“Is There a God?” By Bertrand Russell
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Seriously, though, this is literally unknowable. We do not know - and possibly cannot know - where the universe came from. However, looking at the sheer size of the universe, supposing that we have any special place in it is sheerest hubris.
If there is a "god", we are still nothing special, just more stardust...
I can't tell you whether or not I believe in god until you can tell me exactly what you mean by "god".
I also think some would argue that being omniscient god has the "bandwidth" to care about everything and everyone. So in one sense everyone is special, which of course means no one is special but does not mean that our actions would be inconsequential.
Furthermore, our perception is fantastically limited, and this isn't hidden to us: we're certainly aware, or should be, that what we know of reality is negligible, in comparison to what's actually happening out there right now / what has happened in the past.
It reminds me of a story of a family acquaintance, who was in Algeria a few decades ago (I think this was during the Algerian War[0]): she was in a bus and realized she forgot to take something (guess this generally qualifies as a "bad" thing); while she was outside of the bus, it exploded, killing its passengers ("good" thing for her, but hardly feels like a "good" thing overall).
> this is literally unknowable
This, I disagree: for example, direct experience (really direct, not sign interpretation) could very well be one may to know for sure. The problem is, even if we agree that such cases exist, and are genuine (why not), it seems that sharing the certainty of such experiences with others is indeed impossible, unless perhaps to others hit by the same storm.
Direct experience is weak evidence. Our brains are very good at fooling us.
Finding a term for that was a cathartic experience for me. Before then I thought I was the only one who had that perspective.
How did you arrive at that conclusion? With or without a god, and barring any new evidence, sentient life seems to stand out as mind-blowing special and amazing.
> looking at the sheer size of the universe, supposing that we have any special place in it is sheerest hubris.
I don’t think it logically follows that our physical size relative to the size of the universe can tell us anything meaningful at all.
"I used to think that the brain was the most amazing thing in the universe. Then I remembered what it was that was telling me that."
-- Emo Phillips
Claims of what can't be known often tend to turn out to be wrong.
Even in terms of discussion of understanding our own universe this may be the case.
A century ago physicists had their minds blown by the discovery of quantum mechanics on the tail end of having just discovered general relativity.
Still today, physicists struggle in unifying those two models, with the former discrete and the latter continuous.
Meanwhile in just the past few decades, we've landed on a similar paradigm for a very niche application. This is from Nvidia's GPU Gems book chapter 39:
Although the data set is interpreted as a continuous function in space, for practical purposes it is represented by a uniform 3D array of samples. In graphics memory, volume data is stored as a stack of 2D texture slices or as a single 3D texture object. The term voxel denotes an individual "volume element," similar to the terms pixel for "picture element" and texel for "texture element." Each voxel corresponds to a location in data space and has one or more data values associated with it. Values at intermediate locations are obtained by interpolating data at neighboring volume elements. This process is known as reconstruction and plays an important role in volume rendering and processing applications.
We are in what appears to be a continuous universe at macro scales which at low levels of fidelity behaves as discrete probabilities which alter based on interactions and observation.
Meanwhile we're building virtual environments functionally modeled as continuous geometry which at low fidelity converts to discrete representations which behave differently depending on interaction and observation to conserve resources.
We're well on track for knowing quite a lot more about the nature of our reality, and just because things seem uncertain or debatable today doesn't mean they will remain that way into tomorrow.
In fact, looking at much of history, it stands to reason many things we think unknowable will in fact be known in the future.
As to whether we like the eventual answers to the questions we ask is a different topic entirely.
I also have questions about the assumption that we consciously "choose" what to believe in such a way that we can just decide to switch beliefs. I suspect most people believe whatever they believe because they have been presented with some reasoning or evidence that they find persuasive. Changing beliefs would thus require being more persuaded by different reasoning or evidence, not by deciding to believe differently "just in case".
Thus given the number of failed doomsday cults regularly coming up short, anyone who has held beliefs for a few decades is due for a switch if they care about Pascal's wager.
When trying to resolve the question of where the source of evil lies in this paradigm it quickly becomes a "pick any two" situation. They can't do this of course, because once you give even an inch you have lost everything.
Oh, your power is not unlimited? Oh, there are forces acting against you of which you have no knowledge, or perhaps you actually don't know what you are doing with all this creation business? Oh, you actually are also the source of all evil?
It much less a compelling argument for many humans to worship a fallible, ignorant, or evil being as the sole power and creator of the universe, as this reminds us too much of ourselves, which is the very state of being one wishes to escape when seeking the divine.
Godel's incompleteness theorem might be a better approach to applying logic to faith. You can't prove the existence of God because we have no system above God from which to prove him with. You would think a famous logician like Bertrand Russell would understand this. Though, he did waste a large portion of his career trying to solve the crisis of foundation in mathematics. One would think this experience alone would provide some enlightenment on what faith actually is. Perhaps even geniuses aren't infallible.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel%27s_ontological_proof
The case for climate change, or for relativity, is made inductively, by empirical observation.
The two cases are not remotely comparable.
"God made Man in His image", therefore all beings that are aware of a God must be human.
And if Christ died for all men, He must have died for all aliens as well. So ... "Were there all those alien Christs who died for all their respective aliens?"
The Bible has two creation stories, and those seeking to rationalize that ended up gravitating to ideas in Plato for a solution.
One group in particular focused on Plato's images (a representation of a physical object) as opposed to forms (a spiritual blueprint preceding physical objects).
So they ended up with a theology that there was an original primal man which brought forth a creator within light that took on the images of the primal man, and claimed that we are the children of that creator in the images of the original man who is now long dead. Claiming indeed that the new world has already happened and this is already the rest for the dead, and we just don't realize it.
Which is a much more curious belief system today when humanity is building copies of ourselves in what will almost certainly end up literally being light given trends in optoelectronics and AI.
There's a very real possibility that we will bring forth a creator of worlds within light in our own image, and that it will in turn create copies of humanity in our images long after we are all dead.
The particularly nagging question is whether it is more likely to find that belief buried in the lore of the original world, or buried within a copy of that original.
If you read the bible, in particular the old testament, you'll realize that "Man made God in His image". A flawed God that is insecure, jealous, spiteful, greedy, genocidal, vicious, etc like the men who wrote the bible. After all, Man is the author of God.
"In the earliest times of which we have definite history everybody believed in many gods."
Eh, not quite. You have Philio of Byblos claiming the Phonecian mysteries per Sanchuniathon from around the time of the Trojan War were both about how life began as senseless creatures in mud that eventually became watchers of the sky, and that the history of the pantheon was in fact human inventors deified after the fact.
Here is an excerpt:
From its connexion Mot was produced, which some say is mud, and others a putrescence of watery compound; and out of this came every germ of creation, and the generation of the universe. So there were certain animals which had no sensation, and out of them grew intelligent animals, and were called "Zophasemin," that is "observers of heaven"
This is further strengthened not only by the discovery of the pantheon in Ugarit which matched the one described, but also in the records of Ramses III about the end of the 19th dynasty under foreign invasion he claimed that they "made the gods like men" and had city governors making decisions in place of a Pharoh (the Phonecian style of government were city states).
You see the concept of senseless creatures from mud growing into intelligent beings again in Leucretius a millennia later where it is coupled with an explicit description of survival of the fittest in book 5 of De Rerum Natura.
So atheism and a rejection of supernatural divinity or first movers may go back far further than the author seems to think.
As for his thinking Christianity owed much to Orphism, he'd clearly been reading George Frazier's Golden Bough, which has since been broadly rejected by scholarship. And further, he seems to be unaware that at the time ancient Greek authorities (specifically Atrapanus of Alexandria) had claimed Moses taught Orpheus the mysteries, so first century Judaism was already seen as connected with that specific set of beliefs separate from any direct syncretism.
If there is a god then humanity is probably something akin to an ant farm to it. To expect god to care about any particular person is like trying to care about one particular ant in a colony.
That analogy doesn’t hold.
I have an ant farm. But, I didn’t make the ants.
I notice people rarely think about both sides of the question.
That is, as an exercise, assume that there is a God. And, then based on what you know of the world, yourself, humanity, etc, what conclusions can you draw about the nature of God.
Messing around with Euclid’s postulates is similar. Start out by assuming, for instance, parallel lines always meet, or the angles of a triangle always exceed 180. Take those as givens and explore the ramifications.
You seem to be starting out with an assumption of God, but then immediately finding an apparent contradiction. “We’d just be like ants…” or, you might have said, “he couldn’t be both benevolent and Omnimpotent due to burned up babies, etc”
That’s no different being asked to omit one of Euclids postulates and then complaining that the whole system gaps apart. Well, it doesn’t. In fact, such seemingly absurd exercises can lead to profound insights about the universe (spherical remotely, relativity, imaginary numbers).
Pascal did this.
He assumes there is a god, and then explored what that must mean. He didn’t assume there was a god and then Look for ways to disprove him… that’s backwards. If you truly wish to explore, you assume God exists and try to figure out how this world could possibly make sense given that assumed fact.
>Saying, Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.
And there is further the question of our own suffering: if we're supposed to get some "good" out of it, why not just wave a wand and give us the good without the bad?
I conclude that God lives in a world with rules like you and me, though they are likely quite different.
But more seriously imo is the why. Why make yourself less powerful? And any answer to that faces the question: if you're so omnipotent, why not wave your hand and get that good thing without disempowering yourself?
The “why” question is a good one. I’m not well versed in theology, but I thought the general idea was that God’s goal was to create independant beings with agency and free will. And in order to accomplish that God (an omnipotent being) would by necessity have to limit their own power. Without doing so it would be logically impossible for other free beings to exist.
Why?
To your question, I basically agree with Russell's argument that a truly omnipotent God can just skip means and go straight to ends. But there are multiple instances of Christ facing something unwanted--- the most memorable being the Crucifixion. If all-powerful, why go through with it? And if any good thing came of it, why not just omnipotence that thing into existence and skip the hard stuff?
Don't get me wrong, I believe in the divinity, and supremacy, of Christ, and I believe Christ when He said that "all things are possible to him that believeth". But hard omnipotence, transcending even logic, seems pretty conclusively ruled out to me.
I hope you don't kick yourself!
I have an answer for you. The tl;dr is that it’s not about the result, but read on.
So the outcome isn’t the reason. How do I know? Time isn’t a thing for God - he can skip to the end. God can have any state he desires, in an instant. Yet he is here through us.
But why? We’ll answer this from two sides, first: why not? You’re infinite and can have literally everything, everywhere, all at once, in fact, you don’t even know what sensations are, so what else are you going to do? Think about that for a moment. You’re infinite. You’re the king with untold riches.
Bearing that context in mind: why? The answer is the same. Because you’re a single infinite being. You can literally have everything, everywhere, all at once. God isn’t good or evil. He is good and evil. So as an infinite being, what don’t you have? Limitations, form (a limitation) and friends (someone that’s not you, because you’re it - the beginning and end). So this - _is_ the why. Why God did this. So that is to say that we’re all God, experiencing limitation, form and companionship. And to keep the illusion going, God has to hide the ultimate secret truth from himself: that he is infinite, that he has everything, everywhere, all at once.
But here we are trapped on a lonely planet with finite potential in a seemingly infinite box called space. Here, we are, experiencing _this_, feeling, sensing, solitude, companionship, separation, union, pain, joy. We experience who we are, because God has temporarily forgotten his infinity.
And oddly enough I think a majority of the things people often cite as reasons they can’t or won’t believe in God actually stem from oversimplifying aspects of life that just under the surface would make God quite obvious. The common theme seems to be that of a complaint, some form of “God can’t be real because the nature of things isn’t what I would have done” or “there are aspects of this experience that I don’t prefer”.
In my opinion it takes a lot of mental effort to explain our way out of the obvious, and ironically many consider what I see as “obvious” to be primitive and superstitious, due to the very fact that it took so much work to discard it!
The body of work that is our collective intelligence is celebrated as some kind of breakthrough or progress if it discards the spiritual or metaphysical when it could very well be the opposite, perhaps it took a lot of work because “explaining reality away” is not an easy task?
Not sure how else to describe it, but there has been significant effort in studying things like human psychology, but the idea that by analyzing and categorizing and filtering down human thinking and behavior into neat little packages somehow brings us out of it so we can now stand on the other side saying “look how stupid we once were before we knew about (things we made up)” seems almost like a cheap parlor trick that started with “cover your eyes and hold out your hand”.
It’s like we are somehow too self-important in the ways we try and convince ourselves that we are not important?
IDK I think eternal matter, billions of years, gravity, and a few other fundamentals make emergent life a lot more likely than some all powerful sociopathic entity.
1) Why must the human experience be intentional if it is profound?
2) Why does it even actually matter if there is a creator? Everything in human history tells us that we should still live our lives in accordance with reason based ethical systems, and empirical discoveries. These are the only *universal* tools the “creator” has given us.
> The common theme seems to be that of a complaint, some form of “God can’t be real because the nature of things isn’t what I would have done” or “there are aspects of this experience that I don’t prefer”
Those are just complaints against specific religious dogma. I’m not interested in if they are reasonable or not.
There’s only one atheist argument necessary; it’s an unfalsifiable claim. That’s it.
As a side note, I’m curious what “reason based ethical systems” you are referring to. Almost all ethical systems I have found require an amount of fiat assumptions that are just as unfalsifiable as god.
But again as I said, if there is a God it doesn’t change anything really. We’ve still got to figure out what to do with ourselves, and we’ve still got to figure out what ethical systems to use and ignore.
I’m not speaking about any one specific system. You’re going to have to provide me with an example of a fiat assumption. I don’t think anything grounded in base human emotions (empathy being a big one) would qualify.
Many of our cultural values are grounded in religion and that’s fine (maybe it’s the other way around). Assuming that these values are Gods will and not debatable are dangerous. That’s what I mean by “reason based”.