I published the article below on my Noumena, Cognita and Dreams blog in July of 2007 under the heading Does God Exist? I thought I'd look at the subject again and see how it fits in with my thoughts 15+ years later. I've made some small changes to the original text to try and clarify it, but more significantly I've also added my current thoughts in italics after each section. Since 2007 I have published articles on my websites that fill out many of the details.
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Does God Exist?
I thought it at last time to bring together a summary of the reasons why, over the years, I have tended to answer that question with a ‘yes’. The following are just summaries of topics I have expanded further elsewhere. Although I have a backlog of scattered writings on this matter, this is the first time I have attempted bring to together the strands from a variety of fields into a summary. The list below is likely to expand, but this is how it stands at the moment. (...in the July of 2007)
1. Skepticism: A thoroughgoing and honest skepticism includes a skeptical attitude toward dogmatic atheism.
JAN 2023 COMMENT: One can't claim that in order to get to the truth skepticism is sufficiently regulated by the "observe and test" scientific method since this very epistemic has its own issues (See below for further comments on "observe and test" science). Skepticism can cut both ways and if pushed to the limit it becomes self-undermining. Hence....
JAN 2023 COMMENT: The argument I advance in this post (based on a 1993 article) sketches out the self-undermining effects of a skepticism pushed too far: Hence, one must have a foundational a-priori starting point, whether it is a belief in God or a belief in the logical self-sufficiency of space, time and matter. But for belief in the logical and absolute self-sufficiency of space, time and matter there is the following little detail to contend with....
3. The Contingency Conjecture: Computational theory tells us that although finite mathematical explanatory structures may (or may not) succeed in compressing cosmic variety into a few fundamental principles, it is not possible to compress those explanatory structures to nothing at all. Thus, a finite Cosmos can never be founded on logical necessity. Any cosmos we could think of would be a reification of a contingent platonic possibility. ‘Possibility’ rather than self-sufficient necessity is the most salient logical character of the Cosmos and therefore it is burdened with contingency. Hence, the hunt is on for Aseity, the self-entailing agent of creation.....
JAN 2023 COMMENT: Contrary to the simplistic notions of many Christian fundamentalists, computation can create information but only at a rate limited by this equation:
Ic = Smin + log(Tmin)
,,.where Ic is the information created by an algorithm of length Smin executed for a step time of Tmin and where Tmin and Smin are jointly minimized. (See here where I derive a similar expression)
Christian fundamentalists have been misled by the "log" term above which tells us that information, for a parallel processor, is created only very slowly and this may convey the false impression that God's Created Cosmos can't create information. Consistent with Shannon's concept of information, we find that randomness contains the greatest level of information in that its generation requires either very large algorithms and/or long execution times. (See here for more).
But the point being made above is that physical explanation, which necessarily conforms to algorithmic laws, can't start from zero information (i.e. nothing) and necessarily starts from a measure of contingent information; that is, a hard kernel of brute givenness (or "contingency"). Therefore, physical explanation can never be logically self-contained and self-explaining. Therefore, the relatively simple elements of physical explanation cannot have the property of Aseity. (See here for more)
5. Exceptions to Occam’s Razor: Although the assumed a-priori organization of the cosmos makes it amenable to compressed explanatory structures, there is no logical guarantee that this should always be the case: a-priori complex entities can conceivably embed and explain simple elements. Hence Occam’s Razor cannot be used to challenge the a-priori complexity of a Deity.
JAN 2023 COMMENT: As I understand it now, Occam's Razor doesn't necessarily challenge explanations that are far more complex than the data they explain. However, the Razor still applies when complex objects are used to explain the elementary. Let me expand on this assertion as follows:
OK, so it is not true that simple data elements always have their best explanation in simple explanatory objects. For example, the relatively simple facts of a crime scene find their explanation in the complex motives of human beings and the foibles of human society; here simple facts have their origins in complexity.
The vast number of possibilities in platonic space means that it is always possible to increase the number of informational bits of one's explanation (i.e. increase the "entities") until one finds an object in platonic space big enough to fit the facts. But if the true explanation has n bits of information and one is prepared to contrive fallacious explanations which arbitrarily & randomly add bits of information until one can fit all the facts with m bits of information, then it is likely that m >> n. This follows because the number of explanatory objects available in platonic space for a given bit count increases exponentially with the number of bits. Therefore the likelihood is that a theorizer who is prepared to multiply entities willy-nilly will not likely discover the correct explanation employing n bits and will return a value of m much greater than n. Therefore explanations from complexity must be justified by sufficient evidence to rule out some of the spurious branching paths that the unwary theorizer may go down when "multiplying entities".
The latter sketches out how I personally would go about formally proving Occam's Razor, but I'm sure professional philosophers of science have already dealt with the matter thoroughly.
6. Idealism: The idealism of Hume, Berkeley, Kant, Hegel and the implicit idealism of the logical and linguistic positivists compel us to acknowledge that the notion of non-sentient noumena is at the very least a deeply problematical concept as far as intelligibility is concerned. For these philosophers, the a-priori perceiving and thinking mind has a central place in their philosophy and this exposes the difficulty of conceiving reality without mind. This prompts one to wonder if sentience, and especially Divine sentience in all its complexity, is, in fact, a given and primary phenomenon. At the very least it looks as though it is meaningless to talk of noumena without invoking the concept of an up and running perceiving & experiencing sentience, for whenever we think about reality, we can only think of it in terms of how we experience it and the theorized organization of the patterns of behavior that experience is subject to.
JAN 2023 COMMENT: At the very least the natural laws organize, describe and predict our experiences. But we intuitively feel that these laws are evidence of a world that goes beyond our experiences: Surely those distant galaxies we see in space aren't just images painted onto the backdrop of the sky? Belief in divine creative integrity suggests that they aren't bit parts just set up for their appearances and that the back-story of their logic is fully worked out somewhere. This mathematical logic must be reified on some kind of medium that has a substantial ontology. But the only way we can think about the inaccessible noumena of this medium is in terms of our experiences and the mathematical logic that control and organize those experiences. This conjectured medium is an unintelligible concept unless it has the potential to serve experience.
7. The Self-Referencing Nature of Consciousness Cognition: So, all attempts to “explain” conscious cognition using concepts like atoms, fields, computation and information are themselves, in the final analysis, artifacts of conscious cognition. In short the Mind can only be described in terms of its own mental artifacts (this is analogous to a computer language compiler being written using the very language it compiles). This necessarily self-referencing and self-explaining aspect of mind may be the human analogue of Divine Aseity.
JAN 2023 COMMENT: See the prologue to my book "Gravity and Quantum non-linearity" where I first floated the idea of the self-referencing nature of conscious cognition.
8. Simulated Universe Logic: This is the joker in the pack: Recently some philosophers have mooted the idea that we may be part of some kind of giant simulation, thus suggesting we are authored by a super background intelligence that looks suspiciously like a Deity! See my article titled Time Travel for this one.
9. The Declarative Universe: Well, if philosophers can moot such exotic ideas as the "simulated universe" then that invites me to try my hand at mooting exotica. In this connection let me note a suspicious looking similarity between my Thinknet AI project and the way quantum mechanics works, and this hints, once again, that intelligence/sentience is an a-priori feature our universe. The micro-structure of our world has isomorphisms with thought and computation. As a friend once suggested to me (circa 1978) our contingent world is like a giant thought being sustained by the vast mind of God. (My friend wasn’t a philosopher, but based his idea on Acts 17:28).
When we think of computer simulations, we tend to think in terms of procedural algorithms following their determined path, but my own speculations suggest that the cosmic "simulation" is closer to the declarative programming model rather than the procedural model. Since the contingent cosmos has no logical reason for existing it can only ever be a "simulation"; for something that cannot exist of its own necessity "simulation" is as real as it gets. For us "simulation" IS our reality.
10. The Quantum Matrix: At the quantum mechanical level it really does look as though the cosmos is some kind of "simulation" that only goes as far as simulating just what is necessary for reality. This is apparent in so far as the envelops of Quantum Mechanics only become “particles” when macroscopic observation demands a result; at all other times those envelops merely measure possibility rather than actuality. The parts of the 'simulation' that are a mere computational overhead, but which are a necessary computational precursor of macroscopic output, are not themselves actualized.
10. The Quantum Matrix: At the quantum mechanical level it really does look as though the cosmos is some kind of "simulation" that only goes as far as simulating just what is necessary for reality. This is apparent in so far as the envelops of Quantum Mechanics only become “particles” when macroscopic observation demands a result; at all other times those envelops merely measure possibility rather than actuality. The parts of the 'simulation' that are a mere computational overhead, but which are a necessary computational precursor of macroscopic output, are not themselves actualized.
JAN 2023 COMMENT: What I'm trying to say here is that Quantum mechanics looks to be a computation in so far as we only have the potential to observe the parts that result in a macroscopic output: There is much that occurs at a quantum level which are not accompanied by a physical output and appear to have a computational role rather than the role of being a potentially observable macroscopic output. This view rejects the multiverse interpretation. The multiverse interpretation attempts do away with the implied asymmetry of a selective output by affirming that all parts of the quantum calculation have a literal existence.
11. Chance: That great incompressible, randomness, is, it seems, at the heart of the quantum process; it looks as though the potentially observable macroscopic outputs are chosen at random and we have no knowledge of any background computation by which these random outputs are generated. Thus, the most complex and contingent thing we can think of, namely randomness, is posited as “just there”. Randomness, given time, is, in fact, ringing the changes on everything there possibly could be! It is far from being a trivial concept. What do they mean when they say the universe is “just chance”! Randomness is a case where the complex embeds and explains the simple (e.g. the simple binary outcomes of coin tossing are embedded in a complex sequence). Perhaps the vast information resources of contingent randomness point to that conjectured entity of infinite complexity which sustains our contingent world. Whatever that entity is, if it exists, there is one thing we can say about it: it is highly complex.
JAN 2023 COMMENT: See my book on Disorder and Randomness for more details on the nature of randomness.
12. Evolution: Resourced by the vast information supplies of an a-priori randomness, current science conjectures that there has been enough time in our cosmos for those resources to innovate complex intelligent adaptive systems which, of course, being adaptive lock themselves in. However, whether these adaptive systems have been arrived at from the information content of random input or not, their self-sustaining character hints at something profound: that is, that in the vast platonic spaces of possibility there are self-sustaining structures, which although they do not have logical necessity, are nevertheless self-perpetuating once they have come into existence. Likewise, Aseity may be a form of self-sustenance arising from some kind of preexistent infinite complexity. The infinities of Aseity are beyond our ability to imagine in detail, but in the infinite platonic world of mathematics there may be an incredibly complex and infinite sentient configuration with such great powers of self-sustenance that its existence is guaranteed to be eternally ‘locked in’. (This paragraph is a reworking of the 'ontological argument’)
13. Evolution: For the process of evolution to work (if it works) so many contingent precursors are required, not least a good supply of a-priori randomness, that it is nowhere near the logically self-sufficient 'creator-less' process that some think it to be. I am making no comment here as to whether or not evolution has actually happened - I am just commenting on its contingent character.
JAN 2023 COMMENT: Although randomness can be used as a search mechanism, to do anything useful it needs to be constrained and channeled as per my metaphor of the spongeam, for example. The spongeam would supply the necessary conditional information implied by this conditional probability:
Prob of evolution = Prob ( Evolution | Physical Regime )
The absolute probability of evolution is all but zero even in a cosmos of our size. Therefore, it follows that if evolution has occurred, the information it needs must be found in the conditions I've labelled above as "physical regime". This necessarily contingent information then raises the question of intelligent design.
14. Other Minds: I believe, (although I have to admit it is more hope than belief) that it is possible to describe the detail of the human mind in full using conceptual artifacts like, atoms, neurons, information and computation. But in affirming this one must be aware that any such explanation is self-referencing – it is using the conceptual artifacts of conscious cognition to explain conscious cognition. The formal structure of such explanations, even if they succeed in covering everything, are not the thing-in-itself, but rather one mind’s external view of another mind. ‘Other minds’ can only present themselves to us in terms our first-person experiences; the organization of those first-person experiences then allows them to be theoretically synthesized into conceptual artifacts like, atoms, neurons, information and computation. However, unlike "material noumena" which have a debatable existence (because the only thing we really can know is our experience & theories), we do at least know what it feels like to be another mind – in contrast we certainly don’t know what it is like to be, say, an atom - if indeed such a notion is intelligible and coherent.
In the light of the foregoing, it seems that regarding conscious cognition as irreducible noumena is a more coherent idea than so-called ‘material’ noumena. Along with Searle I agree that there is an irreducible first-person ontology in personhood. The third-person language of the formal sciences simply disguises the fact that the descriptive explanations of science are, in the final analysis, cognitive artifacts whose formulation conceals the implicit role of the first-person perspective required to formulate these explanations from cognita. So, if the first-person perspective of human personality is ultimately irreducible it is an ominous sign for those forms of atheism which try to place so much emphasis on those enigmatic "material" noumena. Therefore, if the existence of other minds is such a fundamental part of rationality it sets a precedent for mooting the notion of an over-arching divine mind.
JAN 2023 COMMENT: As I've already said, I first set out the self-referencing and self-affirming nature of mind in the introduction to my 2004 book Gravity and Quantum Non-linearity.
For the nature of consciousness see also:
15. Metaphysical World: Our Worldview, if we have one, is far too complex an object for our theories about it to be tested with any more than a few experiential samples here and there. That Worldview informs us about a world well beyond anything that can be fully tested in principle. Given these human sampling limitations complex objects like personality, society and God are not amenable to easy cognitive apprehension and have little chance of being “proved” with a small set of experiential samples. It is no surprise, then, that given the partiality of human experience and cognition, an entity like God (if such a being exists), whose prime posited attribute is that of complexity and/or personality, has a very debatable existence; that is, even if God exists we expect his reality to be difficult to humanly grasp and therefore Hebrews 11:1-3 & Hebrews 11:6 look, from the point of view of epistemic methodology, to be reasonable demands in these circumstances.
16. Keyhole Science: Science, as the careful social formalization of the testing procedure, puts justifiable strictures and formal controls on our anecdotal experience and consequently reduces the keyhole of experiential sampling even further. Science’s “guilty until proved innocent” criterion is a strict filter that helps block spurious claims and as such science's cautious epistemic methodology is analogous to the precautionary strategies used in courts of law. However, as with legal courts, the unavoidable cost of the cautious epistemological method of science is that it is going to make heavy weather of complex domains, like politics, sociology, personality and above all theology; it also cannot easily cope with erratic, out-of-place experiences that come in ones and twos.
JAN 2023 COMMENT: The demand that every entity posited must submit to prediction and test procedures is all well and good for relatively simple, accessible and regular phenomena, but is unrealistic for many of the realities the human mind has to grapple with, realities that are neither easily accessible nor regular. When faced with a complex world that for most of us presents itself through many social texts rather than carefully controlled laboratory observations, the approach is much more a case of the post-facto crafting of sense-making explanatory structures. However, this enforced resort to an on-the-hoof post-facto epistemology must be exercised with caution, tentativeness, self-criticism and humility - this is something the conspiracy theorists and religious fundamentalists need to learn.
On the subject of epistemology see more here:
17. Limits of Scientific Epistemology and Authority. For the man in the street (or the man in the field), science’s observational samples and theories reach him via social texts. The end result of scientific theorizing entails the passing into society of all-embracing grand theoretical structures which of necessity are highly textual. Hence, for the man in the street science is largely a textual phenomenon and not a laboratory or direct observation phenomenon. So, for the intelligent layman epistemology is mostly a matter of handling the texts of society. In fact for all of us knowledge about the grand sweep of the cosmos mostly reaches us through the texts signaled to us by society, and it is our cognitive processing (or lack of processing in some cases!) of these texts that is pivotal in forming and testing our Worldview. In this respect science texts have no special authority apart from their appeal to our general mental toolkit of perception and reason. The social texts of formal science must therefore take their place side by side with historical and theological texts.
18. The God Instinct: History suggests that there is an instinctual/intuitive human understanding that the cosmos doesn’t contain its own explanation (i.e. it doesn't have Aseity) and that it points to something sentient beyond itself (See for example Romans 1:19-20 and the history of human relations with the notion of Deity)
19. Theodicy: The existence of suffering and evil doesn’t so much challenge a belief in the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient loving God, as it does leave us with an existential dilemma: Are we really prepared to say that God should not have dragged our flawed world out from among the myriad contingencies of the platonic realm because of its huge burden of suffering and evil? Are we prepared to forego our own existence, because that existence is inevitably bound up with suffering and evil?
JAN 2023 COMMENT: See the following link where I discussed the problem of suffering and evil in more detail, although I have to confess that I don't really have much worth saying about this big problem:
20. Generalised Copernicanism: It is sometimes suggested that Human Cosmic Insignificance is a clear sign of our unimportance in the cosmic scheme of things and therefore evidence that there is no loving personal God. However, if we regard the universe as some kind of massive computation, the huge size of the cosmos may be connected with the “computational byproducts” of an important end result. As a wonderful Jewish saying goes: “For a single rose a field of thorns was spared”.
JAN 2023 COMMENT: See here where I discussed this point more fully.
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The above are rather general and speculative pointers that prompt me to at least give some thinking space to the notion that a highly complex entity with the property of Aseity sustains our contingent world much like a mind sustains a thought. Frankly, however, on the basis of the above alone the case for theism is no more obliging than the case for atheism. That’s always been my problem – I could no more convincingly rule in theism as I could rule it out. At best the points above provide a prima-facie case for theism. But even if I concluded that the above points convinced me of the existence of a deity, they reveal very little about the exact nature and motives of that deity; at best they point in that direction but provide no personal introduction. In fact, a personal introduction may be impossible because ‘God’, if that’s the right name to use of Aseity, may be an utterly alien and impersonal entity or principality. In that case it is likely that attempts to take the matter further would be fruitless. (However, one might wonder why an impersonal Aseity would sustain the high personality we find at the top of the complexity ladder. Moreover, one might expect complex human nature to reflect something of the complexity of Aseity)
If that’s where it all ended, I think I would be agnostic, unsure where to go next. Actually, to be honest, I think know where I would go next – probably into disbelief; or at least disbelief in the existence of a gracious personal God; as far as the latter is concerned absence of evidence is truly evidence of absence because it seems to me very likely that any gracious personal God would reveal Himself more clearly. Thus, in the absence of a clearer revelation my conclusion is that there is likely to be no gracious personal God. Agnosticism about the existence of a personal loving God is not a consistent position.
However, my approach has been as follows: If there is a loving personal God and, moreover, a God of Grace, that God is unlikely to leave us bereft of some kind of special revelation as to His nature. To cut a long story short I believe the Revelation of God I have sought for is that found in the Christ of the Bible, the only quality revelation I have discovered. Why I think that Jesus Christ is THE revelation of God would itself be the subject of another list, but I will leave that for another time. I have to admit that it has all been a bit of a gamble: “Go for it and see what happens: nothing ventured nothing gained”. Nonetheless, I believe that God graciously meets the sinful seeker where he is at, as did the father of the prodigal son. Moreover, once one has apprehended the Revelation in Christ, the rather general philosophical list above starts to provide insights into God’s glory, grace and day-by-day providence.
But there is one tremendous irony here. If I were to compile a list of reasons for not believing in the existence of God the items in that list would largely be drawn from the counter evidence provided by the behavior of many a fundamentalist Christian. In short, most of my intellectual time is spent protecting my faith, not from atheism, but from Christian sectarianism & cultism. Evolution and Creation? ....No problem, solve that one over breakfast! Suffering and Evil?....On that question I'm swimming but I'm just managing to stay afloat! Inter-Christian spiritual rivalries? .....Gulp! I'm now out of my depth! In a world of competing spiritual grandees a spiritual low ender like me is pretty much out of the picture! Reach for The Open Gospel....
(http://viewsnewsandpews.blogspot.com/2006_11_01_archive.html)
But there is one tremendous irony here. If I were to compile a list of reasons for not believing in the existence of God the items in that list would largely be drawn from the counter evidence provided by the behavior of many a fundamentalist Christian. In short, most of my intellectual time is spent protecting my faith, not from atheism, but from Christian sectarianism & cultism. Evolution and Creation? ....No problem, solve that one over breakfast! Suffering and Evil?....On that question I'm swimming but I'm just managing to stay afloat! Inter-Christian spiritual rivalries? .....Gulp! I'm now out of my depth! In a world of competing spiritual grandees a spiritual low ender like me is pretty much out of the picture! Reach for The Open Gospel....
(http://viewsnewsandpews.blogspot.com/2006_11_01_archive.html)
JAN 2023 COMMENT: See also page 8 of my account of my visit to Jerusalem.
I have to say that the contemporary challenge to faith set by crackpot versions of Christianity continues unabated as their insanity sinks to a new nadir of intellectual debauchery and craziness in movements such as flat earth Christianity, evangelical cultism, 6K year young earthism, gnostic revivalism, fideism, prosperity gospel, conspiracy theorism, dominionism, the glorification of gun-law, far-right Christianity and a general anti-democratic & anti-science ethos that pervades them all. The ultra-traditionalist tendencies at the heart of some of these movements are personalized in characters like Rodney Howard-Brown, Kent Hovind, Marjorie Taylor-Greene, Steve Bannon, Lauren Boebert, Donald Trump, Alex Jones and Vladimir Putin. These people fear the open-endedness, open debates and uncertainties of liberal societies with their freedom to dissent & protest, along with their very public governing forums which display all the contradictions, corruptions, contentions, and tensions natural to human nature. As Sir Robert Walpole observed, it is "the natural state of human affairs."
The far-right's perception that the open society is a conspiracy of the radical-left counterbalances the far-left's perception that liberal capitalism is a conspiracy of the owning classes. The logic of both far-left and far-right, whose radical politics seeks to overthrow the open society, would unintentionally lead to the locked-down quietus and unalterable "certainties" of dominion, autocracy and dictatorship.
