Either it’s an unknown, or it’s implausible
There are two choices, it sees to me. Either ‘God’ is the god of religion, of churches and mosques, that gives rules and answers prayers – in which case it’s part of nature and history; or it’s something else, which we can’t comprehend.
Either it’s the first, which is like a giant cop, or a combination cop and nurse, or it’s the second, which is [ ? ]. The first is not reasonable to believe in, because a god like that would (or should) provide unmistakable evidence of its existence and its wishes (because what in hell is the point of keeping it a secret?). The second is perfectly reasonable to believe in – but is it reasonable to call that ‘God’?
The combination of the two makes no sense at all. An unknown that tells us what to do, a mystery that we’re supposed to worship in specific terms, a question mark that loves us – it’s an incoherent jumble. Yet it’s the usual idea of ‘God’ – half parental half concealed; half judge half Cloud of Unknowing. It might as well be half Bactrian camel half peanut butter.
If it’s simply (or complicatedly) what we don’t know, or causes that we don’t know about, and the like, who would object? Who would disbelieve in the existence of such things or concepts, or think it not reasonable to believe in them? But why on earth call that ‘God’? Is it because its fans are desperate to retain a person god? But that’s not reasonable either; not for theological reasons, but for biological ones. We know now what humans are, and how we got to be what we are. Do we really think ‘God’ (or Betsy, as we might as well call it) is like that? But if human nature and human abilities are a product of natural selection, how could Betsy’s nature and abilities be similar? So the ‘person’ thing seems pretty untenable, no matter what you do.
Before 1859, it must have been different. It must have been (seemed) self-evident that humans were mysteriously special and strange and interesting, unlike other animals and very unlike trees and rocks. All explanations were unsatisfactory, and a person-like god making us as miniatures of itself could have been the least unsatisfactory. That’s not unreasonable. But once the peculiarity of humans no longer seems so peculiar, a person-like god becomes less necessary and less explanatory. In fact it raises questions rather than explaining. (Does it have an appendix? Does it have a small intestine? Why?) A person-like god now seems not like a spiritual version of ourselves but like an inexplicable giant ape. Why would there be a god like that? Okay it has no body (but then we’re getting into unknowable territory, which is the other choice, but never mind for now), but it has a person-like mind of some sort. But – our minds are human minds. They’re not Pure Minds, they’re not examples of What Mind Should Be; they’re human minds. A person-like god seems like a not very reasonable belief – it has to be person-like and yet completely different in every way that matters. Well then we’re just back to Incomprehensible again, in which case we’re back to Nobody Knows again, which means we’re back to Why call it God again.
One of the ironies in all this is that theists are so seldom expected to define their god – just invoking the name is supposed to be adequate – it’s supposed to be self-evident who and what it is. Theists and some agnostics claim that atheists have too much certainty, but belief in a shifting inscrutable but bossy demanding god is – at the very least dangerous. Believers don’t always use their god to bully and oppress, but the risk is always there – it’s well adapted for such a purpose. I would argue that atheists are not wrong to be pretty certain that, at a minimum, it is dangerous to believe in elusive mysterious inscrutable gods who impose strong laws and punishments on human beings.
Because there is no appeal. No accountability, no chance to revise, discuss, re-think. There are no defense lawyers, no appellate courts. And in fact no present god, either, but only human intermediaries. Why should we – and how can we? – be so sure they have it right?
Mark Vernon adds this in a comment on Stephen’s post on the mystery move:
Both the atheist and the theist will do away with false gods, and false theories, as they ponder the mystery. But whereas the atheist will conclude there is no god, and the universe is pure, if delightful, chance. The theist will conclude that the universe is pure gift – as articulated by the doctrine of creation ex nihilo. The difference between believing the universe is chance and gift strikes me as a very great one.
Yes, it’s a big difference, but on the other hand ‘chance’ might not be quite the right word (brute fact might be better); and as Stephen points out, ‘gift’ has some problems too. And in any case, it always makes a big difference how one thinks of things, but that fact doesn’t change reality. It makes a difference whether we think various natural forces caused it to rain today, or that our dearest friend made it rain today; but that doesn’t determine what caused it to rain today, so pointing out the difference between the two ideas is beside the point if the dispute is over whether or not ‘god’ exists, or whether it’s reasonable to think so.
I think you’re drawing the same way-too-sharp dichotomy Mark Vernon draws, between on the one hand a God that is “part of nature” and the wholly other, wholly incomprehensible God of the theological stream of thought Mark Vernon is enamoured with. This leaves out most of the theologically interesting concepts: the wholly transcendental, yet (partially) comprehensible Deity of classical theism (Anselm, Aquinas), the immanent, partially comprehensible yet non-interventionist deity of panentheism, etc. etc. In other words, you are quite correct, I think, in your criticism of the “mystery move” – but wrong (as Mark Vernon is) in implying this is the only theological alternative to the fundamentalist cartoon version of God.
Aside from this, you jump the gun by stating that a personal God is “not reasonable either; not for theological reasons, but for biological ones. We know now what humans are, and how we got to be what we are.” But we don’t. We know how we got to be what we are biologically. We do not know how that relates to the aspect of our personhood, which is what relevant here. Because this involves a philosophy of mind, which lies for the moment outside of the scope of biology. Perhaps it won’t be so forever, but it does now.
Of course, on a naturalist view, human nature, personhood, mind pretty much has to be a product of natural selection. But this is exactly what is disputed on the theistic view.
“But whereas the atheist will conclude there is no god, and the universe is pure, if delightful, chance. The theist will conclude that the universe is pure gift – as articulated by the doctrine of creation ex nihilo.”
Putting the question in terms of atheists and theists reaching different conclusions about the “great mystery” seems circular to me. If you’re starting the inquiry from the point of one’s (dis)belief about existence of god, then of course the conclusion is going to reflect that starting assumption. The conclusion you’re looking for is already pretty explicit in your first premise.
Discussing what God could or could not be strikes me as an interesting intellectual exercise but as essentially hollow (like all counterfactual dicussions). However, that aside I don’t think it’s fair to claim that concepts of God face the necessary dichotomy proposed by OB.
For starters, ‘the god of religion, of churches and mosques’ has consistently been defined as ‘something … which we can’t comprehend’ – not only that, but that in part. The two are not exclusive; nor are they mutually incompatible.
All analogies for God must (by theological definition) be weak analogies, but nonetheless they may be a useful tool. As such, I proffer this: we can never truly know the mind of another mature person; even that person’s conscious thoughts are hidden from us, still more the morass of unconscious motivations, conflicting biological drives, etc. Through communication, through the aplication of folkpsychology (ToM), etc. we can arrive at some kind of approximation of understanding of and empathy wih another; yet we can never achive full knowledge.
And that is another mature person – something so like us that we can rely on folkpsychology to make reasonably reliable inferences. The mind of an animal, or of a baby, or the ‘mind’ of a hive – our approximations of understanding of these are necessarily still more limited. We may still make observations and derive some knowledge of how such minds work, but our empathy is limited by fundamental difference.
Comparably, we may learn about God through inference and reasoning – looking at the world, for example, we may try to construct a folkpsychology to account for a God whose world is ravaged by suffering and pain (which is essentially what answers to the Problem of Suffering are trying to do). We may be addressed by God as individuals through revelation and thus be given insights into what God wishes. But our limitations, our fallibility, and our fundamental difference in kind mean that while we may understand (or think we understand) an explicit message we can never fully emathise, never really create a ToM that accurately reflects God.
In this way, we arrive at something like the Vatican’s proclaimed version of God: He is ulimately unkennable, like (yet unlike) the mind of evry other being; yet through personal communication (ie revelation) and/or rational phenomenological analysis (the search for a ‘Godly folkpsychology’ or ‘Theory of Divine Mind’ [ToDM]) we can come closer to understanding.
The obvious rejoinder is ‘why then no universal revelation?’… That is no killer rejoinder, though: the lack of such, like the existance of suffering, is a datum for inputting to our ToDM:)
Merlijn
What do you mean by “disputed”? As you properly say a biological explanation for ‘mind’ may well be on the cards and one can already see how it might work. When/if it does come it will be supported by experimental evidence, peer review and all the other familiar props of the scientific method.
Can you suggest what kind of similarly rigorous scaffolding supports your alternative proposal to the extent that it can be seriously claimed to ‘dispute’ the first one rather than just gainsay it?
Chris Whiley – I mean by ‘disputed’ that there are strong reasons to assume that a reduction of certain normative mental structures (logic, reason) to biology will be self-refuting (Nagel, Popper). With other features of consciousness (phenomenal experience, intentionality) the space between the mental and the physical still looms very large. I think reduction goes out of the window here, and I’m sceptical of whether “emergence” can be ever supported rigorously and scientifically in this case, rather than being used as a primarily philosophical concept. Now without that, any evolutionary explanation of mind as such (involving such concepts as personhood) can be, at best, plausible given one’s other philosophical commitments.
Outeast – I pretty much totally agree. The analogy between the (ultimate) incomprehensibility of God and other minds is a nice one. Except I don’t think the problem of suffering can be dealt with by ToDM – I think it is input to a preliminary discussion about what God can and cannot be/do (which is not vacuous at all because some conceptual analysis about whatever one proposes as existent is necessary to test whether it is even coherent). In other words, I think the omnipotent, potentially interventionist and perfectly good God runs into the problem of evil (and also into some other ones).
outeast – are you making an argument for a sort of theistic solipsism? That is what I thought you were trying to say on the other thread, but it seems to me that it fails because the argument was about a god defined in such a way that we can’t know anything about ‘Him’.
The problem with this partly knowable/partly unknowable god that Merlijn seems to want to defend is that the knowable parts seem to coincide with those properties believers want Him to have, and the unknowable parts with the questions believers want to avoid. Essentially, if your argument for the existence of God is that there are things that we cannot know, let’s call them ‘God’, you can’t then tack on a set of other properties that you’d also like your god to have – the atheists may have conceded the theoretical possibility of this unknowable thing (called God or Betty or whatever) but you can’t just pull a bait and switch by adding back in all those properties that made atheists reject the existence of your god in the first place. Either your god is minimally specified, and thus theoretically possible, or it isn’t! It seems to me that once you step beyond minimal specification you just end up back in the world of ontological arguments where necessarily existing beings go about being perfect.
I think there is a common key to my answers to both Merlijn and PM. Basically – as I have said before – any argument about the nature of God is question-begging since we have no reason (or I see no reason!) to posit a God in the first place. Hence, any discussion of ‘God’ requires taking some parameters as read.
At the simplest level, this may simply be pointing to the Unknown Stuff and squueeezing ‘God’ out of this (something which gets pretty boring pretty quickly).
At the other extreme is taking a literalist textual God and trying to make that fit the world around us (which leads to fake dino fossils, etc.).
In between are the many, many conceptualizations of ‘God’ that have been developed by sophisticated and shallow thinkers alike. These generally start with some attributes of ‘Godness’ (largely drawn from scripture); thereafter, they may be consistently imagined but the attributes are necessary givens.
In my God-description above I was focusing on a God-description broadly suggested by the Vatican definition I’ve been referring to (which can be found here). As such, I was assuming benevolence and opmnipotence – which I hope answers Merlijn’s query as to why I felt the Problem of Suffering might inform a ToDM. Of course I could reject one or another of these traits and build a consistent image of a God of another kind.
In these sorts of discussions I am hampered by difficulty in getting on the same page as a theist or deist; I can look at a God construct and see that it is (or is not) internally consistent, and discussing this can be intellectuially rewarding. But I cannot agee that such consistency has any impact on the credibility of the thesis itself.
Addendum: Either your god is minimally specified, and thus theoretically possible, or it isn’t!
I simply don’t see that this is logically valid. You might say a minimally specified God is more plausible, but even a God who recreates the universe every picosecond exactly as he desires is theoretically possible. Not very credible, maybe; entirely unnecessary, certainly; but theoretically possible:)
“The problem with this partly knowable/partly unknowable god that Merlijn seems to want to defend is that the knowable parts seem to coincide with those properties believers want Him to have, and the unknowable parts with the questions believers want to avoid.”
Exactly. It’s such a useful ploy – so flexible – so able to answer any conceivable question – that it’s very hard not to see it as just self-serving. Of course we could say it’s just coincidence that it’s so useful for believers…but coincidences of that kind tend to be suspect.
Of course we could say it’s just coincidence that it’s so useful for believers…
We could say that it segues with the convictions of believers because conceptions of God are divinely inspired, too:)
The unknowability of the kind Outeast proposes however is the same kind of unknowability we are confronted with other persons – I can understand the actions of another person and the probable desires/fears etc. underlying it through analogy with my own, but ultimately, the internal state of another person are outside my cognizance.
I should stress that I have no interest at all in defending this concept as a possible explanation for the problem of suffering. I understand, however, that referring to a ToDM as Outeast points out is theologically quite orthodox. But as it is, I quite agree that making this move makes a God concept too flexible to retain much credibility. It also runs into a possible contradiction as the nature of God as posited in classical theology is eminently simple and comprehensible. There is nothing incomprehensible about perfect benevolence.
There’s another sense in which the classical conception of God as omniscient, omnipotent and perfectly good appears to me to be incoherent. At least, it seems to me to be inconsistent with a free will theodicy, which is the most promising and perhaps the only promising theistic answer to the issue of evil. Because such a theodicy presupposes libertarian free will. I have no problem with that (though others might). But this means that God cannot know future states from a certain position in time in the same way we might “know” (predict) the future states of a deterministic physical system. If we suppose that God nonetheless knows the outcome of free actions by human beings from whatever vantage point he has, we would have to assume him to be extratemporal: all states that are for us future possibilities are actual for him. Such a God cannot be a loving one, since that presupposes the capability to be affected by someone else, i.e. to be in some sense “in time” with a partially indeterminate future of its own.
More to the point: it is only in the way free actions are contextually restricted that they become meaningful. My free actions are limited by free actions in my own past and their results (by me and by others), every choice excludes a set of future possibilities, etc. Were this not so, free actions would be indistinguishible from randomness, and thus not comprehensible as such. If we posit an omnipotent God, we would either have to assume that his actions are of no consequence to himself in that the set of potential states God can make true is as big as it was before – which would make him genuinely, ultimately incomprehensible. It would also conflict with other properties assigned to God (love, goodness) in that if God can love, his states are affected by his creation.
So this is part of the reason why I would be moved to reject the classical conception of God as omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good and personal. The first two conflict with the later two. I would reject a “mystery” move in this regard because I find it frankly not very fruitful to argue about the existence of concepts and properties which by definition we cannot comprehend.
I should clarify that: I think it is useless to argue about inherently incomprehensible concepts and properties. However, these are abstracts. In the actual world, there are many things which are ultimately incomprehensible to us but which nonetheless embody abstract features which are quite comprehensible. So, I would not demand that a posited God would be in all its actuality be entirely comprehensible in order to (be believed to) exist. However, the abstract qualities assigned and embodied in God, in addition to the argument furnished for positing some actual existence to God, would need to be comprehensible.
And I believe that ditching the classical concepts of omnipotence and omniscience would serve to make God more comprehensible, rather than more mysterious.
Merlijn,
Some of your less orthodox theology is leaving me a little puzzled… A non-exhaustive list follows:)
There is nothing incomprehensible about perfect benevolence.
There is when juxtapositioned against the harshness of the world, is there not? I mean, isn’t that the crux of the so-called problem of evil?
Such a God cannot be a loving one, since that presupposes the capability to be affected by someone else
I don’t think you have elucidated your reasoning in this point clearly. Can you expand? Why should being extemporal refute the possibility of loving?
ditching the classical concepts of omnipotence and omniscience would serve to make God more comprehensible, rather than more mysterious.
Yes. But isn’t this arse-about-face? This sounds like an argument from the consequences: surely comprehensibility does not constitute evidence for accuracy?
Yeah – ‘There is nothing incomprehensible about perfect benevolence’ jumped right out at me, too. There is nothing incomprehensible about it as a form of words, or an abstract entity, or an imaginary, perhaps, but as a real possibility it becomes pretty incomprehensible. Okay that’s the point, that’s what Betsy is – but then that’s the point too: Betsy is something it’s possible to imagine, but that doesn’t mean it really exists in real reality.
Outeast:
“There is when juxtapositioned against the harshness of the world, is there not? I mean, isn’t that the crux of the so-called problem of evil?”
Absolutely. I meant, there is nothing incomprehensible about perfect benevolence in an abstract sense. I think that the juxtaposition of perfect benevolence with the harshness of the actual world is problematic for theology.
“I don’t think you have elucidated your reasoning in this point clearly. Can you expand? Why should being extemporal refute the possibility of loving?”
I think that to love someone else necessarily entails that one is affected by that someone else. Not just to love; even to just think of someone else. It implies a potential to change, that there is something potential in God’s future as well as in ours.
“Yes. But isn’t this arse-about-face? This sounds like an argument from the consequences: surely comprehensibility does not constitute evidence for accuracy?”
This is a difficult issue. Comprehensibility in a gradual sense does not constitute evidence for accuracy, in things that are complex have to be understood with all their complexity rather than simplified to further comprehensibility. On the other hand, I am not sure this would go for potential comprehensibility vs. incomprehensibility in an absolute sense.
An entity which at its core embodies a logical contradiction is ultimately, and absolutely, incomprehensible, not? No matter how hard we try. And a logically coherent entity is at least potentially comprehensible, even if it may be hideously complex. Yet I think it behooves us rationally to avoid entities of the first kind in our philosophy, and to strive for entities of the second kind. We may _think_ that out there in the real world, there may be absolutely incomprehensible things – but if there are, we cannot _know_ about them and it makes little sense, to me at least, to talk about them. So I do believe that the “wholly other” theology of Vernon’s is tantamount to making theology vacuous as an intellectual enterprise.
As a theist and a rationalist (as opposed to empiricist), I’m naturally predisposed to assume that the world, and God as immanent in the world, is ultimately comprehensible by human reason. But even if I were not, I think we need to assume comprehensibility as a matter of attitude. Because if we argue the universe is incomprehensible, God is wholly other and therefore wholly, totally incomprehensible, etc. we close off areas to intellectual argument. Which I think is a bad thing to do.
If this theory of divine mind approach to thinking about god is the best on offer, theists are in real trouble. Anyone who even attempts to look at the universe and deduce the properties of its creator, or in any way look at the universe with an eye towards understanding its meaning and intentions with respect to ourselves, is not going to see anything resembling a benevolent or caring deity. The universe is incredibly hostile to life on average, with only tiny local and temporary lapses in absolute hostility – places with enough matter and energy in the right proportions to allow anything resembling life to exist. And in those places life is a struggle, and it ends not just for every individual living thing, but for all of them in a given place. Earth is finite. Once it was sterile molten rock, and when the Sun swells into a red giant it will be again. Even if there is life elsewhere in the solar system (the seas of Europa, perhaps?), it too will be unlikely to survive Sol’s initial expansion phase, and certainly cannot survive the subsequent collapse into a white dwarf. Maybe the other stars out there are orbited by countless planets, planetoids, and moons teeming with life: Even so, each is a temporary and local blip in the general emptiness, with light years of deserted vacuum in between. If the universe was made by a god or gods, or has any intentions towards us in particular or life in general, they (the gods, the intentions) are simply not friendly. It’s not so much the problem of evil as the problem of entropy that makes any theory of divine mind unconvincing in the extreme. Either the universal mind is at best indifferent, or there is no universal mind. Take your pick. There really are no other options that don’t presuppose the conclusion you want to believe.
There is something else sneaky about this notion of divine benevolence, perfect or otherwise. There is no conception of value or ethics that I’ve ever seen (I am an ethical theorist, after all) that doesn’t have at its root the interests of embodied beings. A disembodied being OF ANY KIND – god, spirit, ghost – has no needs of the kind that are at the base of what makes anything valuable to any organism. There is nothing which is of value to a rock – or a god. There are all sorts of things valuable to organisms – acquiring nutrition rather than being acquired as nutrition, for an obvious and important example. Value ultimately has a biological origin, springing from the needs and limitations of living things. Every notion of inherent value ever conceived or explained remains wildly unconvincing (or simply inexplicable), whereas extrinsic value – various objects and states of affairs being of some value to some valuing entity, ALWAYS AN ORGANISM – is so obvious that sometimes we have trouble seeing it. (In another way, seeing value in this fashion is so innate to us that we have trouble not seeing it, hence Aristotle’s attribution of telos to non-living things in his physics, and hence supernatural beliefs which mis-attribute purpose to non-living events and processes like storms and earthquakes).
If you don’t have an account of value that somehow gets around the problem that all value is tied to the needs and interests of living creatures, then the idea of attaching any ethical property or desire to a disembodied god is surely some sort of category mistake.
Great stuff, G. Will post that as a N&C, if you have no objection.
Twelve billion light-years of merciless vacuum in every direction, all made by some guy who’s really bothered if someone’s willy goes in the wrong hole….. ;-)
As Monty Python put it, you’d better hope that there’s intelligent life somewhere out in space, ‘cos there’s bugger-all down here on Earth…
Quick & hasty remarks:
As for value, tying the concept down to biological organisms in the common parlance sense of “biological” and “organism” would be question-begging: it would namely assume that there are no non-biological organisms capable of having internal states and experiencing those internal states as pleasurable or unpleasurable. I’d argue that the basic requirement of having internal states capable of change is an argument against an extratemporal, wholly transcendental yet good God – as it presupposes being “actual” in some sense, relating to other things, having potential future states and thereby being in some sense “local”. And this would entail being embodied. Only abstract things are existing in wholly disembodied fashion. But I do not see how it would entail being embodied in organic matter, or how it would render invalid an immanentist conception of God (embodied in the universe as a whole and perhaps, in as far as its consciously experienced states go, in our own minds as well).
As for the first, it would seem to reverse the logic of fine-tuning arguments, but I’m not convinced. It would rest on an assumption that
1) there are possible universes with more optimal fine-tuning (and is a universe without entropy or with reversed entropy possible, and habitable?). Would a universe teeming with life be ‘better’? As supernovas played a role in the creation of heavy elements, and it is not a good idea to live right next to one, one can argue that vast expanses of empty space are a necessary requirement for life to flourish. Also, arguments like this tend to underestimate the future possible feedback of technologically advanced life on the universe. Perhaps one day the universe will be teeming with life. 2) God creates the universe in an intentional act at time x in the past. A probably widely current theological position, I’m sure, but not an indisputed one. I personally don’t think God has any actual states without an actual universe, so I’m enamoured with Peirce’s (and Whitehead’s) position of creation as a continuous process rather than a singular act (i.e. as a self-creation or “unfolding” of God at the same time). Needless to say, the same objections can be made against pro-theistic fine-tuning arguments as well.
Merlijn, be honest now, you just do this for fun, don’t you?
Not that you aren’t very good at it, but it seems to me you end up with a parlour-game god, one that can be constantly redefined so as to meet any posited objection to its existence, but that with each redefinition, drifts further away from the historical attributes that connect the word ‘god’ in common usage to the practice of religion.
Which is to say, as far as it concerns human affairs, this form of argumentation is just a parlour-game…
The key distinction is between a god that makes no difference (at least to us) and one that does. Merlijn’s seems to be one that doesn’t. Mark Vernon’s seems to alternate between the two. It’s the ones that make a difference that are the worry – and they are neither scarce nor dependent on the arguments of theologians.
hmmmm,
to me Merlijn’s god looks a lot like Schroedinger’s cat and Mark’s god looks like the Cheshire cat.
As an atheist I do definitley find Kurt Vonnegut’s: GATOI (God Allmighty The Outmost Indifferent) much more appealing. It does at least have a sensible (and single) instrumental commandment.
“People be good to each other, then god allmighty, the utmost indifferent will take care of himself”.
Cassanders
In Cod we trust
Dave: I have been pretty much defending the same conception of God all along around here. Really. It’s not as if I have been arguing for a classical theistic vision and suddenly decided to shift my ground. I haven’t.
OB: I agree if “making a difference” is interpreted as “telling us what to do and not”, particularly indirectly through priesthoods and the like. I don’t believe and rather mistrust such Gods, for quite the same reason as you do. But there is a wider sense of making a difference as well. Theism as a philosophical position brings a whole lot of baggage with it, as does atheism. With ramifications as to free will, the relationships of mind to matter, etcetera. For example, I notice that you react to abstract concepts and “possible worlds” a lot differently than I do. You seem to scoff at them a little (correct me if I’m wrong), I would regard them as real, if not more so, than “stuff” (if not quite as actual). This “makes a difference” in how we look at the world, though the difference does not necessarily become apparent in our political commitments.
Merlijn –
I scoff a little at abstract concepts?
I wouldn’t have said so.
I don’t think I scoff at possible worlds either – in fact I thought I’d explicitly said I find both them and speculation about them interesting and valuable.
But that’s not the same as thinking we know anything about them. Maybe that’s what you mean by ‘scoffing.’
I stand corrected, then. Was mainly thinking of a remark of yours in the first Vernon thread – your comment concerning Bigfoot, in which you seem to define ‘inquiry’ as involving the empirically knowable world.
Well, I do. I don’t think it’s possible to inquire into the unknowable. Speculate about, yes; think about, imagine, guess, yes; but inquire into, no. I don’t think that’s what inquire means. But I don’t see why that amounts to scoffing.
Merljin: Hmm. I think you are focusing on exactly the wrong part of what I said. The parts of being an organism that are relevant are needs and limitations, not complex carbon chain molecules and water. The problem with the idea of any god or gods having some sort of ethical stance at all – good, evil, both – is that for an entity to find anything whatsoever to be valuable or disvaluable to itself, that entity must be such a valuer by virtue of its limitations and needs. At least, that’s what all the accounts of value on offer that make any sense require.
The petty disputing deities of polytheistic mythology are at least vaguely plausible as moral agents (if not otherwise), because they were mostly like us – they were born, they had limitations (albeit different from ours), most of them were even subject to pain, or even death. The abstract process theology deity you gesture towards has none of these basic sorts of features required for a valuer. Thus, any attachment of ethical attributes to such a deity concept requires extraordinary additional justification that neither you nor any theologian I’ve ever read has produced – some theory of what makes something valuable to an entity in the absence of any needs whatsoever. Indeed, most theologians talk about God’s love for us (or at least God’s intentions towards us) without even addressing the problem of how or why an entity like they describe gives a shit about anything, let alone us.
The absence of any evidence of God’s love is actually a secondary problem: That is, the problem of evil is preceded by a problem of good or evil. To get around this problem, someone must articulate how a deity is capable of having ethical attributes (specifically, that things are valuable and disvaluable to the deity) without any of the properties that create and shape the ethical attributes of other things that have them (needs and limitations).
OB: As always you’re welcome to do whatever you want with my comments. But in this case I think I’d rather you held off. I’d like to e-mail you something a bit more organized and essay-like, if you’re going to post it out of the context of the conversation in this comment chain.
Okay G, I’ll hold off. If it’s much more organized and essay-like, I’ll just go ahead and post it in Articles.
G
If this theory of divine mind approach to thinking about god is the best on offer, theists are in real trouble. Anyone who even attempts to look at the universe and deduce the properties of its creator … is not going to see anything resembling a benevolent or caring deity.
I was not advocating a ToDM approach; I was observing that in essence that it what speculative theology is. I also think that you misunderstood my claim: I do not think that theologians generally look at the universe as it is and try to establish a ToDM from that; rather, they start with a set of concepts which (as I explicitly stated) they take as necessary givens and only then start to look at the world.
It is because this is the approach taken that I call this ToDM in the first plece. When we as humans build a ToM about other people we similarly take certain paramaters for granted – generally a model loosely based on ourselves. We do not start with a blank slate and build a ToM based solely on another’s behaviour. (This is why psychopaths and other people who lack the basic attribtes we expect of others are so hard to comprehend – they defy our modelling processes.) With God, the assumed parameters and attuibutes vary, as do their sources; some Gods (such as your ‘petty disputing deities of polytheistic mythology’) are clearly based on ToDM parameters derived from human attributes; others draw on idealized attribtes invented specifically for God.
The attribution of attributes (ugh. sorry about that phrasing.) always comes first, even if further attributes are later ‘deduced’ (and preset attributes rejected, though this is rarer) in the process of dveloping the ToDM. Even the theistic approach exemplified by Merlijn relies upon a priori characteristics of god, though certainly fewer than, say the Vaticanate (Vaticanish? Vaticanian? Fuck it, Catholic then) conception. To me, this constitutes question-begging.
With this last point you clearly agree – as you put it, ‘There really are no other options that don’t presuppose the conclusion you want to believe.’ However, it should be borne in mind that this does not close the case: it may render the argument unpersuasive, but it doesn’t rule the conclusions out.
On a different point, I think there are some rather questionable (by which I mean question-begging) assumptions about critical attributes floating around in here. Merlijn’s gone in for this (‘to love someone else necessarily entails that one is affected by that someone else. Not just to love; even to just think of someone else. It implies a potential to change’), as has G (in claims to ‘the basic sorts of features required for a valuer’). On the other hand, the most obvious rejoinders to such anthropocentric definitions of the qualities attributed to Gods are also question-begging… Ho hum.
I’m not so sure if my assumptions about love or G’s about value are question-begging. They need to be teased out to see whether a divine being with those attributes is even conceivable. I’m aware they’re anthropocentric but I don’t think that’s a terrible problem in this regard – we’re dealing with a concept of the divine with some human-like attributes. You mention that the whole enterprise seems question-begging but I’m not interested in proving the existence of God (not in a blog comment, at any rate ;-)) rather than testing the viability of a concept.
“They need to be teased out to see whether a divine being with those attributes is even conceivable.”
Do they? Why? Of course such a being is conceivable – surely the real question is whether it’s credible. It’s obviously infinitely conceivable, since it goes on and on being conceived, but is it credible? Not to me it’s not. No more than a divine being with some cetacean-like attributes.
But I think the conceivability issue has to be resolved before we go into whether it is credible or not. And it is not entirely clear to me whether God, as a “clear and distinct idea” is conceivable. Not by me, at least: I haven’t been able to grasp it fully, just in part. Like the pig in the bushes: I can see either the tail-end, or the snout, but not (yet) the whole animal, part of it remains obscure. To assert that one can conceive of something and to actually do it are two different things: I can say I can conceive of a square circle by conceiving of an inherently contradictory proposition (X is square and circular) – but that is not quite the same as bringing a square circle before one’s mind’s eye. In order to be conceivable as “clear and distinct”, something has to be coherent, without logical contradiction.
The reason why this has to be done before arguing about whether the actual existence of something is credible or not is that we need to pin down even potentially credible Deities. There are some widely current conceptions of Deities that are, I believe, incoherent. I do not believe incoherent Deities are less credible than coherent ones as that they do not exist, period. Either that or the “mystery move” (and the latter is waving an intellectual white flag). Ideas and abstract concepts are real, they exist – as potential. I would argue that before one can decide whether a concept such as God is embodied in any _actually_ existing entity, one needs to ascertain that they are possible, first.
To really go out on a limb for a change (heads up Dave): the non-existence of a conceivable Deity is in itself inconceivable. Provided that one of the attributes of Deity is that it is a necessary being, which is common enough in classical (and neoclassical) theology (Anselm, Aquinas). Now, to conceive of the absence of a conceivable (as “clear and distinct” thus logically possible idea) deity (which has the attribute of a necessary being) is clearly logically contradictory.
No comfort for the theist, here, though, since:
1) Whether something is necessary in an abstract sense may say nothing about whether it exist _actually_ (which always involves some contingency, relationships with other existents, alternative possibilities, etc.). God may exist in the same sense that pi exists.
2) It’s possible to argue that God in this sense is inconceivable, for example by arguing the notion of necessary beings is nonsense.
I am, provisionally, convinced that the notion that God is either necessary or inconceivable makes sense. This puts a considerably stronger version of theism against a considerably stronger version of atheism (as it would be potentially possible to prove the impossibility, and hence necessary non-existence, of God). In other words, agnostics are out, “mystery theists” are out, now the real game starts.
That said, the whole question is dependent on a certain (broadly Platonic) framework concerning the relationship between ideas and things: I’m enamoured by Peirce’s notion of the reality, as potentials, of universals and abstract concepts. Also, both objections 1) and 2) provide me with just about a mountain range of literature to work myself through.
I don’t think you would accept the framing of the issue as I put it here. But I think it makes clear why (from my own perspective) conceivability is of such paramount importance. I said earlier that the theism vs. atheism question is most interesting with regards to the philosophical baggage that each side brings. Within the framework above, the probability of God is either 1 or 0 – credibility of God as such is not quite relevant. What matters is probably the credibility of the framework as a whole.
Oh Merlijn, not now, I’ve got a headache.
“Ideas and abstract concepts are real, they exist – as potential.”
[Cries bitter salt tears, gropes for paracetamol…]
This is interesting, and partly pertinent –
http://stephenlaw.blogspot.com/2007/03/anselms-argument.html
Merlijn, you might want to add a comment ;-)
[laughs uproariously at Dave’s comment]
But
“I do not believe incoherent Deities are less credible than coherent ones as that they do not exist, period. Either that or the “mystery move” (and the latter is waving an intellectual white flag).”
Eh? I’m completely lost. There’s either a word missing or a word in excess, or perhaps both. Or else I’m an imbecile. One of those.
This business about deity being a necessary being – I don’t understand that at all. I don’t even glimpse an understanding of it. Plantinga says something similar in that review of TGD, and I don’t understand it at all. The idea seems to be that people can think of ‘God’ and it’s perfect and it has to exist therefore it does exist – and I can’t begin to see why that’s not just ludicrous. I really can’t. It seems to me to amount just to people saying ‘God is perfect and to be perfect God has to exist therefore God exists.’ Why is that not just ridiculous?
Thanks, Nick – interesting post by Stephen Law. I think I agree with the main tenor: I don’t believe that Anselm’s argument serves to prove the (actual) existence of God, however, I do think it serves to elucidate our concepts of God. Anselm also somewhat hubristically assumes that his conceiving of God indicates that God is conceivable in the relevant sense (as ‘clear and distinct idea’).
I would probably differ from Stephen Law in that I do think that the argument (provided genuine conceivability) does prove God exists: but only as Platonic object. Necessary existence is just that: it doesn’t involve any actuality. Whether God is (also) actual is a whole different kettle of fish.
I’ll comment on his blog later on.
What?
You mean Betsy exists as an idea in human minds but not necessarily in any other way? But if so, isn’t that something of a cheat? Or do you mean something other than that, which I’m too dim to understand? Probably; but what? Betsy exists but is not necessarily actual? Is there a genuine distinction between existing and being actual? One that’s not a cheat?
I commented at Stephen’s. I’m trying to figure out what Anselm meant by ‘perfect’ – and especially what Gaunilo meant by it. What is meant by a perfect deity would be different from what is meant by a perfect island, it seems to me – very different, in fact. Or if it’s not different, then the deity just becomes Everyone’s Favorite Bestest Thing. A lollipop of the mind, which exists but is not actual.
I feel queasy.
OB: I’m going to comment on your newest thread.
Where’s my perfect chair? Perfect beer? Perfect child?
Perfect gods work the same way.
Did someone say …
PERFECT BEER ?
Mine’s a pint!
GT – As “perfect beer” clearly includes the property of existence, and as, moreover, half a glass of beer clearly lacks perfection, as does three-quarters of one (it being quite possible to conceive of a full glass of beer), it shouldn’t matter whether you have a pint or a spoonful – it should never run out, on pain of instantiating a logical contradiction and causing the end of the universe. (So if it’s all the same, I’ll have the pint, you can have the spoonful).