Ranting Under The Stars

My mother died almost two weeks ago, and my family and I are in a state of grief and transition. It was kind of sudden, but she had been in poor health for several years and it only took one problem unrelated to her health problems to set her death into motion. 

I’ve been in this boat before. Thirteen years ago, my father was killed suddenly in a car accident. I was 19 at the time, fresh out of high school and working at a decent job. The shock of his death (and the family fallout that followed) sent me into a deep depression. For a year, I rarely slept or ate. I got severe headaches and spent most of my time either in bed or on AOL chat rooms. I stopped going to work outright and I shut out all my family and friends. I tucked myself into a cold pocket of grief and depression and told the world to go fuck itself.

This time, however, I am determined to not let that happen again. For the past two weeks I have been rather solitary, but that’s my nature normally. I’ve made it a point to get out of the house and be around people in positive environments. But just getting out isn’t going to be enough. The desire to fend off the debilitating effects of depression coupled with a new sense of my own health and mortality has prompted me to start making some changes in my life.

Change is hard to make when it’s large, but small, incremental changes are necessary. I’ve never been one to be able to easily drop a habit or make any sort of large change without dread and uncertainty. This is why I’m committed to making small, manageable changes at the start. I’ve been inspired by comedian, TV host, podcaster, and generally all around nice guy Chris Hardwick’s book, The Nerdist Way. So far the book has helped me set some large goals and break them into small, achievable chunks in order to instill some change in my life, one little bit at a time. I highly recommend the book, especially for nerds like myself. (BTW Hardwick is not paying me to promote his book, but he SHOULD.) 

I’m hoping by slowly and surely making small changes to my rather crappy existence will help me achieve the goals in my Character Tome (read the book to find out WTF that is) and improve my life. 

I tend to get into lots of theological discussions, and one thing that keeps coming up in them is the probability of God. After stating the evidence against God, most believers will end the debate in a way that makes them look like the winner. They will almost definitely say, “Well, you can’t say God doesn’t exist truly because anything’s possible.” 

Let me make one thing perfectly clear. This may seem like semantics, but it is important to distinguish between “possible” and “probable.” “Possible” is defined as “able to be done within the power of someone or something.” “Probable” means “likely to be the cause, or to happen.” With these definitions in mind, realize this simple fact: Just because something is possible doesn’t mean it’s probable. However, if something is probable, it’s most likely possible.

In order for God to be possible, he must be able to exist within the parameters and power of nature. In other words, HE WOULD NOT BE SUPERNATURAL. “Supernatural” is defined as being “attributed to some force beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature.” There would be measurable, testable, tangible evidence that he existed. This, in turn, would also prove every holy book to be false, as religious texts claim that God has supernatural powers. If God wasn’t supernatural, all of his abilities would be natural as well. In essence, if there were evidence of God, it would prove that all religion was a lie.

Probability deals with statistics and math, so people tend to use these to show that there is a good probability that God exists. Intelligent designers like to point out that the way the the universe is organized and functioning is statistically impossible, according to them. However, these ideas are based on the assumption that the universe was assembled randomly, and that nature doesn’t have the power to organize itself via the four known universal forces (gravity, weak nuclear force, strong nuclear force, and electromagnetism). This of course leads to the debate as to where those forces originate, but currently we don’t know that. We know they exist and pretty much how they work, but we don’t know where they come from. This inevitably prompts the believer to say God is the origin of those forces, but there is no evidence to that. Just because we don’t know something yet doesn’t mean that God is then responsible. Just like Neil DeGrasse Tyson famously said, “God is an ever-shrinking pocket of scientific ignorance.”

There have been efforts to try to statistically prove that God exists. Physicist Stephen D. Unwin (ironic last name) wrote a book called The Probability of God, where he used the 200 year old Bayesian Probability equation to determine that there is a 67% chance God exists. The theory begins with the 50/50 chance that God exists, then takes into account all of the evidence for and against God to come up with the probability. This includes things such as goodness, natural and moral evils, intranatural and extranatural miracles, and religious experiences. Each variable is assigned a value by Unwin on a rather odd scale based on how likely each variable is to occur in the existence or non-existence of God. For instance, Unwin assigned goodness a 10, meaning that goodness existing would be 10 times as likely in a God existing universe. The scale indicates that 1 is neutral (whatever is variable is, it would not matter if God existed or not, it’d still be around), to decimals indicating a very small likelihood that the variable would exist.

The first glaring problem with this theory is that the variable values are dependent on the opinions of the person using the equation. There’s a website where you can take a “test” to determine your values and have them plugged into the Bayesian Equation. I took the test three times (the links to the results are here, here, and here), picking the extremes and then the last one I chose the middle road. Unwin’s values assigned to the variables, as well as the values assigned by a person’s answers to this test, are subjective and are in no way scientific. Each person using the equation would assign different values to each variable based on their own knowledge, experiences, and bias towards or against religion. THIS IS IN NO WAY SCIENTIFIC. The variables used in the equation cannot be empirically measured or tested, therefore the values are unusable. 

Secondly, even if this equation was right, which God is it? This equation simply supposedly determines the existence of A GOD, but is it the Judeo-Christian God, or the Islamic Allah? Or Odin? Or Shiva? There is literally no way to find this out. Stating there is a high probability that a God exists would further ignite the hatred between religions. They would constantly fight each other claiming their God is the one the equation proved to be real.

So is there a reliable, unbiased way to determine if God statistically is probable? Not really. In any situation that has a multitude of outcomes, the highest probability is always assigned to the most logical outcome, and any subsequent outcomes are assigned lower values based on the variables of the situation. Using the age old coin analogy for probability, we can determine that the probability of a coin falling will land on either heads or tails is 50/50. However, no one seems to take into account that the coin could land on its edge. The reason is that in order for the coin to land on its edge, there has to be a perfect set of variables (coin speed, wind speed, drag, weight of the coin, etc.) that will allow the coin to fall on its edge instead of its side. All of those variables are measurable, and through rigorous testing, one could come up with the perfect scenario for a coin to fall on its edge. However, in the realm of probability, the chances that all of those perfect variables exist outside a vacuum are so minute, that we can simply eliminate the third outcome from the list of probable outcomes.

We can say the same thing for God. Almost every natural phenomenon attributed to God’s work has been proven to not have any supernatural influence whatsoever. The reason is that we can measure out variables and determine a list of probable outcomes based on those measurements. Because we have no way of measuring God’s influence, we cannot include him on the list of variables. Therefore, all of the outcomes will be naturally occurring and we can leave God out of it. Until we have evidence that God exists and can measure his influence on the universe, scientists have no need to include him. Even if they were to include him, there are way too many assumptions to be made to justify his presence. Remember Occam’s Razor: of the choice between a set of probable outcomes, the one that requires the least amount of assumption is usually the right one.