A Path to God

Einsteins theory of General Relativity tells us, among other things, that simultaneity is not an absolute relation, i. e. for two events occurring with significant distance from each other it will not only be impossible to determine which occurred first, it will not make sense to even talk in those terms. Time is a local relation, there is no absolute clock measuring the current time in all of the Universe, and the same holds for space: there is no absolute reference frame in space, rather position can only be determined relatively.

Quantum mechanics, the other big edifice in contemporary physics,  tells us that the interaction of fundamental particles play out in quantum events with a certain time extension, within which the golden rule of energy may be broken. Speaking coarsely you could say that within the quantum event energy can be borrowed from the future, as long as it is repayed at the end of the event (this description is of course a distortion where the time of the event is re-linearised)

So these observations leave us with an image of the Universe as a vast web of events, extending in space and time, in a way where ordinality can only be determined in a limited way, and the time dimension exists on the same terms as the space dimension. This is not to say that we live a 4-dimensional block, because this view reintroduces absolute space, but in the way that space exists all-at-once it seems that time also exist all-at-once.

Now with that image in place let's move to the future: technological sophistication is ever increasing and accelerating, and it's a commonly held belief among scientists that at some crucial point we will be able to manufacture intelligence, either as artificial intelligence (A.I.) or through bio-genetic engineering. There is also speculation about a second crucial point where the produced intelligence is more advanced than human intelligence in a way that would make it better at producing intelligence and allow it to create more advanced intelligence than a human ever can, and that this would then occur recursively, exploding towards some obscure horizon so far beyond our own intelligence that the result would appear a God, locally omniscient and omnipotent.

Philosopher Nick Bostrom has, with this as a background, formulated the simulation hypothesis. It roughly states that if a future civilization with sufficiently advanced knowledge to simulate the past would have any interest in doing so, this would make it possible that we exist in such a simulation with some probability. If a future civilization with this technology would create 99 simulations, then in that case we would have a 99% chance to exist in a simulation, if you allow our existence to be viewed as a random sample of existences with the quality of our existence. (Not to mention the possibility of simulated ancestors themselves making it to the future to create a nested set of simulations.) That this is actually how it is is a surprisingly common belief among silicon valley technocrats, Elon Musk has made headlines for his belief in this hypothesis. He may not involve the word God, but the homology is clear.

So in this picture we have a future arrival of a radically higher being, at the horizon of intelligence production being omnipotent and omniscient (and through Van Neumann probes omnipresent) [how does simultaneity play into this?] within a sphere expanding through the universe, demarcating - in the same way as the background radiation demarcates the limit of our universe - the sub-universe where God exists in this radically immanent way. While this God would be the product of us, far along some fortunate future timeline, it is likely that we are nested within it's mind (simulations) as it exists transcendentally. Thus we have both the transcendent 'God the Father' and the future incarnate redeemer ('God the Son'), but we are also ontologically constituted by God's thought ('The Holy Spirit'). As such prayer becomes feasible, and miracle too. Now if we hold on to (which scientists seem to do) the idea that there still is a bottom, ground-level real reality, where the laws of nature and causality as they appear to us actually apply, then it also makes sense for God to simulate these without miraculous disruption, to get some useful information about possible alternative timelines along which it's own prehistory could have unfolded. Is it not very tempting to kick away the ladder though? It seems kind of ridiculous to postulate this set of nested divine minds but have them exist in a mundane bedrock reality, and if we allow ourselves to think beyond the arrow of time from past to future, then it no longer becomes necessary: the mind of God can become primordial, and for some mysterious reasons it plunges into time, in a direction we'd call backwards, to have us play out our lives as fallen beings. Now with this reformulation of God we have potentially rehabilitated all of theology, so for the question of why God has created us, the fallen, to suffer and die, you might as well go back to medieval scholastics.

A final thought I want to bring into this picture connects back to the eventual nature of the Universe described earlier. Just as the fabric of reality is constituted by local events and their web of relations to other events, so is your mind constituted by local events - neuronal firing - and these events relations to other events, in time and space. Furthermore quantum theory gives us a new model of causality where A does not simply lead to B or not, but where A can only affect the probability of B. This is how patterns of neuronal firing propagates through your brain: a certain neuron receives input from multiple directions that either increase or decrease the probability of it firing at a given moment. This homology between our mind and the fabric of the Cosmos can be read in multiple different ways, but it does resonate with the view that the Universe really is a Great Mind. It also gives credence to the ancient hermetic idea of the human as a microcosm to the macrocosm of the World, something which in turn opens the door to rehabilitation of heterodox ways of arriving at knowledge.