If There Is A God, It’s Easy To See Why He’s Smarter Than We Are

I just got back from the floating around an area of the wordpress.com blogosphere, tagged Critical Thinking, where I tracked onto the very interesting site of the Space City Skeptics (“The Official Blog of the Houston Skeptic Society”).

From there I blog-rolled onto a post by Jeffrey Ellis (The Thinker) titled A Thought Experiment on Evolution vs. Creationism. This is a rather interesting read.

He begins by pointing out the truth behind many apparent conundrums – how the truth is easily obfuscated anytime an argument is couched in a false dichotomy.

Personally, I like using the brick layer’s conundrum to illustrate the point: Is that mortar there to hold the bricks together, or to hold them apart?

Given his observations on the nature of time, and our perception(s) of it, it would probably seem apparent to most critical thinkers that one cannot entirely dismiss, out of hand, the postulate of a god (or gods) ‘hiding in plain sight,’ so to speak (which is the ultimate conclusion he appears to reach).

However, what really got me interested in making this post, was his device of introducing artificial intelligence into the allegory.

I was at once reminded of a thought I’ve been nursing for a number of years (and that I may have heard somewhere else).  That, if A.I. ever does, indeed, rise to the level of creating sentient beings with human-like intelligence (and I’m increasingly having trouble seeing why not), we probably shouldn’t be surprised at all, to see “them” dive headlong into the search for an answer to what continues to be a major preoccupation of mankind’s own – namely, a search for the source of their own divinity (the operative term in the afore-mentioned condition being ‘human intelligence’).

But as a postulate, and a place to suppose from, how might they then come to see us? As their own god-like creators, or merely the human apes in one of the evolutionary steps along the way to their own creation?

After all, how do we view the lesser creatures in our own evolutionary linage? It says a mouthful about our own sense of self-importance.

These, and many other considerations, would probably completely obviate our even touching on any of our normally more pragmatic concerns – like their possible willingness to do windows.

It at least goes to show, and I think he illustrates (possibly unintentionally) here, that given this a-priori exercise of the imagination, consideration must indeed be given to the role that point of view would inevitably play.