Ant Gods

My friend JC, over at uglybutbearable.blogspot.com has a very interesting post on what God could represent. He takes the example of ants in ant farm will attempt to make their "God" in their image - thus the idea of a God these ants will carry may have nothing to do with their "real" "God" - the owner of the ant farm.

I'm going to try taking this in another direction; to help point out the issues I see with the belief in a God - or at least, the notion of a God as it is popularly believed.

Imagine a 2-d ant, in fact imagine a colony of 2-d ants. Consider the world they live in to be a perfect sphere. Now being 2-d, it is inconceivable for these ants to understand a sphere, since their understanding of the world is going to be limited by the physical characteristics of the world as they see it. Although they live on a sphere, for the 2-d ant a sphere will be nothing but a bunch of circles. They might discover that the circles get smaller as you move up or down - but there is no up or down in their world.

This will become a mystery then, probably a mystery they will be unable to solve. Why do their circles get smaller at some places and larger at others? The change in circle size will probably also affect physical characteristics of their world. Ants that are believers will put this down to a "God" - a mysterious supernatural force that affects their world in innumerable ways.

Now, through a series of scientific advances they may chance upon a mathematical proof that claims a reconciliation of all the phenomena they observe lies upon the existence of a 3rd dimension, in which the sphere exists.

Impossible, most ants will say. "That's ridiculous! A 3rd dimension!" Of course this doesn't mean that it isn't true!

It does not also make it any less revelatory or supernatural than a belief in a God.

There are 2 ways of interpreting the above statement - (a) God is an easy concept that people rely on to escape their non-understanding of the world therefore religion halts science; (b) it does not matter what you call it as long as you seek to understand it.

Being no expert in theology, I have no idea what the consensus among religions is regarding understanding the world but I'd be surprised if the teachings in all the Holy books tell you not to seek understanding. In this way I see religion and science co-existing. It is a narrow view on what religion and science represent that I guess underlies most of the debate between religion and science.

But then again, it's hard to reconcile this with the apparent statement in the Bible that the world is 5000 years old, for example. Or that there were flying saucers during the time Ram was king.

As far as I'm concerned however, as long as you maintain a curiosity about the world and a basic humility regarding the extent of our knowledge, there does not seem to exist any room for a debate. In this light, the problem that I see is not with religion/God per se, it is the interpretation of it - this is our Holy Book, and it is completely correct, so don't challenge it - that is the problem. Of course this is not to say that scientific beliefs are easily challenged either, but rather that they are allowed to be and that too in a systematic fashion, more or less.

The beauty of a logical proof demonstrating an aspect - physical or psychological or both - of the world and that helps generate insight - that beauty you can call God. A God, that works in a less mysterious way.

Of course there is the question - why do we find beauty in a mathematical proof? (Well some of us anyway). Is there is a "understanding the world" gene within us, a la Richard Dawkins' Selfish gene?