# Playing "hide and seek" with God **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [September 3, 2012, 3:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/playing-hide-and-seek-with-god/633549 "2012-09-03T15:48:19Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [September 4, 2012, 8:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/playing-hide-and-seek-with-god/633549/61 "2012-09-04T20:31:46Z")
> [@Trinopus](#): > > Actually, the novel/novelist metaphor doesn’t entirely rule out free will. It doesn’t even matter - it was an analogy someone used - when someone uses an analogy, they say “it’s like this, and resembles this in the following list of attributes” - and there’s no reason why the analogy and subject are beholden to resemble each other in any additional, unmentioned attributes. Indeed, an analogy is by definition imperfect. ---
**Author:** ![FinnAgain](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/finnagain/32/12500_2.png) [@FinnAgain](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FinnAgain)\ **Post date:** [September 4, 2012, 9:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/playing-hide-and-seek-with-god/633549/62 "2012-09-04T21:06:31Z")
> [@DrCube](#): > > Is any of this true? All of it is true. Of course we live inside a black hole. A black hole is an amount of matter compressed to the Schwartzchild Radius for that amount of mass. The entirety of Universe was compressed into a naked singularity which then exploded in the big bang. A singularity _is_ a black hole. We live in a black hole. As for the rest, you can google it pretty easily. The bit about a black hole’s ‘skin’ being holographic is pretty well established. For the proof that information is conserved, google the debate between Susskind and Hawking on the event horizon of black holes. Susskind won, information is conserved. ---
**Author:** ![cmyk](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cmyk/32/3353_2.png) [@cmyk](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cmyk)\ **Post date:** [September 4, 2012, 10:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/playing-hide-and-seek-with-god/633549/63 "2012-09-04T22:48:04Z")
> [@DrCube](#): > > Is any of this true? I don’t think we live inside a black hole (it’s possible, but I thought the data suggests otherwise), and is information actually conserved? I’ve been thinking in terms of our universe being, essentially, inside an even horizon for years now, ever since the idea of a holographic universe became clear to me. Also, the idea of matter at subatomic levels being zero-dimensional points of pure energy (singularities?), sort of gives you an interesting perspective on the nature of physical matter itself. Indeed, the universe is a möbius strip of seemingly separate, yet one, phenomenon twisted and intertwined back in on itself. I’ve said the below, looping phrase here before: **…time, being an aspect of space which is bent and curved by matter is really just a form of energy that gives rise to gravity which dilates time, being an aspect of space…** ---
**Author:** ![RTFirefly](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/c77e96/32.png) [@RTFirefly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RTFirefly)\ **Post date:** [September 4, 2012, 11:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/playing-hide-and-seek-with-god/633549/64 "2012-09-04T23:41:02Z")
> [@Czarcasm](#): > > Not what I’m saying at all. I’m saying that dismissing the question of where God is by saying “He lives outside Space and Time” is bullshit if the person making the claim has no idea what “outside Space and Time” means in the first place. I have personally heard this from people, and for the vast majority of them it means almost the same thing as Heaven. Moving the goalposts a little? Because I sure don’t see that in your OP. You weren’t talking about people who _don’t understand_ the answer, but give it anyway. You were talking about **the answer itself**. After a dozen years in this zoo, some people _still_ don’t catch on to the notion that we can roll tape, so to speak, anytime we like. ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [September 4, 2012, 11:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/playing-hide-and-seek-with-god/633549/65 "2012-09-04T23:53:34Z")
> [@Czarcasm](#): > > Not what I’m saying at all. I’m saying that dismissing the question of where God is by saying “He lives outside Space and Time” is bullshit if the person making the claim has no idea what “outside Space and Time” means in the first place. I have personally heard this from people, and for the vast majority of them it means almost the same thing as Heaven. Cite? ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [September 5, 2012, 12:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/playing-hide-and-seek-with-god/633549/66 "2012-09-05T00:06:23Z")
**FinnAgain** , not to hijack this thread, but most of what you’ve been posting about physics here is misinformed. To pick the low-hanging fruit, the current best evidence suggests that we are not living inside a black hole. That was a realistic possibility a couple of decades ago, but it seems to have since been ruled out. Back on the thread topic, if the author/book analogy is problematic, how about instead a programmer/computer program analogy? I’ve written computer programs that have gone on to do things completely outside my expectations of them, and I _don’t_ mean that in just a compartmentalization-of-my-own-mind sense. I suppose that the results were implicit consequences of things that were already in my mind, but the consequences themselves weren’t in my mind. And yet, every bit of those results, in some sense, bears my fingerprints: The results existed because of my actions. Now, of course, this analogy is also flawed: The reason the consequences weren’t in my mind is just that my mind was inadequate to anticipate them, and one would not want to attribute such inadequacy to God. It’s still a reasonable analogy for what it’s trying to explain, though. ---
**Author:** ![Thudlow\_Boink](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thudlow_boink/32/320_2.png) [@Thudlow\_Boink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thudlow_Boink)\ **Post date:** [September 5, 2012, 12:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/playing-hide-and-seek-with-god/633549/67 "2012-09-05T00:13:33Z")
> [@RTFirefly](#): > > After a dozen years in this zoo, some people _still_ don’t catch on to the notion that we can roll tape, so to speak, anytime we like. Speaking of rolling tape, **Czarcasm** has asked this thread’s question before, such as in his own thread [“Outside Space and Time”-where and when, again?](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=515483) and in the thread [How do theists reconcile disbelief in predestination with an omniscient deity?](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=599143) I suspect he’ll keep asking this same question every year or two until he gets the response he’s looking for, which is for theists to admit that they can’t physically point to God and say “There He is” and for them therefore to “give up” and admit that God doesn’t exist after all. ---
**Author:** ![Trinopus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/2bfe46/32.png) [@Trinopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trinopus)\ **Post date:** [September 5, 2012, 1:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/playing-hide-and-seek-with-god/633549/68 "2012-09-05T01:07:14Z")
> [@Mangetout](#): > > It doesn’t even matter - it was an analogy someone used - when someone uses an analogy, they say “it’s like this, and resembles this in the following list of attributes” - and there’s no reason why the analogy and subject are beholden to resemble each other in any additional, unmentioned attributes. > > Indeed, an analogy is by definition imperfect. All very true; I was simply defending it against a suggestion that it was flawed in a way that I think it wasn’t necessarily. As Isaac Asimov suggested, in “The Relativity of Wrong,” some analogies are _more_ wrong than others. ---
**Author:** ![FinnAgain](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/finnagain/32/12500_2.png) [@FinnAgain](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FinnAgain)\ **Post date:** [September 5, 2012, 1:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/playing-hide-and-seek-with-god/633549/69 "2012-09-05T01:58:18Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > most of what you’ve been posting about physics here is misinformed. No. That the Big Bang occurred from a singularity is bedrock. The only remaining question would be if it could be better modeled as a black hole or a white hole, but that doesn’t really matter for this discussion as Conservation of Information will still hold sway. If you require a citation that the BB was a singularity: [ > [@](#): > > At this time, the Big Bang, all the matter in the universe, would have been on top of itself. The density would have been infinite. It would have been what is called, a singularity. ]([http://www.hawking.org.uk/the-beginning-of-time.html](http://www.hawking.org.uk/the-beginning-of-time.html)) The only difference is that we’re in a naked singularity which is, for the purposes of this discussion, still going to work like a black hole in terms of information. The only real difference is that the black holes we know are localized within spacetime while the BB _is_ (our) spacetime. But we are most certainly living inside a singularity. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [September 5, 2012, 3:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/playing-hide-and-seek-with-god/633549/70 "2012-09-05T03:20:46Z")
There are many, many different kinds of singularities. Just saying that something is or has a singularity in no way implies that it’s a black hole. ---
**Author:** ![FinnAgain](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/finnagain/32/12500_2.png) [@FinnAgain](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FinnAgain)\ **Post date:** [September 5, 2012, 3:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/playing-hide-and-seek-with-god/633549/71 "2012-09-05T03:46:47Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > There are many, many different kinds of singularities. No, there aren’t, unless you’re being hyperbolic and referring to the limited taxonomy of singularities as “many, many”. And while there are certainly differences between the BBS and the BHS’s, none of them alter the basics of Conservation of Information. ---
**Author:** ![Trinopus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/2bfe46/32.png) [@Trinopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trinopus)\ **Post date:** [September 5, 2012, 5:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/playing-hide-and-seek-with-god/633549/72 "2012-09-05T05:14:36Z")
Are you sure there is “conservation of information?” As I understood it, from information theory, it requires energy to destroy information, but it can be done. It’s as easy as erasing a disk. When a civilization gets scientific, and starts writing immense libraries full of data – isn’t that “creating” information? Where is the corresponding loss that compensates for it? I Googled the phrase, and didn’t find any immediately promising leads. Can you, maybe, point me to a good starting reference? ---
**Author:** ![FuzzyOgre](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/a587f6/32.png) [@FuzzyOgre](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FuzzyOgre)\ **Post date:** [September 5, 2012, 8:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/playing-hide-and-seek-with-god/633549/73 "2012-09-05T08:06:29Z")
> [@Trinopus](#): > > Are you sure there is “conservation of information?” As I understood it, from information theory, it requires energy to destroy information, but it can be done. It’s as easy as erasing a disk. > > When a civilization gets scientific, and starts writing immense libraries full of data – isn’t that “creating” information? Where is the corresponding loss that compensates for it? What does creating information entail? To me it seems it is just us rearranging the stuff of the universe in an aesthetically pleasing manner. Destroying it is as simple arranging it once more. If I decide 3 red pebbles touching is relevant to my life, have I created information? I can go around arranging pebbles in such a configuration, but so too does the universe. ---
**Author:** ![cmyk](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cmyk/32/3353_2.png) [@cmyk](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cmyk)\ **Post date:** [September 5, 2012, 5:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/playing-hide-and-seek-with-god/633549/74 "2012-09-05T17:18:07Z")
I believe the conservation of information has more to do with the wave-functions of quantum particles themselves. For any given particle, it has an associated wave function that are a range of probabilities of that particle playing out some event. If this wave function is destroyed upon entering a black hole, then it would mean their wave-functions would collapse or evolve to the same state. IANAPhysicist, so, I could’ve totally screwed that up. ---
**Author:** ![FinnAgain](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/finnagain/32/12500_2.png) [@FinnAgain](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FinnAgain)\ **Post date:** [September 5, 2012, 6:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/playing-hide-and-seek-with-god/633549/75 "2012-09-05T18:28:51Z")
> [@Trinopus](#): > > Are you sure there is “conservation of information?” [Yep.](http://calitreview.com/790) > [@](#): > > \*\*Stephen Hawking once said something about black holes that apparently upset you. What was it? > \*\*Stephen said that when a bit of information falls into a black hole it is permanently lost to the outside, despite the fact that he also proved that black holes evaporate and eventually disappear. That claim touched off a crisis in physics, a clash of basic principles like no other since Einstein was young. > The problem that upset me is that the most basic principle of physics—the principle that underpins everything including classical physics, thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, energy conservation, that physicists have believed for hundreds of years—is that information is never truly lost. It can be scrambled beyond recognition, but it is never completely erased. > […] > To understand how we got from black holes to holograms you’ll have to read my book, but here is a hint. The horizon of a black hole (a two dimensional surface like a film) somehow stores all the information that ever fell into the hole. ---
**Author:** ![FoieGrasIsEvil](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/foiegrasisevil/32/16638_2.png) [@FoieGrasIsEvil](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FoieGrasIsEvil)\ **Post date:** [September 5, 2012, 6:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/playing-hide-and-seek-with-god/633549/76 "2012-09-05T18:33:06Z")
> [@jackdavinci](#): > > What I find interesting about the idea of a God outside time is that it implies God might let the universe have a quick run through on it’s own merits before going in to make changes. Reminds me of the final scene in _Men In Black_, with the god-like alien playing marbles with all the worlds/galaxies. ---
**Author:** ![FinnAgain](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/finnagain/32/12500_2.png) [@FinnAgain](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FinnAgain)\ **Post date:** [September 5, 2012, 11:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/playing-hide-and-seek-with-god/633549/77 "2012-09-05T23:40:33Z")
[Or:](http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2008/07/28/the-black-hole-war/) > [@](#): > > Many different pasts could lead to precisely the same present; whereas, if information is conserved, each possible past leads to exactly one specific state of affairs at the present. The conservation of information — which also goes by the name of “determinism” — is a profound underpinning of the modern way we think about the universe. > > Determinism came under a bit of stress in the early 20th century when quantum mechanics burst upon the scene. In QM, sadly, we can’t predict the future with precision, even if we know the current state to arbitrary accuracy. The process of making a measurement seems to be irreducibly unpredictable; we can predict the probability of getting a particular answer, but there will always be uncertainty if we try to make certain measurements. Nevertheless, when we are not making a measurement, information is perfectly conserved in quantum mechanics: > > Schrodinger’s Equation allows us to predict the future quantum state from the past with absolute fidelity. This makes many of us suspicious that this whole “collapse of the wave function” that leads to an apparent loss of determinism is really just an illusion, or an approximation to some more complete dynamics — that kind of thinking leads you directly to the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics. (For more, tune into my Bloggingheads dialogue with David Albert this upcoming Saturday.) > > In any event, aside from the measurement problem, quantum mechanics makes a firm prediction that information is conserved. Which is why it came as a shock when Stephen Hawking said that black holes could destroy information. Hawking, of course, had famously shown that black holes give off radiation, and if you wait long enough they will eventually evaporate away entirely. Few people (who are not trying to make money off of scaremongering about the LHC) doubt this story. But Hawking’s calculation, at first glance (and second), implies that the outgoing radiation into which the black hole evaporates is truly random, within the constraints of being a blackbody spectrum. Information is seemingly lost, in other words — there is no apparent way to determine what went into the black hole from what comes out. > This led to one of those intellectual scuffles between “the general relativists” (who tended to be sympathetic to the idea that information is indeed lost) and “the particle physicists” (who were reluctant to give up on the standard rules of quantum mechanics, and figured that Hawking’s calculation must somehow be incomplete). > […] > Right now, the balance has tilted quite strongly in favor of the preservation of information; score one for the particle physicists. The best evidence on their side (keeping in mind that all of the “evidence” is in the form of theoretical arguments, not experimental data) comes from Maldacena’s discovery of duality between (certain kinds of) gravitational and non-gravitational theories, the AdS/CFT correspondence. According to Maldacena, we can have a perfect equivalence between two very different-looking theories, one with gravity and one without. In the theory without gravity, there is no question that information is conserved, and therefore (the argument goes) it must also be conserved when there is gravity. Just take whatever kind of system you care about, whether it’s an evaporating black hole or something else, translate it into the non-gravitational theory, find out what it evolves into, and then translate back, with no loss of information at any step. Long story short, we still don’t really know how the information gets out, but there is a good argument that it definitely does for certain kinds of black holes, so it seems a little perverse to doubt that we’ll eventually figure out how it works for all kinds of black holes. Not an airtight argument, but at least Hawking buys it; his concession speech was reported on an old blog of mine, lo these several years ago. ---
**Author:** ![monavis](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e0b2c6/32.png) [@monavis](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/monavis)\ **Post date:** [September 6, 2012, 11:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/playing-hide-and-seek-with-god/633549/78 "2012-09-06T11:07:36Z")
> [@FriarTed](#): > > OK, I have heard it said that Space & Time did not exist until the Big Bang. I have no idea of the scientific accuracy of this but I always wondered if there was no Space, what did the energy exist in, and if no Time, how did it endure? > > Re the OP, I would say that God is “Above” or “Beyond” Space & Time in that He is not limited to them, or that He “transcends” them. I have no idea if that helps at all. Isn’t it necessary to exist any,being must exist in space? if they are not in existence then they (or it) doesn’t exist.Existence is space and more.If energy exists then it must be in existence! ---
**Author:** ![cmyk](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cmyk/32/3353_2.png) [@cmyk](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cmyk)\ **Post date:** [September 6, 2012, 1:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/playing-hide-and-seek-with-god/633549/79 "2012-09-06T13:12:00Z")
So, God is hiding in black holes. No wonder he never seems to answer my prayers. We just need to, somehow, unscramble the Hawking radiation. ---
**Author:** ![Blaster\_Master](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/cab0a1/32.png) [@Blaster\_Master](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blaster_Master)\ **Post date:** [September 6, 2012, 6:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/playing-hide-and-seek-with-god/633549/80 "2012-09-06T18:00:07Z")
> [@Thudlow\_Boink](#): > > “God is outside space and time” means (if nothing else) that God does **not** have a specific location _within_ space and time, and thus, the question “Where is God?” has no meaningful answer, any more than “What color is God?” or “How much does God weigh?” If a question has no meaningful answer, what is one supposed to do with it besides dismissing it? As a theist who has used this point in the past, this is all it means. Yes, there are some theists who will throw it out there not really understanding what it means, but it is an ad hominem fallacy to discount the point simply because the person putting it forth doesn’t understand it. From my perspective, the only real point of that statement is as an answer to “well, if God exists, where-when is he in space-time?” It’s simply to point out that there isn’t a meaningful answer to that question. That question more or less presupposed materialism, that if he exists he is made of matter and energy and has space-time coordinates but the case for most theists would be that they are not materialists, they believe in some sort of supernatural or ethereal plane, and thus describing God in purely materialist terms is meaningless. I understand how this comes across as disingenuous, ignorant, or some kind of intellectual game to an atheist asking the question, but it’s really just an impass in how theists and atheists view the world differently. I think there’s plenty of other interesting discussions to have about theism and atheism, but this is just one of those things I think that we just have to sort of understand is part of the other perspective and, unless explicity trying to fit the concept of God into a materialist view or atheism into a non-materialist view, just isn’t going to be fruitful. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/playing-hide-and-seek-with-god/633549.md?page=3) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/playing-hide-and-seek-with-god/633549.md?page=5)