Six Impossible Godly Concepts: Part Two

We all like lists: The ten best this, the top dozen that; the five worst ranking next thing. That’s why the popularity of the Guinness Book of Records. In “Alice through the Looking Glass”, the White Queen believed in six impossible things before breakfast. Exactly what those impossible things were is not stated; perhaps they fell in the lap, not of the gods, but of God.

Continued from yesterday’s blog…

Impossibility Three: Is God All–Knowing?  Hardly! If God is all knowing, what’s the point in the whole creation business? There’s no fun or satisfaction to a creation if you know to the tiniest detail, exactly what will happen at each and every moment to everything, everyone, and everywhere. Would your life be worth living if at say age 10, you had absolute knowledge of the future and knew exactly what each and every future second would be like for you in advance? So God created Adam and Eve, but since God is alleged to be an all-knowing God, then He knew even then what would happen in the Garden of Eden, so why bother instructing Adam and Eve not to eat forbidden fruit? What would be the point? That’s why people don’t usually want to be told the resolution to a film they haven’t yet seen. If you’re told before-the-fact whodunit, why see the film or read the novel?

That applies equally to that final Biblical Book of Revelation. The Bible is God’s Holy Word. Revelation is therefore God’s Holy Word. Everything that is to come is spelt out in detail. The ending is not in doubt. How the ending is achieved is not in doubt. God knows all of this in advance. Satan, being a literate sort of entity, knows all of this as well. Therefore, what’s the point in enacting out the scenario? If everyone has to go through the fixed Revelation scenario, then that confirms everything is predestined and that there is no such thing as Free Will despite God’s utterances to the contrary. Just like in a novel or a film, the plot plays out the exact same each and every time. The characters have no choice but to follow the plot line – they have no Free Will.

Impossibility Four: Is God All-Powerful? Hardly! If God can not prevent evil, then God is not all powerful. If God can prevent evil, but chooses not to, then God is hardly benevolent (see Impossibility Two above). If God allows evil to exist in humans, and God created humans, then God must share some responsibility for that evil. It’s akin to parents having to shoulder responsibility if their child or children runs amuck.

God is not all-powerful since not even God can get around the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in quantum physics, which states that it is impossible to know simultaneously any particle’s precise position and trajectory.

Presumably, God, like gravity, and anything comprised of mass and/or energy can’t operate at faster than light speed. If God wants to smite you down, and God is ten light-years away, then you’re safe for a decade before His bolt of lightning hits you.

If God exists in a physical location within the Universe, then God can’t know about an event until the light (or other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum; or gravity) from that event reaches God. Since light has a finite speed, God is in the ‘dark’ as it were until the light and information it contains reaches God. For example, if God is residing on Planet Earth, and for some reason our Sun goes supernova, God (as well as the rest of humanity) won’t know about it for other eight-plus minutes – the time it takes light to reach Earth from the Sun.

Not even God can change the past. I mean, there are any number of instances where to correct some mistake; it would have been easier to backtrack in time and undo something, like going back in time and posting a “No Trespassing: Keep Out: Serpents Will Be Shot On Sight: This Means You” sign at the entrance to the Garden of Eden.

Not even God can accomplish something that is self-contradictory, like creating a spherical cube or a cubical sphere! Not even God can draw more than one straight line between two points on a flat piece of paper.

If God is all-powerful, why did God need to rest on the 7^th day?

Impossibility Five: Is God A God for All People? If you believe the Bible, God has His Chosen People – the Hebrews. God has His Promised Land for His Chosen People. That Promised Land isn’t America (far less California) or Australia/New Zealand or Europe (with or without Great Britain) or Antarctica or Asia or Africa or Russia, etc. Those Chosen Peoples aren’t the Italians, the Japanese, the Koreans, the Aboriginals, the Amerindians, the Polynesians or the Turks, and especially not the Egyptians! The Promised Land is the Land of Canaan, now called Israel; The Chosen People are, obviously, the Israelites. In fact the Bible (King James Version) makes crystal clear, not once, but 201 times that God is the “God of Israel”. So, if you ain’t associated with God’s Chosen People and God’s Promised Land, it’s impossible to believe that you are one of those in God’s holy grace! In short, it’s safe to give God your Big Middle Finger, even both of them! 

Impossibility Six: God versus Intelligent Design? Do you need a hearing aid? Do you need glasses? Did you require your tonsils or appendix or wisdom teeth to be removed? Do you suffer from haemorrhoids or back problems?  Have your hips, knees, and ankles let you down? Do you suffer from baldness, tooth decay, arthritis, acne, colds, the flu, even cancer? Do you have issues with your sexuality or the functioning of your private parts? Do you suffer from mental illness? Who created the human species and therefore by definition created you? God, that’s who, created you! Who created your physiology and anatomy? Did I hear you say “God”? So who created all of your psychological, physiological and anatomical problems? Did I hear you say “God” again? Is this what you would consider Intelligent Design? I don’t think so! Did God fail Anatomy 101? I think so.

God does in fact have one ‘All’ quality. He’s an all-nothing. God, the supernatural deity, doesn’t exist. One line of evidence in support of that is that God hasn’t struck me down dead by lightning by writing and posting this! So you see, blasphemy is a victimless ‘crime’. And no, I don’t hate God. You can’t hate something that doesn’t exist.

Biblical Doomsday: The End of Days

While many Biblical concepts resonate with the general public, one of the most interesting and personal concepts is the ‘End of Days’ prophecy and the Book of Revelation. Old Testament prophets predicted (speaking on behalf of God) gloom and doom. Jesus has been cited as a deity obsessed with the Apocalypse, forever preaching about the ‘End Times’. Over the following 2100 years, religious fundamentalists have followed suit, dragging the faithful along by their short and curly bits. It’s even spawned a minor publishing industry. Alas, it’s all bovine fertilizer.    

For religious reasons relating to the concept of ‘eternal life’, many look forward to the world going down the gurgler, because that means that they, while going down the gurgler too, get deposited at the other end of the tube into an eternal paradise. Or so they believe. 

It’s a pity that so many peoples’ lives are so miserable that they literally look forward to someone else (i.e. – God and/or Jesus Christ) ending their mundane existence of everyday mortality and transporting them into another one of peaceful eternity, although who really knows, maybe it’s a case of going from the frying pan into the fire, just in case they go south instead of north!  Regardless, the great unwashed get support in their beliefs from religious fundamentalists or evangelists and those obsessed with the ‘End Times’.

It would seem that every time there is a natural disaster (even oil spills qualify), anywhere in the world, but especially in America, right-wing Christian fundamentalists and televangelists jump for joy, do high fives and are more than happy to point out, even gleefully telling “I told you so”, and the more the destruction, the better the mayhem, the greater the death toll, the higher they jump, the happier they are and the more they rub their hands gleefully together. Why? It’s to them yet another Sign that the ‘End of Days’ are near. That’s quite apart from those wars and rumours of wars, etc.

Of course if our fundamentalists and television Bible thumpers had lived 500 years ago, or 1000 years ago, or 1500 years ago, they would have been strutting out the same old line, the same old hype, the same old gloom and doom (gloom and doom for the rest of us sinners that is).

How long can these televangelists go on playing the same old ‘End of Days’ song before credibility runs out? - Seemingly indefinitely if you’re already preaching to the converted and/or the gullible.  No doubt 500 years from now their descendents will be screaming out the same old tired ‘End Times’ tune.

Is the 'End of Days' prophecy really believable? When it comes to the Bible, for all the prophecies therein, and all the prophets that pontificated, there's only one prophecy that ultimately matters - the 'End of Days', the apocalypse, Armageddon, etc. There are only two points that need to be made here. The first point is that 100% of Biblical scholars, Christian fundamentalists, televangelists, even the great unwashed reading and interpreting the Bible, who have predicted the end of the world, have got it wrong!

This is more than just a tad relevant. 100% of all ‘End of Days’ prophecies, and there have been thousands of them, scholarly or otherwise; have failed to come to pass; so much for the Bible being the literal word of God; so much for spot-on Biblical accuracy. I hope all here-and-now Christian fundamentalists and especially those televangelists take note of this (not that they will of course).

100% is not a trivial percentage! 100% of all end-of-the-world predictions have failed (that’s bloody obvious isn’t it? I mean we’re still here; we’re still standing)! If I’d received a fiver for each failed ‘End of Days’ doomsday prediction, I, my bank manager and the tax man would all be happy little campers.

Despite endless predictions, the 'End of Days' has not happened. So, what are you to believe when the next soothsayer (Christian fundamentalist, televangelist, etc.) comes along and says on such-and-such a date Armageddon will arrive? My response would be a swift kick in their private parts!

The second point, for those who take the Bible literally, is that Jesus told any and all who would listen that there would be those hearing his utterings about the ‘End Times’ that those very ‘End Times’ would happen within their lifetime. Alas, there is no one alive today who heard Jesus speak, so Christ's own prophecy has to be graded as an "F". Now either J.C. hasn’t a clue what he’s talking about, or the ‘End of Days’ he thought was imminent has now been cancelled (2100 years on is a bit of a stretch to call it a mere postponement). IMHO, if it hasn’t happened by now, it’s not going to.

In short, if you are eagerly awaiting the apocalypse, have a good supply of reading material and DVDs on hand, because it's going to be a Very Long Wait! If you’re eagerly waiting for the ‘End of Days’, have a nice wait. The odds are greater you’ll find a pot-of-gold at the end of the rainbow first; but at least you’ll have something to do – search for the pot; spend the gold – while you wait, and wait, and wait, and wait, then wait some more. 

It's just plain impossible for any rational person, given the historical track record, to accept that the 'End of Days' is not only near-and-dear but will happen at all.

By the way neither the phrase “End of Days”, “Second Coming” nor the phrase “End Times” actually appear in the (King James Version) of the Bible. Neither does the word “doomsday” nor “apocalypse” though “Armageddon” makes a singular appearance. But least you think it’s safe to go back into the waters, the phrase “end of the world” appears frequently. Here’s but one example.

Matthew 24:3: And as he sat upon the mount of Olives, the disciples came unto him privately, saying, Tell us, when shall these things be? and what shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world?

My response is to quote Gershwin and Heyward in “Porgy and Bess”: “It ain’t necessarily so, It ain’t necessarily so, De tings dat yo’ li’ble, To read in de Bible, It ain’t necessarily so.” Amen to that!

Free Will: Your Reality or Your Illusion? Part Two

Introduction: “You have to believe in free will. You have no choice”. Seriously, if our Universe is a clockwork Universe, where causality rules absolutely (as both Newton and Einstein believed), then you do not have free will, only the illusion of having free will.

I will argue that if causality means anything, then everything is predetermined and therefore there is no free will. Causality rules – a cause causes an effect which in turn becomes the cause for a later effect which is hence the cause for an even later effect, and so on down the line. It’s an unbroken causality chain starting from an initial set of fixed conditions. The past determines the present which determines the future. If you knew the past to an absolute infinite amount of detail, then you know the future to that same degree of infinite detail, and free will doesn’t enter into things.

Continued from yesterday’s blog…

Now let’s take the case of human conception, through to blastula, embryo and foetus. I think one can agree that a human doesn’t need to make any decisions for the first nine months, while still in the womb. Ditto the nine months following birth, and probably another nine months after that. But sooner or later, that baby or infant will make its first decision that’s not based on fundamental body needs like ‘deciding’ to go to sleep or wet it’s diapers.

The question is what is fundamentally different about the nature of the infant before it can make its first free will choice or decision and just after? The brain, the brain chemistry, the neural nets and pathways, would be seemingly identical. The only thing I can think of is that the infant and infant’s brain/mind is receiving an ever steady input of sensory data, ultimately enough to allow the infant to make decisions – the baby wants scrambled eggs, not soft-boiled eggs. 

The ever increasing absorption of external stimuli may provide the ultimate need or desire to make choices, but it doesn’t provide the mechanism. Ultimately I don’t think there is a free will mechanism as everything is predetermined, like the computer simulation of “Life”. But does it really matter whether or not you have actual free will or the illusion of free will? It doesn’t alter how you live your life and the expectations of those unknown choices you’ll make between now and when Mother Nature makes that final choice on your behalf!

So far I’ve been muttering on as if you came to a metaphorical fork in the road and had some sort of free will to pick one path, or the other path; maybe neither path - or maybe not, if causality rules the universal roost.

There’s no free will solace in the Many Worlds Interpretation of reality; in coming to that fork in the road, because all paths, all possible choices, are enacted as the universe splits to cater for each and every one. You may think you picked one path – the high road, the low road, or the path least travelled, it makes no difference – and thus could pat yourself on the back for having free will and acted upon it, but in actual fact it was, ditto, an illusion. All paths were taken, in one world you took the high road, in another the low road, in a third world the road in-between, so no cigar, you do not pass ‘go’, you do not collect $200 free will dollars as there was no free will exhibited. 

I do have some unanswered questions. Say you have to decide between wearing that green dress or that red dress to – whatever. You set those thought chemical/physical wheels in motion. I’m not quite sure how the chemical/physical processes stay focused on the issue at hand. I mean, what if you hence decide to make scrambled eggs – nothing to do with the original green dress/red dress decision! Perhaps that’s a part of the ‘disease’ we collectively call mental illness.  

Then there’s the old hairy chestnut of if there is no free will, can people, should people, be held accountable for their behaviour? The fact that people are, obviously suggests that society as a whole has voted for the concept of free will. Whether that has ultimately a religious base (God gave us free will) I know not, but I’d bet - probably. 

Quite apart from that deterministic clockwork Universe scenario – what was set in motion at the Big Bang event 13.7 billion years ago, those initial fixed conditions, the set of particles and the laws and relationships that governed their interactions and evolution past to present to future – there are other slightly less plausible scenarios that also limit your free will if they reflect true reality.

For example, if you appear in your dreams as a character, or as a character in someone else’s dreams, your (or someone else’s) dream world representation of you, if questioned (not that that’s possible of course) about your free will, well you would reply that within the dream you were a part of (not that you would know you were a participant in a dream) that you were exhibiting free will. But of course it’s actually the dreamer’s mind that’s pulling the strings, and thus the characters (such as you) in a dream just dance to whatever tune is played out for them. No free will.

Dreams (wetware) aren’t the only form of virtual reality. There’s software, and computer generated simulations, like, say video games. The characters within, as per the dreams scenario, would tell you if they could that their actions exhibit their own free will. But of course that’s not true; the programmer and ultimately the player dictate the action and tell the character what to do. Again, there’s no free will actually exhibited by the characters.

Now, ask yourself what if our reality is actually the product of a higher reality wetware or software? That is, we’re dreamed or simulated but ultimately generated beings akin to the beings we dream about or we create via our software. We’re actually characters in someone else’s dream (let’s hope they don’t have an alarm clock set) or the product of someone (something) else’s software (let’s hope they don’t hit the delete key). If that’s so, then, we got no free will. We waltz to their wetware or software tune.

Lastly, although according to legend God gave us free will, let’s say for argument’s sake that there’s an afterlife and that we go to Heaven. Do you have free will in Heaven? That is, could you, of your own free will, commit a sin in Heaven?  

Conclusion – Regardless of what society believes, I believe free will is an illusion. Everything is preordained, much like that next scene in the movie you’ve already seen a half-dozen times before. You know what’s coming next and the characters you’re observing have no choice in the matter – no free will. Well, maybe that’s what life, the Universe, and everything is – something already recorded and set in stone. Or, like that example I gave above, “Life”, perhaps we’re a computer program or simulation with relationships and rules all set in motion, perhaps for the edification or amusement of that extraterrestrial computer programmer in the sky!

*Because of etiquette or protocol, Tycho Brahe, while in the company of royals so the story goes, apparently couldn’t, or wouldn’t excuse himself to go to the bathroom. As a result he suffered a ruptured bladder and snuffed it, getting a Darwin Award in the process. That was a hell of a way to die for king and country!

Free Will: Your Reality or Your Illusion? Part One

Introduction: “You have to believe in free will. You have no choice”. Seriously, if our Universe is a clockwork Universe, where causality rules absolutely (as both Newton and Einstein believed), then you do not have free will, only the illusion of having free will.

I will argue that if causality means anything, then everything is predetermined and therefore there is no free will. Causality rules – a cause causes an effect which in turn becomes the cause for a later effect which is hence the cause for an even later effect, and so on down the line. It’s an unbroken causality chain starting from an initial set of fixed conditions. The past determines the present which determines the future. If you knew the past to an absolute infinite amount of detail, then you know the future to that same degree of infinite detail, and free will doesn’t enter into things.

Our Universe could be a reflection, albeit on a far grander scale, of those computer-generated simulations, like “Life”. Start with a simple set of initial conditions and relationships, add several rules to the mix, press ‘enter’ or ‘go’ and see what happens. Such simulations can evolve into immense complexity, but the outcome – as far up the track as you wish to extrapolate – is 100% predetermined.

You can download and run “Life” on your home computer – in fact I understand some come automatically equipped with the software. In a similar way, cosmologists run simulations where they vary the various parameters thought to have existed close on the heels of the Big Bang event or era, along with the laws and constants of physics and see if the simulation evolves into something approaching the large scale structure of our actual, observed, Universe. Their fundamental assumption is of course that causality is absolute. If you start with ABC, you end up with XYZ – the first time, the last time, and all the in-between times.

If causality however is a sometime thing (like a woman is – sorry, I didn’t write the song, Gershwin did, so complain to him when you get to the afterlife part of your existence), then there must be (or probably is) such a thing as free will.

Now quantum physics as we currently understand it, is in-deterministic – it’s all based around probabilities, not certainties. Einstein never accepted that, believing to his dying day that there was some undiscovered deterministic or certainty principle or hidden factors that would restore or reaffirm causality in the realm of the quantum. If Einstein were alive today, he’s still be waiting. However, the indeterminacy and lack of causality in the realm of the quantum has nothing to do with free will.

Free will, if it exists, is a function of the mind; it’s all in the mind – the ways and means of consciousness to achieve a conscious choice.  Free will, if it exists, is ultimately then a function of brain biochemistry or neurochemistry. Chemistry is deterministic and causality driven. Chemistry is an atomic process, but chemistry is still macro compared with the micro of the quantum realm. If you combine sodium and chlorine in equal parts and only probably get table salt and thus every now and again you get quartz or stainless steel instead, well that’s just not the way the Universe works. That’s not the way chemistry, any chemistry including brain biochemistry or neurochemistry works.

Let’s explore the issue further.

Firstly, free will means making decisions that have no predetermined outcome. Free will is coming to that metaphorical fork in the road and having the ways and means or ability to choose one path or the other. Even choosing neither, doing nothing, is in itself a decision.

Decisions require conscious thought – well, maybe not. There’s something more fundamental at work here – physics and chemistry.

Let’s start with simple life forms, say microbes and plants.

Plants and microbes make decisions but clearly they do not have free will. They respond to external influences. Plant roots ‘decide’ to grow downwards with gravity; the plant ‘decides’ to grow upwards, against gravity. Phytoplankton ‘decide’ to move up and down in the ocean with respect to light intensity, and plants can ‘follow’ the Sun as it moves across the sky. Unicellular organisms ‘decide’ to reproduce when the environmental conditions are right. 

Even more complex organisms that we don’t normal associate with free will make decisions. A snail will decide to tuck into its shell with threatened. We may call it instinct, but its still decision making, albeit somewhat involuntary.

At what point does instinct or blind response to environmental stimuli morph into the appearance (real or illusionary) of free will?

And so we have, slightly higher up the evolutionary chain, a threatened organism will decide to fight or flee or hide or go into its shell. The response is not 100% instinctive; not apparently 100% predetermined. The organism chooses, and if it is not instinctive, then the decision required thought.

Decision making, instinctive or otherwise, has an awful lot to do with chemistry, and ultimately physics, because organisms are chemical structures, and chemistry is ultimately based on physics.

So, thought processes are ultimately chemical processes, ultimately routed in physics – we’re back to that micro world again!

Faced with a non-instinctive decision – fight or flee; red dress or green dress; scrambled eggs or boiled eggs – you have to think about it. That thought process sets into motion a chain of chemical and physical processes. It’s like you’ve pulled the handle on a slot machine - when everything stops and the numbers (or symbols) come up, that’s it bingo – decision made. But you had no actual control between setting the wheels in motion and the result. Your decision making was only an illusion of free will.

I repeat - once those chemical and physical processes are set into motion, you have no control over them – no say-so. You have no say-so in the reactions that happen, in the energies required to see those processes through to completion, what pathways electrons travel over your neural circuits.

Should that be surprising? Setting your brain aside for a moment, the rest of your body does not answer to what you want. In the exact same way you have no control over the natural chemical reactions that take place in your stomach when you dump a load of food into it, or for that matter any of the biochemistry that makes you tick. You don’t dictate to your body what pathways electrical impulses take when they blink your eyelids or control your heartbeat or make you twitch or even when you put one foot in front of the other.

Every molecule, atom and fundamental particle in your body does not answer to what you want, free will or no free will. You do not decide what they do! If you really had free will – willpower or mind-over-matter – you should be able to decide to control your aging process, or control your hair growth or colour. You can’t. You don’t really have free will.

You can only hold your breath for so long, or deprive yourself of sleep. While a relatively few can have the willpower to starve themselves to death when food is readily available, few could willingly die of thirst, and astronomer Tycho Brahe* notwithstanding, you can only put off going to the bathroom just so long and no longer. On a less gruesome note, how long can you prevent your eyelids from blinking?

If you have no control over the operations of your own body – its systems, organs, tissues, cells and biochemistry, why is the brain – including the mind, or that inner ‘You’ within you any different?

To be continued…