God's Lab Rats

Trying to understand God, a friend deflected the attempt by pointing out that we are as likely to understand God about as much as ants can understand people. Point well taken, I was still trying to work my way around it the next morning when I noticed the honey for my coffee had not been properly closed. A trail of ants led away from it. As I set about punishing the thieves, I realized ants may not understand people, but they knew everything they needed to know about us.

Thus I set off on an analytical journey to understand everything I needed about God. First I set aside my faith and religion, just to see where this road of pure logic might lead. As with many journey's, the first step is the hardest, "Is there a God at all?"

All probability problems end up as an equation with time in the numerator (top part of the equation). That means that if the probability of something happening, like a big asteroid hitting the Earth, is 1% over 100 years, then it's likely to be roughly 2% over 200 years, 4% over 400 years, and so on. The more time we consider, the more likely an event occurring simply because we are considering so many events that one of them is likely to be the event we seek. The probability of a big asteroid hitting the Earth in a billion years is very close to 100%. However small the probability that matter, energy, spirit, evolution, and whatever else would form God, there appears to be an infinite amount of time for that to occur. The odds thus favor it having happened at some point. The exception would be if we are asking for the probability of an event that is impossible by definition. The probability of a black ball being white remains zero regardless of how long we give it. Since I can't think of a reason God would be logically impossible, I conclude that God, in some form, probably came to be.

Then the question would be, "If God arrived however he did, would he stay?" By definition, God would have some large amount of power, probably at least the ability to make the decision of staying or disappearing. Besides basic self-preservation, God would have decided to give meaning to all that was rather than melt back into the random soup from which he emerged. And if he didn't, the next God would, and that is the God we have today.

Next we try to understand this God. Because he wouldn't be God unless he was powerful, I tried to understand how powerful. The quick answer is infinitely powerful. But integral calculus has defined infinity as a number we can understand and use. For example, 2 divided by 0 is infinity and so is 4 divided by 0, but the two are not the same. The second infinity is twice the first. This is not something profound and useless — mathematicians have used it to help design much of the modern world. Remembering the ant, I have to conclude that God is more powerful than infinity because we can understand how big infinity is. God is probably powerful enough that he can even decide how much power is best (his definition, of course), and to even reduce his own power if necessary.

God is powerful enough that he could decide not to control every little thing and thus know the exact future of everything. If he chose to control everything, we would have gone from a meaningless collection of random events to a universe where all events are predetermined and as meaningless as a fixed election. Moreover, what would be God's job if he had arranged today for the outcome of all future events. Assuming he has immeasurably high intelligence, this situation would also leave him immeasurably bored.

God is smarter than to back himself into a corner like that. He can create a universe where the outcome is indeterminate at some level. He can orchestrate the big picture so water flows downhill, and a lot of the future can be predicted from that — but not so anyone, not even God, can predict where a particular drop of water will end up in the river. He can create a world with some randomness and surprises, after all, he is God.

Quantum physics gives us a glimpse into how he would have arranged it. Until Niels Bohr and others showed the opposite, scientists assumed that matter and energy can continue to be divided into ever smaller pieces. Quantum physics showed that at some point the division of matter ends with atoms and energy with photons, and there are no such things as half a photon. Consider what this has to say to probability. We cannot make a pencil balance on its point because there will always be some small amount of pencil to the left or right of its center of mass, or there will be a little more wind energy coming from the left or right to knock it over. If we keep reducing the size of the pencil, however, we will come to a pencil with one atom on the left and another identical atom on the right. If we hit it with a photon from the left and an identical photon from the right, the pencil will still fall to the left or right, but the laws of physics preclude anyone from knowing which way it will fall. Statistically, we can say it will fall to the left half the time and to the right the other half of the time, but no one can predict which way any one such pencil will fall. Not because we are still ignorant of what makes the pencil fall, but because a grand design includes quantum physics so it is unpredictable by law.¹

Further readings in entropy and enthalpy (thermodynamics), chaos theory (mathematics), and advanced quantum physics, which postulates that even time and space can be divided only up to a finite small fraction of an inch or second, will compel the conclusion that a wondrous balance between order and disorder has set the stage for our search for meaning. Total random disorder would have meant there is no meaning to find, but total order would have meant there is no search required.

We are not able to figure out why God made the world this way (or if he found it this way when he gained mastery over it) any more than ants can figure out where humans come from, but we don’t need to. One conclusion of a partially indeterminate universe is that God may also be on a search for meaning. At a level beyond our comprehension to be sure, but many of us suspect we have something in common with God, why not that? Beyond a love of honey, we have so much in common with ants as living creatures, why cannot similarities such as a search for meaning progress up the spiritual chain between us and God.

If we carry forward this logical speculation, God is on a problem-solving mission. What analytical problem-solving techniques he employs is outside our understanding, just as calculus is beyond an ant’s. But some techniques are likely to be similar to ours, just as an ant understands how to find food, it understands what we are up to when humans look for food. When certain African humans eat ants, the ants understand what is going on and what they have to do about it.

When engineers seek to solve complex problems, they often use simulations or controlled experiments to understand what is going on, and then analyze the results. We set up wave tanks to study the complex interactions of waves on piers. If we can use that to reduce complex problems to their simple components, we can then use mathematical analysis. The harder the problem, the more likely that simulations or controlled experiments are one of our problem-solving tools of choice. For human behavior, clearly one of the most complex of problems, we observe history as the result of our collective human experiment, and derive what understanding we can from history.

If God were to use this problem-solving tool as part of his search for meaning, he would likely arrange an experiment involving subjects searching for meaning, probably with some characteristics similar to God to ease interpretation of the results. We would learn more about tool making, for example, by using chimps rather than ants because a chimp has more of our characteristics and thus easier to interpret. The best lab rats for this experiment are we humans because we are the most advanced and the best design (at least on Earth) in a search for meaning. If we are to help God in his search for meaning, he would make us as similar to him as practical. As we showed with quantum physics, he put just the right amount of unpredictability in the world to give us free will, just as he has. He gave us intelligence and power over our world, again as miniature replicas of God. And finally, he gave us a need to search for meaning — that is after all why you are reading this.

Then he made billions of us to make sure nothing is overlooked, that with so many lab rats, we will try all possible alternatives. Then, to further encourage exploration of a broad variety of alternative understandings of meaning, God arranged for a world full of wonder, beauty, tragedy, upheaval, and suffering. Philosophers have produced a cornucopia of meanings to the universe based on which of those impacted them.

When humans manage experiments, we try to exclude external influences that may skew the results, typically ourselves artificially promoting an outcome. If God were to reveal himself, we would stop searching for meaning, having found it in him. If we were shown that there is no God, we would abandon our search. The middle ground we have in real life is what we would need for the experiment to produce useful results.

To set the lab rats in motion, God would have to provide the maze and cheese, which life has in abundance, and some starting point to baseline the experiment. Love and hate and an innate understanding of good and evil seem to be a common starting point shared by all humans. Whereas we come with many instinctual starting points, like self preservation, those are experimental overhead, something the lab rats need or they will die before the experiment can progress. Striving for good and loving our neighbor seem like counterproductive distractions from the ruthless competition of evolution. Almost as though the natural order has to tolerate this major human aberration, this directive diverts us from what has so successfully produced our bodies. We hope lab rats won't notice that cheese does not naturally occur at the end of a maze, but we have to take a few liberties with our simulation to encourage the rats to go in a certain direction. So too, God had to put good and evil in our cage so we would set off to search for meaning, and he put love in our cage so we could sense when we were getting close. Almost to cover his tracks, God made it hard to distinguish good from evil, or to recognize love amid all of life's distractions.

Since love and an understanding of good and evil are found so rarely in the physical world, one might ask where God grabbed it to give to us. The handiest approach would have been from God himself. By definition, he has plenty to spare, and if he wanted the rats to simulate his own search for meaning, to be as useful as possible, he would have simply put a part of himself into each lab rat. Imagine an engineer who can multiply his effectiveness by replicating some of his problem-solving capability into lots of assistants working the same problem. This ultimate simulation is in fact the mantra of the Computer Age where we have put some of ourselves into a machine we created in our intellectual likeness. That experiment has already yielded more profound results than everything before it. Why would God not have followed the same approach?

With the stage set, the simulation ready, and billions of lab rats in position, God would need to keep track of things. He could observe every move of every rat, but as with any experiment, we are not looking for every move of our subjects, only those we label as significant. In God's experiment, it would be breakthroughs in our search for meaning, usually accompanied by spikes in our goodness or love readings. To keep track of experimental subjects, we humans like to instrument them. We number them, and sometimes we even outfit them with recording devices, radios, etc. We are usually limited by how much we can pack on the subject before too much instrumentation changes the realism of the simulation. The rule is, if the subject notices the instrumentation, the experiment may be compromised.

Why not assume God has also instrumented us with something to measure the progress and results of his lab rats. Light and impossible for us to notice would be something from another dimension, something otherworldly, something we could drag around but never factually confront, pull off like clever dolphins unbuttoning radio beacons, and changing the nature of our experiment by realizing there is a God as we uncovered his trace. We have thus discovered our souls.

Cleverly designed, our souls do not record what we had for breakfast, but perhaps some meter will advance a notch with a good deed. If we love another and interact with their soul, perhaps there is another recording that "carries them in our heart forever after". As we stare at a sunset and make progress in our search for meaning, however slight, we often feel a sense of peaceful realization. The insight evokes a good feeling, a feeling of accomplishment and righteousness. Besides God rewarding us with some cheese, perhaps our soul records this as a significant event.

When we reach the other side of our maze and conclude the experiment with our death, God collects his recording devices to see what we accomplished. Whatever progress we made in our search for meaning, he integrates into his overall search for meaning and proceeds with the analysis beyond a lab rat's understanding. This begs the question, "What would God do with his lab rats after the experiment?"

Since he put a little of himself into each rat to make them as effective as possible, it's unlikely that he would simple discard them. He would at least retrieve the part of himself that he put into the experiment. We've gone pretty far on this logical speculation, put perhaps this is where we rejoin God, where he takes our soul, the recording device which is all that is left of us after the experiment, and recovers whatever value we have produced to himself.

Much like the wave tank simulating the dynamics of a pier, we can ask ourselves what happens to the waves after they finish their experiment. In our world, they travel the oceans doing their work and eventually each of them crashes on some distant shore and dies. What is remarkable is that they each roll back and return to be part of the sea.

The lab rats that yielded poor results because they returned with high readings for evil and hate and useless in a search for meaning, God may discard, repair and try again, or recycle in some way. The lab rats which yield the best results, the highest readings for love and good, and the most useful understandings of meaning, God may reward with some extra cheese, perhaps by congratulating them, perhaps by revealing what a wondrous experiment they were part of, perhaps by giving them all the good and love they sought and as much of an understanding of meaning as lab rats can handle. Curiously, this sounds a bit like what many religions call heaven.

One conclusion may be that we have been musing about processes rather than destinations. Just as we don't go fishing to obtain fish, perhaps goodness, love, and meaning derive their value from the road they put us on. If this has some absolute value, why can God not be on the road with us as we can share a road with an ant? God sees the road from much higher and understands much more than us about what he sees, somewhat like we zipping along in our BMW while the ant struggles over a pebble, but what if we are all three traveling companions? We have learned a great deal from ants, and we continue to study them and to be amazed at the wonder they are. Anyone who has diverted his foot to keep from crunching an ant realizes that we do share the road of life, in spite of them stealing our honey.

If this logical romp were to have a conclusion, it is that we lab rats are on an important mission. We must try hard to get the cheese because God is counting on us. Any one of us can stumble upon an interesting gate in the maze, uncover an interesting morsel of meaning, and conclude our test with impressive readings for love and goodness.

1After writing this, I encountered the Heisenberg Principle of Uncertainty, a largely proven scientific proposition within quantum mechanics showing that our natural world was designed as I postulated with uncertainty built in.