The Very Noodle of the Appendage

            There is a very old philosophical problem that asks us whether or not we can judge the evidence of our eyes.  If you’ve seen The Matrix, you may have asked yourself whether or not you would know if you were trapped within such an illusion.  The answer is, of course, that you probably would not.  The whole premise is that The Matrix is so cleverly designed that no inquiry can be made from within it of its own existence—and everything out of it is beyond our ken for as long as the illusion is maintained.  As a rule, we cannot be certain that what we see is real and not some collective delusion.

            From the point of view of science, this is perfectly fine.  Rational conjecture based upon our observations will still allow us to understand the rules of the delusion and create (illusory) technologies that still (appear to) work within it.  It doesn’t even much matter whether or not we each share a single common simulacrum of reality, or if we each were given radically different delusions: whether the red I see in a tomato (which might be your cucumber) is your purple or not doesn’t change the fact that when I say, “that tomato is red,” it is still perfectly intelligible to you.  Of course, if you begin with the premise of a Matrix, you can make all sorts of guesses about it based on the world you see, but ultimately the addition of a Matrix is not necessary to explain the world around us.  And so we simply dismiss the possibility as unlikely, when in fact such a possibility is much more probable than a mystical god.

            That note aside, the fact that we cannot necessarily trust our observations, while (momentarily) irrelevant to science, is distinctly relevant to the question of God.  I am of the opinion that the observable world can be ultimately be explained without recourse to god, that furthermore what we are learning about it suggests that the universe we see is not compatible with such a being.  Which of course is entirely inconsequential if the world that I am observing is an illusion provided by that very god whom I doubt.

            For the moment, accept my premise that the observable universe indicates that god does not exist—I’ll be justifying that premise later—we still need to resolve the problem of the universe’s possible falsehood, as perpetrated by a mystical being.  I do it like this:

1.      That possibility is extremely unlikely, but

2.      No good god can hide his existence and then blame us for not believing in him, much less can he create a universe which suggests his non-existence and then blame us for declaring that he does not exist

3.      this leaves the—small—possibility of a wicked god, although a wicked god is better called a demon

4.      Since obeisance to a demon is reprehensible and belief in a good god is unnecessary, the possibility of a hidden mystical being is irrelevant.

Of course, if you would rather surrender your mind to a demon than spend eternity in hell, it isn’t altogether irrelevant, but you’d rather be bending over backwards touching your toes to believe in something wicked (or at least unfair) when the universe gives you no particular reason to do so.

On the other hand, while it is true that there is suffering, there is a considerable amount of beauty in this world.  If that beauty is merely part of a simulacrum provided by a good god, I should think that I ought to be allowed to enjoy it, rather than rip it apart as a part of some gigantic sham, just to get to a god that has clearly gone out of his way to hide from me in the first place!

(This argument has been made, in many different ways, by nearly every atheist patient enough to accommodate such silly ideas.  The succinct response ought to go something like this:

Atheist: Ideas like evolution make God redundant.

Christian: Well then, evolution—and all the observable evidence backing it up—must be wrong.

Atheist: Are you serious?

Christian: “I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes.” Luke 10:21

Atheist: You’re a moron.)