More epistemology

Many people find it uncomfortable to live with deep mystery. They want their questions answered. Many people also need to be handed meaning and purpose on a platter -- it's too difficult to make their own, especially in the face of hardship and injustice. Making up stories that seem to satisfy the need for explanation and meaning is a temptation that many just can't resist. But for other people, testing stories against empirical reality is more important. Whatever dissatisfaction or psychological distress we suffer from choosing to live in reality is worth it to us, because we want the truth more than anything.

 

One kind of logical fallacy that often tempts people in the first category doesn't exactly have a conventional name, at least not that I can find. I'll call it the semantic fallacy. It's essentially arguing over the meaning of a word. I believe I've previously invoked the example of a guy who claimed that the entire concept of "organic food" is meaningless because "organic" means "consisting of carbon compounds" and all food consists of carbon compounds. That is extremely stupid. Most words have various meanings and people happen to be using "organic" in a different way than chemists use it.

There's an inverse of this trick, which we commonly encounter with the word "god" or "God" if you prefer to treat it as a name rather than an abstract concept. People make up God to fill those uncomfortable gaps in explanation and meaning, and they give God all sorts of attributes and a life story and even develop a relationship with him or it. But now we've proved that the stories people used to believe about God just aren't true, and we can explain much of what has been attributed to God without him or it. So people just stick with God, but change the meaning. God is the explanation for whatever we still can't explain by empirical study and deduction, God is whatever seems meaningful to the speaker. But that says nothing at all -- it's meaningless, it's just a word that by your own admission doesn't mean what it meant 100 years ago, or last year, or last month. And as soon as we make a new discovery, it will suddenly mean something else. And so on and so on . . . 

So, while I suppose it's possible that our universe is actually a simulation running on a ultra-super-duper computer made by an unimaginably advanced civilization -- and I personally don't find that very plausible and even if it's true I'm not sure why it matters -- calling the entities that are running the simulation "God" is just a meaningless semantic trick. They (assuming plural) do not resemble any concept of god or gods that people have believed in at any time up until you said that just now. While I can't rule out the simulation idea, I also can't rule out that our universe was created by the equivalent of a kid playing with a chemistry set, or that it is in fact the excrement of some vaster being, or as many cosmologists suspect, one of innumerable or even an infinite number of universes. If you want to call some entity associated with any of those (mostly remote) possibilities "God," go ahead, but that is a completely meaningless gesture. 

While you're busying labeling everything we don't understand "God," I'll busy myself with trying to understand it, whereupon whatever God you're happening to believe in right now will be dead, and you'll just have to invent a new one.