Hmm.. sorry to bore you with this atheist crap again. But I am drunk to prevent a headache, and philosophy relaxes me more. I was wondering what would it take for atheists to believe in a God? Would a significant pattern arising in any of the mathematical or physical constants be good enough?I have mentioned this before: In the novel Contact by Carl Sagan, astronomer Ellie Ann Arroway acting upon a suggestion by the extra-terrestrial life forms who sent a message, works on a program which computes the digits of π to record lengths and in different bases. Very, very far from the decimal point (10^20) and in base 11 (postulated number of dimensions in M theory, after 1995), it finds that a special pattern does exist when the numbers stop varying randomly and start producing 1’s and 0’s in a very long string. The string’s length is the product of 11 prime numbers. The 1’s and 0’s when organized as a square of specific dimensions form a perfect circle. The extraterrestrials suggest that this is an unmistakably intelligent artifact, an artist’s signature, woven into the fabric of space. It is another Message, one from the universe’s creator. Yet the extraterrestrials are just as ignorant to its meaning as Ellie, as it could be still some sort of a statistical anomaly. They also make reference to older artifacts built from space time itself (namely the wormhole transit system) abandoned by a prior civilization. A line in the book suggests that the image is a foretaste of deeper marvels hidden even farther within Pi. This new pursuit becomes analogous to SETI; it is another search for meaningful signals in apparent noise.The concept of a Message embedded within the digits of π can be criticized by atheists & critics if something like that was actually found. First, it is an open question in mathematics if π is a normal number. If it is such, it would not be surprising that a “message” can be found in the infinite digits of the ratio. Actually, any specified message will be found within it, somewhere. Finding a picture of a circle or a drawing of Santa Claus is simply a matter of knowing where it is. Sagan assumed the “message” is not a likely occurrence due to its very high order, since the chance of random occurrence can also be calculated if pi is in fact normal.Furthermore, this reshaping of pi raises questions related to the omnipotence paradox concerning whether God can do logically impossible things. This paradox relies on the assumption that logic somehow transcends the constraints of the universe, rather than being a property of it. Yet assuming logic is a property of the cosmos, God may just have fashioned our reality in such a way that pi has unlikely properties, thus conveying a Message to anyone clever enough to count in Base 11.In the Many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics beginning after the Big Bang, some numbers that define essential properties of our universe, like the fine structure constant or Newton’s gravitational constant, could vary among universes. The physical conditions in these universes would be radically different, and it is possible that intelligent life could not exist in all of them.π, however, falls into a different category of numbers than those which primarily represent space and time, because it can be defined by the inherent properties of the real numbers. These in turn depend on the properties of the natural numbers; changing the value of π is therefore analogous to changing the information contained in the ratio 2/3 and encoding data in that. Any intelligence, working in any universe— no matter what the characteristics of its particular “space-time fabric”—must deduce the same value of π, presuming they are able to think of numbers at all, and that logic is not a property of the Cosmos.This type of argument goes back to philosophers like Averroes, who proposed that not even God could create a triangle whose internal angles did not add up to 180 degrees. The number of degrees within a triangle is a fixed consequence of Euclidean geometry (in non-Euclidean space such a triangle is possible); God may choose to build a universe that follows different geometrical axioms, but once the axioms are chosen, the results are essentially determined.I am still wondering what would it take for atheists to believe in a God. I am sure you would have figured it by now that a highly advanced mathematical discourse in the Bible wouldn’t prove that a God wrote the Bible. Can you guess what counter-arguments would skeptics and atheists put in to counter it?
