God is not an explanation

Posted on September 19, 2008 by me

One of the comments that I often read or hear from atheists as a reason for why they don’t believe in God is that since science has supposedly provided an explanation for things, there is now no reason to need God as an explanation.  Never mind, of course, that science still has no answer for the origin of life, and no real explanation for the Big Bang. The presumption is that science in time will provide these answers, too – what I have been calling the “science of the gaps” theory.  My response to all of this is that God is not an explanation.

The thinking that finding some other Cause is an argument against the existence of God is somewhat presumptuous: the presumption is that out of superstition, primitive man invented God as a cause for things he didn’t understand.  To further bolster this position, you’ll often hear Occam’s Razor invoked. Occam’s Razor, named after a 4th century Franciscan friar, William of Occam (or Okham), states that “entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily” (I’m not really in favor of multiplying entities in any event). Isaac Newton restated the rule as “we are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.” So, because various cosmological and evolutionary hypotheses can explain many things, God is superfluous. My response to this is:

  1. William was a Catholic friar who used the argument to argue, among other things, that the only entity that need exist is God.
  2. Occam’s Razer is only a tool for judging between competing hypotheses of equal merit; in other words, all things being equal, the simplest explanation it probably the best.
  3. Providing an explanation for how something happened does not preclude the possibility that the “how” was simply God’s method or design (in fact, showing order and consistency seems to fall in favor of God, not against).
  4. The concept of God is not advanced merely as a hypothesis to explain any effect; that thinking is somewhat backward.

Bradley Monton, one of my favorite atheists, says

Some who think that God exists think that God is directly epistemically accessible, through for example revelation, or some spiritual experience. But others who think that God exists think that God is only epistemically accessible via more tangential means. For example, they hold that the way to get evidence for the existence of God is by for example learning about the fine-tuning of the fundamental constants of physics, or investigating the structure of a biological system and learning that it is irreducibly complex.

Science, of course, deals with what is epistemically accessible – or does it?  Monton also has this to say:

Are quarks epistemically accessible? Are events in the distant future epstemically accessible? Is the beginning of the universe (if there was one) epistemically accessible? Scientists make claims about such things, though it is clear that the epistemic accessibility we have to such things is (at best) more limited then the epistemic accessibility we have to everyday aspects in our lives.

Those who are looking only for an explanation (cause) that satisfies the “Occam test” are of course starting with what is epistemically accessible – the effects – and working backwards until they are satisfied with the proposed cause, even though some cosmologists are now proposing that cause may not be necessary (based on quantum theory). This, of course, takes science into the nether regions, where most scientists are reluctant to follow.

I believe that it is somewhat counterproductive to advance the issue of the existence of God in such a fashion; if we propose that God exists because of the design inference, or fine-tuning, or whatever, then we have competing theories (though not necessarily equal theories). However, that’s not how God presents himself, and neither should we.  Is God evident in nature? Of course. But, do we believe in God because He is evident in nature, or as Monton puts it, by tangential means?

My position (and I think the standard Christian one) is no; God is directly epistemically accessible, to use Monton’s phrase. In other words, God is directly knowable. In fact, all knowledge of God comes from God; we do not find God, he finds us.  Now here we are definitely speaking theology, not science (for those of you who need to keep track). However, here science is epistemically inadequate; science really only deals with the tangential. I am not apologetic about this at all; I find no need to make God scientifically accessible.  There are those who have elevated science as the supreme means to knowledge (or at least, information); I would put science a bit lower on the heirarchy. In fact, I propose that science is actually inadequate, even to study the material world, in and of itself. It is a tool, a method, in need of a context.

God is not an explanation, God is The Cause, in every sense of the word.  In dealing with science, or anything else, I presume God, because God is known directly, not through science.

Posted in Faith, Science & Doubt, Philosophy | 4 Comments

How much should atheists know?

Posted on September 15, 2008 by me

While I am by no means an expert, I do enjoy thinking about epistemological issues.  A few weeks ago, I started writing a series of posts on epistemology, appropriately entitled, “How do you know?”  It’s a theme I haven’t quite exhausted, as I’m not tired of thinking about it yet.  For the last week or so, I’ve been discussing similar issues with a couple of nice atheists over at my friend Mike’s blog. Mike started off the discussion with a post asking, “How much religion do we have to study?”, referring to how much atheists have to know about religion before they can proclaim the non-existence of God.

It’s a valid question, I think.  And, I have 2 answers, at the moment:

  1. None. You can choose not to believe in God at any time, even in a completely uninformed state.
  2. Enough to be intellectually honest.

I’m serious about both answers. Concerning answer #1, I think it is perfectly valid to simply not want to believe in God.  I am not about to tell my friend Mike or the others at his blog that they can’t be atheists. That would be silly. You can be an atheist simply because you don’t want to believe that there’s any type of god who you might need to answer to. In fact, I suspect that’s the type of atheism we usually see.  They’re probably not the ones who join atheist organizations and wear t-shirts with a big scarlet A on them, but they’re out there, quietly not believing in God.

Now, if you’re Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens, you’d better have something besides pompous idiotic rantings to back up your position. Even if you’re just some commenter on a blog, you’d better be ready to be intellectually honest and discuss your statements.  I think it’s fair to challenge blanket assertions like, “there’s no evidence for the existence of God.”  Seriously, anyone can say that. For some, it’s possibly the atheist version of “positive confession.” It certainly sounds authoritative, and most of the time, it probably goes unchallenged. But, what does it mean?

This is where the discussion on Mike’s blog ended up, with me asking for definitions of evidence and proof. “No evidence …”  What are they talking about?  What if I were to maintain that there’s no evidence for evolution (like some crazies might do).  Of course there’s evidence.  The question is not whether or not there’s evidence, but whether or not someone accepts the evidence as sufficient enough to conclude that it’s true. Of course, I am using the term in the legal sense, not with any implication that evidence equals proof.  Webster’s first definition for evidence is “an outward sign; indication.”  The 2nd definition is “something that furnishes proof.”

Now, proof is another matter entirely.  Can we ever prove anything?  My contention is that no, we can never really prove anything. We can only provide enough evidence or information for someone to choose to believe something. Belief is always a choice.  Even to believe that 2+2=4 is a choice, to some extent. However, mathematical and logical proofs are probably the only things that we can say are proven, by the respective laws of math and logic.  Every belief represents a decision – a Kierkegaardian leap, as it were – from collected information (including emotions, etc.) to that belief.

If we are to say that something has been proven to us, I think all we are saying is that we have sufficient information in order to make a certain leap to a belief.  What is proof, then, differs from person to person, and from decision to decision. If we are predisposed to not believing in God (for any number of reasons), I think the level of information necessary to believe in God is much higher than that necessary for the same individual to believe in no God. To be fair, the opposite would be true for someone who is more open to a belief in God.  Star Trek‘s Spock is about the only person I can think of who could possibly evaluate every decision equally. Of course, I am oversimplifying a number of things, but that’s the only possible way to deal with the issue in a blog post.

Peter (1 Peter 3:15-16) admonishes Christians to “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect, keeping a clear conscience…”  This is what I try to do, and hopefully do it with gentleness and respect.  All I ask of atheists is that they do the same with respect to their position.

Now, I’d like to see both Christians and atheists better educated in their respective beliefs, as there’s just a whole lot of ignorance going on. But, that’s a subject for another time.

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Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton take on sexism in politics

Posted on September 15, 2008 by me

This is one of the funniest bits I’ve seen from SNL in a long, long time:

Posted in Humor and/or Sarcasm, Politics/Current Events | 2 Comments

Science and superstition

Posted on September 12, 2008 by me

Ewen Callaway wrote an interesting little piece over at The New Scientist last week that’s actually kind of funny, if you don’t take it too seriously.  The point of the article is to say that Darwin’s theory of evolution explains why people believe in superstitions. It’s nothing new, I heard this before: people believe in superstitions – including religion, I presume – because some superstitions help us to survive.  The logic is a bit back-assward: essentially, if evolution is moving in a positive direction and superstitions have persisted, they must be beneficial.

Superstition is defined as the tendency to falsely link a cause to an effect. The article states:

The tendency to falsely link cause to effect – a superstition – is occasionally beneficial, says Kevin Foster, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University.

For instance, a prehistoric human might associate rustling grass with the approach of a predator and hide. Most of the time, the wind will have caused the sound, but “if a group of lions is coming there’s a huge benefit to not being around,” Foster says.

…

In general, an animal must balance the cost of being right with the cost of being wrong, Foster says. Throw in the chances that a real lion, and not wind, makes the rustling sound, and you can predict superstitious beliefs, he says.

The article goes on to quote Michael Shermer, the professional skeptic, as saying

“Our brains are pattern-recognition machines, connecting the dots and creating meaning out of the patterns that we think we see in nature. Sometimes A really is connected to B, and sometimes it is not,” he says. “When it isn’t, we err in thinking that it is, but for the most part this process isn’t likely to remove us from the gene pool, and thus magical thinking will always be a part of the human condition.”

Now, I really don’t think Darwinism has much to do with it, though I don’t have a problem with the concept that people make wrong cause-effect associations; I think this happens fairly often. However, primitave cultures, as far as I know, were less linear in their thinking than we are; the cause-effect principle is foundational to modernism.   Foster has to back off a bit from his theory when talking about why superstitions still exist in today’s modern, scientific world: “My guess would be that in modern life, the general tendency to believe in things where we don’t have scientific evidence is less beneficial than it used to be.”

Now, here’s where it starts to get really funny:

However, Wolfgang Forstmeier, an evolutionary biologist at the Max Planck Institute of Ornithology in Starnberg, Germany, argues that by linking cause and effect – often falsely – science is a simply dogmatic form of superstition.

“You have to find the trade off between being superstitious and being ignorant,” he says. By ignoring building evidence that contradicts their long-held ideas, “quite a lot of scientists tend to be ignorant quite often,” he says.

Like I said, I think people often make incorrect cause-effect associations, and I would expect that it’s more common if you expect to find a cause-effect association, making scientists prime candidates. I don’t really know… But, I can tell you this: no good can come from walking under a ladder.

Posted in Faith, Science & Doubt, Humor and/or Sarcasm | 1 Comment