One last thought on all this God/cosmology stuff before moving on.
The crucial moment of our panel discussion occurred when John Haught said that he couldn’t imagine a universe without God. (Without God, the universe couldn’t exist.) It would have been more crucial if I had followed up a bit more, but I didn’t because I suck (and because time was precious).
Believing that something must be true about the world because you can’t imagine otherwise is, five hundred years into the Age of Science, not a recommended strategy for acquiring reliable knowledge. It goes back to the classic conflict of rationalism vs. empiricism. “Rationalism” sounds good — who doesn’t want to be rational? But the idea behind it is that we can reach true conclusions about the world by reason alone. We don’t ever have to leave the comfort of our living room; we can just sit around, sharing some single-malt Scotch and fine cigars, thinking really hard about the universe, and thereby achieve some real understanding. Empiricism, on the other hand, says that we should try to imagine all possible ways the world could be, and then actually go out and look at it to decide which way it really is. Rationalism is traditionally associated with Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza, while empiricism is associated with Locke, Berkeley, and Hume — but of course these categories never quite fit perfectly well.
The lure of rationalism is powerful, and it shows up all over the place. Leibniz proclaimed various ways the world must work, such as the Principle of Sufficient Reason. Lee Smolin uses Leibnizian arguments against string theory. Many people, such as Oxford philosopher Richard Swinburne, feel strongly that the world cannot simply be; there must be a reason for its existence. Paul Davies believes that the laws of physics cannot simply be, and require an explanation. William Lane Craig believes that infinity cannot be realized in Nature. Einstein felt that God did not play dice with the universe. At a less lofty level, people see bad things happen and feel the urge to blame someone.
But the intellectual history of the past five centuries has spoken loud and clear: the dream of rationalism is a false one. The right way to attain knowledge about the universe is ultimately empirical: we formulate all the hypotheses we can, and test them against data. (Making decisions about which hypotheses best explain the data is of course a knotty problem, but that’s for another time.) Broad a priori principles are certainly useful; they can help guide us in the task of formulating and testing hypotheses. But that’s all they do — if we get lazy and start thinking that they grant us true knowledge of the world, we’ve gone off the rails.
A common manifestation of the rationalist temptation is an insistence that a certain state of affairs cannot merely exist; it must be explained, we must find a reason for it. The truth is that, if things are a certain way, there might be a reason for it, but there might not be. Both are hypotheses that should be examined. I personally have a strong feeling that the low entropy of the early universe is an unusual situation that probably has a deeper explanation — it’s a clue pointing towards something we don’t understand about the universe. But I’m careful to distinguish that I don’t know this to be true. It’s perfectly conceivable that the universe simply is that way, and there is no deeper explanation. Ultimately the decision will be made by constructing comprehensive theories and comparing them to data, not by scientists stamping their feet and insisting that a better explanation must be found.
An inquisitive five-year-old might bombard you with an endless series of “Why?” questions. Sometimes you encounter an older version of this five-year-old; someone who, when you say “I have finally formulated a successful unification of all the laws of physics!” will insist on asking “But why is it that way?” If you say “it just is,” they will say “that’s not good enough.” That’s the point at which you are allowed to turn the tables. Just start asking, “Well why isn’t it good enough? Why do I need a deeper level of explanation for how the world is?” Not that it will actually change their attitude, but it can be personally satisfying.
Favorite targets for people insisting on deeper explanations include the existence of the universe itself (as Haught was indicating) and the particular laws of physics we observe (as Davies argues). The proper scientific attitude is to say: well, there may be a deeper explanation, or there may not. Before we go out and actually look at, the universe could very well be many things. It could be a single point. It could be a line or a plane. It could be non-existent. The universe could be a fiber bundle over a Riemannian manifold, an n-dimensional cellular automaton, a trajectory in Hilbert space obeying Schrödinger’s equation, a holographic projection of a conformal field theory, the dream of a disturbed demon, a layered collection of natural and supernatural dimensions, someone’s elaborate computer simulation, or any of a million other things. It could be unique or multiple, meaningful or intrinsically purposeless. It could be brought into existence by something outside itself, or it could be sustained by a distinct being, or it could simply be. If you personally find some of these alternatives unsatisfying, that is a matter for you and your therapist to work out; reality doesn’t care. The way we will find out the truth is not to insist that it must be one way or another; it’s to understand the likely consequences of each possibility, and line them up with what we actually observe.
You can see why a rationalist line of reasoning would be attractive to the theistically inclined. If you have God intervening in the world, you can judge it by science and it’s not a very good theory. If on the other hand God is completely separate from the universe, what’s the point? But if God is a necessary being, certainly existing but not necessarily poking into the operation of the world, you can have your theological cake without it being stolen by scientific party-crashers, if I may mix a metaphor. The problem is, there are no necessary beings. There is only what exists, and we should be open to all the possibilities.
None of this is to say that there is no room for logic or reason in understanding how the world could possibly work. “2+2=4” is a true statement in any possible world, once we specify the definitions of “2” and “+” and “=” and “4.” But that doesn’t mean it’s a true statement about anything that actually happens in the world. The universe might very well have been something where there weren’t two collections of two things to add together, nor sufficient computing power to perform the arithmetical operation. Once we accept some hypotheses about the world (through comparing their predictions to reality), we are allowed to use reason to draw inferences from those hypotheses. (That’s kind of what I do for a living.) But step one in that process is to be open to which sets of hypotheses are actually relevant to the real world.
The temptation of rationalism can be a hard one to resist. We human beings are not blank slates; not only do we come equipped with informal heuristics for making sense of the world we see, but we have strong desires about how the world should operate. Intellectual honesty demands that we put those desires aside, and accept the world for what it actually is, whatever that may turn out to be.
Arun says:
>Leave aside the mention of “Creator” in the sentence below. Even so, it is a sentence that cannot be arrived at by the observation of nature.
>“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Well, the usual standard in experimental psychology for what a subject holds to be self evident is self reporting, so as stated, this sentence can be arrived at by science. But, on a more serious note, it does not benefit me in the least whether I have rights, unless these rights are enforced. Whether the existence of rights is a scientific matter or not (I contend that once you decide what a “right” is, their existence is indeed self-evident, but this is really just semantics) it is definitely an empirical matter whether governments enforce various rights. Strip away the poetic language, and the polemic against divine right kingship, and all Jefferson was really saying is that he and the other signers were refusing to live under a government that did not enforce the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all men. This may not be as poetic as the original statement, but it is every bit as forceful.
Jefferson may have defined these rights into existence, while giving credit to an imagined God, but those who guaranteed that those rights were useful (i.e. enforced) were the continental army, the army of the union, and the rest of what became the US government — a collection of men, and eventually women who were committed to granting the rights promised by the Declaration and explicitly stated in the US constitution (especially amendments 1-10, 13,14,15, and 19.)
Asking ‘why’ isn’t the problem. Answering ‘God’ when you don’t necessarily have a clue, is.
Sean,
I almost laughed out loud reading your post.
I’m all for empiricism. But your newfound respect for empiricism seems to contradict much of the string theory hype that you and others promote. How do you reconcile empiricism while promoting things without empirical support (string theory/multiverse theories etc.) ??
What can we know about the world without looking at it?
What can we understand about what we see without rationalizing it?
The statements “God does not exist” and “There are no such things as a soul or spirit” are not based on scientific empiricism, but rather on a priori assumptions, which, by the way, is rationalization. They cannot be inferred by lack of scientific evidence. They obviate the suggestion that the existence of God and science are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Science is not the search for ultimate truth, but rather the correspondence of theory to result. We should be able to use rationalism and empiricism, along with our intuition and personal experience, to decide for ourselves the ultimate truth of such statements.
Great post!
In my corner of the world (quantum computing theory), the battle between empiricism and rationalism rears its head in debates about the Extended Church-Turing Thesis (ECT): the idea that any physical system can be simulated with only polynomial overhead by a deterministic Turing machine. A surprising number of computer scientists (and even some physicists) have taken the view that, if some phenomenon predicted by current physical theory (like let’s say, oh, a scalable quantum computer) appears to be a counterexample to the ECT, then so much the worse for the phenomenon, since we can know on a priori grounds that the ECT must be true! For years I’ve argued with these people to no avail—pointing out that, even if quantum mechanics turned out to be false, that still wouldn’t logically imply that whatever theory replaced it would satisfy the ECT.
Even so, like (I suppose) almost all mathematicians, I definitely have a soft spot in my heart (or should it be brain?) for rationalism. In particular, I find it entirely plausible that, if we were smart enough, we could figure out almost everything worth knowing while sitting around in our living rooms drinking single-malt Scotch. (Cf. Wheeler’s vision that if and when we discover the ultimate theory of physics, we’ll exclaim, “but how could things have been otherwise?!”) However, I also think that we’re not smart enough—hence the need for observation and experiment.
@Phil:
Here is where I think we part ways:
But it seems to me that if you create something (a universe) from nothing, it would have to involve intention. Also, this universe that is created is governed by laws of physics with certain values of constants that seem “just right” for life. So, these considerations make me think that this something that transcends space and time is some kind of supernatural “intelligence” that transcends space and time and that this being had intention when it created the universe from nothing.
I’d suggest that this is a failure in YOU, not a requirement of creation ex nihilo. You assume that intention is necessary based on your own failure to conceive of any other answer. I’m content with saying, “There’s clearly something about causality we don’t get,” without stuffing a transcendent intelligence in that particular gap.
I do agree that there is something that transcends our notions of space and time, but I believe that’s a limit on our conceptual ability more than anything else. It’s related to the existence of paradox: say, Zeno’s paradoxes. Similarly, we can always get into a “What made those?” regress, no matter what the nature of this transcendence is. We can always ask, “Well, what caused that?” The fact that we eventually come to a point that we can’t answer doesn’t necessitate a God (much less one created in our own image, who has intent and intelligence and does things); it just means that we are fundamentally ignorant about some important aspects of existence. For now.
Samuel Prime wrote: “Didn’t Einstein arrive at his two theories of relativity by an approach similar to rationalism? He hardly had much experimental basis for making the postulates he made in these theories.”
The “rational” consequences of his 1905 false light postulate:
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/barn_pole.html
“These are the props. You own a barn, 40m long, with automatic doors at either end, that can be opened and closed simultaneously by a switch. You also have a pole, 80m long, which of course won’t fit in the barn. Now someone takes the pole and tries to run (at nearly the speed of light) through the barn with the pole horizontal. Special Relativity (SR) says that a moving object is contracted in the direction of motion: this is called the Lorentz Contraction. So, if the pole is set in motion lengthwise, then it will contract in the reference frame of a stationary observer…..So, as the pole passes through the barn, there is an instant when it is completely within the barn. At that instant, you close both doors simultaneously, with your switch. Of course, you open them again pretty quickly, but at least momentarily you had the contracted pole shut up in your barn. The runner emerges from the far door unscathed…..If the doors are kept shut the rod will obviously smash into the barn door at one end. If the door withstands this the leading end of the rod will come to rest in the frame of reference of the stationary observer. There can be no such thing as a rigid rod in relativity so the trailing end will not stop immediately and the rod will be compressed beyond the amount it was Lorentz contracted. If it does not explode under the strain and it is sufficiently elastic it will come to rest and start to spring back to its natural shape but since it is too big for the barn the other end is now going to crash into the back door and the rod will be trapped IN A COMPRESSED STATE inside the barn.”
http://www.quebecscience.qc.ca/Revolutions
Stéphane Durand: “Pour mieux comprendre le phénomène de ralentissement du temps, il est préférable d’aborder un autre phénomène tout aussi paradoxal: la contraction des longueurs. Car la vitesse affecte non seulement l’écoulement du temps, mais aussi la longueur des objets. Ainsi, une fusée en mouvement apparaît plus courte que lorsqu’elle est au repos. Là aussi, plus la vitesse est grande, plus la contraction est importante. Et, comme pour le temps, les effets ne deviennent considérables qu’à des vitesses proches de celle de la lumière. Dans la vie de tous les jours, cette contraction est imperceptible. Cependant, si une fusée de 100 m passait devant nous à une vitesse proche de celle de la lumière, elle pourrait sembler ne mesurer que 50 m, ou même moins. Bien sûr, la question qui vient tout de suite à l’esprit est: «Cette contraction n’est-elle qu’une illusion?» Il semble tout à fait incroyable que le simple mouvement puisse comprimer un objet aussi rigide qu’une fusée. Et pourtant, la contraction est réelle… mais SANS COMPRESSION physique de l’objet! Ainsi, une fusée de 100 m passant à toute vitesse dans un tunnel de 60 m pourrait être entièrement contenue dans ce tunnel pendant une fraction de seconde, durant laquelle il serait possible de fermer des portes aux deux bouts! La fusée est donc réellement plus courte. Pourtant, il n’y a PAS DE COMPRESSION matérielle ou physique de l’engin.”
http://www.parabola.unsw.edu.au/vol35_no1/vol35_no1_2.pdf
Parabola Volume 35, Issue 1 (1999)
LENGTH AND RELATIVITY by John Steele
“The Pole in the Barn Paradox. Now we know about length contraction, we can invent some amusing uses of it. Suppose you want to fit a 20m pole into a 10m barn. If the pole were moving fast enough, then length contraction means it would be short enough. (…) Now comes the paradox. According to your friend who is going to slam the barn doors shut just as the end of the pole goes in, the pole is 10m long, and therefore it fits. However as far as you are concerned, the pole is still 20m long but the barn is now only 5m long: length contraction must work both ways by the first postulate. How can you fit this 20m pole into a 5m barn? This paradox is apparently due to Wolfgang Rindler of the University of Texas at Dallas. Of course the key to this is relativity of simultaneity. Your friend sees the front end of the pole hit the back wall of the barn at the same time as the doors are closed, but you (and the pole) do not see things this way. You are standing still and see a 5m long barn coming towards you at some shockingly high speed. When the back of the barn hits the front of the pole (and takes the front of the pole with it), the back end of the pole must still be at rest. It cannot ‘know’ about the crash at the front, because the shock wave travelling along the pole telling it about the crash travels at some finite speed. The front of the barn has only 15m to go to get to the back of the pole, but the shock wave has to travel the whole length of the pole, namely 20m. The speed of the barn is such that even if this shock wave travelled at the speed of light, it would not get to the back of the pole before the front of the barn did. Hence in both frames of reference, the pole fits inside the barn (and will presumably shatter when the doors are closed).”
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/Hbase/Relativ/bugrivet.html
“The bug-rivet paradox is a variation on the twin paradox and is similar to the pole-barn paradox…..The end of the rivet hits the bottom of the hole before the head of the rivet hits the wall. So it looks like the bug is squashed…..All this is nonsense from the bug’s point of view. The rivet head hits the wall when the rivet end is just 0.35 cm down in the hole! The rivet doesn’t get close to the bug….The paradox is not resolved.”
Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com
@ AJKamper,
“I’d suggest that this is a failure in YOU, not a requirement of creation ex nihilo.”
I thought I’d be treading in dangerous territory by mentioning intention. 🙂
Ok, let me ask you something. What are your requirements of creation ex nihilo?
@Phil:
I don’t think I have any requirements. I’m willing to take the evidence as it comes and see what results. I do think our notions of causality are fundamentally incomplete, and would not be surprised if they remain that way. QM hints at this, of course, but I think our failure is much broader. At any rate, they are sufficiently incomplete that we can’t assume any of the characteristics of whatever it is that transcends time and space based on our notion of causality; without additional evidence, we certainly have no reason to believe in a willed intelligence.
As such, I’m definitely not of the “There is no God” crowd, but rather the “I have no need of that hypothesis” crowd.
@Stuart Brown #14:
[A]t its worst, rationalism completely ignores empiricism: as has regrettably happens in far too often in my field (linguistics) where the Chomskian approach is to rationally deduce how human language ‘must’ work, and then declare actual data ‘epiphenomological’ and simply ignore or deny contradictory observational findings. (It could be added that in his politic writings, too, Chomsky exhibits a tendency to favour his theory-driven narratives over actual, inconvenient events…)
That’s a useful insight! In his political writings, Chomsky’s signature technique is to invent facts and then declare them “uncontroversial” (one of his favorite words). I’d often wondered: how could someone so intelligent consider that sort of anti-empirical bullying okay? If your account is correct, then it suggests a possible explanation: he considers it okay because, when he tried the same thing in linguistics, a large fraction of the field went right along with it.
@Scott #60:
Good point, Scott. I stopped paying attention to Chomsky’s political writings in the 80s when he started denying the Cambodian holocaust, so you could say that he invented the “fact” that the holocaust never occurred! (g)
I sympathize with rationalism, but there are certain things that are simply not knowable a priori.
If we hadn’t done the experiments, there is simply no way a smart theorist in 1880 would have been able to deduce quantum mechanics from classical mechanics. It would have been a illogical and an unjustified extraneous leap. Not only was there no experiment that justified it, there was no obvious physical principle or reason why you would want to add the extra baggage.
Likewise, there is no way anyone could have guessed that the standard model of particle physics was based on the rather arbitrary su(3) * su(2) * u(1) effective Yang Mills theory.
Now, there are certain things that a smart enough theorist could have and should have deduced earlier in physics. For instance, the concept of decoherence could have been discovered in the 1920s, ditto for Bell’s theorem.
In practice, the rationalists and empiricists weren’t all that far apart. All the great rationalists had great reverence for empirical approaches to knowledge and all the great empiricists recognized the necessity of some first principles. On the other hand it’s common to find in introductory Philosophy courses rationalism being highly contrasted with/played off empiricism seemingly as a type of teaching technique to illustrate the differences so perhaps Sean is just trying to make a general point in that same way.
If comes down to “that is the way it is” versus “god is the explanation”, I give up. What is wrong with simply “we don’t know (yet)”?
I’ll echo the cry of “false dichotomy” but add that there are way more variables at work here than just empiricism and rationalism. Something that Haught started going towards without saying explicitly was a relational model of God. It’s an oft ignored model in debates of this sort because it is troublingly non-empirical (kind of, which I’ll elaborate on later) and non-rational, yet it is so painfully obvious because A) it’s how human beings actually engage their world most of the time and B) it’s exactly how the Judeo-Christian tradition has consistently described the nature of God. Basically, it’s the model that God may not be rationally “necessary” or empirically “measurable,” but is nevertheless determined to exist experientially in the same way that one would experience a relationship with another person, creature, or even nature as a whole.
I use the analogy of a romantic relationship not merely because I think it’s the most apt, but also because I think it’s the same category of experience. Empirically, one could measure certain things about a romantic relationship: a hormonal imbalance, certain behavioral changes, a set of social customs, etc. Yet every single one of us knows that this is, at best, an insufficient description for the interior experience of a romantic relationship. What the empiricism is doing is describing physical effects of something that has a proverbial life of its own. It goes so far, but we are also well aware that testimonials of the interior experience are more adequate descriptions (i.e.: poetry). Furthermore that a purely empirical approach will actually prove problematic as a basis for the healthy negotiation of a relationship, if not outright pathological. Yet relationships are messy situations that don’t measure up to rational ideals either. They’re an entirely different class of experience, and one which governs most of our interactions throughout life. AS IT SHOULD BE.
Judeo-Christianity’s emphasis on a personal being active in the universe but only discernable through a personal relationship (participant observation!) is, hook, line and sinker a description of this relational model. Because this is a model I find convincing, it makes the emphasis on rational “necessity” and empirical “evidence” look as outdated as the theological “God of the Gaps” model that those are basically arguing. Using a multidisciplinary approach (which theology, by necessity, must be) I can see God active in history through natural laws. A critical split I make with a lot of critics is that I don’t assume that evidence of temporal lobe activity or whatever disproves God any more than hormonal soups disprove love. If anything, I interpret it to verify the existence of a Deity, insofar as I think those centres of mystical activity are actually reacting to an outside stimulus.
Anyways, I disgress. Given what I said, I don’t think they’re entirely exclusive categories either (one of the things that has convinced me on Christianity specifically is the historic figure of Jesus, and things like the connection to temporal lobe activity helped convince me on religion in general). However, I think by leaving out other categories of experience that we use as much, if not moreso, than rationalism and empiricism, we’re not really engaging the questions at their full depth. And yeah, I do take the rhetorical question “why can’t we just be satisifed with what we can know through science and not ask ‘why’ questions?” to be, for all intents and purposes, a mode of thought control. “Go so far but no further, you’re not allowed because I don’t approve.”
Science and religion: the proposition that science and religion are independent and live in different territories is just unbearable. They are radically related. Science denies what religion asserts: the later asserts that a supernatural level exists that explains the natural, while the former denies the existence of a supernatural level (which therefore can not explain anything of the natural). Voltaire dictum is just rethoric. Only ignorant men need to create a God. To laugh at our ancestors for beeing religious is as insulting to them as is to be religious today. To summarize, either you embrace religious beliefs package, either you embrace scientific package: a religious scientist is as incoherent as a religious person that uses scientific results (for instance in health) which are in contradiction with its religious dogmas.
Rationalism versus empiricism: rationalism (as we understand it today) is just about contradiction: no matter how accurately your theory explains the data (empirism), if it is logically inconsistent, incoherent, if it bears logical contradictions, it is wrong. In our days empirist and rationalist positions are not antagonists but complementary (as others commenters has already pointed). Empirist methodology alone would be impractical (we need the rationalist shortcuts) and intelectually unsatisfactory and rationalism alone is not sufficient: firstly, there are many coherent theories that does not fit the data and secondly, what is worst, there are many incompatible coherent theories that fit current data. To tell appart the right ones we need the “isomorphism” empirical test: not only to proove that the theory explain all known empirical data, but that the theory does not include predictions that does not appear empirically (theoretical hallucinations).
The situation of physics today is that we have two broad theories that explains most empirical data accuratelly but which are inconsistent both considered alone and combined. Most if not all of the proposed QG theories does not pass the isomorphic empirical test (some are clearly a hallucinatory theories). And what is worst none of them ask the legitimate (from an atheist point of view) fundamental question: why this physic and not other conceivable physics ? A definite theory does answer this question
We need both rationalism and empiricism. With “pure reason” alone, the best we can come up with is pure math. But observations are also inherently theory-laden. We need a theoretical model to tell us what to observe, how to observe it, and how to interpret it. Raw experimental data needs to be organized into a coherent theoretical framework, often in ways which aren’t straightforward right away. That’s why science needs both theorists and experimentalists.
We can never talk about or think about things as they actually are, only things as they seem to be. It’s logically possible that the universe doesn’t exist, or that we don’t exist, or that God doesn’t exist. It’s even possible to describe properties of nonexistent entities. So, the question to ask is, do we really exist? We seem to exist, and that might be the best we can say.
@62 Haelfix
“If we hadn’t done the experiments, there is simply no way a smart theorist in 1880 would have been able to deduce quantum mechanics from classical mechanics. It would have been a illogical and an unjustified extraneous leap.”
In retrospect, quantum mechanics is pretty heavily supported even if you only consider experimental data collected prior to 1840:
1800-1805 Dalton is led by empirical investigation and already known gas laws to formulated atomic theory
1824 Carnot publishes Carnot’s theorem, which is equivalent to the second law of thermodynamics
1826 Ampere’s law is discovered
1831 Faraday’s law is discovered
From here the sufficiently clever theorist can figure out that Maxwell’s correction is needed, formulate the second law in terms of entropy, figure out the entropy of the electromagnetic field and the entropy of a gas of atoms, and discover that all the heat should end up in the electromagnetic field at any finite temperature. Big problem — aka the ultraviolet catastrophe
Anyway, if that’s enough clues:
1835 Charles Wheatstone discovers spectral lines
As an afterthought. I think the theoretical hangup that delayed quantum mechanics by 60+ years (aside from the fact that theory is hard) was the tendency to regard chemistry and physics as non-overlapping magesteria.
Assuming that everything you want to know is a logical consequence of axioms you already possess, it may still be the case that you need experience to arrive at important conclusions. The number of derivable implications blows us so fast as the number of initial proposition increases that there may simply not be enough time or computing power to find what you’re looking for by deductive means.
This Abstruse Goose cartoon is extremely relevant to the debate between rationalism and empiricism.
There’s no experimental test from the inside to distinguish between a non-existent universe and an existing universe. For all I know, you can be philosophical zombies in a nonexistent zombie universe. What exactly is existence anyway? Only direct experience can make the difference, but that’s not something which can be detected experimentally. Is there a difference between logical existence and actual existence, whatever the latter really means?
#72, that is delightful. It has to be a variant of preconceptual science, I will name it reconceptual science.
@71
Excellent.
we are moving along the same track
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_completeness#Overview
what is even more interesting in the case of sean is that his mastery of linguistics is still primitive, replacing the word god with some other string of logic doesn’t really resolve the issue.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_problem_for_groups