Noise is everywhere in the universe, and where we find noise, people will see God. But a careful study of noise reveals there is no supernatural force playing with it. A humorous example is the visions of The Virgin Mary in a pizza (Houston 2007). In fact, there is a whole book dedicated to visions of just Mary (The Star of the Magi). The random events of our world are often attributed to God, even cheese patterns. As mankind’s understanding of nature has improved, fewer and fewer things are left to God. He now remains buried in the noise. There will always be random events, and so there will always be ways to see God if you really need to.
The random events in our universe are often used as proof of God. They seem so mysterious, that many want to believe they are supernatural. The random noise and sporadic events actually provide us with excellent evidence that there is no God manipulating the universe. If you want to see evidence of God, you will see it in random events and the noise in our life. Is this proof of God? Anyone with a basic understanding of logic and statistics can see that random events are not related to anything, much less a God.
In engineering terms, noise is the random background fluctuation of most everything we do or find in nature. Transistors have thermal noise. Engines have vibration noise. LEDs have light noise. If we make a pizza, the distribution of the sauce and cheese will have random fluctuations. Even the best pizza maker cannot spread the ingredients perfectly even. Everything we make or do has some completely random variation. When that one-in-a-million random event happens that cheese pizza looks like a Madonna’s face – that is totally normal. Mathematicians even call the distribution of purely random events the “normal” curve.
And there is another kind of noise. There is the background noise of most every natural process due to the physics of the atom. Tune a car radio between stations on the dial, and you can listen to it. This noise is due to random atomic fluctuations within the wires of you car, creating a small (about 0.000001 volts) noise voltage that you can actually hear. The equation for the average noise voltage is:
Everything that happens in the universe has some random noise component to it. The faithful are taught that this is were God lives, and that is how He manipulates the universe.
So why the physics and mathematics lesson in noise? A few reasons:
I do have a good understand how noise works, and with just a basic understanding of it, you will see how all events people attribute to God are very normal. They are not supernatural. And the actions of random events can in some ways be accurately predicted. For example, flipping a coin is a 50/50 chance of heads or tails, but with 99.99% certainty, we can predict that after one million flips, about 50% of the time it will be heads. If it came up only 10% of the time heads, that would be a miracle and case for God controlling it. But this never happens. Its always 50/50.
We may not be able to predict purely random events, but we can determine their probably outcome. They are “deterministic”. As Morton Tavel says in Contemporary Physics and the Limits of Knowledge: “I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is that many important macroscopic processes previously thought to the random are indeed deterministic. The bad news is that these deterministic processes are unpredictable!”.
The God described in the Bible, the Torah, and the Quran controls the universe. The things he can do are amazing, and the thing he supposedly will do for His believers is equally impressive. When random events occur, if they cause something good to happen, many will quickly point to God’s handiwork. This is not intellectually honest, but does reinforce the faith. As we know, proving the negative statement: “God did not make the event occur” is virtually impossible. Inability to prove God didn’t control the event reinforces the notion that He did control it. And some random events are very very improbable. Cures for certain ailments are almost impossible, so when they happen, it seems a miracle must have happened and is hard to prove otherwise. If the patient lives, “It’s a miracle”.
Look at the random events around us, and you will see the proof that God is not in control. Proving a positive statement is easy, and there are so many positive statements attributed to God, finding God would be easy – if he were there. Remember, the God described in the Bible, the Torah, and the Quran controls the universe. Evidence of this control would be very easy to see and even measure. All we need to do is listen for God in the noise. See if random events aren’t random but show some signs of God. See if God is in control. It is easy to prove a positive statement such as “God is in control”, and if the proof does not exist, intelligent people will take this as good evidence that God is not here.
Look at the evidence of God in the noise. Weather, earthquakes, illness, car accidents, and hard-drive failures. It is easy to determine if God is in control.
Weather is very unpredictable, and filled with random events. Sure, the sun, oceans, terrain and many factors affect it, but it is unpredictable and is one of those things that God is supposed to have a hand in. And when the weather turns bad, the God of all Christians, Jews, and Muslims can protect them from it. Does He?
The God we hear about is a good God and protects his people, loves them, and loves children. As we look around the country and the globe, bad weather happens totally randomly. We don’t see signs of love, compassion, or caring in it. Tornados, floods, wild-fires, deadly cold. These kill mothers, children, believers, and unbelievers alike. And when they strike, no intellectually honest person can say God did a loving job. What a F4 tornado or a Cat 5 hurricane does to people’s lives is horrible, and brings any loving person to tears. We all would have stopped the storm and if we could, would spare the children, women, and men from being crushed, drown, and ripped apart. We mere mortals have such compassion and God is infinitely times more caring. Where is He?
The fact is, God is nowhere to be found. As families huddle in their basements praying to God that he spare them from the tornado, the sad truth is, no one is listening. In fact, tornados kill more Christians than any other religion. Not because God hates Christians, but tornado alley runs right through the Bible belt of America. Why can’t God stop a tornado? Because He isn’t.
Yes, transistors can prove that God does not routinely twiddle with the workings of the universe. If God routinely modified the way the universe works, the computer industry and the semiconductor industry would be destroyed.
Believers in God are sure that he routinely modifies natural events to suit His needs and help His followers. But the only events they ever point to as evidence for God are events that randomly go their way. God is never found in anything that requires precision or has measurable results. Why, because there is no God twiddling with the precision of our universe.
For example an Intel Xeon microprocessor has 1,900,000,000 transistors in it. It typically runs at 2GHz while accessing a couple gigabytes of RAM. So in one hour, the number of times some transistor in a computer will switch on/off or do its job is approximately 136,800,000,000,000,000,000,000. Inside your computer, this on/off switching happens perfectly this many times every hour. And computer chips require their transistor to switch so they can add, subtract, multiply, and divide. These chips can run millions of lines of software code every seconds. Millions of times a second they compute such things as 1+1=2. And if just once, the microprocessor in your computer computed 1+1=3, the computer would crash. If physics of the transistor changed so that they computed 1+1=0, all computers on the planet would crash.
I’ve been a computer engineer for 30 years, and never have I ever heard another engineer or computer executive say they had a production problem due to demons or a devils invading a micro-processor. Computer chips always calculate 1+1=2. If there were a God twiddling with the physics of the universe, he sure must love the semi-conductor industry because computers have been adding 1+1 accurately for years. Sure there are “Bugs”, but these are due to design errors. Humans fix them. When a transistor is fabricated properly, it works amazingly well. The physics behind producing sub-micron transistor circuits that can perform billions of complex operations every second is incredibly complex. And every day, the semiconductor fabs of the world crank-out trillions of transistors that reliably do their job. If the physics of silicon atoms changed even slightly, the factories would quickly go silent. But this never happens. Intel can reliably put almost 2 billion transistors on a IC chip, and be certain the chips will work. Regardless of how their competitors pray to God that their ICs would work better than Intel’s, Intel transistors keep working.
The God most believers trust is supposed to be all around us. He stops accidents from happening. He improve weather. He kills micro-organisms that make us sick. He blesses the activities of his followers. All these actions are noisy random processes. Good and bad random events always occur. But look at a process like semiconductor fabrication. Fabricating a silicon die with billions of transistors requires a precise control of the random aspects of the semiconductors involved, and smart humans have mastered it. If some factory staffed by atheists, or whatever religion you feel is evil, could not make a transistor work, it would show us a God is here. But when it comes to predictable scientific processes, we do not see some companies rewarded and others punished. Atheists can make just as fine of transistors as Christians, Jews, Muslims, and all other religions. When did you ever read an Annual Report of a corporation who reported it failed to meet its production goals because God would not allow their production processes to work? It never happens. Why? We Created God.
Illness
Sickness has long been used as proof that God loves his followers and helps them when they need it. People get sick, then they pray, and they get better. The believers connect these dots, and say it proves God healed them. Televangelists make millions of dollars betting on this. The pray for sick people in their audience, knowing that some of them will get better, and hopefully give them credit for it. For many terrible diseases, its purely random chance whether a person contract it, and lives through it. It is a terribly sad for those who experience the death of a loved on due to a random bad health problem. There is nothing that will comfort them thought it, although many will look to their God for some shred of emotional comfort.
Christians do get healed, so does this prove God is helping them? Well, are God-fearing people healed more often than atheists? No. Does the FDA recommend prayer to a specific God to cure an infection? No. Are God-fearing nations such as Mexico or the Philippines so much more healthier than nations full of Atheists? No. Has God ever cured an amputee who lost both legs? No. Has God ever cured someone whose head was decapitated?
Look at how illness afflicts all people, and why the answers to all the above questions are “No”, and you will see that the random biological fluctuations of our race and population prove that the healing and loving God of the Bible does not exist.
