Also see the followup posts: Why Would A God Care About You? and Belief in God is More Fun.
Questioning reality has been a past time of humans for as long as we’ve been around. Let’s notice some patterns now.
In the post I’m referring to strong atheism, which is the belief that there is no god. It means, literally, a-without and theism-god.
God can be defined a myriad ways, I’ll use the simplest I can envision: an immortal creator.
Let’s take it for granted that humans are evolved beings, that arose completely naturally according to the mathematical and physical properties of the universe. We are capable of conscious thought and self-reflection, even though nothing “gave” us this ability explicitly. Awareness simply works better and makes us fitter and more able to survive.
Let’s think of a creator as something that changes the environment in order to help itself. From this point of view, all life creates. It creates with different strategies and varying levels of sophistication, but it’s all of the same nature.
So what does it mean to be immortal? Immortality is but ubiquity in time. If a pattern exists throughout the entire universe for all of time, then we can consider it to be immortal.
We exist inside a reality that apparently has 3 spacial and 1 temporal dimensions. This is called a 3+1 universe. We can move up/down, left/right, and forward/backward in space, and we have a past and future of time.
Mathematically a higher dimensional reality is simple to implement. Just add another axis to travel along, a perpendicular direction to the ones we use.
Imagine a world that exist on just two spacial dimensions, like graph paper. If you’re a three-dimensional being looking down on this two-dimensional world, you can see more of it at once than the beings on the 2D world. You’d have a bird’s eye view that they were not capable of. If you have your feet on the paper and they tried to put you in jail by drawing a square around you, you could simply step over the line and be free.
Just as we can imagine lower dimensions, we can imagine something existing outside our 3+1 reality. It would see our universe from a higher perspective.
According to Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, space and time really are one combined fabric. According to current theories, no information travels faster than the speed of light through spacetime. Also, the faster you move, the slower time goes. If you move at the speed of light, you perceive time around you as stopped.
Therefore just as we think of space as really out there, we should think of time as really out there. They are inseparable. Moving in space moves you in time.
Physicist Brian Greene puts it similarly in his book The Fabric of the Cosmos:
Just as we envision all of space as really being out there, as really existing, we should also envision all of time as really being out there, as really existing, too. Past, present and future certainly appear to be distinct entities. But, as Einstein once said, “For we convinced physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion, however persistent.” The only thing that’s real is the whole of spacetime.
If we physical beings can evolve in a 3+1 world, then it’s easy to imagine a higher dimensional physical being evolving. If we evolved and have love and the potential for goodness, then so could a higher being. A god is probable, if not definite.
Another way to think about it is as a computer simulation. Imagine we build a mathematical model of a universe inside of a computer. Imagine the laws enable the creation of complex evolved life. Just as we can exist outside a simulation we run, obviously a god can exist outside our perceivable universe.
Given the probability that what we see is not the whole picture, something bigger than us is likely.
No one denies the possibility of creatures that might be so much greater than any of us. We simply demand evidence of it.
Something bigger than us might be indifferent and uncaring or even outright malicious.
We might just be a computer simulation crated by creatures almost exactly like us. And they are trying to study the emergent nature of consciousness. When they get bored or run out of funding they’ll hit a switch and our universe disappears.
Yes we can imagine higher dimensional beings. We can imagine an infinite array of possible realities. That doesn’t make any of them more true than any others.
How much thought have you given it, exactly? It seems to me that things are not true or untrue, they are only true within the principles you choose to accept. Isn’t this what Godel’s Incompleteness Theorems show?
I look at it like this: We care about ants. For no particular reason other than we’re curious. We don’t go out of our way to kill lifeforms, so I find it unlikely that a more complex entity would. It just doesn’t really follow. Think it through; I haven’t been able to congruently merge maliciousness and higher intelligences.
It’s certainly possible they are indifferent or uncaring. But given infinite levels of awareness and reality, on some level some being might care, just like most people don’t particularly care about strange non-infectious bacteria, but a molecular biologist might.
If we’re in a computer simulation created by a species similar to us, then it seems to me that it’s just as possible they _do_ care about the lifeforms they are studying. Perhaps not enough to stop tragedy, but if we take a bigger perspective of what a self is, it could mean our entire human record and culture. If they are interested in that, then our “self” is still safe.
We can imagine things, certainly. None of them are inherently impossible, certainly. All rules are beholden to higher and lower rules. If we see that some sets of rules are more true, or make more sense, then they probably are.
All this amounts to me that strong atheism, the belief in no immortal creator, is untenable.
Fear is why a lot people find the idea of an immortal creator tenable. As far as nature is concerned and as far as our current understanding of the laws that apply to everything, immortality is highly improbable. As a strong Atheist and speaking for my self, what “makes more sense” to me is based on my understanding of physics, biology, and the laws of the natural universe, more complex lifeforms do not equal immortal creators.
I can’t rule out that we’re not the result of some lab experiment to demonstrate abiogenesis, but that is as close as I can get to agreeing with the logic of your argument.
You’re free to believe what makes sense to you, of course.
What do you think of my proposal that we are living in a computer simulation?
I use immortal to mean “ubiquity in time”. That takes away the association with life and death.
If a being exists above the simulation of our universe, it might be able to slow down, speed up, and perhaps even reverse time, according to how we perceive it.
That is, if our observable universe is an extremely complex deterministic system, something above this system is immortal. A being above our simulation might thus have “ubiquity in time”.
The point of this all being, if you have no way of knowing if you are in a simulation or not, you should lean the direction that makes you happiest in the long-run. That seems to me to be a personal decision.