my 25c’s:

- Laws of physics seem to be pretty universal. Reliable and boring. They seem to sum up all the stuff about matter and energy pretty well and boring and just the fact that those laws seem so stable is the only thing at least I see as philosophical interesting about it.

- Our individual thinking seem, on the contrary to be pretty peculiar. Quite singular, both in terms of isolation from the outer world, and in the fact that its perceived as lack of parallelism. I think what i think right now, I cannot think two things at the same time.

- At the same time our collective thinking seem to be a realisation of a multi-processor computing thing. We’ve kind of invented materialism together. And well, the Gods too.

- But few will allow our individual thinking to be a strictly materialist stuff, just a lot of little electrons running around in the brain. There some mystical thing about the self that remains.

after all your clarifications, I'm still thinking you're talking about plain ol' emergence. A lot of emergence is substrate independent too.

How can "a beyond" the here and now provide "something better" to us within the here and now?

As a non-"materialist", what is it (ontically? epistemically?) about the material that you oppose?

What do you mean by "reality"? — 180 Proof

I agree with you (emphatically) in questioning whether "a beyond" can provide anything of value for the here and now. That sort of statement is at the core of my conclusions about reality.

What I oppose about materialism is that it is exclusively the domain of what is real; of reality. There are obviously other aspects of our existence that transcend the physical. But none of which are unscientific.

By "reality" I mean that which we encounter and can verify or measure.

A great story that nicely illustrates this all is "The Celestine Prophecy".

All the sources of knowledge we have to choose from make living a wonderful thing. It appears you want to enjoy it all as I do. — Athena

Yes. Absolutely. In my mind there is little reason to exclude the thinking, intuition and conclusions of others outright; especially if the work being done is about balance and hybridizing extremes. Being able to challenge myself with diverse sources of knowledge does indeed make living a wondrous thing. This is a hallmark of a good life, in my observations.

There are obviously other aspects of our existence that transcend the physical. But none of which are unscientific. — Bret Bernhoft

Can you give some examples?

"Transcend the physical" could be interpreted in at least 2 ways. You could be talking about stuff that is completely not physical in any sense, or you could be talking about stuff that is emergent from physical stuff. I'd like to clarify which of those two senses you think obviously exists.

For example, when two (or more) people meet, their heart rhythms and brainwaves entrain with each other. These are energetic experiences that cannot be accounted for simply by assuming everything is materialistic.

Or remote viewing. That's another parapsychological phenomena that transpersonal and nonlocal.

What are the differences between mater and energy?

Energy gets generated from matter's movement (e.g. fall), gravity, chemical process etc. Energy is a physical entity. Energy is not material. Matter is just stationery mass.

For example, when two (or more) people meet, their heart rhythms and brainwaves entrain with each other. These are energetic experiences that cannot be accounted for simply by assuming everything is materialistic. — Bret Bernhoft

Really? Why not?

Really? Why not? — flannel jesus

Great question. Because that's not what the measurements indicate. Good science shows that these phenomena are part of the material world, but energetic in nature; immaterial.

What's really exciting about all of this, is that the immaterial aspects of this world are present, just waiting to be rediscovered. That is what entices me, as an individual.

do you have any links to support these claims?

Energy is, believe it or not, considered part of the material world. Materialists believe in physics. Physics is all about how matter is moved around and changed by energy. So saying these things can't be accounted for in materialism, and then saying "that's because it requires energy to happen", seems to be a misunderstanding of materialism.

Of course materialists believe in energy! How else could matter move and change momentum!?

:up: :up:

What I oppose about materialism is that it is exclusively the domain of what is real; of reality. — Bret Bernhoft

In other words, you believe that reality is also "immaterial"? If so, how does the immaterial affect the material and vice versa?

By "reality" I mean that which we encounter and can verify or measure.

Give a couple of examples of how "we encounter and ... verify or measure" the immaterial. Thanks, Bret.

The first thing to stress would be that composition in computation doesn't work like composition in superveniance metaphysics. Salt is salt because of how Na and Cl interact. 20 grains of salt is salt in the very same way that 1,000,000 grains of salt is salt. The output comes from the causal properties of fundamental units, which may arguably be unpredictable from the properties of these units themselves (classical emergence).

But 5 * 10 is not an output of 50 in the way that Na + Cl = NaCL. You can add grains of salt to salt and it remains salt. If you add multiples of 5 or 10 to 50 you get a different number.More importantly, there are limitless ways to write an arithmetical function that will output 50 and so the output cannot be uniquely defined by the inputs in the way NaCl is defined by its component particles.

Against this view, we can consider that, if all of physics was unified into one thing, if the fundamental forces and space-time itself were unified, and we could say: "yes, there is one undifferentiated substance that forms all these building blocks from different processes," then the difference elucidated above looks to be in trouble. However, if this was the case, "substance" as a concept now fails to do any explanatory lifting at all. All phenomena are generated from a term that applies equally to all things, and so it is only the processes that actually have causal power.

Emergence was developed by a number of British philosophers in the 19th century with old-style materialism in mind. Substrate independent emergence, the example of material formed into a wheel, is a later innovation, and I would argue that it is better explained via a process metaphysics. From this start, "emergence" largely developed up to the 1990s in line with popular ideas of superveniance physicalist metaphysics. "Classical emergence," is just emergence that accepts substance metaphysics.

Thus, one of the big arguments in emergence tended to be if "strong emergence," or "true emergence" is even possible, or if emergence just represents opportunities for what is essentially data compression. If the latter holds, then all phenomena can still be fully (and often, most accurately) described by simply ignoring the emergence and instead fully describing any physical system via the sum of its fundamental components. Or, at least this idea is believed to be true, "in theory;" however, plenty of people accept that, barring the advent of some Le Placean Demon capable of almost supernatural computations, emergence might still make sense as a concept to use from a pragmatic perspective.

More recently, it has been common to argue that "strong emergence," appears to be impossible within a substance metaphysics, but, so the argument goes, this is simply more evidence that that we must move to a process based metaphysics.

House of Cards?

The most influential critiques of ontological emergence theories target these notions of downward causality and the role that the emergent whole plays with respect to its parts. To the extent that the emergence of a supposedly novel higher - level phenomenon is thought to exert causal influence on the component processes that gave rise to it, we might worry that we risk double - counting the same causal influence, or even falling into a vicious regress error — with properties of parts explaining properties of wholes explaining properties of parts. Probably the most devastating critique of the emergentist enterprise explores these logical problems. This critique was provided by the contemporary American philosopher Jaegwon Kim in a series of articles and monographs in the 1980s and 1990s, and is often considered to be a refutation of ontological (or strong) emergence theories in general, that is, theories that argue that the causal properties of higher - order phenomena cannot be attributed to lower - level components and their interactions. However, as Kim himself points out, it is rather only a challenge to emergence theories that are based on the particular metaphysical assumptions of substance metaphysics (roughly, that the properties of things inhere in their material constitution), and as such it forces us to find another footing for a coherent conception of emergence.

The critique is subtle and complicated, and I would agree that it is devastating for the conception of emergence that it targets. It can be simplified and boiled down to something like this: Assuming that we live in a world without magic (i.e., the causal closure principle, discussed in chapter 1), and that all composite entities like organisms are made of simpler components without residue, down to some ultimate elementary particles, and assuming that physical interactions ultimately require that these constituents and their causal powers (i.e., physical properties) are the necessary substrate for any physical interaction, then whatever causal powers we ascribe to higher - order composite entities must ultimately be realized by these most basic physical interactions. If this is true, then to claim that the cause of some state or event arises at an emergent higher - order level is redundant. If all higher - order causal interactions are between objects constituted by relationships among these ultimate building blocks of matter, then assigning causal power to various higher - order relations is to do redundant bookkeeping. It’s all just quarks and gluons — or pick your favorite ultimate smallest unit — and everything else is a gloss or descriptive simplification of what goes on at that level. As Jerry Fodor describes it, Kim’s challenge to emergentists is: “why is there anything except physics?” 16

The concept at the center of this critique has been a core issue for emergentism since the British emergentists’ first efforts to precisely articulate it. This is the concept of supervenience...

Effectively, Kim’s critique utilizes one of the principal guidelines for mereological analysis: defining parts and wholes in such a way as to exclude the possibility of double - counting. Carefully mapping all causal powers to distinctive non - overlapping parts of things leaves no room to find them uniquely emergent in aggregates of these parts, no matter how they are organized...

Terrance Deacon - Incomplete Nature

But there is a powerful argument against mereological substance metaphysics: such discrete parts only appear at the quantum scale through large scale statistical smoothing. In many cases, fundamental parts with static properties don't seem to exist and even those that are put forth can form into new, fundamental entities (e.g., Humphrey's notion of fusion).

This is not meant to suggest that we should appeal to quantum strangeness in order to explain emergent properties, nor would I suggest that we draw quantum implications for processes at human scales. However, it does reflect a problem with simple mereological accounts of matter and causality that is relevant to the problem of emergence.

A straightforward framing of this challenge to a mereological conception of emergence is provided by the cognitive scientist and philosopher Mark Bickhard. His response to this critique of emergence is that the substance metaphysics assumption requires that at base, “particles participate in organization, but do not themselves have organization.” But, he argues, point particles without organization do not exist (and in any case would lead to other absurd consequences) because real particles are the somewhat indeterminate loci of inherently oscillatory quantum fields. These are irreducibly processlike and thus are by definition organized. But if process organization is the irreducible source of the causal properties at this level, then it “cannot be delegitimated as a potential locus of causal power without eliminating causality from the world.” 20 It follows that if the organization of a process is the fundamental source of its causal power, then fundamental reorganizations of process, at whatever level this occurs, should be associated with a reorganization of causal power as well.

Terrance Deacon - Incomplete Nature

I have posted relevant parts of some of Bickhard's analysis here in an earlier post:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/826619

But since, in examples like the Game of Life you mentioned, "more is different," I don't even know if the concept of emergence can even be fundamental under a process view. To be sure, it's useful for higher level fields where speaking of substance is a fine stand-in for describing long term stabilities in process. However, the only thing it makes sense to decompose computations - the transformation of output into input - into is the intervening states between S1 and SF. But if you're defining composition by transitions of states over time, you aren't talking substance anymore, that's process, and so the "emergence" part is redundant since a different process is a different process. We can have morphisms between processes, but it doesn't make sense to say a F(x) = 100 is somehow emergent, in the same way it isn't really useful to say "lines are emergent from points," or "planes are emergent from dimensions."

Energy being physical is fairly well established. If you want to get into a more wonky question there is the matter of it information is physical (Landauer's Principle) and there remains some hot debate on that.

But, if information because essential for explaining cause in a way that people do not think is somehow an epistemic artifact, I imagine we'd see widespread acceptance of information as physical (it's already a majority opinion I would think).

The problem with, "if it has causal powers it is physical," is that it would simply mean that if ghosts and magic are real, we just need to accept the physical reality of ectoplasm, djinns, etc. (Hemple's Dilemma). I think in general physicalists would like to go further, but that's where the interesting problems come up.

Is saying that there is no intentionality behind the behavior of the universe writ large necessary for physicalism? Is saying that mind is not essential to being necessary for physicalism? Can we say some things about the nature of the physical beyond the scope of scientific realism or simple naturalism?

In general, I think ontic structural realism, the idea that the mathematical structures of physics are themselves the ontological basement, the constituents on which all cause depends and from which all being emerges, doesn't sound like physicalism. We don't tend to think of mathematical entities and processes as physical, rather they are abstractions. But I'm also not sure if it's necessarily disallowed. Certainly there are theories that do advance structural realism as physicalism.

But it's not like idealism, in its broadest form, is that much different in this respect. In some ways it's defined largely by what it says "no," too. So, say what you will about dualism, but when you have two distinct types of being, there is a lot more you can say of them, since there is at least some comparison to define them through. (I am not a dualist BTW, a theory being more interesting, less "flat," doesn't make it necessarily more true lol).

Materialists do not see reality like this...

The earth, in a very real sense, is our mother. We are born from this mother, from Gaia; we are extensions of the earth and the cosmos of which it is a part. This means that our conceptualizing and our spirituality also extend from the spiritual dimension of the cosmos and the earth.
— Thomas Berry — Athena

Doesn't seem to follow though, does it? That "spiritual dimension" sneaks into the picture. Is that "spiritual dimension" a part of Nature? If so, a Naturalist may accept it as a part of reality, like everything else, including energy. The question would then seem to be whether if it's part of the Universe it is corporeal.

Energy being physical is fairly well established. If you want to get into a more wonky question there is the matter of it information is physical (Landauer's Principle) and there remains some hot debate on that.

But, if information because essential for explaining cause in a way that people do not think is somehow an epistemic artifact, I imagine we'd see widespread acceptance of information as physical (it's already a majority opinion I would think). — Count Timothy von Icarus

This thread seems to have diverged into a debate on Physics (energy, matter) instead of Metaphysics (abstract concepts such as being, knowing, substance, cause, identity, time, and space). But the OP seems to be implying a metaphysical (philosophical) distinction : Theism postulates non-physical (metaphysical) causes, while Materialism denies anything non-physical. Yet even Materialists must accept the existence of causal Energy, even though scientists don't know what it is (ontology) -- only what it does (epistemology)*1.

My position on the OP is somewhere in between mundane Materialism and spooky Theism. And it's based on a "wonky" concept (the role of information in reality) that is fiercely challenged on this forum. It is definitely eccentric, in the sense that it is not aligned with the mainstream Materialism of modern Physics. That's because generic Information as Causation is on the cutting-edge of science, not in the dusty textbooks. For example, In computation, Energy is lost as Entropy only upon erasure of Information*2*3. As you implied : Information is physical in the same sense that Energy is physical.

I won't go into the abstruse details of the Information = Energy equation here. But I will note that, for those to whom Mind is just as real as Brain, the notion that Information = Energy + Relationship = Mind*4 may make sense. Of course, a materialist/chemist will find that assertion absurd. But a Physicalist, who deals mostly with Change (causation) instead of focusing on the inert Material substrate, may be quicker to grasp that invisible intangible Energy is the cause of all changes in Form : i.e. en-form-action. Which opens up a whole new range of possibilities for the sciences of Physics & Computation. And, perhaps novel ways to define Theism & Metaphysics. :smile:

*1. Physics of Energy :
Energy is defined as the “ability to do work, which is the ability to exert a force causing displacement of an object.” Despite this confusing definition, its meaning is very simple: energy is just the force that causes things to move. Energy is divided into two types: potential and kinetic.
https://ingeniumcanada.org/scitech/education/tell-me-about/physics-of-energy#:~:text=Energy%20is%20defined%20as%20the,two%20types%3A%20potential%20and%20kinetic.
Note --- "Ability" is not a material thing, but merely the immaterial Potential for change. Kinetic energy is the causal process of change in a material substrate. What I call "en-form-action".

*2. INFORMATION IS PHYSICAL : Rolf Landauer,
Earlier centuries gave us clockwork models of the
universe. A similar, but more modern, orientation leads
to the position of Zuse and Fredkin that the universe is a
computer. Without going quite that far, I do suggest that
there is a strong two-way relationship between physics
and information handling
https://www.w2agz.com/Library/Limits%20of%20Computation/Landauer%20Article,%20Physics%20Today%2044,%205,%2023%20(1991).pdf

*3. Rolf Landauer . . . . Award in Quantum Computing :
This award recognizes recent outstanding contributions in quantum information science, especially using quantum effects to perform computational and information-management tasks that would be impossible or infeasible by purely classical means.
https://www.aps.org/programs/honors/prizes/landauer-bennet.cfm

*4. How is information related to energy in physics? :
Energy is the relationship between information regimes. That is, energy is manifested, at any level, between structures, processes and systems
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/22084/how-is-information-related-to-energy-in-physics

I am not sure but I think the big divide between materials and the spiritualist is disagreement about the source of the energy that makes life possible. — Athena

Good Point! For all practical purposes, and within the here & now world, I am essentially an Atheist, but I prefer the more modest & philosophical label Agnostic. Even so, the physicalistic/materialistic Big Bang theory, was formulated with the unprovable assumption (axiom) that Energy & Natural Laws pre-existed the Bang.

So, my philosophical curiosity naturally wonders about the original Source of that all-important creative & animating power. I don't imagine the origin of the world as a biblical Genesis, but Plato/Aristotle's abstract notion of LOGOS & Prime Mover suits me for philosophical purposes. That gives me a point from which to reason about our temporary sojourn in a habitat suitable for matter-transcending living & thinking creatures. :smile:

Note --- Energy provided the push, and Laws limit the direction of this guided missile cosmos. And here we are, 14 billion earth-years later, trying to remember the birth moment of this thrill-ride of ups & downs, while plaintively asking WHY? So far, the Logical Laborer remains mum (punny) :joke:

@Bret Bernhoft :point:

I don't imagine the origin of the world as a biblical Genesis, but Plato/Aristotle's abstract notion of LOGOS & Prime Mover suits me for philosophical purposes. — Gnomon

Well, I find Spinoza's non-transcendent substance, or natura naturans, much more parsimonious and elegant (as do e.g. Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche ... Einstein, Bohm, Wheeler, Everett ... David Deutsch, Seth Lloyd et al). Btw, Epicureans & Stoics are also immanentists, to wit: "the source of energy" is existence itself (à la the vacuum); thus, "creationism" by any other name, whether biblical or onto-theological – multiplying (transcendent) entities – is both philosophically and scientifically unnecessary. :smirk: