"Many people think that there must be something more to the fabric of reality than what science can explain," said The Economist in a recent review of a book about the philosopher Henri Bergson, who once said of Einstein's theory of relativity that "it is not science, it is a metaphysics grafted upon science."
Bergson obviously understood nothing about relativity, and The Economist is often surprisingly prone to magical thinking for a paper devoted to the dismal science, but the comment happened to coincide with this interesting post by "A Motley Fool" on Substack and the above video by Grim Jim Desborough, both dealing with the question of the mystical vs the material.
It isn't a contest, and only non-scientists imagine that faith in science puts the two in conflict. (A point that Grim makes in his video.) I am a rationalist. I believe that the universe is simply a set of processes, "mechanical" if you like. But I also believe that we live in a mental model of the universe, and our mental model includes mystical phenomena. Those things are not real outside the world of ideas, as Alan Moore puts it, but in that that world they matter.
In other words, both gravity and love are real and important, but they are not real and important in the same way. To think so, and to try to insist that mystical ideas are also important to the universe -- that they're part of the fabric of reality, as The Economist insists -- is a category error. We're apes, and apes with clever little brains that imagine all sorts of art and feelings, but the universe doesn't give a stuff about that -- unless you can believe in an immanent deity that thinks like an ape. Einstein would have had no need to refute Andrew Marvell's statement of time
But at my back I always hear Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near; And yonder all before us lie Deserts of vast eternity.
because, unlike Bergson, Marvell wasn't Dunning-Kruger (or even Donneing-Kruger) in thinking he was saying something fundamental about the objective nature of time.
It's the 21st century. We should have got past human exceptionalism by now, and also past the clomping kind of philosophy that still thinks science and intuition are describing the same kind of reality. For us they exist as a superposition, but that only matters on this tiny blip of matter in this tiny sliver of time to this one primate species. When humans are gone, the universe will still have red shift and black holes and gravitational waves but the notions of Bergson will be gone forever in the abyss of time.
This one's about religion, not gaming. Actually, it's not even about religion, really; it's about theism. I've been thinking about it lately because of all the deities in the Vulcanverse series that were once believed in and worshipped by half the civilized world, and now are universally regarded as fictional. If that's not a topic that interests you there'll be more ludology next time.
Years ago some friends asked me to be godfather to their daughter. 'But it will be in church,' they said, 'so you have to have been baptised.' Anything for friends. I spoke to the local vicar about getting baptised. 'Do you accept Jesus Christ as your lord and saviour?' he wanted to know. Well, I conceded that I was totally onboard with the ethical side of Jesus's teaching, just not the supernatural bit. Perhaps this is what's called Jesusism. Anyway, it wasn't enough for the vicar. 'I think you and the Church of England must go their separate ways,' he said.
Sometimes I get characterized as an atheist, but that's incorrect. Belief in the existence of a deity, or accepting the possibility of such an entity, is an entirely different question from whether you believe in a specific deity. And the question of whether you should revere a deity is another thing again. So just to set the record straight...
Newton thought that something must have created the planets and set them in motion. He called it God, as did priests throughout history and probably prehistory. The only thing that changed over the ages was that the phenomena that God was used to explain became more closely observed and more complex.
Nowadays we know that it’s not just about explaining how the sun and planets formed. That was gravity, not God. We know we live in a vastly bigger universe than Newton ever suspected. It might even be infinite, but almost certainly consists of far more than the septillion stars in the observable region around us.
Nearly fourteen billion years ago there was an event sometimes called the Big Bang (though a lot of astrophysicists avoid the term these days, seeing as it's thought of more as a kind of state change and certainly not an explosion) which might have been the beginning of matter and could be said to be the starting point of our universe, though we can infer the existence of a reality before that which was of unknown extent and which for an undeterminable period had been (according to theory) undergoing something we call cosmic inflation.
We could start speculating how that earlier reality came about, but it’s (almost) pure conjecture. You could imagine the Big Bang as like a bubble forming in a pot of boiling water. Each bubble in this analogy is a universe. But we not only don’t know any of that, we almost certainly can never know. We can't even see the whole of the bubble we're in. So let’s just stick with the Big Bang and our own universe.
The theistic argument is that an entity or entities existed in the proto-reality and they caused the Big Bang. Let’s assume that’s true and we’ll call them God. That still doesn’t tell us if God intended to cause the Big Bang. Also it doesn’t tell us if God designed the nature of the resulting universe or even was able to foresee it. It doesn’t tell us if God was generating a whole lot of universes or just the one. We can’t say what further interest God had in the universe once it formed. We can’t say where God came from either, unless we evoke an earlier God; turtles all the way down.
In any case, this is an unimaginably alien intelligence we’re talking about. Would we even be able to recognize God as intelligent? That requires us to observe an entity that has a mental model of reality, uses that model to predict the consequences of an action, and can update their model based on the consequences actually observed. Can we apply diagnostic principles like that to God? If not, the concept of ‘intelligence’ may simply have no meaning.
Incidentally, theologians have a concept called the cosmological argument that runs something like this: everything we observe has a cause, therefore everything in the universe has a cause, therefore everything can be traced back to the cause of the universe, and we’ll call that God. It’s not a lot of use because it is based on everything working the same way our everyday observations suggest, which is almost certainly a fallacy. Also, it uses the word ‘God’ but doesn’t tell us whether that first cause is intelligent or even if it still exists. And it has the problem of only going back to the start of this universe (no philosophy or science can take us further, other than speculating on the most general principles, though we can provisionally include non-observables if they are corollaries of an otherwise complete and working theory) but that’s only where our reality began. You could call what came before that ‘God’ but you don’t thereby learn anything about it, you simply gave it a name.
Typically whenever humans discover that the universe is bigger or older than previously known, the concept of God gets adjusted to be the supposed first cause. Other Gods are possible. We could conceive of a God that created just the solar system or just our galaxy rather than the whole universe. Or a God specifically responsible for creating life on Earth, or even just for creating hominids. There could be other Gods responsible for other planets. Gods of that sort can't be the first ever cause postulated by the cosmological argument, but that argument is probably based on a fallacy anyway. And the cosmological argument requires a God who was in existence eternally but who waited until 13.8 billion years ago to create our universe in its current form. What was that God doing for the preceding (maybe infinite) period of time? Each question unpacks a dozen more.
Let’s make another set of assumptions anyway. Let’s assume a God who existed before this universe, who planned and initiated the Big Bang, and who continues to take an interest in the universe, particularly in the 5% of everything that comprises what we are used to thinking of as ‘normal’ matter. A few billion years after the Big Bang it was theoretically possible for life to form, and given all that time and all those stars maybe life did form many, many times. We can’t estimate a probability for that as we only have the one example. However, we have some basis for thinking that life probably formed multiple times on our planet, in which case we might expect it to form elsewhere under similar conditions.
We also have no way of setting a probability for the evolution of general intelligence, language, and culture among tool-using social animals. We have the one example, and for all we know it’s the only case of it happening in the entirety of our universe. If we really are the one and only philosophizing species in all this universe, perhaps the God we’re hypothesizing took a special interest in us. What then? Would God want to contact us? We wouldn’t immediately think of making contact with a colony of new microbes, but perhaps intelligence makes all the difference and is recognizably a shared trait even between God (conjectured lifespan 13.8 billion years up to eternity) and we mere mayflies.
Did God contact humans? We only know about historical religions, each of which had its set of divine revelations. All we can infer from those is that God restricted revelation to matters that were of immediate interest to the people of the time: what to eat, who to have sex with, which fabrics to wear, contemporary codes of law. God revealed nothing involving science or technology, and in fact vouchsafed completely erroneous versions of the size, nature and origin of the stars and planets.
Also, in most cases God’s pronouncements were supposedly revealed only to a select few, either by choice or perhaps because God is not omnipotent and cannot use any method to communicate other than speaking telepathically to a specially receptive mind. Certainly if God did choose to communicate with humans, it was in a manner that left any genuine messages exactly as uncertain as the thousands of delusional messages experienced by the mentally ill. If some guy told you he’d spoken to God, and that God had revealed exclusively to him a whole bunch of precepts, you’d be dubious. There are many explanations more convincing than that the guy really had been singled out by God. If I told you that I believed the guy’s story, and if I gave my reason for believing him as ‘just faith’, you’d think I’d lost my marbles. It makes no difference if the guy is in a trailer park in Texas today or in a desert a thousand years ago. Whenever we accept something on the grounds of faith, we should reflect on the origin of that faith. If it’s just what we were raised to believe, or if it’s just something we’d like to believe, that tells us nothing about reality on a cosmic scale; it only tells us about our own nature.
But let’s assume that God did communicate with some people, as most religions claim. God could not have any experience of what its like to live as a human being, but several religions solved that with the concept of the avatar – creating a human possessing some of God’s mind. That must be a bit like trying to do quantum computing on a Sinclair Spectrum, but let’s say it’s enough to let God include human experience in God’s mental model of everything.
What about other animals, incidentally? Does God care about the existence of bees? Has God contacted any individual bees? We can’t know that any more than we can know anything about the nature of such a being. Assuming that God only cares about humans, does that just mean Homo sapiens or did it extend to Denisovans and/or Neanderthals? If God is only concerned with modern humans, does that apply equally to all ethnicities? Or how about sex? Does God favour men or women?
These might seem like frivolous questions, but they're all things you’d have to think about once you’re going with the hypothesis that God exists at all. If we can look at a person's behaviour and detect favouritism, or at whole organizations and declare them institutionally racist or sexist, then it should be possible to look at how the universe operates (assuming it is controlled by a God who is not disinterested) and infer any built-in preferences.
Suppose we believe that God, having evaluated human existence, has come up with a set of precepts for how we should live. We don’t know which religion’s version of morality corresponds to this. Even if we did, should we follow God’s rules if they don’t accord with our personal morality?
Some would argue that their morality is directly based on God’s rules. The trouble is that everybody thinks that, and they can’t all be right. It’s entirely possible that none of them is right. Just assuming that God exists, and designed and initiated the universe, and takes a personal interest in the doings of humans, doesn’t give us a steer as to whether any of the world’s religions say anything accurate about the nature of God. You can say, ‘I am convinced that Baptist Christianity tells us exactly what God wants.’ Or Zoroastrianism. Or Wahhabism. Or those Greek gods who show up in the Vulcanverse books. Or the faith of the Aztecs. But all that’s guiding you there is a feeling, almost certainly based on how you happen to have been brought up. It’s not reasoned speculation from first principles.
Can we tell anything about the nature of God (if there is one) just by looking at the universe? That would be a good place to start. OK, well, it seems that God either does not have direct control of events or else prefers to stand aloof. Having set up the laws of physics ('laws' is a misleading way to look at it, but let it stand) God is a dispassionate observer allowing each event to have the consequences that emerge naturally. (This makes perfect sense to me. It’s how I’d do it if I were God – not that that’s a proof of anything.)
I call myself an agnostic rather than an atheist because I don’t have any idea what caused the Big Bang – or, indeed, what caused whatever conditions that applied before the Big Bang. Maybe it was some kind of intelligent entity or entities, with the caveat that I don’t even know what intelligence would mean in that context. I can’t even say that’s unlikely, as there’s no basis for assessing probabilities. I can say I don’t feel it’s likely, but that’s no more rigorous than somebody saying they feel sure Jesus is God. A groundless sense of improbability is not enough to go on to call myself an atheist.
As for earthly religions, that’s another matter. They all look like human inventions to me, and pretty nonsensical ones. If there were a God who insisted on the blind faith and footling rules demanded by most organized religions, I’d repudiate that God. Being the creator of the universe doesn’t give God any more authority than me on what it’s like to be me or how I believe other people should be treated. So I’m an atheist – or an irreligionist – as regards all historical religions. But that’s nothing remarkable. Everybody who espouses one religion is an atheist towards all the other thousands of gods believed in, worshipped, and died for throughout history.
As well as an irreligionist I’m definitely a non-worshipper – because even if a God exists, worshipping that God strikes me as pointless. I don’t worship light or heat or matter. I don’t worship the universe. I don't even worship beauty or truth or justice, much as I appreciate them. Any intelligent being that requires worship isn’t worthy of it. (And, as a personal note, rituals and ceremonies leave me cold anyway. But that's irrelevant to the theism question.)
Nor do I believe in life after death, because I don’t see any viable mechanism for it nor a sensible reason why God should arrange it. But I’m agnostic about that too. Just because it makes no sense to me, I can’t know whether it makes sense to an alien mind that thinks on cosmic scales. Maybe some or all of us get to live on (but as what?) after we die. If so, and if I eventually get first-hand experience of it, it still won’t necessarily prove the existence or nonexistence of God. It could be just another random process, albeit a really baffling one. We all just have to wait to see if we get an answer.
All of this, though, is perhaps beside the point. It arises because most people are literal-minded and insist on religion being true in the way that it’s true that water is wet. Think instead that religion is true in the way that a Mozart symphony is beautiful and you’d be on firmer ground. That of course requires you to accept that it is subjective and can be true for you while not true for somebody else. That God is real in the way that Lizzie Bennet and Winston Smith are real – very real, subjectively, that is. If more religious people understood it that way we’d have a lot less trouble in the world. You can object to other people's ethical rules, because those govern how they behave towards others, but there's no point in disputing matters of personal belief. Why take issue with anyone else’s idea of the nature and wishes of God, given that there is no objectively true version of those concepts?
Still, I remain open-minded; I could yet be convinced of atheism, perhaps, though probably not of theism. Dr Richard Bartle, who knows more than I do about the nature of world design and its implications, says: "I can see what would have to follow if reality were a conscious creation. These consequences have not arisen. [...] Even if reality were an accidental creation ruled over by an uncaring or capricious god, it would be different from how it is now." His book How to Be a God: A Guide for Would-Be Deities seems like the best place to start; on sale on Amazon US and Amazon UK.
Here's a question that we really ought to settle once and for all. Richard Hetley, who is a veteran of Fabled Lands campaigns on Kickstarter and has been invaluable to us as an editor and design consultant, recently asked about Ebron, the god of Uttaku who crops up in The War-Torn Kingdom:
Richard Hetley: "I mention this delightfully angular deity because he came up in discussion about the Fabled Lands app. Replies there said 'Yes, it's been confirmed by the authors that Ebron has angles, not angels. Must be some sort of Lovecraftian non-Euclidean god.' I was fairly certain that this was not the case. I had even corrected the misconception where possible. But then I couldn't find a reference in our e-mails, so I didn't say anything.
Care to clarify, for the ten thousandth time, whether Ebron was in possession of angles or angels?"
Jamie Thomson: "It most definitely is angles! And it first made an appearance in the Heart of Harkun radio play.
And yes, he is a kind of non-Euclidean deity, that's a nice way of putting it, but not Lovecraftian. Imagine it more as a Zen koan, like you meditate on the mystery of how god can have fourteen angles in the same way the early Christian Greek churches used the Trinity as a mystery to meditate on, but not to be taken literally. Of course, the Western Christians decided to do just that, and so you get the Nicene creed, where they actually conceive of a threefold god."
Not many fantasy stories are more often cited as thought experiments in moral philosophy than as fiction. I’m thinking of “The Space Traders” by American lawyer Derrick Bell. In a nutshell: super-powerful beings arrive on Earth and offer the United States money, energy and technological advances if all the non-black people agree to hand over all the black people to the angels/devils/aliens.
The Trolley Problem it ain’t. We can’t know what other people will do when faced with an ethical question. It’s hard enough to predict what we’d do ourselves; look at all the people who are convinced they’d have stood up to the Nazis if they lived in 1930s Germany. Derrick Bell takes a misanthropic view -- in his story there’s a referendum and the black Americans are handed over. If Germany had held a referendum in 1940, would the majority have voted to exterminate the Jews? They certainly colluded with that policy, but it was framed in a way that allowed the average citizen to tell himself that he didn’t actually know what was going on. Being confronted with the stark truth and voting on it – morally pulling the trigger, so to speak – would be a different story. We hope.
And the Jews had been demonized in Nazi propaganda for years. Posters claimed they’d betrayed the country, hoarded gold, spread disease – all sorts of conspiracy nonsense, and (as now) there are always idiots who’ll believe it. But for citizens to turn against a group of fellow citizens out of a clear blue sky – whites against blacks, or blacks against whites, even given the dire racial history of the Confederacy -- would be a whole other matter, surely? We cling to the hope humanity is better than its worst moments.
And yet… Islamic State threw gay men off rooftops and then stoned them if they survived that. The people who flocked to join IS presumably condoned it. Even so, it’s not the same as voting within a normal society to murder a group of people. IS was a self-selected band of extremists; we’d expect them to behave like rabid fanatics.
It seems like it might be easier to turn on a subgroup if belonging to that subgroup is a matter of choice rather than an accident of birth. The English in Tudor times might have voted to round up Catholics, if voting had been a thing. The Khmer Rouge, in common with many populist movements, hated intellectuals and was happy to persecute them. Crusades and holy wars throughout history have been all about exterminating people who don’t believe in your big guy in the sky.
Derrick Bell’s story would be more interesting if, instead of making his fictional citizens outright monsters, he’d presented them with a choice that was more honestly and credibly tempting. “We want all your incarcerated criminals,” the aliens/angels could have said. “No harm will come to them but we’re taking them away from Earth.” Even without the offer of extraterrestrial super-tech, getting rid of those inmates immediately saves the US about a hundred billion dollars. Tempting yet?
It’s still an absolutely appalling scenario. With no idea of what fate those exiles are going to face, a vote to hand them over is heinous self-interest and nothing more. However, until very recently a referendum on capital punishment in the UK would have voted in favour of sending some criminals to their death. That’s a lot worse than being banished to space. As a society we don’t make serious efforts to address the root causes of crime, nor to rehabilitate the criminals we have. In a sense we’re already consigning them to exile from humanity, and we’re not even getting fusion power in return.
How might this sort of ethical Gordian Knot be presented in a roleplaying scenario? An example from our Last Fleet game: the war has been going badly for the fleet, and the Corax offer a deal. Humans can live in peace, but they will be settled on one world and they have to give up all their technology. Effectively it would be a return to a primitive Eden. The Corax undertake to watch over the human planet, ensuring no disease or asteroid impact would ever be an existential threat -- but also to make sure we never develop science that could get us off the planet. The deal in a sense is that the Corax are offering to become humanity's gods. Immediately it gets interesting because some will want to take the deal ("We get to live. Our descendants will know peace, not endless war.") but others will bitterly oppose it ("So the human race becomes the pets in a Corax zoo?") If it's presented as a genuine and tempting option, it could cue a lot of gutsy inter-party conflict. I should add that in our game the Corax were not interdimensional fungi (wtftm) but creations of humanity ourselves. A war against your own rebel children is obviously more interesting than one against a genuinely alien Other.
Or it could be a bargain like the one Clark Ashton Smith postulates in his story "Seedling of Mars". The alien's offer ends up dividing humanity into two warring camps -- which might well have been the intention all along.
Going back to "The Space Traders" idea, the choice needn't hinge on an entire racial or ideological subgroup. People in the millions are abstract. What if it's a single individual? You can have all these wonderful things: free energy, unlimited resources, miraculous medicine, nobody goes hungry… and in return you give us one person. One human being for the lives of billions yet to be born.
This might just be my favourite of the H P Lovecraft letters read on the Voluminous podcast. HPL shows how it's possible to hold very different opinions from someone else and still remain friends (we shouldn't need to be reminded of that) while having a robust argument with them (we all ought to be taught that).
