Supernatural

What does it mean to be supernatural? If something does or can interact with something or someone in this system, is it truly supernatural? If by making contact with a system can that phenomenon remain outside of, or 'super' of that system? Is God supernatural? Does He exist outside of this system? If He interacts with this system does He become part of this system? If He interacts with this system does His system become continous with this system? How about a one-way flow valve that allows influence into this system. Could it be a controlled interaction such that it flows one-way? He may interact in this system but this system is blocked from interacting back?

Equilibrium

I have been thinking more about equilibrium and what that may mean as far as this earth is concerned. I think that most Later-day Saints picture the creation as a somewhat immediate and 'fixed' creation - even those that believe in some sort of process still think or have the picture in their minds of a fairly static earth. Such as the atmosphere as being always here in it's present state from the 'beginning'. Even though I have taught for years about the evolution of the atmosphere, it hit me harder this morning as I was thinking about some of the 'Gaia' ideas. The atmosphere of the earth is very much out of chemical equilibrium. It has way too much very reactive oxygen (~20%). Although the atmosphere is out of equilibrium, it is 'maintained' in this charged state. It is dynamic but not explosive. It seems that the best current explanation for this dynamic homeostasis is biosciences. Life processes maintain the dynamics. The atmosphere and life are so tightly linked that they most certainly have co-evolved.

Kolob University

Are there research labs at Kolob U or will there be nothing left to discover? Does (do) God(s) continue to learn or develop (evolve)?

How difficult (possible) are novel thoughts?

So I'm wondering, how difficult is it to come up with a novel thought. I was reading Copernicus last week and noticed that even though he has been credited with moving our major frame of reference from an earth centered to a heliocentric universe, that thought was not novel with him, there were others that had that thought this (and wrote it down) as many as 1500-2000 years earlier. And Copernicus made reference to them. Where did those thoughts arise originally? How do new thoughts arise? Who or what was the origin of those thoughts or ideas? Is a person capable of generating a novel thought? I am wondering if I have ever had a thought that was not the compilation of other things that I had previously experienced. I can not think of a thought that I have had that I can't trace the genesis to some previous experience. I have synthesized thoughts from other parts and sources, but I am not sure that I have had a novel thought. At least in the last 10-15 minutes that I have been thinkng about this I can not recall a thought that I could claim as completely novel to me. I have had the experience of discovery of new facts, but in these instances, the discovery was the result of bringing bits and pieces of existing knowledge and experience together in ways not previously accomplished.
I doubt that anyone will ever read this blog. I am a little nervous putting this out so that it is possible that someone could read it, but I am interested in a conversation with someone about it and thought that writing it down would at least give me a reference point to assist me in remembering the things that I have thought about. I have all kinds of scraps and bits of files around in different formats on different storage media where I have put random thoughts at sometime. I have always been a little worried about committing these types of things to writing for a few different reasons. One is it exposes my ignorance. Second it makes me in some way responsible for the things that I have said. However, it is my belief that I have the absolute truth only about a very few items. All other things that I have opinions about are tentative. So, I feel that writing them down like this exposes me in a way that I would prefer not to be exposed. Even though I admit that I could be wrong, I don't like to be wrong. It is very likely that most of the items that I have incorporated into my corpus of knowledge are not completly accurate, or perhaps, more correctly, are not yet fully developed. Some of them may just be flat out wrong. I would like to be able to discover this myself, without someone else pointing it out to me. But here I go.