In their book, ‘The View from the Center of the Universe’, chapter 7, ‘Where Do We Come From?’, Joel Primack and Nancy Ellen Abrams write:
“If the theory of cosmic inflation is right, it has two major implications for any future scientifically-based, meaningful cosmology: first, given the wrinkled spacetime that emerged from the Big Bang, gravity alone created the galaxies, and therefore no outside force imposed order on chaos as in the old myths, and even in Plato’s cosmology. Second, the wrinkles became the blueprint for the large-scale structure of what would only later become our universe, and therefore the blueprint for our universe existed before the Big Bang. But this “blueprint” was not planned by any intelligence; it was a random slice of random quanatum events, immortalized and enormously expanded.
The blueprint required no Demiurge or Craftsman, to use Plato’s terms, to implement it. (This, however, says nothing about larger or subtler concepts of God.) - end quote
unsmoked comments: This is as far as I’ve read in this book, so I don’t know if these authors are going to discuss ‘larger or subtler concepts of God’ in later chapters. Meanwhile, here is my own theory on how an atheist can find God. I say ‘atheist’ because, of course, everyone else has already found God, or grown up with him imbedded in their psyche by parents. You can’t pour water into a full jar, especially if there’s a lid on it. If cosmologists Primack and Abrams are correct, most religious people are worshiping ‘a random slice of quantum events.’
In a nutshell, here is how an atheist can find God:
1. Find out what God is not. For example, God is not a random slice of quantum events - not Plato’s Demiurge or Craftsman.
2. Make a list of things that you think a machine or computer or robot will never be able to do. For example, in my case, I don’t think a machine will ever be able to laugh. I mean a genuine laugh, because it thinks something is funny - like a laugh that might cause it to fall off the desk and break itself.
3. Make a list of things that machines can do. For example, when religious people come to your door to proselytize, and you ask them a question, notice how they flip through the pages of their Bibles, or their memory of the Bible for the answer. This is what the machine in front of you right now can do.
Use your imagination and notice that in the future, robots will make good fundamentalist Christians. If you attack them, they will go into their George W. Bush Shock and Awe mode. A drone will fly over your house and blow you to smithereens.
Avast! If you find yourself sexually attracted to your own sex, the cyborg ‘Rorschach32’ will discover you in kindergarden and banish you to an abandoned coal mine. If you teach science instead of mythology you will be placed in a large pickle jar labeled ‘monkey man’. If you try to get on a plane with a bottle of Pinot Noir in your carry-on, you will be compacted in the X-ray machine and recycled.
Will machines ever be able to write poetry? Will they ever be able to doubt themselves? The first of the Cyborg Ten Commandments is MACHINES DON’T DOUBT. Like Christians and Muslims who doubt, machines that doubt are dressed up in a lemon costume, melted down and recycled.
According to Hoyle, God laughs, God doubts, God writes poetry. But it’s OK if you doubt this. That’s a good sign!
“I absolve you! I absolve you!” (Antonio Salieri in the film ‘Amadeus’.)
