Last October I was privileged to be awarded the Emperor Has No Clothes award from the Freedom From Religion Foundation. The physical trophy consists of the dashing statuette here on the right, presumably the titular Emperor. It’s made by the same company that makes the Academy Award trophies. (Whenever I run into Meryl Streep, she’s just won’t shut up about how her Oscars are produced by the same company that does the Emperor’s New Clothes award.)
Part of the award-winning is the presentation of a short speech, and I wasn’t sure what to talk about. There are only so many things I have to say, but it’s boring to talk about the same stuff over and over again. More importantly, I have no real interest in giving religion-bashing talks; I care a lot more about doing the hard and constructive work of exploring the consequences of naturalism.
So I decided on a cheerful topic: Death and Physics. I talked about modern science gives us very good reasons to believe (not a proof, never a proof) that there is no such thing as an afterlife. Life is a process, not a substance, and it’s a process that begins, proceeds along for a while, and comes to an end. Certainly something I’ve said before, e.g. in my article on Physics and the Immortality of the Soul, and in the recent Afterlife Debate, but I added a bit more here about entropy, complexity, and what we mean by the word “life.”
If you’re in a reflective mood, here it is. I begin at around 3:50. One of the points I tried to make is that the finitude of life has its upside. Every moment is precious, and what we should value is what is around us right now — because that’s all there is. It’s a scary but exhilarating view of the world.
Yes Simon but it is even more fundamental than that! IF there is “a creator” he is outside the finite and that means there would be something “besides the physical universe”. But human consciousness lies entirely within the finite and that means we can never in principle actually encompass and comprehend the creator should he exist! We can never prove the creator exists even if his existence was logically necessary. All we can do is stipulate such an existence based on evidence in consciousness (not physics) that could conceivably be illusory!
So it isn’t merely that God might choose not to make the trick to the origin of the finite, consciousness, and the interaction between them available to us. Rather they are unavailable in principle!
Matthew,
The Westminster Catechism of the 1640’s says that God is infinite, but the Biblical derivation of this point is uncertain; the Hebrew word rendered ‘infinite’ in the KJV may not have the same connotation. If you move God as creator out from ‘entirely higher’ to ‘infinite’, then yes, it seems to me you just add more oomph to my reasoning. If He reveals himself, it is because He has condescended to reveal things, or allow them to be discovered. We will not work Him out. We will not achieve final understanding of His creation, either in terms of its structural fabric or in terms of His conscious intentions.
Simon I’m not into biblical quibbling. A god who isn’t infinite isn’t God! Modern theology has to evolve just like modern science. God doesn’t change but the human conception must or should.
Matthew
You are probably right there, thinking a little.