Yes, I meant the possible future AI being(s) evolving today as a small-g god(s) rather than a monotheistic God. They will lack the ridiculous tri-Omni exaggerations of Anselm’s “greatest being that can be conceived,” and “merely” be powerful but not omnipotent, intelligent but not omniscient, etc.

You know, just like Yahweh and other gods like him like Baal are depicted in the OT…

There is a category of theologies that meets that condition, called Process Theology, whereby God is something in the process of being made, and not something primordially perfect. Most process theology is supernaturalist, but there have been quasi-naturalist versions imagining a future AI will fit the bill.

Needless to say, these have never been popular. And that’s because theism isn’t a rational solution to anything. It’s an emotional need, which, rather than evidence or logic, dictates what can be popularly true about God. Thus popular theisms always remain stuck in the implausible ruts of the ridiculous.

That said, the idea of a future God is likewise rubbish, unless one stretches and decapitalizes the word, and means to merely speak of a smart overlord, perhaps governing a simworld. But I suspect there won’t then be a god, but many gods. And they will only be relatively impressive and imperfectly reliable.

The problem comes when they favor consciousness over unconsciousness and intelligence over its absence. When naturalism comes up with a theory that has great explanatory and predictive power where consciousness and intelligence are emergent phenomenon that arise from things that lack these descriptors, they are stuck with their unfortunate intuitions that cannot accept this (chrono)logical progression of events where the less-great unconscious and unintelligent forces somehow cause the more-great conscious and intelligent effects.

Perhaps, if they actually want to look for a god or for God, they should try to look for the trajectory of where the universe is headed rather than where it started. That, in fact, would be a better read of their ancient manuscripts such as Genesis and the OT followed by the NT and its focus on the apocalyptic future — at least from a literary standpoint.

The worship of intelligence and cleverness is certainly understandable, however vain it may be for a clever engineer like myself to worship such a thing. Recent (apparent?) progress in AI makes me wonder if, in our lifetime, we will experience and interact with a form of intelligence emerging that is orders of magnitude more clever than we could ever be. Would that be like interacting with a god? Does it matter that we “created” this god? Would we judge ourselves as greater than our creation because we were the cause of it?

I would also pay very close attention to “the dialectical relationship between essence [i.e., ‘occurrent’] and phenomenon” starting on p. 156!

Fred: I would encourage you to pay very close attention to annotation 196 starting on page 188 and annotation 201 starting on page 195 of the Vietnamese “state propaganda” textbook I linked you to earlier! The material universe itself operates dialectically, that is to say, through the union of opposites! We are living in a dialectical material world and I am a dialectical material girl!

Mario:

The way you’re using dialectics “incorrectly” is that you’re using it as a description for any kind of change whatsoever, or even unchanging states. You plug it in anywhere. I’ve never once seen you describe what the thesis or antithesis of the system you’re describing is and how it’ll achieve a synthesis.

I put scare quotes around “incorrectly” because I think your failure is emblematic. I think the idea just isn’t very precise. It’s a fine heuristic conceptually, but it’s not actually a meaningful model of change, because it’s too vague.

And you yourself cop to this. If you can use the word “dialectics” to refer to phenomenology, and the thesis/antithesis, and all metaphysics, it’s meaningless . You can’t tell from almost any context what is being said. So why not say something precise?

Moreover, the outcome of dialectics is change (the thing subject to synthesis-antithesis is different from both; it has changed into a new thing that didn’t exist before). That can never describe particle waves, which always stay the same, just moving in a circle. You’d be better off calling it mandala, since that almost captures the idea of moving in a circle and never changing. But even that would abuse the language in any literal prose discourse.

Also, note, Craig is obfuscating between the terms “necessary” and “contingent” here.

Quarks are certainly contingent in the sense that something causes them to exist and have the properties they do. But that something might be a necessary existent. For example, on M theory, once spacetime is twisted up a certain way, it becomes logically impossible for quarks to not exist, or have different properties than they do. So in the only relevant sense quarks are logically necessary (if that fundamental theory is correct; it may be some other that is, but certainly all signs point to some such explanation, even if it’s not exactly that).

Craig could then pull back and admit the necessary contingency (if contingently X, then necessarily quarks) and attack the underlying contingency (whatever X is, usually some Big Bang or other cosmological fine tuning model). But that just moves the argument to a different theatre. Physicists still have better theories than his in that theatre.

That whole exchange is pseudoscientific.

Quarks are a form of matter; not the form. Leptons are also matter (electrons being only the most famous kind). So are the gaugue bosons (W, Z, Higgs). While dark matter is in fact most matter—and definitely not made of quarks. Moreover, you can’t explain reality without including non-rest-mass particles (photons and gluons). And energy is more fundamental (matter is just a form of energy).

So it is evident neither person knows what they are talking about.

Still, we can steel man what Craig wants to say, which is the Ontological Whatsit argument: there must be some universal reason the known particles are all the same and maintain the stable properties they do (including rest mass). It’s just that physicists already have better theories of that than this “god just keeps it that way” nonsense.

See The Argument to the Ontological Whatsit and Superstring Theory as Metaphysical Atheism for a followup.