Summer Philosophy

Ahh, the lazy days of summer, and the delightful philosophy that imbues them. I absolutely love verbal fencing. Because through the dancing around of argument, you get to know more about yourself and why you believe the things you do, and why your partner believes the things they do. In addition there are usually plenty of opportunities for jokes and good humor. But most importantly, you share a learning experience about each other.

Today, after talking about Turing machines and reducibility (and going through a nice clever proof of the undecidable nature of the Post Correspondence Problem) I was able to have a rather lengthy conversation that touched on religion and the nature of thinking.

I attempted an instill in my friend an unsuccessful conversion from Christianity to … well, not atheism, but at least a state of questioning. I tried 2 methods.

1. Method 1: Logical contradiction
   Try to use the classical attack on an ‘All-Powerful Being.’ That is: Can God make a rock so heavy he cannot lift it? Unfortunately I didn’t get quite what I expected as a riposte. Instead I received “Only God can set limitation upon himself.” To which I parry, “Can God create a being that is powerful enough to put limits on God?” to which I receive the nice and simple “No.” I which case I’ve won the argument (and least in the limited logical sense) because I’ve trapped my opponent into naming something that God cannot do, in spite of the fact that he is supposed to be Omnipotent.

   Now this actually isn’t a satisfying win. In fact, I’ve never had success using this argument. Logic alone cannot make a person convert religions. In fact the more a religion preaches the finding and re-affirmation of belief through incidents in every-day life that I ascribe to mere coincidence or good fortune, the less success you will have with a purely logical critique of God’s existence.

2. Method 2: Demonstrate why God is unnecessary.
   This is actually the primary reason for my own atheism. For every reason that a person could come up with for answering the question “Why is a God necessary?” I come up with a perfectly materialistic method that satisfies that condition. I forget what the specific reasons were in this case, but I do remember mentioning that “The idea of a God is meme that lets you connect and communicate in a community among other similarly infected people, and thus the meme helps fulfill a very basic human psychological need, and thereby propagate itself at the same time.” (This last part was a back-reference to a previous part of the conversation about Dawkins memes.) Insulting someone is not exactly the best way to go about a conversion, no matter how cleverly performed. The other reason was to “put something higher than yourself.” Well, why a God, why not the more self-evident principles, or simply a set of morals? I couldn’t make any headway on this one, even though we both agreed that most morals are fairly axiomatic. So, in my view, if you wish to believe in something higher than yourself, and thereby transcend your more baser instincts, then why not simply adopt a moral system without a God? But, sadly, my friend just wouldn’t let go, not even to entertain the argument, copping out with a “If a simple moral system is enough for you then fine.”

   Interestingly, I fielded none of the more common reasons, like the need for a Creator, or the need for a Bestow-er of Morality.

For me, this was a really informative conversation, and it occurred to met that God is so powerful that He can effect all the wondrous things ascribed to him without the burden of existence. I wasn’t expecting to make a conversion, rather my aim was to try and understand what it is that Christian’s get from their beliefs. For my friend it was primarily a sense of belonging to a group, and the intellectual sharing that occurs within that group. A reason with which I can personally identify (this town is an intellectual wasteland, I’ve got to go back to grad school). I’d like to further understand the psychology of belief, in the hopes of formulating pro-atheist arguments that a Christian can identify with, arguments that are non-threatening. Because Dawkins is afraid of religion for exactly the same reasons and with the same level of vehemence that the more fundamentalist religious people are afraid of him. (the world has wonderful symmetry.)

Unfortunately for my friend, he is not yet well-skilled in the art of verbal fencing, so I end up doing most of the talking. He doesn’t go on the attack nearly as often as I’d like. It’s not until your own arguments and beliefs are challenged that you can really give them an honest look. In the end I just hope I encourage him to think, not only because belief without reason is empty, but because, whatever you believe, thinking about those beliefs is a Good Thing. Too many people in our society are intellectually lazy, so if I can just encourage one person to go home and think, I’ve done my good deed for the day.

PS. I’m also trying to cook up an argument against a God based on the concession that machines can think. It would use the following elements, but I don’t know in what way.

• Humans are a special creation of God, because we can think and we have souls (but animals can’t), therefore thinking and posessing a soul are somehow related.
• Machines can think. (the opponent has to concede this, I know Christians that wouldn’t)
• Machines don’t have a soul.
• Would machines need a God? If so, are we that god? If not, then why do we need a god?

To make things even stronger: Supposing that we make a thinking machine, we would do so taking our inspiration from biology. That is a thinking being is really a noosystem of thoughts fighting amongst each other for control of the entire system. That a brain is a collection of neural nets each specialized for processing a specific thing (center for vision, hearing, motor control, etc.) but with certain amount of leakage current and cross-connection to other neighboring nets. Therefore the thinking machine that we construct would be similar to ourselves in design (dynamic and robust), and would probably work without our knowing explicitly how. But it still wouldn’t have a soul. So why would something so similar to ourselves not have a soul, but we still do? Anthropocentrism.