I Don't Know by Philip E. Graves - HTML preview

Part III.  Theology

Faith, is a knowledge within the heart, beyond the reach of proof.

--Kahlil Gibran

An honest man's the noblest work of God.

--Alexander Pope

An honest God is the noblest work of man.

--Robert G. Ingersoll

Charles’ “Test of Faith,” and the Morality of Atheism

“Yes,” said Charles, “Dave has always been more relaxed about the whole topic of theology than I ever was.  Michelle, you recall when I joined our church?”

“I was pretty young, Charles, because you were around fourteen or so, right?”

“I was fourteen when I joined the church and I really didn’t know what I was doing.  I guess in the back of my mind, religion just did not register with me, even then...joining was more about that charismatic preacher than real belief…remember him, Michelle?  Anyway, I recall seeing the person who was being baptized ahead of me coming out of the water and thinking ‘I can see through her sheet!’” Charles laughed, but E did not seem to think it was too funny and gave him a look that reminded me of the look that Michelle often sent in my direction.

“Gradually, over the next six months or so,” Charles continued, “I began to have doubts, at first specifically about our religion, then more broadly.  I began to dislike our narrow little protestant sect because it preached, or it always seemed that way, that everybody else was going to hell.  Catholics, Jews, Muslims, even most Protestants…all of ’em.  It occurred to me that it was pretty arrogant to think that we somehow had lucked into the one true faith…and pretty statistically unlikely to boot.”

“You were always a little rebellious Charles, at least in some ways…in other ways, Dave has been more rebellious as a wild-and-crazy single guy out West!” Michelle smiled at me, with only the faintest hint of disapproval on her face.  I did have fun...but I tried not to hurt people and I tried not to get hurt, not always successfully either way.

“I guess…but for a long time I was an agnostic…I figured it was all set up so it couldn’t be proven, anyhow.  So, I figured, why not just accept the fact that we can’t know and be done with the topic?  But, the key thing at the time that prevented me from going all the way to atheism was that I didn’t really like the personalities of the people I knew at that age who were atheists.  They seemed both obnoxious and smug…and they made fun of believers, something I was not willing to do, at least not at that time.”

“When did that change?” asked Michelle, who knew that it did change.

“It started to change when I devised a test, a test to get ‘fence-sitters’ like me off the fence.  I had always thought that, pardon the expression, it was a chicken-shit position to be an agnostic.  I mean, God either exists or He doesn’t, right?  Take a stand!”

“So how does your test work?” asked Michelle.

“It is sort of a cruel variant of something called ‘Pascal’s Wager.’  Pascal took the view that it was basically smart to believe in God, because if you believed and you were wrong, there was no big harm…but if you disbelieved and you were wrong, there might be major penalties, hell and all that.”

“What sort of ‘cruel variant’?” asked Michelle.

“Ok…you ready?  Here it is: imagine two buttons, a green button and a red button, in front of you on a desk, kind of like a stop-go sign, but where there is no yellow light, no in-between.  The green button, on your left, signifies “There is an All-Knowing, All-Powerful, and All-Loving God of the traditional sort.”  The red button, on your right, signifies “There is no such God.”

“Well, pretty harmless to push the green button, on your left, huh?” I chimed in, feeling very Pascal-ish.

“It would be under the simple rules of Pascal, Dave” said Charles, “but not the way that I play the game!”

“How’s that?” asked Michelle.

“First, you have to push one of the buttons…if you refuse, you die a slow and agonizingly painful death.  Second, and this part has to be a little hypothetical, if you push the wrong button—the untrue button—you die instantly.  If you say there is a God of the usual type, and there is not such a God, you die.  If you say there is no such God, and there is, you also die.”

“Hmmm…quite a test,” I murmur.

“Indeed,” said Charles.  “At some point around age 20 or 21 or so, when I devised this test, I realized that I would have to push the ‘no God’ button—the world I saw around me just didn’t present me with any convincing evidence to support the other button.  In fact, I saw what looked like pointless misery with seemingly random occurrences of good and bad.  Good things happened to bad people and bad things happened to good people about as often as not, at least insofar as I could guess at the goodness or badness in the people around me. 

Moreover, there was what I’ve already mentioned, the ‘statistical unlikelihood’ problem…there are all these wildly different religions, each believing itself to be the one true religion.  Statistically, it is extremely unlikely that you would happen to believe the right thing, if there even was a right thing to believe.  Yet everyone who really believes in a religion thinks it is the ‘right one’ or they would pick a different one.”

“Are there really all that many religions and are they all that different?” asked Michelle, who obviously hadn’t done her research on this issue.  Even a wayward agnostic like me knew that there was a slew of different religions—sometimes Michelle seemed very naïve, though in a remarkably pleasant sort of way.

“According to some guy named J. Gordon Melton, there are 2,630 denominations within 26 religious ‘families’ in the U.S. alone.  Say somebody is a Catholic…that doesn’t really tell you much, since there are 116 different Catholic denominations.  Protestants are, of course, even more splintered.  You can’t even conceive of the variety out there…religions believing in drug use, believing in UFOs, you can go on and on.  Weird stuff.”

“Ok, so there are a lot of religions, but most aren’t right,” said Michelle.

“Interesting, Michelle” said Charles, with a tinge of sarcasm in his voice.  “And you, who have never questioned any particular aspect of your upbringing—which I must say is something Dave has done, if only for hedonistic reasons—think you know which one, if there is just one, is right?”  Mom and Dad looked warily at Charles, worried that the conversation might get a little heated, as religious debates often do.

“I think the church that I go to is just fine,” said Michelle defensively.

“You know, Michelle, I’m guessing it probably is, too!” said Charles, far more agreeably than in the past in such discussions, “but, of course, that is just a guess!  As you are probably tired of hearing by now, I don’t know the answer to any interesting question.”

“What?” said Gary.

“Oh, you missed the big ‘I don’t know’ story…part of Charles’ newfound world view is that he doesn’t know anything,” I said.  “But, he seems like he knows more than ever, at least as far as I can tell.  He thinks he’s had some interesting ideas for a guy who doesn’t know anything…or rather he claims to have been given some interesting ideas.”

“There is a much more specific story on why I now say ‘I don’t know’ so frequently, having to do with an experience I had during my first psychosis,” said Charles.  “But, perhaps I’ll come back to that…can I continue?”

We quietly looked at Charles, nodding our heads.

Charles continued, “When I was an atheist, technically a secular humanist, for all those years, I actually thought I was on a higher moral plane than religious people were.  In some sense, it seemed to me that it was hardly even ‘moral’ to do the right thing in a standard religious context.  If you treat people properly because you seek to achieve heaven or to avoid hell, that is far less noble than treating people properly because you believe it to be the right thing to do.”

“What are you getting at?” asked Michelle.

“Well, if it is necessary to either bribe or threaten someone to get them to behave properly, that seems somehow ‘worse’ to me than if they just behaved properly without those incentives,” answered Charles.

“Hmmm…I never thought about it that way, I have to admit,” Michelle said.  “But, lots of people probably need those incentives to behave properly.  Isn’t it better to have those incentives imposed by religious belief than to have the bad behavior?”

“Probably…I don’t really know,” said Charles, as expected by now.  “But, even when I was an atheist, I could plainly see that those seemingly very important incentives weren’t being taken seriously by all that many people.  There are as many, or more, people in prison who claim to believe in God, and all of those heaven-hell incentives, as there are out of prison.  How do you explain that?”

“I don’t know,” I said, thinking that Charles now has me saying his pet phrase, “but, yes, there certainly appear to be a bunch of hypocrites out there.”

“As I say,” continued Charles, “I used to think that the Golden Rule—do unto others as you would have them do unto you—was all that you needed to live a proper life.  In fact, the Golden Rule, worded one way or another, is a part of nearly every religion deserving of being called that.  And, I thought I was on a higher moral plane if I tried to live my life that way, without either bribes of heaven or threats of hell.  I was happy to give up first belief in any religion...and, later, belief in God.”

“What do you believe now?” asked Michelle, innocently enough.

“Well, I’m guessing you won’t like what I now believe, Michelle,” said Charles.  “I’ll tell you what…tomorrow is Christmas Day, a fairly quiet day around here.  If you are really curious, I will lay out for you everything I believe.  But I won’t ‘know’ any of it!”

“Is there a name for what you believe?” I asked.  “You called your solution to the problem of over-spending by politicians ‘The Mechanism’…got a nice catchy name for what you believe about theology, say ‘Charlesism,’ or perhaps, ‘Petersonism’?”  I thought I was pretty funny sometimes.

“Ok, Mr. Wiseguy, for shorthand let’s just refer to what I believe as ‘The Thesis,’” said Charles.  “I will tell you all about the thesis tomorrow.”

We all went to bed.  And I was actually looking forward this time to what Charles was going to say tomorrow—I figured it would almost certainly be easier to follow and less mentally taxing than his stuff on economics and politics.  And, in addition, I was curious how Michelle, always pretty traditional, would react to it.  Fun, fun.

The Science and the Sci-Fi Part of “The Thesis”

Christmas Day began, as is traditional in Indiana, as a gray, cloudy winter day much like any other.  The brown trees, barren of leaves, were shrouded in more mist than was typical.  It was rare to have snow on the ground, but Michelle and E always hoped for it.  We were all somewhat subdued, for us, sipping our morning coffee.  Some were shuffling around microwaving the leftover breakfast casserole.  Charles was taking the day off from running, probably a concession to advancing age.  My motto, one among the many inane mottoes that I have, is that “we all have to get older, but nobody has to get old.”  A reminder to have fun, I guess…not that I need much of a reminder to do that.

“So, older brother,” Michelle began, “what is it that you believe about theology on this fine Christmas morning?”  The grass was always just a little greener and the sky a little bluer for Michelle than it was for normal people.  She had a good heart.  Made me think of Tripod back in Colorado.

“In a nutshell, Michelle, I believe in the Golden Rule and in God…and not much else.  And, I don’t even know the relative importance of ‘good deeds’ versus ‘faith,’ though one might be much more or less important than the other.”

I chimed in with another one of my inane mottoes, “Anything that can be put in a nutshell probably belongs there.”  Michelle rolled her eyes, but Charles plunged ahead.

“Oh, I’ll go into great detail about what Dave has led me to call ‘the thesis.’  The totality of it is somewhat elaborate.  But first of all, I should probably say something about why the majority of scientists are atheists.” Charles began, “It is relevant to why I find what I now believe to be at least plausible.”

“Ok,” said Michelle, “but I think most atheists really believe in God when circumstances they face take a marked turn for the worst.  You know how they always say, when at war, that there are no atheists in foxholes!”

“Possibly…I don’t know.  I can only speak for me on that and I was a fervent disbeliever, as you know, through a fair number of bad ‘circumstances.’  Anyway, scientists are predisposed to be atheists because one of the most fundamental methodological precepts of science is that ‘consistency with data’ is required for acceptance of theory.  Most atheists would argue, as I just now did, that looking around the world, one does not see a lot of evidence of the existence of the posited All-Knowing, All-Powerful, and All-Loving God,” said Charles.

“Well,” Michelle persisted, “we, being merely human, can’t know what God’s will is, so how can your so-called ‘evidence’ say anything, either way, about whether He exists?  It’s all about faith.”

“Yes,” Charles responded, surprisingly agreeably, given some of his anti-theist rantings in many arguments with Michelle over the years, “you have a point, and an important point.  This is actually a critical part of the thesis, but it appears for a different reason.  In fact, as I mentioned yesterday, the lack of evidence, either way, was what led to me being an agnostic for several years before devising my test.  It seemed to me that the whole religion/theology thing was set up to be immune to disproof…hence it was not even a scientific hypothesis.  A scientific hypothesis has to be at least potentially refutable with reference to data,” said Charles somewhat cryptically.

“You see,” he continued, “in contrast to typical non-scientists, scientists know that no theory is ever ‘proven,’ so I was speaking sloppily a second ago when I said ‘acceptance of theory.’  All theories are ‘tentatively held,’ pending the development of better theory.  For example, round earth theories replaced flat earth theories, sun-centered solar system theories replaced earth-centered solar system theories, chemistry replaced alchemy, neuropsychiatry is increasingly replacing psychotherapy, and so on.  At any point in this on-going process, we never know we are, in any sense, ‘right.’  Moreover, scientists have always been correct in observing that we did not really know very much at any point in this historical process, compared to what we will know, with on-going scientific advance, in the future.  From a scientist's perspective, indeed our very methodology, all of our tentatively held hypotheses about how the world works, are just that—tentatively held, until something better comes along.”

“So I tentatively hold my beliefs and you tentatively hold yours, huh, Charles?  So what are your ‘tentatively held’ beliefs about God these days?  What is your ‘thesis’?”  Michelle had some of the Peterson rhetorical combativeness, and sometimes exercised it, but typically without as much sarcasm as Charles and me.  But Michelle always was more fervent when it came to religious discussions.

“Part of it, the least interesting part really, has probably been thought about and written about lots of times before,” said Charles.  “In fact, what I believe happens/happened—you will see why I express it that way shortly—should have been seen, and perhaps has been for all I know, by Ray Kurzweil, the much lauded artificial intelligence guru at MIT.  He wrote a couple of books, the first called The Age of Intelligent Machines, written in the early ‘90s.  He followed that one up with one called The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence in the late ‘90s.”

“Don’t tell me, let me guess,” I chimed in, “God is a future computer?  Sheesh.”

“Pay attention, younger brother, as that is possibly related to where I’m going, but it isn’t quite so simple in the details, and it’s in the details where it gets interesting.  In fact, whether it is a wondrous machine or human evolution itself that progresses toward infinite knowledge turns out not to be in the least critical to the thesis.”

“Ok, I’ll hold off, but you can bet I’ll be skeptical of your thesis,” I said.  I always thought that such approaches, lumping alien spaceship landings in with that, were too contrived.

Charles continued, “Anyway, Kurzweil recognized that the evolution of computers has powerful, not widely known, implications.  He believes that a computer will exist, perhaps within two or three decades, that will have all of the capacity of the human brain.  Plus, of course, it will have the on-going advances in the calculating abilities computers already employed to defeat, for example, the world's best chess player.  In perhaps another ten years beyond that, he argues that a single machine will have the capacity of the combined mental power of the entire human race.”

“Phooey,” said Michelle, “nothing like that is going to happen for a long time, probably not for hundreds of years!”

“But, Michelle,” continued Charles, “it doesn’t matter when it happens, as long as it does eventually.  The timing issues do not matter at all to the thesis.  50 years or 5,000 years—it really does not matter.  And that is important, since it seems like it could eventually happen.”

“Go on,” said Michelle, clearly as skeptical as I.  I was on my second cup of coffee and expected to enter the fray with more focused arguments at any time.

“Kurzweil's projections flow from straightforward extensions of work already underway.  He argues convincingly that computers will learn to truly ‘think,’ employing a variety of methods.  Computers will employ so-called ‘recursive search methods’ that are used in the big number-crunching exercises, such as when IBM’s Big Blue beat Gary Kasparov in chess.  In addition, computers will use ‘self-organizing neural nets’ that are analogs to how the brain functions, particularly in pattern recognition.  Finally, computers can sort through ‘evolutionary algorithms’ that take a large range of trial ‘strategies’ and simulate the impact of on some goal.  The computer then drops algorithms that do poorly and adds potential competitors, rapidly calibrating and extending existing models.”

“So what?” said Michelle.  “Computers will get better, as they have for years.  But they are still just machines.”

“Yes, you might be right, in the same sense that a car is just a faster substitute for walking, a helpful machine.  However, there is a difference—even a great car does not yet drive itself.  Kurzweil saw that the computer would need to be ‘seeded’ with knowledge. A thinking machine would need to have data from which to draw inferences and make testable predictions.  There is no reason that an entity with the intellectual capacity we’re talking about could not have all of mankind's cumulated knowledge as input to be understood at lightning speed.”

“Hmmm…I think I see where you are going,” I said, as anticipated, since the coffee was kicking in.

Charles looked over at me and nodded approvingly, “Yes, since the machines will be seeded with mankind's knowledge, Kurzweil inferred that they must be of necessity ‘spiritual’ machines.  They would likely have the same sorts of ‘feelings’ expressed by mankind in all its diverse settings.  He also realized that it does not matter whether this vast computing power resides in a human with marvelous appendages or in a computer.  So whether the evolutionary future is to remain a carbon-based or a silicon-based life form or some other form not yet even envisioned—the form taken being likely to ultimately become a matter of choice—is immaterial.  The Kurzweil capstone is that with such capacities, scientific advances will begin to occur at vastly accelerating paces, though reiterating, whether his predictions occur in two generations or five hundred is fundamentally irrelevant to my argument.  The Age of Spiritual Machines is a tour du force exercise in Big Thinking.”

“So you are just taking Kurzweil’s arguments to their logical conclusion, huh?” I asked, skeptically.

All-Knowing and All-Powerful?

“Yes, it seems inevitable that we, in some evolutionary form, will eventually approach ‘All-knowing.’  Since there can only be one ‘All-knowing’ there can only be one God, although there could, I suppose, have been a ‘shake-out’ period that could have corresponded to the ancient Greek notions of pantheism.”

“What are you talking about?” asked Michelle, with E nodding her head in support.

“Well, it seems likely to me, for several reasons, that All-knowingness is unlikely to occur instantaneously, but rather would have to be an on-going process.  Moreover, it is possible that knowledge that enables time travel and other physics-related phenomena might be more readily gained than knowledge of the fundamental nature of humanity, of understanding human emotions…but, I’ll come back to that.”

Michelle was clearly into the discussion, arguing “God, though, is more than All-Knowing…He is All-Powerful and All-Loving.  How does this entity, your ‘sci-fi god,’ acquire those traits?”

“Think about our past experience on the relationship between knowledge and power, Michelle.  It is always the case, at least as far as I can tell, that knowledge and power are essentially the same thing.  Eons ago we learned how to keep a wood fire going for warmth but it was messy and polluting and we didn’t know how to generate useful non-heat energy from wood.  Then we discovered how to use coal, and later figured out how to run a steam engine to convert that heat energy into kinetic energy.  Still later we learned to generate electricity for work and light, from coal, oil, and gas fired turbines.  We have followed that knowledge with nuclear fission and that is likely to be followed by nuclear fusion, which would be a great environmental improvement. 

Indeed, economists think a lot about what we call ‘production functions’ that relate inputs to outputs.  However, those production functions just reflect the current levels of technical knowledge.  People typically look back on past levels of knowledge and power with disdain and we tend to think of ourselves as vastly superior to primitive man, or people even a hundred or two hundred years ago.  It will probably always be that way, since at any point in time our arrogance and self-esteem do not let us see our lowly position on the continuum of knowledge from zero to All-knowing.  It seems clear in any event that with great knowledge would come great power.  Surely understanding the fourth dimension, ‘soft’ wormholes, and anything else necessary for time travel, would be a trivial skill for even an approximately All-Knowing entity.”

“So, supposing an All-Knowing entity could travel through time, are you arguing that it doesn’t matter whether God comes at the end and travels back or is there at the beginning, as asserted by most of the various one-God religions?” I asked, jumping ahead a little bit, probably because of the audiobook theological discussions on the trip home.

“Yes, while I don’t know, for reasons that we will come back to, it would seem that it shouldn’t matter whether God comes at the beginning or at the end.  He can likely be in all places and all times, if He wishes, so the distinction is meaningless.  Of course, it was probably much easier to tell a story to humanity of God being ‘in the beginning,’ because that is a much simpler, more comprehendible story for primitive people.”

“Plus,” I said, attempting half-seriously to get into Charles’ theological perspective, “if God were to tell us that he comes at the end, as a result of human striving for knowledge, we might change our behavior so that He doesn’t come into existence after all!  Sort of like the famous ‘Grandfather paradox’ in sci-fi time travel discussions.  The grandson comes back and kills the grandfather as a young man…how then could the grandson come to exist to be able to do that?”

Much to my surprise, Charles responded, “I don’t think that would be a problem at all, unless God did something careless in trying to come back too soon.  It would seem to be fairly trivial for an All-knowing entity to simulate what would take place in the future as a result of any given intervention, including any impacts on His potential existence.  If you really know the system you are dealing with, you would know how the ‘variables’ of the system—people impacts, ecosystem impacts, and so on—would respond to any change you might contemplate.  Presumably God would only make changes the consequences of which He liked, subject to the ‘minimal intrusion principle’ that I will come back to.

Moreover, it is possible that there are a large number, possibly an infinite number, of universes, so that there could be one without the grandson and one with the grandson.  Besides, for most interventions, even careless ones, the worst thing that would happen is that it would just slow the length of time before All-knowing was again achieved.  And, as with how long it takes to become All-knowing in the first place, that shouldn’t matter at all.”

“But what makes you think there would be no limitations to knowledge?  What if we can’t become all-knowing, because some things are unknowable?” asked Dad, perceptively.

“Wow, great question, Dad!” said Charles with genuine enthusiasm.  Both Charles and I liked it when Dad was involved in one of our discussions, as he always brought something interesting to the table.  “There is a big thrust in science right now to try to figure out what is ‘knowable’ versus fundamentally ‘unknowable.’  In the last century, huge strides were made in knowledge…the double helix DNA discovery in the ‘50s and now, just a half-century later, the mapping of the entire human genome.  Einstein’s special and general relativity…quantum mechanics…the origins of the universe…medical knowledge doubling every four years…much has been learned.  That kind of progress tends to make us cocky, as a species, about our ability to know things.

But, at the same time, we have Kurt Gdel’s Incompleteness Theorem—that there are some mathematical statements that can be neither provable nor disprovable.  And quantum physicists assert, at least somewhat convincingly, that it is impossible to simultaneously know a sub-atomic particle’s position and momentum.  Is there a way to know if our universe is part of a much larger, potentially infinitely larger, multiverse?  And so on…many things might not be knowable.  But, you know what?”

“What?” responded Michelle, anyway, to what was doubtless another rhetorical question from Charles.

“…I don’t think any of that matters,” continued Charles.  “I think that what we will almost certainly know in the future is incomprehensibly vast relative to what we currently know.  A mere century or so ago heavier-than-air flight was thought impossible, now we have walked on the moon.  It seems likely, at least to me, that we can not even begin to comprehend, meaningfully, the gap between what we currently know entering the 21st Century and even approximately All-Knowing.  That is, even with all of humanity’s cumulated knowledge over the millennia, relative to All-Knowing, we are dumber than Tripod is compared to Dave!”

Charles and I had on more than one occasion observed that Tripod, while being a wonderful friendly lab, was no rocket scientist.  Saying that humans are to God as Tripod is to me did not seem to be a huge compliment, either to me or to humanity at large, but Michelle and I got Charles’ point.  It was clear that “knowing-as-much-as-can-be-known” would look damned impressive to humans, even if it were not literally “All-Knowing.”

“Ok,” said Michelle, “are you arguing, then, that knowing whatever can be known will also convey as much power to the possessor of that knowledge as can possibly be conveyed?  But, just like ‘Lots-Knowing’ isn’t ‘All-Knowing,’ it seems like your God, under the thesis, can’t be ‘All-Powerful,’ either?”

“Again, while that is possible—maybe even likely—I don’t think it matters…suppose Tripod sees Dave flick on a light switch and light appears.  It would have to look like magic, or a miracle, to Tripod, if he were bright enough to conceive of either magic or miracles, which is highly unlikely.  As a practical matter, ‘Lots-Knowing’ would lead to ‘Lots-Powerful’ and we—like Tripod—would be far too ignorant to distinguish those from All-Knowing and All-Powerful.  There may or may not be things God cannot do, but as with His level of knowledge, His level of power will be ‘off the map’ from anything we can comprehend.  So we might as well think of Him as All-Knowing and All-Powerful.”

“I want to talk more about miracles at some point,” said Michelle, “but why would your entity, under the thesis, be All-Loving?”

All-Loving?   The Problem of Evil and the Principle of Minimal Intrusion

“Yeah,” I joined in, “there are lots of stories akin to your thesis, The Matrix or the Terminator movies and their sequels being recent examples.  However, the superior beings from the future are usually malevolent.  Why would this entity of yours care about humanity?”

 “Recall that the ‘entity’—let’s just say God from now on—will have been initially both programmed and seeded by human knowledge, potentially all of it. God will likely have human feelings, having evol