Questions of Truth
My review in the FT of Questions of Truth: Fifty-one Responses to Questions about God, Science, and Belief by John Polkinghorne and Nicholas Beale went through several drafts. The paper found the first two versions had too much of my own views on the subject; was not sufficiently even-handed; didn’t describe the actual contents enough; and was also a bit technical in places. Apart from that, they were perfect!
So I thought I’d share here some of the bits that got away, which I have reassembled into a hopefully coherent whole. (Read the published review to get a better sense of the book as a whole.)
I argued that the authors followed the time-honoured strategy to identify the spaces which science leaves behind and get their God of the gaps to plug them.
This works most effectively with “anthropic fine-tuning”, covered in one of three lengthy appendices, the others being on evolution and the relationship between mind and brain. The laws of physics contain six key numbers, and life could not have evolved anywhere in the universe if they were just slightly different. Currently, the most popular scientific explanation of this “fine-tuning” is that there are an infinite number of universes, and so the variables were bound to be right in one of them. In comparison, the alternative hypothesis that some divine being fixed them deliberately looks simpler and more plausible.
Many find this argument persuasive, including some very good physicists. The problem is that such divine gap-filling just isn’t science. To argue that God typed in the right numbers to allow life to evolve doesn’t even begin to solve the problem, since the mechanism by which this is supposed to have happened is utterly mysterious and can never be known scientifically. The God hypothesis may not contradict science, but the science can never lead you to it.
A truly scientific approach accepts gaps in our knowledge and keeps looking for testable answers. Beale, however, dismisses such intellectual humility, saying “there is a long tradition in atheist philosophy … of saying ‘There is no answer to this question’ when what you mean is ‘There is an answer to this question, but I don’t like it.’” It would be more accurate to say “There is an answer to this question, but it’s not scientific.” Ironically, it is the religious, who criticise “materialists” for lacking a proper sense of mystery, who seem least able to actually live with a real one when they find it.
Questions of Truth vividly illustrates how, if you are sufficiently committed to a belief, it is always possible to interpret other facts to fit in with it. It all depends on which of your beliefs you take to be non-negotiable. “The materialist takes as basic fact the existence of matter,” they say, somewhat caricaturing the atheist position. “The theist takes as basic fact the existence of a divine creator,” they add, accurately describing their own. From this starting point, it is clear there is nothing which could persuade the theist otherwise.
Polkinghorne and Beale’s exercise in apologetics shows how naïve it is to think that reason can lead all rational people inexorably to the same conclusion. Reason is not dispassionate, it is motivated by our prior commitments, and few are as strong as those of Bible believing Christians.
This does not mean that we should become entirely sceptical of reason and truth, however, simply that we must not overestimate the power of the former to illuminate the latter. Even when the truth is staring us right in the eyes, it often does so from the back of a crowd, the front row of which is filled with more seductive faces.
Filed under: Books, Philosophy
Julian: Good article. Maybe the God of gaps can reveal how to deal with deepening economic crisis.
Let’s pray that he emails Obama soon about what to do about the banks.
Would it be invidious to say that your review had the patina of ‘disappointingly good’? A further side light on the anthropic aspect is developed in Beale’s blog with your comment
http://starcourse.blogspot.com/2009/02/not-god-of-gaps.html
(What is a social philosopher/strategist?)
The anthropic principal is perhaps metaphysics that wants to be metascience when it grows up. When I read about it I get that feeling that there’s a false move being foisted on me. But where? In Indian logic there’s a valid means of knowledge called ‘Non-apprehension of existence’ (anupalabadhi). They contrast that to the invalid ‘Apprehension of non-existence’ because perception cannot be applied to what does not exist. Now in the actual universe do we see as a shadowy overlay all the universes that might have existed? Is contingency multivalent with repect to the universe as a whole?
Hi Julian,
Just as starters, it’s interesting to me that there are at least two places in the above and your article where science and religion are interchangeable, viz.
“. . . test the hypothesis [how it happened] it is no substitute for a proper scientific answer.” Here you were talking about God but infinite number of universes works equally well.
Also,
“if you are sufficiently committed to a belief, it is always possible to interpret other facts to fit in with it. It all depends on which of your beliefs you take to be non-negotiable.”
In order to maintain the Big Bang as a viable theory a great many new substances have had to be “discovered” none of which have actually been seen, measured or otherwise sensed.
Have they really been lead by reason? Have they shown themselves to be rational people?
Hmm, why draw conclusions about reason instead of just saying these authors are not dispassionate, and that they are motivated by their prior commitments? These guys seem like a very skewed data base to use for reaching general conclusions about capital-r Reason.
Whatever the state of science there will always be many truths that are beyond science (for Godelian and other reasons). To say that an explanation is “not scientific” is not the same as saying that it is untrue: atheism is just as “unscientific” as theism.
However as noted on http://www.starcourse.blogspot.com, whatever the laws of nature turned out to be (say a set L of laws and B of initial conditions) there will always be two meta-scientific questions:
1. Why this (L, B) and not some other?
2. Why should any laws work at all.
It may well turn out that some deeper scientific undertsandings change our current (L,B) in a way that reduces the number of free paramaters and makes the fine tuning seem less unlikely - though at present the changes are in completely the other direction. But it will not get away from these questions. And at present the data strongly support the idea of strong anthropic fine-tuning. “No credits for the future” Pauli used to say.
“2. Why should any laws work at all.”
This reminds me of a similar debate at Stephen Law’s blog. It was very long and very heated but fun to watch from the sidelines
http://stephenlaw.blogspot.com/2009/02/syes-presuppositonal-apologetics.html
Nicholas Beale writes–
This is ridiculous. Theists have inherited ideas about invisible beings from religious poetry, and want to use them to plug holes in existing science. This is not “just as scientific” as saying that we don’t have a way to plug certain holes. Julian makes a good point about how a story about God picking the constants is just not the stuff of science. I mean really, after he picked them, how did they become real? Did he say “shazzam”? Or maybe “abracadabra”? This stuff is obviously coming from story-land. A nice place to be for some, but nothing to do with science.
Jean: Do you really use “arguments” like this when you teach philsophy??
Is your position that the existence of a Loving Ultimate Creator is logically impossible or merely that you consider it, on balance, highly unlikely? Assuming the latter (even Dawkins doesn’t suppose the former) you must know that “shazzam” has nothing to do with it. If a LUC exists then by definition the LUC can create the universe.
Science can neither establish the existence or the non-existence of a LUC. Hence Theism and Atheism are equally “non-scientific”. Nor, for that matter, can Science establish the existence of minds. Would you try to “argue” that “people who believe in other minds have inherited ideas about invisible minds from poetry and prose, and want to use them to plug holes in existing science”? If one of your students came out with that, how would you grade them?
The fact that science can establish neither the existence nor the non-existence of a LUC does not signify that atheism and theism are equally non-scientific. First of all, science does not establish much, if anything; it deals with probabilities, not with certainties. So, the question is what is more probable, the LUC or her non-existence. It’s a bit like asking whether the existence of Santa Claus is probable or not.
Science might not be able to establish the existence or the non-existence of a creator, but it can make a significant contribution towards finding out if the hypothesis is required.
At the moment, the God hypothesis is a hypothesis looking for data to support it, not an intelligible way of making sense of things. It has no explanatory power and little utility.
Even if we needed to invoke a creator, on what grounds can we make the inference he/she/it is loving?
When people believe in a theory because they want to believe in it, rather than because they have no way of making sense of the world without it, then I think it’s understandable that hackles are raised and suspicions aroused.
Paul: Do you have any evidence for these strange assertions? You may think belief in God is mistaken, but it is certainly intelligible to almost everybody, and on any objective measure (eg evolutionary fitness) it has a great deal of utility.
On the loving bit, philosophically I’m inclined to offer “Loving Ultimate Creator” as a defintion of God. That is clearly fundamental to Christianity and I think broadly consonant with Islam & Judaism. It offers a philosophical explanations for Anthropic Fine-tuning the intelligibility of the universe, the existence of objective morality and beauty, and our strong intuition that love is the most important and fundamental aspect of the universe. It also makes sense of the phenomenon of Jesus.
I don’t say for a moment that there are no alternative worldviews, or that there are not problems (notably suffering) with this view. But as Julian says in his review of Questions of Truth, people who would benefit from this most are fundamentalists and over-confident atheists who think that religion is irrational.
Sure, it’s intelligible - in so far as it’s clearly stated. But is it required? Do we actually need it to explain anything? I wouldn’t call myself an atheist and I don’t even think a belief in God is mistaken. I don’t think people are wrong to say God exists, but I just don’t see how it has any relevance.
I certainly do think people who believe in God are wrong when they attempt to explain anything that happens on Earth or the observable universe by reference to him or her without doing a bit of science first. If I’m honest, the well-observed rush to explain by reference to God makes me suspicious of the whole shooting match.
Anyway, I’d be interested in understanding how the God hypothesis has utility in terms of evolutionary fitness. I was using ‘utility’ to mean ‘helps us understand the world’.
And I’m certainly not convinced that God is required to explain or justify morality, beauty or love. I don’t see any problems in need of a God-shaped solution in any of these areas.
Okay Nicholas, I have an alternative (world?)view. To me the thing that, as of now, makes the most sense is something that was (and maybe still is) instrumental in the shaping of our universe. Nothing silly like a god. Nothing that might give a damn about humans. Such a notion draws hostility from both theists and most scientists. We have physical forces, gravity, electricity, etc. Why not one that has evolved (over an infinite amount of time) so that it can manipulate it’s environment for it’s own purposes. We happened to have been a by product of whatever it was up to.
Nicholas, I think it’s a perfectly good question why we take gods seriously when we are looking for serious explanations instead of telling stories. Why the Loving Ultimate Creator, not the Jealous Ultimate Creator? How about the Angry Ultimate Creator (what with all the floods and sick kids in the world)? The origins of these things in story-telling traditions does make them suspicious. It would be an amazing coincidence if the protagonist that met your story-telling needs also served the purposes of cutting edge science. It strikes me as being extremely unlikely.
As to other minds. I know for a fact that I have a mind. So minds don’t even begin to seem like fictions. The question about other minds is whether in addition to the one I clearly have, there are more. I think it would be rather fantastic if I were the only one in the universe who had the privilege of having mind. It seems more reasonable to think I’m not unique. That’s no proof of other minds, but it’s enough to make other minds worth taking perfectly seriously.
Rather than just joining in a debate about whether X exists or not, I think it’s quite reasonable to first ask whether the debate is worth having. The god debate got grandfathered in by 3000 years of people taking it seriously, but maybe it’s time to stop.
Even if God created the universe, and is responsible for the fine-tuning etc., why does this mean I have to go to church on Sunday’s? Why does it entail immortality? Why does it mean that when someone important to me dies the Priest or whatever talks about God and the Bible, not the person I’ve lost? Why does it justify people killing each other?
I just don’t get it. I’m sorry, I just think it’s all nuts.
Nicholas,
If you take the Big Bang as a given then there are plenty more meta-scientific unanswerable questions, e.g.
3. Why were there just the right components for the formation of atoms.
4. How is it that atoms formed?
5. Why was there a period of inflation?
6. Why the formation (if that’s the right word) of the singularity that created the B.B.
If we don’t assume the B.B. and do assume the universe had no beginning, that is time is infinite, you can get rid of your initial conditions in 1. and 2.
“It offers a philosophical explanations for Anthropic Fine-tuning the intelligibility of the universe, the existence of objective morality and beauty, and our strong intuition that love is the most important and fundamental aspect of the universe”
It offers as much a philosophical explanation to any of those points as would inserting the idea of leprechauns, faeries, Zeus, or my butt in the place of the LUC you posited. I guess they are all some sort of answer, but certainly poor philosophy.
“It also makes sense of the phenomenon of Jesus.”
The real phenomenon of Jesus is that it was in no way a singular phenomenon. The story of Jesus was not an original one even at that time. There are many very human explanations that make sense of the phenomenon of Jesus.
Jean and Paul have already said it well, but I think it’s worth preaching to the four corners of the earth if need be…any God or LUC or whatever is a hypothesis that doesn’t well serve the role of a good hypothesis. Or even a bad hypothesis. We might not ever be able to come up with a good hypothesis to explain away a lot of the big questions, but even elegant theories (String) run into this problem. At least there’s some beautiful math involved with that idea, math based on previous models based on real world hypothesis and experimentation.
Mr. Beale seems like a knowledgeable person, well read, and I’m hoping being in the minority here doesn’t persuade him away from the discussion. I think the best medicine for this world would be more believers getting into debates with well meaning, interested atheists.
Heh. But wouldn’t the probability of there being a god that created us be even more probable?
Mmmmm this thread is delicious. I do enjoy these discussions.
Christianity is a very complex, subtle and well-developed set of ideas, held by a large number of extremely serious and well-educated people. There is no point in trying to give a 1-liner on why it is to be preferred to any number of non-theories that no-one seriously believes.
If a LUC exists then (s)he is unlikely to be incompetent and will therefore have some communication with the people (s)he loves. So if (s)he exists it’s reasonable to suspect that at least one of the major religions has a substantial core of truth.
The idea that infinite time removes the need for B is an common philosophical mistake (read Augustine).
People who can’t tell the difference between God and their butt really should learn something and cannot expect to be taken seriously any more.
Glad to see such a good discussion, and Nicholas pitching in. Returning to two quite early comments made by Ralph:
I’m not sure enough of my physics here, but two points. First, the infinite universe hypothesis is, I believe, a result of the mathematics. But second, even if it is indeed as speculative as God. no one draws any other moral or existential conclusions from it, or uses the hypothesis to help shore up such a world view. So it;s not as much of a motivated belief.
Absolutely. This is not just true of religion. But I would argue that a good atheist would have minimal fundamental commitments, the kid anyone must have to think and believe at all, and would not include among them beliefs about specific deities which are clearly optional.
N.Beale:
As a believer of the tribe of Pascal who would hold that God is a living God and not a theorem I still respect your attempt to use science to give a rational basis for your belief. Anything that brings about consciousness of the living presence of God in whatever form you take it to be is a good thing. However it is surely significant that no saint, sage, prophet, jnani, mahatma etc. has ever come to God by way of a reasoned out process. Even Aquinas with his 5 ways could only show that the existence of God was at least not self-contradictory or absurd and in his final days had a vision which reduced all this apodeictic elegance to the status of a wisp of hay in a furnace.
In our times the paradigm of rationality is science and every new theory is hopefully tried for its potential power to vanquish the infidel. Will the Anthropic Principle do it? A lot of smart people are impressed by it but I cannot get over the sense that it is infected by circularity. Why should Laws work at all? Because there is nature and things have thingness. We have this world or data because we have this world. How could data not support the Anthropic Principle when either fine tuned or gross tuned things are what they are. Even very simple things operating with simple rules can create complexity in their interaction. No fine tuning required.
Clearly you cannot reason people into faith - or love for that matter. But if they think they have “scientific evidence” that their beloved is dead (photos, newspaper reports, a telegram) you may be able to show reasonably that this “evidence” is faulty (faked, drunk journalists, mistaken identity etc…).
What you say about fine tuning sounds reasonable, and was pretty much what people supposed before they did the calculations. It turns out, at present, not to be like that at all.
“What you say about fine tuning sounds reasonable, and was pretty much what people supposed before they did the calculations. It turns out, at present, not to be like that at all.”
Can you expand on that because it seems to me to be like that tautologically: things are as they are because there are these things this way and if there weren’t we wouldn’t know about them.
Not that ‘god’ supplies an answee even if we think there is a problem. Who did the ‘fine tuning’ to make the divinity possible? Why are things structured in such a way that there can be divine beings rather than in a way inimical to them?
Julian,
Thanks for commenting on my offering. My aim, which I only realized later, was to suggest science, or specifically cosmology, has taken up some of the aspects of religion. When you say no one draws existential conclusions from the infinite universes hypothesis, isn’t its raison d’etre to explain why we have life in our universe? I also suggest if it were accepted more generally it would have the effect of closing down other avenues of consideration.
There are ways of dealing with the fine-tuning dilemma which are in my mind less exotic and outlandish than offered in our above hypothesis:
We pretty much accept the notion of dark matter; its existence is inferred from gravitational effects on visible matter. There are other like quantities in cosmology, i.e. undetectable by direct means. Is it such a far leap to consider the possibility of a “substance” that is in some way self-motivated? Something which for its own self-preservation “designed” our universe as it is? To make any sense at all, if you think that’s at all possible, time would have to be infinite or curved or . . . To me, this idea sure beats gods and infinite numbers of universes.
John: By definition any Ultimate Creator must be self-existent. To ask “who created the UC” is simply not to understand the term.
Ralph: if a substance is “self-motivated” then it seems to have at least some of the characteristics of personhood. But it makes no difference whether time is infinite or curved (again Augustine had this straight in the 5th C) logical or ontological dependence does not have to be temporal. You can always transform the t-axis to make it appear infinite, or finite. (John Lucas is wonderful on this in “A Treatise on Time and Space”)
“John: By definition any Ultimate Creator must be self-existent. To ask “who created the UC” is simply not to understand the term.”
Which is really just a tautological conversation stopper. What can ’self-existent’ possibly mean and why should it not apply to the visible universe? How does it explain anything?
Nicholas,
“You can always transform the t-axis to make it appear infinite, or finite.”
As a mathematician that doesn’t sit well with me, but I’m going to a least glance at Lucas to see what he says.
You’ve got my curiosity up with your reference to Augustine. I’m going to poke around his stuff too. I might be back.
My limited entry into the back and forth is for
Julian:
You write “The materialist takes as basic fact the existence of matter,” they say, somewhat caricaturing the atheist position.
Could you explain why “A materialist taking as basic fact the existence of matter” is a caricature?
“Clearly you cannot reason people into faith - or love for that matter. ”
I think this is pretty much the heart of the matter (for me anyway!). If someone told me they truly loved God, then there is little I can or indeed would say. Much like I would not ask a parent why they love their child, I would not ask a believer to justify their love of God. To forcefully question this love seems to me to miss the whole point of love.
However I would seriously question any actions based on that love which control or influence the lives of others. I include in this any attempts to indoctrinate vulnerable people (who may not have the capacity to choose otherwise) into sharing that love (i.e., children).
Here’s a thought. If a believer based a life or death decision upon their love of God, are non-believers justified in questioning whether such a person has the capacity to make this choice? We generally feel obliged to point out to a person about to walk across an imaginary bridge between two tall buildings that the bridge might not be real. Are we obliged to point out to a believer any mistakes in their reasoning or sense experience that might be influencing a similarly consequential decision?
While we feel obliged to stop people killing others because of their Faith (Abraham and Isaac come to mind!), we are reluctant to intervene to stop them killing themselves. That is, the Courts generally respect a person’s religious belief when that belief leads them to refuse medical treatment.
But how is the latter case different from the person walking across the imaginary bridge?
Paul: Refusing to accept medical treatment isn’t the same as killing oneself. In fact, suicide is illegal in most countries, although I don’t think that it should be illegal. In most cases, refusing to accept medical treatment only increases the probability of death. Of course, a man bleeding to death from a stab wound in the throat is sure to die, but it is very rare that someone refuses medical treatment in an emergency situation: stab wound, auto crash, drowning, etc.
That’s interesting, isn’t it? No one refuses medical treatment, as far as I know, in the emergency room.
Fair point Amos, so let’s change it from killing people to letting people die.
For example, let’s say an experienced tight-rope walker only chooses to walk across a tight-rope between two tall buildings because they hallucinate a safety-net below them. Again, we feel obliged to query his or her capacity to make that choice.
Compare this to a person who refuses medical treatment, not because they want to die, but because they think God will intervene or they think they’re heading to an afterlife. The Courts respect this, but I’m not sure why*.
Anyway, these issues are probably off topic. Apologies!
*I’m not saying they shouldn’t, but I’m wondering what the difference between the tight-rope walker and the believer really is.
Would it be illegal to walk a tight-rope, imagining a safety-net below? I’m not sure what the current laws are about declaring someone insane and commiting them, against his or her will, to an institution. In a recent case in Chile, a woman, member of some New Age sect, bled to death, after giving birth in her New Age community. It was her decision not to seek medical help, although obviously, as she grew weaker and weaker, her ability to make rational decisions decreased. The leaders of the sect were arrested on various charges, not attending to someone in a situation of medical emergency being one of them (that is, they had a legal obligation to call an ambulance). I’m not sure how the case turned out, since the leaders of the sect were using the insanity defense the last time I heard news about it. Now, the difference between a sect and a religion is like the difference between a dialect and a language: a language is a dialect with a flag and an army.
It’s not necessarily illegal, but we might feel morally obliged to point out the non-existence of the safety-net. We might even feel they are unable to properly consider the risks, given their faulty sense-experience.
Anyway, I think the fact that courts don’t force people to have medical treatment when it conflicts with their religious beliefs is an Anglo-Saxon matter. I think that in Chile the courts would force the person to undergo medical treatment and I’m absolutely sure that if a child were involved, the courts would over-rule the parents’ beliefs. The problem doesn’t come up much, since this is primarily a Catholic country, although the number of fundamentalist Protestant groups is growing.
1. the evidence is that religious believers have appreciably better health and evolutionary survival. So these metaphors about safety nets are profoundly misleading.
2. Anyone who doesn’t understand the term “self-existent” should probably not be debating the philosophy of theism. But roughly it means that your existence does not depend on any other entity. The visible universe is certainly not self-existent. It is not self-evidently contradictory to suppose that the initial signularity was, though there are some problems.
3. Juilan: we need to disentagle the idea of an “optional” belief. If you are on a beach and you suspect (but cannot be certain) that a tsunami is on the way then in the sense you use it your belief in the tsunami is “optional”. But if the tsunami is in fact on the way it is not “optional” at all - you will (probably) die unless you hold that belief. It has been said that there are no dead atheists - only dead former atheists - becasue when they die they are either non-existent or better informed. This does not (of course) settle the question of whether God exists, but it settles the absurd idea that it doesn’t matter.
“the evidence is that religious believers have appreciably better health and evolutionary survival. So these metaphors about safety nets are profoundly misleading.”
Yes, and the evidence suggests that people who believe the dummy pills are real derive considerable benefit from them.
I also do not doubt for one minute that our ability to believe in things because they make us feel better and despite evidence to the contrary confers survival value at times - but it’s a high risk strategy. It also says nothing about the truth of the belief, and does nothing to justify concerns about people basing consequential decisions on such a belief system. That mainstream religious belief systems can be questionable, to say the least, is nicely illustrated by the continued employment by the Vatican of an Exorcist:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article1974737.ece
I’m also not aware of any studies that have examined the hypothesis that the health benefits of religion reflect religion’s success at creating non-existent problems in the minds of non-religious people. Perhaps the truly non-religious person rejects the existence of the problems and has no need for solutions?
It would be interesting to compare the health of 1) people who are sceptical that the problems religious people purport to solve actually exist, 2) people who accept the religious problems but not the religious solution and 3) people who accept the religious problems and the religious solutions.
“People who can’t tell the difference between God and their butt really should learn something and cannot expect to be taken seriously any more.”
People who can’t see the similarity between the assertion that an LUC created the universe or that my butt did should also not expect to be taken seriously. I did not claim that God and my butt are the same, and contextually, that should have been obvious. I said only that they offered the same limited explanatory power to the ultimate questions. If I say that some LUC created the universe, or some self-existent leprechaun created the universe, or that my butt created the universe, any one of these ideas will help out philosophers or scientists roughly equally, which is to say roughly not at all. And I say roughly, because when it comes to my butt, scientists would at least know where to begin their experiments.
“Christianity is a very complex, subtle and well-developed set of ideas, held by a large number of extremely serious and well-educated people. There is no point in trying to give a 1-liner on why it is to be preferred to any number of non-theories that no-one seriously believes.”
Except for the fact that a large number of extremely serious and well-educated people hold it to be true, the rest of that statement is absolutely ludicrous. I’ve read the bible from cover to cover twice, and studied parts in between hard and often, and it’s nowhere close to subtle, well-developed, or complex. It a collection of painfully superstitious beliefs mixed with painfully inaccurate history. There is NO good reason why the “non-theory” that is christianity should be preferred over any other non-theory. If every serious and well-educated person in the world except for you was brainwashed tomorrow into believing that leprechauns exist or that my butt is magical, that would not be a reason for you to also start preferring those theories. It would be a great reason for you to be thankful that you weren’t brainwashed as well.
Hey Michael could we leave your butt out of this? It’s a stupid argument and adds nothing to the debate. At least your self existent leprechaun can be made to do some work (i.e. to show how the “ultimate cause” can be cloaked in any form we wish to imagine). But a product of the universe (your butt) being the cause or source of it (the universe) is manifestly incoherent and a conversation de-railer (to the point where it’s rude).
Arguments like this belie your statment “I think the best medicine for this world would be more believers getting into debates with well meaning, interested atheists.”
I’m sorry. Upon posting the comment, I didn’t see it as a bit different from the leprechaun argument or the LUC argument, which was my point in any of it in the first place. Silly and childish, absolutely, but I often find both of those attitudes to be enjoyable. But hey, I also really like the movie Dogma, so poor taste is part and parcel.
Only one question - “i.e. to show how the “ultimate cause” can be cloaked in any form we wish to imagine”
makes sense to me…why should my imagination not consider magic naughty bits? especially if for no other sake than a giggle?
Anyway, I appreciate this site, the time everyone spent reading others posts and engaging us with theirs, for their patience with my pontification, and for the general sense of humor expressed throughout. I respectfully excuse myself from further posts to this topic.
Not in the least surprised to read :
(from http://www.polkinghorne.net/)
Quite.
My point from a previous post was that people come to religion and remain in it via personal experience. They then may be able to see the merit in converging and convincing arguments for the existence of God which are far from knock down proofs in the scientific sense.
If it is the case that
as N.Beale claims then the problem of all those people who are too thick to get them remains. The arguments may be intriguing but without the prepping of spiritual operations they will not have much force. Moreover if one makes belief a rational matter the unpersuaded will think ” I’ve been there, tried the tee-shirt and it didn’t fit”.
I do say almost overwhelming. People who aren’t convinced are not “thick”. But if any other worldview needed to posit 10^100 un-knowable alternative universes to sustain its plausibility, it would be laughed out of court.
And if someone said they simply did not know then that ‘negative capability’ might be treated with respect.
“… that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” (Keats, 1817)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_Capability
Nicholas
“I do say almost overwhelming. People who aren’t convinced are not “thick”. But if any other worldview needed to posit 10^100 un-knowable alternative universes to sustain its plausibility, it would be laughed out of court.”
I’m not sure why it would be laughed out of court any more than saying there is a self-existent creator. Once one decides to bypass mystery in its general sense (i.e. gives up negative capability as Paul points out), and decides to “answer” questions that concern ultimate conditions and causes, it’s not clear to me why saying “every (L,B) that can exist does exist” (uh oh! Anselm?) is any more ridiculous than saying “only this particular set of things exists and it exists due to the action(s) of a supreme consciousness.”
I am persuaded that both of them are pretty mindblowing to seriously contemplate, but most theories about the ultimate nature of things are pretty mindblowing whether they are Idealist or Materialist in nature.
I guess I would add a general comment about theist vs atheist (vs deist and pantheist and panentheist) arguments is that although I do love the discussions, such discussions have a propensity to trend away from an appreciation of mystery as such. We are SO ignorant, after all this time. Our knowledge base is extraordinarily large, so much so that we fragment it into a multitude of extreme specialities that take many years if not a lifetime to master. In this way our enormous knowledge base fragments our capacity for understanding into “microunderstanding.” What holds our meaning in common?What common discourse can we use to find common ground? Perhaps a discourse that begins with (and then does not forget) an appreciation of the extreme limitations of our pursuit of truth. In the case of Christianity this is called Sin. In Science at least we can suggest an embrace of humility.
N.Beale:
No they’re clearly not thick as is shown by the fact that many philosophers who are acquainted with rational argument do not find the proofs for the existence of God convincing. ‘Almost’ overwhelming is an overstatement that attempts to put such arguments on the same footing as empirically founded theories. The anthropic principle is not like ‘ether’ or ‘phlogiston’ or ‘wave theory’ that will, as time goes by and more information becomes available, be rejected, established or continue to exist in a modified way. It will always be a meditation on providence for PhDs in Physics.
Faust,
Extremely true:
“Our knowledge base is extraordinarily large, so much so that we fragment it into a multitude of extreme specialities that take many years if not a lifetime to master.”
A friend of mine who was the head of the physics department at U of Southern Cal for a number of years admitted to me recently that he hardly understands anything coming out of cosmology now. I’ve tried to chip away at it, but my doctorate in math is no match for it. But it doesn’t take “a rocket science” to realize that a lot of stuff coming from cosmology is off-the-wall. Infinite numbers of universes is not the hardest to believe. Possible “observers” emitted from black holes (Hawking) I believe has that beat. The only way I can make any sense of it is to assume they’re taking some extremely low probability results from some incredibly esoteric mathematics and latching onto them for dear life (or publishing.) The “dear life” part is the result of insisting upon keeping the Big Bang Theory alive which lends itself to talking about (L,B.) In fact, without the B.B. the need to justify fine-tuning disappears.
Michael: I think we are loudly agreeing. Almost overwhelming is quite consistent with philosophers finding the arguments less than certain.
Ralph/Faust: Indeed. There is (I’m reliably told) some very deep and beautiful maths in String/M theory but at present it is all wildly speculative and has no real connection with experiment. John P and I think it has a bit of the flavour of epicycles at present. With the Standard Model there is a big Fine-tuning problem and so far every attempt to “solve” it has introduced more free parameters. But even without B.B. you would have (L,B). Fred Hoyle was convinced of the Steady State universe, but even he (a staunch atheist) concluded that “the universe was a put-up job”
N.Beale:
No we don’t agree. The existence of God is not a matter of evidence in the scientific sense in my opinion. It is a matter of personal realisation and decision to accept a testimony. The anthropic principle is not a demonstration or a near demonstration but may be useful as a meditation.
Elsewhere Brandon at http://branemrys.blogspot.com/ examines Julian Baggini’s understanding of Hume on miracles and causality. It has some bearing on the present discussion. Admirable clarity in a subject which is like lifting mercury with a fork.
Still with this ‘anthropic principle’ red herring? The trouble is, even if we agree that there is something that needs to be explained (and Beale conceded upthread that there wasn’t when he accepted that the universe could well be ’self-existent’ and would, therefore, not need any self-existent predecessor) , the argument from anthopic principle to god is self-refuting.
If the argument is that conditions of nature have to be so incredibly delicately balanced to permit life that the existence of a creator is required to explain the coincidence, then it is implicit that creator must have been constrained to balance the forces of nature in just this way in order to allow life which means that the creator is bound by the laws of nature which must logically precede his or her existence, which in turn means that the problem hasn’t gone away: why are the laws of nature such that a creator must balance them in the delicate way that we see them balanced in order to permit life?
John: you seem a bit confused.
a. I don’t say the universe “could well” be self-existent. SImply that it is not (obviously) logically contradictory to suppose that it is.
b. The argument is that the presently-known set of laws & boundary conditions (L,B) has the property that very small changes of B (subsuming for convenience the dimensionless constants into B) would make the universe non-anthropic.
Of course a Loving Ultimate Creator can choose any (L,B) pair that (s)he wants, and is only constrained by the laws of logic.
Pretty well every serious scientist who studies this issue realises that it is a problem, and the consensus at the moment is that the only viable “solution” is an enormously profligate multiverse. Read Martin Rees on the subject.
Nicholas: Why are you so sure that an omnipotent God must be constrained by the laws of logic? By the way, does our loving God create good and evil according to her Will or is She constrained by the ethical principles of good and evil?
Sorry that was an informal way of saying what should more accurately be expressed as “the laws of logic constrain what we can meaningfully say about God”.
The problem of evil is too big for this blog, but the moment you have the possibility of people freely choosing to love/do good you have the possibility of freely choosing not to love/to do evil. And the moment you endow creation with the possibility of “freely” developing according to deep laws like those of physics and biology then the same laws that enable the emergence of beings that are free to choose to love entail the existence of disease and disaster. It does seem to be a package deal: we cannot have the freedom to love without suffering.
Christians would add that God is not simply a spectator in this suffering, but takes it on Himself and transcends it. And that love is of infinite value, whereas suffering, though real and horrible, is finite.
In the end it depends on a fundamental perspective that love is at the heart of the universe. And that utlimately matter and energy arise from love, and not vice-versa. You may not share this perspective, but it is certainly coherent, and offers (whether you want to accept it or not) explanations for many puzzling aspects of life that lie beyond science.
Hi Amos,
Wow, that’s an interesting thought, god not being constrained by logic. Of course, why would she be, but what would it even mean in this context? Is logic necessary for the existence of the universe? I don’t see why. In fact it necessary for lesser life forms than intelligent ones?
As to your second question, you know god is not constrained by anything, that’s part of the neat thing about being god.
Is love not better explained in evolutionary terms?
Well schematically there are two possibilities:
1. LUC ->Matter/Energy +(Love, Morality,Reason etc..)->Persons
2. Matter/Energy ->Persons->(L, M, R etc..)
Neither seems logically impossible. (1) answers many questions that (2) leaves un-answered, but of course the answers could be wrong. As with any metaphysical question, in the end you have to choose.
Forgive me - what are the unanswered questions from (2)? And how does (1) account for the conditionality of pretty much everything we feel and think following say drugs, brain damage, dementia etc.
For example, it seems inconsistent to say a ‘loving’ creator would give someone the experience of love, and then put in place a mechanism which strips that person of all the functions which allow them to have that love in the first place (I’m thinking dementia here, as an example). If it were true that such a being devised such a nasty plan, I’d feel rather angry and not entirely sure I would want to obey him or her anyway.
There’s something slightly insulting about any attempt to justify this sort of stuff from a religious perspective.
Faust.
Because it contrasts the theist with a “materialist” who believes in “matter”. This is not entirely false but then again caricatures are not entirely false, just simplistic and focusing on aspects of the caricaturee that make them look funniest.
It is a caricature because
(1) The existence of matter is not taken as a basic fact in any thick sense. What “matter” is is up for investigation, and in fact, we find it is not what we intuitively think it is at all.
(2) The atheist’s world view does not revolve around matter. We do not generally consult the nature of matter when thinking about how to live, or what is important. God therefore holds a very different place in the theist’s worldview to matter in the atheists, which is why it is somewhat misleading to contrast the two.
Tempted to suggest reading QoT. In brief:
a. Unanswered Qs include: where does M/E come from? Why is it so fine-tuned for life? Why is reason so effective? Why do we have such a strong intuitions that Love and Morality and not epiphenomena?
b. Dementia is just one more aspect of suffering and death, inevitable if we are to have freedom and life. It is horrible, but finite. Love is infinite. It really is “better to have loved and lost”.
Nicholas
It is optional because we can get along perfectly well without it. Properly “properly basic” beliefs, such as the fact that we exist, that things cause other things, etc, are literally indispensable.
The view that God’s existence or non-existence does not matter is quite different from the view that belief in him is optional, in this sense. Let’s not confuse the two.
My last post was of course in reply to Paul. I largely agree with Julian’s - though “over-simplistic” would I think be more accurate that “caricature”. Of course God turns out not to be what people thought either….
Out of sequence, but I’m curious…
But the LUC does not have some communication with (all) the people she loves, assuming that ‘the people she loves’ refers to humanity as a whole. The LUC does not have some communication with me, for example; why should I be left out? And in fact the claim that a LUC would have some communication with (all) the people she loves would make it seem quite unreasonable to suspect that only one of the major religions has a substantial core of truth, or that that core of truth was limited to religions. Why would a LUC limit such truth to one religion, or to religion as opposed to non-religion? Why would a LUC not make the communication universal? Chopping things up that way seems the opposite of loving, for a variety of reasons, including the exclusion of some from the communication and the bloodshed and misery caused by competing religions over the centuries.
But not with Julian’s latest :-). On the Atheist worldview we can get along without belief in God, but not on the Christian worldview. So I’m afraid you’re begging the question (in the correct sense of the term)
I have come late to this discussion, so I’m not going to try going back to the beginning, but just taking the two options that Nicholas provides:
Supposing that the LUC is a person, it’s strange that such a being should take such a round about way to create persons. And, with Paul, I wonder what the unanswered questions are in (2). With (1) we’ve got to make a big leap to the LUC, which I suspect is inconsistent with the amount of evil in the world and the particular way in which the LUC has decided to create persons. But with (2) I can’t see where the questions arise, and why we can’t just accept it as the way it is. After all, we’re here.
Perhaps I’m just dense about these things, and I’ve heard Dawkins say that the Anthropic Principle really does capture something. If there is something ‘goldilocks’ about our existence, why does this matter? We’re here? So the universe must have the characteristics necessary for us being here. The constants are what they are. How does it help to say that there is a LUC that sets the constants in order for us to be here. Isn’t that (the portion in italics) a much bigger assumption than just taking things as they are?
Besides that, I do have a question, arising from Jeremy’s review in the FT. Here’s the quote:
I don’t see that this is possibly an adequate defence of Genesis. This assumes something that is almost impossibly unlikely, that there was a particular first morally conscious couple (that is, a man and a woman). I should have thought that moral consciousness was something that evolved within a group, at the very least, of conscious members of homo sapiens. I don’t think Genesis can be let off the hook this easily.
Where does M/E come from?
- Don’t know
Why is it so fine-tuned for life?
- Don’t know
Why is reason so effective?
- Helps us survive?
Why do we have such a strong intuitions that Love and Morality and not epiphenomena?
- I don’t share your intuition, and I don’t know if it really matters if they are epiphenomena. It doesn’t change the authority they hold over me (and I think the term is quite misleading in the context). If others do share your intuition, then perhaps it’s because of centuries of religious conditioning (classical and operant).
Ophelia: of course God communicates with you. But he doesn’t force you to listen or respond. That is freedom - and love.
Eric: Almost every fundamental truth about the universe seems “strange”. As for Adam & Eve: it would’t make any real difference if the set of first morally conscious human beings was >2. In Biblical language individuals can stand for groups. But most great breakthroughs occur first to one or two people.
Nicholas: Actually, above when I asked if God was constrained by good and evil, I was citing the so-called Euthyphro question, not the problem of evil.
The Euthyphro question, as you probably know, asks whether the good is good because God wills it to be good (thus, God, being omnipotent, could will murder to be good, as Abraham discovers) or whether God wills what is good in itself and thus, good and evil are prior to God’s will.
Ralph: God’s omnipotence is tricky. Could an omnipotent God create a rock so heavy that She could not life it?
spelling error: the last sentence should read: Could an omnipotent God create a rock so heavy that she could not lift it?
Julian,
Thank you for unpacking the statement.
I think I understand better what your thinking is here though I’m still not sure that simply saying “materialists take the existence of matter as a basic fact” is much of a caricature. What “matter” is might be up for investigation, but “matter” is just the heuristic label that we give to the “thing” or “collection of things” that underly everything (It’s “things” all the way down!). So yes a thick(er) description would say something more like “materialists believe that underlying all existent things are other things that have certain qualities and attributes and relate to each other in various ways and we call these various fundamental entities `matter’” but really…how much farther have we gotten here other than to say that materialists believe that “things” are complicated? Saying theists believe in the existence of a divine creator could also be a “caricature” if the standard for non-caricature is “thick description.”
As for 2), Ok fair enough. I think this is perhaps really what you were trying to get at. God is extemely important in a theistic worldview, however, in a materialist world view the mere fact that “matter” is the source of everything does not then have automatic implications for what we should value and how we should live. So “matter” is not the metaphorical “god” of materialists, even if it is the most fundamental “thing.” The theist would argue that the ABSENSE of God has huge implications for materialists (I think this is what Beale was getting at with the Tsunami and the beach), but the materialist does not (necessarily) think that the mere fact of of the existence of “matter” has any automatic implications for what we should value or what is important, and is also not concerned with the absence of God (or at least holds we can get along just fine without him or her).
Amos: As we explain in QoT (Q15) Euthrypo is not a problem for Christianity, though it is for abstract theism.
“so heavy that an omnipotent being could not lift it” is a term like “the largest prime”. It is a logical impossibility and refers to nothing.
Well, Nicholas, now we are becoming facile. You say:
But this isn’t a fundamental truth about the universe. If it’s a truth at all, it’s a truth about God (or the LUC), and about why a LUC would create in such an incredibly wasteful and cruel way. And this is more than just strange. It’s fine to squeak out of the problem of explanation by saying that the LUC is self-existent by definition, but you can’t keep using this escape route. At some point what the LUC does has got to make sense, even if its being self-existent isn’t. And, as Darwin properly noted, I think, natural selection is a particularly odd way for an LUC to go about creating life (especially if the ‘L’ stands for something).
As for Adam and Eve and the breakthrough to moral consciousness, my guess, since moral consciousness is still something of a problem for many if not most people, is that this is something that took place in a group or in a group of groups over a long period. The idea that there was a couple or a group to which the story in Genesis applies is really quite far fetched. It’s quite clearly an anti-myth, in which human beings learned to disparage themselves, and cringe impotently before the almighty (the LUC if you like), and ever since has fed the trope that we shouldn’t play god - which of course we do all the time to some good purpose. But suggesting that the story in some sense is compatible with the scientific account of the evolution of homo sapiens is surely straining at a gnat and swallowing a rather bigger bug.
But, Nicolas, you affirmed above that God was not constrained by the laws of logic, so the problem of whether an omnipotent God could create a rock so heavy that he could not lift it remains.
Nicholas,
I don’t see the analogy between “the largest prime” and god creating a rock too heavy for her to lift. I hope you don’t have any more time lines with a beginning up your sleeve.
My previous post should read “infinite time lines.”
No, Amos, if you look, what Nicholas in fact says is that God is constrained only by the laws of logic.
Eric: No, I called Nicholas on that and he corrected himself, affirming that God is not constrained by the laws of logic; only our understanding of God is constrained by said laws in Nicholas’s opinion.
Nicholas,
Here’s a reasonable analogy to
“so heavy that an omnipotent being could not lift it”
A weight lifter can lift 300 lbs. She puts 500 lbs. on the weight bar and is unable to lift it. Perfectly logical.
Nicholas, oh come on. What does it mean to say God communicates with me when I am completely unaware of any such communication? Why is my experience and my testimony not to be trusted? How could your claim be falsified? What kind of communication is it that is entirely undetectable to the communicatee?
I suppose it’s some special kind of goddy communication that one can’t detect unless one has ‘opened her heart’ or some such. But how is that distinguishable from confirmation bias and just plain wishful thinking?
Does it worry you that there’s something a trifle…insulting, or presumptuous, about informing people that they have had an experience that they say they have not had?
And what does it mean to say that is freedom and love, anyway? If parents sequestered themselves away from their children from the moment of the children’s birth so thoroughly that the children were entirely unaware of any communication from their parents at all, and grew up in a verminous orphanage - would that be freedom and love?
And why is the claim that God does communicate with me despite my total lack of awareness of such communication but that he doesn’t force me to listen or respond and that that’s freedom and love, not just a way to respond to the fact that God doesn’t ‘communicate’ in the straightforward way that friends and relations do? Why is it not just a desperate cover story?
Eric: Is your “point” that the universe may be complex and suprising where fundmental truths are strange but God can not be??
Ralph: God is not exactly “constrained by logic” but whether a sequence of words signifies anything is. “God does not know the largest prime” is not a limit to God’s omniscience because the term “the largest prime” denotes nothing. Similarly “a rock so heavy that an omnipotent being cannot lift it” denotes nothing.
Ophelia: Surely you have heard of Jesus of Nazareth?
A really fundamental difficulty that a lot of atheists seem to have is that they don’t seriously consider the possibility that Christianity is true (shorthand, I know, but bear with me, this is only a blog). So people often argue: “C => X, not X, therefore not C” when either X is something that is not implied by C (usually C-philosophers have not been suggesting X for >>100 years, c/f Ralph) or “not X” turns out to be “A => not X” which begs the question.
I’d hope that everyone on this blog would (at least on reflection) agree that if C is true then the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth is a genuine communication from God.
I never do consider the possibility that Christianity is true, because to be perfectly honest, much of it makes literally no sense to me. It would be like considering the possibility that roundsquareism were true.
However, I do think it’s worth considering the possibility that theism is true. The bare bones of monotheism can at least be mentally grasped.
If C is true…well, as I said, I don’t really get what I’d be supposing. But OK, I’ll try. Maybe if Christianity true, the “life death and resurrection” is the way God communicates to Christians. But surely not to non-Christians. Surely if there’s a god he’s smart enough to communicate in different ways depending on the “receiver.”
How about the idea that God sends little moments of joy or illumination or something to atheists? If he exists, that is…(and I think not). Of course, we atheists don’t interpret these missives as being anything of the kind. But I think you could say they “get through” anyway if they have the right effect.
I think atheists ought to like this picture. It makes non-belief cost free, even supposing there is a god. Which makes good sense, since non-belief is not a sin.
It does seem extraordinary to be teaching philosophy at Southern Methodist University and not giving any serious consideration to the possibility of Christianity being true. It is, forgive me, completely ridiculous to compare it to “roundsquareism”. A great many people much smarter and better educated than you (or me) seriously believe in Christianity - no-one believes in roundsquareism.
Do you seriously think there is some fundamental logical contradiction in Christianity which you have seen and has eluded almost everyone else? Even Dawkins does not imagine this. Have you published this earth-shattering insight??
Why not read QoT - write a detailed critique of it, and see how we go from there.
Nicholas, you are a shifty character! I objected that when you compared the two options, the LUC seems to have chosen a very strange way to create persons, namely, by way of natural selection, which is, as Darwin noted, wasteful and cruel. You responded by saying that ‘every fundamental truth about the universe seems strange.’ I pointed out that the LUC axiom was not a fundamental truth about the universe. So you reply by asking:
See what I mean by shifty?!
However, the presumption behind postulating an LUC is that this makes the existence of the universe more, and not less, intelligible, less, and not more, strange. But if you take your two options:
option 2. seems less strange than option 1. Indeed, natural selection seems triply strange, since, first, as Locke believed, (it at least seems that) design presupposes mind. That’s why creationists have such a deal of difficulty with evolution. But as if that weren’t strange enough, now we are supposed to think that a mind actually chose to create in a way that doesn’t presuppose a mind, and, in fact, seems to be a way of creating that is precisely the opposite of something a loving creator would choose. Now, surely, that’s a level of strangeness that we shouldn’t have expected, and could quite easily do without, since option 1. is quite intelligible on its own terms.
But you will no doubt throw Jesus of Nazareth at me, as you have done with both Ophelia and Jean. Jesus of Nazareth, however, only makes sense as a communication, if the LUC makes sense. And since the amount of philosophy arguing the implausibility of the LUC is much richer now than it was in first century CE, and since the philosophers are much more educated in these matters than either you or me (if that move works for you it will work for me too!), the supposition of Jesus’ resurrection has more hurdles to jump before it can be thought to be a communication from God. In fact, given the state of the evidence - despite NT Wright’s weighty tome - it is much more reasonable to suppose that Jesus did not rise from the dead (in any of the many shifting senses of that word used by theologians) than to suppose that he did. (Hume’s argument is still very strong, I think.)
You see, I used to believe all that stuff, and now am quite convinced that it cannot reasonably be held to be true. Indeed, the doctrine of the atonement, on which the whole meaning and purpose of Jesus’ death and supposed resurrection depends, is a very strong moral reason for holding it not to be true. This is the ‘fundamental logical contradiction in Christianity which … has eluded almost everyone else,’ because atonement theories depend on the idea that God has condemned everyone to an eternity of punishment, and yet has ‘lovingly’ chosen to save some. (Universalism is often suggested as a remedy, but was considered heretical for most of Christian history. And even taking universalism to be true, we still all deserve (according to atonement theory) to be punished eternally, and can only be saved by an event of, we are supposed to believe, infinite suffering - as only a god could do (see Anselm on that in Cur Deus Homo?).)
I did proof-read it, but a mistake crept in. In the text immediately after the second blockquote, in the last sentence, ‘option 1.’ should read ‘option 2.’
Eric: I thought you considered Evolution a strange way of creating humans. But in fact it seems to be the only way to create persons who are genuinely free to choose to love. It is sadly inevitable in an evolutionary world that there will be waste and cruelty. But infinite love is an overwhelmingly greater good than a finite amount of waste and cruelty.
Some competent philosophers are Christian, others are atheist, others agnostic etc… All this shows that none of these views is contradictory.
The point about atonement is not that God has condemned people, but that loving perfect union with God is non-trivial to achieve.
This has just got to be wrong:
That suggests that it is (logically) impossible for God to have created genuinely free beings in another way. (It also makes assumptions about freedom and love that could be questioned.) After all, God has always been assumed to have created angels. Preposterous or not, they are assumed to be free beings, since some, at least, freely chose to disobey God. This seems to presuppose that it would not be impossible to create free beings in a less wasteful way.
Second. To suppose that
is possibly one of the most morally callous things that I have ever seen in print. To quote D.Z. Phillips:
What you wrote seems to me simplistic, insensitive, indredible and obscene. I am left gasping for breath, wondering how such a wicked thing could possibly be said, and yet there it is on my screen, in black and white!!!
It is because it is possible for Christians to believe such a thing that leads me, in the end, to repudiate it as the most arrogant and silly, at the same time as it is the most callous and cruel, nonsense. Theology, as a Jewish writer has said, has to make sense in the presence of burning children. You fell at the first hurdle, and not only is it callous and cruel, what you have said is also dangerous, since it has led Christians to justify cruelty to people for the sake of some higher good. (Finite waste and cruelty for an overwhelmingly greater good.) I can scarcely believe that you actually wrote those words, but to mean them is beyond telling terrible!
Some remarks:
- At least in some sense, much of our best science shows the universe (not our hubble volume, which “began” at the big bang) is eternal: the conservation laws are not of the form “E = const except …” This does not entail that any particular thing in the universe is such, however.
- There was no singularity: singularity is a property of the equations that describe the early expansion, not the world itself.
- Matter and energy are not interchangable: a semantic analysis of any equation in physics involving energy would tell you this, as first performed by Maxwell long before bad (at least in this respect) physics books involving relativity confused the issue. What Einstein’s famous equation actually says is that energy and mass are (sometimes).
- The “fine tuning” thing is a nonstarter, if only because improbable events do happen. Moreover, “creating everything except itself …” is special pleading.
Eric: resorting to insults is always a sign that you have run out of arguments. Of course blog posts are “shorthand” so simplistic in that sense. Read QoT and then we can have a useful discussion. In the meantime, just becasue you don’t believe something doesn’t mean it is irrational.
Keith: sometimes you believe the equations (E=..) and sometimes you don’t?? Also the concept of an Ultimate Creator is not “special pleading”, and “improbable events happen” could “explain away” any inconvenient observation. Your beliefs are not wholly unreasonable (though I think they are mistaken) but you need to understand and accept that mine aren’t either. As Julian says, “overconfident atheists” should read QoT.
Nicholas - I have a few questions for you based upon your comments so far:
1) If you believe that the apparent fine-tuning of the fundamental physical constants strongly implies intelligent design of our universe (which I don’t, by the way), then please demonstrate how the fine-tuning argument leads to the conclusion that this inscrutible designer is the Christian God in particular, as opposed to any number of other conceivable natural or supernatural designers.
2) If you believe that God has communicated with you, then please explain what measures you have taken to rule out the possibility that this apparent communication was not merely a natural product of your own mind.
3) Following on from the previous question. If we assume for the sake of argument that you have found some reliable way to rule out a natural mental explanation for the communication, then how can you be so sure that the communication came from the Christian God in particular (as opposed to some highly advanced alien life form, or from some evil demon that is trying to deceive you, for example)?
4) If we assume for the sake of argument that the communication did actually come from some entity that believes itself to be God, then how can you be so sure that this entity is not itself being deceived by some evil demon into incorrectly believing that it is God?
5) What evidence or argument would ever convince you that God probably doesn’t exist?
Nick:
Of course all these arguments are indicative rather than conclusive, and I’ll give shorthand versions (read QoT for longer ones).
1. God is not incompetent, so one of the major religions is probably broadly true.
2. Jesus of Nazareth is certainly not a product of my mind.
3. (a) see (1) (b) “you shall know them by their fruits” (c) this is solipsistic stuff.
4. same as 3.
5. I don’t know. How can you prove the non-existence of someone you experience? Have you ever loved anyone you can no longer touch or see? You can almost never specify in advance what evidence would convince you of a counter-factual.
SMU is nominally Methodist. There’s no requirement to take Christianity seriously.
Yes, I think Christianity is chock full of nonsense. Uh, I don’t think I’m the first person to have noticed this. Think Tolstoy and Thomas Jefferson, just to name some obvious critics. I do recall some pretty intense derision in The God Delusion.
One example of nonsense–the idea of the trinity–that the very same individual is both father and son. How could I even momentarily suppose that’s true? What would I be supposing to be true? I haven’t the slightest idea.
Other bits of Christian doctrine are not so much a logical mess as just wildly strange. Like the idea that by allowing himself to be crucified, Jesus saved someone. Or that by just believing that this was the case, I can be saved. Or the idea that there’s some deep sinfulness from which I need to be saved.
I don’t take all this stuff seriously enough to be able to warrant spending my time attacking it. That will seem dogmatic to you, but it really isn’t reprehensible. Anyone can come along and demand attention be paid to their religious beliefs. It just can’t be a rational person’s duty to take the time to respond to all comers. There has to be an initial screening process–this is worth taking seriously, this isn’t.
Thanks for answering my questions Nicholas. I would reply thus:
1) That answer appears to beg the question, as you are assuming what you are attempting to prove by means of this argument (i.e. that God exists). Why could the intelligent designer implied by the fine-tuning argument not be a purely natural one?
2) True but irrelevent. The existence of Jesus as a historical person (with or without any of the supernatural elements) does not preclude the possibility that your apparent communications were merely natural products of your mind.
3) a) Begging the question again. b) logical fallacy known as affirming the consequent. God’s existence might possibly entail certain communications, but the converse is not true. c) Yes - so how do you rule it out?
4) I don’t think that you have given a satisfactory answer to this.
5) So, nothing would falsify your God theory then? If a theory cannot be falsified by any means, then how can you ever determine if it is true or not?
Jean: You live in a country where 80% of adults, including your President and 90% of your legislators, say they are Christians. Yet you seem to have no idea what they believe (you obviously have no idea what the doctrine of the Trinity is) - and don’t want to take it seriously enough to find out. An odd kind of “philosopher”. Certainly no-one should not take your views on Christianity seriously until you find out what it actually teaches.
Nick:
1. I thought you were asking “why do you think the Ultimate Creator is the Christian God”. It is, of course, logically possible that this universe was created by aliens who themselves …. frankly this is teenage stuff and genuniely not worth taking seriously since no-one seriously believes it.
2. Think about what communication in a person means.
3. look up “you shall know them by their fruits”. And remember these are not knock-down arguments but short responses to your questions.
4. When you understand (3) you will understand (4)
5. Can we leave tired old tropes out of this. (a) I didn’t say nothing could falsify (b) Popper’s ideas only apply (to the extent that they do) to rather simple scientific questions. If you can tell me how to falsify the existence of quarks, electrons, love or other minds then I might re-open that discussion.
Well, Nicholas. What I said might have been ad hominem, but not because I had run out of arguments. There are lots, at least when it comes to reasonable arguments regarding the existence of evil (vide infra). It was an absolutely overhwhelming sense of the offensiveness of what you said in the light of all the suffering that exists that simply left me, not speechless, obviously, but so deeply, personally, hurt, that I could not but take offence. (I think Phillips’ warning is a fair one, and you should take it to heart. Nor is the sense of offence, or remarking on it, necessarily purely ad hominem either.)
For the truth is, you see, that your argument covers any finite amount of suffering, and that could be such a staggerlingly huge amount as to make your argument totally meaningless to a suffering finite being. To my knowledge no one has really been so callous as to suppose that there is not some second order, but yet not infinite goodness, that does not redeem the suffering of this world. To hold that all the suffering of this finite realm is redeemed by a suppositious infinite goodness is simply beyond the realm of reasonable argument.
You have not given me one reason to read your book, not yet. It is true that blogs must be telegraphic (if that adjective makes any sense now), but they don’t need to be quite this simplistic. You can’t just say this. You have to give a reason for saying it, even a short one.
Added to that, I cannot understand your frequent resort to the argument to the authority of numbers of believers (or educated thinkers). Until Darwin, no one got the development of life right; until Newton, everyone was wrong about motion. And as for the trinity, not even theologians agree. And, by the way, I think I know a way to falsify infinite love! This world is, I think, a standing falsification of that claim. But in a more mundane sense, I think it would not be hard to falsify the claim that ‘A loves B’, given sufficient knowledge of their relationship, and even in the face of A’s continuing insistence that he does. There are lots of B’s who have reasonably come to the conclusion that they are not loved by (their particular) A. As for quarks, not being a physicist, I can’t say, but I should have thought that physicists could think of results which would disprove the existence of them. But here I speak from ignorance.
Nicholas -
1) Whether anyone believes it or not has no direct bearing upon its truth or otherwise, but that’s by the by. However, let’s get to the crux of the matter here. Even if the fine-tuning argument is taken to be sound (which I don’t think that it is), it merely leads to the conclusion that our universe was created by some powerful and knowledeable (but not necessarily omnipotent and omniscient), but otherwise inscrutible designer. It is a huge and unjustified leap to conclude that this designer is necessarily the Christian God. So, I think that the fine-tuning argument does far less work for you than you seem to believe. If you think that you can justify the conclusion that the fine-tuning argument does entail the existence of God, then let’s please see this justification.
2) I don’t understand what your answer means. However, why do you think that it is more plausible that your apparent communication (which I presume takes place inside your head i.e. it is not directly audible or visible to people or instruments around you) is from God and is not merely a natural product of your own mind? If you grant that people do sometimes experience such mental abberations, then how can you be so sure that yours don’t fit into this category?
If God does exist, then you might expect such communications. However, the existence of these communications doesn’t entail the existence of God, as they might be much more plausibly explained as delusions.
3) So, you agree that you can never know that any such communication, even if not a product of your own mind, actually comes from God?
5) You are the one making the claim here (that God exists), so you tell me how you might falsify that theory. If you cannot formulate your theory in such a way that it makes testable predictions, then how have you determined that it is likely to be true? Furthermore, if any apparently failed prediction can be explained away by the introduction of some additional ad hoc element to your theory (such as theodicies), then it would seem that you have a theory can can never be falsified.
Nick
I’m afraid you are confused about the nature of the arguments here. Read my debate with Colin Howson. This is not about A entails B, it is about comparing two worldviews and assesing the likelihoods of different observations.
Worldviews are not “theories that make testable predictions” in the sense that simple scientific hypotheses are. If you don’t understand Christianity you should try to learn about it before trying to make philosophical arguments about it.
Point (3) is simple sollipsism - there is a sense in which you can never “know” whether any communication purporting to come from X has come from X. But it is not a very useful sense. If you want to make the trivial point that you can be sceptical about anything I of coure concede it - but that says nothnig whatever about the consistency of Christianity.
I’d be delighted if I could convince you that Christianity was true, of course. But my more modest aim is to show that it is not irrational - even if pretty fully informed about modern science.
All of your responses to my comments have included one ad hominem or another. You need to break the habit. The issue is not how I teach my philosophy classes, or the fact that I teach at SMU, or how much I have read. The issue is whether there’s really a coherent body of doctrine that one could suppose to be true, if one were interested in supposing that Christanity is true. I don’t know what it means to suppose that there’s one entity that’s both father and son. Please, don’t pretend that’s not a tenet of Christianity. We both know that it is.
Probably the least misleading way of thinking about the Trinity which consists of three Persons (Father, Son and Holy Spirit) is to consider a very loving and united family and then try to extrapolate this to an infinite degree. The classic formulations talk about “neither confounding the persons nor dividing the substance” and it is never taught that the Father is the Son or the Son is the Father.
The fundamental idea is that Love is at the heart of God, and Love doesn’t really make sense unless there is a beloved, but that perfect love leads to perfect unity. Of course this is difficult stuff and human language is inadequate - but in many ways it’s similar to quarks and the Standard Model. Read John Polkinghorne’s Quantum Physics and Theology, an Un-Expected Kinship to explore this further.
But if Christianity is monotheistic, then this just won’t do The father must literally be the son. Separate things that are loving and united “to an infinite degree” are still separate things.
But say that I go with your formulation, even though I think it’s polytheistic. And say I’m willing to suppose Christianity is true. I still don’t really know what I’m supposing. OK, so there’s this infinitely loving and united family, part of which created the universe, and part of which was born 2009 years ago, etc. etc. (By the way, why isn’t the mother part of the loving family? Why did she get left out, and the holy ghost get included?) So…what if? I have no idea, because I really can’t wrap my mind around that supposition.
Look, if these things speak to you, I bear you no ill will. I’m not actually hostile to people who are religious. In fact, I am happy to rub shoulders with them and make common cause, when possible. I don’t think, though, that I am under any obligation to take seriously what you take seriously.
I’m completely confident that there are many religious ideas you don’t take seriously–how about those 30 million “atmans” supposedly packed into ever cow? Are you really prepared to take Hindu ideas seriously?
I doubt it. So you really shouldn’t expect Christian doctrine to be taken seriously by non-Christians.
Ah - then how do you know that which you asserted to me? - that
I’m not even in receipt of any communication purporting to come from God. There are stories which believers purport to be communication from God, but the communication itself does not purport to come from God. When I read Matthew there is no emanation floating up from the page whispering ‘This is a communication from God.’
Nicholas - I think that it is you who might be confused here.
If you are “comparing two worldviews and assesing the likelihoods of different observations”, then what are you doing if not determining based upon the set of basic beliefs and hypotheses that make up your worldview whether particular observations should pertain or not? In order to do that, you need to make predictions about what one would expect to observe, and what one would not expect to observe, if one’ s worldview is true, and look to see if those predictions are met or not. One does that by looking both at individual components of one’s worldview, as well as the interelated whole.
So, as the expert on Christianity here, why don’t you tell me what observations one would expect to observe if Christianity is true, and what you not expect to observe if it is true? Here are a few examples for starters:
1) Due to God’s omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence, one would expect no more suffering to exist in the world than is absolutely necessary. Do you think that this prediction is met? I rather think not. The amount of suffering that exists in the world (both natural and man-made, human and animal), and has existed throughout all known history, would seem to be vastly more than this minimum.
2) Some Christians believe that a merciful and compassionate God wants us all to be saved. If this is the case, then God would be expected to provide clear and unambiguous information about his message to all humans, as this is necessary for salvation. Has this prediction been met? Clearly not, as many humans have never heard this message, and others have chosen to reject it as the supporting evidence is ambiguous at best.
3) God would be expected to create the type of universe that Paul thought we lived in. In other words, to quote Richard Carrier, “a universe with no evidence of such a vast age or of natural evolution, a universe that contained instead abundant evidence that it was created all at once just thousands of years ago. A universe that wasn’t so enormous and that had no other star systems or galaxies, but was instead a single cosmos of seven planetary bodies and a sphere full of star lights that all revolve around an Earth at the center of God’s creation–because that Earth is the center of God’s love and attention. A complete cosmos whose marvelously intricate motions had no other explanation than God’s will, rather than a solar system whose intricate motions are entirely the inevitable outcome of fixed and blind forces. A universe comprised of five basic elements, not over ninety elements, each in turn constructed from a dizzying array of subatomic particles. A universe governed by God’s law, not a thoroughly amoral physics. A universe inhabited by animals and spirits whose activity could be confirmed everywhere, and who lived in and descended from outer space–which was not a vacuum, but literally the ethereal heavens, the hospitable home of countless of God’s most marvelous creatures (both above and below the Moon)–a place Paul believed human beings could live and had actually visited without harm.”
Is this the type of universe that we observe? Certainly not. Another failed prediction.
Whilst it is possible to reconcile these failed observations with the Christian worldview, this is achieved only by introducing a plethora of totally ad-hoc (and unproven) elements in order to explain away the apparent failures. This can be done indefinitely, but it then becomes a worldview that is totally imprevious to observations of the world around us, as the basic beliefs and hypotheses that make up the worldview will be changed or added to until there is no longer a conflict.
Moreover, the Christian worldview makes a number of claims. Firstly, God exists. Apart from merely saying, the universe exists therefore God exists, how would you attempt to prove this? This fine-tuning argument is one attempt that you alluded to, but I have shown why this is inadequate. You believe that you have received communications from God, but I have pointed out the problems with that idea. Of course, there are many other arguments, but they all suffer from serious flaws, as I’m sure you know. In fact, there failure is such that I don’t even think that they build a cumulative case.
Secondly, and perhaps Christianity’s most important claim: faith in Jesus Christ procures eternal life. Where is your evidence that this is so? Can you point to a single proven case of this prediction coming true? Can you show a single believer in Jesus actually enjoying eternal life? I could go on and on.
I’m afraid there is little chance of your convincing me that Christianity is true, as evidence and reason has convinced me that it is manifestly false. In my view it is just another false worldview, to add to the huge scrapheap of other false worldviews that humanity has believed in (and an infinite number of conceivable worldviews that would have as much or more claim to be true as Christianity does). I don’t know that I would go as far as to describe Christianity as irrational, but I think it is implausible, lacking in parsimony, and has little explanatory scope or power. Therefore I reject it.
Jean: You might think that is what Christianity ought to teach but it simply isn’t. Of course if someone is happy to be ignorant about the values and beliefs of the majority of his/her fellow citzens and the people who govern him/her no-one can force her/him to study them. But it is strange then to try to debate them philosophically.
Ophelia: the sense of “know” as “that there is no possible question a sceptic could ask for which there isn’t a knock-down answer” is, as I stated and most readers will know, not a very useful sense. Almost nothing that anyone knows comes into this category.
Do you get “emanations floating up from the page” in other communications you receive. What on earth has this got to do with anything??
There is an interesting and quite subtle distinction between a record of a communication from X and a communicaton from X but if you are prepared to agree that under a wide range of circumstances a Record of a C. from X is a C. from X (for example you are reading a record of a C. from me) then there are clearly entities which purport to be communications from God on the Christian worldview. To which, as I say, you are not forced to listen or respond.
Jean writes:
Jean:
Where did you get that one? Never heard of it and I have studied the subject. Atman relates to the human identity. The Trinity - if you miss one more question you’ll be out. Go back to being bored with religion
This of course is the background of my question. (It’s also the subject of my contribution to Voices of Disbelief, Blackwell 2009.) A compassionate God would be expected to provide clear and unambiguous information about its message to all humans; I for one have had no such thing; the claim that ‘of course’ I have except that it was not clear and unambiguous because God ‘doesn’t force you to listen’ because ‘That is freedom - and love’ looks to me like pure evasion, and I would love to know how one could tell it’s not.
Nicholas’s reply to my disbelief was
Certainly not. That is because the best of my knowledge and understanding is that the stories of Jesus are stories put together decades after his death by people who never knew him. Even if C is true, that remains the best of my knowledge and understanding. The life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth can’t be a genuine communication from God because the communication failed.
Oh my god, Nicholas has simply gone back to calling me ignorant! Unbelievable! Methinks he needs to learn a thing or two from his loving God…
Michael, Now, now. I’m afraid you’re letting Mr. Beale influence you too much. I may be bored with religion, but it’s not for lack of studying it.
Reference for the cow point:
Lance Nelson, “Cows, Elephants, Dogs, and Other Lesser Embodiments of Atman: Reflections on Hindu Attitudes Toward Nonhuman Animals.” In A Communion of Subjects: Animals in Religion, Science and Ethics. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. (very exhaustive book, full of good articles on religion and animals)
Nelson reports what Hindus think partly based on extensive on-the-ground research. He writes: “Respondents in the holy city of Varanasi, where Brahmins can be found who faithfully perform go-puja (cow worship) confided: “We believe that 330 million Hindu gods live in every atom of the cow’s body.” (p. 180) [note: he says "we"]
OK, it’s gods, not atman, and it’s 330 million in every atom. But I’d think there must be one atman per god. So in fact there are way more than 30 million atmans per cow (as I originally said). I underestimated.
As to your claim that atman “relates to the human identity.” Note the title of the article.. Nelson says that atman is embodied “in plants as well as animals, not to speak of gods and other beings inhabiting other, ‘higher’ planes of existence.” (p. 182)
“frankly this is teenage stuff and genuniely not worth taking seriously since no-one seriously believes it.”
Can you tell me what proportion of the population need to believe in something for it to be taken seriously? If this is a valid argument then we can then apply the same standards to Christian belief and decide whether it is worth taking seriously.
You’ll note, however, that surveys suggest between 10-25% of the UK population have had the experience of hearing voices or seeing things that aren’t there at some point in their lives (e.g., Tien, 1991 - 1)
A survey of 60,000 UK citizens found 50% believed in thought transference (telepathy) between two people, 25% believed in ghosts, 25% believed in reincarnation, 23% believed in horoscopes, 10% believe in Black Magic (Cox & Cowling, 1989 - 2). The same survey found 68% believed in God, but interestingly only 21% believed in the Devil (cake and eating it springs to mind!).
Other surveys suggest 1 in 10 have held a belief they are being spied upon or are the victim of a conspiracy (see Freeman and Freeman, 2009, for a review - 3)
The 2001 UK census results (4) suggests just over 50% state their religion as Christian, while a study commissioned by a Christian charity found 22% went to Church once a year (5). Behaviour is arguably a better indication of what people truly care about.
1.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/qv0750283ng75j9n/
2.
https://www.alibris.com/search/books/author/Cox,%20David%20Peter%20Cowling%20In
3.
http://www.iop.kcl.ac.uk/apps/paranoidthoughts/default.aspx
http://www.iop.kcl.ac.uk/apps/paranoidthoughts/book/default.aspx
4.
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/census2001/profiles/commentaries/ethnicity.asp
5.
http://richarddawkins.net/article,1870,A-third-of-adults-believe-God-watches-over-them,Denis-Campbell-The-Observer
Ophelia: you are still in effect saying “I assume Atheism - therefore Christianity is false”. And this “would be expected” trope is really a bit silly (can you give an example outside atheism where it is used with advantage?) Try, as an philosophical/intellectual excercise, to consider p(X|C) for a moment.
If God provided the sort of “clear and unambiguous” communication you seem to demand (zapping all humans, incontrovertably stamped “SIGNED GOD”) then he would in effect be forcing people to believe. Jesus of Nazareth is quite clear and unambiguous enough: you have a simple choice and you are free to make it. The fact that hundreds of millions have chosen to accept this communication shows that it hasn’t “failed”. (We discuss universalism in QoT - John P is pretty much a universalist, I have an argument why in a sense it doesn’t matter)
Jean: When I say you are ignorant of Christianity I don’t mean it as an insult. I am ignorant of (eg) the governance of SMU. What I find odd is for a philosopher to pontificate on a complex set of ideas that by their own admission they don’t take seriously and by their comments they clearly don’t understand.
Also if I lived in a Hindu country I would take some time to try to understand Hinduism. If I worked as SMU I would try to understand how it worked. I am genuinely puzzled as to how you can do philosophy in such a highly “christian” country as the US and not try to understand christianity. But that’s your business, not mine.
One thing that would probably help all of us understand Christianity and theology in general would be the presentation of the key ideas without obfuscation, constantly shifting goal-posts and appeals to dubious authority.
If Timothy Keller’s ‘The Reason for God’ is an example of an attempt to define the Christian position in today’s world, then I am still waiting.
(Jean, my last comment went into moderation. Probably because I put a few weblinks in it regarding the prevalence of unusual or irrational experiences and beliefs)
Nicholas,
You are committing ad hominem after ad hominem. It’s bad manners as well as bad philosophy. You make points, I reply to the points, then you start talking about what I teach, where I teach, what I supposedly know.
Imagine me doing the same thing. What would it look like–just for purposes of illustration? Instead of responding to your points, I would point out that you are a management consultant. You have no philosophy degree, no theology degree. Essentially, you are Mr. Polkinghorne’s website manager, according to wikipedia.
Now, I learned that about you the moment you came on this site, but I haven’t mentioned it…because that would be an ad hominem. I’d be discussing you instead of the issues. As I say, that’s bad philosophy as well as bad manners.
And yet you have repeatedly done the equivalent. You’ve complained over and over again that I don’t know anything about Christianity, that I am woefully incurious about my fellow Americans, that as an SMU professor I ought to know about Methodism. It’s mostly been about me, not about my points.
Now, I think the right response to an ad hominem is just to get back to the issues…basically to ignore it. I have done that again and again. But…finally…I give up. OK, let’s talk about me. I am actually pretty knowledgeable about Christianity having read many books and discussed Christian ideas with many Christians. I have taught philosophy of religion many times and I have written about religion pretty carefully and respectfully in a book.
You supposed I wasn’t knowledgeable because I said the trinity was a near-unintelligble notion. Theologians have been struggling with the concept of the trinity since the very beginning of the doctrine. So it’s absurd to count my problems with it as evidence that I know nothing about Christianity.
Anyhow, I’m tired of your absurdly presumptuous statements about what I have or haven’t tried to understand. I don’t know how things work in management consulting, but in philosophy people really do debate issues. If you can get the hang of that, do come back to TP and attempt another conversation.
Nicholas, I don’t ‘demand’ anything, I simply don’t take words in a book to be a communication from God. I don’t see why I should, either - that is, I don’t see why it would be sensible or reasonable to do so.
There is a book that contains sayings attributed to Jesus. There are other books that contain other sayings attributed to other people; some of them are considered gods or prophets or otherwise holy. I see no reason for me to take Jesus at face value. That’s not to ”assume” atheism, it’s just to refrain from assuming theism in this one place.
No it doesn’t. The communication has still failed me. I couldn’t believe it if I wanted to. You’re right that I don’t want to, but if I did I still couldn’t.
“Jesus of Nazareth is quite clear and unambiguous enough…”
And so was Moses, and Mohamed, and Buddha, and the authors of the Rig Veda, and Zoroaster, and Mani, and Lao Tzu, and the Ghost Dancers, and L. Ron Hubbard for that matter. And they all say completely different things. And in the end, in a universe 13 billion light-years across, on a planet 4.5 billion years old, in a body made up of elements spewed out of ancient supernovas, there’s really no reason to suppose that any of them actually had a clue about what it all means.
“If God provided the sort of “clear and unambiguous” communication you seem to demand (zapping all humans, incontrovertably stamped “SIGNED GOD”) then he would in effect be forcing people to believe.”
And then we’d have all sorts of riff-raff getting into heaven. The ones deserving of salvation are the truly virtuous who take a wild stab in the dark and just happen to get lucky!
Ah, well, Jean, at least he didn’t ignore you! My last post zinged past him as though I were not here. (I know, he thinks I was abusive.) So I won’t address this to him. I still want to know the answer to the question that I asked there. How does infinite love become meaningful to a suffering finite being, if, in fact, any amount of finite suffering can be ‘redeemed’ (if that is the word) by infinite love? Or doesn’t it matter? I think it does. If Nicholas thinks the message is clear to millions of people, I think he has to explain how someone who is suffering - a child thrown into the fire at Auschwitz, say - can know this love. (And later, after death, doesn’t count; it’s theological Träumerei.) And just talking about Jesus obviously won’t do.
To me that simply doesn’t compute, and I’d like to know how Nicholas computes it. It’s not even an argument, so far as I can tell, for he has so defined the problem of pain that there is no problem. Someone who knew the long history of this problem, including Job, for example, would recognise that more needs to be said than that infinite love takes care of everything.
Nicholas keeps throwing Jesus of Nazareth at people, yet it is clear, from the accounts of Jesus in the gospels, that there are very different conceptions of what it means to be a communication from God.
The gospel of John assumes that Jesus was the Word who was with God at the beginning (as in the wisdom tradition). Mark assumes that Jesus became son of God at the baptism. Matthew and Luke obviously think that the circumstances of his birth show him to have been divinely born. Paul, on the other hand, obviously thinks that Jesus became son of God at the resurrection. So the story is all over the place.
Rather than being a clear communication, it is clearly garbled in transmission. Now, even if we were willing to grant Nicholas’ rather strange idea that a person can be a communication, and supposing that Jesus had made it very clear what the communication was about (and he doesn’t), it stands to reason that the message wouldn’t be so mixed up, prescinding from all the language about zapping someone and taking away from their freedom.
A clear message would be one thing, but it’s quite clear that it isn’t that, and the early development of Christian doctrine is pretty good evidence that it wsn’t. Who is Jesus? No one really knows. Even though Nicea claims to clinch it with the clever word homoousion (instead of homoiousion) - how doctrine is decided with a vowel! - the question is still one for debate.
No one knows what it means to speak of Jesus as the incarnation of God! No one! There are many different theologies of the incarnation, but none so obviously true that it will convince everyone. Most people who believe in the incarnation do so, not because they can understand it, but because it is part of the content of doctrine. It’s a form of words. So how could a message be received, unless, of course, you already know what message you would like to receive, and can turn Jesus into the favoured text. Any introductory text in Christian theology will make this very plain. I have an introduction to modern theology in which, I believe, fifteen different solutions are scouted. A message from God could surely be clearer than this without revoking someone’s freedom - and should be.
Ah, Jakob, your post came in while I was busy with mine (always too long, I know!). But it is so poignant! Thank you!
Eric, I don’t really know what has made NB want to talk about me, instead of my points. Maybe it’s because my points were so devastating incisive? Or maybe it’s just all the z’s in my last name. Who knows.
As to the bewildering mess that constitutes Christian doctrine… indeed. You see that in Christian friendly authors (Bernhard Lohse–A Short History of Christan Doctrine) and less friendly authors (Elaine Pagels, Bart Ehrman). It is hardly an easy thing to “suppose Christianity is true”. Not only are there many versions, but each version is a an arcane mess. “Suppose there is a god…” is something that I can sort of do, with some effort. But “suppose Christianity is true…” Without even trying to be uncooperative, I really do find it difficult.
Jean: I thought that NB’s comment about you working at SMU contained a veiled threat, which fortunately means nothing since, as you say, your university is only nominally Christian. That threat, the threat of denouncing your atheism to your Christian university, is very ugly. In any case, this whole thread has just proved what Jeremy says in his post above: that dialogue is not possible with everyone. And don’t tell me that there was a dialogue with NB. A dialogue involves being open to learn from the other.
Jean:
from a dictionary of advaita vedanta (advaita is the most philosophical of the orthodox schools of Hinduism):
The latter use is the one encountered in the vast majority of contexts. You’ll find much the same definition in The Oxford Dictionary of World Religions Nice little article on the Trinity too.
Ah, but Michael, Advaita Vedanta is non-dualistic (monistic), so that’s the only place for the Atman to go, that is, to refer to the individual self. It seems to have a more generous meaning in other forms of Hinduism. Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t Advaita Vendanta more atheistic than theistic?
I meant to say, and forget the best line, in my response to Jakob: “I lack the gift of the jab!” (Gab, however, as everyone knows, I posess in too great a degree.)
Jean: ‘Zeds’ or ‘Zees’?
I’m sorry Jean, I didn’t mean to ignore all but the zeds (Ha!). Yes, of course, you were very incisive, I thought, and the best way to fend of incisiveness is to turn ad hominem. As to the mess that constitutes Christian doctrine (or any religious doctrine, I rather suspect - that’s what comes of trying to stop time in its tracks), you will get no argument from me. It’s interesting, as a Christian official, how to go about balancing the various ways that you just know people are going to interpret what you say (in church). It’s very threatening.
The easiest thing is to say nothing new and to parrot the magic words which have an astonishly numbing effect, but I could never bring myself to do that, so I often lived dangerously. In the end, as my wife once said, we had more atheists in the congregation than Christians, and it was, in part at least, true. (But our parties were phenomenal - and the rector always got to make the ‘rum run’ to the Liquor Commission. It’s a government monopoly here.) But strangely, as Altizer and Hamilton showed, Christian atheism was a theological (perhaps ‘theological’ would be better) option. How’s that for the mess that constitutes Christian doctrine?
To quote my source again–
“There is a vigorous dispute beween Hindu Theists such as Ramanuja, who believe there are many atmans, one for each being, and the non-dualist (advaitin) theologians, who hold that the Self is quantitatively as well as qualitatively identical, there being only a single, universal atman.”
So I guess the latter don’t go in for 330 million atmans…Still, I gather from this article that many do.
The author’s a professor of theology at the University of San Diego and an expert on Advaita Vedanta (it says in the book).
As to the z’s in my last name, that may have drawn undue attention to my comments…that’s “zeds” I guess!
Atman, Brahman, Karma, Dharma, Moksha and a few more are core concepts which are not in a fundamental way disputed as to their base meaning. The meaning proffered by Lance Nelson is a surprising one but it may well be held by some. Hinduism is a very broad church. Anyway the thing about Atman it can realise its identity with Brahman which implies that it be the atman/self of a self-conscious being. The atman/Brahman concept is a twin one, intimately connected in Ramanuja and identical in Advaita.
from http://www.angelfire.com/md2/timewarp/ramanuja.html
By Alex Scott.
I don’t know who he is or what his scholarly background is but it rings true to me and I have been reading in this area for a long time.
It’s a pity that the focus was lost on the OP and the anthropic principle. Complexity is a fascinating study (aka Chaos). Panpsychism has a place in this too. Is the being of things and information convertible? Just by being things inform each other. Here is proto-consciousness without the need for infusion. Hindu theory has it that ‘creation’ is beginingless because beginnings are in time.
Jean: you say you don’t take Christianity seriously (and ask - why should you?). You then make a whole series of statements about Christian doctrine which are manifestly untrue. You then complain that when I point out the problems in that I am making ad hominem attacks. Clearly we are talking past eachother - perhaps you should post on some other thread and it would make sense if I didn’t respond to yours. When a book of yours is launched by the President of the AAAS in the US and the President of the British Academy in the UK, let me know and I will post on a thread about yours.
Eric: read what we have to say in QoT on the problem of pain. Both John and I have lost people we love dearly to agonzing cancers.
Ophelia: If Christianity is true then it is perfectly reasonable to see the Bible as communication from God. If Atheism is true it is not. In symbols p(B|A) is low, p(B|C) is high. But if you are to claim some kind of refutation of C, then it is p(B|C) that is relevant. Please read my debate with Howson: he is a very good (though atheist) philosopher.
Amos: I may be ignornant about SMU but I am not that ignorant :-).
Nicholas: We’re all pretty minor league minds compared to you, but being such a genius and so inspired by your loving Creator, how have you managed to destroy the small quota of respect I had for the Christian religion in just two days of reading your posts? It may surprise you, but in the past in this blog I and the evil Jean tended to defend religion against the more militant atheists. Your brillant proselytism has convinced me that those militant atheists (whose names I will not mention) are basically correct in their evaluation of your loving creed.
Wow! I didn’t know that! The AAAS and the British Academy! Wow!
No, the fact that you’ve insulted me over and over again in this thread is not a reason for ME to leave the thread. It’s a reason for you to stop. As an administrator of the blog, it really is my role to ask you to cut it out, if you’d like to be part of the conversation here.
Aside from the sarcasm, Nicholas, I just don’t think pride has a place in this particular discussion. Your book may be lauched by the British Academy, and you may appear in Debrett, but reasons are what count. I have been with quite a few people when they died. Many of them died miserably. I thought I had taken their suffering into account too. I didn’t. Neither, I think, have you.
But that is neither here nor there. The question has to do with the reasons you can give, and the arguments that respond to existing arguments in the field. Given what you have taken as a sufficient answer to the problem of pain here, I cannot think that you have adequately dealt with the question in your book. Your book is 160 pages long. You claim to answer 51 questions in it. By my reckoning that’s rougly 3 pages an answer, if the Foreward is not paginated with the rest of the book, and there is no index. Can’t be done, I’m afraid.
Just a random selection from my library: Phillips’ book has 280 pages, plus 23 pages of front matter, including the intro. Weisberger’s book Suffering Belief has 242 pages. John Hick’s book Evil and the God of Love has 389 pages. James Crenshaw’s book, Defending God: Biblical Rsponses to the Problem of Evil, has 275 pages. (And it is a serious problem for the Bible, which shows more honesty and sensitivity than many Christians have shown later.) Leibniz’s Theodicy runs, in my English translation, to 448 pages. And of course, the books and papers on the problem are extensive. Dostoyevsky gives more space to it in The Brothers Karamazov than you could possibly give it in the short compass of your book. Even Hume’s Dialogues give the problem more space.
Three pages just won’t do the trick, I’m afraid. The problem is far more serious than that, and it’s far more difficult to respond to than you seem to think. Your book is a short book of apologetics by two clever men, giving clever answers no doubt as befits your cleverness, but it can’t, as the launch says, reasonbly be thought to be an adequate response to Dawkins, or an important contribution on the questions answered. This is not possible. Good for you. If you like put up the pages on the problem of pain, I’ll read them. I’ve archived most of my theology books. I don’t want another introductory apologetics, no matter how clever. And that’s not meant as an insult. Life is limited, so I have to choose.
Eric,
How does infinite love become meaningful to a suffering finite being, if, in fact, any amount of finite suffering can be ‘redeemed’ (if that is the word) by infinite love?
I hope you will not feel upset for Nicholas “neglecting” your post. After all, he is in the mimority and has so many posts to answer on this thread.
But you have raised a very good point. I remember I myself have been lingering and struggling upon this point for pretty a long time. What I want to say is, suffering, death, how to live a good life…, all these questions are not what only Christianity is concerned with, but are all religions, all philosophies in this world are concerned with. And that is why we humans can have so many diversified ways and perspectives of viewing life and choosing different ways of life, and also why, we can have the opportunity to gather here (maybe we are of different nationalities) and argue about these questions.
To understand the nature of suffering requires of a lot; it is rather psychological and spiritual experience, rather than sth. that can be made to understand through “explanation.” According to my personal experience, the book of “Job” might be very helpful to understand this question.
Lastly, I only want to ask you one question: Have you ever thought about what this world will really become of if there is no suffering, and there is only bliss and happiness and eternity?
Eric: we offer responses to questions, we don’t imagine that we have Answers. And I fully agree with you that the issues around suffering (and many others) are complex and substantial, and cannot be disposed of in short blog posts. Inevitably in a blog we talk in shorthand. And I think we need to be very cautious about pouncing on what someone has said with a move like “you have said X. X might imply Y. Y is dreadful. Therefore X is dreadful”.
The fact that the world, from a Christian perspective, is one of finite suffering and infinite love does not mean that Christianity doesn’t take suffering really seriously: the suffering of God is at the heart of our faith. And I have never made the argument that the suffering doesn’t matter. But perhaps we can at least agree that, if the choice really were a binary one:(a world that has Suffering + Love) vs (a world that has No Suffering + No Love), then the former is preferable?
Nicholas said “…the world, from a Christian perspective, is one of finite suffering and infinite love”
Well, I can see plenty of evidence for finite suffering, but no good evidence for infinite love. As far as I can tell, love exists as a purely natural feature of humans, and possibly to a lesser extent of other animals too. So, it seems to me that you are making a pretty extraordinary metaphysical claim when you say that the world contains infinite love. I’m not even sure that I find the claim to be coherent at all but, at the very least it is not self-evidently true, and is most certainly contentious. Where is your extraordinary evidence to support this extraordinary claim?
“But perhaps we can at least agree that, if the choice really were a binary one:(a world that has Suffering + Love) vs (a world that has No Suffering + No Love), then the former is preferable?”
How about minimal suffering + love? Surely far less suffering than is actually present in the world + love would be a possible state of affairs for an all-powerful and all-loving god?
Nicholas, you say:
No, I don’t agree. I think you have to take into account the vast amount of unnecessary suffering that now exists, unnecessary if there actually were a God of love. You have to make an accounting, as it were, at least of all the suffering that animals and people suffer when they die.
That, incidentally, is an indication that the process is wholly natural. Lack of pain while dying is not selected for, since it doesn’t matter from the point of view of natural selection. At that point the organism has either passed on its genes, or it is a loser in the game of selection. Either way, how much suffering is involved is clearly irrelevant to the process, so there are no pressures to see that dying is less painful or horrible.
In order for a loving being to allow so much suffering, there has to be a reason for it. It has to accomplish something. Loving beings don’t do things without reasons, yet dying is often so massively painful and miserable when it need not be. There is no conceiveable reason for this, on the presupposition that a loving creator is responsible.
Nor can I see, I’m afraid, why the idea of a suffering god helps out here. Article 1 of the 39 articles, by the way, says that God is without ‘body, parts or passions’, which would make suffering something of an oxymoron with respect to God. But if a loving god were to suffer, perhaps he/she would recognise how pointlessly terrible suffering is and reach out, and help and save.
The reason the idea of a suffering god comes into play is because of the problem of suffering, not as a resolution of it. God is imagined to be afflicted in our afflictions, precisely because afflictions are so pointless. It’s a vain attempt to give suffering context and content. It fails, despite the Archbishop of Canterbury’s rather fatuous remark that no matter what the stage of human life or level of human experience, life can still be lived through in some form of trust and hope. (House of Lords, May, 2006) This is a belief held in the teeth of the evidence. As Nick says, for something like this to be even remotely plausible, we need some extraordinary kind of evidence. Apart from some such reasonable evidence - evidence that can be recognised and appropriated by those who suffer - it can’t just explain it for those who are hale and whole(and the mixed up traditions about Jesus, and what his life meant, simply cannot constitute reasonable evidence) - this kind of claim is to spit in the faces of the afflicted.
Thank you Lucia, for your remarks. And, of course, you are right. Nicholas has been facing quite a lot of opposition here, and he has very gamely entered the lists. I appreciate the sensitive things you have said about suffering. I don’t think they really deal with it very well. While pure bliss might be somewhat cloying (see “The Makropoulos Case” by Bernard Williams), the usual ‘reward’ for doing well or believing correctly has been an imagined ‘beatific vision’ of God, a delight that will never cloy, and an intensity that will never fade, so, presumably someone had in mind that God could have done this from the start.
Not having that advantage, what shall we say about evil? Well, that there is far more of it around than is necessary to make life interesting or challenging, and much of it that accomplishes nothing but destruction. Much as I would like to be able to say that such suffering has a purpose, I cannot find any reason to say so. What is accomplished by a kangaroo, say, dying slowly, all alone, of thirst, in a drought? (The example is Peter Singer’s, but we could dream up lots more.) I can’t find where to fit love into that.
As for Job. I think that Job shows that the universe (and god) is far more indifferent to suffering than people might think. Herman Tønnessen, in a paper entitled “A Masterpiece of Existential Blasphemy,” argues convincingly that Job’s suffering is shown to be meaningless, and god is, as Tønnessen says, a cosmic cave dweller, a being of quite abhorrent primitivity. So far, I am not convinced, given the amount of suffering that exists, that the universe has anything else to offer.
Nick: You have the problem I alluded to earlier. You assume atheism and then say A =>~X C=>X hence ~C. But all this shows is that A=>~C which we knew already. I say from a Christian POV we have a world with infinite love (because people who come into perfect loving union with God become caught up in God’s life which is eternal). Now I know you don’t agree C , but surely you can see that that C =>IL.
You raise an interesting point about the quantity of suffering, which leads us to one of the few real theorems in this field. I guess we agree that some minimal level of suffering LMin is consistent with a Loving Ultimate Creator. You then argue that
(1) L(Suffering)>>LMin
(2) E (LUC) => L(Suffering)=LMin
hence ~E(LUC)
The trouble is that both (1) and (2) are highly problematic, and you have no real evidence for either. Love does not imply that you never allow the Person you Love to suffer (if you could have prevented it), only that you do not allow the P you L to S without a Sufficiently Good Reason. Suppose we concede (1) for the sake of the argument, the nearest you can have to (2) is:
(2a) E (LUC) => ((L(S)>>LMin)=>E(SGR))
Plantinga’s “noseeums” theorem is that even if we concede
(3) no Human Knows (SGR).
it does not follow that ~E(SGR) unless you have the absurd additional premise
(4*) E(SGR) => HK(SGR)
Eric: I hope you see the point. All the suffering in the world is caused by the laws of nature and (in some cases) human freewill. To reduce the suffering God either has to change the Laws of Nature or interfere with Freewill. But AFAIK no-one has ever produced an alternative set of LoN that would reduce suffering and would allow intelliegnt personal life to evolve: there is no evidence that such a set exists let alone that it would not have other deleterious consequences.
Eric, very much enjoyed reading your comments. Powerful stuff, and somewhat knock-down I believe.
Nicholas, you still don’t get it, do you? Even were we to assume that the amount of suffering in the world - not counting suffering at the end of life - is necessary for something, say, building strength of character, toughness, courage, patience, etc. (an incredibly large assumption), is consistent with the existence of an LUC, this does not account for suffering at the end of life, which serves no useful purpose of this kind, and no useful purpose of any kind that we can know (unless you take Hick’s eschatological verification seriously, which, I suggest, as a scientist, you cannot do).
The fact that no one has ever produced an alternative set of laws of nature is irrelevant. We don’t need to do that. We’re not creating a world, just trying to understand the one we’re in. But, the assumption is that an LUC did create the world, and that the creation expresses his/her/its love. So, it’s up to him/her/it. Since the selective pressure of the environment is so creative in producing complex apparent design, it seems surprising to claim that with a few adjustments here or there the LUC could not possibly have reduced the amount of suffering at the end of life, since natural selection is so inherently wasteful and cruel, especially at that point. Though for a human, perhaps, this is almost inconceiveable, there is no obvious reason why an LUC could not (and free will is irrelevant at this point). (And it’s not up to us to explain how. This is the dog that didn’t bark, and the missing bark is not ours.) But, since he/she/it didn’t, evolutionary processes can reasonably be considered, given the evidence, to be merely natural processes, apparently creative, but not created. This is a reasonable conclusion, from the evidence that we have, without presupposing anything at all about ultimate things.
But, more than that, the fact that your argument would very implausibly work for someone dying in misery, without that person already making the assumptions that you do, is a good sign that there is no love perceptible in and through the experience of misery, despite what the ABC suggests.
By the way, in your ‘tricky logic’ you suggest that this theorem is absurd:
(4) E(SGR) => HK(SGR)
And, indeed, that is absurd, for there are lots of existent things that we do not know. However, since religious people so often accuse atheists of a kind of naturalistic reductionism, I think it would be fair to describe this as a kind of logical reductionism, and, in fact, is arguably the redutio ad absurdum of religion (something that Plantinga’s tricky logic always suggests to me. Like ad hominem attacks in argument, logical trickery in religious apologetics always seems to me a bit of evasive skullduggery.) For while the existence of a sufficiently good reason may not depend upon human knowledge of such a reason, believing in the existence of a loving reason does depend upon the experience of love.
For instance, to take one example. It is said that Mother Teresa of Calcutta used to kiss dying patients in terrible pain (to whom she refused the comfort of effective analgesia), and say to them, “Jesus is kissing you.” I suggest that such patients had no reason to think that their pain was the loving gift of an LUC, and that we have every reason to think of (let’s call her Agnes, since MT in this context is offensive) Agnes’s counsel as an act of pure religious charlatanism. I believe your suggestions face the same challenge.
As to the free will defence, I think AM Weisberger’s arguments in Suffering Belief are very convincing. It’s not as simple as quantum physics! And it simply does not count at the end of life. Just to clarify. Free will at the end of life - which the church is prepared to prevent suffering people from exercising - is important, but free will, as it occurs in arguments about the reason for human suffering, is not. Indeed, the refusal of the church to recognise the free will of those who are suffering intolerably at the end of life is the main reason I am no longer a Christian or a Christian priest.
Michael,
Back to the 330 million atmans…
I got into looking at it this because I was writing a chapter of my animal book about various western and eastern ideas about animals. I was trying to get a grip on how Hinduism looks at animals, given the fact that they have the notion of rebirth. If a human can “come back’ as a dog, or start off as a dog, then what does that say about animals, and how they are like or different from humans?
I looked at various sources and was disappointed to find clear discussion of this rare. Lance Nelson at least addresses the question, and says something very clear, and has impressive credentials…so I’ve gone with what he says.
He says atman literally moves from body to body. But he also says that one wants “higher reincarnations.” It’s bad to come back as a dog. That’s because humans have potential for a spiritual life, and dogs don’t. But wait–the “atman” is the same! What I inferred is that atman is some sort of spiritual kernel, but not the entire mind. So the extra spiritual potential of a human exists despite “atman” being the same in animals and humans. So there is a sameness between humans and animals, atman-wise, but not overall. Comments welcome!
Eric: Thanks for this.
If the argument under discussion is of the form [LUC =>X, ~X, hence ~LUC] then the onus is on you to establish your premises. “There is no obvious reason why Z should not be the case” is not a good phliosophical argument for Z.
The whole Hospice movement was pioneered by Christians so I’m a bit puzzled by your reference to the church denying people alagesia. There is considerable evidence that religious faith helps people bear pain and death. Of course death is sometimes angonizing - this is a pretty direct consequence of the laws of biology: without pain receptors we would not learn to avoid danger. Analgesia (natural and artificial), religious faith and various forms of meditation can reduce it.
There have been reports that Mother Teresa did under-medicate patients, justifying this with something about the redemptive value of suffering. Perhaps that’s what Eric is referring to.
As to explaining end of life suffering as being due to the laws of biology, that seems superficial. The laws of biology allow organisms to have all sorts of different constitutions. For example, humans and many other animals have endogenous painkillers that kick in at times of intense pain. It’s perfectly compatible with the laws of biology that there should be special endogeneous pain-killers that are triggered as the body breaks down and nears death. But evidently there aren’t, or they aren’t very effective.
The thing is, it’s hard to see how such a thing could have evolved through natural selection. Having an easier death doesn’t confer reproductive fitness. But a loving, all powerful god could surely manage endowing us with such a thing. By an inference to the best explanation, it seems we’ve been engineered by blind forces, not by some sort of a caring father-figure.
Thank you Jean. You explain things more succinctly than I do. Yes, Teresa of Calcutta - I actually have a letter from her - am I not privileged! - did not provide more than simple analgesics like aspirin. She did not relieve pain. Suffering was a spiritual value for her - though she herself went to the doctor in New York, I think. But I thought I had made this clear. The hospice movement and Dame Cecily Saunders, etc., are all familiar to me. I’m not sure why this is the response that Nicholas gives.
However, it seems to me that the onus is on the believer in an LUC to show why, given the way the world is, we should believe in an LUC. It is silly to suggest that the LUC is subject to natural laws which are his own creation. And if they are not, if, indeed, there is no way to vary conditions so as to provide at least some convincing evidence for an LUC, then there is no reason to believe in one either.
It’s a bit like the Euthyphro dilemma. Either morality is dependent on god or not. If it is not, then morality is something independent of god and we do not need god in order to be moral. Same thing with natural laws. The natural laws of the universe are either dependent on god or not. If they are, then god should be able to fiddle with the nobs until it looks as though someone loving is in control. If it doesn’t seem that way, then there is no evidence for an LUC. That seems clear to me. I mean, why call him/her/it an LUC unless he/she/it has such control?
As for Christian end of life care. The ABC rejects the claim of some people, dying in uncontrollable pain and distress, to bring their struggles to an end by permitting them, when they so request, to receive assistance in dying. Since god didn’t fiddle with the nobs, and perhaps cannot, this seems the most loving thing to do. But the ABC seems to think, with Nicholas, that god is loving even when hateful things happen. Well, good luck Nicholas! Die as you like. I will choose. And, not waking up to some reward in the hereafter, you won’t know that all your suffering was for nothing, but I will have abbreviated mine.
Hospice care is all very well, but when someone wants assistance in dying, it is immeasureless cruelty not to provide it. And talk about the ability of religious faith to reduce suffering, even if it is marginally true, is not an answer. The ABC is welcome to placebos. Why does he deny the real thing to others? So much for the LUC and its/her/his minions.
Sorry, left out the ‘k’ in ‘knobs’
I come late to the discussion, but I thank you all for such a stimulating read. Im guessing NBeale went into the habitual Christian amongst the lions mode without thinking about it, but all of you seem like pussycats to me.
NBeale throw’s in a bit of stupid philomath LMC=<something and appeals to numbers, (80% , many well-educated people believe so there) etc etc.
And lets not forget the very cunning- well there are so many belief systems so one of them must be right, and I pick my one.
Which just means he cant prove a thing.
And the god is talking to you, and maybe your not listening. Boy is that insulting.
The monotheistic god thing is a failed attempt to unite humanity. It is really simple and a product of its time when people believed gods to be real.
The logic went there is “god” if we all believed in the same god and its passed down wisdom/morality then we(humans) would all be united by that belief and we would all think and act the same. And it just extended it self out from attempting to unite one tribe to attempting to unite all people. And that is it.
Slowly as time has passed this uniting of all people into a single belief system took on sinister aspects (wars about gods) the supposed uniting belief system became a nightmare that divided and subjucated people rather that uniting them, and suffering increased.
But still people like NBeale cling to the notion of a single god and the idea of uniting under one belief idea.
They are fooling themselves and no one else.
And all the sophisticated quantum fiddling,convoluted high flown theological waffle in the world isnt going to change that.
And the people who will suffer wont be those like NBeale, but those at the bottom of this pile of humanity. Those lesser mortals who have to find their way in the mindfield of a society NBeale and his ilk are perpetuating.
Jean: It seems somewhat nonsensical to say “X is perfectly compatible with the laws of biology but X cannot arise through evolution.” As you say there are endogenous painkillers and it seems probable that they kick in to the maximum extent that is compatible with the laws of biology. There would be group selection advantages, and certainly there are common death situations (battle, childbirth) in our evolutionary past where such mechanisms would be helpful.
Eric: the euthanasia debate is much more complicated that this. And as for the laws of nature, I don’t think you begin to appreciate how subtly interwoven they are (and we are only just beginning to see this scientifically). “Fiddling with the knobs” entirely misses the point.
The euthanasia debate may be much more complicated than this, but many reasonable people now believe that there is no reason to refuse assistance in dying to those who have reached the point of intolerable suffering, where hastening dying is the only way in which to relieve such suffering. (And, if we’re allowed to play numbers games - though I tend to deprecate them - the numbers in Britain, Australia, and Canada show a clear majority in favour of a change in the law on this matter.)
As a matter of British history, a proposed bill providing for assistance in dying, was given its first reading in the House of Lords in 1936. The main reason it was rejected is that, in the opinion of those who contributed to the debate, doctors did not need such interference. They knew when it was necessary to help someone out of life, and since it was a matter of medical practice, it should be left to the medical professionals. In the Lords debate of 2006, religious reasons predominated in the defeat of Lord Joffe’s bill. The Church of England had an entire section of its internet home page devoted to ways in which people could defeat the bill. Religious reasons apply only to religious believers, and should not be imposed on those who do not believe. The debate is indeed complicated, but most of the complications have to do with religious beliefs or smokescreens laid down by sedulous religious critics of assistance in dying.
I believe nonetheless that this can be shown to be a reasonable position, and I believe also that anyone who refuses to grant such assistance to a suffering person who desires such assistance (under clearly assignable conditions) is unconscionably cruel. (It may be complicated, but claiming that it is complicated is largely just an excuse to delay change in the law. Shouldn’t take over seventy years. It’s not that complicated.) The religious person who does so - and it is almost always a religious person who does so - makes their claim that there is a loving god null and void, in my view. That’s all I will say on that. But I think the existence of such suffering at the end of life is clear evidence that there is no loving god.
As to ‘fiddling the knobs’. If the universe is god’s creation, then he can fiddle the knobs. If he can’t (and I’m using ‘he’ for brevity), then the universe is not god’s creation, within the normal understanding given to that word in religious contexts. I’m quite prepared to accept a scientific judgment that you can’t fiddle the knobs. Fine. But I am not prepared to admit that, if that is in fact the case, and there is a creator, it makes sense to speak of the creator as either loving or ultimate; and if this creator is not loving or ultimate then it is not god in the traditional sense of this word. It would be no more than to speak of Spinza’s god, which comprised the order and harmony of the universe itself.
Jean:
Atman is a monistic concept which is twinned with Brahman so strictly there’s only one atman or one identity. Atman is more universal than soul which is sometimes used to translate it. Individuals have their own experience of personal identity which is where the concept of jivatman (jiva/individual atman/identity) comes into play. What transmigrates is essentially the knot of desires that the individual has. Obviously those desires and desserts are played out at a similar level at which they were established so it is regarded as rare for transmigration to go backward to a lower level of self-awareness. The case of an animal that has attained moksha (freedom) is also rare but one case is accepted by the devotees of Ramana Maharshi 1879 - 1950. By his grace the cow Lakshmi was liberated at her death i.e. did not have to suffer any further transmigration.
http://www.kheper.net/topics/sentientism/Ramana_Maharshi.html
There is a shrine commemorating her beneath which she is buried as is the case with self-realised human being i.e.realisation of unity of self (atman) and Brahman.
I thought a big difference between Buddhism and Hinduism was that Buddhists get rid of atman (even though that is weird and puzzling). There’s rebirth, but not “transmigration,” whereas Hindus do think there’s something that goes from body to body. A “knot of desires” doesn’t sound like a something. Both religions have lots of schools, so no doubt I’m simplifying, but I thought this was in essence correct.
Nicholas – it seems as if you have failed to grasp a number of important points, so I will explain them to you.
Firstly, I didn’t say that the Christian worldview doesn’t imply the existence of infinite love. What I actually said was that I can see no evidence that infinite love actually exists in the world (insofar as this concept coheres at all), and you have failed to produce any evidence that it does. All you seem to be saying is that infinite love exists on Christianity. However, I am unaware of love existing in the world as anything other than a purely biological mechanism within humans. So, if you are unable to give any good evidence that infinite love actually exists in the world as we find it, then this becomes a failed prediction for the Christian worldview, which renders it less likely to be true. In other words:
P1: If Christianity is true, then infinite love exists in the world
P2: Infinite love doesn’t exist in the world
C: Therefore, Christianity is not true
Since you seem to accept P1 then, if you want to show that my argument is not sound, you must show that P2 is false. You cannot do this by simply saying that Christianity is true, and therefore infinite love must exist in the world, as this is just begging the question. You need to actually demonstrate that infinite love does exist in the world. I’m waiting (but not holding my breath).
On the subject of suffering, all Plantinga’s theorem shows is that no human knows that there is not a sufficiently good reason for the amount of suffering present in the world. This is just a reworking of the tired old mystery argument i.e. it may be a mystery to us why God does or allows certain things, but he has his good reasons for it. However, this type of argument is really just the last resort for the person who is trying to explain away the fact that the world as we observe it is nothing like what would be expected on the Christian worldview.
Yes, on the Christian worldview we cannot actually know the minimum amount of possible suffering that is compatible with the greatest possible good under God’s plan, but do you honestly think that it is what we observe around us? If one fewer Jew had been killed in the gas chambers, do you think that would have resulted in less overall good? If one fewer person had died in the Soviet Gulags, do you think the same? How about babies who are born with terrible health problems, suffer excruciating pain, and then die. Do you think that this is necessary for the greater good under God’s plan, as he has a good reason for it? What purpose could such suffering possibly have? Do you think that the millions of people who have died of horrible diseases needed to do so as this is required by God’s ultimate love? And how about the seemingly arbitrary nature of the suffering – with some good people suffering terribly, whilst some bad people don’t suffer at all? Do you really believe that God has a sufficiently good reason for all of this suffering?
Furthermore, do you really think that an all-powerful and all-loving God could create no better world than one in which animals must kill each other horribly in order to survive; resources would be limited so that countless humans and animals would die of thirst or hunger; our bodies would be frail and prone to injury and disease; and natural disasters would kill and injure millions? This is exactly the type of world that we would expect on Naturalism – where the universe it totally indifferent to us. However, it is not at all the type of world that we would expect if it was created by a maximally good and powerful God.
You say that “Love does not imply that you never allow the Person you Love to suffer (if you could have prevented it)”. However, if you love your child, would you allow them to walk into a road when a car is coming, knowing that they will get run down, or would you prevent them? Yes, you sometimes have to allow your child to suffer a little for their greater good (having a vaccination, for example), but do you not think that it would not be wholly disproportionate and utterly pointless to allow them to be run over and killed or terribly injured? Yet, this is analogous to what you think your God does when he allows countless children to die horribly in an earthquake or a flood, for example.
How about if you were to see a young child being horribly tortured by somebody, and you were told that the torturer was a very good person and had sufficiently good reasons for torturing the child? Whilst it’s possible that this is true, would you not think it more plausible that the torturer was not actually good at all, and try to prevent the torture? By analogy, when you see all of the suffering in the world around you, do you not think it more plausible that an all-powerful and all-good God cannot exist (either he doesn’t exist at all, or he is not all-powerful and all-good)? In other worlds, which is the more plausible:
1. An all-powerful and all-good God would create a world that contains vast amounts of suffering, but he has a sufficiently good reasons to allow all of this suffering, or
2. God either doesn’t exist at all, or else is not both all-powerful and all-good?
Stephen Law has actually created a thought experiment called ‘The God of Eth’, where he demonstrates that a maximally evil God is just as compatible with your logic as is a maximally good one (see: http://stephenlaw.blogspot.com/2007/03/god-of-eth.html)
The Christian worldview is not a good explanation for the world around us because on that worldview:
1. We would expect to observe far less suffering. See above.
2. We would expect God to get his message to all of us in a way that is absolutely clear and unambiguous so that we might be saved. We might still choose to reject his message, but there would be no doubt about the fact that God exists and to the content of his message. As it is, God seems to be totally absent in the world (unlike the way things are supposed to have been in Biblical times), and the message has not been given in a way that is not open to doubt or interpretation. For example, the Bible is full of contradictions and things we know to be false or absurd (as well as showing God to be more of an evil tyrant than a loving father); messages that people say that they received from God are contradictory, more plausibly explained as delusion or lies, contain nothing but clichés and banalities, and don’t seem to be received at all by millions of people. A God that wants us to be saved would surely leave no doubt at all with regard to his existence and message.
3. The vast age and size of the universe and the fact that it is almost entirely lethal to human life is not at all what we would expect if it was created solely for us.
4. It proposes the existence of some unseen and unproven supernatural realm in order to explain the existence of the natural world. For example, you are unable to give any good proof for God’s existence, or for the assertion that faith in Jesus will procure eternal life.
5. No good evidence has ever been produced for the existence of any miracle at any time in the recorded history of our world – never mind for the resurrection or the Virgin Birth in particular. These are much more plausibly explained as myths, hearsay, anecdote, lies, delusions etc. The lack of any good evidence for these supposed miracles is a further failed prediction for the Christian worldview.
So, the Christian worldview lacks plausibility and parsimony, and has little explanatory scope and power. Therefore, it is not a good explanation for the world around us. Metaphysical Naturalism is a much better explanation, for example (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphysical_naturalism). Therefore, I reject the Christian worldview as a plausible explanation for the world.
As a matter of interest, why do you believe that God created the universe at all? If Heaven exists, then why aren’t we all there already? Surely an omniscient and omnipotent God has no need for tests, as he must surely know what we will choose to do. Our supposed free will (which is looking increasingly untenable anyway, given the deterministic nature of the universe, with the possible exception of quantum indeterminacy that is out of our control anyway) can surely not render our actions beyond God’s knowledge? So, on the Christian worldview, God seems to have knowingly created millions of us who are going to fail his test, and therefore end up suffering for all eternity. That seems to me to be more the work of a supremely tyrant than a maximally loving father. So, given this, I am extremely happy in the knowledge that God almost certainly doesn’t exist.
I have just discovered, and am still making my way through, this interesting, albeit long, discussion. However, I was intrigued by Nicholas Beale’s “meta-scientific” questions early on (23.02.09, 1.20pm). First, is it not strange how theist apologists like to confront their opponents with “why” questions (”Why is there something rather than nothing?”, and so on), whilst ducking equally pressing “how” questions? I for one would be most impressed if such an apologist would offer a clear and detailed explanation as to how an immaterial (and, according to some thinkers, non-complex) entity outside space-time operates to affect material objects within space-time.
Second, some theists seem to regard laws of nature as analogous to laws promulgated by humans, i.e. as prescriptions of behaviour (except, of course, that human laws can be broken, whereas physical objects can do no other than move, react, interact, etc. as dictated by the laws of nature). This of course facilitates the theist’s positing of a divine law-giver, but the question still remains as to what kind of thing such a law of nature would be. How, for instance, is such a law instantiated in the world? If Beale is going rely on “meta-scientific” questions concerning laws of nature, I think he owes us an explanation of what he considers the ontological status of such laws to be. Then perhaps one could begin to consider whether his “meta-scientific” questions are in any way substantial.
Nicholas - another problem with Plantinga’s “noseeums” theorum. Let’s face it, this theorum, which is just a version of the old mystery move (God has his reasons, which may be mysterious to us blah blah blah), has been introduced in an attempt to save the Christian worldview when its predictions do not fit with what we observe in the real world. If the observations did accord with what the Christian worldview predicts, then theologians wouldn’t have expended so much effort, and spilt so much ink, in trying to solve the ‘problem of evil’.
However, the problem with Plantinga’s theorum, and the mystery move, is that it is entirely ad-hoc. That is, there is no evidence that it is actually true. It’s just been pulled out of a hat. But, when you introduce an additional element to a theory in order to explain away some failure in the original theory, the new element must be capable of being proved independently. You can’t just make up something up that saves the theory, but cannot be tested in any way. Furthermore, this new element should ideally make the original theory more, not less, testable.
The reasons behind this are twofold. Firstly, we should aim to apply Occam’s Razor when constructing hypotheses to explain the observations (theoretical entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity when attempting to explain observations). Furthermore, we should not believe some assertion unless there is good reason to do so. The number of false beliefs always vastly outnumbers the true, so any ungrounded assertion will most likely be false. Therefore, if one arbitrary chooses a belief based upon blind faith rather than evidence and reason, then that belief will most likely be false. So, as a process for acquiring knowledge, blind faith is an unreliable one, as it is not truth-finding.
Jean wrote:
Jean:
The Buddhist anatman/annata (no atman) doctrine is very like Hume’s dismissal of personal identity - ‘whenever I look within all I find is a bundle of perceptions etc’. It’s complex but in fact they are denying what the atman theory doesn’t hold. Identity arises out of consciousness as such and not out of the particular elements of consciousness, memories, dreams, reflections, perceptions, sensations and the like. Atman or Pure Consciousness does not change and always remains the same. The material identity analogy is offered of clay and the various vessels of clay which are fundamentally clay with different names and forms. Very broad brush here. What is reincarnated is not an entity like atman which doesn’t change and which is in reality impersonal but the particular psychic pattern or the human clay taking different shapes according to the individual style of going on. It’s like an open ended drama playing itself out passing on from medium to medium.
This is a doctrine not a scientific theory and therefore will have elements at its edges where mystery intervenes and logic departs. Naturalists belong on another beach.
Nick: no time to respond in detail here to your long posts. If you read Questions of Truth you’d get a reasonable idea of how (some) christians respond to these kind of points.
The notion of “would be expected on the Christian worldview” needs a bit of unpacking. AFAIK almost no Christians actually affirm any of these things - it looks like a straw man, and demolishing a straw man proves nothing (except about the arguer).
The P1,P2 business is also quite helpful. Of course when I say “in the world” I include (in the Christian worldview) the state of eternal loving union with God for which (in this worldview) we are intended after our earthly life. It is clearly absurd to say that we have infinite love (even though we may seen glimpses of it) if we confine ourselves only to earthly life.
But it’s worth noting that almost every fundamental scientific discovery would fail your P1,P2 test - if P2 is allowed to be “theory laden” in the way it is with you.
Nbeale
“…when I say “in the world” I include (in the Christian worldview) the state of eternal loving union with God for which (in this worldview) we are intended after our earthly life.”
Of course you meant to preface this with ” It is my opinion that ” didnt you, but you were is a bit of a rush and left it out. That way you can leave out the Christian worldview palaver.
An apology will be fine. Just dont forget to leave it out next time.