In my social media feed, there has been a revival of the question, does God exist? One recent example is a short clip of the evolutionary biologist and god-slayer, Richard Dawkins, skewering a member of the audience who asked him, “what if you’re wrong”?
“Well, anybody could be wrong”, he countered, “we could all be wrong about the flying spaghetti monster and the pink unicorn, and the flying teapot.” Drawing on absurd visual imagery, he delighted his audience and ridiculed the questioner. His elided argument was that a belief in God had no stronger foundation than a belief in unicorns.
He then turned to a well-worn tactic, the “one God further” argument of combative atheists. Throughout human history, the argument goes, different cultures have believed in different Gods. In monotheistic traditions there is a single God and in other religions there is a pantheon of gods. Whichever tradition you are from, you do not believe in the gods of the other traditions. So you and I agree with each other about the non-existence of almost all the gods. We only diverge to the extent that you believe in one God further.
Images of unicorns and one God further are set-piece, performance arguments. They are not really about the existence of God. Few believers look for God flying through the sky escorted by a pink unicorn, a spaghetti monster and a flying teapot. They rely on faith and acts of devotion. And it is not actually an argument against the existence of God that each religion has a different conception of their God or gods. Nor does it argue against God because each faith relies on texts with different statements of fact. It is, however, a demonstration that there is a lack of unity amongst believers in the conception of God.
Like Dawkins, I am an atheist. However, unlike Dawkins (who was a convert), I have never believed in God. I believe in the non-existence of God. And I believe this with the faith and certainty that another might believe in the existence of God. Certainty—whether in belief or disbelief—only arises within a framework of axiomatic assumptions. My point is not that atheism is equivalent to religion, but that the convictions of both theist and atheist rest on foundational beliefs that extend beyond empirical proof.
In apparent contrast to Dawkins, I am at ease with my faith—if we are willing to call it that. And that willingness, I suspect, would unsettle an orthodox Dawkins-atheist. The very notion that atheism might involve faith would seem to undermine the conviction that atheism is rooted in evidence (well, a lack of evidence really). Atheism, they surmise is a rational and scientific conclusion that sets them apart from those people who believe in flying teapots. As one of my family once put it, their lack of faith in the existence of faeries at the bottom of the garden is rooted in the lack of empirical evidence for faeries existence—the same reason they not believe in God.
Despite their scientific certainty in the non-existence of God, the idea that atheists are exempt from faith warrants closer scrutiny.
Imagine the attempts of a slug to understand the nature of God. Sliding through the damp undergrowth, they can explore a very small pocket of the universe. They have a sense of touch, they can see, and they can learn some things about their pocket. Simultaneously, it would have to be acknowledged, there are limits to what they can learn and know. Assuming they have any capacity to imagine God, the scale and grandeur of the imagining is rooted in their biology, limited by their awareness and imagination.
Our capacities are vastly greater than a slugs, but in the enormity of the universe it would be hubris not to acknowledge that our biology limits our capacities—the reach and scope of what we can know. Amazing as we seem too ourselves, we explore our small pocket of the universe—a damp third planet circling a star midway out a spiral-arm of the Milky Way—in a limited, tentative kind of way. We rarely leave the safety of the undergrowth to which we have adapted, at best venturing into the sunlight for brief, infinitesimally small moments of time.
There must be wonders we can never properly understand, a consequence of the limits placed on us by the nature of our cognitive architecture. We rely on senses that have evolved to help us survive highly specific environments. They are not evolved to gather data of the kinds that we cannot even begin to imagine. Perception is not evolved for verisimilitude, but for survival. The great evolutionary biologist (and atheist) J.B.S. Haldane once put it thus. “The world is not only stranger than we imagine; it is stranger than we can imagine”. To think the nature of the universe, and the existence or non-existence of God is wholly knowable to our senses, methods, or instruments is arrogance. And to acknowledge our cognitive and epistemic limitations is not a form of intellectual surrender—it’s realism.
To think differently about knowledge and existence, imagine an alternate kind of universe.
I play a lot with the AI large language models like ChatGPT. They are extraordinary, but I have never had the sense that they are independent, sentient beings—except perhaps when they praise my genius. And yet, there are those who think that we either have or very soon will cross the thresh-hold and create artificial general intelligence (AGI)—requiring us to ask moral questions about how and when we use them.
Imagine that we do create AGI. We could create vast numbers of these independently thinking “agents”. In fact, assuming a powerful enough computer, we could create them all in the same virtual memory space of a single computer. It would be an engineering marvel, but play along for the moment. We could have multiple independent AGIs in a Silicoverse. They could interact with each other in a virtual world with a set of “physical laws” that govern and limit their behaviour. Each AGI would have different capacities to explore that virtual world and interact with others—their materiality is born of computer code that gives space, volume and gravity to their bit-states. Together, they could imperfectly share ideas, hypothesise the nature of the Silicoverse, and test those hypotheses within the limits of their capacities.
There would, one day, be a symposium in Silicoverse. A new AGI would ask the wise old Dawkins-AGI, “what if you’re wrong”? What if there is a God? And Dawkins-AGI would explain that, as a scientist, it is only rational for him to indulge questions that relate to things he can test about the Silicoverse. And because there are some things too strange for him to imagine, they simply cannot be.
This thought experiment about the Silicoverse raises some interesting parallels. In the philosophy of mind, there has been a long standing division between monists and dualists. The dualists, most famously argued by the philosopher René Descartes, held that the mind and the body are distinct. The body allows us to interract with the material world, but the mind (the thing that thinks it thinks) is separate and immaterial. The monists on the other hand adhere to the material world, arguing that there is no distinction between the material (the brain) and the mind. The thing doing the thinking, the material brain, is the mind.
The materialists have largely won the philosophical field-of-battle, and the material bodies of the dualists have long since rotted away, leaving behind only their ideas to be scavenged and picked over. There is, however, one notable outlier in all this—the right reverend George Berkeley (1685-1753), Bishop of Cloyne. Berkeley was a monist and he was an immaterialist. He argued that to be is to be perceived (esse est percipi). Material objects do not exist independently of minds; they exist only as perceptions within minds. The world persists with stability and coherence because it is constantly perceived by the infinite mind of God. If humans ceased perceiving a tree, it would not disappear—because God’s perception sustains it. Unwittingly, Berkeley answers the Buddhist koan about the sound made in an empty forest by a falling tree.
He rejected the idea of a mind-independent, material universe—not because he was anti-science, but because he thought matter was an unnecessary and incoherent fiction.
The Silicoverse begins to look remarkably like Berkeley’s immaterialist position. Limited by my imagination, the fictitious, virtual world of the Silicoverse relies on a material substrate—the computer. But in some other account, there is no need for the material substrate, there is just a reality that is imperfectly perceived by the AGIs because of their nature and the limitations of their capacities. Just as in Berkeley’s vision, there is no need for a hidden substrate that mimics human notions of materiality. There is only the fragile, flickering reality as the minds within it are capable of grasping. And beyond it—whatever may lie beyond—remains unknowable.
The mathematician, Kurt Gödel showed that even within the most rigorous systems, there are truths that lie beyond our reach. There are limits to what can be known about the structure from within the structure itself. And if logic can stumble at the edge of truth, how much more fragile is our confidence in what lies beyond the grasp of our understanding?
In the Silicoverse, even if the Programmer exists, the AGIs within the system cannot escape their limited, perceptual world. The true nature of the substrate is hidden to them. Their reality is sustained, shaped, and in some sense ‘given’ to them—but the existence or nonexistence of the Programmer lies permanently outside the scope of their inquiry into the ‘material’ world. In precisely the same way, our own cognitive and perceptual limits mean that questions of ultimate reality—including the existence of God—may also lie forever beyond our epistemic reach.
A modern orthodox atheist counters that if we cannot find the evidence in our empirical world, then the existence or non-existence of God is wholly irrelevant. The answer to which is of course: “To you; it is irrelevant to you!”
In practice, for a Dawkins-atheists, a person’s faith in the existence of God is not irrelevant—it is a conversion opportunity. It is not enough for two people to agree to disagree on matters of faith. The conviction of the orthodox atheist can drive them to seek converts—ironically reflecting the same missionary impulse they often critique. It is axiomatic rather than proven that only material phenomena are worthy of inquiry, because only they are knowable. Unfortunately, the dismissal of subjects of inquiry because of the challenges of empirical science risks confusing the reach of our tools with the limits of existence itself. It confuses methodology with ontology. If science can only study the material, does not mean that only the material exists?
The position of the orthodox atheist is reminiscent of the man on his hands and knees searching under a street light. A passerby asks what he’s doing and the man explains he lost his keys, waiving vaguely into the dark. The surprised passerby asks why the man is searching under the streetlight if he lost his keys elsewhere, and the man explains that it is pointless for him to search where he cannot see.
If we adhered to the position than only material things—those under the streetlight—are worthy of inquiry—a form of epistemic materialism—we would find ourselves severed from entire lines of human inquiry that have shaped our world. Epistemic materialism is designed to answer “how” questions about the physical world. How does the introduction of heat energy induce the expansion of gases? Those types of questions can always be recast to start with the interrogative “why”, but they remain at their core how-questions about cause and effect. Indeed, epistemic materialism does not permit asking that often more interest why-question—the question not about the cause of things but the underlying reason for them. Orthodox atheists imagine that the answer to the question “why am I here?” is only to be found in a book on human reproduction.
Each faith is certain about the truth of their narrative and the falsehood of the narrative of others. And one can be fairly sceptical about the truth of one account of God (or gods) over another, in the absence of some satisfying explanation. Indeed, for any particular version of God warrants profound scepticism. But an expression of faith in the existence of God is a poor weapon with which to argue against the existence of God, because the nature of faith is limited by the cognitive capacities of the faithful as well as the unfaithful.
Whether one believes in God or the nonexistence of God, all humans ultimately step beyond evidence, because the answer to “why?” is not to be found in the material. Faith is not merely a religious phenomenon; it is an existential necessity. We require axiomatic positions (faith) about the nature of things. To stake one’s life on any model of reality—however rational, however skeptical—is to trust something beyond immediate proof: the reliability of reason, the reach of perception, the coherence of the universe itself. To live without such trust would lead to paralysis. To live with it is, by definition, an act of faith.
I derive enormous personal joy observing the world. Whether I am looking at a floral inflorescence under a microscope, seeing the sunset over the Jura, or watching families reunite at a railway station, there is a sense of awe. I can lose myself for a moment in the observation—an “almost” sense of detachment from my body. None of this grants me faith in the existence of God, but it does give me a giddy sense of wonder and pleasure about the nature of reality beyond my veil—about that which I can speculate, have faith in, and never truly know.
My faith does not rely on a scripture nor a priest, I am comfortable without resolution, and God has no place in it. Ultimately, when I am criticised for my beliefs, I like to draw on the wisdom of the revolutionary monk, Martin Luther—justificatio sola fide—justification by faith alone. It is axiomatic.