Is it possible to create a god?

Dommo said:

I'm wondering if it's possible to create a god through artificial means.

First let me define what I mean by "god" or "godlike".

1. Intelligent beyond human imagining.
2. Understands the workings of the universe in such a way that it could do things far beyond our capability.
3. Limitedly omnipotent/omnipresent.

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Maybe we could aim a bit lower with our divine candidates. Surely just being moderately intelligent would be a big leap foward versus the divine beings I've seen.
Does a god need to understand "workings"? Does understanding of "workings" give the ability to do things? What kind of things? Wouldn't some agility and dexterity help? Maybe being a good swimmer is more divine than being a physicist.
I'm limitedly omnipotent and omnipresent: I'm here in my chair and I am more powerful than a bag of potato chips.

'Limitedly omnipotent/omnipresent' strikes me as self-contradictory.

My problem is that the description doesn't make sense to me. A god is something that is a little bit all powerful?

If it is an entity that is more powerful than me, willful and real then George W Bush is a deity.... if it must be more powerful than any human then the internet is a deity....

I had a similar thread a couple of months ago. In general I think it's possible to have an entity that appears to us as God, but impossible to create an actual God. Perhaps a superintelligence will discover how to be omnipotent, but in general I would have thought the manipulation of matter and energy through any means bar direct physical intervention more in the realms of magic than possible reality. Of course, if a being created the Universe, perhaps an AI creating its own big bang computer simulation, then I can easily see direct intervention into the "source code" if you will.

Of course, following that possibility, if we ourselves were to simulate a big bang in the future, then to the consciousnesses in that universe we would fulfil every definition of God.

I think inter/intranets that run our traffic lights, trains, control our borders etc etc are never turned off, act on their own and are by ma ny measured of intelligence (acuity, speed of calculation, memory, rationality) smarter than us already.

We can keep say they have to be smarter than us in the ways we are most smart, and more powerful than us in the ways we are most powerful, but at that point isn't the Judeo-Christain God also not perhaps a God?

I mean what does he actually do on a day to day basis? I can 'turn off' that God and ignore it with no apparent ill effects, after all.

Dommo said:

Eeek you're hitting the nail on the head.

What I meant by limitedly omnipotent/omnipresent was that it had the ability to monitor and gather information that to a human would be impossible. Think along the lines of being able to observe much of what goes on in a world, or what not while still being able to interact with it in ways that no human ever could(like holding 250,000 conversations at once, while watching the traffic patterns of a metropolis, while also monitoring the global weather). I meant in a way that while not having knowledge over everything in the universe, and not being everywhere in the universe, RELATIVE to a human they were omnipotent or omnipresent.

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It is possible that there already have been gods like this. If one avoids the prejudice that AI/style gods have to be electronic and run in relatively short cycles, then there already have been gods with the characteristics you describe, such as Ashur, who basically was the bureaucratic and military structure of the Assyrian Empire. He could interact simultaneously with any of the thousands of people who could read and write clay tablets. He knew all the taxation and weather patterns, all the secret alliances of the Empire, his memory was far beyond human abilities (thousands of clay tablets) and his power was the greatest on Earth. He could have cities destroyed and populations relocated and so on. The King of Assyria had to write him official letters.

So I think there already have been very powerful administrative gods and we pretty much know what an electronic AI system along those lines would be like.

Eeek said:

That's making my head spin.

Here's another one -- what if people were mucking around with some animal DNA in the lab, and a creature emerged that was orders of magnitude smarter than humans, and that was able to control our environment -- turn the temperature of the planet up or down, create or relieve droughts, etc. Would those creatures be gods? I think probably yes.

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I don't quite get the requirement that gods need to be intelligent. After all people have pumped lots of CO2 and whatnot into the atmosphere and now the planet is heading up. Does making a destructive mess make us divine? If we were smarter would we be divine? Are we pretty divine now...not very bright, but able to drop hydrogen bombs and annihilate things?
Would a really smart god be just a guy who doesn't mess up the world?
Anyway...I don't get the intelligence requirement. After all, how much intelligence have any of the gods ever shown? Zeus' father ate a rock...Zeus himself had rather unappealing and not very intelligent sexual habits. Aphrodite is portrayed as being rather stupid and even Jehovah apparently destroyed most of mankind after allowing angels to have sex with earth girls. Now all those beings qualify as gods and don't seem to have been very smart. Why do the gods all the sudden need to be smart?

Dommo said:

I'm wondering if it's possible to create a god through artificial means.

First let me define what I mean by "god" or "godlike".

1. Intelligent beyond human imagining.
2. Understands the workings of the universe in such a way that it could do things far beyond our capability.
3. Limitedly omnipotent/omnipresent.

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To an extent, we have already done this. Consider a telephone conversation between a modern Web user and a 17th century scientist (yes, we'd need a telephone for this). The scientist doesn't know about computers, CCTV cameras, Google Earth, Wikipedia. A single Web user could answer an extraordinary number of questions instantly with high levels of confidence and could (perhaps with the aid of Yahoo Answers or the like) answer many other questions in only a few days. To that scientist, the average Web-user might appear to have godlike knowledge and intelligence.

Now consider a sentient, technological civilisation ten or one hundred times older than our own (which is say 3,000-4,000 years old at a stretch). With all that time to amass knowledge, couldn't every craft, art, science seem immensely superior? Couldn't even their children seem almost magical in what they can do?

Yes, but would it make them our spiritual authorities? Would we hang on their every word, and obey them faithfully?

Some people might, but I probably wouldn't.

Ruv Draba said:

Yes, but would it make them our spiritual authorities? Would we hang on their every word, and obey them faithfully?

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I'm a bit puzzled by the implied god requirements. After all, the actual requirements for hundreds of gods are quite well-known and we even know the objections of different groups to other group's gods...or cults. Hugh Thomas (http://www.amazon.com/dp/0671511041/?tag=absolutewritedm-20 ) reports the northern neighboring empire (the Michocans in their own language I think) of the Aztecs thought that the Aztec cults were rife with bad housekeeping practices. The Michoca did not deny the potential power of the Aztec gods, but:
a) they had their own gods and cults
b) the Aztecs obviously did not understand their own gods properly, hence all the trouble the Aztecs were having with Cortez.

veinglory said:

'Limitedly omnipotent/omnipresent' strikes me as self-contradictory.

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I could see the phrase fitting Jupiter. Or Zeus. Or a super-computer.

I'd need to see it defined exactly first, though, since it IS an apparent contradiction. I sort of understand where the OP is coming from--but I sort of don't.

This strikes me as a semantic argument. If we define a god as having x, y and z traits, then create something with those traits, then, yes, we've created "a god". What I then wonder is, what does it matter?

Anything is potentially, eventually possible--as opposed to actually, currently possible.

Would you want your god active like in the Greek/ Norse/ Egyptian (etc) pantheons or passive and let humanity do for themselves with free will?

Dommo said:

By limited omnipotence , I was thinking in comparison to a person.

As in, a being that could be aware of, and simultaneously act a number of inputs that would be far beyond what any human individual could do. Also, I was adding "limited" to sort of restrict the location of the "god", as in, the god might be able to do a lot say on earth, where it's present, but can't really do anything that's on Mars for example.

Suppose a sentient computer did have total understanding of everything you've ever done, and could actively monitor your thoughts, or possibly infer what you might be thinking(empathize). Suppose that praying to it, could cause it to directly respond to you, as long as you were within its domain.

Ask the "God" for help, and it does what it can to help you, if it feels you warrant the help. Do you get what I'm saying? In effect a god or at least "godlike" being could conceivably exist in such a way that as far as the average joe is concerned, would be a god. Do what pleases it, and it might reward you, do what it dislikes, and it might punish or ignore you.

I'm just making the conjecture, that creating a being of godlike power, with godlike abilities, is possible.

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The problem is that there have been lots and lots of gods and quite a lot of them clearly functioned at the level of autosuggestion.

For example, suppose I'm so attracted to someone that I pray to the Love Goddess to help me. If I even slightly "believe" in the Love Goddess this prayer will be potent enough to get me what I want probably. No other machinery is required. The God of Lust is as potent as Lust itself...so you have a sure-fire god there...and that's just one example.

"Teh Godularity"

I figured this Artificial God (AG) needed a name to distinguish it from the Christian and other Gods. I had glanced through this thread before, but I only just now carefully read the OP where this "created God" is the result of a/the technological singularity.

I grew up with the usual Western/Christinan/USAian idea of a God being REALLY omnipotent and omnipresent. No one I knew was was bothered or had even thought of Asimov's proposition (nah, he was just repeating it, this must have been a philosopher centuries ago that St. Augustine said was going to hell for asking such questions) that went something like: "Can God create a rock too big for Him to move?" The more general question is, what happens when an irresitible force pushes on an immovable object?

My point here is that the Western God is Truly Infinitely Powerful, as oppose to this Singularity entity that may only be the most powerful entity on Earth, the Solar System or the Local Group. So this isn't a True God in that sense.

Dommo said:

I'm wondering if it's possible to create a god through artificial means.

First let me define what I mean by "god" or "godlike".

1. Intelligent beyond human imagining.
2. Understands the workings of the universe in such a way that it could do things far beyond our capability.
3. Limitedly omnipotent/omnipresent.

Now suppose the idea of a technological singularity does occur and we manage to somehow create an AI that is capable of exponentially growing intelligence. IF it can attain enough knowledge and understanding then perhaps it might transcend into "godhood".

What would be the impact on world religions or even on atheistic views when there could very well be a consciousness that would by many definitions be a god or at least godlike. Even if the being was apathetic to humans and in general didn't interact with us, just the knowledge that such a being existed would rock the boat.

I mean, I'm an agnostic, but I'd probably have to acknowledge the existence of gods or at least one god if this came to pass. Whether or not this does happen is surely up for debate, but IF such a being were created the philosophical implications would be immense.

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I'd acknowledge this as (to use 12-step language, which I rejected a long while back) "a power greater than myself" or the most powerful physical entity known to Humankind, but I wouldn't call it a God, especially not in the religious sense.

It seems with every high-profile technological advance, there have been naysayers who beliebe Man is overtaking God's will to Man's detriment. With the Wright Brothers' power air flight, there were serious "moral" objections to it. People said "Man was not meant to fly. If Man were meant to fly, God would have given him wings." I'd heard such things all my life and thought they were meant as jokes, but around the 100th anniversary of the Kitty Hawk flight I learned how people took it it as a serious affront to God.

Then there was the Moon landing. I think by that time most people in the West, even the most religious, had to admit that God wasn't going to smack people down for using advanced technology. The 1968 Christmas eve telecast from Apollo 8 orbiting the Moon (in which each of the three astronauts read one of the first three chapters of Genesis) surely helped placate believers. (the 30th anniversary of that event is coming up in just two weeks)

"Teh Godularity" may well become my SuperGoogleWikiWhatever, or it may well Pwn me and every other human and only feed me what it thinks I should know, but it's still a tool (even if it grows out of control and we become its tool). The Pope may acknowledge its existence, but he'll still say (with good reason within the definitions and beliefs of Christianity) "My God, the God of Christianity, is still bigger than this secular, technological god."

Dommo said:

Ask the "God" for help, and it does what it can to help you, if it feels you warrant the help.

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Hmm, doesn't sound that much like a god to me! It'll HELP?

Dommo said:

By limited omnipotence , I was thinking in comparison to a person.

As in, a being that could be aware of, and simultaneously act a number of inputs that would be far beyond what any human individual could do. Also, I was adding "limited" to sort of restrict the location of the "god", as in, the god might be able to do a lot say on earth, where it's present, but can't really do anything that's on Mars for example.

Suppose a sentient computer did have total understanding of everything you've ever done, and could actively monitor your thoughts, or possibly infer what you might be thinking(empathize). Suppose that praying to it, could cause it to directly respond to you, as long as you were within its domain.

Ask the "God" for help, and it does what it can to help you, if it feels you warrant the help. Do you get what I'm saying? In effect a god or at least "godlike" being could conceivably exist in such a way that as far as the average joe is concerned, would be a god. Do what pleases it, and it might reward you, do what it dislikes, and it might punish or ignore you.

I'm just making the conjecture, that creating a being of godlike power, with godlike abilities, is possible.

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I'll agree that a being with Godlike power "may be possible" or may well even be inevitable.

But this argument reminds me of Clarke's (third) law. This would be a 'mechanism'/technology/being originally created by humans that provides a SIMULATION of what Western religion tells us what God is. I just don't see this as a "Real God[TM]" thought it may well be enough to fool most or even almost all people (at least from Western culture). For my own part, I might just deny such a thing is The Real God[TM] all the way to Hell.

veinglory said:

Anything is potentially, eventually possible--as opposed to actually, currently possible.

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You remind me of a quote from Robert A. Pease that he probably took from somene else: "In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they're not."

Eeek said:

I think GUDSqrl is right. If you define a God in such a way that it is something that people could create (now or in the future), and then say people could create it, then what you've got is a circular argument.

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I'm not following this, can someone clear it up. Eeek, did you leave out a word or something? This looks more like a tautology (you're repeating yourself) than a circular argument.

Eeek said:

On the other hand, if you define a God as the entity that created humans (which isn't a necessary part of the definition of a God but is certainly a common one in today's religions), then the God must have existed before humans did. The only way that humans could create such a God would be through time travel, because they would have to go back to the time before humans came into being. I don't think that time travel will ever be possible outside of science fiction, but who knows.

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Yeah, but I got the impression that any "God of/from/created by The Singularity" is specifically NOT a/the God that created humans.

Dommo said:

I'm wondering if it's possible to create a god through artificial means.

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Of course it is. Humans have been doing that all throughout their existance. Some of these 'Gods', and the religions based on these deities have survived to this day...

One could argue that was through "natural" means....

veinglory said:

One could argue that was through "natural" means....

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By definition, if something is a product of human activity, it is artificial.

If it is defined that way then it is tautological and not a meaningful addition to the sentence (also everything including feces and catching cold is artificial).

I belief the OP intended the meaning to be construed as "by means of advanced post-mechanical technology".

If it's okay for a newbee to chime in...

The title "God" in Western Culture comes from the Hebrew "YHVH" or 'Jehovah.' The literal meaning of this title is, 'The all-sufficient one.' This means a lot of things in one:

1. He is the only one (singularity being equal to the wholeness of God's sufficiency).
2. He is sufficient unto himself (cannot be created, always was).
3. He is the origin of all sufficiency (the maker and continuing sustainer of all that is).
4. He is all-ness of one (meaning identity, totality of personhood).

In short, anything that could be created does not measure up to the actual meaning of the title 'God' (YHVH).

By contrast, 'god' (little 'g') usually translates into 'diety' or 'spirit.' It's usage is pretty flexible (demon, angel, ghost, messenger, and a whole lot more). Generally it means, 'An etherial being with some divine attributes.' Problem is, the standard of divinity still relies on the totality of the divine (JHVH), so without 'God,' 'gods' have no measure of divinity, and therefore become insufficient to meet their own title ('god' is not a meaningful term aside from 'God').

Make sense?

It's a difficult philosophical/theological concept to grasp, but that's the best I have.

Eathray