Answering the Question with the Question
I read a bit of Keith Ward this morning, looking for some sophisticated theological arguments, since we keep being told there are some and we don’t respect them enough. Various thoughts occurred to me as I read. On pages 13-14 of God, Chance and Necessity, for instance, Ward says ‘The argument of this book, then, is that a theistic interpretation of evolution and of the findings of the natural sciences is by far the most reasonable…and that it is the postulate of God, with its corollary of purpose and value, that can best provide an explanation for why the universe is as it is.’
That’s just the introduction, not the argument itself, but all the same, it prompts me immediately to notice that the meaning even of that summary sentence depends heavily on what Ward means by ‘best’ and ‘explanation’. It strikes me that by ‘best’ he means ‘one I like best’ – one he finds comforting, familiar, unfrightening, nonalien.
And then, as always, it also strikes me how easy, and empty, that word ‘God’ is in that usage. You could say that about anything and everything; it’s just as explanatory, just as comfortable, and just as empty. You find a beautiful garden, a painting, a building, a statue; how do you explain this? ‘A genius.’ Okay – but which one; where; when; in what context; why; in short, tell us more. Just saying ‘a genius’ doesn’t say anything, because we already know that much; we want to know the details. The same applies to ‘God’ as the explanation for why the universe is as it is. What is ‘God’ there? The thing that caused the universe to be as it is. Well – we sort of know that something caused the universe to be as it is (unless we think it was uncaused, which is tricky), but what? Just saying ‘God’ amounts to the same thing as saying ‘don’t know’, except with all sorts of smuggled (and unwarranted) baggage. Theists claim the ‘God’ answer is explanatory but it isn’t because it argues backward, so it’s really just repeating the question – looky here, look at this, it’s special, so something special made it, and of course that something special=god, so there’s your explanation. No. Just pointing at an explanandum – where did this come from? – doesn’t provide its own answer. Of course ‘god’ is a better explanation in many senses of ‘better’ – it’s more appealing, more intuitive, more human-like – but it’s not better in the sense of being a real answer; it’s more of a disguised non-answer.
And then – when there is no explanation, or no explanation that we can get at, yet and perhaps ever – then providing one by supplying a name – God, or A Q Genius – is not better than saying ‘don’t know’. So the argument is spurious. Saying that god is a better explanation for the universe than (say) naturalism plus don’t know, is absurdly deceptive. It reassuringly soothingly says yes there is an answer when in fact there may not be – we may just not know.
And the god answer is just too generic – hence, again, too easy. It’s like seeing a poem and saying ‘a poet did this!’ A crime scene: ‘a criminal!’ It’s generic, it’s circular, it answers the question with the content of the question: ‘this is big, great, impressive, so who made it?’ ‘someone that can make things that are big, great, impressive.’ Er – that doesn’t answer.
Aren’t you conflating ‘to be’ and ‘to be what it is’ here? There is no ‘one thing’ accounting for the second of these, and having done the accounting ‘the universe’ is not a separate extra thing needing separate accounting but the name we give to the highest category – not a thing at all but the category whose common attribute is isness.
Adam Tjaavk
_____
Hrmph – they don’t have this one either at the university library or the Royal library, so I won’t be able to comment on the book itself.
I think Adam is basically right, except that there has traditionally been the basic metaphysical question: “Why is there anything at all, rather than nothing?” My feeling about this question has always been that it doesn’t really make sense, since it assumes that it makes sense to suppose that there could be nothing. When I try to get a mental hold on the situation in which nothing at all exists, it always seems to slip out of my grasp.
Be that as it may, I think OB’s post is right on. But after all, most religious people don’t pretend that “God” is a rational answer to a rational question — he (or she or it or they) is an image of a warm, comforting something or someone or other who is somehow or other basically in charge of everything, who (or which) set it up somehow or other in the first place, so we can rest easy. No need to worry about life/death — it’s all arranged for our benefit.
One can easily see how such a belief can become extremely popular, and is probably ineradicable in the human race as a whole. But it pleases some of us to treat it with intellectual contempt. That’s a pleasant feeling, too, at least for some folks.
Adam, that was what Keith Ward said – “it is the postulate of God…that can best provide an explanation for why the universe is as it is” – so I was addressing that.
“But after all, most religious people don’t pretend that “God” is a rational answer to a rational question”
No but Keith Ward does. He apparently finds his own arguments quite persuasive. I find that curious.
You, Richard Carrier, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett – even me on a good day – it’s all to no avail. They just say “But I have faith and you don’t so you can’t possibly understand!!!” and that’s the end of it.
We might have to accept that we’re all just talking to each other and they aren’t going to listen.
Well but Keith Ward doesn’t say that; he’s making arguments. He says that quite explicitly.
Anyway, I don’t particularly expect believers or faith-havers to listen, but I like raising the questions anyway.
Well, I’m listening. And some people who fit the bill of “believer” more than I have been listening to and chiming in on other threads.
The question of “why is there anything at all” is problematic for the reasons JonJ mentioned. I am not sure whether this is the only thing Ward would be departing from, though. OB’s remark that: “Theists claim the ‘God’ answer is explanatory but it isn’t because it argues backward, so it’s really just repeating the question – looky here, look at this, it’s special, so something special made it, and of course that something special=god, so there’s your explanation. No. Just pointing at an explanandum – where did this come from? – doesn’t provide its own answer.” I kinda half agree with. We lack the comparison with other worlds – we can only imagine those other worlds, more or less responsibly. But I think there’s an in-between between the ultimate question “why does anything exist at all?” and the dubious “Look at this beautiful dandelion! Where did it come from?”. I think the origin of such things as ideas, mind, beauty etc. could be part of a rational, though of course not scientific, case for Deism/Theism.
I did not find anything I recognised as an argument in Keith Ward’s book. Whenever I thought he was going to explain, he provided only the visionary language of ‘revelation’.
Likewise in this September 2006 article in The Tablet. For example: “That God should, over thousands of millions of years, by laws of incredible beauty and simplicity, bring out of the basic matter of the early universe all the complexity of galaxies, planets, living beings and intelligent moral awareness, is truly wonderful. As the letters to the Ephesians and Colossians depict it, Christ is the eternal wisdom of God through whom this unimaginably vast emergent cosmos was formed and in whom it develops, working towards what the writer calls the ‘final mystery’ of the divine will set forth in Christ, the unity of everything in the cosmos … in Christ.”
It seems to me that there are basically four possible types of answers to the question “why is the universe, as far as we can tell, governed by knowable physical laws?”
1. Because these are the only possible laws, for reasons we will one day understand.
2. Because these are the only possible laws, for reasons that are wholly natural, but too difficult for us to understand.
3. Because there are many possible laws, but we observe the ones that obtain in this universe.
4. Because a supernatural Grand Designer chose these laws, in a process beyond our understanding.
I further think that many humans, for reasons I personally do not understand, but which I can accept are a valid emotional choice, for them, find type 4 hugely attractive. I do, on the other hand, understand how this type is attractive if it is combined with further ‘revelations’ that this Grand Designer loves you, and will punish Bad People after the Bad People’s death. Or, of course, with regular paychecks for being a Professor of “Theology”.
Nicholas –
I think alternative 1) is difficult to support. Probably science’s efforts to reduce the current number of constants and natural laws will continue – but in the end, you’d either end up with something contingent or something that can be reduced further. Alternative 2) seems a bit suspicious to me as, so far, “natural” has always implied understandable. Alternative 3) seems to me to be where the atheist stops, but would be an explanandum for a theist who likes antropic reasoning. I’m not arguing that one of these is more rational than the other.
Merlijn, quantum physics is entirely natural, but something nobody really ‘understands’ beyond the mathematics. Particle/wave duality, quantum entaglement and all the rest. Wierd stuff. We don’t have a mind that can really deal with the concepts involved. (Dead/alive cats sort of trample over the concept of the Excluded Middle). Physics are continually arguing on how to interpret the damn equations. Schrodinger, Bohm or Everett, plus several more besides.
So I can accept Nicholas’s (2) as a possibility, the universal is what is it, with no God involved, but is ultimately inexplicable to our minds.
Read Heisenberg for Schrodinger in my last post. I really should go to bed.
Of course, the problem with (2), for “hard” atheist/rationalists, at least, is that it admits that the world is probably ultimately unintelligible, which lets mysticism back in. Their ideal is a human race that not only can, but does, understand the world completely.
“Softer” atheists, like me, accept that, since quantum theory, especially, the world has turned out to be basically unintelligible (unless anyone claims to understand, really understand, quantum theory). I think it’s unlikely that our scientific picture will ever move back in the more understandable direction. But OB’s original point is important: christening (sorry for the term) the source of the mysterious world we live in “God” is an empty gesture, except for those who are emotionally attached to it.
I have nothing against those whose hearts are warmed by religious language, unless they try to force me to live according to what their sacred books say (gay marriage is evil, adulterers should be stoned, women should be subordinate to men, etc.). They can believe whatever fairy tales they like, but they should keep their mitts off of the lives of those who don’t share their beliefs.