Passes in the air
Why do people think there is a deity? (Small question. I’ll just knock off the answer in a few hundred words here. No biggy.) Partly (only partly) because of the thought that something must have created the universe – that there must be Mind behind it all. There is the regress problem – what created the mind then? – but many people simply find it more plausible to start with a mind than to start with a brute fact, or a Big Bang. Okay – but then you have to ask what kind of mind is it, and what kind of deity is it?
That’s one place you get the two-step. Mind in the form of an Intelligent Agent must have created the universe, and (unstated premise) the mind and the intelligence must be the kind of thing we mean by mind and intelligence. But that is not actually terribly likely. We think that what we have is Intelligence, generic intelligence, some of the kind of thing that intelligence is and has to be in order to count as intelligence. But maybe that’s all wrong. We would think that, of course, because it’s the only kind we know from the inside, and we’ve seen what it can do, so for us it’s quite natural to think that we have The Thing Itself, as opposed to having a set of faculties that have been adaptive (more or less) in this particular environment, which we call intelligence. In short, it could be that we’re flattering ourselves.
We don’t really know what – if anything – generic intelligence would be, or what it would be like. We think maybe like a computer, but who knows?
Our intelligence, for instance, is saturated in feeling. It’s full of evaluation, it’s always deciding what matters and what doesn’t. But what matters to us is what matters to mortal, reproducing, fragile, short-lived, hungry, greedy, easily frightened, vulnerable beings. Our intelligence is shaped by that, steeped in it. A deity’s would be nothing like that. So why do we think it would recognize us? Why do we think it would care? Any more than a filing cabinet does? It needn’t be cruel to make all this suffering – it could just be a thing that has no chip for recognizing, understanding, caring about suffering, just as (say) we don’t worry about the grains of sand on a beach bruising each other as they jostle about. There seems zero reason to think a universe-designing mind would care about us; zero reason to extrapolate from our best selves and minds to its.
It would have no reason to care about suffering because it is not (if it is for instance a First Cause) mortal or vulnerable. It has no predators, it needs no food, it has no need to choose between good and bad options – so its intelligence wouldn’t have evolved to select for that ability – as ours must have. So there’s not a lot of reason to think it would ‘think’ that way at all. We think it would – but that’s because we think that way. We can’t help thinking of it in our terms, but we have no real warrant for doing that. We have no way to think of it in alien terms (because any terms we can think of are thus our terms), but it is more likely to be thoroughly alien than it is to be reassuringly familiar.
If it doesn’t have a body it’s not like us. If it’s a star it’s not like us. If it’s disembodied intelligence it’s utterly not like us, and we can’t even imagine how it would go about creating a universe. We utter grand phrases about transcendence and unknowability, but we don’t take their implications on board. If it’s as alien as all that (as it pretty much has to be to do what’s claimed for it) why do we worship it and why do we think it’s interested in us? It seems to me that these questions just proliferate; the more you think about the putative deity, the more unanswerable they seem, and the more the confident answers given by religious authorities just seem like passes in the air. A deity as strange as this one would have to be seems to make no difference to anything.
Yes but, you see, it cares because, by definition, it’s perfect. So it is also perfectly good and perfectly caring.
Here you are, problem solved!
Of course, it could also be perfectly evil but… I’ll have to call you back!
(Happy to be the first to comment here, a few more posts and I will have to re-read my Spinoza!)
I think it’s been said often enough that all the conceits of religion tend to exaggerate the importance of man (yes, man is the appropriate word here) – ‘there must be some reason for my existence!’.’Why am I here?’.’It can’t all be for nothing!’, whilst science and reason tend in the opposite direction – Copernican revolution, Darwinian revolution, etc.
I think a lot of the resistance to the scientific view comes from the implicit loss of power and importance assigned to us humans that goes along with it.
“Why do we think it would care?…just as (say) we don’t worry about the grains of sand on a beach bruising each other as they jostle about.”
Or just as we don’t worry about the tremendous suffering that we know goes on throughout the animal kingdom to keep us in the lifestyle we’ve become accustomed to, for that matter.
This and the preceding posts are very interesting and worth pondering on. Which I shall do. Thanks.
Unbelievably, I came across a (the only) copy of WTM in Borders at Lakeside (a retail park in Essex England) last night. So I bought it.
Best wishes
PS My daughter’s wedding went very nicely thank you. And, no, I did not ‘give’ her away. She’s a grown up and does not need that kind of thing.
That was a near thing, Arnaud – there you were typing that you were happy to be the first to comment and there at the same time was Ian B, also typing. What a good thing you finished first – but it was close.
I know, by definition it’s perfect – which, don’t forget, also includes that it exists. So it exists. Bob’s your uncle.
“Or just as we don’t worry about the tremendous suffering that we know goes on throughout the animal kingdom to keep us in the lifestyle we’ve become accustomed to, for that matter.”
Yeah but not quite, because some people do worry about that, but pretty much no one, I think it’s safe to say, worries about bruised sand grains. And it seems to me that’s how we are to the putative universe-creating god.
Fun to think of WTM at a retail park in Essex. Still, JS says there were a lot of copies in bookshops over there. There are even some over here.
Felicitations about wedding, Jeffrey. Couple of months ago now I think?
Good article. I must be a bit dyspeptic, because I didn’t feel personally challenged as usually happens when you write a good one.
Killing off a generic postulate of deity doesn’t interest me in dealing with religion’s truth value. Maybe you need to deal with the Flying Spaghetti Monster and each of her litter-mates as individuals – because thats what people choose to believe in, one special case of deity that is special because its the ‘only real one’.
Sorry, no weddings to report but at church I met two of the most beautiful creatures in existence – babies around a week old, born to lovely people who are ‘church family’.
I suggest everyone read Jonathon Thake’s ecellent article another part of “B&W”, on religion and multiculturalism…
Answering the origianl question…
Because peole, rightly, want explannations for things.
And, until very recently, “gods” were the best explantions that people had.
Thunder was the anger of the gods, lightning was the DIRECT anger of the gods, the winds were the gods’ breath, etc, etc …..
Now, we know better, buty what we now call “science” had a long and difficult birth, fro Eratosthenes of Samos, through Archimedes, the long Dark Ages, William of Ockham and Roger BAcon, Newton, The Royal Society, Darwin etc.
This gives a much better explanation for EVERYTHING that science has been able to examine. Previously unnaproachable problems have fallen to the careful, painstaking onslaught.
BUT
Science requires careful thought, and effort, and training (It always did, but a lot of people forget that)
Religion, especially with modern (science-and-technology based) communications gives you instant answers, instant gratification, and you don’t even have to switch your brain on!
Also, there is what I might call “cultural hysteriesis” – the baggage of tradition and culture, and literature.
If the only way we could get rid of religion, for instance, was to burn/bomb/erase all the “religious” buildings, works of art, and music from the world, then I think that would be a serious mistake.
We have to deal with the mind-set.
“That was what we thought then, but now we know better” is the message to transmit, but, it can be very difficult to get it across.
“Killing off a generic postulate of deity doesn’t interest me in dealing with religion’s truth value.”
Well I’m not sure I’m really exactly trying to kill off generic postulates – I’m more asking questions about them. I find them incredible myself, and I make that obvious enough, but I’m also wondering how people who don’t find them incredible go about not finding them incredible. The questions about ‘what kind of deity do you take it to be?’ for instance aren’t bogus or coat-trailing or rhetorical, I really am curious. I’m especially curious since these more abstract ideas of the deity are (I think) considered more sophisticated than the personal cuddly kind of god – so that makes me all the more curiious about the actual content of these sophisticated ideas.
OB – I’m not at this point able to give you an answer to your (incisive and well-worded) questions, as I am not at all that sure about “personal” Deities myself.
But I would want to criticize your reasoning at one specific point. You argue that a Deity cannot be, in any way, like us – but it seems to me you are getting at this conclusion by anthropomorphizing Deities. “As flies to wanton boys, we are to the Gods. They kill us for their sport.” You argue, for example, that the incredible distance between us and a Universe-creating Deity means that we are to the Deity what grains of sand are to us. But it seems to me that you are thereby projecting a very human feature (limited cognitive and perceptual capacities, inability to empathize with each individual grain of sand) on a postulated Deity. What I mean is that both assuming that Deities have very human emotions, or that it would lack them because it didn’t gain them in the same way as ours, result from the same application of human models on Deities (which in the end I am not sure is avoidable).
I do not mean to attack your reasoning by a tu quoque and expect to get away with it, mind you. What would follow from the above is that we might not be able to know anything at all about either the likeness of God to us or the difference between God and us. The uncertainty we are dealing with only increases.
“But it seems to me that you are thereby projecting a very human feature (limited cognitive and perceptual capacities, inability to empathize with each individual grain of sand) on a postulated Deity.”
Very true, Merlijn. Everything I say on the subject is of course what a human would (can) say, and therefore extremely limited. I quite agree. But what I mean by all that is not so much that we know for certain that a deity doesn’t and can’t have that kind of empathy (even though I did phrase it that way in places…) but that it’s strange that we assume it does. It’s strange that most theists don’t seem to consider seriously the possibility that 1. if there is a universe-creating deity it’s terribly strange and 2. that we just can’t ever know.
“The uncertainty we are dealing with only increases.”
Exactly. That’s what I mean. It seems to me that the more one thinks about it, the more the uncertainty increases. That ‘faith’ – must be about something else altogether.
OB, have you ever read Ralph Waldo Emerson? I think my notion of God owes a lot to Emerson: kind of a universal consciousness. More deistic than theistic, I suppose. The problem of suffering is due to the fact that my perspective is limited, and if “the doors of perception were cleansed,” if I had God’s perspective, I would see how things make sense. Don’t really believe in heaven or hell; I hope that when we die we will enter into the universal consciousness. Or maybe I believe in heaven as the place where we all get answers to all our questions.
This is an inadequate definition, in ways you could point out to me and in a few ways I can see for myself. (Why pray? Why go to church?) I feel that it’s something like a circular argument that is only amenable to logic up to a point. Intuitively, or as a result of my Episcopalian upbringing, the existence of God makes more sense, feels righter, to me than the non-existence of God. Obviously irrational, but that’s my bottom line.
One insight I’ve arrived at, or paradox I’ve embraced, or something, is that faith and doubt are not a zero-sum game. I had thought of it like a glass of water, where faith is how high the water level is, and doubt is the empty air space left over. I no longer think this — I think one can have a lot of faith and a lot of doubt simultaneously.
Dix,
I’ve read a little Emerson, but only a little. I’ve read much more Thoreau.
“the existence of God makes more sense, feels righter, to me than the non-existence of God.”
See, that I can completely understand. And in a way it’s just an extension of the normal and necessary human illusions like free will, continuity of the self, and such – illusions I certainly lean on heavily myself. It’s the believers who put it all much more dogmatically that I have trouble understanding.
I love the part about faith and doubt, and think you’re abs’ly right. There’s a lot of overlap in that glass.
[You argue, for example, that the incredible distance between us and a Universe-creating Deity means that we are to the Deity what grains of sand are to us.]
as I said on the earlier thread, if you’re omnipotent you don’t need to prioritise.
[most theists don’t seem to consider seriously the possibility that 1. if there is a universe-creating deity it’s terribly strange and 2. that we just can’t ever know]
surely the opposite; most theists don’t consider any other possibility. The idea that it is possible to understand the true nature of divinity is “mysticism” and it is a defining characteristic of most religions that mysticism is either heresy or blasphemy.
For those who would like to devote a little of their time and energy to something enlightening and productive in the theism/atheism debate, I can highly recommend the following reading –
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/whynotchristian.html
The essay considers the arguments for and against the type of god that most Christians actually believe in, and is thus, in my opinion, rather pertinent to the overall debate.
For those who prefer more abstract, transcendental musings, I would humbly submit the following questions for discussion –
– Does excrement exists in paradise?
– Can more than one angel occupy the same space?
– Will hair and nails continue to grow following the Resurrection?
– Will the Resurrection take place at night?
(For more on these and other similar questions, I would recommend reading Thomas Aquinas).
“as I said on the earlier thread, if you’re omnipotent you don’t need to prioritise.”
It’s partly what you said on the earlier thread(s) that I’m reacting to. That all just looks like hand-waving to me. Yes, of course, if you’re omnipotent you don’t need to prioritise, and by the same token if you’re magic you don’t need to prioritise, and maybe the deity is omnipotent, or magic, but then again, maybe those are just easy ways to answer difficult questions. Why should we take them seriously? Why should we believe them?
It often seems as if theists tend to pogo to and fro between very different ideas of the deity. Point out that miracle stories don’t hold up, that science has eroded the plausibility of a personal God directly meddling in our affairs, and that prayer doesn’t seem to work, and they’ll just respond that God doesn’t have to pigeonholed in such petty, anthropomorphic ways. But then, having kept open the possibility of God as a more mystical, abstract kind of being than the traditional account upholds, they proceed to smuggle all the really comforting things in the traditional account right back in. Then God all of a sudden goes from being an abstract, whispy bit of celestial energy right back into the caring, doting deity celebrated in Sunday school. This tendency to juggle competing and contradictory models of God without really examining the process has a lot to do with why so many people still manage to believe in God.
But that still doesn’t really address the deeper question of WHY they do this bit of conceptual acrobatics. I had an odd insight into this recently when I was writing about conspiracy theories. I argued that conspiracy theories are comforting because all the random, difficult to comprehend things in life suddenly seem understandable. And then it occured to me – belief in God is really the ultimate conspiracy theory. He can’t be seen, he can’t be definitively shown to exist, and much like the world-movers of conspiracy theories, the very lack of evidence for His existence is taken by some believers as evidence of His efficieny. And hell, He certainly controls everything behind the scenes, doesn’t He? Economics, world affairs, the accidental death of the family pet – all of it becomes part of the unfolding, secret divine plan. Add to this the belief that He is conspiring for OUR good, and you have strong motivations for faith, especially when things like eternal life become part of the big plan. Of course, there are many other factors that feed into this, such as belief in an objective basis for morality, disbelief in the finality of personal death, etc., and these interact in complicated ways.
Now, I don’t want to seem like I’m ridiculing this impulse, because I’m not immune to it myself. The funny thing is that I was reading an excellent book by James Tabor about the historical Jesus recently, and the book discussed the possibility of Jesus’ bones someday being found in an ossuary. Now, I was raised Catholic and lapsed years ago, and can’t rightly be said to believe in God in any sense. But still, to be honest, the thought that Jesus died and rotted away actually does disturb me. Judging by my own feelings, I’d have to think that many people want there to be at least a possibility that the great divine conspiracy is true – that death is not final and justice will somehow prevail.
Phil
I like to think that I’m not a conspiracy theorist, I’m an incompetence theorist. Laziness and bumbling explain a lot more about history than conspiracy theories. Human beings aren’t good at conspiring; we have trouble making careful plans and following through on them, and a *lot* of trouble keeping a secret.
But I don’t assert that God has much at all in common with human beings.
The conspiracy theory makes a lot of sense. I gather from reviews and extracts that Dennett’s book talks about the human tendency to see agency in what happens – wind, etc. So conspiracy and deity are both agency theories – invisible-agency theories.
Phil’s view of pogoing between competing images of God, using the minimum model (kind of the God of the Gaps) for intellectual positioning and the maximum model (watching every thought you think, and caring for every sparrow) for religious living – THAT cerainly a way that we see our thinking change according to the social setting.
My son has an artificial and invisible friend, Grimble. Grimble needs a place set and a dish of food, especially if lamb chops are served. “What’s that Grimble? Feeling unwell? No, not at all, I don’t mind helping by polishing off your chops!”
A big driver of religion is not the intellectual understanding, but the need for social approval. And if you are going to keep being plunged into the baptism pool until you come up speaking tongues, your survival instinct supports that drive for social approval…
I think Phil’s conspiracy theory idea has a lot of merit. The idea that a cabal of evil (insert targets of particular prejudice) are running the world seems perversely MORE reassuring to many people than the alternative – no one’s in charge, there’s no script, it’s all ad lib. Expanding this to include God … why not?
[Why should we believe them?]
Believe what you like, but you appear to be trying to make the argument that the most common conception of God is in some way incoherent and this argument doesn’t establish your point at all, for the reason given.
The most common conception of God as the one that combines being omnipotent and transcendent with being local and a person is in many ways incoherent.
Just repeating dopy empty formulaic orthodoxy isn’t all that convincing. What do you get out of it, I wonder?
A nice analysis by Phil on the bait & switch technique which asks you to concede the possibility of a vague, minimal deism almost indistinguishable from physics, but which then slides full blown theism through the half open door.
Indeed. And the pogoing or bait and switch is almost universal, and very irritating. This is where the fork comes in. Because sure, you can always go “sophisticated” and say it’s abstract and outside and all the rest of it, but then why worship it and pray to it? So then it becomes personal and local – and utterly implausible. So we keep ricocheting back and forth between these two points – one minute being told it’s all in the New Testament, the next minute being told god is omnipotent so doesn’t need to prioritize. How are non-believers to think all this is anything other than a dodge?
dquared:
“if you’re omnipotent you don’t need to prioritise”
Agreed. But I think the concept of omnipotence is incoherent. Can an “omnipotent” entity name two integers a and b such that a-squared divided by b-squared is exactly equal to 2?
It’s also, in my view, a very odd concept for humans to have fantasised about. In the real world, we continually observe that all real entities have powers which vary, but are always limited. We know, we really do know, that water does not flow uphill, and that therefore no real entity can part a sea so that some Chosen People can walk across the sea bed. (And at least one self-styled Christian and self-styled scientist, D A Alexander, tries, incoherently, to wriggle out of that one by blithely asserting that “Red Sea” is a mistranslation of “Reed Marsh”, and that the fantasised “omnipotent” entity only had to magick up a wind to make a bit of marsh a bit less boggy than usual.)
Ah, but there is the famous quote from R. A. Heinlein:
If you pray hard enough, you can make watr flow uphill.
How hard do you have to pray?
Hard enough to make water flow uphill, of course!”
Erm, err ……
Right-wing Heinlein was, but he had NO time for the religious loonies.
(Also posted to the ‘Fork’ entry)
On the subject of an immaterial, transcendental, and yet personal god
Such an entity can certainly be conceived of, and perhaps the theory might even be coherent. But so what? An infinity of such entities could be conceived of, but what does that really contribute in trying to fathom the way the universe actually is? The fact that something can be imagined, and then made logically consistent by means of the introduction of various ad-hoc elements gives us no reason whatsoever to think that it is actually true. In order to get beyond mere armchair metaphysics, we need the scientific method.
[The most common conception of God as the one that combines being omnipotent and transcendent with being local and a person is in many ways incoherent.]
No it isn’t. Not any more than Plato’s doctrine of an eternal Form of the Horse which is both distinct from and embodied in every individual horse, for example.
Once more, the doctrine of Trinity has been the subject of vast amounts of analysis for more than a thousand years, by some of the greatest minds in history. It is not something which one can just assert to be obviously contradictory in a single sentence. This is the same intellectual bad faith that creation scientists exhibit when they try and throw off one-sentence refutations of evolution.
Nick, fair enough comment, but the question of whether a transcendent God that it yet personal is conceivable, not actual is armchair metaphysics. It’s what OB engaged in in her original post, it’s what DSquared and I have engaged in in our answers to similar questions on different threads – and if one of these is hand-waving, then surely so is the other. And it is a useful exercise. It says nothing about whether or not there actually is a God. Whole different ballgame. But it might clear up the air on what kind of God its whose existence we are debating.
I liked the Richard Carrier quote – it is rather more carefully worded than many “science-based” critiques of Theism I have read, and does not make the mistake of confusing science with physical science. But still, it tends to miss the point for me, at least. Because what Carrier rightly regards as the first step in the scientific methods – i.e. logical abduction, coming up with a hypothesis to explain observed phenomena, is applicable to metaphysics and religion as well. But all that follows is not. When dealing with the hypothesis of a Deity, to serve as an explanation for such observed phenomena as the seeming rationality of the Universe, the mind-matter divide, the antropic principle or whatever (I set out my own reasoning on this in a past thread) we are not dealing with spatiotemporally limited entities we can study and compare to their non-instantiations. We can imagine – but just – possible non-lawful worlds, or possible worlds without mind, etc. – but we cannot scientifically put these to the test. We probably won’t even agree on whether they are sensible questions to ask, whether the observations are even in need of explanation.
So “God” is not a scientific hypothesis. We’re back to “armchair metaphysics”. Which I think has an undeservedly bad reputation.
“and if one of these is hand-waving, then surely so is the other”
But there is a big fat difference between hand-waving on the skeptical side and hand-waving on the belief side. There is a big difference between taking the default position to be not believing in an entity without some evidence, and taking the default position to be believing in an entity without some evidence. Skepticism is a more reasonable default position than belief.
That may well be so – but I think the original dispute was about whether a transcendent and personal God was possible, whether such an idea could be coherent. Whether one _believes_ in such a Deity is another issue – and one where a whole lot of different arguments come in. So I don’t think the “skeptical” and “belief” sides actually come into play here.
Merlijn,
Firstly, the definition being debated is rather nebulous. We need to pin this down more clearly in order to get anywhere with the question. You mention that the god in your hypothesis is transcendental and personal. However, the Christian god is generally held to have the following characteristics. He is –
1. omnipotent
2. omniscient
3. omnibenevolent
4. morally perfect
5. the uncreated creator of the universe
6. specifically concerned with human beings
7. the only deity, and
8. essentially immaterial or non-physical
9. transcendent
Is this your definition too, or are you just picking a subset of these characteristics? As you suggest that you don’t think that the hypothesis can be tested scientifically, then I presume that you are not accepting all of the above characteristics? By paring away at these characteristics, it is quite possible to end up with a definition that makes no predictions about the type of universe that we would expect to see, and is thus untestable and unfalsifiable. If the hypothesis is framed in such a way that it makes no testable predictions, and can never be verified or falsified in any way, then it is, and will always remain, pure speculation. If one’s aim is to indulge in metaphysical gymnastics, then fine. However, if one is instead trying to fathom the way that the universe actually is, then this approach is futile.
The fact that a hypothesis is logically consistent and conceivable is, on its own, insufficient reason to consider it a likely candidate for being true. I don’t know if your hypothesis even makes it this far, as it is so far too vague for me to tell.
Under such a scenario, what would ever convince you that your god hypothesis is true or false? What would even increase or decrease the probability in your mind of it being true? How would you attempt to persuade me that it might be true? Since I could equally define an infinity of logically consistent but competing hypotheses, why would you spend so much time contemplating just one of them? Doesn’t that strike you as being rather absurd? There would be no way of ever discriminating between the theories, so we would have reached an impasse. If your hypothesis falls into this category, then I think that it is pointless debating it, as you have effectively ruled your hypothesis out of court.
As far as I can see, one of the issues in this case is parsimony of explanation or, if you like, Ockham’s razor. Another is falsifiability.
If your one brute fact is that God exists, then it is always possible for you to interpret everything we see around us in a way that fits with this fact. For such people, it is likely that nothing will ever convince them that they are wrong. However, if one is starting from an impartial position, is it helpful to take an unfalsifiable definition of a universe-creating god as our working hypothesis of the world?
A few analogies might illustrate the point that I am trying to draw out here. For example, it is theoretically possible that I exist only as a brain in a vat, and that all of my physical experiences are illusory – being artificially generated. It would be possible to define this hypothesis in such a way that it is logically watertight, and that it could never, even in principle, be tested, verified, or falsified in any way. Nevertheless, would it be reasonable or fruitful to make this one’s working hypothesis? Or, would it instead be just perverse and futile?
Or, consider the following. Perhaps the whole universe, with me in it, came into existence 5 seconds ago, with my and everyone else’s memories already present. It would be possible to make this hypothesis logically unassailable, and define it in such a way that it could never be verified or falsified, even in principle. Again, would it be reasonable or fruitful to make this one’s working hypothesis? Or, would it instead be just perverse and futile?
In fact, how would we in practice discriminate between the likelihood of either of these two hypotheses? If they are both equally logically consistent, and neither can ever be tested in any way in order to verify or falsify them, then how would we decide which hypothesis to favour? Further, an infinite number of such competing hypotheses could theoretically be concocted. Each would be logically incontrovertible, and none could ever be verified or falsified in any way. So, which one, if any, is correct? The effective odds of any one of them being correct (without any means of testing them) are infinity to one against! If one’s hypotheses are unfalsifiable, then these are the types of problems that need to be addressed.
Now, on the subject of parsimony, how about this one (courtesy of Julian Baggini)? Imagine that you are a police officer called to investigate the sound of shooting. You arrive at the house in question, and find a bullet-shaped hole in one of the windows. You enter the house, and look at the wall opposite the window in question. There you find a single bullet embedded in the wall. Now, without any further information, which of the following hypotheses is more reasonable?
1. A single bullet was fired, and this bullet is the one embedded in the wall.
2. A hundred bullets were fired through the same hole. The gunman then broke into the house, leaving no trace whatsoever, and removed all of the bullets save one.
I think most people would elect for hypothesis 1. But, why is that so? The second hypothesis is theoretically possible, so why not judge either hypothesis equally likely? How about if I introduce a third hypothesis that is a variation on the second hypothesis – such that 99 bullets were fired instead of 100? Why stop there? How about hypotheses where 101, 102, 103,… bullets were fired. I could go on indefinitely. Do you see the problem? I have framed the hypotheses in such a way that there is no way to discriminate between them. In such a case, it seems reasonable to go with the most parsimonious theory – the one that introduces the fewest ad-hoc assumptions.
Another example (this one courtesy of Stephen Law). If I look out of my window and see the compost heap at the bottom of the garden, is it more reasonable to think –
1) There is just a compost heap there.
2) In addition to the compost heap, there is also a family of invisible, intangible, immaterial fairies?
The second hypothesis is a logical possibility, so why not make it my working hypothesis, or at least keep an open mind on the subject? Again, Ockham’s razor dictates that in such cases, and with no other information to hand, one should provisionally accept the more parsimonious hypothesis i.e. that there is just the compost heap. Similarly, when we examine the world around us and find that it seems to operate by purely naturalistic processes, do we propose that there exists:
1) Only a naturalistic universe. Or,
2) A naturalistic universe, together with the addition of some unseen, immaterial, transcendent supernatural entity?
In the absence of any other information, I would say that the first option is the more reasonable one.
These analogies illustrate the type of problems that believers in such a god face. Either they define their hypothesis in such a way that it can be falsified – and take their chances – or they define it in such a way that it is unfalsifiable. In the former case – such as with the Christian god’s characteristics of omnipotence, omniscience and omnibenevolence, amongst others – predictions are implied about the way that the world would be expected to operate if such a god exists. These predictions can be compared to reality, and are found to be severely wanting – e.g. the notorious problems of suffering and divine hiddenness.
If you fully define your hypothesis, then I might be able to tell into which camp it falls. It may well be that your hypothesis does in fact make predictions about the universe. In this case, it may be that your hypothesis is falsifiable, and could in fact be shown to be false, or at least unlikely. Of course, at this point you could always introduce some more ad-hoc elements to prevent it from being falsified, but then we’re back to the type of scenario that I have just been talking about.
Nick,
My _own_ hypothesis-in-the-making is quite different than the one debated here, as I am particularly unsure about the moral characteristics of a putative Deity (but not for the reasons OB mentioned in this post). As I mentioned in other threads, I don’t believe God is omnipotent in that the laws of nature or indeed logic can be broken by God at will, neither is he omniscient in that he would have knowledge about the future.
Another small remark: I am not sure the criterium of Ockham’s razor is really applicable to such categories as God. The reason we would instinctively reject such hypotheses as being brains in a vat, or the universe being created five minutes ago, or solipsism, for instance, even if they are not falsifiable, is I think that they go directly against our intuitive notion that other people really do exist, that our sense of the passage of time represents some real feature of the universe, etc.
Any notion that such very basic, human intuitions are in fact wrong had better be very explanatory and solid otherwise. The brains-in-a-vat hypothesis on the other hand isn’t explanatory of anything. But I think theism can be considered explanatory, albeit in a very tentative, non-scientific way, of some features of our universe.
“The brains-in-a-vat hypothesis on the other hand isn’t explanatory of anything.”
Hmm. I think it is. Of various things – questions about who we are, how did we get here, what are we doing here, why are we here, etc. One possible, thinkable explanation is definitely that it’s all an illusion created by an evil demon, and variants on that basic thought. It’s really very explanatory – in some ways more so than the familiar deity. It’s just that it’s not such an attractive or consoling or reassuring explanation.
“But I think theism can be considered explanatory, albeit in a very tentative, non-scientific way, of some features of our universe.”
Sure, it can, but then so can all sorts of variants on theism and alternatives to theism – or, to put it another way (and to return to the question I asked a few days ago), theism can be explanatory with a very bizarre (uncozy unfamiliar uncomforting) X as theos – which comes to the same thing.
[There is a big difference between taking the default position to be not believing in an entity without some evidence, and taking the default position to be believing in an entity without some evidence. ]
No, too strong. I would love for this to be true as it would give me a short way of dealing with the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which I don’t like. But there isn’t such a short way, because the simple fact that there is neither evidence nor any possibility of evidence for MWI is not a decisive objection to the theory. MWI does have the advantage of telling a coherent and intuitively attractive story about why things are how they are rather than some other way, an attribute which it shares with theism. I don’t agree with either theism or MWI, but they are both serious theories which deserve intellectual respect.
An intuitively attractive story? Is that one of the criteria? Really? Why? Doesn’t that amount to saying that a theory is more plausible and more likely to be true if it matches up with our desires? But why would that be the case?
“but they are both serious theories which deserve intellectual respect.”
Well (obviously) I’m not so sure in the case of theism. And in any case, theism already gets massive intellectual respect; quite a lot too much, I would claim; so I think there is considerable need for people to ask why there is all this habitual, almost intimidated, hyper-polite intellectual respect. In other words I think it’s kind of bizarre to get in a fret at the possibility that theism isn’t getting enough intellectual respect (from one measly website editor) when in fact it already gets such a large amount of that very thing.
“is not a decisive objection to the theory”
I’ve already said (in reply to something JS said) that I don’t think my objections are decisive (to put it mildly). I think they’re real objections, but I don’t think they’re decisive.
Based on my extremely limited understanding of the MWI, I’d prefer the description “utterly bizzarre” above “intuitively attractive” – but what DSquared was getting at is perhaps that for many scientists there does seem to be some kind of aesthetic component to their work. E.g. formulae and theories possessing some kind of innate beauty. Perhaps some kind of intuitive grasp of logical consistence and coherence comes into play here.
As for intellectual respect – I think the kind of public respect dealt out to religion by banning plays and so on is insulting both to the religious by treating them as nagging, spoilt children who will blow things up if they don’t get pancakes for dinner (and to be sure, a rather visible and annoying minority of the religious is just that) – and insulting to the irreligious by curbing the free exchange of ideas. The biggest respect one can pay to ideas is to criticize them. Reserving the right to disagree with said criticism, of course.
Yes, perhaps, but some of us, having seen the complete intellecyual hollowness of religions, and the les, blackmail, torture etc. that they hand out, are not interested (any more) in “respect”.
That’s what mafia gangsters want.
What we want to do is thoroughly rubbish and trash the whole sham edifice.
The methods are: A really searching criticism – for which people like Dawkins and Dennett are best, coupled with a persisten, sarcastic and pointed mockery.
Remember, that all the religions DEMAND to be taken seriously, with (if they can get away with it) dreadful threats to people who won’t toe their bullying line.
Oh yes, Merlijn, let’s all line up and repect the blackmailing bullies.
Perhaps not such a good idea?
Merlijn,
I wonder if you would define for me your god hypothesis, and explain why you find it to be persuasive.
[An intuitively attractive story? Is that one of the criteria? Really? Why?]
yes, in any philosophy of science with more content to it than bare-bones falsificationism. Because it’s the basis for gedankenexperiment. Scientific theory is about things which make sense, and “make sense” means “make sense to us”.
[ Doesn’t that amount to saying that a theory is more plausible and more likely to be true if it matches up with our desires? ]
“Our desires” is equivocal here. Not “the things we want”, but “our sense of what makes a theory plausible”.
[And in any case, theism already gets massive intellectual respect]
Not really. Not from its critics. Very few of them take it seriously as a theory about the world and make a good faith attempt to engage with it on its own terms; very very few bother to learn anything about theology (a lot of atheist writers on religion clearly know less about theology than I do, which is really pathetic if you’re going to write a book about something).
What theism gets is a lot of intellectual patronising; people pretend to take it seriously and say over and over again that they “respect” religious beliefs when they clearly mean nothing of the sort, but just want a quiet life.
Nick – of course. Is going to take some time though. Will answer your question later today.
I think it is possible to construct a model of God that avoids some of the contradictions, and yields at least a more plausible theodicy (explanation of evil) than many theists have given.
For instance, let’s start with Einstein’s question about whether God had any choice in how He made the universe. Maybe He didn’t. Maybe, just as parents cannot raise their children to be autonomous moral agents without exposing them to the world’s challenges and dangers, God couldn’t create humans any other way than to do so through the design and implementation of natural laws. God may not be omniscient, but maybe He’s sufficiently intelligent to see that these laws would someday produce human beings. Of course, cutting his creation loose like this would also expose them to the dangers of natural disasters like earthquakes, plagues and hurricanes, but also to the violence of fellow humans, who can’t quite seem to get the morality thing down. Since God wants to create humans whom He loves but cannot do so any other way than a way that will also bring them suffering, God Himself also suffers, and that’s the meaning of the crucifixion in Christian theology. Perhaps parallels with other religions can even be teased out – the links between death and creation in all of the Mesopotamian creation myths, for example, as well as Hindu mythology…perhaps even the link between existing, desiring and suffering in Buddhism. I have to say I’m surprised that more Christians don’t seriously discuss the idea that God’s creation requires Him to suffer, and this finds its ultimate meaning in the Crucifixion.
But – there’s no reason to think that any of this is true.
The contradictions of the God concept are only part of the problem. The real problem is that there is not only no real evidence that any kind of God exists, but also that by the standards used to judge virtually anything else, the evidence seems to point the other way. And without any basis in evidence, we can always concoct any nice-sounding story we want to explain God. Our stories may involve a single God, many Gods, or vanishing and reappearing Gods with purple diamonds and green clovers on their foreheads. In fact, they need not involve God at all, since a story about hypothetical, benevolent race of advanced ETs creating the universe seems at least as good as many theistic models. But all of these still, in the end, remain stories only.
Phil
Dsquared,
When scientists talk of theory being attractive, or beautiful etc., they mean that it has particular explanatory power whilst being simultaneously parsimonious. They don’t mean that it is attractive because it conforms to our prejudices, desires, or wishes. Clearly, all human undertaking are anthropomorphic to an extent, so these theories are inevitably going to fit with our human observation and understanding of the universe, but there’s no real way around this.
However, whilst the search for beauty in one’s theories – in the limited sense described above – might partially drive the direction taken in the search for the truth, the real arbiter is observation and evidence. First of all, our hypothesis needs to account for the existing observations, but we are then required to deduce what else would have to be observed, and what could never be observed, if that hypothesis really is true. We then we go and look to see if our predictions are fulfilled in practice. The more they are fulfilled, and the more different ways they are fulfilled, the more likely our hypothesis is true.
The Christian theory is certainly intuitively attractive to many people – including some scientists. But it is not attractive in the same way that scientific theories are. It does not offer explanatory power – as it just replaces one set of questions with another – and it is not parsimonious, as it requires the introduction of numerous ad-hoc elements. Also, in as much as it makes predictions about the type of universe that would be observed, these predictions largely fail.
I, for one, have no more ‘respect’ for the Christian worldview than I would have for any other worldview that I consider to be fundamentally flawed and misguided. However, in my opinion the Christian worldview is far more insidious than this. I am happy for people to hold the Christian or any other worldview, so long as they respect my right to disagree with them, and do not try to impose their beliefs upon me. However, by nature the Christian religion (and many others too) is fundamentally intolerant of any opposing worldview. This is not just a case of human nature perverting an intrinsically tolerant worldview either (although human nature has inevitably made things much worse). Rather, it is the case that intolerance is fundamentally enshrined at the very core of the religion. I could quote chapter and verse all day long to back up this assertion, but I need look no further than the Ten Commandments –
3 Thou shalt have no other gods before me
5 Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me;
7 Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain; for the LORD will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain.
These commandments alone have been responsible for untold death and misery.
Of course, human intolerance wasn’t invented by the Abrahamic religions. Human beings are naturally intolerant of different opinions and beliefs. However, as a human invention, these religions have intolerance at their very core.
Of course, one can use the Bible in order to justify both good and bad acts, and no doubt the Bible has also been responsible for many acts of moral goodness. However, the product of a supposedly morally perfect, omnipotent, and omniscient god should have been written in such a way that it could not be used to justify death, misery and suffering.
Let me put on my amateur theologian’s hat on and interject an alternative perspective here:
The Ten Commandments (in fact, all of Hebraic law, including the prohibitions on homosexuality and eating shellfish) were written and should be read in light of the fact that the Hebrew nation in the first millennium BCE was struggling for its survival. The Old Testament is inherently tribalistic, and in context, understandably so. The genius of the early Christians was to abandon the goal of ethnic and cultural purity and invite gentiles, not just Jews, into the church. (An oversimplification– obviously there were major doctrinal struggles and purges, but also an ethic of hospitality and pragmatic tolerance.) And Christian orthodoxy came to privilege “love God and love your neighbor” over the “minor” Commandments as the heart of Christian ethics.
Scriptures should be READ in a way that accounts for historical context and tries to discern God’s will in contemporary life. That’s the task of theologians, in opposition to fundamentalists / religious populists who use texts in a crudely literalistic way. Obviously, there are many instances of Scriptures being misused and put to violent ends, but to ask them to be written like a mathematical proof is unreasonable and misses the point.
I don’t expect to change anyone’s mind here, just offer this perspective. Phil Mole, I do find Christians discussing God’s suffering and the meaning of the crucifixion, though not much to outsiders.
Yes, I’ve encountered a good deal of discussion of suffering and the crucifixion too – much of it very interesting.
“Not really. Not from its critics. Very few of them take it seriously as a theory about the world and make a good faith attempt to engage with it on its own terms”
Well, I’m not sure that’s true, but it’s a fair point in the sense that I was thinking of the kind of quiet life respect you mention.
But I think you’re disregarding the possibility that my questions here have been real questions. I really do want to know what kind of thing believers take the deity to be. To be sure, that is partly because I find the ideas of the deity present in public religion to be inconsistent and implausible, but that doesn’t mean I’ll refuse to pay attention to the answers.
Dix, the thing about reading scriptures – how is that different from reading any other book? Once it’s acknowledged that the OT needs to be read in context, doesn’t it become another book among books, albeit a particularly good one in many ways? If so, what does ‘scripture’ refer to?
“Phil Mole, I do find Christians discussing God’s suffering and the meaning of the crucifixion, though not much to outsiders.”
I should clarify a bit. I’m not saying that I think that Christian’s don’t discuss God’s suffering and the Crucifixion – that is the whole point of Good Friday mass, after all. (Remember, I’ve been around Christians my entire life, and have been one myself). But I’m surprised that the kind of discussion isn’t different. For instance, Christian discussions of God’s suffering and the Crucifixion tend to focus on it as an act of redemption needed to atone for man’s fall from grace, or original sin. I’m highlighting God’s hypothetical suffering in a different way…saying that a)maybe there’s only one way to create autonomous humans, b) that this way involves humans suffering, and that c) God (because he loves us) suffers along with us….redemption doesn’t really enter in. So essentially God’s decision to create humans involved a decision for him to suffer from the very beginning. But now I am drifting into theology – an odd place for someone who doesn’t actually believe a word of what he just said above.
The point of outlining this little scenario is to show that there are all kinds of nice stories we can tell about God, especially when we’re not contrained by evidence. Reading scriptures for historical context as you describe above absolutely is important, whether you’re a believer or not, but knowing historical context still doesn’t give us reasons for concluding that any of this stuff actually happened.
Phil
More about biblical interpretation –
If one is going to use some of the Bible’s moral teaching, and choose to ignore or reinterpret other bits, by what means is one making this choice? In order to decide what to include in one’s ‘Christian moral framework’, and what to leave out, one is necessarily appealing to some other ethical system – a sort of Meta ethics. One can’t decide purely by reading the Bible what to include or not (since you should include everything, unless you make some sort of arbitrary choice), so it must be the case that you are making this choice based upon some other moral yardstick. In other words, there is some other framework – existing outside of the Bible – that is determining your morals. So, that gives the lie to the concept that a moral framework must necessarily derive from the Bible alone (and God’s word).
If there is a kind of meta ethics to which people appeal in order to ultimately determine what is acceptable or not, and which is not based upon the Bible at all, why not just use this and ignore the Bible totally? Liberal Christians choose to ignore the biblical exhortations to stone people to death for all sorts of real and imagined crimes, and do not condone slavery, even though Jesus apparently saw no problem with it – which is good news! However, when they choose to follow those biblical teaching that are good, they always refer back to the Bible as their source.
Why can’t Christians just admit that the moral code espoused in the Bible is often a very primitive one, and is deficient and unenlightened in many ways? Subsequent, more enlightened thinkers have improved upon its moral teachings dramatically, which is to be expected, as the Bible is nothing more than a book written hundreds of years ago by fallible humans.
So, in answer to Nick’s earlier question: “I wonder if you would define for me your god hypothesis, and explain why you find it to be persuasive.” I basically answered half of it earlier, in the big thread. To recap:
1. Impressed by the apparent lawfulness of the universe and our success at, so far, making sense of it. Mathematics and natural laws are nonetheless ideal rather than material things.
2. Anthropic principle. Dubious, but plays a role in my reasoning. Basically, all bets are off if there are forceful reasons to believe in a multiplicity of universes with varying natural laws, or if the current apparent “coincidences” can be reduced to a much smaller number. But anthropic reasoning cannot be refuted by the mere assertion of the possibility of a multiverse. And in the absence of either of the two mentioned problems, the reasoning does seem valid to me.
3. I do not believe mind can be reduced to matter. This is not a God of the Gaps argument, as I think there are very forceful reasons to believe that the mind-matter gap will remain a gap, even if science will narrow it down. The problem will remain a metaphysical one. of course, the non-reducability of mind to matter (I can argue this in more detail if needed) does not at all automatically imply Theism, but it would refute (reductionist) physicalism, which is used by some atheists as a (hidden) metaphysical assumption.
I should not that all the alternatives: emergent materialism, panpsychism, and idealism, all seem to have their pros and cons, and I am not committed to any in particular (I would however reject substance dualism).
4. What this means is that my world-view would need to take both mind and matter into account. Though I would tend to accept some kind of emergent materialism in the case of evolution of consciousness and all, the problem of 1) would seem to draw me to some kind of Platonic idealist with regards to at least some ideal concepts. The two are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
In any event, the four preceding thoughts would seem to go a long way to explaining why I find the thought that the universe does not only seem rational but is rational intuitively attractive.
On the other hand, I have problems with the concepts of an omniscient Deistic God standing outside of time. The first theistic concepts I found attractive conversely posited God as evolving and changing in time, perhaps as a product of human evolution (i.e. Teilhardism, though I reject both Teilhard’s vitalism and Tipler’s reductionism). The conception of Deity I am currently most interested in would be that of process theology: as it seem to combine a time-bound, evolving aspect and an eternal aspect in its concept of God.
But briefly, the concept of God I am currently thinking about (because it isn’t more than that), would probably be:
1. Rational
2. Omnipresent in physical space (I would regard the universe as part of God, rather than as a seperate creation)
3. Neither omnipotent nor omniscient in that the future is undetermined, and human actions are free.
4. As for personal/good: I don’t know. I can think of coherent ways in which the kind of God I am thinking of would be both, but I find some of the objections OB raised against the actuality of such a being (not the a priori possibility) persuasive to a degree. Very much in doubt about this.
I suppose that there are at least a few things which could potentially draw the rug from under my speculations:
1) Very strong reasons to accept the MWI of quantum physics or any other kind of multiverse theory. Would not be decisive, but would make Th/deistic anthropic arguments void.
2) Very strong reasons to accept epistemic relativism or any kind of “social construct” theory of science.
3) Reduction of mind to physics. I believe this can be rejected as impossible a priori, but that may be controversial.
Incidentally, I find especially the last two distasteful for a lot of reasons. What brought me to this site first was my annoyance at the relativist logorrhea which is current in some humanity departments – but I am also annoyed with the opposite (with the caveat that reductionism can be fruitful as method, whereas I do not believe epistemic relativism is).