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07/03/2005: "oh, no god"
during my drive from albany to cherry hill, nj, i came across a good way to think about whether or not there's a god-like thing.
it depends on how you think about free will (this strain of thought will eventually turn paradoxical, but keep with me). if we live in a mechanical universe, one without souls and magic, there's a compelling argument that we ultimately don't have free will. (this is b/c we can trace back the causes of events to observable phenomena - and out inability to do so hinges on our lack of complete information [ a constraint that becomes less and less binding as time progresses]).
however, in order to live a decent life without going nuts, we need to believe we have free will. things that remind me that i don't have it drive me nuts. things that make people apparent for the b0ts they are drive me crazy. i think a decent way to resolve this problem is that given that we don't have anywhere near a complete information set or complete rules of the game, and even if we did, nowhere near the ability to compute what outcomes will be or would have been, we don't know what's coming next and therefore the upshot is that we have free will, because it seems that way to us.
on to god-like forces. like with free will, what matters is what we can observe. if god-like forces have no observable impact on my life, there's no reason to act is if it exists. assuming that things exist when they don't impinge on our lives isn't helpful (though i suppose i'll have to concede that stories give people piece of mind).