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religi[w83,jmc]		Scientific forms of the religious hypothesis

	When Laplace showed Napoleon his treatise on celestial
mechanics, Napoleon asked him what place God had in his theory.
Laplace replied that he had no need for that hypothesis.  We
also have no need for it, but let's consider it anyway.

	The religious hypothesis in its narrowest form is that
the universe was designed and  created by an intelligence.
Another form is that some superhuman power frequently intervenes
in life on earth.  These hypotheses are distinct; one could be
true without the other, both could be true or neither.  One reason
for considering these hypothesis is that when people understand
computer programming well enough, people will be inclined to
program evolutionary processes in a computer that might develop
intelligence and might be inclined to intervene in the ``worlds''
they have created.

	We can therefore consider the hypothesis that our world
is a computer program or some other designed system.
There are two interesting questions:

	1. What would constitute evidence for creation or
intervention?

	2. Is there any such evidence?  I don't see any.

	3. Is it worthwhile to look harder for such evidence?
My answer is that it is moderately worthwhile, although I'm not
sure I would favorably review a proposal for research aimed at
it if the National Science Foundation asked me to review one.
There would have to be a good idea about where to look.  Probably
it's best to regard  thinking about it as a leisure time activity
for people with inclinations to speculation.

	Note that this form of the religious hypothesis may not
satisfy anyone's ``spiritual needs'' nor is it  necessarily
compatible with existing religions.  It also won't console
people for the death of their children or offer compensation
in an afterlife for suffering and injustice in this life.
It may be that the decline of religion in prosperous countries
in this century is a consequence of prosperity and democracy
having reduced the need for consolation as well as having
popularized scientific views.

	Indeed my speculations about religious hypotheses
will not attribute to the hypothesized ``intelligence'' any
special interest in human affairs, any sympathy with humanity,
or any desire to be known or worshipped, or any tendency to
hear prayers.  If I were to write, run and observe a program
that might evolve intelligence, I don't think I would be inclined
to want it to print out ``John McCarthy is great'' or even put it
in many memory registers.

	Since the advent of science, many religions have become
``purified'' and lost their previous scientific goals and
pretensions.  Indeed there is a tendency to deny that they ever had
such pretensions.  Nevertheless, before science existed, there
were religious hypotheses about questions now treated by science.
Here are some examples:

	1. Thunder and lightning are caused by Thor throwing his hammer.

	2. ``God gave Noah that rainbow sign/That it won't be water
but fire next time''.  This explains rainbows by ascribing a purpose
to them.

	3. The reason there are ants is to persuade people not
to be lazy.

	4. Churches are often damaged by lightning, because the evil
spirits of the air hate the houses of God.  The alternate explanation
is that churches are often struck by lightning by God in order to
show the congregations that God disapproves of certain recent
sinful behavior.  (See A. D. White's ``The warfare of science and
theology in Christendom'').

	This kind of explanation of natural phenomena has been
superseded by scientific explanation.  The latter makes more
satisfactory theories, and also leads to technology that works,
while the technologies based on religious hypotheses, such as prayer,
sacrifices, astrology and sorcery, don't work.

	While the above theological explanations of natural
phenomena are inferior to non-theological explanations,
this can be ascribed to the naivete of pre-scientific
cultures and to their self-absorption.  We could try for
theological explanations that are less parochial.  For
example, we could try to explain some aspect of the theory
of relativity as fulfilling some purpose of the God that
designed the world in this way.  Indeed Einstein and some other
scientists look for beautiful theories, but none of them ascribe
any but aesthetic motivations to God.  Also it's hard to tell
whether their references to God are just metaphorical.

	As another example, note that the religious often cite
the complexity of life as an argument for the implausibility
that present day life is purely the result of random variation
and natural selection.  The alternative hypothesis, supposeing
that the geological evidence for the succession of species
isn't a fake on God's part, must ascribe a purpose to the
particular observed succession of species.  The British
biologist J. B. S. Haldane is supposed to have been asked
by a bishop what his biological studies told him about God's
purposes.  Haldane is said to have replied that God seemed
to have ``an inordinate fondness for beetles''.  Indeed a
theological explanation of the succession or distribution of
species would have to account for the 300,000 species of beetles.

	The clockmaker religious hypothesis doesn't have
such obvious disadvantages.  God created te world in the
first place and set it running.  A religious explanation
would involve say why this kind of world was chosen and
not some other.  When we know more physics, someone may
explore such hypotheses.

	Now let's explore the religious hypothesis from
the other end.  Suppose we were to program a world
and set it running and it evolved intelligence.  Could
these intelligences determine or even plausibly conjecture
that they were part of a computer program, and could
they infer anything about us, the programmers?

	Maybe!  It depends on what kind of program we
wrote.

%March 1989
	Suppose the prgram were very large and involved many
detailed decisions.  Suppose we made these decisions on the
basis of some ideas about what kinds of events we preferred
to happen in our simulated world.  Imagine that the program
had thousands of such decisions made by hundreds of programmers
over tens of years.  It might then turn out that the scientists
within the simulated world could account for their world's
features most economically by figuring out our purposes.
They might even be able to identify the styles of the different
programmers of the different aspects of the world and their
characteristic mistakes.  This would depend on the how the
detailed decisions related to features observable by them.

	The Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem raises
the question of the human programmer's moral obligations to his
simulated creations.  Might it be wrong to program a world of
suffering?  I have to confess I have few moral intuitions about that,
one way or the other.  I suspect that concepts of morality get
rather tenuous when taken much beyond human affairs.