The Unfalsifiable God

For the last few weeks, I've been drilling down on Twitter, as part of a multi-front marketing strategy for the book. 

I'm using that form of media to keep engaged with conversations around Many Worlds theory, and it's opening me up to where that conversation is going on around the world.  I've also been dropping in with on-topic comments here and there when people seem interested in the multiverse concept.  Along with my comments, I drop a link to the book on the publisher's site.  It's like virtually going door to door, making me a bit like a faith-and-science Mormon/Jehovah's Witness.

"Hi, I'm from the Church of Jesus Christ Getting Along With Science!  I'm wondering if you've heard about how faithful people can be more open to theoretical physics!"

It's a tich more aggressive than I like to be, but one does what one must.  Some folks have responded negatively, which is their right.  "I can't believe you're pitching your book to me," said one.  "I'll flay the skin from your body and suck the marrow from your bones," said another.  

Door to door hasn't changed since I worked for Greenpeace, evidently.

But others have been polite, because though I'm there, I'm not pushy.  Still others have wanted to chat, and some have been downright grateful, and have bought the book.

Where it's more intriguing is seeing through Twitter where Many Worlds cosmology is getting "play" around the world.  It's a sustained and consistent thread in all contemporary scientific literature, but it has purchase beyond that.

Like today, for example, when the "tea party" portion of the Twitterverse has lit up with people sharing an article by conservative commentator Dennis Prager.  Prager attended a conference of physicists, and came away with a chip on his shoulder about multiverse cosmology.

His take on it, which he wrote up for the National Review, is familiar.  The Many Worlds hypothesis suggests realities that are beyond our capacity to observe.  Being a deeply conservative Christian, he takes this as justification for an attack on atheistic uses of the multiverse.

"Your atheistic multiverse is just like faith," Prager notes.  "It can't be empirically proven!  Gotcha!"

This is a standard counter to the Many Worlds hypothesis, one that I've seen used by faithful folk.  If you're making your primary argument for God's existence based on design, then the multiverse needs to be resisted.  It's the whole "anthropic" argument, the idea that our time and space are intelligently fine-tuned for life.

But to my ears, Prager's approach doesn't work particularly well.  "Hah!  You believe in something unfalsifiable, just like me! "   The problem with that line of attack seems pretty self-evident.

As a line of attack.  But everything doesn't have to be an attack.  Really.  It doesn't.  

Why not view our growing similarity as a place of connection?  Where one can say, you know what, you and I are not so different?

Probability, Gambling, and God

As part of my tendency to read as widely and as wildly as I possibly can, the last few weeks have been spent nibbling away at Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise.   It's a fascinating book about statistics and probability, from a statistician whose track record in predicting American elections is remarkably accurate.

Though he's despised by the pundit-class, particularly those on the right wing who've been recently stymied by his predictions, Silver comes across as remarkably nonpartisan.   He cares about data, and being as accurate as possible.  Period.

One thing I most certainly did not expect as I read through Silver, though, was just how much theology would be involved.   This goes well beyond the opening chapters, where he spends page after page discussing the Reformation.  It goes beyond his quoting Proverbs.

Silver is a Bayesian statistician, meaning his approach to interpreting data is probabilistic and flexible.  Bayesian statistics derive their name from Thomas Bayes, an eighteenth century Presbyterian minister/mathematician.  Bayes created a theorem that calculates the likelihood of things, a theorem that he derived from a theological treatise on the nature of God's sovereignty.

This was beyond cool, and it took my reflections to interesting places.  Silver's explication of probability theory and Bayes essay on the nature of the divine play out interestingly against the theological implications of Many Worlds theory.

Silver spends a great deal of time talking about probability in the context of gambling.  I'm not a gambling man myself.  First, it doesn't float my boat, and second, I've watched gambling destroy too many lives and relationships.  More on that another time.

But there's one wager I know that might be interestingly informed by a fusion of Bayesian thinking and the Many Worlds Interpretation.   It's the wager suggested by Blaise Pascal.  That classic wager is also itself a probabilistic statement.  To woefully oversimplify it, Pascal's Wager suggests that there is nothing to be lost by believing in a God if God does not exist, and much to be potentially be lost if you do not believe and God turns out to be there.  Therefore, belief is a more rational position.

This has always struck me as a bit weak, if only because it seems too self-interested and abstracted.

Applying the Bayesian Theorem to belief in the probability of a God is a related but different wager.  Bayes laid out the probability of a thing in terms of an equation, which is perhaps one reason most human beings struggle with it.  I fiddled around with a spreadsheet for a bit the other day, trying to  figure out what elements might make for an interesting probabilistic proof.   What factors should be considered in calculating the probability of God?   Hmm.  Good question.

Faith as a transcultural phenomenon?  Sure.  But  the absence of empirically measurably evidence needs to be in there.  So do the belief patterns of scientists.  I mucked around for a little bit, assigning factors and percentages.  I was as conservative as possible, and as contrarian to my own faith-position as possible.  With the most pessimistic assumptions used as primary metrics, I ended up with a rather low probability for God's existence.  Not "impossible."  Just "highly improbable."

This was not news.  It's why faith requires a Kierkegaardian existential leap, eh?

Where the equation got interesting was when I took it beyond the assumption of one space and time, and into the multiverse.  As Stephen Hawking spitballed it, there might be...at least...10 to the 500 discrete universes.  Assuming they're not functionally infinite.   What I found?

Taking a Bayesian probabilistic equation and playing it out across ten to the 500 iterations, the answer is pretty much always yes.

The House always wins, baby.  The House always wins.

Dealing in Absolutes

With the manuscript away and in the hands of my editor, I've found myself re-engaging with the Believer's Guide.  Some if it came as I wove in the excellent edits plugged in by my wife.  You think you've read a thing through enough to catch every typo...but no...

Some of it has come as I have seen that goldarned fifth chapter for what it was.  Ack.  It's a clumsy flesh golem of a Frankenchapter, knit together out of the bits and pieces of essays and bloggery as I struggled to reassemble a stolen manuscript.

But mostly, the concepts stirred about afresh as I explored the heady fusion of a Many Worlds cosmology and classical theology.

When you come back to something after a while, those renewed eyes mean you can enter into a conversation with yourself, challenge yourself, and reconsider your thinking.  In particular, I found myself wondering about one of the sustained themes of the book: the challenge to absolutism.   Drawing from the joyous, endless generativity and freedom implied by a multiverse creation, a core theme of the book involves challenging the idolatrous certainties of both literalist fundamentalism and militant atheism.   And, frankly, any system that assumes that it's got the one final answer.

Absolutism bad, as Multiverse Hulk might say.

But wait, I say.  I do make claims about truth.  Throughout the book, and particularly in it's exploration of ethics, I present a series of arguments for both Love and God.  Throughout, I make the case that the ethic of radical compassion is The Essential Law governing sentient beings, and that love is the essence of God and God's self-expression.

I also argue for the existence of a Creator, The Ground of Being that is and should be the focus of our existence.

So, isn't that an absolute?  Seriously.  Isn't that just the same thing I rail against?  I mulled that one over for a little bit.  Took a good long walk on it, in the brisk cold of an evening.

And on two significant levels, the answer was no.

First, faith---the orienting of one's existence towards God--is not the same thing as orienting oneself towards a finite object or a neatly, cleanly defined system or pattern of understanding.   If you think for a moment you've entirely grasped the full nature of what you have come into encounter with when you stand in the Presence, then you've missed the point.  The thing you grasp cannot be the completeness of it.  It cannot ever be, for God's completeness is without end or limit.

The rigid certainties of the absolutist bear no resemblance to faith.

And love?  Love...understood not as emotion, but as the state of seeking and engaging in a compassionate relation with another free being...is also not an absolute.  It can't be, not if it's authentic, because the compassionate interplay between two free beings is not a finite thing.  Neither is bounded or delimited or set in stone.  Neither is an object.  Neither is an "it," and both are "Thou," as Martin Buber would have put it.

So the rigid certainty of the absolutist bears no resemblance to love, either.

The Worlds

The worship focus today was on Mark, and that painful, challenging teaching about divorce, so my pastoral energies were poured into that interpretation.  

When you just know a passage will bring tears...Oy.   It's so hard to preach those.

Which meant that I missed out on a detail in my Epistle reading.  In Hebrews 1:2, which we discussed in the Bible study afterwards, a term used to describe the universe in the intricate, erudite Greek of that complex book was  αἰῶνας.     That's aeonas, in the non-Cyrrilic.    Here's the funny thing, or at least it's funny for me given all my thinking and writing over the last year or so.

Aeon is the word for all of time and space.   So aeonas is the plural of all of time and space.

Which, on the one hand, is impossible.  Absurd.  A plural everything?  The "everythings?"

On the other, that's the multiverse in a nutshell.

Which is kind of cool.

Many Worlds and The Meteorite Conundrum

One of the things that I've found most interesting as I've delved into the scientific foundations of the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum theory is the guy responsible for coming up with the concept in the first place.

Hugh Everett III was an interesting, complex human being.   He was a bright, fascinating Princeton physics Ph.D., a polymath with wide ranging interests.   He was also prone to indulging in food and drink, and died relatively young of a heart attack.   Although he was an atheist, he appeared to believe in something that he called "quantum immortality." This involved the belief that because the universe was, in fact, a multiverse, then one could never actually die.

If all probability is materially actualized, then death can never come.  At the last instant, something will happen that continues your consciousness.  Even if that thing is insanely, wildly, impossibly unlikely, it will occur.  Or so the idea in its most essential form goes.  

It made it a whole bunch easier to eat and drink yourself to death.

I've ruminated on related topics before, particularly at the miracle of identity cohesion in such a wildly churning universe.   Being of a somewhat contrarian bent, I find myself thinking about Everett's quantum immortality in the inverse.  Sure, some version of myself could continue infinitely in a multiverse.  But of equal likelihood within this cosmology is the extermination of myself at any instant.

Amid the functional infinity of universes, there is a "me," identical in every respect.  That me is so me it could be me.  I could not tell the difference.

Approaching the back of the head of that "me" at high subsonic speed is a meteor.  It's about four centimeters in diameter, what's left of it after a descent through the atmosphere.   It's mostly comprised of superheated heavy metals.   In a fraction of a second, it will punch through the roof of my little suburban house and down through ceiling of my study.   Splat, will go my head, rather messily.   End of my existence.

If the universe is the functional infinity that Everett, Deutsch, and others have suggested, then this would seem to by necessity happen to some variant of me at every instant of my life, and at every instant of every possible life that I might possibly live.   Taken together, those moments of my annihilation would be endless in and of themselves, a boundless splatter of skull shards and partially ionized grey matter.  

And yet I am s


















Kidding.    What strikes me (heh) about this is the remarkable miracle of my own continued existence.  I do not have to still be living in this moment.  And yet I am.  It is remarkable.  Cause for thanksgiving, even.  And for gratitude.

Quantum Immortality and Everett's Paradox

Yesterday, after a day of sociology and anthropology, I motored over to my in-laws on the SuperBee (what my little guy thinks I should call the Suzuki).

There, I chatted a bit with the mother-in-law about life and class.  Then, over a beer or two, I talked about waveform collapse and quantum mechanics with my physicist father in law.  It was a followon to a conversation with someone who kindly agreed to provide input to my writing, and it was...helpful.

Though temporarily sidetracked by writing and preparation for my D.Min. classes, the drafted manuscript for the Believer's Guide to the Multiverse continues to burble away happily on the back burner.   A few souls have read it so far, and feedback has been...well...the way feedback is when you put out that first draft of anything.

It's always a bit daunting, exposing the first tender shoots of a manuscript to outside inputs.   It's your baby, this tender delicate interweaving of ideas and hopes and concepts.  You've pored over it, loved it, struggled with it, and reached a point where you and your muse are almost content with it.

And then reality intrudes.  It's necessary.  It's a good thing.  A critical read over something is vital, and particularly a critical read from an expert eye.   For my little exploration of the implications of the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, the expert eye needed was from someone with a Ph.D. in physics...and, being Presbyterian, finding such a soul in my congregation was achievable.  

The inputs were both significant and useful, and will strengthen the manuscript, once I've stopped quietly sobbing to myself.  One particularly helpful insight was that in plowing through the works of contemporary "popularized" physics that gave my layman's mind insight into the multiverse, I'd managed to truck right past the physicist who came up with the idea in the first place.  Not a mention.  Not a peep.   A good catch, that.

The physicist in question was Hugh Everett, whose 1957 dissertation provides much of the conceptual foundation for the Many Worlds hypothesis/interpretation in quantum theory.    Everett was an interesting fish on many fronts, and some more exploration of his thinking will be plugged into the manuscript once time allows.

Today I found myself ruminating on one of the more peculiar elements of Everett's personal thought: his belief in what was subsequently called "quantum immortality," which arises from an odd variant of the Shroedinger's Cat thought experiment, from the perspective of the cat.  The "quantum suicide" thought experiment involves a weapon pointed at a tester.  The weapon is triggered by a quantum event, which is essentially random.  If it occurs, the weapon goes off, and the tester dies.  If does not, the weapon does not discharge.   In the Many Worlds approach to quantum events, the tester...or some iteration of the tester...will always survive.  The termination of consciousness will never occur.   It's interesting to think about, but it got me going in another direction.

The obvious limitation of this thought experiment is that the Many Worlds interpretation does not suggest a binary set of options.  It suggests, instead, that from every moment arise a functionally infinite set of variant realities.

For some reason, this got me thinking of Zeno's Paradox.  That classical brain bender, if you recall, notes that in order to travel a distance, you must first travel half that distance.  As any distance can be halved, the number of "halves" you'd have to travel would be infinite...meaning, technically, you shouldn't ever be able to get anywhere.

If the multiverse is as Everett suggests...what is the self?  That's always a fuddler, of course, even in our linear time and space.  Where is the "I" that exists in the flow of time?

But what is self if quantum splits occur from instant to instant?  If from every instant comes not just one but infinite iterations of every possible variant of probability, which one of the umpty-bazillion variants of ourself that pours from the prior moment is the "real" one?

On the one hand, that's an easy one.  Why, we are, of course.

Yet it makes the reality of our being...that we are, that we cohere, that we somehow have integrity as selves...feel even more astounding.  Miraculous, even.