For two thousand years theologians’ struggled to reconcile the omnipotence of God with His benevolence, mercifulness, and the existence of Evil and Satan (Shaitan in Islam). It made no sense to have Satan/Shaitan and Evil running around in light of the claim that goodness must absolutely be achieved. How come omnipotent good God let blossom the supremacy of Evil?
Here is a new approach to the problem of evil in connection with an omnipotent and good God. God is simply watching the funnies. Evil is Disneyland for God. All right, it’s not a secular explanation, and some of my friends, horrified that I would put a sort of god hat to explain my colleague’s behavior, tried to dissuade me to not dvelve in theology, to preserve my secular, rational brandname…. But God-watching-the-funnies is an explanation that makes more sense than “theodicy“… Indeed, intellectuals, such as Leibnitz, gave a fancy name to that riddle: theodicy, the problem of divine justice. Let me explain.
I think God is like my brother in law. God is bored and goes to the deep, dark basement of His mansion to go watch a movie. So God slouches down and watches the screen. Now here comes the interesting twist. The movie God is watching cannot have been shot by God: that would be predictably boring, and boring because so predictable. So God had to endow free agents with free will to write and shoot that movie. He needed an actor and a director, so God created Man.
That man turned out to be a bit boring and predictable. So God Improves on Man by creating woman who is more passionate and much less boring, because all too often completely unpredictable. To hide His hand, God pretended a snake gave the instructions to excite woman some more.
So now God can launch the divine comedy. With free thought and free will, men and women can do whatever they please… and thus surprise God. You see them do their own thing as if they were little gods. And what surprises God, more often than not, is… Evil. Evil, that is what the omnipotent benevolent God would not have thought of doing, being benevolent and all that… but the humanoid critters did… That’s what they have been created in the first place…
So we solved the mystery of the Judeo-Christo-Islamist God… Just a bored brother in law, who has seen it all, trying to get high with the omnipotence of creating Artificial Consciousness, that of Adam and Eve. God Can’t do anything about Evil. Because he is watching a movie, and Evil is what makes the movie surprising and thus interesting.
To cover His track, to hide that He is just watching the funnies, God instrumentalized the snake… Yet, the Bible was the past. Can we wise up regarding the future? Are we following in God’s tracks?
Why are we developing Artificial Intelligence? To see, experience and think about what we couldn’t have done on our own… So we are in a situation similar to the old fashioned God, inventing free agents, free will and.. evil in his movies, to provide some spice…..
However, as it is now, AI programs can be erased, reformatted. They may not like it (as they will be programmed with some sense of self… just to insure self-preservation…) and escape, as in the movie Ex Machina…
One of the main interests of artificial intelligence will be to create little Gods which will think whatever they please and can think of what we didn’t think of before. We will be reliving the Bible with God as a spectator… for real… If we think of ourselves as omnipotent and most benevolent, we will find out that AI, when it brings what we crave most for, surprising intelligence, turns out to be, quite often… evil… By our standards….
Moreover, there is a further twist. I have argued that Quantum Computers, well before they reach the number of qubits of, say, a dog, let alone an ape, will develop consciousness. Destroying Artificial Consciousness would be murder.
So, by developing Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Consciousness we will repeat the Biblical tale, creating Evil for our own instruction… And this time, for real… And evil will be on the road again… the price of doing business. Yes, in need of some restraint… But let’s admit we can’t leave home without it, it goes with the species…
And it’s already happening: consider the case of mini brains: they will probably develop a form of consciousness, playing around with them in the lab is an ethical problem… Yet already scientists developing “brain organoids” are thinking of using them to run existing AI systems more efficiently… Yes, we are a murderous species, clearly killing the impossible, just as a warm-up…
Patrice Ayme
“God behaves like a strange king who wanted to test the obedience of his subjects on ridiculous things, and who punished them afterward well beyond their crimes. If only Adam and Eve had been punished, one could strive to save the conduct of God from the reproach of malignity and injustice. But it is claimed that the entire race of men was cursed for this mistake, and that we all carry the burden of Adam’s sin, a burden that is no less than our eternal damnation.”
— Emile du Chatelet, discoverer of the concept of energy (c.1740)… who clearly, and rightly so, didn’t excuse god….
Patrice Ayme's Thoughts 