Quiz time
I wasn’t specifically invited to take this quiz, but I’ll take it anyway. Well not really take it – more like look at it. The point is to find out what gnu atheists think, and I think a lot of things, so maybe I think some things related to the quiz.
1) Why is there anything?
2) What caused the Universe?
3) Why is there regularity (Law) in nature?
4) Of the Four Causes in nature proposed by Aristotle (material, formal, efficient, and final), which of them are real? Do final causes exist?
5) Why do we have subjective experience, and not merely objective existence?
6) Why is the human mind intentional, in the technical philosophical sense of aboutness, which is the referral to something besides itself? How can mental states be about something?
7) Does Moral Law exist in itself, or is it an artifact of nature (natural selection, etc.)
8) Why is there evil?
1-4, I don’t know. 5, big question. Basically because of how the brain works – but there’s a lot more to say than that; it’s just that none of it includes the word “god.” 6, similar. 7, no, there’s no Moral Law.
8. Because we’re sentient, and conscious (cf 5 and 6), and mortal, and fragile. Bad things happen to us, and we think of them as bad, and we may think of some of them as evil. Bad things are how natural selection does the selecting. Legs too short? You’re eaten. Hearing dull? You’re eaten. Drought? You starve.
And then go on from there. Many centuries of experiencing this and talking about it with language and telling stories about it and writing books about it. We know a lot about it. We have a lot of feelings and thoughts about it.
OK, I’ll bite. What is objective existence in the context of experience?
1-8, I don’t have the first damn clue. Ergo, Jesus.
Even if you do have a clue, you’re wrong, because the answer is still just Jesus.
My answer is that none of those questions has anything directly to do with the theory of evolution through natural selection, nor of the age of the earth. Thus they are moot in the debate over scientific empirical evidence for the theory of evolution through natural selection. Creationists are always looking to side track the debate to off topic theological/philosophical gaps, conundrums or non-falsifiable diversions.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Skeptic South Africa, Ophelia Benson. Ophelia Benson said: Quiz time http://dlvr.it/7Rmxw […]
#8Isaiah 45:7: I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things.The founding Christian myth is a tale of human moral defectiveness originating from Adam and Eve whose characters were given by God. It’s a little odd that the origins of evil should be seen by Christians as a problem for atheists rather than themselves.
I answered it (in the link). Funny how a group that is supposedly discovering the truth about evolution or the age of the earth is bringing this up. It is very off topic.
Why doesn’t Michael Egnor open up comments on his blog so the atheist horde can come flooding in and answer his (non) questions ?
Oh, that’s right, he doesn’t get any traffic.
1. Because nothing necessarily isn’t. To be is to exist. If there were no existence, then there would be nothing, but we don’t know what non-existence means unless we have an idea of what does exist. In other words, we need to presuppose that things exist before we think about what it would be like to not exist. This make the question impossible to pose sincerely.
A better question would be, “Why is there this kind of stuff instead of some radically weird other kind of stuff?” That’s a sensible question, and the answer will depend on the details. Imagine, for instance, the cosmological constants were different, and hence the universe was of a very different kind than the one we know of. So we say, “The answer is, the cosmological constants were different”. And if you ask why we have the constants that we have, then the answer would have to be: “We don’t know, but we might figure it out one day. Stay tuned.”
2. The big bang. (Or: ask Stephen Hawking.)
3. Entropy.
4. All of them correspond to some patterns that we usefully attribute to the real world. But final and formal causes can presumably be explained in terms of the material and efficient ones. Or so the physicalist story goes.
5. False dichotomy. Subjective experience objectively exists. This experience is prone to error, but that’s a feature of subjective experience, not synonymous with it. A clearer question would be, “Why do we make mistakes?”, but that’s not liable to give us very mysterious answers.
6. Natural selection. The ability to treat representations as information that can be manipulated confers an evolutionary advantage. Tool use, for example.
7. Moral laws must be motivated by seriously considering natural forces, like our natural endowments and social consequences. They’re also partially constructed — sometimes by negotiation, sometimes by subordination.
8. Because moral laws can be negotiated badly, for instance by ignoring social consequences and the full range of our natural powers. Evil is unnatural in the sense that it doesn’t care at all about what the world has got to say about morality. It tries to be an autonomous moral force “in itself”, ignoring the various ways in which it cannot be anything “in itself”.
About 8: You immediately connected that to the problem of evil, but if these questions are as cryptic as they seem, it might be that he was referring to human behaviour, and thus to the fall, no?
In general, I always find the term problem of evil misleading – if something is not done on purpose, it is not evil by definition. We should perhaps rather call it the problem of unnecessary suffering.
Anyway,
1. Those who are qualified to comment on that seem to answer that “nothing” is a less stable state of affairs than “something”, so something comes into being spontaneously, no matter how conter-intuitive that is.
2. This question presupposes that everything must have a cause, which is known to be false.
3. I would like to see somebody outline how a universe without any natural laws or regularity would look like…
4. No idea what that even means, or why Aristotle should still be relevant to modern cosmology.
5. Eh? I do not quite understand the question, truth be told.
6. ditto
7. It does not.
Apologies for being off-topic, but I just had to relate this. Having fallen asleep on the couch reading a book (which happens from time to time when you like both books and naps), I just woke up from the most amusing dream (which also seems to happen much more often with couch naps than with regular sleep). I have no idea what the hell the dream was really about; I only remember the last sentence in it, which was spoken in an It’s-NPR-Fundraising-Week intonation:
“The previous comments were brought to you by the Ophelia Benson Family of Commenters(TM), dedicated to maintaining a quality brand of discourse.”
1) Why is there anything?If there is nothing then the question cannot be asked. I think that the question should be framed to mean “What is the purpose of existence” and the answer is “There is no purpose, just existence”.2) What caused the Universe?I remember being taught that a circle is the locus of a point at a fixed distance from another point – thus a circle is a mathematical concept and has no beginning and no end. The universe is like a circle – it just is. 3) Why is there regularity (Law) in nature?If there were no law, there would be no nature. If you change any regularity, then nature would change.4) Of the Four Causes in nature proposed by Aristotle (material, formal, efficient, and final), which of them are real? Do final causes exist?Human beings look for causes because they can’t stand the idea that there is no primal cause, no reason for their existence. However, if there is no reason for the existence of humans, then there is final (or primal?) cause.5) Why do we have subjective experience, and not merely objective existence?Subjective experience is an evolutionary development that allows us to survive by reacting to external stimuli. 6) Why is the human mind intentional, in the technical philosophical sense of aboutness, which is the referral to something besides itself? How can mental states be about something?Look at the answer to 4 for the first part of the question, and the answer to 5 for the second part.7) Does Moral Law exist in itself, or is it an artifact of nature (natural selection, etc.)It seems to me (but that’s an opinion, not a fact) that Moral Law is a long term survival mechanism, which is why morals change when the environment changes8) Why is there evilEvil exists because of the divergence between short-term moral law and long-term moral law. In the short term it helps an organism to survive if it does evil things to gain advantage; in the long term it loses out
I think it’s more apt to address his description of what he thinks is the central beliefs of the. ‘new atheists’.
1) There are no gods
2) Theists are IDiots
3) Catholic priests molest children.
Despite Egnor being one of the worst sort
Ooops! I wasn’t finished!
What i was trying to say is that Egnors summary of the beliefs of New Atheists is actually remarkably similar to the descriptions of New Atheism that come from the accomodationist faitheist camp. That is the interesting point of his post, not the rest of it which is a desperate attempt to drag the debate into obscurantism.
1.Why shouldn’t there be something rather than nothing? Is, ” Why is there something?”, ‘begging the question’?
2-4 Seem pointless from a scientific viewpoint.
5,yes,of course, that’s the way the brain works.
6, also pointless, leave the investigation to the neuro-scientists.
7.There’s some scientific evidence that ‘moral law’ is a product of evolution.
8.Nobody’s perfect(human brains don’t all function the same way) and some people are complete psychopaths.
1) Why is there anything?
We don’t really know – but that doesn’t mean we are going to accept your wildest guess. In order to answer this question we need something that is actually consistent with the things we do know about.
2) What caused the Universe?
We don’t even know that the universe had a cause.
3) Why is there regularity (Law) in nature?
Scientific law – or regularity – is descriptive, not prescriptive. Therefore whatever “nature” was, if intelligent beings could evolve in it they would describe it by natural laws.
4) Of the Four Causes in nature proposed by Aristotle (material, formal, efficient, and final), which of them are real? Do final causes exist?
I don’t know.
5) Why do we have subjective experience, and not merely objective existence?
Because our brains can’t quite handle reality as it is – so instead we simulate a simplified version of it. This version is not in any way perfect, and we tend to miss different details depending on what our experiences have taught us are important.
6) Why is the human mind intentional, in the technical philosophical sense of aboutness, which is the referral to something besides itself? How can mental states be about something?
We can’t handle reality, therefore we simulate it. This has the side effect of substance dualism.
7) Does Moral Law exist in itself, or is it an artifact of nature (natural selection, etc.)
No it doesn’t.
8) Why is there evil?
Define evil.
New atheists are no different to old atheists.
Try reading the books: God Is Not Great, The God Delusion, The End of Faith, if you’re actually interested in what atheists are saying. As for metaphysics: naturalism.
1) Why is there anything?
The answer is in the question. Because if there was nothing, there would be no questioning. It’s self-referential or incestuous.
2) What caused the Universe?
Stupid question. Show that the universe is the kind of thing that could be caused, as we understand cause, then we’ll talk. Or to go to the canny Scot. What is cause?
3) Why is there regularity (Law) in nature?
Dumb question. Because if there weren’t regularity, there’d be no pattern to ask about. Really, it’s question 1 all over again.
4) Of the Four Causes in nature proposed by Aristotle (material, formal, efficient, and final), which of them are real? Do final causes exist?
Oh fuck me dead. Aristotle again. The man was genius, who given his circumstances and relative blind ignorance, understandibly thought everything was teleological. Cow moves, must be cause, cause has purpose. Planet moves, must be cause, cause has purpose. Universe exists, must be cause, cause has purpose. Bertrand Russell deflated this rubbish so well.
5) Why do we have subjective experience, and not merely objective existence?
Because we’re subjects you dumb tool! In other words we model reality.
6) Why is the human mind intentional, in the technical philosophical sense of aboutness, which is the referral to something besides itself? How can mental states be about something?
Because dying doesn’t select well. If the mind didn’t model the world well, it’d be a blip on selection smorgasbord.
7) Does Moral Law exist in itself, or is it an artifact of nature (natural selection, etc.)
Nope, Christians were all for slavery until they were dragged into the 19th century, then the followers of immutable law, mutated. See Mark Twain for more.
8) Why is there evil?
Loaded. Does he mean why are there Earthquakes? Plate techtonics. Why are there plagues? Biology?
Does he mean why the inquisition? Authoritarianism. Why the holocaust? Humans treating other humans as non humans……What does the question mean?
“Many centuries of experiencing this and talking about it with language and telling stories about it and writing books about it…….” – hasn’t actually got us any further forward has it? I’ll go along with OB’s answers to 1 – 7.
8 doesn’t really have an answer either since evil is defined by each of us individually. I think evil is some of the stuff that other people do that I really hate……but why do they do it? because it is the nature of people to do stuff that I hate. Try and figure out why that is and you’re right back on the religious carousel.
We must accept that there are questions we can formulate that we cannot answer – this isn’t after all very unusual for us; we ask questions all the time that we can’t answer – but often someone else can. But we must stop thinking that because we have no real answers therefore we can create mythical answers and insist that they are true.
Answers 1-8: The Flying Spaghetti Monster, Peace be Upon His Noodly Appendage.
1) Why is there anything?
I don’t know. Nobody knows.
2) What caused the Universe?
I don’t know. Nobody knows. We don’t even have a solid definition of “Universe” yet.
3) Why is there regularity (Law) in nature?
Regularity is a subjective (human-made) notion. It’s where and how we look. If we look at the distribution of matter in the observable universe, it’s fantastically irregular.
4) Of the Four Causes in nature proposed by Aristotle (material, formal, efficient, and final), which of them are real? Do final causes exist?
Aristotle is much revered in Christian (and let me lift that out!) circles. It went so far that Aristotle’s work had been lifted to an almost unquestionable status. Some of this remains today (see for examples the Aristotelian approach of Charles Taylor). Sadly it is a structure theory that is no longer valid, very much in the same way that the “earth,wind,fire” theory of matter is no longer valid.
We know what “material” cause and effect are linked at least since Newton, making our physical equations not carry any notion of cause, but rather of exchange and change of state. “Causation” emerges again as a subjective human-made concept to try to explain the world. A much more contemporary discussion that surplants this is the question of time, it’s direction, it’s nature and so forth. Then endpoints of “causes” really are much better discussed as end-points of time-evolutions.
5) Why do we have subjective experience, and not merely objective existence?
Brainz.
6) Why is the human mind intentional, in the technical philosophical sense of aboutness, which is the referral to something besides itself? How can mental states be about something?
This is an extremely convoluted set of questions. It stretches from intentionality to mental representation and abstraction.
But here is a simplified toy brain plus sensory input:
Memory + sensory input + language (association of sonic sensory input with signified things).
Sees an object which doesn not yet have an “about”. Language labels it. Stores association of sensory input (object, finger pointing to it, label uttered) in memory. Now “aboutness” is stored and recallable from memory. The representation itself (mental state of neuron) is not the aboutness, but the relationship.
This is trivial stuff, long being understood (at least since artificial intelligence is studied). Problem is that people still look to Aristotle.
7) Does Moral Law exist in itself, or is it an artifact of nature (natural selection, etc.)
False dichotomy and vague. I assume “moral law” tries to suggest absolute moral code. And the second part suggests that moral attitude are a natural adaptation.
I don’t think either describes what is going on, but I’m not going to write a textbook on subjective morality here.
8) Why is there evil?
“Evil” is a label. See Konrad Lorenz. Again this is a complex topic, because we’d have to extricate the imprinted religious notions of evil and replace the topic with discussion of things happening to emotional beings and how actions on them have negative consequences (pain, etc) to them and to the collective of beings around them. And because the subjects are complex and the context is complex (natural disasters, aggressive and hurtful behavior etc etc) the topic is complex.
“The problem of evil” is a religious problem due to the way the morality is claimed to work.
Overall the question encode a certain set of assumptions, mostly Aristotelian (metaphysics, ethics).
“I want to learn more about what New Atheists really believe.” Really, Michael? Then why aren’t you allowing comments to your ‘quiz’?
1. Presupposes that there could be nothing, which is false, even as granted by the theist. Leibniz always meant “why is there anything but god?” which is a different question.
2. The universe is everything – it does not have a cause – only events “within” it do.
3. Presupposes that lawlessness is possible, which is not in evidence to say the least. Moreover, additional laws arise via emergence and chance.
4. All of them, but they aren’t all causes, and some are limited in scope. For example, final causes only exist where there are sufficiently cephalic organisms.
5. See Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained. Even if the details are wrong, I think something like the gist is right.
6. I’ve never understood why this is mysterious. A trivial computer program refers to things outside itself. (Any program with any form of I/O does, and the data structure which handles the input is the way it works.) This does not necessarily entail computationalism or strong AI (either way).
7. I don’t know what “moral law” is supposed to mean here. if it just means ethical systems, then no, it again requires certain sorts of animals.
8. Why is this even a question? People are poorly raised, improperly socialized, and have billion years of competition in their background. (I must add that we are also a fantastically social creature, in spite of it all.)
(OT frivolity – Josh @10 – I laughed really hard. I bet you did too!)
“Why is there anything?” A strange question, since religion doesn’t address it. The religious never try to explain why there is a God, or where He/She came from. and surely God falls in the category of “anything”.
Quite. What is the difference between “why is there something rather than nothing?” and “why is there god rather than nothing?” If “god” were the answer to “why is there something rather than nothing?” then the answer would just raise the same question all over again. Hello infinite regress.
What’s funny about all this is, it doesn’t really matter what the Gnu Atheists think, or whether they can agree on an answer, or whether they can even answer. Half of these are mere philosophical questions, a couple are directly related to religious concepts, and none of them, if answered, would provide anything really useful. It’s just Egnor’s pathetic attempt to make some kind of point in stumping those know-it-all elitist Gnu Atheists. What he’s hoping (or is too dense to have ever thought of) is that no one then asks him to answer the same questions. “Intelligent design,” “jesus,” and/or “god” doesn’t provide the answers either, yet open up a whole packet of their own.
The only difference that a supernatural, intelligent entity provides for is, “It’s intentional,” rather than, “It’s just physics.” All this does is lead to the next question, the very one that every religious person I have ever seen cannot answer: “What is the intention?” But isn’t that the whole point of religion in the first place, to answer this one damn question? Isn’t it the reason they keep asking it?
There’s definitely something wrong when you base everything you do on a question you admit is the most important one there is, cannot actually answer, and cannot explain why it’s important.
It seems like there’s something approaching a consensus for all the questions, apart from (8). There’s an especially large consensus around (4) and (2), though most of the answers are consistent with each other anyway.
I’m especially surprised to see that people are so quick to think that the universe is non-caused.
I’m not quick to think that the universe is non-caused, I’m quick to think that I don’t know. I really don’t know. My mental capacity stops cold with the Big Bang. The universe originated in an explosion in which the contents of the universe went from being one dense point to being the expanding universe. I can’t get past trying to figure out where the stuff that exploded into the universe was. Was it, like, on the ground? On a table? Hovering in the air? What was on the other side of it, or outside it? Those are all primitive clueless questions – so I know that I don’t know.
Yes, of course. I should rephrase — the consensus is skepticism towards the idea of a cause of the universe. That’s what surprised me. You, Alex, Jan, Bruce, Brian, and philosopher-animal agree on that much.
There’s new support for the theory that , “our universe is a recycled version of an earlier cosmos” ( New Scientist 16 Oct 2010). The ‘Big Bounce’ rather than the ‘Big Bang’, perhaps, the Universe really wasn’t created at the Big Bang.
1) Why is there anything?
Short answer: Not sure.
Long answer: I’m not sure if that’s a meaningful question. I don’t know if ‘nothing’ can exist. I don’t know if there’s a contradiction in saying that something existed forever. I’m not sure if we have the mental equipment to understand the issues. I suspect the question may be equivalent to ‘what colour is Thursday?’ – perfectly syntactically correct but meaningless. There are no good, neutral reasons for suspecting any explanation of the existence of everything is sufficiently good that one cannot entertain reasonable doubts about it. Any progress on this issue will likely be made by physicists. I don’t think that our intuitions have any right to wander into this terrain without strong empirical backing, as our intuitions on matters of this kind are continually shown to be false. This is one reason why any cosmological arguments leave me cold.
2) What caused the Universe?
See above. It may not be a meaningful question to ask ‘what caused space-time within which all causes happen’. Causes happen within the Universe. Talking about a cause outside a Universe may make as much sense as talking about sound in a vaccum. The B-theory of time, if true, may make speculations like this irrelevant.
If you want to cart in a timeless, changeless, non-physical mind that caused the universe, like God, then you’re going to have to do a huge amount of work to show that that is a coherent concept that gives a satisfactory explanation of the phenomenon. This has not been done to my satisfaction, nor to the satisfaction of many experts in cosmology (Hawking, Krauss), metaphysics (Oppy), epistemology (Dawes) etc.
3) Why is there regularity (Law) in nature?
I’m not sure. Perhaps this is an unusual part of the universe, maybe non-ordered parts exist elsewhere. Maybe it is impossible for universes to exist without regularity. Maybe only regular universes survive for very long. Ask a cosmologist. Lot’s of speculation, but we’re hardly in a great position to give a good answer to the question, or to know how to correctly frame it.
4) Of the Four Causes in nature proposed by Aristotle (material, formal, efficient, and final), which of them are real? Do final causes exist?
It really depends on what kind of thing you are talking about. This is poorly phrased, so pass.
5) Why do we have subjective experience, and not merely objective existence?
I’m not sure. I’m not sure if we have the right mental equipment to answer these questions (McGinn). I don’t really see why we should expect to understand how consciousness exists any more than a dog should expect to understand how its nervous system works. Perhaps consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe (panpsychism). Maybe it is an emergent property (Searle). Maybe the whole issue is being framed incorrectly and our talk of consciousness embodies many key misunderstandings.
Positing a soul gets you nowhere. You just replace a riddle with another riddle (Kim).
6) Why is the human mind intentional, in the technical philosophical sense of aboutness, which is the referral to something besides itself? How can mental states be about something?
I’m not sure. See Dennett’s entire career, for example.
If you’d like to show a rigorous defence of how spooky souls can have these properties, together with how you know this, I’m all ears.
7) Does Moral Law exist in itself, or is it an artifact of nature (natural selection, etc.)
No law. Nothing immutable. Nothing that a human being can take and then use as an absolute justification, with which any amount of suffering, or humiliation, or torture, or repression, or persecution, can be justified. Human beings, real concerns as real as anything in the world – to not feel pain, to live a happy life, to be able to be safe, and to thrive, and to pursue your own ends in life. That’s the foundation. If you think that’s shaky then that says a lot about your attitude to life:
“The values that play the most important role in any person’s life are those which stem from the meaning they have found in their lives. It is the standard rhetoric of the religious that only god gives life meaning, but to really believe this one must first believe that human life, thought, happiness, even love, are all in themselves worthless and void of meaning. I think any atheist would agree this is absurd. Even if I were the accidental byproduct of a giant rubber tire machine, the mere fact that I live and know that I live would give my life meaning at once. And the moment I felt happiness or love, their meaning and value would be immediately obvious. Anything else would be unnecessary. And as all atheists know, all of these things would exist even without a god. For all that is needed is a person, who is capable of living, loving, and knowing happiness.” ~ Richard Carrier
Also, see everything that Peter Singer ever wrote.
8) Why is there evil?
Because there is so much rape and torture and persecution and injustice and cruelty and other hideous things in the world. Why else?
Ah yes, the sly apologetics of burden-shifting. Does Egnor really think these questions will be stumpers for gnu atheists? Has his brain been pickled in fantasy that long?
Let’s be clear: He does not want to know what we think. What he does want is to imply that our answers to such questions are somehow insufficient or philosophically naive. What our answers actually are, is totally irrelevant to him. This is one of the dishonest tactics that is fundamental to apologetics—imply that the skeptic “can’t answer” certain questions, even though the skeptic has answered them, time and again. (Hence the acronym PRATT—Previously Refuted A Thousand Times.)
No, no. You really don’t. Your faux open-mindedness makes me convulse in dry heaves.
Do we even have one piece of evidence that points toward the universe being caused (under what definition of “cause”)? As best I know the answer is a resounding no. The explanation why people still promote the possibility has more to do studies in the anthropology of religion than the physics of the universe.
Efficient or material causes, presumably. Every physical event that we know of is caused, which is what would make it surprising if the Big Bang also had no cause. Whether that cause in something like spooky membranes rubbing together, or a Big Bounce, etc. — those explanations posit causes.
Don’t really know what religion has to do with how we answer this particular question, so I don’t accept your diagnosis.
I might add that the bit about “universe” results in equivocation – I use it in the original (and etymologically correct) sense. If you want to use it to mean “local hubble volume”, be my guest, but why would the origin of this be anything particularly unusual. That we don’t exactly know what that origin is, etc. is besides the point, since to use it as a gotcha is both obnoxious and physically ridiculous. Vic Stenger has pointed out that even if you want to call the (ridiculously unsupported) hypothesis that it was deliberate in some fashion god, you face the problem that nothing survives the initial expansion. Thus you are left with at best a deist god who never can know what the outcome of the supposed action was.
[…] far, we’ve seen responses (well, kinda) from Ophelia Benson, P.Z. Myers, and Larry […]
“1) Why is there anything? The answer is in the question. Because if there was nothing, there would be no questioning. It’s self-referential or incestuous”
Or, as Sydney Morgenbesser replied to the same question posed by a student: ‘Even if there was nothing you wouldn’t be happy!’
In any sense that we understand causation, there can be no cause of everything, because there’s nothing else to cause it. Gibbering about uncaused causes and such doesn’t change that—there is no possible answer that could satisfy our normal intuitions about causation.
Whenever there’s no possible satisfactory answer to a question, there’s something wrong with the question, and it’s worth figuring out what that is.
For example, if you happened to find yourself in free fall in interstellar space, and asked somebody “which way is down?” they couldn’t give you an answer because the question presupposes something false—that there is always a particular direction that’s “down.” There’s just not. and even asking the question means that you literally don’t know what you’re talking about.
Similarly, the normal concept of causation (“efficient” causation in Aristotelian terms IIRC) just doesn’t apply outside of time. There can be no actual cause of everything. Expecting things to have prior causes in that sense is a habit of mind that we’re evolved and conditioned to have, and it’s a bad one when it comes to questions like a cause of everything or even the first thing. No matter how much it seems like a good question, it isn’t. It’s a concept pushed beyond its domain of applicability. The best we can ever hope for is to understand how the question itself is simply mistaken. No matter how loudly our intuitions scream that we can ask the question “why?” about anything, that’s just wrong—and no matter how unsatisfying that is, it’s still true.
There’s another important dependency relation that theologians (following Aquinas) like to call “causation,” but it’s really something utterly different. It’s the relation of being-made out of, or what philosophers would call supervenience. (Roughly Aristotle’s “material causation” IIRC.) This is what they’re talking about when they talk about God being the ultimate ground of all being. (If they’re making any sense at all.)
For example, when you roll a billiard ball against another and they collide and go off in different directions, that billiard ball behavior depends on the motions and interactions of the molecules making up the balls. That is not at all the same thing as causation in the modern sense. The motion of the molecules doesn’t cause the motion of the balls—it is the same thing as the motion of the balls, at a lower level of description.
Note that this non-causation doesn’t involve something being prior to something else in time. It’s not like the molecules in a pool ball move, and then the pool ball moves. Those events happen at the same time, because they are the same events. Similarly, if the ball is just sitting there, the very existence of the ball depends on the very existence of the atoms—but again, not because one actually causes the other, but because one is the other.
This has some really awkward theological implications that theologians are usually very, very careful to gloss over, or actually invert the significance of.
They often make a Cosmological Argument (an analogue of the First Cause argument) going downward through this dependency relationship, rather than backward in time. At the end of the dependency chain is supposedly something that doesn’t depend on anything else, and is obviously God.
They like to talk about following this dependency relationship backwards going up through levels of “metaphysical priority.” (E.g., the existence of a pool ball’s molecules is an enabling condition for the existence of the pool ball, and thus “prior to” it metaphysically—you could have the molecules but no pool ball, but you can’t have a pool ball and no molecules, so it’s not a symmetric relation.)
The problem is that that’s not going upward, in the sense that scientists or philosophers usually talk. It’s going downward—higher-level phenomena supervene on lower-level phenomena that they’re made out of. E.g., we think of psychology as being higher-level than the underlying biology, biology as being higher-level than the chemistry it supervenes on, and chemistry being higher-level than atomic physics, which supervenes on quarks and such, down to strings or quantum loops or whatever the hell’s at the bottom. (And a billiards game is a much higher-level phenomenon than the molecular motions it depends on.)
By inverting the mental picture, the like to make it sound like they’re going upward toward something that you could plausibly think of as God.
But notice the trend the trend—at the high level you a relatively have interesting complicated things like people, and games involving their activities and thoughts and so on. As we go down the hierarchy of supervenience, things get much more numerous and much simpler—e.g., a human is made out of a bunch of organs, organs are made out of a huge number of cells, cells are made out of a vast number of molecules, and so on down to an inconceivably vast number of astonishingly simple mindless things, like simple vibrating “strings.”
If what we find at the bottom of this chain is God, God is a collection of the most numerous and stupidest things in the cosmos. Or, if we follow some theologians and say that god is metaphysically prior to that, what we’re talking about is some very, very simple laws of physics that enable the existence of inconceivably vast numbers of breathtakingly trivial things. God is a pretty simple formula, which may or may not involve a random number generator that generates an inconceivably vast amount of absolutely pure random noise. (Depending on your interpretation of quantum mechanics.) God is extraordinarily simple and utterly dumb.
There’s a pretty picture, huh? Think about that next time you hear hifalutin’ talk about “metaphysical priority” and God being “the ultimate ground of all being.” If God is the ultimate ground of all being, God is apparently beyond stupid, and utterly mindless, and nothing like anything you could manage to worship if you knew what you were talking about.
That isn’t theism, either. At best it’s pantheism—the lowest-level things aren’t different from the Cosmos with all the higher-level things in it; they are the same thing as the Cosmos, at the lowest and least interesting possible level of description.
Now of course, we can never prove that there isn’t, underneath all those layers of increasingly numerous and stupid things, a sudden reversal where we run into something mindful and smart. But then the argument about “metaphysical priority” is pretty much irrelevant—if you ignore the obvious trend, whether it says anything about a personal or intelligent or even meaningful God depends entirely on what you assume about what you will find there, despite that obvious trend. The Cosmological argument is irrelevant or worse, because you’re just assuming the properties of the thing you were purporting to find.
Science shows that we live in a bottom-up universe, where meaningful and complicated interesting things are made out of progressively more meaningless boring ones. Reductionism works, and the obvious lesson is that the ultimate ground of all being isn’t likely to be remotely like what anybody means by “God”—apparently it’s the diametric opposite.
And even if you do go ahead and assume that it still doesn’t come close to explaining why there is something rather than nothing at all. It doesn’t say anything about that at all, which shouldn’t be a surprise.
Q: Why is there something instead of nothing?
A: God.
Q: OK, So why is there God?
A: God.*
Q: I see, but why is there God?
A: Uh, God.
Q: Interesting. Tell me then, why is there God?
A: I, er, uh, God, I guess…
Q: Then why is there God?
A: I, um, well, I …don’t…know…
Q: Finally, an honest answer! Neither does anyone else!
* Although I think that a loudly shouted “FAITH!” would occur right about here.
John, I think you’re right that no matter what the answer is, it’s going to violate intuitions.
But it’s not at all clear to me how you’ve even tried to show that the question itself is incoherent or necessarily mistaken. It could be that the causes are there, but very weird: e.g., membranes rubbing against each other, or whatever. Though of course that’s going to be a conception of cause that is itself pretty weird, since (as you indicate) there’s no guarantees that the idea of “time” is involved. But the language of “x causes y” is always going to play some kind of explanatory role in physical theories, which is what makes it very hard to understand how we should imagine a theory that trades on some other way of speaking.
It’s interesting that people are framing their answers in theological terms, as if (1) had to be motivated by religious interests. In context, this sort of makes sense, since we’re pretending that we’re actually talking to whatsisface who wrote the original blog post (even though he’s probably not reading this, and even if he was, probably wouldn’t care either way). However, this all seems like a trap to me — it seems like reverse psychology. To every atheist that advocates something like an uncaused universe, a Clever Religious Joe gets to say: “Aha, so you believe in at least one miracle. That’s all I need.”
If we were dealing with doctrinal Catholics or something, then maybe the finer points of how we ought to imagine the Godhead would be a live concern. But actually, we’re talking about largely American New Age-Protestants here. And these people are not really going to care at all about whether or not the immediate cash value of the argument is mere pantheism. For rhetorical purposes, though not logical ones, they’ll use this as a strong demonstration of a pantheist God, and then use the existence of miracles as weak leverage to argue for a panentheist one.
By ‘John’ I meant ‘Paul’. Ich.
Because humans like to perceive order. We look for things that seem to “fit” or “match,” and then we mentally group them together, and we invent names for these groups or behaviors that distinguish them from other groups or behaviors. Some people then take the next step and say, because WE are able to mentally create groupings, therefore some supernatural force must have DICTATED those groupings. This is a logical failure of extreme magnitude.
Remember the Bohr model of the atom, with the electrons moving around in neat little tracks? It makes good predictions because it’s empirically-derived. It’s also complete nonsense. Electrons, in reality, swarm in a disorganized cloud. Describing “rings” and energy levels is very useful, but it’s not accurate — and therefore attributing rings to a “ring designer” is equally inaccurate.
3) Why is there regularity (Law) in nature?
If there wasn’t, would mathematics be an abstract art?
[…] by question. It’s already been done a few times (by atheists linked above, as well as Ophelia Benson and Luke Muehlhauser, and in the comic Jesus and Mo) and while I might quibble with a few details […]