From: Damien Broderick (damien@ariel.ucs.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Mon Jan 11 1999 - 08:14:04 MST
At 11:49 PM 1/10/99 +0000, Nick wrote:
>I used to say that I was an atheist, but I've changed my mind and now
>I'm just an agnostic. This is partly because of the possibility that
>our world is a simulation; the posthumans running the simulation
>could well be said to be gods.
I doubt it, at least not in any sense of deity recognized by modern
theologians (although it might fit with the plural and anthropomorphic gods
of Greek, Roman and Norse mythology, not to mention Xena and a lot of Star
Trek eps). If you build a snazzy alife sim and its GAs construct
intelligent CAs, you'd be a kind of bridging `first cause', and might even
have the power to intervene in their lives - even obliterate their entire
experienced cosmos - but that wouldn't make you a god in any interesting
sense. Gods are ontologically distinct from creatures, or they're not
worth the paper they're written on.
>There is also the possibility
>that all possible worlds exist; then gods would exist since there are
>gods in some possible worlds. Or if the universe is spatially
>infinite, which it is on the simplest topology if it is open (which
>it seems to be) then random fluctuations should lead to the
>existence of godlike physical creatures somewhere (but would these
>be real gods?).
Again, I think this is an abuse of language. In an infinite universe there
would be very powerful beings by that path; there could not (I think, but
my set theory isn't remotely up to this) be a quantum fluctuation that
yielded an infinite volitional entity coextensive with *all* those infinite
worlds. And even with Gott-like (ha) closed timelike curves, I doubt that
there could be a fluctuation that took the form of the logically earliest
volitional entity that *preceded* itself and its own ontic context (unless
it is the universe in toto).
Moreover, I suspect this line of thought is self-refuting: shouldn't there
also be (1) an *infinite* number of distinct gods so produced; and (b) at
least one catastrophic transcendental event, perhaps accidental, perhaps
done by a Mad Mind, that obliterates all these infinite universes? Or
would such obliteration, like a vacuum catastrophe, have to proceed from a
center outward at the speed of light? If so, any god postulated as its
cause is crucially limited, and fails the definition accepted by most
(Western) theists.
>And there is the possibility that there might be a
>kind of neoplatonistic god, a "creative principle" which might
>explain why the world exists (though I think that looks highly
>problematic).
This sounds something like the array of current sub-theological
representations of deity (as far as I know; I'm hardly an expert in gods)
that is adduced by scientists such as, say, Paul Davies. I don't see how
it makes sense as a proposition (so I guess I'm a noncognitivist in Max's
terms, although it sounds like a nasty label to accept), but that might be
a limitation of imagination.
Damien Broderick
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