I’ve had God on my mind lately, as I’ve been finishing an invited essay for the upcoming Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity. The title is “Does the Universe Need God?“, and you can read the whole thing on my website by clicking.
I commend the editors, Jim Stump and Alan Padgett, for soliciting a contribution that will go against the grain of most of the other essays. As you might guess, my answer to the title question is “No,” while many of the other entries will be arguing “Yes” (or at least be sympathetic to that view). I think of my job as less about changing minds than informing — I want thoughtful people who are committed Christians reading this volume to at least understand where I am coming from, even if they don’t agree. Think of it as an elaboration of “Why (Almost All) Cosmologists Are Atheists,” which was a bit breezier.
Hopefully there is still a bit of time for tweaking the essay before the editors get back to me with their comments, so please let me know if you think I’m getting something importantly wrong. Again, the whole thing is here, but I’m including the final section (minus the footnotes) as a teaser below the fold. In the earlier sections I do more nitty-gritty cosmological stuff, talking about the Big Bang, the anthropic principle, and meta-explanatory maneuvers. In this section I finally evaluate the God hypothesis in scientific terms.
God as a theory
Religion serves many purposes other than explaining the natural world. Someone who grew up as an altar server, volunteers for their church charity, and has witnessed dozens of weddings and funerals of friends and family might not be overly interested in whether God is the best explanation for the value of the mass of the electron. The idea of God has functions other than those of a scientific hypothesis.
However, accounting for the natural world is certainly a traditional role for God, and arguably a foundational one. How we think about other religious practices depends upon whether our understanding of the world around us gives us a reason to believe in God. And insofar as it attempts to provide an explanation for empirical phenomena, the God hypothesis should be judged by the standards of any other scientific theory.
Consider a hypothetical world in which science had developed to something like its current state of progress, but nobody had yet thought of God. It seems unlikely that an imaginative thinker in this world, upon proposing God as a solution to various cosmological puzzles, would be met with enthusiasm. All else being equal, science prefers its theories to be precise, predictive, and minimal – requiring the smallest possible amount of theoretical overhead. The God hypothesis is none of these. Indeed, in our actual world, God is essentially never invoked in scientific discussions. You can scour the tables of contents in major physics journals, or titles of seminars and colloquia in physics departments and conferences, looking in vain for any mention of possible supernatural intervention into the workings of the world.
At first glance, the God hypothesis seems simple and precise – an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent being. (There are other definitions, but they are usually comparably terse.) The apparent simplicity is somewhat misleading, however. In comparison to a purely naturalistic model, we’re not simply adding a new element to an existing ontology (like a new field or particle), or even replacing one ontology with a more effective one at a similar level of complexity (like general relativity replacing Newtonian spacetime, or quantum mechanics replacing classical mechanics). We’re adding an entirely new metaphysical category, whose relation to the observable world is unclear. This doesn’t automatically disqualify God from consideration as a scientific theory, but it implies that, all else being equal, a purely naturalistic model will be preferred on the grounds of simplicity.
There is an inevitable tension between any attempt to invoke God as a scientifically effective explanation of the workings of the universe, and the religious presumption that God is a kind of person, not just an abstract principle. God’s personhood is characterized by an essential unpredictability and the freedom to make choices. These are not qualities that one looks for in a good scientific theory. On the contrary, successful theories are characterized by clear foundations and unambiguous consequences. We could imagine boiling God’s role in setting up the world down to a few simple principles (e.g., “God constructs the universe in the simplest possible way consistent with the eventual appearance of human beings”). But is what remains recognizable as God?
Similarly, the apparent precision of the God hypothesis evaporates when it comes to connecting to the messy workings of reality. To put it crudely, God is not described in equations, as are other theories of fundamental physics. Consequently, it is difficult or impossible to make predictions. Instead, one looks at what has already been discovered, and agrees that that’s the way God would have done it. Theistic evolutionists argue that God uses natural selection to develop life on Earth; but religious thinkers before Darwin were unable to predict that such a mechanism would be God’s preferred choice.
Ambitious approaches to contemporary cosmological questions, such as quantum cosmology, the multiverse, and the anthropic principle, have not yet been developed into mature scientific theories. But the advocates of these schemes are working hard to derive testable predictions on the basis of their ideas: for the amplitude of cosmological perturbations, signals of colliding pocket universes in the cosmic microwave background, and the mass of the Higgs boson and other particles. For the God hypothesis, it is unclear where one would start. Why does God favor three generations of elementary particles, with a wide spectrum of masses? Would God use supersymmetry or strong dynamics to stabilize the hierarchy between the weak scale and the Planck scale, or simply set it that way by hand? What would God’s favorite dark matter particle be?
This is a venerable problem, reaching far beyond natural theology. In numerous ways, the world around us is more like what we would expect from a dysteleological set of uncaring laws of nature than from a higher power with an interest in our welfare. As another thought experiment, imagine a hypothetical world in which there was no evil, people were invariably kind, fewer natural disasters occurred, and virtue was always rewarded. Would inhabitants of that world consider these features to be evidence against the existence of God? If not, why don’t we consider the contrary conditions to be such evidence?
Over the past five hundred years, the progress of science has worked to strip away God’s roles in the world. He isn’t needed to keep things moving, or to develop the complexity of living creatures, or to account for the existence of the universe. Perhaps the greatest triumph of the scientific revolution has been in the realm of methodology. Control groups, double-blind experiments, an insistence on precise and testable predictions – a suite of techniques constructed to guard against the very human tendency to see things that aren’t there. There is no control group for the universe, but in our attempts to explain it we should aim for a similar level of rigor. If and when cosmologists develop a successful scientific understanding of the origin of the universe, we will be left with a picture in which there is no place for God to act – if he does (e.g., through subtle influences on quantum-mechanical transitions or the progress of evolution), it is only in ways that are unnecessary and imperceptible. We can’t be sure that a fully naturalist understanding of cosmology is forthcoming, but at the same time there is no reason to doubt it. Two thousand years ago, it was perfectly reasonable to invoke God as an explanation for natural phenomena; now, we can do much better.
None of this amounts to a “proof” that God doesn’t exist, of course. Such a proof is not forthcoming; science isn’t in the business of proving things. Rather, science judges the merits of competing models in terms of their simplicity, clarity, comprehensiveness, and fit to the data. Unsuccessful theories are never disproven, as we can always concoct elaborate schemes to save the phenomena; they just fade away as better theories gain acceptance. Attempting to explain the natural world by appealing to God is, by scientific standards, not a very successful theory. The fact that we humans have been able to understand so much about how the natural world works, in our incredibly limited region of space over a remarkably short period of time, is a triumph of the human spirit, one in which we can all be justifiably proud.
No.
I’m not sure of the nature of the Blackwell publication, but it seems like you are treating God as merely another scientific hypothesis among many. This might be adequate to address some of the other claims in this particular book, but I was under the assumption that the most recent Christian theology places God at a level more fundamental to reality than science. If this is what they are claiming, (namely, that science, or the scientific method, isn’t the ultimate descriptor of reality) – doesn’t going the route of claiming that God is a failed scientific hypothesis miss the point?
Like I said, I’m not sure of the nature of the Blackwell book – maybe that IS what they’re claiming – but wouldn’t most theologians agree with you that God doesn’t work as a scientific hypothesis (the key word being: scientific)?
Joseph– I think the chain of explanations either terminates somewhere, or goes on forever. Both are certainly options, although I personally find it easier to imagine that there is some final level. My point is just that there’s nothing wrong with the last level of explanation being a certain set of laws of nature. We can’t simply say, a priori, that we need something beyond that.
Jonathan– I can’t speak for people’s inner mental states, but there are a lot of people who explicitly attempt to ground religion on attempts to explain the world. I predict that the rest of this volume will have many examples. Or you can just look at the footnotes in the full article. I would actually argue that this would be the most intellectually respectable way to ground religion, but that’s not the point of this article. As far as the list of sciences, I think you are reading uncharitably. All the workers in those fields would love to ground their theories in clear and unambiguous principles. It may be difficult, but that’s still the goal.
Metaphors are useful in coming up with hypotheses, but they are notoriously useless in validating them. I’m particularly suspicious of what gets imported into discussions of cosmology by the expression “fine tuning” which seems to imply a tuner even though all it actually asserts is that only a tiny set of parameter values is consistent with intelligent life. One has the imagine of God as somebody fiddling around with an old fashioned radio as if there were some way to make physical sense of varying the parameters, some dial you could adjust. Even beyond the absence of any notion of how an agent could vary parameters, however, there is the far more basic problem of why such a being would vary ’em. We talk about the personhood of the deity as if there were a question of whether there is such a person when the more fundamental question is whether the notion of person makes sense in a cosmic or transcosmic context. The only candidates for personhood in our experience, after all, are humans or perhaps non-human animals but at all events beings with needs and therefore desires. What could an infinite being possibly want? At least the old pagans assumed that Zeus, father of gods and men, had balls so that their cosmology made some sense. What is Yahweh supposed to be missing? How can an infinite being have purposes? Seems deeply illogical to me.
@Joeseph
Uck. The whole lawgiver argument thoroughly sickens me. The very concept presupposes a being that can conform to the strictures of rational thought. To do this it must act in a complex and highly regular, or dare I say lawlike manner. That is to say, the lawgiver presupposes the very thing it is meant to explain.
As Jim Harrison says, the way out of this mess is to just recognize that the concept of natural law is only a metaphor, and not a very close one either. Natural law is very much like the similar metaphor “the law of the jungle.” There is no lawgiver of the jungle — that’s pretty much the point of the expression. Likewise, there is no being out there dictating gravity from on high.
And while we’re at it, I’d also point out that the notion of creating something presumes a concept of time, complete with a thermodynamic arrow. So likewise it makes no sense to speak of a being creating the regularities in our universe (including time) without postulating a meta-universe with all the same regularities and then some.
The only reason anyone would think God can explain anything is that they haven’t thought it the whole way through.
@ray the law giver argument is only meant to explain the presence of law in the created universe. It does not attempt to explain (or need to explain) the presence of a law in the world of the creator
Sean,
There is a big difference between what educated apologists usually say in defense of Christianity (and other religions) and what grounds the religious practices of most Christians (or other religionists). I’m not saying that there are no defenders of cosmological arguments (e.g. Swinburne, Taylor, Craig, and Polkinghorne) — although even those guys would, I think, continue to practice their religion if they were convinced that their favored cosmological arguments were wrong. What I’m saying is that those kinds of arguments do not have the place in Christian life that you seem to think they have. In order to pursue the question with any rigor, we would have to at least do surveys of Christians to find out why they believe what they do. I am guessing that most have not reflected on the question at all. Among those who have reflected on the question, I doubt that more than 5% would offer cosmological arguments. My guess is that insofar as people give “scientific” answers at all they will appeal to design arguments, not cosmological arguments, and even those will probably be rare.
Moreover, the *grounding* claim is the thing that I think is worrying in the passage I quoted. One might defend an argument for some conclusion without basing one’s belief in that conclusion on that argument. Of course, one should think that the argument is sound if one is giving it, but initial belief might come from another argument or might not have come from an argument at all — unless observing or experiencing something counts as an argument. One might, for example, believe on the basis of a religious experience but recognize that such experiences are first-person, not third-person evidence.
I’m not sure what your “this” is referring to when you write: “I would actually argue that this would be the most intellectually respectable way to ground religion.” Could you clarify?
I guess I was unclear with my point about many of the special sciences, since I don’t think what you said in reply actually responds to what I was trying to say. (In particular, I agree that science ought to aim for clear and unambiguous explanations. I even agree that theists generally do a very poor job of deriving any testable consequences from the very squishy “God hypothesis”; however, I don’t think that “essential unpredictability” and “free choice” are the right things to pick on because by picking on those, you throw out a lot of perfectly respectable science.) Let me try again. Consider a rational-choice economic model for a grocery store. The model might suppose that people are rational agents who act freely to optimize perceived quality and cost of goods that they purchase. Suppose that with enough specificity, the model does a good job of predicting purchases in the store. It seems like we then have an explanation of purchases at that store in terms of the free actions of the people who shop there. So, it doesn’t look like explanations that call on free action are ipso facto unscientific. Do you still think I’m reading uncharitably? If so, could you say how you think your argument avoids scuttling economics, sociology, and history (at least)?
Kevin
Either you accept that regularities in reality (call them natural laws if you must) do not require a lawgiver, or you must bite the bullet and believe that your god obeys a law created by an even greater lawgiver. To do less would be nothing short of hypocrisy.
So which is your choice: atheism, rank hypocrisy, or turtles all the way down?
@Ray,
Thank you for your response, but I think it too is weak. (Time for me to commit intellectual suicide. 🙂 This comment is just for fun!)
You are trying to explain God using normal concepts we use to describe the rest of our universe. *Now, this may be the correct thing to do* but I think there are reasons to believe it may not be. For example, you say for God to create requires time etc… as if rules that apply to our experience necessarly apply to Him.
Now, before people laugh me off for being crazy (which I realize you will all do anyways 🙂 ) let me give you an analogy. (Look up the Wikipedia article on Axiom of Infinity to follow along). You cannot describe infinity sticking to finite sets. Infinity *literally* has to be inserted as an axiom. “The axiom of infinity cannot be derived from the rest of the axioms of ZFC, if these other axioms are consistent. Nor can it be refuted, if all of ZFC is consistent.”
Now, do infinite sets exist? I will let you decide, but my point is if they do exist you can never use finite sets to describe their properties as infinity cannot be derived from finite mathematics. What you learn from finite sets literally cannot describe infinte sets.
My point: It is possible for something to exist and be logically consiatant and rational and yet still be completely out of your grasp to describe correctly using known facts. For example, If we lived in a world where man had “dicovered” {ZFC – infinite sets} he would be powerless to then go and try to prove properities of infinity using facts he has learned from finite mathematics.
If someone said “Infinite sets can’t have property X because… fact about finite sets… fact about finite sets… etc…” that person would draw incorrect conclusions about infinite sets.
Likewise by analogy, though it may not be true, it is may be possible that God on one hand exists and on the other we have no facts that can correctly decribe real properties He posesses so trying to is vein. Now, in writing this I have realized I have opened the door up for many critiques, *but* on a basic level without worrying about the technical details, I hope to convey by example it may be possible for something to exist and be perfectly rational and illuminatiing but beyond your power to fully comprehend, describe and explain using facts you know. (Just like infinite sets cannot be derived from all the facts about finite sets that exist combined.)
@Ray #31 an 33: “The only reason anyone would think God can explain anything is that they haven’t thought it the whole way through… So which is your choice: atheism, rank hypocrisy, or turtles all the way down?”
It is actualy very ironic/amusing to find someone accuse others of not being able to think things through and then come to the conclusion that these are the only viable options. (Ironic in that the accuser apparently has a hard time thinking things through himself while at the same time throwing around the word hypocrisy!!! :))
Wow. Great text thanks.
why does the world of the creator of the universe have to obey the same laws of logic, physic? It doesn’t seem to be a requirement to me that you have to extend the rules past the boundary of a world we experience to one we have no knowledge of.
@Ray #31
“The only reason anyone would think God can explain anything is that they haven’t thought it the whole way through.”
Also, I have learned from experience that anyone who feels the need to append “if you were smart enough you would see it” type statements should be trusted like a snake-oil salesman. In fact! I met a law professor who said they train lawyers to be on the lookout for such statements because usually they are said when there is a subtle problem with their reasoning they hope others look past.
If an argument really was clear and intelligent you don’t have to go out of your way to “remind” people that is must be. (It should just be obvious.)
Classic example is Fox News who feels compelled to assert to its viewers that they are “fair and balanced”. 🙂 (If they actually were why would we need this constant reminder?)
God as an explanation is an invention of the Abrahamic religions.
@Joeseph
Intellectual suicide indeed. I could point out your technical errors (the whole apparatus of set theory, axiom of infinity included, is built upon finite manipulations of a finite number of symbols which, if you regard set theory as foundational, are represented as finite sets.) There is however a bigger problem here. To claim that god is incomprehensible within the language of science is to admit unabashedly that you have no bloody idea what you’re talking about. You argue for god by analogy to human minds, human laws, human watchmakers, and then you excuse yourself by saying that you don’t really mean what you say.
There was a time when the idea of god was a hypothesis like any other. Read 1 kings 18:25-40. It is the very embodiment of the scientific method. The fact that believers now go to every effort to hide their god from science is not some great advance in philosophical understanding. It is merely a consequence of the fact that every time defenders of a God hypothesis have played fair, their ideas have been shown to be false.
@Arun — don’t blame the Jews for this one. It was mostly the Greeks (think Plato’s Timaeus.) who probably got it from the Persians, at least as far as systematic theological thought goes. That said, etiological tales are far older than any of these cultures.
Ray
“To claim that god is incomprehensible within the language of science is to admit unabashedly that you have no bloody idea what you’re talking about. ”
I don’t think that is true. On this very blog it has been argued that, for example, morality cannot be proven or disproven by science and yet I would think it is a stretch to say people who think things like “it is bad to kill”, “it is bad to rape” dont know what they are talking about.
People understand rape is wrong and yet cannot prove it scientifically and I don’t think they are out of their mind.
Also, I am not maintaining some weak-sauce version of God that “necessarily” hides beyond the reach of science. All I am saying is:
1. It makes sense to me, and a lot of other intelligent people by the way, that if an elegant set of rational laws describing every scale of universe exists (like say string theory for example) that it is *possible* that there is an explanation beyond “It’s just that way end of story.”
2. *If* there is an explanation it only makes sense to me that the explanation has the property of being rational given the laws are rational. (If rational laws have a source then it seems to make more sense that the source itself is rational then to believe an irrational source gave way to rational laws.)
Sean,
I agree fundamentally with what Jonathan has said. But, I want to take it one step further. God and science attempt to answer different questions. Science is very good at answering how things work, or even how they came into being. God answers “why”. These are two completely different questions and in fact two different realms.
What you have artfully done (and I have read many similar articles over the years, including yours) is a classic bait and switch. Science has never been able to even approach the question of “why”. Religion (Christianity, at least) barely, if ever, attempts to answer “how”.
God: “why”
Science: “how”
In fact, their wheelhouses are almost completely mutually exclusive. There seems to be plenty of room in the Universe to answer both.
However, unfortunately, science is failing at one of the very tests you are using to condemn God; the ability to predict. Lately (<20 years ago), almost all mature branches of science are currently in (glorious) upheaval as they've all experienced crisis of unpredictability.
For instance, we should be able to predict what MESSENGER sees when it opens the veil of ignorance that shrouds Mercury. Alas, with just cursory observations, we already have to almost completely re-write what we "know" about the formation of rocky planets.
Quantum mechanics; same dilemmas (or opportunities), now that the Super Collider is up and running.
Paleontology; more of the same — future fossil finds will invariably re-write what we “know” about evolution.
Why is it that whenever we build a bigger telescope, the Universe seems to retreat to just outside that device’s field of view? Why isn’t the unknown Universe getting smaller? Why is it that the known Universe shrinks in comparison to the unknown Universe whenever we expand of observational sphere?
Why it that whenever we build a better microscope, the Microverse seems to shrink even further out of view?
I know. I know. Sean, I am "guilty" of the same "sin" that I have just said that you are; I have condemned science for not being able to answer questions for which it isn't even attempting to answer.
Does that make me a hypocrite?
Science has NEVER answered why. Ever. Even the first, almost most fundamental scientific question has never been answered by science.
Sean, "why is the sky blue?"
Science has been dodging this question for at least 15,000 years. Probably, in all honesty, for millions of years of Human evolution. The scientist will distract by answering "how" in its place.
But, my Pastor will gladly answer "why". As has been noted in this blog, God is usually personified, which actually lends credence to the Pastor's answer for "why", because persons are allowed to do things arbitrarily. Further, for the Christian, the scientist’s answer becomes, "how God did it".
In other words, they both fit neatly together is our vast, complex, wonderful Universe.
“Does the Universe Need God?”
The question is irrelevant.
“God” is the Universe and the Universe is god.
Mankind is the Universe’s unconscious attempt to express and understand itself.
At one point humans did not understand the gods of fire and the wind, and then emotion and a god was created for each emotion and then humans tried to tackle societal relations with a god…
We have always attributed that which we do not yet understand to a god.
God is X…a place holder.
The question is,
Do some humans still need the concept of a seperate entity/god?
The answer is yes…some do.
Sean is not me. You will find that I’m the one arguing against his moral anti-realism on that thread. My view is that, while the term “bad” is mildly ambiguous (as is much in natural language,) that ambiguity does not go so far as to allow an understanding of the term which would exclude rape and murder.
Now mind you, I do allow that there are a few basic things one has to assume to get his understanding off the ground, which basically boil down to “empiricism works — usually.” But this is not a blanket license to make any unfounded assumption you feel like in addition, unless you like being demonstrably wrong on a regular basis.
As for your points 1 and 2. That’s a whole lot of ifs. And as they say, “if ifs and buts were candy and nuts…” Further, “the source itself is rational” is a long way from even establishing the minimal deist god. And this too is a far cry from the divinity of Jesus and whatever other nonsense you pay homage to on Sundays (I’m guessing from your school, that you’re a Mormon — let me know when you find those golden plates, mate.)
Great article. Hopefully in the future we won’t need to argue about this anymore according to this article:
– Religion to become extinct, says model of census data:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12811197
I wonder what the situation is in the US?
What difference does it make if there is a god or not ? Just like SantaClaus or the Easter Bunny !
“What difference does it make if there is a god or not?”
For those not inclined to investigate, for those that are not wired like you and me, somewhere to hang one’s hat,to ease the mind, so that the god of mt St Helen or mt Vesuvius worries us no more and we can continue with our daily lives without donating time to understanding (cause thinking is hard)and some people do not have the time to independantly think and others who know not how to think just follow blindly because it’s comfortable or some such reasoning.
God is a necessary intellectual evolutionary place holder for some humans.
and then theirs this…http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZEO1Lug25s
which is a great song but is really just a diversion.
@Ray,
“you’re a Mormon… golden plates ”
Well, it was fun talking with you, however, apparently my initial suspicions beginning with #37 have been confirmed. It is pointless arguing against fallacious arguments (ad hominem and strawman in this case) because your opponent can prove *anything* using fallacious arguments.
Ad hominem: because throwing out words like “Mormon” and “golden plates” are intended to evoke boogyman type ideas when you get stuck and can’t think of anything intelligent to say: “Psst… did you hear? So and so is Mormon! Oh my goodness! They must be wrong about unrelated subject X!”
Strawman: because my arguments about rational laws have nothing to do with the existence of things like “gold plates”. Just because it is easier to avoid the actual argument being made and try to construct a strawman and knock that down to save face doesn’t make it anything other than a fallacious argument.
Lastly, I suggest you take notes from Sean. He is not religious (and therefore not Mormon oh my heavens!!!) and yet he is intelligent enough that he doesn’t need to resort to fallacious arguments to make his case. (If I am wrong, show me where Sean feels the need to use fallacious arguments to make his point?)
They aren’t needed when you know what you are talking about. Kant, Hume, Plato, and all the great thinkers of history have one thing in common: they attempt avoid using well-known fallacious arguments to prove their points.
Bertrand Russel’s definition of faith: A belief which cannot be shaken by evidence to the contrary.
@Richard,
That’s a very interesting definition of faith, thanks for sharing!
So, God is unrelated to Mormonism. I had no idea. I don’t think that word means what you think it means.
Anyway. The Mormon bit was an afterthought. You were so hazy about what you meant by the word “God,” I deemed it necessary to do some minimal research. If you’re not trying to claim the Mormon God is remotely plausible. Feel free to say so. It was just an educated guess. If you are in fact a Mormon, maybe you should think about why you profess beliefs that you are too embarrassed to defend.