Why everybody should be an atheist
There is one very strong argument against the existence of consciousness (God or an afterlife) beyond time and matter and that is that information IS time and matter. And it’s basically the only argument one needs to debunk belief and religion.
Consciousness is a process in which information is retrieved, stored and processed by a living being that has sensors, a processing unit and storage device that is capable of giving meaning to the processed and stored information ánd is also aware of itself. It also can communicate this information or the result of the processing to other conscious beings by sensory output. But information is always structured in some form, in moleculair structures, in computercode or in words and images. This information is stored in sequence and we need the natural flow of time to decode it.
Without time — and thus a sequence — all information will lose it’s meaning, as if you would throw all characters of a book on the ground. The information is still there but the sequence is gone and thus the meaning lost. Information must be stored in a fixed way and only matter is capable of storing information because it is fixed by nature (at least, for a certain amount of time, ultimately it gets lost over time anyhow).
There is no conceivable way to store information in whatever structured form without matter, and without causality and consequently a natural flow of time there is no meaning in information, code or words (all information we know is sequenced). So if we take away matter, how is information kept and stored? If we take away time, how does information still makes sense? Believers refer to God or angels as ‘energy’ but they have no clue what the are talking about. Energy is made of… tada… massless particles that obey laws of physics in space and time and travel at the speed of light. People claim to have seen ‘beings of light’ but light particles travel at the speed of light and take whatever information they have stored internally(frequency i.e. energy, polarization) with them as they travel — individually — across the universe. There is no way to store retrievable information in a ‘structure of light’, let alone have it sit naturally in a specific location in space and time.
As long as there can be no mechanism proposed how information is stored and kept without matter and with no ‘logical’ frame in which causality is embedded (other than time) in which this information is processed, it is safe to say there is no God or afterlife.
