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A gross theological caricature |
In part IV of this series, I'm continuing to comment on the following post by a Mr. Richard Carrier:
Why the Fine Tuning Argument Proves God Does Not Exist • Richard Carrier Blogs
As Richard stares out at our strange cosmos and considers the question of theism and whether or not a cosmos like our's would have been produced by the kind of God conceived by most theists, this is what he thinks:
It cannot be predicted that this [Universe] is what a God would produce, or that it is what he would want to produce. Whereas it is exactly 100% predicted to be what we’d see if there was no God
I would certainly question Richard's second sentence here: What kind of universe/cosmos would I have predicted if there was no God? As we saw in the previous parts I certainly wouldn't have predicted our own remarkable universe in all its organized complexity, it's surprising organized contingencies and above all an organization which gives it a very strong propensity to generate life....... especially that propensity to generate complex organic objects! After all, only in recent history have humans started to master systems capable of generating other systems. Why wouldn't I have predicted all this in the absence of God? .... because the evidence of our experience is that organization of all types, both simple and complex, are associated with the activity of human (and animal) intelligence. Therefore, when I see a cosmos so organized that we can distill out of it those highly succinct mathematical laws of physics, laws which are crucial for the generation & maintenance of life, my intuitions turn to thoughts of an a priori intelligence being active. Moreover, the fact is that the laws we distill from cosmic organization can never have the property of Aseity (that is of self-explanation). This is because these laws are mathematically descriptive devices destined to always leave us with a hard core of irreducible, incompressible and enigmatic contingent information; those laws are therefore logically incapable of delivering the logical necessity of Aseity. Some atheists at least do understand this. Take for example atheists Galen Strawson and Sean Carroll: Both appear to understand that all probing human inquiry into the form and pattern of the cosmos must eventually bottom out with unexplainable brute fact: Aseity is beyond the reach of conventional descriptive science. This is a mathematical truism. See the following links for more details...
There have been some who have tried to get round all this by suggesting that somehow quantum mechanics can be used to redefine nothing in such a way that it tells us how it is possible to get something from nothing: But this line of thought is achieved by mere empty linguistic tricks: One can use the same tricks to claim that this simply amounts to a redefinition of something!
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And yet I'm inclined to agree with Richard's first sentence in the quote above: I don't think I could have predicted that the kind of God I think I know would have created the specifics of our universe, not only because of its strange impersonal and dispassionate vastness but also because of the much closer to home, well aired and time-honored conundrums around suffering and evil. Yes, I might have predicted a highly organized universe, but organization covers a multitude of possibilities, and it seems a multitude of sins. So, I do have some sympathy with honest atheists on this point. (But types like Richard don't want sympathy & measured opinions; they want abject submission to their thinking; his attitudes match those of the hardened fundamentalists of Biblical literalism).
Moreover, based on our experience of intelligent activity in this world (which by & large is human and animal) we have to admit that not only does intelligent activity have an immense space of creative options open to it making anticipation of specific activity in the absence of evidence all but impossible, but also that intelligent activity has a fair measure of inscrutability. For example, the ancient stone circles we see dotted around Europe entail a high level of organization both in their configuration and the logistics of their construction and yet as to their purpose we have to resort to hypothesis and speculation. Furthermore, coming from a vacuum of evidence I could not have predicted from first principles that early cultures (probably as a consequence of that time honoured search for cosmic meaning & purpose) would build stone circles. Because of the huge variety open to intelligent behavior I can't move from an evidential vacuum to stone circles. But the reverse is possible: Given the evidence of stone circles I can link that to known aspects of the human psyche, a psyche I share. This means we have at least some inkling of the motives driving the human organization of inanimate objects and therefore have a chance of interpreting the meaning of this activity; in this case that the stone circles probably represent a culture's attempt to engage with the numinous and seek to give shape, meaning, and purpose to the universe; I personally think I understand that mystical endeavor.
Likewise, as we look out onto the cosmos itself, we observe high levels of organization in a pattern we couldn't predict even if we knew beforehand that a creating deity was behind it. But conversely, if we are sufficiently primed theists, we at least stand a chance of getting a purchase on cosmic purposes via theological hypothesis and speculation. But if we reject God's attempt at self-revelation and we reject the necessity of the epistemic bootstrap of faith (See Hebrews 11:3&6), we will remain as much in the dark about Divine purposes as we are about those enigmatic stone circles. For it is possible in my view to come up with at least a hypothesized framework as to the meaning of the cosmos.
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But now I ask myself this: What would I have predicted if there is no God of any sort? My first intuitive response to that question would be absolute empty nothingness; but this is patently not the case: Our conscious perceptions tell us that the universe exists and therefore we do have an evidential handle on this question. In fact, as I said in Part III of this series, if the evidence was that the universe is completely random (That is, a Big-R superverse), I would interpret that as evidence of the absence of the God I think I know. As Sherlock Holmes observed in the story of The Cardboard Box where he was commenting on a particularly tragic case of crime...
“What is the meaning of it, Watson?” said Holmes, solemnly, as he laid down the paper. “What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But to what end? There is the great standing perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer as ever.”
(See the introduction to my book on Disorder and Randomness where I first used this quote)
But whilst I'd agree that our intuitions suggest that Big-R points to atheism, the reverse isn't true: Viz: Given atheism I wouldn't have been able to predict a Big-R universe: The consequences of the absence of God are just as inscrutable as God himself. In any case a prediction of Big-R isn't a straightforward deduction from the absence of God. Let me explain...
Firstly, in a Big-R universe I wouldn't exist to perceive anything and neither would anyone else. Being an idealist where I regard conscious cognition and perception as an important underwriter of reality, I would therefore question the coherence and intelligibility of Big-R notions.
Secondly, randomness represents the very opposite of a logical truism; A logical truism, once understood, has zero surprisal value and therefore no information, whereas randomness has maximum surprisal value and maximum information. If you are looking for the logical necessity of explanatory completeness or aseity you won't find it in randomness. The existence of randomness entails maximum contingency and maximum mystery. It is first and foremost the very opposite of a logical truism, the very opposite of "necessity". It therefore explains nothing in the sense of explanatory completeness; rather it just leaves us with a conundrum as to who or what is managing to generate the most complex pattern of all, a pattern that requires a maximum of computational effort.
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In the following quote we find Richard continuing to dig even deeper into the hole he is already in....
RICHARD: Thus, Fine Tuning is not a “peculiar” thing for us to observe. It is not distinctive of God-made universes; it is, rather, distinctive of godless universes. It is literally the only thing we could ever observe—unless God existed and made the universe. Because only then could the universe possibly have been made conducive to life without the Fine Tuning of our peculiar fundamental constants. Hence God-made worlds will tend to not be Fine Tuned.
MY COMMENT: As we saw in Part III, so-called "fine tuning" is just a small facet of a much bigger story of a remarkable order which has facilitated the human project of distilling out of the pattern of that order some remarkably elegant mathematical forms which from my standpoint have a very divine feel about them. They look to be the very epitome of an incredibly intelligent design. And let me repeat, further "explanation" of these forms can never deliver aseity but could only ever be a further enhancement of the succinctness of their form; but increasing mathematical succinctness can't go on until one has nothing left to compress; an incompressible kernel of contingency will always remain using mathematics as we know it.
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Richard Carrier has a very low view of our Cosmos. In spite of its exceptional and highly stable order, an order strongly conducive to the emergence and maintenance of life Richard still courts the Big-R hypothesis, the random bizarro universe that can be used to explain away anything. Take a look at the following...
RICHARD: This is a crucial realization. Fine Tuning of our observed fundamental constants is only necessary when a God is not doing the designing; it is only necessary when observers only evolve through billions of years of gradual cellular scaffolding, and life at all arises only by chance chemical mixing, and only after billions of years of the meandering random mixing of chemicals across a vast universe billions of light-years in size filled with random lifeless junk, which is almost everywhere lethal to life, and only hospitable to it in tiny specks of the chance arrangement of randomly mixed conditions. Only those conditions require Fine Tuning. Quite simply put: only Godless universes have to be Finely Tuned.
Which means when you observe a universe like ours (old, huge, deadly, and producing life only in the most awkward of ways and rarest of places), you can expect it to have been Finely Tuned by chance accident, not intelligent design. Intelligent design would more likely make a universe as large and old as needed to contain the life it was made for, and would create life directly (not employ billions of years of cellular scaffolding), and imbue the world with only those laws of physics needed to maintain it to its purpose (no weird fundamental constants, no weird fundamental particles). It would not produce a universe almost entirely hostile to life. There would be no lethal radiation-filled vacuum. No dead worlds or lifeless moons. Stars would not be uninhabitable monstrosities. Black holes would never exist.
MY COMMENT: And again: Chance fine tuning is a very bad argument for atheism; it neglects that the values of the "fine-tuned" variables only make sense in the context of the highly organizing effect of a set of remarkable laws and which together with those laws constitute pre-conditions which considerably enhances the chance of life. As I've said above, because of the huge space of possibilities open to intelligence and on top of that intelligence's inscrutability it is difficult to anticipate in advance what intelligence will do. But the reverse is an easier path. Given the works of intelligence we, as intelligences ourselves, can work backwards with a chance of interpreting the purpose of its works. To my mind all those dead worlds are the evidence of a search, reject and select computation, a declarative procedure that may well use teleological constraints.
The emphasis on fine tuning in Richard's quote above completely misses the plot; namely, that what is actually being fine-tuned is a remarkable cosmic computation machine of immense dimensions. And yet according to Richard's theology God simply doesn't do things like this; instead, God does things without logic and without sequence; it is ironic that Biblical literalists often think in a very similar way. But contrary to this kind of thinking is the evidence of our experience of the way intelligence works: Viz: It works using an experimental search, reject and select activity; the cosmos appears to be a tableau of intelligent activity, a tableau of creative activity.
And while I'm here a note to self: Here's a speculation for me to think about. The fine-tuning constants could have many, many non-zero decimal places after the decimal point. Therefore, if ordinary parallel processing rather than expanding parallelism is the search space method being used to develop the cosmos, the fine-tuning constants could be a sneaky way of feeding information, a priori, into cosmic evolution, thereby speeding the search up.
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Epilogue
In Part III I introduced the idea that the cosmos can be thought of as a fantastically large computation, a computation which is expressible in a very abstracted form as an equation relating the information content of the created configuration to a function of two variables: 1) The starting information and 2) the minimum possible number of computational steps. This equation looks something like this:
I = S + Log T
Equation 1
Where I is the information content of the configuration created, and S is the minimum length of the algorithm needed to generate the configuration using a minimum number of execution steps of T. See here where I give more details on this relation. (See also here). For a parallel computation the time taken for the computation will be proportional to T, but if as I feel is entirely plausible for our universe expanding parallelism is somehow being employed, the computation is achieved much faster.
As we saw in Part III according to the theology of Richard Carrier, God, if he existed, would just do stuff abracadabra style; that is Richard takes it for granted that T ~ 0 and that creation has no sequential duration; in his theology God just does his stuff by downloading reified brute fact via his mighty magic commands. As we saw this is also the theology of the Biblical literalists (* See footnote below for the theology of the North American ID community).
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As I have said so often; there is a sense in which the elegant & succinct mathematical forms distilled from the high organisation of the cosmos "explain" absolutely nothing in the deepest sense of the word. Explanatory mathematical objects as we know them are less an act of explanation than that of compressed descriptions; as such they can never break the explanatory completeness barrier and deliver aseity.
Our world is just one of the possible worlds that can be reified from the platonic realm. This fact is going to be hard to take for those who hanker after the secular notion that somehow the so-called material world can be so closed ended that it delivers an aseity of its own. Rather, it is just one of many possibilities that can be dragged out of the platonic world, reified and because of its organization, described with succinct "distilled" mathematical forms. It is in fact a work of art rather than a work of necessity; there is good art and bad art, but all is art, and art is but realized possibility. Our science gives us the pattern of the creation but not its fundamental origins; as many people have put it; the objects of science give us the "how" but not the "why?". But "why?" is only intelligible as a question in the context of an assumed a-priori sentience; in the context of this assumed conscious cognition the concepts of intention, goal and purpose have meaning. So, is our ravenous curiosity going to be satiated with answers that merely tell us about the "How"? For some people at least that does seem to be the case.
As we try to make sense of the cosmos we use a combination of induction, abduction and deduction: The generalizations of induction sometimes help prompt the production of theories but perhaps more often a theory is abducted with a giant intuitive leap of inspiration. Crucially, however, a theory arrived at by inspiration must then be tested via the predictions of deduction. This testing methodology has grown up around the relatively simple conceptual objects which control the physical regime, but it is a methodology that is far less effective when dealing with the inscrutabilities & complexities of the personal, the psychological, the sociological and above all the liminal world of the numinous. These phenomena are far too complex, erratic and full of exceptions to easily admit formal methods. The numinous in particular is the domain of anecdotal evidence, the domain of personal revelation.
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The evidence of our senses is that our cosmos is highly organized, and that this unique organization is such that it facilitates those descriptive conceptual devices and tokens we call the laws of physics which ride on top of and can be intellectually distilled from this order. That this order is being created and maintained everywhere and everywhen by an a priori intelligence is not an implausible proposition for many of us, even if for some it seems too large an epistemic step to make. But I'll concede that it is not a proposition that can be formally tested like the relatively simple physical regime can be tested; testing such a complex entity is more akin to testing the partially veiled and complex world of sociology and human thought. So, although individuals may feel they have tested their faith anecdotally the anecdotes they tell won't convince everyone, least of all the evangelical atheists. But we do have this: Theism has the potential to at least make sense of the cosmos in terms of purpose and meaning whereas vanilla science, which only tells us the "how", cannot do this. Moreover, as an idealist I would contend, that the reality of the particulate cosmos is unintelligible unless one first posits an a-priori up and running conscious cognition. Particulate matter only makes sense as the mathematical constructions of a conscious, thinking & perceiving sentience. For me Hebrews 11:3&6 is a necessary first principle of epistemology.
But of course, I can't expect an evangelical atheist like Richard to agree with any of this as it is very much dependent on personal anecdote rather than formal observational protocols. All I can advise is that people like Richard will just have to get out on their bikes and find some anecdotes of their own. As far as I'm concerned, all bets are still on!
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Depending on how I feel I might complete this series by looking at Richard's tongue in cheek theology which he expresses in the picture that heads this post. Viz: God needs blood to fix the universe, but only his blood has enough magical power to do it, so he gave himself a body and then killed it. I wonder where Richard got his grist to come up with that one? I just wonder. The guilty parties probably know who they are.
Footnote
* On North American Intelligent Design (NAID): Although I'm fundamentally an Intelligent Creation person I must once again disown any intellectual sympathy with this community, especially so as they fall into the welcoming embrace of the far-right, merging Christianity with politics.
I personally don't have any intellectual commitment to the engine driving evolutionary change as currently conceived and yet I would heavily criticize the line taken by the NAID community: They have entrenched themselves in a tribal culture which is married to a set of misleading conceptual cliches: Viz: anti-evolutionism, "blind natural forces", anti-junk-DNA, "chance vs necessity" and subliminal deism. (See here for more). The NAID community make a sharp distinction between so-called "blind natural forces" and intelligent activity. The consequence is that they have adopted an epistemic filter which makes hard going of the identification of the basics of the physical regime as a work of hyper-intelligence; thus, in a sense chiming with Richard Carrier's view that the physical regime is a product of mindless blind Kaos; how utterly ironic!
If we assume that the cosmos is created and maintained everywhere and everywhen by the Divine will, then immediately the NAID category of "blind natural forces" becomes problematical. This is because in the context of intelligent creationism those forces can hardly be classified as blind and natural; in fact, the cosmos as the reification of artistic possibility rather than of necessity is highly unnatural. Although the NAID community are by and large like myself old cosmos creationists they nevertheless have subliminally taken on board the category of God as a super-duper conjurer creating stuff instantaneously as fully formed configurations, stuff that just springs into existence like a rabbit out of a hat. If this statement of their views is caricatured and unfair they had better tell me why it is.
The particularly North American notion of God as a magician appears to be associated with the view that somehow the T term in equation 1 classifies as a "natural force" and therefore we must have T ~ 0. For them admitting T >> 0 is an intolerable bogy that is shockingly close to admitting some kind of evolution; to them it is the evil thin end of the "natural forces" wedge of secularization. But in my opinion for the Everywhere and Everywhen God T is just as much a divine creation as is S.
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