Millions of scientific experiments are carried out every year, and these experiments can be copied by anyone with the right equipment and knowledge. The results of any experiment carried out under the same conditions should be reproducible, and that is how science operates. We have never found any divine intervention in any experiment, and there are many cases where divine intervention could help. For example, God could help an experiment to find a cure for cancer or, in one fell swoop, eliminate all disease.
In a similar way, the intervention of God (referring to the Judeo/Christian/Islamic concept of an all-powerful god) could help the world in many ways. For example, God could put in place physical laws that made it impossible to wage war.
Assuming we earthlings had free will, all the evils of this world would be a result of the exercise of that free will. The role of a god then becomes unclear. Whatever happens in a world where free will exists, happens because of our exercise of free will, not because of any god. God therefore again becomes an observer rather than a participant, and does not intervene, because to do so would contravene the free will hypothesis. The corollary of this is that whatever happens in a world where free will does not exist is inevitable, and we cannot be blamed for anything we do. In such a case, if there were a god or gods, how could it or they condemn us for what was preordained?
In Stephen Hawking’s book, The Grand Design, he argues for M Theory, a theory that includes the multiverse, and the fact that given any starting conditions, what happens after that in any particular universe is the inevitable result of the starting conditions playing themselves out to their ultimate conclusion. Think of a computer program that has been set to perform a certain task. No matter how complex the code, and no matter how many millions or billions of instructions are in the code, every time the program is run under the same starting conditions, it will do the same thing. To get it to do something else, you have to change the programming, which is to say, change the starting conditions, or allow the program to change its own starting conditions. However, we humans can’t go back to the starting conditions of our universe and change anything, so we have no control over our program. We do what the starting conditions make inevitable. The illusion of free will that we have is also inevitable, given the starting conditions of our universe. In other universes with slightly different starting conditions there could be planets populated with creatures that were all fatalistic, with no illusion of free will.
Given the right starting conditions, in other universes there could also be gods who did intervene in the affairs of the beings inhabiting the planets around the suns of those universes. The starting conditions would have included whatever was necessary for gods to exist. In our own universe those starting conditions were apparently not present or we would probably have some evidence of their intervention.
Gods, of course do not need to be benevolent, and could enjoy causing pain to their subjects. But imagine being alive in a world with a truly benevolent god who, for example, would not allow the thought of sodomising an altar boy to enter the head of one of his own priests. In a world like that, the life of one creature would not depend on the death of another. There would be no food chain, because the sun would provide enough nourishment for all, through photosynthesis. There would be no wars and in particular, no religious wars because the god of that world would reveal itself to everyone, making religious differences pointless, and the violent behavior impossible.
The absence of these conditions on earth, of course, does not mean that there is no god in our universe, but if there is one, the bloodthirsty nature of man, and the indifference of nature to the most appalling cruelties and sufferings, together with the regular mass extinction events that happen on this planet, mean that any god who lords it over earth must have a particularly disturbed sense of humour. Even if somehow proven to exist, such a god would not be worthy of worship.
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