The creator of the universe is really clever
Karl Giberson is a honcho at BioLogos. BioLogos is about “Science and Faith in Dialogue,” about Science & the Sacred. Francis Collins is a scientist, Karl Giberson is a scientist. Karl Giberson explains why he has reservations about Intelligent Design.
BioLogos enthusiastically endorses the idea that the universe is intelligently designed and we certainly believe that the creator of the universe is intelligent. We consider the evidence regarding the fine-tuning of the universe to be provocative and compelling. Our reservations about ID certainly do not derive from any rejection of the rationality of the universe.
The rationality of the universe? What’s rational about the universe? It’s too big, for one thing. It’s too cold for another, too full of surprises for another, too hard to breathe in for one more. What’s so rational? And…rational according to what criteria? Ours? Obviously not. God’s? But that just begs the question.
Anyway. What I really wonder is what he means by saying “we certainly believe that the creator of the universe is intelligent.” What can any human mean by that? What do we mean by “intelligent”?
We mean “intelligent according to us,” of course. We’re human beings, saying human things, seeing things from a human perspective. “Intelligence” is something we attribute to ourselves and perhaps in small amounts to some other animals. It’s something we name as existing in some of the evolved animals in the organic top layer of this one planet. Does it seem at all likely that the same quality could exist in an entity that “designed” and “created” the universe? Not to me it doesn’t. We recognize something we call “intelligence” in entities of a certain size with a certain amount of brain tissue. The universe doesn’t seem to be the kind of thing that could be “designed” and “created” by a similar entity magnified enough times to be bigger than the universe (you have to be bigger to be outside it, because you have to be outside it before you can design and create it). It’s not enough to be bigger than Texas, or bigger than the earth, or bigger than Jupiter – bigger than the universe is a whole different order of bigger. Does it make sense to think we can make educated guesses about what kind of personal qualities – intelligence, courage, politeness – an entity of that size might have?
I don’t think it does. I think it’s just a packet of words that people mouth, without really thinking about them properly. If they actually thought about them, the oddities would slow them down. It’s very easy to say we certainly believe that the creator of the universe is intelligent, but making sense of it is another matter.
Karl “Gibberish” Giberson.
Exactly. Easy to say — partly because it doesn’t make even the tiniest bit of sense. You can say perfectly meaningless things all day long, and most people won’t object, because you haven’t contradicted them. Because you aren’t saying anything. Just flapping your gums.
Nice work, if you can get it!
Maybe “rational” is meant as a replacement for “comprehensible?” As you say, their use of words seems rather sloppy and ill-conceived.
Just trying to salvage some meaning from his ejaculatory nonsense, that’s all. No I don’t know why.
One question:
I’ve never seen anyone argue that their god is bigger in a spatial sense the way you portray it here. Are there actually people who think this? Or were you just having fun?
I get the feeling that many think their god is some sort of noncorporeal intelligence floating around in space. We have no evidence for immaterial minds – minds are tied to material brains in material bodies. We have no evidence for minds constructing material objects without directing a body to do so.
JC
Having fun, but also making a real point, in the sense that Michael indicates. Sure people mostly avoid saying “God is bigger” but that’s just what makes the claims so easy – not having to reconcile them with reality, real limitations, etc.
Isn’t Intelligent Design another stage in the long retreat of the ‘God-of-the-Gaps’ argument? Humans don’t completely understand the universe therefore some god must have created it.
My impression of Karl Giberson is that he’s like one of those clergy that Daniel Dennett and Linda LaScola wrote about. He’s really a naturalist, but he doesn’t know how to get out of the arrangement that’s giving him stature.
I’ve just been looking at his Wikipedia page. He’s really not a working scientist at all and never has been – he’s done this Science and Spirit crap from the beginning.
Speaking of not knowing how to get out of his arrangement, here’s what Giberson said in his book Saving Darwin: How to be a Christian and Believe in Evolution:
Sounds similar to Pascal’s waging: feigning belief in case of consequences. At least he has the honesty not to hide his intellectual dishonesty.
I’m sometimes pretty convinced the creator of the universe was a redneck, and laid little contradictions everywhere just to tease doo-goody wusses like Giberson.
Karl “Gibberish” Giberson:
As we all know, that’s not how it works. The only reason to believe something is that it appears to be true.
Furthermore, that is the only time that we do in fact believe something. That’s what belief is: to regard something as probably true. Giberson is not doing this. He has not decided that some thing is probably true. He has decided that it is worth saying, not believing. He does not actually believe in God. Like everyone in his social circle — especially, of course, his employers — he pretends.
God is bigger, smaller, simpler, more complex, sometimes both, sometimes neither. It depends on what is required to continue arguing that He exists.
I suspect that “drunk” is a more likely attribute for the creator of this particular universe to possess.
J.C. Samuelson: You’ve noticed a place where a great equivocation gets played out constantly.
Jerry, I was thinking of that passage – which I know of from your “Seeing is Believing” – when I wrote the post, but I didn’t take the time to look it up. It’s a tragic statement.
It’s not as simple as Roy makes out though. Belief isn’t as yes or no as that; it’s more like a continuum. It is possible just to decide to believe something. Beliefs can be more and less secure, more and less vulnerable, more and less reasonable, etc.
Consider the Gibberson quote
The day Gibberson realizes that what he really means is that he has compelling reasons to act like he believes in God is the day he’ll begin to realize why the notion is empty.
Interesting point — but Giberson doesn’t mention it, does he?
Everyone here simply has a thing that Giberson calls, for variety, ‘faith’, ‘belief’, or ‘commitment’. A few of his friends simply don’t have it; but the company he works for does!
The last statement is true, but the first is not, IMHO (that is, if I am ever humble). It is true that beliefs are more or less secure, vulnerable, reasonable, etc., but I’m not altogether sure that you can just decide to be believe something. I’ve been sitting here trying to think what that would be like, how I would go about it, and I can’t clear idea about it at all. If a person can actually decide to believe something, then it seems to me that it should be possible to force a person to believe something, and while you can force a person to say that they believe it, that doesn’t seem to be the same thing. I know that, for a time, I tried very hard to believe that I believed something, but I’m not sure that’s the same thing either. I suspect that Dan Dennett is probably right, and that many religious believers, maybe even most, believe in belief, but I don’t think that’s the same thing either.
But, Ophelia, you put your finger on it right at the beginning, when you said:
Precisely! What would it mean to say that? What would it mean to believe that? Can you just choose to believe something like that? Especially if it’s not at all clear that it has any meaning?
This really is the issue with almost every believer from the theistic evolutionist to the young-earth creationist – they cannot accept that “unintelligent” natural selection is creative. They want to ascribe to bacteria “intelligence/consciousness/purpose” when bacteria can, in response to certain environmental conditions, show an increased mutation rate or plasmid/free DNA acquisition rate. If genetic engineering by humans requires intelligence and purpose and bacteria perform genetic engineering on themselves, then bacteria must be intelligent and purposeful. They want to see agency where none exists.
But Roy, Giberson doesn’t in that passage simply say that people have a “thing.” Saying people are “deeply committed Christians” for instance is not the same as saying they have a “thing,” even one called commitment.
(It can be understood that way, certainly, but since you’re making the “thing” central I think it’s worth pointing out that he’s not literally talking about a “thing” throughout.) It’s true that he uses different words and phrases to refer to theism or Christianity or belief in god, but I don’t see how that fact contradicts what I said.
Eric – I don’t think it’s always or necessarily possible to decide to believe something. I certainly think it’s entirely possible to try to believe something and fail – that was Ma Teresa’s case, apparently, and it must be true of lots of people who “lose their faith” and so on. But I think it’s sometimes possible, for some people. I don’t think Giberson is necessarily admitting to a purely instrumental, forced, faked “belief.” He could be of course, but I don’t think that’s for sure. It’s a very revealing admission even if he’s not admitting that, but it may not be frank cynicism.
It could easily be belief in belief though – unforced belief in belief. In a way it pretty clearly is that…but it’s not clear that it’s only that.
Well maybe not, once someone has asked questions about it. For some people, questions of that kind really are the beginning of the end, or the end itself. I take that to be what the Australian guy had in mind when he told Richard Dawkins that he (the guy) was raised by religious crackpots and he could have used somebody just telling him it was bullshit. Questions can defamiliarize the taken for granted, and once that happens, for some people the way back is closed.
I’m not following you, Ophelia. You said that belief “isn’t as yes or no as that; it’s more like a continuum.” And of course this must be true. No human behavior can be perfectly simple (if it actually takes place). But I did not say (that is, did not mean to say) that belief is a yes-or-no decision. I said:
I did not intend to rule out some kind of continuum — a scale of confidence, for example. Maybe I should have written, “We believe something to the extent that it appears to us to be true. That’s what belief is. Giberson is doing something quite different from this; it does not lie anywhere on that continuum; therefore I would not call it belief.”
In Giberson’s cringeworthy confession, he does not say that his friends display a continuum of approaches to the question of God. He says simply, “Most of my friends are believers” — implying that either you are a believer or you’re not. And there is a way in which this is correct. It is logically true that “either you have it or you don’t” — because you don’t. “God created the Universe” is not a belief you can have.
Thanks for clarifying, Ophelia. And that is the very essence of faith, isn’t it? There’s no need for justification, or if there is (for the individual), it usually takes the form of those contrived, “just so” stories we’ve all heard before a thousand times.
Regarding this bit from Jerry:
I think Giberson is expressing something a lot of people in faith communities have to contend with, actually. That is, those who have doubts about their faith fear those doubts, and invariably consider the social impact of their choices. That fear – often (or maybe even usually) justified – is that their relationships with others, including loved ones, may suffer. For people like Giberson, who’ve staked their careers on belief, I’m sure it’s even more complex. No doubt many decide not to take those risks, even for the sake of truth or reality, compromising their own intellectual integrity for the sake of continued association. Thus is resolved any discomfort they may have as a consequence of cognitive dissonance.
Ophelia nailed it (sort of) with the remark about “belief in belief.” Belief has value to people like Giberson for it’s consequences rather than its content. I’m willing to bet that Dennett’s work with non-believing clergy will bear this out to some degree.
Just a few continuing thoughts…
Existential leap of faith, anyone? Though I have to say “because I’d get fired otherwise” is a pretty thin justification.
I see what you’re saying, Roy – Giberson is talking about belief – belief that X is probably true – while adducing reasons that are nothing to do with whether or not X is probably true. There’s a kind of break there.
I suppose he must be aware of that – awareness of that seems to be implicit in the admission itself. He seems to be copping to having external reasons that are really not about belief as such. Yet overall it doesn’t seem to give him any real pause – judging by that essay at BioLogos.
It’s all rather depressing. A common situation, as J.C. says, and depressing.
Well it was the same for Ma Teresa – she hid her “doubts.” Or to put it another way, she made an existential leap of faith. Or she accepted Pascal’s sleazy bet.
Yes! You said it better than I had said it! Thank you, Ophelia.
Here’s another thing I’ve been thinking about a lot.
Right — so what does it mean to attribute beliefs to people who have not even considered the question?
A pollster from Pew or Barna asks, “Do you believe in miracles?” and most Americans say, “Absolutely.” But it’s not as if they have carefully considered the issue and concluded that this is where they have to make their stand. In general, they have never thought about it. Doesn’t this sort of imply that they don’t really have an opinion? They are not reporting a thought, only obeying a norm: When someone asks whether you believe, say Yes.
It seems to me that if they’ve never thought about it — I might even say if they’ve never thought about it properly — then they don’t really have an opinion. And if that’s true, then all the estimates of how many folks “believe” are way too high. (Another of Ophelia’s points comes into play here, too: the surveys don’t bother to ask people how much belief they have, or of what flavor. They just ask, “Do you believe in God?” (And yes, the script uses a capital G.))
How many people have a sincere, serious, considered opinion that there is a deity and that it created the whole Universe? It cannot be anywhere near the 90 or so percent reported in the United States. As Daniel Dennett points out in Breaking the Spell (in the chapter called “Belief in Belief”), that 90 percent has to be an exaggeration.
What would be a more accurate figure? Dennett suggests that we can’t know. I think we do.
Theology has at this stage run far ahead of itself. So far that what we need is not prayers, but REYARPS. Reyarps are prayers in reverse. Instead of asking the (however many) gods for favours in the usual way, reyarps are there for the purpose of providing him/her/them with information.
In particular and especially, regarding the ways they have all been intelligently redesigned. It’s no use letting Jehovah, for example, believe that he is an old man in the sky with beard as white as a cumulus cloud, a la Michelangelo’s version of him on the Cistine Ceiling when modern theology has a different perspective.
I think it’s the least we can do.
http://www.bible.ca/trinity/trinity-ontology-views.htm
Roy, yes. The word “belief” covers a multitude of shades of meaning. It can be (which is not to say it should be) compatible with not having really thought about the particular item, because it can be a form of allegiance or obedience or, as you say, conformity or norm-following.
I think I talked about this in my keynote thingy at the Center for Inquiry three years ago. That was before CFI went all accommodationist and anti-atheist.
Oe more thing about Giberson’s appalling confession, quoted above by Jerry. Perhaps the best response to this is something like what Dennett says in, where is it? I think it’s in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, and also in The Four Horsemen. The point is that as soon as you attribute your faith (belief, opinion, whatever) to something other than evidence, you’ve eliminated the possibility of having an intellectual discussion on its merits.
Dennett calls it “playing the faith card”: saying, “I believe P because X,” where X any statement that is not evidence for P. In the game of Trying To Have A Meaningful Discussion, this is a disqualifying move. It actually takes you right out of the game.
In my own way of speaking, I might put it this way: once you’ve announced that you don’t have to think rationally, you don’t get to tell the rest of us that we are not thinking carefully enough.
Just evidence? Not argument, or logic?
I would make that ‘where X is any extraneous statement’ – which could just get circular if you don’t define ‘extraneous’ very carefully. You could define it as non-epistemic, perhaps (but then again perhaps fans of faith would claim that was question-begging). There are valid reasons for belief, and there are invalid ones. The ones Giberson cites are obviously invalid because they have no relation to whether the thing he believes is true or not.
Yeah, I guess ‘evidence’ is too narrow. The set of things that have a “relation to whether the thing he believes is true or not” is bigger that that. But you can’t plug in just anything. Some widgets you can plug in and they’ll tell you something; others, you can’t, so they won’t. Of the latter, “How does Jerry Coyne know, I don’t know, nobody knows, therefore God is just” is a great example. :~)
See, there you go, you’re defining ‘extraneous.’
I’m sure there are terms of art for this, but I don’t know what they are.