Entry 796, on 2008-06-17 at 21:02:04 (Rating 4, Religion)
It has been a week or two since I blogged about religion because I have been concentrating on more technologically oriented things during my time at the Apple WWDC conference. Its now time to return to more contentious issues, specifically the likelihood of a generic god existing.
Assuming we quickly dispose of the trivial cases of the gods described by organised religions, a lot of theological arguments get back to the question of what a god actually is. By this I mean its easy to dismiss the idea of the god described in the Bible for example, but its a lot harder to dismiss the less well defined concepts which some modern believers invoke.
Maybe its a matter of personal taste what your definition of god is but the one I use is a conscious entity which created the Universe. Note that this doesn't include the philosophical notions espoused by people like Einstein when he said about quantum mechanics that "God does not play dice". And it doesn't include advanced alien races, even if their abilities are so far beyond ours that we couldn't begin to comprehend them.
So my god would need to have created the Universe and many people say that this proves god exists because how else would the Universe have got started. Something must have caused the Big Bang - or whatever other creation event you might prefer. Of course we could say the Universe always existed, and quote the oscillating Universe or metaverse theory, but creationists dismiss them (with some legitimacy) because these don't currently have good scientific standing, so I will avoid them.
I have been debating against some creationists recently and they invoke this creation idea to prove god exists: god must exist because something must have created the Universe. Of course the standard answer to this is: but what created god? At this point they usually say that god has always existed so there was no need for him to be created.
This is where I use my killer observation: if god has always existed but he only created the Universe 14 billion years ago then what was he doing for the rest of the (infinite) time before that? That gets them thinking!
But there are a couple of answers. The first is that he created other Universes before that and that those Universes go back forever in time. But isn't that really just a reformulation of the oscillating Universe theory they reject? If the Universe has always existed in some form then there is no need for a creator (just like there's no need for a creator for a god which has always existed).
So they can't wriggle out that easily but then they then resort to pseudo-scientific mumbo jumbo and say something like: god exists outside time. What does this mean? Without time everything would happen at once in a confused mass of acausal and random events. How could an organised, conscious entity exist in that state? Well, of course, it couldn't.
I usually find the ultimate excuse used by creationists relies on some jumble of words with no real meaning like this. Its hard to refute an argument which is meaningless so they can continue in their happy delusion that their religious views are true and the evil atheist has once again been proven wrong.
But I think sometimes they just might have occasions for doubt because I think many of them know they are wrong. When they are away from the self-advocating environment of their church they might just think about god in that infinite time before creation: just what was he doing?
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