Does God Exist?: Hendricks vs Myers

 

Does God exist? Perry Hendricks & I argue about it (freethoughtblogs.com)

I was interested to do a first parse of the above debate on God's existance with theist Perry Hendricks and evangelical atheist PZ Myers.  If time permits, I might do a more detailed commentary on this video but here are some initial comments.

Much of Perry Hendricks' argument was based on the Bayesian type reasoning which uses priors like the existence of cosmic design, organization, biological structures and human moral instincts as evidence for God. These arguments have a generic form which employs Bayes theorem to derive a high probability of God's existence. I considered an example of this class of argument here: Bayes and God. He also used the cosmological argument; Viz: Because the natural world is shot through with contingency and cannot be the seat of Aseity or the realm of explanatory completeness, Aseity must exist beyond the material world and must be the ultimate cause of the hard core of cosmic contingency. Hendricks is a bright guy and is a credit to the faith.

PZ Myers dismissed all that without further ado as just philosophy and therefore not worth further consideration. PZ made it quite clear he is looking for a God he can test like he can test a mechanical system such as a chemical reaction: i.e. Press button A and you get output B. He's looking for a God of quick tricks and the example he gave is this: Can God tell me what I've got in my pocket? If God can't rise to that simple test, then it is unlikely there is a God, although to be fair PZ admitted that no one can answer the question "Is there a God?" either way with absolute certainty. I'd agree there is no human certainty and I have some sympathy with atheists who feel that a world like ours can't be a result of a personal, loving and infinitely wise Creator; just think of Ken Ham, Alex Jones, Margorie Taylor-Green, Donald Trump & QAnon promoter Trey Smith and you've got some evidence for atheism.  But as for providing some tricks for PZ, you never know: After all God is a God of grace! What PZ didn't seem to twig is that underneath it his reasoning was Bayesian! How ironic! The further irony is that those Christians who say they know God exists because they have God in their hearts, are also using Bayes without knowing it!

The Self Referencing Problem

 

In 1993, in response to an article by Richard Dawkins in the New Statesman (Dec 1992) I wrote this essay:

Quantum Non-Linearity: HOW TO KNOW YOU KNOW YOU KNOW IT (quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com)

This essay was all about the unstable self-reference implicit in Dawkins' article. However, that Dawkins was unaware of this conceptual instability was actually his "salvation"; the instability is only likely to occur if one spots and ponders the conundrum: People like Dawkins who implicitly assume there is such a thing as an unambiguous truth accessible via observation and rationality immunize themselves against the ravages caused by the unstable conceptual swings of contradictory self-reference (Self affirming self-reference is also immune). However, there are those out there who are not so fortunate and start to lose their grasp on the concept of Truth and consequently lose touch with reality itself as unstable self-reference kicks in. The societal confusion that this can cause gives opportunity for self-assured demagogues to exploit the situation by becoming an anchor point in a troubled sea of existential crises; in the face of this confusion demagogues from both the left and right oversimplify the struggle with a polarized "us vs. them others" model.  Today "them others" may be referred to by the right-wing as "The Woke". But in 1993 "woke" was not a vogue term and so I itemized the philosophies I was targeting, and they were...

THE NARROW CONFINES of extreme forms of reductionist materialism, dialectical materialism, existentialism, relativism and subjective idealism may be dogmatic about what can be....

(I'd also want to add any philosophy which portrays truth purely as a social construction and therefore relative to a particular society) These philosophies have an embedded unstable-self-reference which ultimately leads to self-contradiction and the thrashings of unstable conceptual feedback. The authoritarian far-right are exploiting the inherent social instabilities that these notions promote by becoming the great simplifiers of social reality as they lump everything they detest under the heading of "woke". In some quarters this counter-reaction has become so extreme that even someone like myself would be classified as "woke" simply because I don't side with the extremes of what I, in a tit-for-tat response, call "The Unwoke".  These extremists are joining the great historical simplifiers and demagogues of the past; their simplification of issues is one feature which makes them popular. But the Old Testaments provides warnings about the kind of popularism which seeks autocratic champions to provide an anchor during those societal breakdowns where every person is a law unto themselves (Judges 21:25):  This situation paves the way for the rule of charlatans who promise the earth but in return demand unconditional loyalty to their "highness". (See 1 Samuel 8:7-18). Adoring crowds are a magnet for the narcissistic. 

What triggered this current post of mine was the following post by IDist William Dembski on the website Evolution News. This post by Dembski also mentions the unstable self-referencing tendency of what he calls Scientific Materialism, but I would call exclusive secularism: 

How Scientific Materialism Begot Woke Ideology | Evolution News

Like Dembski I'm in the ironic position of siding with people like Richard Dawkins and Laurence Krauss, people who still firmly hold on to a belief in truth and rationality. So, 30 years after my essay I find Dembski mentioning something I wrote about in 1993. In fact, it was 20 years on from 1993 when Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga was also talking about the same subject. 

Relevant Links:

Quantum Non-Linearity: Evolution, Unstable Conceptual Feedback & Nihilism (quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com)

Quantum Non-Linearity: Plantinga Catches up on Unstable Self Reference. (quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com)

Quantum Non-Linearity: Meaningless Conflict (quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com)

I'm Feeling Lucky

The above Google search, "Reeves Probability" + "I'm feeling lucky", used to work in favour of the paper I wrote on probability and then after a while it stopped working. But I seem to have "struck lucky" again and the "I'm feeling lucky" search now comes up with this:

T. V. Reeves, A theory of probability - PhilPapers

It's rather neat that "I'm feeling lucky" should come up with a paper on chance and probability!

With the advent of statistical and quantum mechanics, probability and chance are ubiquitous in physics. Also, in common speech we hear about events being "just chance", or "just luck" or "random"; events are often written off as insignificant and meaningless on the basis of these emotive labels.  

But "chance", "luck" and "random" cannot be used coherently unless you know what you mean by these terms. So, with this in mind in the 1980s off I went and after long investigation & thought I wrote a paper on probability and also a small book on randomness with the purpose of probing the meanings of these often glibly used terms.  The above link returns the probability paper. The link to my indy-book on randomness is here:

projectZv01b.pdf - Google Drive