I am an atheist, I don’t believe there is a god, but I do believe in a grand purpose. I have always been interested in physics and found it beautiful that all of the complexities in the universe can be expressed in a handful of mathematical laws. I think there is a theory of everything out there somewhere that when unveiled will make everyone’s jaw drop on the floor. I do think this is a form of faith. Not in god, but the nature of the universe has inherent meaning. I have faith in objective truth, objective beauty and objective morality. I will try to somewhat “formalise” my faith. This article will draw upon a few ideas such as game theory and natural selection. Now you might be thinking here we go is another cynical idiot who wants to preach every man is against others, survival of the fittest, etc, etc. But I think these ideas have a bad reputation. Game theory isn’t saying every game is a zero-sum game. It is just a way to analyse how individuals react to incentives and how proper incentives can create cooperative games. Natural selection does not only say the strongest species always survive, it is beautiful tautology that says that the system that survives is the one that is the most sustainable. This article is also heavily inspired by the works of David Deutsch and his book The Beginning of Infinity where he describes the concept of an explanation being a representation of scientific thought.

Beauty

I will define beauty in a universal way. I think beauty is relative but when comparing two items of expression, the one that contains the least amount of extraneous detail is the beautiful. I think the phrase “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” should be changed to “beauty is in the eye of the right beholder”. , might be the most beautiful sight for the mathematically trained, but for others it represents gibberish. Just like that, a picture of some random woman can represent someone you might or might not find attractive, but to her lover, it represents love itself. But all these have one thread in common. They both try to compress vast amounts of ideas, emotions and truths in one simple packet. It presents an idea that unfurls in your mind creating magnificent detail. Beauty simplifies, never complicates. Beauty is the compression of information. The question of faith should be obvious in this one. Does the idea of simplicity cover everyone’s ideas of beauty? For some shouting from top of the hill and over-expressing might be more beautiful. Having a bigger house, a bigger diamond ring and a bigger yacht might be preferred by some people over simpler items. I even find the pyramids, taj-mahal and Empire State Building all beautiful. It is all awe-inspiring, but there is nothing subtle about these items. They express much more in their loud detail than their subtleness. But if the point of its existence is to express grandiosity, then subtlety loses its expressive purpose. If pyramids were miniature, they would lose some detail about the statement of scale the ancient civilisations were trying to express. On the other hand, if it was messy, contained unnecessary colour, random bumps and just dirt then it would fail to be beautiful. To make this even clearer, let’s say there is an artwork. This artwork contains a certain amount of details. Now if it contained detail that was not important at all, then by definition it adds nothing and can only subtract. So this extra detail makes the artwork less beautiful. If it is missing some detail that would add more then the lack of this detail is taking away from its beauty by definition. Now the extra detail might be necessary for some people and others might think it redundant. This is where there is a sense of relativism in beauty. But any one individual will not find redundant detail or the lack of important detail more beautiful than the exact right amount as desired by them. In this sense, beauty is always the simplest. This is what compression is, the act of getting rid of redundancies in information. You can also have lossy compression, where you lose some information. This also is ugly. It is about using the right amount of information to convey what you may want to convey. This is why I mostly reject the idea that it can be beautiful for art to have no inherent meaning and that any interpretation is equally valid. Sure multiple people might have different perspectives or interpretations of a particular artwork, but it has to justified interpretation. If an artwork can be interpreted in any way possible without any justification then it is expressing nothing at all. Beauty has to have some purpose, it has to be saying something.

Truth

The second pillar of my belief is the idea of objective truth. One of the types of truth is mathematical or logical truth. It is arrived at by logical reasoning and given you agree with the presupposition, it can verified with a hundred per cent certainty. Its truthiness is not debatable, you can use a computer to do this by checking each step of the proof sequentially. The other type of truth is empirical truth, or the truth about events and objects in the universe. These truths are about what happened, when it happened, where it happened, why it happened and how it happened. The what, where and when are causal truths and can be verified by recording events or seeing the past’s causal influence on the future. The truth about recorded history is accurate as to who or what instrument is used to record it. Anything beyond recorded history is now getting to the domain of explanatory truth. This brings us to the explanatory truths the whys and hows. The universe generally has observable patterns and we can use the power of explanation to describe those patterns. One way to assess the truthfulness of an explanation is by checking how well it fits with the evidence. But lots of competing theories can fit the evidence equally likely. Suppose we are seeing fallen trees in the forest and we want to explain why? Our theory is that lightning is shooting it down and our opponent is saying a monster is chopping it down. Suppose no one has ever seen the trees fall in person, only seen it after it has fallen. If we have zero to little evidence that supports either of these theories then do they both stand on equal footing? You can judge the effectiveness of an explanation if it can be falsified. If the opponent’s monster is claimed to be invisible and unobservable then it is impossible to falsify. However, if I say lightning is cutting down the trees then I can measure the number of trees that have fallen during a thunderstorm and compare it to the number fallen during other days. And if we see no difference or we see that the trees fall more often on other days then we have effectively falsified this theory. Our opponent’s theory cannot be tested in any manner because it has monster a monster that cannot be proven or disproven. It has a hidden unobservable variable to make it work. It has redundant information, it is less beautiful. The more beautiful theory is always the better theory. Under this metric, the best explanation is just the most beautiful explanation that is waiting to be falsified. So usually the better explanation is the more beautiful one. So does this mean it is the truth? Now where is the question of faith? Firstly how do we know that one of the redundancies we have cut isn’t the truth? We have no way of knowing whether there is in fact a hidden secret monster cutting down trees that might come and go as the lightning strikes. There may be such a thing in reality but it is my faith that says when comparing two explanations that fit the evidence, the simpler one is the truth. If we see the process of finding the ultimate truth as disproving false theories and beautifying our truth with fewer and fewer assumptions then the leftover theory is the most beautiful theory that is impossible to be falsified. I think this is the definition of truth. This a process of natural selection where the fittest explanation is the most truthful one. But our society is complicated we don’t usually select explanations based on truth, we select based on power attainment, cultural attachment, happiness, etc. Let’s even assume we live in a perfect society where we choose to believe explanations that maximise every individual’s well-being. Is this going to be the same as selecting based on truth? And that brings me to another question of faith. I believe the most truth is also the most useful theory. Everyone is always happier when they believe in the truth. We might even argue in the placebo effect, where believing you are taking a life-altering medicine will make you feel better regardless of the fact you might be taking a sugar pill. But is this the only way to make you feel better, by lying to you, by tricking you? I cannot believe that lying to yourself is the only way to be happy, I think there always exists a truth that trumps the lies, in any situation. But this is a statement of faith, not really provably true.

Morality

Morality is next and by far the loosest of my faith. Seeing the people who have power and events around the world is enough to lose my faith. To discuss morality I have to introduce well-being. Well-being is not happiness, it is the measure of an individual’s ability to achieve happiness. Achieving happiness is whole another article. Gaining the ability might be gaining the knowledge, resources, etc. Once you have individual well-being, there is societal well-being. Does everyone have enough resources, do they have the ability to live happily? Given this, if you act on your self-interest then you act to maximise your well-being, if you act altruistically then you act to increase societal well-being. Societal well-being is hard to define, it is not just the sum of everyone’s well-being or even the average, because it fails to adequately account for inequality. It is not just how equal a society is either, because if everyone is equally limited, then we can see that no one can pursue their happiness. It needs to be some combination of both measures. I will come to this in future articles but let us assume that there is a measure that both takes into account the total well-being and the spread of that well-being. This is where game theory comes in. Game theory suggests human beings will act to maximise their well-being. We are programmed this way and given a large enough sample size selfishness is almost inevitable certainty. But if we have a society that provides enough incentives for us to act altruistically then acting selfish could be the exact same as acting altruistically. I think this is a completely cooperative game. I don’t think we are going to get to this ideal society even if it should be the ultimate goal. I will call this endgame goal Peace. I think if you ask 100 people if they ultimately want peace, I think 100 of them will say yes. But there are a few fundamental reasons peace might not happen:

  • Resources: Ultimately individual’s well-being is tied to the amount of resources available to them. Now I am not saying happiness but an individual’s ability to achieve happiness. According to game theory, people will eventually act to maximise their own resources, it is a statistical truth. There are semi-cooperative games where people band together to maximise each other’s resources such as an idea of a Nation, Company, Family or Local Community. But these clusters compete against other clusters.
  • Ideologies: Ideologies are a way of communicating and enforcing agreeable goals in society. Religious ideologies band people together based on religious beliefs, nationalism bands people based on the idea of a shared nation and under capitalism, we are banded together to work in a common company. Ideologies generally have some semi-consistent (being very generous) set of dos and don’ts that are enforced through incentives and punishment. The rewards and punishment can be restriction/distribution of resources or just psychological shame/pride. Now these are the primary restrictions on morality. Depending if you ask a materialist who thinks competition for resources is what is driving the ideologies, or if you ask an idealist then they think it’s the ideology that is taking control of the resources. I don’t think these two can be decoupled. Ideology is a way we form an agreement on the rules of the game and a way for us to ideas to convert raw resources into useful ones. We are limited by the resources that are available to us. If peace is the desired goal at the end then we need to guarantee that agreeable ideologies rule us. Ideologies that are completely verifiable by everyone, and ideologies that are falsifiable through experiments have a mechanism to create agreaability. Ideologies that maximise our access to resources so the lack of resources is never a reason to have wars. If you don’t already see where I am going with this, we should pick ideologies with the same process we pick truth. Truth will set us all free and beauty will guide us.

    Conclusions: TLDR,

    This article is a summary of my faith. And if I was to summarise them in dot points it would be:

  • A is more beautiful than B if it represents more with less. Or in other words simpler is always more beautiful
  • If two ideas both fit the evidence equally likely then the one that is more beautiful and simpler is always closer to the truth.
  • Every idea might be falsified once we see evidence that disproves it. So the idea that survives the longest is the one that is the closest to the truth.
  • Truth is always better for an individual and society than lies. -The only way to reach peace is by having a universal agreement, and the only idea that creates universal agreement is the truth.
  • If we aren’t aiming for peace then we are aiming for extinction. One doesn’t need any extra belief to feel fulfilled in life, they only need to aim towards truth, beauty and peace. A belief in god is not necessary as far as I can tell. I will try to define god and its relevance maybe in a later blog. I think faith is an important part of the human experience and I don’t think religious beliefs are necessarily a bad thing, since they can provide beautiful imagery for beauty, love and peace. But it’s up to you to make sure your beliefs aren’t harming the world and aren’t being used by people in power to spread hatred. I think healthy scepticism should be a core concept of your belief system, whichever you choose. Often skepticism is associated with cynicism but I hope I have provided some ideas here that show that optimism can also be achieved with a healthy skepticism.