Several years ago I entertained the theory that the Sun is God. It's a bit Fredkin-esque, but I'd like to repeat it for the purposes of archival.
Ed Fredkin was one of the early eccentrics who conceived of the universe as digital automata. If I'm not mistaken, Stephen Wolfram tread a similar path.
Here's my idea. God is the Sun and everything we think about the God's mysterious ways can be encapsulated in the ways and means that the Sun does what it does. Except we are a bit too primative to understand what the Sun actually does, much less can we divine it's purposes. However thin the theology is, what is less questionable is the matter of physics.
If we can believe in evolution then we should be able to imagine the almost infinite combinations of molecule positions in the middle of a star's fusion. If it is reasonable to think of a star as a gigantic state machine, then at any moment, the position of all of its atoms could have meaning. What if the noise coming through the radio as the static created by the Sun was just a single word we simply do not have the capacity to decode? What if there is a message in that, not for us, but for other stars? Or what if divine intervention could be the work of neutrinos, or sunshine?
I would certainly entertain any proof of the sun being non-sentient, and I can think of a few ways to begin such a proof. When I originally thought of this, I thought of the entire outer layers of the Sun just being a protective shell around an Earth sized intelligence at its core. I'm not sure that it is within our power to disprove that, but then I wouldn't know exactly where to look. Well, actually, I'm too lazy to go disprove what I think to be a very cool idea, at least as cool as faster than light travel. Still, when you look, there are a lot of non-obvious things about the Sun.
The problem with the Sun god theory is that is rather inverts the anthropomorphism of the all powerful God. I mean it would be rather sad to think that what humans want, need and have defined as the mission and purpose of God was of little substance outside of our local volume of Solar System. We want our god to be God of the Universe, but what if he was just a dude in a planet sized reverse Dyson Sphere in the middle of Sol? Worse, what if he were a robot with a bad sense of humor left behind by a bigger robot?
If we found god-like powers in a local god, would we keep looking for a bigger god? I suspect the answer to that is yes, which is part of the twisted sense of humor embedded in human nature. But the point of all this speculation isn't to throw a curveball to our current theology so much as it is to contemplate the awesome compute power of a star-sized state machine. Just wow on that.
Recent Comments