I
THE WRONG GOD

God: An entity believed by some religions to be the creator of the universe, the reality of whose existence is a matter of belief or inferential reasoning.

This definition is incomplete, for it defines God only in terms of an action He may have performed.

A complete definition would include the properties God is thought to possess, particularly those necessary for performance of the action. In other words, what abilities must God have in order to create the universe? Webster's Dictionary leaves considerable space for religious sects to fill in its blanks, as does the Bible. Spaces are made to be filled, and that's what religions have done.

The idea of a single Creator was invented several millennia ago by people who knew almost nothing about the nature of the universe, and the little they thought they knew was wrong. How, then, could they have been qualified to describe an entity who created that universe?

They did what they could, finally settling on a set of properties for their God which could never be surpassed by any competing God concept, old or new:

• God is omnipotent.

  He is capable of anything, able to complete any conceivable task in an instant.

  God has created the entire physical universe, countless galaxies with a billion odd stars in each, our solar system, our planet, its past and present life forms, and man, along with an individual soul for each man. He created these wonders from nothing by simply willing them into existence.

  Should He choose to create another universe a trillion times larger than ours with different laws and 79 spatial dimensions, complete with planets full of huge arachnids with IQ's of a million or so, He could do so effortlessly by a similar act of Divine Will.



• God is all-knowing.

  This attribute comes without qualifications. God knows all information from past, present, and future. He knows the intimate thoughts and actions of every man. He knows the precise position and momentum of every atom in the universe, contrary to the “uncertainty principle” of quantum mechanics. Not one of the trillion or so termites on this planet emits a single molecule of methane gas without God's knowledge. Sneak a fart in church— God knows. He knows when you have sex and when krill have sex, and when you or the krill will have sex.

  The difference between us and krill (for many religious people) is that God doesn't care if those little buggers have all the sex they can get, with whomever they can get it.



• God is a spirit.

  This means that God is nonphysical, which implies that He is composed of neither matter nor energy, both of which are physical.

  (Philosopher Bostrom's assertion that the Designer must be external to our universe is derived from this religious belief.)

  It has become chic among a few modern believers to declare that God is an energy being. It is not clear whether they are implicitly redefining the meaning of spirit, energy, or chic to make this declaration.



• God is perfect in all conceivable ways, and infinitely good.

  Neither “perfect” nor “good” are precisely defined words, so their application to God cannot be precise.

  The “good” attribute may be intended to assure us that we are safe from unjustified punishment at God's hands. The “perfection” attribute is job security for theologians who, ever since it was declared, have been trying to explain why a perfect God makes imperfect human beings and puts them on a disease ridden planet which kills every one of them, yet Who expects them to love and adore Him.



• God is infinite.

  God has existed in full possession of His abilities forever and will continue to exist forever. He cannot be the result of any other process or mechanism.

Physical Depictions

Judaism forbids depictions of God. Perhaps this is because the Jews realized that a spirit will not have an image. Maybe their artists simply could not produce a convincing visage. There may be other reasons.

Christianity's deification of Jesus Christ as the “Son of God,” gave its followers a human image to worship and made the new religion a competitive force on the Greco-Roman playing field. Zeus, Apollo, and other refugees from soap opera mythology were no match for an equally depictable God speaking relevant messages with quiet wisdom.

To create a kinship between man and God, Christianity declared that God the Father made man in His own image, thereby leading to the popular depictions of God as an old man wearing a nice white robe, or in more risqué renditions, a towel to conceal the plumbing for which a spirit is unlikely to have any use.

Christianity eventually adopted the Holy Spirit as a Third God, perhaps because early theologians mistook biblical references to “spirit” as references to a distinct entity instead of to the ethereal nature of the God they already had.

Finally, in a masterstroke of neurolinguistic trickery that would put a politician to shame, Christianity declared its three Gods to be One, making itself the first monotheistic religion to worship multiple gods.

Implied Properties of God

The God discussed here is that entity charged with the task of creation, closest in sense to Judaism's “Jehovah,” Christianity's “God the Father,” or Islam's “Allah.” The following discussion applies to the God of these and derivative religions.

God has several properties which are implicit in the actions attributed to Him, but not readily admitted by believers. For example:

• God is emotional. The Old Testament notes His decisions to eliminate all but eight people in Noah's flood, and to destroy the populations of Sodom and Gomorrah because human behavior angered Him, even though He knew when he created mankind that most of us would misbehave. Anger is an emotion.


• God is vindictive. He could dispose of evildoers by simply eradicating their souls, the ultimate death sentence. Or He could remove their free will (which seems to be the source of the human recalcitrance problem) and reprogram them to behave themselves, like the Stepford Wives. Instead we are told that God has created a nasty environment in which sinners will suffer horrible pain for eternity.

  The attribution of unnecessary, vindictive behavior to an entity touted as “all merciful” is an absurd contradiction.

  Imagine someone buying a cat and ordering it to fetch newspapers, then torturing the hapless beast for the rest of its life because it would only fetch mice. That's analogous to the God of Christianity's apparent relationship to humankind.



• God is also lonely, an attribute used to explain His creation of man. He must have been extremely lonely.


• God is needful, particularly of worship. That He has created human beings far inferior (infinitely inferior, to be precise) to Himself to fulfill this need suggests that He may have other issues.

  In many civilized countries, a man who subjects his dog to starvation, or otherwise causes an animal in his charge to suffer unnecessarily, is poorly regarded. Yet God has arranged an environment in which thousands of people starve to death every year.

  It might be argued that people starve because of their own choices, i.e. through their God given free will. It is not clear how this argument applies to starving children.

  Moreover, God has placed man on a planet full of torments. If a carnivore, poisonous snake, insect, parasite, or natural disaster doesn't terminate life, there are enough bacteria and viruses to make it an unpleasant experience.

  If the natural world does not provide enough pain, there are plenty of our fellow humans looking for the opportunity to beat, maim, rape, torture, and kill their fellows one by one, and entire nations anxious to perpetrate wholesale violence— often in the name of God himself.

  The planet God created is a pain filled living space. We are the dogs in God's charge. While some of us have a pleasant or even happy life, many more have a miserable, tortuous life. Many of these are children. A human being who did the equivalent to puppies in his charge would be highly regarded only by the mentally ill.

  But remember that the God concept reviewed here was invented by men, and therefore might not apply to any real Creator of the universe.


• The last implicit attribute of the Creator is particularly important, and not at all negative: God thinks.

  It is likely that God thought about the precise balance between mass and electric charge before assembling protons and electrons into atoms. He surely considered other alternatives before choosing the four nucleotides which comprise DNA strands.

  The Old Testament Bible clearly supports the idea that God is a thinking being. In The Book of Job, Chapter 38, verses 5-6, God illuminates His own thought processes. God's many choices in his dealings with man are described throughout that Book.

  His implicit ability to think is also covered in the omnipotency clause. The one thing we humans can sometimes do which separates us from animals is to think creatively, inventing ideas, works of art and music, or complex devices.

  Clearly animals can process sensory information and make useful choices, as can computers. We have no lock on that form of thought. But unlike critters and computers, we can imagine things which have not previously existed, then deliberately bring them into form.

  Surely God can do anything man can. Therefore God must be able to think creatively.

The Origin of The God Concept

If there is one single belief upon which monotheistic religions keep a death grip, this is it. Without divine revelation, their dogmas would collapse like a house of soggy cards.

Never mind that it is often the very prophet revealing the latest truths who claims that his revelations came from God, perhaps via an angelic emissary. If not, his followers make the claim. But who told them that their prophet was speaking the revealed word of God? Ah— God did. And who says so? Who else but the followers?

Each religion has its beliefs, its dogma. The foundation upon which the dogma rests is another level of belief— the belief that their beliefs are divinely revealed.

Never mind that some of the revealed teachings are illogical, or that God appears to have revealed entirely different absolute truths to different holy prophets. Claiming that God revealed the dogma is a cheap path to acceptance. For someone who wants to be taken seriously by people who do not think clearly, it is the only path.

This website will prove that statement. It will propose ideas about the nature of God which are consistent with science, and offer suggestions for God's purpose which would make a credible movie plot. Yet these ideas will be mostly blown off. Why? Because the author of this site freely admits to their invention.

Common Understanding

The Limitations of an Omnipotent God

It would seem at first thought that an omnipotent God is necessarily an unlimited God. This is not the case. In theory, an all-powerful God can construct anything and can cause any object in the universe to change position. But can God make a rock so big that He cannot move it?

Note that either a yes or no answer compromises God's defined omnipotency.

Can God declare that 2+2 = 5? Give this question honest thought, for it is an honest question. Given the definitions of the integers 1, 2, 3, etc., the mathematical definitions of + and =, the answer is no!

Consider the consequences if the answer could be yes. Lawyers would soon rule the world, for customers and storekeepers would be deprived of any common standard of measurement. Imagine going to a supermarket, choosing four apples priced at 10 cents each, but getting charged 50 cents at checkout. Why? The checkout clerk holds two apples in one hand, two in the other and says, “2+2 = 5, and 5 apples cost 50 cents.”

If a ten cent difference doesn't catch your attention, think about owning a pair of 2-acre lots and being taxed for five acres.

If 2+2 = 5, the number 4 would no longer exist. Simple arithmetic would be rendered useless and science would become an exercise in futility— the element beryllium would be indistinguishable from boron; as would carbon from nitrogen. Life on planet earth would cease.

A logic limited God.

Because logic can be discovered but cannot be created, people of different languages, cultures, and religions manage to agree upon matters of mathematical logic, and ultimately upon the hard sciences which depend upon it. This is why math is a universal language as useful to fish peddlers as to physicists, as useful to humans as to God.

God is logic limited, as are you and I and any useful ideas we might profitably exchange.

Can God Think?

The phenomenon known as human thought is actually a function of several properties such as memory, access to sensory information, automatic information processing, and creative thought. The creative component, to which we will refer simply as thought, is the point of this discussion.

Believers in God assume that God can think, but not because the Bible explicitly says so. As we noted earlier, thought is an implied property. However, it conflicts with a property officially attributed to God— all-knowingness.

Either God knows everything, or God thinks. Both are impossible.

You have had ideas. The best of them appeared in your mind instantaneously, fully formed and without words. Perhaps not all the ideas which were new to you are actually new, but this does not matter, so long as they were so for you.

Suppose that at this moment God suddenly has an idea, a new concept. A minute before, He cannot have known this concept. Therefore a minute ago God cannot have known everything.

If God knows everything, God cannot have a new thought. If God thinks, He cannot know everything. The logic of this is simple, and as we have already noted, not even God can meddle with logic.

Does God Think?

The fossil evidence reflects an engineering development project complete with a midstream change in management goals. This evidence points to a thinking Creator.

The Bible supports this position. The Old Testament God makes choices and changes His mind, clear evidence of a thought process. For these and a book of other reasons I have chosen the assumption that if there is a Creator, He must be capable of original thought.

You must make your own choice. If you disbelieve in God, consider the reasons for your disbelief. If the God in Whom you disbelieve is indeed the same omnipotent God in whom other atheists disbelieve, don't dislocate a joint patting yourself on the back. Instead, ask why you didn't invent the theory we are proposing here, or something even better?

IMPLICATIONS OF ALL-KNOWINGNESS

In such a state of being you cannot experience anything new. The concept of “new” would be merely a theoretical abstraction, something applicable to lesser, limited entities.

You can never experience a surprise, good or bad, for you knew of it beforehand. You cannot experience the joy of listening to a beautiful concerto you've never heard before, for you will have heard every concerto as well as every mind numbing commercial jingle a zillion times before it was even written. You have already memorized every book. You know the plot, screenplay, and final cut of every movie made and yet to be made. For you, there is no such thing as an opening day.

Notice how you rarely, or never listen to once-favorite songs of which you could originally not hear enough? Notice how, when you view a great movie again, and again, the once-clever plot loses its initial appeal?

The idea of all-knowingness may seem a wonderful attribute at first, for with such knowledge you could easily become the wealthiest person on the planet. But there is a price to be paid for the gift: Infinite boredom.

So choose: Does the God in whom you choose to believe (or disbelieve) know everything? Or does He think?

Subsequent pages will develop the concept of a Creator as an entity with definable, limited properties, Who thinks. This may be difficult for some to accept. If your choice is for an all-knowing God unfettered by the rules of logic, we invite you to keep your mind open and read onward, if only to measure how easily this alternative God-concept dovetails into both scientific and common sense knowledge.

Wed 09/30/09 23:25