Just some musings really after listening earlier to Fay Dowker on Radio 4’s The Life Scientific – she was talking about Causal Set Theory, which postulates a space-time fabric that isn’t smooth and consistent, but rather is granular and atomised. It’s way beyond my physics pay grade, but it got me musing about “God”, time etc.
As I understood it the Theory makes various predictions (one of which, the accelerated expansion of the universe, has been verified): time is local to everyone and everything in the universe – ie, it’s relativistic rather than constant; general relativity doesn’t describe how time passes as a physical property – it models a block universe where past, present and future have the same presence, but the passage of time has no theory for being physically real; there are “space-time atoms” for events (a click of the fingers for example) that don’t exist in space or persist in time but are idealised points to describe one event after another, and so on.
It’s fascinating stuff, but it got me thinking about the relative naivety of the “what came before the universe, therefore God” type discussions we sometimes have here. If Causal Set Theory is right then time itself if far more complex and nuanced than just thinking of it as a river flowing inexorably along with a beginning and an end, and with a god at the start of it to open the sluice gates.
How then is it that some reach for “God” as the explanation for the observable universe, when that universe may well not be as we observe it to be at all in any case? Aren’t they doing the same thing as their predecessors did with, “we don’t know how thunder works, therefore Thor” – ie, looking for explanations for what we observe but not necessarily for what is?
Now some will say, “OK, maybe using “God” as the answer to “how” questions is necessarily a god of the gaps fallacy, but what about “God” as the “why” then?”
The answer to that is obvious to any six-year-old who when given the answer to a “why” question will then say “why” over and again – if someone posits “God” as the answer to a "why" question, it creates another infinite regress – “OK, but why did this God decide that?” etc which almost immediately leads to a “dunno”. In other words, “God” as the “why” actually answers nothing either.
So to the question: why bother giving “God” a CV? Why in another words even try to say anything about the god you think you’ve experienced given the problems that beset you when you do?
If instead a theist said something like, “Look, I had this wonderful, transcendent experience one day that I choose to call “God”, but I make no epistemically hopeless claims about that god, and nor even do I have a basis to decide whether the experience was externally generated or mind generated, but there it is anyway” wouldn’t that be the only ground he could legitimately defend? No “holy” texts, not sordid tales of child sacrifice and the like as moral exemplars, no fantastical stories of miracles (“miracle” meaning only, “something I can’t explain”), no paraphernalia at all in other words from credulous and conspiracy-satisfied times that actually turn out to tell us nothing at all.
Anyways, as I said – just some musings. “God” seems to me to be fine for those who need or like it, but I cannot for the life of me see how you can give him a CV too without collapsing immediately in a heap of incoherence and irrationalism.
