How to agree with atheists and believe in God at the same time
We will begin at the end of the beginning of the end...
I recently watched a bunch of videos on the atheist YouTube channel Cosmic Skeptic and found myself nodding along with everything he says. He says he’s been open-minded to God for years and goes into every debate with the possibility that he could be convinced.
Now if we agree on so much, how do I end up over here while he ends up over there?
If you’re not convinced of God, you have good reasons that I’m not going to take away from you.
Theists will jump to God as an explanation, but both you and I will agree that filling a gap with “God” doesn’t fill the hole. You can’t explain an unknown with another unknown.
Another big problem is the question of evil. Why would a good God create a world with suffering? Or you might ask, if God is all-knowing, and knows the future, how can we be held accountable for actions God already knew we’d commit? The way we tend to think about these questions is we put ourselves in God’s boots and ask what we would do if we were almighty creators. If we were to create the universe with living beings, how would we do it? Sure, you’re right, but I’ll posit this is the wrong approach to take with God.
Let’s start by saying God is something like the unknown. Instead of God being an explanation, we’ll just use God as another way of saying “we don’t know”. But if you believe in God, you likely believe in some outside force that has some potential influence over the world we do see. And this step creates the possibility for the supernatural. This God wouldn’t be “the universe”, or even the unknown, exactly, though “unknown” may be closer to the truth.
Placing God outside doesn’t seem to solve anything. Instead, it merely takes the problem of how we get something from nothing, and pushes it back. But even if we’re trying to answer the question of how any of this exists, we can’t let our search for a perfect answer prevent us from answering anything at all.
Think about how we grow up. We don’t go around flailing our arms, hitting people, jumping off bridges, setting things on fire, etc. until we get some cogent and believable argument for why we shouldn’t do those things. This is the classic problem that theists will often deploy against atheists. They’ll say that you can’t solve the is-ought problem without God. This would be a fun tangent to continue on, but I want to direct you in a slightly different direction, and it’s not going to be immediately obvious where I’m taking you.
We do actually start our lives by flailing our arms and hitting people. But when you were in the uterus, your kicks counted for almost nothing. You’re likely not flailing your arms like a newborn right now, and it’s not because someone offered you anything resembling a convincing argument. Instead, you stopped because flailing is tiring. You haven’t discovered anything resembling an ultimate answer to the universe. We aim to understand the universe and our role in as much detail as possible as we get older, but we act regardless. With every tick of the second hand on the clock, you still need to ask yourself: what do I do now? We live off of approximate solutions.
Back to God.
If God is outside, and has total control, then what we’re positing is hardly distinguishable from the simulation hypothesis. How do we know we’re in a simulation? How do we know we live in a world with a supernatural designer who can exist entirely outside any of our attempts at probing?
We have no clue what operating system this simulation is running on, etc. And even conceptualizing it as a simulation is depressing—like a cruel joke. But what if I were to offer you two pills: a red pill and a blue pill. If you take the red pill…
Anyhow, if it really is the case that we’re in a simulation, then what’s creating it? Another simulation? This sounds like the old Hindu argument. The student asks what holds up the earth. The teacher says it’s a turtle. And what’s that turtle standing on? Another turtle… it’s turtles all the way down. Could a universe with infinite numbers of turtles exist? Probably not.
How about this: we’ll make the snake eat its own tail, and that’s our universe. This way, the last turtle stands on top of the earth. So the earth is propped up by a series of turtles that ultimately stand on the earth.
Ponder, for a second, what this gives us. If this is how the turtles work, then we should look for turtle feet on our own planet. The same goes with the simulation. We’ll create a super-computer that simulates the universe as it actually exists, and it will be the universe that birthed us into existence, and now we’re the gods… tada! Problem solved.
Maybe you’re not totally, convinced, but stay with me. We are the snake eating its own tail. What is the snake made of? It’s made of snake. Ah… but we’re not done, and worse… we’re frustrated. As soon as we imagine the universe as a self-eating snake, we see ourselves outside this snake, and what’s this snake made of? And in which world does it exist? Don’t we still have a ton of complexity left to explain? And, fine… but we’ve managed to get quite far and let’s not forget to admire what we’ve accomplished. After all, we can do something with this model!
Eric Weinstein sees the universe as the hand that draws itself. His view is we’re not going to get off the planet with rockets. Instead, we’ll be saved by new physics, and not the brutal economics of rocketry. It’s still unclear how this snake/turtle/hand model plays out in the real world, but we have enough of an idea that we can start to do some work.
Our simulation hypothesis may not turn out to be real, but that doesn’t matter. We need different propositions for explaining the universe. And we need this kind of adversarial arms race between explanations. Sometimes the hare appears to be ahead, but it falls asleep and the turtle ends up winning. Sometimes the turtle appears to be chugging along while the hare is asleep at the starting line, but it quickly overtakes the turtle when it wakes up.
My point is, we’ve got two paths for the salvation of mankind. The first is to take the physics we already have, and build on it. This has been a fruitful approach since around the enlightenment. And the second is to say “hold on just one second”, and realize that if we do live in a simulation, then maybe that simulation runs from within itself in some way. And if so, the ultimate answer is not out there, but already inside of our universe in some way.
This view of simulations running on top of simulations already plays out in our world at many levels. We have explanations that work until they don’t. Newtonian physics works until it doesn’t. We didn’t throw out Newton when his explanations stopped working. And we didn’t fix Newton either. Newton is fine, and we’ve kept him. Instead, we recognized that Newton was a useful approximation of the truth, but a new approach had to be taken if we wanted a better approximation.
This pattern repeats in computers. We have programming languages like JavaScript. The language can do a lot on your computer, but not everything. In order to understand the computer “universe” as it actually exists, you need to go down a level. JavaScript runs inside a web browser written in C and C++. And this explanation takes you pretty far until you realize that there’s yet another reality underneath you: Windows or Mac. So now you’re dealing with the OS. You peel back another layer and now you’re looking at a processor and hard drive. You peel once more and now you’re looking at electrons and atoms. You peel again and what’s this physics running on? A simulation? And what’s this simulation running on? JavaScript in your web browser?
Are you impressed? Have I explained God while solving the problem of evil while also explaining free will and how it is that we find Jesus in our hearts? Eternal salvation? A model of the universe that gives us an almighty creator that we are subject to even though we ourselves are somehow involved in such a creator’s existence?
Are you frustrated to have gone on a ride that ends where it started?
Related:
I think God does solve the problem. I don’t see a good reason for assuming God knows everything nor do I see a reason to assume God is ‘good’ in a way we can understand. I think the correct assumption is that humans do not understand God and both his intentions and morality are beyond our comprehension. When we can live for millions of years and can cross from galaxy to galaxy, and can create stars and living creatures, we might begin to have some understanding of the creator of the universe. Maybe.
I would say, do not look for Christ, look for the truth. You will meet him along the way =)