Convincing Illusions
So I brought up the subject of free will again. I decided to get God’s take on the whole universe as a big clockwork thing. In case you aren’t familiar, it’s the idea that everything is a result of deterministic processes. It was a natural philosophy to come out of Newtonian physics and the industrial revolution. It’s a little harder to see it when it comes to thoughts and decisions, but the idea is that all the experiences of our lives produce an inexorable cascade of chemical reactions in our bodies and brains and ultimately lead to whatever decisions we may reach. This starts to seem a little less far-fetched when you see all the progress psycho-pharmacology has been making in medicating away mental maladjustments.
So after I laid out all of that, I was a little surprised when God brought up computerized random number generators. These are more formally referred to as pseudo-random number generators, because any computer scientist will be happy to tell you that the generators are never truly random. The thing is, they’re random enough. So God’s point was, does it matter if we really have free will, if what we do have is a convincing enough illusion of free will?
But I didn’t care about the answer as much as I was intrigued by God bringing up computer science as a way of making a point. She explained to me that she talks to people on their own level and using whatever metaphors and illustrations they can understand. Just because The Bible hasn’t been updated in many hundreds of years, doesn’t mean that God hasn’t kept up with the world.
She really finds most religions rather limiting and wishes we’d grow up a little.
Your metaphor is my Mephistopheles….
God the Watchmaker citing computer science theory is clearly Deus Ex Machina.
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> all the experiences of our lives produce an inexorable cascade of chemical reactions in our bodies and brains and ultimately lead to whatever decisions we may reach
Since a central reoccurring theme of most major religions in the existence of some sort of extra-universal entity residing within our corporeal existence – e.g. the soul, wouldn’t this both provide a plausible explanation for any given subset of the processes that comprise thought could happen in a sphere beyond our ken – i.e. non-physical processes - as well as inculcate the existence of free will, and not simply a convincing illusion?