Consider these two school math questions.
1. Juliana had 18 carrots. Noah ate six. How many carrots does Juliana have?
2. Juliana had 18 carrots. Noah ate Juliana. Where is Juliana's God now?
Only the first is a real math question, but neither is answerable. In the first, we must make assumptions about whose carrots got eaten. In the second, we know who was eaten, but we must assume that Juliana's God not only exists, but also cares about Juliana and protects her from being eaten.
God, or gods as the case may be, is not just the expression of the humans' fear about the future. The great asymmetry about time, as we all know, is that we never really get answers to any such questions, only half-answers. This is a more likely explanation for religion: as beings who occasionally experience brief intervals of rationality, we hope that rational answers are possible.
Davros experiencing a setback in one of his experiments
If we ask whether our consciousness exists in some form after death, we only discover the answer if it is an affirmative. If I ask whether I would have been happier to have gone into my first love—designing H-bombs—instead of science, the only way to get an answer would be to go back in time. Half an answer is not an answer at all. When one sci-fi show (now sadly replaced by another dull propaganda lecture hour) talked about how the fictional mad scientist Davros created a “Reality Bomb”, which neutralizes the charge of subatomic particles and thereby annihilates entire galaxies, I found myself thinking, just for a second: what an interesting idea!
Of course I am only kidding about the H-bombs. But if someone contemplating a career in science asked me what they should do, I wouldn't tell them what choice they should make. The only answer I would have is that science in America is now dying; for a young person trying to base a career on it could be a mistake. Science is no longer a viable career path in a society where the conclusions we reach are preordained by the wishes of our increasingly evil politicians and bureaucrats.
If, for example, the government wanted us to discover that eating bananas caused global warming, that is what they would fund. Anyone who found evidence for it would move ahead in the rat race and anyone who discovered evidence to the contrary would be forced out. If the government decides, as they're doing now, that curing diseases is not as important as solving one of their imaginary social problems, then they will not fund attempts to cure a disease. They will only fund more clinical trials. Sooner or later the laws of statistics guarantee a false positive result, a drug will be approved, and everyone will agree to pretend the problem is solved. Anyone who disagrees is a “denier.”
Now, it is conceivable, however improbable, that even the American government, as much as it loves to bomb things, might not really want a Reality Bomb and my alternative life as a Davros character would not have worked out. We would have to solve the riddle of time before we can know for sure.
The other reason is that the humans' deity isn't just some guy who somehow managed to feed five hundred people with two pieces of bread and a fish, or whatever it was, presumably by making really small fish sandwiches. It's not just some trick of language whereby somebody mistranslated “walk by the water” as “walk on the water.” In a real, scientific sense, this deity is how the humans perceive the laws of nature.
If this country ends up a basket case like every other country in history that followed the course we're on, at least there is an explanation: they violated the universe's commandments. The laws of nature told us this would happen and we didn't listen.
Years ago in Sunday School I was told that God is all around us. Likewise, the great theologian Paul Tillich said that God was the ground of being. As the humans' concept of God becomes more distant and more abstract, the two ideologies inevitably converge: it is increasingly apparent that both religious people and atheists are talking about the same thing. What is the meaning of ‘ground of being’—or, for that matter, the Word—if not ‘the omnipresent and eternal laws of nature’? Where we differ is in whether we believe that the laws of nature care about the humans. That is why today I almost—but not quite—envy the religious in their optimism of Easter, which tells them that there is such a thing as hope. For us atheists, today will always just be another Sucky Friday.
apr 09 2023, 7:28 am
