Sunday, February 27, 2011

God vs the Universe


A lot has changed since the original assertion that God exists. We have learned many things about our universe. As we have learned, conflicts have arisen between those who believe in the supernatural and those who do not. For the scientifically minded, there's a number of issues with believing that science is true and that God exists. How does he exist? Is he able to break the scientific rules? If so, why do scientific experiments not tend to break more often? On the other side of the coin, it is not uncommon to see someone who does believe in God disregard science or refute it entirely, but this is foolish. We cannot honestly ignore science. If God exists, there has to be a definition of God that is compatible with science.

I want you to imagine what life would be like in a computer program. Imagine how you might look. You could look just as you do right now or you could look completely different. Imagine what physics might be like. The physics of the computer world could also be like the physics of our world. In fact, the computer world could be just like our world in every way. Possibly, you might not even know that you lived in a computer world, but let's assume you did.

With this knowledge, there's a fact that you cannot escape: Your definition of reality is incomplete. It's probably incomplete anyway, but it's especially incomplete if you live in a world embedded in another world. Not only that, but there might be other worlds in the computer in addition to your world. Where is the line between your world and the others? Where is the line between the computer world and the outside world?

The computer world has to have a boundary or a wall that divides it from the other worlds and the outside world. If the computer world is very simple, it could be a literal wall or an invisible wall in three dimension space. If the world is accurately like the world we know today, the wall could be wrapped outside the third or fourth dimension. Or possibly the eleventh if there are so many. Possibly, the boundary could even be at the edge of traversable space. Somewhere, the boundary has to exist to protect the computer world and the people in it from the outside world. If someone ever found a way to cross that boundary and passed to the outside world, they would probably cease to exist.

In the computer world, you are a person with a body and a mind. In the outside world you're nothing but a bunch of electrons and magnetized metal. If those components were removed from the computer, your sentience would cease. The electrons would be absorbed by nearby particles and the magnetized metal would be nothing more than magnetized metal. The computer world would have completely forgotten about you and the outside world has never known you. You are gone.

It's conceivable that embedded worlds could exist where this is not the case. The computer world has a creator or, more likely, several creators in the outside world. We call them “programmers.” From the outside world, the programmers, if sufficiently skilled, could create yet another world inside their computer world. If they did so, they could make those worlds compatible so that people in the “inner” computer world could be moved to the “outer” computer world and vise versa. If extra careful, the programmers could even make it possible to move people from one computer world to another. They can do this by making the way people are stored in the outside world similar. Then by moving the electrons and magnetized patterns in the outside world in the correct way, they would move people between the various computer worlds and the worlds nested within them, but still, they could never move to the outside world.

All of this details how we can create worlds within our world and how they can be made to interact. What about the other direction, though? How can we know that our universe isn't embedded in yet another universe? It's certainly possible. We can create as many embedded universes as we have time to make. Why would we live in the one universe at the top of the chain? On top of the simple “chance” that another system houses our universe, we already know of things that could be the boundary between our universe and the next. Quantum physics and M-theory believe that there was a point in our universe's history where time did not exist. This is a boundary of our universe. Some theories say that space itself has boundaries. Super string theory states that additional dimensions exist that are outside of our access. All these, or any of them, could be the wall that protects us from a universe we where we may not be able to exist.

Along with the possibility that an encapsulating universe exists come the possibility that people or some kind of sentient entities exist in the outside universe. If so, those people may be able to interact with our world in the same way the programmer could interact with the computer world. Possibly, these “programmers” of our outside universe exist in a universe two, three, or a hundred layers up. Any entity that could interact with our universe from an encapsulating universe could cause miraculous events to occur in our universe, if they so chose. They don't even need to have created our universe. Though, given how our embedded universes required creators, it seems likely that one or more of them would have. Our computer world could have “users” or people who alter the state of the program. With the right tool, users can create lightning or life in the computer world. In the same way, the programmers or users of our universe can act upon it to create or destroy.

If this is the case, there's an unlimited amount of power these entities could have. Perhaps they are one or many. Perhaps there is one master and many helpers. Perhaps they can fast-forward and rewind time to try different actions to perform their work and cover their tracks. Given enough tools to operate on our universe, they would have omnipotence within the context of our universe, even if they are not omnipotent within their own. To us, it or they are gods.


9 comments:

  1. Soooooooooo... you are postulating that God is simply a being from an extra-universal or extra-dimensional space interacting within the confines of a "program" (our universe/reality) which He "created" (ie: programmed)?

    Or is this simply an attempt to understand, within the limits of our ability to do so, what God is like, or what/how He is Who and What he is?

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  2. I think of this as a metaphor for God, more than a complete and legitimate definition. To say that God is "simply" and extra-universal entity undercuts the complexity of that idea. I do believe, however, that God is "more like" an extra-universal entity than anything else we know today. I use the program analogy because it's the closest concept to what I'm trying to define.

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  3. Granted, "simply" may have been a poor choice of vocabulary. I tend to use the term when I am trying to collate an idea-set into one coherent thought. You are correct, there is nothing "simple" about it.

    For me the question is one of origins. “Why do we have something rather than nothing at all?” This is the basic question of existence—why are we here; why is the earth here; why is the universe here rather than nothing?

    Hawkings and others have postulated that it is a matter of purest chance that all of the factors required to produce the universe we live in, the physics and natural laws in operation in it, and life itself are all a high order of coincidence alone.

    As a result of what one sees in evidence all around us and via investigation, man does not ask the question about God as a purely intellectual thought-experiment, based upon a "what-if" proposal, but rather existence itself raises the question about God.

    There are only four possible answers to that that query, namely:

    1. Reality is an illusion.
    2. Reality is/was self-created.
    3. Reality is self-existent (eternal).
    4. Reality was created by something that is self-existent.

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  4. Rene Descartes dispelled the first conclusion, with his famous statement, “I think, therefore I am.”. An illusion requires something experiencing it, and moreover, you cannot doubt the existence of yourself without proving your existence; it is a self-defeating argument. So the possibility of reality being an illusion is eliminated.

    The second proposal is self-creation. When speaking in philosophical terms, we come across “analytically false” statements, which means they are false by definition. The statement, "All that is created itself" is such a statement - because something cannot "BE" prior to itself. Even David Hume has said, “I never asserted so absurd a proposition as that anything might arise without a cause.” Ideas such as "spontaneous generation" and similar have been discarded by both science and philosophy. If you created yourself, then you must have existed prior to you creating yourself, but that simply cannot be. Since something cannot come from nothing, the alternative of reality being self-created is ruled out.

    And then...Eternity.
    (continued)

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  5. (continued)
    A concept that boggles the human mind. We know it exists - we can see it all around us. We cannot argue that it doesn't exist because of this. It then becomes a question of which sort of eternity is it? Is it a cold, impersonal eternity, with no real purpose other than to exist and exist and exist? Or is it personal, with meaning?

    On an individual level we do not seem to partake of eternity in a personal sense. We are conceived, we develop, are born, grow and develop some more, become adult, most of us have offspring, most of us attempt to live lives of purpose and contribution to the common good while reaping some personal satisfaction and pleasure along the way until - due to accident, disease or aging/deteriorating - our personal existence comes to an end, like a candle flame being snuffed out.

    And that scares the living bejabbers out of most people.

    "What is it all FOR?" is the cry against the cold darkness.

    The alternative is a personal eternity. And here is where we confront the concept of God.
    (continued)

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  6. (continued)
    Regardless of the postulate of our particular universe having been "created" by an extra-universal Being either materially or in the form of a "program" in some version of an extra-universal Cray computer, the question begs to be asked: "Who and What is God?"

    An eternal universe or an eternal Creator.

    By the postulate of your argument, Anthony,we can discard the former idea of an eternal, impersonal universe. We are looking at an eternal Creator.

    Can we discover anything about this Creator via investigation of that which the Creator has created?

    The very features and laws that surround causation speak of the nature of God for this simple fact: an effect must resemble its cause.
    (continued)

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  7. (continued)
    Here is what we can see at work around us that gives us the opportunity to learn of the nature of the Creator, based upon the evidence contained within creation itself:

    • The Creator must be supernatural in nature (as the Creator created time and space).
    • The Creator must be powerful (exceedingly).
    • The Creator must be eternal (self-existent).
    • The Creator must be omnipresent (the Creator created space and is not limited by it).
    • The Creator must be timeless and changeless (the Creator created time).
    • The Creator must be immaterial because the Creator transcends space/physical.
    • The Creator must be personal (the impersonal cannot create personality).
    • The Creator must be infinite and singular as you cannot have two infinites.
    • The Creator must be diverse yet have unity as unity and diversity exist in nature.
    • The Creator must be intelligent (supremely). Only a cognitive being can produce cognitive being.
    • The Creator must be purposeful as the Creator deliberately created everything.
    • The Creator must be moral (no moral law can be had without a giver).
    • The Creator must be caring (or no moral laws would have been given).

    I will end the discussion here, to give you time to respond, Anthony. I am not trying to lecture, but to have a true discourse, and I apologize if I have been long-winded.

    We intellectual types can be that way, I have found.

    I look forward to your response. :)

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  8. I thoroughly enjoyed your response. To be honest, I don't have much to say about your words as they sufficiently speak for themselves.

    In regard to my post, however, I cannot make any more assertions about the existence of God other than what I have written above. You make several assertions about the personality of God and I think it's very likely they're all true, but that doesn't define *how* he is. It defines *who* he is.

    Imagine someone inside the computer program trying to make guesses about the outside world. In the example, the outside world was functionally identical to the computer world, but there's no way to know that from the context of the computer world. Is the outside world deterministic or non-deterministic? Does it have physical laws? Does it have physical entities at all? Does my creator live in that universe? Maybe the Creator IS the universe. By this I mean a eternal, PERSONAL universe. To us, that means nothing because our universe is impersonal, but we cannot make any such assertions about the universes we can't access.

    So, what we're left with is a universe that forbids it's own existence without a god to govern it (See God vs Determinism and you're own arguments around self-created and self-existent universes) and also forbids the existence of an internal God. To resolve this, we must accept that an entity exists that is not a part of our universe. Your arguments further validate this. If God was a part of our universe AND created it, then the universe had to exist to house God before it was created.

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  9. Seems, then, that we are, at least on most points, in agreement with one another. I, also, have thoroughly enjoyed this dialogue, Anthony.

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