Many Worlds

Central statement

“God is in everything.”

Translation

“The universe itself is a living organism.”

Analysis

A definition of life most people could probably accept would go as follows: something is alive if it has either consciousness or a series of other properties including metastability, the ability to metabolize external substances and/or energy, to respond to stimuli, to procreate, and to adapt to a changing environment, possibly only over the course of more than one generation. The latter set of criteria relies on the presence of an external environment, which would require a universe sized creature to be embedded in a larger multiverse.

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Religions hold that an advanced alien culture (one or more so called “gods”) had a hand in the development of the human race. Atheism (and sometimes agnosticism) disputes these claims on the grounds that they are implausible: there are no indications that our planet is an artificial structure. For that matter, there are no indications that the universe is even remotely artificial in nature. There are just too many badly designed, woefully inefficient processes in nature, that someone with access to the fabric of the universe could easily optimize. And as for biological development, there is a known process called “evolution”, which can be observed in the real world as well as in simulations, and which explains our presence on Earth to a satisfactory degree.

There are other arguments against the existence of gods, rooted in both observation and logic. I can subscribe to almost all of them, and they appear to suffice for the majority atheists. Not, however, for me. Reformed Atheism (for the lack of a better word) must go beyond probabilities and make a definite statement that no gods exist. Here is the first of many:

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