Analogous.

I am fairly addicted to extended analogies, (which is probably somewhat indicative of how my mind works), so forgive me this digression. I need a metaphor sometimes; I may or may not be willing to tweak reality a little to fit, depending on the aptness of the metaphor, haha.



A question atheists are often asked is why they are not agnostics, or at least ambivalent about the possibility of there being a God, or some god-like supernatural consciousness. I have earlier written of the reason why agnosticism and atheism are philosophically indistinguishable in the case of any modern religious text or faith-based religion. (I appear to have lost that essay already; I shall perhaps rewrite it some time.) Whether or not you have certain knowledge as to the existence of God is irrelevant to whether or not you have faith in the existence of said God, which is why agnostic believers are entirely possible.

But the rules change when we are no longer discussing a Creator-God; Moses' or Jesus' or Mohammed's deity. My dad often stresses to me the point: there are many conceptualizations of God that aren't constrained by the faults of their respective holy books; there are Gods that do not answer prayers nor smite the unworthy; Gods that can be termed collective consciousness, or love, or nature, or some sort of ineffable sentience.

These are not concepts that I would choose to term "God," for the simple reason that most of the world accepts a personal Yahweh, or Jehovah, or Allah as their God. My dad responds sometimes by calling this unconventional supernatural substance the Aether (or Ether, if you prefer). I find that nomenclature strikingly accurate.



In physics, the luminiferous aether was a theory put forth to solve a simple problem: we know light is a wave, like water or sound waves, so what does it wave in? Out in the vacuum of space, there was no answer, so physicists postulated a substance called the luminiferous (light-bearing) aether which permeated the universe for light to travel in. With the wisdom of hindsight, of course, we can see that it was a flawed question--light, for one reason or another, is able to wave entirely on its own.

Framing the question of God like this is similar, to me, although perhaps the analogy is only the product of a fevered mind fed by too many layman's-level physics books. The question God is put forth to answer is as follows: the universe is tremendously complex, who made it like that? And thus God is postulated, much like the luminiferous aether, to explain a concept that we do not yet understand.


Beginning with this flawed question, aether grew in explanatory power. Aether became related to the absolute frame of reference that Newton's laws and Maxwell's equations seemed to require: the absolutely accurate tick of the ineffable clock, and the perfect stillness of the infinite meter stick. I couch my phrasing here in vaguely supernatural terms; it was a vaguely supernatural idea. Absolute time is God's time.

Analogous is the philosophical expansion of the concept of God from merely the name we give to the unknown into a dynamic figure that decides right and wrong, plans, answers prayers, and ultimately decides what will occur. (I am tempted to make a further analogy between absolute space/absolute time and absolute good/absolute evil, but I leave the metaphor of absolute morality and absolute spacetime as an exercise to the particularly enthusiastic reader.)


And yet, for all this successful philosophizing the aether aids, there were a few significant problems. Firstly, no one had ever seen the aether; it was, as far as science could determine, undetectable. Secondly, in order to transmit light, the aether had to be a solid more rigid than steel, and yet in order to fill space it needed to be completely fluid. Moreover, it necessarily had no viscosity, no mass, was incompressible, and had dozens of other sufficiently magical qualities that no one had ever seen or detected. In fact, the most miraculous quality of the aether at all was its complete invisibility. We were sure it was there. Very sure. It was just remarkably hard to find.

I really can thing of no better analogy for a deity, even the non-traditional deity of a collective consciousness, etc. Undetectable by scientific means. Any perceived paradox of the aether, such as its lack of drag on the planets, was merely prescribed as a new property of this unique substance; much as I often am told God's marked reluctance to answer prayers is due to his desire not to reveal himself. And above all, above all, the absolute certainty that it is there.


In the late 1800s, some experiments were carried out to test aether theory: the results were as one might expect. There was absolutely no drag on the Earth from the "aether-wind," nor any other detectable effect. Some rather clever scientists (one of whose name was Lorentz, I think, hence "Lorentz contraction") decided that objects moving through the aether must contract spatially in the direction of their motion in order to explain the null result.

Then Einstein came along and said right, right, that's good, except the aether part. His special theory of relativity destroyed absolute space and time, and soon after that aether was abandoned. It no longer performed a necessary function--a new worldview had supplanted it.


There is no one theory of relativity for atheism, but the point is there. Relativity was not a perfect theory (although it is probably as close as we have come)--it had, as all theories, holes and unanswered questions and kinks to work out. Aether was thrown out as a hypothesis, but it is not because aether was incorrect. Aether almost certainly is incorrect, but there is no way of knowing. How can we be sure that there isn't a massless, viscosity-less, undetectable substance out there? No surer than I am that an invisible pink unicorn does not follow me around.

No, aether was thrown out because of Occam's Razor, which is more than the simple adage that "The simplest explanation is best." Scientists' Occam's Razor is more like a paraphrase of Einstein, "A theory should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler." Ideas with explanatory power are entertained. Ideas that are akin to "what if the universe were actually like this, even though it appears exactly the same as it does now and I have no way to check" are dismissed.

But more to the point, the death of luminiferous aether was an accomplishment because it killed a supernatural theory in favor of a natural one. Supernatural ideas invoke forces or powers outside of nature--not "things that we don't understand yet" (science invokes these often), but "things that we can never and will never understand." Natural theories can be as uplifting, as spiritual, as empowering, and as positive as supernatural ones: indeed, I find them more so. Supernatural theories close a door. Natural theories open one, even if only to say "I do not know what is beyond this door."


I dislike the idea of some ineffable collective consciousness or common human spirit not because I dismiss the concept. There may well be something connecting us, be it our genetic human nature, our shared ability for empathy, or some more remarkable collection of ideas and emotions over time and space. What I dismiss is the idea that the problem cannot and should not be approached scientifically, with the goal of understanding. We may never completely understand anything, let alone such a concept. But why stop trying now? Science has limits, surely, new limits every decade, some of which are temporary and will be rolled back, some of which may well be permanent. But we don't know which. Let's not cement any limits in stone, and say "beyond this point, science can know nothing." Give science a chance. You may be surprised.

After all, we worked out the aether thing okay.