Creator's Puzzle

I believe in an all powerful, ever present, monotheistic God, but it was not always so. Like many I have had my time of skepticism, when I considered myself an atheist and thought of it being the only intelligent choice. But as time passed I found myself spending a lot of my time thinking over existence of God and on why this knowledge remains elusive to the human mind, if God actually did exist.

I believe the endless debate between atheists and believers is premature, and we have not stopped to think and find out whether it is possible to have knowledge of the creator in the first place. I call this problem the 'Creator's puzzle'. 

Creator's puzzle is - "Is it possible for the created to have knowledge of it's creator? And, if yes, then under what conditions can a created specimen have knowledge of it's creator."

People have long argued about the fact whether God exists or not, but a more fundamental question remains unanswered, whether can we know about existence of God, our creator. If yes, then what are the conditions of obtaining this knowledge and verifying the facts.

In reality, belief in a God could be a matter of perennial argument with very good for and against points. But the God Himself cannot be argued into or out of existence. God exists or does not exist irrespective of the fact that one wins or looses an argument. Belief in God has to be a matter of discovery to find whether God exists or not, and not a matter of arm-chair logic and reason. A lot of things in the universe exist irrespective of whether human beings can logically explain them or not.

Coming back to Creator's puzzle, which deals with any creator-created pair and not just God-human pair. In the remaining post I try to present a couple of models for creator-created pairs and explain conditions under which the created could obtain knowledge of the creator.

In the first model, consider a hypothetical computer simulation game, a biological simulation, with a single human player and actor controlling all the characters and life forms in the biological simulation (i.e. single player playing a computer simulation game). Assume also that the single human player is also a software programmer who has created the simulation program. So in the above model, the biological simulation game and its characters are the 'created' life forms, while the human player is the 'creator' of the simulation game and its characters.

Last assumption is that the different life forms in the simulation game have a form of basic consciousness programmed into it (consciousness as we claim to understand it, not necessarily as it is in nature).

Now as per 'Creator's puzzle' under what conditions would one of the created life-form, say a digital deer or dog or human, become aware of its creator. Any programmer could tell that this will be possible only if the programmer him/herself were to program the code for knowledge of the creator's existence. Or if not the actual code, the programmer would have to write code into the simulation software such that the knowledge of the creator could be obtained indirectly by a created life-form. Programmers realize that nothing in a computer program works unless it has been programmed to work that way. And if some unexpected or unpredictable behavior is observed then the system would have been programmed to display unexpected or unpredictable behavior.

A second but similar model could be considered where the created life-form is a type of self-replicating robots which have been let loose on a distant planet with conditions for the robots to have a self-sustaining existence. Something like a colony of self-replicating society of robots with human like, but man-made, consciousness, created by a scientific research organization. Now consider under what conditions would the robots know of the existence of the research organization which created them, assuming the research organization only observes the robots from a distance never revealing themselves. Only way may be for the organization to program this knowledge into the robots. Or, to program a behavior into the robots such that they seek the creator organization and stop the search only once predefined criteria of identifying a creator organization are found to match a discovery.

In both the above models, it is easy to see that logically speaking, knowledge of a 'creator' is not for the 'created' to find by its own effort, but by virtue of it being programmed into the 'created'. And another very important point is that a 'creator' is free to program different levels of knowledge into different specimen of a particular life-form, and different specimen need not come to same conclusion about any particular experience or discovery, if it has not been programmed that way. Also, trying to find an objective explanation of some subjective experience may not always be an intelligent and/or valid approach.

Coming back to the main topic for this post, the Creator's puzzle. Based on the above, It is my understanding that for a human mind to insist that it can get knowledge and experience of it's Creator by it's own efforts alone is logically and fundamentally flawed. I believe this knowledge and experience can only come from the Creator Himself, either directly or indirectly through a seeking behavior specifically programmed into human mind, which is very similar to the notion that God and His knowledge is revealed.

An implicit assumption here is that the above creator-created pair models are close enough to God-human pair, to justify a comparison. Maybe the above models are an over-simplification, but that is not much different from a large number of scientific theories which explain, with reasonable accuracy, a very complex world using simple models that human mind can grasp (but this will probably be a topic of another post).

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PS: As with all human understanding and theories it is possible that my understanding will increase with time, and in future I may be able to share better/deeper insight.

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