What is the scientific perspective on the omnimax god?

Has it? Why would nothing be in any sense a more natural state of affairs than the existence of something? There’s no reason to believe ‘nothing’ can exist, and moreover, the concept seems logically troubling – existence, at first glance, seems to be a property, but for there to be a property, you need for there to be something that has that property – so if nothing is literally no thing, how can it have the property of existing?

Of course, to think of ‘existence’ as a property in this sense rather oversimplifies the matter, seeing as this would render the sentence ‘x does not exist’ inherently self-contradictory: for any property P, the sentence ‘x is P’ implies that there is such a thing as x, and that it is true that it has the property P; obviously, this can’t be true for the sentence ‘x does not exist’, as this would mean that x both exists and does not exist.

Indeed, as far as every utterance needs content to be meaningful, one can always only speak about things, or even think about things. One cannot speak, or think, about nothing. So how could one say that ‘nothing exists’ – without talking about something, and hence, not about nothing? (Of course, there’s also the matter of what am I talking about when I talk about something that does not exist – the present king of France, say --, but that discussion would lead too far down the rabbit hole right now. Suffice it to say that such non-referring names can still have content, interpreted carefully.)

Anyway, that went off on a bit of a tangent – the point I was trying to make was merely that the assumption that the existence of ‘nothing’ should be a natural state of affairs is at least as problematic as the existence of something. One could even be tempted to say that since nothing is incoherent, there must be something, at least.

A lot of the inherent contradictions with the God hypothesis go away when you assume that God is outside the Universe, and is omnipotent with regards to what happens inside it, but is not necessarily omnipotent with regard to the larger meta-Universe in which It lives.

Qpw3141 already referred to the Simulation Hypothesis: that our Universe is actually a computer simulation which, for all we know, might be running on the laptop of some teenager in another Universe. Said teenager could do whatever It wanted with our Universe; exterminate our solar system for example, or select a single human on our planet and give them supernatural powers. Therefore, It would be rightly considered God as far as our Universe is concerned, although It need not be particularly poweful relative to Its own world.

Things like the “create a rock too heavy to lift” trick question go away in that case: God could turn the entire Universe into one giant rock if It wanted, but the question of “could It then lift that rock” is meaningless because It does not live inside the simulation. Perhaps there’s an optional “Heaven and Hell” module available for the software as well.

Is this a scientific hypothesis? Mostly not: if the simulation is sufficiently realistic, then we will never be able to tell the difference between a real world and a simulated one, so we might as well treat our Universe as being real. Also, while it is theoretically possible for such a God to involve Itself with the lives of individual humans occasionally, the available evidence suggests that this either does not happen or is very rare, so for all practical purposes our Universe behaves as if there is no God.

However, it is possible in principle that we could scientifically uncover evidence for or against this hypothesis. Some of the weird stuff that happens at the quantum level could be interpreted as (weak) evidence that the continuous, physical processes we observe in the world are actually easier to explain in terms of discrete processes running on a computer. If, as a performance optimisation, the simulation software does not bother to simulate anything in detail unless there is a chance that it will be observed by a conscious being, that might explain certain surprising findings about the role of the observer in quantum physics. It would nicely answer the questions about the Anthropic Principle as well.

Even if this hypothesis could be proven true, it would of course still leave a lot of questions unanswered, such as “where did the Universe containing God and the computer running the simulation, come from?” But that’s nothing new; you can always keep asking questions until you arrive at a point where the answer is not know (yet).

(Just in case anyone cares: I’m an atheist, and I’m playing Devil’s Advocate here as I do not actually believe in this hypothesis, although I find it very entertaining to think about its ramifications.)

I’d go along with that.

The vast majority of people I meet see it as no big deal. They believe one of: “god dunnit”, “there was no start point” or “the universe just is”.
But none of these explanations help at all in solving the mystery.

Part of the problem I think is that people seldom discuss this problem. It’s supposed to be one of the ultimate questions (IMO it’s the ultimate question), yet it’s rarely talked about.

Far more common topics of discussion are “Does god exist?” (:rolleyes:) and “What’s the meaning of life?” – which is usually interpreted to simply mean “What should I do with my time on earth?”.

Now Hawking is trying the same argument. If quantum events are the reason the universe exists, then what caused the quantum events? If that is a logical argument against the existence of God, then it is equally a logical argument against the existence of quantum events.

Regards,
Shodan

However, quantum events are slightly easier to imagine arising spontaneously, or somehow being an inherent property of the fabric of the Universe, than an all-powerful conscious entity which creates humans because It wants to be worshipped.

You’re right – if those two hypotheses had the same empirical support and testability.

But while I haven’t read The Grand Design, I think it’s a safe assumption that his new hypothesis is based on an extrapolation of quantum theories which can and have been empirically verified. And further that his hypothesis is in some way testable or falsifiable.

This makes it useful for understanding some of the mechanism of how our universe came to be.

But I don’t think it helps us understand “why does anything exist?” any more than “god dunnit”. As I’ve been saying in this thread.

The contradiction between omnipotence and omniscience remains, though, so even such a god couldn’t be omnimax; and, as you note, the questions regarding simulator god’s existence and the existence of the universe he resides in remain.

Adding onto the discussion -

What’s the deal with infinite regression? That’s a common argument for God that I hear, that infinite previous moments would prevent us from ever arriving at this one. Is there a definite beginning before the Big Bang? Is the universe possibly infinite in time?

I believe the argument is better understood the other way around: not that since the universe can’t come about spontaneously, god can’t either; but rather, if you grant god the possibility to come into existence as its own cause or whatever, then you have no logical grounds to not grant the universe this possibility, too, and thus, no need to postulate god.

Apparently he’s pushing a version of the many-worlds hypothesis, with parallel universes and branching timelines and et cetera. So you figure there’s nothingness that, down at the quantum level, by definition has a nonzero probability of resolving into particles and antiparticles or whatever – still totaling zero, either by dint of remaining “zero” or by splitting off “a +3 and a -3” or whatever – and then you figure all possible outcomes proceed to ensue in a multiverse, such that (a) we’re living in an interesting universe that’s chock full of stuff, and that (b) other people are living in another universe that unfolded a little differently, sure as there’s yet another other universe where the nothingness that could’ve potentially spawned evenly-matched particles never actually did.

This apparently differs from the God hypothesis in a couple of ways: you could, one supposes, monitor an empty space and wait for a quantum event to again spawn particles as Hawking claims happened before – an experiment you presumably can’t perform by waiting to see a new God emerge from nothingness. And if we thereby sidestep the what-caused-it question by positing that quantum events always both happen (in one timeline) and fail to happen (in another), while adding that any timeline with a something-from-nothing outcome produces a matched pair that still totals zero, we get added difficulties for the God hypothesis: after prefacing any remarks by postulating entire universes that lack Gods, a believer hoping to piggyback on Hawking’s claim would then add that any timeline which hypothetically produced a God apparently required the simultaneous creation a mathematically equal-and-opposite antiGod: each as effect, neither as cause (let alone uncaused cause).

Actually, I’m not even sure SimGod could be considered properly omnipotent in the simverse: if we were in his position, and created a simulation that runs on our computers, there would be certain things we couldn’t do; namely, since our computers are, essentially, evolving electromagnetic field configurations, we could not do anything, i.e. create any state of the simulation, that can’t be mapped to an electromagnetic field configuration. Of course, SimGods computers could work on some totally different principle, but the argument works in a generalized way – he could not do anything that can’t be explained by the hypothesis that we exist in a simulation; in particular, if there is no thing that can’t be thus explained, he can’t make it so that there is. Some framework – in general, the theory of universal computation – always limits the capacities of SimGod, precisely by virtue of his being SimGod (and consequently, his creation being a simulation).

Which brings us back to the question of how we define an “omnimax” God. As others in this thread have already pointed out, the question of whether God is really omnipotent and omniscient, as explored by edge cases such as “can God make pi equal 17” and “if God knows the future, does that mean that It cannot change Its mind after making a decision” is less important than the question of whether a being which can create worlds, actually exists, and if so, what the properties of that being are exactly.

The OP asks about “the omnimax God as commonly defined by mainstream Christianity”. I don’t think the average mainstream Christian really cares about these kinds of edge cases. If it’s true that God created the world in six days and cares about whether or not you work on Sundays, that’s probably enough for most of them.

Likewise, if SimGod is limited by the possibilities of the software It uses and the hardware which that software runs on, but is able to create a realistic universe with plausible laws of nature without being overly constrained by those limitations, I’d say that is close enough to “omnipotent” for most practical purposes.

What you’re saying is true, but isn’t it always around the edges that arguments or definitions fail? How much would one want to chip away at omnipotence before one stops calling it omnipotence – before the definition becomes useless? To me, even accepting such a relativistic view of omnipotence, there has to be a difference not merely in degree, but in kind, to the capacities of non-omnipotent beings – I would not consider myself omnipotent with respect to an ant, for example.

So, what does it mean to be supernatural, according to you? Does the thing interact with the physical world at times, and then disappear into some supernatural realm, undetectable from the natural world, at other times? If it is part of the natural world, then it is not supernatural. It’s like calling a circle a square, even though you know it’s a circle.

Well, that could well be.

I believe in the Universe because I do not believe that the Creator came into being without something creating it. Has the Creator always been here? If not, where did it come from?

Something cannot come from Nothingness.

Actually, Quantum Mechanics says that it can.

The universe is really just a statistical fluctuation. But don’t worry-- it’ll return to state of nothingness at some point. :slight_smile:

As I was saying earlier though, we can never know that something is supernatural. All we can do is study the phenomena we are presented with, and attempt to explain them.

Perhaps dark matter is supernatural. Perhaps ball lightning is supernatural.
The possibility that something may be supernatural hasn’t stopped us doing science in the past.

What’s stopped us doing science is having nothing to study, as in the case of god. He’s astonishingly good at making it seem like he doesn’t exist.

But by implication you’re saying that something that has always existed is metaphysically less problematic than spontaneous existence. But, when you think about it, they’re the same. In either case you have something that “just does” exist.

Quantum events don’t require a cause. This is proven by the Uncertainty Principle (and by Bell’s Theorem which shows that they are incompatible with any deterministic variable).

Did you really think you’d spotted some kind of logical flaw or error that Stephen Hawking overlooked?

So good, that he’s convinced me!

What stops science from dealing with the supernatural is the issue of repeatability. If I can’t repeat the experiment, then science tells me the phenomenon doesn’t exist.

Now that’s just not right. The uncertainty principle merely puts limits on the accuracy of observation (and I’m not sure what bearing that’s supposed to have on the issue), and Bell tests only rule out local hidden variables; global ones, such as are featured in the deBroglie-Bohm interpretation of QM, are still possible. And even if they aren’t, the indeterminism of quantum mechanics only comes about in interpretations featuring spontaneous collapse of the wave function, so, for instance, Everett’s relative state or many worlds interpretation is perfectly deterministic and causal. And even indeterministic interpretations still require the framework of quantum mechanics to exist prior to any quantum events, so one still might ask where that comes from.