Thoughts on religion and tolerance for all

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Thoughts on religion and tolerance for all (3/2/06)

Well, I have everything else up here so I might as well hit the biggie and discuss religion. I tend to toss a lot of cosmology into this but I'll try to hyperlink most of it so it makes sense. Traditionally there are two paths in this discussion, one for people who are religious and one for those who aren't. I'm deliberately addressing both groups at once.

Everyone understands there is a base "cause and effect" relationship, called Causality, that defines why things happen. We spend our lives exploring that relationship and the many things it has to offer. People take different perspectives for the root of all of these things, but at the end of the day this is our defining factor: We are all creatures of causality.

One of the more surprising things that I've found out so far, is exactly how ordered the universe is, which is a defining factor in the nature of causality. As a boy some brave soul let me get my hands on "Chaos: Making a new science" by James Gleick. Bear in mind I'm a freckled redhead so letting me get my hands on anything is quite dangerous, but this book had software in it and I had my 286 computer so I read it avidly and played with the software to understand what Gleick was talking about. What I took away from it was that science was starting to understand the seeming randomness of nature. It wasn't as random as we thought. There were equations that could explain it all.

I also had access to a Life program. I show one over in the cancer article. Between the two I realized that just about everything in nature, including humanity and our creations, could be explained quite easily by some pretty basic rules. With a lot of stuff operating over a sufficient time those rules can create some very interesting things. The twist comes when we think of this from the various perspectives on religion. Atheists rejoice because God isn't needed to explain everything around us. Religious folks rejoice because it is just so amazing that the system is this pristine and clearly a higher deity is involved to make things like this.

Adding to the brouhaha is when we apply causality to existence. What, if anything, touched off all of this? If it is a God, then what created God? How is all of this possible? Believe it or not, this is called the "Cosmological argument for the existence of God."

Now, try to imagine this in your head: We've got a 10-year-old freckled redhead armed with Chaos, Life, and a computer, peppering people with questions about the nature of existence and asking ministers who created God. Lets just say I didn't get many in depth answers. Enter: Occam's razor.

Wikipedia tells us Occam said something to the effect of "Numquam ponenda est pluritas sine necessitate," which can be translated a bunch of ways but my favorite is: Given two equally predictive theories, choose the simpler.

"Simpler." Bit of a problem, isn't it? At first the answer seems obvious. God must have done all of this. That is simplest theory. But that answer requires an explanation of God's existance, so which is simpler: that God exists on his own without any cause, or that all of this exists all on it's own without any cause?

"We are all creatures of causality." We have a causality bias. In determining which side of the cosmological argument is simpler, that bias prevents us from answering the question free from bias. To date I have not come up with a reliable method for cracking this. Personally I side on the no God side of things, but I do this with a trick of perspective rather than logic, comparable to how some folks see a glass as half empty, others half full. I'm one of the half full folks. I think that if all of this can exist without a god there must be a fundamental expression of life within existence. I find that brings me hope in even the worse circumstances.

As a side note, all of this talk of causality also bears a word of advice: Regardless of why, causality guarantees change will happen. It is a cosmological constant. Success, then, is learning how to influence it and assist it in going your way.

Anyway, answering the questions I've outlined above can only be done by the individual. You can tell someone an answer but to really embrace it each person will need to decide it on his or her own. We have to tolerate each other's answers if we can expect to have one of our own.