From Agnosticism to Atheism

                                                    "And the three men I admire most,
                                                    The Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost,
                                                    They caught the last train for the coast
                                                    The day the music died."
                                                                Don McLean, American Pie

I am nearing the end of what I have to say about atheism.  I have ideas for six additional posts, but in a general sense, this post is the culmination of what I have to say about atheism and belief in God. 

I had doubts about the existence of God and souls from my early teens.  As I grew older, married, and had a family, I kept my doubts to myself.  I went to church with my family, worshipped and prayed as a practicing Christian.  As the children grew older, we stopped attending church and I stopped praying.  I returned to my earlier doubts and considered myself an agnostic.

Being agnostic implies uncertainty.  As it is often used, being agnostic incorrectly suggests something of a 50 – 50 proposition – “Eh, maybe it’s so, maybe not”.  Even if evidence or lack of evidence leads you to an opinion, at the end of the day being agnostic means giving a shrug and saying, “I really don’t know.”  This post is about how I moved away from a mindset of uncertainty, to decide with reasonable certainty that there is no God.  This is the path to atheism.

About a decade ago I read a short passage in an essay which radically changed my thinking.  The essay is “A Dream of Socrates”, in the book The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch.  In the essay, Socrates is speaking with the god Hermes in the style of the dialogues of Plato.  Hermes and Socrates have been discussing the virtues of Athenian society. 

“Hermes: ‘Most Athenians would indeed call those virtues.  But how many really believe it?  How many are willing to criticize a god by the standards of reason and justice?’
Socrates: [Ponders.] All who are just, I suppose.  For how can anyone be just if he follows a god of whose moral rightness he is not persuaded?  And how is it possible to be persuaded of someone’s moral rightness without first forming a view about which qualities are morally right?’”

The notion that people should judge gods (or God) was revolutionary to me.  But why shouldn’t we judge God?  We are intelligent beings and we can appraise justice and reason.  We should expect God to be reasonable and just.  Being reasonable and just should be something intrinsically part of how we define God.  If the world does not show evidence of God’s reason and justice, we can logically conclude that God doesn’t exist.  And if God is not reasonable and just, we’re talking about a demon, not God.  I will not believe in an unreasonable, unjust or capricious God.

Some people would tell me that God doesn’t want to be judged.  We are told, without proof, that we are lower beings created by God, and therefore we have no right to judge God.  But isn’t that unreasonable and unjust?  

On social media, I’m frequently told that I will suffer eternal damnation if I don’t repent and worship God.  If God demands worship under the threat of eternal pain and suffering, isn’t that extortion?  Is it reasonable?  I’ll answer for you.  No.  Is it just?  No.

Much of this blog has been an exploration in the ways in which God is apparently unreasonable and unjust.  My essay “God as Sustainer of All Things”  (https://sensibledisbelief.blogspot.com/2016/10/god-as-sustainer-of-all-things.html) contains a list of dozens of rationalizations that religious authorities use to excuse God’s apparent injustice toward humans.  If God exists, we have to twist logic like a pretzel to justify God’s apparent indifference and cruelty towards humankind.  Occam’s Razor gives us a better resolution of the paradox.  It is simpler, and therefore logically correct, to conclude that God doesn’t exist.

Agnosticism
Dictionaries define agnosticism as a belief that any ultimate reality, including the existence of God, is probably unknowable.  (It’s funny that agnostics are even agnostic about agnosticism.  “Is reality truly unknowable?”   “Eh, I’m not so sure.  Maybe not.”)  It’s appropriate that I am an atheist, not an agnostic, because I believe that objective truth does exist and is generally accessible to everyone.

“The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”
Carl Sagan 1984, after others circa 1890.

A list of famous agnostics includes many smart people whom I greatly respect.  Presumably they thought about the problem, doubted the existence of God, but could not bring themselves to the point of denying that God exists.

Agnosticism.

Famous agnostics:

Thucydides, Confucius, Immanuel Kant, David Hume, Charles Darwin, Erico Fermi, Alexander Von Humboldt, Mark Twain, Edwin Hubble, John Tyndall, Marie Curie, Leo Szilard, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Karl Popper, David Attenborough, Thomas Kuhn, Milton Friedman, Stephen Jay Gould, Jacob Bronowski, Neil Gaiman, Noam Chomsky, Matt Groening.

Part of the rationale for agnosticism lies in the fact that knowledge is always incomplete.  There are always unknown aspects of reality.  The progress of science has been a bit like the process of peeling an infinite onion.  After we began to understand the elements as the fundamental building blocks of matter, we learned of fundamental sub-atomic particles – the proton, neutron and electron.  Then we learned that protons and neutrons are not elementary particles, they each consist of three quarks.  Seventeen elementary particles have been recognized, including six varieties of quark.  Similarly, Newtonian ideas about gravity and mechanics were replaced by Einstein’s gravity and  others’ quantum mechanics.  Dark matter and dark energy are additional mysteries; the early evolution of the universe contains paradoxes, etc.  Each layer of reality peels away to reveal a new mystery.  Could the next scientific discovery reveal the face of God?  Agnostics believe so.  They would say that don’t know what we don’t know.

However, the notion of the “unknown unknowns” has limits of reasonable conjecture.  Edward Abbey expressed the reasonable limit of "unknown unknowns" in this aphorism:

“Is there a God?  I don’t know.
Is there an angry unicorn on the dark side of the moon?  I don’t know.”
Edward Abbey

Isaac Asimov's “The Relativity of Wrong” is a brilliant essay on incomplete knowledge.  He shows that incomplete knowledge is not the same as not knowing anything.  The discovery of general relativity does not invalidate Euclidean geometry; it simply expands the domain of geometry to include new truths about non-Euclidean space.  New subatomic particles don’t change the composition of salt from sodium and chlorine.  And uncertainty about the existence of God is something that we can address using logical principles and then reason to a logical conclusion.  

Atheism
In contrast to Agnostics, Atheists actively assert that God does not exist.  Through various processes of reasoning, atheists conclude that there is evidence of absence; i.e., that God does not exist.  Here’s a list of well-known atheists.

Famous Atheists:

Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan, Anton Chekov, Dave Barry, Henrik Ibsen, Franz Kafka, Jack London, Terry Pratchett, Salman Rushdie, Maurice Sendak, H.L. Menken, Richard Dawkins, David Deutsch, Francis Crick, Richard Feynman, Sigmund Freud, Stephen Hawking, Daniel Kahneman, Bertrand Russell, Clarence Darrow, Andrei Sakharov, Irwin Schrodinger, Alan Turing, Charles Richter, Henri Poincare, Ayn Rand, Linus Pauling, Richard Leakey, Steven Pinker, Jared Diamond, James Watson, Orson Welles, Karl Marx, Oliver Sacks, Kurt Vonnegut, Kenau Reeves, Lisa Randall, Tim Berners-Lee.

The Atheism symbol is derived from a simplified
schematic of atomic structure and the letter "A".

Standards of Proof
Standards of proof depend on why we’re trying to prove something.  Let’s consider four different standards of proof commonly used in society.

• Preponderance of Evidence: Civil suits in the United States, regarding damages due to a negligent or improper act, are decided according to a lower standard of proof than a criminal case.  A jury in a civil suit must decide their judgment on the preponderance of evidence.  If 51% of the evidence supports the plaintiff, and 49% supports the defendant, the judgment should be decided in favor of the plaintiff
• Reasonable Certainty:  A higher standard of certainty is required in judicial criminal cases in the United States.  This standard is also called certainty beyond a reasonable doubt.  A defendant in this country is presumed innocent until proven guilty by an overwhelming weight of evidence, such that no reasonable doubt remains about the defendant’s guilt.  Reasonable certainty suggests that no reasonable doubt remains.  This standard is unquantified, but is generally understood by ordinary citizens in society.
• Unequivocal determination:  Scientific meta-studies aggregate all of the relevant research on a topic.  Examples include the IPCC climate assessment reports and the National Climate Assessment.  After integrating the findings of many studies, the reviewing organization may issue an unequivocal determination on a finding.  This standard requires that the likelihood of the finding is significantly greater than 99%.  (A finding of >99% likelihood, but with reasonable remaining uncertainty is assigned a grade of “virtually certain”.)  When all reasonable objections to the finding have been removed by evidence, the finding is judged to be unequivocal.
  
• Mathematical certainty:  A mathematical proof is an even higher standard of proof.  A mathematical proof of an assertion requires that there is no possibility of contradiction within the domain under consideration, reasonable or unreasonable.

In becoming an atheist, to make my assertion that God does not exist, I chose the standard of reasonable certainty.  On the basis of the preponderance of evidence, we would easily conclude there is no God, because there is no rigorous evidence that God exists.  On the other hand, it seems unlikely that atheism could provide mathematical certainty that God doesn’t exist.  However, we do not live our lives according to mathematical certainty.  The standard of reasonable certainty allows us to reason to a conclusion, and would rebut all reasonable (that is, evidence-based) objections.

Proof
It’s easier to prove something exists than that something doesn’t exist.  Still, there are tools we can use.  We can look for internal inconsistencies to disprove an assertion, or inconsistencies between reasonable expectations and reality.  In formal logic, the first is reductio ad absurdum, and the second is modus tollens.  In the first method, if you can reason from a proposition to a contradiction, the proposition is disproved.  In the second, if you can disprove a consequence of the proposition, the proposition is disproved.  (Given the proposition: If P, then Q.  If Q is not true, P is disproved.)  Let’s use the second method and consider the logical consequences if God exists.  

As an aside, I have added a step to modus tollens.  I first consider our expectations of God in terms of character, and then what interactions logically follow from those traits.  Logicially, if P, then Q, then R.  If R is disproved, then Q and P are also disproved.

Please take a moment to think of things that logically follow if God exists.  Find a piece of paper and make a list.  Be serious.  Begin with the assumption that God is all-knowing, all-powerful, and present everywhere, as is the general assertion of Abrahamic religions.  First write down characteristics of God that logically follow from being all-knowing, all-powerful and present everywhere.   Second, write down conditions or events in the world that logically follow from the characteristics that you assigned to God.  You may think of things that are in the world we know, and also things that are not.  Go ahead, take your time.  I’ll wait.

Here is my list of God’s characteristics which logically follow if God really exists.  Given that God is all-knowing, all-powerful and present everywhere, I expect that God would have developed empathy and responsibility.  God knows and understands suffering of living things, and from empathy, should care enough to develop the characteristic of responsibility and fairness for the outcomes in the living world.  From empathy, responsibility, and fairness, God should become caring, reasonable and just.  Here is my list of God's characteristics, if God exists.

• Empathetic
• Caring
• Responsible
• Reasonable
• Fair
• Just

If God is empathetic, responsible, caring, reasonable and just, I would expect that the following conditions would exist in the world, representing the interaction between God and humanity.

• God would communicate to all of humanity clearly, consistently, and continuously about God’s plans, purpose, desires and instructions for humankind.
• Revelation of God would be given equally and fairly to all societies, as soon as each society was capable of understanding God.
• Sacred texts would be consistent across all cultures and times.  Sacred texts would also be complete from the first version, not subject to revision and without internal contradictions.
• Clear indications of God’s divinity would be given through demonstrable miracles in modern as well as ancient times, meeting scientific standards for observation.
• God would show reason and justice in God’s own actions or inaction.
• Sacred literature would also exhibit clear standards of reason and justice.
• God would mitigate the suffering of innocents.
• God would clearly answer prayers.  (Note that “answer” does not mean “fulfill”, but instead means “respond”). 

None of those things happen in reality.  They are contradicted by lived experience and all credible reported experience.  They are not true.  How does your list compare?  Does your lived experience and the experience of others confirm or disprove the existence of God?  

This is what David Deutsch means when he says that we should judge God.  Does the world we live in reflect our logical expectations of God?  To me, the logical consequences that should follow from the existence of God don’t exist.  If God existed in the form that human religions have proposed, as an omnipotent, omniscient and all-good being, creator of the universe and humankind, we would have a fundamentally different world and different human experience.

Conclusion
If the Abrahamic God exists, then God is empathetic, responsible, caring, reasonable and just.  God would interact with humans in ways that are reasonable and just.  But God does not communicate clearly and consistently with humanity.  God did not give his revelation to all societies fairly and equally.  Sacred texts across cultures are wildly inconsistent, and contain revisions and corrections to earlier texts (i.e., the New Testament).  There are no modern miracles meeting suitable standards of observation.  God’s actions, as recounted in the Old Testament, are cruel and unjust.  God does not mitigate the suffering of innocent victims of either human or natural misfortune.  God does not clearly respond to prayers.  

God’s interactions with humanity are not empathetic, responsible, caring, reasonable or just.  We should judge God not only on the basis of our own experience, but also the lived experience of others.  We might think about those drowned in the Titanic, victims of Nazi gas chambers and slaughters, Native Americans accepting missionaries and dying of smallpox, victims of famine and war, non-viable babies, and all the tragic events suffered by all of humanity.  We should think about prayers which were met with silence.

The lived experience of humanity contradicts the care that we should expect from an all-powerful being.  Therefore, we must logically conclude that God does not exist.
QED.

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The image of a path above was generated by a free AI tool on the Internet.  It replaces another image from the Internet used in the original publican of this post. 

Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence

Carl Sagan popularized the phrase “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” (ECREE), in his 1979 book “Broca’s Brain” and the Cosmos television mini-series in 1980.  Sagan was drawing on previous use of the concept by Marcello Truzzi in the 1970s, Thomas Jefferson and Pierre-Simon LaPlace in the early 1800s, and ultimately by philosopher David Hume in his 1748 essay “On Miracles”. 

 

“Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence”
Carl Sagan, 1979

To make sense of the aphorism, we should first ask what qualifies as an extraordinary claim.  There are three classes of extraordinary claims:

• Statistically improbable claims.
• Claims outside the range of prior experience, with unknown probability.
• Claims contrary to the body of established scientific knowledge or preponderance of existing evidence.

Religious ideas are of the third kind, assertions that are contrary to established scientific knowledge.  (I will discuss other kinds of extraordinary claims and evidence in my science blog.)  Religious or spiritual claims are closer to Hume’s original idea about extraordinary claims in 1748 than the other kinds of extraordinary claims.  

                        “What is a miracle?”
                        “A miracle is something that happens contrawise to the will of nature.”
                                            Source is forgotten, likely to be Robert Heinlein or A.C. Clarke

Social scientist Marcello Truzzi, who founded an organization to investigate paranormal claims, coined a similar wording of the ECREE aphorism that Sagan later used.  In 1978, Truzzi wrote, “extraordinariness must be measured against theoretical expectations provided by the general body of scientific knowledge at the time...claims require extraordinary evidence if they entail the falsehood of established scientific results that are themselves extensively tested and well understood.... A black swan is one thing; a swan that visits you from beyond the grave is something else.”

Religious Claims
Let’s try to summarize religious and spiritual claims.  It won’t be easy.  There are about 3000 distinct religions followed by some group of people, now or in the past.  From this variety, it may be difficult to compile a simple list of religious claims, but I will try, using parallel ideas in a number of religions.  

God and Gods, each having many of the following characteristics:
    Non-corporeal, invisible, silent spirits.
    Immortal.
    Capable of magic or miracles.
    Interested in humanity.
    Intervening in human affairs.
    Responsible for creation of the world, or parts thereof.
    Often engaged in conflict with other gods, spirits, or beings.
    Protecting humans from evil spirits, people or natural disasters, often in exchange for worship.
    All-powerful.
    All-knowing.
    All-good. (In some traditions, not all.)
    
Divine Creation of the World
    Creation of the universe or world by gods or other spiritual beings.
    Creation of the living world.
    Distinct creation of people, separately and above the living world, and endowment of people with sentience, knowledge or wisdom.
    Creation of the spiritual realm, of heaven and hell.

Sacred Gifts
    Gifts of knowledge or other gifts to humanity, including positive and negative gifts.

Immortal Souls
    Spiritual, immortal extension of the human self, capable of existing without the body after death.
    Includes self-awareness, memory, will, thoughts and emotions.
    Generally believed to travel to non-material spiritual places after death -- Heaven, Hell, Limbo, Valhalla, Folkvangr, the seven Samaawat, Alma d-Nhura, Deva Loka, Narka Loka, etc.

Human Spirits
    Ghosts existing after life in the physical world (but not necessarily immortal).  May include malevolent spirits.

Divine Superior Beings
    Demi-gods, including Jesus, Maui, and Heracles, and divine relatives, including the Virgin Mary.  Often considered the offspring of god or gods, sometimes through parthenogenesis, sometimes the offspring of humans and gods.  Often believed to have a previous physical life, but currently are non-corporeal spirits.  Prayer for intercession is often directed toward divine superior beings rather than to God.

Spiritual Superior Beings
    Angels, demons, animal or natural spirits with greater magical power than humans or human spirits.
    May include antagonistic spirits such as Satan.

Afterlife Places
    Heaven, limbo and hell.  Places without a physical presence or contact with the physical world, where one can meet people from one's former life.

Miracles
    Extraordinary events, contrary to expected behavior of natural systems, generally for the benefit of people experiencing difficulty.

Divine Causation
    Routine natural events, seasons, tides, eclipses.
    Routine human events, birth, death.
    Movement of heavenly bodies.
    Extraordinary events as reward or punishment (usually punishment), including natural disasters, virgin birth, ascension to heaven.

Natural Spirits
    Attribution of living identity, will or sentience to animals, plants, places and objects; anthropomorphism of nature.  

Sacred Places
    Attribution of sacred living identity to mountains, rivers, and lands.  Sacred objects and places are believed to enable religious miracles.     

Spiritual Inanimate Objects and Places
    Religious icons, relics of saints, churches, temples, springs and objects or places believed to have magical powers or enable miracles.

Reincarnation
    The belief that souls are recycled into new people or animals.  Some religions attribute a “leveling-up” process of attaining higher or lower status according to moral behavior during life.

Divination and Prophecy
    Belief that the future can be determined by religious ritual or by religiously endowed individuals. 

Saints and Spiritual Intermediaries
    Belief that the spirits of sacred humans can intervene and influence God’s actions, or parallel beliefs in non-Christian religions.

Sacred Texts
    Belief that the Bible, Devi Bhagavatam, Quran, Book of Mormon or other sacred texts are divinely inspired, contain divine revelation, are literally true, and have an absolute obligation to be obeyed.
    
Prayer
    The belief that humans can communicate with gods and higher beings, to give thanks and ask for divine help.

Ancestor Worship
    Belief that deceased ancestors actively intervene and protect their descendants.

Human Religious Intermediaries Priests, Pastors, Popes, and Shamen
    Belief that special humans possess magical powers or can intervene to influence divine action.

Divine Humans
    Egyptian, Roman and Japanese societies held that their leaders were gods, or became gods when assuming office as emperor or pharaoh.  Chinese and other cultures believed that their leaders were semi-divine descendants of gods.

Belief in Transcendent Reality, and/or denial of physical reality.
    Belief that physical reality is corrupt and is superseded by a transcendent reality.

Karma
    Belief that good or bad actions have real-world consequences in luck or future events.

Ordinary Scientific Evidence

The scientific method systemized the search for truth and standardized the criteria for truth, beginning in the 17th century.  Scientific evidence involves the following elements.

• Empirical observation.
• Identification of processes and developing hypotheses about processes.
• Experiments designed to fulfill predictions or invalidate the hypotheses.
• Clarity of data from experiment.
• Repeatability.
• Relevance of evidence, often measured by statistical tests.
• Peer review and publication.

In general, religious claims fail most or all of the standards for scientific truth (or as it is otherwise known, truth).  Stories of 14th century BCE conversations with a burning bush or visions by a 15th-century French girl do not qualify as evidence.

 
Moses and the Burning Bush, Holman Bible, 1890

Vision of Joan of Arc (1428), artist and date unknown to me.

With religious claims, there are few repeatable observations with objective observers.  There are no identified processes.  There are no experiments to invalidate the claims.  There is little clarity of the data.  There is often little relevance of the evidence, and little critique of the claims.  We see that religious claims fail to meet standards for ordinary evidence before even considering the need for extraordinary evidence,

Why Are Religious Claims Extraordinary Claims?
Religious claims are extraordinary claims because they violate known scientific knowledge about processes.  The list of religious claims is too long for a complete rebuttal, but fall into four general categories.  First are claims involving spirits, second are claims involving higher classes of beings, third are claims involving miracles and fourth are claims of future knowledge or predestination.

Spirits represent disembodied beings, with self-awareness, memory, will, ability to communicate and other powers.  But scientific knowledge places the seat of sentience in the brain.  Through observation of patients with brain injuries (as described well in the books by Oliver Sachs) we know which parts of the brain enable these aspects of sentience.  We can observe patients in which memory, will and communication are gone, and have established that the brain performs those functions of humanity.  Without a physical brain, spirits cannot have sentience; souls cannot persist after death.  To claim otherwise is an extraordinary claim, and requires extraordinary evidence.  

The same reasoning applies to the existence of higher beings, gods, demi-gods, angels and demons that are believed to exist in the spiritual world.  Without a brain, how do they think?  How do they persist as self-aware entities?  To claim that an angel or demon possesses sentience without a brain violates our scientific understanding of sentience.

Religious claims of miracles and magic are also extraordinary claims.  We know how physics, chemistry, and life sciences work.  A miraculous event, by definition, is contrary to the expectations from those natural processes.  As such, every miracle or magical claim requires extraordinary evidence.

Claims of prophecy and predestination violate the scientific understanding of time.  In all well-documented experience, information can not flow backwards through time.  Future events are fundamentally uncertain, despite high precision in prior conditions and known processes.

Extraordinary Evidence
What is extraordinary evidence, as compared to the normal scientific evidence described above?  

I return to David Hume, who first established the ECREE standard in 1748.  “No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish”.  

In essence evidence of a miraculous event must be strong enough to invalidate the scientific knowledge precluding that event.  To be considered true, a miracle involving levitation must be supported by evidence sufficient to invalidate our well-established notions about gravity.  To be considered true, the claim of a soul, ghost or spirit must demonstrate disembodied sentience in some unquestionable, observable, repeatable form.  The claim that God exists needs to be demonstrated by apparently unlimited power – perhaps by moving thousands of galaxies overnight to spell out, “I am God” in every language on earth.  Of course, none of those things have ever happened or ever will happen.

Conclusion
Religious claims are extraordinary claims, defying our existing body of scientific knowledge.  Religious claims fail to meet even the lowest standards of scientific evidence, much less the extraordinary evidence required for such claims to be regarded as truth.  
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Afterword
Non-Religious Paranormal Beliefs
There are also a substantial number of non-religious paranormal beliefs, some of which overlap with religious beliefs.  Some (telekinesis, telepathy, extraterrestrial visitors) do not involve spiritual elements, while others (ghosts) do not involve higher spiritual powers.  These also require extraordinary evidence, but are irrelevant to the discussion of atheism.

Non-Interventionist God
Albert Einstein said, "I'm not an atheist, and I don't think I can call myself a pantheist... I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings”  The Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) framed a special case of the non-interventionist God.  Spinoza held to a physical sense of reality, but viewed all of creation as a sub-set of God.  According to commentator Paul So, Spinoza “rejected the existence of Soul, Angels, Demons, Miracles, Divine Creationism, the possibility of Afterlife, Divine Revelation, validity of Prophecy, Biblical literalism, Tradition, Scriptural authority, and last but not least the existence of a personal God.”

Giordano Bruno in the 16th century rejected many of these same religious claims, while introducing revolutionary speculative cosmological ideas that are today held as true.  He speculated that stars were far-away suns, that planets might orbit those suns, and that intelligent beings might live there.  He also made contributions to the study of memory, mathematics, geometry and language.  Bruno may have been approaching the rationalist’s idea of a non-interventionist God, but was burned at the stake for heresy in 1600.

Giardano Bruno, 1548-1600, portrait from 1830 biography.

Execution of Giardano Bruno, source unknown to me.

Spinoza’s non-interventionist God eliminates most, but not all, of the unsupported religious claims.  Spinoza’s God presumes that God is the creator; that God is reality, and that God is greater than reality.  These claims are also unsupported by evidence. 

Baruch Spinoza, 1632 - 1677.

Spinoza tried to rationalize religion by removing the most fantastic claims, and altering the definition of God to equate God with our observed reality.  But God is unnecessary to explain our observations, and equating God with reality brings no additional understanding.  There’s also no evidence, extraordinary or otherwise, that God is greater than our reality.  The central claim that God exists is completely unsupported.  According to Occam’s razor, the best explanation of our reality is that God does not exist.

Does the Creation of the Universe Imply the Existence of God?

“Is there a God?  I don't know. 
Is there an angry unicorn on the dark side of the moon?  I don't know.”

Edward Abbey

God, the Creator

This post will consider the question of God himself.   As discussed in the first post of this series, the question of belief in God first requires a definition of God.

The traditional Christian view is that God is omnipotent; omniscient, infinitely good, and above all, interested in Mankind.  Traditionally, God is believed to be Creator of all things, Sustainer of all things, Redeemer of Souls and Judge of all people.   This post will consider God as Creator of the Universe. 

This image by the infra-red JWST shows the earliest known galaxies in the Universe, 

younger than galaxies imaged by the Hubble telescope.

God as Creator

Of all the arguments for the existence of God, the idea of God the Creator seems the most compelling.  The universe exists.  Science is clear that the universe began in a discrete moment of Creation about 13.8 billion years ago.  At that moment, in a flash of pure energy, all of the matter, energy, forces and dimensions of the universe, including space and time, expanded from a single infinitesimal point.  Scientific theory and astronomical observation agree that the Big Bang event occurred; that discovery and proof is one of the greatest achievements in the history of human thought.  And for all of the complexity of the scientific story, it is amazingly similar to the much simpler account in Genesis: “God said, ‘Let there be light.  And there was light.’” 

If Creation occurred as a distinct event, doesn’t that imply a Creator?  Perhaps it does.

To me, the fact of Creation is the most reasonable of all arguments that God exists.  But what kind of God is implied by this moment of Creation, and what is humanity with regard to God, the Creator of the Universe?

Further Evidence of a Creator:  The Fine-Tuning Problem

Recent thinking in physics and cosmology gives further credence to the idea of a Creator.  There are physical constants which govern the forces in the universe and which bind matter together.  These constants form a set of parameters which allow matter to exist, allow atoms and star systems to form, and allow you and me to exist to contemplate these questions.  It turns that the values of these constants are necessarily very specific.  If any of these constants varied from their known values by even a tiny amount, then the universe would not be filled with molecules and galaxies, but might be filled with ionized plasma or pure energy, or perhaps some other dimensionality of space.  Physicist David Deutsch calls this the “fine-tuning problem”. 

One branch of modern physics deals with the fine-tuning problem by invoking the idea of the multi-verse – an infinity of universes encompassing all possible values of the fundamental physical constants.  Our universe, in this view, is not special.  We are simply one of the universes in which matter, life and bloggers can develop.  We are writing about it because life in this universe is possible.  In this view, our existence simply represents survivorship bias, not a specially constructed universe.  We are writing about the fine-tuned universe because life is only possible in the fine-tuned universe.  The problem with this interpretation is that there is no evidence of other universes.  In the absence of evidence, whether we believe that the universe was purposefully designed for life by a Creator, or is simply a random occurrence is still a question of personal preference.

Does the Existence of a Creator Validate the Traditional Concept of God?

Some philosophers argue that the evidence of a Creator proves the existence of Judeo-Christian God, omniscient, omnipotent and good.  A good example of that thinking can be found in Jim Holt’s interview with Oxford professor Richard Swinburne, in Holt’s book Why Does the World Exist?, chapter six.  But does that necessarily follow?

Does the act of Creation necessarily mean that the Creator is also omniscient, able to foresee all details of Creation through time?  I don’t think so.  The Creator may have started something with no idea how it would turn out. 

Does the act of Creation give the Creator omnipotent powers to intervene in what has been created?  Again, I don’t think so.  In our own earthly endeavors, we sometimes start something which is beyond our ability to influence or control.

And does the act of Creation demonstrate that God is good?  The Gnostic religions provide an interesting interpretation of Creation, which casts doubt on whether the Creator is necessarily good.

Gnosticism is a set of religions which developed in the second century, drawing on a variety of earlier sources, including early Christianity.  Gnostic belief holds that there are two levels of reality, a lower, corrupt physical reality, and a higher, perfect spiritual reality.  This aspect of Gnosticism may derive from the teachings of Plato, who lived six hundred years earlier.  According to Gnostic belief, the physical world was created by the demiurge, a lesser spiritual being than God.  Because the physical world is intrinsically corrupt, the being that created it is also believed to be corrupt.  The demiurge is sometimes considered to be Satan. 

So, upon reflection, the Big Bang and the existence of the universe may suggest the action of a Creator, but there is no evidence that this Creator is the God of Judeo-Christian belief.  The Creator may be good, evil, or indifferent; perhaps even unaware of the existence of mankind’s brief existence on a small planet in an unremarkable galaxy. 

Mankind’s Place in the Universe

For a moment, let’s accept that the Big Bang and the structure of our universe imply the existence of a Creator, and that our universe is deliberately fine-tuned for life, by design.  Let’s consider our place in this universe. 

Hubble Deep Field Image, showing galaxies of the early universe.

The image covers an area of sky equal to about 1/100 of the size of the full moon.

According to current estimates, there are about 100 billion galaxies in the universe.  Perhaps coincidentally, there are about 100 billion stars in the average galaxy.  The number of planets orbiting stars is still unknown, but the recent discovery of over 4000 planets outside the solar system suggests that planets are relatively common.  For a simple calculation, let’s assume that there is an average of 1 planet per star.  This means that earth is one of about 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 planets in the universe.

Let’s also consider how long humans have lived on earth, and have had a relationship with God.  Anatomically modern humans first appeared about 200,000 years ago.  Since the earth is 4.6 billion years old, people appeared only in the last 0.000004^th fraction of the life of the earth.  If we take Earth as an average planet, then humans have occupied 1/23,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 of the available planet time in the universe. 

As I consider the scale of space and time, in comparison to the scale of humanity, I think it is fair to say that whatever the purpose of the universe is, it isn’t about us. 

The Relationship between Mankind and God, and Revelation of God to Mankind.

The current year of the Jewish calendar is 5775, counted from the believed creation of the world.  The Jewish religion is one of the earliest monotheistic religions, and archeology places the origin of Judaism at about 3500 years ago.  One might ask why God waited until 3500 years ago to reveal himself to mankind.  Perhaps we only know of God’s revelation to humans after the development of writing. 

According to some sources, there are an estimated 4200 distinct religions.  Many of those are now extinct, and an unknown number have been lost without record.  There are artifacts and evidence of ritual dating to as early as 35,000 years ago.  Ancient Egyptian religious traditions were already established 5000 years ago, and persisted for about 3000 years.  Many early religions were polytheistic, animistic or related to ancestors.  There is a bewildering variety of traditions about spirits and gods, and customs of worship.  Modern Western philosophy has tended toward monotheism, exemplified by the Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions, but developed independently by Greek philosophers and by other middle-eastern religions. 

The question is, why is the revelation of God to humans so muddled?  Was the one true revelation of God given to Akhenaten or Zoroaster?  To Abraham or Pythagoras?  To Siddhartha Gautama, Confucius, Zeno, Jesus, Mohammed, Joseph Smith or L. Ron Hubbard?  Or to any of thousands of other prophets?  If divine guidance is present, shouldn’t we expect a little more consistency?

Certainly, there is sometimes deep wisdom in the teachings of these prophets.  But it seems to me that it is a particularly human kind of wisdom, filled with contradictions and errors, rather than a perfect, divine revelation. 

The Nature of Reality I – The Multiverse

When we consider the question of whether God is the Creator of the Universe, we tend to focus on the question of God.  But we should also consider the question of what God has created.  What is reality?

Modern physics continues to produce ever-stranger evidence for the nature of reality.  Physicist David Deutsch writes convincingly of the evidence for the multiverse, an infinite series of alternate universes composed of all possible events, down to the level of sub-atomic particles.  Deutsch is the world’s leading expert in quantum computing, and is using these ideas in a practical sense to build computers that work.  By analogy, it may not be absolutely necessary to accurately understand electricity in order to have a glowing light bulb, but it certainly helps.  Deutsch’s working quantum computers give credence to his notions about the multiverse.

If Deutsch is correct about the multiverse, everything that can happen has happened, or will happen.  In such a multiverse, how can good or evil exist?  How does the moral choice of mercy or cruelty exist?  Anything good in one version of reality is matched by something bad in an alternate reality.  What is the role of God in this vision?  As creator, he created all possibilities, and all realities.  But in this view, there is no good and no evil, just endless variation across all possibilities.  And the first criterion of our conception of God – that he is good – is void.

The Nature of Reality II – Is Reality Material or Non-material?

A different problem exists with the possibility that reality is non-material.  Perhaps it should make no difference whether matter and energy and human beings are physically real, or some digital representation.  We might consider God the Great Programmer. 

If we are merely a digital representation, it is more plausible that Creation is all about us.  Perhaps a forest is only a statistical model, until a person walks into it.  Perhaps leaves on a tree are only a blur, until we put on our glasses to see individual leaves.  Perhaps the stars were only diffuse light, until the invention of telescopes, and distant galaxies only shapes that approximate the gravitational aggregation of matter into stars.  If so, our very history may be suspect.  We may have been created yesterday with our memories pre-formed.  People who deny evolution sometimes approach this idea, when they say that God planted fossils in the ground as a test of our faith when He created the world 6000 years ago. 

But I have to ask why God would be so deceptive.  If we take the idea that we are special further, perhaps humanity lives on the only inhabitable planet – all the rest may be illusion.  It is solipsism for a species.  Perhaps other races, other people are also illusion.  Perhaps God is only concerned with you, the reader, and I am an illusion typing this blog post.  And the Great Programmer created the illusion of a philosopher to invent the word solipsism for this situation. 

Conclusion

I believe that the idea of solipsism is absurd.  I believe in the physical reality of the universe, the reality of the people around me and in the truthfulness of my senses and scientific instruments.  I do not choose to believe that God would be deceptive towards mankind, in creating illusions of any kind. 

Belief in the physical reality of the universe, in the scale that we observe, leads me to believe that mankind is a small part of the universe.  Mankind has existed for an infintesimally trifling part of the space and time in the universe; I don't think it is all about us.  Mankind is not the greater purpose of Creation, whatever that may be.  The existence of Creation may imply a Creator, but the Creator does not necessarily conform to the Judeo-Christian concept of God -- infinitely good, omniscient and omnipotent.  The Creator may be good, evil or indifferent to mankind; capable of intervention in the world or not.  The Big Bang is perhaps evidence of a Creator, but that Creator does not imply the existence of the Judeo-Christian God.

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References:

Jim Holt, 2012, Why Does the World Exist, 320 p.

David Deutsch, 2012, The Beginning of Infinity, 496 p.

Alan Lightman, 2013, The Accidental Universe, 176 p.

Richard Preston, 1996, First Light, 275 p.