It could be understood as consistent
Kenneth Miller replies to Jerry Coyne on religion and science.
I made no argument that this happy confluence of natural events and physical constants proves the existence of God in any way—only that it could be understood or interpreted as consistent with the Divine by a person of faith.
Ah. Well sure it could, but lots of things could be understood or interpreted as consistent with the Divine by a person of faith. In fact the number of things that could be so understood and interpreted is, pretty obviously, staggeringly large. Persons of faith have no trouble coming up with the ability to understand and interpret whatever there is with whatever they want there to be; that’s what it is to be a person of faith. In short, that’s a pretty feeble standard.
Sam Harris gives a sardonic reading of the same passage:
That’s just the right note to strike with a neo-militant rationalist like Coyne. These people are simply obsessed with finding the best explanation for the patterns we witness in natural world. But faith teaches us that the best, alas, is often the enemy of the good. For instance, given that viruses outnumber animals by ten to one, and given that a single virus like smallpox killed 500 million human beings in the 20th century (many of them children), people like Coyne ask whether these data are best explained by the existence of an all knowing, all powerful, and all loving God who views humanity as His most cherished creation. Wrong question Coyne! You see, the wise have learned to ask, along with Miller, whether it is merely possible, given these facts, that a mysterious God with an inscrutable Will could have created the world. Surely it is! And the heart rejoices…
Heh. Exactly.
Imagine if Kenneth Miller was a lawyer.
“The prosecution says my witness is unreliable because he’s a disreputable crack-head with a history of perjury, but I never claimed that the existence of an alibi proves my client is innocent – only that it could be understood or interpreted as consistent with his innocence.”
Sam Harris says that, “Finding many of the responses to Coyne’s essay deplorably obtuse, I decided to try my hand at satire.” I think he did pretty well.
Perhaps the most amazing response of all is the one by Lisa Randall, who actually says that she saw the future embodied in the very pleasant young man in the seat beside her on the plane, a man who had a degree in cell biology, but believed that Adam was the progenitor of the human race.
Lisa Randall’s response was:
This from an expert in particle physics and cosmology! The mind reels.
And perhaps the strangest idea is the one put forward in Giberson’s book. He has good reason to believe because (i) his parents would be devastated in he gave up the faith; (ii) his wife and children believe and they attend church together; (iii) most of his friends are believers; (iv) he has a job at a Christian college which he likes a lot; and so, (v) abandoning faith would disrupt his life.
Well, you can’t say better than that!
But was Randall endorsing what that guy said or just reporting it? I thought she was simply reporting it, and reporting the difficulty it illustrates.
I’m not sure. I think she was endorsing what the guy said. This is the way to deal with the incompaitibility of science and religion. If you simply throw logic out you can be religious and still understand science, even though your religious beliefs will not square with what you do in the laboratory. That’s what Sam Harris takes her to mean, and I think he’s right. As he says:
I know, I saw that Harris read it that way, but I’m not sure why. The passage is written in a very neutral way, and I really can’t tell what she thinks of it.
I think you have to be open to the charitable version of the reading. Otherwise the only response, not merely to that single example but to the whole arena of science/religion discussion, is STFU, and that’s not working very well. For either side…
I’m probably way too optimistic, but does Miller’s response indicate something of a retreat among intelligent defenders of the faith?
To oversimplify a great deal,science and atheism both ask what is probable in the light of the evidence, but religious apologists seem increasingly forced to defend their beliefs by asking what is possible, given the gaps in the evidence.
Dave:”I think you have to be open to the charitable version of the reading.”
Applause. FWIW, charitable versions do not exclude critical response, merely the presumption that the opponent is not acting out of malice.
It is amazing to me how people like Miller simply skirt all the messy details, like reconciling God with the presence of “evil.” Apparently, he thinks he can simply hand-wave at the arguments. If God is all powerful, all knowing, and all good, then how can he allow such atrocities as the Holocaust to occur? Surely he would intervene to stop them from happening. One defense often given for the presence of such evil is that God gave us free will, that by giving us free will he gave us the power to choose evil, but that the possession of free will is such an important and great gift from God that it is better, all things considered, for humans to have free will and sometimes choose evil than to never do evil but lack free will. But let’s take a closer look!
First, I assume that Christians will accept the following three claims:
(1) God is all good
(2) God has free will
(3) God is all powerful
Because God has free will, he could have chosen not to create the universe, or could have chosen to create it differently.
I will also a assume that, all things considered
(4) a world in which people that have free will but always choose to do good is better than a world in which people have free will but sometimes choose to do evil.
An important question then arises: could God have chosen to create a world where people have free will but always freely choose to do good? If so, then it would seem that God’s failing to choose to create such a world shows that he does not always choose what is best (from (4)) and thus that either he is not all good or not all powerful or not free.
I would argue that, indeed, God could have chosen to create a world where people have free will but always freely choose to do good. The argument for this is rather straightforward. First, let’s consider God again and his attributes. What does God’s perfect goodness imply? Among other things, it implies that he always chooses the good. A God that occassionally chooses to do evil cannot be a perfectly good God, since evil is a “privation.” But God also has free will. So God himself, according to this view, is an actual being who both always does what is good and yet possesses free will. Since God, himself, is supposed to be a being that has free will but always chooses the good, could not God have created us in such a way that we always freely choose to do the good? Since it is not logically impossible for there to be such beings (since God himself is such a being), and since God can do whatever is logically possible (I take it that this is entailed by his being all powerful), God could have created beings that always freely choose to do what is good. And since a world where people always freely choose to do good is a better world than a world where people sometimes freely choose to do evil, God is either not all powerful, not all good, or lacks free will.
Yeah, the problem of evil is a killer, isn’t it. 2,000+ years of trying to pretend that a solution wouldn’t have to be either:
1) God is not all powerful
2) God is not good
3) God does not exist
As you point out, the “free will with occasional evil” argument is just a complicated way of phrasing number 2 (while refusing to admit that’s what you’re actually doing).
Arrgh! Should have been:
(while refusing to admit that’s what THEY’RE actually doing).