Moderator Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the museum’s Hayden Planetarium, put the odds at 50-50 that our entire existence is a program on someone else’s hard drive. “I think the likelihood may be very high,” he said…Somewhere out there could be a being whose intelligence is that much greater than our own. “We would be drooling, blithering idiots in their presence,” he said. “If that’s the case, it is easy for me to imagine that everything in our lives is just a creation of some other entity for their entertainment.”
…http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-we-living-in-a-computer-simulation/
Tyson’s comment “it is easy for me to imagine that everything in our lives is just a creation of some other entity for their entertainment” compares well with a comment I made here:
Life is deadly serious to us and living things because it’s our life, but if God made them, they might not be much more to him than the toys characters in our video games or what Rube Goldberg machines are to us.
comment 113673 in Philosophy and Complexity of Rube Goldberg Machines
and newton’s response
Human suffering is just entertainment for this God of yours,Sal? Nice.
comment 113676 in Philosophy and Complexity of Rube Goldberg Machines
So, what Tyson says is comparable to what I’ve said about this universe being something that God constructs and destroys for his amusement and delight, not ours. The main difference is Tyson’s view of the “creator” is anti-Christian. Even though he might characterize the “creators” as a non-deity, they have an equivalent skill set as far as we are concerned.
Also from the same Scientific American article:
But some were more contemplative, saying the possibility raises some weighty spiritual questions. “If the simulation hypothesis is valid then we open the door to eternal life and resurrection and things that formally have been discussed in the realm of religion,” Gates suggested.
This is the ID theory akin to Hoyle and Tipler and Barrow.
Tipler outlined these same ideas decades ago in the book, Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology and the Resurrection of the Dead.
Tipler became an ID proponent of sorts as a consequence of his research.
What’s your point? Your god might be a teenager experimenting in their basement? Well, judging from the words you claim it’s written you might well be on to something there.
Continuing a venerable tradition of astrophysicists making dumb statements on probability.
Bu…bu.. but, who simulates the simulator?
It’s an infinite deGrasse. Well, it nearly works …
Well, if we believe him, there’s a 50-50 chance that he was just programmed to say that.
In that case, there’s a pretty good chance that it’s not his fault.
Glen Davidson
What makes this whole thing seem like such a repeat is that it brings us back to the Greek (at least) notion of humans and the world as entertainment for the gods. The earth as the center of the universe was in no exalted place, it was kind of where all of the junk had fallen, while noble gods and regularly-traveling stars were well away from that mess. Trouble is, gods and stars get boring, and as low and degraded as earth was, it was a stage upon which dramas played, and gods interfered to the advantage of their favorites.
So now, it’s god-like aliens who find humans fascinating? Really? Why? We find humans entertaining, to be sure, but we’re humans. And even we like computer games with figures having more than human powers, as well as fictionalized stories where things turn out rather less messy and mundane than does real life. Maybe it’s time to quit thinking that we’d be so interesting to massively more intelligent beings.
There’s still the less flattering notion that we could be in one of a huge number of simulations just being played out as possible universes, given arbitrarily different starting points. Then again, why not just make a bunch of universes with arbitrarily different starting points? Why would simulations be better–given what we (don’t) know? The multiverse idea is that the universe is trying out all real possibilities anyway, though, so why would we need god-like aliens to do it? Maybe they would just observe the multiverse.
In the end, it seems to be rather idle speculation, a bit of godless myth-making. It’s nothing I’d rule out, but really, why bother?
Glen Davidson
And not just ancient Greek. Consider the Hindu concept of Maya. Here’s the String Band version:
Thank you all for your comments.
The “bad design” argument in biology is often framed in terms of what would be benevolent and beneficial to the designed living creature. Darwin used the bad design argument in his writings outside of Origin of Species to argue against ID. It was wrong-headed, but here are some of his sayings:
and
and
But the problem with that line of argumentation is that it appeals to human emotion and anthropocentrism. If the Designer has a cruel side, then it is like I said or what Tyson said:
similar to
The Scientific American article mentioned also the fine tuning argument as evidence of Godless ID. There is fine-tuning in the universe, life, Rube Goldberg machines and in houses made of cards. That’s why I think evolutionary theory is wrong, OOL theory is wrong, and why there is intelligent design in life and in the universe.
I think the Designer is the Christian God, others think it is something else, but the fine tuning seems very much in evidence to me. And finally, Darwinian selection in the wild doesn’t make all the fine tuning we see in biology maybe only a fraction of it.
An illustration of fine tuning in a design made for amusement. The physical characteristics of the house of cards should be indisputably exceptional. The origin of life problem is like explaining how tornados assemble a house of cards. One of the points of the OP is that “bad design” arguments are not really logical arguments against design, but are actually anthropocentric appeals to emotion, not really arguments that successfully deal with the high specificity state of life and the universe we live in.
They are logical arguments against a perfect, omniscient designer.
They are arguments against the anthropocentric view of what constitutes perfect.
No, it isn’t.
Sal,
It isn’t clear to me why you identify this cruel, capricious god who creates and destroys for amusement with the Christian god, whose claimed qualities are quite different. Can you explain?
Usually, they’re arguments that evolution makes things in one way, that intelligence typically makes them in quite another way, and that evolution’s way leaves tell-tale “bad design” that intelligence would not (intelligence can certainly make “bad design,” but it doesn’t mimic evolutionary “bad design”). Hence there are vestigial organs that may have some function, but hardly make sense as anything but vestiges of evolutionary change, and most mammals’ testes descend from their ancestral position where they still develop.
Sal consistently fails to address the fact that we find many indications of the limits of unintelligent evolutionary processes in the features of organisms, while concentrating on the idea of “bad design” out of evolutionary context. Furthermore, Tyson’s point about design most certainly has nothing to do with life being designed in the ordinary sense at all, at best being “designed” by setting up conditions in the universe. Although, I do think that there’s some room for more direct manipulation that he seems not to have thought about (not much thinking behind his comments, it would seem).
Someone comments that the universe could have been designed (true, but hardly new or impressive), and that becomes another excuse for ID soundbites that fail to address the issues. It gets old.
Glen Davidson
The argument of ‘bad design’ is that the nature of the artifice reflects the artisan’s knowledge ,skills , motivations, limitations. Not that bad design is not designed. As humans we are quite familiar with badly designed objects.
However since a potential designer of all things is an omnipotent ,omniscient, all good being ,sub optimal bad design is incongruent with that particular designer.
Mostly the bad design argument is an response to the argument of good design.
The Christian God of the Bible is quite cruel, that’s not the same god that is sold from the pulpits of most preachers.
and
and
The worm never dying is worse than the worm (larvae) from the wasp that was consuming the caterpillar — the one Darwin said he couldn’t believe would be designed.
These words from the Christian scriptures read to me like Designer who is unimaginably cruel.
Neil Rickert,
Your post is an exact duplicate of one I was about to compose.
Why? Why would God make something as perfect as himself. One could argue a perfect God would design suboptimal beings just to drive home the point his creatures aren’t God.
In any case, these are philosophical, not empirical considerations about the fine tuning of life and the universe which suggests design.
The notion of sub optimal doesn’t really fit with evaluation of Rube Goldberg machines as designed or not.
No, it isn’t.
stcordova,
I don’t understand the analogy of the simulation. We are just bits on a hard drive. In visual simulations we use pixels as the base resolution of what we are seeing. What is the “pixel” in the simulation we call our universe?
The ID folk are too fixated on probabilities.
I do not know how life originated. But I suspect that there can be circumstances where some sort of pre-life can emerge with a reasonable probability.
I’m always amused by the use of a tornado in these arguments. For it sure seems that a tornado is a highly improbable arrangement of air motions. Yet we know that there are circumstances which are conducive to their formation.
Sure, but you can find all manner of contradictory characterizations of God in the bible; you have picked some of the nasty ones, but we also get “But God so loved the world that he sent his only begotten son, etc.” The bible, taken as a whole, suggests not so much a cruel God as an incoherent God, which is another good reason to consider it a work of fiction.
So do you think we should praise and worship such a god? Are you in fact a Christian? Are you perhaps a Manichean?
It’s rather absurd to think that most works of fiction are incoherent. So why classify the Bible as fiction?
You’re indulging in a logical fallacy. You’re reading “it’s incoherent, therefore it’s fiction” as equivalent to “it’s fiction, therefore it’s incoherent”. I know that fallacy has a name, but I don’t recall what it is. Consider, for example, “it’s a cow, therefore it has four legs” compared to “it has four legs, therefore it’s a cow”.
Mung,
You callin’ me a liar?
Fortunately I have backed up my mental state every millisecond since birth. I’ll prove it. It’s here somewhere …
Neil Rickert,
Probabilities they can’t even meaningfully calculate. The probability space which Life in this universe samples is … ? The probability of getting this set of ‘fine-tuned’ parameters from the space of all possible values is … ?
‘Tornado’ thinking, meanwhile, misses the importance of scale variance in physics. Things happen to molecular-scale objects that cannot possibly happen to ball-and-stick models of the same. Even keeping scale, a whirlwind would sort velcro cards differently from the conventional kind.
I suppose the proponents of the simulation view argue that what we call “the real world” is more akin to the world in the movie The Matrix, that there is some underling reality we have no direct and/or easy access to, and our “real world” is not the ultimate reality. I suppose the way the hypothesis can be confirmed would be for ultimate reality to somehow show our “real world” is something of an illusion. I suppose “illusion” is too strong a word, “virtual” is probably a better word.
That’s up to you, but if the Christian God is real, one might do anything to avoid eternal punishment at the hands of such a cruel God.
I self-identify as an Evangelical Christian. I’m a member in good standing in the Presbyterian Church in America.
stcordova,
Do you think they may be proposing:
2d pixel=3d atom or 2 million addressable points vs 10^80 addressable points?
Better yet why make anything at all? On the other hand, a near perfect unchanging design would be overwhelming evidence of an extraordinary designer.
Sure ,women dying in childbirth makes that point pretty emphatically, but it seems to me if a human designer created the same effect we would put them in prison.
No, they are questions archeologists ask, what can the design of artifacts tell us about the artisan.As for fine tuning, when you only have a sample of one one should be cautious about making inferences.
No one doubts something caused the pattern of elements ( the design)to occur. The question is what. Rube Goldberg created the designs for monetary gain and entertainment, what purpose did a proposed intelligence have? Not efficiency, not reliability, since you are sure, why?
Why should one trust such a cruel God to provide eternal happiness?
Holy hannah!
I have literally never met another person who was aware of the ISB. Pleased to meet you, walto. 🙂
hotshoe_,
Hey, I’m aware too!
I can’t reconcile your claims about God’s nature with your being a Christian. Do you have any interest in enlightening me on this?
You have suggested only one reason so far for worshipping God: to avoid his cruel and arbitrary punishment. While I agree that might be an advisable course if such a person existed, it seems to me that in order to avoid that punishment you must also believe that God isn’t cruel and vindictive but instead loves you. While logically incoherent, it seems that most Christians have managed the trick, but only by not thinking about it. How do you, who have thought about it, manage? It could be rational to go through the motions in order to appease the monster, but I don’t see how it’s possible to buy into it internally (which seems necessary as God supposedly can’t be fooled) while still knowing he’s a monster. Please advise.
I think it’s called affirming the consequent
I don’t know the specifics, but I do sort of know where the idea comes from. The laws of physics as we know them are thought not to have had the form they have now during the early universe. Quantum mechanics and a few other things suggested that the laws of the physics and the universal “constants” got fixed to the form they have now, but that implies the laws were different in the early universe than what they are today. But if the laws of physics are pliable, then what constitutes what is real and what determines the laws of physics?
Some interpretations of quantum mechanics are made consistent by invoking a Universal Mind of some sort. Also, as physics began to be expressed in terms of information theory, it began to look as if the laws of physics are some sort of algorithm. Thus it began to become a little more believable that the universe is some sort of algorithm playing out.
I posted this commentary by a professor at my alma mater, Richard Conn Henry that explains the necessity of a Universal Mind based on Quantum Mechanics alone, and how this mind shapes the form of physics:
True Christian doctrine asserts the existence of hell. Do you think a God who sends people to hell is as nice like Santa Claus? A God who sends people to hell seems pretty cruel to me.
And as far as the New Testament, this is how Jesus (the Lamb of God) is portrayed in the last book of the Bible:
It’s awful to buried alive under a mountain, but that is more tolerable than facing the wrath of Jesus Christ. The early Christians had a great reverence and fear of Jesus Christ.
Much of the modern churches treat Jesus like some weakling who is not to be feared and reverenced, but rather some pal, some Santa Claus — but that is not the Jesus of the Bible. The Jesus of the Bible is the Old Testament God. Personally, I see the present world going into a period of famine, disease, war and agony just as Jesus said:
I hope I’ve made it clear, why in some respects because of hell and the coming apocalypse I hope the atheists here are right because it would be far more merciful for the majority of humanity if the Christian God does not exist.
Jesus prophesied of the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70. It followed exactly the curse laid out over a thousand years earlier in Deuteronomy 28. Does this strike you as nice guy God (who just answers prayers on human demand?) or a God that should be feared?
The Almighty Dinkan, the god that roared.
stcordova,
OK, so your God is a monster. Why, then, would you worship him? Is it purely to save yourself? I’m trying to understand, and it doesn’t make sense. You seem almost proud of his cruelty.
Cockroaches (or name any creature whose existence you despise) seem probably good to themselves. Should they sit in judgment over human affairs (like the Orkin exterminator)? It is just as absurd for humans to judge God a monster as it is for a cockroach to judge a human a monster for killing a cockroach.
According to the Bible, when Adam sinned, humanity became children of the devil. We may seem worthy to each other of better treatment than what God gives to us, but we are not the ultimate judge.
When I accepted by faith that I was the object of God’s wrath outside of Jesus, then I no longer view God as a monster but rather humanity as sons of the 1st Adam who sold humanity’s soul to the devil and thus became sons of darkness.
Of course, in human terms we don’t feel deserving of all that is bad that happens to us. For myself, if I had the power to heal a child of juvenile cancer, I would, I have no reason to want his life to be miserable. It is not my place to mete out God’s judgment on other humans but to show grace and mercy and compassion as a symbol of God’s grace to me.
God is viewed as merciful because he has withheld the full force of his wrath. As bad a childhood cancer is, it is nothing compared to hell.
So to answer your question, I can worship God because He has offered forgiveness in Jesus Christ and thus I’m spared from hell.
A taste of God’s wrath will come upon the Earth as the apocalypse unfolds. The nuclear, chemical, biological weapons. The famines, the pestilences, the wars — those were ordained by our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ as he prophesied 2,000 years ago. He has promised that those who call upon his name and believe and trust in him will find grace and they will find eternal life even if their mortal life is destroyed.
Each day I go to class at the NIH, I see the incredible intellect that constructed the complex Rube Goldberg machines of life. It is a mind far beyond all human comprehension that made the eukaryotic multicellular genome.
It says in Romans, “behold the kindness and severity of God.” God is kind but he is also severe.
I admire his power and ability to inflict such great retribution on his enemies, but I’m sad most of humanity, those outside of Christ, is the object of his eternal retribution.
I wish it were not so, but it looks to me like the human race is headed toward extinction, perhaps sooner rather than later, just as Jesus said would happen. But for those in Jesus, as Paul said:
The bad of this world will only be temporary for those that believe and confess in Jesus and have accepted the free gift of eternal life and forgiveness of sins. Hence for those who have received this gift and will be spared eternal retribution, it becomes possible to love God because He will be good to those that trust in Jesus Christ.
I see Sal as like that character in The Mummy that cosies up to the monster in exchange for a few gold coins. It might be a monster, but it’s Sal’s monster mmmkay?
Seems to me that it works better for him than just admitting that ID is a crock.
Not that God being a uncaring lout (at best) explains why life would end up looking like it evolved (opportunistic parasites, the inability of evolutionary processes to make rational, planned choices). But if one ignores that fact and goes with the ID nonsense about it (“bad design is still design,” that kind of horseshit) one can just change God to fit the ID story and not have to face being wrong.
It agrees with the ID impulse to explain away uncomfortable science rather than to actually pay close attention to the evidence and what it indicates.
Glen Davidson
stcordova,
Cheers, God!
Huge fan back in the day–though paisley robes never looked that good on me–so I dressed more like Beefheart. (I’m at my absolute best in a trout mask replica.)
May the long time son shine upon you, all love surround you.
Done by friends at my wedding.
Cool. The book of mine that keiths says he read more slowly than I gave him credit for focuses on the (half-remarkable) ‘What is it that we are part of, and what is it that we are?’ in a couple of places. Love that song.
Actually, I’m kind of surprised hotshoe hasn’t met any ISB fans before now. They were pretty big. I mean, Judy Collins even butchered one of their songs (‘First Girl I Loved’) onto the Billboard lists, IIRC.
Where else is there to turn? There is no salvation in Charles Darwin. As the Apostle Peter said, ““Lord, to whom shall we go?” If God ordains wrath for us, we’re toast anyway, but if there is a chance for mercy, take it.
I’ve recommended this alternative before:
Good Guy Lucifer seems to be preferable to your god concept.