Mar 222014
 

As a followup to THIS POST which discusses the idea some hold that the universe having a definite beginning is proof positive of the existence of God, I suggest a new discussion topic: how to prove Gods existence.

For simplicity, “God” in this discussion can be reduced to something like “an intelligent, thinking entity that created, intentionally, the Universe.” Probably add in “omniscient and omnipotent,” though that’s probably not necessary. Never mind whether that’s Jehovah or Zeus or Shiva or Feklar or Odin. Just “Prime Mover Guy.”

 

First off, any potential Proof Of God would have to be able to get past the concept of Really Powerful Aliens. Something like turning the moon blood red would have impressed folks a few millenia ago (or even just a few centuries ago), but today it could be explained via any of a number of physical phenomena that Really Power Aliens could employ. Or something like The Rapture: hundreds of millions of people get bodily borne up into Heaven… by, say, Really Powerful Aliens with tractor beams or transporters or phasers set to *disintegrate.* Or something like the dead returning… thanks to Really Powerful Aliens who have been watching us for a while, recording our minds, and then uploading those recordings into cloned bodies. Stuff like that doesn’t work as Proof Of God, since it could easily be explained by forces far lesser than Omniscient and Omnipotent.

OK. So, if God wanted to prove his/her/its existence, how might God go about doing it? Science Fiction brought us two possibilities that I think would be pretty damned convincing, if they came to be:

1) Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” included the notion of a message embedded within pi. Pi is an infinitely long string of seemingly random numbers. Within any infinite string of random numbers, statistically speaking you will find sections that look like messages, but are just happenstance. But if the “message” is sufficiently complex and ordered so as to be beyond statistical probability, that would argue that the message was intelligently created. And a message embedded within pi, or the natural log of 2, or the square root of 2… this would argue strongly in favor of an intelligent creator of the universe. The hypothetical message may only start ten trillion digits into pi, and, worse, pi in base 42… but still, the message would be there and it would be accessible to anyone. Across all time and space, the message would be discoverable by anyone with sufficient math skills and number-crunching capability. Really Powerful Aliens would seem incapable of actually tinkering with the constants of the universe.

2) Stargate: Universe featured a starship billions of lightyears away, built by a long-dead species of vastly intelligent and powerful aliens who were on a mission. That mission was, as memory serves, to cross the universe in order to get observations as widely spaced as possible of the cosmic background radiation. Because they had detected a message within the CBR. Here again, Really Powerful Aliens would seem insufficient to explain a message embedded within the Big Bang.

Either of these, if confirmed and *rigorously* re-re-re-confirmed, would be strong arguments for the existence of some “god” or other. It would not necessarily follow, of course, that a message embedded within pi would imply one *particular* God. But then… it *could.* If the message in pi started off as a geometric thesis, in order to grab the mathematicians attention, and then turned into the Old Testament in binary code, ending with “To be continued in the square root of 2,” and then the New Testament is found in the square root of two… that’d be a pretty fair argument in favor not just of a generic creator-god, but the Christian God. Of course, the New Testament in root-2 might end with “To be continued in the square root of pi.”

So: what physical/scientific/mathematical discovery could, if it was made, serve as a really good Proof Of God? Discuss.

 Posted by at 11:28 am