PART ONE: The George Bailey Paradox HAPPY REFORMATION DAY!
- Modern-Day Mountain Man
- Oct 30
- 16 min read
PART ONE: The George Bailey Paradox: The purpose of this writing project is going to be an attempt to argue and illustrate the importance of a belief in a god or deity in the formation of our view of the universe. Throughout this writing project, we will be taking historical trips into the past and fantasy voyages into the future. We will use historical facts, observations, and viewpoints from the past to predict an outcome a thousand years in the future. The definition of a paradox is a seemingly absurd or self-contradictory statement or proposition that, when investigated or explained, may prove to be well-founded or true. We will certainly be taking a trip into the realm of the absurd. Heidi and I will be delivering content through podcasts, videos, and writing projects in an effort to argue on behalf of the importance of religious beliefs in the formation of “science.”
The causation behind this project is a sentiment that many atheists throughout the recent past have expressed, that religion and science should be two separate entities, with zero connection whatsoever. This would be a concerted effort to completely dismiss organized religion and look directly to science as a religion of its own. Specifically, this project is going to argue a statement that was made by one of the leading mouthpieces of atheists today, actor Ricky Gervais. To be forthright, I really like Mr. Gervais. I think he's very funny. I think his comedy is very witty and he is someone whom I would like to sit down and have a conversation with sometime. The Golden Globes of 2020 that he hosted was one of the best things ever done on television, and without a doubt the most truthful statements ever uttered in the entertainment world. None of this is an attempt to attack Mr. Gervais personally. We are going to make an argument specifically against one of the statements that he said: that if all fiction books and religious materials were destroyed today, along with all of the scientific textbooks, that in a 1,000 years, the religious books and the fiction books would read completely different (or be non-existent), but that the science textbooks would be exactly the same in a 1,000 years as they are today. I completely understand what his argument is here. In fact, I don't totally disagree with the premise of his argument. The universal constants, the natural laws, and the very things that underpin physical laws would look the same to a qualified interpreter in 1,000 years. These are things that have been observed in the past. They are observable in the present. And they will be observable and interpretable in the future. Our argument is going to address whether or not there would even be science textbooks in the future if we woke up tomorrow and no works of fiction, religious texts, or otherwise were to exist. This, of course, is just a thought experiment, as we cannot simply make an entire genre of literature and writing disappear overnight, but make no mistake, that is exactly what atheists would like to have happen. They would love to "unexist" the things they don't agree with. Books are one thing, but look at what happened when this was tried on a large scale in the 20th Century. If Hitler had his way, there would be entire groups of people wiped from existence. Also, he and others like him sure enjoyed burning books. Perhaps the two go hand-in-hand. We are of the solidified belief that if there were no search for the supernatural or otherworldly profound, none of the “science” textbooks would exist in the past, present, or future.
We are going to attempt to do this through something that I am calling the George Bailey Paradox. In the classic Christmas movie, It's a Wonderful Life, we get to see the main protagonist, George Bailey, go through many ups and downs in his life. This leads us to a point where he is literally going to jump off a bridge to change the story of the universe. He makes the wish in a prayer that he would have never even existed. This is, of course, overheard by his guardian angel Clarence, who is trying very hard to earn his wings, and just wants to do right by George. Clarence realizes that if he can give George his wish, that he never existed, he would be able to see how profound and important his life is, and thus may value it for the wonderful gift it is from our Creator. We see this through the lens of all of the people who were directly affected by George’s life. He sees what happens when he wasn't there to save Harry. Harry fell through the ice, and because of that, Harry never became a war hero and saved all of the soldiers, sailors, and airmen that Harry had directly come in contact with. We see what happens when George isn't around in the Bailey Savings & Loan to give money to people to build a community. That is, to stand against the evil robber-baron, Mr. Potter. This, in turn, allows the town to go downhill and allows things to be introduced into the community, like gambling and prostitution. Most importantly, we see what happens with the love of his life, Mary. Mary and George never got married. This means, of course, that they never have a family, which was the greatest gift of all and made George the richest man in the world. When George realizes what happens without him, he says a prayer, saying he wants to live again, even if it means facing all of the things that were bad in his life.
If there is someone who understands the sentiment of what George Bailey was doing, it would be me. Over these past 5 years, I have had many days when I have wished that I had never existed. Now, dear reader, don't take this statement the wrong way. I am not somebody who has ever thought of hurting myself or doing something along those lines. However, I have certainly wondered at times over the past five years what God's great plan is, or if I am even a part of any plan God has designed or pre-destined for me. I have also wondered many days whether or not my being around has made things more difficult for other people. In other words, I've wanted to George Bailey myself into non-existence. These past five years have been indescribably tough. My wife, I, and my family have had to deal with a lot of adversity that I never would have thought could enter our lives. We have had terrible things happen to us financially. To put it simply, we are broke, busted, nada, however you write it or say it, this life (at least financially) has not remotely turned out the way I thought God might have planned for us. We have had baseless accusations made against our family from people who hate how our family exists. We have found ourselves living in a place that, before 2020, I would have NEVER intentionally moved to. But just like Clarence, my wife has pointed out many times that when I say something like I wish I had never been born or that I existed, or I make a wish along those lines, I am making a very foolish wish indeed. I have said things like these: I wish I had never left law enforcement, or I had never gone to work at the camp where my wife and I met. I am not going to lie or not be 100% honest with you as a reader, because truthfully, I have nothing left to lose at this point and time but my honesty, but I have gone to bed many times over the past five years and prayed that I didn’t wake up. Most of this sentiment is directly from embarrassment, especially financially (just like George). My entire life, people have told me how smart and intelligent I am, which makes it even tougher and more embarrassing knowing the countless stupid decisions I have made over and over again to find myself in the dire straits I have found myself in over the past five years.
Before you get too concerned, dear reader, please know that as of this writing, I no longer feel this way or think such awful negative thoughts. It has taken many times of my wife reminding me of our wonderful marriage and our three absolutely wonderful children for this to get through my thick, ignorant skull. In the past month, my entire outlook has changed. I am now so far down the hole financially that I can no longer see the sunlight, but this has helped me to realize that money was really never important anyway. It is really about the love of my family and how I live my life. In that respect, I am the richest person I know. Also, If I would have never been broken down financially, or had my business fail in 2020, I would have never been introduced to a community that I think has been very positively served by my wife and myself (and certainly our children), through the passion for education that we have provided in classrooms, through sports and through our other community interactions, I understand it. I get it now. The world needs all of us. It is nothing but pride or foolish selfishness if we try to George Bailey ourselves or anything else out of existence. Everything exists for a purpose, a well-ordered, designed purpose. Doing this project with Heidi (and the other members of my family) has given me a new confidence and a sense of hope and purpose that all is not lost. Perhaps our story is just beginning.
What does that have to do with this writing project, you may be asking? For Mr. Gervais to make a statement that if we were to destroy or get rid of (make disappear) all of the fiction books, all of the fantasy books, all of the religious texts and iconography, and all of the scientific textbooks today. Then come back and take a look 1,000 years in the future, only all of the scientific textbooks would be exactly the same. That is suggesting that none of the religious books would be the same or possibly even exist. This is a very bold statement indeed, and as we are speaking of “science,” it begs the question, does it stand up to any sort of critical thought or rigorous scrutiny? First and foremost, this is an incredibly arrogant and ignorant statement. This statement does not acknowledge the greatness of the men and women who came before us and the incredible contributions to our current science textbooks that we have today. You see, dear readers, if we discount all of the interactions that people have had with scientific material, because they were looking for order in the universe, we would not have any of these textbooks today. Also, if we don't have any of the textbooks today, we couldn't destroy them today. To make a statement today that in the future they would look the same is completely neglecting the consideration of whether or not they would exist in the first place.
Our goal during this project is to show that with religion, the world would be a fundamentally different place, and certainly not for the better. Think of the dystopian future George Bailey saw when the old miser Mr. Potter created his world without George’s goodness and love.
I have played a game with my students for many years when they ask why they have to learn mathematics, or more specifically, when they will ever use “this” math in life, where I ask them to name one thing or anything that cannot be tied directly back to mathematics. I am going to let you in on a little secret: it cannot be done. We could make the same argument of sort to Mr. Gervais that without religion and all that came before him that were religious in any capacity or religion, he wouldn’t have a platform to speak from, because there wouldn’t be an entertainment industry that would pay people a king’s ransom to tell jokes or simply make people laugh. Now, don’t get me wrong, atheism, especially since the mid nineteenth century has always had a mouthpiece or vocal person that will tell anyone who will listen just how evil and vile it is for religions to exist, and more importantly how the imposition of religion makes it impossible to perform high level “science,” or advance “science” any further because of the belief in what atheists define as fairy tales. Darwin had Huxley, the scientific community had Hitchens, and has Dawkins, and the entertainment industry has Gervais.
I am going to be very clear at this point and time for those of you who will follow along with this project that I will more often than not refer to gods (lowercase g) or a god, or perhaps even a deity by another name. I will not often refer directly to the God of the Bible, per se. The reason why I'm doing this is because I'm trying to make an argument that long before the Hebrew Bible, which of course has direct ties to Islam and Christianity, people were always looking for order and substance in the universe. The ancient pantheon of Greek gods also influenced the very underpinnings of knowledge (science) and mathematics. All ancient civilizations used religion to find order and structure, and based their scientific and mathematical text on this knowledge. Yes, dear readers, what we are proposing is that we cannot have science texts without having a belief in a deity. Maybe even what I'm proposing is that Mr. Gervais, who has said, like many other famous atheists in the past, that it's not their job to prove the nonexistence of God, it's the religious person’s job to prove the existence of their god. Perhaps we could even use this as some tangible example or argument (maybe even proof?) of the importance and existence of a god. In our universe, if nothing can exist without order, and order can only come from the observance of a god, then to me, that is showing the existence of a god. Now, I fully understand that, logically speaking, there are some holes in this argument. I am not seeking perfection from this standpoint, but I am more than willing to poke holes in someone else’s argument when it is just as weak. For Mr. Gervais to say that only science textbooks would remain unchanged is suggesting that the current textbooks are even 100% factual information today. They are not.
First, we have to be very clear, as I have been trying to do in some of my previous writing projects, that when we say science (in Latin Scientia), we are just speaking of a body of knowledge. To say that science says anything is a huge fallacy in and of itself. To say that a science textbook says anything is also a huge fallacy. Science textbooks don't say anything; the people who write the science textbooks are the ones to say something. This is, of course, based on repeated observations, experimentation, and making recordings of those findings in such a way. If all of the information in science textbooks were lost today and the process had to start completely over, in 1000 years, I promise you the information will be different in some capacities than it is today. How do I know this? I have several antique science textbooks that are sitting on my shelf that have wholly inaccurate information in them, and that information has changed grossly in just 100 years. I could only imagine what profound changes might show up after 1,000 years, especially if the process had to be started from the proverbial source code. I, of course, have no way to prove this, as we cannot George Bailey anything out of existence in real life, but I would be surprised to find anything related to Darwinian evolution in a newly created science textbook 1,000 years in the future.
If anything, Mr. Gervais could make an argument that would be more substantial or more provable, if you want to use that word, we should say that mathematical textbooks would be exactly the same in a thousand years. I have used this example over and over throughout the years. The idea that 2 + 1 will always equal 3. If we have two of something and we add one to it, we will have three things. That is a timeless mathematical example. No matter where or when we go in the universe, whether back a million years or forward a million years or way off in the farthest reaches of the universe, 2+1=3 will always hold true. This was one of Nikola Tesla's favorite things, and I find that pretty cool too! This notion is the very reason why mathematics is the language of science. If you need to record something, observe something, or experiment with something, you need to have a tangible way to demonstrate the results, thus mathematics.
This is the reason why we are starting with one of my favorite mathematicians of all time, Johannes Kepler. This is also being posted on the anniversary of Reformation Day, and coincidentally, Herr Keppler was a Lutheran. Herr Keppler has some of the most profound scientific (especially astronomy) and mathematical writings of all time. His work is the underpinnings of many of the things that we learn and use today in science and mathematics. We know from looking at historical records that Johannes Kepler went looking for the very things that he wrote, because he thought the best way to worship his God was to be able to explain his creation logically and orderly through science and mathematics. Of course, in this time period, all scientists were known as philosophers, which literally means lover of knowledge in Greek.
Why did we ever change from calling people philosophers to calling them scientists? Well, specifically from the middle of the 19th century on, there was a concerted effort to disconnect religion from science. When, in fact, in the past, these two things were one and the same. Again, dear reader, I am not speaking strictly of Christianity or of the Hebrew religion or of the Islamic religion. Science and religious sentiments were indistinguishable, going back as far as we have written records of mathematics, science, and religion. They were all the same. This is the reason why I am including all world religions, through all of history, is that Mr. Gervais has undermined all of them. We wouldn’t have the Great Pyramid of Giza if the Egyptians didn’t have gods, we wouldn’t have Gobekli Tepe if there were no gods, we wouldn’t have Classical Greek civilization (or any Western Civilization) without their gods. Mankind is lost without their gods. We only need to look at the atrocities of the 20th century if we want to see the full breadth and width of the destruction that happens when we let the atheists run the show.
If we were to destroy all of the religious texts, fiction, poetry, fantasy, etc., along with all of the science textbooks that Mr. Gervais is suggesting, then take a fantasy trip 1,000 years into the future, what would we have? That is the main goal or argument of this project. We are going to take a journey backwards and forwards in time to see what it would look like if we could somehow, some way, George Bailey religion out of existence.
We do not have a roadmap in place for this project. Heidi and I will go where the wind blows us. She is much more technically and electrically astute than I am, so she will be leading the social media portion of this project. I always considered using any social media as making a deal of sorts with the devil, but perhaps it is time to fight fire with fire. Throughout the past writing projects, I have had readers on 6 of the 7 continents, minus Antarctica, but I am hoping we will be able to reach even more people to inspire them to conduct their own search for truth and to question why so many people have a vested interest in making sure you don’t have a god to worship. Although let’s be completely honest, it is really Christianity that they mostly attack and abhor. And why is that? Because they hate the message of the Gospel, because they are not a requirement in the equation of salvation.
As my father has said, the first person we use to counter Ricky Gervais's claim of the 1,000-year trial of religion to science is Johannes Kepler. First, I'd like to introduce myself: I’m Heidi Amschler, John Amschler’s second child. I've taken an interest in listening to my father's rants and having conversations over them. This is why I'm delighted to help in this project (and help my social media-inexperienced father) and assist in showing others God through my favorite subjects: science, math, and history.
To reprise what my father has already said of Kepler, he was a dedicated and profound Lutheran. His education, in fact, included going to the University of Tübingen to become a bastion of Lutheran Orthodoxy. He was convinced of the fact that it was his “duty” in life to understand God's creation, which he believed was made according to mathematical plans. As we know, his equations are correct, and we have a basis for his gratitude to God for the insight.
Herr Kepler found the Kepler laws, or the laws of planetary motion, which are as follows:
1. Planets move in elliptical orbits with the sun at the focus. 2. A line segment joining a planet and the sun sweeps out equal areas during equal intervals of time. 3. The square of a planet's orbital period is proportional to the cube of the semi-major axis of its orbit.
So what would we get if we George Baileyed him? Let's see. If we took him out as if he had never been born, we couldn't have those equations today. Even if someone later on found the same results a thousand years later, it would have fundamentally changed everything. For starters, Kepler’s work inspired Issac Newton. If we lose Kepler, then Newton is out, too. Other than that, Kepler's laws help with modern space work, such as satellite orbits, rocket courses, physics, and other factors in the void of space exploration.
Ever listened to Billie Eilish’s song “Hayley's Comet”? Personally, I quite enjoy the song. Well, it's a long stretch, but without Kepler, there wouldn't be that song. How? Well, dear reader, Newton wasn't the only person inspired by Kepler’s work. Another one he did was Edmund Halley, the man who correctly found the path that Hayley’s Comet takes. (See his name in the comet's name?) He was also known for the movement of stars, the orbits of things, meteorology, and so on.
Want another man inspired by Herr Kepler? Well, Thomas Browne is another to focus on. This author was free-spirited and learned in multiple subjects, such as polymath, science writer, physician, and philosophy. He had many major writings as well, one of which I believe may relate to this writing: Religio Medici, a personal reflection on faith and science.
Let's get one more person we would lose if we George Baileyed Kepler: Benoit Mandelbrot. He found and made fractal geometry. He was revolutionary in art, geometry, math, and science. His findings were for jagged shapes and how to find them geometrically. Without him, then economics, astronomy, geometry, computer sciences, the stock market, and other things would be far behind our time.
So let's sum this up. You take out Johannes Kepler, you lose, Issac Newton, Benoit Mandelbrot, Thomas Browne, Edmund Hayley, and one of Billie Eilish's songs. The world would be behind on astronomy, marketing, writing, math, technology, and many other things we use daily, somewhere in this great world. All this would have never come to pass if there was no religion, as (again) that is the main reason Herr Kepler even began his works. We are not arguing that 1,000 years in the future the “science” textbooks wouldn’t look the same, what we are proposing is that the “science” textbooks wouldn’t even exist.
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