Ruminations about Deities

[dragonlaire]

One amusing, contemporary variant of Zeno's Paradox pretends to prove the impossibility of ever traversing a finite distance. For example, is it possible to cross from one side of a road to the other? It's clear that any successful crossing must first past the midpoint of the road and consume a certain discrete amount of time. Similarly, the half segment from starting point to midpoint has its own center that must be bypassed and a finite amount of time necessary to complete that task. By continuing this procedure of obtaining successive midpoints, we arrive at an infinite number of required midpoints and a corresponding sequence of temporal segments each finite in measure but infinite in number. Since the sum of needed time segments grows ever larger as we proceed through the successive midpoints, and the number of incremental segments increases without bound, the attempt to cross the road must inevitably fail because it will exhaust all available time before successful. Yet, the road can be easily crossed without undue exertion or expending several lifetimes to complete the task.

Two flaws are involved in this puzzle. The first neglects to recognize that for each midpoint there exists a corresponding seqment of time, so the ordered pairs of midpoints and time segments form a sequence, an infinite sequence to be sure, but a countable one as well. The second component of the paradox assumes that any series of an infinite sequence must grow beyond bound as additional terms are considered in its sum. As any calculus student will affirm, that's not true. Many infinite series converge: they may have infinitely many terms but a finite sum nevertheless.

A different but related fallacy underlies the cosmological arguments for the existence of God, whether draped within the Thomistic tapestry of a prime mover or given a scientific disguise in theories of black holes, strings or instantaneous origins of the physical universe. All these explanations, ranging from the easily disposed to the physically respectable, have a seductive quality hard to resist. Yet all of them share the same faulty premise that every sequence must have either first member or largest term, lower and upper bounds. But the empirical universe, observable or not, contains a multitude of examples of sequences without bounds. Where string theory, unified fields and investigations into origins of the cosmos will end has yet to be determined; at present, all of them display an uneasy marriage between scientific foundation and metaphysical nonsense.

It's tempting to reduce the metaphysical problem of deities to one of individual consciousness but misleading to do so. While it's true that deities may behave similar to 'ghosts in a machine' and offer even less physical evidence for their existence, it's equally true that the problem of deities is intimately related to the general problem of other minds: how can we determine whether any other person has a conscious mind similar to our own? And the problem of other minds is less easily dismissed, for there are abundant reasons, physical reasons, for their existence.

Suppose, though, that we do adopt the viewpoint that God exists only in the consciousness of an individual mind. What have we gained? By similar reasoning, all metaphysical problems can be laid to rest, yet they persist in spite of all our efforts to dispel them. God dwelling within each mind may be a notion with enormous comfort but one with deadening expectations, for doesn't it remove every objective worthy of attaining? Life is reduced to an existential vacuum and a boring one at that. Wittgenstein was convinced that he had demonstrated conclusively the impossibility of metaphysical theory; all the classic problems were due to a misuse of language. He was a conscientious fellow and took himself seriously. Having solved all the problems in metaphysics, he left philosophy to pursue other endeavors, none of them academic. But as his student John Wisdom observed, Wittgenstein may have cured the patient's disease but the symptoms linger nevertheless. Intellectually, we may agree that concepts of God arise in superstition and that the concepts themselves are essentially meaningless, but that achievement doesn't prevent us from staring in awe at the stars lighting an evening sky.