Much ink is being spilled today over Stephen Hawking’s comment in an interview with The Guardian that “I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.”
So… is he right?
As a fairly scientifically-minded person not predisposed to take things on faith, this is a question I’ve wrestled with for a long time. Actually, I can be more specific than that. It’s a question I’ve wrestled with since Mrs. Duetsch’s World History I class, my freshman year in high school, going on 16 years ago. Mind you, I went to public school, this was a history class, and Mrs. Duetsch wasn’t teaching religion (or its absence). Not at all. She was straightforwardly teaching the early part of the history of human civilization — the ancient Mesopotamians, the ancient Egyptians, etc. And of course, as part of learning the histories of those ancient societies, you learn about their religious beliefs.
Up until that point, I knew almost nothing about religions other than a handful of flavors of Christianity, and (vaguely) Judaism. I knew, of course, that other religions existed, and had existed throughout the history of humanity, but I’d never really been exposed to them in any level of detail. And now suddenly, I started learning about all these strange, quirky, oddball beliefs that these ancient peoples had — most notably about the afterlife, and what it takes to get there. And I thought to myself, “Isn’t that funny? Isn’t that odd?” And: “They sure did go through a lot of trouble to convince themselves of this elaborate afterlife they believed in, and to set up all sorts of rituals about how you get there.”
And then came the critical follow-up. I thought, “Wait a minute. Wouldn’t they think the same thing about us? And why shouldn’t they?” Is it really so much less quirky, less odd, to believe that Jesus Christ died on a cross to redeem mankind and that, thanks to Him, we go to Heaven if we live virtuous lives (and/or repent for our sins)? Or that there’s a Messiah who hasn’t yet come, but that He will someday? On what basis should I be inclined to suspect that those objectively silly-sounding notions are any more likely to be true than the silly-sounding beliefs of these various ancient peoples?
Most importantly, I thought, why doesn’t my insight* about the afterlife apply equally to us? Isn’t the simplest explanation for all these competing views about the afterlife simply that we all really, really want to believe there’s an afterlife? Isn’t the infinite capacity of human invention, motivated by an intense desire to believe that we don’t simply cease to exist when we die, by far the most likely explanation for all the varied beliefs about the afterlife? In the absence of a compelling reason to suspect that one set of beliefs is more right than the others, isn’t the simplest answer that they’re all wrong, that there is no afterlife, that we mortals just invented the concept entirely out of whole cloth?
Basically, unbeknownst to Mrs. Duetsch or anyone else in class, World History I made me an agnostic. And that’s where I’ve been ever since.
I don’t know where or when I first heard the Voltaire quote, “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him,” but that was basically the insight I arrived at independently, except substitute “the Afterlife” for “God.” (Whether there’s some higher organizing power in the Universe that could reasonably be called “God” is, for me, a separate question.) And I truly believe that. If there were no afterlife, we humans would surely believe that there is one anyway. (Well, most of us would.) The motivations to invent the idea are too obvious, too utterly compelling: first and foremost the overwhelming reluctance to believe that everything simply ends when we die (and, perhaps even more powerfully, when those we love die), but also the desire to create incentives to live a virtuous life, even when nobody’s watching. We want to believe that the unfairly maligned will have an eternal reward, and that those who escape justice in this world will find it in the next. Of course we want to believe that. Whether it’s true or not, we would want to believe it.
But does that prove it’s not true? Not necessarily. Occam’s razor, in my view, suggests that there is no afterlife. I might even say strongly suggests. But Occam’s razor isn’t a law; it doesn’t posit that the simplest explanation is always right. Just that it tends to be right. So it’s certainly still possible that, although we would believe in Heaven even if it were a “fairy story,” it just so happens that it’s not a “fairy story”: it actually exists, conveniently enough! That’s possible. I can’t disprove that, any more than I can prove it. And so I remain agnostic on the question, and continue to cross my fingers and hope that Hawking is wrong — and continue to say things like “Rest in Peace,” and to reference Heaven when people die, earnestly hoping in my heart that those words aren’t empty — even as a substantial portion of me suspects that Hawking is probably right.
(This has been your Living Room Times Religion/Philosophy Corner entry for the day. We now return you to your regularly scheduling political flame wars, already in progress.)
*I use the term “my insight” very loosely. I realize that this is by no means an earth-shattering idea. It’s something that countless others have thought of, and have articulated far better than me. I only say “my insight” because, at age 13 or 14, I came to this idea independently, not triggered by reading any great thinkers on the matter, nor by hearing a pithy quote like Voltaire’s “it would be necessary to invent him” or Marx’s “opiate of the masses,” but rather simply by learning about ancient religions and then making some logical leaps from there. And yet in the years since, despite reading all sorts of interesting and insightful commentaries on the matter, and despite (I hope!) maturing intellectually, I’ve never been able to really meaningfully expand on that initial “insight.” I still don’t feel I have a solid answer to the question, and I doubt I ever will.
I am a deist, and thus reject all religions as false. However I support religion and acknowledge its role in civilization. In fact, I have strongly stated that I believe that civilization could not existt without the extrinsic behavioral controls present in religion.
Stephen Hawking is a brilliant physicist and if he chooses not to believe in God or heaven or what not, thats fine. But I do wonder how a man who claims on the one hand to believe that universes can spontaneously come in to existence can also deny the possibility of the existence of God. Seems one is as fantastical as the other right?
Brendan,
I arrived at religious belief for these reasons:
1) We are too emotionally deep, complex and rich to be random products of matter.
2) The notion of having a soul, an essence which transcends the physical body, possesses a considerable degree of realism and even more heft.
3) Those fear-gripped Apostles, roughly 2,000 years ago, stopped being fear-gripped Apostles and began building the flawed but important Church. Something transformed them. Something took those lives and made them different. That, more than any resurrection debate about the supernatural or shrouds of turin, is what Easter is about.
Sadly, I bet that Notre Dame taught Anselmian substitutionary atonement instead of a more modern, adult way of looking at Christianity and the resurrection. (Maybe I’m wrong. 🙂 )
Matt Zemek
Heh. Being a law student, I didn’t take any religion classes at Notre Dame. I took a class in Catholic Social Theory (or something like that – not sure if I’m getting the exact name right), but that was it, and that didn’t really touch on these sorts of first-principles issues of whether to have faith in the first place.
God isn’t proveable or disproveable by science, anymore than a three year old can fully explain quantum physics and general relativity. The concepts just aren’t there. Which is why creationism shouldn’t be taught in a science course, its a philosophical argument, just as the existence of God is.
Brendan, I found it interesting that you would “hope that Hawking is wrong” about Heaven. It sort of depends on which version of “Heaven” you’re hoping exists, but if it’s the Christian version, then I would’ve expected an agnostic to hope that Hawking is right about it not existing. Of course this is dependent upon having the correct understanding of Christianity, but non-Christians spend eternity in separation from God (ie, suffering). What I’ve said so far is the main point I wanted to make, so everything that follows is just my explanation for the above.
If the Bible is the truth (and this is the assumption for the rest of my post), including about Heaven, then that also means it’s correct about the existence of Hell (or one can more accurately refer to it as eternal separation from God, since I’m pretty sure the word “Hell” isn’t in the Bible… actually, come to think of it, i don’t think the word “Heaven” is either, but anyway). Living a “good” or “virtuous” life doesn’t qualify one for Heaven. Neither does “repenting for sins.” Neither of those is even necessary, though both are demanded of Christians by God. A person can live to a very high moral standard (even by the Bible’s standards), and/or repent for every sin they ever committed, and still not get into Heaven. The only thing that’s necessary for getting into Heaven is believing that Jesus is the only Son of God, and that he died to pay the necessary punishment for all our sins… either that or living a perfect sinless life, which nobody ever has or can possibly do (other than Jesus).
The following example may not be received well by everyone, but I’m going to use it because it illustrates what I’m trying to explain very well. Let’s assume Osama bin Laden, just before the raid on his compound and his subsequent death, put his faith in Christ (and i mean truly in his heart). That would’ve been sufficient for him to get into Heaven. That would have qualified him to receive Christ’s righteousness (his perfect sinless life) in God’s eyes.
Sorry if that sounded “preachy”… really tried not to sound holier than thou because i’m certainly not one who’d even come close to qualifying if I had to earn it by the way i lived.
It sort of depends on which version of “Heaven” you’re hoping exists, but if it’s the Christian version…
I guess my response would be two-fold: 1) I think there’s more than one “Christian version,” i.e., there are Christians who interpret the Bible differently and believe things work differently than you just expressed (I guess those would be the “[in]correct understanding of Christianity” from your perspective), but in any event, 2) whether it’s the “Christian version” or not, the version you’ve just articulated is not the one I hope exists — and frankly, while I don’t have any confidence in the answer to the question “Is there a Heaven?” I do feel reasonably confident that “there isn’t a Heaven like that.” I simply can’t accept that an otherwise merciful and loving God would sentence people to eternal damnation (whatever that means) or deny them access to Heaven simply because of something so — from the perspective of God/Jesus — egomaniacal as “not believing in Me.” Especially when that would condemn countless souls in parts of the world (or periods of history) where Christianity is/was less prevalent or nonexistent, to damnation for no other reason than the accident of birth. Sorry, I just don’t buy it. If Heaven exists, it must either be a universal place our souls go after we die, or else some form of reward for virtuous behavior and/or repentance in life. It can’t be a place where you’re rewarded for something as random as what particular set of religious beliefs you happened to earnestly believe in during your life, which is, of course, largely a product of what your family believes, where you grew up, etc. That would be fundamentally unjust, and I don’t believe the Christian God is fundamentally unjust, so either the whole thing is a human-created myth, or else the human interpretation of the reality of the Christian God and “Christian Heaven” is incorrect — a misinterpretation of divine truth.
I’ve seen Christians who claim to believe in Jesus act in a way totally anti-thetical to his teachings. I’ve seen non-Christians who strive to live a Christ-like life (whether they do so consciously or not). My view is that the later are the ones who are TRULY accepting Jesus into their hearts. Actions speak louder than words.
Well, I’m a Christian. In short, I believe that you need to repent and believe to go to heaven. I do believe this is just, because every person has sinned, and needs that sin paid for, and that the death of Jesus DOES pay for that for all who will come to him.
That’s to be clear as to where I’m coming from, and I know many here disagree. But as to the original question: Hawking’s statement is not surprising. He’s a materialist in the older sense of the word: he only believes in the material. What I have read in the Bible matches with how the world works – describing humanity and God in a way that makes sense. And I’ve certainly experienced things that were in answer to prayer. Indeed, I have experienced God. I am convinced of that. And that experience seems to match up with the evidence of how I believe God works as read in the Bible.
Should you ever be in the neighborhood again, or if I’m in yours, I’d love to continue this line of conversation. And I’ll be willing to do that in the comment section as well. But blog comments are known for their inflammatory nature, which is why I don’t bring this up much here – but it seemed like an appropriate venue. 😀
Inflammatory?! Who the *#$*% are you calling inflammatory! I’ll kill you! 😉
I’m not really going to mince words here, all religion is a man made construct. There is no rational argument otherwise. They are all equally wrong equally false and at times equally laughable. However, it is important to remember that the above does not prove in anyway what is true about the universe, nor does it mean that no religion has anything to offer us. The last point for better or for worse at times. But on their best days there is something wise to be learned from many ancient and even modern philosophers. I think many people get a little too caught by the details of what the believe and this leads to a number of problems.
What Hawking is doing, I think, is offering a hypothesis that postulates a way for the universe to start that does not require any outside force. Regardless of the veracity of his hypothesis an explanation that does not require god or gods is more likely to be correct than something requireing a supernatural power. As I mentioned before to David, I do not think he means what you seem to thinknhe means….
I don’t think it really takes a genius physicist to figure out there is no heaven. Anyone of sound mind that is honest with themselves that contemplates the issue ought to conclude the same thing.
The God of the Old Testament is a total dick, so who would want to go to a heaven ruled by him. The New Testament Christians think Jesus came to earth to save us from God, essentially, who was keeping humans out of heaven because of Original sin. Hell, the suffering Jesus went through is nothing compared to what John McCain did for his country, it’s nothing compared to what thousands of humans go through every year. I’d take Crucifixion over a lecture hosted by Sarah Palin, that’s how Not Bad it is.
Who needs an afterlife? Why would I want to go somewhere to live forever in peace and joy? Why is just being dead not enough for people? If there were a hell and the god of heaven didn’t let people in because they didn’t worship him or Jesus on earth, then I wouldn’t want to live in a place ruled by someone so close minded. That would be hell.
What part of spontaneous am I not understanding dcl? He has postulated that universes can/do spontaneously start out of nothing. I’m not saying he’s wrong, I’m saying why is believing that any saner than believing some higher power causes them to exist?
Because believing there is a god requires there to be someplace from whence god came. So something still had to come to be out of nothing. Thus god is simply a needless complication.
First that is a fundementally flawed assumption on your part, limiting God to the same cause and effect relationship that exists within our universe. Second, even if its true that God did come from somewhere, just because it adds an extra step doesn’t mean its also not true. Does the existence of a short route between points A and B imply that ONLY that route exists and no longer ones can? Anyone whose had to take connecting flights can tell you that THATS not true. Hell I once flew to Columbus, OH from Seattle, WA via Charlotte, NC.
Occams razor is a guideline not a universal law, the simplest explanation isn’t ALWAYS the right one. You can choose not to believe in God/Buddha/Vishnu/Zeus, etc. and thats fine, but your statement is an argument, not conclusive proof.
I once flew to Columbus, OH from Seattle, WA via Charlotte, NC.
Stupid Buckeyes. I blame Tressel.
By the way, I just want to clarify, vis a vis my response to Sully, that I don’t mean to disrespect or degrade anyone who takes a different view – who takes the conventional “Christian” view, I guess – and believes that only those who believe in Jesus can go to Heaven. Although I personally feel that would be fundamentally unjust, I know there are different views of what constitutes “justice” in this context, and I am not judging anyone who believes in the viewpoint that I’m saying I “don’t buy.” I personally think it can’t be right, but I don’t think less of people just because they think it can. Spiritual beliefs are far too complex, and frankly above my pay grade, to judge people for believing in things that I am inclined feel are “unjust.” Because really, what the Hell (or Heaven) do I know?
That said, I like David’s take, about non-Christlike Christians and Christlike non-Christians. And I would add that, to the extent my view conflicts with the literal text of the Bible, I tend to view the Bible as — to use David’s analogy from earlier — sort of like a 3-year-old’s transcription of a quantum physics lecture. Or maybe an 8-year-old’s, so they at least have the ability to write. 🙂 The point is, since they can’t possibly understand all the concepts, they’re inevitably going to get some stuff wrong, just as human beings taking down the Word of God aren’t always going to get it quite right. I suppose that’s sacrilege to some folks, but it makes good sense to me.
(Unless, of course, it’s just some stuff some people wrote, in which case never mind. But for purposes of the preceding paragraph, I’m assuming arguendo that it’s actually divinely inspired.)
David you are being obtuse. The central problem with postulating a god or gods is that it is an endlessly recursive problem. This issues show up blatantly in early mythologies. It is a problem we see more abstractly in the concept of the trinity. The problem of the unmoved mover must still have come from something, the only other option is that something spontaneously arouse form nothing. It is a quite literal problem if there is a god where did god come from if not nothing and how did god come if not spontaneously. I which case god or gods is an extraneous step. God is neither a nessisary nor sufficient cause for anything. Arguing about the existence or non existence the of is quite literally a waste of time. It is simply not an important or useful question.
Brendan, why are you doing back flips to avoid being judgmental towards people that are blatantly being judgmental? It’s silly.
Bother it is late and the typos are coming out to play….
With regard to the justness of God in his requirements for getting into Heaven, i think B. Minich worded it well in #9. One thing that could use further discussion is the idea of repentance. If you define that in a very general sense (ie, recognizing that you’ve been living a sinful life and decide to turn away from that lifestyle), then yes i guess that could be considered a requirement since that would inherently be part of giving your life to the Lord. When i said repenting isn’t sufficient/necessary, i was referring more to specific sins… without wordy explanation, i’ll just say that i’m confident that it’s impossible for one to repent of all sins committed.
As for versions of Heaven, yes there are many different ways that true Christians picture Heaven. In terms of what Heaven is actually LIKE, the Bible doesn’t explain every last detail, so there can be several legitimate beliefs about that. However, the Bible does not allow for several different versions of how one gets into Heaven. I cannot say that someone who doesn’t believe the path I explained necessarily isn’t a true Christian, and therefore cannot get into Heaven, but I can say for sure that the Bible only provides one possible interpretation of what qualifies someone for Heaven.
Assuming the Christian God exists, the “perspective of God/Jesus” probably isn’t something we humans have a right to claim much knowledge of, but I’m not sure why God would see denying access to someone for “not believing in Me” would be egomaniacal. I mean, the Bible clearly describes God as “jealous” (Deut 6:15), and humans are religious beings by their nature, so if the God of the Bible isn’t one’s God, then something else is (this can be true of Christians as well btw, but in a more situational/temporary way), whether it be money, family, drugs, sex, power, a cow, the sun, etc. Regardless of whether you want to define it as egomaniacal or whatever, a bible-believing Christian cannot legitimately deny that access only comes through honest belief in the work of Jesus (John 3:16-18).
The issue of what happens to people who were never exposed to the Bible or its message is another area that I haven’t found a definitive answer to, so I think it’s open to several honest beliefs. The answer I lean toward, but am completely unsure of, is something along these lines: God presents himself to everyone in their heart, in one way or another, along with the idea that nobody is perfect and everyone is sinful and in need of forgiveness. Of course this person wouldn’t say, “I believe in God and Jesus” and the rest of it, but they could have a true heartfelt faith that they’re in need of a savior, that there’s a God, and that God has provided a savior for them. Again, this is just one of many possibilities in my opinion. Another possibility is that those who aren’t exposed to the Gospel just don’t get into Heaven. This seems unfair from a human perspective, but it is true that all of us are sinful and are deserving of death… and the fact is that not a single person DESERVES to go to Heaven or be with God in any fashion. So if someone’s excuse for not believing is not having been exposed to the ideas, that doesn’t therefore mean that that person should have their sins forgiven by default.
Sandy, not that you’re anything but hostile to Christianity and closed to any reasonable discussion, but if you thing the suffering that Jesus dealt with is anything short of a million times worse than any other human has ever suffered, then it just shows that you aren’t informed about what His death/punishment included and what He was punished for. Leaving aside all the physical suffering involved, the worst part was being forsaken by God his father… abandoned by God… spiritually separated from God.
No, dcl, you’re the one being obtuse. David simply disagrees with you, and comes at this from a different perspective, and that’s fine. Meanwhile, to believe what Sully, Brandon and other Christians believe is not “judgmental” as such. If they’re true to their beliefs, they feel that only God can truly judge; they are merely expressing what they believe to be God’s Word. To be judgmental would be to see a Jew or a Muslim or a Buddhist or an Atheist on the street and think, “That guy’s going to Hell,” and treat him differently — e.g., look down on him, treat him as something less than your equal — as a result. While some “Christians” do that, just as there are subgroups within any group who behave improperly, that’s clearly not the proper way to behave, and it’s not what Sully and Brandon are advocating.
I feel strongly that we should all respect each others’ religious and spiritual beliefs, except in extreme cases (for instance I obviously do not respect the beliefs of radical Islamists who think their religion commands them to kill innocent people, nor of radical Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland who think they should kill each other in the name of God, etc.). I frankly don’t see the downside of mutual respect, and in any case I think it’s simply the right thing to do.
i think i’ve been clear on this, but just in case, pretty much everything i’m stating is based on the assumption that the Bible is truth. Are there people who claim to be Christians (Bible-believing ones even) who for whatever reason twist clear statements of the Bible into their own version of theology? of course! some of them are true Christians who are misled, and some of them are fakes… but i don’t claim to have the right to judge who is and who isn’t? Am i claiming that everything I believe about God and what the Bible says is the actual truth? not at all. I’m sure there are some concepts in the Bible that I’m misunderstanding. Different churches can have different interpretations of many things, and Christians can honestly disagree about many things. However, there are essentials that aren’t debatable amongst people who claim to be Christians, and I would never become a member of or commend to others a church whose doctrine is wrong on those essentials.
No Dane you are just plain wrong, the existence of God does not require that God came from somewhere. Temporal cause and effect may not exist for God, in fact he may have created it and be beyond it. Granted thats a difficult concept to wrap our heads around as we are hard wired to think in those terms.
And again, even if God the universe CAN have been created without God, that doesn’t mean it WASN’T created by God. Plus you don’t even KNOW that the universe could have been spontaneously created.
None of this prves God exists or invalidates your or my beliefs, but you are arguing based on principles you assume to be true but aren’t inherently so.
Brendan, my view is not that the transcription is wrong, just that it can’t fully capture the entirety of what it’s attempting to. Its like taking a picture of something with a .25 megapixel grayscale camera. The picture is insufficient to fully capture reality. Even if it were a 10 megapixel camera with millions of colors it STILL wouldn’t tell you what it felt like, smelled like, sounded like, was like in the infrared, uv, etc.
Right. I didn’t mean to suggest that my “transcription” point was exactly what you were saying. I was just taking your analogy and running with it, expanding it to suit by sacrilegious agnostic tastes. 🙂
One has to suspect that a Just God probably doesn’t believe in Stephen Hawking, either …
After reading the 20th set of myths and legends, from all around the planet, and realising the overlaps and the differences, I found that I’m intrigued by what the *bleep* happened to give *every* culture some version of the Flood myth … and I realised that there are a lot of parochial religions and religions – and that the Deity has a divine sense of humour, picking and choosing what aspects to show each culture … and that the AfterLife has a whole bunch of walled enclaves, one for each of the cultures who believe themselves to be the *only* ones that’ll achieve the AfterLife … and the rest of us there will get to visit ’em if we wish …
Oh – and that the SoHotG is omnipresent in *my* existence … (Sense of Humour of the Gods) …
Brendan, David doesn’t disagree, he is stuck in a logic trap of his own creation and doesn’t want to see it. It is either hocus pocus or something along the lines of what Hawking is postulating is correct. I can’t say anything as to the positive statements Hawking is making he could be right on the specifics he could be wrong, I don’t think he is making nearly as much of a positive statement as David et al seem to think. There could be the 5 billionth time there has been a big bang, there could be a multi-verese or just here and now. But at the basic root level your options really are a recursive logic trap or something spontaneously coming to be out of nothing.
Even if god is beyond or created our temporal cause and effect, the god of man made religion is required to exist in some context. And god cannot have created that context without creating a paradox. Thus there is another god or that context came to be spontaneously. If there is another god the problem simply becomes recursive. Now there is nothing that says such a situation is impossible, but it would mean that “god” is not really “god” in the sense Christians would have us believe. He didn’t create everything, just our specific Universe, and there is some other Universe in which God exists that He could have created ours. Now, such a postulation could be so. If we presume that there is another Universe and they were experimenting with how they came to be, and they were sufficiently advanced that they could create an experiment in which a Universe was brought into being. There is nothing that says such a scenario is impossible. It seems unlikely, but also could be quite likely. Such a situation could even be recursive to some initial point. But it doesn’t get around the problem that at some point there was nothing, and I mean absolutely positively nothing a nothing so nothing that we can’t even really fathom it, before there was something.
Now if you were willing to postulate god as some non specific non entity to wit god is synonyms with some unspecific spontaneous event that causes the universe (multi recursive or otherwise) then perhaps you’d not have the logic problem. But then you’d have rather a good size problem arguing that that god tells us to do anything or has any bearing on our life or is possessed of any sort of specificity whatsoever.
The root problem with Christianity in the modern context is that it initially postulated an aloof sky god of omnipotent power that controlled created and saw all–it was a grater abstraction than all other extant religions (Though possibly not the original more shamanistic religions). But in conflict with modern sciences the God of the Christians is insufficiently abstracted to be able to co-exist logically with our modern understanding of the greater world (in the limitless all encompassing sense) around us. Thus a god that was initially used to more effectively explain things is rendered a moot point from our own success in the sciences.
There is nothing wrong with being in awe of the power beauty of nature and the world, or have some abstract idea of the spirt of earth. Or in tune with nature or the natural world. But in trying to make effable the ineffable you create a logic trap that will eventually catch you. Religion embraced the death of mysticism and in so doing signed their own death warrant. Without mysticism religion eventually becomes superfluous.
You know, Dane, we completely disagree on this. I believe that God had no beginning – he’s always been there. And that this is not any more ridiculous then the postulation that something came from nothing. Indeed: these are the two options: either something has existed forever, or something came from nothing. And I’m not one to believe in a “God of the gaps” as you describe above, because that’s setting yourself up for failure when the gaps shrink. An all powerful God as described in the Bible can, I believe, exist, even in light of what we know about the world scientifically.
(To put the “God of the gaps” in a different perspective: either your God is bigger than the gaps, or he isn’t worth following.)
Now if you were willing to postulate god as some non specific non entity to wit god is synonyms with some unspecific spontaneous event that causes the universe (multi recursive or otherwise) then perhaps you’d not have the logic problem. But then you’d have rather a good size problem arguing that that god tells us to do anything or has any bearing on our life or is possessed of any sort of specificity whatsoever.
Which is a pretty good definition of deism. We believe in a “creator”, but not a good that judges us.
Make that *God* who judges us.
There is no exited forever B. There might be time horizons beyond which we cannot see. But it simply isn’t possible for something to have simply always been without coming from someplace. Even if that place is beyond our spacial temporal horizons it is from somewhere within it’s own context that eventually must have come from nothing if only because that is slightly more logically possible than something always being.
Modern religion embraced the gaps and they are now being crushed as the gaps close in. A mysticism wholly apart from from the constructed understanding is the only place they would have maintained relevance. And there is much that is mystical and wondrous about our world, but that tradition was belittled and left behind. Mysticism and science can coexist fairly well. A god only definable by what it is not, or some non specific something that is also nothing is in no way contradicted or even troubled by sciences understanding more about this world for there is simply more to wonder about and more about which to be in awe.
But instead most religious people ask far too much of their god and their religion. And at the same time they don’t ask nearly enough.
There might be time horizons beyond which we cannot see. But it simply isn’t possible for something to have simply always been without coming from someplace. Even if that place is beyond our spacial temporal horizons it is from somewhere within it’s own context that eventually must have come from nothing if only because that is slightly more logically possible than something always being.
See, this is where you’re wrong, dcl. It is perfectly plausible for religious folks to believe in God’s eternal existence, with no temporal beginning or end. Certainly, this would be beyond the realm of anything that can be explained by science. But you can’t simply assume that everything has a temporal context and assert that anyone who disagrees is obviously wrong. Really, haven’t you ever watched “Deep Space Nine”? 🙂
This is not a question that science or logic can definitively answer. Your conception of the logic of the question is fundamentally rooted in the laws of physics and reality in the Universe in which we live. I don’t even think the concept of a dimension with no temporal beginning or end is necessarily contradictory to quantum physics as we understand it. But even if it is, that doesn’t mean it’s definitively wrong, and that David is being “obtuse” for believing something different. You obviously don’t have to agree with him, but this really is a matter of opinion and belief, not provable fact.
Thanks Brendan. That’s what I would have said. And Dane, I agree with you saying that many in modern religion embracing a “God of the gaps”. Even now, they try to find more, and as I said before, a God of the gaps isn’t a big enough God.
I think our disagreement is that you insist that all things must adhere to material laws. A “materialist” in the older sense of the word, as I said earlier – believing only in the material. I believe that God is outside of that realm. I believe that miracles are possible, that God can do things that are outside of the laws of nature.
Anyways, I’m pretty sure that we wouldn’t come to an agreement over dinner, much less over the internet. 😉
Dane you are drawing conclusions based on certain premises that you assert as “must be true” which are only “must be true” because you believe them. You are placing arbitrary limits on what God can or can not be based on your pre concieved beliefs and accepted realities, i.e. that all things MUST have a beggining and an end, all things MUST come from somewhere. Certainly within human frame of reference this is true, but there is nothing to suggest that such constraints apply to God (should he exist). You are living in a Euclidean world and insisting that a triangles angles must always sum to 180 degrees without accepting that its possible in a non-Euclidean world for a triangles angles to sum to more or less than that value and still be a triangle.
Basically, you are trying to define God within a box that I don’t believe He is constrained by. Within your box it may be entirely consistent to conclude that God doesn’t exist, but ONLY if you believe that everything HAS to be inside the box. I don’t believe that.
Dane is trying to put God inside a lockbox! Clearly he’s been chatting with Al Gore!
Well maybe God and Al can get into that lockbox and debate which was more difficult to invent… the world or the internet.
So your saying that something can exist outside of the realm of existence? Not to be tautological, but for god to exist god must exist. Your argument that god exists seems to be that god does not exist.
No Dane, thats not what I’m saying at all, and its starting to get really annoying trying to deal with your obtuse attitude.
Your statement just now only makes sense if you define existence as everything inside the box. I’m saying that there is more than just whats inside the box. You are defining existence from an entirely human centric standpoint of what we are able to comprehend and observe, I’m saying its entirely possible that we can only observe a small portion of what existence really is.
You are seeing the world defined by the black and white photo or the euclidean geometry, without being willing to consider or even concieve that those may be limited views of a more complex reality.
If it is sufficient for you to live your life assumign that what we see is all there is, that the totality of existence is defined by physical laws of causality and the like, then fine, you are free to do so, you are free to live your life based on those premises and go from there, I have no problem if that is how you choose to view the world.
I do have a problem when you act as if thats the only possible interpretation and anyone who believes different is a deluded moron. Thats just being an obtuse prick and I’d like to think you are more open minded than that.
Dane # 38 – “for god to exist god must exist” – one of the advantages (this one hopes) of being a Deity is that One should be able to bring One’s Self into existence all by One’s Self … (just as a God of Ikea would presumably spring into existance complete with the label “Some Assembly Required”) … (and, as far as I can tell, The Assembly of God folk don’t actually worship IKEA) …
Sully #37 – Brendan only *wants* to believe that Fortunately-Not_President Gore invented the Internet because he (Brendan) cannot handle the truth – that UCLA invented the Internet …
“The person most widely credited with “inventing” the internet, Dr. Leonard Kleinrock, received a graduate degree from MIT; where in his doctoral thesis he introduced the simplest notions of something called “Packet Theory”.
After becoming a professor at UCLA in 1964, and using the facilities and personnel at UCLA to further develop and perfect his theory, the Internet was created.
SO YES. THE INTERNET WAS IN FACT CREATED AND BORN AT UCLA. The first internet transmission was between UCLA and Stanford; and while many groups and government agencies contributed to what the internet has become today, UCLA has by far the most legitimate claim to being the so-called “inventor” of the internet. This is indisputable.” …
Actually no, no it wasn’t created and born at UCLA, although the school did play a big part in its early stages.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET
Further ARPANET was an ancestor of the Internet. ARPANET ceased to exist in 1990.
SO YES. THE INTERNET WAS IN FACT CREATED AND BORN AT UCLA.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbeR6uYxU50
David I really think you are missing the point. And being maddeningly defensive about things to boot. To the point where you are really missing the interesting avenues for discussion and focusing instead on holding on with iron might to some specific preconceptions. I think I’ve left rather a lot of room for a lot of interesting and at the moment rather ineffable possibilities that all would provide fruitful avenues for discussion and discussions that would be far less adversarial and far more productive than the present one but you seem unwilling to take a little glimpse outside the construction within which you grew up. It seems to be you are insisting on one particular effable explanation that we pretty much know is wrong.
Not withstanding the question of is or isn’t a god isn’t even a particularly interesting one as it’s functionally irrelevant because of the next point.
The key point in all of this is, I think, fairly simple. In all likelihood no religion we have is correct probably not even remotely. I really don’t see there being any doubt on this point anything else is quite presumptuous, and extremely anthropomorphic and egocentric. Please understand this is not a positive or prescriptive statement; it is a simple statement that all religion is a cultural construct and false and says nothing what so ever about what Is with a capital i. The reality is that the Universe is vastly more interesting and awe inspiring and complex than any religion could possibly have imagined. And that’s just the parts we know about. In trying to hold onto any particular notion in this regard you are making the Universe (whether there is a god or not) so much smaller than it really is. And I do mean any notion including Hawking’s proscription for how the Universe came to be. Anything we know or think we know could be wrong, and that just makes it all the more interesting. It is a wondrous uncertainty.
Now, as to the boring part of all this, as I was saying before in order for there to be a god or gods he, she or they must, well, exist at least in some sense of the word. You keep saying I’m creating a box. And perhaps this is so, but that box is of both infinite size and infinite inter-spacial dimension. Thus I propose a box so large that there is literally nothing in terms of matter, time, energy, or other as yet undiscovered property existing outside of it. A box that is vast and possesses multitudes. Now within this box there are a great many things that you could, in at least the mystical sense of the word, call a god, though none of these would fit any particular constructed notion of God and none of these possibilities would be likely to show any particular care for or concern with bending the laws of physics for some random person on some random planet. We are small existence is intensely vast. Anything that could be reasonably called a god that could reasonably exist is likely to be one so unconcerned with the minutia of our planet as to be, as a functional matter, irrelevant to us. Thus the question itself really isn’t all that interesting because it doesn’t change anything. God no god Heaven no heaven, it makes no functional difference in your life, nor does it make a difference in any potential after life as you are most assuredly praying to the wrong “god” so one must suppose that any god possessed of an after life would not expect any particularly accurate devotion but must have other, unknown, criteria for their decision making. Maybe there is something maybe there is nothing but that doesn’t nor should it stoping form doing the best we can with what is here and now.
You are proposing a god that created everything and is interested in us, produces miracles etc. We have absolutely no evidence for the last two points. And I think it is rather hard to say that is credible in anyway. The only functional point of debate is the creator god. The only reason that is debatable is because it is a point that is inherently ineffable. It would seem that you are suggesting there is the something that just sort of exists. Presumably at all times and places that exist with in the box you were talking about. But the box I’m proposing is at least one step and one dimension larger than that. Such that it can accommodate that something. For that something to exist it must exist. And if that something exists, from whence did it arrive if it always existed how are you proposing that that is possible? It seems much more likely that something simple could explode into existence and slowly evolve into the Universe that we now are in than there should be something as massively complex that just is and is capable of creating the world around us. Especially given we have no particular evidence of that something or it’s supposed interest in us. But even that proposal feels like it has a recursive problem. It is simply a concept like complete nothingness that is a virtual impossibility to actually get your mind around.
Trying to get all this stuff to fit into the confines of any specific religion, or faith tradition and so forth is just intensely limiting in thinking about the rather wonders Universe around us, and to ponder what might exist far beyond even that. I would even say that it is rather likely there is something that extends beyond the Universe we know. But that doesn’t mean we know or can know a damn thing about it. I really would suggest embracing the mystical sense of all this. Most religions have a mystical tradition of some sort that was at one point or another divorced from the mainstream of the religion. But I do recall that there are some Catholic mystical traditions and writings, and I think exploring those would be quite fruitful though perhaps technically heretical at this point. As I said, there is a lot more and a lot more wondrous that truly is than can exist or be encompassed by what we knew or thought we knew thousands of years ago. If nothing else our optics are better. Getting caught in the specifics or the gaps just limits you and leads to strife and conflict with others that think they have the specifics.
Dane, the only person here who is being obtuse and holding on to specific preconceptions is YOU! Its obvious to everyone but you apparently though. YOU are the one who is claiming that there are certain arbitrary boundaries and then using those boundaries to dismiss theories you don’t like. There is no point in continuing the discussion with you because you aren’t willing to even consider any other possibilities. You are EXACTLY like right wing born again Christians whose only response to everything is “the Bible says so”. I’m done. You took what was an otherwise interesting exchange of ideas and killed it. Bravo.
My favourite davidkian strikes back ! From his cite – “Historical document: First ARPANET IMP log: the first message ever sent via the ARPANET, 10:30 PM, October 29, 1969. This IMP Log excerpt, kept at UCLA, describes setting up a message transmission from the UCLA SDS Sigma 8 Host computer to the SRI SDS 940 Host computer” – and “The first message on the ARPANET was sent by UCLA student programmer Charley Kline, at 10:30 p.m, on October 29, 1969 from Boelter Hall 3420.[7] Supervised by Prof. Leonard Kleinrock, Kline transmitted from the university’s SDS Sigma 7 Host computer to the Stanford Research Institute’s SDS 940 Host computer. The message text was the word “login”; the “l” and the “o” letters were transmitted, but the system then crashed. Hence, the literal first message over the ARPANET was “lo”. About an hour later, having recovered from the crash, the SDS Sigma 7 computer effected a full “login”. The first permanent ARPANET link was established on November 21, 1969, between the IMP at UCLA and the IMP at the Stanford Research Institute. By December 5, 1969, the entire four-node network was established.[8]” – so I do indeed thank him for supporting what I said …
Other entities did indeed have their part in the birth of the Internet – yet the first two ‘cells’ of the organism which is the internet were at UCLA and SRI … and the first message was *sent* from UCLA’s Boelter Hall …
There is something sorta theological about the first message actually successfully sent being “lo”, wouldn’t you agree ?
Sigh, you really are completely missing my point … still.
I’m not setting any boundaries. I’m trying to get through to you that when I am saying everything I mean F***ing everything. Boundless, in all directions and all senses of the word everything every-when everywhere. Something cannot be completely infinite without being synonymous with that boundless everything which makes it nothing in particular but at the same time makes it everything…. It must be encompassed by the term everything because were it not then the word would not mean what it means; thus everything. In that context god is everything and everything is god.
Good lord man I’m actually making what would have once been tantamount to a deeply religious argument through this entire thing (a standard syntactical construction of Jewish mystics around the time of Jesus was to call all Hebrews the children of God (basically in that sense I outlined above, everything is god and we are a part of everything thus we are God’s children), thus Jesus was indeed the Son of God in that construction, but it is a point of mysticism that the Christian Church has tried to make literal, and in so doing missed the point). So In a certain sense this still is a “religious” argument, though it is of no constructed faith per se, so in so much as it is not a theistic argument it becomes an atheistic one and it seems like that’s where you are running into the trouble? Or is it that it is a religious statement that makes no positive assertion about what god is? There is quite a long tradition of being only able to speak of God in therms of what He is not. Which makes a certain amount of head sense. But thinking about God like that is hard, and people don’t want to think hard anymore, so we let that methodology go by the boards.
No theism constructed by man can truly explain all of what Is (that is is with a capital i). Any you seem fine with accepting someone else’s beliefs so long as they believe something that seems at least vaguely similar to what you believe or at minimum tries to say what Is, or at the very least is some how proscriptive. But when someone points out that we are all almost certainly wrong this seems to bother you?
That we are all probably wrong doesn’t particularly bother me. We all fall victim to a certain about of confirmation bias, but I do try and keep an open mind to where I’m wrong. And I also think in this case I’m being rather a lot more open minded about things than you are giving me credit for (or than you are being for that matter). True, I’m not willing to accept as even remotely plausible some pet Christian ideas but I am willing to, and have conceded, an awful lot of possibilities that are inherently ineffable—I’m not even saying what Brendan is saying “that there probably is no Heaven” I’m saying if there is one we know nothing about it.
True, I’m not willing to just accept some fairy stories that we’ve made up to try and explain things we didn’t understand but now do. God did not literally create man and then woman from man’s rib and so forth, we know that explanation for things is false. And trying to continue to espouse it is worthy of ridicule. If you want to call the Big Bang and the events that lead to it God, that’s fine. And if you want to say that God created the Universe and Man, well in that sense it did. So I see nothing wrong with that either. But you seem to want to heap a lot more onto some constructed God with agency intent and all these other human characteristics and situational biasses than is reasonable or reasonably supportable.
I’m trying to get you to look beyond the bounds of your religion and SEE the Universe in all of it’s boundless glory. Gods and heaven and worrying about all that stuff constricts and bounds things within a certain preconceived notion–if god is everything then god is nothing and if god is not everything than god is not God. If you can wrap your mind around that you quickly understand that asking “is there a God” is not helpful nor even relevant. There is a big wonderful boundless Universe to learn about and try to understand, and you need no preconceptions to look at it and be amazed. After all it is something so complex vast and wondrous we invented religion to try and comprehend it and make ourselves feel secure within it. It is something so vast we will never understand all of it. Of course we should try hard as we can to understand as much as we can. But it’s okay to say I don’t know and we will never understand all of it. And that’s okay too. All of that is quite a bit bigger, as an idea, than you seem to give it credit for.
If your religion helps you sleep at night in the rather harsh uncaring vastness that is the Universe there is nothing, per se, wrong with that. The problem is Religion has expanded itself beyond this into science and law and politics and trying to replace these things. Trying to impose it’s constricted notion and dogmatic preconceptions that are easily contradicted. Instead of embracing the more philosophical and rather mystical ideas that would better help people come to terms with what Is, especially in our modern context, religious leaders jettisoned them in an effort to become more powerful in our material world. To take and claim they were the ones who had the TRUTH. And thus they construct something that both must be proved false and is inherently in conflict with what science is able to tell us actually is true about our Universe. Science can’t tell us everything though it constantly pushes the boundaries of what it can explain. But modern religion no longer gives us much of anything beyond false notions and Santa Clause figures. Clinging to an understanding of the Universe that is 2000 or more years old. And ignoring the parts of their past and the wisdom that could indeed prove rather useful to people today. And so while still clamming to be “spiritual” people leave organized religion. Or they move to Religions like buddhism (in it’s somewhat westernized form) which have a lot less construction about them and are more concerned with the wisdom that helps us live a better life with less suffering. A lot of the ideas existed at one time or another in Christianity or Judaism, or Islam but they were either jettisoned or simply go mostly ignored for some reason.
Now, being perfectly honest, I think B. is a bit “out there” in his explanation of his beliefs, but I also think he has thought about things and it trying to place a label on experiences that he has had that he does not fully understand and he is using the constructs of his faith tradition to do so. And I don’t see anything wrong with that per se. Feeling of deep transcendence and connection happen to a lot of people (I wont say it happens all the time, because taking the time to make that connection to yourself and the world around you is a bit rare) and if you want to call that feeling the presence of God go right ahead, I won’t fault you for that. Someone that follows the teachings of the Buddha might take the same experience and call it a glimpse of enlightenment. But you don’t need to call it anything in particular either. You certainly shouldn’t ignore it. Whether it happens while sitting in church praying, while you sit beneath a tree mediating, or when you hiking up a mountain and the clouds break and you are suddenly struck by the glory of nature all around you. Taking the time to be present and truly really see is a wonderful thing. The presence is what is important what you call it is irrelevant.
I do have a problem when you start telling other people what to do because your god commands it. That seems rather silly to me.
Have a look outside the confines of a religious construction and the things really are a lot bigger and a lot more interesting without those preconceptions. It is certainly a fuller and bigger world on this side of the fence than you seem to think.
As for dismissing theories I don’t like, it’s more a dismiss theories that we have pretty strong evidence are completely untrue or backwards. Or are things that simply become recursive logical fallacies. So yes, when someone isn’t making sense I’m going to call them on it, I’m sorry if this offends your delicate sensibilities.
I’m not sure how saying theistic traditions are all wrong and we have pretty good evidence that they were all made up by people to explain things they don’t understand is synonymous with evangelically saying every word of the bible is true.
Tell me truly, do you not think the beliefs of Scientologists are completely ape shit insane? What about Greek and Roman Mythology. Lot of fairy stories right? As Brendan said, what makes your religion any different?
I’m quite comfortable with a lot of unknowns, and when there is something that is unknown instead of making up a story about it I’d rather just say it’s unknown. If there is an idea or a theory we have that seems pretty solid I’m also okay with saying here is the theory here is the evidence does it follow? Why can’t the Universe just be fascinating, why does it have to have intent and agency and all these human ideas about it?
And so your definition of an exchange of ideas is that it is interesting as long as people sort of agree with you, but saying “what if we are all wrong about this” well that kills it? Pointing out where your logic fails is some how some destructive act in discourse? After all it’s the whole point of Socrates, detonating your preconceptions, questioning everything. I don’t have a problem with you pointing out where my logic fails. It’s interesting. Yes as an opening saying I believe this and I believe this is interesting, but it doesn’t get you very far. Test your beliefs. Do you want to discuss things or do you want to discuss things only with people that have some Judeo Christian conception of god? Asking a hard question shouldn’t kill a discussion, if it does your debate skills are lacking.
So wait, I’m confused. Who’s being more obtuse, David or Dane? 😛
Consensus seems to be Dane 😀
I would say it all hinges on where you come down on the fairy stories question.
It’s got nothing to do with belief Dane, and everything to do with how obtuse you are being about what arguments are being put forth. I don’t accept your initial premise as being true, therefore using that as logical proof that I’m wrong and you are right, or that my beliefs are “illogical” IS being obtuse. It’s as simple as that.
It’s fine with me if you want to believe and live your life based on the assumption that everything, God included must have a beggining and an end and draw conclusions from that. It’s fine if you want to put that forth as an argument. It’s not fine to claim that your belief is absolutely true and therefore ANY possible alternate explanation is logically invalid because it violates your initial premise. If I don’t accept your initial premise I’m not bound by it and thus my arguments don’t need to be based on it.
Again, what you are doing is no different than a person who bases their arguments on a Bible verse they insist is true and discards your views because of it, when you don’t claim to hold those views in the first place.
There is NOTHING logically inconsistent with the possiblity that God (or some higher being) exists outside of, or beyond temporal causality as we understand it. Its certainly hard to imagine because we are bound by temporal causality, but then I figure its hard for a person who is born blind to comprehend color. Difficulty in comprehension does not equal impossibility.
I fully realize that there is NO way of proving that God exists in the way I am proposing, and I’m not arguing that it is provable or absolutely true. It is merely one possible explanation. You are of course free to disbelieve such a possilbilty (as you do obviously) but disbelieving something and something being completely illogical/impossible are two very different things.
You are also, of course, free to think that those of us with a belief in God are wrong, but if you are goign to attempt to have any sort of productive discussion on peoples different beliefs with the intent of understanding them and learning from them, you’re attitude of “I have certain truths and if you don’t believe them you are wrong and illogical and your argument sucks” is a very poor one. Your consistent need to resort back to your base premises as the Truth and anyone disagreeing with them being obtuse, is in fact, being obtuse yourself. I fully understand the argument you are making, but again I disagree with the initial premise and therefore it doesn’t convince me. Thats not being obtuse, thats simply disagreeing. As I have pointed out. As Brendan has pointed out. As many others would undoubtedly point out if they were willing to wade in at thsi point.
First David, you are not reading what I was writing if you think I was talking about something fully within our own spacial temporal context.
Be that as it may, let me put it to you this way. The rapture is a risible joke right? And are having good fun poking fun at those that believe it based on no evidence in the face of some pretty good evidence that it’s a complete joke. My point is that religious metaphysics is all equally illogical. We have a lot of evidence that this stuff is constructed by man. So any positive statement about what exists beyond the horizons we can see is wrong. It doesn’t mean there is nothing there it means what we say about it is wrong because we cannot say anything about it because we don’t know and have no way of knowing.
That doesn’t mean there are no philosophically useful ideas in some religious traditions. But those things in recent years are getting swept away by fundamentalist zealots which makes religion dangerous instead of useful.
So as I said, obtuseness depends on how you view the accuracy of a particular faith tradition.
Dane, isn’t it a kind of belief that the world is rational and can be explained by science? I mean, isn’t Hawking’s entire career based on that belief–that his inductive methods can yield answers about the universe? Yet there’s no proof that the world is ultimately a rational place where rational explanations can illuminate the answers to all of our deepest questions. Hawking believes that the same way that David believes there’s a God. It’s all faith in the end. Whether you arrive at that faith via an intellectual/rational perspective or from an emotional/intuitive understanding doesn’t really matter. You’re arguing for faith in science (because after all, when has science killed people? :P) David is arguing for faith in God. But you’re both making an argument for faith. You’re simply trying to say that it’s more “rational” to place faith in science because science is based on reason. I call shenanigans on that. At its very highest levels, scientists recognize that their beliefs about even basic principles are based on assumptions about the way things operate that may or may not be true.
I like thinking that God is the singularity. No one can explain where that came from, just that at some point in our past, everything that we know was part of one singular entity that became everything.
*sigh*. No Dane, your being obtuse has nothing to do with the fact we hold different beliefs. It has to do with your continued insistence that my disagreeing with your conclusions based on premises I don’t accept as Truth makes me obtuse. As Brendan, myself, and Becky are apparently futily trying to point our to you that’s not being obtuse, it’s disagreeing. I fully understand your position and the argument you are putting forth. I acknowledge that in your frame of reference it’s a perfectly rational argument. I merely reject that your frame of reference is the ONLY possible one. I have proposed a different possibility which is entirely consistent with the arguments I am putting forth. You happen to disagree with some of my premises. That’s fine. But it doesn’t make either of us wrong or right. We just disagree.
As someone wise almost said – “Timeo Dane et data ferentēs “ … loosely translates as “Beware dcl bearing data” …
Becky #48 – our resident davidkian is more obtuse – Dane is more sorting-out-his-thoughts-ful …