On Life, the Universe and Everything.

I could try to be poetic and sum this up in 42 words, but I’m not that clever right now. Instead, I’m going to talk about one of the most dreaded topics ever: God.

Yes, you could call me religious (unless you’re a good Christian - then you might call for an exorcism). I make no pretence at being a perfect Christian (far from it!), but I do believe in God, and that’s a start.

So, there are always people who constantly denigrating my belief in God, dismissing it as ridiculous, disparaging my intelligence. Why, though? Why am I not allowed to believe in God? There are people allowed to believe that their country is “the best on Earth” - how do you even begin to validate that claim? What is best? Have you been to every country? Who are you to judge? People are allowed to have favourite colours, favourite foods, favourite vices; people are allowed to fall in love, die for their causes, hate other people at first sight - none of these things is particularly rational (at least as I’ve had rationality explained to me), and none of them are particularly scientific or likely to affect scientific progress. They’re all just fine, though. Yet I’m not allowed to believe in God.

***PONTIFICATION WARNING***

As an aside, I would just like to address the claim that religion is oppressive, destructive, and generally horrible. Religion and belief in God are different things - not entirely separable, but different. All the atrocities committed “in the name of God” are more truthfully in the name of a religion. At the same time, not all atrocities are committed in the name of religion. People are people, power is power. Whether someone gains power as a communist dictator or as the head of a church, they have power. The more power there is to be had, the more likely someone is going to do something underhanded for and with it. Manipulating the fear and trust of others is a reprehensible thing, but it is a human thing. Religion just happened to be a means to an end for some people.

***END OF PONTIFICATION***

Okay, now that that’s out of my system, I ask again: why can’t I believe in God? What mountains of evidence are going to bring to me to prove there isn’t? I mean, if you want to argue there is evidence that there might not be a God, well, okay, but there is evidence to me that you might not exist, either; I’m a closet solipsist.

Why do I believe in God, anyway? Well, it meshes well with my theories of the world, especially quantum mechanical stuff. If God’s observing everything in the universe, then I don’t have to lie at night wondering exactly what makes all the quantum states of everything around me, including my body, collapse into a specific reality. It also makes me feel better about physical laws and evolution and the way mathematics weaves itself into the fibre of the universe.

As an electrical engineer, I get to be the one saddled with applying esoteric concepts like complex numbers to the real world. You might say, oh, physicists have to do it, too, but let’s be honest: do physicists apply anything? (I’m sure they do, really.) So you have complex numbers popping up in equations that govern things that you put together with your own two (real-valued) hands and you go, “Um, what?!” So many “laws of physics” are presented mathematically - why is that? Why is it possible to play with equations on paper, get something cool, and then go look for it in the real world - and find it? It’s simple to add, subtract, multiply and divide everyday objects - but squares and square roots? Have you ever squared anything? I haven’t. And most maddening of all: how come capacitors/inductors/memristors can integrate & differentiate? 

I mean, you can jump up and say that mathematics is just a tool to model the world, so it’s not even coincidence - it’s design. I see it as design too - but not human design. Just set some physical constants, mix them into the mathematics, ensure a little quantum wiggle room, and let ‘er rip. I see that as the supreme expression of creativity. On a large-scale, the universe appears finely tuned for life; change a constant in a few decimal places and *whoompf* - no stars, no life, no me. At the same time, the more minutely you look at the world, the less certainty there is in what’s happening next, down to the subatomic level where you can’t even pretend to know what’s going on.

You can wave it away, chalk it up to chance, whatever you feel like. I’m not trying to convert you, and I probably couldn’t if I tried. I’m just saying that in my quieter moments, there is a still, small voice that reminds me exactly how piercingly beautiful the world and its construction is. I like to attribute that beauty to Someone older, wiser, and way cooler than me.