I love Spinoza, Alex, and allow me to accept this as an indirect compliment.
Yes, the matter is complex, but the good part is that it is about language, and not about the items for which we devised words.
A different look at what is being said in the article is therefore through understanding that collective nouns are conjugates in the singular (English has a few annoying exceptions, but all other languages I know do not use any plural for collective nouns).
So, already in ancient times when languages were developing, folks recognized that a collective noun like group, team, family, or party should be conjugated with 'is' and not with 'are'. "Our team is winning" and not "our team are winning". (Again, particularly the British people have thrown this rule out the door for some unknown reason.)
We say that "the Universe is expanding" and that shows a contradiction in terms, already if we stick just with language. It is like stating that "the group is running away from one another forever." Of course, when all members of a group are running away from one another forever, then there is no group at all.
The idea that the Universe can be conjugated with the singular and not as plural tells volumes about what we are doing inside our minds. We created an abstraction, like 'a tree' being the singular thing, and 'the forest' pointing rather to the grouping and not each individual tree in the forest. And still call out that forest as singular.
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Scientists are not known for their language skills. They have their own entries in the dictionary because they are using words the way they want to use words. They prefer words to have singular meanings. They love the universe to be singular.
The other way to tell this story is therefore a warning not to follow physicists all the way into their folly.
There is a line in the sand that no scientist can cross, and yet they do all the time. They are walking their scientific data all the way to the point their footing is no longer found in science. Yet the rescue is simple.
Instead of looking for a model of the universe, one should look for a model-of-models. It is with the models that we find the material outcomes, for instance, galaxies. Yet the overall model that contains the galaxies is itself not just material. That means we can never make the universe singular. The universe is truly a group that split apart.
Thank you, Alex, my friend. You showed in two paragraphs that you can express yourself real well. I'm jealous : - )
