Nice one Eric, I had to shut the window too...

Jake asked:


RC, what do you think?


To be honest, as I mentioned earlier, until someone identifies something that is testable, or a paradox, I am off the subject of comparing the ratio of unicorns to leprechauns.

Interesting thread. I took all the religion stuff really seriously as a kid, but gradually the more you read the more the contradictions become apparent. I like to say, "If you treated your children the way God treats his children, you'd be in jail for child abuse."

Anyway, I thought some of you might enjoy this little true anecdote. One of my kids who was listening from an upstairs window started laughing so hard she had to shut the window.

I was standing in my front yard minding my own business when who should pull up but a car load of Jehovah's Witnesses (or Seventh Day Adventists, I forget). Two men and two women piled out and I thought I might have a little fun so I decided to be friendly. They started telling me all about heaven and how heaven would be recreated on earth and parents would be united with their children, etc. So I asked them, "that's interesting, because we have 6 adopted children (true). Will they be reunited with their biological parents, some of whom abused the kids, or reunited with me and my wife?" Well that set them to thinking a little bit and I said, "You make this up as you go along, right?" Well they started getting a little uncomfortable, and then I said to one of the women,"doesn't it bother you that the Bible and the Church are so paternalistic, that you are expected to serve men?" And they came back with some bullshit about God being male and head of the house, etc. etc. So by this time I figured enough was enough and it was time to move on. I asked, "what actually makes the difference between male and female except differences in genitalia and what does God need a penis for unless he's out boinking the angels?" Well, that frosted things over and they left shortly thereafter.

I doubt if I converted anyone though.

Now I wonder if it is possible to escape that default state of believing in god having been brought up that way.

I think many of the formerly religious atheists (like myself) on this board would attest that it is. For me, the most influential idea pushing me out of Catholicism and into atheism was that I had no reason to believe in God. My bumper sticker answer to questions of why I don't believe in God has always been "Why would I?" So I'd like to think that my default is to not believe absent proof, as opposed to not believing only after justifying abandoning belief.

Or maybe I'm misunderstanding your question.

Dan wrote: "I take the opposite view: the default should be to not believe in God, or any other purely hypothetical nonsense, until justification is produced...."

That's close to what I've been thinking, but failing to articulate. Now I wonder if it is possible to escape that default state of believing in god having been brought up that way.

RC, what do you think?

rgb wrote: "In the meantime, God can be neither accepted nor rejected in the same way one can accept the probable truth of a statement like: If I drop this penny, it will fall. We can agree that there is an enormous about of information, organized in a very intelligent way. And that's it...."

Very well constructed argument, and I can agree with your conclusion. I suppose the way I am thinking about it these days, god is like a tachyon. Useful in certain equations, not useful in others. And not particularly provable or disprovable at this point.

Unlikely? Actually, it is more likely, if one were permitted to play the "lets compute the probability of the current state of being" game with a one-shot Universe. There is far less information required to produce a tiny pocket Universe that merely appears to be huge according to your erroneous memories than there is required to produce the real thing.

Perhaps, but that requires a universe with both an immediate reality and an illusion of a more distant reality that is consistent with that immediate reality from the perspective of one (and only one?) of the universe's inhabitants. Essentially, a universe "designed" to simulate a larger universe. Isn't it much more likely that what seems to exist actually does exist rather than that it is part of some elaborate accidental cosmic hoax?

'm still not quite sure of what any of this has to do with giving up God.

By stating that God needs to be "given up," you imply that the default position is to believe in God (in some form), and one should only refrain from believing in God with sufficient evidential justification. I take the opposite view: the default should be to not believe in God, or any other purely hypothetical nonsense, until justification is produced.

...Any bridge hand is infinitely unlikely. The existence of a deck of cards -- try predicting that from the laws of physics, or looking for one to have emerged from the rocks on the surface of Ganymede! The existence of a set of utterly artificial rules for a game that is completely irrelevant to volutionary esurvival and that exists only in the improbable minds of improbable beings in an improbable society that could easily have developed in an entirely different way (or not at all) if a dragonfly had beaten its wings slightly differently back in the pre-cambrian (or whenever it was that dragonflies first emerged) -- that's what we are talking about, right?

I'm fond of saying (whenever some amazingly unlikely thing comes up), "Given a large enough statistical universe, anything that can happen will happen."

So, while a deck of cards existing at any particular point in space/time may be mind-numbingly unlikely, the Universe is also mind-numbingly huge. It may not be large enough to guarantee a deck of cards, but is more than large enough to make it and all the other attributes of the situation much more likely to exist inside the totality of space/time somewhere.

There was always something. Everything ever needed to comprise all that has ever existed and will ever exist, has always existed. And the Big Bang - and all that followed - was just another expression of existence.

We are in complete agreement. Nothing -- and I was describing the concept, which clearly you'd thought about as well, not quoting a theory -- is the logical contradiction of anything, except that it is a contradiction so complete that given nothing there is also no logic. Unless one subscribes to the idea that mathematical theorems and axioms float around in some sort of space of potential ideas in a network of unsubstantial potential truths based upon all possible formulated axioms in the absence of being. I personally have a hard time getting my head around that one; it's like saying "numbers are something".

However, all that we are both really observing is that something is a consistent choice out of the two possibilities. The existence of anything negates nothing, and since anything includes all time one can literally state that, given the observation of something, nothing has never existed (even if time is bounded this is still true, although that is an uncomfortable thing for time-bound beings to visualize. It is true even if the actual time boundary is five minutes ago and five minutes into your future and the actual space boundary is just out of your personal sight -- the entire tiny Universe simply happens to be organized in such a way that you think that the visible space-time continuum has been around for thirteen billion years.

Unlikely? Actually, it is more likely, if one were permitted to play the "lets compute the probability of the current state of being" game with a one-shot Universe. There is far less information required to produce a tiny pocket Universe that merely appears to be huge according to your erroneous memories than there is required to produce the real thing. To reject it you will have to appeal to exactly the same argument that you and RC seem to find unappealing -- you will have to prove that it is somehow unlikely or implausible, where in order to back up any such assertion of plausibility you will have to make assertions about the nature of Being that are indefensible logically and empirically; they are your articles of personal faith, as it were, what you believe for no reason so that you can reason. Your axioms.

So not-nothing is an ongoing empirical truth. It is literally impossible for a self-aware mind to assert nothing as anything but a bit of sophistry in a smartass bullshit semantic game. The negation of nothing as a personal experiential truth is one of the reasons why people assert the existence of an immortal soul. To me personally "death" or "unconsciousness" makes the Universe go away into "nothing" (where I've experienced the latter as a "hole in experiential time".

Time and space cease. Duration and location -- which I "know" only from and as a cusp that appears to be riding along on the leading edge of an advancing indicator of experience even when I also know that there is a point of view that I cannot directly experience from which the past and future are the same, where every moment I have experienced or will experience are static, where the Universe itself is a very large DVD -- an enormous pile of static information (know subject to some very broad axioms -- "the laws of physics as best we know them" plus assumptions that the Universe we appear to see is as we appear to see it and not just information.

I'm still not quite sure of what any of this has to do with giving up God. Consider the following:

a) Nothing and Something are two completely disjoint conditions we can define, although it is troublesome psychologically for a something-being to try to actually imagine nothing. At least for me. It's like trying not to think of the word "rhinoceros".

b) We are experiencing, therefore Something.

c) Given Something, we define Everything (the Universe). As Nathan and I have both observed, precisely everything has existed/exists/will exist.

d) We don't know what Everything is. In fact, "we" seem confined to a narrow window around a particular coordinate in space-time that is sweeping in one particular direction, with one part of our "knowing" being an ongoing sensory stream of information we associate with "Outside Everything" merging with an ongoing stream of information we associate with our "Self" -- our memories, thoughts, and the cusp of awareness that is both playing and enjoying the movie.

e) Entropy is abundant. Our experiencing quickly fades and most of the information flowing in instant to instant is simply lost. The entropy associated with the future is nearly infinite -- we have even less idea of what is about to be experienced than we do of what we just experienced; indeed, we differentiate "past", "now" and "future" on the basis of the intensity and quality of the asymmetric entropy.

f) As Nathan has also observed, the space of what is possible is enormous. Our imagination has no limit, and it itself is incredibly limited and slow compared to the permutation group of all possible non-self-contradictory states of being or even "interesting subgroups" such as ones that have the same general laws of nature as the one we seem to find ourselves in. Our "knowledge" of everything is derived from the tiny, entropy laden window and stored in truly pitiful little brains that do their apparently evolved best to abstract the most important patterns from their personal experiential stream.

g) There exists an arguably best methodology for using inference to transform this experiential stream (internal and external) into "knowledge", where knowledge is a particular pattern of mutually interconnected semantic assertions that seem to optimally minimize the entropy associated with our personal threads of being. Our "knowledge" permits compression of past experience for and provides a partial and approximate extrapolation of future experience. I'm pretty sure, for example, that in a few seconds (whatever that might mean, as it is a measure that constantly changes with my personal cusp) I will be typing (wait, now I AM typing) these very words, or words very similar to the ones that I was thinking of and waiting for my fingers to get around to typing back when I thought of and typed them just above.

Very odd indeed. But there you have it.

h) This best methodology is more than sufficient to reject hairy thunderer versions of God. Most of the ones proposed in theistic religions are openly contradicted by our experience or are logically self-contradictory collections of attributes. It is utterly inadequate to address the question of pantheistic or panentheistic God. The reason the question is "interesting" is the importance of step b) above in our own systematic exploration, together with our own psychological difficulty with imagining nothing.

i) It is interesting as a metaphysical question, not a physical one. To analyze it, one requires a metaphysical methology. However, our current state of knowledge has barely produced a coherent statement of our actual physical methodology alluded to in g), and that methodology cannot address the question at all as RC has so convincingly shown -- given our empirically singular subjective windows onto Something, our range of "vision" cannot be extrapolated to provide any sort of plausibility statement for metaphysical assertions, at least while we lack a "believable" metaphysical theory.

In the meantime, God can be neither accepted nor rejected in the same way one can accept the probable truth of a statement like: If I drop this penny, it will fall. We can agree that there is an enormous about of information, organized in a very intelligent way. And that's it.

In Scott Adams' book God's Debris, the idea is floated that the Big Bang was God killing himself. It was the only thing he could find to do that was challenging to him, to see if he could destroy himself.

rgb wrote: "There is a level of nothingness that is even more nothing than mere "empty space-time"..."

Where is this theorized? (I ask inquisitively.)

Speaking of Occam's Razor...

Many years ago, when I was in a transitional phase, a thought first occurred to me that there really should be no reason for something before nothing. The whole notion of something having to exist before nothing seemed obvious enough, but obvious in the same way as "God made it so" was obvious. My first big step in giving up God was also giving up on something before nothing, and accepting that nothing never was; there has always been something.

I tried explaining this thought futilely to some other thoughtful friends, and either wasn't articulating the idea very well, or was perceived as talking out of my ass. I sort of was, because I hadn't really anything to base it on. I hadn't read much in the way of philosophy in the academic sense. Well, actually, it would be fair to say that I had a lot of philosophical discussions with others, and maybe picked some things up along the way. I remember at the time being more interested in cosmology, as well as Chaos Theory. But the only philosophical books I had read about this time (not including the bible) were a couple by Richard Bach (JLS, and One).

So I've been at peace with this idea for about the last 20 years. It's the one that's always made the most sense to me, in an Occam's Razor sort of way.

There was always something. Everything ever needed to comprise all that has ever existed and will ever exist, has always existed. And the Big Bang - and all that followed - was just another expression of existence.

Ultimately though, this idea doesn't seem testable. No more so than God.

Why indeed! However, given the big bang (which we don’t know the origin of) then the rest follows. Many things could have existed but only that which does exist does exist! Highly unlikely but something has to exist. Any given bridge hand is highly unlikely but it happens. (Agreeing here with Nathan and RC).

"Given":"Follows" is another way of saying -- nothing. It is like saying "given that something exists, we should find it unsurprising that something exists and therefore we should find it unsurprising that this particular something exists." And of course the statement that "something has to exist" as if it were a conclusion of an argument or an assertion either one is incorrect -- it is merely a tautology, a restatement of your observation (with which I enthusiastically agree!) that something exists.

I, on the other hand, find it mildly (but pleasantly) surprising that something exists because it would have required so much less energy and trouble for nothing to exist, or for something to exist that is much simpler than what we observe. Where I mean energy literally -- that is a precise statement, not a use of common English. By trouble I mean "informational complexity". Simple seems more likely than complex, right? Occam's Razor, sort of.

There is a level of nothingness that is even more nothing than mere "empty space-time" -- a lack of even an empty space-time, not even a point-like Universe, but no Universe at all. The utter absence of existence. Not even the state with zero energy, no information -- no state at all, no fabric of being that can support a mere lack of energy, no "theory" of information. The void.

Such a non-state cannot persist, of course -- there is nowhere for it to be, and notime for it to (not) be in. It is difficult to even speak of the void in a language or in mathematics, as the most accurate description is the utter absence of anything to describe or symbols to describe it with. Yet it seems like the easiest, if manifestly incorrect, anti-answer to all questions, and find it difficult not to experience a certain degree of joy that it is not.

Your bridge metaphor is also very amusing (I used to love bridge but lack time and partners, alas). Any bridge hand is infinitely unlikely. The existence of a deck of cards -- try predicting that from the laws of physics, or looking for one to have emerged from the rocks on the surface of Ganymede! The existence of a set of utterly artificial rules for a game that is completely irrelevant to volutionary esurvival and that exists only in the improbable minds of improbable beings in an improbable society that could easily have developed in an entirely different way (or not at all) if a dragonfly had beaten its wings slightly differently back in the pre-cambrian (or whenever it was that dragonflies first emerged) -- that's what we are talking about, right?

Sure, sure, given all of that working out juuuust right, given a group of ludicrously unlikely people sitting down and playing a pointless game with cards that any sane person would have bet were nearly infinitely unlikely to ever exist given the laws of nature and any partial knowledge of initial conditions at the big bang whose origins we are unsure of but which appears to have happened anyway, at that point being dealt a cold slam is "merely improbable", but some hand has to happen on any particular deal and sure, sometimes it will turn out to be a run of eight spades with a few nice honors on the side and your partner's hand matches up perfectly.

Let me state the problem slightly differently. You hold an infinitely sharp razor. Before you is a piece of string exactly one unit long. Without looking, you slice down and cut the string (which is Acme string, infinitely thin and unstretchable, the kind of string used in physics problems:-). What is the probability that you cut the string into two rational pieces (pieces that have ratios that can be expressed as integers)?

Yes, the answer is "zero". The rationals are a set of measure zero on the real number line. Add up the length of all the rationals in any real number line of nonzero length, including one infinitely long, and you get a line of zero length.

Sure, sure, the line has to be cut somewhere, and whatever cut we get is the cut we get, almost certainly an irrational number (although another very, very interesting question is associated with how one might measure the two pieces to tell but measured or not some number, one that is infinitely unlikely but that turned up anyway).

But the really interesting thing isn't the probability of turning up a ratio of 0.93311172394892927398... it is that such an absurd and abstract question should be discussed between a number of minds that are themselves even more unlikely (once one opens the problem up by selecting a measure that permits a discussion of probability to occur at all).

I find it most curious that a mind capable of being "surprised" by something as simple as an unplanned birthday party or an unpleasant notice from the IRS could ever look out over the Universe and not be abso-lutely frickin' amazed at every single thing experienced every single moment. Sort of like Tony in The Tenth Kingdom after he is cursed with bad luck for breaking the mirror: "What are the odds of that happening..." time and time again.

Probability of rolling a six, given a fair roll of an existing unbiased die: 1 in 6, presuming that "fair" means the usual state of ignorance of microstate in the initial cast of the die and the surface you cast on.

Probablity that a die should exist to be rolled on any surface at all by beings that "bet" on the outcome, given the same presumptive state of ignorance of microstate in the initial "fair" cast of the Universe? What do you reckon that is?

Ultimately, what we're talking about is whether or not the bet was rigged. Not "created" -- what evidence we have is against creation of any sort. A rigged game is one where the appearance of chance is an illusion. The game might be played out just as if it were a fair game, with winners and losers, it might even be a reasonably likely outcome that they play to, but in a rigged game the deck is stacked cold and every card plays out accordingly.

The metaphor demonstrates the importance of ignorance -- entropy -- in assessments of probability. A fairly shuffled deck has its cards in some definite order. The particular order is by definition maximally unlikely -- all permutations or card order are equally, maximally unlikely in a fair shuffle -- but the cards are physically sitting there, and they have the order that they have. It isn't "likely" or "unlikely", it just is.

We exist in a state that is nearly entirely ignorance (maximum entropy), compared to the information content of the Universe. The Universe itself, however, is like the deck of cards; it has no intrinsic entropy at all. One part can be ignorant of another part but the whole is what it is.

Finally to Dan: I'm already argued the following. The Universe is all that is. I think we agree on that, and besides, it is "true by definition". One attribute associated with God by definition is that of omniscience, but what that means is that the information content of the Universe must be "inside" (represented within) God. Both by definition must contain the other (with the additional problem of the representation of the information if one postulates a Universe partitioned into God and not-God as Christians contradictorily do). Equating the two "perfectly" solves an important problem of consistency.

I actually agree about the baggage, but it's just the baggage of imperfect language and a lot of entropy. It pleases me to talk to the Universe in my head, even if what listens and replies is ultimately me.

There's nothing that can be said about God that can't also be said about the universe, so God is superfluous.

That is cool. I wish I said that. However, I likely said instead, "Silly Christians, magic tricks are for kids." Of course, in a much more caustic way.

Rgb redefines god as nature (or the universe). Why, for what point? The word god brings so much baggage with it that this re-definition is counterproductive. Why not just say the universe is amazing and awe inspiring and leave it at that?


Exactly. Someone on this board (I forget who) said something along these lines a long time ago that I really liked: There's nothing that can be said about God that can't also be said about the universe, so God is superfluous.

I always found it a nice thought that we are "made of stardust"...all the elements in us ...manufactured by stars.....etc....

I just wanted to clarify a couple of things from earlier...

rgb wrote “I do hope that Gregory doesn't go around asserting that we create reality quantum mechanically by observing things.”

He does not. As you say ‘the territory is not the map’, he is talking about the map. However, the map is all we have and can ever have, we build models of reality in our heads and this is all we see, in that sense it IS reality for us and it is very largely based on language.

rgb also said “Pure discontinuity. Physicists hate that. ”

Agreed, but I should point out I didn’t suggest that. I didn’t mean time started in the big bang, I meant time was ‘created’ in the big bang. This implies no start point and hence no discontinuity (as described in my previous post).

Also again I am not saying this is what I believe, just that it is a possibility.

Shaitte asked “"why is there something instead of Nothing?"

Why indeed! However, given the big bang (which we don’t know the origin of) then the rest follows. Many things could have existed but only that which does exist does exist! Highly unlikely but something has to exist. Any given bridge hand is highly unlikely but it happens. (Agreeing here with Nathan and RC).

Rgb redefines god as nature (or the universe). Why, for what point? The word god brings so much baggage with it that this re-definition is counterproductive. Why not just say the universe is amazing and awe inspiring and leave it at that?

Nathan quoted "We are the universe becoming aware of its own existence."

Lovely. I too have come across that before. In fact I actually use it in my book “Stardust: our Cosmic Origins”.

rgb wrote: "...just an ongoing sense of wonder at the very cool Universe that you are (a part of) and the miracle of your own ability to perceive it and experience it from a time-bound point of view."


I hear where you're coming from re: Brahman. And I know of the distinction - at least with Buddhism - between Buddhism for the Enlightened, and Buddhism for the superstitious rural folk. That hits you in the face every day in Thailand (if you're looking for it, that is).

Science has opened my eyes more to the wonderment of the incredible Universe than any religious or spiritual idea has, though. Every day I learn something new and awesome.

But you've made a reasonable case for 'god' still serving a useful purpose, if for nothing else it does, as you say, "make it just a bit simpler to transcend our evolutionary drive to succeed at all costs, where our greatest pleasures is to crush your enemies, drive them before us, and hear the lamentations of their women.

Jake, I don't know that I'm any smarter than anybody. I just make my living, in part, from thinking about stuff like this.

Note well that God as Everything is not a dualistic hairy thunderer. In particular I see no way it could care one way or the other about being worshipped. Do you care if the 1844234442th cell from the left in your big toe "worships" you?

This is where Hinduism splits (and for that matter, so does meditative atheism, that is to say, Buddhism). There is Hinduism "for the masses" -- social religion -- where worship and prayers asking for intervention and alteration of luck (as it were) still occur, Buddhism that "worships" the Buddha, either as a quasi-Hindu avatar of Vishnu or in a way very similar to the way Jesus is worshipped, as a presumptive perfect/enlightened human, or both. Asking the Universe for help and good fortune, in the guise of one or another of the devas or via "magic".

Then there is enlightment, high Vedic Hinduism as writted down in the Upanishads, which writes that Brahman is not that which sees but that by which we see, that Brahman is not the being that is worshipped by men. You are God. You can be a self-aware God, and behave as you yourself conceive that you as God should behave, or you can be an unaware God, God who has forgotten who and what he is, God stilled trapped in the web of Maya, illusion, that is what he (also) Is. Where I use "he" but mean anything that is, especially anything that is self-aware. What you cannot do is stop being God (although in Buddhism, perhaps you can stop being God in pieces).

Worship? What is that, anyway? An utterly dualistic concept, or an expression of narcissism and solipsism. We worship Other, not Self, but there is no such thing.

Similarly, disbelief in God carries no punishment, belief no reward. At worst one or the other is a mistake. It may alter your degree of satisfaction in life (either way), and of course if one has a philosophical bent one is likely to want to choose either one or the other and have reasons for that choice.

The one place where I can see a point where belief in God might matter is that if God exists and if the Universe is sufficiently complex and ordered that it forms a kind of trancendent intelligence, then it is at least plausible that our personal awarenesses are simultaneously part of the global awareness of God as all things. In this case being self aware of the connection at the very least without question alters the way you interpret everything (and thereby your actions) as would any belief true or false.

According to Hinduism and Buddhism (and Quakerism and Unitarianism and a few other theistic heresies) there are two direct benefits from maintaining a direct and perpetual awareness of this connection. One is a kind of spiritual contentment and peace; the other is a self-actualized sense of compassion. Both of these things make one suffer less and enjoy more, to obtain greater satisfaction from life. Not "God given" satisfaction, not good luck or victory over your enemies or wealth or lots of sex and many children, just an ongoing sense of wonder at the very cool Universe that you are (a part of) and the miracle of your own ability to perceive it and experience it from a time-bound point of view.

I personally wouldn't argue that this state of being "centered" is exclusively tied to belief or a "reward" of those that choose to believe. I would argue that bitterness or anger or excessive passion utterly rejecting God is moderately likely to make one less likely to achieve it, just as being overly zealous and passionate about insisting that God exists and is your own best friend probably makes one less likely to achieve it. If one takes Buddhism at face value, Buddha achieved it as an active anti-theist. If one takes the Upanishads at face value, so did a lot of other people both before and since achieve it as active theists, although those individuals did have to transcend the silly mysticism and magic they were brought up with and move past the socializing part of the theistic message to the underlying metaphysic itself.

The interesting thing is that nearly all worldview belief systems, theistic, atheistic, or any combination, tend to have a small cadre of individuals that are identified as having achieved this particular kind of Enlightenment, and it is usually portrayed as being of the highest value.

The idea of the Universe as God is not necessary for you to become and Enlightened soul and achieve the sort of inner peace that best arms you for existence in an amazing, yet dangerous world, filled with pleasures as well as suffering, where you are at once free and utterly bound by the laws of nature, where you act and are acted on in beautifully patterned ways. However, neither does it hurt, and there is some evidence that it might actually help. After all, what is sympathy and compassion but our minds identifying ourselves with others who are not-self. We feel their pain and share their joy, if we permit ourselves to do so. The vision of a all such souls being a part of a Universal God may make it just a bit simpler to transcend our evolutionary drive to succeed at all costs, where our greatest pleasures is to crush your enemies, drive them before us, and hear the lamentations of their women. Not essential, but perhaps useful. Almost certainly certainly comforting, if nothing else.

rgb

P.S. Shaitte. You might laugh, but I've had at least four people who've read the book so far (out of at most a few hundred total readers) write me to ask me where the scrolls are, and if they can have a copy.

It is scary, how easy it would be to become a Joseph Smith. If one talks a good, persuasive game, is loaded with charisma, appeals to the right hormonal subsystems, and know a little practical stage magic, it would be (and historically, obviously is) simplicity itself to start with nothing and end with a band of "followers" who hang on our every word. One can accomplish this without trying in good faith (drinking your own kool-ade) or by trying, especially if one is completely unscrupulous and use shills in the crowd and actual technology to rig your "miracles".

Both have occurred countless times in human history. Some, like Saint Francis (Assisi flavor) appear to have done so in utterly good faith, to have been extraordinarily good people who completely believed what they figured out and lived their lives accordingly. They convince us by their very sincerity and passion, even as our reason cries nay. Others, like Pat Robertson or Tammy Faye, are high-grade confidence artists that systematically rape their victims out of money and achieve a sort of "worship" of their own, which is also what they crave.

It is hard to know which sort Jesus or Mohammed or Joseph Smith might have been. In the latter case "finding" utterly implausible gold plates bespeaks con artist. In the former two the many "miracles" could equally well have been mythologized insertions into an otherwise far more unremarkable story of a good man with at least a few good ideas, or they could have been the result of careful stagecraft by a small team of con artists. Or, of course, they could have done exactly what it is claimed that they did -- this simply seems to be the least plausible of the alternatives because miracles like that don't seem to happen every day in anything like an experimentally verifiable way.

And I hope you enjoy the book! If nothing else, a few parts of it might make you laugh.

I have heard that before and it may be an "old quote".

Speaking of the universe ---- I was listening to a Center for Inquiry podcast yesterday and I heard something cool.

According to the guy that said it, it isn't a new idea, but I had never heard this before and thought it sounded cool.

He was quoting someone else and he said, "We are the universe becoming aware of its own existence."

That seemed cool to me.

Except that people don't worship the Universe. ;)

They oughta!

This is all, by the way, in The Book of Lilith; it is a significant portion of what God as Innana communicates to Lilith in the first chapters of the story and consistently reveals as the rest unfolds.

Good! Because I just got your book and started reading it. I really like the set-up in the preface. Makes me wonder why we have not yet seen a modern-day Joseph Smith declare that he found some digital copies of some gold plates...

rgb wrote: "If one defines God to be that which is self-sufficient existence, that which is for no reason but that it is, one is no better or worse off than if you call the Universe that which is self-sufficent existence, that which is for no reason but that it is...."

Except that people don't worship the Universe. ;)

Accepting on principle that if anything is possible, then god is possible, still isn't enough of a reason for me to believe in god. Through research and testing, should proof of god be revealed, that's different, but until then I don't care. The very idea of any god or god-like being is an ancient vestige of our development as a species. It may have served a purpose at one point in our development, but I suggest that the idea of god has outlived its usefulness (accepting that it ever was truly useful).

If anything, I think that hanging on to the idea of god, just because it is what we have been taught, can actually be a hindrance to scientific achievement, because god may always be a factor that taints otherwise reasonable observations.

Of course, I'd have a hard time making this case to RGB since he is waaaay smarter than I am, yet still holds on to the possibility of god.

Just to be clear, my thoughts are framed around the Western idea of God. But God is Universe is God still isn't really helpful. I just don't see any use for the term, nor the idea of, God.

If there is going to be stuff that exists, isn't it simpler if everything exists?

Well, everything does exist. Everything that exists, exists that is.

Everything else that doesn't exist is merely an idea, so I don't think it would be easier if every idea was a reality since there are conflicting ideas and even impossible ideas.

Sure, but everything is precisely what exists, by definition. If you mean "everything that could possibly exist exists, well, there are infinities and there are infinities, but that is essentially the concept of Hilbert's Grand Hotel, and the kind of thing people mislabel when they talk about multiple Universes (which is a rather obvious oxymoron, they "mean" multiple spacetime continua because there can only be one Uni-verse).

If you read the Wikipedia article on it, you'll note that it contains a reference to a silly "cosmological argument" against infinity or a steady state/cyclic Universe that goes back to Thomas Aquinas's the Universe had a definite beginning and must have had a cause, and that cause must be God. Which (as has been noted many times) begs many questions and once AGAIN violates the definition of Universe, as the Universe is everything that has objective existence and hence must INCLUDE God (if God has objective existence).

God could at most "create" a spacetime continuum, but as I noted above, "creation" is a dynamical act that itself can only occur in "time", so it presupposes a covering geometry with timelike and spacelike coordinates in which differential relations exist that can describe "dynamics" -- the dynamics of God thinking in meta-time, for example, about creating space and time. One still has the problem of something from nothing if God "creates" the Universe out of nothingness. One also has a serious problem with free will -- the free will of God. It is rather obvious that free will (or the illusion of free will) is related to entropy, or partial knowledge. An "omniscient" being cannot have will at all, let alone free will, because complete knowledge of the state of the Universe is static -- "dynamics" merely describes relationships between quantities within that state.

Anyway, your question ultimately addresses one of the most interesting questions studied in physics and mathematics -- self-organizing systems and systems that spontaneously/dynamically break symmetry. We manifestly live in a state of seriously broken symmetry, but believe that the underlying field theory is itself intrinsically symmetric.

I reserve judgement on the idea of everything that could possibly exist existing, primarily because I think that the concept itself is inconsistent due to Godel's theorem. Reality is clearly complex and self-referential enough for Godel's theorems to apply, and hence a) We cannot prove the consistency of any theory of everything, ever -- if we could it would in fact prove the inconsistency of our model; and b) if we wish our model to be consistent as far as we've been able to define it, that model must be incomplete and Godel proves that sufficiently complex theories can be complete or consistent but not both.

This is one of the things I'm working to describe in my book, as it is fundamental "prior knowledge" of the metaphysical sort applying not to any particular worldview but to worldviews in general. The "best" worldview accessible to a finite being in a much larger Universe is one that is known to be incomplete, that is consistent so far as it is known, and that lacks axioms that permit one to "prove" its consistency. Odd, but there it is.

Fortunately, this perfectly describes science. Nobody would argue that science is capable of achieving complete knowledge of the possibly-infinite Universe, and our knowledge of quantum theory and information theory so far makes it theoretically impossible for one portion of the Universe to achieve "perfect knowledge" of the rest in any non-trivial situation. Science itself is all about building the best possible consistent description of everything based on the partial and filtered and projective exchange of information between the subsystem seeking to "know" the rest and the rest. It would be stupid to assert that science and/or mathematics working together or alone could ever achieve perfect, provable, consistency -- there are intrinsic "paradoxes" such as the existential/ontological wonder sickness paradox that science cannot consistently describe. Science is great at telling us how a force acts on a baseball to produce its trajectory in a way that roughly corresponds to our observations of the trajectories of many similar baseballs. Science cannot consistently answer the question "why the baseball" (it can only go so far back and cannot address the super-ultimate-why question because it is essentially descriptive and evidence based and the "whys" it can explain are all internal to stuff that exists, not why existence).

Two last observations. One is that this last statement leaves us free to assert God or not assert God as a self-sufficient answer to the SUWhy question. This answer cannot be proven -- it would violate Godel's theorem and is itself a Godelian self-referential loop either way one chooses to assert it. The Universe Is. Behold it. If there is no God, the Universe is for no reason. If there is God, the Universe (including God) is for no reason. If there is God, the Universe is God and God is the Universe or God fails to possess all the attributes we wish to assign to the term "God". If there is no God, the Universe possess exactly the same attributes.

For God (postulated) to possess free will, God must be bound to time, and non-coordinate time -- experiential time -- is bound to entropy. Entropy is missing information, which requires a partitioning of the Universe into subsystems a la NZGMEs and statistical averaging of the exterior portion so that there can be "discovery" and "choice" for information processing systems that possess a memory and the right integrodifferential self-organized structure. We are all, therefore, fragments of God, and only through our eyes can God (the Universe) see itself (the Universe) in a state that is not static and timeless.

This is all, by the way, in The Book of Lilith; it is a significant portion of what God as Innana communicates to Lilith in the first chapters of the story and consistently reveals as the rest unfolds. It is a mythopoeic truth, and does not have to be literally true to be useful to us as we seek to make sense and answer the unanswerable questions that our inquiring minds are led to contemplate even as we can see that they are unanswerable.

The second observation is that if one judges religious scripture on the basis of how accurately its "divinely inspired" writings describe observational reality (leaving aside entirely whether divine inspiration is anything more than intuitive reasoning mixed with symbolic reasoning in the ontological semantic available to the inspired brain that produces it), Vedic Hinduism wins hands down, with no other religion coming even close. Nobody (in the US) ever actually studies it (or rather, they study it badly, as a polytheistic hodge-podge of myths and legends regarding the devas and their human avatars) but it arguably describes the Universe as a series of expansions and collapses -- Yugas -- wherein Brahman/Universe splits itself into many and binds itself to the illusion of time so that it can experience it as Atman -- both the suffering and the pleasure -- before recoalescing into a timeless state of unity and then doing it all again, differently.

Rather beautiful, from a mythopoeic point of view, and of course within it there is perfect justice. All things are God, all actions are God's actions, in all events one is both windshield and bug and in just the right frame of timeless mind one has perfect knowledge of both. Most of the actual religious practice is devoted to achieving an approximation of that Mind, to Know yourself as God knowing God.

rgb

I'll jump in and admit that I too suffer from Ontological Wonder Sickness. The question of "why is there something instead of Nothing?" has bothered me for as long as I can remember.

Here is a related question. Given that some things exist and other things don't, how did that demarcation line get drawn? If there is going to be stuff that exists, isn't it simpler if everything exists?

I'm not certain that I agree that physicists create reality for us; one of those prime meta-axioms of most aware souls is that there exists an objective external reality that is self-defined as a set of information; it (and we) have a state (which you can think of as a complete set of coordinates required to precisely specify that state, on top of a fixed ontology that can be thought of quite generally as a vector space, with every unique coordinate part of the general coordinate description vector for the complete system.

Our labelling of our partial understanding of this objective reality does not in any way affect that reality. So back when Newton invented (one view of) classical physics, it did not affect the way that nature worked, it only improved the correspondence between our internal ontological semantic map and the terrain it sought to describe. The map is not the territory (although the human brain in which the map lives is part of the territory, which is one thing that makes it all so very interesting).

I do hope that Gregory doesn't go around asserting that we create reality quantum mechanically by observing things; that's a nearly universal fallacy that derives from a poor understanding of the nature of the measuring apparatus relative to the system being measured. It disappears when one starts at the top with a unified system consisting of both measuring apparatus and measured subsystem -- at that point there is clearly no such thing as "quantum collapse" and hence there is no such thing as quantum collapse. It is an illusion brought about by the aforementioned split and our ignorance, in this case ignorance concerning the phases of all the quantum elements in the measuring apparatus, which forces us to use a projection onto a classical (or semiclassical) state description for that apparatus.

Doing it "correctly" leads from the density matrix "for the Universe" to the Nakajima-Zwanzig generalized master equation, which is IMO the most important piece of physics that almost never gets taught even to physicists, literally the golden key to the understanding of nearly every aspect of the entropically driven time evolution of partitioned systems. We are little Nakajima-Zwanzig subsystems, evolving according to an non-Markovian integrodifferential equation (one with a memory kernel) in interaction with "everything else".

You might have to google a bit to find a good paper on NZEs and the Wikipedia article on GMEs still sucks, although the article on the (related) Langevin equation isn't terrible. The fundamental connection between information theory and quantum theory, if you like.

If Gregory is just referring to Sapir-Whorf for physicists (where there IS a really excellent Wikipedia article on Sapir-Whorf) then I agree without seeing it -- coming up with the right "language" (or coordinatization) is over half the battle when it comes to formulating a consistent worldview, with the inference of the rules and grammar that permits the consistent manipulation of the symbols in ways that achieve maximal correspondence with observational reality the other half.

rgb

The book I mentioned called ‘Inventing Reality’ and subtitled ‘Physics as language’ by Bruce Gregory is a fascinating read and I can strongly recommend it.

It takes you through the history of physics but from the perspective of language defining how we view reality... so physicists in a way create reality for us. Hence the story of the umpires above.

A rather bold statement (if I may be so bold!) Your examples are no less weird e.g. 2048 dimensions! And if there was a ‘before’ the big bang then we are back to versions of the ‘steady state’ theory which have their own philosophical dilemmas. Such as where did it come from and why is it there?

Yes, this is a fundamental, irreducible, philosophical existential dilemma that is made no more palatable by asserting "because God made it so" or "for no reason". All things considered, nothing seems far more reasonable than something, and once you've got something (for no reason, something being fundamentally unreasonable) you're further stuck with "OK, so something exists. Why this?"

If one defines God to be that which is self-sufficient existence, that which is for no reason but that it is, one is no better or worse off than if you call the Universe that which is self-sufficent existence, that which is for no reason but that it is.

As far as steady state is concerned -- if there is something I have a bigger problem with than something vs nothing, it is first having nothing and then something. Sequence with nothing to serve as the origin of something. Before and after with (as you say) no time to create an ordinal relationship. Pure discontinuity. Physicists hate that.

Infinite existence, on the other hand, is no problem. No beginning, no end. No need to think of what came before, or what will come after. All points in the middle of an infinite line, but a half infinite line, that's a bit of a problem...

rgb

p.s. -- I'll address other points later, but this is the essence of it.

p.p.s. -- time makes sense two ways, and physics has a problem with them. Yes, time is measured by clocks, clocks are associated with change, change with dynamics, so the frozen is "timeless". But there is also dimensional time, time as in space. Space-time. Space-time does not overtly rely on dynamics. I don't think physicists fully understand the nature between space-time and dynamics as in quantum mechanics and space-time granulated at the Planck scale. That's why string theory is so important. That's why when I go and talk about 4096 dimensional spaces, you shouldn't dismiss them with a sniff or a shake of your head. That's exactly what people did when Einstein, Lorentz, Riemmann, Gauss, and so many others postulated "ridiculous" extensions of common sense that turned out to be right. Not to mention quantum theory itself.

I too have a story...

Three umpires were discussing their roles in the game of baseball. The first umpire asserted, “I calls ‘em the way I sees ‘em.” The next umpire, with even more confidence, and a more metaphysical turn of mind said, “I calls ‘em the way they are!” But the third umpire, displaying a familiarity with twentieth century physics, concluded the discussion with, “They ain’t nothin’ until I calls ‘em!”

The players and fans have no doubt that the ball was either over the plate or it was not over the plate, but the umpire’s call, and not any “fact of the matter,” creates a ball or a strike. Without the ball and the plate there would be no baseball, and without the world there would be no physics; but physicists, like umpires, “call the game” and in the process tell us how the world is “really” put together.

This was taken from a lovely book call ‘Inventing Reality’ subtitled ‘Physics as language’ by Bruce Gregory.

Rbg said “I think that it is incorrect to state that time was created in the big bang.

A rather bold statement (if I may be so bold!) Your examples are no less weird e.g. 2048 dimensions! And if there was a ‘before’ the big bang then we are back to versions of the ‘steady state’ theory which have their own philosophical dilemmas. Such as where did it come from and why is it there?

There are some good cases to be made for time itself being created in the big bang – along with space. To Einstein, space and time were a single entity. It is possible, I believe, that the time dimension can, in another part of the universe say, be swapped with one of the three space dimensions – and the equations would still work. We also know that ‘space/time’ can be curved, so why can’t it be curved right back on itself in some manner? We also know time is dependent on speed and on gravity. If you fell into a black hole (apart from being strung out like spaghetti) you would slow down and fall forever as measured by us on the planet you left from.

Hawkins gives the example of moving north on a planet: if you keep going you will end up travelling south again, hence it is meaningless to ask what is north of the north pole. If say time was created in the big bang and if you could travel back in time, you might well end up travelling forwards again, hence it would be meaningless to ask what came before the big bang.

We live in a very small and localised area, 3d space works and time flows slowly forward. We have evolved to survive well in this environment and the models our minds make of the environment are limited to it. We find it very hard, therefore, to visualise other configurations of space and time.

Another way of looking at it I found in an entrancing book called ‘Deep Time’ by David Darling. This follows (in beautifully lyrical language) the journey of a single sub-atomic particle from the moment of creation to the death of the universe. An idea here was that time only makes sense as a measure of things changing or moving. (I’m not sure if I’ve remembered this correctly but you will get a feel for it.) As you go back in time the universe becomes hotter and hotter, particles move faster and faster, they have much more energy. What matters is not the size of the time interval but what happens in it, during the first tenth of a second more took place than in and similar length period that followed. Time as we know it is abandoned as we set up instead an exponential scale. As much could happen between 10 to the minus 36 and 10 to the minus 35 as happens in say three billion years of our time. But placing the whole of cosmic timescape within a fresh frame in no way alters time’s basic nature.

I’m not advocating one position over another. I’m just pointing out another possibility for the universe, i.e. that time, like space, was created in the big bang and hence the question of what came before is meaningless.

(Actually, I find it fascinating one can construct a sentence in English that is grammatically correct but is in fact meaningless or wrong or nonsense... but that’s another story!)

Hooray. Love it, rgb.

Dear Stephen,

I think that it is incorrect to state that time was created in the big bang. Was space created in the big bang? If so, "when" did it occur?

Without time, change in time cannot occur. Without space, there's nowhere for it to occur.

We have no way of extrapolating either observation or theory to the moment of the big bang. Our knowledge of the underlying physics is partial, because (Feynman's wry comments aside:-) it may well turn OUT to be string theory in 2048 dimensions as our next approximation to the way things work. We still cannot rationalize Einstein's version of gravity and quantum theory, and string theory at least provides a possible way to make the two compatible.

To put it another way, there are a number of ways it can be meaningless to ask what happened before the big bang. One is the logical positivist way (that is to say, the stupid way). We can't measure it, so it is meaningless. The other is to ask "if we track backwards in the proper time of e.g. particles or the field, can we in principle go back before the time of the big bang?" Or to ask "If we stepped outside of spacetime altogether, into a higher dimensional space, what would we see?"

I personally don't think that most physicists truly believe that there "was no time" before the big bang or that the idea of a persistent state before the BB is somehow contradictory. There is evidence that the universe was not a point-like object at the time of the BB. Nor was it a homogeneous object -- its initial state structure is still visible in the sky overhead. From whence inhomogeneity? From whence the particular inhomogeneity that was the "initial state" on some timelike hypersurface? Why was that initial state unstable, and what can the term "unstable" mean if not "unstable in time"?

As I said, the argument from symmetry alone is a powerful one. Sure, arguments based on symmetry are sometimes wrong. Sure, Hoyle had a lovely theory too, only it turned out to be wrong. Or did it? Perhaps he just missed the right SCALE.

Perhaps the right time scale for Hoyle's vision is trillions of years, trillions of space-time continunua themselves, all oscillating with periods of tens of billions of years?

Perhaps -- just perhaps -- openly believing in things one cannot see and have not verified or which don't gain support from a strong Bayesian argument is unwise. However, by the same token, disbelieving in things just because you can't see them now has been proven repeatedly by experience to be just as unwise.

Heck, I'll even believe that it is possible that one day I'll win the lottery, or that one of the many emails I receive every day offering me riches (I think I average 20-30 million dollars a day, easy) if only I would reply to claim them will turn out to be REAL and somebody will turn up at my door with a check!

I'll even acknowledge the possibility of Santa Claus, and I really do believe in Oz. Dorothy is real, I know it, and one day Ozma will see me through her magic mirror and will use the Gnome King's belt to bring be through. It is possible that reality is large enough to embrace all of this -- a certainty, even, if we include the reality of our imaginations.

I myself think that the wisest of the three of them is the engineer. Of course there are black sheep in Scotland. If I had prior knowledge that there were black sheep anywhere I would have guessed that there were black sheep in Scotland sight unseen -- good sheep country, bound to be some black ones there. The physicist is just being a show-off and reminding us "we should doubt until we see with our own eyes". The mathematician is even worse -- why not doubt that you are seeing sheep at all; perhaps they are sheep cut-outs sitting up on the hillside. After all, unless you see it how can you even be sure the sheep have another side (there was a Heinlein story where that wry observation was made by some character's father, only it was with reference to the back side of the moon, which at that time no human had ever seen).

The easy way to find out who is rightest is to offer to make a bet. Will the mathematician bet that the other side of the sheep isn't black? Even odds? Unlikely. How about the physicist, will he bet that there is exactly one black sheep in Scotland (having seen one already in a single short train ride)? Only if he's insane or very, very stupid.

The engineer's remark is practical and embraces the only probable conclusion from the observation that can reasonably be given weight. The others were "more correct" in their wording but so what? They themselves know perfectly well that the engineer was (almost certainly) correct, and neither of them would have taken a bet at 100:1 odds that that was the only black sheep in the country.

rgb

This post is in no logical order...

I like the physicist; the mathematician as usual is taking things to extremes and postulating the unlikely as if it was a possibility! Multiple universes anyone? Eleven dimensions? ;O)

Feynman, who worked in the same university as the people developing string theory, would often come into the common room and say “and how many dimensions does the universe have today?”

Wendy, your “man who is wandering in a forest and keeps coming to a clearing where a lovely woman and her father” but where it’s many clearings and many people, reminds me of the notion that we have/present a different personality to each person we meet. We are a multitude of selves.

I remember that I liked “a Canticle for Leibowitz” when I read it, many years ago, but I can’t really remember it now. I will have to read it again. So many books to read... So many I’ve read and forgotten... I think I may lose my mind, if only I could remember where I put it!

I love Robert Forward too rgb.

Now, re your different scenario for the timeline of the universe rgb. Haven’t you omitted the one where time itself was created in the big bang? Then it would be meaningless to ask about prior to the big bang. We are trying to understand such weird and unearthly configurations of space/time/matter with our common sense modelling of chasing food on the plains of Africa.

I've discovered from these posts that there are two ways to atheism.

The first is a priori, like RC, never having had religion to begin with, and a posteriori, as in most of the rest of us who had religion, were exposed to new data, and made a series of rational decisions.

;)

A Canticle for Leibowitz was and is one of my favorite stories, although I like fantasy as well as SF and everything in between:-) And it encourages both an open mind and a skeptical one. One has to be able to suspend disbelief to a greater or lesser extent to enjoy the story, but some stories are more believable than others. E. E. Smith's stories have terrible science -- really awful -- but are great fun! Greg Bear's stories have much better science and bore me. Larry Niven, David Brin, Robert Forward all have good to great science, and tell a good yarn as well (the latter two being astrophysicists helps:-).

Anyway, my joke.

An engineer, a physicist and a mathematician are all on a train going to a conference in Scotland. None of them have been to Scotland before, and are all watching the landscape through the windows of their shared car.

Through the windows they all see a lovely hillside, dotted with sheep. All of the sheep are white but one, which is black.

The engineer points at the lone black sheep and says "Look there, they have black sheep in Scotland!"

The physicist gives a bit of a sniff and says, "You mean there is at least one black sheep in Scotland."

The mathematician quietly removes his spectacles to give them a good clean, and as he does so he muses, "Or rather, there is at least one sheep in Scotland that is black on at least one side.

This story has many morals that can be derived from it. Many of our discussions on this list can easily come to resemble one or another of the points of view represented. So ask yourself: Who has made the most correct statement? Who is the most reasonable in their observation? Why? What kind of prior knowledge do you use in making your choice(s)?

rgb

Stephen, Science-fiction reading midwifed many a creative skeptical mind. If we can dream implausible things and multiple worlds lit by alien moons, we can recognize implausibile beliefs...and make choices. I read all the greats too..of that time. Not the fantasy stuff either... Remember a Canticle for Leibowitz?
I particularly remember an SF story (author I do not recall) of a man who is wandering in a forest and keeps coming to a clearing where a lovely woman and her father live..but each encounter with them is strangely incongruent with what he experienced before..including one time where he is in love with and loved by the woman and another where he realizes that they want to kill him.. Gradually one realizes that there are many identical clearings in this forest and the visually identical pair of inhabitants are really different and distinct pairs of people.. the hero's interaction with them is necessarily different though often predicated on assumptions based on his prior encounters in other clearings...As I recall, he feels as if he is going mad.

Another, very strong, element of the growth of my disbelief, it must be said, was and still is books!

Initially I became hooked on science fiction, especially the masters like Asimov, Clark, Heinlein, Frank Herbert, Larry Niven and others (none of your fantasy stuff – all hard core). And I interspersed that with the New Scientist magazine.

As I got older I started reading real science, especially Gould and Dawkins – the epitome of good science writing. More recently I have moved on to Russell, Hume and the like.

Without books disbelief would probably not be possible!

In college and after,I did explore a variety of spiritual paths,mystic and magical, by various means .. and my explorations led to some incredibly interesting and still inexplicable (for me) experiences which remind me that there is much we do not understand about the nature of our own perception, the limiting and shaping of of it by particular linguistic frames and culture, the power of the human mind..so much untapped, and the oddness of
synchronicities, fateful meetings or events, or intuitive aspects which enrich our lives.

Yes, I agree, Wendy. Our difficulty is that we lack a persuasive theory of cognitive awareness on the one hand (and that this is a "hard" problem, one as difficult as any physics problem, although one that I think may at last prove to be solvable over the next couple of decades) and on the other there are some extremely interesting sychronicities in human experiences, at least in mine.

These two observations taken together are the main reason I keep an open mind about God and think God rather more likely than not. "I" am more than the sum of the microscopic processes that give rise to my awareness, or at the very least represent a kind of order that is not at all visible at the microscale. I too read a lot of SF as a kid -- e.g. Frank Herbert's Whipping Star, Asimov's The Gods Themselves, and of course Heinlein's amazing Pan-Solipsism series.

One's beliefs should correctly be derived from one's experience. Every living human has many experiences that are well explained by science based models. Things "make sense". Most humans have at least some experiences that are not so well explained, experiences that it is difficult to make sense of within the framework of a simple scientific theory.

What is one to do with these "uncomfortable" experiences, the ones that don't fit? Places where million to one chances come up nine out of ten times (Pratchett fans, anyone)? Some people use them as a -- not necessarily unreasonable -- excuse to believe in God, or at least in some sort of organizing principle that keeps things from being quite as random as one might expect. Some people try to ignore them and pretend that they don't exist or that they really aren't as unlikely as they seem to be, to (literally) rationalize them.

After all, sometimes when somebody has a panicked moment of sudden certainty that a loved one has died far away it has to turn out to be true that they did, in fact, just die at that very moment far away. It's just billions to one against it happening and yet it does, nine out of ten times (or so it seems from anecdotal evidence).

When you get right down to it, there are things I believe in and disbelieve in just because I want to. I believe in a closed Universe, and believed it back when the evidence in physics seemed to point to an open one. My reason was basically a religious one -- I can sort-of cope with the Universe truly being an infinite time series of expansions and compressions, no beginning and no ending. In that case all points are in the middle of an infinite line, so my being here, now, is "unlikely" but not unreasonable in a posterior analysis.

If it were a SINGLE pass Universe -- with an infinite amount of time spent in a state indistinguishable from non-existence, followed at some specific time (related somehow to infinity by processes in a medium that had no structure or possibility of change) by change -- expansion into a bunch of "stuff" that just happens to have the properties required so that a bunch of this stuff can eventually look out at the rest and go "Wow, what cool stuff" for a brief moment before all the stuff spreads out and cools down to where there is nothing interest left and nothing to watch it, for eternity -- that would be horribly asymmetric, and it would be very, very odd. The human mind cannot help but wonder why, and of course there could not ever be any answer.

An oscillatory Universe, OTOH, makes more metaphysical sense. One still cannot answer the why question, but now there isn't quite the burning need. The Universe no longer picks out any particular time as "special" in a nearly impossible way.

Similarly I find it rather difficult to believe in just one space-time continuum. Why one? One is so "unlikely", so asymmetric. Why two? Why ten? The only two numbers that make the slightest bit of sense are zero or infinity. No space-time at all, perfect nonexistence, or an infinite number of spacetime continua. Just one seems like an absurdity to me, even though "science" can hardly justify such a belief one way or the other at least at this time.

(Note that an infinite cyclic Universe achieves the infinite number a different way, but it is the same symmetry issue.)

These aren't very strong beliefs -- they could be knocked over my a strong wind, if you like. By their very nature they aren't easy to validate, although a more careful analysis of evidence seems to be increasing the plausibility of the former steady state model as people start looking for Dark Matter, or Energy, or invisible rubber bands or pesky fairies adding on to the apparent force we can attribute to gravity alone.

My belief in a panendeist God is rather like these beliefs. Sure, I could be wrong. And the Universe may well turn out to be open. And it could (I suppose) be True that there is precisely one spacetime continuum with a definite initial starting time that is that particular time for no particular reason and that will continue to expand, slowly, forever, until the energy density of that space-time approaches a limit of zero for an infinite amount of time following. It could all be that way for no reason, random, chaotic, unpredictable, the ultimate refutation of the question why for eternity and beyond (with nearly all of that time spent without any aware mind being aware of anything at all.

The tree falling in the forest may or may not make any sound if nobody is there to hear it, but without anyone to ask the question the answer either way appears to be an infinity of nullity, existence indistinguishable from nonexistence, a somewhere that might as well be nowhere.

I prefer a Hilbert Grand Hotel Universe. There's always a party going on in an infinite number of its rooms, so there's nothing all that surprising about the one we're celebrating now. Step out of one door and into another picked at random, and you can even imagine finding therein a perfect cigar, or yell down the hall for one and have one delivered from a room where there are two.

Romantic? Absolutely. Supported by evidence? Yes, and no. We're in a room now, which is very sound evidence for a hotel for at least one room. How far can the evidence be extrapolated? Everywhere! And Nowhere! In finite time one can only<i/> experience one suite of this particular hotel; the other rooms will always be known only by rumor, by insight, by (maybe) visits from other guests that have been in some of them.

Which reminds me of one of my favorite physics jokes, one that truly illustrates several lovely things. I've got to get Sam at school; when I get back I'll relate it.

rgb

I think like many "unconversion" stories ..Or stories of "when I dropped voodoo and got my reason back" , my story is one of someone who "escaped early brainwashing"by dint of having parents who did not insist on adherence to a particular religion and church attendence etc., was exposed to books and good free-ranging conversations on alternative realities/worlds (like for me..that was science-fiction to which I was addicted as teen), myths ,comparative religion or critiques of religion/the holy books...which provoked thought and opened the door to the respectability and acceptability of treating religious statements, beliefs, dogmas to the same rigors as anything else. I am not aware of any evidence of theistic beliefs that my father may have had. My mother was neurotic and narcissitic but was more interested in our secular education and being "good" than inculcating any religious beliefs though she did make us go to the nearest protestant church (happened to be Presbyterian) for a relatively short time though SHE did not bother to go herself.
All I got out of that brief church Sunday school stint was a wooden piggy bank in the shape of a church that one was supposed to fill with money and bring back to donate. An early doubter in the reasonableness of such commands, I kept the piggybank.
Occasionally, a classmate would invite me to attend her church services . I went out of curiosity and was mainly bored. One time, however, I did go up to offer to be "saved" at such a service (Baptist) and when I told my mother afterwards, she wrinkled her nose at such behavior so I got the message that it was unseemly somehow. Her mother was Congregational and kept a bible and being good/respectable (to my mother) obviously meant being appropriately Christian.(She vaguely believed she had certain obligations as a good mother which led to her sending us to church when convenient. She made it clear that we were Protestants not Catholics though it was not clear to me what, outside of long services and some belief in the Pope ..was different about Catholicism. We were not to use "bad words" or swear or be overtly irreligious but neither were we lectured on faith or dogma. I did say prayers at night ..a ritual which was to be "good" and for "self-protection" somehow.

I played with a lovely large ceramic headed baby doll with blue eyes that opened and pretended he was the baby Jesus. I had absorbed the manger story and believed in it and God etc ...especially around Christmas. I absorbed the traditional myths thru Christmas carols, and what not.

My parents divorce and our relocating to another city was wrenching and contributed to my growing awareness of the "unfairnesses" visited on individuals that could not be "prayed away". Religion seemed divorced from me as well since I could not connect it with efficacy in my life.

As a high school student, I resisted recruitment into "Youth for Christ" and my skepticism and curiousity grew about religion. I joined with other bookish and bright friends for a study group run by a minister of the local Congregational church to read and discuss ...Thomas Paine's the Age of Reason. Turns out the minister was actually a Unitarian filling in at the Congregational post,(there was no Unitarian church in town then) ..and was also a lawyer! That study-group was pivotal for me in that I thought Paine's critique of the Bible..was dramatic, and dispositive in terms of exposing it as flawed , full of error, contradiction, fable, illogic, and immoral barbaric acts unworthy of a God to worship.. Of course Paine was a Deist and was not saying God did not exist but removing the Bible as some kind of "proof" or holy creation or underpinning for dogma was a major step in freeing me from any danger of unquestioning faith in such claptrap and making a distinction between organized religions/churches and holy books on the one hand and personal relation/understanding or experience of the divine, ineffable etc. . I read Sir James Frazier's The Golden Bough which traced mythologies and religions and elements of belief suggestive of common roots and uses of religion by man..to explain the natural world etc. I benefited from an excellent class on Logic by a teacher who was a physicist who taught a few select "honors student" classes at our high school for a few years. I would place me firmly in the agnostic camp by hs. graduation. It was,
a "much longer process" as Chantel put it, to move on into atheism.

I learned of suffering, of the fickleness of fate consigning so many to lives of poverty, illness, starvation etc. thru reading literature..as well as the news and school. I was immersed in reading and in writing as a refuge, hobby, activity and love of books and wide reading continues to be central in my life.

In college and after,I did explore a variety of spiritual paths,mystic and magical, by various means .. and my explorations led to some incredibly interesting and still inexplicable (for me) experiences which remind me that there is much we do not understand about the nature of our own perception, the limiting and shaping of of it by particular linguistic frames and culture, the power of the human mind..so much untapped, and the oddness of
synchonicities, fateful meetings or events, or intuitive aspects which enrich our lives..My deliberate decision to attempt to leave my cultural and linguistic box to see what I could see in the world led me to largely solitary travel thru 18 countries in 7 months..after I graduated from college.

It was indeed life-altering and freeing though dangerous at times. I felt, saw, learned much that was new to me. I will never forget a mysterious vision in Greece (shared by other travelers ) for example. However much remains unexplainable, it is not explained by or even contingent on the existence of a God.
I am now an atheist. I have arrived at tenets to live by. I believe in various causes and have a strong sense of what is just and right and have passions. I am also a seeker, a wonderer, an explorer and love life, not yearning nor expecting any particular sensient existence.
(It would be more interesting to speculate on the "before-life" than the "after-life"... and perhaps its time to create entertaining descriptions and stories for that. Why is there so little mythmaking about whether there was anything for our "souls" before we were conceived? ..Of course its hard to beat the Reincarnation theory eh? We should start another thread)

My anti-conversion story is pretty weak but here goes…

I was brought up in a Pentecostal household. My mother didn’t attend church regularly but we were definitely Christian. Not only did my mom believe in god but she also believed in almost every other woo-woo thing out there; auras, astrology and psychics to name a few. To this day she’s a big fan of people like Edgar Cayce and Deepak Chopra. My beliefs, I suppose, were sort of a diluted version of hers.

I didn’t think much about being religious until I started attending youth services in high school with a friend of mine. It was mostly just a place to hang out, but then I realized how very cliquey it was. If you weren’t completely absorbed in the church then you weren’t worthy of very much attention. It’s also where I noticed that many Christians are extremely condescending and unforgiving when it comes to anything secular (music, schools, people, etc.). That was probably my biggest turn-off. I really disliked the idea of judging others and putting blinders on to everything that exists outside the church. Not to mention that there was no way I was giving up Metallica. So I quit the youth group, but not with the intention of becoming an atheist. That was a much longer process.

I can’t say when I completely switched over. I just know that Christian negativity, the lack of any sort of logic in the religion, and the feeling that I was always pretending to believe instead of truly believing led me down this path. In a sense, it was the religion itself that pushed me into atheism.


By the way, great thread so far. I wish we had more people telling their stories.

Stephen,

Yeah, one of my favorite all time books of philosophy is Russell's little Problems in Philosophy. Brilliant. But Roberts was even more fun than Russell. The Duke Philosophy department hated him, because he was so outre. He was a big, fat guy, with bug eyes and a thick neck -- in retrospect I'm guessing he was hyperthyroid/graves. He was beloved by all the jocks on campus because he gave no grades lower than a B if you actually handed in the required papers (whoever might have written them) and didn't grade attendance at all.

Roberts would stand at the front of the classroom and "declaim" parts of philosophy, with his eyes wildly bugged out, a cigarette in his hands that he puffed but wouldn't inhale (inhaling was bad for you), with his shirt unbuttoned at the bottom so his belly was bulging through with black curly hair all over (all unconscious, I'm sure). Periodically his finger would stab out and skewer a student and he'd say, and Mr. Brown, what do you think of that. As the semester proceeded, he only skewered students that played the game and had fun with it -- the somnolents in the back he simply ignored. Even large group classes were basically seminars with four to seven students (and forty more desks that were occupied with something, but it wasn't students.

His best two stories (insofar as I still remember them) were very definitely his version of the Cave and his related story of Adam on the first day of creation.

God has created Adam, and left him under a tree in Eden. Adam has not yet opened his eyes, though, to look around him? What can Adam (equipped, we imagine, with perfect logic, a language, whatever he needs to reason) know about his new world before he opens his eyes?

One of my very favorite questions.

As far as the much belabored Lottery Paradox is concerned, we don't know whether or not the lottery in question "has to have a winner". All we know is posterior, not a priori. I repeat, even in cases like "dice" or "coin flips" where we have mechanical reasons to suppose equal a priori probabilities, our best possible estimate of the actual probabilities comes from analyzing a series of coin flips (there's a lovely Urn argument by Polya that illustrates this point that is in many statistics books if anybody cares). If I give you an object and tell you that it has two sides, or give you an urn and tell you that it contains black and white balls, before you draw any balls your best estimate of the probability of 0 vs 1, heads vs tails, black vs right, is 50:50.

After you draw a single sample whatever the result might be, the best possible estimate based on complete ignorance of the urn and its preparation is not 50:50.

As I said, even the lottery fallacy makes use of Bayesian priors. It requires Bayesian priors. In the absence of such priors one should make the maximum entropy estimate.

Which takes us once again back to whether or not my observation (it isn't even an argument) is fallacious. I carefully stated that it did not apply to the fact that the Universe exists. I also carefully stated how I formed the estimate of the probability of the observed state as something that is interesting to think about. Perhaps you don't think it is interesting, RC. That's your prerogative. I think it is pretty amazing! There is nothing fallacious in my observation of the entropy of the Universe -- it is for all practical purposes infinite, and at the same time (as I already said) it is zero. That's the interesting, puzzling, thing.

As far as the Universe being aware or not, it is empirically true that at least one small part of the Universe is, and is typing this (presumptively) to another. You are welcome to form your own estimate of the probabilities of (or interpretations of) the complexity of the Universe itself and to determine whether or not that complexity is adequate to support any form of awareness beyond yours and mine and any other presumptive ones.

rgb

rgb...

I kind of knew I was quoting Russell to a Russellian. A bit like quoting the bible to a Christian, except most of them haven’t read it! ;o)

I just thought it might be of interest to the thread.

Jumping in late...

Jumping in late...

My anticonversion story is remarkably similar to a combination of others mentioned here. I would have to say that my immediate family (mother/father) weren't particularly religious. My mother only went to church on Easter, and my father never went at all, though he still fancied himself a Baptist (albeit one who danced, drank, and lived a life quite the opposite of true Baptists). I've always been inquisitive, and insatiably curious about nearly everything. Apparently more than my parents could handle, too. My father was always giving me BS answers to my questions, either because he didn't know, or wasn't very interested, as he was always indulging his own interests. (We have a much better relationship now, FTR.) My mother would always tell me to "go look it up" since we had this great set of encyclopedias they bought from a door-to-door salesman. So I spent a lot of time with those encyclopedias, my favorite being the giant medical encyclopedia.

No one on my father's side of the family were very religious, other than my uncle I mentioned in another post, who had converted to his wife's Adventist faith. But I had more contact with my mother's side of the family. My mother's father and stepmother were more religious. Whenever we'd visit them in rural Alabama where they lived, going to church was compulsory. Not just on Sundays either. But they hardly lived by Southern Baptist principles for the most part, except when they got a bug up their ass about something.

My grandmother (mother's stepmother) encouraged me to read the bible when I was around 15, because she couldn't answer my skeptical questions (similar to Dan's), so I did. By this time I was also going to church weekly as required by my father's new wife, the epitome of wicked stepmother. My main reason for willfully going along with it was for the free coffee and donuts at fellowship afterwards, and made a game of asking skeptical questions and seeing how long it took before I was told to "look it up" or "talk to the preacher" or something inane like that, which always ended with something even more inane like "it is not our place to question - blah blah blah."

Reading the bible probably did it for me. I hadn't been through half of it before I realized it was a huge crock of shit. By this time I had read the Declaration of Independence, had topically covered the Constitution, and even read (the Cliff Notes of) the Federalist Papers, and those made a lot of sense. The bible, in comparison, was ridiculous.

Towards the end of high school, I had basically forgotten about religion, the church, the bible, etc. About this time I had moved away from my wicked stepmother, only to live with my mother and her super-evil husband. Without going into that, I'll just say that even if there was a god, he was nowhere to be found then. My mother, who did believe, and who did pray an awful lot, sure didn't have any prayers answered then.

I hadn't thought of religion really in any way until I was in the military and had to fill out the form for my dog tags that asked what my religious preference was. Even though I didn't think much about religion, nor did I think that I was really atheist. To be truthful, I don't think I encountered that term a whole lot except for hearing it in a derogatory sense. So on my dog tags it just says Rel: None. I don't even recall "Atheist" being an option, but that was a long time ago.

I meandered a bit through that fog of spiritual-but-not-religious, dabbled in some New Age thinking (before realizing that was way more daffy than Christianity), and then being agnostic because it would tend to be less off-putting than atheist to others. Then I got a little more serious and began studying religion and philosophy (still doing that actually), and decided one day that I was so incredibly sick of the wishy-washyness of agnosticism and began to defiantly call myself an atheist. It was during the Bush years that I started getting a bit militant about it, or at least very hostile towards religion. So that's my anticonversion story in a nutshell.

Shaitte, it often amazes me people survive childhood. We are so resilient as a species.

After leaving school, however, that is where learning begins and we can direct it ourselves.

Hey RC, be gentle with him, :o)

There are some jewels in amongst the jargon...

e.g. “Roberts taught the Cave not "just" as Plato presented it but with his own little flourishes as he was both brilliant and bizarre as hell in his own right. Taught "correctly" as a metaphor for what goes on inside our heads, where all of our sensory input is indirect information extracted as shadows cast on the walls of our personal caves”

Also it took three attempts for you to explain what you meant by the lottery fallacy. We all use jargon without thinking... communication is so difficult...!

I like this one too... “I'm not arguing for idealism vs materialism, merely pointing out that at its heart is a recursive puzzle where ideal or material, the Universe is information, information that has a representation in real numbers. If it is material, then the material encodes the ideal, perfectly. If it is ideal, the ideal describes the material, perfectly.”

RC said “if the lottery rules are such that a winner is guaranteed, then the probability that someone will win is "unity".”

Not a lot of people know that!

To nitpick, the lottery also has to actually take place.

"Yes, I was told all these years that this book has all the answers, so I am reading it, and you know what? Jesus was an asshole!"

Shaitte,

Does your wife have a sister by any chance? Ha ha!

rgb said:

</i>
After somebody has won the lottery, do you assert that the probability of their winning is unity (since they actually won it and that's a unitary event)
</i>

No, I assert that if the lottery rules are such that a winner is guaranteed, then the probability that someone will win is "unity". But the probability of any particular person one is whatever the odds were.

That is the lottery fallacy. It is the most common mistake in understanding evolution, and insurmountable for some.


Didn't I just say that myself on another thread without bringing Zeno into it?


Yes, but my concern is whether you are following your own good advice. It may just be a matter of clarification, the only thing I ask from any objections I ever make.


I'm asserting that a proper analysis of what the Universe MIGHT be should not exclude the possibility, and should be very open minded concerning the occurrence of "awareness" in that model.


It you talking about the issues of the human mind, I agree. If you are saying the universe cares what I (or any life form thinks) I disagree.

I have not had a chance to post my anti-conversion story, so here goes.

I had the ill luck to be born to a family of Jehovah's Witnesses, and I literally almost died as an infant because of the blood transfusion issue (my mother, now a non-JW, told about this when I was in my 30s). I also had a very unpleasant childhood of Kingdom Hall (that is JW-speak for church) three times a week, door-to-door every Saturday AM, restrictions on friends, and the pariah status of an oddball at school because I could not say The Pledge, or celebrate holidays, etc.

My folks divorced when I was twelve and that put an end to going to that damned Hall. It was then when I fell in love with Astronomy. I joined the Salt Lake Astronomical Society and learned the joy of hanging out with adults that actually KNEW something and loved studying nature.

But in a few years I became a typical teen, and my interests turned to drugs, music, and other things. I dropped out of high school and played in a garage band and worked as a short-order cook. That was enough to convince me, at 18, that I needed to get back to my love for science, so sans high-school diploma, I snuck into the University of Utah, and ten years later, had my Ph.D. in physics. Along the way, I too came across Ayn Rand, and while I disagree with much of her philosophy, she steered me sharply away from religious thinking, for which I thank her. Pretty much in my early 20s I was aware that I didn't believe in any superstitious hooey, and the older I get the more I see I made the right choice.

I did have a brief flirtation years ago with "philosophical theism" but that didn't last. I had come across a wonderful book by Martin Gardner called The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener. Martin Gardner is no dummy, he is a famous skeptic and debunker of paranormal scams, and yet he is a theist. In that book he sets out why. He subscribes to fideism and the "credo consolans" - he chooses to believe because it makes him feel better. I tried to do the same thing, but it just felt wrong. Like playacting.

When I met my wife, in grad school, she was studying biology. I asked her what she was reading at the time "The Bible" she said. My heart sunk. She went on, "Yes, I was told all these years that this book has all the answers, so I am reading it, and you know what? Jesus was an asshole!" I was in love!

You mean speaking slooow-ly and louuud-ly doesn't work?

;-)

OK, I understand your observation now, although the first still has nothing to do with the lottery fallacy. After somebody has won the lottery, do you assert that the probability of their winning is unity (since they actually won it and that's a unitary event)? The posterior probability is certainly unity. The number one should sensibly compute for the probability is 1 over the number of possible equally likely outcomes. Lottery fallacy implies a different answer from the latter, the former is completely useless for any purpose other than to observe that number xyx won. I don't think there is anything odd about describing the odds of winning a lottery with an continuum infinite number of balls as being a number that is good friends with zero, even though yes, as you noted, somebody won.

You reference to Zeno I also understand . It nothing to do with the Zeno paradox, you're simply asserting that logical arguments however perfect are not a model for the natural world. Didn't I just say that myself on another thread without bringing Zeno into it?

I'm not asserting that the real Universe is infinite spacetime dimensional. I'm asserting that a proper analysis of what the Universe MIGHT be should not exclude the possibility, and should be very open minded concerning the occurrence of "awareness" in that model.

And here, I'll be impressed that you were impressed but undaunted by the error I didn't make in probability estimation. Or something;-)

rgb

rgb said:


"I was simply trying to convince you that I am relatively unlike to make an elementary mistake in a discussion of probability..."


Can't help but think of another physicist:


The chance that higher life forms might have emerged in this way is comparable with the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein... I am at a loss to understand biologists' widespread compulsion to deny what seems to me to be obvious."
-- Sir Fred Hoyle

I still disagree, respectfully now, due to the low probability of your infallibility, on the lottery fallacy. You said (I repeat, since you seem bent on addressing my points by rebutting points not in quuestion):


What is the probability of the state of the Universe, based on a priori complete ignorance (maximum entropy). The answer is fairly obvious 1 over aleph one infinity, a number I'd call "zero". And yet we exist."


The key phrase is the last one. "and yet we exist". That is the lottery fallacy -- that the probability that we exist is the same probability that "something exists". And I do not see anyway to determine any probability on "existence" unless one can also make some statement on the probability of "non-existence". It is the same mistake the esteemed Mr. Hoyle stubbornly maintained.


Do you understand that? I'll explain it again if I need to.


If you want to continue with jargon obscure in meaning (to me, and I would suspect most in this discussion group), further explanation will not help. As I tried to explain, you will need to present your thoughts in an academic manner to those expert, and then I can grasp your meaning through their subsequent interpretations (should they find it meaningful). Otherwise, I must hope you can explain your theories in a more common way, for the educated layman.


And a whole lot of knowledge comes out of imagining a Universe of possibilities that is bigger than what everybody sees and knows just now:


Are you suggesting you have a testable theory here? If not, then I am not convinced on scientific grounds. Or are you suggesting you have solved a paradox? If not, then I am not convinced on philosophical grounds either.

As to Zeno's paradox. What you said (repeated):

"Leaves plenty of room for God -- an infinite amount of room, in fact. One can precisely partition the space of possibilities in two with a binary choice -- in half of them God exists, in half God does not exist"

Zeno makes an argument that is logically perfect, and yet is not an adequate model for the behavior of the natural world. My objection is that you are doing the same, and it demonstrates nothing.


Fine, you're unimpressed.


I ended though with saying overall I am impressed. So maybe they cancel out.

I wonder though, rgb. When you visit a foreign country, whose language you do not speak, do you repeatedly yell louder and louder at the natives because they don't grasp your meaning?