Programmable Gods

I would like to suggest a way to scientifically prove that people should follow God.  By follow God, I mean that people should follow the basic rules and moral principles of the Bible.  And by scientifically prove, I mean the process described in Popper's The Logic of Scientific Discovery which says that a scientific theory should include a description of experiments that qualify to falsify that theory.  A theory that has been subjected to such experiments and not been falsified will, over time, be accepted as true.

I will not say anything about the existence or non-existence of God, both of which are unprovable.  In my personal opinion, this question is irrelevant anyway because what matters is what people do, not what they believe.

Multiplayer video games provide a virtual environment where people can express instincts that are normally suppressed in modern culture.  In particular, men are naturally tribal, so teenage boys enjoy cooperating with each other in a tribal fashion and fighting common enemies.  I believe that this provides a unique opportunity for anthropologists to study human behavior.  Anthropology is currently a soft social science because it does not meet Popper's criteria of a true science.  Anthropology simply studies what is.  It does not conduct controlled experiments.  But multiplayer video games could provide a means for anthropology to construct experiments about social behavior which would make anthropology into a hard science.

For my experiment, I would like a multiplayer video game with programmable gods.  Any player can create a god by programming it.  All gods would be open source, meaning that their source code is public and gods can be copied and modified.  Players can follow/worship any gods they wish.  The gods that a player follows is public information.  A god only has power over those players who follow that god.  The only powers of a god are to observe its followers, to punish its followers, and to "speak" to its followers or speak publicly.  These limitation would be enforced by the functions made available when programming a god.

In this game, players would compete to conquer territory and things of value.  Players would be able to kill each other and steal from each other just as in real life.  Since gods can only really punish players, not help them, you may wonder what good a god is.  The answer is that gods can enforce morality by punishing players who follow them for violating moral rules.

My hypothesis is that in such a game, players would initially have no gods.  Then as gods are created, there would be a period of paganism where players follow several gods based on the gods that their friends follow.  And then as players see which attributes of the various pagan gods work best, they would program monotheistic gods who insist that their followers follow no other gods.  These monotheistic gods would compete until the ideal god is found.  When this ideal god is found, everyone would eventually follow this god which would end the game in a similar way to end-time prophesy in the Bible.  And furthermore, this ideal god would be basically the same as God in the Bible.  If my hypothesis proves correct, what this would show is that following God is the ideal human behavior.

Now let's consider whether such a game is a reasonable representation of reality.  I think it is obvious that gods in the real world are open source.  The nature of gods are public and anyone is free to start a new religion by modifying gods.  The issue of the power of gods is a little more complicated.  Clearly gods have the power to inspire their followers.  Virtually all gods have some kind of expectations regarding the behavior of their followers.  These expectation are usually enforced by the followers themselves in a religious community by punishing violators.  So gods in the real world have the indirect power to punish their followers.  In my game, I simply make this power direct.  I believe this is a reasonable approximation of reality.  I also restrict gods to only having power over their followers because, without an assumption of the existence of supernatural gods, gods cannot affect people who do not follow them.  And I do not believe that the assumption of supernatural gods (whether true or not) is required to prove that people should follow God.

As I said, I would expect the game to end in a similar way to end-time prophesy in the Bible, with everyone following the one true god.  But here there is a basic difference with reality.  As I explained in Human Evolution, empires tend to cause genetic decay which in turn destroys the empire.  Following God tends to lead to success which leads to empire which leads to decay which prevents end-time prophesy.  The game doesn't have this problem, obviously, because it is not played over many generations.  I believe that the only way to actually achieve end-time prophesy in the real world would be to replace empire with some other structure that avoids evolutionary decay, but I don't know what that would be.

Returning to Popper, my criteria for a valid experiment is any game that allows players to form competing groups and program gods as I described.  The details of the game can vary greatly, but I would expect in all cases the result to be the same, namely that a god resembling God in the Bible would eventually take over the world.  This god would have rules that closely resemble the Ten Commandments which would include:

- Do not follow other gods.
- Adhere to some regular ritual like the Sabbath in order to develop self-discipline.
- Do not murder other followers of this god.
- Do not steal from other followers of this god.
- Do not compete for women with other men who follow this god.
- Do not tell lies against followers of this god.
- Avoid gross inequality among followers of this god in order to prevent coveting and jealousy.

Since I am a programmer, I would like to actually conduct this experiment eventually, maybe in a few years.  I emphasized the idea of proving that people should follow God in this post, but such a game would have a lot of other benefits.  It would teach teens to program.  It would force teens to think about morality.  It would teach the relationship between religion and morality.  And I think it would interesting and fun to play.

I would like to put this thread in context.  The original post was copied from here:

http://www.actbiblically.org/Programmable-Gods-tp5000994.html

I wrote this post several months ago.  After writing this, I wrote Making a Difference.  This was a rejection of the idea that scientifically proving anything has any value in modern times.  So even if I could scientifically prove that one should follow God, no one would care. This made me forget about the idea of programmable gods.  In this later article, my point is that the only way to really make a difference is by teaching children.  But since then I have realized that programmable gods may actually be an excellent way to teach children.

The core point of the Bible seems to have been lost in all religions.  This core point is that morality is what really matters.  The prophets repeat this over and over again, yet no religion today pays any attention.  Both Rabbinic and Karaite Judaism are focused on ritual and don't see the big picture.

I am currently reading How the Bible Became a Book: The Textualization of Ancient Israel.  The point of the book seems to be that the use of scrolls and growing literacy were technological changes that the Israelite priests took advantage of by writing down their oral tradition, and this became the Bible.  Certainly religion should take advantage of technological advancements.  The written Bible has enormous value as a means of preserving ancient wisdom.  But books also have limits which can be seen by my previous point.  Readers can simply ignore the primary message of a book and instead follow irrelevant details, which is what Judaism is doing today.

Computers and the internet are as dramatic a change as was writing itself.  What computers can do that books cannot is to force people to take actions, to train them to think in a certain way so that they can understand ideas based on their own actions and experiences.  This is particularly true in video games.  So now my interest in programmable gods isn't to prove anything, but rather to get teens to understand the importance of morality and religion.  It is clear that a book cannot convey this understanding to modern people.  I cannot imagine a better book than the Bible, and if readers of the Bible don't understand this core concept, then this just proves that books are insufficient as a means of explaining morality.  Maybe by using video games, we can take religion to the next level and provide a permanent means to explain the importance of morality to people.

One of my peeves is that I don't feel as if adequate forms of reasoning are taught today.  When I was young or in college I was a liberal.  By the time I came out of law school I was largely set onto the path of being a conservative.  I use these terms loosely of course because they tend to be oversimplified and politicized but I'm sure you guys know what I mean.

My change after going through law school was, more than anything else, that I learned a different method of reasoning by the time I was done.  This is very vague but I think that good forms of reasoning seem to naturally draw people towards the idea of "God" which itself can be very malleable but is also a natural conclusion to draw after a person begins to cognitively organize their view of the universe.  Modern liberal reasoning seems to be built from the ground up to dispense with the suppositions of God, the existence of the soul (a belief that itself changes everything about someone's legal and political beliefs, should they hold it) etc.  The problem with this non-supposition is that it replaces God with a bunch of incorrect suppositions that are meant to direct someone away from selfishness despite the lack of any supernatural element.  I'm writing a book that somewhat addresses all of this.

Regarding proving that God exists/should exist/must rationally exist and the fact that no one would care, what it comes down to is that people are not rational.  I've rationally explained to people that being so liberal that you don't have children is irrational, they agree with me if they have to, it doesn't change what they do.  It must be concluded that they want to be irrational, or that they are fundamentally irrational beings.

I think more than anything else a person needs to know that it's all right to factor "God" into their reasoning because as some people have mused, God is reason.  To deliberately try and avoid God and all conceptions of a "deliberately" ordered universe during your reasoning is basically to try and avoid a characteristic of good reasoning.

You may have noticed that I haven't written much here recently.  This is because I gave up, I feel writing down my thoughts is pointless.  But your post relates to some very basic ideas that I will mention briefly.

Atheists/liberals/secularists are actually religious.  Their religion was founded by Plato and they worship the ideal forms which are basically found by a religious process combined with deductive reasoning.  Inductive reasoning plays no part in this religion, and is rejected.  This is why they are so hostile to tradition, because tradition is based on inductive reasoning (practice X has worked in the past, so let's keep doing it).

The problem is that inductive reasoning is actually the only kind of reasoning that produces truth about reality.  This means that liberals continually move away from reality in their beliefs.  They use deductive reasoning to rationalize whatever they want to believe is true.  Their truths are basically the product of fashion.

The 2 belief systems that are based on inductive reasoning are the Old Testament and science.  If you look at the arguments presented in the Old Testament, they are always based on what happens in reality.  Science uses experiments to produce results from which conclusions can be inductively reached.  It is no accident that science rose primarily from those areas affected by the Puritans who were the most Old Testament oriented Christians in history.

That's enough for now.  I suggest you read this:

http://www.mikraite.org/The-Philosophy-of-Hebrew-Scripture-book-tp8.html

We can discuss more after a Skype Bible reading.

Yeah, that is a lot like what I have been trying to say only much better.  Hopefully I can get into one of your bible readings over Skype :)

Relatedly, they tend to retest things they don't like, over and over again, until the weight of their bloated research begins to resist review and drowns out the original results.  There was a study recently which found that a shocking number of psychological experiments aren't reproducible: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/aug/27/study-delivers-bleak-verdict-on-validity-of-psychology-experiment-results