Science and Religion. Part I

True, but I would want to add that religion can also suffer from idolatry & false absolutes
...and science can be infected by error and superstition. Let's face it, both are human activities and will therefore suffer from the vagaries & foibles of human behavior.

As I've said many times before, our current grasp of the explanatory objects developed by scientific epistemology explain nothing at all in a intuitive & deeply satisfying way; for those objects are in actual fact descriptive devices (Although I hesitate to say "just descriptive devices"). These devices exploit the highly contingent organization of the created cosmos to arrive at compressed descriptions, descriptions often expressed as succinct mathematical one-liners. Clearly, however, data compression can only go so far before it eventually hits a point of mathematical incompressibility, the compressibility barrier. At that point the progress of scientific "explanation" comes to an end with no real answer to those nagging intuitively sensed questions which arise when descriptive science has left us at a place of extreme  contingency (albeit succinctly expressed contingency). 

The descriptive laws of physics appear to be arbitrarily selected from the platonic world of mathematical possibility, the only sure constraint on this arbitrariness being the weak anthropic principle. Descriptive laws of this type can never make claim to explanatory completeness in an absolute sense. Moreover contemporary physics seems to be at a stage of diminishing returns as the development of physics logjams over gravity and string theory. This may be an outcome of the fact that further data compression becomes harder on already very highly compressed forms.

The unnatural contingency that scientific epistemology has uncovered is acknowledged in a backhanded way by those  strenuous attempts to minimize the surprisal value of this contingency with multiverse models. The trick of multiverse theories works by immersing cosmic contingency in huge seas of randomness*, thus making the contingent uniqueness of the cosmos no more surprising and startling than if one would find a run of ten heads in a million throws of a coin. Some semblance of explanatory completeness may then be claimed and intuitions that a creator God is the author of cosmic contingency neutralized - at least in the minds of some. The human surprisal instinct is a noteworthy intuition in any case. 

If we leave the curiosity numbing effect of multiverse notions aside we are then left with the enigma of "why" those physical laws are the way that they are and "why" they are so reliable in anticipating and unifying our conscious experience and assimilating that experience into a rational grand narrative. But then what does the question "why" mean in this context? If I am going to claim that descriptive physical laws have an inadequate explanatory status in an absolute sense what other ways can the question "why" be defined and answered? This leads us into theology where the question "why" is best defined and satisfyingly answered in the context of the intentionality and purposes of a creator God. Here the infinities & complexities of the Godhead, unlike the simplicity of natural law, could conceivably hide the concept of aseity, thus ending the search for absolute explanatory completeness, albeit in a way that may well be beyond human understanding. The alternative is to fall back on the irreducible kernel of brute contingency necessarily present in the compressed simplicity of physical law explanations. 

But although the inevitably descriptive role of science is destined to always leave us with an irreducible kernel of unexplained brute fact, the explosive surge of scientific discovery from Copernicus onwards has weighed strangely in the intellectual scales and, let's face it, has been a challenge to theists. Although I'm not a science & cultural historian, in my quest for understanding I've had to come up with my best shot as to the whys and wherefores of the receding sea of faith and why science has generated a challenging intellectual environment for theism. Below is my list of scientific challenges to theism. I have touched on them to a greater or lesser extent in various blog posts & articles but in this post I bring them together into one pen. None of them, in my opinion, are insurmountable problems to theism although some are more tricky to deal with than others, particularly the last three in my list. But they all give rise to intuitive objections to theism that should be addressed.

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1. Copernicus: This one is well known of course. The "Copernican revolution" is often lauded as the first step in a series of demotions of human kind from that apparently special cosmic status humanity was used to, the multiverse being the most recent step in the history of this series. In fact Copernicanism has become prototypical. Since Copernicus and the demise of the Ptolemaic universe humanity has lost that center stage feel which was once sure evidence that (wo)man had a significant place in the heart of an existing God. But the temple universe with humanity as manifestly centre stage has long since departed and  the belittling effects linger in our cultural consciousness.  For my response to this one see The Cosmic Perspective. 

2. Localised laws: One of the bugbears with the common concept of "mechanism" is that it is conceived as entirely a matter of local interactions between the parts of the mechanism. Those parts, such as atoms or fundamental particles, have a few relatively simple rules governing their near-neighbor interactions and it is thought that these "mindless" rules are then the source from which all else incidentally and purely fortuitously emerges. It is further assumed that these rules are the fundamental & primary reality of the cosmos and all else is secondary and ephemeral. No further questions are then asked about whether this system of rules, if it supports the development and maintenance of life, must therefore be algorithmically pre-biased.  Moreover, it is further assumed that these rules do not include global teleological constraints, constraints which (as they would imply "spooky" action at a distance) would really blow away any semblance of local interaction completeness & primacy. The oft overriding and superficial gut reaction to this picture of local mechanical interactions is that it is clearly entirely mindless in that in and of themselves these interactions obviously have no sentient apprehension of what they are doing and therefore any complex development built on them (such as life) is purely accidental and incidental. But this reaction misses the fact that a randomly chosen set of laws are very unlikely to favour the generation of life as is the case in our cosmos. This tends to prompt a retreat into multiverse ideas in order to neutralize the surprisal of cosmic contingency. 

3. Mechanism & Deism: The discovery of those quasi-localized laws governing the cosmos superficially made it look like a clock, an object which maintains its motions without human supervision. It was a metaphor only but nevertheless this metaphor, I propose, helped prompt a belief that somehow these laws sustain themselves by their own intrinsic animus. Although perhaps at first regarded as inferior to the creative power of God, they set up the initial hint that Deity may have some emerging competition over the question of creative origins and sustenance. Those laws started to assume an independent status and became in the minds of some so-called "natural forces" with not only autonomy, but perhaps themselves an engine of creation. At best the outcome of this drift of thought is deism and at worst belief that the notion of God is redundant in the face of this new creative kid on block. 

But the laws of nature are no engine. Strictly, as I've already said, they are descriptive rather than being explanatory in a deep way and as such only postulate patterns of operation; mostly patterns of high order and rationality which the true underlying cause, whatever that may be, maintains. For the Christian these patterns of operation are God reified everywhen and everywhere; that is, moment by moment and place by place. In that sense they earn the epithet "supernatural forces" rather than mere "natural forces", so perhaps we can expect miraculous output from those laws; they are, after all, the instruments of the cosmic Sovereign.  As descriptive devices those (super)natural laws are without prejudice & don't include any assumption as to the existence of an autonomous internal animus which drives them; that's something we may or may not add in our minds eye: If for example we attribute to them an impersonal internal animus and thereby raise natural law to a level where it has an autonomy of its own the laws of physics are then thought of as "natural forces" rather than "supernatural forces". This raises them to a level where they have the potential to compete with God as creator. 

Some may withdraw completely from the questions surrounding the origins of these contingent descriptive laws and just accept this happens to be the way the world is and that is all there is to it. Beyond us securing these succinct descriptions all other questions are considered to be meaningless or impossible to answer. That's more or less the line Bertrand Russel took in the Coppleston-Russell debate. For Russel the regular ordered world that is amenable to the predict and test epistemic is the only & ultimate reality. The faint signal of the anomalous, the erratic and the apparitional, which are far from epistemically tractable, is discounted out of hand or shoehorned in to the framework of the  knowable and repeatable world. 

However, I don't think contingency, as Coppleston hinted, is proof of God: Rather it's a pointer for the curious to progress further in making sense of the human predicament; in particular the primacy of consciousness.....

4. Absence of consciousness? Close observations on the human brain reveals nothing immediately obvious that one can identify as consciousness; at close quarters the observer only sees a neural dynamic. Conclusion for some: Consciousness doesn't exist and is an illusion worked by the brain; therefore humans are reducible to complex mechanism and as such have no more mystery behind them than any other complex product of "natural forces".  But of course consciousness is not going to be found if you are an observer beyond the person being observed and therefore, by definition, standing outside the experience of the person you are observing; you're just seeing the second person view of the first person. To discover consciousness and the first person perspective you have to look back at yourself to find it. Don't be fooled by an observer's use of third person language, a language which only makes an implicit reference to the fact that all observations on the working brain only make sense if they are carried out by another observer whose observations, of course, trace back to another conscious first person perspective. (See here for more). All third person language has its (implicit) origins in a first person experience. However, my own view is that the first person perspective will only arise if matter is configured in the right way; presumably as the biological brain configures it. Therefore formal complexity alone, such as would be seen in a computer simulation of the brain is insufficient condition for consciousness; the necessary conditions are that the right qualities of matter, along with the right formal configuration  of matter be used in conjunction before consciousness is generated. (I have a lot in common with the views of Philosopher John Searle on this question)

Consciousness has an irreducible place in our reality; in fact without conscious perception the material stuff of the universe has no meaning: In a self affirming loop that material stuff generates consciousness therefore making that stuff register in conscious observation, thus in turn giving matter an existential meaning. That consciousness has such an elemental and irreducible place in the scheme of things is once again another pointer for the curious to follow. That we are in a very contrived universe which generates the first person perspective prompts the search for the ultimate conscious intentionality; i.e. God. No surprise then that those who feel uncomfortable with this prospect, seek to head it off by denying the existence of the first person perspective and get hung up on third person language. 

5. Determinism takes away our humanity: It is unlikely that the laws describing our rational world are deterministic, but even if they were deterministic and moreover fully described the formal structure of human thought, that doesn't mean that "free agents" cannot be defined and be considered responsible for their choices. (See here for more)

6. No observational evidence for God.  This is not actually true: People invoke the concept of God in order to make sense of their life experiences by placing that experience in a theological explanatory framework (or "narrative"; in most cases this theoretical leap is carried out very informally). Experience, after all, is observation. Those theological frameworks (or "narratives") are ways of joining the dots of experience. But, of course this can be done with varying degrees of rigour and moreover some objects are less amenable to "dot joining" and testing than are others. 

With God, as with many other social constructs, we are not talking about simple physical objects like test tube precipitates and Hooke's laws springs whose simplicity, regularity & reliability makes them amenable to elementary predict and test laboratory science; for the objects of the social sciences are much more complex and erratic and therefore of greater epistemic difficulty. To only confer the status of existence to elementary, regular, repeating objects which are amenable to highly controlled laboratory procedures is a form of epistemic self-mutilation. When it comes to those complex social constructs the epistemic keyhole through which we see the world becomes an all too obvious limitation. In short we have great difficulty picking up a strong existential signal from all but the most simple regular objects. It's no surprise then that the social sciences (being the science of hugely complex social objects) are so controversial. But epistemic intractability and erratic behavior doesn't imply non-existence. With God we are well out of the zone of test tube precipitating and spring extending science. I've written many articles on epistemic status. (See here & here for example)

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So ends those challenges for which I feel reasonably confident in handling the relevant material. But that is not true of the following questions where I have much less confidence.

7. Suffering & Evil: Viz: If a sovereign loving God exists why does he allow....etc. I have to confess I have not much to say on this question which has consumed gallons of ink. My small offerings on this subject are here & here. Better to consult C S Lewis (among others) on this one. 

8. The Problems of Natural History: For standard evolution to return a realistic probability of generating life it necessarily demands the a priori constraints of a highly organized world and this therefore begs questions about intentional design. However, although at this level evolution looks to be a highly contrived process, at another level, the level of natural history, it looks haphazard, untidy, wasteful, a hit and miss affair subject to a great deal of randomness, suffering and survivalist ruthlessness. In my spongeam model of evolution we see a similar distinction in the difference between the highly constrained channels of the spongeam network (which are evidence of the contingency of an overall bias toward high order) and the random diffusion. It is the random diffusion component which gives the whole of evolution its dynamic.

When we look at the details of natural history we are faced with questions like where was God during those apparently wasteful mass extinction events? The inefficient hit and miss survivalist ethic of natural history seems more pointless than it is meaningful; it doesn't have the touch and feel of an intentional creation by a loving Deity. However, it has been pointed out by Christian Biologist Denis Alexander that the word "good" in Genesis 1 doesn't connote perfection but rather "fit for purpose" whatever that divine purpose may be (presumably ultimately to do with the plan of salvation & restoration). Even in everyday parlance "good" is not strong enough a word to entail perfection ....we can all be merely "good" by human standards even though we know we are far from perfect in our dealings with God and (wo)man; "good" may be, but not "good" enough. 

It is clear that (wo)man (and also Satan) had a propensity to fall and deviate from his/her ordained path of introducing purpose & meaning to the imperfect chaos of the Earth (See the "subduing" of the Earth in Genesis 1:28). The existence of that propensity along with the need to subdue the earth implies creation was not perfect from the first day; it was intrinsically chaotic and had a propensity to go wrong. The emergence of purpose from meaninglessness and the emergence of order from chaos was one of the original aims of creation and in particular the work of its human stewards, but this work was marred by the fall (presumably to be eventually restored by the plan of salvation).

This particular question is a close relation of the problem of suffering and evil.

9. Christian Crackpotism: There are more than enough sectarian and exclusive cultic expressions of Christianity out there along with plenty of bizarre Byzantine thoughts like flat earthism, QAnonism and conspiracy theorism doing the rounds in Christendom to be a serious challenge to any claim that the God of Christian revelation actually exists. The naïve "answers" of say Answers in Genesis which demand a perfect original cosmos, tyrannosaurids with 6 inch fangs eating melons and oranges, men riding dinosaurs, a mere 6000 years of geology and crass solutions to the starlight problem are simplistic treatments which belong to the pages of children's picture books. They have no doubt brought an untold blight upon the Christian witness. All this even before we get started on the worldwide religious situation. 

As with points 7 & 8  I don't have much I can offer as an apologetic on this one (but see my small offering here and also on pages 8 & 9 of  this document).  

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If you are an atheist and very much against your expectation you one day find yourself at the Pearly gates, but you are barred from entering because of your atheist background, then simply tell them that in your evaluation of Christianity you had ruled out Christ's claims because of the antics of the likes of Westborough Baptist church, the cultic Jehovah's witnesses and personalities like Kent Hovind & John Mackay. On top of that floating about the God-o-sphere you witnessed bizarre notions like Mormon history, pervasive Christian conspiracy theorism, Christian flat earthism, and a gamut of anti-science notions. Mention these items and there's a good chance you'll be able to claim mitigating circumstances and be let in. One word of warning though: You might find Ken "hell and hamnation" Ham there, but please don't let that put you off: It'll give him a really big shock to see you and I for one am looking forward to the look on Ken's face when you enter.

And while you are there you might like to cite issues 7, 8 & 9 above as also being a problem for you. I'll certainly be asking about those myself.

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In Part II I will be looking at the connotations behind the labels "natural forces" and "materialism" and in particular how they have detrimentally impacted the thought life of Christian fundamentalists and the de facto Intelligent Design community. 

Footnote

*  If we are going to posit the existence of a multiverse that rings the changes of platonic possibility then because disorder has such a high frequency representation (i.e. a high statistical weight) then disordered universes will be overwhelmingly represented in the multiverse ensemble.