Archive for the ‘Science’ Category

[This post originally appeared at my old blog on August 3, 2007. The original is here.]

From my beach reading, Arthur C. Clarke’s The Fountains of Paradise:

2069 June 08 GMT 1537. Message 6943. Sequence 2. Starglider to Earth.

The hypothesis you refer to as God, thought not disprovable by logic alone, is unnecessary for the following reason.

If you assume that the universe can be quote explained unquote as the creation of an entity known as God, he must obviously be of a higher degree of organization than his product. Thus you have more than doubled the size of the original problem, and have taken the first step on a diverging infinite regress. William of Ockham pointed out as recently as your fourteenth century that entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily. I cannot therefore understand why this debate continues.

The speaker here is “Starglider,” a robotic alien probe that passes through our galaxy on an information-gathering mission. Clarke means Starglider to be an immensely intelligent entity, a sentient logical computer with the accumulated knowledge of a thousand intelligent species at its disposal. As much as I admire Clarke and enjoy his writings, I find it difficult that a super-intelligent being would propound such a sophomoric argument for the non-existence of God (and I assume that Clarke means Starglider to be speaking for himself here). Starglider’s statement first jumped out at me because of its conspicuous similarities with Dawkins’ 747 argument, against which I have been voluminously blogging lately. Indeed, the argument is downright Dawkinsian in its cheeky assumptions about its own cogency, as if it decisively ends the debate.

I won’t address the issue of whether a Creator-God, “must obviously be of a higher degree of organization than his product” or not. Dawkins makes this same claim as a necessary premise of his argument, and I’ve already spent far too much time showing it to be problematic, due to the fact that it is vulnerable to some fairly simple counterexamples. I do want to make a few relevant points, however, as this type of argument is very common among Dawkins and his fellow proponents of the “new atheism,” particularly of the blogosophere troll variety. “Who designed the Designer?” is a common war whoop of those who think that theism can be easily swept away with loud but mediocre argumentation. For abbreviatory purposes, I’ll call this argument WDD (“Who designed the Designer?”).

First, forms of WDD like Dawkins’ and Clarke’s seem to assume that belief in God’s existence is only legitimate if it does some necessary explanatory work over the world. I suppose this is right as far as scientific explanations of phenomenon go, but are all beliefs like this? Is no belief rationally acceptable if it fails to come at the end of some sort of abductive argument from known facts? In other words, does God’s existence even need an explanation to be accepted as true? I don’t think so. One can argue for God’s existence on other grounds than explanatory ones, just as one can believe numerous propositions on non-explanatory grounds. I see a boll weevil in front of me. Do I accept the proposition, “A boll weevil is in front of me,” because that proposition explains some known fact? Not really. My perceptual experience serves as an appropriate foundation for my belief about the boll weevil. In other words, I don’t infer that the proposition is true from other facts or premises. My perception occasions the belief, and my belief in the boll weevil is justified.

Clarke thinks that Starglider’s simple argument should bring an end to the debate. Which debate? He might mean the debate over whether God exists or not, but surely this isn’t right, because we all hold many beliefs about the world that are quite independent of any explanatory power they provide. It’s true that we often make abductive or transcendental arguments to conclusion C because C is the best explanation of a set S of known facts. But it would be inordinately silly to say that a proposition P is rationally unacceptable simply because it fails to provide an explanation over some set S of facts. If we did that, there wouldn’t even be a set of facts to explain, because then accepting those facts would be rationally unacceptable unless they explained some other set of facts, which in turn would need to explain some other set of facts, and so on ad infinitum. But any (foundationalist) system of knowledge needs facts that aren’t explained by any other facts and that are acceptable a priori. Logical laws are good examples. For many, perhaps the majority, of committed religious believers, belief in God comes not at the end of some chain of inference but through a direct encounter with Him, thus making belief in Him properly basic.

So by “debate” I suppose that Clarke/Starglider means the debate over whether God can be invoked as an explanation of the natural world or of some feature of it. But even here I think Clarke is wrong, and this is my second point. Theistic apologists do not naively claim that everything needs an explanation and that thus the cosmos, or biological design, or whatever, need an explanation and “Presto!” God is the explanation. Atheist objectors often set up this sort of straw man and then accuse the theist of being inconsistent by saying that the universe needs an explanation but God doesn’t. I can only suppose that atheists who raise and then assail such a gargantuan straw man have been watching too much TBN and have not been reading their serious Christian philosophers.

Arguments of this sort usually go a different way. Consider a simple cosmological argument that claims that the physical cosmos needs some sufficient explanation for its existence. Here various versions of the principle of sufficient reason (PSR) come into play. For now let’s assume a simple one that claims that matter and energy lack the ability to either (1) bring about or (2) sustain their own existence. If the theist defends a version of PSR that says this, the WDD peanut gallery will immediately claim that he is being inconsistent by claiming that the cosmos needs an explanation but God doesn’t.

Is this right? Yes and no. No, because the theist usually argues in some way that the cosmos is very probably contingent, and contingent entities need necessary explanations. In other words, the cosmos is the type of thing that can’t exist on its own as necessary de re, but the God of traditional theism is by definition the entity (the ground of being) that exists necessarily de re. But also Yes, because it isn’t clear (to me anyway) that the cosmos doesn’t exist necessarily de re. It seems extremely implausible that this would be the case, but I just don’t know how one would go about trying to prove it true or false. It’s true that the physical cosmos seems contingent, but I just don’t know how it could be proven either way. This is how counterarguments to cosmological arguments of this type usually run. Sophisticated atheists will just point out that we don’t know that the universe doesn’t exist necessarily as a brute fact. But this is a far cry from assuming that it does exist as a brute fact and then brashly asking “Who upholds the Upholder?” Things are much more complicated than that, and Dawkins, the fictional Starglider, and the loud internet trolls who oversimplify the issue against theists are doing nothing but making themselves look like philosophical lightweights.