Sermon 17 - False News Proves God Exists
Job 28:9-13
9 People know how to tear apart flinty rocks
and overturn the roots of mountains.
10 They cut tunnels in the rocks
and uncover precious stones.
11 They dam up the trickling streams
and bring to light the hidden treasures.
12 But do people know where to find wisdom?
Where can they find understanding?
13 No one knows where to find it,
for it is not found among the living.
...
23 God alone understands the way to wisdom;
he knows where it can be found
I have spoken, in other sermons, about discord attacks, and the significance of false news in relation to that topic. False news seems to be the bane of our times, and it is creating problems in politics, the church, and society at large. A lot of discussion has taken place about whether we are in a post truth society, and what terrors that may bring. People have been talking about lies. We apparently have all kinds of different names for lies. I kind of wonder how many words we have for falsehoods, for misinformation, for disinformation, for social engineering, and for all the other forms, and all the other ways, that we refer to untruths. But we're really talking about lies. Most recently, of course, we were talking about fake news. But people are even starting to tell lies about fake news, and so now, in order to discuss the idea, we have to refer to *false* news. It's all still lies. Of course, sometimes people say that they aren't lying, because they didn't know that they were lying. They were just spreading stories, that they liked, and they didn't know whether they were true or false. But they wanted them to be true, because it made somebody else look bad. So they spread the stories. Whether they were true or not. And mostly they're not. It's all lies.
Social networks, and social media, have been the means of promoting much of this false news. Now the new large language models of artificial intelligence have a demonstrated properties which make it seem that they have almost been created intending to generate false news.
In addition, artificial intelligence is seen as a threat in a number of other ways. And some of the threats of artificial intelligence seem to be particularly directed at faith, and the church.
However, these rather terrible forces also provide us with a new opportunity. And even a new hope.
It may seem strange to try to prove the existence of the God of Truth, from the existence of lies. But that's often the way logic works. If X can either be true or false, and, if false, then Y must exist, then if Y does not exist then X must be true. That's often referred to as deductive logic. We're going to look more at logic in a bit.
And I even found a Biblical passage that seems to talk about this weird idea. It's in Job 13:7:
Why are you lying?
Do you think your lies will benefit God?
Many years ago, I based my own belief in God, and in the existence of God, on a preference for a universe with a God in it. There are many proofs for the existence of God, but none of them are, in fact, completely provable. If we could, actually, prove the existence of God, what would that do to faith? If we could, in fact, prove the existence of God, then belief in God would simply be a matter of being intelligent enough to understand the proof. Faith wouldn't enter into it.
At the same time, in discussion with my atheist friends, of whom I have many, they could propose arguments against the existence of God, but they couldn't prove that God *didn't* exist, either. We can't prove God does exist, but they can't prove God doesn't exist. So, I figured that I could get away with choosing the universe that I preferred.
We believe certain things about the universe. We believe that there is morality, that there is right, and wrong. We believe that there is truth: that some things are true, and that some things are false. We also believe that we are aware, that we understand these things, and even these concepts about morality and truth, and even self-awareness. We all believe these things. All religions believe in morality, even if they differ on the details. Even atheists (for the most part) believe in morality, even if they differ on the details. And they believe in thought, and in truth.
I am not saying that any of us actually know "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth." But all of us seem to think that the truth *is* out there, and that we can strive towards it.
But can these things exist in a universe without God?
I preferred a universe with God in it, because, if you imagined a universe without God in it, that runs on purely mechanistic principles, there is no mechanism to support morality. There is no reason to say that one action is good, and another is bad. You can say that one action will make people happier, or possibly even that one action will lead to more people living than another action, but you can't say that making people happy, or even keeping them alive, is morally right or wrong. Without God there is no basis for morality.
But it goes further than that. We believe that we are self-aware. We believe that we experience life, and the reality of the universe around us. But where does that self-awareness come from? What mechanism would create self-awareness? What mechanism would create an awareness of truth and falsehood? Evolution might drive the creation of a brain that leads people to survive, and some consistency with reality would better enable survival, but why would we have to be aware? Why would we have to be concerned about truth? And, even if we were, somehow, aware, why would it be that our brains would seek out reality and truth, beyond the immediate demands of survival? And, how could we possibly think that our brains do provide us with the truth, beyond the immediate needs of survival?
We think that we think. We think that we have the faculty for our thoughts to correspond to reality. But why should they? We certainly have no facility with logic: it takes a lot of work to develop our skill there. And many of us believe that we are more skilled in logic than we actually are. (But I digress.)
And, of course, Godel has proved that we actually don't know if we can rely on logic. We believe that logic allows us to determine what corresponds to reality, but Kurt Godel proved that no system of logic, starting with its own internal principles, can be proven to be correct. So, we have to take logic on faith.
Oh, dear. The atheists are on shakier ground.
As I am writing the notes for this sermon, I am also teaching the cryptography section of the information security seminar. I love cryptography, primarily because it is the history of really, really smart people making really, really bad mistakes. This is related to the idea of our belief in truth, and logic, and rational thought. Why should we think that we think? Even the best of us can make really bad mistakes. Part of the reason is that we decide issues more on the basis of emotion, than rational thought, regardless of how we feel that we actually do in those departments. But part of it is just that we make a lot of mistakes. We do not think as well as we think we think, but we have a strong belief that we do think, and that thinking is an advantage to us. Actually, just simply the fact that there are an awful lot of people who are tremendous successes, even though they are really, really ignorant, tends to work against this idea, but we still believe in thought. We still believe in truth. We still believe in logic and rationality. And why should we believe that, unless God has actually given it to us? Evolution is not enough of a process to give us reliable thinking mechanisms. Evolution is enough to give us processes that will help us to survive, but truth? Logic? Rationality? These are not concepts related to survivability. Natural selection might give us street smarts, but there's no reason to believe that it would give us intellectual rigour.
The idea that truth is not quite exactly the same as facts may be difficult for some. We think of truth as binary: things are either true or false. But that is often not, well, true. For example, there is C. S. Lewis's statement that fairy tales are important, not because they teach children that dragons are real, but because they teach kids that dragons can be beaten. There is the statement that comedy is a way of telling the truth with a lie. The again, saying that the value of pi is three, or three and a quarter, is incorrect. It is untrue. But it may be plausible, or useful, as a heuristic for quilting. (Especially if you are going to have half inch seam allowances anyway.) So there are lots of examples where we can see that something doesn't have to be true, to be useful for survival.
Again, while natural selection might favor some correspondence of behavior with reality, what possible mechanism could there be that would drive human beings to develop philosophy? It is a standing joke that the only job that a degree in philosophy qualifies you for is the teaching of philosophy to university or college students.
(As an answer to any of the foregoing, I will not accept any proposals that contain the phrase "emergent properties." "Emergent properties" is just another way of saying "and then a miracle occurs," and miracles are God's province.)
Therefore, we can create possible classes of untruths. There are things that are true. Philosophers have argued for millennia about what (if anything) is included here, but probably some mathematical facts belong in this category. Then there are things that are untrue (or incomplete), but useful. (Actually, most scientific theories fit into this category.) Then there are things that untrue, but plausible. (Most of politics fits into this category.) Last there are things that are untrue and complete nonsense. These things tend to be discarded fairly quickly, but there is, unfortunately, a large overlap with the area of untrue but plausible.
If God exists, He can provide us with self-awareness. God can provide us with an awareness of the importance of truth, and a faculty, and facility, for seeking out truth.
Now we turn to the areas of mathematics known as number theory and set theory. Don't worry if you didn't study them: the basics, and the parts I'm going to use, are pretty simple.
The huge prevalence of false news has allowed us to study lies. Not just epistemologically, but analytically and mathematically. The existence of computers, and the Internet, and social media, has given us a huge dataset, such that we can have a high degree of certainty that our conclusions are correct. The storm of false news has given us a way to see a truth.
The point is that the set of truths is much smaller than the set of things that aren't true, but are plausible, credible, or believable. For everything that is true, there are a great many things that diverge from that truth, but are still plausible. So the set of things that is plausible but untrue, is much larger than the set of things that are actually true. Therefore, it is much easier to create something that is untrue, than something that is true. There is a much larger set of things to choose from.
In addition, untruths spread much more quickly than do truths. This is partly because there are more of them, but also because it takes time, and effort, to verify something as being true, but it takes only a fraction of a second for us to believe something that we want to believe. So the truth is always at a disadvantage. There is always more untruth, and there is always the fact that the untruths spread much faster than the truth.
There is much more that is plausible than that is true. Creating a brain that finds the plausible is probably a lot easier than creating one that finds the truth. That assertion now seems to be supported by additional evidence: the evidence that we have created artificial intelligence systems that can create very plausible products--but a lot of them aren't true.
OK, now comes the part that might make your head hurt.
The atheist believes in truth, and thought, and logic, the same as we do. But he has to believe that evolution; which is a wonderful theory for explaining the diversity of life, and has ample evidence that it is still happening today; has, without assistance, created a brain capable of logic and truth. And that this brain has enough facility in logic to come up with the truth of its own creation. Natural selection selects for reproductive advantage. Truth is not an advantageous trait. It is expensive, in terms of both evolution and energy. Evolution tends to take the low energy path: a low requirement for energy always has survival advantage. The probability that evolution would create a mind that would reliably find truth is low. Therefore, the probability that the idea of unassisted evolution that such a mind would conceive is, in fact, correct, is also low. So, to state that God does not exist, and that we figured this out because a thoughtless universe created a mind that could figure it out, seems to be a self-defeating argument.
Now, it is still possible that, somewhere in the immensity of time and space, and possibly multiple universes, hydrogen is a colourless, odorless gas which, given enough time, turns into people. And it is possible that, randomly and accidentally, we came across the truth. And that, in addition, also randomly and accidentally, we developed the capacity to recognize this truth. But it doesn't seem very likely.
And, even if we did, somehow, improbably, develop the capacity for truth, we can't take any credit for it. If God doesn't exist, the mechanistic universe was pre-determined to create us, and in such a way that we developed the brains that we did, and, given precisely the same set of initial conditions, we would always come to precisely the same conclusion.
(If you want to say "quantum" to me, and say that everything *isn't* precisely determined, I'd say that, in some ways, that's even worse. In that case, the universe, at base, regardless of how it seems to us, is pretty much completely random and chaotic.)
This doesn't, logically, prove that God, necessarily, exists. We are now in the realm of *inductive* logic, where the compilation of evidence directs us one way, or another. So, it would seem that we can only say that God *probably* exists.
I would prefer to live in a universe where right and wrong exist. I would prefer to live in a universe where we can rely on being able to figure things out, correctly. Therefore, I would prefer to believe that God exists. If God exists, He can make us aware that He exists.
So, while the existence and prevalence of lies may not necessarily prove that God exists, it certainly seems to make His existence much more probable than the universe we seem to think we live in, but without Him.
And, if God *doesn't* exist, then for some reason, the mechanistic universe wants me to prefer to believe that He does. So, what do you say to that?
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