More bad arguments for the existence of God

Earlier this year I wrote a post about Rebecca Goldstein's book, "36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction," citing several arguments that religiously-minded visitors to this blog often like to use.

Each has flaws, which Goldstein points out clearly and entertainingly in an appendix to her book. They can be read here in their entirety. (Scroll down past the book excerpt.)

I'd been slowly making my way through "36 Arguments," not finding the story all that engrossing. I liked the philosophical discussions, though, so decided to jump to the climactic debate between a religious skeptic and true believer.

Then I made another jump to the appendix and read the 36 Arguments straight through. Well, not exactly.

Because I've done so much other reading on this subject, most of the arguments were both (1) very familiar to me, and (2) spectacularly unpersuasive. So I didn't spend much time on these lame attempts to demonstrate that God exists.

A few, though, grabbed my attention. These also had come up fairly frequently in Church of the Churchless comments when people challenged religious skepticism in more than a simplistic Believe! manner.

Here are the two best arguments, in my opinion. Which turn out to be pretty bad -- just better than the rest of the thirty-six. I've summarized both the argument and the flaws Goldstein finds in it.

(33) The Argument from the Unreasonableness of Reason

Our belief in reason cannot be justified by reason, since that would be circular. So this belief has to be accepted on faith. Since faith provides good rational grounds for a belief, given that even a belief in reason requires faith we are justified in believing that God exists. This allow us to live coherent moral and purposeful lives, just as a belief in reason brings similar sorts of benefits.

Flaws. The attempt to justify reason with reason is not circular, but, rather, unnecessary. One already is, and always will be, committed to reason by the very process one is already engaged in -- namely, reasoning. Reason is non-negotiable; all sides concede it. It needs no justification, because it is justification. A belief in God is not like that at all.

Also, if the unreasonability of reason was taken as a license to believe things on faith, then which things should one believe in? A single God who gave his son for our sins? Zeus and all the other Greek gods? The three major gods of Hinduism? Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy?

If one says that there are good reasons to accept some entities on faith, while rejecting others, then one is saying that it is ultimately reason, not faith, that must be invoked to justify a belief.

(35) The Argument from the Intelligibility of the Universe (Spinoza's God)

All facts must have explanations. So the fact that the universe exists, this universe, with just these laws of nature, has an explanation. In principle, then, there must be a Theory of Everything that explains why this universe, with these laws of nature, exists. The only way the Theory could provide this explanation is by being true. So the universe would be shown to exist necessarily and explain itself -- which is a definition of "God." Thus the universe is God, and God exists.

Flaws. It is not at all clear that it is God whose existence is being proved. Spinoza's God, which is identical with the universe, is sharply at variance with all other divine conceptions.

Further, the premise "all facts must have explanations" cannot be proved. Our world could conceivably be one in which randomness and contingency have free rein, no matter what the intuitions of some scientists are. Maybe some things just are ("stuff happens"), including the fundamental laws of nature.

Spinoza's argument, if sound, invalidates all the other arguments, the ones that try to establish the existence of a more traditional God -- that is, a God who stands distinct from the world described by the laws of nature, as well as distinct from the world of human meaning.

The mere coherence of The Argument from the Intelligibility of the Universe, therefore, is sufficient to reveal the invalidity of the other theistic arguments. This is why Spinoza, although he offered a proof of what he called "God," is often regarded as the most effective of all atheists.

[Note to above: Naturally I was thrilled to come across the phrase "stuff happens" in such a thoughtful book just a few days after I wrote my "Stuff happens -- meaning of life in two words" post. Clearly this is a message from God...Spinoza's God, a.k.a. reality.]

Comments

[Spencer Tepper]

The idea of proving with reason or logic that God exists is a logical impossibility. A true believer in God understands how limited human reason is, how it depends upon common definitions, common experiences, and agreed premises. All these are entirely tied down to limited experience, very limited knowledge, entirely bound up in history and cultural constraints.

How un-reasonable was the notion that all matter is mostly empty space! How unfounded! How easily disproven!

But only when in a lab Niels Bohr saw that electron rays mostly passed straight through a thin sheet of foil, he realized that foil could not be mostly matter at all, but empty space. Without that experience, and the flash of insight to connect the dots, Bohr would never have been set on the path to discovering neutrons, electrons and protons, nor their general placement.

Logic and reason follow truth, but they can readily follow belief, and be twisted in any direction in which you choose to gather the most facts.

Logic is just a whore, ready to bend into any position you like for a fee.

[Spencer Tepper]

RE: Randomness:

In the common dialogue, we talk of randomness as being truly random - unpredictable events. And this gets stretched innocently to mean events that have no actual cause. But that stretch is rhetorical. All science disproves it.

In science "random" is a term used to describe the interplay of forces we cannot yet measure, but which effects the things we can measure. It is noise in the system from variables we don't yet know about.

That noise is in a general sense predictable and we can statistically control for its effects in our experiments.

To state therefore that such forces don't actually exist and that "random" means these events arise without any cause, is, to be polite, unscientific and without any empirical support.

When the term is used outside its actual scientific meaning, it becomes voodoo for magic - things happening without independent causal forces.

That is a misrepresentation of the mathematical, statistical and scientific meaning of the term.

All scientific evidence demonstrates that everything has a cause - or more precisely, that any observable event is a dependent variable, dependent upon other relatively independent variables that have had an effect on it. Not all independent variables are known and not always detectable, but what our instruments can detect supports this basic principle.

Indeed, all science is based on the presumption of causal factors, primary elements and forces which lead to the events and world we see.

Yet, science also resigns where it cannot go in detection by withdrawing into the theory of random numbers. Yet even that theory demonstrates the predictability of a myriad of forces that have not yet been discovered.

The theory of catastrophe is all about this: events that we thought were not predictable actually are created by the tipping point of subtle forces that have not yet been measured. Even in catastrophes there are preceding events.

So the universe is "random" only in a mathematical sense and only relative to our position of not knowing or measuring all independent variables. The word "random" does not mean "WITHOUT CAUSE" only, without known or understood or measured causes.

But random theory helps us account for the noise in our data - the effects on the heavens and on earth which we can't actually see or measure or yet understand.

To say that "random" means those forces don't exist actually violates the principle of random numbers theory, which is a means to account for those very forces. If they didn't exist, there would be no scientific way to control for them in experiments.

But we can help to account for the forces we can't measure by allowing some acceptable level of randomness in the outcomes that we can measure. Call it "noise": variance.

Once science can measure it , it then filters that out, or understands it better.

But to suggest "things happen" without cause is neither science nor reason.