God versus Science

By Romana Annette 09/19/2009

I can speak about God and science; however, I will strain a lot of definitions and produce a lot of speculation.  Let me remind the reader that I thoroughly believe in extreme rationalization; no one should have to believe anything that does not make sense.  Still, most people find my analyses to be disturbing.  Of course, I am trespassing in areas that many say are plainly posted.

Does reality have an economy?  Fundamentalists want us to believe that the primary focus is on the control of souls, which, conveniently, only people have.  While all lifeforms have an emergent identity, which could be described as a soul in relative terms, all things living are subject to transformation and death.  Even if some aspect survived death, it would still be subject to change and decay.  Livings things all have a brief moment of glory, as they buck the trend of increasing entropy, but they are overwhelmed in the end by chaos from within.

I do not like top-down, authoritarian hierarchies, especially ones controlled by an omnipotent God that everyone must worship as the price for membership.  Evolving systems have a bottom-up hierarchy.  Not only can this create complex structures, but also diversity, as the number of components grow so large that a multiplicity of structures become possible from the same material.  I claim that it is not just biological systems that evolve, but cosmic ones as well.  This makes reality take on an organic form.

I will discuss an alternate vision of God, a God of Process.  I will not use the familiar, limited either  is or is-not options, nor will I quote books, especially not the Bible.  Books are purely subjective creations, which have to be interpreted.  Of all the concepts that can be discussed, God turns out to be the most subjective and difficult to define of all.

I will speak from my own point of view, based upon my studies of Process Philosophy and Theology.  In Process Philosophy, all reality is made up of running processes.  Processes evolve and combine to create emergent phenomena, which are complex entities that can have identities separate from their component processes.  Such entities are atoms, molecules, cells, organisms, planets, stars, galaxies, universes, and so forth.  Entities can all be given a name, but their existence does not depend on having such a name.

We naturally filter all processes to produce subset collections called stories.  Stories are our interpretation of what has happened or what can happen; they are not the actual events.  Philosophers have debated the relevance of stories for centuries.  Yet, processes only carry the meanings that we assign to them.

Processes are like open-ended programs.  Running processes are the closest things to perfection that we will ever know.  Processes can seem perfect, because they can keep churning out entities for billions of years; however, the physical entities produced by processes can be extremely imperfect and may have limited lifetimes.

We, as human beings, are also entities that were created by processes involving many antecedent entities.  We did not appear accidentally, since there was a history involving the evolution of inanimate and animate entities.  Such a history is almost impossible to trace back more than a few generations.

In a totally objective reality, there can be no means for rendering any opinions.  However, we do not live in a totally objective reality, since our life forces are layer after layer of subjective, energetic harmonics applied over objective reality.  As entities, we evolved as part of reality; as observers, we can render opinions.  I do not think it takes any sense of wonder to say that we would not be here unless we served a purpose to the whole.

Religious and secular humanism have tended to emphasize our independence from the rest of reality.  Fundamentalist religious people even claim that everything was designed for us, despite the billions of years that passed before we evolved on the Earth.  We could be stuck with these ideas, but the development of the theory of evolution and modern genetics seriously challenge teleological ideas.

I see no evidence that any master entity designed everything or can even be in charge.  Everywhere we look, we see processes and entities functioning quite well without external coercive guidance.  This is not trivial, since we are talking about extremely complex entities.  There are more atoms in the body of an average person than there are stars in the known Universe.

Classical mechanics would never allow all the components of processes to successfully work together, because there are no two of anything exactly alike.  However, quantum mechanics does allow a multitude of components to work together.  This works best for objective processes, since subjective processes introduce immeasurable features such as personal whim.

Theists often claim that reality cannot work based on derived scientific principles.  However, this is religion giving us materialistic science.  Without a useful philosophy for examining the underlying science, science will end up being meaningless.

Since we are part of reality, a totally materialistic view is of no value to us, because we are subjective beings.  We have trouble figuring out how we fit in, since we see so little of what is happening around us.  We perceive that we are alone.

There are no isolated entities.  The processes of reality work because they are constantly getting feedback.  Any physical reaction to conditions requires that information be received first.  Physics is much about particles reacting with each other in fields; therefore physics can be said to be about feedback.

I claim that living things are no different, and that they require a lot of feedback to function.  Each generation of living things can benefit from the experiences of previous generations.  Instinctive rituals become subconscious guides, so that living things do not continually have to reinvent themselves.  Process Philosophers call this Objective Immortality.

The deaths of individual entities were not in vain, and their existences were not failures.  One can look at history as being nothing but endless creation and perishing for no reason, accompanying evolutionary outcomes that make no objective sense and are therefore filled with too much messiness and wastefulness.  Thus there is the desire to replace it with a steady-state reality in which there is no suffering or death.  This is a misguided attempt to substitute a dismal reality doomed to failure for one that actually works.

Now I come to my vision of God; however, it will not include a rosy afterlife in a magical paradise.  When we were young, we accepted the reality that we were born into.  We did not have to swear allegiance at birth, since there was really no choice involved.  By using scientific analysis, we can observe and attempt to deduce how everything works.  Still, some will see God in everything, while others will not.  Some, such as me, who were born with a high-functioning form of autism called Asperger’s Syndrome, will have an interface problem that limits ability to do subjective analysis.

This has led me to wonder how everyone can have such widely divergent opinions when we are all subject to the same set of rules.  The same feedback mechanism is there for everyone to use, but people respond differently.  Some become child prodigies, while others can barely function.  Some navigate complex social skills so well that their lives seem perfect, while others feel left out.

This has lead to a new idea about God, the God of Process.  This version of God may only be a sophisticated feedback mechanism, not a real entity.  This version of God can advise, but not coerce anyone to do anything.  This God cannot answer prayers directly; that is what people do.  In fact, this God depends upon corporeal beings to fulfill all objectives in reality that are not controlled by natural processes.  Besides being the keeper of all prior knowledge, this God presents us with lures that benefit our species instead of just individuals.  Pairing and sexuality have high priority; however, I claim that the joy of sexuality is insufficient to justify all the work involved in marriage and child-rearing.

I think all features of living things, including morality, are entirely relative.  I think all attempts to use binary modeling are wrong.  I realize that binary models are simpler, but I think the large number of components in any entity will always ensure that each aspect will usually have more than just two possible states.  I do not believe that we are extra-special in relationship to all the other animals on our planet.  We all share the same, basic set of 21.000 genes.  I do not even believe that we are the only intelligent species to appear in the long history of our planet, and certainly not in our galaxy or the rest of the Universe.  What does set us apart is that we have become a technological intelligent species, which may be quite rare.  No one has figured out why we have been intelligent for about 200,000 years, but only recently begun to develop technology.

What is reality all about?  It is easy to think we are fulfilling the vision of a creator who resides outside all realities.  Creation based on an uninvolved personal whim without any kind of meaningful testing does not make any sense.  We, the sum-total of all the beings in the Universe, are the ones with a vested interest.  Global warming has shown us that we always affect the environment around us; maybe, our presence also has some small affect on the evolution of physical laws.  Perhaps this is why reality looks like it was designed by a committee high on drugs.  Reality ends up being an over-designed, unfathomable mess.  I like it, but most people would rather replace it with a heavenly paradise.  All the built-in humor alone is worth the price we pay to live here.