Materialist Conceptions of God

yet another attempt at bridging religion and rationality

Content warning: I expect this to feel trivial to many and incomprehensible to others. But it’s exactly the essay I wish I had read when I was a teenager struggling to reconcile my family’s Christian beliefs with my understanding of science.

My friends and I have recently developed a verbal tick of referring to “God” in everyday conversation. “Why did God bring us together today?”. “I think God wants me to do this, but I’m not sure”. “God hates clustering”. We say it self-consciously and with a tinge of irony, so it feels a little transgressive, a little sacrilegious. But under the cover of irony, it allows us to communicate more sincerely and more vulnerably. This language feels right. It unlocks forms of communication and togetherness I hadn’t experienced before.

In most elite professional and social settings in the Western world, using this kind of language is taboo. It marks one as being unserious, delusional, or worse. It seems that a person who speaks in such overtly religious terms cannot be reasoned with.

I want to defend this use of language, and maybe convince you to also speak in this way. I don’t want to convince you of any particular religion - we can save that for a future post. For now, let’s stick to the pure scientific materialist perspective. The whole universe, the Earth, the Amazon rainforest, Albinoni’s Adagio, the Hagia Sophia, your lover’s smile - all just cold uncaring particles bouncing off each other. There’s nothing supernatural about any of it, nothing fundamentally ineffable or mysterious.

From this scientific materialist perspective, what are we to do with a statement like “God loves me”? If you’re a secular person, the statement probably rings false, or at the very least feels deeply confused. What is the word “God” even referring to? Which particles, exactly?

It might help to start with a religious claim that you actually believe in. Article 3 of the United Nations’ Universal Declarations of Human Rights states

Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.

This statement probably rings true to you. But what is the word “right” referring to? No physicist has observed a bundle of particles called a "human right”. What then, explains this feeling we have that “human rights” exist and matter?

Some obvious explanations are

1. Tradition. A lot of smart people seem to have believed in human rights over the years. Who are we to think we know better? So we defer to them.

2. Mimesis. People who seem wiser, more powerful, more skilled than us believed in human rights. We copied their beliefs in an effort to become more like them.

3. Incentives. We will be socially punished if people think we don’t believe in human rights, and rewarded if people think we do. Eventually we internalized the incentives and learned to actually believe in them instead of just parroting the words.

4. Mechanism Design. Some designers considered a variety of different schemes for how to get the social outcomes they wanted. They decided that getting people to believe in human rights was the best strategy, and formed a powerful enough coalition to make these beliefs win, perhaps via mechanisms 1-3.

5. Evolution. Individuals or groups who believed in human rights outcompeted ones that didn’t.

6. Sensation. While rights may not be physical objects, the language of rights is a poetic way of speaking about a category of sensations or emotions. There is some specific feeling (pattern of particles flowing through bodies) that people have when their rights are violated, or when they witness a rights violation.

If these explanations feel distressingly cynical, this is exactly what it feels like to have your religious beliefs questioned. If it helps, you can Ctrl+F replace “human rights” with “God” or “patriarchy” or some other religious belief you dislike. But my goal is not to question or undermine - I actually think all six explanations are great reasons to believe in something.

If you’re like me, you feel some resistance here - it’s not okay to believe false things just because they’re useful, right?

Right. But “everyone has the right to life” is not a false statement, even though it cannot be scientifically verified. The statement is not making a falsifiable claim about particles. It serves a different purpose - to draw our attention to certain features of reality, and to create and defend a social norm.

But if we’re not trying to make a claim about the world, why pretend that there’s a thing called a “right to life”? Why are we using descriptive language when it would be clearer and more honest to use normative language like “let’s try really really hard to make sure nobody dies”?

The answer is that rights are real, but in a special sense. Claims like “everyone has the right to life” are self-fulfilling prophecies or hyperstitions: If enough people believe in rights, then rights will in fact come to exist as real physical objects - as vast decentralized processes composed of the neural firing patterns in the minds of people who believe in them, the gavels of human rights judges, the bullets carried in the guns of United Nations peacekeepers, and so on.

Another phrase for self-fulfilling prophecy is self-evident truth, i.e. a truth that stands as evidence for itself, as in the American Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Curious how this otherwise very secular piece of political philosophy turns to the existence of an agentic, benevolent “Creator” in order to justify the existence of human rights…

which brings us back to “God loves me”. If we take this statement as another self-fulfilling prophecy, then believing it brings about a real, physical, agentic process that is capable of loving us - i.e. of protecting us, of soothing us, of seeing us for who we really are, of appreciating our uniqueness and supporting our growth.

Where could this process be located? Depending on your preferred level of galaxy-brain, you might locate God in the private subconscious, in the collective subconscious, or even in the broader universe. Let’s take these in turn.

God at Three Scales

The simplest God to conceptualize is the God in our subconscious. Our best theories of how the brain works (predictive processing, free energy minimization) describe us as acting to reduce discrepancies between our beliefs and our sensations. If we hold strongly to a belief in a loving God, our subconscious is forced to generate loving thoughts and actions in order to reduce our prediction error. If that seems kind of crazy, note that one of the state-of-the-art therapies for childhood attachment disturbances, the Ideal Parent Figure protocol, has patients vividly imagine ideal loving parents, whose characteristics (perfect attunement and patience, omnipotence, omnibenevolence) match Christian conceptions of God suspiciously closely. That God is commonly referred to as “Father” is yet another strange coincidence…

Next is God in the collective subconscious. When you have a society that believes in an agentic loving God, each member will be more loving to themselves and others. People will be more willing to bear hardships and sacrifice for each other. Healthy social processes will be supported, unhealthy ones stopped. This may be one of the main mechanisms for why religious people are happier, healthier, live longer, and have more children. A religious community feels like it is being shepherded by a powerful, benevolent agentic process beyond its understanding - because it is! The physical instantiation of God here is much like the instantiation of the “right to life” described earlier - a distributed process running on thousands or millions of human brains. This is God as egregore or as a Jaynesian collective hallucination. In this interpretation, God is not really omnipotent (e.g. can’t yet affect the movements of the stars). But a process controlling millions of human minds and all their tools and infrastructure is so incomprehensibly vast and powerful from the perspective of a single human that you can forgive the theologians for their mistake.

Finally and most speculatively, we can try to view the entire universe as a unitary benevolent agent. This is the claim that Abrahamic religions make. On the surface, it seems crazy to think of the universe as benevolent. Earth is a tiny irrelevant speck in the cold dead vastness of space. Science has shown that the universe is ruled by simple laws, those of gravity and entropy and evolution, that seem to leave no room for benevolence.

One way to make sense of God as universe is to personalize evolution, as Wolf Tivy does in his brilliant essay Don't Learn your Values from Society:

We now translate the thing that called Abraham forward as “the LORD” or “God almighty,” but thousands of years of built-up ontological baggage do not necessarily help us understand what the authors of Genesis were getting at. The original word is closely related to a verb meaning simply “to exist” or “to cause.” It later identified itself to Moses as “I am.” In a more familiar cosmology, we might understand it as the living will of existence as such, the fundamental power behind all nature and contingent life.

New atheists make fun of monotheism for correctly disbelieving in almost all god cults and then somehow tripping up and falling into idolatry again at the feet of the last one. But the whole point of the book of Genesis is that Abraham’s God was not, or grew not to be, the same kind of thing at all. Where the local cults divinized non-total pieces of creation like the sun or moon, Genesis says these are just lights in the sky and tools for man. It implied that nature was governed by rational and exacting law, more true and more real than the arbitrary customs of the cults.

The thing Abraham was listening to was not some simple cult idol, but the living creative force behind and inside all of nature as such. You could joke that Abraham was the first atheist, but this would miss the point of how devoted he was to this divine Will behind nature.

In this reading, submitting to God is the same as submitting to reality. It’s an attitude of surrender towards what really exists, towards the implications of the cold laws of the universe. A determination to see the world for what it really is, and act courageously on what you see. As Thomas Carlyle writes in On Heroes and Hero-Worship:

Belief I define to be the healthy act of a man's mind. It is a mysterious indescribable process, that of getting to believe;—indescribable, as all vital acts are. We have our mind given us, not that it may cavil and argue, but that it may see into something, give us clear belief and understanding about something, whereon we are then to proceed to act.

I find Wolf’s reading of the Book of Genesis compelling, but it’s missing something crucial: the benevolence. God as reality or God as evolution is the cold genocidal God of the Old Testament, not the loving God of the New.

So how could God as universe be benevolent? The only cluster of explanations that make sense to me is that the universe is not yet a benevolent agent, but is tending in that direction.

Quoting the futurist Ray Kurzweil:

What happens in evolution, entities like mammals and humans become more intelligent, more creative, more loving, and moving exponentially to become more God-like; never quite reaching God, but moving in that direction. So evolution is a spiritual process to bring us closer to God, and technological evolution is now running a million times faster than biological evolution and ultimately we will vastly ultimately trillions-fold expand our creativity and our sense of humor and our ability to love and will become more God-like.

Similarly, the AI researcher Joscha Bach describes God as the theoretical limit point of a bargaining process between all sentient beings across time. For much of evolutionary history, the universe was a bloody battlefield of warring selfish agents - at all scales from bacteria to animals to tribes and nations. But as time goes on, we develop better systems of cooperation, so the universe increasingly adopts the character of a unitary omnibenevolent agent. Someday perhaps even “the wolf and the lamb shall graze together”.

This universally benevolent future God, too, is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If it comes to exist someday it will be because people believed in it.

In other words, don’t ask whether God exists. Ask if you want a universe that cares about us and loves us, or one that doesn’t? It’s a choice we make together.

But why say “God”?

I imagine many secular readers accept the arguments above, but are still frustrated at this use of religious language. “Sure, it might sometimes be good to view parts of our collective subconscious or even the universe itself as a benevolent agent, because this helps bring such agents into existence. But why do we have to use the term ‘God’? It has so much baggage. In our culture that’s just asking to be misunderstood.”

I’m not usually a stickler for words but I think using the term “God” is very important. It lets us speak to religious people on their own terms, and understand them better. Among unprecedented wealth and technological power, virtually the only modern communities that seem sustainable are religious ones. This is why so many thinkers, from Tyler Cowen to Robin Hanson and Eric Kaufmann, expect religion to grow in importance over the coming decades. So being able to communicate with and learn from religious people will be increasingly important. Also, the category “religious people” includes most people in the past, including the writers of most of the classics! I still remember how confused I was reading Descartes’ Discourse on Method where he starts with the axiom “I think, therefore I am” and derives the existence of God within a few pages. It would have made so much more sense if I had access to the understandings of God pointed to above. Modern popular culture’s lack of religious fluency cut me off from a substantial fraction of my cultural inheritance.

Which brings me to perhaps the most important reason: I want to reclaim the term “God” from the only people who seem fully comfortable using it today: religious fundamentalists of all stripes, people who define God so narrowly that they cut themselves off from humanity’s precious inheritance of scientific and cultural knowledge. Religious language is the language of self-fulfilling prophecy. By ceding it to fundamentalists, I fear we have given them control of our shared future.