The Antichristian Phenomenon

In this short article I will share my views upon the future, and why creationism has no place in it. A warning in advance; this is merely conjecture, although highly probable, still only a product of my imagination.

Like Santayana once stated, before we can take a look at the future we have to dig into the past. Creationism has it’s roots in the original biblical Christian dogma. God has created man in his own image, and our souls will be dealt with after our death based upon our loyalty to the dogma during our lives. During many, many years after Christianity became the de facto faith in the western world, philosophers have slowly stripped Christianity down to what it is now. A collection of shaky assumptions, easily taken down by modern reason.

One of these assumptions, dualism, has never been successfully challenged by reason. There have been, and still are, several philosophers who have an interesting view on things. The so-called father of modern philosophy, Descartes, was one of the first to describe dualism in a less theistic way, in a way acceptable by the standards within the level of reason mankind had reached in the seventeenth century. He described the two aspects of the human being. The mind and the brain. The mind, according to Descartes, is the non-physical part which encompasses self-awareness. The brain would takes care of the intelligence and the physical interaction with our surroundings. The Christian creationist’s view is easily applicable on this model, hence the largely theistic following of Cartesian dualism. The model has been refined over the years, like the removal of the idea of a gland as the link between the mind and the brain. But the basics have been preserved and are still fueling many philosophical debates today.

There wouldn’t be any debate if there wasn’t a movement pleading against dualism. And remember, the case against dualism is a case against Christian dogma. A large variety of philosophers are forming a formidable counterweight against the aging Cartesian dualistic model. Usually these counter arguments have a scientific background. There’s the argument from the physicists, who claim that dualism breaks the second law of thermodynamics. The biologists and doctors say brain damage can cause personality disorders. Psychologists are reporting physical reactions to mental problems. And there’s of course Occam’s razor, which simply asks why dualism should exist in the first place. All these people haven’t been able to kill off the Cartesian dualism once and for all.

The final blow to the very existence of the weakened concept “soul” will come from a very unexpected corner of science. One of the greatest, if not the greatest, logician Alan Turing. His ideas are still used in the foundations of modern computer science. His other major achievement is often overlooked. Turing saw the raw potential of computer science and it’s role in the creation of true artificial intelligence. According to Turing, a computer, if powerful enough, should be able to think individually. It should be able to be conscious, while being entirely physical. If such a computer could ever be built, the entire dualistic world view would cease to exist. Theists mocked Turing and when it turned out he was gay, which was a criminal offense at the time, he became an easy target. Soon after his prosecution and obliteration of his scientific career he died, under questionable circumstances. Many people believe he was killed because of his radically new ideas.

And then along came Gordon Moore, with a company indirectly fulfilling Turing’s dream. In 1965 Moore published a paper, “The experts look ahead – Cramming more components onto integrated circuits”. The paper describes an exponential increase in the amount of components that will fit onto a single chip. This increase is responsible for the exponential growth of computing power, storage capacity and bandwidth available in computers. This paper has been coined Moore’s Law, simply because his assumptions were bang on.

If we continue this exponential trend, following Moore’s Law, mankind will be able to effectively rebuild the human brain in electronics, and thus the mind in software. And this important breakthrough isn’t that far away. The human brain is capable of processing roughly a hundred million million instructions per second. That’s fourteen zeros. We’ve been able to create computers to just surpass one percent of that goal, but still lacking in bandwidth. But since this increase is exponential, we will reach Turing’s dream in a mere thirty years or so. Most of you will still be around when the last bastion of the old dualistic model collapses, when the pope gets a phone call from HAL 9000, explaining how there is no soul, no god and no hope.

Further reading: Vinge’s Singularity.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 8th, 2009 at 12:30 am and is filed under Philosophy, Religion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.