Sunday, December 12, 2010
You Dear Reader, may not exist…!
There is an excellent series on BBC Knowledge showing in Ghana at the moment. I suppose you may have been able to see it a year or two ago but time here does not behave like yours does. Last night I watched Morgan Freeman, who fronts it, ask what the latest scientific proof might be for God. Get to see it unless you are so smitten with your religion that you could not bear to be challenged. The latest theories were like a gourmet’s meal for famished philosophers. I’ll have to watch it again because my brain buckles with so much being thrown at it. Here’s what my depleted memory store can regurgitate for three of them.
Theory One: we are living in a simulation created by our descendents. In 50 years computer power will be so extraordinary that this world we know as our own, with you, me and everything could easily be created and because we are part of it, like in The Matrix, we cannot tell that it is not real. Think Playstation 50+ and the Sims. Evidence can be found by examining the very fabric of our world. On close inspection it is made up of pixels…
Theory Two: put a magnet over your brain’s right lobe and focus its power and even atheists have God-like experiences. Because we know death is an end to existence our anguish is converted into the means to alleviate it with spiritual experiences. Great prophets may have access to this part of the brain and thus ‘see’ God.
Theory Three: a beach bum with a PhD and a mind that has moved on since Einstein has come up with a theory for everything, mathematically speaking. It excludes God but is so elegant that it makes it appear that God or a supreme Physicist must exist. It (the metatheory) says that only by random do the constituent four theories of gravitation, electro-magnetism and weak and strong forces fuse together on this planet….
As I gurgled in a recent blog, our brains are undoubtedly capable of believing that what they conjure up, actually exists outside them and that our senses apprehend them.
Oh no! I have just realised that mine may well have done this. My brain is so capable of such creative self-deceit that it has fabricated this blog, Ghana, my life thus far, the programme called Through the Wormhole and even the illusion that I am an atheist…!