Knowing God Through Man
I was reading a TED book called The Laws of Medicine, by Siddhartha Mukherjee, when I came across a theorem by Thomas Bayes that piqued my interest:
There is no absolute knowledge; there is only conditional knowledge.
Most of Bayes’ mathematical compatriots were concerned with problems of pure statistics… Bayes, instead, was concerned with a converse conundrum — the problem of knowledge acquisition from observed realities.
Perhaps the most striking illustration of Bayes’ theorem comes from a riddle that a mathematics teacher that I knew would pose to his students on the first day of their class. Suppose, he would ask, you go to a roadside fair and meet a man tossing coins. The first toss lands “heads”. So does the second. And the third, fourth… and so forth, for twelve straight tosses. What are the chances that the next toss will land “heads”? Most of the students in the class would nod knowingly and say: 50 percent. But even a child knows the real answer: it’s the coin that is rigged. Pure statistical reasoning cannot tell you the answer to the question — but common sense does.
Standard probability theory asks us to predict consequences from abstract knowledge: Knowing God’s vision, what can you predict about Man? But Bayes’ theorem takes the more pragmatic and humble approach to inference. It is based on real, observable knowledge –
Knowing Man’s world, Bayes asks, what can you guess about the mind of God?
In the standard Christian definition, God is an omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent being (supposedly without gender, but commonly referred to as male) whose nature is the epitome of Good. He is the Creator, whom all living beings serve, and he cares for each of his creations. The primary explanation for the existence of evil in the world is the Devil, who is the antithesis to God, and relentlessly tests Man, tempting him into the path of evil (I use ‘man’ here to stick to classical biblical terminology when describing humankind). Regardless of their quality of life on Earth, those who succumb to Evil will spend an eternity in the merciless flames of Hell.
But if God is good, and we are all his creations, then how do we all have the capacity to be evil? Christianity’s answer: original sin. When Eve bit into the apple of knowledge in the Garden of Eden, she created humanity as we know it today — a race of self-aware beings devoid of ‘innocence’ (innocence here has had many interpretations over the centuries, the most common of which relates to one of the most natural aspects of Creation — reproduction, i.e. sex. But that’s a topic for another time). With this evolution came the innate capacity to be evil.
If we take Bayes’ theorem into account here, the idea of God is abstract knowledge. To understand Him, we must look at a more tangible, practical source of information: Man. With the overwhelming amount of evil that thrives in the world, propagated by our innate inclination towards it, Bayes’ theorem points us to a heretical truth, i.e. God is Evil.
If God were evil, then this would immediately explain the triumph of Evil on Earth. God’s creation, the infinite cosmos, everything exists for the fulfilment of Evil. If we consider Evil to be the driving force on Earth, this would make God’s creation an immense success, with the presence of Evil as a majority being intentional.
However, this worldview does not account for the undeniable presence of Good. Perhaps if the laws of conventional Christianity were followed in reverse, the ‘Devil’, i.e. the opposing force to God, would be a force of Good; original sin here would be our innate capacity to be good.
But this approach has its flaws as well. In both of the above cases we have analysed Man from a polarised perspective, i.e. he is either good or evil. Thus, God is either good or evil based on our observations of Man. However, the objective truth is that Man is both good and evil. Every human on Earth has committed acts of both good and evil — sometimes even simultaneously (for example, there was a time when one could be a ‘good Christian’ and a discriminatory bigot without any questions as to one’s integrity. Even in today’s world there are people who are considered good citizens of strong moral character, who actively persecute certain minorities).
The forces of Good and Evil co-exist in Man. Therefore, by Bayes’ logic, God is neither Good nor Evil, rather, both Good and Evil.
This would explain why there is suffering in the world, why evil can triumph, and the concept of free will (which has remained a grey area in my experience of Christianity, often rapidly skipped over with hasty and ambiguous explanations). With this interpretation, free will allows for Man to choose to be both good and evil without questioning God. It also allows for a more subjective approach to understanding good and evil in different social contexts.
By observing Man as a reflection of his Creator, we see a highly complex God, an entity that is not a single, polarised force, but rather a balanced duality, carefully preserving an intricate cosmos, His Divine Creation.
