Mortality Week: Could God Kill Himself?

Could God create a stone so heavy even He couldn’t lift it? How does God know what it is like to learn if He has always known everything? These are just a couple examples of logic busting paradoxes that an idealized deity runs into. I’ve posed these questions to apologists who explain them away as illogical...but that’s kind of the point. If they think God can hold his omnipotent title while being confined by logic, fine. Thinking about mortality this week, I thought of a new question. Could God kill himself?

There is nothing illogical about this question. Suicide is something you or I can do fairly easily (although I don’t recommend you try.) I’ve reached out to a few high-profile apologists with this question. No answers. None. I’ve never gotten such a lack of feedback from these people.* I guess it’s because they know the repercussions of the question.

I’ve come to realize that I may never be able to convince a true believer that God is imaginary, but if this question can convince them that God is either mortal or less-than-omnipotent, I’m at least making some headway.

From my understanding, the biblically accurate answer is that yes, God could kill himself. We are made in his image, so anything we can do, he should be able to accomplish. A theist might argue that God can’t sin and suicide is a sin. To this I say that He clearly sins in the bible by wiping out masses of people on more than one occasion. The theist would then either have to grant me that God sins or take the stance that anything God does is inherently not a sin, which makes suicide not a sin if and when God commits it. This isn’t a question of whether God would commit suicide, it is a question if He could.

Any theists who would like to weight in on this, please do so in the comments or by email or on Twitter or by...carrier pigeon? Anything, just show me how I’m wrong. Until then, let’s just agree that your God ain’t what He used to be.

Upon further Googling, I realize that I'm not the first to ponder this question--even though I arrived at it organically. The only answers out there from the theist perspective I have already covered or fall under the "puny humans can't comprehend God" category. These same people then go on to explain all about God...paradoxes within paradoxes.

Mortality Week: You Know Why.

Mortality Week: Multilife

Quantum physics has given the idea of the multiverse nonfiction cred. If you want to know exactly how the multiverse seems reasonable, I suggest you do a lot of reading. Quantum physics is hard, counter-intuitive, and can only be put in layman’s terms with thought experiments that are more approximations than accuracies. As I understand it, the most fundamental particles that make up atoms behave probabilistically. We can only assign odds as to where they are and where they are going. In fact, as we become more accurate in locating them we become less accurate in their movement and vice versa. It’s called the Uncertainty Principle. One way of explaining how, say, a single particle can interact with itself to form a wave function, is by saying that the particle takes every possible path to it’s destination. The particle may end up in this spot or that, but given the multiverse, it ends up in every spot. Get it? Neither do I.

For the sake of argument, let’s say that the multiverse is true. This makes every possible universe true. This still doesn’t allow for the supernatural because every universe is bound by it’s physical laws, even if those laws are tweaked from our own. So while there may not be an Adam and Eve in any of these universes, there are an infinite number of yous living out every possible life that you could lead. This leads back to what I think is the most comforting afterlife that can realistically exist. Essentially it’s natural reincarnation. If the multiverse is true, there will still be a you after you die.

A you isn’t as good as the you, but only because you’ve grown attached to yourself. This is more a comfort of legacy than a continuation of soul. A multiverse makes us both more insignificant in our redundancy and more significant in our abundance. It’s quite a thing to think about.

If this multiverse stuff interests you, check out The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos by my favorite science writer, Brian Greene.

Mortality Week: a Great Quote from a Great Book