The Physics of God

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Often I wonder why God still exists. Shouldn’t reason and knowledge that we boast of today have long before made the existence of God far less obvious to us? I mean, let us have a picture of our universe, now, where does God fits in ? No telescope has ever found a heaven. The concept of  The God being a human lookalike who roams around freely in space and has an offspring is nothing more than an aesthetically appealing art form or a hilarious joke today. The necessity of the  existence of  God is often traced back to the creation of the universe, the question being, if there was no God, who created this universe?.

Celebrated physicist Stephen Hawking, who had made abstract physics concepts blonde friendly through his popular science books began his famous “A Brief History of Time” with

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on.” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”

A similar path of arguments would lead us into pondering over who created him who created our universe. So it’s turtles all the way down here too.

If we consider Him to be an omnipresent non-entity, He must be similar to the all pervading weightless medium, ether, which kept our 19th century physicists so awfully obsessed.  Its a very funny situation  here, because in this case we need to have a God Who is growing. Well, at least since our universe is expanding and God might not consider it healthy to become less dense in order to remain omnipresent, so, He too must grow! And this concept of a growing God is neither quite favorable to entropy decrease nor in compliance with any known conservation laws. (Not even our medieval ancestors would have liked it. )

I also do have questions regarding God’s communication interface with the human. How do our prayers reach the God. An omnipresent audio signal receptor (or an omnipresent SQUID like instrument to decipher silent prayers) attached to a language processing and interpretation unit which also retains the source spacetime co-ordinates, is  not quite gullible a concept. The next point of introspection is how does God exercise His control over us?  Making way for some rationality we can rule out abstract figments of imagination that our revered holy texts would ask us to believe in. If  God interacts, it has to be at a very fundamental level, through the elementary particles. Well, that might even lead us to a fifth fundamental force, the God force. Also, in that case, The Almighty is sure to punish me for denying his existence by making his God-particles interact with  my body particles, as the High Energy Physicists would sit by drawing the Feynman diagrams of the interaction process.  Long after my demise, when their tumultuous financial situation would get salvaged, those High Energy Physicists would even build a Large Godron Collider.

Bad query processing example of a overloaded server with non upgradable limited back end processes

Bad query processing example of an overloaded server with non upgradable, limited back-end processes

Strong egocentric nature of human beings have made the God, (they have so carefully developed over millenniums)  highly biased, in spite of his supposedly ideal sense of justice. He only favors good over evil in the context which man and his society deems fit. We set our own moral parameters and assume it to have naturally descended upon us by the  divine providence. And we also automatically believe without any arguments that along with the human cultural and political evolution, God’s sense of justice has kept changing over the time and from country to country.  There are places  in today’s world where rape and subsequent public flogging of the victim is a social practice while at other places skipping a ‘thank you’ is comparable to a crime. And apparently its our God has made these rules up and is constantly moral policing us on that basis.  Isn’t it ridiculous.  Couldn’t it be so that God’s sense of justice is just the same as when He was created 1000s of years ago. And there is no provision for punishing a bank robber today because there were no banks back in those days ans so no laws laid down for its robbing. I mean, do we really expect our fabled God to be maintaining a log of  our sins according to our user defined protocols. Throughout the infinite space of the universe there are gas clouds of nascent stars, billions and billions time larger in size  than us, possessed with the power of gravitational force, rampantly creating havoc. There are massive supernovae explosions, the all engulfing black holes, destruction and creation in scales so enormously huge that it won’t make the slightest difference if we remain religiously obedient or  our planet succumbs to a red giant  Sun.  Our  being intelligent is not a cause powerful enough to reserve God’s special attention for us because we are insignificantly microscopic and hardly contribute to the cosmos at any dimensions.

*

Being a religious and conservative person myself, I can’t convince myself into losing my faith in God. But I rather see God as a source of my completeness, an institution within myself. She is my friend and motherlike to me. I rather love Her than worship Her and imagine Her than believe in her. And that’s what keeps reason and all allied disbelief away from us.  Throughout time, the concept of God and the fear of God has kept order in the society and sustained the civilization. Its for the same reason that although we don’t carry stone weapons with us any longer we bear the very same God in our minds that our ancestors had invented, in the ‘beginning of time’.

16 Responses to “The Physics of God”


  1. 1 ronsin April 7, 2009 at 10:09 am

    1. well… the kind of post i totally agree with… all the funny logics of god not existing… and finally the belief and faith in the non-existant… :D
    2. looks like you’ve studied a bit of CMP… talking of SQUID and all… :P

  2. 2 Rahul Munshi April 7, 2009 at 10:27 am

    @ronsin

    1. thanku thanku

    2. I carry the information all the way from “Introduction to Cryogenic Engineering”

  3. 3 Naveen April 7, 2009 at 2:00 pm

    interesting take….

    Haven’t heard many people calling God a Her…. coming from the patriarchal societies that we do. So was that more of a subconscious chauvinstic take to deny God , given the “religious and conservative” person that you are?

    About the comic

    Reminds me of the t-shirt quote- God is Busy, Can I help you? Perhaps God uses an auto reply machine at times and we should really sanitize the facts first.

    • 4 Rahul Munshi April 7, 2009 at 2:12 pm

      @ Naveen
      Being of Sakta faith I view God in the all powerful, all merciful Goddess form. I am not being satirical or chauvinistic here. Please read the lines properly before expecting stuffs between the lines. Hope, that would make a more realistic reading.
      The comics is just a joke on mismanagement of God’s database. With the exploding population, hard- disc space is surely a problem. :P

  4. 5 Nikhil Sarda April 7, 2009 at 4:06 pm

    Can you fathom infinity? You cannot write down or imagine what the largest possible number looks like. Yet it is a concept without which most of the theories we use to give meaning to the world around us will fall flat on their faces. Can that be the same with God? Is God the spiritual infinity?

  5. 6 Rahul Munshi April 7, 2009 at 4:19 pm

    @Nikhil
    You have struck such a perfect chord. That is my whole point. Don’t go on making a whole intangible grand fuss about God and stick to loads of theories or beliefs. Whatever suits you best let that be your God. Let it be spiritual infinity to a mathematician or an irrational number to a mathematics olympiad aspirant, the sun to some or an idol or a non entity to the other. Whatever it might be, God is one who is always close to you, who you have immense faith in and who you would obey out of love rather than fear. And more importantly one should never mess up God with religion.

  6. 7 Kartik Prabhu April 7, 2009 at 7:18 pm

    interesting post.

    @Nikhil

    But i would really hope that people will one day have sense enough not to draw analogy between mathematics and God. The point is not whether you can intuitionally fathom infinity, but whether you can do it logically and operationally.

    Unfortunately, that does not seem to be possible with the concept of God. So, your analogy is only a very superficial one.

  7. 8 Rahul Munshi April 7, 2009 at 10:57 pm

    @Kartik

    I have been trying to emphasize on not confining yourself to any textual, religious or ancestral belief about God and frame your own God in your mind in whatever way that suits you best. That’s the best way you can be close to Him and interact with Him.
    For a mathematician like Nikhil it is most likely to be a number. For a physicist it can be the Minkowski spacetime continuum. For a toddler it can be his inanimate stuffed toy.
    It is important for us to understand that when someone declares his own version of God that necessarily does not mean he is asking a social approval or expecting others to adopt it.

  8. 9 Nikhil Sarda April 8, 2009 at 9:58 pm

    When people ask for social approval and expect (coerce?) other people to adopt it, that is the birth of religion. Live and let live I say. As Munshida said, I am not looking for some external agent to validate my beliefs. I do not claim to be a prophet. Man’s search for truth, purpose and the meaning of life is an intrinsically personal one. The most liberating and yet frightening thing is that we choose to believe what we want to. My own mortality and the fact that I will see my loved ones die in front of me is something I have contemplated for a long time. God gives us strength when these events actually happen.

  9. 10 Rahul Munshi April 9, 2009 at 1:40 am

    Let me site an example.
    For those who have already seen Little Zizou, there is a perfect example. The narrator’s dead mom was his God.

  10. 11 Kartik Prabhu April 9, 2009 at 8:39 am

    @ Rahul & Nikhil

    Unfortunately you seem to have miss interpreted what I said, partly because I was so very brief.

    I have no problem with anyone believing in “spiritual infinity” (whatever the hell that means) or “quantum connectedness” (again whatever the hell that means) as God. What I am saying is that these concepts have nothing to do with math or physics. They just, wrongfully in my opinion, borrow ideas from mathematics and physics and try to generate metaphysical concepts from them. Unfortunately, what people miss is that “sounding” mathematical is not really “being” mathematical. Usurping solid and rigorous ideas and blurring them to metaphysics doesn’t make them valid or true or real by a long shot.

    “Can you fathom infinity? You cannot write down or imagine what the largest possible number looks like.”

    Well, if Nikhil is a mathematician he should know that the answer to the first question is “yes”, thanks to Cantor and the second one is a meaningless question, thanks to Euclid (I guess).

    So I think that should clear up things that I wasn’t commenting on your personal beliefs nor was I saying that you go about coercing people to call you “Prophet Nikhil”, but only questioning your “mathematical motivations”.

    Now I have no doubt as to the effectiveness of a belief in God, as a source of hope, motivation or moral strength. I have been religious at a point of time my self and then rejected it.

    But, then do such notions really exist? You people say its a personal matter. Well, if I personally believe with all my heart and soul(whatever that is again) that the earth is flat, does that make it true in any sense?

    I guess not. Then why does believing with all your heart and soul that there exists a metaphysical entity who will provide me help and solace and answer my prayer, make it true?

    People keep saying that their beliefs are their beliefs and cannot be questioned by others. But then such “beliefs” like the earth is flat are certainly within the realm of objective enquiry. Then why is not the belief that “an all-powerful supreme being exist”?

    If you truly think that God is just a human conception to cope up with various events (tragic or otherwise), that do not lie within her control, then you must again realize that this hope or strength then comes from the human and the concept of a God is just something invented to coax the strength out, nothing more, nothing less. If your beliefs are just that “beliefs” and not statements asserting the existence of anything, then of course the notion of them being true does not arise. But then fact that you are “believing” in them, means that you consider them as some existential truth.

    For example: Munshi has a female God. So is God male or female? If by God you refer to just your delusion of an almighty protector then it could be male or female, knock yourself out with your delusion. But if you mean it as a “truth” with any kind of existence, then it is a valid objective question and not a personal thing.

    ( this is getting too long)

    to conclude (?)…

    1. I don’t care what your “personal beliefs” are, using vague mathematical arguments do not justify any conceptions of God.

    2. If God is personal, then it is just a psychological delusion made up to keep you hopeful and sane.

    3. If it is not so, if God really “exists” in any reasonable sense of the term, then it cannot be a matter of personal choice.

    There are many more subtle points but this is really getting too long (and I have to get breakfast now :) ). You are welcome to reply and I will answer when I get time. So, Munshida is welcome to stop harassing other poor souls in the department and have a real argument with me sometime ;D

    • 12 Rahul Munshi April 9, 2009 at 10:08 am

      @Kartik
      Without going into your “questioning Nikhil’s “mathematical motivations”.”, I would like to to quote a part of my post here

      But I rather see God as a source of my completeness, an institution within myself. She is my friend and motherlike to me. I rather love Her than worship Her and imagine Her than believe in her.

      .
      The question of believing in earth to be a flat surface and its falseness is not an analogy to be drawn here. Here we are not dealing with any physical entity or trying to be scientific. Somebody might say his God is in a temple idol, and some might attack him saying God is formless. But to be practical, we all know that both are true and false at the same time. God is not something that some physicists would discover someday making all other notions fall flat. I again emphasize, its a part of our imagination, an imagination that is powerful enough to hold our faith unmoved.

      Throughout time, the concept of God and the fear of God has kept order in the society and sustained the civilization. Its for the same reason that although we don’t carry stone weapons with us any longer we bear the very same God in our minds that our ancestors had invented, in the ‘beginning of time’.

      .
      The only point in my trying to rationalizing the current concepts is to let people know that the concept put forward by some ancient men are not something to be considered perfect and unquestionable. We have our own freedom to choose our God. Religion and tradition do bring people close, I agree. But if an idol is what you would love to see God in, then please go ahead and don’t deprive your mind of the privilege, even if your institution of faith forces you to think otherwise.

      What we are dealing with here is certainly something that for certain we know is purely our imagination and source of our hope and inspiration for sticking to righteousness. I would again request you to distance your loathing for people who generate metaphysics out of science. That’s an issue altogether different from this, I hope.

      If you truly think that God is just a human conception to cope up with various events (tragic or otherwise), that do not lie within her control, then you must again realize that this hope or strength then comes from the human and the concept of a God is just something invented to coax the strength out, nothing more, nothing less.

      I never defended the existence of an Almighty. Rather, throughout the whole post I have been trying to prove such a concept wrong. I, think that should justify what I had been trying to say and answer your other questions. And yes, what you say is perfectly right. We don’t get endowed with any extra hope or strength by praying, but maximize the use of that which is already within us.

      For example: Munshi has a female God. So is God male or female? If by God you refer to just your delusion of an almighty protector then it could be male or female, knock yourself out with your delusion. But if you mean it as a “truth” with any kind of existence, then it is a valid objective question and not a personal thing.

      You wrote the above before it got too long. Well, the question of delusion comes when there is some proof or rational argument against it. My friend worships Ganesha and his friend worships Allah. Are both of them making fool of themselves? A Christian missionary might drop in to convince them so. But we all would agree that all three of them are right in their own way. If there had been a physical entity who could be framed as God, the question of delusion in believing otherwise could have been aroused.
      I am not trying to be an atheist, but do attach importance to the fact that prehistoric men developed the concept of God associate with phenomena those were not in their control, and ever since the concept has become a distinct and intimate part of human society and entity as a whole.
      So the concept of an omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient God has developed over some time and it is not a discovery or invention. Early Aryans and even medieval mongols practiced animism and their religion was based on that. So, we see that even religions with no God associated with them existed.
      With the questions sprouting in your mind, i would suggest a careful re-reading of the post. I, think all your answers are well in there.

      I am always available for real arguments, as you already know and I don’t think any soul would like to be called a poor one.

  11. 13 Kartik Prabhu April 9, 2009 at 12:41 pm

    As I said if you imagine Her than believe in her then I have no problem :)

    And I guess we also agree when –

    the concept of a God is just something invented to coax the strength out, nothing more, nothing less.

    and you say –

    We don’t get endowed with any extra hope or strength by praying, but maximize the use of that which is already within us.

    I don’t think we have a conflict when we are using the word God as simply a not-existent personal metaphor, and I knew that from my first reading alone :)

    But we all would agree that all three of them are right in their own way

    Actually I think all three of them are wrong in their own way, if they take their God to be a existential being and not as a personal metaphor.

    Of course I know about the origin of the God concept as an explanation of the unknown and its subsequent “elevation” to “an omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient” being. And this is where I differ. I think that as animals capable of thought, we now ought to know better and take God, if at all, only in the personal metaphorical sense that I guess we both agree upon, and not as the traditional religions and even some individual believers have taken it literally and as an existent being.

    As Steven Weinberg said once “If you want to say that ‘God is energy,’ then you can find God in a lump of coal.”

    But I guess a lump of coal cannot send me to Hell ;)

    PS:

    Well, the question of delusion comes when there is some proof or rational argument against it

    That is not quite correct.. but it will be quite a digression to discuss this.

  12. 14 Nikhil Sarda April 9, 2009 at 4:35 pm

    @Kartik
    When I say fathom, I mean can you quantify it?
    I can fathom the mass of the sun because I can assign a specific value to it. My question was, can you assign a specific quantity to this term that we call infinity. I have a test now so I will give a more detailed response later.

  13. 15 James Redford April 29, 2012 at 2:12 am

    For more on the topic of science and religion, see my following article on physicist and mathematician Prof. Frank J. Tipler’s Omega Point cosmology, which is a proof of God’s existence according to the known laws of physics (i.e., the Second Law of Thermodynamics, General Relativity, and Quantum Mechanics), and the Feynman-DeWitt-Weinberg quantum gravity/Standard Model Theory of Everything (TOE):

    James Redford, “The Physics of God and the Quantum Gravity Theory of Everything”, Social Science Research Network (SSRN), Apr. 9, 2012 (orig. pub. Dec. 19, 2011), 185 pp., doi:10.2139/ssrn.1974708, http://ssrn.com/abstract=1974708 .


  1. 1 BlogAdda's Tangy Tuesday Picks - Apr. 07, '09 | BlogAdda Blog Trackback on April 7, 2009 at 12:53 pm

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This is mostly a random blog featuring text and webcomics'. It has little to do with humor as we know it. It mostly attempts to ridicule the urban life and the associated complexities. From the government to free will of sane individuals, its gives a damn to all of them, sometimes in words and at other times through figures. It draws inspiration from sources varying from Southpark to a deranged young scientist, working in a clean room. I try to do justice, but often fail in a unique way, allowing some giggling moments to creep in. Better enjoy them and stay healthy.
Please hop over to the comics category to view the webcomics posts only

 

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