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Let's leave aside for now the increasingly sterile arguments between the so-called "New Atheists" and the Defenders of the Faith - each side seems to feel that the other is making a category error.
Let's leave aside the anthropomorphic God of many religions, as shown above.
Let's look, instead, at the limitations imposed on us by thinking that there could be a finally satisfying answer, which could be arrived at to convince all the uncommitted and uncertain people (most of us in the UK, I'd guess.) "Yes, there is a God." "No there isn't a God." More either/or, more polarisation.
Bring together, if you will, the emergent properties of complex systems, and the unpredictability of same.
The universe (just this one, never mind all the others we are told may exist) is vastly, unknowably complex. Relatively tiny changes in one area could well produce unpredictable results down the line. We (humans) are a tiny part of this vastly complex system, and it moves through us as we move through it. We are not separate from it,we are part of it.
All the time we know more and more about the systems that make up the universe, but perhaps it is never finally knowable, because never finally predictable.
If all the systems that comprise the universe are, as it were, looked at together, can we predict, can we know, the whole?
The East Asian traditions of Taoism and Zen Buddhism intuit that there is a Way, a state of being, that is at one with the universe, literally indescribable, and with us all the time if we can live in it. It is not knowable by reason. The Way that can be spoken of is not the true, eternal Way.
Western science seems (I think...) to be telling us that complex dynamic systems are unpredictable, and that you can't, at the next level up, define, determine or predict the emergent properties of such systems. (Water both is and isn't one atom of hydrogen and two of oxygen...)
Perhaps the sense of God that so many people have is an emergent property of all the systems of the universe, something that since we are part of it we can intuit, but not analyse or describe. It's the Whole Damn Thing at maximum emergence.
It doesn't matter if we call it God, or not. We humanise it and symbolise it because we think that makes it approachable. I prefer the East Asian Way, you prefer the GodMan who rolled away the stone - it really shouldn't matter so much.
That's not to say all religions are the same. Not all cultures are the same - and organisations are complex and dynamic. Could anyone have predicted, from the early work of the Prophet, that a Muslim would shoot a Muslim girl in the head because she said it was a good idea to go to school? That Christians across 17th century Europe would slaughter each other because some did and some didn't belief that a piece of bread turned into the flesh of Christ?
But it seems to me that the whole argument about belief is often a waste of time. There both can and cannot be a God.
Let's grow up and live with uncertainty. Keats called in "negative capability," the ability to hold in the mind two contradictory things at the same time.
Zen masters threw koans at their students to break the chains of either/or thinking. I'm also trying to use my tiny half-baked bit of scientific understanding to reach the same place.
Apparently, Newtonian physics - gravity - explains very well the elliptical orbits of large planets, stars etc. and we can predict their movements very well. However, a 19th-century astronomer thought about the orbits of much smaller lumps of stuff in space - what about the very small moon of a planet, or an asteroid? He worked out that a tiny disturbance (a little shove) would suffice to move the thing a disproportionately large amount off its usual orbit, to unpredictable consequences. This was, I am reliably informed, one of the very earliest origins of what came to be called chaos theory.
(If you already know this stuff, do skip it, pausing only, please, to tell me where I've got it round my collar.)
Dynamic systems are highly sensitive to initial conditions. So even if the system's future behaviour is fully determined by their initial conditions, (planetary orbits) with no random elements involved, the fact that they are deterministic does not make them predictable if the initial conditions are made approximate by tiny changes.
Tiny initial changes can result in huge and unpredictable later results - the so-called "butterfly effect." The idea that a butterfly flapping its wings could result, weeks later, in the birth of a hurricane. Although we know the components of a hurricane's birth, we can't predict its emergence because it is dynamic, complex, and sensitive to tiny initial changes.
"Chaos: When the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future." says Edward Lorenz.
All of the above I owe to Wikipedia.
Next, I'll get on to God. For that I'll need both chaos theory and the idea of emergent properties.
(I've got that nasty feeling that any readers will think "she's getting excited about stuff that's actually pretty common-place and widely-known." Maybe so, Mr Big Brains, but writing this stuff makes my head hurt so it must be good for me...)
I've decided not to beat about the bush. In a few day's discussion with dear old (and brilliant) friends, I have found the answer to life, the universe, and everything. Up to a point. I reckon. And I need YOU to tell me where I'm going wrong, so please comment if you sniff out absurdity or inaccuracy. And this stuff really has to do with how we face death.
Firstly, the mind-body problem. Is the mind more than the individual's brain,
influenced by genetics and continually adapted and moulded by experience as it grows older? Is it infused with some universal force, some divine spark, some immortal stuff outside our skulls?
Rationalist might say no, it's all answerable from the chemistry and electrics of the the physical brain. Dualists, religious or otherwise, might say no, there must be more to it, "the scientists" can't point to a bit of brain and say "your sense of self, your sense of wonder and your acknowledgement of the vastness of the universe is in here." The mind is more than the brain.
My friend J's answer was "Yes. Quite possibly both."
Then he talked about the unpredictability of complex systems. He pointed out that if you started to bring together, for the first time in the history of the universe, one atom of hydrogen and two of oxygen, there is no way you could predict or estimate, the nature of water, that wonderfully complex substance all around and inside us.
Water, he said, is an emergent property of one atom of hydrogen and two of oxygen. It is more than could be comprehended by looking at hydrogen and oxygen separately.
If the mind is an emergent property of the human brain, then it is both only the brain and more than the brain - impossible to deduce from the chemical and electrical properties of the brain on their own.
There is no need for an either/or, dualist/rationlist single answer to the question.
Maybe we need a new way of thinking, of being, to live with these big questions. We move through the world, the world moves through us, and that dynamic relationship generates from the brain, an almost incredibly complex system, the unpredictable uniqueness of a human mind. It is and it isn't just the pasty stuff inside our skulls.
If you're still with me, is this giving you a headache? It did me, but it was worth it, I felt.
