We’re responding to an imaginary dialogue that explores Soft Theism, which is basically Christianity without the baggage. Can jettisoning Christianity’s crazy bits make it acceptable? Read part 1 here.

This is post 6 in this series, and up next are God’s hiddenness and our drive toward reason and compassion.

God’s hiddenness and free will

Atheist: Well, let me ask you this—Why . . . would a loving God withhold knowledge of His existence from really sincere seekers . . . such as myself . . . who still see . . . no convincing evidence for God?

Cross Examined Blog: And a related question: is there a downside for misunderstanding or being unaware of God in Soft Theism? In Christianity, your destiny in heaven or hell are in the balance, but what does your God think? Said another way, what is the upside for correctly understanding him?

Soft Theist: Yeah, great question. I don’t know. I don’t know. Maybe because . . . proof of God would compel us to be moral, instead of allowing free will to reign . . . as the intended norm.

This is the Problem of God’s Hiddenness, which I think is the single biggest argument against Christianity.

I don’t think free will is relevant. We don’t impose on anyone when we make our existence known. It can’t be any different with God since Christians tell us that he has made his existence known to billions of Christians over the last 2000 years. Jesus made his existence known to his apostles, and that didn’t step on anyone’s free will. God showed his power in public in a test conducted by Elijah. I think this free will argument is a desperate attempt by Christians to explain away God’s apparent indifference to humanity.

And God is no champion of free will when he stands by when robbers, rapists, and murderers impose on their victims’ free will.

I’ve written more on the hiddenness problem here, here, here, and here.

But don’t you think that if God exists, He would communicate with us in some way?

Yeah, yeah, yes. But not necessarily through any physical mechanism that we can detect.

Why the secrecy? And ask yourself which is likelier: God leaves vague, ambiguous bread crumbs about his existence, or God doesn’t exist and your God belief is just wishful thinking.

Clues from God in everyday life

I find . . . the two most valuable concepts in life, are Reason and Compassion, and so . . . I choose to interpret Reason and Compassion, as God’s way of communicating with us.

I mentioned earlier the question of humans vs. the highest life forms from the rest of the universe. Let’s have a little humility—we may not be that special. Reason and compassion are important, and we celebrate sages throughout history who refined these and other traits. But these are due to evolution. We’re Douglas Adams’ puddle again and think that, because the best human traits are important to us, they must be important in an objective sense or from a cosmic perspective.

Here’s another way to see that. Make a list of humanity’s most impressive technology achievements—landing on the moon, telecommunication, internet, transportation, war technology (radar, fighter jets, nuclear weapons), energy infrastructure, and so on. Now add in something that we can’t do today. Make it something that seems eventually doable—maybe a cloak of invisibility or eliminating the common cold. Take this list back to Europe 200 years ago and see if they can find the misplaced entry. I’m sure each technology would sound remarkable, and many would be unbelievable.

I give this example to illustrate how provincial our thinking can be. Imagine an alien civilization who achieved a similar burst of innovation in a similar amount of time, ten thousand years ago. Or a billion years ago. What stage of development might they be at now? What might they think of your “The two most valuable concepts in life are Reason and Compassion”?

Whatever reason tells us to do, whatever compassion tells us to do, that’s . . . what God wants of us. So God, DOES reach in to communicate with us, in that way, but not, in any tangible way.

What reason and compassion tell us to do is evolution talking. We’re a social species, and it’s not hard to see how evolution selected for traits like reason and compassion.

Next time: Theists’ rejection of other gods and the role of evidence and science.

.

Image from Manki Kim (free-use license)
.

We’re responding to an imaginary dialogue that explores Soft Theism, which is basically Christianity without the baggage. Can jettisoning Christianity’s crazy bits turn it into something plausible? Read part 1 here.

This is post 5 in this series, and up next are evolution, the Big Picture, and consciousness.

Evolution and how vs. why

Atheist: I don’t think you understand evolution. Evolution . . . is essentially a process of adaptation over time, with the most successful adapters lasting the longest. It has no need for a God at all.

Your questions, “isn’t there some force moving the whole thing forward,” “why wouldn’t the better adapted organisms simply take longer to die out,” “isn’t there some life force that makes our bodies heal,” “why should it work,” and so on, are ALL answered through a cursory study of chemistry, biology, and evolution. You would find very definitive and evidence-based answers if you looked . . . but you’re not looking, because you have what you think is an easy catch-all “answer” that has fooled you into thinking you know.

This is how religion kills the search for truth. “God of the Gaps” thinking. Like the ancient Greeks. What causes lightning? Zeus, the god of lightning . . . no more investigation required. You’re doing the exact same thing when you ask all those questions . . . without checking for the scientific answers, which exist, and are supported by real-world evidence.

Cross Examined Blog: I’ll add another difficulty with “God did it” as an explanation: it’s unfalsifiable. Wherever the atheist questions—the goodness of God, say, or whether the afterlife makes sense—the theist can always say that we humans can’t judge God. God could have his unfathomable reasons.

An unfalsifiable hypothesis is useless since no evidence can ever prove it wrong.

Soft Deist: Aaaagh! NO, I’m not! You’re attacking a straw man. I believe firmly in the value of science. You’re completely missing my point! Science explains . . . HOW things work, not WHY they should work . . . That is a subtle but critical distinction that I find you atheists NEVER get. Science explains HOW things work, not WHY they should work.

How vs. why doesn’t seem to be a helpful distinction. Why are humans similar to chimpanzees and gorillas but unlike sparrows and bananas? Evolution answers that. Why do the South America and Africa look like jigsaw puzzle pieces, and what’s the deal with volcanoes and earthquakes? Plate tectonics answers that. Why do we get sick from other people? Germ theory answers that.

But I guess you’re asking the meta question: yes, evolution does work, but that wasn’t guaranteed in our reality, so what makes it work?

I’m still not seeing that there’s an interesting question here. Are you sure you’re not inventing a problem? You’ll have a much stronger case if you show that your stumbling block appears in textbooks on evolution. I think the opposite is the case: if you spelled out your concern at a biology conference, they’d say, “Huh?”

While you say you embrace science, the problem raised by your imaginary atheist antagonist remains: “God did it” doesn’t answer the question. Instead, it shuts down the discussion. Slapping the God answer on any particular question at the frontier of science is not to embrace science, it’s to say, “Nothing to see here, people. You science-y guys can go home now. God did it.” In practice, though, it just replaces one mystery, like “Why did the Big Bang go bang?” with a bunch of other questions about who this dude is and how he came to be and so on.

Looking at the big picture

I am not asking how does nature work, but why does nature AS A WHOLE work. I am not asking what’s the physics behind something (which would be . . . science), but what’s behind . . . physics itself (which would be philosophy, or metaphysics).

I once heard a description of Philosophy that makes sense to me. Imagine Socrates and his students trying to find order in reality. To them, it’s like a swamp, without structure. But as they explore, they find elements that can be grouped together. Gradually, fields form—arithmetic, geometry, medicine, physics, engineering, and so on. And as they do, they’ve become independent fields and are no longer Philosophy.

Physics used to be philosophy, but it’s not anymore. Philosophers have no claim to physics; physicists do.

Christian apologists often hide behind philosophical claims as if, “Ah, but that’s Philosophy!” shields an idea from criticism. I’ve written more on the misuse of Philosophy here.

To you, saying God did it, is unsatisfying. To me, establishing “how nature works,” is great, but, not enough. Evolution doesn’t explain how consciousness can arise from molecules.

That’s exactly what it explains!

Yeah, the incremental steps, the elements, the forces involved, but not WHY THE WHOLE THING WORKS.

This is too vague and hand-wavy. You need to show that there’s a question needing answering. Scientists will agree that they have profound questions that are unanswered. But keep in mind that the people who identified the questions are those very same scientists. Show that your concern would pique a biologist’s interest.

Where did healing come from?

Why are our bodies capable of healing? You would say, well, because of the following measurable, physical causes. And I would say, well yeah, right, of course, and it’s great that we have learned these things, but, why should these elements and forces do what they do? Isn’t it reasonable to posit an ultimate, overall force that created the laws of nature, that causes plants and animals to grow, that causes our hearts to beat for a lifetime, that causes our bodies to heal, that makes evolution progress, that makes intelligence emerge?

I’m sure the relevant scientists would say no. Again, you must show that there’s a gap in our thinking for your God hypothesis to answer.

This reminds me of Julia Sweeney’s “Letting Go of God” monologue that related her long spiritual journey away from Catholicism and then Christianity and then spirituality in general. She remembered realizing that there was no God, and he had no role in her life. “I could just see him sitting on his suitcases near the front door of my house.” She imagined telling him to stay for a while if he needed; there was no hurry. “And slowly, over the course of several weeks, he disappeared.”

Does an actual God have any role in evolution? Or has science explained enough so that God has picked up his suitcases and left?

You ask if it’s reasonable to posit an ultimate force that created the laws of nature. No, it’s not! The supernatural has never explained anything. Every reliable explanation has been naturalistic. I’m sure many will share your angst about something not quite right, something incomplete at the frontier of science. But I’m not one of them.

You’ve heard of Douglas Adam’s puddle? It marveled at how nicely its hole fit it. The mistake, of course, was imagining that the hole was adapted to fit the puddle when in fact the puddle had adapted to fit the hole. We must avoid making the puddle’s mistake.

We have different mindsets. For you, God explains nothing, because you have a scientific mindset. For me, science does not explain enough, because I have a philosophical mindset.

Again, make sure your philosophy is telling you something valid. Philosophy has birthed many disciplines, but they now carry the baton, not philosophy.

Where did consciousness come from?

You say you can’t figure out where consciousness comes from. How about this as an alternate hypothesis: Consciousness is the result of higher biological brain function. There is much scientific evidence for this.

Well, yeah, of course that’s so. Consciousness is the result of higher biological brain function, but, it’s not really . . . where it comes from. I don’t know how else to explain it, but it only makes sense to me that consciousness needs a source for its existence, besides the consciousness-less molecules, from which it emerged.

And again, I accept science completely as to HOW things came to be—astrophysics, paleontology, genetics, all of that. I’m not ignoring them; I’m claiming they are, ultimately, an INADEQUATE explanation for their OWN existence, for WHY all those laws of nature should be as they are . . . and result in intelligence.

You’re, in effect, saying God cannot exist because he violates the laws of physics. And I’m saying a God who is not beyond the laws of physics is a caricature of the concept of God. If you define God like that, in such limited terms, then of course, there is no God.

All right, avoid the limited definition of God and define him more grandly; why think that that God exists?

My response to the question of consciousness is that it is an emergent phenomenon. I see you raise that topic later, so I’ll hold off.

Next time: God’s hiddenness and our drive toward reason and compassion.

.

Image from Igordoon Primus (free-use license)
.

We’re responding to an imaginary dialogue that explores Soft Theism, which is basically Christianity without the baggage. Can jettisoning Christianity’s crazy bits turn it into something plausible? Read part 1 here.

Today’s topics: evolution and human consciousness.

Richard Dawkins

Atheist: What do you think of Richard Dawkins?

Soft Deist: Oh, I like Dawkins. I like Dawkins. I agree with him that belief systems that encourage submission, instead of curiosity and rational thought, are dangerous . . . and often lethally dangerous. I . . . agree with him that traditional “faith” . . . is NOT a virtue. And, that rigid indoctrination of children is a form of child abuse.

So where are you on the faith question? Do you insist on every conclusion being reliably supported by evidence? Why not just say that we can’t answer some of the big questions and leave it at that? You seem to have a restlessness to answer the God question right now.

God’s meddling in evolution?

But . . . I disagree with him on the existence of God. Yes, evolution IS . . . how we got here, but it seems to me that without God, evolution wouldn’t work. Instead of life progressing, from amoeba to man, the better adapted organisms would just . . . take longer to die out. I feel some general force has to be pushing the whole thing forward. I can’t think, “Well, that’s nature . . . things grow, evolution happens.”

I’m unclear about where the problem is. You accept evolution, so what is left for God to do? If you read a textbook on evolution, you’ll find no gaps for God to live in. The natural explanation is sufficient, and God is left with nothing to do.

It’s not that well-adapted organisms take longer to die out but that environments are always changing, and evolution makes life forms change as well. Those individuals that are a little bit fitter (that is, that fit better into their environmental niche) are likelier to create offspring.

The problem of religion

Well, let’s get into evolution in a minute. But . . . I think . . . what you don’t seem to recognize is that any belief in any god supports and encourages extremists.

Mr. Atheist: I see where you’re going, but I think a more defensible concern would be: belief in god (that is, belief poorly supported by evidence) encourages belief in other things poorly supported by evidence such as quack cures, financial scams, QAnon conspiracy theories, and so on. Belief in God might manifest as nothing more dangerous than gathering with nice people on Sunday, but lowering your guard for other nutty claims could be a far greater harm. A credulous, non-empirical Christian approach to society is like using the internet without a firewall.

Oh, I think that’s an overstatement . . . A volcano God who demands human sacrifice does not mean that therefore ANY concept of God is pernicious. I DO agree with Dawkins that traditional religious belief systems need to be scrapped, because they DO contain pernicious ideas that extremist people latch onto.

And . . . of course, I’m claiming . . . Soft Theism contains none of the bad ideas.

Right—this seems central to your belief. You want to have some of the features of Christianity but jettison the crazy, unsupportable baggage. Which came first for you? Did you start as a Christian and shave away beliefs that were indefensible or repugnant? Or did you start as an atheist and wonder, isn’t there more than just what I can see?

And are your views best labelled Soft Theism or Soft Deism? Your view of evolution senses that it’s guided by a deity, and that would indeed be theism. On the other hand, an argument like the First Cause (which you favor further on) doesn’t argue for a god who’s involved with human society but rather a clockmaker who wound up the universe and walked away.

Can evolution explain human intelligence?

I can’t be satisfied to think the universe created itself and somehow intelligence eventually just emerged. Dawkins would say, we don’t know the origins of the universe at this point; it’s lazy to conclude . . . therefore, God. But, I am not at all saying we should not explore the universe further, and further. I’m saying we should be able to foresee logically that there will be no end, that explanations will be infinite.

Who says that the universe created itself? I don’t think this is the consensus view within cosmology. What seems like a leading contender to me is that it was uncaused and uncreated.

You act as if human intelligence is a big deal that is so remarkable that it needs a special explanation, but is it? Sure, from our standpoint, it’s essential to who we are, and we can flatter ourselves to think that it’s pretty special from a cosmic standpoint. But who knows what other things brains might evolve to do in another ten million years?

For a comparison, think of a lizard. It’s conscious, but it would never grasp the idea of humor. Not only will it never get a joke, we could never even convey the idea of humor. Now imagine a mental gap of the same magnitude between us and some supersmart alien race. Just as we could never explain humor (or morality or math) to a lizard, the alien race not only couldn’t teach us their unique mental gifts, they couldn’t even show us that they exist. Our brains would be unable to understand. All we could conclude is that these aliens have mastered some mental domain. They’re far beyond our capacity in the things like science that we do understand, they say this mystery domain is very important, and that’s as much as we will ever understand.

This isn’t to say that these supersmart aliens exist. I’m simply illustrating how petty our human capabilities might be in a universe with 10²² planets. Humility, please.

Where does it end?

Let’s say, someday, string theory is understood and accepted as a good explanation for the universe. THEN, you have to ask, “but what is the explanation for string theory?” It never ends. Science never ends. So, I think it IS logical to posit God, as an ultimate causeless force behind everything.

You’re wrestling with the series of causes. Going back in time, it has to end somewhere, right? Okay—that’s a noble quest. But I don’t see how you’re not stuck with the same problem with God. Sure, you can give him whatever properties you want—uncreated, eternal, whatever—but that doesn’t mean he exists.

Or perhaps you’re approaching this from the other direction. You’re not starting with “God” and giving him properties but rather using logic to point to properties. But as we’ve seen with quantum physics, which is both completely illogical and experimentally verified, we must remember that our common sense isn’t much help at the frontier of science.

Well, to me, your concept of God is awfully vague, and with no evidence.

Yeah, vague, and with no hard evidence, true. But remember, I don’t believe in God as a fact, but as the most reasonable . . . hypothesis.

I appreciate your honesty on the evidence issue.

Next time: Evolution, the Big Picture, and consciousness.

.

Image from Karly Gomez (free-use license)
.

We’re responding to an imaginary dialogue that explores Soft Theism, which is basically Christianity without the baggage. Can jettisoning Christianity’s crazy bits turn it into something plausible? Read part 1 here.

We continue with two questions about the atheist mindset, objective meaning for our lives and spirituality.

Meaning in Our Lives

Atheist: Why would the existence of a God give your life any more meaning than it would without God? I have no problem finding my own meaning in life.

Soft Deist: Yeah, I know . . . the atheist approach is to make your own meaning. That’s one of the big tenets of existentialism—there is no set meaning to life, humans make their own meaning.

Cross Examined Blog: I think the human approach is to make our own meaning, not just the atheist approach. Just because theists point to the supernatural and imagine objective meaning and purpose, that doesn’t mean it exists.

And . . . I know that the atheist attitude is that because life is temporary, it is thereby MORE meaningful, more precious. But I . . . just don’t see it that way. I think if life is temporary, then it’s just not as . . . objectively meaningful.

How valuable would gold be if it were as common as clay? How excited would you be for the weekend after you’d already experienced a trillion of them?

That’s not to say that I’ve proven that one lifetime’s worth of days is more valuable than countless days in heaven. But when the number of new days you’ll get is both limited and unknown, the value of any one day on earth must be much more than that in heaven.

And even if you’re right and forever in heaven with a God-defined purpose is better than threescore years and ten here on earth (as the King James Version phrases it), that does nothing to argue that it’s anything more than mythology. The days on earth are the only ones we know for sure we’ll get.

William Lane Craig—he’s a Christian philosopher—says the universe doesn’t acquire meaning because a person gives it one. Without God, meaning in the universe remains a matter of subjective opinion; a universe without God is objectively meaningless.

“Meaning” for humans is defined by humans. As for objective meaning (presumably this means meaning grounded outside humans, which would exist whether humans did or not), Craig needs to show that such a thing exists. The ordinary kind as defined in the dictionary exists and works well.

Well, that just it. The universe does NOT have an objective meaning or purpose. There are only subjective meanings that we ourselves create in our lives.

I think . . . the very fact that we CAN find meaning in our lives, indicates that there is some ultimate source for that meaning. To my way of thinking, partial meaning cannot exist, without ultimate meaning, without a source . . . like a branch cannot exist by itself, but, must have come from . . . a tree, a source. That’s not so much an argument, but an analogy of how I think of it.

This sounds like C.S. Lewis’s Argument from Desire: we feel hunger, so there must be food. We feel thirst, so there must be drink. And we yearn for ultimate meaning, so it must exist, too. I reject that argument here.

How would a world with objective meaning or purpose look different from one with the ordinary kind, the kind defined in the dictionary? Once we have an unbiased distinction that theists and atheists can agree on, we can move on to figuring out which world is ours.

(I also question objective meaning here and here.)

Reification

Dan Barker [from the Freedom From Religion Foundation] says that the mistake theists make is “reification”—you treat ideas as though they are something real, something objectively out there, when they are just . . . ideas.

Well, that’s the thing; I think ideas ARE real; it’s just that they are  . . . not physical “things” . . . I’ll give you an example of what I mean: Say, a good friend of yours, is killed by a giant boulder. Which is the greater reality, the boulder, or your friendship? Surely, the boulder is the greater reality; it killed your friend. Surely, your friendship is the greater reality; it meant a great deal to you, whereas the boulder is just an inanimate object. So . . . how does one reconcile these two powerful realities? I do it by perceiving the world dualistically. I see life as a constant interplay between both these realities, the physical and the spiritual.

Where is the spiritual in this example, and what’s there to reconcile? We have good days and bad days. Stuff happens.

Let me compare the boulder killing the person with a nature TV show with a fox chasing a rabbit. Our allegiance is probably for the rabbit, and we don’t want to see it killed. But maybe the fox has pups back home, and they’ll die if they’re not fed. Also, the fox is keeping the rabbit population under control to avoid overgrazing. We may want the rabbit to live and the pups to eat, but it’s a zero-sum game in reality. And, if we don’t like seeing the rabbit eaten, we must remember that, unless we’re vegetarians, we’re part of the problem.

Seeing a physical/spiritual duality doesn’t explain anything with the fox vs. rabbit contest, and it doesn’t explain anything with the boulder vs. the friend.

Spirituality

Now, I am not a dualist in the sense that there is some magical spirit world that frequently breaches the laws of nature. But, I am a dualist in the sense that, in addition to the physical world, there is a spiritual world that emerges from it—experiences, of love, beauty, deep emotion. All these admittedly fuzzy and abstract things, I think DO exist. They resist scientific verification, but they are real, and absolutely critical to our identity as human beings.

You think my mistake is reification, regarding these things as real. I think your mistake is reductionism, experiencing these things yourself as real, yet claiming they are not really real, because they are not physical.

So the spiritual world is just the emotional component of the natural world? There’s no supernatural involved? I can accept that, but you imagine the supernatural exists since you imagine God. You might want to clarify.

Obviously I agree that love, emotion, and the experience of beauty exist. Some things are physical (rock, car, sun), and some are abstract (love, frustration, courage). I don’t see the difficulty they pose for science.

Yes, there is more to learn about them. If you’re saying that science will forever be stuck analyzing human experience at the chemical or hormonal level, that sounds unlikely. Physics and chemistry are indeed low level—not usually the most productive place to discuss love or beauty—but physiology, psychology, artificial intelligence, and other disciplines are bridging that gap.

A focus on the lower level may be inappropriate or unhelpful, depending on what you’re thinking about, but that doesn’t make it invalid. Here’s an example that bridges that low-to-high gap. Suppose you saw 123 on a calculator display. You know that those digits are just representations. Sure, it might look like 123, but this is just electrons turning bits of liquid crystal dark or light. Are physics and semiconductors of any use when the topic is a cerebral math problem? Obviously, the answer is yes.

Where did logic come from?

But ideas are not things in and of themselves. For example, logic is not a thing. If all life died out, then there would be no logic.

Not quite. There’s a difference between logic and the laws of logic. An example from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance illustrates this. Before Isaac Newton, there was no Newton’s Law of Gravity, but of course there was still gravity, and it was still true that F = Gm₁m₂/r² (the formula that Newton discovered). The thing and the laws describing the thing are different.

Oh, I disagree. I think if a new form of intelligent life arose, that life form would find itself operating in a cosmos with the very same logic that was there before. I don’t think we create logic. We discover it. We activate what was already an inherent, existing, part of the cosmos.

But that brings its own conundrums. In our world, 2 + 2 = 4, and something can’t be a potato and not-a-potato at the same time (the law of excluded middle, one of logic’s three traditional laws). Is God constrained by these axioms? If he is, then we get these axioms from a greater reality than God. It’s reality that teaches us that 2 + 2 = 4, not God.

Or, if God is not constrained by these axioms, then God created the rules of addition and the laws of logic. But now they could be anything. God could’ve made 2 + 2 = 9 and created different laws of logic.

My assumption is the former, that God is constrained by an external reality. But if you say that the buck stops with God, then show us how God could’ve made 2 + 2 = 9 and could’ve made a thing that’s a potato and not-a-potato at the same time.

(You may be familiar with the morality version of this argument, the Euthyphro dilemma.)

Next time: Evolution and human intelligence

See also:

• Christianity Can’t be Deduced from Nature
• The Argument from Mathematics Doesn’t Add Up to God
• A Dozen Responses to the Transcendental Argument for God
• Do Atheists Borrow From the Christian Worldview? A Parable.

.

Image from daily sunny (license CC BY 2.0)
.

We’re responding to a dialogue between an imaginary atheist and Miklos Jako, who advances a spiritual worldview he calls Soft Theism. It’s basically Christianity without the baggage (God’s Old Testament rampages, the Trinity, Creationism, and so on). Can jettisoning Christianity’s crazy bits turn it into something plausible? Read part 1 here.

This is a fresh approach compared to the countless posts I’ve written responding to conservative Christians. I think it’s worth a look.

We continue with two more questions that wrap up what Jako calls atheism’s weaker arguments. They are: Who made God? and Why not multiple Gods?

(A note on format: The many ellipses in the green and blue dialogue indicate pauses, not omitted text, and are part of the original script.)

Who Made God?

Atheist: You can’t assert that everything must have a cause and then arbitrarily claim that God does not need a cause. You’re destroying your own argument before it even gets off the ground . . . That’s special pleading.

Soft Deist: Yeah, it IS special pleading . . . legitimate special pleading, because God, if He exists, is the special case, the logically necessary uncaused First Cause. Besides, you’re doing exactly the same thing . . . under Occam’s Razor, YOU are special pleading for the universe, as a major . . . uncaused effect.

Cross Examined Blog: “Logically necessary”? “First Cause”? We may want to avoid relying on 13^th-century theologian and philosopher Thomas Aquinas to answer our tough cosmological questions when he didn’t even know the earth went around the sun.

The universe might have come from a quantum mechanical event, and those don’t always need causes.

If common sense were enough to figure out science, Aristotle would’ve been able to do it 2300 years ago, but common sense is not sufficient. If you say that something doesn’t make sense to you, I believe you, but that’s no guide to resolving science’s open questions.

But, if you’re going to grant . . . self-causation, why not just grant it to the universe instead of postulating an extra entity?

Because . . . the universe is physical, and physical entities need a cause. Whereas a non-physical entity, like God . . . admittedly a hypothesis . . . would not need a cause.

But some physical entities don’t need causes. The positron and neutrino emitted from a decaying nucleus did not exist (as a positron and neutrino, that is) in the nucleus beforehand. We can express the probability that any such nucleus will decay in a certain amount of time, but we can’t point to a cause.

Maybe you’re making a category level error. If everything IN the universe needs a cause, that doesn’t necessarily mean the universe itself needs a cause.

(It sounds like he’s referring to the fallacy of composition. An example: a car causes less pollution than a bus, so cars must be less of a pollution problem than buses. Or: tires are made of rubber, and since cars use tires, they must also be made of rubber.)

Yeah, right, maybe not, who knows? But, it seems far more likely to me that some ultimate, non-physical power caused the Big Bang than . . . nothing caused it . . . that . . . it just happened.

Okay, I can accept that—a Creator seems more likely to you. But this is just the results of your musing. Why think you can resolve this question?

Let’s consider other open questions. The Millennium Prize problems are six open mathematical problems, each with a million-dollar prize. (There were originally seven, but one has been solved.) Why not tackle some of these? If you’re not a professional mathematician and must dismiss them as impossibly difficult, why think you have a chance figuring out the grandest question, as someone who isn’t a professional cosmologist?

Here’s a more humble stance: “Personally, I like the idea of a Creator. But Science doesn’t know, and Religion (having reliably answered zero questions) certainly doesn’t know, so ‘We don’t know’ is the best answer. I’ll have to content myself with that.” What do you think?

(More on “But who created God?” here and “Why is there something rather than nothing?” here.)

Why Not Multiple Gods?

We . . . observe . . . that complex things are designed usually by teams. Why not posit multiple gods?

Because then none of them would be the ultimate power. You can’t logically have more than one ultimate power.

Assuming the supernatural, which still needs evidence, you could have a pantheon of gods, each contributing their unique superpowers. Why isn’t that as good as one ultimate power? Using the Greek Olympians as an example, Zeus may have been the king of the gods, but was he the one ultimate power? He wasn’t for the sun (Apollo took care of that) or the ocean (Poseidon), or the underworld (Hades), and so on.

And if smart and powerful aliens in the universe somewhere could be the “ultimate power,” now we’re in the realm of science fiction. It’s possible one being is far above the rest, or one civilization, but maybe “ultimate power” is ambiguous. How would you decide whether civilization A’s destructive power counts for more than B’s transportation and colonization power and C’s refined wisdom and peace?

(Speculating about aliens may not be relevant to your thinking because you could ask where they came from.)

. . . Hah, you’re implying that belief in multiple gods is superstitious nonsense, but belief in one God . . . makes sense?

Hah, yeah, yeah. I think historically humans have progressed from polytheism to monotheism, as a more mature concept of God . . . I find that you atheists tend to have a very undeveloped, I’ll say . . . adolescent . . . concept of God. You think of God as this . . . anthropomorphic comic book character, instead of . . . an ineffable source of reality.

Huh? What does “mature” mean here, and how is monotheism more mature? And why is “mature” a good thing? We see plenty of evolution of religion (yet more evidence that religion is untethered to reality and adapts to society’s changing needs), but that’s what you’d expect from a manmade religion. Religion is a response to human needs, but that’s no evidence that it’s a reflection of an actual supernatural. And is the Christian Trinity monotheistic as claimed? I realize that Christians are desperate to say so (perhaps this is where you’re getting the maturity idea), but skeptical outsiders like Muslims say it’s not.

“Evolution” is a continual process of change, but “mature” suggests an end. Once something is mature, don’t you stop evolving? Judaism evolved into Christianity, which has continued to evolve. Was Islam a maturation of Christianity or just more evolution? Mormonism was another refinement of Christianity, and there were many more splinter groups substantial enough to be called religions rather than denominations of Christianity.

You’re doing it yourself with your own post-Christianity soft theism. I assume you’re trying to leave behind its weaknesses and make it more defensible. Is your spiritual worldview more mature than Christianity, and how do you know?

When you read the Bible, we find that Yahweh is indeed, as you say, an anthropomorphic comic book character. Atheists usually have a literal take on the Bible, but that doesn’t make it an adolescent one. Forcing Christians to back up the claims in their holy book isn’t adolescent; atheists are simply unwilling to give Christianity a pass. If Christians don’t like frank critiques of the Garden of Eden, the flood, God’s support of slavery, and other absurd Iron Age stories, they should rethink what’s in their holy book.

Up next: How atheists think: objective meaning and reification

.

Image from Vincent Lau (license CC BY-SA 2.0)
.

I came across an interesting comment at the blog recently. Miklos Jako sent a link to his video, “DEFENDING SOFT THEISM against ATHEISTS.” He’s arguing for what he calls Soft Theism, and he made his case through an imaginary discussion between him and an atheist.

Most of my posts explore a new idea or respond to an argument made by a conservative Christian. This video is something new, an interpretation of God without the baggage of any religion. Take Christianity and pare away the Bible, a couple of dozen ecumenical councils, church tradition, a long history of political meddling, and fear of science, and what’s left? Jako calls this Soft Theism. You know all those Nones who aren’t atheists? This is one of them.

The video is over an hour long, but Jako send me the script. I’ll print his conversation and include my reactions.

What am I going to say if I’m not responding to the typical narrow-minded fundamentalist? It turns out, quite a lot. I think you’ll find it interesting.

The first category of topics is what he calls “Weaker atheist arguments.”

We live on a speck of dust

Atheist: I think, it is a childish conceit, to think the world revolves around . . . us. Our planet . . . is just a speck of dust in a vast, VAST universe.

Soft Deist: I don’t think it’s childish. We’re the only planet we know of, that has intelligence on it. I think . . . objectively . . . that’s pretty damn special.

(Jako’s imaginary atheist speaks in green, and Jako’s soft theist response is in blue. My comments are in black.)

Cross Examined Blog: There are an estimated 70 billion trillion (7×10²²) stars in the observable universe. Thirty years after discovering our first exoplanet, astronomers understand a bit about how common they are and estimate one planet per star, on average. That’s a lot of planets, about which we know little.

We also have a lot to learn about life. We don’t even understand life on the one planet where we know life exists. Biologists continue to be surprised at the extreme environments that life can adapt to. Let’s get excited about the earth’s specialness after we’ve shown that it’s special. (More here and here.)

God of the gaps

Alright . . . But, to say, God is the cause of something . . . explains nothing. That’s not science. It’s lazy thinking, “God of the gaps” thinking. Like Michael Shermer says . . . God is just a . . . word, a linguistic placeholder, until science discovers the . . . real reason for why things work.

OK, I agree, that invoking God . . . for the trillions of things that happen, is a lazy, and valueless way of thinking, but, invoking God for the ORIGIN and sustenance of . . . THE WHOLE DEAL . . . makes sense to me. I don’t posit God to explain lightning, but I do posit God to explain . . . the universe.

But if you do this without evidence, then you are guilty as charged. As you note, this would be God-of-the-gaps thinking where science explains more and more and the theist responds, “Ah, yes, but you haven’t shown God doesn’t exist in these gaps in between, where science still has unanswered questions!” True, science has unanswered questions, but it’s hardly an argument for God.

It’s a bit like Creationist thinking where they demand answers to this or that attack on evolution. What those Creationists ignore is (1) they should be talking to biologists (who likely have an answer) rather than laypersons, and (2) their theory can only displace evolution once it explains the facts better than evolution.

If you want to displace naturalistic explanations, (1) you should see if cosmologists share your concern that there’s a big gap at the top of the pyramid that only a deity could fill, and (2) your supernatural explanation can’t raise more questions than it resolves.

I could accuse YOU of being intellectually lazy, because you refuse to even consider anything outside the boundaries of science. I find it more reasonable to think some power created the universe than that the universe created itself.

I’m happy to consider arguments outside science, and when religion and theology can get its own house in order, let me know. Theists across religions can’t even agree on the most fundamental questions: how many gods are there? What are their names and properties? Worse, they don’t even have a reliable mechanism for resolving these questions! They can only fall back on the non-supernatural tools of arguing, charges of heresy, threats of hell, mutual excommunication, schisms, and the occasional war.

But why posit God? Why can’t I posit . . . ANYTHING to explain the universe—a purple cube, farting fairies, the flying spaghetti monster?

I argue that the Flying Spaghetti Monster (sauce be upon him) is a valid argument against Christianity here and here.

Well, because those things are defined by limiting characteristics. They don’t represent a reasonable concept of God, which is . . . an ULTIMATE power that transcends limitations like color, shape, and so on.

A “reasonable” concept of God? How is your concept of God reasonable and any other one unreasonable? Is there any evidence for a god with any properties, let alone ultimate power? Some religions posit a supernatural with no god having ultimate power. It sounds like you’re sketching out possible properties of the ultimate being, but this is just your own contribution to the discussion. If you know the properties God must have, show that everyone would come up with the same set.

This reminds me of the flimsy “God is love” argument made by some Christians. These Christians have made God a puppet, forcing him to mouth platitudes that sound good in the 21^st century. God was a good old-fashioned fire ’n brimstone god in the Old Testament, where he supported slavery, demanded human sacrifice, and drowned the earth.

A super-smart alien could’ve created our universe without having “ultimate” (that is, infinite) power. But in that case, I imagine you’d want to go back to find out what created that guy, tracing things back to a god with infinite power (in particular, with omniscience and omnipotence). Perhaps you make a stronger case going forward, but I don’t see your justification yet. Let’s see how your argument plays out.

Next topics: Who made God? Why not multiple Gods?

.

Image from Humaidi A R (license CC BY-SA 2.0)
.