God and BSG - an atheist rant

Television, Movies Games and Books BSG-2003
#1

Right-o, let’s talk about god. Let’s assume he exists. There are two possibilities which flow from this assumption:

  1. God is omnipotent (not omnivorous, as Homer thinks),
  2. God is not omnipotent.

There’s no other choices here: it’s either one or the other. Please, do tell if there is another choice.

OK, let’s go with (1): God is omnipotent.

He knows all. He is everywhere. The laws of the universe do not apply to him. He is infinite. He knows every event which has ever occurred, and every event which will ever occur.

Oops. Hit a roadblock here. If he knows everything which will occur, then what is the value, what is the point of free will for humans? What choice can any human make that is not already foretold and preordained? If god knows what is going to happen with the free will he has given humans, then what is the purpose of anything? We can only do what god already knows we are going to do. BY DEFINITION. That’s what omnipotent means.

Thus, there’s no point in the entire universe. At the very moment of creation, god knows every little thing that is every going to happen, and the whole thing is simply a circus, a charade. Stars form. Stars explode. Planets form. Life develops. People do things. People die. Stars die. Universe grinds to halt. And NOTHING that an omnipotent god doesn’t know right from the start.

Craaaaaap.

(2) Sounds more inviting. But then, it’s not god. Just some alien dude with some superior technology and/or inexplicable powers. And he doesn’t know what’s going to happen, doesn’t know your choices.

But then, what’s the purpose of a god in this case? What does this god explain that purely natural forces cannot? In what way is the weak-god universe better than a no-god universe? If he is not omnipotent, then what is he? A meddler? A Loki? A frakkin’ intergalactic do-gooder?

And how does he decide to interfere with humans? What criteria does he use? Who deserves to get visions, and who does not? And why does he give silly breadcrumb trails, and hints and clues, instead of just saving the peoples he (allegedly) cares for?

Sorry, this bucket is full of holes as well. Neither one makes sense. (And this is correct. Neither do.)

#2

They don’t make sense only in that you’re defining the word “God” in terms of your first condition. Think, instead, of Clarke’s law: any suficiently advanced technology (or, I suppose, life form) is indistinguishable from magic. To us, an advanced being (the Star Child, or Ron Moore, say…) would be as unto a god. But that is not necessarily the case. We could simply be talking about very advanced, very highly evolved, very “tuned in” being(s) here that have little to do with our notions of God or the gods, but which we lack the knowledge or even the basic vocabulary to come to terms with.

Rememember, “he doesn’t like that name.” :wink:

#3

That is an excellent way to put it Armando - I agree totally.

#4

Here’s a more ancient interpretation : God is unknowable. :eek:

#5

I have said it before and I’ll say it again - i don’t understand why we have to project our own personal world view into fiction. The world that RDM created is obviously a made up world - it’s not real. We are not really descendants of the survivors of Galactica…Hera is not really Mitocondrial Eve. It’s a story - and in that story God exists. Doesn’t mean God does or does not exist in our world.

I for one am way more satisfied that they paid off a theme that has run through the entire show - I would have been kind of let down if Baltar’s head six had turned out to be a chip in his brain…would that have made more technical sense? Probably. But I think it’s cool that she really was a messenger from god like she always said she was.

#6

The thing I wonder about is whether the Cylons’ believe in the One True God came from an angel appearing to one of the Cylons even before Caprica Six resurrected and started seeing her Head Baltar.

Oh, and it was awesome meeting you in person! :slight_smile:

#7

See you are still putting limits on God here. You are saying he/she/it/them/----- can only see one defined outcome. You did not add into your argument that God can perhaps sees all outcomes and all times. If he/she/it/them/----- is truly omnipotent then they have no set bounds. Freedom of Choice still exists in an Omnipotent God view. Its only our small minds that prevent us from understanding Omnipotence. Can you imagine seeing every possible event for every possible action that you do let alone for every atom in the universe. Its not possible it would drive you mad. But that the beauty in an Omnipotent God. He/she/it/them/----- could by choice have existences where he/she/it/them/----- will intervene and be an active God yet in existences could be completely hands off. With a truly powerful God everything is possible.

#8

God schmod, i want my monkey-man.

#9

That’s entirely possible - though didn’t Ellen say that they (the final final five) got the idea of the one true God from the centurians? If that is the case I think we might find that the answer to that question will be revealed in Caprica…

It was awesome to meet you too!!! :slight_smile:

#10

I do believe that’s right. And the trailers for Caprica are full of talk of the “one true God.” But it was the Final Five who’d had visions of the “angels.” As far as we know (and, given their propensity for speech, how could we?), the centurions never saw head people.

It would’ve been awesome to have met you, and everyone else. Maybe next year.

#11

How do you know that’s not the name he prefers? :smiley:

#12

I thought the Centurions one true god was the Old Goo Guy. I figure they were experimenting with biological Cylons and created the hybrid who was able to tap into prophesy and thus they saw him as god. However, that was as far as they could take it, and it required the technology of the Final Five to get them to resurrect Cylon consciousness into independent biological entities such as the Significant 7+Daniel…

In the end there really was no substantial difference between the monotheists and polytheists; they were worshiping the same entity…

#13

My take on it all, as an atheist:

IT’S A FRAKKING TV SHOW*.

Like missmuffett, I think it makes better sense in the context of the narrative that they reconciled the themes that they began with.

If someone has that hard of a time dealing with religious content in their fiction, I would question why they watched the show in the first place. The religious themes were there from the start, it would be silly to expect them to just disappear at the conclusion of the show.

  • Srsly. Get over it.
#14

extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

battlestar however, requires only suspension of disbelief.

#15

Precisely.

#16

I’m sure that was meant light-heartedly, but posts that tell everyone to just “Get over it” or dismiss discussion really irk me no matter the nature of the thread. That’s the main reason I quit going to Galactica Sitrep.

#17

Yeah, I’d like to hear everyone’s take.

#18

Amen (no pun intended) sister.

#19

What you’re describing here is more than omnipotence. It also includes omniscience (all-knowing) and omnipresent (everywhere at once)–which is what Christians believe about God, at least according to all of the “official” Christian doctrines I know about, which isn’t an exhaustive list to be sure. (I was raised Catholic, and explored a couple of different Protestant faiths during my first year of college–out of curiosity, purely; I have been an atheist since I was about 13.)

But yeah, there are lots of logical paradoxes that you run into when you assume these 3 properties for a deity. This is the beach that Calvinism runs into, IMO (they’re into predestination, which kind of takes the wind out of the Christian salvation narrative’s sails–no disrespect intended toward any Calvinists out there, it’s just my take on things).

Edit: oooops, forgot to finish my thought. Sorry! It’s been a long day. I had 2 other things to say, actually: I’d have to think about it harder than I have, so I’ll phrase it as a question: is it possible to posit an omnipotent being that is not also omniscient and omnipresent? And the second thing: I don’t recall whether or not the God of the BSG universe is posited as possessing these three omni-traits.

#20

As soon as you have even one quality be infinite in measure it gets pretty hard to elaborate upon a worldview/physics/metaphysics that’s entirely consistent. Any kind of equation or relationship in which part becomes infinite tends to break things; reminds me of High School and playing Uno with the rule that +2s and +4s were cumulative, sometimes you’d hit a critical threshold where it’d start snowballing and soon someone would have to pick up more cards than there were left in the deck. Anytime there’s some infinite attribute things break easily, you have to have a pretty perfectly engineered set of rules to get away with it.

That’s actually why I think Predestination works pretty well as a theology, it gets around a lot of the problems posed by imagining a deity with omniscience, omnipotence and omnipresence. Really the only logical explanation of how the world would work then is that it would all be predetermined; the Calvinists simplified the system so that the rules about God didn’t break the entire game, but yeah, to do that they had to throw out a lot of what people tend to like about Christianity. Theologically though it’s a lot easier to defend simply because it’s simpler and thus easier to make consistent; if you start throwing in other doctrines like free will it gets much harder to make it work.

I am, actually, fairly certain that at some points Head Six said stuff about God being all-powerful and all-knowing, actually I think some of that was in 33. But of course Head Six (and Head Baltar) are rather unreliable sources, especially since they act in the manner of their respective hosts’ mental conception of what that character is like, despite being nonetheless from an external power. Or, then again, Baltar’s teachings would seem to imply that they’re a manifestation of the divine in each of us, especially considering Baltar’s cut sermon lines from Islanded, which could explain to a degree their unreliability despite their divinity.

Still, although I can justify it, I would have somewhat liked the ambiguity to remain. Well, maybe it couldn’t, I guess, but it’s still unfortunate, the only thing left really ambiguous is something rather irritating, heh. I agree with Roman Sandstorm to a degree, as in personally I don’t think that the idea of an all-knowing, all-powerful God is logical, and a limited God isn’t really God at all, but at least as far as the Head Characters go they do seem to leave the theology/cosmology open enough that there’s at least as much wiggle room as in, say, Unitarianism. So it doesn’t really bug me, or if it does bug me then real religions bug me more and I’d rather go out and try to convince those people that they’re wrong first (and actually I do, heh).

I’ve always enjoyed the idea that in this fictional world

b The Monotheistic worldview is essentially right[/b], and

b The big bad evil robots are the ones that realized this[/b]

which strikes me as for one an interesting thought experiment (and hey, even if having religion being true is straying away from Science Fiction, on the flipside, playing out though-provoking scenarios is Sci-Fi in a nutshell), and for two being a logical way of playing out that conception. After all, in a universe where there is a God, wouldn’t machines who have tremendously advanced intelligences and the abilities to analyse the world far better than human beings be the ones to notice this? So I enjoy this even if I roll my eyes a bit at times.

Oh One True God I wrote a lot of text.