by Apognophos 4 Replies latest members adult
I thought this was an interesting short story even as a Witness. An atheist scientist dies, and is chagrinned to find himself meeting God. But he realizes that his assumptions about God were wrong in more ways than one....
Please take the time to read it, it's not long (most of the page's length is the comments section). I'm simply posting this as food for thought, not to make any specific point or provoke a debate.
Entertaining.
I never have an allergic reaction to folks who opine that there exists some type of creator of the universe. I have reasons to believe that religion, and the beliefs therein, were integral to the social contracts and lingual diaspora that built what we call civilization. I.e., you could not have gone from Cro Magnon, atheist, to modern homo sapiens, atheist, and atheist all the way. I don't think it could be done. I say that because atheism is a technological, socioeconomic, first world luxury. It is a luxury good. It is something you can afford after all needs are met. It is something you can afford when you are swimming, or drowning, in data that represents and tells very precise stories about the natural world, from quark soup and Bose-Einstein condensates to the cosmic neutrino background and baryogenesis. If civilization ground to a halt, religion would reassert itself as a widespread group alliance identifier and as source of motivation, hope, and other crucial brain chemistry. Religion is a survival mechanism. Its purpose is crucial, depending on the time scale.
I economize my concern by observing that a many-world distribution of combinations in parameter space, and the consequent possibility that our universe is just the one, or one of the few, that are hospitable to conscious existence, resembles what we observe as 'the real world' with its gaussian distributions. A gaussian or "normal" distribution follows the familiar bell curve where you have a big hill in the middle, where a large number of possibility have a moderately non-zero probability, and then off on the edges the probabilities decrease slowly, asymptotically to zero. The sum of the area under the curve is "normalized" to equal 1, which means, if you can approximate by the area of triangles, that the height of the function at the origin will never be 1. It is always less than one, meaning, there is always the probability that it might be something different from the central value. High probability to be something slightly different, low probability to be something greatly different from the central value.
If you proceed from the initial assumption that an infinite being created all that we can know, from quark soup to barygenesis, this can only best be represented in our mathematics as a Dirac delta function. It is zero probability at all points outside the origin, but at the origin the value is infinite and the probability is one. Whereas most people have a natural sense of a bell curve, where most things are like some central value and less things are far from a central value, the Dirac delta is not easily pointed at in nature, for it is used to mathematically represent abstractions. (Dirac was a quantum physicist, and that's probably where you meet it in college.)
If one hedges their bet and assumes some kind of non-infinite deity, perhaps a superior race, then the Kronecker delta will do. The Kronecker also represents a distribution that is zero everywhere other than the origin, but that is defined as having, not an infinite value at the origin, but a value of 1. While it requires infinite explanation to explain the origin of an infinite deity, it will still require a lot of explanation to explain the origin of a non-infinite creator. With a many-worlds approach, it requires yet less explanation to explain the origin of our universe, sans specific creator. We received the luck of the draw.
It seems to me that the gods that man worships are all reflections of themselves. They fit whatever culture they were worshipped in. Almost as if they were created by man. I'll read the short story in a few minutes.
Asimov has explored the problem of near-eternity a few times. I've lost the title of the book but memorable is a character who lives a fantastically long life, but as a consequence cannot bear human contact and is a germophobe besides. Ironically by extending life, its' value becomes so precious that living becomes the luxury.
Great story. It reminds me of an old joke, much weaker than that story, but here goes.
A woman hating racist white red-neck goes to heaven, and is sent back to earth to tell those like him what it is like.
"I done got two surprises to start with about god, she's black !".
