The Ontology of Information, and Hard Atheism
by Adam Reed
When Napoleon asked Pierre-Simon Marquis de Laplace why there was no mention of God in Laplace's work, Laplace relied that he didn't "need that hypothesis." Laplace's answer is the canonical statement of "soft atheism." The rational man only believes in what he perceives by the evidence of his senses, or in what he needs to explain the evidence. By this criterion, there is no more need to believe in a God than to believe in the existence of an invisible unicorn looking over one's shoulder.
Laplace's "soft atheism" was the only atheism that could be reasonably asserted in the early 1950s, when Ayn Rand, in the course of writing Atlas Shrugged, began to set down her philosophical system. For a stronger atheism—"hard atheism," the assertion that the existence of a God is not merely unnecessary, but actually impossible—there was no conclusive evidence at the time. If "Objectivism" were simply what Ayn Rand believed and wrote down, "soft atheism" would be the end of it, and that would be that.
But, given what Rand determined about the relation of knowledge to the evidence of the senses, that is not the end of it. All knowledge, even knowledge of philosophy, is ours by induction from the facts we perceive and deduce from our perceptions. With new observations the scope of knowledge grows; the most important fact that Ayn Rand taught us about human knowledge is that there will never be a point at which a man might rightly say, "Stop, there is no additional knowledge to be had any more." Ayn Rand's Objectivism does not contain knowledge compelled by observations that were not available to her in her time, but it does compel the integration of knowledge induced from later discoveries with whatever was known beforehand. There is hardly anything more contrary to Ayn Rand's philosophy, than to deny a fact merely because it was not known in Ayn Rand's time.
In 1948, just about the time Ayn Rand began to realize that she would need to write down an explicit philosophical system, Claude Shannon discovered, and published in the Bell System Technical Journal, a procedure for measuring information. Ayn Rand's eventual link between metaphysics and epistemology hinges on measurement: existence is identity, and the identity of an existent consists of the measurements of its attributes. If information can be measured, then it has measurements; it has identity; it is an existent, as real as existents composed of energy and matter. Identification is knowledge; with Shannon's discovery of methods to measure it, information became a category of what can be identified and known.
One property persistently observed of information is that it never exists without a material substrate of energy or matter. The same melody might exist as sound waves or as radio waves or as electrical currents; as grooves in a phonograph record or as magnetic domains on tape or as laser holes in plastic; as ink on paper or silver chloride on film or as nerve impulses in the brain—but no one ever found information without some kind of matter or energy carrying it. Not that people haven't looked. Using matter to store information across time is expensive, and so is using energy to send information from place to place. Finding ways to do it with less has kept a large fraction of the world's scientists and inventors busy for the last half century, and nothing was as big a prize as finding a way to store or transmit information without any matter or energy at all. If no way to store or communicate information without mattergy was ever found, it was not for lack of trying. If those five decades have taught information scientists anything, it is that information exists but does not exist independently. To get information across space or time, energy or matter are unconditionally indispensable. Information cannot exist without matter or energy for it to exist by means of.
What, then, of the possibility of God?
On the one hand, the concept of a God includes the idea that God is consciously aware. But awareness is necessarily awareness of something, and therefore information identifying that of which one is aware is indispensable for consciousness. On the other hand, the concept of a God includes the ability to exist independently of matter or energy, and at the same time, to exist throughout space and across time. But to get information through space or time requires matter or energy. This is a contradiction, and contradictions do not exist. It is simply not possible for the same entity to be conscious and, simultaneously, independent of matter and energy, because information cannot exist except as attributes of entities composed of energy and matter. Our current knowledge makes the assumption of existence of a God or Gods not merely unnecessary—as in the "soft atheism" of Laplace and Rand—but untenable.
"Soft atheism," then, in view of the new knowledge acquired since the time when Ayn Rand wrote on the subject, is obsolete. We humans now know, in the same sense in which we know anything at all, that an entity with the attributes traditionally ascribed to a God cannot exist in reality. Thanks in part to Ayn Rand's epistemology, current knowledge of the relation of mattergy to information implies "hard atheism"—the positive knowledge that an entity with the attributes traditionally ascribed to a God or Gods cannot exist.
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