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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
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I hate to pick on this so soon, but from the science perspective:

1.  We don't know what is prior to the big bang.  There are lots of ideas, but it may not be nothingness.
2.  God as defined as that thing before the universe (if there is such a point) is hard to distinguish from the universe itself.  Assuming in classic big bang theory, there was a singularity of infinite density and energy, that exploded forth, [b]your version of God would have to either be the force that released all that, or the thing itself[/b].  But that doesn't necessitate a sentient being.
3.  Information theory is not what you represent.  I think you are describing metaphysics.  Information theory is an abstract mathematical concept that really isn't dependent on a sender or receiver at all.  [b]Shannon's (inventor of information theory)[/b] insight was to study information abstracted from semantics - ie, meaning.  Therefore, in information theory, certainly within the field of cosmology, the material universe is the information.  In information theory, we don't look at the meaning (semantics), but rather the quantity and whether it is conserved, created, or destroyed. (BTW theists, you want to pull for "conserved".  Destroyed breaks causality and therefore God).
4. Therefore, if information is as described in information theory, it refutes the part about "That Mind is God".  Sorry, I really didn't mean to do that.  But there it is.  Maybe the idea survives if you revise what you are thinking about regarding information.
5.  But next, I think that even with an everyday understanding of information (semantics), we see it consumed to powerful effect without the presence of a mind.  DNA is transcribed by transcription RNA to [b]encode[/b] messenger RNA to[b] encode[/b] proteins that do useful things.  None of this requires a mind to operate.  A crystal builds copies of itself by simple inorganic processes.  Now you may believe that this took a creator, but you can't conclude that merely from seeing that a nonthinking process consumed information.  And if that is tough, it is clear that nature  produces information continuously.  Wind blowing across the sand encodes ripples.  Waves and the tide are the encoding of the moon's gravitational pull on the earth.  And so on and so on.

Thus, with God relegated to only causality, your essay leaves us with an image of God no better than the initial energy or force in the universe.[/quote]

OP, back again, but only for a moment, because--wait, PPs have shown frustration when I reference my family, so forget it!

Your point on causality is not quite right.  It still references concepts such as time, force, energy, density.  Those things are not God.  God caused those things.  The universe is contingent;  the Cause of the universe is not.  God is "I am that I am."  More prosaically, "God is the fullness of Being and of every perfection, without origin and without end. All creatures receive all that they are and have from him; but he alone is his very being, and he is of himself everything that he is."

As for information theory, Shannon is not alone ;)  Best I can tell, information theory is a noisy arena these days.  Mind-blowing stuff.  I haven't read it yet, but[i] Information and the Nature of Reality:  from Physics to Metaphysics[/i] recently caught my eye, and I have stumbled across Gitt's theories, when reading about DNA.  The little that I have read goes waaay beyond your comments, and anything I could reproduce here.  Simply, I will never stay on top of an extended discussion of these areas, because I am no expert, but what do you think of the example below?  Is there a materialist response?:

"One mystery is how one virus has DNA which codes for more proteins than it has space to store the necessary coded information.

'The mystery arose when scientists counted the number of three-letter codons in the DNA of the virus, QX174.  They found that the proteins produced by the virus required many more code words than the DNA in the chromosome contains.  How could this be?  Careful research revealed the amazing answer.  A portion of a chain of code letters in the gene, say -A-C-T-G-T-C-C-A-G-, could contain three three-letter genetic words as follows: -A-C-T*G-T-C*C-A-G-.  But if the reading frame is shifted to the right one or two letters, two other genetic words are found in the middle of this portion, as follows: -A*C-T-G*T-C-C*A-G- and -A-C*T-G-T*C-C-A*G-.  And this is just what the virus does.  A string of 390 code letters in its DNA is read in two different reading frames to get two different proteins from the same portion of DNA.  Could this have happened by chance?  Try to compose an English sentence of 390 letters from which you can get another good sentence by shifting the framing of the words one letter to the right.  It simply can’t be done.  The probability of getting sense is effectively zero.’"[/quote]

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