The Painful Truth-Herbert W. Armstrong's Worldwide Church of God

Since I explored Occam’s Razor below, it may also be necessary to discuss something called the Church-Turing thesis in regard to the human mind and computers.

The Church-Turing thesis is named after Alonzo Church and Alan Turing, who arrived at the same general conclusions separately. Very roughly, it says this:

The human brain is nothing more than a computer, since it is subject to the laws of physics. If there is anything more than the laws of physics governing the brain, we have no evidence of it.
Therefore, mathematicians will someday be able to model the human brain so that a computer will be equal in every sense to the brain.

However, since we have no knowledge of anything outside of or “higher” than the brain, we would not be able to program or model any possible concept of that “higher” awareness. Everything that the brain is, as far as we know, will be the same as a computer.

Turing once proposed something called a Turing test, when he was playing with his idea of a universal Turing Machine, his mental creation that was the forerunner of a computer.

Turing proposed that if at some point in the future we could place a computer and a human behind a wall so that a questioner could not tell whether he was posing questions to a human or the computer, and the questions were printed out, given to the computer or person behind the wall, and a printed response was given back, then at some point, if the computer could respond to the questions so that the questioner could not tell the difference between human and computer, the computer would be, in every definable sense, the same as a human regarding knowledge and communication.

Let’s take this analogy and suppose we are asking the computer questions about God. Assuming the computer can respond exactly in a way the human can respond, then there would be no possible way for any human to determine any difference between a human “soul” and a computer “soul”.

You might say, “Oh, but God can tell the difference”. Yes, but God isn’t asking the questions. Humans beings are.

Based on that same example of the Turing Test, which religious organization or church actually does represent God? If all of them can give satisfactory answers, if all of them can show truths consistent with human knowledge about God, which one of them would actually be the true representatives of God?

Keep in mind, if you can make that definition, you can then take that same knowledge and program it into a computer, so that the true church of God can be completely computer generated. But if the true church of God can be computer generated, what, really, is the difference between the computer and God himself?

This would follow Occam’s razor, since it would reduce all possible answers to one system of thought, and that system can be reduced completely to a mechanical, finite, logical process.

Do you begin to smell a rat in the form of church and state? What is the state? A system of finite, logical, mechanical rules by which we organize human lives.
What is a religion? A system of logical, mechanical, finite rules by which we organize human lives.

And where do both systems come from? The human mind. They would therefore be “Attila and the Witch Doctor” as Ayn Rand calls them, or the “Beast and False Prophet” as the bible calls them.

If you belong to either system, in any definable form, it is a certainty you are not following the truth. How do I know that? Godel’s theorem. In any axiomatic formulation of number theory, there exists an infinity of undecidable propositions. That applies to laws as well as numbers. There exists no formal system of knowledge such that it leads to a complete, consistent definition of truth.

And thanks to Byker Bob, what is “God” telling you in regard to truth? Basically, there is only one possible conclusion: you are the final authority in the matter, you and you alone.

There is no government that can prove legitimate authority, and there is no religion to prove legitimate authority, and that’s exactly what both Jesus and Paul told us.

0 Comments

In his book God is Not Great, Christoper Hitchens makes excellent arguments against God.

One of Hitchens‘ first arguments deals with Laplace, who, when asked where God stood in his cosmology, simply said there was no place for God, and in fact, no need. The simple fact is, if we attempt to explain the universe in terms of a creation of God, we must first demonstrate that there is or was actually a God to create it.

Hitchens then goes into the arguments known as Occam’s Razor, or Ockham’s razor, developed by one William of Ockham. Ockham developed what was recognized as a “principle of economy”, stated simply as “Do not multiply entities beyond necessity”.

If you watched the movie “Contact” the idea of Occam’s Razor was employed quite often. If two or more competing theories attempt to explain a theory of existence, the one that explains the most with the least effort and unnecessary detail will probably be the truth. (I quote from memory. I’m sure there are better explanations).

To quote from Hitchens‘ book, “Ockham stated that it cannot be strictly proved that god, if defined as a being who possesses the qualities of supremacy, perfection, uniqueness, and infinity, even exists at all….’It is difficult or impossible(wrote Ockham) to prove against the philosophers that there cannot be an infinite regress in causes of the same kind, of which one can exist without the other’. Thus the postulate of a designer or creator only raises the unanswerable question of who designed the designer or created the creator”.

Stated in a popular fashion by such people as physicist Paul Davies, “it’s turtles all the way down”. I hope you’re familiar with that story.

I like Hitchens‘ statement just a paragraph later: “If one must have faith in order to believe something, or believe in something, then the likelihood of that something having any truth or value is considerably diminished.”

So, if I tell you “there is a God”, the only possible “explanation” can come up with is that it was “revealed”.

Big problem: how does one prove a revelation? Only one way it can be done, and that is to prove it by some method that demonstrates beyond any doubt, by reason, logic, or physical demonstration. But that presents a further problem: if I can prove it by reason, logic, or demonstration of physical example, I don’t need a revelation! it would be a fact of existence!

Ockham, therefore, has left us with the realization that existence, and the reason we discover within existence, simply cannot rely on revelation, since the very process of explaining the revelation makes it unnecessary in the first place.

However, this leaves us right in the same position as I mentioned earlier: I will add a qualifying statement to it. If there is a God, any facts of evidence we present to demonstrate existence could not depend on unproven revelations, since the very proof of itself would be contained with no necessity for such a revelation. It would simple “follow” from the proofs inherent in the explanation.

So, if there is a God, it would stand to reason that such a God would either exist within the proofs stated by reason, or that “God” cannot exist within those proofs, leaving us with exactly the same statement made by the apostle Paul in Romans 8:7: the natural mind is enmity against God, and cannot be subject to “his” laws.

And that places us on a par with Occam’s razor, since the results achieved IF the mind is enmity against God, will produce no evidence of God, and further would produce no decision procedure by which we may demonstrate any relationship to God.

And that is precisely what Paul said in Romans 9:16-22. Further, if we try to apply definitions of “God” in any human sense, both Occam’s Razor and Romans 8:7 would lead logically to the same results: a multiplication of entities trying to define “God” outside the power of human reason.

But Ockham says that such multiplication of entities is unnecessary, and would prove absolutely nothing. Therefore, with both Paul’s statement and with Occam’s Razor, we are left with one unavoidable conclusion: there is no need to follow or believe in any religion that claims to represent God. That is just what Jesus said in Matthew 24:23.

Prove me wrong.

Comments

I suppose there are those of you who think I must be intimidated by your constant, useless, and meaningless ad hominem attempts to “put me down”.

I didn’t suggest this to James, he suggested it to me. I started this out only with the intention of expressing ideas, and it turned into pretty much an insult match. I personally like insult matches.

A bit of my background. As you already know I spent time in the marines. Not being particularly impressed by authority, I spent probably as much time in jail as in regular service. I stood two Company Office Hours, Two Battalion Office Hours, was sentenced to two months Correctional Custody, and stood a Special Court Martial, which I won on my own defense.

The reason I was court martialed is that the marines sentenced me to two months Correctional Custody, which would make most any civilian jail today look like time spent in Paris Hilton(the building).

Since they took my money I said “no pay, no play. I’m going home”.

I spent eight months of freedom before the FBI convinced me to return, and then faced court martial for desertion.

As a result of my defense, I not only won the court martial, but the marines apologized and promoted me meritoriously. To my knowledge, that has never been done in the history of the marine corps.

During my time waiting for court martial, I quite literally had to “watch my back”. At one point, five marines gathered, and tried to “adjust my attitude”. They caught me on a good day , but not for them. At that time, I was deadlifting 500 lbs, squatting 600, bench pressing over 300, and I ran 8 miles a day for good measure. It wasn’t much of a problem for me to throw two average marines like a baseball. When those five marines came at me, and of course not realizing the fed up state of mind I was in, to paraphrase Clint Eastwood, they “made my day”.

You think your puny garbage bothers me? I’ve had REAL harassment from experts.

You think I’m crazy? I’m an ex-marine. Of course I’m crazy.

A side story of interest. After i won my court martial, I was assigned a room in the 22 area at Camp Pendleton, Ca. We were given rooms much like an average motel room, and three marines lived in each room. Me, I like to make things shine. Spit and polish really suits my nature. On Thursdays, we had to ‘field day” our rooms for inspection Friday. If we failed that inspection, we spent the weekend doing it all over again, until the inspector got bored from watching.

I hand buffed the tile floors in my room, every single square, until it shone like crystal. If an inspector opened the door and looked in my room, he saw that almost crystalline reflection of my room perfectly in the floor.

People talked about my floor. People came to look at my floor. Inspectors used my floor as an example of what floors should look like.

And then one day the company sergeant, who was responsible for inspecting rooms, decided he wanted my floor. I was ordered to move out. As the sergeant moved in , I told him, “You know, sergeant, that i won that court martial. Nobody in the history of the marines has ever done that.
You really should re-consider, sergeant, because somebody up there really likes me”.

Of course I was joking. The sergeant smirked and said “Yeah, right”.

That night, after the sergeant and i got re-settled in our new rooms, a toad strangling rain came. It poured torrents almost all night, in Southern California, where everyone who lived there back in the 70’s knows, as the old song said “It never rains in Southern California”.

I had been moved to the front of the building, where the rain simply drained away. I was high and dry. But in my old room, on the back side of the building, rain and slime and mud ran under the threshold guard of the Sergeant’s door, and he awakened that morning to about two inches of mud and slime and ooze all over his floor.

I walked by and saw him sweeping the filth off the floor, and I said “Sergeant, I told you somebody up there likes me!”.

He grinned sheepishly and said “I’m startin‘ to believe it”.

That’s a true story. Am I threatening you with “God”? Of course not. Just wanted you hecklers out there to know, unless James decides to cut me off, I’m looking forward to March even more than you!

Comments