For when the agent gets here
So as Sigmund says, the point is that if there is (what looks like) convincing evidence of ‘God’ we will not be able to tell whether it is simply evidence of an advanced alien technology. My similar point is that we won’t know of any way to distinguish between a natural intelligent agent and a ‘god’ of whatever sort.
I think that observation is hard to get around. We could of course say that it could be a ‘god’ – that we don’t know that it’s not a god, that it has powers that seem to us to be what is called ‘miraculous.’ But could we say ‘this is supernatural for sure’? I don’t think so. It seems like the kind of thing we couldn’t know, in the nature of the case.
Another, and perhaps more relevant, thing we couldn’t know is that the agent/god had legitimate authority over us. Believers take that idea for granted – ‘God’ is great, God is bigger and stronger and better than we are, God made us and the flowers too, therefore God is the boss of us. Non-believers however don’t take that for granted. Lots of people are bigger and stronger than I am, but I don’t consider them to have legitimate authority over me. An agent with miraculous-seeming powers might have the ability to force us to obey it, but that’s not at all the same thing as legitimate authority.
But that’s not it, the devout listeners in the audience murmur to each other; it’s not just superior strength, it’s also infinite wisdom and goodness. That’s what makes the authority legitimate.
Well – I’ll suspend judgment on that point until I meet such an agent…or until someone gives me a good argument. One of those.
We generally concentrate of on the atheist/theist argument. I think many believers and non-believers alike operate under the assumption that all you have to do is convince someone that religious claims are true, and they’ll fall to their knees and praise The Lord. I know that is not the case for myself, though. I can imagine fanciful situations that could convince me that the claims of <insert religion here> were all true. But that wouldn’t make me a “follower of the religion”. To be religious doesn’t just mean you believe that it’s true, it also means you’re happy about it, that you’ll gladly worship the deity and beg Him for mercy. Well, you’d never catch me doing any of that. If I thought that say, Yaweh, really existed, I would try to oppose Him, futile though it might be.
So I think there’s a religious/anti-religous argument that is to some extent independent of the theist/atheist argument.
It is. Apparently God loves us so much that he has not given us the tools to verify properly his existence.
As a kind of weird corollary, I once made a William Lane Craig fanboy angry by asking the simple question “How does God know he’s God?” The implication being, of course, that how does omnipotence and omniscience really work out in practice? In the same way we can’t know whether or not we’re just brains in a vat, how would God truly know that he’s not in some kind of super-sophisticated “God Matrix” that has an even more powerful God—or, what the heck, an alien species—at the helm? I thought that, since we were presuming unseen deities and all, it was not an altogether silly question. The guy told me that that seemed to him like an unlikely contingency, and I happily agreed.
I would have no problem believing in the existence of a garden-variety Greek or traditional Chinese god, who is very powerful but full of human flaws and limitations. I can’t see how that can be distinguished from a powerful alien (although maybe DNA tests would suffice). And the Greeks and Chinese did and do worship these gods more out of fear and mystery than out of love.
But for the Abrahamic superlative god of infinite everything, there’s no way anyone could ever be justified in claiming knowledge of its existence. That means a finite human is claiming infinite knowledge — and almost always for the purpose of telling other finite humans what to do. The whole concept can be rejected immediately as impossible to ever verify.
Ooh, the “God Matrix.” I like it.
If we didn’t have the cultural baggage we do, would we need to come up with the term “supernatural”? I think not. There would just be reality, explored by science.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Skeptic South Africa, Ophelia Benson. Ophelia Benson said: For when the agent gets here http://dlvr.it/7zplV […]
“Abrahamic superlative god of infinite everything” – but that is not the abrahamic view, it is the christian view. The abrahamic god was a trickster who almost had abraham kill his son and then said – “just kidding”. That’s more like a Loki or a Blue Jay….
and would a being of “infinite wisdom” have left us nothing but the crap that is in the bible or the koran? I think not. Of course there is no reason to think that yahweh or allah is really a god of any kind; they are obviously as much creations of the primitive human mind as quetzalcoatl and the midgard serpent.
That seems to me like another unverifiable idea. For one, what does “infinite goodness” (or perhaps the more common “perfect” goodness) really mean? For another, how could one ever verify that a being is not merely very wise, but infinitely so?
If a being (god, God, or alien) showed up with a whole lotta wisdom and good ideas, demonstrating a good track record and being generally trustworthy, I would probably do more or less what that being said (with some reservations about the inherent asymmetry involved). But I don’t know how one could ever know that some being was infinitely wise (or how the difference between extremely and infinitely wise would ever even be detectable by a finite being).
[…] For when the agent gets here – Butterflies and Wheels […]
I feel like at this stage of the argument all value has been lost.
1. Seriously, what’s the point of arguing over whether we’d ever be able to tell the difference between an omnipotent superbeing from beyond time and space, and an arbitrarily powerful being from within time and space? We don’t have either.
2. One thing that usually annoys the crap out of me is when people demand that atheist live up to standards of proof that nothing else in life has to meet. Some people like to insist that unless atheists can prove that its literally impossible for there to be any sort of God at all, that atheism is therefore unjustified. But isn’t that what’s going in this debate? If I can conclude that there’s no God based on the fact that its extremely, extremely, incredibly unlikely that there’s a God given the available evidence, then in bizarro world where the evidence for the divinity of an incredibly powerful being were equally convincing, I could conclude that it was a God.
3. The theists who ask this question don’t want to know the philosophy of belief. They want to know what they would have to do to convince us. Their goal is to either come up with a bright line test that they can then satisfy, or if satisfying that bright line test is impossible for them, they want a clear target they can mock in order to portray atheists as close minded. Lets not lose sight of what’s really at issue.
It seems like the kind of thing we couldn’t know, in the nature of the case.
So? We also cannot know if we aren’t all brains inna tank. If anybody claims that we would know for certain that aliens are not messing with us they should brush up on their epistemology. But just like we can now say, it seems most sensible to assume that evolution happened instead of the world having been created last Thursday to look billions of years old, we could say it seems most sensible to assume that a god has created the world if it actually looked like having popped fully formed into existence a mere 6000 years ago.
And what exactly is the difference between a god and superadvanced aliens if, say, these aliens can create the universe as we know it, listen to our thoughts, and answer our prayers with miracle healings? If it quacks like a duck…
I agree completely, on the other hand, that the term supernatural is useless except as a science no go there label. But what I or you would call supernatural is not the point. No matter what Massimo Pigliucci or Eugenie Scott like to believe, the believers call a lot of things supernatural that would, if they existed, not only be subject to scientific inquiry, but would actually form important parts of what our science-derived model of the world would look like. That is the point; even if the believer cannot give you a nice definition for supernatural, they would still call ghosts or magic by that name.
my agents were here today. it annoyed me.
they are obviously as much creations of the primitive human mind as quetzalcoatl and the midgard serpent.
i’m about 1000% atheist. but i don’t like this construction at all. there’s nothing “primitive” about religious belief. all societies, and all classes and races, are and have been in the vast majority, believing. you can call atheists “the intellectual elite of humanity” and i guess i’m vain enough not to disagree. but one big hurdle for atheists to overcome- and science and technology make this much, much easier- is to convince believers “our way is better.” there is a very powerful, very useful quality to religion. as others have said: it helps the unscrupulous to control the credulous. that brings power. that’s not “primitive” in any way. there are other comforts and securities religion provides. they may be false, but they can be persuasive. ignore that fact at your peril.
Patrick, I think the point of pondering on this question is really to carry out a thought experiment based on Dawkins 1 to 7 scale of belief. Dawkins says he is a 6.9 – meaning that he is almost certain that there is no God. At this end of the scale things are rather clear – there is no evidence in favor of God and thus it is rational to withhold belief (and since we don’t know everything in the Universe it is also rational to allow a tiny bit of wiggle room – a sliver of possibility that something God-like MIGHT hypothetically some day be revealed by science).
The other side of the scale is really where our debate centers. In other words can there ever be sufficient evidence to justify a claim of being a 1 on the scale. Some of us think there is no chance whatsoever that a religious proof will occur – Jesus returning on a cloud, for instance. Others have said that if Jesus actually did that then this WOULD be positive evidence in favor of that God. The third conclusion is that even the best religious evidence imaginable should still be regarded as inconclusive since humans would not be able to distinguish a ‘natural’ explanation (ET) from a ‘supernatural’ explanation (Jesus).
This conclusion doesn’t rule out the possibility of a ‘supernatural’ religious God, but it does render all positive evidence as inconclusive.
Why does the question of supernatural come into it all? If a being could prove he/she/it has created our universe (to be decided how this could be done) then wouldnt this being have earned the title of God? And wouldnt it have earned some authority similar to the authority one grants a parent/grand parent? (which doesnt mean one has to obey it ofcourse).
FYI your site seems to be having some trouble – I got 500 -Internal server error message though the comment did post
This sort of discussion reminds me of the debate over super-Turing (or hyper)computation: if you had a super-Turing machine (one that can calculate more functions than a Turing class machine), how would you know? Wouldn’t you need to perform another “supertask” to find out? It seems that both in the case in the article and in the ST case the only evidence has to come from consilience and inference to the best explanation. Arguably, in the case of the putatively divine, IBE will *never* get the answer the theist wants.
I am also reminded of the scene in that silly but classic movie, Tron, where the User has to explain to entities within the computer that just because he he’s a user he’s really no different when it comes to understanding “everything” or words to that effect.
‘If there are no Users, who wrote me?’
The ‘gods’ in Tron have a natural explanation: they’re human.
There’s a conversation in Philip K Dick’s Our Friends from Frolix 8 which goes something like:
‘God is dead. They found his body floating by Alpha Centauri’
‘Just because the autopsy proved the body was capable of creating planets doesn’t mean he was God’
I’m with Clarke on the ‘sufficient level of technology being indistinguishable from magic’ argument. Even if a big finger came out of the sky and zapped me with lightening everytime I thought something naughty I’d still be reaching for a natural explanation, even if it did rely on some Star Trek/Doctor Who notion that gods are just aliens faking it.
Has anyone got any data on a correlation between SF fans and atheism? There are religious SF fans and writers, certainly, but the genre depends on ‘rational’ – if far fetched – explanations for fantastic phenomena.
I made a similar point on my blog quite awhile back. If Kim Jong Il could walk on water, wouldn’t he still be a douchebag?
@Shatterface: I think the question that is a big part of what divides “there can never be evidence” atheists from “there could in principle be evidence (even though there won’t be)” atheists is whether you believe the converse of Clarke’s Law: That any magic is indistinguishable from a sufficiently advanced technology. I tend to believe it, but others insist that a sufficiently capricious and inconsistent “magic” could not be achieved via physics or technology.
(The other big question is whether one considers “created everything” to be a necessary condition for godhood. I am ambivalent on this point — it’s just a choice of definition. But, if it is a necessary precondition, then of course there can never be evidence that would convince me of a god.)
Patrick, srsly, all value lost? I totally disagree – the comments alone contradict that.
The definition of god or gods is sufficiently amorphous that an advanced alien could in fact be a god.
Set up a Young’s slits experiment, in which photons are emitted one at a time, pass through two slits, and, in time, form a pattern of stripes on a light-sensitive screen. If an Agent appears which can correctly predict, one at a time, in the presence of several professional conjurers, where each photon will hit the screen, then either
a. It has supernatural powers; or
b. Our understanding of quantum electrodynamics is fundamentally flawed.
I would prefer to believe a.
More interestingly, suppose an elephant is found in a convenient zoo which can communicate with humans, in all human languages that are tried. Ratzinger, Osama bin Laden, the Dalai Lama, other leaders of other big religions, and Daniel Dennett discuss their ideas with this elephant. They unanimously report that the elephant has convinced them that
1. There is a supernatural essence present in the universe, which is communicating to humans through this elephant.
2. This essence is nothing like any of the gods that humans have invented and discussed, and is beyond human comprehension.
3. Human consciousness is, in principle, within human comprehension, but not yet. Human consciousness does not survive death.
4. The suffering of all life forms on this and other planets results neither from mistakes by the supernatural essence, nor from ‘sins’ of the life forms.
5. Human suffering will be decreased, though not eliminated, if humans try harder to be kind to each other, stop obsessing about who puts what in who, limit their numbers, and treat females fairly.
6. The surviving accounts of the lives and teachings of Gautama, Jesus, Mohammed (etc) are garbled. They were all well-meaning, but all mistaken on many points.
or c. You are hallucinating; or
d. The aliens’ stage magicians are simply much trickier than ours; or
e. All the participants are playing a huge practical joke on you; or etc. etc. etc.
I would think that “the natural laws of the universe can be violated” would be the very last option to choose, much farther down than “we don’t fully understand such laws”.
The following thought popped into my head in reading this discussion: theists not only have implicitly assumed that God has legitimate authority and is worthy of love and devotion but they have also implicitly assumed that the mere existence of that god is a necessary and sufficient reason to love and worship that entity. The distinction here is subtle and perhaps purely semantic. But it perhaps it leads to a definite test to tell the difference between an extraordinarily powerful multidimensional entity that just happens to have been responsible for our observable universe and a God. It is a God if you have no choice but to love and worship it. Conversely, if you just like that entity (or are just smitten by it) well then, no Godhood for it.
One of the reasons I think it’s important to get clear on what people actually mean by “supernatural” is that it has a lot to do with what they find it intuitively reasonable to worship. I think it also has a lot to do with what religious people mean by “faith,” and how it’s not just believing without evidence—it’s about trust and commitment that they think is justified because they assume that certain essences exist, and that they can access them.
Think about The Force in Star Wars and the Jedi religion around it.
Why is it credible that you could have a religion around something like The Force? Whether you actually find The Force credible or not, it’s pretty intuitively credible that if there was such a thing, people would be religious about it. I think that says something important about the supernatural, and about the relationship between supernaturalism and religion.
It’s related to why people think that the gods they believe in are worth worshipping, and even why Karen Armstrong can get religious about her apophatic “God,” whose thinly-veiled supernaturalism makes it an appropriate object of religious reverence.
A really interesting and revealing thing about The Force is that it’s assumed to be something like infallible—not necessarily knowing everything, but always being right within a certain area of applicability. You can tell that by the things that people don’t say and clearly wouldn’t say about it. (Have I said this here before? I’ve said it elsewhere.)
For example, when Obi Wan tells Luke to Use the Force, Luke would never say “I used the Force, but the Force fucked up.” (If you had that in a blooper reel, it would be funny because it’s obvious it would never be in the movie.)
The Force is clearly supernatural, and supernatural entities don’t just fuck up. at least not in quite the way natural things do. If Luke tries to use The Force and fails, it must be Luke’s own fault—he didn’t tune into the force correctly, or misinterpreted it, or let it get the better of him somehow.
The Force doesn’t fuck up because it has something like an irreducible essence that’s directlly tied to the interesting things The Force is about—Truth or Knowledge or Skill or something. It has a light and dark side, but it’s accurate. It can distinguish certain kinds of things reliably, if you know how to access it, and it is not fallible or confused within a certain domain—you might accidentally be lured into the dark side without realizing, but The Force itself isn’t just confused about what’s light and dark.
This might seem wrong if you consider a pagan god like Cupid. Pagan gods can have normal human foibles, and can make mistakes like humans can. So, for example, Cupid might shoot a love arrow at somebody and miss, and hit somebody else, and they’ll fall in love instead. Oops. (Or he might shoot an arrow that makes somebody fall in love with the next person they lay eyes on, and they see the wrong person and fall in love with them.)
But notice what doesn’t happen, and obviously would never happn. Cupid’s arrow doesn’t make somebody react in a way other than falling in love. It doesn’t make them fly into a psychotic rage, or fall into an epileptic seizure, or begin farting uncontrollably. That would never happen, because it’s a love arrow, not an epilepsy arrow or a farting arrow. A love arrow has something like an irreducible essence that is directly related to Love, or is Love, or something like that, and Cupid is an irreducibly special kind of being who has an essential knack for making or obtaining and shooting such arrows. A love arrow isn’t complicated and heuristic—it doesn’t have a computer program in it, and a brain scanner and brain rewirer; it doesn’t have heuristic failure modes, and it isn’t buggy. It doesn’t need that complexity and fallibility, because we assume Love is an simple essence you can just shoot somebody with a dose of, and if you do hit them, it just works.
One reason for the appeal of such concepts is that they’re very simple. If you assume that there’s an essence of something interesting, and a reliable connection that essence, things make sense at a certain level. Is a simple theory, in a certain intuitive sense. (Too simple to be realistic, but fine for fantasy fiction.)
Another reason for the continuing appeal of such attractive concepts is that they make for good stories. You can easily and unconsciously distinguish between the kinds of human-like mistakes that Cupid might make with his human-like mind from the reliable things he can do with his godly gifts. You don’t even have to think about it consciously; it’s automatic.
As in superhero stories, godly powers are simple modifications of the usual idea of a normal person, which advance the plot dramatically without complicating it much and making it confusing. They make it easy to construct, understand, remember, and retell interesting stories.
Now think about Christianity and how people assume that God is Good.
God is good because his essence includes the highest and best Goodness. It’s maybe the source of all Goodness, or something crap like that. You can trust him to be reliably Good in the same way you can trust Cupid’s arrow to inflict love, and trust The Force to know where the target is. It’s assumed that that’s essentially the kind of thing he is, and he just does that. God is Good, God is Love, God is Truth, etc. He’s essentially connected to everything right and true, and you can count on that connection, because it’s essential and direct, not contingent and fallible. If you think he fucked up, you must have fucked up, like Luke thinking The Force fucked up, or somebody blaming a farting spell on Cupid’s arrow.
And that’s why it’s okay to worship him. He’s connected to important things, or in some sense is those things, rather than being a complicated and fallible natural being that you can’t really trust about those things. His authority is justified because his essence is reliably connected in a certain way to what you care about, and can’t make the kinds of mistakes humans do. It would be contradictory to his essence.
Exactly. There’s a really serious problem with the notion of defining the supernatural in terms of deviations from or exceptions to natural law, and it has to do with how we use the word “natural law,” and really stems from the fact that all scientific theories are provisional, waiting to be falsified in some future experiment.
When we use the phrase “natural law,” especially in the context of defining “supernatural,” we want to mean something like “fundamental natural laws,” the laws that are prior to all other laws; or you might describe them as the fundamental source of regularity in our universe (I don’t know, it’s tricky). Obviously, we have a lot of identities and inequalities referred to as “laws” that we’d exclude from this class of “natural law” — the ideal gas law, for example, is a contingent law that can be derived from “more fundamental” laws. And then we have scientific concepts that seem to hang somewhere between contingency and necessity. The second law of thermodynamics isn’t a law in the strictest sense, it’s more a matter of overwhelming probabilities — and yet, it’s of fundamental importance in any modern discussion of metaphysics (especially concerning the nature of time). And evolution by natural selection isn’t really a law as much as a rough description of a very general algorithmic process. Nothing necessitates that the best-adapted will win out, but it would be a strange coincidence if they didn’t.
This is just to point out that when we define “supernatural” in terms of “deviations from natural law,” this only seems to make sense because we don’t actually know what we mean by natural law. This becomes more apparent when we try to use the definition — does a particular apparent deviation from natural law represent a true deviation or simply a misunderstanding of the true natural law? We’d need to know the actual fundamental laws, and moreover know that we know them before the definition in terms of deviation from natural law could be of any utility whatsoever.
I think it’s another case of philosophers leaning very heavily on a term without actually knowing what it means or what they mean by it (of course they think they know what they mean by it, but I suspect they’re fooling themselves). Twentieth century physics has been an extended lesson in not getting too cozy with any particular metaphysical model; the persistence of “supernatural” as a concept seems to me to stem from folks who’ve yet to learn this lesson.
@Andy
I’m surprised his head didn’t explode. Good question. Forces a direct confrontation with the paradoxes generated when omnipotence and omniscience side swipe theodicy and free will.
@chidy
I’m willing to settle for my way is based on evidence, reasoning and an unwillingness to lie to myself or others about the nature of reality.
I’m glad to see this sudden surge of Ignostic-related interest in the Atheist community. There are many fundamental aspects of the whole God concept (as it is commonly used) that break down completely under sufficient scrutiny and pursuing our knowledge in those areas doesn’t leave us dependent on simply observing a lack of evidence but instead grants us a deeper understanding of why a proposition for the Divine itself is flawed and how most of these propositions make themselves inherently unverifiable to human agents or otherwise meaningless.
After all the beating of dead horses when it comes to the ever present social ills caused by religious groups or focusing on the empirical (lack of) evidence for religious claims, the recent discussions are a refreshing change. There are only so many times that one can point out the obvious barbarity in religious texts before annoyance replaces the intellectual curiosity of examining a long-standing part of our collective culture. Exploring the philosophical aspects also gives us more tools to put theists on their toes.
Dan, I agree with what you say, but I think it goes even deeper than that. I don’t think there is or ever will be any such thing as a “natural law” in the common sense of these words. These laws do not describe restrictions that the natural world is required to obey; they merely describe in an approximate sense the regularities that we humans have observed with our limited capabilities. An electron does not carry with it a Dirac equation simulator whose output it follows slavishly; the Dirac equation is just a convenient way for us to describe what we have observed about the electron so far.
Many people seem to think that if we ever achieve an experimentally verified union of quantum mechanics and general relativity (perhaps along the lines of string theory, but perhaps not), this will represent the end of elementary particle physics; it will be the “theory of everything.” But that’s just silly. It would take us down to the level of the Planck length of 10^{-35}, which would be a supreme achievement. But to think that nothing else fundamentally new could ever appear below that length scale is not just arrogant, it displays an ignorance of the whole history of science. Can we really assert on this basis that nothing new could happen when we get down to 10^{-100}? How about 10^{-10^{100}}?
That’s the sort of arrogance displayed by people who assert the existence of the supernatural. They assume that they know everything there is to know about the natural world, and everything that could ever be known — and furthermore, they know that that’s not enough. There must be something beyond the natural, and fortunately for the rest of us, they are just humble enough to know precisely what that something is, and what it wants us to do.
Oops, the HMTL superscripts were working in the preview version. The numbers are supposed to be 10^{-35}, 10^{-100}, and 10^{-10^{100}}, respectively, where ^ represents exponentiation.
Thanks James. Same here. I find the epistemology interesting and…what…not yet used up as a subject. I think it’s worth exploring.
I’ll see if I can fix that, Hamilton. Stand by for explosions.
There.
Living in Japan as I do, I come into discussions at odd times. This discussion started in fact on Jerry Coyne’s excellent blog, and I am going to re-post a comment made there which was posted late and which probably no-one saw (and I don’t want to waste it!). It concerns the nature of gods and the definition of them as ‘counter-intuitive agents’, because, as Patrick W has tried to point out, it is the splendidly theological and contradictory qualities that theologians and a-theologians get so het-up about that people do not genuinely believe in and have some sort of strong emotional commitment to. I think it was Miguel de Unamono who told the story of some theologian explaining the most advancedv ideas about God to a Spanish peasant, who listened carefully, spat, and then said, ‘Then what use is He?’ Gods serve a purpose, a human one, and it is those purposes that need to be addressed rather than arguing on this ultra-abstract level. Anyway, the post on JC’s blog follows:
I don’t know if anybody’s still reading (I live in Japan so there’s a large time-difference), but I just want to pick up on what Pyysiainen means by ‘counter-intuitive’ agents’; Boyer also, by the way, speaks of agents with ‘counter-intuitive’ properties, and in a series of ‘brilliantly designed experiments’ (I quote Harvey Whitehouse)he and his collaborators have shown that what he calls ‘minimally counterintuitive (MCI) representations’ are ‘easier to recall than intuitive, strange, or profoundly counterintuitive concepts.’ That is to say, agents who violate ordinary expectations in a moderate way are especially easy to notice, recall and transmit. It is such agents that are ‘gods’ – including Jehovah, concerning whom no believer believes in a deeply emotional way that he is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent etc (except when they are trotting out the theological niceties they have been told are ‘correct’); they in fact believe (and this has been demonstrated in experiments)that Jehovah acts much like a human agent and can’t do more than one thing at once, so that after unleashing a tsunami in Indonesia and Thailand or floods in Northern England to deal with all those gays and show his disapproval of gay marriage, he will come to Arizona to save a little girl from being mowed down by a car, and then will offer Ray Comfort, if our little ray of sunshine is feeling gloomy, some comfort… ‘Counter-intuitive’ is not meant by Boyer or Pyysiainen or Whitehouse to mean ‘unnatural’ or ‘hard to envisage’ but is rather a technical term to describe the properties of the kind of agent human beings in fact regard as gods. (Whitehouse goes out of his way to entitle a section of his ‘Modes of Religiosity’ ‘The Naturalness of Gods’.) Which is why it seems to me that conducting the debate on a high theological, or a-theological, level is, though not entirely pointless, not very helpful, since it is not on that level that people actually entertain the concept of ‘counter-intuitive agents’. And it leads to the sort of constant exasperation with which some atheists regard the believer, as though the latter were merely being perverse in not accepting the atheists’ arguments. Anyway, enough of that: the famous Calvinist preacher in Scotland had the right idea about ‘God’ to my mind. In a Sunday sermon, he told the story of Jock who drank on Sundays. After his death, Jock found himself lying on a lake of fire burning from head to toe. He looked up and there was God glowering down at him from Heaven. ‘Lord, Lord,’ wailed Jocky, ‘I didna ken, I didna ken…’ ‘Well, ye ken noo!’ said God.Now that’s a proper god.
As we all know, the theologians/apologists love to move the goalposts that is ‘God’ whenever it suits them. Finally show that the universe requires no cause? Ah, now God hides in the fundamental mathematical constants that are so ‘fine-tuned’, even though such constants were unknown two-thousand years ago.
It is time to both fix a single hypothesis–and no arbitrary qualities of God because those qualities were dreamt up in the minds of metaphysical thinkers–then test hypothesis for evidence, then if there is no evidence make the conclusion: no evidence for claim and claim contradicts known evidence therefore claim is falsified. God is gone for good.
Thanks, Ophelia. There were actually some HTML superscript tags lurking in there, but since those seem not to be working (outside the “Visual” editor, that is), this is good enough.
One more “oops”: there was originally an “m” (for meters) after each number. Not that the units really matter in a discussion of this type. OK, I’ll go away and stop filling the thread with irrelevancies now.
I’m writing something about this myself.
Anyway, I haven’t been back to that thread since I stormed out, but I wanted to apologize for my last comment here. I stand by my other remarks, but that was a serious overreaction and an unkind thing to say. Sorry.
Hey Salty – thanks. Funny, I was thinking about that yesterday – and trying to remember what the disagreement was about, and failing utterly. I think that’s a good thing, and I plan to leave it that way. :- )
Glad you’re back.
@Hamilton:
Yes, I agree with you that “laws of nature” can only ever refer to our models of how the world works because we can only apprehend the world through models. I disagree that we don’t have good reasons to suspect the Planck scale is the floor. You’d need something less massive than a photon to detect anything smaller than Planck scale, and then you’d need to detect your micro-photon. That would be a neat trick.
Oh, but I still agree that the marriage of QM and relativity won’t really be a “theory of everything.” Like I said before, 20th century physics has been an object lesson in the fact that the next big theory isn’t the one everyone was looking for. But I think the problems with the current program will be more subtle than, “OK, but what about really small stuff?”