Swinners
I’ve been wanting to mutter a few words about this exchange between Dennett and Swinburne. Actually it’s Swinburne I want to mutter about.
…if there is a God of the traditional kind – omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly free and perfectly good – we have every reason to expect that he will bring about the existence of good things; and one especially good thing is the existence of embodied creatures such as ourselves who have a choice between good and evil and can influence the world and each other in various ways.
Why is that an especially good thing? Why is it a good thing at all? In what sense is it a good thing? Above all, to whom is it a good thing? I can see why it’s a good thing to us, that is to say, in our view: because it’s about us (‘such as ourselves’ – Daisy, he means you and me!). We think it’s an especially good thing that there should be embodied creatures who can influence the world and each other in various ways and compose music and invent new video games, because we are those very creatures (what a coincidence! these creatures Swinburne talks about turn out to be none other than human beings! what a small world, eh?). We think creatures that do things that humans do are an especially good thing because they do the things we do – so how could they not be? But Swinburne, I take it, is claiming to go beyond that merely parochial point of view, and talk about things more in general – and in that case I don’t understand what he’s getting at. What’s so good about it? Who is there to think it’s an especially good thing, other than more of us? I look around, I flip through the catalogue of other solar systems and galaxies, I ask flies and fir trees and bits of plaster, and I can’t find anyone else who thinks it’s an especially good thing. So what does Swinburne mean? Just – ‘we think it’s a good thing because here we are and our preference is to go on being here so we think it’s a good thing that we are here’? No, surely more than that. But what? Why is anybody or anything anywhere in the rest of the universe supposed to give the smallest tiniest damn whether we have a choice between good and evil or not? And if no one and nothing else does, in what sense is it an especially good thing?
And besides that – if there is ‘a God of the traditional kind – omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly free and perfectly good’, then why did it, why would it, create or arrange the emergence of creatures like us instead of better creatures? Why would it take so long to do it? Why would it waste so much material, create or generate so many stars and planets and so much space between them, just to get inadequate patchy bloodthirsty creatures like us? Why such a massive to-do for such a derisory product? Why not something better? Why all the extinctions? Why all the suffering? If we have ‘every reason to expect that he will bring about the existence of good things’, then why the hell didn’t he (and how does Swinburne know he’s a he, anyway?) bring about the existence of more of them? Why not lots and lots and lots more good things and much fewer bad ones? Why don’t we have every reason to expect that? I would really like to know. The whole idea seems remarkably lame, to me.
Mark Fournier has some comments on Swinburne in a similar (but different) vein. I love this bit:
All those billions of years, all of those trillions of stars, all that space, just so that the Almighty could gather to himself a handful of syncophants. Hardly seems worth the trouble, if you ask me. And why does a Being so Great crave the adoration of some great apes from the unfashionable arm of a rather low-rent galaxy?
Really. None of it seems worth the trouble, and wouldn’t you think the Being would want some more glam adorers?
One of my favorite examples of what makes god such a quirky dude is the ingeniously cruel method he came up with for the Komodo dragon to get to its dinner. The huge reptile simply inflicts a nasty bite with its bacteria-laden jaws covered in slimy saliva, and then scampers a safe distance away to observe the animal while it slowly weakens from the increasingly infected wound. When the prey can no longer flee or defend itself, the dragon tears it apart at its leisure. Neat, huh? I’ll bet he burned the midnight oil on that one. Now that’s what I call ID — Insidious Design.
Maybe it’s also just lack of time to concentrate, but I admit to not reading it all the way through, curious as I was about Dennett’s responses, for the simple reason that Swinburne’s whole line of argument breaks down so completely at the very beginning. The presumption that religion is an entirely natural phenomenon needs to be justified? Says who? Anyone possessing evidence to the contrary? There is such a person?
If people believe things without evidence, no, it does not make sense at all to investigate that belief with a set of tools that includes a presumption they may be right. Of course, Swinburne only gets sillier, but I had no great desire to follow much further after such a wrong-footed and indefensible opening.
I think you’re dead on correct to point out the blatent self-aggrandizment hiding behind the meek insistence that there must be a “Higher Power” of consciousness and intelligence above our measly, worthless selves — because how could something so wonderful and special as ourselves exist unless we were planned? The whole pious “god-centered” vs. “human-centered” dichotomy is a joke. They’re the same thing.
This is the same problem behind all the so-called Fine-Tuning Arguments. Start out with the fact that humans are special, so we need to find an explanation for that. Calculate the odds against our being here, and come up with the surprising result that — wow — it turns out that humans ARE special, so something must have planned us.
Reading the Fournier comment made me think of a pre-Python sketch (1967) by John Cleese and Graham Chapman. Swinburne starts with his assumptions and all he cares about is making the rest fit them (“I don’t think that it is in any way important that science should make predictions. What is important is that science should make probable the occurrence of certain phenomena which we observe, when their occurrence would not be probable otherwise. What is unimportant is whether we observe these phenomena before or after we formulate our scientific theory.”). In the sketch in question, a detective interprets what he sees at a crime scene any way he feels like, starting from the assumption that because the body on the floor is covered by a sheet, it means the victim was killed in his sleep, having chosen to sleep on the floor (ignoring the sergeant trying to tell him the police put the sheet over the body). Eventually, he compounds all his loony ideas into the notion that the murderer was an eight-foot backwards-leaning Guards Officer, wearing a white fur coat and carrying a bloodstained goat. Precisely this individual is then revealed to be hiding in the cupboard. It’s a nice punchline, because life isn’t like that, but that’s what Swinburne and Co expect us to buy regarding what we see before us and the idea of god having caused it all. Somehow I don’t think god is in the cupboard just because Swinburne is determined to interpret everything in such a way that might support hím being there. The logic that makes the “Goat Skit” funny is apparently not accessible to Swinburne.
Fournier’s argument is an old and reliable one, used by Voltaire in, I believe, Macromegas. However, the idea that immensity equals importance doesn’t really seem valid to me. If God were waiting for a bus, the billions of years would get to be a drag — but, unless one considers God simply a swollen version of your average People Magazine reader, the whole thing about being God could mean that one’s sense of what is important and what isn’t is personal. All those billions of people and you still love your kids? is pretty much the same kind of argument. After all, if you, or your kids, or your mom or everybody you know dies, that may well be as one drop in the bucket — but most humans wouldn’t be comforted by that thought.
However, that still doesn’t imply that God finds human beings that important. Perhaps the Ice Lice on the planet of Tralmalfador are much more to her taste. While the argument from physical proportion to moral importance seems spuriout to me, the argument from a anthropic moral importance to a deist moral importance also seems specious. The world doesn’t really seem intelligently designed just for humans — by which I mean, as humans kill off those species that are noxious to us, the planet’s life-system’s chances of survival seem to be getting less, rather than more. Maybe that has caused the kind of unconscious rage that is causing humans to try to pollute and destroy the place as quickly as possible.
Great comments.
“unless one considers God simply a swollen version of your average People Magazine reader”
Yeah but aren’t people who assume God thinks creatures like us are a good thing, doing pretty much exactly that? If God isn’t simply a swollen human – why wouldn’t it think we were vermin, or bacteria, rather than a good thing? It seems to me the Swollen Human Hypothesis lurks behind the whole idea.
I’m not sure I buy the argument that it is good that we are given this moral choice, First, it means that those who make the “right choice” are often horribly abused by the nasty among us (or brutalized by the nasty realities of our lovely natural world). Second, our perfectly loving God uses the fact that the vast majority of us will make the wrong choice, indeed are congenitally and permanently unable to make the right choice or redeem ourselves (unless we profess beleif in the “son” he tortured himself) as an excuse to toture us for all eternity in some blippin’ lake of fire. The Gnostics have it right-Jehovah is Satan.
To what end all?
Pretty disappointing. You would think a theologian like Swinburne would know better than to try to hijack a debate like this by trotting out some tired theist arguments, which, I might add, he does not even defend well. I stopped reading 2/3 of the way through.
Oh, and Dennett is wrong here: ‘To speak of a machine suggests design, but no such “machine” is required; in the absence of design, in an infinite time, all possible values would occur.’
That does not follow; many sets (for example, the reals) are not enumerable, even given “infinite time”. Actually, the assumption that there is a machine (read: algorithm) would support Dennett’s argument, as every algorithmically generated set is recursively enumerable. (Or so we believe: this is essentially Church’s Thesis, but nowadays no one will look askance if you define “algorithm” this way.)
But Dennett’s argument is also problematic because the notion of “time” is local to the concept of “universe” in the first place, so it makes this remark meaningless.
BTW, is the “multiverse argument” even necessary to defend against the “life-is-improbable argument”? I always thought the anthropic principle was enough: if adverse conditions prevailed, we would not be here to observe them! Ipso facto, it is unsound to conclude from “life is improbable” that some other factor (such as a designer) likely influenced the universe’s initial conditions. In the same way, self-selection can bias psychology (or what-have-you) experiments.
I also find the life-is-improbable argument odd for another reason. It may well be the case that life is improbable; but if the universe can develop from a set of initial conditions to a large number of distinct configurations, then there are probably going to be a large number of improbable events in any given configuration. For example, life is improbable, but so is the fact that I am writing these exact words at exactly 18:15:29 on 5 March of 2006 (as opposed to other choices of phrasing, or content, or at 18:15:30 or :31 or…). Of course, I can make this event as improbable as I like by adding more and more parameters to some predicate that uniquely identifies it.
If life is so significant because it is so improbable, then certainly this message of mine deserves some applause!
Frank Atanassow wrote: “If life is so significant because it is so improbable, then certainly this message of mine deserves some applause!”
Of course not! Your message is so improbable that it could not have occurred without Divine Intervention. All applause should go to the Divine who Intervened.
The problem I have with the “it’s so great that we have moral choice” so-called argument is that billions have never had the CHANCE to exercise that choice – they died at birth, or as babies. And the afterlife is no solution. Do you get moral choice after you’re dead? If Heaven is set up so you can still have moral choice somehow without committing evil, then why bother with this earthly existence at all? Of course there’s the send-em-all to Hell option – which makes God an unparalleled bastard by any sane moral standard.
In short: all bollocks.
Swinburne’s view that “one especially good thing is the existence of embodied creatures such as ourselves who have a choice between good and evil” means, surely, that Adam and Eve were right to eat the apple from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, that the serpent was right to tempt them to do so, and that God was wrong to forbid them from eating it.
A tricky position for a Christian like Swinburne.
(I’m fondly reminded of his lectures at Oxford 10 years ago, which were basically “This is what I wrote in my book 15 years ago…” Nice to see he’s still banging the same skinless drum.)
The Being would want more glam adorers???
Damn Olivia, I count you far more glam than the alga and trilobites they got started with. Pity about the adoration, but we HAVE glam.
Quick, before She notices, get Her name right!!
Too late!
No wonder he thinks I’m glam if he has me confused with Mariska Hargittay.
Hah. I am no longer the only Olivia versus Ophelia transgressor! :)