collected writings

The Non-Existent Personal God

Science and theology have long been polar opposites in the spectrum of knowledge we use to understand the world; science is based on observable data and answering how, theology searching for a higher being and the why. Traditionally, both exist in their separate spheres, using different terminology and methods. To try and move between science and theology under this classical structure would be impossible, the wrong questions would be answered with the wrong ideas. To posit which holds a higher truth would be, when comparing apples and oranges, to ask which is more of a fruit. A nonsensical and irrelevant question. However, the progression of academia has led, most notably in different fields of science, to unification rather than diversification of genres. Will this eventually hold true for two disciplines as neoclassically diverse as science and theology?

The relevant model to use when thinking about this is one offered by Neil Cornish, in which the laws of physics converge at higher energies, but do not necessarily crystallize out in similar fashions at lower energies. This, of course, is a graphical representation of how a single unified theory (or Theory of Everything) would lead to separate fields of physics (thermodynamics, relativity, chemistry) that would not necessarily be linked (or linkable) to each other without first traveling through a Grand Central Station of extraordinarily high energy. Does this model hold true for academia? Does, at sufficiently high energies, science and philosophy, of which theology is a specialized portion, merge? Without the ability to define "energy" in this sense, is there any common ground where every form of understanding we have is capable of holding just as much truth?

For the sake of the remainder of this paper, we will accept the possibility of a junction of science and theology as a priori knowledge, so that using scientific methodology to understand theology can be logically possible. Specifically, theology when concerned with the model and definition of god. It is true that science will never be able to "prove" the existence or role of god, but to a large extent science already has found a place for god to exist. However, I feel that a fully incorporated science, physics unified with psychology, sociology, and biology, will be able to offer better models to explain existence and life than any concept of a personal god. That is, in an interpretation of the nature of science; a removed, apersonal god could exist, an immanent personal god cannot exist.

God has to be either completely removed from the universe and the continuous creative process, or must be everywhere and everytime, personal and self-limited. There can be no god that intervenes in natural affairs some of the time...such a god could not exist theologically, let alone logically. This argument is offered eloquently by Arthur Peacocke in Paths From Science towards God , so I will not readdress it here, though I do feel that complexity as Peacocke uses it needs to be better defined. Complexity is best understood through phase transitions, and phase transitions in turn are illustrated through the scientific models that we use to explain observations. Therefore, chemistry is the complexity of physics, where it becomes easier to talk of chemical process than billions of physical relationships. Likewise biology is the study of the complexity of chemistry.

This said, complexity should not be thought of as a process that exists apart from science. In reality it is only a model that fits observed evidence. Complexity does not exist any more than "Big Bangs" or "Evolutions" exists; the models follow the observations, not the other way around. Models should never be used as evidence for a designer, only as evidence of a modeler (human thought). Science as the observer is very much engrained in the "existence" of complexity through the positing of a hierarchical progression of theory, (we will return to the role of the observer as it applies to theology later).

Complexity by itself cannot then be used as evidence for a god on any level, no more than Kepler's laws of planetary motion can be evidence of god. The claim that simple gravitational models exist is not proof of god, only of gravity. The same for complexity. The failure of humans to accept beauty or complex patterns in nature without wanting or needing a cause for it (from theology or science) will prove to be the limit of our understanding in this universe of knowledge.

The evidence (or lack of strong opposing observations, if you like) for a removed, non-personal god is relatively strong. There are limits to science, and it is acceptable to insert god into these gaps. The limit-questions mentioned by Ian Barbour are the human realization of these boundaries. We may never know exactly the method or reason for physical laws, creation, and sustentation, and god rightly jumps in as the superhero to provide the answers.

An interesting application of this is in the venerable debate between fate (god) and free will (mind), by understanding physics and the idea of probability. Modern physics states that all elementary particles (and in a deterministic sense all matter) exists as a probability wave, and its true state can only be know upon observation (again: the role of the observer is intrinsically important). This probability can be boiled down to a binary choice (except for, perhaps, strings, whose very nature might determine how many choices it has), where free will exists in that you can choose between two options, and fate exists in that there are only two options. We can have our cake and eat it too, but we will never get full. In elementary particle physics, this property of god is simple: even if god is the cause for the options or the choices, there is still a very defined and thus removed role. A god-of-the-options (free will) is very much the absentee god, designing the rules or the metarules and then pushing the GO button. A god-of-the-choices (fate) would be forced to operate on such a small scale that many millions of years (or likewise, many millions of millions of simultaneous independent choices) would have to pass for a single nonrandom action to grow into something noticeable by humans. Either model of god is non-personal, by choice or necessity.

Likewise, the god-model as determiner-of-indeterminacies effectively removes god from the personal sphere by creating a smoke screen behind which any physical process or physical manifestation of god or god's choice is forever hidden. If god were to operate via Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, we would never know god's existence. More profoundly, if the uncertainty principle forms an unsurpassable barrier of knowledge, such a god would never know us.

A god that wishes to remain completely hidden is unlike most current religious traditions, but I think it is a more accurate depiction. Why would an infinite being need or want our awareness and respect? Is not an insecure god or a god with needs and desires a product of humans constantly anthropomorphizing god, something that must be avoided at all cost? Pantheism or panentheism could both hold true, but only if god solely operates at levels below the Planck terms: the energy that "vibrates" strings in superstring theory, the most elementary particle possible in others. This would hold true for creation (a non-singular creation à la the Big Bang, quantum randomness in evolution, etc.) and ongoing physical process, but not in an immanent sense.

To summarize so far, we have found that god certainly can exist in our universe, but only at levels and limits were science throws itself into an infinite loop or where it falls flat. At all points infinite and zero, interestingly enough. So god, mathematically speaking, must be completely nothing and/or completely infinite. A model of god thus defined, we can examine how this cannot be a personal god. I will postulate two separate arguments.

The idea of a personal god, one that is immanent, continually creating, and at some level able to bridge a gap between godself and humans through relationship and dialog cannot exist unless we are to abandon major epistemological tenets. Communication between an infinite being and a finite being simply would not be logically or in any other way possible. Communication is only possible between two objects that "speak the same language." An infinite god's language would be infinite as well, and would make no sense to humans. Even if god were to "dumb down" the communicational level in an attempt to reach us (divine revelation), a minutely small portion of infinity is still infinity. Likewise with zero. A very large or very small portion of zero is still zero.

If communication were possible, it would mean that either god was finite or humans were infinite, two claims that are very hard to justify, and would make life tough for the traditions of theology and philosophy. Likewise, any form of communication would amount to a physical manifestation of god, which would be impossible for the same reasons. There can be no physical (finite) proof of an infinite being, just as it is scientifically impossible to find a true zero. God must stay in the infinite and zero, and we have to stay in the finite. Period. I find beauty in an idea contained in John Barrow's The Book of Nothing , which, summarized quickly, states that mathematically a zero sum and an infinite sum can produce a finite sum:

if n / 0 = ? then 0 x ? = n

...but there is no implication of communication. Nor could there be.

God must then be limited (finite); unknowable and hidden; or nonexistent. As far as theology is concerned, and as demonstrated above, the unknowable god is the most satisfactory choice. We have two independent justifications of a removed and nonpersonal god.

Why do human consistently view themselves as senior to other living organisms, when it is all but obvious that we arose from the same processes? The quick and dirty answer is that we are different. Though every living organism is united in biology, there is no denying the differences. I personally believe that these differences exist because we were able to develop a complex spoken language, and thus able to progress our evolutional strategy from a slow biological process to a quicker social evolution. Through social evolution, it is possible to make many more changes (mutations, adaptations and selections) in a lifetime than ever before, as we were limited by life and death. Essentially, evolution becomes conscious; but these concepts are not necessary for my argument.

Conscious language is a higher mental process, and like the evolutionary means that produces it, much more abstract but no less important. There are many products of this advancement that we find ourselves; most generally, we have removed our kind from being subjects of the world to being observers.

Here we start to introduce the role of the observer in theology, something that I feel has been ignored. Anthropologists and psychologists have known for some time that the observer influences the observations, and this is unavoidable. Even in film there was this realization (beyond the art-as-representation-of-life question). Documentary film started as a very intrusive medium. Nanook of the North (1922), generally considered the first nonfiction film, resurrected and staged a way of life that had been extinct among the Alaskan native population for at least thirty years, for the purpose of a "more realistic" film. Through the New Deal era and into World War II, documentaries evolved to be a very heavy handed, propaganda like film, with newsreel attitude and Voice of God narration. Then, in the 1960's, a new style of documentary sprung out of historical and technical innovations, and a desire to produce a more "realistic" film. Cinema Verité, as it was called, eschewed narration and scripts, instead desiring to simply go and film, and see what unfolds in front of the camera. The classics of this style include Primary (Drew Assoc. 1960), Don't Look Back (D.A. Pennebaker, 1967), and Gimme Shelter (Maysles', 1970).

This style was taken to its logical extent by giving cameras to indigenous peoples, and then asking them to shoot and create their own documentaries. However, the ultimate failure of Cinema Verité lies in that no matter what, there can be no objective way to capture reality through art. Having directed a verité concept film last year, I know how the simple placement of a camera, or even the use of a select shot during editing, "recreates" an environment that did not exist.

The observer is very much an important character in life, and cannot be removed from observations. Physics eventually discovered this through quantum mechanics, and has used it as a basic concept ever since. It seems obvious that, if theology is to be held to as high a standard as any other search for truth, the role of the observer must be kept in mind.

Here, most dramatically, the failure of the personal-god model is complete. The observer is "corrupted" by a large number of influences that remove the possibility of a personal god. When a social, historical, and geographical background is taken into account, not to mention familiar structure, the room in which a god could interact personally is shrunk to a point far in the distant past. Perhaps the last nail in the coffin (metaphorically, of course) for the personal-god model comes from psychology.

One of modern social psychological theories is that of Terror Management Theory (TMT). TMT, an offshoot of both Freudian and existential philosophy, is a testable theory that holds that death related anxiety is our most fundamental source of anxiety. Our basic desire for self-preservation, coupled with the discussed abstract consciousness that has led to the realization of our own eventual death, colors every action. We seek structure, meaning, and permanence, and create society to fulfill this need. Religion and theology exists because we are aware of our own inevitable deaths. TMT has the added blessing that it is completely testable, and has in fact been a sort of panacea to modern psychology, because its hypothesis can be directed towards nearly every standing question about human behavior. Studies have successfully used TMT to examine the need for a belief in immortality. One such study overwhelming confirms how increased awareness of personal death leads to an increased need for literal rather than symbolic immortality.

This basic human desire, coupled with a social progression from less technologically advanced societies (as must be, of course) provides an explanation for the existence of god models. The human connection, all-important in Peacocke's writings, is destroyed, because the observer becomes too subjective to pass straight judgment on theological matters, and too engrained in the process to remove in any attempt to find an objective model of a personal god. The existence of a theory such as Terror Management Theory can explain away much of the need for an immanent creator; without this need, constructed views of god are washed away and we are again left with a god that is removed and nonpersonal. God should be all the evidence needed to prove that god exists. The fact that other explanations can be forwarded to "explain" god is evidence against a personal god. Man then, as a product of higher consciousness, invented the personal god. A universal human need for an immortal being is not proof of existence, after all humans are too subjectively attached to the system to possess understanding.

By becoming aware of limit-questions and certain infinite regressions deeply embedded in science, such as Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, we can find a very specific field for god to exist. God must be nonpersonal, due to the nature of infinity; apersonal, due to the natural limits imposed by uncertainty and indeterminacy; and above all removed, as there could be no physical manifestations of an infinite being. Conversely, no solid evidence can be found for a personal, immanent god when constructs such as social and historical perspectives are taken into account. Consciousness created the personal god shortly after consciousness created the need for literal immortality. When social and psychological perspectives are removed, thus theorizing away human needs, we are left with matters of nature and matters of the infinite, and a missing personal god.