[Article.Atheism] Free will is a sign of God’s likely inescapable weakness (The “Researcher God” principle)

What follows is an old thought experiment mine, wrt to the theistic God:

1. The job of machine learning researchers is to make smart software that do things that humans are effortlessly good at, like recognizing images.

2. These smart software are loosely inspired by the human brain, so they can learn somewhat like humans do.

3. These researchers, because they are non omniscient, they don’t know how to make the very smart software from scratch. As a result, the smart software that they build have to learn by trial and error/make mistakes in order to get better at doing tasks.

4. In a similar way, if theistic Gods really gave humans free will, humans are using this free will to learn from past mistakes, where humans have actually gotten smarter and smarter as we developed science and technology.

5. This then has a surprising consequence; why would God need to give humans the chance to learn by free will, if theistic God was smart enough to make modern intelligent humans without the need to learn by trial and error?

It implies that if free will is God given, the theistic God is non omniscient/non omnipotent in a similar way to how machine learning researchers are non omniscient, and therefore make smart software that need to learn by trial/error to get better at tasks (Likewise due to the theistic Gods’ limitation, such theistic Gods reasonably at the limit of their knowledge and power, allowed humans free will to learn to become as we are today by trial and error)!!!

The theistic God (if existent) could have made humans as we are now, we have used technology to get where we are, and our life spans and populations are steadily increasing. If God did make us now, we would still have stuff to learn (as we are learning things daily today).

1. The universe has an evolutionary characteristic; the universe is evolving and gaining complexity as entropy is increasing.
2. As such why wouldn’t God initially materialize whichever complexity is desired, rather than generate a universe that evolves to whichever point is intended or “planned”?
3. The answer is reasonably that said theistic God lacked the knowledge of how to immediately create the intended complexity, and so said theistic God created simpler, understandable initial rules, (equipped with “free-will” or the ability to evolve by trial and error beyond said God’s understanding and or power)

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Author:

I am an atheist, casual body builder, and software engineer.