Via 3quarksdaily, here is Richard Skinner (“poet, writer, qualified therapist and performer”) elaborating on Why Christians should take Richard Dawkins seriously. I would argue that they should take him seriously because much of what he says is true, but that’s not Skinner’s take.
Skinner suggests that Dawkins is arguing against a straw-man notion of God (stop me if you’ve heard this before). According to the straw man, God is some thing, or some person, or some something, of an essentially supernatural character, with a lot of influence over what happens in the universe, and in particular the ability to sidestep the laws of nature to which the rest of us are beholden. That’s a hopelessly simplistic and unsophisticated notion, apparently; not at all what careful theologians actually have in mind.
Nevertheless, Dawkins and his defenders typically reply, it’s precisely the notion of God that nearly all non-theologians — that is to say, the overwhelming majority of religious believers, at least in the Western world — actually believe in. Not just the most fanatic fundamentalists; that’s the God that the average person is worshipping in Church on Sunday. And, to his credit, Skinner grants this point. That, apparently, is why Christians should take Dawkins seriously — because all too often even thoughtful Christians take the easy way out, and conceptualize God as something much more tangible than He really is.
At this point, an optimist would hope to be informed, in precise language, exactly what “God” really does mean to the sophisticated believer. Something better than Terry Eagleton’s “the condition of possibility.” But no! We more or less get exactly that:
Philosophers and theologians over the centuries, grappling with what is meant by ‘God’, have resorted to a different type of language, making statements such as “God is ultimate reality”; or “God is the ground of our being”, or “God is the precondition that anything at all could exist”, and so forth. In theological discourse, they can be very helpful concepts, but the trouble with them is that if you’re not a philosopher or theologian, you feel your eyes glazing over – God has become a philosophical concept rather than a living presence.
The trouble is not that such sophisticated formulations make our eyes glaze over; the trouble is that they don’t mean anything. And I will tell you precisely what I mean by that. Consider two possible views of reality. One view, “atheism,” is completely materialistic — it describes reality as just a bunch of stuff obeying some equations, for as long as the universe exists, and that’s absolutely all there is. In the other view, God exists. What I would like to know is: what is the difference? What is the meaningful, operational, this-is-why-I-should-care difference between being a sophisticated believer and just being an atheist?
I can imagine two possibilities. One is that you sincerely can’t imagine a universe without the existence of God; that God is a logical necessity. But I have no trouble imagining a universe that exists all by itself, just obeying the laws of nature. So I would have to conclude, in that case, that you were simply attaching the meaningless label “God” to some other aspect of the universe, such as the fact that it exists. The other possibility is that there is actually some difference between the universe-with-God and the materialist universe. So what is it? How could I tell? What is it about the existence of God that has some effect on the universe? I’m not trying to spring some sort of logical trap; I sincerely want to know. Phrases like “God is ultimate reality” are either tautological or meaningless; I would like to have a specific, clear understanding of what it means to believe in God in the sophisticated non-straw-man sense.
Richard Skinner doesn’t give us that. In fact, he takes precisely the opposite lesson from these considerations: the correct tack for believers is to refuse to say what they mean by “God”!
So, if our understanding of God can be encapsulated in a nice, neat definition; a nice, neat God hypothesis; a nice, neat image; a nice, neat set of instructions – if, in other words, our understanding of God does approximate to a Dawkins version, then we are in danger of creating another golden calf. The alternative, the non-golden-calf route, is to sit light to definitions, hypotheses and images, and allow God to be God.
It’s a strategy, I suppose. Not an intellectually honest one, but one that can help you wriggle out of a lot of uncomfortable debates.
I’m a big believer that good-faith disagreements focus on the strong arguments of the opposite side, rather than setting up straw men. So please let me in on the non-straw-man position. If anyone can tell me once and for all what the correct and precise and sophisticated and non-vacuous meaning of “God” is, I promise to stick to disbelieving in that rather than any straw men.
Update: This discussion has done an even better job than I had anticipated in confirming my belief that the “sophisticated” notion of God is simply a category mistake. Some people clearly think of God in a way perfectly consistent with the supposed Dawkinsian straw man, which is fine on its own terms. Others take refuge in the Skinneresque stance that we can’t say what we mean when we talk about God, which I continue to think is simply intellectually dishonest.
The only on-topic replies I can see that don’t fall into either of those camps are ones that point to some feature of the world which would exist just as well in a purely materialistic conception, and say “I call that `God.'” To which I can only reply, you’re welcome to call it whatever you like, but it makes no difference whatsoever. Might as well just admit that you’re an atheist.
Which some people do, of course. I once invited as a guest speaker Father William Buckley, a Jesuit priest who is one of the world’s experts in the history of atheism. After giving an interesting talk on the spirituality of contemplation, he said to me “You don’t think I believe in G-O-D `God,’ do you?” I confessed that I had, but now I know better.
For people in this camp, I think their real mistake is to take a stance or feeling they have toward the world and interpret in conventionally religious language. Letting all that go is both more philosophically precise and ultimately more liberating.
If ‘god is love’ then how can atheists or other people love? Or are people like Sean and this sinner Dawkins incapable of love?
Couple more possibilities:
1) God is simply a word that has been so overloaded and redefined as to lose all meaning over the centuries. –> God is a cliche.
2) God is in the eye of the beholder I guess. –> God is beauty.
God is beauty. Unfortunately some people have really bad taste.
God is a psychological construct people use to explain things they don’t understand or are uncomfortable with understanding (like death). Everyone searches for meaning and some things are either not yet known, ultimately unknowable, or (even worse) we don’t like the answer. God solves those problems. A world with God is a world that you believe you can comprehend in an acceptable way. A world without God is too scary for some people, so He/She must exist in it. At the end of the day, God is about fear of the unknown.
Shorter Whatever -> God is a crutch.
God is the chief character in a nightmare tale that parents tell their young innocent children to scare the living hell of them so they behave.
God is an excuse some humans use to see what would happen if they burn other humans to death.
James, No, you have the wrong idea about this discussion (at the level of philosophical theology.) The cherub analogy is incorrect: we are not talking about God as an explanation for lightning etc, but for the universe itself and that is not the same logical ball of wax. BTW, we do not have explanations for the laws and “existence” (i.e., meta-explanations or The Meta-explanation) despite some pretentions by some. Muslim up ahead has well summarized the proper framing of the issue. (Muslim – pls. send your email or etc. to neil_delver[at]yahoo[dot]com if you are interested in some conversation about this – I am intersted in how such “higher philosophical theology” is and has been treated in Islam, thanks.)
Sean Carroll said, in the update:
There once was a time when I called such a thing “Urszula”. And after that, I called it “Grace”, and some seasons later I spoke of “Laurel”.
NB,
But the argument that a specific deity is the cause of the universe itself is nonsensical. It doesn’t mean anything, because you can’t make any concrete statements about how a universe created by this deity would be different from one not created by this deity.
Well, let me rephrase that a bit. You could make certain logical conclusions about what a created universe would look like, but if you did you’d immediately find that it doesn’t remotely resemble our universe, so you’re forced to make no predictions and leave it at that. And in retreating from putting your belief on the line, you remove all meaning from the belief.
Guys,
Forget about God. I’ve already shown how existence comes from nothing. Remember? Nobody could prove me wrong (just put their head in the sand). If I do it again, will you take the point or will you just go on pretending circular logic about god or any other eternal existence some time will do the trick? Cause it won’t.
Carl
The origin of the concept of God was of the tribal spirit and individuals came and went. A good book on the topic is Gilbert Murray’s The Five Stages of Greek Religion. From there it became an ego contest of ‘My God’s bigger then your God.’ Then my God is the only God and your God is a fake. To a certain extent this aspect is even playing out here, between the ‘I don’t need no damn God,’ vs. ‘God is everything.’ So how about God is absolute, which is both everything and nothing.
Is God also infinite? or is that just the Holy Ghost?
God of order(past). God of complexity(present). God of chaos(future).
There is a point in one’s growth where the father goes from being the model one follows, to the foundation one rises from.
I must say that I look up at the moon on a clear night, it’s another world. To the extent the discussion of God and all it represents has real meaning, it’s about communication here on the surface of this planet, between increasingly intelligent, but monumentally egotistical creatures who assume the universe revolves around them/us and our beliefs. The fact is any understanding of reality we are capable of is the roughest of sketches, as the more abstract it is, the more detail it distills out. We are reaching a point where either our ability to cooperate overcomes our inclination to compete, or we start that long slide back to where we came from.
You want to know what God is? It’s money. The basic common denominator of material exchange. If we want a society that functions, then we are going to have to accept that money is a form of public utility, similar to roads, not private property. That means that since taxpayers pay for the monetary system and insure the banking system, the profits of that system should be public funds.
Neutrinos are elementary particles that travel close to the speed of light, lack an electric charge, are able to pass through ordinary matter almost undisturbed, and are thus extremely difficult to detect. Neutrinos have a minuscule, but non-zero, mass too small to be measured as of 2007. They are usually denoted by the Greek letter ? (nu).
Neutrinos are created as a result of certain types of radioactive decay or nuclear reactions such as those in the sun, in nuclear reactors, or when cosmic rays hit atoms. There are three types, or “flavours”, of neutrinos: electron neutrinos, muon neutrinos and tau neutrinos; each type also has an antimatter partner, called an antineutrino. Electron neutrinos are generated whenever protons change into neutrons, while electron antineutrinos are generated whenever neutrons change into protons. These are the two forms of beta decay. Interactions involving neutrinos are generally mediated by the weak nuclear force.
Most neutrinos passing through the Earth emanate from the sun, and more than 50 trillion solar electron neutrinos pass through the human body every second.
But even if and when we can detect every elementary particle, component or string in the universe, will we be able to categorically state that nothing survives death, or that heaven is not sitting safely cocconed on some far off distant galaxy of the observable universe.
Perhaps this universe is not the best of all possible universes, but simply the universe we ‘observe’ while we are in it – and there are other universes, in One of which, neither time ageing or decay exist or are of any consequence.
After all have we given a name to that which is beyond the cosmic event horizon or beyond the ‘observable’ universe, and what proof do we have that what is beyond is an empty ‘nothingness’ or vacuum. Even a Torus is surrounded by ‘something’ on all sides.
Since with current technology, science & knowledge we are unable to travel the length of our solar system in a lifetime, should we therefore conclude that interstellar & intergalactic travel is ‘beyond’ the human race’s capability. Or should we be prepared to admit that there is much we do not know, and there are advances we hope to make. But even when we think we know everything, or at least everything about the observable universe (including visible matter and dark matter) will be ever be any closer to the great Unknown.
“Oh, oh yes! If only we could, you know, just make him understand how we view God! And of course, no matter what he says, he obviously doesn’t get it because he doesn’t agree with us!”
Right. Because Dawkin’s is an idiot who doesn’t do his homework.
/sarcasm
There is no salvation from death. No multiverse version either. Get over it. No personal self pre-exists birth and none survives death. We have to take Darwin seriously.
Sean,
Assuming that we do indeed jettison some schoolchild version of God as a big father-figure with a white beard (while admitting that lots of people sadly find the will to believe this), and want talk about what ‘God’ might mean in a more sophisticated way, perhaps an analogy is useful.
Suppose I were to say ‘I believe in a platonic world of mathematical forms.’ Why might I believe this? I may have intellectual reasons for or against this. Or, I might be impressed with the opinions or beliefs of other thinkers I respect. Or, it might be experiential: when I *do* mathematics or physics, I might feel that I am ‘discovering’ rather than ‘inventing’.
Now, is this putative belief testable? I don’t see how. Is it precisely defined? Probably not — and yet most people that think about this tend to understand what the ‘platonic’ versus ‘not platonic’ views are getting at, and tend to align with one or another. Meaningful? I think so: I certainly feel that believing this, or not believing it, means something; that is I do not think it is a purely semantic or meaningless distinction. Have deep, careful thinkers that I admire believed both sides of the issue? Yes. Does belief in this affect whether a given mathematical proposition is considered true? Nope. Would it influence the way I did mathematics, or which topics I studied (if I were a mathematician)? Maybe it would. Would it change the personal meaning or feeling I get while doing mathematics? Probably, yes.
There was once an episode of ‘The Simpsons’ where Homer went bodily to this platonic realm and saw equations floating around etc. This sort of literal belief would be silly. But that does not mean the whole notion is empty or misguided. Again, this is just an analogy, and I should say that my putative ‘belief’ in Platonism oscillates week-to-week (e.g. I’ve recently been reading the very interesting ‘Where mathematics comes from’ by Lakoff & Nunez). But this helps me, at least, to have some idea by analogy of what people may be talking about when they talk about God.
No personal self pre-exists birth and none survives death. We have to take Darwin seriously.
Are you sure about that? You were dead before you were born, but that didn’t stop you from coming into existence. Could it happen again? None of us asked to be born (as far as we can recall).
As far as I’m concerned, the absence of consciousness is equivalent to there being nothing rather than something, which may not be possible (see Sean’s previous posting). I don’t think death scares me nearly as much as the prospect of not being able to die. That is existential terror of another order entirely.
Jason Dick:
Sorry, you are missing the point when you say, “It doesn’t mean anything, because you can’t make any concrete statements about how a universe created by this deity would be different from one not created by this deity.” First, that isn’t really true at that level, since the life-friendly properties of the universe (correct fine structure constant etc.) are in fact the very properties that move many to believe Someone was responsible for it (well, why do *you* think it just coincidentally has life-friendly properties, out of all logical possibilities? Please, no circular arguments or empty self-referential pleas to that not being a problem for you etc., whatever that means…)
If you meant the universe should have been a paradise or etc. when you said, “You could make certain logical conclusions about what a created universe would look like, but if you did you’d immediately find that it doesn’t remotely resemble our universe,” – huh? How in the world can you know? An reply to the paradise problem is, absolute logical omnipotence is not there, but only an expression of “rules” or “ways” in general (to be expected from a “ground” not a structured agent.) It is clear when we look at properties that life-friendly framing is expressed, and that is good enough for most who think of it (anthropic reason for “creation” as per Paul Davies in The Mind of God etc.)
Second, a major argument for God is that the universe is contingent and couldn’t exist without something more basic to express it (because it is a particular configuration, needing logical justification to separate it from other “logically possible worlds” to be blessed with the special trait of “existing” and them not…) Hence, the statement “…from one not created by this deity.” is missing the idea that such a universe couldn’t exist at all, even aside from what properties it had.
Cola: I’m not sure wth you are saying. Really, Dawkins probably assumes any rational person would agree with him if only they did their homework. Do you really know whether he did his homework? From what I’ve seen, his grasp of the best of philosophical theology of the sort you would see here, about contingency, modal realism, etc, is pretty ragged – he’s more like an Ann Coulter or Rush Limbaugh of atheism (oh, their arguments about liberals being communists etc. sound good too, to uncareful people who like to despise opponents and feel driven to superior ideological assuredness) than he is a really good scholar who could hold his own against Paul Davies or Alvin Plantinga instead of the usual bumpkins.
bob: Really, I can’t imagine why you are so sure. Based on what? (BTW, I didn’t say I was sure, I just offered a possibility – that’s all any of us has, pro or con.) And, it has nothing to do with Darwin. All Darwin says to us is that the genetics of life forms changes through generations, and selection picks out some more than others, etc. – that has nothing to do with what the universe came from, whether mental processes can “run” elsewhere, which itself does not matter whether they ever run anywhere else before this (as if there can’t be a first time.)
Anthony, I’m going to give the boring reply that I don’t think belief in a realm of Forms makes any more philosophical sense than does belief in “God as stand-in for the awesomeness of the world.” The belief may affect how you act, but a world with the Forms isn’t distinguishable in any way, in principle or in practice, from one without them. So in that sense it’s a great analogy!
Anthony A: Very good point using the philosophy of mathematics as an analogy. Few realize that there are competing mathematical philosophies (which as you say don’t affect results per se, except possibly some infinite set issues or similar fringe problems.) There is constructivism, intuitionism, etc. People have various intellectual reasons for believing in these, and similarly for whether the universe is contingent or self-existent etc. (I still haven’t ever heard a good justification from anyone, that isn’t either circular or vapid, about why the hell this particular world with its laws should just happen to “exist” selected from other possibilities, like the number 23 in brass numerals as I say and not 17, 1, 5467, etc.) If the world is contingent, then “something else” has to make it real. Let’s remember that “not X” is a meaningful logical assertion, even though we may not be able to describe all or even any of the non-X things. That’s how some people get to God. If you think that’s too icy or whatever, then why don’t you believe in something fuzzy instead of complaining about those of us who like to think icy (but “pro” instead of “con”) thoughts? Actually, I think the fuzziness is there anyway because of the Plenum implications (look up that concept), but it wouldn’t have to be to get most of the good arguments.
PS: Sean, you keep gravitating to “make the world distinguishable” in some sense, which is understandable for a physicist. But that isn’t what most of the argument is about, it’s about whether there could be a world at all without some ultimate First Cause to make so, and also whether it’s having the life-friendly properties it does is comprehensible or explicable without that Cause, etc. It’s really a deduction that you can’t test empirically, it is not science, it’s philosophy. Let each of them be what they are. Don’t forget either, that you have to use philosophy to argue that it should make a difference, etc. You are ultimately fighting metaphysics with metaphysics anyway.
At the risk of pushy over-commenting, but I have to go soon:
Greg Egan: You complain about Davies but don’t offer any reason why we shouldn’t be surprised by those meaningful properties of the universe (see my framing of that problem just above.) Well, why is it just like that? What have you to offer to answer that? As for his saying it doesn’t have to be like a person, that’s his point: the First Cause doesn’t have to be a “person” (although it could be in some sense.) That makes enough sense to me, as a conceptual approach. What are you offering either as genuine critique or better answers, other than talk-radio grade put-down bombast?
I like Anthony’s analogy, and maybe it is not that far from the discussion here. To extend it a bit let me suggest the following: I am pretty comfortable thinking that attributing “existence” to other branches of the wave function is a completely meaningless exercise in semantics (basically defining the word “existence”, which in this context has no prior restrictions to its definition, coming from example from the way the word is used in daily life). However, I also believe it when people say that the many world interpretation is a very efficient way to think about quantum mechanics, which leads to many insights and new discoveries. Maybe the analogy extends in that direction?
This post was fascinating for me and has sparked what is slowly evolving into a thirty-or-so page response (which I’ll most likely be posting in series on my own blog), but for now, I wanted to quote a passage from Sokolowski’s “Introduction to Phenomenology” that I stumbled upon today and that I thought might be relevant.
In this passage, Sokolowski is discussing the idea of “evidencing,” our activity as reasoning beings to allow the truth of things to disclose themselves to us. As he writes, “This activity is our achievement as transcendental egos, not simply our behavior as animals or our reaction as bodies embedded in a network of material causes. […] We do something when intelligible objects present themselves to us; we are not mere recipients.” Obviously, for strict materialists, the idea of anything being ‘transcendent’ of material causes is suspect, although it is important to note that here is a philosophy which appeals to such a concept without any need to resort to a straw-man conception of deity (or any deity at all) and yet remains non-vacuous. Perhaps in the search for a ‘definition of “God,”‘ it would be easiest to explain to a materialist/atheist (noting that materialism and atheism are not synonymous) starting from this philosophical ground and working towards the spiritual, rather than trying to begin by debunking the straw-man theory and undertaking the difficult task of qualifying and “waffling” from there. But I digress. Sokolowski proceeds to discuss two common ways of “trying to escape evidence.” The following quote is part of his discussion of the second:
“The second way of trying to evade evidence is to claim that the presentation itself is not enough to establish truth. We might think that a presentation gives us only an appearance or an opinion. We would then have to go on to prove the truth of what has been presented, and we would do so by giving reasons for it. We have to explain it; that is, we have to derive it from other, more certain premises, even from axioms, to show why it has to be the way it is. In this view, we do not know anything until we have proved it; we demand a proof for everything. […]
“This claim reflects the belief [my emphasis] that truth is reached by means of methodic procedures. Nothing is directly presented to us, but we can reach truths by reasoning to them. Descartes appealed to such method at the beginning of modernity, and he thought that method could replace insight. Even perception requires proof, he thought, because it involves an inference from the ideas we have to the putative causes ‘outside’ us that must have brought the ideas about. This confidence in method is part of the rationalism of modernity. […] Such trust in method and proof is an attempt to master truth. It is an attempt to get disclosure under control and to subject it to our wills. If we can get the right method in place, and if our methodical procedures can be helped by computers, we will be able to solve many important problems. We will get a hammerlock on the truth of things, coercing consent in ourselves and in others.
“[…] The rationalist may find the contingency of evidence unsettling and may reject the fact that we cannot master truth, but such is indeed the case.”
This may be the heart of why you find any view of God more complicated than the straw-man approach to be vacuous and nonsensical. If a person’s underlying assumption is that spiritual reality, like the material reality according to Cartesian duality, lies ‘out there,’ outside of the mind–then appeals to the “evidencing” of the Divine, the disclosure of spiritual truths as well as logical and material truths to a reasoning being, may seem impossible. No! one might insist, Of course if there were a God, we should be able to “prove” it, to arrive methodically at a complete and satisfying definition based on previously established premises… The down side of the conviction that truth can be mastered by method is that anything too slippery and fluid for method is utterly beyond one’s grasp–not merely beyond one’s ability to understand, but even to conceive as being possible.
Neil B (#122):
That small variations in some physical constants would be fatal to human life is an interesting fact that we’re currently very far from being able to say anything definitive about. We have only one example of a biosphere, and we have a massive amount of disagreement and uncertainty about the nature, origins, and universality or otherwise, of physical constants. Davies mentions the possibility of regional variations in physical constants, but then says “Well, this is too extravagant, I just can’t believe in these kinds of models.” He’s entitled to that opinion, but he gives no argument to support it. That’s a pattern that’s repeated throughout the book; alternatives that don’t point in the direction he wishes to go are dismissed as a matter of personal preference, not any empirical evidence or logical argument.
The “unreasonable effectiveness” of mathematics is not unreasonable at all. Given that the universe has any regularity at all — without which it would not be able to support reasoning, memory, perception, etc. — it’s not remotely surprising that we have drilled to the core of at least part of that ubiquitous regularity and internalised it. Given that we’re made of exactly the same stuff as the rest of the universe, it’s no wonder that we’re both capable of and interested in mentally modelling its possibilities. Of course we happen to share a planet with a few billion species who didn’t invent differential geometry before its relevance to gravitation became apparent, but then they’re not arguing about the metaphysical implications of their failure to do so, as far as I can tell.
I don’t have the time to re-read the book and give an opinion on whether Davies is really saying anything that coincides with or supports your personal views on the need for a First Cause. As far as I can parse your comments, you seem to be doing nothing more than positing an entity with some properties that you like, and declaring that, since it’s a “First Cause”, it’s exempt from any of the rules you invoke about other entities in order to make this “First Cause” appear to be necessary or useful in the first place.
I’m happy to concede that there are many mysterious facts about the universe that we’re probably millennia away from understanding, and it might well be that there are facts about the universe about which there will always be mystery and disputation. Nothing that you’ve written in this thread, or that Davies has written in The Mind of God, contributes anything to the resolution of these mysteries.
What I found most objectionable about The Mind of God, though, was not the fact that it was an unsupported catalogue of Davies’ personal metaphysical preferences. He’s entitled to all his preferences, and I suppose some people might be interested in reading them, just as some people are interested in reading some writers’ opinions of “The Fifty Greatest Movies”. The most objectionable thing about the book was the abuse of language. “Meaning” and “purpose” are words that belong to agents; God might well be posited as something very remote from a human person, but to deny God all the other qualities of agents, but then to ascribe to him/it the quality of giving “meaning” and “purpose” to the universe, is just nonsensical.
But the argument by Davies that John Baez quotes (#85) is an order of magnitude sillier than anything I recall from The Mind of God. “Absurdity masquerading as rational order”? He seems to be suffering from some kind of Watch-maker syndrome; he can’t believe there can be mathematics without God The Mathematician, he can’t believe there can be order without a Divine Orderer … but at the same time he’s so intent on escaping from anthropomorphic mythology that he leaps to the opposite absurdity of taking all the human qualities he wants to find in the universe and then pretending that they can exist in some disembodied, agent-less fashion.
Humans are doing just fine coming up with meaning and purpose for their lives. There are many things we don’t yet know about the infrastructure we’ve used to do this, and maybe many things we’ll never know, but Davies makes no coherent (let alone persuasive) argument for his proposition that the only way we’ve been able to do this is because “meaning” and “purpose” have been hard-wired into the deepest level of reality from the start.