I really like this comic for some reason, although I know the author is essentially reducing God down to infinite space and time and that is not what I believe.
Source: A Bunch of Rock
I do believe God is infinite but not solely manifest as infinite space and time. God is more than that.
This comic helps illustrate how it can be hard for some people to believe in God. The author is saying that if you have a person with above average intelligence, let's call him Randal, who is immortal and has access to infinite space and time, then Randal is indistinguishable from God.
And here, Randal is simulating the visible universe. He only really needs to simulate what we can see, right? So only the perceivable chunks. He also only needs to simulate a chunk of time. As far as we're concerned, time could have started 10 minutes ago, but we have planted memories from years ago in the simulation.
Randal can even make mistakes. If he does, he could rewind and try it again, if he wants. Things can happen in his simulation that he is not fully aware of. All he's doing is maintaining a simulation that with rules for physics on particles. He's not necessarily paying attention to everything nor does he have control over everything. Furthermore, it's just a simulation to him, so he doesn't even have to care if a human or a kangaroo suffers. It's just simulated deterministic suffering and he's above it all.
But does this idea disprove God? Not at all. All it does is push the question back a layer. Someone created Randal, after all. You could say the cosmic comic author decided to abstract his creation to a sub-creator, call it an inkling.
If you want to suggest that Randal was created by a super-Randal, ad infinitum, then you've really just decided to replace one unbelievable concept with another.
Which one is easier to believe? Infinitely abstracted Randals or God? I'm just saying.
No comments:
Post a Comment