God of the Gaps

Julien Musolino in the soul fallacy says:

Thanks to Fox News celebrity Bill O’Reilly, the logic of god-of-the-gaps argument has become viral. During an interview with David Silverman, president of the American Atheists, O’Reilly challenged his baffled guest to explain how the tides so predictably and regularly go about their business. “You can't explain that!” O’Reilly told Silverman. But if you assume that God exists, as O’Reilly says he does, then everything makes perfect sense and you can understand how the tides work.

Some people (known as “pinheads” in the anchor's colorful jargon) informed O’Reilly that we do know how the tides work, and that we have known for more than three hundred years. Undaunted, O’Reilly posted a clip on YouTube in which he pushed the argument one step further. Fine, he concedes, the gravitational pull of the moon explains the tides. But where did the moon come from? (For an amusing parody demonstrating the existence of mail fairies using O’Reilly logic, YouTube is also an excellent resource—because you can't explain the superb regularity with which the mail gets delivered, and if you can, you sure can't explain where the mailman came from.)

The mail analogy is a very poor one - or at least it is if one is attempting to mock the notion that any type of "God" or metamind could be responsible for the predictability of tides. The "superb regularity with which the mail gets delivered" is, after all, due to conscious agents with an end in mind. So, if anything, the analogy suggests the regularity of the tides is also due to some conscious agency with an end in mind.

People might object that in the case of the tides that we know this is due to the existence of gravitational force. However, this buys into a certain conception of physical reality that it is constrained to behave as it does due to innate physical causes such as gravitational force. But this goes beyond what we can legitimately infer. Physical reality exhibits patterns, those patterns can be captured via mathematical equations. And, ultimately, that's all that physics deals with. I go into detail about this here. Indeed, physics has absolutely nothing to say about such a suitable conception of "God". I try and illustrate this here.

Granted this conception of God is not a God of the gaps one. But did Bill O’Reilly actually state that he was defending such a conception of "God"? I would imagine not. The God of the gaps is a silly one as I address here.

A ridiculous conception of God Part 2

I want here to add a little on what I said in a previous blog entry:

A ridiculous conception of God.

Let's remind ourselves of the analogy I employed there.

Let's suppose that in the future the bots in a computer game become conscious. Some bots think their world (computer game environment) is designed and a creation of some intelligence, others do not (let's call them atheists).

The atheist bots assume that should there be a creator/designer of their world, then it must be some entity within their computer game environment. That is to say, any designer must either equate effectively to some particularly coloured pixels or failing this to at least influence the environment in some way. However, since no such appropriately coloured pixels have ever been detected, and their world operates according to discernible rules (physical laws), they regard it as being highly unreasonable to believe in the existence of a designer. Certainly if there is such a designer then the onus is upon those who suppose he exists to supply some evidence for his existence.

However, many of the theist bots think that this concept of a designer is utterly ridiculous and think of a designer in a quite different sense -- namely a computer programmer who exists "outside" of their reality (game world) altogether. However, they do disagree and quarrel about the name and personality of the designer (programmer).

This computer game analogy is not necessarily analogous in all respects, at least not with a sufficiently sophisticated conception of God. Hence the analogy conveys the notion that God created the Universe but that the Universe is ontologically self-subsistent -- that is, to say, nothing keeps the Universe in existence, it has the ability to exist all by itself without the need for an external cause keeping it in existence. But instead of God causing the Big Bang then sitting back with his arms folded playing no further role, another possible hypothesis is that God sustains the existence of the Universe on a second by second basis. In this scenario the Big Bang would not constitute a special event -- it's not as if only the Big Bang required an external cause to bring it into being, and then all other events did not. This concept of God implies that physical laws, the physical constants, the behaviour of a physical primitive such as an electron, and the fact that these values do not vary over time, is due to God's ongoing activity. Physical laws on this understanding would then be an approximate codification of God's behaviour.

However, I find that atheists do not tend to have this conception of God at all. Incredibly this also applies to professional philosophers who are atheists. To give a few examples.

The philosopher John G Messerly has said:

we should remember that the burden of proof is not on the disbeliever to demonstrate there are no gods, but on believers to demonstrate that there are. Believers are not justified in affirming their belief on the basis of another’s inability to conclusively refute them, any more than a believer in invisible elephants can command my assent on the basis of my not being able to “disprove” the existence of the aforementioned elephants. If the believer can’t provide evidence for a god’s existence, then I have no reason to believe in gods.

And near the end of the same article he more flippantly asserts:

You might comfort yourself by believing that little green dogs in the sky care for you but this is just nonsense, as are any answers attached to such nonsense.

And the famous atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell has said:

nobody can prove that there is not between the Earth and Mars a china teapot revolving in an elliptical orbit, but nobody thinks this sufficiently likely to be taken into account in practice. I think the Christian God just as unlikely.

And what about the famous philosopher Antony Flew? From here:

Two people return to their long neglected garden and find, among the weeds, that a few of the old plants are surprisingly vigorous. One says to the other, ‘It must be that a gardener has been coming and doing something about these weeds.’ The other disagrees and an argument ensues. They pitch their tents and set a watch. No gardener is ever seen. The believer wonders if there is an invisible gardener, so they patrol with bloodhounds but the bloodhounds never give a cry. Yet the believer remains unconvinced, and insists that the gardener is invisible, has no scent and gives no sound. The skeptic doesn’t agree, and asks how a so-called invisible, intangible, elusive gardener differs from an imaginary gardener, or even no gardener at all.

Such a conception of God mirrors the countless references to flying spaghetti monsters, invisible unicorns and the like strewn throughout the net.

We can agree that if a creator is in any way comparable to invisible elephants, giant teapots, invisible gardeners, flying spaghetti monsters and the like, then such a creator is just as unlikely to exist as the foregoing. But, of course, it is this concept of God which is at fault. It's the concept of a God analogous to that which the atheist bots in the computer game hold; namely a concept of god that equates effectively to some particularly coloured pixels in their computer game world. A group of coloured pixels which somehow intervene with the programming of the game.

Why do seemingly the vast majority of atheists have such a ludicrous conception of God? One possible answer is that this is the only concept of "God" they have ever entertained. I imagine this might apply to a large number of atheists, but surely not to professional philosophers? The suspicion naturally arises that what we have here, at least in the case of atheist professional philosophers, is an example of the widespread practice of attacking either the weakest articulation of a position, or resorting to attacking straw men, and then concluding that the belief held has no merit. If so then this is ridiculous because it achieves nothing whatsoever apart from perhaps persuading others that the notion of any type of "God" is foolish. But one can always attack the most naive concept of x -- whatever x might stand for -- and show it to be untenable. Surely, and especially for professional philosophers, what they ought to be interested in is getting to the truth. To that end what, in fact, ought to be done is to address the strongest or most compelling articulation of a person's position on any subject and try to show that it doesn't hold up. So they ought to address the most compelling conception of "God" and attempt to show that it is reasonable to reject the existence of such a "God".

Often people defend attacking the weakest articulation of a position by pointing out that many people do in fact subscribe to such an interpretation. Hence, I have heard atheists say that this concept of God as a being existing within physical reality is the one that most theists actually subscribe to. Now that might or might not be the case, but so what? To justify calling themselves atheists they must think it is reasonable to reject any type of entity or reality which it would be reasonable to label "God". But the vast majority of atheists simply do not give any arguments attacking more sophisticated conceptions of God. Indeed often they appear to have difficulty in grasping the concept of God I articulate.

A ridiculous conception of God.

As a preliminary readers might be interested in another blog entry by myself where I make an analogy between our minds and God's mind. 

I want to employ and extend an analogy I first used here to try and dispel some of the apparent misunderstanding between atheists and, at least some, theists.

Let's suppose that in the future the bots in a computer game become conscious. Some bots think their world (computer game environment) is designed and a creation of some intelligence, others do not (let's call them atheists).

The atheist bots assume that should there be a creator/designer of their world, then it must be some entity within their computer game environment. That is to say any designer must either equate effectively to some particularly coloured pixels, or failing this to at least influence the environment in some way. However since no such coloured pixels have ever been detected, and their world operates according to discernible rules (physical laws), they regard it as being highly unreasonable to believe in the existence of a designer.  Certainly if there is such a designer then the onus is upon those who suppose he exists to supply some evidence for his existence.

However many of the theist bots think that this concept of a designer is utterly ridiculous and think of a designer in the correct sense -- namely a computer programmer who exists outside of their reality (game world) altogether.  However they do disagree and quarrel about the name and personality of the designer (programmer).

The take home message from this analogy is that we should really try to get away from the ideas that should a "God" exist then he/it is some entity which exists within reality, and that he/it intervenes with physical laws (a so-called "God of the gaps").  It is just as ludicrous for us to entertain such a conception of "God" as it is for the bots to entertain such a conception of a designer for their game world.  Moreover, for the bots, the question of whether a designer exists, is not a question which could be answered by their science.  Their science deals with the regularities of their world and therefore could only address the concept of a designer should that designer exist within their reality.  The exact same applies to us.  The question of whether there is a creator, where that creator exists outside our physical reality, is not in principle something which could be addressed by our science. It is a purely metaphysical issue.

In addition, although the disagreements between the various religions might at some level be interesting, this really doesn't have any implications for the existence of some type of "God", at least not if we construe such a "God" in the minimal sense as a creator or designer of our world.  Compare this to the scenario where the bots disagree about the name and personality of the computer programmer.  It would be absurd to maintain that this suggests that no one created their world at all!

This conception of "God" as being wholly outside of our physical reality, or that our physical reality exists "within" God, also dispenses with the  requirement that it is incumbent upon the theist to demonstrate that a creator exists. Why?  First of all we need to understand why the burden of proof is normally on those who claim that something exists.

In our observations of the world we note that the Universe appears to be described by physical laws.  It seems that these laws have universal applicability -- that is the very same laws apply throughout the Universe.   Hence we know what entities to expect and what not to expect -- thus our expectation is that stars will have planets orbiting them, and not flying teapots.  In short, if someone asserts that x exists, but x would be unexpected given our understanding of physical laws, then the burden of proof ought to be on the one making the assertion.  Note though that strictly speaking there is no distinction between positive and negative assertions. Hence we surmise there are galaxies beyond the cosmic horizon even though in principle we can never detect them. So, contrary to what people maintain, the burden of proof is not on the one asserting something exists, but rather it's on the one asserting something exists which we would not expect given our understanding of physical laws.

But clearly this does not apply to any existent which resides outside physical reality.  Either our physical reality came into existence through a conscious external agent --  some type of creator, although such a creator need not necessarily correspond to what we typically think of as "God" -- or the Universe, Multiverse or whole physical shebang came about as a brute fact with no cause.  Whichever hypothesis pertains arguments need to be advanced to justify ones position on this issue.

Related to this is the fact that many self-proclaimed atheists assert that they merely lack a belief in any type of "God" rather than disbelieve in a "God".   However, if one lacks a belief in whether there is a creator, then necessarily one also lacks a belief in the converse.  That is they also lack a belief in the supposition the Universe came into being as a brute fact.  This is contrary to how atheism was originally understood as being the position of supposing that most likely there is no entity or reality corresponding to what one might label "God".

2nd part here.