God as a programmer
Some more weekend theology
Imagine a world made completely of snow.
Oh, this is fun! Maybe some space travellers land on the snow planet. Their feet sink in and they almost drown in the snow. But they survive, building an igloo and even a snowman. You could write science fiction of their adventures on Qana, the world made only of snow.
But maybe you want to write hard SF. Thinking about it more, you start to worry about your concept. Wouldn’t a planet-sized ball of snow be subject to gravity? If so, won’t it have a hot core? Alternatively, below the surface, wouldn’t the snow compact into ice? Hmm, maybe if physics were different then you could have a planet completely of snow. But in your alternate-physics universe, is that cold white stuff really snow any more?
It turns out that thinking about a concept, and even developing convincing narratives around it, does not guarantee that it is coherent. We see a world with some snow, and we imagine a world which is only snow. But in fact, there cannot be a world made completely of snow.
Here’s another example: going north. Usually, “go north” is a perfectly coherent driving direction. But, keeping our space-based theme, “fly north” is not a useful instruction for an astronaut. North is defined with reference to the earth, which wobbles as it spins through space! If you want to get to Mars, you’d better use a different frame of reference. In fact, even at the North Pole, the direction “north” stops being meaningful. Northness is a local concept. Outside of its context, it stops making sense.
Like others, I think there are interesting arguments for God’s existence:
But are theists — or atheists — really certain what they are talking about when they talk about God? The core attributes of God, in Christian theology, are omnipotence, omniscience and omnibenevolence: God is all-powerful, all-wise, and all-good. Do we actually know what these mean?
We know what it means for someone or something to be powerful. But can anything be all-powerful? Or is that like an all-snow planet, a contradiction in terms?
What about all-knowing or all-wise? Again, some people know more than others. Is it possible to literally know everything? What would that mean?
Trickiest of all: there are good and bad people. But these words come out of our everyday human experience. Can an omnipotent being be good in a meaningful sense? Are we sure good isn’t a local concept, like “north”?
Human ideas
Let’s digress a little into history. The peoples who thought up the Western concept of God started by giving him labels from their human experience. The Israelites called Him a king or a judge — ideas that combine power and justice. The Christians added that He was a father, emphasizing His personal interest in and love for each human being. The ancient Greeks, focusing more on explaining how the universe came to be, described a Demiurge or Craftsman. (It’s interesting that unlike the other labels, being a craftsman was rather low status.)
All of these are extremely loose and suggestive. Saying that God is a king, or like a king, leaves a lot unspecified. But they are also fruitful images, and it’s worth thinking about what insights they might capture. Behind all of them is the idea that God is a person; we were made in His image, as Genesis puts it, so in some sense He is like us. That is so basic to Jewish, Christian and Muslim thinking that it goes without saying. Yet cashing it out in the context of an infinite being is also quite tricky. What does it mean, say, for God to have intentions? Our intentions are about what we will do. But God is beyond time. What are intentions then?
Small worlds
Perhaps thinking about computers can help us understand concepts like omnipotence and omniscience. On a computer, I can create a little “world” like Conway’s Game of Life:
This world has its own physics, even its own space and time: if I shut my laptop lid and reopen it later, the world continues on as if nothing has happened, and from the point of view of the world, nothing has: real-world time is not represented within the Game of Life, it only “knows” what time step it is at. As the creator of this little world, I can replay it back and forward1; I can intervene in it, setting some cells to alive or dead at a given point. I can find out anything about the state of the game at any point — it’s all in my computer’s memory. I have Godlike powers with respect to the game!
The Game of Life can simulate Turing machines, and Turing machines can simulate anything, so a big enough game could include a simulated brain, or even a simulated “Matrix” with a lot of brains all interacting. If these brains had thoughts, might they conclude that their universe was created by a God? Maybe: you can imagine intervening in the simulation, to show one brain a piece of paper saying “you are thinking about tomatoes now, am I right? Also, your universe was created by me, a conscious being.” It is usually thought that God doesn’t do that to real humans, perhaps for reasons of good taste.
At any rate, the analogy suggests that ideas of total power and knowledge are not meaningless. Ordinary mortals can be in positions like that, with respect to tiny primitive worlds implemented in software; conceivably the universe is implemented in God’s mind.
Goodness
Infinite goodness seems harder. Of course, you can simply identify whatever God wants with goodness, but that’s never seemed very satisfying. Most of the human virtues only make sense for finite, vulnerable beings. Can God show courage, for example?
The most obvious approach is to think of God as interested in our welfare — or in the welfare of all living beings — in fact, God is just interested in welfare tout court. That is a nice, utilitarian approach to goodness, and it might generate testable predictions: a created universe should be good in some way, or perhaps should simply allow for the possibility of goodness. But there is still a worry that the concept of welfare makes sense for humans but is cosmically meaningless. We can be joyful or sad, but why should God care about that, any more than I care about the interior state of the bacteria on my blue cheese? Isn’t it arrogant to think our welfare is important to anyone but ourselves, or even “objectively” important?
Perhaps the best interpretation of omnibenevolence is just as thinking God is interested in our welfare. So, he happens to be good from a human point of view, whether or not that is good from some broader, objective standpoint.
Thinking about God
These are just idea sketches (I’m just a weekend theologian). I do think that online discussion sometimes gets short-circuited into arguing about different pieces of evidence for “God’s” existence, without thinking much about what kind of being they are evidence for. It’s as if we can’t wait to settle the issue and get to church on Sunday (or settle comfortably into our atheism and go round the supermarket). The church fathers, and almost all mystics, have said that God is a mystery. I wouldn’t for a moment dismiss that idea. No shallow rationalism here! But that should not stop us from thinking about God with our brains, as well as or instead of exploring Him in our hearts.
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Replaying it back requires me to store the history of the game, since the Game of Life is not deterministic when run backwards: a state at time t can result from many states at time t-1.
Yes! When the theist Bentham's Bulldog (whose writings, more than not, I often find compelling) wrote something to the effect that God likely exists because he's "simply unlimited goodness", that rung strange to me — can we blithely assert that "goodness" is a unitary idea? Thanks for helping me put words to this.