(no subject)

[proximoception]

The main atheist bloggers are arguing about just how much of an atheist each of them is. One of the bones of contention, the one that interests me most, is approximately this:

If God violates the rules of nature even once, does that mean there are no rules of nature?

One corollary of answering in the affirmative being if you believe in natural rules at all you must disbelieve in God, I guess - since if there's a God life is just a hallucination he's imposing on you with the general appearance of consistency...but if that's the case you can't confirm God's own existence empirically, hence you can't differentiate hallucination-realities manufactured by God from ones manufactured by yourself, since the trustworthiness of the external world has been disproved. Of course, we're all stuck in that one - how do you know the sun will rise tomorrow, that gravity will function a minute from now, that you'll feel your own body a second from now, past the assurance of all those things having stayed stable so far? - but it's interesting that a miracle-working God can't get you out of this bind. You will never know, even in apparent heaven, unless and until completely collapsed into identity with him, assuming even the concepts of distinct identity or lack thereof aren't parts of the present hallucination, whether you are in God's hallucination or he is in yours. And of course you could just be hallucinating you're God even when you are one with God. And a crazy person's assumption they are God would have to be considered true in God's own terms until interrupted by 'reality' (the imposed hallucination of God) which is itself a sort of interruption or holding-apart of miracles, of revelations of reality's hallucinatoriness.

So if you're religious you'll never have a reason to think you're not nuts and/or God. Unless, of course, he must logically exist apart from us. But he mustn't - that one's never flown, if you'll excuse the empiricism of human memory.

But if you go back to the question and answer that nature is real, is itself, but just gets trumped by God when that's what he's into - by answering prayers, sending offspring, causing disasters or whatever - well, what are you basing this on? How can you know?

Suppose the laws of physics worked except when they didn't, and we could observe no absolute laws about when they did and when they didn't (since these, too, would be laws of physics) - what would we be in relation to them? Presumably not having full evidence that reality was following laws gave us gods, magic etc. in the first place: multiple sources of inexplicability. Or, if just one God, his different actions, even if stemming from just one unsharable thought, in effect permitted reality to do whatever, permitted a reality that seemed to be doing whatever to have a viable explanation - or anyway graspable description. If things mostly hold together, do they really hold together? I think my vocabulary is leading me toward a trap here, actually - things, because plural, are by definition able to be both distinct but together, in whatever sense their plurality entails. 'Phenomena' runs into the same problem, but so do singular nouns: if I say 'if reality is only usually itself, can it ever truly be itself?' I may be leading the question again, but in the other direction. A discontinuous state of affairs can be interrupted while still being a state of affairs, if a state of affairs can be discontinuous while still a state. By state I don't mean something like the state of your living room or finances, though - I mean Everything, so we may be running into a problem where you can't analogize the Container with anything merely Contained (living rooms, finances).

Continuities are continuous until they end, let's at least grant that. Would a miracle, say a virgin birth, be like a stop to natural order, or just a sort of hole in it? But how could the hole be contained, why would it end there, not contaminate everything forevermore. Even if God is faking a Y chromosome quite perfectly, whatever means he's using to enter the world to do that faking shouldn't be able to touch it without stopping it from being a world, should they? Even if he's using nanotechnological oven mits of some kind, they're being worn by impossible hands. If what's foreign to it can manipulate it, how can reality be considered to have more ontological integrity than a hallucination God's just rather fond of keeping stable?

Okay, but what if reality is a part of God without being quite, essentially him (so not pantheism - something permitting intelligent action), like his hair or nails, say. That way he's not foreign to it. He shares enough properties with it to wander in, but it's going to do what it does whenever he wanders back out - also in whatever parts he hasn't wandered into, even at the moment he's mirabilifying. Kind of a split-brain God, half animal and half vegetable, where the animal half reaches over and nurtures (or munches on) the vegetable now and then. But there the problem becomes the boundary between them - how do you know what's vegetable, law-following God, and what's caprice God - you're back in the hallucination problem. The impossibility just enters the God-creature himself: the border between the substances, not empirically verifiable because it's the border of empiricism. The border of Spain and France is neither Spain nor France. It's only a border because they both stop. But what two things are stopping here? What things are things anymore?

Also what was I even trying to argue. Oh, whether God is just flat-out impossible, viewed scientifically. I don't think so - we could be running in a simulator, for instance, existing really as Matrix-type brains in ajar way, or just as beings of pure electricity here in the simulation. Our laws of the universe could truly be false, just self-consistent - but in a universe functioning with laws of its own, maybe ones the simulation copies but doesn't necessarily have to. Could the simulator runner be God in the classical sense? No. But he could be a ridiculously powerful entity, from our perspective - and perhaps approaching some kind of absolute moral excellence, all appearances to the contrary. But he wouldn't be God because he'd be bound by the laws of the outer world, whatever they are. There he would be possible, hence his interference would be possible in the mostly-cohesive simulation he's provided us. But the outer world could have no god, just that mere person capable of total power over a simulation. So, yes, I guess God is flat-out impossible on empirical grounds - i.e. on the grounds that there really is a coherent, able-to-be-experienced world. He's possible if empirical grounds aren't possible. And if they're not, all of this is just us and him and something he's making us perceive, a sort of living movie, a livie. Or it's just us not realizing we're him, gone just as mad and thinking damn near whatever.

You may worship virtual-god if you like, but you'd have to drop the 'omnni's. Without which there's really no reason to trust his motives. Or abilities, past his evident skill in making himself look unnecessary. Which, in the outer world, he is.

Comments

[mendaciloquent.livejournal.com]

The laws themselves could just be folly -- superficial regularities given excessive weight by transient, limited intellects. There is no violation, no discontinuity, because the form of reality itself is never nearly as solid as we assume, need, or want it to be; given omniscience, or simply a long-enough lifespan, the regularity of the universe, its "laws", might be perceived as being just a flimsy construction draped over some other order more inscrutable to us. This does not imply hallucination; the consciousness of a honeybee, if it exists at all, might be veracious, even if its reality only speaks to the location of flowers, quality of pollen, and the dances of the hive. Its order is not the one it thinks it is a part of (again, if it could think of order at all); it does not know its role in the reproduction of angiosperms, etc., just as our intended purpose may be simply spread radionuclides across the Earth's surface.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

No idea how to respond to that straightforwardly, so I'll import what I can and ramble through to whatever conclusions offer.

If there's no standard of empirical proof, can there be empirical proof? If not, it's not clear how you could give evidence for God's existence, could prove it except as something logically necessary. Conviction can blow into you and then back out again, but what would make it communicable to others? What could you show them, if the show won't stay on one channel? What could you show yourself that wasn't epiphany, a colorfully dusted wind?

Imperfectly perceived or understood evidence is different from imperfectly existent evidence - I don't see how the latter could ever be rounded up to evidence at all; you could say we do it all the time, but if so we do nothing we know anything about. We couldn't even say what amount of the time we were doing it, because no measure could be trusted.

"[G]iven omniscience, or simply a long-enough lifespan, the regularity of the universe, its "laws", might be perceived as being just a flimsy construction draped over some other order more inscrutable to us."

Here laws becomes order - the singular/plural switch I was worrying about. But supposing with the right glasses that order clarifies into superlaws, not the mere imposable conviction I've been scoffing at, I guess you're saying, hence there may be new standards of evidence (or some kind of correction and completion of our present ones) that permit proof of things we don't yet know are provable.

So what if science isn't yet science, basically. Well, if so, I guess we shouldn't pretend it's anything? The word is not yet ripe, in that case. I'm saying 'knowing what we know of knowing, no god could ever be known' and you're saying 'but maybe you don't know how to know yet.'

What if our standards of knowledge are not real standards of knowledge, but there are others out there, to rephrase you again (sorry, only way I know how to proceed in any detail). But I don't think this quite works - drop what I understand to be knowledge, and any other source of conviction, from the standpoint of the hypothetically-dropped but by me actually-still retained knowledge, looks like unknowable conviction. You'd have to prove that some of the ways I think I've been knowing are wrong, but also that some of the ways stay right - like with your bees: the new knowledge will have to come out of the shell of the present misapprehension. Doesn't that put the burden on the reformer? Can you actively doubt science without proving science's inadequacy in its own terms? Somehow get the 'could just be' of your first sentence accepted as the 'is' of the first clause of your second?

The post-structuralist and/or po-mo people in my field love to doubt science, or rather to try to dream up ways to doubt science in a way that doesn't use science's own standards and assumptions. None of it has ever not come apart into tricks or imposed obscurations, to my mind. But maybe I'm missing something. Or maybe a rephrasing of the problem could take care of this category of objections: If evidence is what we've been defining it to be, we can never have evidence of god. Object to our definition of evidence first and you can object to god's unevincability after, assuming objection is still a concept coherent enough for use in a world with super- or no evidence. Because the 'what if [arbitrarily chosen word from sentence] can't mean what you feel it means' is a game playable all day, and one infamously playable on its own rules.

[mendaciloquent.livejournal.com]

Well, I think the main problem is that the diffusion of religious faith is not a rational game to begin with; or to perhaps put it more sympathetically, both its rational and empirical components are never strong enough to stand alone. It's sort of like playing a game of plausible deniability, except with yourself: how thick does the real evidence have to be before I cave into my own fear of mortality, experience of wonder, need for order, and all the other reasons people believe in God. And for most people the need for reasoning is either wafer fucking thin, or they have some really big needs, or both.

But, if we pick up where you leave off, and take the perspective of a rational human being operating at his or her best, then I think you're right, there's not a whole lot you can do to make it communicable, no way to differentiate between imperfect perception and imperfect existence. There will be an incommensurable gap between those who think they've experienced God and those who think they couldn't have. And if God were somehow accessible via empirical means -- let's say that the heavens parted every January 1st and he held a press conference, submitted himself to scientific scrutiny, etc., -- he would no longer, by most definitions, be God, just another thing in a universe of things.

We could also take the other route -- not only is our standard of knowledge not really knowledge at all, but what's beyond or underneath it, and which periodically punches holes in our attempts to understand appearances, is not comprehensible to any current or future science, is completely incompatible with the human intellect, such that projecting science forward into a superscience is itself inadequate, it would look like nonsense, or worse: something which is in the main incomprehensible, but which can accurately be perceived malicious and disruptive when it does occasionally inject itself into what we can see, a kind of Satanic antilawfulness. Bad miracles.

And I don't think you're really missing anything about the anti-science bent in some sectors of the humanities. I've generally perceived this to be an over-reaction to the otherwise legitimate problem of the excesses of instrumental reasoning in 20th century history, a problem which some academics have elected to fight in the ether. It's sad, sort of, because I think science is a fucking mess on its own terms. Pomo voodoo is the least of its problems.