Motivated Atheism

Motivated atheism: "We don't want none of that God business here, thankyou very much!"

                From: Viewpoint: What 'New Atheists’ get wrong about science and religion - Genetic Literacy Project

Does Humanity Need a God Who Doesn’t Exist? asks fundamentalist theme park supremo Ken Ham in a blog post dated December 2025. After posing the question Ken goes on to say....

KEN: Is God just (Note the "Just" here) an evolutionary necessity? I was recently sent an article titled “The God Construct: Why Humanity Needed God Though God Need Not Exist.”  The abstract of this “atheistic, scientific-philosophical perspective” applied to the idea of God says:

This article argues that humanity created the concept of God to address deep psychological and social needs, even though no empirical evidence requires a God’s existence. Drawing on the philosophy of religion and cognitive science, we demonstrate that belief in gods arises from evolved cognitive byproducts (e.g., hyperactive agency detection and theory of mind) and existential motives (such as meaning, order, and comfort in the face of death and suffering). From an atheistic, scientific-philosophical perspective, we contend that God is a cultural construct (‘man needs God’) rather than a necessary metaphysical being. Logical analysis (e.g. the problem of evil (But see here) and ontological arguments) supports God’s non-necessity, while empirically humans with strong God-belief report greater purpose and reduced death anxiety (Cranney 2013). We argue that religion fulfilled survival functions (community cohesion, moral regulation) but did so via God-concepts as symbolic projections. In sum, the God-idea met human needs, not vice versa. This thesis is supported by interdisciplinary evidence from evolutionary psychology, anthropology, and analytic philosophy. [emphases added]

MY COMMENT: Ironically I don't necessarily disagree with much of that abstract! If for the moment I put on my evolutionary hat (which I don't wear all the time) then I can accept that humans have evolved in such a way that their cognitive, temperamental and emotional needs precipitated an existential crisis which motivated a search for meaning & purpose and ultimately led to the construction of concepts of divinity in various forms; hence the jargon "cultural construct". I would also accept that as far as limited human understanding is concerned God has no known logical necessity. But what about "empirical necessity"? - more on that subject in a bit.

But, and here is the big "but", an evolutionary account explaining the human need for the divine can be taken as empirical evidence which is readily incorporated into a theistic world view. Viz: From the theistic evolutionists world view it is easy to claim that the evolution of the "God shaped hole", a void which humanity seeks to fill, is God's way of revealing himself to the evolved world.  In short, yes, the divine is a cultural construct, but is it only a cultural construct? (See Romans 2:14ff for more)

Ironically, the thesis in the above abstract may not actually be that popular among some motivated atheists. Why? Well, its tantamount to admitting that theism is not some random human foible of relatively recent social origin but a deeply ingrained human trait inextricably intertwined with evolution; a product of an emerging conscious cognition capable of self-awareness, self reflection and in need of existentialist assurance.

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I wonder if the author of the abstract really understands empiricism and the role of evidence? All evidence is subject to interpretation (*1); it is just that some of the simpler and very accessible ontologies (like Hooke's law and chemical precipitates) provide us with prolific empirical evidences at will; the high organization of this empirical data then allows us to incorporate natural information in succinct laws.  

As we move from elementary ontologies to more complex and  less accessible ontologies, such as human beings themselves, their societies and their histories, and their cosmogonies etc. the vexed question of how to interpret sparse and less accessible data comes very much to the fore. And if that is true of commonplace objects (albeit objects which are very complex and of greater epistemic distance) then we would expect it to be even more true, if it exists, of the Transcendent.  I discuss this more fully elsewhere: See here for example. Compounding the problem is that evidences for God are often found in private experiences and epiphanies that are not easily shared. 

God's apparent lack of logical necessity is true as far as we are concerned but this may be down to a perspective effect of finite cognition and epistemic limitations. These limitations prevent us  from wrapping our minds around a full understanding of God thus thwarting human attempts to appreciate his logical necessity. When it comes to ultimate origins this problem even surfaces in atheism....

In my series on conceited blowhard Richard Carrier we found even him accepting that beyond what appears to us as the unnecessary contingency of our own cosmos there are logical truths out there which cannot be done away with. Therefore he argued that the cosmos didn't come from nothing; at the very least certain logical truths hold eternally, although he at first left open exactly what those logical truths are. But he then went on to erroneously use probability theory as if it were one of those logical truisms, thus allowing him to generate universes at random. But while his identification of what is logically true was in error, the idea that the universe is created and upheld by some underlying logical truism is not out of the way.... although I would regard attempts like Anselm's ontological argument and the first cause argument as weak and even invalid proofs of God's existence... but I have great sympathy with the underlying motivation to get at the logical truisms behind the cosmos. 

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Now let's see how Ken reacts...

KEN: In other words, there’s no convincing evidence that God exists; but we needed him, so sometime in our evolutionary past, mankind invented a God or gods to serve our purposes. But do you realize that, in making his argument, this atheistic author has already defeated his very premise? Okay, what do I mean by that?

Well, he admits his research comes from an atheistic perspective: He believes everything is material and everything evolved by materialistic (non-supernatural) processes over many millions of years. In this worldview, there cannot be anything immaterial. And yet he is applying logic and reason to make his arguments. But logic and reason are not material! They are immaterial . . . and the immaterial can’t exist in his own worldview. (emphases added)

MY COMMENT: It is simply not clear to me what is meant here by materialism and materialistic processes.  In my view such notions are incoherent and it is likely they have their origins in the bogus God vs natural forces dichotomy; they are crypto-deist categories. I've argued against this sham paradigm many times in connection with the North America Intelligent Design (NAID) community (See here). It is no surprise to see that Ken has been influenced by this error. 

Material objects, so called, exist because the high organization of our sense data allows us to mathematically and logically define material objects such as stars, planets, people, minds, computers, atoms, and fundamental particles etc. geometrically; "materialism" does not make sense without the use of mathematics and logic. Beyond those mathematical constructions we are hard put to it to identify the true nature of the thing-in-itself which supports the high organization of our experience. For Christians of course that thing-in-itself is, whatever its ontological nature, created and sustained by God. 

Because of Ken's undefined use of the term "material", Ken's statement that  logic and reason are not material! They are immaterial . . . and the immaterial can’t exist in his own worldview is unintelligible. It is the very organization of the creation which facilitates our notion of logic. Ergo, an atheist too can appreciate logic and reason although atheism would not, of course, attribute the origin of that organization to a rational creator God. For example the atheist  Galen Strawson (who has no idea where it all came from), as a last resort throws up his hands and declares that the organized cosmos "just is". Well, Christians (such as myself) can't really complain too strongly about that because for us God himself "just is" as per Hebrews 11:6. 

In the above quote from Ken, we find him, as is his wont, yet again putting his own ideas into the mouths and minds of an antagonist - a bad habit of his whether his antagonist is a Christian or atheist. (See here and here for example).

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KEN: In a chance, random universe, laws of logic that apply to everyone everywhere don’t make sense. Why would randomness produce immaterial laws that don’t change? In order to make his argument, this atheist has to borrow from a biblical worldview because it is only the eternal God of the Bible, who is logically consistent, never changes, and can account for laws of logic. He is borrowing from the very worldview (or theism, at least) that he is arguing against! The very fact that he can argue at all shows he is wrong.

MY COMMENT: Defining randomness is itself quite a challenge in logic; randomness certainly doesn't do away with logic; in fact it needs logic to be understood. But I think I get what Ken is trying to say here: Randomness is the antithesis of the high organisation which facilitates the enunciation of those very successful laws of nature. If that's what Ken really means then its true those laws make the natural world an intelligible place and make logic possible. But beyond those descriptive laws the deeper logical reason for the cosmos remains an enigma, not withstanding Richard Carrier's botched philosophy of probability. As Galen Strawson appears to acknowledge that's where atheism's questions hit an impenetrable barrier.

I'd accept what Ken is trying say in as much Christianity has played a role in helping us to have confidence in the stability, organisation, rationality and consequent knowability of the cosmos. This is the a priori epistemic feature which motivates science. 

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KEN:  We didn’t invent God. God exists outside of time and space. He created us by the power of his word and then revealed himself to us through his perfect Word and his Son, Jesus Christ, who came to offer his own life in our place so we could be forgiven and spend eternity with him.

MY COMMENT:  I can run with the gist of that Ken, even though you would likely classify me as a pagan. (I'm generally much more generous to cultists than they have any hope of reciprocating that generosity) However, if evolution made the invention of God an existential necessity for searching, seeking humankind it's an invention that not only worked but has revealed The Big Secret behind the universe. 

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KEN: And don’t forget, man can’t escape the fact that “that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, both His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse” (Romans 1:19–20 LSB).

MY COMMENT:  Well Ken, if I temporarily put my evolutionary hat on, it could be plausibly maintained that the writer of the paper, in a back handed way, concedes one point; namely that that which is known about God is evident within them......etc., but he is proposing that this knowledge has emerged evolutionarily. Of course Ken doesn't believe in evolution but for Christians who are evolutionists this paper can be seen as an acknowledgement that humanity's innate awareness of the numinous comes from deep rooted whisperings within. 

But not everyone responds positively to those whisperings: For one thing is clear however, and Ken may well agree, the writer of this paper is likely to be highly motivated toward atheism; that is, he wants atheism to be true and thus he casts around for arguments which fit this a priori belief; much like Ken does for his a priori beliefs!

Footnote

*1 The view I express here is similar to but is certainly not the same as Ken's bigoted presuppositionalism. Human beings most often work abductively, trying to fit the evidence to some a priori world view which (hopefully) successfully interprets that evidence. But unlike Ken's quasi-cult artistry which motivates him to threaten all but damnation on antagonists, our world views should not be regarded as immutable; if a world view struggles to make sense of the cosmos (such as YEC, flat earth theory, conspiracy theories etc.) then it must be abandoned and a new world view developed. Contrast that with the absurdities of YEC fundamentalism which according to Ken must be held onto on pain of all but excommunication from the faith.

The AI Garbage Bubble?

I was interested to see that conceited blowhard Richard Carrier has commented very dogmatically & abrasively on the subject of AI. See here:

AI Is Garbage and a Bubble (Please Learn This) • Richard Carrier Blogs

Hahaha Richard, I like it! I've only skimmed over his article but my guess is that he's probably got some worthy points there. We have to factor in, however, that he has a tendency to blow hard on stuff he doesn't like. That is very much a Richard Carrier trait. 

It is likely that the biggest problem with AI is that it's over hyped. At least part of reason for this, I guess, is a result of chatbot behavior which gives every impression of a talking, walking sentience; humans have a reactive tendency to think that if it talks and walks like a duck then its a duck. Responsive talking, in particular, is very convincing of the presence of sentience. But that's a bit like a person from a primitive culture, unaware of our hi-tech times, looking in our very perfect mirrors or listening to a perfect recording and then inferring as a first-off conclusion that he's actually seeing or hearing a real human there and then; it's a very natural and understandable knee-jerk reaction to conclude that such are evidence of the immediate presence of a sentient being. 

But chatbots are only another (albeit very sophisticated) human-computer interface. It is chatbot's very human like language behavior which is fooling a lot of people and if the investment bubble bursts we could be in for some trouble. But then are things as bad as Richard says? He's well known for being a blowhard and he may well be blowing just a little too hard (again). 

The quasi human interface which chatbots provide is impressive and can give the impression we are talking to an entity which is super-intelligent. But then using SQL (Structured Query Language) to interrogate a big computer database can also be very impressive.  I regard AI language models as a step (perhaps quite a few steps in fact) beyond SQL. I personally would want to congratulate the AI research community on providing us with a natural language interface as a way of accessing knowledge and information. Thanks and Well done; you deserve an accolade of two. I have a measure of appreciation about how AI works after my involvement on The Thinknet Project. That involvement started in the 1980s (but later morphed into a project in Quantum Mechanics). 

But in creating AI based on the human thinking* model it is a fairly sound inference that it is therefore going to be very, very fallible; after all, humans are very epistemically fallible; in fact ask Richard himself just what he thinks of the fallible conclusions of many of his fellow humans on whom he has been known to blow very hard. His criticism of AI is on a par with some of his criticism of his fellow humans; like humans, like AI. However, although Richard's post is probably overstated it is worth a read especially by some of those rich CEOs who don't understand what they are dealing with. It might sober  them up a bit on the subject.

Footnotes

* As I proceeded with the Thinknet model I perceived that an actual "thinking machine" was not very far away. After all I based my model on Edward De Bono's "Mechanism of Mind"

NAID: The Thumbs Down and the Thumbs Up

 

I think this is what they mean by a "trigger"

I've complained about North American Intelligent Design (NAID) culture on many an occasion; in particular their unnecessarily a priori anti-evolutionism and anti-Junk DNA posturing founded on their dualist God-of-the-Gaps philosophy: Viz: "either God did it or evilution did it". NAID pundits like Casey Luskin will of course try and deny this, but Luskin is not the kind of guy I find very competent. But worse than Luskin's philosophical faux pas' is that NAID culture, following its sometimes off-hand treatment by academia, has fallen into the embrace of far right nationalists & "libertarians": We can find, for example, an article on their website which supports the Trumpist commandeering of museums to preach the far right gospel of unwokeness. (See also here). In the US Christian culture is being politically corrupted from within. The late Charlie Kirk is to my mind a typical case of a politically corrupted Christian. So, it's thumbs down to all that Philosophical dualism and to Casey Luskin, but most of all to those far right political bedmates determined to cancel anything which to them smacks of "woke".  

Trump Commandeering policy at work

But having said all that I can get behind Intelligent Design in the abstract and would call myself an intelligent design creationist along with the late Sir John Polkinghorne. In this post I'm going to mention some articles on the Evolution News/Science & Culture website where I can give them a thumbs up for a change. 

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The Thumbs Up

1.  Death by Intelligent Design? A Biological Enigma | Science and Culture Today

This article is by Eric Hedin. I have criticized Hedin before as a NAIDer who has succumbed to dualism but in this post he makes some very worthy remarks (in my view).  He points out that given the biological world's potential ability to breed exponentially such a superpower makes death in a world of limited space and resources a necessity; he even applies this to human populations - an idea that would certainly not go down well with Biblical literalists of a fundamentalist frame of mind. What he doesn't say however is that the breeding/death contention is very much part of the evolutionary dynamic. For a discussion of this contention see my generalized evolutionary equation and the question of  islands of functionality. 

Quantum Non-Linearity: Evolution by (Naked) Chance?

Quantum Non-Linearity: Evolution and Islands of functionality

Quantum Non-Linearity: Evolution: Naked Chance?

Quantum Non-Linearity: The Mathematics of the Spongeam.

Quantum Non-Linearity: On Structuralism and the Spongeam

Quantum Non-Linearity: Necessary Conditions for Evolution: The Spongeam

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2. Farewell to John Searle, Philosopher of Mind and Language | Science and Culture Today

This is a tribute to the late philosopher John Searle who made it clear to the world that there is a difference between conscious cognition and the formal computational simulation of the amazing molecular processes which give organic minds their consciousness and therefore their first person perspective. Those irrational "rationalists" who are spooked by the subject of consciousness and the irreducible first person perspective will likely continue to maintain their consciousness-doesn't-exist stance(*1); they do this by conflating the difference between third and first person linguistic usage and also conflating the structure of formal models and the actual subject of a formal simulation. 

This tribute to Searle by Science and Culture was well deserved. 

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3. French Authors Say Science Points to God; Scientists Listen | Science and Culture Today

This interesting article by Denise O'Leary starts with a mention of a book by two French authors titled "God, the Science, the Evidence". This book apparently takes a favorable view toward theism. Denise goes on to consider what may be a more sympathetic shift among some scholars toward theism. The article does, however, betray  hints of NAID's anti-evolution God-of-the-Gaps philosophy(*2) and displays no cognizance of the One Big Gap everywhere and everywhen necessarily left by descriptive science's elegant compressed mathematical formalisms.

What particularly interested me was this quote from Denise's article:

For one thing, materialism is, as philosopher Edward Feser points out, a snake that eats its own tail. If our minds are merely illusions or brain noise, why should we believe anything?

That reminded me of the following post of mine on unstable self-reference: 

Quantum Non-Linearity: HOW TO KNOW YOU KNOW YOU KNOW IT

Denise finishes by suggesting that materialism may be reborn as panpsychism - she might (or might not) be right.

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4. Materialism Is Bad for Science | Science and Culture Today

This is another interesting post by Denise O'Leary. She rightly takes geneticist Richard Lewontin to task for his closed mindedness toward epigenetics. Well, I'm not going to get into that fracas - it could go either as far as I'm concerned, but where I would agree with Denise is that in her quote from Lewontin it seems that Lewontin was or is an unscientific bigot who is of the opinion that when a theory is well established he is right to ignore data and experience which might just point to the need to refine and/or update the theory.  Lewontin's attitude is on a par with the geocentric establishment who persecuted Galileo in favour of the established Ptolemaic theory.  True, the established theory with its ad-hoc epicycles fitted quite well with the data, but the vested interests of the establishment meant that they were captive to the theoretical status quo and unable to pay attention to its limitation or entertain other possibilities, least of all a paradigm shift.  

The foregoing doesn't necessarily relate to hardened materialism: It's really all about how rigor mortis can plague established science if conservative bigotry, status jealousy and vested interest get their way. Nevertheless I can see how Lewontin's bigotry will also readily port to God-denying materialism.

ADDENDUM 9/11/2025

I can give NAID's Science & Culture website a reserved thumbs up for this post. It strongly criticizes far right and alt-right characters Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes although anomalously grouping under them under the heading "woke right" whatever that means! I myself prefer to use the term "unwoke" for such people. It's true to say however that the woke and the unwoke, although initially moving in opposite directions, end up at the same place in the curved universe of politics; their jaundiced view of status quo politics helps to open up a political vacuum and in rushes a dictatorship to fill that vacuum. E.g. Libertarianism with its abhorrence of standard politics and its tendency toward conspiracy theorism (which also is seen in Marxism) is a prime candidate for helping to create such a vacuum. 

For more on Carlson see here, and here. It is clear from these references that the "right wing" are no simple unified tribe but themselves breakdown into a confusing patchwork of factions.

ADDENDUM 23/11/25

I picked up the following passage from the NAID website Science & Culture. (See here); the bold emphasis is mine....

The theistic evolution perspective, also sometimes called evolutionary creation, accepts the standard scientific evolutionary account — the same view held by atheists — and simply adds the theological claim, “but this is how God did it.” Critically, these proponents reject the idea that design can be empirically or scientifically detected in nature. 

If, repeat if, evolution is the mechanism behind natural history it would certainly require some heavy duty designing. So thumbs down to this particular NAID post. The NAID fault here is down to their flawed explanatory filter.  The reason why NAIDs jump onto this anti-evolution bandwagon is because they have subliminally taken on board those crypto-atheist dualist categories which impose a natural forces vs Intelligent Design dichotomy on the subject.

None of this is to say that standard evolutionary mechanisms are behind natural history; for example evolution may not work for this reason. But I have a feeling that the polarization present in American religio-politics has been superimposed on the evolutionary question and evolution has thence fallen foul of the likes of the Christian far right. But an exacerbating factor is the contempt with which many in liberal academia treat Christians, (See for  example my link to Carrier, R.) and the consequent mutually escalating row which then ensures. 

Footnotes

*1 There is clearly a lot of background processing going on in the mind that is unconscious just as in a computer game there is a lot of background computing well beyond what is on the screen. But this fact is insufficient reason to dismiss consciousness.

*2  See for example this post on Science and Culture....

From John West, a Concise Explanation of Evolution’s Toxicity | Science and Culture Today

Where we read this comment re. "evilution"...

For one thing, it degrades any idea of human beings holding a unique status in nature, bearing God’s image. For another, as an unguided, purposeless process, it undercuts any idea that an intelligent creator planned or cared about the course of life’s history. But rather, finally, it teaches that the actual creator or sculptor of life is “mass death,” in the form of natural selection.

Compare here...

Quantum Non-Linearity: NAID Part IV: Evolution: Creation on Steriods

And I repeat: None of this means I have any intellectual commitment to standard evolution, but I know a bogus argument when I see one; the writer of the linked to article has swallowed the atheist mind-set on evolution. Also, compare Eric Hedin in my first point of this post.

Classic Dualism

Courtesy of the Faraday Institute

I'm part of a Facebook group called Evangelicals for Evolutionary Creation. This is not to say that I've committed myself to standard Evolutionary thinking, but I feel that this group are worthy thinkers to keep an eye on. However, somebody put the following comment on their FB feed....

So I’m getting toward the end of Origins by the Haarsmas. A question arises, if abiogenesis is true, how does this not prove that life can happen without God? This kind of concerns me and it seems to be an open question in evolutionary creationism.

I believe that "Haarsmas" is a reference to Deborah Haarsma, the current president of Biologos, the Christian evolutionary creation organisation. I didn't comment on this statement as the Evolutionary Creation people are more than capable of critiquing such a breathtakingly naive perspective, a perspective with widespread appeal among both Christians and atheists. On this view it's a binary choice: "Either God did it or evolution did it"

I've no doubt said something like the following many times before: Since the enlightenment Western science has merely shown us that the cosmos is sufficiently organized for us to form succinct mathematical statements describing its dynamics. As many Christians fully understand, those descriptions in and of themselves only tell us about the "how?" of the cosmos and not the "why?" - but the "why?" is only a meaningful question if one first accepts that sentience, intelligence and purpose are a priori features of existence.

 If  anything this strange mathematical descriptive elegance only compounds the enigma of the cosmos and tells us little about absolute origins; that is, the ultimate gap, a gap that descriptive science is logically incapable of filling and if pressed simply leaves us with an elegant-descriptions-all-the-way-down regress. In fact, since we have no logically obliging reason for the continued existence of the contingencies of our cosmic reality that ultimate gap is everywhere and everywhen. 

And yet the dualistic view expressed by the above quote is the common default: That is "either God did it or cosmic processes did it"; the underlying assumption of this perspective is that somehow the enigma of cosmic organization has a logical self sufficiency which at best only leaves room for the God of deism or at worst no God at all. Such a perspective might have its origins in the early enlightenment/industrial era when it started to become much clearer that mechanisms (such as a steam regulator & automata) could be developed which meant that machines looked after their own running. The popularist conclusion was that the cosmos must be that kind of mechanism. Such mechanisms appeared not to need any prayerful ritualistic support or mystical input of any kind to continue. On this perspective sacredness seems to have been purged from what was now thought of as a self sustaining profane cosmos. 

But the realization that such mechanisms were so startingly sophisticated enough to beg the question of their design seems to have been lost on many people: One such person in our modern era is (atheist?) theologian Don Cupitt of the Sea of Faith movement. Also, blowhard atheist Richard Carrier is of this ilk. Carrier is so convinced by the sophistry of his flawed view of probability and randomness that he believes probability to be logically sufficient to fill in the God-gap.  And yet Carrier succeeded in identifying that our cosmic context lacks some logically self-sufficient kernel, although Carrier's erroneous concept of probability doesn't provide that kernel. 

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It is surely ironic that the self same virtuoso cosmic organization which for some fills in the God-gap and does away with God actually intensifies the nagging enigma of the absolute origins question; the contingent particularity of that organization is amazing. In fact as I have shown, evolution itself (if it has occurred) is effectively creationism on steroids.  And yet it is the underlying dualism of God vs evolution that much of the North America Intelligent Design movement (NAID) trades on. They will deny it of course, but whenever they open their mouths it is easy to see that they are exploiting the popularist God-of-the-gaps "Intelligence vs blind natural forces" dichotomy. To attack standard evolution on the scientific basis that the evidence is insufficient is one thing but to attack it on the basis of a half-cocked dualist philosophy is quite another - and I put it to the NAID community that although they affect to claim theirs is a scientific dispute their ulterior reasoning is in fact based on the popular appeal of their philosophical dualism, whatever they might claim. That appeal, however, is understandable I suppose because the above quote from a Facebook page is in fact the tip of a huge market iceberg of popularist thinking which the NAID's dichotomized explanations address and by which they make their money, trade and continue in mutual backslapping. For more on NAID see here, here and here.

NOTE: Luskin's God-of-the-Gaps paradigm

As I've made it clear before I don't think much of NAID theorist Casey Luskin's competence as an apologist for Intelligent Design. This post on Evolution News, which describes Luskin's views, cements his reputation as a God-or-of-the-Gaps apologist.  As I've said above I have no intellectual commitment to standard evolutionary theory, but what is clear, evolution or no evolution, one cannot get away from the question of intelligent design. That Luskin is so anti-evolution, a priori, is evidence that he still thinks subliminally in dualist and atheist categories in so far as he believes it to be  a choice between "blind natural forces vs intelligent design"..... where he interprets evolution atheistically in terms of "blind natural forces". Ergo, Luskin is a God-of-the-Gaps apologist whatever he claims. 

Relevant Links

Quantum Non-Linearity: From Spears to Aircraft

Quantum Non-Linearity: Evolution and Computation

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....

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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

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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 implies A with certainty). 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.