Steven Dutch, Natural and Applied Sciences, Universityof Wisconsin - Green Bay
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I will respond to questions and comments as time permits, but if you want to take issuewith any position ea
pressed here, you first have to answer this question:
What evidence would it take to prove your beliefs wrong?
I simply will not reply to challenges that do not address this question. Refutabilityis one of the classic determinants of whether a theory can be called scientific. Moreover,I have found it to be a great general-purpose cut-through-the-crap question to determinewhether somebody is interested in serious intellectual inquiry or just playing mind games.Note, by the way, that I am assuming the burden of proof here - all youhave to do is commit to a criterion for testing.It's easy to criticize science for being "closed-minded". Are you open-mindedenough to consider whether your ideas might be wrong?
Instead of debating evidence for or against the existence of God, let's consider a question we can state and answer in completely naturalistic terms. We don't have to postulate anything supernatural; we don't even have to postulate any undiscovered laws of nature. This is a question that, in principle, should be answerable in terms of known science using known methods.
Is there some powerful and ultra-capable alien Entity (or Entities) influencing events on earth?
The Entity may or may not be benign. In fact, things get much more interesting if there are more than one Entity, some benign, some malevolent, others indifferent or alternately benign or malevolent as it suits their purposes. Their purposes may or may not be intelligible to us.
But to keep the discussion in bounds, let's hypothesize a "god-like" Entity. It's actively benign, meaning it actively intervenes to prevent harm or do good; it's knowledgeable enough to accomplish its goals without any error that we can detect, and powerful enough to block harmful actions by other Entities if it chooses. It has intelligence gathering capabilities good enough that it can't be blind sided. Whatever limitations it may have, from our perspective it is omnipotent and omniscient.
None of this requires postulating any supernatural powers or unknown physics. The Entity is close enough, or has operatives close enough, that we needn't worry about light travel times. It is either orders of magnitude more intelligent than us, has a huge number of cooperating Entities, or a huge number of massively parallel computers. It has good enough models of human behavior and social interaction that it can leverage tiny events into sweeping historical changes (compare Isaac Asimov's 1958 short story Spell My Name with an S). It has models of weather that allow it to steer, generate, or disperse storms. It may communicate with and act through any number of human agents. It may use non-human agents. It might be able to use a small burst of solar particles to trigger some trivial effect on Earth that then amplifies into something very significant.
Why doesn't the Entity reveal itself? There are so many likely answers to this question that it is at once revealed to be irrelevant. In fact, trivially irrelevant. The answers are so immediately obvious that the question itself is merely specious.
First, maybe the Entity does communicate all the time. Maybe, just like fish aren't aware of being wet, we aren't aware of the communications because we're constantly immersed in them. Maybe that sudden impulse that causes you to turn and spot an oncoming car is a message that penetrated the mental fog. If you believe there's an Entity, you interpret the thought as a message. If not, you write it off as a random event.
If the Entity is benign, why doesn't it prevent evil? Either it isn't really benign, or is not really capable of preventing evil.
Except that, first of all, we don't know how many times it has intervened. We know that a Soviet missile officer once received a false alarm indicating an American missile attack, refused to believe it, and thereby very likely spared the world a nuclear war. We know that George Washington escaped from New York under the noses of the British with the help of a fog bank. We know the Mongols broke off their invasion of Europe in 1242 because the Khan died. It's not hard to picture our hypothetical Entity averting these disasters with a trivial expenditure of effort and in an undetectable way.
And we don't know how many alternative history scenarios would have turned out worse. Alternative histories have a habit of assuming some change and then postulating the most benign possible outcomes. It's salutary, and perversely fun, to imagine some apparently benign change and picture how things might have worked out for the worst. Say we intervened in history to get Adolf Hitler into art school and he lived out his life as a starving artist, grumbling over the lack of sales for his paintings. And we never get World War II or the Holocaust. Or maybe Josef Stalin conquers Europe instead. Or we get another German demagogue, this one rational. He doesn't wait for air superiority to invade England. He doesn't get sidetracked in the Balkans and delay his invasion of Russia for three months. He pulls back from Stalingrad in time. He uses the Jews for cannon fodder on the Eastern Front. Or let's assume Franklin Roosevelt and Pius XII condemn the Holocaust. They mobilize public opinion, only public opinion adopts the view that Hitler was right and the War is all about the Jews, enough to sap public support for the war itself. Let's assume we somehow prevent both World Wars. Millions of lives are saved. Or maybe the stagnant and moribund societies that ruled before both Wars continue on, becoming ever more ossified, corrupt, smug, and self satisfied. Maybe we don't have spectacular evils like the Holocaust, but unglamorous banal evil in which many more millions might have died from poor working conditions, poverty, poor health care, or brutal colonial repression. Maybe that smug and self-satisfied culture decides it knows everything worth knowing, research stagnates and there's no Green Revolution, no polio vaccine, no MRI's, CAT scans, or organ transplants, no weather satellites to warn of hurricanes, no Internet. Maybe this is the least worst of all possible worlds.
One additional complication that we haven't so far discussed: maybe the Entity can confer some form of immortality. Maybe, Matrix style, it can download people's minds into a virtual reality paradise. The Matrix franchise got silly there at the end, but the initial premise, that we're living in a computer simulation, doesn't violate any known science. Or maybe it can clone new bodies, not prone to disease or aging, and download people's minds into them. Both of these scenarios are beyond our technological capabilities but both have been employed in plausible science fiction and there's no fundamental reason we know of why one or the other might not be possible. (By the way, as a geologist I have some idea what "immortal" really means. Unless the Entity can maintain itself and its clients until long after the Sun goes red giant, it's not immortal. It may be a very long time, but a long time is not forever.)
Now if we knew for a fact that there was an Entity and it conferred immortality (let's just for fun call it the Matrix), there are a ton of ways to abuse that knowledge. We could become fatalistic, assuming that whatever happened, it would all be put to rights by the Entity in the Matrix. We could become nihilistic, saying that it didn't matter what we did because this wasn't our "real" primary existence. We could become selfish, hedonistic, or exploitive. We could rationalize away any problem by saying it would all go away after we were rebooted in the Matrix.
All of those things actually happen as a consequence of beliefs people now hold about immortality. But note:
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Created 07 December, 2007, Last Update 24 May, 2020
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