Variations on the concept of untestable volitional directing entities.
Gods are volitional beings beyond our normal daily experience. They seem to be in control of things which we cannot control. At least these unseen beings seem to be in control because we don’t perceive any beings that are in control. This presupposes there must be an intelligence of some type, at least some sort of intelligent volitional control behind things which we don’t understand, or else why would thing happen, why would apples choose to fall from trees, why wouldn’t they just float away, or explode – is there a directing being?
Ever since Newton we can understand with considerable precision why many things like gravity behave as they do. As the accumulated knowledge of testable science progresses more things come to be understood. What has been found in all of these cases is that there isn’t any volitional control, only the interaction of forces, each of which has an understandable and deterministic quality about them. It is only when these forces become too complex to follow that there seems to be some unknowable volitional quality making things happen. However, this feeling that there is intelligence and volition about these previously non-understood events has always been shown to be a projection of our own human need to have absolute answers – even if the answers are obviously made up just-so stories.
I was watching snowflakes fall after writing those paragraphs and occasionally when the air was calm they would fall vertically at their terminal velocity. But even in the calms between the turbulent winds there was a considerable amount of variability with each flake’s fall over a short period of time. The variations were caused by the irregular shapes of the flakes, as their tumbling would create highly variable drag forces on the edges of the snowflakes. Thus an individual flake when flat would fall slower but soon a tiny force would tip the flake and its downward friction-profile would become much smaller and the flake would appear to suddenly speed up, then something would change its drag-profile again and it would suddenly dart briefly in some other direction. It was all too complex to follow very well but if one could see each of the forces acting on the flake in very high resolution and in very slow motion its dance could probably be understood and even predicted for very brief periods of time. But these things in real time would be far too rapid for a human to predict.
Then of course there were gusts of wind caused by the general wind interacting with the swaying trees and creating invisible eddies of air which also affected the snowflakes and made their dance even more random seeming or controlled by some invisible god intentionally playing with these flakes. These invisible gusts made visible by the movements of the flakes themselves appeared to be random, but then of course if a super computer could follow each atom of the air in the gust all of the behavior would be seen to be mechanistic. But even if all the major and potentially measurable factors were known to high precision, the predictions for a given snowflake would only be for a few seconds of specific behavior.
The exact actions of a snowflake are mechanistic but they can only be predicted a short way into the future. Gross actions are different and they can be predicted, but in a different way. Say you chose an exact square foot of horizontal area 100 feet above the ground and were able to note snowflakes going through that exact place and then plot the time and location where each of those flakes landed on the surface below. After a large number of flakes had been observed landing they would form a circular target pattern in a smooth Gaussian-like distribution and you could say with some accuracy where a new flake falling through the hole would land, although you couldn’t be certain exactly where this particular flake would land. It would probably land near the center of the distribution but it might land at one side or the opposite side. You just can’t predict and even if you had a super-super computer you still couldn’t predict any better because there are so many tiny variables that affect the final result.
The world is made up of vast numbers of these kinds of variable actions and we can’t know how they will work out in specific, but we can know how they will work out in general. Our lives are made livable because of the smoothing out of vast numbers of these kinds of tiny events each modifying the others in a probabilistic way. The sum of these actions become understandable macro events. These types events are the ones we can learn to control and use to live our daily lives.
Because we as individuals learn to control these kinds of natural things we can be led to believe that other intelligences can control other events which are beyond our control and even beyond our understanding. We can be told, by authority figures, there is an intelligence so powerful it can control every atom in the entire universe, and that may be true but only in the second sense of prediction, that of macro control. If you took a voluntary deep breath you could claim to have controlled every atom in that breath to do as you willed but it would be true only in the vaguest of general macro senses. If you were to map even a single molecule of oxygen for the time it was within your body it would take all your consciousness for an hour to make a map of a single second’s three dimensional travel of that single atom.
It is unlikely that a conscious intelligence created the Universe, but even if that did happen that intelligence stepped away from further control, because the processes since that moment of creation are probably all knowable processes even if we don’t know them all in detail at the moment. And we may never know the finest details, not because they are unknowable, but because the research tools for finding them are too expensive to build. It won’t help humanity one iota to know prime physical factors to 20 decimal points of accuracy, but spending the amount of money to get that last decimal point would leave billions of people to starve for lack of resources.
Gods exist only in our imagination to explain the incomprehensible.
