Causality and God
We believe the world is causal in nature, but in fact it is correlational. Even though my slapping your face will produce the feeling of pain, the very fact that I can slap you implies the existence of the universe as it currently is. To use a term Alan Watts coined, your pain goeswith my slap, goeswith my being in your proximity, goeswith my irritability, goeswith the fact that we know each other, goeswith the fact that humans have hands, goeswith planet Earth, goeswith our galaxy, goeswith the whole universe. One thing is the way it is because everything else is the way it is.
Cause and effect is a sloppy way rationalising our existence. While our thinking in this way does add value to our ability to operate and move in this world (as long as our underlying context doesn’t change too much), it doesn’t mean it’s universally applicable. The field of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML) is starting to make us more aware of this. While the average human can only keep in mind a maximum of 3–4 variables, AI can operate with virtually unlimited variables. Because we can make sense and keep track of so few variables, it is very easy to isolate the proximal one or two which we interpret to “affect” or “cause” the event in question. We are rather narrow-sighted. Is it common sense for the machine learning or AI expert that the computer can come up with correlations that we would have never thought about.
Using causality to explain the world is a sloppy approach because it begs the question “when do I stop?”. It hurts because I slapped you. But I, in turn, slapped you because you annoyed me. You annoyed me because you said something nasty and I understood you. I understood you because we both speak the same language, because we were born in the same country, because the country exists, because the Earth supports life, because the sun shines, because our galaxy exists, because the universe is the way it is…
… and, we said to ourselves, “we just have to stop somewhere”. And that’s how we conceived the God that most people think about. That’s how theologians reasoned this God into existence. They conceived of an ultimate, absolute, causeless cause. But this is nothing more than our satisficing. We all agreed to not go any further than that, and for good reasons, cause you can go on forever.
