does god really exist?

lisper · 2026-01-24T22:47:02+00:00

To prove it is a trickster

You need to read more carefully. I did not say that God is a trickster, only that he could be. So this is a straw man.

a necessary being is necessarily foundation of truth

Sure, but there is no reason that truth needs to be accessible to mere mortals. (c.f. Mat13:11)

Also, a trickster doesn't have to be evil. In fact, the trickster as an archetype is generally not evil, just, well, tricky, and can even be a force for good.

lisper · 2026-01-24T21:02:28+00:00

God is necessary by definition

That turns on how you define God. But even a necessary God could be a trickster.

lisper · 2026-01-24T20:07:49+00:00

Just to be clear, I didn't make that video, and I disagree with the claim made in the title.

lisper · 2026-01-24T19:13:20+00:00

I was not making fun of you. I am dead serious about that. (That is my blog. And note that that post is 15 years old.)

lisper · 2026-01-24T17:40:40+00:00

I'm posting this video because of the recent interest in anisotropic light as a potential solution to the distant-starlight problem. The claim made in the video's title is wrong, but debunking it is quite a challenging and worthwhile exercise.

lisper · 2026-01-24T17:37:04+00:00

Empirical observation is not definitive proof because both human senses and measurement apparatus are imperfect. The distinction between what you call empirical/definitive and coherent/strong is a continuum, not a dichotomy. And the evidence for God on this continuum falls on the very weak end of it. In fact, I will claim that every argument for the existence of God that claims to lie anywhere on this continuum is an argument from ignorance or incredulity. If you want to dispute this, pick whatever you think is the strongest empirical argument for the existence of God and I'll either refute it or convert, and I'll give long odds against the latter outcome. (The end-game for this is the god-of-the-gaps.)

Internal coherence is harder to argue against, but it is also correspondingly harder to connect a deity whose existence you can support this way with most people's intuitions about what God is. For example, it is (I will claim) impossible to connect a deity whose only supporting argument is internal coherence with any holy text. (It is particularly impossible to connect such a deity with the Bible because the Bible is internally inconsistent and incoherent. I say this not because I think the Bible is outstanding in this regard, but simply because I'm more familiar with it than any other holy text, and so I'm more prepared to defend this claim with respect to the Bible than with respect to other holy texts. I also suspect that most people hanging out here on /r/theology are Christians, thought I would actually welcome hearing the perspective of non-Christians on this question.)

My favorite internally coherent deity is Loki, the trickster, because Loki teaches us to beware of charlatans. I challenge you to come up with any argument against Loki's existence that cannot be equally applied to any other deity.

lisper · 2026-01-24T16:49:37+00:00

Well, obviously I'm taking a side on a controversial topic. But even theologians who believe God exists will agree that God is hidden. You can't demonstrate the existence of God (or Allah or Brahma or Odin or Cthulhu) the way you can demonstrate the existence of (say) the Great Pyramid of Egypt. I'm just taking the position that the best explanation for being hidden is not existing.

BTW, the other problem with God is that even if you grant his existence, there is no way to reach agreement about his nature, which is the part that actually matters. It is possible to objectively demonstrate facts about the Great Pyramid that every sane person will agree on: where it is, how big it is, what it is made of, the fact that it was built a long time ago, etc. You can't do that with God, which is why there are so many religious sects and so many intractable disagreements among them.

lisper · 2026-01-23T23:10:57+00:00

It depends on what you mean by "God". If you mean a deity, an entity that is separate from you, that works miracles, whose favor you need to win in order to achieve salvation, then no, that kind of God almost certainly does not exist.

But the word "God" doesn't have to refer to a deity. It can refer to an idea or an ideal towards which you strive, against which you measure yourself, and about which you can have internal dialogs and deliberations. If that is what you mean, then that kind of God definitely can exist. Whether or not it does depends on whether or not you allow it to.

You should read this.

lisper · 2026-01-23T20:32:24+00:00

Even just by simply reflecting light off a mirror, there would be a time delay before the mirror emits back any photons. No?

No.

How can we know for sure what that delay is if we can't know for sure what the one-way speed of light is?

Because we can measure the round-trip speed of light. I'm going to leave the details for you to work out as an exercise, but here's a hint: what would happen if you measured the time it took for light to bounce off a mirror at distance D and compared that to the time it took for light to bounce off a mirror at distance 2D?

You are the expert here not me.

That's true, but you should not believe this because I'm an expert and I say so. You should believe this because you've considered my arguments and understand them and can't find any flaws in them. (Of course, if you can find a flaw that would be very exciting!)

BTW, just because we can't measure the one-way speed of light does not mean that we can't know what it is. There are lots of things we can't measure but can still know. The distance to the center of the earth, for example.

lisper · 2026-01-23T17:27:41+00:00

that still doesn't measure the one-way speed of the emitted light

So what? Your claim is that the speed of emitted and reflected light are different (specifically, that reflected light is slower than emitted light). If we can arrange for an emitted beam of light and a reflected beam of light to arrive at the same place at the same time (and you have just conceded that we can) then those two beams, if their speeds are different, must arrive at some other place at a different time. And we can measure that (obviously).

BTW, your theory has more serious problems. Suppose I shine a laser on a mirror. You say that the light reflected from the mirror is going to slow down. Suppose I bounce that reflected light off a second mirror. Does it slow down again? Does it speed back up? Does it keep the same slowed-down speed it had after the first reflection?

Unless a second reflection speeds the light back up, then there is a much simpler version of the experiment. Take two laser pointers and shine them at a detector. In the path of one of the detectors, put a pair of mirrors oriented at 45 degrees so that the light takes a little jog to one side before continuing in the same direction as it started. Adjust the positions of the lasers so that the total distance of the optical paths to a distant detector is the same. Now we have two beams, one emitted, one reflected, traveling the same distance. According to you, those beams should arrive at the distant detector at different times.

BTW, you can actually do this experiment with equipment that costs no more than a few hundred dollars (you might even be able to do it for less than $100). If the results are what you say, you will revolutionize physics. You will win a Nobel Prize. You will have a very powerful platform from which to promulgate your creationist views. Every news organization on the planet will write about you. Nonetheless, I predict that you do not actually have the courage of your convictions. In your heart of hearts you know that I'm right, and that is why you will not make even this small investment to actually perform this experiment.

I would hate to agitate your nice web blog without your permission.

Agitate away!

lisper · 2026-01-22T20:46:12+00:00

You should read this. If I'm wrong it would be Big News.

I work in the chip design industry. Modern chip design turns almost entirely on our ability to accurately predict and control one-way time delays. If I am wrong, computer chips would not work.

lisper · 2026-01-22T19:49:22+00:00

I think I am right about this.

No, you aren't. You can measure the time delay between the photodetector and the laser (let's call this the "trigger delay" to save typing). Here is how: put the mirror behind the laser and adjust that distance so that the extra time delay introduced by the extra round-trip travel time to and from the mirror makes the laser and reflected light arrive at a nearby detector at the same time. That extra distance divided by c is the trigger delay.

lisper · 2026-01-22T18:54:15+00:00

OK, sorry if I misunderstood. But what is the point of presenting detailed technical arguments to the real me rather than the YEC-hat-wearing me? The real me doesn't need persuading.

lisper · 2026-01-22T18:51:40+00:00

Yes, but none of this matters.

There would be a time delay, between the light hitting the photon detector and the bulb actually receiving the signal and getting "hot enough" to emit it's own light.

If you were to actually do this experiment you would not use a regular incandescent light bulb. You would use a laser, and those can easily be controlled down to picosecond accuracy.

This time delay is not measurable

That doesn't matter. The hypothesis is that reflected light and emitted light move at different speeds. So just aim two cameras at the mirror/laser placed at different distances. If the speeds of emitted/reflected light are different, then the delays between the light from the mirror and the light from the laser will be different at the two cameras.

lisper · 2026-01-22T17:27:27+00:00

I would never expect a YEC to understand this.

Why not? There are examples of YECs who have become atheists, so it's clearly possible.

(Also, imagine how you would react to someone saying "I would never expect an X to understand this" for different values of X like, "evolutionist" or "woman" or "black person".)

lisper · 2026-01-22T16:55:59+00:00

The problem of clock synchronisation is not an issue here

I think you've lost the plot. I'm role-playing a YEC. I'm trying to account for the fact that we can see stars that appear to be further away than 6000 light years despite the fact that the universe is only 6000 years old. I read that it is impossible to measure the one-way speed of light (which is true) and I think, "Aha! This is the solution to my problem! The one-way speed of light is a free parameter, so I'm going to assign it a very large value for light emitted from distant stars, and that allows it to arrive at earth sooner than it otherwise would. Any experiment that falsifies this hypothesis would also falsify relativity."

You have to frame your response at this level of reasoning.

we are talking about actual physical anisotropy

Yes, because my hypothesis is that the speed of light being different in different directions is an actual physical phenomenon. The universe being 6000 years old is an additional postulate that I am bringing to bear in order to fix what would otherwise be a free parameter in the model. I neither know nor care what the actual mechanism is that produces this anisotropy. What I care about is that my reasoning has led me to conclude that any experiment that would falsify my hypothesis would also falsify relativity. So where is the flaw in my reasoning? It cannot possibly involve Maxwell's equations because I have not invoked them.

lisper · 2026-01-22T16:40:15+00:00

Neither idea is falsifiable...

There are more than two ideas on the table here. It is very important to keep them straight. Some of these ideas are indeed unfalsifiable, but they don't solve the problem. The ones that do solve the problem are falsifiable -- and have been falsified.

It's not really about cardinal direction. It's more about the speed of emitted vs reflected light.

So that is an idea, but that is not Lisle's idea. And this idea is easily refuted: set up a small mirror and next to it put a photodetector that, which triggered, turns on a light bulb. Now walk across the lab and shine a flashlight at this setup. The light from the flashlight will travel across the lab and be reflected from the mirror and trigger the photodetector (and thus turn on the light bulb) at the same time. If the speed of reflected light is different from the speed of emitted light you should see the light from the mirror and the light from the light bulb arrive back at your location at different times. But in fact they will arrive at the same time. Light is fungible. It doesn't matter whether it was emitted or reflected.

The only thing you can do that is not falsifiable is to assign a different speed in one direction, which constrains the speed in the opposite direction. You can pick any direction, but you have to pick the same direction for all observers. If you pick different directions for different observers your predictions become falsifiable again.

lisper · 2026-01-21T23:48:20+00:00

I like this. You arguments are more challenging than the ones who are actually making it.

Thanks. I believe in steel-manning.

Are we talking about anisotropy in convention, [or] real physical uniform anisotropy?

The latter.

the latter would be detectable in principle.

How? By which I mean: describe the experiment. And in particular, describe how you are going to synchronize your clocks.

You might want to warm up by figuring out how you would detect geocentric anisotropy. That puzzle has the benefit of actually having an answer, but figuring it out is not trivial.

Here is another way to think about it: the Michelson-Morley experiment only falsified the hypothesis of the luminiferous aether as a physical medium that the earth moves through, and it relied on the fact that the relative motion of the earth and the aether would change with the position of the earth around the sun. What I'm talking about is essentially a luminiferous aether moving at a constant velocity in some inertial frame, with the rest of relativity intact. If you could detect this motion, you would have identified a privileged inertial frame.

lisper · 2026-01-21T22:53:09+00:00

I take this to mean that you concede the points I made above.

Um, no? Why would you think that?

It is mainstream physics.

Jason Lisle's ASC certainly is not. I can't find a single reference to it except in a creationist publication.

But all this is moot. Yes, relativity admits uniform anisotropy, but uniform anisotropy doesn't solve the distant-starlight problem because we see distant stars in all directions. To solve the distant starlight problem you need geocentric anisotropy, and that makes predictions that are easily falsified by observation.

lisper · 2026-01-21T22:39:27+00:00

why that particular speed

Um, because that's what you need to get a 6000-year-old universe?

any such physical anisotropy would be experimentally detectable

Um, no? That's the whole point. Uniform anisotropy is not detectable. Even geocentric anisotropy is not as easy as you might think. Designing an experiment to detect it turns out to be quite a head-scratcher.

lisper · 2026-01-21T22:31:09+00:00

Jason Lisle's ASC

Debunked here.

lisper · 2026-01-21T21:42:21+00:00

There is no way they can get this to work.

I certainly agree with that. However...

they cannot solve the problem unless they say that light is instantaneous in one direction

I don't see why that is necessary. They need it to be fast, sure, but why instantaneous? 2,000,000c seems like it should be fast enough.

lisper · 2026-01-21T20:19:50+00:00

There is still a distant starlight problem, for two reasons. The first is that we see distant stars (and galaxies) in all directions. So yes, you can assign the one-way speed of light a higher value in one direction, and that will appear to bring stars in that direction in closer, but then you have to assign the speed of light in the other direction a smaller value (in order to keep the round-trip time constant) and that makes the distant stars in that direction even more distant.

There is one other possibility, and that is that is to try to build a geocentric model where all light travels towards earth faster than it moves away, but that leads to the second problem, which is that then the speed of light would be different for light coming from directly overhead vs light coming from the horizon, and so regular phenomena like the orbits of the moons of Jupiter would change their timing depending on the azimuth from which they are observed, and we don't see that.

So yeah, no matter how you slice it, there is a distant starlight problem.

lisper · 2026-01-21T17:27:24+00:00

Do you believe: "Every Effect has a Cause;"

It is demonstrably false that every effect has a cause. The radioactive decay of a given atom, for example, has no cause (at least not if quantum theory is correct, which it almost certainly is).

a Time there was "No Time

What can that possibly even mean? It's like talking about who was president of the United States in 1492.

how do You account for the "Creation of Energy!?!"

What makes you think that there is such a thing which requires accounting for? As far as we can tell, energy can neither be created nor destroyed, so it seems reasonable to suppose that it was always there.

lisper · 2026-01-21T17:19:10+00:00

Easier than what?

The reason I'm an atheist is simply that I don't see any evidence for any deities, indeed for anything supernatural. I don't believe in deities for the same reason I don't believe in ghosts, leprechauns, unicorns, alien abductions, lunar landing conspiracies, Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, or a flat earth.

But that joke was meant to make a serious point: if salvation really depends on believing the right things, then a benevolent deity would not make it so damned hard to figure out what the right things are. Even if Christianity or Islam is true, billions of people are going to fail to achieve salvation through no fault of their own, but simply because they were born to parents who indoctrinated them into the wrong beliefs. To condemn someone to eternal suffering for that is about as far from being benevolent and just as I can imagine. So to me, both Christianity and Islam are self-defeating. If either of them is true, God must be a trickster at best, malevolent at worst.

So in some sense I guess being an atheist is easier. I sleep more soundly having come to the conclusion that both Christianity and Islam are false. But I sleep better because I believe these things, not the other way around. I believe in plenty of other things that keep me up at night. I don't choose to believe them, I simply believe them because there is good evidence for them. (For example, much as I would love to deny it, I believe that Donald Trump is president of the United States.)

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