Plastic Gods

Douglas Adams Lecture - BoingBoing

Below is my response to a question posed by a friend about this lecture by Douglas Adams in 1998. She recommended that I post it as is so I blame any murkiness or grammatical errors on her.

You have to remember that science in the old days conflated the questions of how and why into one. So while our scientists today focus only on the question of how things happen, the science of the old days attempted to answer why things were a certain way. So the old myths were the science of the day, god is in the rocks and the thunder and whatnot. The philosophers of old, like Aristotle, were also theologians and scientists. That's why most of Western science started with philosophy. But we've separated the questions which is why someone like Heidegger can ask why there is something instead of nothing without worrying too much about the science (physics) behind it. It's looking at information in a different way, not so much how does information move but why the information exists in the first place. If the fundamental element in the universe is information one does have to ask why this kind of information, or any kind of information at all. Moreover, what does nothingness entail, a complete lack of information? Because when we ascribe the quality of nothingness to something we are imparting some form of information. So true nothingness must necessarily have no information whatsoever. We use the term god to refer to something that exists outside of our logical realm, which is why the science of today cannot grapple with the question of whether god exists or not. It's a way of explaining the world in a full and meaningful way, even if it isn't true.