God’s wot

Or: ‘God’s what?’. [Note on title: I don’t know where or when I read or heard this phrase but a little searching now shows up no exact reference.  The ‘correct’ phrase is ‘God wot’ with wot being allied in meaning and etymology to wit aka knowledge.  So its meaning is similar to “God only knows”.  But my version?  It makes a different sense if wot=wit, as in humour.  God’s wit.  Ha ha!  Good one God, telling Arjuna that guff about duty.  But if God’s wot or Gods wot or Godswot  or God swot (who knows?  Maybe even gods must study, or going further, swat, as in what you do to a fly.  That sits well with the omnipotence gig) is my invention, it is through a miss-hearing]  The reason for the title, whatever it means, is a pun as the question I began with.  For, I am not boasting, I was relatively young when I decided there is not God.

I have to credit my older brother.  I don’t know how old we were but we were washing the dishes after dinner – “tea” – one evening; he was washing and I was drying.  He could always wash faster than I could dry and would leave me to it the instant his job was done.  This particular time he voiced something that had he had clearly thought through himself (he is three years older than me): he said, almost in so many words that, rationally, God could not exist.

This may have been a revelation to me, I cannot recall.  But it certainly resonated and I knew with certainty that logically he was correct.  (Cautionary tale: he later in life found God again and gave his progeny Biblical names and I was left to eternally wonder where he lost his way.  It was the navy wot dunnit)  I was definitely in primary school then.  He probably was in high school, so I was perhaps 9 or 10 years old.

That kitchen sink conversation merely crystallised things for me.  I must have had my doubts already.  There was the incident at Sunday School.  The teenage teacher was telling us Bible stories while our parents were listening to the sermon in the next building.  Church services were the most boring things.  How my mother realised I was in the wrong place, i don’t know.  I was not generally naughty.  But one day I was excused from the service and sent to school.  I took this change with mixed feelings – glad to get out of the church service but apprehensive about going to a new school.

It was a Congregational Church if anyone wants to know – the proliferation of protestant sects that puzzled me was but a precursor to the paradox of major religions existing in the same globalised society.  I remember another conversation a bit later at my Grandmother’s funeral.  Talking to a fellow parishioner of hers, I referred to her sect as the Church of Christ – wrong! “Churches of Christ”, if you please, formed with the intention of uniting all denominations but effectively just contributing to the noise.  In a similar way, another brother was a minister in the “Uniting Church”, and woe betide anyone who calls it united.  Since family history was such a big thing, I always wondered why we weren’t Lutherans.  My sense of historical rectitude told me that we had lost our way, somewhat.  Not that i had any clue what that ‘way’ involved.  It just seemed another disjunction with historical roots that characterised ‘modern’ society.  You know, when you are taught about history in a nostalgic way, and you are led to ask, ‘so why are we changing?)

I had not yet (at the time of that Sunday School class) formalised a conscious attitude toward God and Christian faith, so my questioning of the various miracles attributed to Jesus in that lesson was entirely innocent.  I was only relating them to what I had by then learnt is physically possible.  I took them literally.  As usual, I wasn’t seeing the wood for the trees but my attendance to date had not been good so I was approaching these stories fresh.  I’d not been brainwashed from birth.  Anyway, the teacher took my questions as a bit too smart and I think I must have been expelled because I never went back.  I never meant to be smart-arsed although with hindsight I shouldn’t have come back with follow up questions.

So by a young age, I already knew the preposterousness of the existence of anything like an old, or even new, testament God.  The fact that you can make such a distinction says enough.  But does that particular refutation debunk the concept of god with any back story at all?  Well, despite my Arjuna comment, I don’t keep up with what most religions assert (and I flunked Sunday School, remember?) especially the more esoteric that seemingly acknowledge that personifications of god are anthropomorphisms.  It is nothing to say that the omniscient, omnipotent god controlling everything is nonsense.  Atheists have got to do better than that.

Anthropologically, religions may have begun as attempts to explain the mysteries a nascent and newly sentient species encountered once it had gained the ability to think beyond the instinctual (which invites the question, what is not instinctual?).  On the other hand, anthropologically that may be a just-so story.  Be that as it may (heretoforth, BTAIM), I will continue with this line.   What we call religious was once pseudo-science and,  before that, a matter of fact.  I don’t know that; I’m simply stating it.  But there is a deep mystery to life (and I use the word ‘mystery’ – well, how do I use it? ambiguously?) that is perhaps explainable but difficult to accept.  From gods as a collection of Marvel-like superfriends to the agency that triggered the Big Bang and then left us to our devices, these are ideas easy to debunk.  But the real debunking of god as most people experience the idea is likely to come from neuroscience.  If you can explain mind, you will have no need to resort to god.  Self, the feeling of inhabiting a particular body, which is simply the immediate envelope to the central viewpoint of the universe, is arguably just the sum of all the mental processes going on in each of us.  But that explains nothing.  That gives no ‘aha!’ moment of understanding.  In nature, many individual phenomena are shown to be just our perception of smaller effects acting in some coordinated way, like a Mexican wave in a football crowd, or a species in evolution.  But we cannot avoid the ineffable sense of the phenomena as a thing in its own right.  One day we will mathematically model the sense of self just like any of the modular sub-processes that are being modelled as I write, and therefore make true intelligent machines.  Maybe we will be able to ask them the answer to the ultimate question.

But we don’t call perception subjective for nothing.  An objective view of consciousness by definition cannot explain the subjective experience.  Cue God.  If there is no way to understand the subjective viewpoint in any objective way (that the said subject would understand), then the easiest straw to grasp is that there is something there beyond physical explanation that made everything I percieve.  If it is not subject to physical laws, how cometh it?  Clearly, you need some non-physical agency.  Of course, ‘I’ may be that entity, i.e. God.  That would be the implication flowing from the idea that I am the only reality I can be certain of.  Anything else is a product of my mind.  So when I expire, so does the universe with me.  Arguably, that fits anyone’s reality.  But no one (at least not me) is aware of having created everything.  We are constantly surprised and astounded by nature – ‘creation’.  So the next best explanation is that there is something else abroad in the universe that is, like me, not physical but is responsible for everything I perceive and, since my origin is just as big a mystery – I haven’t existed forever – what caused me to be?  (Just arse-luck, physicists would say but if the next sperm had united with that egg instead of the one that did, would I now not be?  Why?  What made that sperm (or egg) special in that sense?  Was my self assured from that point on, or from some time earlier?  Did it depend on my parents even meeting?  Again why?  So many questions…. )

But there is also a problem with ‘you’.  It is human nature to superpose all my notions of perception, sensation, world view and inner experience onto other entities in my universe, particularly the entities that look and behave most similar to me.  So what goes for me should be true about others.  Who knows?  Maybe one of you is even that external agency that is responsible for me, hence the common idea that Gods (occasionally) move among us.  (not to mention what that does to the idea of time – so Jesus had to be the son of God, not God itself.  So if I accept that your experience and inner self, nay, your very existence is every bit as valid as mine, then the idea that I am special, that a god principle made it all happen just for moi, needs serious revision and like the first child that resents the new sibling, I have to accept that I’m not going to get it all my own way all the time.  This is the Old Testament version with God smiting everyone in sight.  With a God that favours the righteous (who happen to be the mighteous).

Yep, I can see all this deriving from the idea that there is something that science cannot explain about existence.  Its subjective experience.  If a robot steps up that can pass the Turing Test, it might be surprising, revelatory even, but it would just be another form of being in the world.  It would have just as much of a problem convincing me of its external reality as anyone else.  And my unprovable guess is that it would have as hard a time understanding its own consciousness objectively as anyone else.

Tags: consciousness, religion