The Cosmological Argument

But perhaps the ultimate cause mentioned here

 is another universe?

The weak point in this argument is the "must be God" assertion
which no doubt could be challenged.

As I said at the beginning of this post I've never been very convinced by  some of the traditional arguments for God's existence. In this connection my friend James Knight posted this blog on the Cosmological Argument. In commenting on his post I explained briefly to James why I have a reserved opinion on the Cosmological Argument....

***

I suppose it started in the 1970s when I became enamoured of idea that the best we can do in science is describe the patterns of the world. In particular I focused on the subject of randomness as a particular form of pattern that was difficult if not impossible to describe algorithmically. Causation, then, becomes a problematic notion with randomness. As the Cosmological argument makes use of the notion of causation this argument loses it's intelligibility somewhat.

That's not to say that the Cosmological Argument does not express something deeply intuitively true and compelling

***

The above explains why I was so obsessed with randomness at an early stage and why I was so determined to crack the question of randomness. (I'm sure professional mathematicians have done a better job, but my PDF on the subject was good enough for my purposes) 

If we are intellectually looking for God it is ironic that blowhard atheist Richard Carrier should identify the area where to start looking; namely, that God is the mysterious logical necessity left when one subtracts out all apparently contingent things. Richard wrongly identifies his logical necessity as probability and randomness. In doing so he appears to misunderstand the ontology of probability.

And while I'm here let me say that I am also unimpressed with Anselm's ontological argument for the necessary existence of God. But I concede that if God is that mysterious logical necessity which Richard Carrier identifies then in that sense the ontology of God makes His existence a necessity. But I suspect that for finite beings like ourselves the true ontological argument for God involves infinities and is likely to be beyond our understanding. However, there is nothing wrong in trying to develop an ontological argument; you never know what you might come up with.

For me God is the kind of explanation one uses abductively; that is, it is the best explanation I can think of which makes human sense of an otherwise senseless cosmos. It gives us the "why"* (rather than the mere scientific descriptive "how") of those astonishing empirical features of our cosmos such as its high organisation, the human compulsion for meaning, purpose & justice and the existence of conscious cognition as the cornerstone of both empirical science and morality. Theism is the crucial intellectual component of a worldview which makes rational sense of our scientific observations on a cosmos which otherwise is entirely absurd. In the beginning God.... (See also Hebrews 11:6ff)

Footnote

* The kind of "Why?" I'm thinking of here only makes sense in a context where sentience is an a priori feature. 

Bayes and God

 

Bayes: A man of the cloth

There is a long tradition of Bayes theorem being used in discussions about the probability of God. I've never been very keen on using Bayes to "prove" God's existence: I expressed my reservations in this short paper where I discussed the use of Bayes Theorem by Christians Roger Forster and Paul Marsden in their book Reason and Faith. In this connection, however, I noticed this post by Christian Blogger James Knight where once again we see God and Bayes appearing together. 

Well, in this instance I didn't want to get embroiled with the subject of God and Bayes, but in my correspondence with James I picked up on a technical issue which obliquely impinged upon his post. 

The theorem that interested me can be expressed as follows....

If 

                                                                        P(A) < P(A|B)

....then it follows that....

                                                                  P(B) < P(B|A)

....where P(A) and P(B) are the unconditional probabilities of A and B respectively and P(A|B) and P(B|A) are the respective conditional probabilities of A and B.

As per my practice in my paper on randomness I'm going to use Venn diagrams. But Such an approach implicitly assumes my frequentist interpretation of probability, an interpretation I won't attempt to justify here. 

In terms of a Venn diagram the relationship of A and B will in general look something like this....

Here the area labelled A represents the set of possible cases with property A and the area B represents the set of possible cases with  property B. This Venn diagram is imagined to reside in a large domain of a total number of possible cases of T.

Now, if N(A) = number of cases with property A, then the unconditional probability of A is given by P(A) where... 

                                                                            P(A) = N(A) / T

If the number of cases with property B is N(B) and the number of cases where B and A overlap is expressed as  N(A|B) = N(B|A), then the probability of A given B, P(A|B), equates to....

                                                                     P(A|B) = N(A|B) / N(B)

Now we postulate that:

                                                                            P(A) < P(A|B)

 Expressed in frequentist terms we can write that as.....

                                                                   N(A) / T  < N(A|B) / N(B).

We now multiply both sides of this inequality by N(B) and this gives......

                                                                    N(A) N(B) / T  < N(A|B)

Now divide both sides of the latter inequality by N(A) and this returns.

                                                                N(B) / T  < N(A|B) / N(A)

But N(A|B) = N(B|A) and so the above inequality becomes....

                                                                N(B) / T  < N(B|A) / N(A)

Expressed in terms of probabilities the latter inequality can be written as.....

                                                                        P(B) < P(B|A)

....and this inequality has thus been proved from our first postulate which was... 

                                                                            P(A) < P(A|B)

In other words:

                                                        P(B) < P(B|A)  =>   P(A) < P(A|B).

*****

James was concerned that the apparent symmetry of this result is contrary to his intuition that the general case is far from symmetric. However this intuition of asymmetry is backed up by the following special case where we have....

From this diagram we see that B=>A (i.e. B logically implies A). But clearly given A the probability of B, depending the relatives sizes of the two sets A and B, may be quite low. This may be the kind of asymmetry that James is thinking of. 

Creation, Probability and Something for Nothing? Part V

 Let's Carry on Carriering Part V

This is my continuing critique of an article by commercial historian and unquenchable blowhard Richard Carrier. In his article Richard believes he has used probability calculus to show that "No god [is] needed" to create a universe. Well, in this instance there is no need for me to argue either for or against atheism; for the purposes of this post it is sufficient for me to show that Richard's misunderstanding and mishandling of probability and randomness hamstrings his polemic completely.  In Part II I pointed out where his argument comes off the rails and from that point on he constructs a teetering house of cards. 

The other parts of this series can be found here....

Quantum Non-Linearity: Let's Carry on Carriering Part I

Quantum Non-Linearity: Let's Carry on Carriering Part II

Quantum Non-Linearity: Let's Carry on Carriering Part III

Quantum Non-Linearity: Let's Carry on Carriering Part IV

On the whole Richard started his article well. In the first part of this series we saw Richard defining what he referred to as Nothing; note the capitalized N. Richard tells us that this kind of Nothing is what you are left with when all mere logical contingencies have been removed and one is left with a bare minimum of logical truisms, truisms which can't be removed without logical contradiction. I had no problems with this proposal. I also agreed that many of the classical "proofs" for God's existence are very dubious to say the least.  But I noted that Richard said nothing about the actual content of this exotic and mysterious placeholder he calls "Nothing" and I went on to say that this omission allows theism to slip in by the back door. Richard might have attempted to lock and bolt the front door but he's left the back door wide open. However, for my current purposes there is no need for me here to smuggle in God using "back door theism" because my focus is on his foundational logical errors, errors which bring his house of cards crashing down, never mind that he's actually failed to even lock the front door.

Let me finish this opening section with this: As I might have said before, theism, particularly Christian theism, is at the very least a mythological world view which for me is the abductive narrative making a whole lot of retrospective sense of an otherwise very perplexing and meaningless world. Moreover, it provides compelling insights into the human predicament; for me personally it is a successful "Weltenschauung"  (world-view) which is actually more than mythology; it is mythology++. However, we must concede that world-views attempt to encompass and synthesize a very wide field of proprietary experience and unique personal histories and therefore Worldview analysis is a rather subjective and contentious business on which the agreement theorem hits the rocks.

Although I would recommend Christianity to atheists even if they are to regard it as only a compelling mythological world-view, I nevertheless respect and understand their perspective given the cosmic context which has developed in our consciousness since the enlightenment  ...although I have little sympathy with the kind of flawed and triumphalist polemic we get from Richard Carrier. 

***

RICHARD: Probability of Something from Nothing. Proposition 8 holds that “when there is Nothing,” then “every possible number of universes that can appear has an equal probability of occurring,” and Proposition 9 holds that therefore “the probability of Nothing remaining nothing equals the ratio of one to n, where n is the largest logically possible number of universes that can appear.” We can therefore calculate limits on how likely it is that something would exist now, given the assumption that once upon a time there was Nothing—not a god or quantum fluctuation or anything else, but literally in fact Nothing.

MY COMMENT: I've already covered propositions 8 and 9 in part IV but I'll outline again Richard's two main embarrassments here. 

In the above Richard has assumed that if he is given a probability this implies he has in his hands an objective source capable of randomly creating outcomes. This is an error on at least two counts as we will see. I can, however, accept  this:

Proposition 8 holds that “when there is Nothing,” then “every possible number of universes that can appear has an equal probability of occurring,”

But then this doesn't follow:

Proposition 9 holds that therefore “the probability of Nothing remaining nothing equals the ratio of one to n, where n is the largest logically possible number of universes that can appear.”

As I remarked in the previous parts, probability is an intelligible concept only if one first assumes the existence of an observer who is able to form an enumerated (or denumerated) ratio of what are believed to be logical contingencies. That is, probability presupposes the existence of a self-aware observer cognitively sophisticated enough to express information in terms of Laplace's classical probability quotient. For example, in proposition 8 we really haven't got a clue as what this mysterious object or entity called Nothing is likely to create, if anything at all. Therefore Richard is right in suggesting that in the absence of any further information “every possible number of universes that can appear has an equal probability of occurring,” Well, as I know Richard himself realizes it's going to be quite an intellectual challenge denumerating all the possible universes in order to return a Laplacian probability ratio here, but the principle entailed is apparently coherent and comprehensible; for as far is our quantified ignorance is concerned we are left with a ratio of 1 to n where n is clearly some huge number. 

But between the two propositions 8 & 9 there is a serious logical fallacy. The probability ratio of 1 to n pertains to an observer's subjective information level and not some potential creation dynamic which pertains to Nothing. Moreover, this probability is conditioned on our complete lack of knowledge as to which logical contingency of the n possibilities which Nothing, so called, will "choose" to create. Those apparent possibilities includes any number of n universes where n actually includes the "null" universe; that is, the universe with nothing in it. On this basis Nothing, so called, sounds like a pretty sophisticated object; don't you think Richard? (Arguing that with Nothing there is nothing to stop it creating something can be turned on its head: Viz: There is nothing to stop Nothing remaining as Nothing; this kind of polemic is just informal verbal sophistry!)

Well, we know that Nothing didn't create the null universe so on the basis of these informational conditions the probability of the creation of a particular universe,  which I shall call U_p, can be symbolized by:

Prob(U_p/E) = 1/(n-1)

....where E is the information condition that a universe is known to exist, although at this stage we don't know which particular universe exists. Now, assuming we know which universe of the n-1 possible universes has been created (because we can look out and observe it) then n = 1. Therefore on these updated informational conditions... 

Prob(P_u/E) = 1/1 = 1 !!!

...which only goes illustrate just how conditional probabilities are upon observer information. For the very reason that probability is a measure of observer ignorance it is an entirely incoherent move to then try to use it to impute a creative dynamic to an object such as Nothing of which we know very little.  Probability in and of itself is not a creative dynamic; rather it concerns our knowledge or lack of knowledge about the object in question. 

What is very clear is that whatever Prob(P_u/E) works out at we have no logical right to infer that Nothing will consequently generate universes at random....along such lines, I suspect, Richard is thinking. A quantified probability does not imply randomness, although the reverse is not true ....the patterns of randomness often entail probability because these patterns are so algorithmically complex that they are from a human angle, practically unknowable in succinct algorithmic terms. Therefore random outcomes can usually only be expressed in terms of probabilities (Unless we've got a book of randomly generated numbers which we've memorised!).

***

RICHARD: Assume that only the numbers 0 to 100 exist, and therefore 100 is the largest logically possible number of universes that can appear. In that event, the probability that Nothing would remain Nothing (the probability of ex nihilo nihil) is 100 to 1 against. There being 101 numbers, including the zero, i.e. the continuation of nothing being the condition of there arising zero universes, and only one of those numbers constitutes remaining nothing, then there are 100 times more ways for Nothing to become something, than to remain nothing. And when there is Nothing, there is nothing to stop any of those other ways from materializing, nor does anything exist to cause any one of those ways to be more likely than any of the others.

It is therefore logically necessarily the case that, if we assume there was ever Nothing, the probability of ex nihilo nihil is less than 1%.

Of course, 100 is not the highest number. Go looking, you won’t find a highest number. It is in fact logically necessarily the case that no highest number exists. So really, the probability of ex nihilo nihil is literally infinitesimal—infinity to one against. One might complain that we don’t really know what that means. But it doesn’t matter, because we can graph the probability of ex nihilo nihil by method of exhaustion, and thus see that the probability vanishes to some value unimaginably close to zero.

MY COMMENT: Here we go again. Richard has projected his otherwise coherent probability examples onto the cosmos as if they entail a creation dynamic. This is very apparent in these sentences.....

In that event, the probability that Nothing would remain Nothing (the probability of ex nihilo nihil) is 100 to 1 against.

It is therefore logically necessarily the case that, if we assume there was ever Nothing, the probability of ex nihilo nihil is less than 1%.

So, according to Richard he can project what is in fact a purely subjective measure of information (i.e. probability) onto this mysterious big deal he calls Nothing and then come up with the conclusion that Nothing will very likely create a universe! This does not follow because those probabilities reside in his observer's head; those Laplacian ratios don't reside "out there". 

***

RICHARD: We therefore do not need God to explain why there is something rather than nothing. There may also be something rather than nothing simply “because there just is.” There isn’t any actual basis for assuming “nothing” is the natural state of anything, or that there has ever really been nothing. We could honestly just as fairly ask why should there be nothing rather than something. No God is needed here. But even if we are to presume that there ever once was Nothing, we still need no further explanation of why then there is something. Because that there would be something is then as certain an outcome as makes all odds.

Formally:

·         If Proposition 1, then Proposition 2

·         If Proposition 2, then Proposition 3

·         If Proposition 3, then Proposition 4

·         If Proposition 4 and Proposition 1, then Propositions 5 and 7

·         If Proposition 5 and Proposition 1, then Proposition 6

·         If Propositions 5, 6, and 7, then Proposition 8

·         If Proposition 8, then Proposition 9

·         If Proposition 9 and Proposition 1, then the probability that Nothing would produce something is incalculably close to 100% and therefore effectively certain to occur.

   MY COMMENT:  Well OK let's run with the idea that "We do not need God to explain why there is something rather than nothing", whatever Richard means by "God" in this context. But according to Richard we do need two other things:

    Firstly, of course, we need this enigmatic entity called "Nothing". But all we know about Nothing is that it is the irreducible logical truism left when all logical contingencies/possibilities have been eliminated; according to this account trying conceive absolutely nothing is in fact a contradiction (I suspect that's true). That word "Nothing" however, is a place holder for what may well be a very exotic truism capable of creating who knows what.  Fair enough Richard, this point of yours has a good feel about it as far as I'm concerned.

    But secondly, Richard is asking us to accept his very logically dodgy maneuver involving the projection of subjective probabilities onto Nothing and then assuming that this is sufficient to give Nothing a dynamic with creative potential. Well yes, Nothing may well be sophisticated enough to be creative (in fact as a Christian I believe this entity is creative) but to suppose that human ignorance somehow projects that creative potential onto Nothing is not the way to argue the case! It's a bogus argument. And I say it yet again; probabilities pertain to a measure of observer ignorance and don't create anything.

  But if I'm understanding him aright Richard does have a fallback position which I can respect: He says above "There may also be something rather than nothing simply “because there just is.”. That is very reminiscent of this post of mine on Galen Strawson where I quote Strawson suggesting that the universe "just is"; that is, it's just brute fact and to hell with abductive mythologies like Christianity which bring sense, purpose and meaning. If you simply find it impossible to believe that some kind of personal God has created our kind of universe with its all too off-putting human predicaments and suffering, then I have sympathy with that response. But I'm not sympathetic with Richard's cack-handed logic pushed through with self-recommending claims about his intellectual authority. Self-praise is no recommendation.

****

    As we've seen in the previous parts of this series the logic of Richard's list of connected propositions is OK up until about proposition 5 when his analysis really goes off the rails as he hits the question of probability and randomness. In the above Richard talks about not needing God. But whatever he means by God in this context, the creative potential he allocates to Nothing is startling to say the least and it looks suspiciously god-like. In particular if Nothing's creative powers extend to the capability of generating patterns of randomness that in itself is a pretty god-like trait: First and foremost random patterns are contingent - they have no logical obligation and there is no known logical contradiction entailed by their non-existence. Secondly, if we are talking algorithmic generation, randomness of varying degrees entails either very long and complex  algorithms or very large generation times or a combination of both.  In the ideal mathematical limit of pure randomness one or both of these two features extend to infinity.

    If Richard is trying to tell us that the creative source he calls Nothing is in fact a generator of genuinely random patterns then I think we are clear what Richard Carrier's god looks like. 

 

****

.....to be continued...? 

    There are still some remaining paragraphs to consider in Richard Carrier's post but as far as the thrust of my criticism is concerned his closing passages will entail just more of the same kind of critique; that is, criticism of his fallacies revolving round his misconceptions about probability and randomness. So, I may or may not finish the series depending on how I feel and whether I consider it to be time well spent....I'll see.

   CAVEAT

   Disagreeing with Richard Carrier on the above issues should not be taken as a sign that I identify as being a member of some polar opposite tribe. For example, it is likely that I agree with him on many issues particularly when he is criticizing the hard-right. 

The Sea of Faith and Don Cupitt. Part II

The post enlightenment sea of faith

In part I of this series I described how in the first episode of his Sea of Faith series atheist theologian Don Cupitt was beguiled (like many others, such as the North American Intelligent Design community) by the "natural forces" vs "intelligent design" dichotomy. For Cupitt the inference was that natural law is just that, namely "natural" and therefore a process with its own internal (clockwork?) dynamic thus dispensing with the need for a prime divine mover either as an initiator and/or as the sustainer of natural processes. Cupitt has kowtowed to the tempting and popularist reaction which sees in high organization a self-sufficient and self-sustaining machine.

Cupitt's response contrasts with the classical science thinkers such as Descartes, Galileo, Newton, Faraday and Maxwell whose faith underwrote their successful attempts to unlock the secrets of the breathtaking cosmic order, an order believed by Christians to be created and sustained by God everywhere and everywhen. In contrast, as I wrote in Part I, Cupitt's view was as follows: 

According to Cupitt, in Galileo's dynamic vision of the universe motion was "built-in" and therefore it was "no longer necessary to appeal to the action of a divine mover who keeps that universe energized".

For Cupitt any thought that cosmic organization is fuel to the fire of theism is to repeat the errors of medieval superstition & magic. After all, isn't the lesson we learn from our own technology (steam engines, clockwork, computers etc) that they run by their own internal impetus, volition and logic without the need for human intervention and least of all without any need for prayer or magical rituals to keep them going? It is a very natural intuitive reaction, therefore, to read into any highly organized dynamic the presence of an internal self-motivating sufficiency.  

However, Cupitt is undoubtedly right about one thing: The discovery of the mechanical universe which (superficially at least) appears to be oblivious to prayers and magical rituals is one reason (among others, no doubt) for the recession of the Sea of Faith. Consequently, the feeling is that science is an escape from the need to control by religious intervention and/or magic. Therefore science should evoke no mystical response. But there is an historical paradox here however; for it seems likely that the very organization of the heavenly motions and the correlation with the beat of the earthly seasons are implicated as one of the motivations behind the construction of the neolithic stone structures and it seems unlikely that these were mere stone computers absent of mystical significance.  

***

In the first episode of the Sea of Faith Cupitt went even further with his undermining of the meaning of the scientific project. In the following quote he misrepresents the scientific quest and underrates any notion of scientific progress...

.....yesterday's orthodoxy we see now is today's heresy. Today's orthodoxy will be laughed at tomorrow. All theories have a limited life. There are no fixed positions anymore.  They'll all crumble and be replaced by others. The truth now is not in the fixed positions, it's in the quest. 

That statement fails to do the slightest justice to the scientific project as I've come to grasp it. As algorithmic models of the creation, the theories of classical science are still taught in universities, not as irrelevant historical relics of a by-gone past but as excellent metaphors and approximations, object lessons in the startling way science makes miraculous progress. The classical theories still describe much about the cosmic order and were the foundations for later theories (cf. the Lagrangian & Hamiltonian formulations of classic mechanics and the later canonical quantum theory; see here). They also typify the breathtaking way various mathematical strands of thought evolved and came together to encapsulate the cosmic dynamic (Faraday and Maxwell, complex numbers and quantum theory). They were steps along the progressive quest of the highly successful physical sciences project. Schrodinger and Heisenberg advanced their own metaphors for the understanding of the quantum world, metaphors of the same descriptive isomorphic power, but it would be wrong at this stage in our understanding to claim that one metaphor has crumbled to be replaced by the other; both stand. 

There is, of course, still some way to go as the physical science project progressively readjusts our theoretical metaphors to fit the data-points of our experience. But what we currently have nevertheless captures the God ordained cosmic organization to a high level of virtuosity and artistry. Contrast this progressive, grand and heroic project against Cupitt's statement quoted above; this is a crass postmodern undermining of the true story of scientific progress toward better and better mathematical understandings of the world. 

***

But to be fair to Cupitt, he well describes the psychological and cultural knock-on effect of the discovery of the mechanical universe. The new perspective left a sense of cosmic alienation and desolation, not least because, to cap it all, the temple of the earth had been displaced from its Ptolemaic center by Copernicanism.  Cupitt puts it eloquently as follows:

Science became a kind of abstract diagram of nature. But when the universe is seen in this way it no longer looks so friendly to man. It doesn’t give him guidelines in the old way. It’s stripped of its old religious and moral significance. It’s god, if any, is a cosmic mathematician rather than a heavenly king and father. How would faith respond to the bleakness of this new vision of the universe?

....I think we know the answer to that last question; not very well it seems; at least in the West where the new science first took hold. However, for some philosophers at least a loss of faith wasn't a necessary  outcome. According to Cupitt Descartes, who he calls an uncompromising rationalist... (My emphasis)

.... proved God’s existence by abstract arguments and then used God to certify the validity of human reason and the existence of the mechanical universe. After that science took over. 

Cupitt goes on to contrast Descartes's faith with that of the very feeling and personable philosopher Blaise Pascal of whom Cupitt says....

Publicly Pascal was a gifted and sociable man with hundreds of friends and correspondents.....

But the highly intuitive Pascal was far from satisfied by Descartes's God whom Pascal saw as promoting a deist God....

Pascal who was an intensely Christian personality such lip service to religion was abhorrent. “I cannot forgive Descartes. In his whole philosophy he would like to do without God but he couldn’t help allowing him a flick of the fingers to set the world in motion. After that he had no more use for God”. That metaphysical God the God of the philosophers was not the God Pascal was privately seeking. 

And it wasn't only Pascal...

The effect of the new discoveries had been to break down people’s traditional sense of their place in the universe. People felt like aliens literally displaced persons. They were surrounded by giddying new vistas of greatness and littleness. In Pascal's mind this sense of exile came together with his Christian understanding of sin, paradise lost, man’s need for salvation, the contradictions of human nature.

In private Pascal was full of angst; for him human existence was characterized as inconstancy, boredom, anxiety. Pascal marveled at the vast complexity and beauty of the universe at both its large and small scales. And yet the size and dumbness of the cosmos filled Pascal with dread & terror. Man was lost in this tiny and insignificant corner of the universe and his purpose utterly unclear.

***

Let me now turn to what to me was the startling aspect in the first episode of the Sea of Faith. In part 1 of this two part series I wrote this...

"At the time it would have been easy for me to write-off Cupitt as just another pundit presenting an all too typically hackneyed misrepresentation of science and then forgotten all about him. But as it turned out his reaction to his own passe concepts was to weigh strangely in the scales of my own thinking. A few years after I had watched the series (I had also purchased the book) I was making heavy weather of some of the gnostic-like aspects of contemporary Christian evangelicalism.  To my surprise I found that Cupitt had given me insight into the condition behind these circumstances. It was ironic that Cupitt's reaction to the elegant intellectualisms of science had parallels in contemporary evangelical Christianity: Evangelicalism's own version of the reactionary existential angst triggered by the apparently soulless and profane mechanical world had taken the form of an escape into the high subjectivism of the inner life with its sublime epiphanies. Moreover, Cupitt's stark account of those Godless so-called "natural forces" was to surface again although in negated form among the North American Intelligent Design community (NAID). Many thanks to Don Cupitt for helping me make some sense of these situations, but perhaps not in the way he and the Sea of Faith movement would have applauded!"

In the first half of his first episode Cupitt surfed the usual "mechanical world" philosophical cliches, cliches which have led him (and many others) to a purely secularized view of science (which ironically itself ultimately has a tendency to undermine science). I nearly went to sleep, but about two thirds of the way through I was brought up with a jolt when he started talking about Pascal's night of personal revelation of the divine. This was stuff I hadn't heard before. Cupitt was describing the epiphany of Blaise Pascal which occurred late one Monday night in November 1643. This highly personal revelation not only calmed Pascal's spiritual angst but also gave him peace, joy, and an overwhelming sense of the presence of the divine. These are Pascal's words describing his experience.....

Fire....certainty, certainty, heart felt joy, peace. God of  Jesus Christ, God of Jesus Christ, My God and your God. Thy God shall be my God. The world forgotten and everything except God.....The world has not known thee but I have known thee. Joy, Joy, Joy, tears of joy.

According to Cupitt Pascal had a copy of the words of this experience sown into his clothing. Although we can praise God for Pascal's overwhelming epiphany and respect it, Pascal himself wasn't going to take a reciprocally magnanimous view toward the faith of his fellow philosophers like Descartes in spite of the fact that Descartes's philosophy was founded on and revolved around the divine. Re-quoting the passage from Cupitt that I've quoted above effectively accusing Descartes of deism....

Pascal who was an intensely Christian personality such lip service to religion was abhorrent. “I cannot forgive Descartes. In his whole philosophy he would like to do without God but he couldn’t help allowing him a flick of the fingers to set the world in motion. After that he had no more use for God”. That metaphysical God the God of the philosophers was not the God Pascal was privately seeking. 

That divine flick of the finger and the notion of a world with its own self-sufficient internal vitality and volition is the stuff of deist/atheist interpretations, interpretations which wrongly equate high organization with mechanical self-sufficiency. What is true however, is that once those secret algorithmic encodings which so successfully describe and metaphorically model the cosmos have been revealed to humanity this provides us with remarkable powers of information and control. That is, there is less need to inquire of God what the cosmos will do next or invoke magical rituals to keep it going because we know so much about the pattern of its God ordained dynamic. The Christian response to this gift of information & control should be one of the thanks & praise of beings utterly dependent on that God ordained order.  

For me nothing about the high organization which defines the physical world underwrites a deist or atheist world view although such are compelling conclusions for many. The deist/atheist intuitions, although understandable, become problematic with patterns of randomness and the expanding parallelism of quantum mechanics; these features have made it harder to swallow the elementary clockwork determinism of deism. 

Pascal railed against those compelling deist intuitions and sought an escape. But he appeared not to find an intellectual escape. He only found his escape in the depths of that deep heart felt epiphany of  Monday 23rd November 1643; an epiphany which as I've already related gave him feelings of peace and joy. Cupitt quotes Pascal as follows:

The god of Christians is not a God who is merely the author of mathematical truths in the order of the elements. He is a God who fills the soul and heart of those whom he possesses, who makes them inwardly conscious of their wretchedness and of his infinite mercy, who makes them incapable of any other end but him. It is the heart which perceives God, not the reason. The heart has its reasons of which the reason knows nothing.

In the parlance of today's touchy-feely Christian culture it is likely that Pascal's late night epiphany would be identified by many Christians in the last century as the "Baptism of the Holy Spirit" or perhaps more recently in this century as a more general sublime "encounter" with the divine constituting a heart experience of God rather than head knowledge of God. My response to this kind of thing has always been this: Different strokes for different folks; i.e. God reveals himself differently to different people and frankly when it comes to faith I'm more Descartes & Galileo than I am Pascal. 

***

But what was Don Cupitt himself trying to tell us when he related Pascal's encounter with God? Cupitt was trying to get past us the notion that the intellectual world of thought which has unlocked the secret mathematical order of the cosmos was a very different thing to the world of religious experience and religious thinking. It is true that since the enlightenment these two worlds have not only drifted apart but, according to Cupitt, have also become alienated from one another; so much so in fact that the world of the intellect can no longer convey religious meanings; religious meanings were now the domain of our religious intuitions, rituals, mystical metaphors and, best of all, sublime quasi-gnostic know-how; these alone could sublimate humanity's sense of the divine and that yearning for a God of some sort. According to Cupitt intimacy & certainty with respect to God was no longer to be found by the reason and certainly not via the physical cosmos; that profane world of mechanism whose sacredness had been banished by the enlightenment meant that the divine now only inhabited an idiosyncratic corner of the human mind.

What startled me about Cupitt's message is that it is not a million miles away from the message I was starting to hear from many contemporary "encounter"/"Holy Spirit" based Christians; for them knowing God was primarily about a profound heart experience of the divine and this was sharply distinguished from what they disparagingly referred to as a "head knowledge" faith. One heard about the 18 inch gap between heart and head and how difficult it can be to cross that gap. As far as my faith was concerned I always knew which side of this contrived divide I was going to end up on! As with Descartes my faith revolved round the head and not the intuitions and experiences of the heart. It became apparent to me that Cupitt's message was all too reminiscent of the gnosto-christian culture that I had experienced up until then. This realization of mine  became an even stronger theme for me in the following decade with the advent of the 1994 Toronto Blessing. Fortunately, the polarization that this induced in church life has, I think, lessened of late but it can still plague churches today (See here for example). But one thing was clear: The divide that Cupitt had identified and which has developed in the last 400 years between the sacred and the profane is of very general import; so much so in fact that it effects diverse subcultures in similar ways (The return to new age and pagan mysticism may be  a case in point) 

But diversity, equality and inclusion wasn't always on the agenda of  all churches; some of them had the same horror as Pascal of the God of the learned philosophers. They were quite sure that full gospel Christianity should, as an obligation, include an intimate, mystical and almost gnostic revelation of God's power. In the second half of the 20th century it was all to take a very bad and alienating  turn as it divided Christians along an intuition vs intellect fault line.

It was this head vs heart dichotomy which was subsequently to plague my relationship with church in the coming decades. The  church (or rather parts of it), like Pascal, could no longer reconcile the cosmic picture and the intellectual world of mechanism with God without doing violence to science (*1) and hence it escaped into the epiphanies and theophanies of almost orgasmic experiences of the divine and those experiences became a shibboleth of a quasi-gnostic flavour of Christianity. 

Thanks to Don Cupitt it became clearer to me how Christianity's retreat into the human heart was pressured by a spiritual  angst which was amplified by the enlightenment. But the  fault line between head and heart probably goes even deeper and the rise of a society based on technology and science merely widened an already archaic fault line. See for example, the Cathars and Diamaid MacCulloch's book Silence: A Christian History (London, Allen Lane, 2013)

***

Is Don Cupitt a Christian? Some would say that that is impossible for someone who seems to be atheist. I am, however, prepared to give Cupitt the benefit of the doubt for the following reasons. He undoubtedly knows Christian theology well. He has said that religion is potentially the depositary of our highest ideals and yet he is conscious of the human fallibility and sin which obstruct those ideals. My reading of him is that he understands the Christian doctrines which contrast the propensities of human selfishness with the vulnerable love we see in Christ and his self-sacrificing work to deal with sin. Via Pascal's perspective Cupitt tells us of The concealment of God's glory in the weakness of Christ and that God is most profoundly revealed in Christ's passion.....that may express the image of God Cupitt follows and worships in spite of the technical philosophical twist that Cupitt believes this image corresponds to no known real world entity. If Cupitt has taken onboard this image of God as his highest ideal to which he strives and he points to Christ as the epitome of this ideal he therefore eschews idolatry and follows the express image of the true God (See Hebrews 1&2). But in saying these things let me be clear; I can't be absolutely sure about Cupitt's private stance and secondly I don't follow him into doctrinal unrealism.

Footnotes

*1 e,g. Christian Young Earthism and Flat Earthism. Of course, in contrast there are some sophisticated & intellectual parts of church culture for whom science is well integrated into their faith - e.g. the Faraday Institute