The God Riddle

Marcus Aurelius is often credited with the most succinct evaluation of divine wrath and human existence:

Live a good life. If there are Gods and they are just, then They will not care about how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you lived by. If there are Gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship Them. If there are no Gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones. I am not afraid.

It s a very neat and tidy philosophy. It does not claim or deny the existence of deities. It simply removes them as the motivating force for being a decent human. Nearly every organized religion has some framework of acceptable and holy behavior that adherents attempt to emulate. For the most part, religions tell us not to victimize others. That's not really a bad plan or even difficult to follow.

The Judeo-Christian tradition often talks about invoking God's wrath. This ranges from heavenly fireballs to floods to bears eating children. The Lord, your God, is a jealous God. Fearing Him is a sure way to make sure we don't misstep and anger him.

The world is currently struggling with the idea that God is a discrete entity. The religious insist that He is, even though there is no scientifically qualified evidence to the fact. Atheists believe that He is not, but have no evidence either. The atheist movement is growing, and will likely continue to grow as knowledge becomes more easily disseminated by the internet. The biggest detriment to the creationist slant is that scientists are continually proving the biblical narrative to be largely inaccurate. Given enough time and learning, God will lose.

God will lose because we regard Him contextually. He, to us, is a conscious being. He knows all. He sees all. He had a plan for everyone and everything. We have our own consciousness and agency. God, therefore, must as well. That is all we can grasp.

Science is pretty uniformly on board with the Big Bang Theory. The Red Shift is clear cut evidence of an expanding universe. A universe in the process of expansion is bigger now than when I began writing this sentence. That said, go far enough back into history and it is a foregone conclusion that the universe was very small indeed. It may be correct to say that all matter was condensed into an infinitely small space, otherwise called a singularity.

That singularity, as mentioned, contained every atom of every galaxy. You, me, the people on the highway this morning commuting to work, this computer on which I type, and the electricity running it once occupied the same space. In that state, time had no meaning. Time and space are two axes of the same plane. One does not exist without the other. Thus, the singularity of all that the universe would become existed without time or dimension. It was both infinite and without form at the same time.

Within that singularity was also contained every possibility, every conscious being (or soul, if you wish) that could ever exist, and all knowledge that could be accumulated. Every thought that could be had, choice that could be made was first part of the singularity. And of that limitless potential and understanding, we were scattered into the existence we know now, to take what form we would. The singularity had been the giver of life, the bringer of death, and omnipotent over all that could exist.

What if... just what if the singularity was God.

While the narrative that we've become familiar with through religious tradition typically includes conscious and deliberate design, it can neither be proved nor disproved that the singularity possessed thought. The narrative may only have been a fabrication to explain existence to ourselves, but it is not in conflict with this possibility.

It also allows for atheism. Presupposing that there is sentient life elsewhere in the universe, it could easily be surmised that they are not Christians. Neither are they any of the other 4,200 other religions in the world, if they are religious at all. The singularity ceased to be when it gave birth to all that we know now. It could not bring us into being without destroying itself. The Alpha and the Omega are no more.

It's an intriguing thought. At least it is to me...

The leap isn't even a difficult one to make. Creation myths usually include one all powerful, or all encompassing deity. The singularity fits that role as being all powerful (containing all the energy in the universe) and all knowing (aforementioned aggregate of all information). The all powerful was simply the most powerful creative force. None of the singularity's offspring will ever be as powerful as it was. And only as the singularity could the repository for all knowledge be in one place; a feat which the offspring can never achieve.

As corporeal entities, we are blessed with inherent limitations. We ourselves are a conglomeration of energy, information, and mass that was once part of the singularity. There is nothing greater than the singularity to which we can aspire. Doesn't that meet the definition of "God"?

Chronic[les]: The Drugged Driving Fallacy

An immediate and enthusiastic cry from the anti-marijuana camp when states began to legalize recreational weed was that we would be waylaid with scores of Driving Under the Influence of Drugs (DUID) arrests and/or accidents. People correlated the availability of legal weed with an expected uptick in DUIDs, and that's not an unreasonable conclusion to draw. However, much of our legislation is based upon what we think will occur rather than actual history. Legislators, from any perspective, are struggling to keep up with, and define, the problem of the DUID.

CNN has published another riveting article on the evolution of marijuana culture in the United States, this time citing a published study that examines the relationship between fatal accidents and drug intoxication. So here are the brass tax, as it were.

Page 7 of the report (press release) has an infographic that breaks things down rather succinctly:

• 57% of fatally injured drivers were tested for drugs
• 34.3% of those tested were positive for drugs listed in the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS), which includes marijuana
• 35.6% of those who tested positive for FARS listed drugs were positive for marijuana
• Reporting is based on the results of blood tests taken after fatalities occurred

It's worth it to do a little math with those numbers. Lets suppose that 57% testing is a good cross section of fatalities to examine. 12.2% of the population who were involved in a fatal car accident were positive for marijuana use. This is also consistent with the report's findings with respect to positive drug tests conducted because of sobriety check points. Were any of the drivers high at the time, though? Actually... impossible to tell.

This is the problem the states have with defining DUID. Testing positive for THC (psychoactive chemical in weed) only speaks to the presence of the drug. It is not conclusive of intoxication, proximity of use to the time of the accident, or causative relationship. The study is conspicuously silent on the issue of alcohol intoxication coexisting with suspected drug intoxication. Because the half life of THC in the blood stream is between four and twelve hours, there is an exceptional window in which to label a person as "impaired" when they may in fact have been well beyond any intoxicating effects.

Alcohol, on the other hand, metabolizes at a predictable rate with predictable effects on driving abilities. Any given person at a given Blood Alcohol Content (BAC) will have predictable symptoms. It can also be calculated how quickly a person will be over those symptoms, so even if a blood test occurs well after an event, determining BAC at the time is simple middle-school math.

The NHTSA, who performed this study, has a remarkable amount to say which was not included in the linked press release. Consider the following:

• 23,000 vehicle fatalities in 2015
• 17,000 involved the death of the driver
• 6,400 drivers had a BAC over .08%

If you whipped out the calculator, you will see that 36% of drivers killed in car accidents were drunk at the time. That number could easily encompass the 12.2% of drivers who tested positive for marijuana, but for whom alcohol involvement is not identified. Considering a Gallup poll that identifies 13% of the population to be current pot users, that number is statistically below mean. Not worth noting.

The NHTSA study quite clearly quantifies the risk of cannabis-only related crashes as "slight." Complimenting that is a 2012 study by Rune Elvik, Risk of Road Accident Associated With the Use of Drugs. Elvik found that the ratio of fatal accidents occurring among cannabis users was 1.31:1. That's practically an even chance. Alcohol, by comparison, is at least a 3:1 ratio in the best performing demographics (age 35 and above), and as high as 14:1 among teens.

The repeated conclusion is that marijuana intoxication does not present a significant risk to driver safety. It's groundless to claim otherwise. The scientific data just doesn't support the assertion that stoned drivers are dying in any significant numbers. That warning cry mentioned at the outset is just without foundation. Was it a good idea to be cautious? Certainly! But it just didn't manifest the way the nay-sayers feared. Advocacy groups, however, rarely have the humility to label themselves as alarmists, let alone wrong.

We are all familiar with the effects of drunk driving. That has been very well studied for decades. The experience we rely on in determining the threat presented to the public happens to be the only tool in the toolbox, unfortunately. And to police who only have a hammer, every driver looks like they need to be nailed.

Of course we all know that it's unwise to operate a car when our senses are affected. We learn to drive with unaltered sensory perceptions. It is only reasonable to conclude that any change to that presents a different risk. However, there are chemical and non-chemical distractions in this world that far eclipse the risks associated with marijuana intoxication.

The risks associated with drunk driving, texting and driving, and teen driving don't prompt us to outlaw booze, cell phones, or young people. Compounding the problem defining intoxication is that the interim demands some kind of stop-gap measure. Driving impaired is negligent to the safety of others, which is deserving of adjudication. But the determination of negligence can only be made by law enforcement who have only the most arbitrary of guidelines. I would personally like to think that if I were subject to legal penalty, my infractions would be very well defined.

Such as it is, the law and good citizenship demands that we do something, even if it's incorrectly scaled.