When reader Ben Goren sent me the latest strip from Wiley Miller’s Non Sequitur, he asked me if Miller had received an advance copy of my book. And indeed, I’ve used the “moving stars into words” trope before as one of the things that could help convince me that there was indeed a god. (Some anti-theist readers would reject this as convincing evidence, saying that it could be a trick by space aliens.)
Unfortunately, I wasn’t so clever as to invent this form of “evidence”. As far as I know, it first appears in Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World as one of the things that God could have done to convince us of his existence (I think Sagan hypothesized God spelling out “I am that I am in Hebrew”). If you reread that book, or especially The Varieties of Scientific Experience, you’ll find that Sagan was far more of a “strident” atheist than people recall.
But I digress; here is Miller’s cartoon, and it’s a good one:
The best kind of god is a trickster god.
If you Loki hard enough, you just might find one!
b&
I think no matter how hard we look, we’re not going to find any gods.
Wotan’t you agree?
Depends on whether or not you Teilhard enough.
b&
I tend to observe this guideline regarding Sophisticated Theologians™:
Don’t embrace the Chardin.
(Okay, at the risk of ruining the joke, this one may need some explanation. There’s a brand of bathroom tissue (Charmin) that used to market itself with the slogan “don’t squeeze the Charmin”.)
Well, at least you’ve identified the source of the brown streak running the length of the priest….
b&
Sometimes I wonder if I could believe in a god again…but the thought is mercurial.
Woah…heavy!
b&
@Mark:
Belief in gods is like Toyland. Once you leave its borders you can never return again. Harsh, I know, but don’t shoot the messenger.
The search can make you Ravenous.
…and, worse, if you’re coy, tea is all you’ll get.
b&
It would be Odin, if you didn’t.
I’ll get Eve with you for that.
b&
Some where Philip Wylie (A Generation of Vipers, 1942, “momism”) has stars arranging themselves to form, as I recall vaguely, a giant F.
Followed by “U”?
Intended as a comment on theodicy?
I am one of those who would not find that convincing evidence…!
After all:
“Q: Simple. Change the gravitational constant of the universe.
LAFORGE: What?
Q: Change the gravitational constant of the universe, thereby altering the mass of the asteroid.
LAFORGE: Redefine gravity? How am I supposed to do that?
Q: You just do it.”
Though, in this case, replace “asteroid” with “star”, I guess. But that’s a detail.
No, the most parsimonious explanation would be that you’d gone nuts. Or fallen asleep and dreamt the whole thing. God, is the least likely explanation for everything.
Bloom County used that joke a few times as well. I’ll have to check the years to see if it was inspired by Sagan, vice-versa, or independent.
The one I remembered: http://www.thecomicstrips.com/store/add.php?iid=85201
Funny. However, even if I did see the stars spell out “Repent Oliver,” I would probably ignore it, because (1) my name is not Oliver, and (2) even if it were, the deity with respect to whom I would need to repent is not specified in the message, and leaves about 30 or 40 thousand to choose from.
If you really want to go to a lot of trouble, try to find a copy of the 1972 book “The Day the Sun Stood Still.” It’s a collection of three science fiction novellas, by Robert Silverberg, Poul Anderson, and Gordon R. Dickson, written to the theme “what would happen if God really did give an unambiguous sign?”
Then there’s the lyric from a Depeche Mode song from the mid-80s: “I don’t want to start any blasphemous rumours but I think that god’s got a sick sense of humour ….” I qualify as a “strident” atheist, but if faced with some sort of clear, unambigous evidence, yeah, I’d change my mind but I still wouldn’t worship god as nothing deserves worship and anything that demands worship on pain of eternal damnation has proved itself entirely unworthy of worship.
love the heh heh
It would definitely indicate strong evidence of something much more advanced and powerful than we are, but I’d have to go with something like a device somewhere in our line of sight that is refracting the light in this way. This is much more likely that all the known laws of Physics being violated by scrambling stars across many light years instantaneously. It hardly begins to approach evidence of omnipotence.
Or, more simply…hallucination. People have been reading messages in the stars for as long as there’ve been people, and most newspapers to this day continue to publish “expert” interpretations — though, to be fair, they typically put the “interpretations” somewhere between the comics and the crossword.
Besides…the trick would be trivial for somebody operating a planetarium. How do you know you’re not in a stadium-sized planetarium and you’re there because somebody wants to convince you that the gods are real and talking to you? Add in all the possibilities for virtual reality technology, especially if you consider the non-zero (though damned close to zero) possibility of space aliens with Star Trek-style holodecks, and so on…
…and, still. All you’ve established is that there’s some entity vastly more powerful than you. But so what? James Randi could easily establish a similar fact to a back-bush tribe. Would that make him a “real” god to them? If not, simply being more powerful than us wouldn’t justify our calling such an entity a god, either.
The problem with gods is that they establish their bona fides not by doing the difficult, but by doing the impossible. Jesus didn’t walk on water because it was an hard trick to pull off; he walked on water because it’s a trick that simply can’t be pulled off, no matter what. But, you see…if you did see somebody walking on water…well, now you know that it’s not actually impossible, and there’s your evidence that it’s possible right in front of you. So walking on water is no longer evidence of a god but of a stage magician, even if a superbly talented stage magician.
That’s because gods are fictional characters whose purpose is to amplify the voices of the authors. So the authors have no choice but to have the gods do that which is impossible; otherwise, others could establish themselves as gods by duplicating the tricks the authors describe, thereby stealing the thunder of the authors.
b&
Yes, were it me alone who saw a message like this, I’d go with hallucination well ahead of anything else. Even if it’s a larger event like Fatima, I’d still go with hallucination (combined with the visual side effects of staring at the sun). But if the whole world saw it, say the stars arranged themselves in a message detected simultaneously by every observatory, and every person you talk to who was outside also saw it, hallucination would probably take a back seat to other hypotheses. I would not rank an omnipotent creator of the Universe anywhere near the top of possible explanations though. Omnipotence is a pretty high bar, to put it mildly.
Indeed. Once you have a phenomenon that passes they type of empirical examination we accept for the existence of most other things, appealing to the Hallucination Hypothesis is problematical, to say the least.
Not necessarily. Anybody who can fake the stars rearranging themselves can just as easily fake CNN coverage of the stars rearranging themselves.
Just look at all the “Candid Camera” types of pranks on YouTube. A coffee shop gets rigged to recreate a full-on Exorcist- style magic duel, complete with stuff moving through the air in response to hand waving. A girl in a diner goes to use the restroom; when she comes back, there’s just piles of clothes where people had been sitting and an hysterical waitress about how they were all Ruptured.
It’s also a popular theme for Hollywood, where somebody wakes up in what’s later revealed to be a giant stage, with the stage being set on an alien spaceship or the Nevada desert or even Hollywood itself, and the hero the victim of aliens of Hollywood executives or whatever.
The only safe conclusion you can make is that something’s gone crazy and that all bets are off. Maybe you’ve gone crazy; maybe the room you’re in has gone crazy; maybe the whole planet has gone crazy; maybe you’re in the Matrix…who knows? And, chances are, you never actually will, unless the craziness is on or close to a scale that you yourself could perpetuate with enough dedication.
b&
Yes, I don’t think we’re disagreeing here. Given an occurrence like the whole world apparently witnessing the stars in the sky spelling out a message (or even as you pose thinking that the whole world sees this), something has gone crazy. It still knocks hallucination down a few rungs on the ladder of plausibility. Something is bizarre, we just don’t know what. (Of course, no one can ever rule out completely that your own hallucination involves all of the above, but that’s technically also true for everyday life as we all know it). Whatever the explanation, there are imaginable scenarios where both hallucination and an all-powerful deity fail in being the most likely explanation. Depending on one’s definition of the latter, it always fails as an explanation due to incoherence.
That is why you contact your friends at remote observatories on the darkside of the planet (locations change, hourly), or other people in whose evidence gathering and testing abilities you’ve already got confidence.
Somebody who can trick you into thinking the stars are doing the tango can probably fake your friend’s voice on a phone call….
b&
Of course, many of the more strident religiostas would shrug off such evidence because they know (“from ma pappie”) that g*d speaks English because it says so in the Bible.