Dear Heather,
I'm looking forward to this conversation. As you know, we have covered some of this ground in earlier talks, but just to bring our new friends up to date, I'd like to offer a bit of information on my background and my perspective on this issue, and why it seems to me that belief in God is not contrary to reason, but, indeed, seems to grow out of it.
I was born in the year that Adolf Hitler was elected Chancellor of Germany, and have never been able to blink away the horrors of the newsreel footage I saw at Saturday matinees during my youth: concentration camp fences; emaciated figures in ragged striped uniforms; stacked dead bodies pitched into trucks like sacks of sand. Hegel wrote somewhere: History is a butcher's bench.
By age twelve I knew that human life can be far more horrible than I was at first willing to face, and I wondered whether unbelief, kicking back at the darkness, would be the most honest way. In the writings of atheists, I have often recognized some of my own bleak feelings. It is from this shared darkness that believers and unbelievers would do well to proceed.
An observation important to my own thinking about God is that knowledge of God's presence, even though unseen, is the default position of the human race. For most of the human race in past history, and also today, the knowledge of God's presence is part of daily awareness.
This knowledge does not depend on Christian or Jewish faith. It seems to spring from human reason itself--from the unlimited drive to ask questions, which leads our minds to the infinite and the eternal. This impulse seems to be irrepressible.
I also think about belief and unbelief with an awareness that in today's world, articulate believers and unbelievers need to be able to carry on a civil, reasoned conversation in order to locate the exact areas of their disagreement. Many purported disagreements rest on gross misunderstandings, often on both sides. It takes a lot of quiet evenings to work through these. In No One Sees God, I try to examine what such a conversation would look like, by closely engaging with the "New Atheists." This exchange proved very beneficial to me. The objections raised by atheists provide an excellent stimulus to deepen thinking about why atheism does not seem plausible to me or to most of us.
Over the years I have tried to contribute to this discussion through some partly original thinking about philosophical approaches to God. This leans me to a number of new epistemological points such as the power of "blicks" in affecting our heuristic expectations, our methods, and the range of our inquiries. Also the relation of the act of "existing" to the act of making a judgment. Our conversation might also benefit from some reflection upon the historical relations of the "secular"--an affirmative term invented by Christian thinkers before 450 A.D. - and the sacred or holy. St. Augustine recognized that the City of God is intended to penetrate the City of Man as yeast does dough. Each "City" has a wholeness of its own, and is complementary to the other.
In fact, the age-old dialectic between the religious and the secular impulses of the West has given our culture its astonishing dynamism. This dialectic is now unfolding anew in virtually every culture on the planet as an amalgram of Jewish/Christian and secular ideas begins to suffuse the whole world. These ideals awaken consciousness of human rights and hunger for liberation from poverty, liberty from torture, and liberty of consciousness, speech, and political association.
All those who care about freedom and open inquiry, whether persons of unbelief or knowers of God, need to learn civil respect for each other, so that we can join forces in resistance to our time's abundant enemies of liberty.
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Years ago I was on a flight back from California and I happened to sit by a gentleman who was a retired CEO. He told me about his expensive homes he sold in California and purchased a beautiful home near the east coast. I asked him if Jesus or the Christian way of life was of any value in the corporate world? He thought about it for a minute and said, "No" Then as I spoke with this gentleman he shared how lonely he was. It wasn't hard to notice how sad he was. Then I mentioned about all the emotional pain executives experience. This executive beat around the bush when I brought up the subject of corporate embezzlements, pirated business stragegies, adulteries, scandals, criminal activities, and bad marriages, etc. These real issues seemed to be avoided in conversation as if they didn't exist in the corporate world. There were Christian's around us who realized the point I was trying to make and that spiritual problems were very real and that God had a solution for them. I could see that our conversation made this gentleman think very deeply as he shared that he was deeply troubled. Is there a need for a relationship with God? I believe there is!
Well by your lights your god set up the universe "his" way, so the credit and blame for how it turned out would be "his". I realize that's inconvenient but if you want an omnipotent, all-knowing god you get a god with all the blame.
I'm quite glad I don't have one of those.
As a buddhist I have no personal opinion on the existence or nonexistence of a supreme being as it is not required to tell me how I should live. However as a technologist I present the following argument.
1. We exist in either a temporally cyclical or infinite universe: This implies that an infinity of time exists for events to occur within.
2. Given an infinite amount of time, order may emerge from chaos whenever appropriate conditions exist: The temporal condition is met by (1), the physical conditions is met whenever energy exists to be converted to matter, or matter exists to develop into a more organized form.
3. Given the correct circumstances order can evolve to more complex states: Matter emerged from energy, elements emerged from matter, the universe emerged from elements, we have emerged from the universe.
4. Intelligence arises from complexity, greater complexity leads to greater intelligence: A bird thinks more than an insect, a raccoon thinks more than a bird, a dolphin thinks more than a raccoon, a human thinks more than a dolphin.
5. Given infinite time (1) and the emergence of intelligence (2-4), intelligence will continue to evolve to more complex and powerful states: Modern man may not be more intelligent than primitive man (similar brain sizes, etc.) however the quantity of tools available to primitive man and modern man are completely different, resulting in far greater capabilities in modern man.
6. Given the growth in capability of intelligence over infinite time (1-5) intelligence will continue to far greater levels of complexity than occur now: if intelligence becomes more capable over time, given unlimited time intelligence will increase though not necessarily to an infinite amount (consider mathematical limits approaching infinity may be quantities other than infinity).
7. Technology will eventually result in the ability to manipulate space, time, energy and matter: As technology progresses we continue to increase our ability to manipulate our environment, it is now possible to manipulate matter and energy, theories exist that imply an ability to manipulate space and time as well.
8. Given (1-7) there will likely occur an intelligence capable of manipulating space, time, energy and matter, though this may occur far in the future or may have already occurred somewhere else in the universe in the past: If intelligence is likely to arise, and intelligence and technology are prone to increase over time it is likely that such super intelligences will arise multiple times over infinite time.
9. If such super-intelligences exist they would be indistinguishable from a supreme being to any lower intelligence: all the attributes typically given to a supreme being (omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence) would appear to belong to a intelligence capable of manipulating space, time, energy and matter as the 4 capabilities combined by definition give rise to omnipotence (the ability to do anything by manipulating space, time, energy and matter), omniscience (the possession of all knowledge through manipulation of energy and time) and omnipresence (an existence in all places and times enabled by the manipulation of space and time).
10. Given the emergence of a intelligence or intelligences indistinguishable from a supreme being (1-9), there will exist a intelligence capable of manipulating space and time in such a way as to effect the creation or modification of a area of space, time, energy and matter: an intelligence, once indistinguishable from a supreme being may perform the supreme act of creation, and may through the manipulation of time effect the creation of the space, time, energy and matter which resulted in its own original creation.
11. Given (1-10) there likely exists a supreme being: if it does not already exist it will arise at some point in the future, even if it emerges in the future it will have purview over the complete infinite span of time and will therefore be a supreme being to all previous times.
I have left out a few technological statements, lest the argument become far to long for easy digestion, however most are simply justifications for the development of intelligence and its progression through technology while other deal with the physics of infinite time.
buddhist, interesting thesis. As you may know, by arguments not unlike yours it may well be that we in fact exist in a computer model, not a physical world. I can't refute such arguments but I don't spend much time thinking about them being true.
Anyway you are arguing for a natural super being, not a supernatural one, though I guess it might get hard to draw the line. I'm inclined to be a lot more comfortable with the idea of a natural super being.
I ran across a sci. fi. book you might enjoy, "Calculating God" by Robert J. Sawyer, if you haven't already read it.
Existence is wretched, it is a prison at best. Until we can accept this fact, there cannot be 'happiness' and an understanding of God. Life is a struggle that ends in failure. Concepts such as 'friends', 'friendship', 'love' do not exist for the most part. The vast majority of human beings are evil, with a fractuon of a minority who are capable of being trustworthy, loving and compassionate. Were it not for the laws, prisons, laws and justice, every Man will steal and backstab from his fellow Man. Man is a vile, creature who sees lust only in stealing, killing, raping, hurting others in a million and one ways, lying, deceiving and being the greatest pretender the planet has ever known.
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