the tao passes the turing test

Some time ago, I came across an interesting reframing of the whole question of God's existence:

There are many people out there who consider themselves to be atheists and they would claim to disbelieve in the existence of"God". But do you ever come across people who call themselves A-Tao-ists? I doubt it. It doesn't really make sense to ask whether the Tao exists or doesn't exists. There is some reason for why there is Something instead of Nothing. There is some reason for why there is Order instead of Chaos. It exists. Whether you call it Tao, Allah, the Absolute, the Ultimate Reality, Jah, or Fred. It's there. The real question is: what is it like?

And given the fact that most earthlings believe in some form of personal deity, it seems fairly clear that this reality, this entity, passes the Turing test. (The concept of the Turing test comes out of computer science, where researchers struggled to define what does it mean to say that a machine is "intelligent". And to put it very, very, simply, the suggestion is that something is *defined* to be intelligent if when you talk to it, you feel that an intelligent being is "talking back".)

So based on the evidence of human religious experience, it is pretty clear that most people do have this sense. We don't have to delve into God's "neurology" and insist that he has a physical human brain with lobes and hemispheres, or that his "anger" is like our "anger" or that his "mercy" is like our "mercy". Far from it. The Quran, at least, is clear that the Creator is unlike the creation. Allah is so amazingly Amazing that he beggars human language. Our words can't touch him.

But nevertheless, that doesn't preclude us understanding our own dependence on a Higher Power and expressing that awareness in the form of love, devotion and awe. Personal language is meaningful, not because God needs our words or feelings, but because we need express them, for our own sakes.

The farmer needs to understand his survial depends on the soil and the rain. The sailor needs to know his life is in the hands of the sea and the wind. And we need to cultivate a similar kind of gratitude and respect for God. Not in order to curry favor by stroking the divine ego, but because we need to keep our own in check. In earlier times, this knowledge might have been maintained by sacrifices to nature spirits or other creatures, and modern-man might view such practices as superstition, but from another point of view they are grounded in an uncompromsing absolute realism.