In my
previous entry on this topic, I tried to motivate the desire to “test things
out” or “conduct an experiment.” That’s
all well and good in the natural world.
The entire field of science is built on that concept. But now, I’d like to step out into the deep deep
deep end. What about testing things in
the spiritual, or non-material, realm?
Well…this is
going to take a lot of explaining first!
I just want to set up a few things in this entry.
First,
although I just suggested that we might consider “testing the spiritual”, I’m
not considering here the things that you see on television about searching for
ghosts and so on. Why is it that
non-material ghosts seem to have to produce fully-material electromagnetic
waves everywhere they go??? I am highly skeptical
of all that sort of thing and I have no real interest in it. In fact, I feel that it clouds the
issue. With so much foolishness, it’s
hard to find the truth and, in fact, hard to believe that there really is any
truth to be found there. So, I want to
distance anything I say from that whole realm of craziness as much as possible.
No, all I
care about is performing experiments about the existence of God. Actually, even the phrase “existence of God”
is too generic. I want to get even more
specific than that. But I have to stop
here again and make another point.
You can’t
test God in a randomized, double-blind experiment. You can’t even do a simple repeat
“test”. It’s the same reason that you
can’t trust political opinion polls about which candidate someone will vote
for. How do I know you can’t trust them?
Because I’ve been asked to do some of those polls and – guess what? – I
lied. I lied. I exercised my freewill as an obstinate human being who doesn’t like being called in the middle of
trying to write up a blog entry and being asked about my opinions for a poll
that is a waste of time to begin with (in my opinion). So, I don’t take them seriously. They can’t make me take it seriously.
Why? Because I have free will
(hah!).
The point is,
if God has any of the qualities that
a God should have, then He has free will.[1] If we don’t place any other requirements on
God, then we face the same problem that pollsters face when they ask human
beings questions: God could lie
too. Or He could play hard to get. He could hide Himself behind blind
chance. There’s just no way to pin God
down and do a study on Him. We’d have to
get His consent first, and His willingness to play along and play fair, and
even then, how could we be sure He was playing fair? We just can’t control Him. So, no, I can’t see any way of testing a
general concept of God through any type of experimental means. That is not what I’m talking about here either.
We will have
to get down to a very specific “God” and a very specific situation to have any
chance of testing. Even then, the rules
for this evaluation are going to have to be very carefully spelled out. But I just want to define the general concept
right now and get into the details in the future.
The specific
“God” I am talking about is Jesus. As I
pointed out in my “Top Five Crazy Things” entry, Christians make a couple of
claims that are relevant here: 1) Jesus
is God and 2) Jesus is still alive today and active in people’s lives. Further, I’m talking about Jesus as described
in the Bible. I am being very specific
because we can only test very specific things.
We cannot test God in general, but we might have some chance of testing
– or evaluating[2]
– specific aspects of a very specific kind of God. That is what I am talking about.
I said all
that to say this: in the Bible, it is
recorded that Jesus said the following:
"Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will
find; knock and the door will be opened to you.
For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who
knocks, the door will be opened.”
[Matt 7:7-8]
And also
“Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my
voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me.” [Rev 3:20]
There is a lot
to these statements, and we will have to analyze them in detail and make sure
we understand them fully before we can go much further. But for the moment I want you to entertain
this one thought: is it possible to evaluate
whether these statements are true or not?
We certainly can’t test to figure out if a lying God exists, but can we
test to see if a man, claiming to be God, who made the claims above in the past
and still intends to live up to these claims even now, today…can we test to see
if such a God as that exists? From an
experimental design perspective, the major advantage of adding Christian
beliefs to the statements above is that if Jesus is still alive today, then we
don’t have to try to figure out how to test if this statement was valid at some
point in the past – that would be
nearly impossible to do – we just have to figure out if this statement is valid
right now.
It’s not
going to be easy to figure this out. But
I would suggest that, at the very least, it is worth some effort on our part to
try to figure it out. Maybe we can’t figure out a way to test this
claim, but ignoring the possibility hardly seems like the smart thing to do. OK, well, I
can’t resist the possibility, and since this is my blog, I get to dive in.
Be
careful though – best to think everything through in detail before knocking
on the lion’s door!
[1]
I’m not talking about a mindless “Force” that has no will. Actually, such a force, assuming it follows
some kind of rules, would probably actually be testable using scientific
methods. And, in fact, such forces have
been identified by science…gravity…electromagnetic force…strong and weak
nuclear forces…
[2]
It is very unfortunate that the English word “test” has different
meanings. A better word would actually
be “taste”, but that would probably seem odd without a lot of explanation. I’ll save that for the future.
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