Is Atheism Logical?

I think yes sometimes and no some other times, these days however my belief in an almighty is being heavily influenced by my wife furiously searching for the latest bollywood movie to go to on a saturday evening, exactly when I am settling down for an interesting history channel article with a glass of wine.


I can joke all I want, but the ultimate question is ultimately an unanswered question. Tell you the truth, it is designed in such a way that you will never get an answer. It feels terrible to live amidst of the vast set of unknowns with so little truth to any of the things that we actually claim we know.

I realize more on every passing thought, that "Life" can be described as a chemical reaction with it's own life cycle, with a definitive start and end points. But this is an interesting thought, I think, because then we can derive some mathematical theories about life.


Consider this one, for instance. We know that chemical reactions are very causal processes, meaning one thing leads to the other and everything can be traced back to it's cause. We are going to have to imagine access to some crazy computing paraphernalia here to make progress, after all, this is a thought experiment. So imagine a great computer that has unlimited storage and infinite processing power. Now have this computer store all the knowledge of the entire universe, like masses of celestial bodies, their compositions, their positions and relative movements and so on.


With all the data at hand, say we can project the next big event such as the "big bang" because it is nothing but a chemical reaction inside the Sun. Then we can project some more about when life begins on earth and extrapolating the super theory some more we can even project the human development. If we agree that Life is a chemical reaction, then the 'actions' performed by living organisms will be chemical reactions too, ofcourse smaller ones compared to the bigger reaction itself. But for any of these actions to occur, it is obviously a result of the environment in which the reaction is happening. If we can predict the environment's state at a given point in time, then it also means that we can predict the person's action at a given point in time.


Phew! there it is, I said it. The summary of the paragraph above is simply that there is no such thing as "free will". Anything that happens, will happen and could not have happened in any other way. I don't think any person can consciouly agree to that. Co-incidentally, this is along lines of what Bhagavad Gita already is saying for a long time, that there is no such thing as "free will". But I think of myself a modern philospher, not a classical one, so I won't go anymore into that than how much I already have.


I know my little thought experiment have many loose ends and doesn't jive with practical logic all that much, but if you think about it leaving out the logistics and details, at some level it does capture the point. Well, all said and done, what does this have anything to do with the title? There certainly is: to me,


God is nothing but the uncertainity that is created because of the lack of that super computer I talked about, it is the one that controls us and everything else in the universe. It seems random at first sight, but it is highly coordinated and closely controlled for everything we think and do is pre-determined and it could not have happened in any other way that it already did.


There are many places we could go from here. But here is one place I love. Having bought into my super theory, since everything is causal and pre-determined - do the terms Past, Present and Future mean anything? Our knoweldge is limited and our perceptions are a handful. We don't know what happened million years ago, we don't know what will happen tomorrow, all we know is NOW. But there is nothing different that's going to happen in the future that hasn't already happened, for it is pre-determined.

It gets me thinking of the concept of Einstien's time-space theory. All that happened in the past and all that is happening now and that will happen in future, are all joined end-to-end like one long deck of snapshots of the world at each infinitesimal moment world has ever seen. You could move back and forth along the "chemical reaction" and observe the different states, what happened and how it happened. So time travel don't seem that impossible now, does it? All you need is that super computer :)

The Theory of Relativity threw a monkey wrench into my thoughts that seem to have been based on classical physics, but after a lot of reading and pondering and reading some more, I am proud to say that I am no less ignorant than I was when I began. I end this article here, yet there is so much more to this rather profound concept than I can ever imagine.

Wish you good thinking!

-Sridhar