Some of you may be wondering: “Does God exist?” Fortunately, Richard Dawkins has written a new book, The God Delusion, that addresses precisely this question. As it turns out, the answer is: “No, God does not exist.” (Admittedly, Dawkins reached his conclusion before the Cards won the World Series.)
Nevertheless, there remains a spot of controversy — it would appear that Dawkins’s rhetorical force is insufficient to persuade some theists. One example is provided by literary critic Terry Eagleton, who reviewed The God Delusion for the London Review of Books. Eagleton’s review has already been discussed among some of my favorite blogs: 3 Quarks Daily, Pharyngula, Uncertain Principles, and the Valve (twice), to name a few. But it provides a good jumping-off point for an examination of one of the common arguments used against scientifically-minded atheists: “You’re setting up a straw man by arguing against a naive and anthropomorphic view of `God’; if only you engaged with more sophisticated theology, you’d see that things are not so cut-and-dried.”
Before jumping in, I should mention that I have somewhat mixed feelings about Dawkins’s book myself. I haven’t read it very thoroughly, not because it’s not good, but for the same reason that I rarely read popular cosmology books from cover to cover: I’ve mostly seen this stuff before, and already agree with the conclusions. But Dawkins has a strategy that is very common among atheist polemicists, and with which I tend to disagree. That’s to simultaneously tackle three very different issues:
- Does God exist? Are the claims of religion true, as statements about the fundamental nature of the universe?
- Is religious belief helpful or harmful? Does it do more bad than good, or vice-versa?
- Why are people religious? Is there some evolutionary-psychological or neurological basis for why religion is so prevalent?
All of these questions are interesting. But, from where I am sitting, the last two are incredibly complicated issues about which it is very difficult to say anything definitive, at least at this point in our intellectual history. Whereas the first one is relatively simple. By mixing them up, the controversial accounts of history and psychology tend to dilute the straightforward claim that there’s every reason to disbelieve in the existence of God. When Dawkins suggests that the Troubles in Northern Ireland should be understood primarily as a religious schism between Catholics and Protestants, he sacrifices some of the credibility he may have had if he had stuck to the more straightforward issue of whether or not religion is true.
Right out of the gate, Eagleton bashes Dawkins for dabbling in things he doesn’t understand.
Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology…
What, one wonders, are Dawkins’s views on the epistemological differences between Aquinas and Duns Scotus? Has he read Eriugena on subjectivity, Rahner on grace or Moltmann on hope? Has he even heard of them?
These questions, of course, have absolutely no relevance to the matter at hand; they are just an excuse for Eagleton to show off a bit of erudition. If Dawkins is right, and religion is simply a “delusion,” a baroque edifice built upon a foundation of mistakes and wishful thinking, then the views of Eriugena on subjectivity are completely beside the point. Not all of theology directly concerns the question of whether or not God exists; much of it accepts the truth of that proposition, and goes from there. The question is whether that’s a good starting point. If an architect shows you a grand design for a new high-rise building, you don’t have to worry about the floor plan for the penthouse apartment if you notice that the foundation is completely unstable.
But underneath Eagleton’s bluster lies a potentially-relevant critique. After all, some sophisticated theology is about whether or not God exists, and more importantly about the nature of God. Eagleton understands this, and gamely tries to explain how the concept of God is different from other things in the world:
For Judeo-Christianity, God is not a person in the sense that Al Gore arguably is. Nor is he a principle, an entity, or “existent”: in one sense of that word it would be perfectly coherent for religious types to claim that God does not in fact exist. He is, rather, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever, including ourselves. He is the answer to why there is something rather than nothing. God and the universe do not add up to two, any more than my envy and my left foot constitute a pair of objects.
Okay, very good. God, in this conception, is not some thing out there in the world (or even outside the world), available to be poked and prodded and have his beard tugged upon. Eagleton rightly emphasizes that ordinary-language concepts such as “existence” might not quite be up to the task of dealing with God, at least not in the same way that they deal with Al Gore. A precisely similar analysis holds for less controversial ideas, such as the Schrödinger equation. There is a sense in which the Schrödinger equation “exists”; after all, wavefunctions seem to be constantly obeying it. But, whatever it may mean to say “the Schrödinger equation exists,” it certainly doesn’t mean the same kind of thing as to say “Al Gore exists.” We’re borrowing a term that makes perfect sense in one context and stretching its meaning to cover a rather different context, and emphasizing that distinction is a philosophically honorable move.
But then we run somewhat off the rails.
This, not some super-manufacturing, is what is traditionally meant by the claim that God is Creator. He is what sustains all things in being by his love; and this would still be the case even if the universe had no beginning. To say that he brought it into being ex nihilo is not a measure of how very clever he is, but to suggest that he did it out of love rather than need. The world was not the consequence of an inexorable chain of cause and effect. Like a Modernist work of art, there is no necessity about it at all, and God might well have come to regret his handiwork some aeons ago. The Creation is the original acte gratuit. God is an artist who did it for the sheer love or hell of it, not a scientist at work on a magnificently rational design that will impress his research grant body no end.
The previous excerpt, which defined God as “the condition of possibility,” seemed to be warning against the dangers of anthropomorphizing the deity, ascribing to it features that we would normally associate with conscious individual beings such as ourselves. A question like “Does `the condition of possibility’ exist?” would never set off innumerable overheated arguments, even in a notoriously contentious blogosphere. If that were really what people meant by “God,” nobody would much care. It doesn’t really mean anything — like Spinoza’s pantheism, identifying God with the natural world, it’s just a set of words designed to give people a warm and fuzzy feeling. As a pragmatist, I might quibble that such a formulation has no operational consequences, as it doesn’t affect anything relevant about how we think about the world or act within it; but if you would like to posit the existence of a category called “the condition of possibility,” knock yourself out.
But — inevitably — Eagleton does go ahead and burden this innocent-seeming concept with all sorts of anthropomorphic baggage. God created the universe “out of love,” is capable of “regret,” and “is an artist.” That’s crazy talk. What could it possibly mean to say that “The condition of possibility is an artist, capable of regret”? Nothing at all. Certainly not anything better-defined than “My envy and my left foot constitute a pair of objects.” And once you start attributing to God the possibility of being interested in some way about the world and the people in it, you open the door to all of the nonsensical rules and regulations governing real human behavior that tend to accompany any particular manifestation of religious belief, from criminalizing abortion to hiding women’s faces to closing down the liquor stores on Sunday.
The problematic nature of this transition — from God as ineffable, essentially static and completely harmless abstract concept, to God as a kind of being that, in some sense that is perpetually up for grabs, cares about us down here on Earth — is not just a minor bump in the otherwise smooth road to a fully plausible conception of the divine. It is the profound unsolvable dilemma of “sophisticated theology.” It’s a millenia-old problem, inherited from the very earliest attempts to reconcile two fundamentally distinct notions of monotheism: the Unmoved Mover of ancient Greek philosophy, and the personal/tribal God of Biblical Judaism. Attempts to fit this square peg into a manifestly round hole lead us smack into all of the classical theological dilemmas: “Can God microwave a burrito so hot that He Himself cannot eat it?” The reason why problems such as this are so vexing is not because our limited human capacities fail to measure up when confronted with the divine; it’s because they are legitimately unanswerable questions, arising from a set of mutually inconsistent assumptions.
It’s worth the effort to dig into the origin of these two foundational notions of God, in order to get straight just how incompatible they really are. Until the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, Israelite religion was straightforwardly polytheistic, as much as the Greeks or Romans or Norse ever were. Originally, the Canaanite High God El (often translated simply as “God” in modern Bibles) was a completely distinct creature from Yahweh (often translated as “the Lord”). It’s not until Exodus 3:6 that Yahweh asserts to Moses that he should be identified with El, the God of Abraham. (Why do you think that Yahweh’s very First Commandment insists on not having any other gods before him?) Remnants of Judaism’s polytheistic origins linger on throughout the Scriptures, which are an intricately-edited pastiche of various earlier sources. Psalm 82, for example, describes Yahweh making a power play at a meeting of the various gods (the “Council of El”):
1 God presides in the great assembly;
he gives judgment among the “gods”:
and show partiality to the wicked?
Selah 3 Defend the cause of the weak and fatherless;
maintain the rights of the poor and oppressed. 4 Rescue the weak and needy;
deliver them from the hand of the wicked. 5 “They know nothing, they understand nothing.
They walk about in darkness;
all the foundations of the earth are shaken. 6 “I said, ‘You are “gods”;
you are all sons of the Most High.’ 7 But you will die like mere men;
you will fall like every other ruler.” 8 Rise up, O God, judge the earth,
for all the nations are your inheritance.
The quotes around “gods,” of course, are nowhere in the original Hebrew; they were inserted by the translators (this is the New International Version), who were understandably squeamish about all this talk concerning “gods” in the plural.
The development of Hebrew monotheism from its polytheistic beginnings is a long and complicated story that contemporary historians only incompletely understand; see this review of a book by Mark Smith of NYU to get some flavor of current thinking. But the crucial point is that the emergence of One God was an essentially political transformation. The ancient Hebrews, surrounded by other unfriendly nations, promoted their tribal deity Yahweh to the position of the most powerful god, promising dire consequences for any backsliders who would choose to worship Ba’al or Asherah or other pretenders (as Ahab and Jezebel learned the hard way). From there, it was a short doctrinal leap (requiring only the imaginative re-interpretation of a few Scriptural passages) to declare that Yahweh was the only God out there — the well-known others weren’t merely subordinate, they were imaginary. Even in its own right, this claim was somewhat problematic, as Yahweh had to serve double duty as the God of the Hebrews and also the only god in existence. But the conception of God as some sort of being who cared about the fate of the people of Israel was relatively sustainable; none of the Prophets went around defining Yahweh as “the condition of possibility,” or even ascribing characteristics of omniscience and omnipotence to the deity.
Meanwhile, the ancient Greeks were developing monotheism for their own purposes — essentially philosophical rather than political. They had quite the robust pantheon of individual gods, but it was clear to most careful thinkers that these were closer to amusingly anthropomorphic fairy tales than to deep truths about the structure of the universe. Unsurprisingly, the monotheistic conception reached its pinnacle in the work of Aristotle. In the Metaphysics, he presented a version of what we now know as the cosmological argument for the existence of God, which (in Wikipedia’s rendering) goes something like this:
- Every effect has a cause.
- Nothing can cause itself.
- A causal chain cannot be of infinite length.
- Therefore, there must be a first cause; or, there must be something which is not an effect.
Admittedly, this is merely an informal paraphrase of the argument. But the more careful versions don’t change the essential fact that these days, the cosmological proof is completely anachronistic. Right after step one — “Every effect has a cause” — the only sensible response is “No it doesn’t.” Or at least, “What is that supposed to mean”?
To make sense of the cosmological argument, it’s important to realize that Aristotle’s metaphysics was predicated to an important extent on his physics. (Later variations by theologians from Aquinas to Leibniz don’t alter the essence of the argument.) To the ancient Greeks, the behavior of matter was teleological; earth wanted to fall down, fire wanted to rise toward the heavens. And once it reached its desired destination, it just sat there. According to Aristotle, if we want to keep an object moving we have to keep pushing it. And he’s right, of course, if we are thinking about the vast majority of macroscopic objects in our everyday world — which seems like a perfectly reasonable set of objects to think about. If you push a book along a table, and then stop pushing it, it will come to rest. If you want it to keep moving, you have to keep pushing it. That “effect” — the motion of the book — without a doubt requires a “cause” — you pushing it. It doesn’t seem like much of a leap to extend such an analysis to the entire universe, implying the existence of an ineffable, perfectly static First Cause, or Unmoved Mover.
But the God of the Judeo-Christian Bible is very far from being “Unmoved.” He’s quite the mover, actually — smiting people here, raising the dead there. All very befitting, considering his origin as a local tribal deity. But utterly incompatible with the perfect and unchanging Aristotelian notion of God.
For the past two thousand years, theology has struggled to reconcile these two apparently-conflicting conceptions of the divine, without much success. We are left with fundamentally incoherent descriptions of what God is, which deny that he “exists” in the same sense that hummingbirds and saxophones do, but nevertheless attribute to him qualities of “love” and “creativity” that conventionally belong to conscious individual beings. One might argue that it’s simply a hard problem, and our understanding is incomplete; after all, we haven’t come up with a fully satisfactory way to reconcile general relativity and quantum mechanics, either. But there is a more likely possibility: there simply is no reconciliation to be had. The reason why it’s difficult to imagine how God can be eternally perfect and also occasionally wistful is that God doesn’t exist.
In fact, in this day and age the flaws in Aristotle’s cosmological proof (just to pick one) are perfectly clear. Our understanding of the inner workings of the physical world has advanced quite a bit since the ancient Greeks. Long ago, Galileo figured out that the correct way to think about motion was to abstract from messy real-world situations to idealized circumstances in which dissipative effects such as friction and air resistance could be ignored. (They can always be restored later as perturbations.) Only then do we realize that what matter really wants to do is to maintain its motion at a constant speed, until it is explicitly acted upon by some external force. Except that, once we have made this breakthrough, we realize that the matter doesn’t want to do anything — it just does it. Modern physics doesn’t describe the world in terms of “causes” and “effects.” It simply posits that matter (in the form of quantum fields, or strings, or what have you) acts in accordance with certain dynamical laws, known as “equations of motion.” The notion of “causality” is downgraded from “when I see B happening, I know it must be because of A” to “given some well-defined and suitably complete set of information about the initial state of a system, I can use the equations of motion to determine its subsequent evolution.” But a concept like “cause” doesn’t appear anywhere in the equations of motion themselves, nor in the specification of the type of matter being described; it is only an occasionally-appropriate approximation, useful to us humans in narrating the behavior of some macroscopic configuration of equation-obeying matter.
In other words, the universe runs all by itself. The planets orbit the Sun, not because anything is “causing” them to do so, but because that’s the kind of behavior that obeys Newton’s (or Einstein’s) equations governing motion in the presence of gravity. Deeply embedded as we are in this Galilean/Newtonian framework, statements like “every effect has a cause” become simply meaningless. (We won’t even bother with “A causal chain cannot be of infinite length,” which completely begs the question.) Conservation of momentum completely undermines any force the cosmological argument might ever have had. The universe, like everything in it, can very well just be, as long as its pieces continue to obey the relevant equations of motion.
Special pleading that the universe is essentially different from its constituents, and (by nature of its unique status as all that there is to the physical world) that it could not have either (1) just existed forever, nor (2) come spontaneously into existence all by itself, is groundless. The only sensible response such skepticism is “Why not?” It’s certainly true that we don’t yet know whether the universe is eternal or whether it had a beginning, and we certainly don’t understand the details of its origin. But there is absolutely no obstacle to our eventually figuring those things out, given what we already understand about physics. General relativity asserts that spacetime itself is dynamical; it can change with time, and potentially even be created from nothing, in a way that is fundamentally different from the Newtonian conception (much less the Aristotelian). And quantum mechanics describes the universe in terms of a wavefunction that assigns amplitudes to any of an infinite number of possibilities, including — crucially — spontaneous transitions, unforced by any cause. We don’t yet know how to describe the origin of the universe in purely physical terms, but someday we will — physicists are working on the problem every day.
The analogy to a penthouse apartment atop a high-rise building is quite apt. Much of the intricate architecture of modern theology is built on a foundation that conceives of God as both creator and sustainer of the world and as a friendly and loving being. But these days we know better. The Clockwork Universe of Galileo and Newton has once and for all removed the need for anything to “sustain” the universe, and the “creation” bit is something on which we are presently closing in.
In fact, although it is rarely discussed in history books, the influence of the conservation of momentum on theological practice is fairly evident. One response was a revival of Pyrrhonian skepticism, which claimed that it was simply wrong even to attempt to apply logic and rationality to questions of religion — claiming that you had “proven” the existence of God could get you accused of atheism. The other, more robust response, was a turn to natural theology and the argument from design. Even if the universe could keep going all by itself, surely its unguided meanderings would never produce something as wonderfully intricate as (for example) the human eye? The argument doesn’t hold up very well even under purely philosophical scrutiny — David Hume’s devastating take-down in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, interestingly, actually pre-dates William Paley’s classic statement of the argument (1779 vs. 1802). Hume, for example, points out that, even if the argument from design works, it allows us to conclude next to nothing about the nature of the Designer. Maybe it was a team? Maybe our universe is a rough first draft for a much better later universe? Or even just a mistake? (Okay, that has something going for it.)
But then, of course, Darwin’s theory of natural selection undercut the justification for the design argument just as thoroughly as classical mechanics undercut the justification for the cosmological argument. Indeed, the unpurposeful meanderings of matter in the universe can produce the wonderful intricacies of the human eye, and much else besides. Believers haven’t given up entirely; you’ll now more commonly find the argument from design placed in a cosmological context, where it is even less convincing. But for the most part, theologians have basically abandoned the project of “proving” God’s existence, which is probably a good move.
But they haven’t given up on believing in God’s existence (suitably defined), which is what drives atheists like Dawkins (and me) a little crazy. Two thousand years ago, believing in God made perfect sense; there was so much that we didn’t understand about the world, and an appeal to the divine seemed to help explain the otherwise inexplicable. Those original motivations have long since evaporated. In response, theologians have continued to alter what they mean by “God,” and struggled to reconcile the notion’s apparent internal contradictions — unwilling to take those contradictions as a signal of the fundamental incoherence of the idea.
To be fair, much of Dawkins’s book does indeed take aim at a rather unsophisticated form of belief, one that holds a much more literal (and wholly implausible, not to mention deeply distasteful) notion of what God means. That’s not a completely unwarranted focus, even if it does annoy the well-educated Terry Eagletons of the world; after all, that kind of naive theology is a guiding force among a very large and demonstrably influential fraction of the population. The reality of a religion is manifested in the actions of its adherents. But even an appeal to more nuanced thinking doesn’t save God from the dustbin of intellectual history. The universe is going to keep existing without any help, peacefully solving its equations of motion along the way; if we want to find meaning through compassion and love, we have to create it ourselves.
Wittgenstein wrote two particularly important books, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Philosophical Investigations. The Tractatus analysed language as though it were a picture of reality, whereas the Philosophical Investigations was essentially a repudiation of this view, focusing instead on the idea that the meaning of a word comes from its use or context (the tool box model). Using the latter insight, perhaps we should try to understand words like ‘God’ in terms of their function – the way they are being used, which is usually a great deal more varied and complex than as a mere positive referent.
My God, what next! Help me God! Good God! If you don’t behave you won’t go to heaven! We probably aren’t unduly excercised by these expressions. It is the idea of a positive referent, of the word ‘God’ being a picture of a reality that creates confusion (and perhaps we need to let the fly out of the fly bottle, as Wittgenstein suggested) .
Private belief in a God, in itself, is of little importance. In Dawkins’ terms the idea of God can be thought of as a meme which is subject to selection pressures, in a way that has some parallels to genetic selection. My own conviction is that in time the hold that religious belief (a cluster of memes) has over people will weaken, as it is doing in Europe and Quebec, and amongst young people in the US (judged by their falling attendance at churches). But unfortunately, in the meantime, the consequences of religious belief can be very harmful, as well as beneficial. Perhaps the impetus to weaken the God meme comes from a concern about these harmful consequences, and has relatively litle to do with anything of scientific interest.
Richard Dawkins states I am completely wrong about the alleged comment re Keith Ward and oxygen deprivation. In that case I withdraw my statement with apologies. I was told about that coment by a source I believed was thoroughly reliable.
Is not the God Conundrum the apparent fact that atheists find Dawkins book very persuasive while theists do not?
Of course it all depends on the definition of the word ‘God’.
One such definition is ‘God is the author and guarantor of the laws of science’.
If we ignore some more speculative hypotheses, the anthropic fine-tuning of physical constants, which makes ours an unlikely fecund universe, may be explained by invoking either a creator God or a multitude of other universes.
Neither God nor other universes are observable by scientific methods; therefore each explanation requires an act of faith in something beyond ‘physics’ observable in the normal scientific sense, i.e. ‘metaphysics’.
The question is what are we prepared to put our faith in? Theists appear just as willing to place their faith in the existence of God as atheists are prepared to put their faith in God’s non-existence.
Surely without such an act of faith, either way, only the agnostic position is tenable?
I am so pleased that someone has generated such a huge debate based on “Does God exist?” The answer is of course a resounding YES, I don’t suppose any of you who are discussing this subject have been to church recently and listened to the teaching or spent quiet time communing with God who is the Creator and Master of the universe,who does love and discipline His people, and of course will do until He creates the new heaven and the new earth. I would strongly suggest you spend more time praying than blogging or debating. You may not believe in God, but He believes in you and He will forgive you if you repent of your unbelief.
I pray that you will have an encounter with the Living Lord, so that you too will believe, in Jesus name I pray this.
I know that what I have written will not convince you, only the Lord Jesus Christ can do this Himself. So, go ahead, if you dare, and invite Him into your life.
See you in Heaven.
I have been back to my source, and have now determined that it was in fact Peter Atkins, the chemist, who in a public debate made the remark about oxygen and Keith Ward’s brain that I quoted. I sincerely apologise to Richard Dawkins for having attributed to him a remark in fact made by his Oxford colleague. My memory let me down. Sorry.
I think, Garth Barber, if you find the fantastical idea of a pre-existing higher intelligence is on a par statistically with the multiverse then it will be hard to convince you of the atheist viewpoint. But of course this is discussed in [i]The God Delusion[/i], along with a clarification of the terms atheist and agnostic which you are somewhat muddying here. I feel like everywhere I see the book discussed half the time must be spent imploring the participants actually to read it! It really would clear up a lot of problems.
I see this blog post has started to attract kooks, which is a pity. I very much enjoyed the article, a quite excellent analysis.
Hauser’s book, ‘Moral Minds’, puts forward the view that morality is innate, rather like Chomsky’s language structure. As a Darwinist, I empathize with this approach, but if Dawkins’ book, ‘The Selfish Gene’, is any guide, it may be that ‘immorality’, in the limited sense that the individual’s interest is generally favoured over the interest of the group, is more likely to be the governing innate structure. Non-kin altruism is a fundamental problem for a Darwinian approach to understanding human behaviour, and to the extent that morality and altruism overlap, it seems unlikely that it would be innately coded. It is noteworthy, that when social sanctions are absent or weakened, immoral behaviour is likely to increase, which doesn’t help the idea of an innate sense of morality. William Golding’s ‘Lord of the Flies’ comes to mind!
Religions are types of social sanction that attempt to instil a moral code. It is, after all, in the individual’s interest to have a social environment which is predictable and moral, and it would make sense therefore for individuals to outwardly support and favour such codes (to display and present themselves as doing this), while inwardly calculating the costs and benefits of following them in any specific instance. The hypocrisy of so many religious leaders, who are outwardly God-fearing, but behave immorally in their private lives, is sufficiently well-established to lend some support to this.
Religions may have no, or little, scientific standing, and history is replete with the harm and the cruelty done in their name, but one of the reasons why they may have survived for so long is their function as a brake on innate ‘immorality’ (which stems from a ‘selfish’ gene). The notion of God may well be a delusion as Dawkin’s has cogently argued, but at this point in our history, it may well have some beneficial effects as well.
extabgrad, are you defining “kook” as somebody who is of a different opinion?
Note my initial comment, yes, atheists do find “The God Delusion” very convincing, others do not. Actually reading the book only confirms these responses to it.
The question is, “What is each individual prepared to believe in?”
Theists do put “pre-existing higher intelligence [is] on a par statistically with the multiverse” as neither can be observed scientifically.
They have other reasons for not finding the idea “fantastical”. That is the problem with the book.
No, a kook is someone who goes on a blog like this to proselytise, see ‘Michael’ above.
You cleverly avoided the real point, which is that you clearly haven’t read the book, yet are commenting on it as if you are familiar with its arguments. This seems a trifle unfair, and a hell of a waste of time. But fair enough, if you insist…
I and Richard Dawkins agree that the default position should be agnosticism. And perhaps you’re right that we should be as agnostic about the multiverse as we should about gods. But we should also be as agnostic about one god as about another, and about gods as about ghosts and alien abductions. So what are we saying here? We’re saying, as Richard Dawkins keeps having to point out poor soul, that we should be precisely as ‘on the fence’ about gods as we should about invisible fairies. If such a level of scepticism isn’t called atheism, then I call for a redefinition of the term. To a typical atheist, an agnostic is just an atheist who is too polite to point out that a supernatural creator of the universe is every bit as plausible as the Great Green Arkleseizure’s sneeze.
Of course, I understand that most theists feel there’s a difference. But can they articulate it convincingly? This is precisely what the God Delusion is about and I highly recommend it. If you’ve already thought long and hard about these issues, as I have, then perhaps you won’t find much new in it. But most people haven’t. Have you?
I might also mention that Richard Dawkins’ approach to the distinction between the multiverse theory and the god theory is a cogent one:
“It is tempting to think (and many have succumbed) that to postulate a plethora of universes is a profligate luxury which should not be allowed. If we are going to permit the extravagance of a multiverse, so the argument runs, we might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb and allow a God. Aren’t they both equally unparsimonious ad hoc hypotheses, and equally unsatisfactory? People who think that have not had their consciousness raised by natural selection. The key difference between the genuinely extravagant God hypothesis and the apparently extravagant multiverse hypothesis is one of statistical improbability. The multiverse, for all that it is extravagant, is simple. God, or any intelligent, decision-taking, calculating agent, would have to be highly improbable in the very same statistical sense as the entities he is supposed to explain. The multiverse may seem extravagant in sheer number of universes. But if each one of those universes is simple in its fundamental laws, we are still not postulating anything highly improbable. The very opposite has to be said of any kind of intelligence.”
Great Blog
But in Zappas Universe how do you explain Joe getting sucked into J Edgar Hoovers Church of Appliantology?
‘extabgrad, you seem to think you know what I have read. Such a claim to psychic powers I find to be “mental porridge”.
Just because I have read Dawkins very readable book does not mean I have to agree with it.
Garth, you bring up points that are addressed in the book as if the book hasn’t dealt with them. So at the very least, you can’t have read it very well.
extrabad – thank you for your clarification.
The point I was bringing up did not concern the origin of complexity in the ‘God hypothesis’ but rather the necessity of faith not only in that hypothesis but also in the ‘multiverse hypothesis’, either in its ‘Rees’ or ‘Smolin’ form.
I make two further points.
First, whereas natural selection provides a simple way of developing complex structure in the universe, and in Smolin’s CNS theory the universe as well, the question arises of the origin and sustainability of the laws of physics that marshal that complexity.
Second, the present standard ‘Lambda’CDM cosmological model requires ‘belief’ in a number of ‘entities’ at present unobserved in the laboratory, viz: the inflation particle (although there is just a hint that the Higgs Boson may have been detected), the Dark Matter particle and Dark Energy. Once you get into the habit of accepting the existence of these entities without question I suppose it is only a small step to accept the multiverse as well…..
But, as we agree, atheists find ‘The God Delusion’ very convincing.
Garth
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Thanks for your response Garth. I suppose we are reaching a natural conclusion in our conversation.
Of course I can see where you’re coming from. I still think there’s a massive imbalance. You can count the number of entities that need to be taken on ‘faith’ (if you must use that word) to support the multiverse theory. The number of atomic axioms that must be assumed to support the prior-existing-supreme-intelligence hypothesis are uncountable. I think Occam would feel physically sick at the suggestion they are comparable! Perhaps my ‘inherent bias’ is just making it seem that way?
I am an atheist. I am convinced by The God Delusion. But it didn’t really tell me anything new, certainly not philosophically. I’ve already thought hard about these issues. So I can’t easily analyse how ‘convincing’ a book it is. You are suggesting that it isn’t very convincing to anybody except people who are already convinced, basically meaning that nobody is actually convinced (as an active verb) by it. I’ll just have to take your word for it, I’m afraid. All I can say is that judging by the reaction of religionists, which has a fair amount of the usual scoffing that Dawkins has missed the point, there is a good proportion of critics who clearly /fear/ the power of book to convince, warning their flock that it will seem ‘superficially convincing’ and not to let themselves fall for it without a fight (I could point you to articles but I won’t unless you request them).
Thank you extabgrad, yes I believe I have seen a few of those articles already!
Do I fear the ‘God Delusion’?’ I hope not. On the other hand, I like to think of myself as a rational religious believer, even if you probably consider that an oxymoron, as a consequence I find myself trying to fend off religious extremism on the one hand and evangelical atheism on the other so I do worry about the effect the book might have if left unchallenged.
Finding myself somewhat in the middle I cannot help but reflect on apparent similarities between both sides.
Apart from rehearsing all the evil done in the name of religion, in which case I join in with its condemnation, there has also been a lot of good.
If a person wants to rid the world of the religion virus then to be consistent they ought do away with all the organisations and institutions founded and supported by religion, in Britain we would loose most of our old hospitals, ancient schools and the good old Church of England, of course we should not forget the universities of Oxford and Cambridge as well. But then as not only would I loose my job but also Richard Dawkins as well, perhaps that would be a step too far!
Sounds suspiciously like an argument-from-absurd-extrapolation, Garth. Religion set up the healthcare and the education because religion is so pervasive and no other institutions had the resources for it; to suggest that they wouldn’t exist if religion didn’t is….naive, to say the least. Religions have subsumed institutional roles that societies might well produce regardless. Besides, must we give up saying ‘bless you’ when somebody sneezes now the plague is no longer around? Must we give up aromatherapy now that we know the reason it works has nothing to do with the superstitions it was original based on? I’ve no problem with the harmless or benevolent /consequences/ of religion, if we discover a good method with faulty assumptions, it’s still a good method.
I’d give up the ‘good old’ Church of England at the drop of a hat. Huge waste of money and offensive to democracy.
You may well be right extabgrad – I had my tongue somewhat in my cheek! (But don’t forget Bach as well!)
However a question remains that if the process of secularisation is proceeding apace then why is it that fundamentalist religion in different guises is so significant in world affairs today?
I would argue that one answer to this enigma is that the human being has a fundamental hunger for meaning and purpose in life that science often does not seem to provide. I speak as a scientist for whom the scientific dimension to my life does provide much identity meaning and purpose, and Dawkins’ biological writings do much to keep that flame alive but I despair at the general lack of interest in science by much of the younger generation. The ‘scientist as nerd’ is a popular youth image that, AFAIK, has not been propagated by religious leaders.
In such a vacuum fundamentalist certainty propagates itself. Therefore I would advocate a reasoned and tolerant approach to spiritual matters; outright antagonism often proves to be self-defeating.
Is it possible for anything in the universe that could have no beginning? Something that has always been there?
Quite unexpectedly, the God conundrum may have been resolved? Consider the review below:
On the horizon appears an approaching confrontation so contentious, any clash of civilizations will have to wait its turn. On one side, a manuscript titled: The Final Freedoms, against all the gravitas religious tradition can bring to bear.
This, the first wholly new interpretation for 2000 years of the moral teachings of Jesus the Christ focuses specifically on marriage and human sexuality, challenging all natural law theory and theology. At stake is the credibility of several thousand years of religious history, not to mention cosmology, all psychology related to human sexuality, and theories on the nature of consciousness.
What at first appears an utterly preposterous challenge to the religious status quo rewards those who persevere in closer examination, for it carries within its pages an idea both subtle and sublime, what the theological history of religion either ignored, were unable to imagine or dismissed as impossible. An error of presumption which could now leave ‘tradition’ staring into the abyss and even humble the heights of scientific speculation. For if this material is confirmed, and there appears to be both the means and a concerted effort to authenticate it, the greatest unresolved questions of human existence may finally have been untangled.
Published [at the moment] only on the web as a free pdf download, made up of twenty nine chapters and three hundred and seventy pages, this new teaching has nothing whatsoever to do with any existing religious conception known to history. It is unique in every respect.
This new teaching is pure ethics. It requires no institutional framework, no churches, no priest craft, no scholastic theological rational, no dogma or doctrine, costs nothing and ‘worship’ requires only conviction, faith and the necessary measure of self discipline to accomplish a new, single moral imperative and then the integrity and fidelity to the new reality.
Using a synthesis of scriptural material from the Old and New Testaments, the Apocrypha , The Dead Sea Scrolls,The Nag Hammadi Library, and some of the worlds great poetry, it describes and teaches a single moral LAW, a single moral principle and offers its own proof; one in which the reality of God responds to an act of perfect faith with a direct, individual intervention into the natural world; making a correction to human nature by a change in natural law, altering biology, consciousness and human ethical perception; providing new, primary insight and understanding of the human condition.
This new interpretation explains the moral foundation of all human thought and conduct and finds expression within a new covenant of human spiritual union, the marriage between one man and one woman. It resolves the most intractable questions and issues of human sexuality. Offering the potential for resolving the most pressing health issues facing the world, including AIDs.
As the first ever religious teaching able to demonstrate its own efficacy, the first ever religious claim of knowledge that meets the criteria of the most rigourous, testable scientific method, this teaching enters the public domain as a reality entirely new to human history.
The beginnings of an intellectual and moral revolution are unfolding on the web and available for anyone to test, discover and explore for themselves, and what might very well define the nature and future of humanity itself!
Links:
http://www.energon.uklinux.net
http://thefinalfreedoms.bulldoghome.com
http://www.dunwanderinpress.org
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‘The reality of a religion is manifested in the actions of its adherents’ may be true, but this is the human face of it alone – to say it’s the entire reality would presuppose that a God doesn’t exist and therefore that the religion cannot relate to Him or derive reality, or correctness, from Him.
The universe very well could just have come into being due to physical laws. The opposite may be true. One could equally write a book called, ‘The Science Delusion’, if arguing over the origin of the universe. Until then, why are we forming opinions? Presumably, so humanity can be more accurately informed to make decisions for its betterment. If the greater good of humanity is the object, only such delusions, based on faith both in science and religion, that achieve or aim for the opposite, should be opposed.
To say God doesn’t exist because of what people believe is foolish. God is not changed for better or worse by what people do in His name, humanity is. God, if He exists, is evidently beyond our collective comprehension. (So, I could add, is the physical principle behind the universe’s self-creation.) Therefore, a religion cannot communicate certainly and permanently the truths inherent in this hypothetical God. A religion that could would be too good for people; we would all fall short. And uncertainty is a uniquely human fate. The animals are below it; God, if He exists, is above it. Surely the rectitude of our beliefs and the need of other people to agree and conform to it matter less than ending the suffering that is caused by people in God’s name. Neither religion or the idea of God need opposing so much as all ignorance that causes ill.
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“On the subject of Richard Dawkins’ credentials, I’m curious to know what credentials, exactly, are required to make a discussion of god and religion? The faculties of reason are available to us all. What experiments must be done? What techniques must be learned? Professor Ellis seems to be suggesting that just because Dawkins isn’t published in the the Journal of Philosophy he is necessarily inadequately versed in the arguments of the field….”
Hi, I’m not a scientist but I do love love science. I’m an old lit professor out of Jennifer Ouelette’s past, who got directed to Sean’s great website. I read Sean’s review with great interest, because I am a theist. I’ve been fascinated by this whole discussion and I really, really care about science and faith. I taught an honors seminar in science-and-faith for many years in which the science students sometimes spoke about the anguish they felt at having to keep their deep commitment to science and their faith in separate compartments. This was because their faith communities were intolerant. But now I see that it could just as well be that their scientific communities could be so intolerant.
Now I don’t mean to say you folks are “intolerant,” because I’m so struck by the open and humanistic tone of the posts, and especially by the give-and-take of the conversation. But, and this is a big “but,” I had thought that the animosity between the scientific ways of knowing and other ways, even mystical ways, was waning in our post-modern period, and I think that would be a very good thing. It’s as though you don’t know that breezy dismissals of faith as mere illusion or seritonin highs and so forth, can be just of painful and damaging as Fundamentalist attacks on and misunderstandings of how science works. I’m struck by how much most of you agree — and agree as scientists, quite clearly — that science and “reason” go against the God hypothesis. That was Sean’s opening thesis and I simply find it extremely surprising. (Especially since I totally agree with Sean that the muffin joke is funny!)
I think what Ellis was getting at by criticizing Dawkins’ lack of “philosophy” was that Dawkins and almost everyone in this thread are taking for granted a basically Anglo-American intellectual tradition based on scientific realism in the good-old British empiricist tradition. Now I think the good old church of England does an amazing amount of good around the world, but I’m not so sure about British empriricism! It’s really true that we all in this thread know a lot about some things and a lot less about others.
But questions like “God” are important questions, and people should talk about them — way to go, Sean — and they should radically disagree. What’s perplexing me is the lack of radical disagreement. Everyone, even Bob, seems to assume that there’s a kind of reason that scientists use all the time and it goes against God and Bob’s experience is just a “personal” experience, not like reason, which is public and objective. But these are all Enlightenment oppositions — reason and religion, objective and subjective, public and private.
I am not trying just to make a compassionate case that Bob’s “personal experience” should be respected and not denigrated. I’m saying that we’ve spent way too long in North America thinking that scientific ways of knowing are the only ones with true discoursive communities and evidentiary standards and validity-testing. What I’m saying is that in disciplines like philosophy and theology — in other than the Anglo-American rationalist-empiricist tradition — have produced perspectives on “truth” and “coming to know” that can differentiate, I think, between what scientific ways of knowing try to know and what other ways of knowing may try to know. Religious and mystical ways of knowing can be very taxing, arduous, discoursive, communal, and deeply tested over centuries and longer.
I am curious about two things — and I really want to know what you think.
1) What would be lost be adopting an agnostic stance toward religious ways of knowing, just as we do for culturally different practices and peoples? Okay, I know, I know. Scientists feel attacked and threated by Fundamentalists. But believe me, they feel just as threatened and endangered by the intellectual elites (as they see it) which have denied ordinary people any wisdom for several hundred years. But does it help anything to maintain the fortess mentality, on either side? Plus the fact that you rule out the pleasure of knowing the third group of people like me, who are charming and fun to know! The people for whom both science and God are the reason they get up in the morning with joy and hope.
2) Isn’t it still true these days to say of current science what science — let’s say physics — use to say — that it started with methodological reductionism (a good thing)and ruled out questions of metaphysics, esp. origin and purpose, in advance? So does it seem to you that science has changed and become a broader and deeper way of knowing, perfectly able to not only tackle but answer these kinds of questions? Doesn’t it seem to you that there are belief-structures operating in your reasoning that are based on your experience in your way of knowing and how it has shaped you and ought to be taken as such by you and others. Rather than on some obvious, irrefutable reasonableness in how you think, I mean.
Okay, I lied, I have a 3) You all sound so chipper and confident. For me, it was utter anguish and existential pain for myself and the human race and the whole planet, along with guilt ands helplessness, that was the arena in which God started to be compelling to me. It’s been Lent and the readings in the Old Testament again and again have said that God’s promise of mercy and justice and peace for all the nations is more astonishing and more counter-intuitive than anything else in the universe. It’s supposed to be a surprise, a relief, and a consolation. But I don’t want to argue pros and cons about that. I’m more interested in asking about whether science deals with the weight of experiences of evil, despair, guilt, joy, love, ecstacy. And if it doesn’t or if it dismisses them, then have they no evidentiary weight at all, perhaps for other ways of knowing, which could be respected?