“The Universe always unfolds exactly as it should.”
- Xenocrates
Have you ever contemplated the existence of a God?
Most people believe in some God they can’t even define. Yet others are willing to believe so blindly that they are easily fooled and led to believe in virtually anything their gullible minds are capable of absorbing. The trouble with belief systems is that they rely on the believer to have faith – which is simultaneously our greatest strength and our greatest weakness. Faith is a form of hope based on unsubstantiated evidence – that’s why it’s not without a sense of deception. As such, any system of belief that requires faith for solubility, is an intrinsically dangerous belief. Because it is through these unprovable systems of belief that peoples have been oppressed and / or slaughtered – all for an idea for which people cannot substantiate.
I do not subscribe to blind faith based religion. In fact, if anything, I subscribe to a sustainable philosophical way of life. When the ideology becomes bogged down with the inexplicable specificity of religion, then it looses its philosophical meaning and becomes more about the rituals than the philosophical ideology. It doesn’t matter what labels people choose to use for religion. At the end of the day, they all boil down to the same thing – worship of the great unknown. Men have always worshipped the unknown. We’ve all been hard wired to subscribe to this idea through some genetic permutation, which no doubt is a part of the grand design. It is that grand design that fascinates me, and which led to my first truly deep philosophical epiphany:
We live in a Mechanised Universe.
I will attempt to completely unify every single religion under the sun using the simplified concept that our universe was designed, specifically to fulfill a grand purpose, however innocuous or fatalistic the nature of its innumerable components. This will get a little deep, so follow me carefully:
Proof of a Maker
Theists rejoice. There is a God. We may disagree on what we call Him, but the bottomline is that a super being does exist. We know this from several proofs:
- Cogitative Summa – If we can think of a thing, then so long as we know how to either bring it to be or at least discover that it is, then that thing does exist – irrespective of whether or not its existence has entered into our knowledge. What we may not be able to bring about today will probably exist tomorrow through a passage (hence, summation) of knowledge from one generation to the next. The continuous summation of human thought always creates discovery. The conceptualization that preceeds discovery is as a result of methodically proven thought. Therefore, if we can methodically think of the possibility of an all powerful being, our inability to substantially quantify the existence of such an entity outside of quantum mechanics is immaterial to the fact that such a being does exist.
- Purpose in Design – Everything that exists has been proven to have purpose. The existence of our world, the environment which sustains life, the life forms that live there, even their acts of procreation – everything occupies a niche of purposeful design. Nothing can exist without purpose. Our inability to determine the purpose of a thing does not mean that this idea is flawed. That is merely a failure in our cognitive capacity to determine that purpose – which will happen eventually because of cogitative summa. Purpose in design automatically insinuates cause and effect. This is the single most important of all proofs.
- Causation – Every designer creates specifically with a purpose in mind. To set that purpose in motion, the designer must become the first cause. Everything else about the design thereafter is an effect of that first cause. This creates an endless propagation of cause and effect, thus giving material definition to the entire design. All things that are meant to be (because of deliberate, purposeful design) will come to be. Therefore no effect that is produced occurs accidentally. It’s a very deliberate part of the entire design.
- Omnipotence - If there is purpose in design, and purpose ostensibly materialises as cause and effect, then the designer is the master of the design. If the universe is designed, then the designer is the master thereof. If all knowledge and all power that could possibly exist is a part of the universe, then the designer of the universe must therefore be all powerful. If the designer is all powerful, then accidents are impossible and the universe always unfolds exactly as it should.
- Chaos vs. Order - If the universe always unfolds exactly as it should, then there is no chaos. That would mean that chaos is a phenomenon based on our inability to perceive the full quantification of a particular element in the design. That means the idea of chaos is intrinsically flawed, and only describes a failure in human understanding. That also automatically insinuates, that other human ideas such as choice and luck are also fundamentally flawed, because both of those ideas are based on the same principle that gave birth to the concept of chaos – an inability to thoroughly perceive the whole design.
If there is purpose, then there is design. If there is design, then there is cause and effect. If there is cause and effect, then it ratifies the existence of a design and automatically proves that some designer must likewise exist. If we are to assume that all knowledge and power exists in the universe, then that automatically makes the designer omnipotent. That designer is what we refer to as God.
God created a mechanical universe – one in which all of its components come together in a very specific way to produce very specific outcomes. This is why God appears to have the ability to see the future. Technically, God’s ability to see the future is the same as our ability to predict where the hands on a clock will go. Because we understand the design of the clock, we can predict the results. The same can be said about God and this universe. Because He is the designer, it is therefore only logical that He can “foresee” events before they occur. This is because the very design of the universe is such that those outcomes are also a part of the design – just as much as we know what the hand position on a clock will be when it’s 6:00 p.m. The universe is entirely mechanical in design. It’s a cosmic automated machine, operating on very strict rules with very specific outputs. However, because we are so infinitely small, we are only seeing a tiny fraction of its immense size.
In tomorrow’s post, I will discuss the finer points of what God is. This should give us all a very clearer picture of what we believe. Tomorrow’s post will be directed specifically at theists who believe that faith is sufficient. Unfortunately, it’s never that simple. When you get to a deeper understanding of the true nature of God, I guarantee you will look at the entire universe, and indeed, your very beliefs in a whole new light.
Stay tuned.
5 comments
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March 31, 2009 at 8:02 pm
Seraph
I must say that i found your blog the other day and I love it and it has opened my eyes exponentially in such a short time, now to the article.
With the article I have two main questions.
1. Purpose in design. You say that everything has a purpose and we may not be able to see something’s purpose because of humanities own inability to recognize its purpose. There really is no way for you to prove that everything has a purpose, is there? You are merely assuming that because everything in our world has its own niche that this is evidence towards purpose. But what about natural selection? If there were two species occupying the same niche the one best suited for it would occupy the niche and the other would either die out or move on. A higher being didn’t create the world so everything worked like clockwork, nature itself worked out the world so everything had its place.
2. Omnipotence. As designer of something you say that one has mastery over it but I find it hard to believe that statement. One’s creation can possibly go out of hand and take on a mind of its own. Though there may not be a way to tell if we have a mind of our own or are still following the master design, as Robert Burns said, though, “even the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.” Then again, through that quote I am possibly over humanizing a god beyond our comprehension, but I am still interesting in hearing your response.
Sincerely, Seraph
April 1, 2009 at 9:31 pm
xenlogic
Seraph,
My interest was immediately piqued when I saw how in depth your perception of what I wrote here was. Normally most people who respond barely skim the surface. So this is a breath of fresh air. On to your concerns:
Is there a for us to prove that nothing has a purpose? Isn’t that an equal and opposite assumption? It is easier for us to assume purpose because of ostensible phenomena. It’s just too easy to say that everything is in a constant state of chaos just because we can’t figure out what the pattern is. Saying that defeats the purpose of investigative analysis and we’d be worse off as an intelligent race for it.
I have a brain twister for you: What makes you think that a higher being’s need for clockwork is what you and I understand it to be? We are like ants traversing a mountain range that larger beings see as a smooth sidewalk. As humans, we are infinitely too simple a creature to assume meaningless, purposeless chaos when we’ve only seen one pixel of a cosmic work of art.
You’ve already answered your question. One of the biggest challenges people constantly face with a cosmological argument is that they assume that if a cosmic watchmaker exists, then he must be human like. There’s nothing about the universe that even remotely suggests that its designer is even remotely that simplistic.
If there is only one designer and everything else is an effect of the design, then cosmically, there is no mistake and no possibility for a plan to go awry. Everything that exists and happens, occurs only that way and no other because there is only one watchmaker. Therefore there is no mistake, no accident, no chaos. It is impossible for a grand designer to make a mistake if no other design can exist.
April 11, 2009 at 12:16 am
Atheism Exposed: Pragmatism « The World According to Xenocrates
[...] The profound simplicity of such ideas sometimes flies right over the heads of even well educated theists because of their psychological preconditioning to believe what they believe. They are mostly completely (and blissfully) unaware of this because they grew up being told everyday that God is very much like them in a very personal way. So they grow up thinking about God as though he is human like, even though if God exists, he is anything but. [...]
September 29, 2009 at 1:52 am
speakeasy
Xeno, I clearly understand the points you are making, but I still think your views are based on leap of faith in some form. You’re saying that because we can’t visualize what the purpose of something is doesn’t mean it has no purpose. Okay, quite possibly true. I’m sure there are many things that serve functions that we are as of yet unaware of that function. However, I find it hard to believe that EVERYTHING in the universe serves some function. As asteroid could hit the earth tomorrow and wipe out all life. Would it be fair to say that the asteroid had a purpose? Or was it just a random event? I mean afterall, the earth is literally nothing but a unimaginably small speck of dust floating in space in a galaxy filled with many other specks of dust(comets, meteors, etc) randomly strewn about. Some of these things collide. If this tiny planet, is wiped out by one, I find it hard to believe it’s anything but a completely pointless, purposeless, random event. It could just as soon have hit Jupiter but we happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time by dumb luck. I think sometimes people are so frightened by the possibility that so many bad things can happen out of sheer dumb luck that they believe that there must be a reason or purpose behind everything.
October 24, 2009 at 4:09 pm
xenlogic
You know what? You’re absolutely right – but as this is a matter of faith in purpose, you could be absolutely wrong too. There’s no reason why you could be wrong, but then again, there’s no reason why I couldn’t be right either. Hmm… faith is a bitch.