Why God Must (and Does) Exist

This is a short string of ideas knotted together in ways that are new to me; if someone somewhere has tied similar knots, I am unaware of it.

The idea: Physicists tell us that there may be an infinite number of universes in which anything that can happen does happen.[1] In one universe I am rich, in another poor. In one I am dead, in another I never existed.

(Every guy at this point usually starts thinking stuff like "Wow, in some universe I actually made whoopie with Mary Lou under the bleachers." Of course, for every happy ending like that one, there is an equally unhappy one; anything, in fact, that is possible.)

Let's assume the multiverse theory is true (we're in good company, many physicists allow the possibility): If anything that can happen does happen, we can easily imagine the existence of a tremendously powerful being who, having had enough time and favorable circumstances, evolved capabilities far beyond anything we can explain.

Let's further imagine that this being is so advanced, we can imagine no greater (Cf Anselm ).

Now, who's to say that a being like this does not reside in the same universe you and I share? And if not, who's to say that he doesn't reside in another universe and occasionally visit this one? Or send messengers on occasion to knock some sense into us (cf CS Lewis[2])? Or create planets or stars or galaxies like ours, and life forms like us to populate them?

Since anything that can be must be, there is a being like this, in every respect precisely as I expect him[3] to be.

There is not, however, any universe without a God, because by definition, if God can exist, he does, and if he can interact among different universes, he does.[4]

Can I prove it? No. Neither can we prove 26 dimensions and subatomic strings. But we choose to consider it because the math leads us there.

[1]
This not science fiction. It's a very real part of a number of flavors of quantum theory.

[2]
CS Lewis: "God sent the human race what I call good dreams: I mean those queer stories scattered all through the heathen religions about a god who dies and comes to life again and, by his death, has somehow given new life to men. He also selected one particular people and spent several centuries hammering into their heads the sort of God He was - that there was only one of Him and that He cared about right conduct. Those people were the Jews, and the Old Testament gives an account of the hammering process." (Mere Christianity)

[3]
Him is my pronoun choice. Feel free to supply your own. In my universe, humans don't spend time debating trivial matters like pronoun gender.

(Interesting aside: Mandarin Chinese has no pronoun gender distinction; my wife frequently mixes up him/her, he/she; our daughter has detected this and corrects her now.)

[4]
We really don't need an infinite number of universes to consider this idea. Given the age of the universe and the wonderfully bizarre things we learn almost daily. we can easily conceive of a being that has evolved far beyond the limits of our understanding. Just yesterday, the day before I posted this, Chinese scientists reported they teleported photons 60 miles , or, more precisely, quantum information was sent 60 miles without traveling the intervening distance.

The response from a skeptic or atheist may be that I am simply positing a being so advanced that he is indistinguishable from God.

Yes, that's right.

(I'm of course echoing Arthur C Clarke's 3rd law of prediction )

You can then posit a God that can beat up my God, or ask why any sufficiently powerful being in any universe would let people suffer in another when he can intervene, or insist there is a difference between "God" and an evolved supreme being and you don't owe anything to anyone that has evolved just like you have. Those are valid observations with as many responses as we can conceive.

[2012-05-20: I’m now in the appendix to Robert Wright’s Evolution of God. He has touched on some of these themes, but not in quite the same way. I wrote this while still in the early parts of the book where he talks about El and Baal and the possible Ugaritic origin of Jehovah. Interesting that we followed parallel reasoning, but not surprising, since similar facts and premises will lead to similar conclusions. I’m not much for his over-used zero-sum game theory approach, but it offers some insight.]

 

Started: 2012-05-10