fish, glaciers and the multiverse

The heat toasts me on my grey-black overdressed left side, which faces the window to my inner courtyard, in which the teeming fish are gradually losing their gloopy water, in which mini-dog Poppy awaits and watches me with doggy patience, sometimes switching her stance and half-switching her tail. This computer is way too loud.

As well as the plausibility-of-god essay, which I’m slightly avoiding, probably nothing new to reflect on it, – but how do I know what I think before I see what I say? - there’s at last a little something on global warming, in an indirect way, in this week’s NS. An article on the formation of a large glacier, in the crater of Mount Saint Helens, formed when it erupted in 1980. Hah, I remember reading about in SciAm. Seems that the formation of glaciers is rare these days, a product of local peculiarities, whereas deaths of glaciers are easily witnessed. Thanks to global warming, most glaciers today are in retreat (Nov 27, p33). A few other comments of the sort, suggestive of a certainty about warming, but where’s the concern? In an accompanying giveaway, 101 Things To Do Before You Die, they mention visiting Tuvalu before it sinks. More touristy than conservational, but I suppose they’re largely preaching to the converted. Sorry, no preaching here, we’re about evidence mate.

Okay then, let’s return to Keith Ward and his ‘interested and interacting god’. Okay, he uses big G, I’m being churlishly misrepresentative. To the surprise of more than a few scientists, I’d suspect, Ward writes that science has long offered an alternative hypothesis [to the materialistic world-view] in which fundamental reality is more like mind than matter, and the material world is dependent on mind (Nov 27, p19). No doubt he’s talking about the weird world opened up by quantum mechanics, in which there’s a fundamental observer-dependence, but does this represent ‘fundamental reality’ for a start? We have to get our fundamentals clear. Something of a leap here from the indeterminacy principle to a mindful materialism.

I find nothing in the piece too objectionable, I mean irritating, because Ward keeps tidily to abstractions. Considering his god (I just can’t use big G) in the light of Everett’s possible worlds theory of 1957, he takes up the notion of a multiverse of which our universe is one. The multiverse contains every possible set of laws and conditions, making our particular universe one of an infinite set of inevitabilities. Now, consider this set of infinite possibilities and hey presto you have God. Apparently. Or at least a definition of God. Cosmic consciousness (just add consciousness). Next, though, Ward divines God’s attributes – omniscience and omnipotence, well sure I suppose so, but Supreme Goodness? Why, because this consciousness ‘contains an indefinite number of forms of beauty, intelligibility and bliss’. But of course these forms are human inventions – which isn’t to say they’re not useful and valuable, like many a human invention. Supreme goodness is also a human invention, though less useful, I’d contend. Of course if you attribute the invention of supreme goodness to this cosmic consciousness, you’ll also have to attribute supreme evil to it, as well as any and every other attribute you can think of, good bad or indifferent. To be everything is to be nothing, basically. There just seems no point to the thing.