You need a better first step
Gary Gutting is a philosopher of religion at Notre Dame, a Catholic university in the US; he writes for the New York Times philosophy blog The Stone. He has a long post saying what’s wrong with Dawkins’s arguments for the strong improbability of god. It’s worth reading because it’s more than just shouting or hand-waving or tone trolling or border disputing or last Thursdayism or science has nothing to say about the supernatural-ism. That’s not to say it’s convincing, but at least there’s something there.
He addresses Dawkins’s argument (not unique to him, of course) that a god that created the universe would have to be even more complex than the universe, and thus would require explanation even more than the universe does, so it doesn’t explain the universe after all, so it’s not a good argument for the existence of god. (That’s not how Gutting puts it, it’s how I do.)
Here Dawkins ignores the possibility that God is a very different sort of being than brains and computers. His argument for God’s complexity either assumes that God is material or, at least, that God is complex in the same general way that material things are (having many parts related in complicated ways to one another). The traditional religious view, however, is that God is neither material nor composed of immaterial parts (whatever that might mean). Rather, he is said to be simple, a unity of attributes that we may have to think of as separate but that in God are united in a single reality of pure perfection.
Okay…but what good is that? What good is a view, what good is “he is said to be”? It’s just saying. Anyone can say, but that doesn’t mean anyone else should believe what is said.
Obviously, there are great difficulties in understanding how God could be simple in this way. But philosophers from Thomas Aquinas through contemporary thinkers have offered detailed discussions of the question that provide intelligent suggestions about how to think coherently about a simple substance that has the power and knowledge attributed to God.
Okay, but I don’t really see why anyone should bother, given that there’s no real reason to pay attention to the claim in the first place. Saying “God is simple” is an ad hoc way to get around the “god would have to be more complex” objection, but it’s not a claim with any apparent relationship to observable reality. That means that intelligent suggestions about how to think coherently about this legless claim don’t strike an outsider as all that valuable.
Making Dawkins’ case in any convincing way would require detailed engagement not only with Swinburne but also with other treatments by recent philosophers such as Christopher Hughes’ “A Complex Theory of a Simple God.” (For a survey of recent work on the topic, see William Vallicella’s article, “Divine Simplicity,” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).
Okay, I had a look.
According to the classical theism of Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas and their adherents, God is radically unlike creatures in that he is devoid of any complexity or composition, whether physical or metaphysical. Besides lacking spatial and temporal parts, God is free of matter/form composition, potency/act composition, and existence/essence composition. There is also no real distinction between God as subject of his attributes and his attributes.
Okay, but again, this is just dogma. It’s just saying. I’m sure it’s internally coherent, but there’s no reason to believe it in the first place. Without any reason to believe it in the first place, it’s hard to care whether it’s internally coherent or not. Don’t you find?
God is what he has. As identical to each of his attributes, God is identical to his nature. And since his nature or essence is identical to his existence, God is identical to his existence. This is the doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS). It is represented not only in classical Christian theology, but also in Jewish, Greek, and Islamic thought. It is to be understood as an affirmation of God’s absolute transcendence of creatures.
Okay – that all makes sense if you believe in this god in the first place. But if you don’t, it just sounds like people saying fancy things about something they know absolutely nothing about. It sounds grand, that kind of thing, but it’s just saying. Just saying is not convincing to outsiders.
You need a better first step. I already know that theology sounds explanatory and serious to insiders, but you need a better first step to convince outsiders. Science and other empirical forms of inquiry have that better first step; theism doesn’t.
Okay – that all makes sense if you believe in this god in the first place.”
Hmm…as a non philosopher, that doesn’t sound like it makes sense at all, regardless of whether you believe in god or not.” God is identical to his existence” sounds like a tautology or a statement that says essentially nothing, and certainly doesn’t ential any kind of simplicity. If we are too assume “is what he has” means god is the universe then that certainly isn’t simple.
When I read this sort of thing, I hear a sonorous voice talking to Krista Tippett about “Mystery.” It is the Mystery (capital M, always, even verbally) that both explains and obscures in one thought. Yes, it works fine once the Presupposition of God’s existence has been stipulated and accepted; but not so well to establish … something.
There is one aspect of this that always strikes me as curious. We have this entity which transcends form and complexity, so why refer to it as he? As a non-believer, that is to me a clear indicator of the man-made nature of religion, but how do the religious view it? Of course, it might just be a convenient convention, but given the mysoginist nature of much religion, there is surely more to it than that. Can religion offer any sort of jusification for this?
If this is true, how is god male?
Looks like a textbook example of the Courtier’s Reply to me.
Of course I’m not going believe a bit of it — I won’t even consider it without something to use as that “first step” as you put it. What I don’t get is, how can Gutting himself believe it? What’s his first step? Is it “that’s what my parents believed”, or “that’s what convinced me when I was young and vulnerable”, and all he has to sustain his faith are vague and circular arguments like these? He seems like a smart guy — he can’t be unfamiliar with cognitive biases and logical fallacies. Why are he and his fans still believers? I’d really like to know.
And does Gutting think we should pray, go to church, get baptized — that sort of thing? His idea of god seems identical in “essence” to a philosophical abstraction — are we still supposed to relate to it as the anthropomorphic being that the rank-and-file theists worship?
The coolest thing about god is that he never, ever, has to play by a skeptic’s rules because he’s just so very special.The appeal to transcendence is the worst, weakest cop-out ever devised and I wish people would stop using it and/or taking it seriously.
Michael Fugate wrote:
Quite. And how could we in any way be said to have been created in God’s image? Shouldn’t we look like little universes, with galaxies and dark matter? And, just to be flippant, where in the universe is God’s penis, and what, exactly, is it for?
Tell me when they get to the point where they say:
“and therefore this god is the Christian god”
Becaus it seems like they are a very long way off from reaching that point
This is the “three-god monte” that I’ve mentioned before–god is an anthropomorphic agent to the believer, but he suddenly becomes a transcendent impotent-yet-omnipotent force when a doubter or a nonbeliever is looking for him. Keep your eye on the dealer’s hands.
“three-god monte.” I love it. A much better metaphor than “constant goalpost-moving.”
Pseudosophisticated, slippery twaddle is still twaddle. As was said by the unhappy child sitting at the dinner table in the old New Yorker cartoon: “I say it’s broccoli and I say to hell with it.”
“Three god monte” is a terrific term, and, dare I say it, a terrific framing of the constant goal shifting theists use in debates. I think before any public debate on the existence of god theists should commit to defending the god they specifically believe in rather than a vague notion of deism. I’m tired of the debates with Christians where the Christian claims that the god of deism is non-falsifiable, therefore Jesus, though with much obfuscation to cover his or her tracks.
I’ve got a very big problem with these assertions.
To store/remember/know a simple true/false fact, you have to have some thing which can be in one of two states. As the facts grow, the number of potential states grow exponentially. However you slice it, this god needs to have a collection of some simpler element, component or something to store these facts and it needs to collect, store and organize (not to mention retrieve) them. This is a pretty basic element of information theory so no, it’s grossly inadequate to simply assert that god is different.
If there’s a conflict between the claims about god (“it’s simple”) and the requirements for meeting god’s attributes (“it’s complex, composed and highly ordered”) then either the claims are wrong or the attributes are, but if something is simple and not composed of any other parts then it has no way to “know” any facts and so far from being omniscient, this ‘god’ can’t tell white from black or up from down. I don’t give a shit if some theologian thinks different, this is just another way of showing the conception of gods are not possible. What else is new?
Ophelia says,
I’d say it depends on exactly what one is trying to establish. Once we grant Gutting’s point that the god of traditional theism is simple, then if Dawkins’ argument is supposed to speak to the traditional theist, he needs to address that traditional account of simplicity. It won’t do to simply assert that a designer god has to be complex. I haven’t read The God Delusion, but I’ve heard several people beside Gutting mention that Dawkins really doesn’t support this claim. (I.e., he doesn’t address the possibility of a simple designer god.) True, a theist would need to argue for this account of simplicity if she were trying to convince someone that a designer exists. But it seems that the atheist also has an obligation to argue against the possibility in claiming that the notion of god is incoherent.
You know, in preview there were paragraph breaks.
I’m sure it’s internally coherent
I’m not. How does an eternal (i.e. timeless) simpleton have thoughts? A thought requires a complex set of ideas and knowledge, none of which work with simplicity. Same with causality. Causality requires a before and after, even if we allow that a cause is co-temporaneous with its effect there’s a problem. Thus, there must have always been a time in which God lives, so he can’t be eternal, for God to have caused the universe and any didling in it. Then there’s the incoherence of something non material interacting with the material, something which has been a bugbear for dualists since Descartes, and which a fortiori violates the 1st law of thermodynamics. Then there’s……
I don’t see how God can have intentional attributes like desires, love, anger and so forth and yet be eternal and unchanging. I don’t see how chimerical, dynamic, ephemeral will o’ the wisps like human beings could possibly be made in God’s image if God is eternal and unchanging. I don’t see how you can take something that seems so remote from any human being’s conception of self and then talk about it as if it were a person.
I posted at Biologos once and one of the folks there kindly informed that God’s love, God’s will, etc. should be read metaphorically. OK, so which part of “love” or “will” is the meat of the metaphor and which part is the scaffolding? Metaphors by definition are not literally true assertions. So make them explicit, make them not metaphors. When you’re speaking metaphorically about God’s love, what are you talking literally about?
But to answer questions like these, theists would have to try to make their theological theories clear, understandable, reasonable, and logically rigorous. We know that’s not in the cards.
You make the implicit assumption that the burden of proof rests on atheists to show that God is not simple. That’s completely backwards. The burden of proof rests on theists to show that, assuming God exists, that God can be simple. It won’t do to simply assert that a designer god could be simple. Show your work.
Comment #5 nails it. It’s just a dressed up Courtier’s Reply. Dawkins hasn’t engaged the most sophisticated and elegant arguments for the existence of God. We’ve heard it over and over.
Dan L made the point about thoughts better than I. If God changes his mind, then he’s not unchanging nor eternal. If God always had a thought that at 13Billion BC (our time) I’ll create the universe, God isn’t eternal. What’s the difference between 13Billion BC or 35Billion BC or last thurdays to a being that has no time? It doesn’t even make sense to jabber on about pure actuality, eternally simple, actualizing the universe at any time. It’s incoherent.
That is one of the silliest things I’ve ever read… It’s pure circular logic and all he is really saying is that God is what God is… And you, foolish mortal, are stupid to understand the ineffable… Especially when some religious guys from history said so…
So, circular proofs and an appeal to authority and he’s suddenly “dispelled” Dawkins’ thesis. I’d give him an “F” on that paper. Two logical fallacies in one conclusion… That’s pathetic.
The nice thing about his brain-cell killing foray into logical fallacy land was it reminded me of the lyrics of Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians’ song: What I am. So I listened to it on YouTube and got a good laugh. That song is as pretentious today as it was then…
I ought to point out that if none of my comments seem related to the linked article, and I come of as a silly gnu atheist, it’s because I just woke up on a Saturday morning and have been letting the cats get some fresh air, and am a bit brain dead to read religious guff.
I should point out, for the Edie fans, I liked the song. It’s just freshman-level-philosophy-pretension. There’s nothing “deep” in it. No matter how many bong-hits-for-Jesus you take…
Problems is that the “sophisticated arguments” aren’t arguments at all, they’re just assertions. And while they couch it in finery, they’re no more sophisticated than saying “nuh uh”.
Everything we know about information theory shows clearly that any entity capable of knowledge and decision making can not be simple. Just stating it over and over and pointing to more and more ignorant authorities won’t change this. Avoiding the arguments won’t change this. It’s childish and it’s not an argument.
Just more proof that words can be strung together grammatically and still not mean a damn thing.
There’s no more coherence in those claims about simplicity than in the concept of square circles or invisible pink unicorns.
Well okay when I say “I’m sure it’s internally consistent” of course I mean “I’ll pretend to be sure it’s internally consistent for the sake of argument.”
The three-god monte – that is good – I came up with the theist two-step a few years back. I wonder if they’re similar.
Thanny, do you offer out agistment for invisible pink unicorns? My stallion is getting a bit, you know, frisky, and you know how the much damage a unicorn can do. So I need a place to keep him until the mare goes out of season. Not enough room here.
Don’t backpeddle Ophelia. You were showning clear signs of partisanship to the accomodationist sect of atheism. As you know, we atheists are in schism and the gnu inquisition has been convened to sort out back peddlers like you.
Phys –
But we don’t grant Gutting’s point, and how could we? How could anyone? It’s inane. The claim is that God created the universe and that that’s one reason to believe God exists – it’s the “how else do you explain all this?” “argument.” God created the universe, so God is the kind of thing that can create things (or design them). How could we grant anyone’s “point” that a simple thing could create this universe? There’s no stuff in between to make it plausible enough to grant.
Brian – heh – well that was a pretty insulting back-pedal, so I’m not too worried.
I was only referring to the theists conception of god (with the phrase “the god of traditional theism”), I wasn’t implying anything about the nature of some actual being.
My point was simply that this is the idea that theists have traditionally had. If you don’t address that head on, you’re attacking a straw man.
Hmm…but is it? Really? The idea of god that most theists – theists in pews – have traditionally had is a person. They do say it’s non-material and all, but again, surely that’s just a form of words, for the sake of 1. dignity and 2. convenience. Does anybody really mean it?
Fair enough. Dawkins is attacking the god of the common believer; Gutting is defending the god of the philosophers.
Right. He does say that. And that’s what I’m doing too. I really don’t care about whatever nebulous floaty thing Terry Eagleton claims to believe in, except when he’s using it to bash atheists over the head, and the same goes for the god of the philosophers.
so I’m not too worried.
That’s good. What I find humourous doesn’t always seem to carry well on the internet. Perhaps it’s just not funny? Anyway, I was hoping to provoke some posts showing how ignorant I am of philosophy of religion by yourself or someone like the incomparable Eric. I guess I’ll just have to get Cardinal Fang to poke you with Hume’s Fork.
So how much of theology is spent scanning for arguments against God and then simply asserting the opposite, as if that’s proof of something?
Recapitulating what Peter said @ 5, in fact –
That’s the monte.
Chayanov , isn’t theology based on the presupposition that God exists? I read somewhere that the subject of theology isn’t God, it’s theology. It seems like a recursive definition of some variety.
It wasn’t the two-step (@ 26), it was the four-step, replying to Brandon of Siris on the atheist two-step.
@Physicalist:
If you want to show that God is at least as complex as the universe itself, consider this: if God is all-knowing, he needs to have a storage capacity that contains at least the same amount of information as the universe does. It doesn’t matter if that storage capacity is material, immaterial, or even outside of the universe. But for God to be all-knowing, the information has to be there. So at least in the information theory sense of the word “complexity”, God must be at least as complex as the universe itself.
It’s the Courtiers Reply all over again. You can argue endlessly, and quite ingeniously, about the qualities of something for which no evidence is required, you can form exclusive clubs to argue the details – divine simplicity, transcendent Being outside of being, whatever, it doesn’t capture commom religious feeling, and it’ll never capture the attention of sceptics
Deen says,
This is a good point (which has occurred to me before as well). Of course, it makes use of a notion of information that many dualists/theists are likely to reject, but their notions of information/knowing are unsatisfactory (to put it mildly).
Ultimately, one of the strongest arguments against dualism is that it really doesn’t allow us to understand anything at all, while physicalism (by contrast) is constantly developing more and more explanations.
Phys – quite – just as a “simple” god that designed the universe really doesn’t allow us to understand anything at all.
Dan –
Except that Dawkins wields the UB747G as a proof against theism. Thus, he’s obliged to demonstrate that a “God” must be complex.
As a proof? No he doesn’t.
Sorry, didn’t notice comment 5 above, which covers it all. As well as Ophelia with her ‘first step’.
That fancy theistic account of god doesn’t mean anything. It really is just a bunch of words.
“Rather, he is said to be simple, a unity of attributes that we may have to think of as separate but that in God are united in a single reality of pure perfection.”
What does this even mean???
This is like saying that we may have to think of a peanut butter cup as separate parts of peanut butter and chocolate, but that in reality they are united in single reality of pure perfection.
That only makes sense if you melt the peanut butter cup, so perhaps god is melted.
I’m just saying.
It’s also like the trinity. They’re separate but they’re also one. It’s a mystery. Woo woo, wa wa, mubba bubba. Say it and it is True.
Ophelia, I asked the guy from Siris (Brandon) about the trilogy on a recent post he did on identity. If identity is an equivalence relation then it must be reflexive, symmetric and transitive at the very least. That is, x is x, if x is y then y is x, and if x is y and y is z then x is z. That would mean the trinity is down the gurgler because it violates transitivity. His response was that it violated classical identity, but not some modal type. I meant to go back and reread his post to understand that modal type but forgot. Better put that on the to do list.
@BenSix,
He does present just such an argument, similar to what I sketched out above. The information God knows must be stored or represented in some fashion which necessitates complexity, composition and a high degree of order. There’s a whole field devoted to this study, called Information Theory.
What, these ignorant little twerps get to thump their little chests and declare that all of information theory is null and void without bothering their pretty little heads to learn the first bit of it, all the while shrieking about how everyone else must learn and respect their incoherent nonsense. It’s hard to feel upset about disrespecting their hand waving when they don’t care about decades of genuine science.
Here’s the identity link:
http://branemrys.blogspot.com/2010/08/jotting-on-identity-and-relativity-to.html
“God is what he has. As identical to each of his attributes, God is identical to his nature. And since his nature or essence is identical to his existence, God is identical to his existence. This is the doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS). It is represented not only in classical Christian theology, but also in Jewish, Greek, and Islamic thought. It is to be understood as an affirmation of God’s absolute transcendence of creatures.”
Doctrine of circular twaddle.
The richest thing is this:
But suppose that several astronauts reported seeing something that looked very much like a teapot and, later, a number of reputable space scientists interpreted certain satellite data as showing the presence of a teapot-shaped object, even though other space scientists questioned this interpretation.
What a peculiar perception of the situation that is. Did any astronauts actually see something like a teapot? No. What happens is that some chaps here on earth feel it in their hearts that there is a teapot where we can’t see it, and others feel with the same conviction that there is a dish, and still others that it is a fork. And when scientists go to where any of those objects are supposed to orbit, they don’t find anything, and then suddenly the teapot is supposed to be metaphorical or somewhere else or along.
” As identical to each of his attributes, God is identical to his nature. And since his nature or essence is identical to his existence, God is identical to his existence.”
Of course, Popeye said it much more clearly.
Now that is comedy gold.
And I think many folks here have done an excellent job of unpacking the silliness of the “simplicity” argument. No one has argued that the “substance” (whatever that may mean) of the Christian god is necessarily complex, but clearly the cognitive/psychological aspects of this creator are, however they might be realized. To fully conceive something is to hold a thought as complex as that thing is (at least by some measure), and so a being that could fully conceive the universe must be at least as complex as the universe.
The monte goes like this:
THEIST: The universe is too complex too have come into being by itself. It must have a First Cause to explain its existence.
ATHEIST: But the First Cause must be even more complex than the universe it creates. So if the universe is too complex to come into being by itself, then a First Cause is even less explanatory.
THEIST: Oh no. You see, it could be that a very, very simple First Cause can create complexity in the same way that the simple arrangements of crystal atoms can create incredibly complex structures.
ATHEIST: But if a simple thing can generate enormous complexity, why can’t that apply to the universe itself?
THEIST: Because I’m a philosopher.
At the beginning of the big bang, the universe was pretty simple, or at least that’s what the astrophysicists say. Creation, and by hypothesis God, could at that instant be described with a comparatively modest assortment of equations. What emerged from that initial simplicity is of course quite complex, but entropy is information, after all. At best this line of thinking only gets you Spinoza’s God, not one who knows if you’ve been bad or good.
Asteroids are discovered and named all the time; why hasn’t one yet been named Teapot in homage to Russell?
Philosopher Erik Weilenberg examines Dawkins argument, criticisms with it, and strengthens it <a href=”http://philpapers.org/rec/WIEDGH“>here</a>
It makes for an interesting read.
Havok, I’ve only read the part up to Cleanthes Gambit. I agree that Hume has brilliant arguments, but I think Weilenberg is very generous, in that, he doesn’t even seem to be troubled by how a simple God contains the information of the universe. Worse in my view is how the non-physical interacts with the physical doesn’t seem to bother him.
Brian, it was my take away that theists taking Demea’s gambit (the simple god) sacrifice any sort of explanatory power (not to mention claims to Christianity) on the pyres of obscurity and mystery. As Wielenberg states, asserting a simple, mysterious god amounts to claiming:
“There exists a necessary, nonphysical, simple, largely incomprehensible something-or-other that created the universe and has no external explanation.”
I’d like to know just how many people who were formerly atheists but who were converted to theism solely by means of this kind of ‘sophisticated’ theological argument – as opposed to those who believe for emotional and/or sociocultural reasons and who, as a kind of post hoc rationalisation, push this kind of sophistry as a way to diminish the cognitive dissonance they experience.
My money’s on a ratio of bugger-all to a metric shitload.
Ophelia –
You’re right. (Sorry, Dawks.) I was being careless. He writes that it “comes close to proving that God does not exist“; an “unrebuttable refutation“.
Tyro –
Makes sense to me. That doesn’t entail, however, that a designer must be more complex than its design. (Does RD ever define “complex“?)
I commented on this over at the NYT (I’m always Greywizard over there and at a number of other blogs), and when I woke up this morning here is all the richness of the coversation right here on my favourite blog! I’m not even going to pretend that I understand all the complexities of the theological argument for the simplicity of god. In fact, I’m not altogether sure that it is comprehensible, though philosophical theologians might say that that’s just because I haven’t immersed myself in the subject long enough. It’s a bit like ‘rocket science’. You have to have a long apprenticeship in order to understand what is being said.
That being said, it does seem odd to say things like this (from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on the DDS [Doctrine of Divine Simplicity]):
Now, I admit this sounds very sophisticated, and it certainly seems to be very technical. I’m not sure that it does make sense, and it’s just as well the author raises the question of intelligibility right up front. But, after all is said and done, what has been achieved? Not very much. Because as Tulse points out,
It’s all very well to talk about self-instatianting properties, and how they can be identical with some postulated being in every possible world, but if that being thinks then there must be some internal complexity. And if that being is more than a computer, and is actually a person, then complexity must mulitply, and it seems simply absurd to me to suppose that the rarified being talked about in such ‘theological logic’ is possibly the god of religion, the creator god who not only creates everything and has a purpose for it, but a god who actually cares.
Now, if that requires internal complexity — and I think it does — then whatever you can say about self-instantiating properties, it seems to me that the theologians don’t really have a handle on what religion is supposed to be all about. In fact, it seems fairly obvious to me that the theologians have been so busy trying to figure out how a being possessing all perfections might be thought to be a simple … — substance? existent? being? what? — that they forgot all about what this simple thing was supposed to be and to do. And in order to get down to the religious purposes for assuming a god in the first place, they have to leave the rarified atmosophere of higher theological logic and come down to the nitty-gritty of the reality of thought and its enormous complexity. And this seems to me sufficient to show that Dawkins was right, and that anything that ‘created’ things like living organisms, let alone the entire cosmos, must have internal complexity greater than that which is created (unless we assume that, being perfect, this being didn’t need to think of alternative possibles), and that this is not sufficiently dealt with by showing that the divine perfections are all identical with god and therefore with one another.
But why did they start off on this hunt for the snark in the first place? Well, simply for reasons such as Dawkins proposes, namely, that something complex would require explanation, and theologians want to posit something that is somehow self-explanatory. And I don’t think that theologians can have this, no matter how they fool around with the logic of the attribution of the divine perfections. But, hey, it’s obvious that I haven’t really digested everything that the theologians want to say, so, officially, I can’t really say anything. This is an area for experts alone, and there’s a big sign saying “DEFENSE D’ENTRER!” or “EINTRITT VERBOTEN” at the door.
Perhaps I should have added at the relevant point that the idea of ‘perfect knowledge’ as a single property that can be identical with all the other divine perfections, doesn’t make a lot of sense. Perfect knowledge is not itself knowledge; it is just something attributed to something which also possesses the knowledge, which is an incredibly complex thing to have. Why anyone should suppose that perfect knowledge is somehow simple is simply beyond me.
I’ve had theists (usually Catholics) reply in a way that Gutting did to me in debates and discussions many times. The reply seems to be just this: “Oh, foolish atheist, you are not talking about our god, because our god is simple. Why? Because we hold it to be such.” Not *one* has ever tried to explain how it is possible. All of them blather on about idealism and how only material things obey the complexity principles I have been adopting. Funny how that works, though, since even an idealist like Leibniz thought there was a way in which animals (taken in his weird immaterialist way) could “sum up” mereologically. (Of course he flinched when it came to god because of the dogma.) Nobody ever mentions either that the dogma was invented (apparently; I suppose Catholics would say revealed) to avoid various paradoxes and contradictions within other matters. Just read the bible – god changes his mind, walks (how does one do that without parts?), etc.
Brian: If that’s true, it is a recursive definition without a base case. Bad!
bad Jim: Actually, no, since the big bang is the origin of our local hubble volume, not the beginning of “everything” – the etymologically correct meaning of “universe”. (If you want to, as some physicists do, call the local hubble volume “universe”, go ahead, but then there’s also no reason to suspect ours as being the only one.)
Wowbagger: It would be very interesting to know, but very difficult to find out. Any social scientists want to comment on how we could ask that question and minimize lying and self-delusion in the answers?
BTW, about perfect knowledge: Patrick Grim has some articles on how that seems to be self-contradictory (gist: by cantor’s theorem there’s no set or even class of all truths).
Wowbagger, I’m sure your right — apologetics is for the faithful, not for converting the heathens, and this kind of nonsense is apologetics with a capital “APOLOGY”. It’s hard to imagine missionaries travelling to the darkest corners of the earth and telling the inhabitants “There is also no real distinction between God as subject of his attributes and his attributes. God is what he has.” No one knocks on doors and tells hostile residents that “As identical to each of his attributes, God is identical to his nature. And since his nature or essence is identical to his existence, God is identical to his existence.” No, this is precisely part of the philosophical shell game, the three god monte, only hauled out when nasty atheists question the platitudes such as “Jesus loves you” and “God watched over everyone” and “He has a divine plan for all”. It’s the usual trick: come for Jesus’ personal love, stay for the ineffable metaphor of Beingness.
Philosopher-animal. Yes, I agree, the idea of perfect knowledge is probably self-contradictory. But whether contradictory or not, as a class of truths, it would have to be complex. That’s all we need to deny the plausibility of divine simplicity. I assume that knowledge is propositional (in some sense), and that propositions themselves are complex. At any rate they are not merely ejaculations like ‘Eh?’ or ‘Damn!’ In order to be truth functional, and therefore qualify as something known, what is held to be true, even by the divine mind, must have some complexity. Of course, if the idea of perfect knowledge is self-contradictory, then it cannot be a self-instantiating property in the required sense, and then, whether simple or not, a god could not be omniscient.
@Bad Jim in #56:
But that doesn’t help the theist who believes that the universe was created with a predetermined goal in mind. If God had a perfect plan for his creation, and this plan included the universe as it is now in all detail, then you’re back at the initial problem: unless God’s plan was incomplete, God must be at least as complex as the universe to contain this plan.
Besides, a God that can be captured in a modest assortment of equations is not remotely the the same as the supernatural God that most people believe in. At most it’s some sort of deism, but it sounds more like arbitrary semantics to call a set of equations “God”.
@Eric McDonald: I always want to ask: “What predictions can be made from the existence of a perfect being?” I don’t think any two theologians/apologetic philosophers have been able to agree on this. Is such a being perfectly hidden? Perfectly indifferent to human suffering? Perfectly random? Or should we expect a perfect being to have created a world of perfect happiness? Or perfect nothingness?
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I think Chris Lawson’s mini-dialogue wins at life. The admission that the complex proceeds from the simple is exactly what naturalists have been wanting these kinds of people to concede for ages.
It looks like gods are as simple as needed to answer Dawkins and then revert to complexity to do things like create Universes or issue instructions to prophets.
When Karen Armstrong says that god is “being itself” it’s treated with derision by many people, and I think properly so.
Look again at the quote from Gutting:
I have a question (actually, three of them). How could anyone come to know such an entity? How could one tell whether it was a fantasy or “real”? Isn’t this a fancier form of Armstrong-ism, or what Dan Dennett calls a “deepity”?
Deen. What follows from the existence of a perfect being?
I guess the answer to that, for most theologians, must be: exactly what we’ve got. After all, most of them think that god is, in some sense, perfect, and that god is, in some sense, responsible for what there is. Therefore, this, just this — look around you — is what is predicted by the perfection of god. Of course, that’s a bit of a petitio, but, when you’re talking about the beginning and end of all things, you can scarcely escape that.
One of the problems is that no theologian has actually done it better than Leibniz. This, on Christian assumptions, must be the best of all possible worlds. That this, the only reasonable conclusion to the Christian belief in the perfection of god, seems prima facie ridiculous, as Voltaire pointed out, is something that no one has really answered satisfactorily, in my view. The present Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford has published a book entitled, with great aplomb, Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God. I don’t think she makes her case, but it is a case that the Christian must be able to make in order to continue believing in god’s perfections.
Of course, Karen Armstrong argues for God’s absence. God can only be known through unknowing. The suggestion here, it seems to me, is that nothing is probably better than something, and I suspect, in true Schopenhauerian fashion, that this is probably true. Though there are, indeed, moments of pure and nearly transcendent happiness, the sum total of the goodness of conscious existence is probably a negative quantity.
Ernie. In answer to your last question: Yes.
BenSix,
<blockquote>That doesn’t entail, however, that a designer must be more complex than its design. (Does RD ever define “<em>complex</em>”?)</blockquote>
That’s true and indeed a designer can easily be far less complex that its design. Why RD and others argue that God needs to have at least as much information as the universe (meaning not just complexity but order). He uses the ‘omniscience’ attribute here, arguing that if God must know where every particle in the universe is, then God must be at least as complex as the universe. Actually, this argument (made as a part of the “Ultimate 747 from a scrapheap”) doesn’t require that God is more complex than the entire universe but that God is more complex( & ordered!) than the start of the universe, since it was only the origin of the BB that the theists invoked God to explain.
<i>What follows from the existence of a perfect being? I guess the answer to that, for most theologians, must be: exactly what we’ve got.</i>
If these people have convinced themselves that the Holocaust, mass extinctions, and the 1918 Influenza Epidemic are perfectly consistent with an omniscient, benevolent God, I really wonder what wouldn’t be.
God-simplicity is meaningful only as a paradox, as a statement or series of statements the import of which is to deny what is asserted. It might parenthetically have meaning as poetry, song lyric or nightmare. Anyway, I doubt that simple god proponents could have any understanding of “freedom from matter/form composition” to help us out.
I can think of something, though. These are ideas, and it’s good to remember that ideas don’t have to be about anything to intrigue us. We are easily fooled by them when we neglect to measure them against ideas we have good reason to know are about things. So when someone proposes an entity that has “properties” that amount to no properties, or properties that can’t be detected by any means and therefore are indistinguishable from no properties, we are justified in saying “what do you mean by that?” or even “you’re not making sense”.
Benjamin Nelson (#70) says:
Quite so. The response then from the theists might be called “simplexity”. ;-)
Proceeds from it but is not designed by it.
Here’s another quote from Guttig that caught my eye:
Now Guttig is concerned that “composed of immaterial parts” might not mean anything, but he maintains that not composed of immaterial parts does mean something. I don’t think either one refers to anything. The “simplexity” of a god is like its “pure perfection” or its “divinity” . These are non-attribute attributes.
By the way, Eric, do you have a link to your comment at the Times? They don’t make their comments easy to browse through.
Eric McDonald:
Exactly, but there is no logical connection from “perfect being” to “the universe we got now”. There is only an ad-hoc realization that the world we have now must be the best possible world, because God must be perfect. Of course, that never stops people who believe this from trying to improve the world. Don’t they understand they’re messing up the perfect plan by improving on it?
I have more than a question or two about the logic of my argument at the NYT, Ophelia. However, if you want to read it, you can find it here .
A while back I thought of a quick (bumper sticker/tee-shirt sized) motto for this situation:
“Mysteries are Questions not Answers”
I think with it all the time.
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The sneakiest part of Gutting’s essay is his endorsement of Plantinga’s ‘properly basic’ move, in which Plantinga declares that basic religious claims (such as ‘God exists’) can be like basic observations (‘the sky is blue’): we can be justified in believing them without the need for an argument that supports them– they are basic entry points into the business of making assertions. No doubt this is what Gutting would say in reply to Ophelia’s remarks. Of course it’s a trick, since we really do have reason to trust our senses (that is, there’s an argument that supports their reliability, grounded in intersubjective, independent agreement) while we have no similar reason to trust our spontaneous religious assertions. After all, there’s huge disagreement over all of them– note that Gutting slips past this by favouring a pretty vague theism; btw, Plantinga isn’t so shy– he invokes the fall to explain why most people’s grasp of religious truth is so flawed (but not his, of course)– but on that turn he falls foul of Ophelia’s point: he’s just saying (and doing it in a pretty prideful way too, since his position basically comes down to, ‘my basic religious assertions are reliable, but yours aren’t, because my Christianity has freed me from the damage to my religious faculties that the fall has imposed on yours.’)
Maybe it’s just me, but it seems to read as an argument for the non-existence of God, subbing in a meaningless sustanceless God as a placeholder for the big bang. This God is immaterial and simple and really just an awkward obfuscation. Then again, I’m not a theologian.
I know; ever since reading Gutting’s piece I keep picturing a puddle. God is a puddle. All those cathedrals, for a puddle!
It is possible there is an unknowable being or entity who creates universes, has unimaginable powers, and is like nothing we have any experience of. No atheist that I know of has ever denied such a possibility, nor have we denied the possibility of an unknowable Easter Bunny who lays invisible, magical eggs on Saturn. (Using the proper incantations, these invisible magical eggs can bring about wonders.) So what? Atheists and theists, i.e., non-agnostics, do not concern themselves with epistemic impossibilities but with gods about whom stories have been told for millennia, even by famous philosophers. The more we learn about the universe, the less reason there is for believing that any of these gods were not created in human imaginations and linguistic labyrinths. Agnosticism regarding Zeus or Abraham’s god is not an intellectually honest position, as it can be maintained only by a fatuous and dishonest treatment of the available evidence. That evidence shows beyond a reasonable doubt that all gods fashioned thus far in the minds of men, including the minds of famous philosophers, are highly improbable. Agnosticism regarding unimaginable, unknowable beings is redundant. Requiring atheists to prove the non-existence of an unimaginable, unknowable being is absurd.
Gutting’s argument that you have to believe in God to prove god sounds like the old Steve Martin joke.
How to be a Millionaire
Step 1: Have a million Dollars.
Gutting can cite as many philosophers as he wants. The sort of abstract, substanceless god he is trying to describe is plainly not the raging anthropomorphic god described in the Bible, nor is it the one invoked at church services and in political forums. Gutting isn’t trying to refute any arguments, he’s just hoping to change the subject.
Heyyy, Bob Carroll! Mr Scepdic himself. Props to you, sir.
And quite so. I certainly have absolutely no sense that I know all about the universe – the idea is laughable. But as Hitchens said in that interview with Goldberg, in response to Martin Amis’s rather preening claim that agnosticism is more reasonable, what I am sure of is that the pope knows no more about the putative god than I do.
It’s amusing when people like Gutting defend God claims by saying (essentially), “Well, so-and-so ignores the possibility that God might not be magic in that way, rather, God might be magic in this other way…” Contemporary apologetics for the existence of God has turned into little more than this.
Laplace said it best: There is no need for the God hypothesis.
As lots of people have said, it boils down to /how do you know this/?
They can go on and on about their ‘DDS’ and how God embodies all these tautologies, while not being embodied (as though contradictions are insightful instead of a cheap literary tactic), but they never explain how they know this.
Really, it’s not like the Bible supports it, and unless there’s a whole field of empirical theology they’ve been concealing for years, they’re just making stuff up that sounds good.
What Sivi said — it’s like Gutting is reading from a Gospel he found somewhere, that the rest of us don’t know about.
Also, the god that Gutting is describing quite different from the one described in those other Gospels and the rest of the Bible. With the exception of his fellow UCC’ers and possibly the Unitarian-Universalists, I would think the billions of other adherents to the Abrahamic religions would take exception to his ideas. To put it mildly. Before he tries to persuade us of his notion of God, maybe he should try to persuade them.
Professional theologists’ discussions about god cannot be taken seriously. Their statements are designed not to aid in understanding but instead to foreclose the possibility of understanding god. We understand something by knowing its limits and edges, so god has none. We understand things by considering their component parts, so god has none. We understand things by looking at their material nature, so god has none. And if we ask about god’s attributes we’re told that god doesn’t have attributes — he is his attributes. Even the rules of grammar don’t apply to god.
Dawkins, like most scientists, knows that you need a brain to have a mind. As result when theists describe an entity with a towering intellect, he correctly expects to find something with a great many moving parts. The theological intuition that minds can be either simple or immaterial is demonstrably wrong (see: http://www.jackasterisk.com/j_a_c_k_/2007/12/maxwells-materi.html). Of course most people believe they will continue to have a mental life long after their brains have decomposed, so it’s easy to see why they find Dawkins’ scientific assumptions objectionable.
Ooh I like that “We understand something by…so god has none” item. Very nicely put.
We know where he got it; he stole it from George Lucas.
May the Force be with you!
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I didn’t think that was the argument. I understood the argument to be (universe + creator) must be more complex than (universe without creator). So complexity alone is no proof of the existence of a creator.
Nick,
If a god existed then the complexity we observe in the Universe would be explained by the god so you shouldn’t be adding the two together, rather looking solely at the preconditions. At this point we would ask whether a designer god helps answer questions or just introduce more, bigger ones. If God really is simpler than the order in the universe, then we’re better off; if not, then God isn’t merely unnecessary but makes things worse.
Jack has it right. Religious Philosophy is pure intellectual masturbation. What are they doing? They are talking ’round in circles, using big words, make-believing they’re actually doing work. But in reality it all boils down to arbitrary assertion and meaningless words and statements. Such talk can’t even get off the ground. It is ironic to me. The first people to see what is wrong with such talk should be people trained in philosophy. I really don’t know what philosophy is good for when such idiotic ramblings are found in the Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
I submit that an immaterial mind is a contradiction in terms just as “married bachelor” is. The mind is an organ. That is a fact. It consists of working parts. That is how it is able to perform the functions it does. End of argument. These “philosophers” could make philosophically plausible an “immaterial (simple) liver”.
Deen @39:
Nice.
BenSix@43:
See Deen @39. QED.
Define “design.” Spiders create very complex webs, but they don’t really “design” them, and even then, the spider is still more complex than the web. No human being has ever designed anything more complex than a human being. We don’t have much evidence of designers being less complex than their designs.
It seems to me that if you’re “designing” then you must at least have an intended goal. If God’s intended goal was to create human beings, it would seem to me he needs to be at least as complex as a human being, which is not at all simple.
And that’s why Natural Selection is such a powerful explanation. It cuts the Gordian knot. There just is no conundrum about a designer less complex than its designs, because there is no design. There is a different mechanism, and away goes the problem.
The Mandelbrot set (and other fractals) is so complex that mathematicians had to describe it using fractional dimensions, yet it arose from an equation with only three terms. The area of a triangle has a more more complex formula.
There are many examples of order and complexity arising spontaneously because of simple rules being applied to the results of the last trial, much like evolution: reproduce, try to survive, repeat.
Well that”s an easy argument to defeat: No, God is not simple. Cosmology and quantum physics and evolutionary biology are simple (I assert, at least!). There, I win. My blind unjustified assertion beats your blind unjustified assertion.
The Mandelbrot set (and other fractals) is so complex that mathematicians had to describe it using fractional dimensions, yet it arose from an equation with only three terms. The area of a triangle has a more more complex formula.
There are many examples of order and complexity arising spontaneously because of simple rules being applied to the results of the last trial, much like evolution: reproduce, try to survive, repeat.
Great analogy. It seems like the rules of quantum physics may have just such a complexity-out-of-simplicity property. (at least, “simple” in terms of there being a small number of rules to define it)
If someone wants to define the word “God” as being “the very simple phenomena that gave rise to the complexity of the universe,” that’s valid I suppose, but… why not define the word “God” as being “cheese-flavored puffed corn snacks”? Then we agree he definitely exists!!
@ Tyro (replying to two different posts:
No, the theists invoke God to explain the design of the universe, that is that the Universe as it was at every point in its history is exactly how it was intended to be by God. So not only would God have to be more complex than the Universe as it is now, God would need to be more complex than the universe at every point in its history combined.
The problem is that none of those have any understanding. If you want to claim that God is just blind rules governing the cosmos, that essentially God is the laws of physics and nothing more, then I guess you can do so, but that is not the sort of God anyone here is talking about. We are talking about a God that designed the universe, that has specific intentions about how the universe will unfold, that has complete understanding of every aspect of the universe. Simple rules can give rise to complex phenomena, but simple rules cannot understand complex phenomena.
And that’s the key thing of course. God has to be a person. Otherwise what’s the point? “God is the laws of nature” – yeah no thanks. God has to be a person, who loves us. Sadly god also has to be simple, because people will keep asking these tiresome questions about how we explain the designer then, but it’s all right, because the idea is just that god is simple but still a person just the same anyway.
@TBC
So not only would God have to be more complex than the Universe as it is now, God would need to be more complex than the universe at every point in its history combined.
I was just stating what the minimum requirements were for the argument from design to fail. That is, God just needs to be harder to explain than that which it was invoked to explain.
I suspect that most Christians don’t give a shit about the rest of the universe and if it turns out that God just let it collect dust while He (and this god really is a ‘He’) focuses on humanity, they would be happy. This also ignores the belief that much of the universe could develop with just a little tweaking from God – it certainly doesn’t need God to be more complex than the universe. That’s arises only from the ‘omniscience’ claim and isn’t necessarily tied to the ‘creator/designer’ arguments.
Each argument for the existence of a god points to a different god and what’s worse, different people will accept one argument and reject another. Even the sophistumicated theologizing hasn’t found any reason to link them all together. An no wonder – there are theories for the origin of the universe which involve the collision between two string theory membranes so any creator that has more intelligence than an elementary particle is exceeding what is required.
Something to think about: you could literally have more power and intelligence in your fingernail than God has in its entire incorporeal non-body.
The divine simplicity argument is one that shoots itself in the foot.
Why would anyone want to worship an entity simpler than themselves? If that’s your predilection, why not worship a black stone?
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