Sunday, February 13, 2005
Fantasies and Illusions
I was just having an interesting conversation with a friend of mine today, and the topic was the usual one about God. Well, actually, I shouldn't call it usual since he just recently converted to christianity and I haven't had much chance to talk in depth about it with him yet. However, its a long story in itself. So, I guess we can just pass that by for now.
Point is, most religious conversations revolve, sometimes, around the question of the existence of God. This, of course, is highly debatable in many many ways, but here, I'll just present my view of it from a fairly strange perspective. Personally, I cannot say I completely believe in God as a being, but rather I believe it as a concept. There is not enough evidence to push the argument either way, but the one and only conclusion would be that God, if he/she exists, would be an omnipotent being. Along that line of thought, I do not agree in the protrayal of God in human form. Anthropomorphic views on dieties is just proof of self-centered egoism that the human race posesses, in my opinion. Some may argue that the bible states that God created humans in his image, but I say that that statement can be pushed in many ways. When God created humans in his image, did he create humans to "look" like him physically, or did he create humans based on an image that he/she/it had? Also, I'd like to point out the gender bias of referring to God as "he" where in reality, if God were male, then how did "he" create women if he created humans in his image!? Some might say that I'm nitpicking at technicalities, but the issue is that no one ever turned to question what was written in the bible. The Bible may contain "God's words" but it is written in an imperfect human language. Ok, I'm swaying off the point I started out with.
One way people argue the existence of God is through the many "miracles" that are witnessed by believers. However, non-believers have a tendency to brush it off as just being a coincidence. On the other hand, in my opinion and opinions of others, there are no coincidences in this world. There is no such thing as true randomness, which means that there is no coincidence. Everything has a specific set of cause and effects, its just that sometimes the causes are too complicated for us to predict the effect. In many cases, its just that we don't know all the causes. Is a coin flip random? We were taught it was random, but in reality, if you knew every single variable involved, the strength of the flip, the weight of the coin, air resistance, rotational force, etc. you can predict a coin flips outcome. A psychologist too this further into a mental exercise where instead of a coin, we "flip" a human. Given enough information about a person, technically, it is possible to predict every single reaction to any stimulus we might throw him or her. So, the question in real life is not whether something is random, but what are the rules governing the behavior.
For those who still remember some physics, we all remember that Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle implied that we can't really accurately meassure anything at the subatomic level, since everything is probabilistic. Einstein didn't believe that and simple said "God does not play dice." And it has been shown that Einstein was right and God does not play dice. Particles at the subatomic level have behaviors that can be accurately predicted, but its just very complicated.
There's a field of research in mathematics called Chaos Theory, popularized in the movie Jurassic Park. However, its mainly called chaos theory because its too difficult to isolate and comprehend all variables involved in whatever phenomenon being observed. Thus, it is chaos to the human mind.
My point being that whoever created this world also laid down a set of rules. Like any game we play, there are rules and bounds we work within and there's a playing field. God created a playing field and laid down a set of rules, and we are all within that "game." To a certain extent, God cannot make exceptions to the rules or alter them in fear of causing the game to become unstable. The world isn't just a simple game, its a complete game of checks and balances. Just like Newton's second law of motion that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, any change in this world may have dramatic effects of everything else. Some call this the Butterfly effect. In truth, if God really cannot do more than work within the set of rules that he has laid down for this game he created, then what are miracles? I believe miracles are coincidences and they are random events. We say something is a miracle because it is surprising and defies all logic and understanding. However, given all the arguments above, a miracle is really just something we cannot comprehend the cause and effect to. This implies that what we call "miracles" are actually legal results of playing the system. We view them as unexpected because we don't understand the system.
For every game we learn to play ever since we were kids, we've known that there are rules to follow and that to win, you must play within the rules. However, we also learn to look for loopholes in the rules to give ourselves an advantageous edge in the game. Thus, the tighter the set of rules, the harder it is for us to exploit possible vulnerability. Thus, a miracle is no more than an unexpected outcome of the given set of rules that govern life as we know it. Thus divine intervention is no more than God exploiting holes in his own set of rules to produce a specific outsome. Let's not call them "holes," its more like new interpretations.
However, do miracles really show that God exists? If there is a preset system and rules that are constantly operating, then does God need to do anything but watch? The world is pretty much a self-sustained system that just keeps running. So, does God really have to be involved in the operation of the world? That may end up being a even longer answer.
Before I forget, I have to say one thing. The reason that I put "Fantases and Illusions" in the first line is because that those two words describe many of the things we believe to be truth. People have a bad tendency to build up their own illusions of what the world is like. It gives us a sense of security in thinking that we know what the world is like and what to expect. There's nothing bad about it. I've come to realize this quite a while back that I have my own illusions about this world. The thing is, illusions are not bad, since sometimes they are the driving forces that keep us going day in day out. We like to call them Hope, but in reality, they are nothing more than fantasies and illusions that make us feel better about ourselves, our world, or just plainly the environment around us. So, question, what's not to say that God is also one of these illusions we built ourselves to make us feel better about life in general and the world in general?
It really is impossible to decisively push the argument either way.
Those are my opinions and I'm sticking to them. :p
I was just having an interesting conversation with a friend of mine today, and the topic was the usual one about God. Well, actually, I shouldn't call it usual since he just recently converted to christianity and I haven't had much chance to talk in depth about it with him yet. However, its a long story in itself. So, I guess we can just pass that by for now.
Point is, most religious conversations revolve, sometimes, around the question of the existence of God. This, of course, is highly debatable in many many ways, but here, I'll just present my view of it from a fairly strange perspective. Personally, I cannot say I completely believe in God as a being, but rather I believe it as a concept. There is not enough evidence to push the argument either way, but the one and only conclusion would be that God, if he/she exists, would be an omnipotent being. Along that line of thought, I do not agree in the protrayal of God in human form. Anthropomorphic views on dieties is just proof of self-centered egoism that the human race posesses, in my opinion. Some may argue that the bible states that God created humans in his image, but I say that that statement can be pushed in many ways. When God created humans in his image, did he create humans to "look" like him physically, or did he create humans based on an image that he/she/it had? Also, I'd like to point out the gender bias of referring to God as "he" where in reality, if God were male, then how did "he" create women if he created humans in his image!? Some might say that I'm nitpicking at technicalities, but the issue is that no one ever turned to question what was written in the bible. The Bible may contain "God's words" but it is written in an imperfect human language. Ok, I'm swaying off the point I started out with.
One way people argue the existence of God is through the many "miracles" that are witnessed by believers. However, non-believers have a tendency to brush it off as just being a coincidence. On the other hand, in my opinion and opinions of others, there are no coincidences in this world. There is no such thing as true randomness, which means that there is no coincidence. Everything has a specific set of cause and effects, its just that sometimes the causes are too complicated for us to predict the effect. In many cases, its just that we don't know all the causes. Is a coin flip random? We were taught it was random, but in reality, if you knew every single variable involved, the strength of the flip, the weight of the coin, air resistance, rotational force, etc. you can predict a coin flips outcome. A psychologist too this further into a mental exercise where instead of a coin, we "flip" a human. Given enough information about a person, technically, it is possible to predict every single reaction to any stimulus we might throw him or her. So, the question in real life is not whether something is random, but what are the rules governing the behavior.
For those who still remember some physics, we all remember that Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle implied that we can't really accurately meassure anything at the subatomic level, since everything is probabilistic. Einstein didn't believe that and simple said "God does not play dice." And it has been shown that Einstein was right and God does not play dice. Particles at the subatomic level have behaviors that can be accurately predicted, but its just very complicated.
There's a field of research in mathematics called Chaos Theory, popularized in the movie Jurassic Park. However, its mainly called chaos theory because its too difficult to isolate and comprehend all variables involved in whatever phenomenon being observed. Thus, it is chaos to the human mind.
My point being that whoever created this world also laid down a set of rules. Like any game we play, there are rules and bounds we work within and there's a playing field. God created a playing field and laid down a set of rules, and we are all within that "game." To a certain extent, God cannot make exceptions to the rules or alter them in fear of causing the game to become unstable. The world isn't just a simple game, its a complete game of checks and balances. Just like Newton's second law of motion that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, any change in this world may have dramatic effects of everything else. Some call this the Butterfly effect. In truth, if God really cannot do more than work within the set of rules that he has laid down for this game he created, then what are miracles? I believe miracles are coincidences and they are random events. We say something is a miracle because it is surprising and defies all logic and understanding. However, given all the arguments above, a miracle is really just something we cannot comprehend the cause and effect to. This implies that what we call "miracles" are actually legal results of playing the system. We view them as unexpected because we don't understand the system.
For every game we learn to play ever since we were kids, we've known that there are rules to follow and that to win, you must play within the rules. However, we also learn to look for loopholes in the rules to give ourselves an advantageous edge in the game. Thus, the tighter the set of rules, the harder it is for us to exploit possible vulnerability. Thus, a miracle is no more than an unexpected outcome of the given set of rules that govern life as we know it. Thus divine intervention is no more than God exploiting holes in his own set of rules to produce a specific outsome. Let's not call them "holes," its more like new interpretations.
However, do miracles really show that God exists? If there is a preset system and rules that are constantly operating, then does God need to do anything but watch? The world is pretty much a self-sustained system that just keeps running. So, does God really have to be involved in the operation of the world? That may end up being a even longer answer.
Before I forget, I have to say one thing. The reason that I put "Fantases and Illusions" in the first line is because that those two words describe many of the things we believe to be truth. People have a bad tendency to build up their own illusions of what the world is like. It gives us a sense of security in thinking that we know what the world is like and what to expect. There's nothing bad about it. I've come to realize this quite a while back that I have my own illusions about this world. The thing is, illusions are not bad, since sometimes they are the driving forces that keep us going day in day out. We like to call them Hope, but in reality, they are nothing more than fantasies and illusions that make us feel better about ourselves, our world, or just plainly the environment around us. So, question, what's not to say that God is also one of these illusions we built ourselves to make us feel better about life in general and the world in general?
It really is impossible to decisively push the argument either way.
Those are my opinions and I'm sticking to them. :p
