April 2001

God's Existence

I'm adamently agnostic, but have an interesting thought experiment

Brief Description

There are two main points to my view on God. I was entirely atheist growing up [See footnote 2], and I remain so as it pertains to human-invented religions. In other words, regardless of the status of God's existence I don't believe there is any connection between God and human religions. However, I learned a cool little fact in a statistics class in college. Nothing can be proven to be false, and thus I extraploated this to mean that nothing can be proven not to exist (which is basically a false assertion of existence) [See footnote 1]. This is the first of the two main points I mentioned. The other thing that made my head woozy with other-worldness was my discovery of artificial life, a field of computer science that I have taken up as my life's persuit. The idea that I could create a world in a computer, inhabited by organisms with no knowledge of my existence stirred the idea that our universe may work the same way. Nevertheless, I find it fairly ridiculous and don't accept it as an accurate description of physical reality; it's just an interesting philosophical idea.

Full Description

Sections:

• Introduction
• Various points of view
• A touch of open-mindedness
• A nonsupernatural definition of God, an interesting thought experiment

Now here's a touchy subject. Does God exist? Can you imagine a more controversial question? Practically every other issue of serious debate stems off this question and the interpretation of any one person's answer. No other question has lasted as long, affected so many lives in the belief of one answer or another, or otherwise had a more profound impact on the history of the human species and consequently on our planet as a whole.

Since this question is so far-reaching, and since it seems to spark such serious debate and contention to the point of triggering discrimination, war, slavery, and genocide, not to mention sparking such reverence and awe to the point of magnificent art and music, deeply ingrained moral codes, and a warm, fuzzy feeling of belonging to something much greater than oneself, it would appear to be pretty important that we clear this matter up once and for all, wouldn't it? The answer to this question, whatever it may be, ought to be vitally important to us. We use this question and its supposedly available answer to define not only our personal lives, but our societal structure as well. One thing is for sure. We better damn well have an answer one way or the other. We sure as hell can't afford to be wishy-washy about this. No less than the fate of the very universe itself rests on the answer to this question so it is extremely important to have an answer, right?

I absolutely disagree! Fancy that. For some reason we as a population, humanity when taken as a whole, seem to have a tendency to fear the unknown. Seems to make sense. The unknown has snakes and poisonous insects. We are simple primates swinging about the forest with no claws and no teeth. Fearing the unknown is a good business to be in, no doubt. Unfortunately, this fear translated into an irrational form of cognition as our brains evolved into larger and more complex forms. The idea of an unanswered question is absolutely intolerable to us, and when it comes to the big questions, matters concerning the nature of the universe, the origin and meaning of life, and the proper way to behave in the course of our lives, these questions which seem to be unanswered must be answered. They must! We cannot admit with honesty that we don't know where the universe came from or where we came from. We cannot admit that we really don't have a clue what "morality" is and we're just stumbling along trying to figure out what to do as best as we can. So, in a complete and total void of information on these subjects we dream up answers. We would prefer some solid answers, but those not withstanding we will resort to the contrivance of answers. It is much more settling than having to admit we don't really know.

Does God exist? Many people know for a fact that God does exist. They are as certain of it as they are that they stand upright and not the other way around. A smaller number of people, although just as insistent in their beliefs, know for a fact that God does not exist. It is so painfully clear to them that this is so, that they are driven positively mad by all the religious nuts running about. It is a very very small number of people indeed who will admit that when it all comes down to it, they aren't really sure. Many atheists will make this claim [See footnote 2], because it sounds more politically correct. Denouncing God with strength sounds close-minded and atheists are absolutely certain they aren't the close-minded ones. It's the religious people who are close-minded as far as they are concerned, so they will throw around the term atheist but will then make slightly more open statements when confronted. For example, instead of insisting that God doesn't exist and walking away, they will offer up questions like, "yeah, sure. I'll believe in God when you offer me some proof." These aren't the words of someone who is sure they know the answer. This is the way a person talks when they are awaiting further information. Most atheists aren't awaiting further information though. They consider the matter to be entirely closed.

Where do I stand? Well, I'm certainly not middle of the road, I'll admit that. I bend pretty far toward the atheist camp [See footnote 2]. Atheism has one really big thing going for it, Occam's Razor, which states that the simplest explanation is often the correct explanation. Atheism holds to the argument that God is the most complicated, most involved explanation ever conceived and that so long as there isn't any particular evidence of God, the logical deduction is that there is no God, at least until satisfying evidence is presented.

However, religion basically makes the exact same argument in reverse. To a religious person, the simplest explanation is God. It is much more complicated to try to figure out how all of this mess could have happened without a little intelligent foresight. The atheists will counter that God is not simple if one is willing to face the challenge of having to explain God. The common religious counterargument is that God lies outside rational reasoning and that is the end of it.

You have to give religion credit. It really did conceive of the simplest possible explanation. No physics equations, no microbiology textbooks, no chemical reactions. Just God. What could be simpler? The simplicity of God only breaks down when the explanation requires an explanation and religious people solidly refuse to debate this matter. Debating the origin of God almost doesn't make sense to these people. The question doesn't really have any meaning to them, which makes it utterly impossible to debate the issue further, regardless of the interpretation one places on the resulting stalemate.

While I hold strongly to the basic atheist tenant in that I am not going to give God too much of my time until I see some evidence suggesting that I ought to be doing so [See footnote 2], I have learned some interesting facts about how to think rationally and objectively, which is the goal of any unbiased scientist. One thing I have chanced across is the fact that a falsehood cannot be proven [See footnote 1]. In statistics you either prove something to be true, or you have failed to prove it true. That is how you state your conclusions. This makes sense.

Think about it. If you see a ball in front of you, then you can positively assert that there is a ball in front of you (illusions aside for the moment). However, if you do not see a ball in front of you, what can you conclude? Perhaps the ball is transparent. Perhaps it is moving back and forth so fast that you cannot see it (the way propeller blades become invisible when rotating at high speed). Perhaps the ball only flashes in front of you when you blink your eyes and the rest of the time it darts behind your head. Perhaps you are blind. Eh? The only statements of falsehood that can be made are perceptual statements (subjective statements in other words), not of-the-world statements (objective statements). In other words you can state the falsehood that you cannot see a ball. Right? You just can't prove that there isn't a ball in the first place.

This extends to any argument concerning a binary yes/no true/false issue. God is an easy one to understand in this context. Perhaps God exists but will only make his presence known in the year 5000 AD. We simply aren't privy to evidence of God as yet. Atheists often argue to me that a God without presence is no different from no God at all. This is essentially true, except that in the end either there is a God, or there is not. Regardless of God's willingness to shake our hand, the question "Does God exist?" still has only one right answer. However, the answer wouldn't mean a whole lot under these circumstances. What difference does God make if he doesn't actually do a damn thing? Believe whatever you want if that is the case. It changes nothing.

In the end, what I believe is this. I am absolutely positively certain that there is no God in the human-invented sense. I refuse to believe that some sort of white-bearded fellow wearing a blue nightgown (what's that about anyway?) has had some sort of direct contact with certain privileged humans. The selfish, utterly egotistical notion that God has engaged in conversation with the leaders of one particular religion at the expense of all other religions strikes me as uniquely human. God should certainly be above such picking of sides, at least as he is generally defined. [See footnote 2]

Some people like to take the everyone-is-right attitude. They say that the God Christians believe in is the same one that Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists believe in, not to mention a thousand other religions. What sort of nonsense is that? If anyone is welcome to interpret God in any unbounded fashion they wish, then how does this provide even the remotest definition for God? Some people even call nature God. This slurs the whole issue to the point of absurdity. We all know exactly what God is, and it isn't nature. The only question is whether God exists, not what it is. Christians believe with all their heart that God only talks to them, only saves them, only rewards them. There is no room for hippy-love here. Either God is the ultimate Christian or he is not. There is no in between. That is the very basis of Christianity. Islam takes an almost identical view. Hinduism has such a different concept of God (being strongly polytheistic), that there no reasonable way to reconcile this view with the monotheistic views, so saying this overlaps with other main-stream religions doesn't fit any conceivable groove. Likewise, the Buddhist concept of God, which varies greatly between different forms of Buddhism, doesn't seem to have much in common with the good ol' Christian God. Out of all the religions in all the cultures of the world and throughout humanity's history stretching back tens of thousands of years at most one can be correct, and I figure if the vast majority are wrong, they may as well all be.

However, while denouncing the arrogance of human contrived religions, I must as an objective thinker give God the opportunity to exist without presenting himself. What sort of god would this be? It wouldn't have to fit any concept that we have presently defined after all. Here's a funny little mind rambling I have come up with. This is really really strange.

In computer science there is a field called artificial life. This is computer science, not biology. It doesn't involve test tubes with brown goo trying to trigger protein synthesis and RNA formation. It involves creating worlds in a computer that have rules, kind of like physics or chemistry. These worlds can be populated with organisms that consist of data in the computer's memory. These organisms can interact. They can evolve and grow. They can reproduce and die. They ingest food, expel waste, move around, fight, compete, and sleep. In short, they are alive. Within artificial life circles there is an on-going debate when "artificial life" as a field will actually spawn a truly living thing. There are all views. Some people believe we have already created things that should be called alive. Plenty of people think it is impossible to ever accomplish of course. Regardless, simply consider the possibility.

Let's look at what this artificial world is really like. Although it only exists as data in a computer's memory, and thus has no corporeal form, as far as the entities inside it are concerned this is not the case. When they try to move through a defined barrier on the world-map, they fail in this task. The world has substance to them. They can be hurt by falling off a ledge. Anything the world's underlying rules dictates will define their existence. Do they know that they exist in a box on a desk somewhere? Do they know that the box has a powerswitch that could flip at any moment? Do they know that a separate intelligent being created their world and their own lives? The answers to all these questions are clearly no. We as the creator exist outside their realm of existence. We aren't in another dimension exactly. We are entirely outside their concept of reality.

Wouldn't it be cool if that was how our universe worked? Imagine that there is no true physical form to the universe. It's all just data. There is a box sitting on a desk somewhere and we (our programs) are running inside it. There's a power-switch which means that at any moment the universe could suddenly wink out of existence and us along with it. In fact, the program can be paused. Maybe time just froze for fifty million years while I was writing this sentence and we didn't miss a beat. Strange, huh?

Some "person" wrote our universe program and set it running. This person is effectively God of course. He may choose not to interact with us or perhaps he likes to toy with our small brains. However, I am not advocating God in the magical sense. This is a being living in his own universe, with its own laws of reality. He lives, his body metabolizes, his species evolved, everything is natural. There is no notion of supernaturalness here, and yet this is a concrete definition of God. God is omniscient (all-seeing, all-knowing) and omnipotent (all-powerful). He can see, know, or do anything anytime, anywhere. Now think about this carefully. I have defined a way in which God, having all the powers that God must have by definition, can truthfully exist without resorting to mystical legends. It is an explanation by nature. It is the only natural definition of God that I have ever heard. I have never been told a concept like this by anyone. I don't think anyone has every really thought of it before.

Now clearly, we are the hallmark of this universe, yes? How can stars and planets compare the the magnificence of Earth? We must be the point of the whole universe, and being as slick as we are, this experiment must be a success, right? Actually, I take quite a different view. If our universe is an experiment in life, I consider it to be a dismal failure. Our universe appears to be almost entirely void of life. How is that a success story? Maybe you think we are some sophisticated program running in an advanced government lab, but maybe we're just some kid's toy running in his bedroom. Maybe you can buy our world at the local department store in the six-months-old bin for five bucks, like SimCity and all its variants. We could be hanging on a friggin' keychain for Christ's sake like one of those disturbing Japanese electronic pets. Please don't drop us in a puddle mister.

I stated a moment ago that I have explained God using natural means. It goes without saying that this is hyperbole of the grandest kind. Let it be known that I have explained absolutely nothing. First and foremost, there is zero evidence to support this "theory", in which not even I personally place much value, despite my being its original dreamer. It holds no water at all. It's just a cute thought-experiment. Second, and this argument stings religious people in the side like the proverbial thorn that just won't go away, even if I could offer evidence that my theoretical concept of God is true, it would offer no explanation for the origin of said God, and therefore would not answer the mightiest questions in all of the universes, only the mightiest question in our tiny little universe, and thus this is not a final answer at all. It only begs the oh-so-obvious question of explaining where this God-dude came from in the first place.

But none of this matters, because he is moments away from spilling a coke on the keyboard, and that is all she wrote folks.

Footnote 1
Added June 2009 (but applicable to my beliefs several years prior)

I must admit that since the time that I wrote this essay, the argument from the unprovability of a negative has severely lost its luster for me. The clincher was Dawkins' description of Russell's classic teapot analogy (I don't recall in which book Dawkins elucidated this example, probably The God Delusion), which demonstrates with crystal clarity that some statements, despite their unprovability in the mathematical sense, can never-the-less be trusted with extreme confidence, and that the posited existence of God is precisely such a claim.

Footnote 2
Added June 2009 (but applicable to my beliefs several years prior)

The terms atheist and agnostic no longer have the same meaning to me that they had when I wrote this essay. I now prescribe to a pair of nonmutually exclusive definitions such that neither, either, or both of these terms may apply to any given person. My current usage is that atheism is the belief (the hunch?) that God probably doesn't exist, whereas agnosticism is the statement that God's existence cannot be known for certain one way or the other. As such, both terms apply to me: I am agnostic in that I believe emphatically that God's existence cannot be known for nor against, and I am atheist in that my inclination is toward the nonexistence of God, as per Occam's Razor and Russell's teapot. On Dawkins' seven-point scale, I rank a proud hell-bound six (assuming fractions are not permitted, which would deeply convolute my attempt to use the scale in the first place).

I would really like to hear what people think of this. If you prefer private feedback, you can email me at kwiley@keithwiley.com. Alternatively, the following form and comment section is available.

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