The Evidence

A standard refrain I'll hear when chatting with folks who are skeptical about the existence of God is that there's just no evidence for a Creator. The universe is a deep and cold place, almost as deep and cold as the hearts of the human beings that inhabit our tiny little speck of nothing orbiting a nondescript yellow sun in a quiet fringe of an unremarkable spiral galaxy. Where is the hand of the Maker?

Further, where is the work of a gracious God in a world in which children starve by the thousands each day, where women are raped and mutilated in the Congo, and where ignorance and self-interest govern the lives of the faithful and unfaithful alike? How could a just God tolerate this [poop]?

The challenge, then, is twofold. It seeks both empirical proof and ethical proof. My responses to that need tend not to be the same as my Bibliocentric co-religionists. What's the point of quoting scripture to folks who don't recognize it as a source of authority? It's like trying to persuade Ken Ham of evolution by quoting from the Origin of Species. Instead, I tend to feel as follows:

1) I find existence itself to be a marvelous evidence of God. In it's complexity, beauty, and deep inscrutability, the universe in which we find ourselves is an astounding thing. It evokes both awe and a bit of knee-trembling, even...and sometimes particularly...among atheists of a poetic mindset. Our spacetime is neither static nor does it appear to have come into being in a way that is scientifically comprehensible. Our physics can only go so far back. That things just plain ol' exist is a marvel, and points to a reality that transcends the boundaries of what we can empirically know.

The way that things are...the intricate interweaving of physical laws and structures...also directly speaks to the connectedness of all things. Matter and energy and gravity and light are all part of a great and complex dance.

2) I find sentience to be a marvelous evidence of God. What am I? I know I must be, because Descartes told me so. But the self that is typing this now is an odd and marvelous thing. It has its roots in a biological system, in the complex processes of an organic neural network mounted atop a slightly sedentary bipedal form. It frames its conceptual grasp of the world through an array of abstract symbolic constructions that are derived from a sociocultural foundation. Yet it is more than an ephemeral and mechanistic process. It is. It has being. I have being. As do you.

This self that I am is does not exist in isolation. My awareness is both particular to myself as an individual and formed by connection to others and to the broader universe of being. Interconnectedness does not just define the physical universe we perceive. It defines us.

3) I find the ethics shared by all sentient beings to be marvelous evidence of God. Well, with a rather significant caveat. There are competing norms governing human behavior, obviously. There are the norms of coercive power and material self-interest, which have played themselves out across the history of humankind in some rather unpleasant ways. There is the norm of tribalism, the bond formed by genetics and blood and language and culture, which has frequently involved the hatred of the stranger and the Other.

But against these destructive ethics there is an alternative, one that surfaces as a strong and consistent meme among the prophets and the mystics of every major religious tradition. For those who have a sense of the presence of God, there is the awareness that there is more to us than the mechanics and desires of individual persons. There is the heart-knowledge that the seemingly insurmountable existential boundary between particular selves is illusory. There is the spiritual insight the joys and hurts of others are not just present for us in the abstract, but a part of who we are in ways that are radically defining. It is an awareness that underlying that ethic is a broader purpose to sentient existence, one that transcends not just the particular self, but also culture and species.

I am Christian because that ethos of living into a gracious interconnectedness is absolutely central to the teachings and life of Jesus of Nazareth. It defines his people. I see it further etched deep into the teachings in Torah, and in the prophetic call for justice...not just for "us," but for the Other. It presents an ethic that both reflects and harmonizes with the nature of being, one that is both self-evidently good and in defiance of the horrors that humanity inflicts on itself.

For some of the skeptical, the absence of miracles and wonders and signs and the mortality and brutality of humankind are evidence of God's absence. I understand and sympathize with this. Our mortality as beings, though, means little in the face of the interwoven nature of existence. It's a little daunting being so small and fragile, but then again, we're more than we seem. As to the brutality of humankind...well...how is this evidence of God's nonexistence? We have, in all of the world's traditions that reflect an awareness of the transcendent, ethics that radically resist the hatreds that lead us to coerce and abuse and destroy.

In the annual Jewish celebration of Passover, there comes a point in the ritual meal when the folks gathered round the table remind themselves of every detail in the story of deliverance from Egypt. In response to each moment of grace, the response is: dayenu. Meaning, in the Hebrew, "it is enough." There is in that statement a thankfulness for every moment, in and of itself, as an evidence of God's being and nature.

We have the marvel that is creation, and to that I say, dayenu. We have in the heart of faith an ethic that, if followed, brings healing and hope and joy, and to that I say, dayenu.

There is more, of course. Much, much more. But even these things are enough.

Maybe I'm just easy.

Manifold Providence and Omniscience

Last month, I edited and reposted my own peculiar pomo-scholastic "proof" of the existence of God. Manifold Providence, as I like to call it, is a mild little heresy, an experimental jazz fusion of multiverse cosmology and classical theology. But hey, it keeps me entertained. It's nice to have hobbies.

A significant part of this little oddment rests on a theological assumption about the nature of God, and for some reason, I feel like blabbering on about it today. As a card-carrying Calvinist, I understand God to be both omniscient and omnipotent. There is nothing that God does not know, and God's creative power knows no limits or boundaries.

Given that foundation, God by necessity must know not only what is, but also must by definition know what might be. If omniscience is to be asserted in any meaningful way, then God knows not only the results of the choices we will make, but also the results of the choices that we do not make. Arguing otherwise delimits God to creation, which is a Biblical and conceptual nono. And we wouldn't want to do that, would we?

If divine knowledge is complete and not simply conceptual, then the reality of those paths we have not taken stands before God in the same manner of our current reality. That we do not and cannot know all of the different potential ways we might exist before God does not mean that God is not aware of us, in all of the ways that we both are and might have been ourselves.

For God to be God, God would be aware of an infinite array of possibilities, the fullness of all that could conceivably be. The unfathomable divine mystery would include a boundless omniverse of realities, some familiar, some impossibly strange, some with structures of physics and spacetimes that are completely different and antithetical to our own.

Omniscience, then, seems to require an infinite multiverse. An infinite multiverse, as I've argued in the link above, gives solid conceptual purchase to an ancient argument for the existence of God. The two concepts are interwoven and mutually self-supporting.

This may appear to be a delightfully cozy tautology, a line of reasoning that depends on itself for it's own proof. That's kinda the same thing fundamentalists do when they argue for the Bible's authority from the authority of the Bible. Then again, I'm fairly sure that a tautology by definition must be finite. As what is being described incorporates the infinite, it can't be a self-referential feedback loop. The conceptual integrity of the...

Oh. Wait. You're nodding off.

Sorry. I do go on and on.

I guess the broader question in all of this is...well...so what? Even if this is true, what could it possibly have to do with me? That, I think, is something I'll need to deal with another time.

Anselm's Ontological Proof 2.0

Proving the existence of God is just not something anyone bothers with these days. It's an old, stale, and dated exercise, the kind of pointless pseudo-intellectual dithering formerly undertaken by medieval monks after they'd delved too deeply into their daily allotment of ale.

Sure, fundamentalists claim to be able to do it, but their efforts generally involve a combination of 1) quoting the Bible 2) quoting the Bible some more and 3) assuming bananas were designed for human hands. These things make us sad.

Moderates and progressives have pretty much entirely given up on such quixotic efforts. What's the point? We come into knowledge of God through faith, not through reason. God exists in mystery, and trying to "prove" the transcendent is like trying to "prove" that feeling of awe you get when your first child moves in your belly. Some things just ain't empirical.

Having said that, I am now compelled to offer up my carefully reasoned proof of the existence of God. We small church pastors have time on our hands for stuff like this.

To set the stage, let's discuss the possibility of a multiverse cosmology.

"Quoi?" you say, suddenly speaking French. You catch yourself, and say "What? What does that even mean?" Well, in order to grasp this rather painfully abstract concept, perhaps the best way to approach it is to think about how we understand the universe. The realm of existence in which we find ourselves is bounded by four dimensional spacetime. "You're not helping," you say.

Fair enough. Let's go through the dimensions for a moment. Zero-dimensional objects are singularities, infinitely small "points." A bit like the dot below...only infinitely bitty:



A one-dimensional object can be conceptualized either in terms of Ann Coulter, or more traditionally, a line. It's infinitely larger than a point, as an infinite number of points can exist across it's span:



A two-dimensional object is a plane, which contains an infinite number of lines within itself:



A three-dimensional object is a solid, which, again, contains an infinite number of planes:



Here's where I've always hung up conceptually. As we move into considering four dimensional "objects," most theoretical cosmologies describe something that expands spatially outward from a cube, taking up infinitely more "space." This has always struck me as...well...silly, particularly given that the fourth dimension is empirically staring us right in the face. Rather than noodling around in theoretical folderol, why not just call it the way it self-evidently is: the fourth dimension is time. "Tesseracts," as some theoreticians call 4D objects, are nothing more than three-dimensional objects put into motion:



Apply change to a 3D object, and at every instant, it is infinitely different from the moment before...while simultaneously remaining completely dependent on the 3D object that "came before." Philosophically, the seemingly infinite nature of change across space-time was perhaps earliest noted in Zeno's Paradox, which I always thought would make an excellent excuse for showing up late to work. "You know, according to Aristotle, I shouldn't even be here at all." This only works in academe, I fear.

As physics goes deeper into the nature and structure of spacetime, what they're finding is that that the structure and movement of spacetime itself integrates seeming randomness into itself. Predictive models just can't seem to quite capture exactly how change will occur, even in some apparently simple systems.

What some cosmologists think...although it is admittedly and by necessity entirely within the realm of speculation...is that the universe we perceive is in fact just a single manifestation of an infinite array of spacetimes, within which all possibilities for being are manifested. To the spatial dimensions and to temporality we would then add potentiality as an aspect of the structure of the universe.

By that line of reasoning, there could be universes that vary from our own in impossibly minute ways, by a single twitch of a subatomic particle. There could be more significant variances, like the universe in which Sam Harris is a closeted lesbian who sings lead vocals for a megachurch praise team in Topeka, Kansas. Then there would be universes that had radically different structures from our own, in which the very physics that ordered them was different.

While that all exists within the realm of theoretical cosmology...we can no more truly grasp it's depth than we can truly grasp the nature of singularity...I think the possibility of such a "multiverse" or "omniverse" or "allverse" is likely. Shoot, if you believe in the omniscience and omnipotence of God, I'd argue that's it's even necessary theologically. That, however, is another argument for another time.

If you are open to a multiverse cosmology, in which all possibility of being is manifested, then you must also by necessity be open to the possibility of the existence of God. Why, you may ask?

Well, because an omniverse cosmology effectively eliminates the only valid objection to St. Anselm's ontological proof for the existence of God. As just saying that probably doesn't clear things up for you, let me unpack that a tad.

St. Anselm, a philosopher/archbishop from the tenth century, was famous for arguing that God's existence was necessary because God was that than which nothing greater can be conceived. As Anselm conceptualized it, God must exist. His line of reasoning was as follows: That which exists is inherently greater than that which does not. If God only existed as a concept within the human intellect, then God would not be "that than which nothing greater can be conceived." Therefore, God must exist. The obvious problem with that is that...well...we can think up many things. That doesn't mean that they by necessity exist. There is a difference between possibility and actuality.

Unless...unless... you think that the universe is a multiverse of infinite possibility. In a multiverse, suddenly Anselm's ontological argument has purchase, and the empiricist counterargument becomes essentially irrelevant.

Within this cosmological framework, an omniscient and omnipotent being...of God...becomes not just probable, but likely.

Intelligent Design?

Intelligent design "theory" is neither faith nor science, but a malformed hybrid mutant that betrays both.

That said, I believe in intelligent design. I believe that all of creation was fashioned by God's hands, and that with the eyes of faith we can see the subtle imprint of God's touch in the world around us.

But intelligent design is not a scientific theory. Theories are assertions that are tested against the proofs of empirical evidence. A theory is accepted as true--or proven false--based on whether a series of tests or evidences support it or poke it full of holes. That's the scientific method.

It is NOT the method of faith. A theory can be proven right, but it can also be proven wrong. Our faith in God as creator cannot be like that. It is unshakable. It is NOT a testable hypothesis. Faith, real faith, is not built upon the proofs of empirical evidence. It we have to argue faith from a series of mutually supportive logical proofs, then we do not have faith. As the Apostle Paul says, "Hope that is seen is not hope." As the Apostle Paul says, "We look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen." As the letter to the Hebrews says, "Our faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen."

What we know in faith to be true is not science, and it has no place pretending to be science.