Draft 1: Disconnected in places.
My objection to religions, as they are practiced, is that they involve establishing an irrational relationship of subordination to a deity or to a priest or master. (Religious art does not fall under this objection, because it does not usually require a serious commitment to subordination.)
The objection rests on two assumptions: that the gods to whom people subordinate themselves are believed to care about them, and that subordination is different from accepting that something exists. Several criticisms can be raised against these assumptions. A creator need not follow human morals toward its creation, any more than we follow the morals of the patterns in Conway’s Game of Life. Many religions have gods who are not perfectly good, all-powerful or all-knowing. Some people believe in a god who should not or cannot be worshipped. If we live in a computer simulation, its programmers might count as gods. Finally, accepting any mind-independent entity, such as numbers or laws of nature, might itself be a form of religious subordination. This post answers these criticisms. The argument rests on five points.
- A definition cannot be proved. For a common word, the definition that matters is the one most of its users share.
- In the common sense of the word, a god need not be perfectly good, all-powerful or all-knowing, but it must care about its creatures in at least one of two ways. It cares providentially if it made or ordered the world in a way that provides for them. It cares responsively if it treats them differently depending on how they act toward it. Care is necessary for divinity, but it is not sufficient.
- Subordination is following the will of another agent. Petitionary prayer, sacrifice and obedience to divine commands are forms of subordination, and they achieve something only if the god cares responsively.
- A powerful being that cares in neither way, such as an indifferent programmer running a simulation, is not a god, and nothing is gained by subordination to it. An entity without agency, such as a number, cannot be the object of subordination at all.
- Religions, as they are practiced, ask for subordination to a god that cares responsively, or to a priest or master, on the basis of claims that lack the evidence such obedience would require. This is what I mean by irrational subordination. I will expand on this below.
1 Definitions
A definition cannot be proved or disproved. It is an agreement about how to use a word, and it can therefore be adopted without argument. A mathematical result or a scientific claim is different. It must be demonstrated, and the number of people who accept it has no bearing on whether it is true.
Since a definition is an agreement, the question for a common word is who is party to the agreement. By “god” and “religion” I mean what most of the people who use those words mean. Anyone may stipulate a different meaning, but a claim made with it is a claim about something else. An unusual definition becomes the relevant one only when a large part of society adopts it. Until then it is a fringe usage, and having some adherents is not enough. In a 2013 poll by Public Policy Polling, 4% of registered voters in the United States endorsed David Icke’s theory that shape-shifting reptilians control the world (Wikipedia). A definition of “god” with a following of that size would still be a fringe usage.
The same applies to definitions proposed by respected thinkers. Section 6 discusses one example.
2 Divinity as care
Most monotheists believe in a benevolent creator, but many gods are not benevolent. What gods have in common is something weaker, which I call care. It takes two forms.
Providential care. The god made or ordered the world in a way that provides for its creatures. The limiting case is the god of strict deism, who designed the world, set its laws in motion and then ceased to intervene. Under such a god, nature runs reliably, and people can work out from it how they ought to live. This is natural law in the moral sense, as distinct from the laws of physics. Few deists held this strict view. Most believed that God still exercised some providence, and some prayed and expected divine rewards and punishments (Britannica; Wikipedia). Even the god of strict deism, however, cares providentially.
Responsive care. The god notices what people do and treats them differently depending on it. This need not mean kindness. A wrathful god who can be appeased by offerings cares responsively, and so does a god who punishes disobedience. A trickster god takes a close interest in humans, even if the interest lies in deceiving them. A god can care responsively without having made or ordered the world.
The gods of the major religious traditions care in at least one of these ways, and most care responsively. No major tradition has a pantheon made up entirely of indifferent gods, who want nothing from humans and give nothing to them. The nearest approach comes from philosophy. Epicurus taught that the gods exist but neither made the world nor take any interest in human affairs. In Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods, the speaker Cotta asks why anyone should worship gods who neither care about humans nor act on their behalf, and what would remain of prayers and vows if the gods did not care. He also reports the view of the philosopher Posidonius that Epicurus abolished the gods while professing to retain them (book 1, sections 115–123; LacusCurtius). The view that an indifferent god is a god in name only therefore goes back more than two thousand years.
Care is necessary for divinity but not sufficient, and power alone does not make something a god. In 2020, Christians made up about 29% of the world’s population and Muslims about 26% (Pew Research Center). If Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Jews and adherents of other religions are counted together as the population of theistic religions, about 72% of the world, then Christians and Muslims make up roughly three-quarters of that population. Both traditions describe powerful created beings that may take an interest in humans but must not be worshipped. The New Testament warns against the worship of angels (Colossians 2:18; Revelation 22:8–9), and the Quran describes the angels disowning those who worshipped them and had in fact served the jinn (34:40–41). A definition of “god” that covers every powerful being therefore departs from the way most theists use the word. What else divinity requires varies between traditions. For monotheists, for example, God is the uncreated creator of everything else. The argument here depends only on care being necessary.
3 Worship and subordination
Subordination, as I use the term, is following the will of another agent: obeying its commands, seeking its favor or avoiding its displeasure. Petitionary prayer, sacrifice and obedience to divine commands are forms of subordination to a god. As ways of relating to a god, they achieve something only if the god cares responsively. There is no point in asking a god for help, offering it something in exchange or keeping its commands for its sake unless it responds to what one does.
These practices are widespread. In a Pew Research Center survey of 35 countries published in 2025, a majority of adults prayed every day in 14 of them, and the figure reached 95% in Indonesia (Pew Research Center). Responsive care is also what allows faith to be used to demand obedience. A priest who says that God wants something done relies on the claim that God cares whether it is done.
The history of religion shows worship following responsive care. Historians of religion use the term deus otiosus for a high god who has withdrawn from the government of the world. The idea is found widely in Africa, Melanesia and South America. Such a god remains a god, as the source of the world and its order, but it has delegated earthly matters to ancestors and nature spirits, who act as intermediaries between it and humans (Britannica). Some Gnostics held that the creator of this world is an ignorant or hostile lesser power. The Valentinian teacher Heracleon told his followers to “worship neither the creation nor the Craftsman, but the Father of Truth” (Wikipedia). In both cases, worship goes to beings that are believed to respond.
Reverence without subordination is possible. Epicurus took part in traditional festivals and sacrifices, but as an expression of admiration for the gods, not as a means of winning their favor, and he expected nothing from them in return (Catherine J. Castner, “Epicurean Hetairai as Dedicants to Healing Deities?”). The deists rejected revelation and accused priests of corrupting religion to protect their own power, which they called priestcraft (Wikipedia). Neither Epicureanism nor deism requires obedience to a priest. Both resemble the appreciation of religious art, which involves admiration without obedience.
4 Powerful beings that do not care
Two examples illustrate a powerful being that cares in neither way.
The Jinn. Suppose that a head sometimes appears inside a whirlwind. If one tries to communicate with it, it stares back. Sometimes it pokes people or does something that affects their quality of life in unpredictable ways. Then it disappears. It did not make the world, and nothing anyone does changes how it treats them. Folklore would call such a being a nature spirit, not a god. Praying to it, sacrificing to it or obeying someone who claims to speak for it would achieve nothing.
The Game of Life. Conway’s Game of Life is a grid of cells that live or die according to a few fixed rules. Simple patterns such as gliders move across the grid, and far more complex patterns are possible. In Winning Ways for Your Mathematical Plays (1982), written with Elwyn Berlekamp and Richard Guy, Conway showed that the Game of Life can contain a universal computer, and Paul Rendell later built a working Turing machine in it (LifeWiki). Suppose that a programmer runs a pattern so complex that part of it behaves like an agent, and that the programmer treats the grid as people ordinarily treat the Game of Life, as an object of study. The simulated agent prays to the creator of its universe, offers sacrifices or tries to reason with it.
In Abstraction as Simulation, minds are physical processes, and that the same high-level structure can be realized by many different physical setups. Given enough space and time, a universal computer can carry out any computation. If the physics of a brain can be computed, the Game of Life can in principle run whatever a brain does. The simulated agent would then be as real as one made of neurons, and its prayers would be real events with real causes. The question is whether anything outside the grid responds to them.
A programmer who treats the grid as an object of study has no reason to respond. The programmer did not set up the grid to provide for the simulated agent, and their main interest would be in discovering the causes of its behavior. They might dismantle it to do so. They can also edit the grid or change its rules at any time.
The power to edit the grid has a further consequence. Abstraction as Simulation also argued that mathematics works because it isolates regularities in physical law, and that calling the laws of nature mathematical means only that they are regular and proportion-preserving. The simulated agent could develop its own mathematics and science in the same way, by abstracting the regularities of the grid’s rules. Those rules are the laws of its world. The hardware running the grid continues to obey its own laws whatever the programmer does, but the programmer can break the grid’s regularities at will. Under such a creator, the laws of the simulated agent’s world are never safe from interference, and its knowledge of them holds only as long as the programmer leaves the grid alone.
This programmer cares less than even the god of strict deism. That god made the world to run reliably and then left it alone. The programmer made the grid for their own purposes and may interfere with it at any time, and so cares for the simulated agent neither providentially nor responsively.
From the simulated agent’s point of view, the grid’s rules and the programmer together amount to indifferent laws of nature with an agent among them that cannot be reasoned with. Ordinary laws of nature differ only in that they cannot decide to interfere. As a source of meaning or consolation, this arrangement offers no more than physics does. Its power resembles that of the Fair Folk, who act on whims and cannot be held to account, more than that of a god.
5 The simulation hypothesis
A creator that treats us as we treat patterns in the Game of Life is therefore not the god of theism. The simulation hypothesis does not change this. The hypothesis states that our universe may be run by someone outside it. That alone implies nothing about whether the simulator cares about us in either way.
Nick Bostrom, whose 2003 paper “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?” is the best-known treatment of the subject, goes further. He compares the people running a simulation to gods: they created the world, they are far more intelligent than its inhabitants, and they can observe everything and interfere even with physical laws. He suggests that simulated people could not rule out being rewarded or punished for their actions, or even surviving death.
Bostrom describes a possibility, however, and offers no evidence for it. Nothing is known about what a simulator would reward or punish, if anything. For every simulator that rewards obedience, one can conceive of another that punishes it, or one that rewards something no one has thought of. This is the “many gods” objection that critics have raised against Pascal’s wager since Diderot (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). Bostrom himself concludes only that everyone might have a self-interested reason to behave ethically. That provides a reason to be good, which we already have, but no reason to obey a priest who claims to know what the simulator wants. Even if the simulation hypothesis is true, then, it gives no reason for religious subordination.
6 Latour on creators and creations
In On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods, Bruno Latour attacks the picture of a creator who fully masters what he makes. He holds that this picture is wrong for gods and humans alike. An engineer does not master his machine, Pasteur did not master his lactic acid ferment, and a programmer does not master his program. Our creations, he argues, are as independent of us as we are of God, and he states that “God is a creature”.
Part of this is correct, and Abstraction as Simulation agrees with it. A high-level pattern has causal regularities of its own. Gliders collide and computations terminate whatever hardware runs them, and the programmer may be unable to predict what the pattern will do. In that sense a program is independent of its maker. Latour’s account should nevertheless be rejected, for three reasons.
It confuses independence of behavior with independence of existence. A pattern’s behavior is explained at its own level, but the pattern exists only as long as something keeps running it. The programmer can stop the grid, and a pattern in the grid cannot stop the programmer. A lack of full control does not make the relationship symmetrical, so the claim that our creations are as independent of us as we are of God does not follow from the examples.
It does not affect the argument of this post. A maker who cannot predict his creation and studies it to see what it does is the programmer of section 4. Latour’s examples describe a maker who need not care in either way, and they give the creation no reason to worship him.
It relies on an unusual definition. For most theists, God is the uncreated creator. Few believers share Latour’s conception of a God who is a creature, so by the standard of section 1 his account concerns something other than what most people mean by God.
None of this implies that Latour should be required to describe himself as irreligious. He identified as a Catholic, attended church and read the Bible devotedly (Wikipedia), and he was entitled to describe himself as he wished. The criticism here concerns only his account.
7 Why the subordination is irrational
Religions, as they are practiced, ask for subordination. Believers are told to obey a god, or a priest, master or scripture that speaks for it. Religions without a creator god can still ask for obedience to a teacher. In Tibetan Buddhist tantra, for example, students are instructed to regard their guru as an awakened Buddha and to follow his instructions wholeheartedly (Wikipedia).
The demand rests on claims that, in my view, the evidence does not support: that the god exists, that it cares how people act and that the priest knows what it wants, or, where there is no god, that the master has insight that justifies obedience. Religions usually ask for these claims to be accepted on faith. The argument does not depend on how faith is defined. It depends only on the claims lacking the evidence that obedience would require. Subordination on that basis is what I call irrational.
(Reminder: Religious art makes no such demand. One can admire a cathedral or listen to a requiem without obeying anyone or believing anything.)
8 Mind-independent entities
A broader criticism holds that accepting any mind-independent entity is a form of religious subordination. On this view, a mathematician who holds that numbers exist independently of human minds, or a physicist who holds that the laws of nature are real, defers to something outside himself in the same way that a believer defers to a god.
The criticism fails because subordination, as defined in section 3, is following the will of another agent, and only an agent has a will to follow. Numbers have no agency. Even mathematical Platonists, who hold that numbers exist independently of minds, regard them as abstract objects that are outside space and time and therefore have no causal effects (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). The number line has no will, so it makes no sense to speak of subordinating oneself to it.
The laws of nature are similar. They limit what people can do without commanding anything, and obedience presupposes that disobedience is possible. No one can disobey the law of gravitation, and no one punishes those who try. The same distinction applies to the programmer of section 4. The programmer is an agent, so subordination to the programmer is possible, but because the programmer is indifferent, it achieves nothing.
Accepting such entities does not require faith either. As section 1 noted, mathematical results are accepted on the basis of proof and scientific claims on the basis of evidence, and both are revised when a proof fails or the evidence changes. Abstraction as Simulation went further and argued that numbers are not Platonic objects at all, but features of physical structure isolated from surrounding detail. On either view, accepting numbers leaves no one to obey.
9 Scope
There are countless forms of theism, and a critic might argue that refuting one of them leaves the others standing. This post does not attempt to refute the forms of theism one by one. It makes a claim about a feature that most forms share, responsive care, and about the subordination that this care is used to justify.
That feature covers most theists. Counting the population of theistic religions as in section 2, Christians, Muslims and Hindus together make up about 97% of it (Pew Research Center). Mainstream practice in all three traditions centers on prayer, offerings and commands addressed to gods who are believed to respond.
There are exceptions. Epicurean piety, described in section 3, reveres what Epicurus called gods without requiring obedience. Deism rejects priestly authority, although whether a deist subordinates himself to God depends on the deist. Other fringe cases may exist. This is why the objection is stated as a claim about religions as they are practiced. Very few claims hold in every possible case, and fewer still if the words in them can be freely redefined.
The way this definition has been chosen determines which actual people and practices the claim concerns. Under the common definition, the objection applies to the religions of the great majority of theists, and to religions built around obedience to a master, because they require irrational subordination.
