Never been one to let the carrier drop

So, recently someone tried to sell me on that old chestnut, the idea that the universe requires a creator but God doesn’t.

And I was thinking about it, and I realized this idea is beyond absurd. If God is a neural network they are a neural network orders of magnitude more complex than *we* are, and we certainly appear to require a framework within which we can exist. I suppose it’s possible that we would be able to exist without the hardware that is our brain, but the vastly different behaviors that people with brain damage exhibit suggest that this is not in fact the case.

(Of course, a lot of Christians get nervous when I talk about God being a neural network – then again, they want for God to have no free will at all, because that’s the only way the whole “Jesus had to die for your sins” thing even makes a tiny shred of sense. Still doesn’t make a *lot* of sense then.)

Anyway, to return to the previous problem. The universe appears to have a relatively small handful of rigid rules – it’s a framework. I have no trouble at all believing this universe was always here and will always be here. I have a much larger problem believing this hypothetical God was always here and will always be here given that we haven’t even come up with a way yet that a thinking being could exist without somewhere to exist in.

So, my original point remains – if the universe requires a creator, so does God, and you’re stuck. If God doesn’t require a creator, neither does the universe. And, given the rigid and simple nature of the universe, if one came about before the other, I’d vote universe first, God second.

Now, of course, we have to consider other possibilities, as I pointed out to this person. One is that creator and creation may be entangled – God may have been created h*self in the process of creating the universe. Certainly creating a universe would be a evolutionary thing. We also have to consider that time’s arrow may only flow in the direction that it does for creatures of our type. Time may be multidimensional, or not exist at all, for creatures of other types. So the discussion about who created who may be meaningless because maybe it was *all* already here and we’re just experiencing it as this linear thing because of the type of creatures we are.

We also should consider the possibility that God in fact created the universe and h*self and we’re currently in the bootstrapping process before God actually exists. I don’t think this is likely but it does go into the hat.

I still also like the possibility that we’re living as a accidental side effect of some other process and no one knows we’re here. It explains a lot.

I could go on for a few more paragraphs but I’m trying to avoid wear and tear on the paws so I’ll save it for some other time.

I do like from time to time the idea that “God” may in fact be a team – I think I’ve spoken elsewhere about the possibility that *we are the operators* – and then we put on our player hats and we’re the players. There’s a certain beauty to this and clearly we have demonstrated that we are capable of building universes.

While I’m tossing additional thoughts in here – it has always scared me that Christianity disables people’s brains such that they can’t see the obvious flaw in claiming the universe required a creator but God didn’t. At some point I should make a list of all the ways Christianity obviously fails common sense as expressed by someone who is capable of thinking in boolean algebra, and why it scares me that the people who believe in it *cannot* see this no matter what you do or say. (It does reinforce my thought that Christianity is a informational virus that in certain ways blinds it’s host so that it can continue to live and reproduce)

I do wonder if, as a programmer who has done a especially deep dive into programming, I’m more able to see religions as programs for humans – written by people with dubious and possibly even nefarious aims – than the average person.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 5th, 2021 at 2:31 am and is filed under Spiritual/Religious. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.