Probabilities in Infinity

So a devout Christian and a silly atheist are arguing one day about what happens to us after we die. The devout Christian obviously argues that we either go to heaven or hell. The silly atheist argues that this is outrageously improbable. What are the chances that after we die we’ll end up in some man-made fantasy world based on man-made morals? What are the chances that our particular notions of right and wrong will be the deciding factors of our fate and that the options are limited to two, precisely one of a heaven full of our particular notions of happiness and one of a hell full of our particular notions of suffering? The silly atheist argues instead that it is far more likely, nearly to the point of complete certainty, that nothing happens after we die--that our consciousness is extinguished and our bodies simply become inanimate objects.

So why is the atheist silly? The atheist’s arguments are completely inane within the context of reason because nobody has any clue what really happens to us after we die. Nobody has ever crossed over so to speak, observed whatever may be out there, and come back to tell us what they saw. There is no workable science, no way of reasoning or proving anything about what happens to us after we die. We know absolutely nothing and therefore we cannot make any logical claims that any one conception of what happens to us after we die is more plausible than any other. Every possibility is equally likely in the same way all orders of infinity—like the number of all integers versus the number of all real numbers—are really just the same: infinite. Another way of looking at it (again mathematical) is the idea that every possibility has a probability of 1 over 0 where the 1 in the numerator signifies that one possibility and the 0 in the denominator signifies the number of total known possibilities. In this case we get an error, and so in this way the logic of probabilities cannot be applied to what happens to us after we die.

This can easily be extended to absolutely everything. Another example is “debate” over the existence of God. Richard Dawkins argues in his book The God Delusion that such as being as God, as we know it, really exists. He, as any good evolutionary biologist, begins from an evolutionary standpoint, attacking the idea that the vast complexity of life could only be the product of an intelligent designer we tend to call God. He argues that evolution does a much better job of dealing with the development of biological complexity by breaking it down into smaller, less improbable steps. (I won’t go into detail because I’m hoping that you have an intuitive understanding of why this is; otherwise, you can read Dawkins’ book yourself as he explains it quite clearly.) Dawkins argues then that the existence of God is an extremely immense improbability because the chances that something as complex as an omniscient, omnipotent creator could spontaneously come together from nothing are exceedingly slim. But it is this assumption that our notions of probability can be applied to something that we ultimately can have no logical way of analyzing shows that Dawkins, for all his Britishness and wit, is human, all too human. When it comes to contemplating the existence of God, every possibility—that there is no God, that there is a God, that the universe is just the slick computer game being played by a bunch of adolescent alien nerds with correspondingly alien acne (that’s probably what broccoli is)—are all unquantifiably possible in a domain outside of human knowledge and logic. No possibility can be ever be definitely proven to be even the slightest bit more or less probable than any other possibility.

For a simpler analogy, imagine I told you there was an empire of llamas on the moon that drank Cherry Coke through their hooves in order to stay undetectable to human beings. You would say that I was crazy and that it is unlikely to the point of absurdity that this is the case at all. But can you disprove it? No. That means someway, somehow, this may be possible. But then you say something about how llamas can’t survive on moon and how Cherry Coke doesn’t have any properties that resemble stealth bomber technology. So then I ask how much do you really know about llamas or Cherry Coke? How much do you know about the moon or space or life for that matter? We thought the Earth was flat for a long time. What if we’re making the same wrong assumptions about llamas and Cherry Coke? (Note: I am not affiliated in any way with Cherry Coke, any Coca Cola product, or llamas.)

Now to extend this all the way. Hold up your hand and look at it. How do you know you control it? How do you know that your mind isn’t just playing tricks on you, making you believe that that hand is yours? What if your brain is just hooked up to a huge simulation and all of what you think is reality isn’t real? What if conceptions such as reality aren’t real and even the idea of something being real is not real? What if consciousness doesn’t really exist? What if nothing you think exists really exists and existence itself is nonexistent? How do you know anything about anything? Anything is possible and there’s nothing we can do about it. If you just challenge all of your assumptions, even the very deepest ones, then you might find nothing left at the very bottom. Or you might find something. But how will you know that something is anything at all?

Anyways, I should probably just throw out some words that really need no explaining but of course scream out from all of this: relativism, nihilism, existentialism, Vanilla Coke, etc. The end.