I am an agnostic, although most of my beliefs could be called atheistic, but that is a question of semantics.
I am interested in the views of atheists who, like Richard Dawkins, admit that God is not falsifiable by empiricism and postulate that if there is a God, it would have a history of development in physical space.
Would God be Clarke’s Third Law made real, perhaps originating beyond our space-time, or taking from Bostrom’s concept, a master programmer that has created a simulation, albeit a simulation utilising 10^92 bits of information? I find the idea that Sagan used in Contact – the cosmic fingerprint in pi – quite interesting, even if he was being playful. I’m not interested in personal deities, just ideas of cosmic consciousness and how it might manifest itself and perhaps how it came to be.
Posted: February 13th 2011
Steve Zara www
Gods are beyond nature. They aren’t programmers, or aliens, or humans from a trillion years in the future come back to show their power.
Gods promise the good eternity. Even the best programmer can’t manage that.
Posted: February 15th 2011
Eric_PK
You posit two different occurences.
I think that Clarke’s Third Law (for readers, its “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”) would be an interesting discussion if we actually had good evidence for miracles that weren’t explained by current theories. Since we don’t, I don’t think it’s worth more than a passing mention.
As for Bostrom’s argument, I think it is silly. If we can’t tell any difference between a “real reality” (whatever that means) and a simulated reality, then there is no difference.
The earth will either end when the Sun enters the red-giant phase, or when the master programmer stops the simulation; it makes no difference to us. Though I do imagine that if that later happens, the mice will be furious.
Posted: February 14th 2011
George Locke
One can dream up any number of coherent god hypotheses that are consistent with the available evidence. But why would you? Without any reason to believe that they were true, it’s just fiction.
Posted: February 14th 2011