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CronoDAS comments on Open Thread: July 2009 - Less Wrong
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As far as I can tell, you are arguing that to you, inviolable physical laws governing the universe are equivalent to what you call "God". If such laws don't exist, neither does God; if they do, they are God. Is this a fair characterization?
If so, here's my question. I also accept that there may be universal physical laws (in fact, I strongly suspect there are). To me, however, they are not God. To me, they would disallow God, by every definition of God I can think of, personal or impersonal. But seeing as we both share a belief in the existence of universal physical laws, why do you see God-nature where I just see nature?
Einstein's belief in God was a belief in something "subtle, intangible and inexplicable" that was a "force beyond anything that we can comprehend"*. If we do some day comprehend that force, surely it would no longer possess any inexplicable "God-nature"... but simply be better information about the universe we happen to inhabit?
*The Diary of a Cosmopolitan, HG Kessler
There’s not much point in defending my beliefs, since my purpose has been to defend those of theists and the link between my beliefs and those of “theists” is not as strong as I thought. Nevertheless, to respond to your question:
An anthropomorphic God is seen as externally manipulating the universe. I think it is natural to ask, if such a God existed and he is omnipotent, why didn’t he make the universe the way he wanted it to be in the first place? It seems to me that not building self-correction into the system would be evidence of an imperfect, if not flawed, design.
I would expect that the universe created by an omnipotent God would be created so perfectly that it would just run itself. When I carry the argument even further, throwing in a bias for mathematics and logic, I would also expect that the universe would contain the rules for it own creation (self-creation), and even its own justification (self-justification). That would be most perfect. It wouldn’t make God obsolete, it would be God. (God as creator.) This is just speculation: what I would expect of a perfect, omnipotent Creator.
Yet, finally, that’s exactly what we have with empiricism: there’s nothing externally manipulating the universe, so the universe is completely self-determined. The answers to the big questions (the why and how of creation and existence) must exist here in the universe, not somewhere else. We can understand the universe by observing what it does.
I guess I never thought the right question was whether God exists or not, but where he exists and how he exists. I think it’s actually meaningless to say he doesn’t exist, and the dominant view here is that it’s meaningless to say that he does exist if he’s not the anthropomorphic, personal God that most people think of. So I’ve made my argument several different ways, not always as clearly and directly as I should have, but I did my best and now I’ll leave the debate to the next theist (or devil's advocate) that comes along.