A response to Richard Dawkins' argument against the existence of God.

[Voyager]

@ITR_champion

Why exclude “old stories or internal thoughts” as evidence for God when you’ve already advanced them as evidence for my mother? It seems an arbitrary distinction to me. There are, of course, plenty of instances that meet your standard–the visions at Medjugorje are ongoing, for instance.

You’ve more or less presented far more than that. I trust you that there are pictures.

If so, then I’d guess you’re accustomed to speaking in academic jargon. Most people aren’t, so language like that tends to cloud rather than clear the picture.

That is because most people haven’t been trained as scientists, and most people haven’t had professors and graduate student colleagues challenging each sloppy assertion. Your did a good job of replicating the kind of language Dawkins used in his chapter heading in this.

And how many peer-reviewed papers have ever testified to the existence of my mother?

(As an additional point, the academic world is not particularly high on reliability. After all, Sigmund Freud had theories explaining why everyone’s experiences of their mother were mostly delusions or distorted, but it didn’t stop his ideas from dominating the academy for decades.)

Feeble. And I’m with my friend Liberal in having some problems with Freudian psychiatry being considered a science. It is remarkably free of testable predictions and repeatability. The models of the mind Freud came up with changed with the seasons. As we’ve learned the structure of the brain using real scientific methods, the things Freud posited are hard to find. They are excellent metaphors, but that is about it.

But what is this “mass of evidence”, other than the personal testimony of myself, the (contradictory) testimony of other people, and silly things such as her moving objects across the room that can easily be explained away?

You mentioned pictures. The supposedly contradictions are not contradictions at all. If we had first hand accounts of Jesus, and some said he was gentle and some said he’d have a temper, these “contradictions” would hardly be reasons to reject his existence.

Firstly, I’d say that the vast majority of my personal experiences with my mother did not happen in the presence of others. In any case, who are these independent observers you keep referring to? When we investigate, we find that the vast majority of pro-mother testimony comes from people who are friends and family members of the subject of the investigation. Pretty suspicious, wouldn’t you say? Why doesn’t she ever appear in a way that amotherists couldn’t deny? I mean, if she really wanted to prove her existence, why doesn’t she run through a shopping mall screaming at the top of her lungs or something like that? If we can make arbitrary demands that God has to fulfill before accepting his existence, why not do the same for my mother?

You have a skewed view of what is sufficient evidence. We have bones of a tiny fraction of the dinosaurs who lived, yet that is plenty good enough. A few solid sightings of your mother are plenty good enough also. What’s this shopping mall business? Walking out the damn door provides plenty of evidence. God appears to have locked himself in a secret room in the basement, or maybe in an attic above the garage. He doesn’t have to shout. Coming out and saying hi once a century or so would do just fine.

[SentientMeat]

@ITR

To your “what cannot be explained” question, I’m think the question is something too broad to answer. The best I resource that I can give you is to point you to chapter 6 in Schumacher’s A Guide for the Perplexed, which is an attempt to introduce and summarize what is known about the greatest mystical experiences with vocabulary and organization chosen for those who know little about the topic.

If I promise to re-read this, will you promise to read whatever I present to you, of equal length, regarding natural explanations for such experiences?

Up to this point, of course, nothing in the process requires any religious belief at all, which is precisely the point I was trying to make earlier about the absence of contradiction among the mystical experiences of various different religions. As far as I’m aware, none of the “candidate explanations” that you alluded to earlier can explain the experiences of people who practice these things carefully.

Meditation, whether ‘religious’ or not, is a hot topic of scientific study these days (TIME magazine did a special on it not long ago). Might such subject matter extend your awareness?

@ITR

Any time I’m given a candidate explanation for religious experience I immediately compare it to what I’ve learned from those and others like them. If it doesn’t match up, then the explanation can be tossed.

Ah, but I already know you prefer supernatural explanations for religious experiences over natural ones. But you are arguing that natural explanations cannot be correct - that God is necessary in an Ockham’s Razor sense in this regard. If supernatural explanations are merely your preference, God is not necessary, merely optional - yes?

[Half_Man_Half_Wit]

So, did Dawkins’ argument, in the somewhat more sympathetically reconstructed form that’s been advanced a fair few times in this thread by now, ever get answered? Somehow, there seems to have been a fair bit of distraction ever since this was brought up.

But just for convenience’s sake, here it is again, as I see it: Dawkins’ argument is primarily a reaction to the claim that the universe could not have come about on its own, and thus, needs a creator; that the universe’s existence is, in some way, mysterious, and that positing an omnipotent entity (who by this description surely would be capable of being, in whatever way, responsible for the universe’s existence) alleviated the mysteriousness.

The counter-argument now is that if the universe’s existence is mysterious in this way, and needs an explanation for its existence, then surely, so does its originator, to get a way from the loaded ‘creator’ which seems to imply a creation event at some point in time without necessity. Else, if the originator’s existence were not mysterious, then whatever means served to explain this mystery in his case, could conceivably apply equally well to the universe at large. So, either the originator’s existence must be at least as mysterious as the universe’s, and thus, he doesn’t serve as an explanation for the mystery of the universe’s existence; or, the originator must not be mysterious after all, which means that the universe is not necessarily mysterious, and the originator thus not needed, either.

The beauty of this rebuttal is that it simply points out the self-defeating nature of the original argument purporting to solve the mystery of the universe’s existence through the introduction of an originator: if this originator actually solves the mystery (rather than just pushing it back), he is unnecessary for this solution; if he is necessary, he doesn’t solve the mystery.

I think I’ve yet to see any response to this argument; to me, it appears perfectly simple, and utterly convincing – not as an argument against the existence of god, as such, but as an argument against his being necessary to explain the existence of the universe. I don’t think it was ever intended as more, by Dawkins or anybody who ever made it; Dawkins, in particular, to me seems rather more concerned with arguing against those arguments that purport to argue for the existence of god, rather than arguing against the existence of god per se, taking the stance that if there are no convincing arguments for gods existence, the default position to take is a lack of belief – correctly, as far as I’m concerned.

[Sophistry_and_Illusion]

Thanks, HMHW–I was actually thinking that same thing, and wanted to post something similar. In this discussion about mothers as theoretical entities and the evidential merit of religious experience, I think one of the most important issues of the thread has simply been dropped. I, for one, would like to see it answered.

[ITR_champion]

@SentientMeat

If I promise to re-read this, will you promise to read whatever I present to you, of equal length, regarding natural explanations for such experiences?

I’d be happy to read anything of reasonable length that’s available without too much difficulty.

Meditation, whether ‘religious’ or not, is a hot topic of scientific study these days (TIME magazine did a special on it not long ago). Might such subject matter extend your awareness?

See previous answer. I am aware, however, that there’s a vast gulf between documenting the regular existence of a phenomenon and explaining that phenomenon. The placebo effect has been carefully documented in many scientific studies, but none have provided a reason why it occurs. Or consider miraculous healings. I used to be told that they never occurred. Now, if I interpret Michael Shermer’s latest on the topic, it seems they occur so often that they’re no longer miraculous. Research of meditation might provide some information about the ‘what?’, but not about the ‘why?’

Ah, but I already know you prefer supernatural explanations for religious experiences over natural ones. But you are arguing that natural explanations cannot be correct - that God is necessary in an Ockham’s Razor sense in this regard. If supernatural explanations are merely your preference, God is not necessary, merely optional - yes?

When I debate on this board, I know that most people who participate in these threads will be materialists, so hence I bring up topics that they’d be interested in debating. But I’m sure that someone as well read as you knows perfectly well that the topics we discuss here are only a fraction of the set of topics that typically come up in Christian apologetics. As G. K. Chesterton said: “Modern masters of science are much impressed with the need of beginning all inquiry with a fact. The ancient masters of religion were quite equally impressed with that necessity. They began with the fact of sin–a fact as practical as potatoes.” In other words, most great Christian writers wrote mainly about morality, finding in that topic the strongest argument for their doctrine, and I am in agreement with them. So while the neuroscientific evidence related to religious experience or philosophical arguments about the origins of the cosmos are on my list of reasons for faith, they’re not particularly high on the list. After all, some of the greatest Christian thinkers have railed against the ‘God of the Philosophers’ as being insufficient compared to the real thing.

[CurtC]

@ITR_champion

The placebo effect has been carefully documented in many scientific studies, but none have provided a reason why it occurs.

I’m not sure that’s a good example. The placebo effect is pretty much just the encouragement of confirmation bias, already known to exist.

I guess you could ask what causes confirmation bias, and that seems to be the result of our tendency to aggressively look for patterns.

[Diogenes_the_Cynic]

“Sin” is a purely religious concept. It’s not a “fact” at all.

The argument from morality is naive and backwards crap as well. I’d be happy to to shatter it for if you want me too.

[SentientMeat]

@ITR_champion

I’d be happy to read anything of reasonable length that’s available without too much difficulty.

Sadly, Schumacher is no longer in my university library. Is there any way I can access chapter 6, or could you ty to summarise precisely what aspect of your experience cannot (not merely has not yet in your opinion) be explained without divine influence?

@ITR

Research of meditation might provide some information about the ‘what?’, but not about the ‘why?’

Are you saying it cannot provide even a feasible candidate explanation based on established neuropsychology?

@ITR

As G. K. Chesterton said: “Modern masters of science are much impressed with the need of beginning all inquiry with a fact. The ancient masters of religion were quite equally impressed with that necessity. They began with the fact of sin–a fact as practical as potatoes.” In other words, most great Christian writers wrote mainly about morality, finding in that topic the strongest argument for their doctrine, and I am in agreement with them.

But there are eminently feasible natural explanations for morality as well. Are you suggesting that these cannot be right, or merely that you prefer supernatural candidates instead?

@ITR

So while the neuroscientific evidence related to religious experience or philosophical arguments about the origins of the cosmos are on my list of reasons for faith, they’re not particularly high on the list. After all, some of the greatest Christian thinkers have railed against the ‘God of the Philosophers’ as being insufficient compared to the real thing.

OK, what’s top of your list? I would endeavour to convince you that the natural explanations for such a phenomenon are not impossible. If I could convince you of that, we could turn Ockham’s Razor to the second on the list.

Again, the entire point of Dawkins’ chapter is that God is unnecessary, not impossible - hence the “almost certainly”.

[ITR_champion]

@Half_Man_Half_Wit

So, did Dawkins’ argument, in the somewhat more sympathetically reconstructed form that’s been advanced a fair few times in this thread by now, ever get answered? Somehow, there seems to have been a fair bit of distraction ever since this was brought up.

Personally I’m not convinced that the more sympathetically constructed form that’s been offered is what he’s saying. He says that God “almost certainly does not exist” and offers only the argument I quoted. Truthfully he could have dropped the “almost” and no one would have ever known that anything was missing. As it stands, chapter 4 does not address the question of an eternal God, and since that’s the only God that any major western religion believes in, that’s presumably the one that Dawkins wanted to address. As for the charge of whether God “pushes the mystery backwards” without actually solving it, I view that as becoming irrelevant once it’s acknowledged that the western religions believe in an eternal God. Assume that we all agree that something exists (you can never be certain among modern philosophers) then either existence popped into being out of nothingness, or else there is something eternal. Debating the “probability” of an eternal thing, whether by the mathematical definition or a more vague “it’s a heck of a thing to believe” line, seems to me inherently wrong according to the definition of probability. To me the explanation of an eternal God is philosophically more convincing than an eternal material universe/multiverse/whatever, because the latter flies against everything we know about material, but I realize that can be contended against. However, Dawkins’ argument isn’t convincing because he doesn’t acknowledge the possibility of an eternal God.

[Diogenes_the_Cynic]

Yes he does. He just doesn’t acknowledge the necessity for it, especially since other explanataions are more plausible and meaningful. You either haven’t really read the book, or you haven’t read it carefully.

Trying to define God as 'eternal" doesn’t solve anything, by the way. It just negates the assertion that everything needs a beginning. If God doesn’t require a beginning, then neither does a multiverse.

[Sophistry_and_Illusion]

@ITR_champion

Personally I’m not convinced that the more sympathetically constructed form that’s been offered is what he’s saying.

Okay, but what if it isn’t? The point is, an argument similar to Dawkins’ can be constructed that seems to use the theist’s own reasoning against God. I reconstructed such an argument in this post, and **SentientMeat **did it in this post:

@SentientMeat

Like I’ve already said, “God” - a Heavenly Father who loves us and can affect the universe, is a heck of a thing to exist at all whether or not He had a beginning moment. And even eternal things need some kind of explanation for their characteristics – why are they like that rather than like this. Cosmology provides candidate explanations even for the characteristics of eternal universes. I would hope you’d agree that theology does not explain God’s characteristics in anything like so transparent a way.

If this argument is sound, who cares if it is Dawkins’*? And it is this argument I would like to see you respond to.

*SM thinks it is Dawkins’ argument. I am posting from home and don’t have my copy of TGD with me, so can’t look it up. But like I said, I don’t think it matters.

[Half_Man_Half_Wit]

@ITR_champion

Personally I’m not convinced that the more sympathetically constructed form that’s been offered is what he’s saying.

Well, I don’t have the text at hand at the moment, but I remember taking him to make more or less the argument that I’ve presented – if anything that exists needs an external explanation for its existence, then so does god, and otherwise, there’s no necessity for god (at least in the ‘creator’-sense). So I think it comes down to interpretation, at best.

As for the charge of whether God “pushes the mystery backwards” without actually solving it, I view that as becoming irrelevant once it’s acknowledged that the western religions believe in an eternal God. Assume that we all agree that something exists (you can never be certain among modern philosophers) then either existence popped into being out of nothingness, or else there is something eternal.

I don’t think that exhausts the options we have at all. Time, for instance, might not be linear on the grandest scale, but close back in upon itself. Or the universe might be a linear ‘spin-off’ from a small region with circular time. Time, or rather, the past, might also be finite, and yet have no first moment, as I illustrated earlier with the example of an open interval, hence no ‘popping into existence’-moment might be needed. I think I’ve also skimmed a proposal according to which there were two universes created in the Big Bang, with one’s arrow of time being opposite in direction to the other’s, so there’s no ‘before’ in either case, and the Big Bang wouldn’t have happened in time at all. Other options no-one’s yet thought of are possible.

Debating the “probability” of an eternal thing, whether by the mathematical definition or a more vague “it’s a heck of a thing to believe” line, seems to me inherently wrong according to the definition of probability.

I’m not sure about that at all – while there’s no meaning to talking about the probability of an eternal thing coming into existence, since they generally don’t do that, one can very well talk about the probabilities of an eternal thing having certain properties. If you’ve got a number of things with a number of properties, the probability of thing X having property Y is equal to the frequency with which property Y is present in the population of Xs. You might say that that’s merely equal to the probability of picking a thing with property Y out of a bag of Xs, but then, the state of things as they are is just such a pick.

To me the explanation of an eternal God is philosophically more convincing than an eternal material universe/multiverse/whatever, because the latter flies against everything we know about material, but I realize that can be contended against.

Well, I would tend to agree with your reasoning that the universe probably isn’t eternal – I’m not a very great fan of the notion, truth be told. But, surely you realize that a lot of those that reject the existence of god do so on the same grounds you reject the possibility of an eternal universe (or at least, consider it not very likely) – it flies in the face of anything we know to exist.

However, Dawkins’ argument isn’t convincing because he doesn’t acknowledge the possibility of an eternal God.

Well, he might simply not have thought that this is a point that needed addressing – and rightly so, in my view.

[KellyCriterion]

I have never understood the argument that atheists often make when they say “If the complexity of the universe is evidence that it must have been designed, then the designer of the universe must be even more complex, hence, in even greater need of its own designer”.

Eh?

The universe exists as a physical entity in space/time. The Creator (as believers would claim) exists in a spaceless, timeless, immaterial sphere.

You need some massive degree of complexity to build a physical universe when you exist in a seemingly limitless dimension?

In the immortal words of many a doper… err…

Cite, please?

[Gustav]

The issue isn’t that he couldn’t have built the universe, the issue is that he couldn’t have built himself.

[Revenant_Threshold]

@KellyCriterion

You need some massive degree of complexity to build a physical universe when you exist in a seemingly limitless dimension?

If it is accepted that universe complexity is evidence of design, then yes, because an argument could be made for the complexity of the universe also arising from a limitless dimension, and so the issues that might arise from that and allow for a non-designed universe are already discounted by the question.

IOW, the problem is essentially the same as has been talked about upthread; you can come up with reasons why the universe was, by necessity, designed, or had to be created, and you can come up with reasons why a god, by necessity, wasn’t, but it’s hard to come up with reasons for both at the same time. Allowing for exceptions for gods often opens up exceptions for the universe, too; in the particular question you ask, you don’t need massive complexity to build a physical universe when you exist in a seemingly limitless dimension. But you do if we’ve already assumed that the universe’s complexity is evidence for its design, because that works as an explanation for that, too.

[Sage_Rat]

@KellyCriterion

I have never understood the argument that atheists often make when they say “If the complexity of the universe is evidence that it must have been designed, then the designer of the universe must be even more complex, hence, in even greater need of its own designer”.

No one has ever said that, that I have seen. It adds complexity for there to be a designer, but whether that designer is or isn’t more complex than the universe isn’t particularly relevant.

If there’s no reason to think that the universe doesn’t need a creator, adding a creator is unnecessary. It’s like looking at a rock and deciding that a particular nick in the rock must have been etched in by a 10 year old boy 831 years ago. There’s no evidence of that, and there’s no reason to think that the nick couldn’t have been created by any other means–including natural ones–so why would you possibly postulate it? It’s just making shit up.

[CurtC]

@KellyCriterion

You need some massive degree of complexity to build a physical universe when you exist in a seemingly limitless dimension?

Like Gustav said, that’s not exactly it. If someone uses an argument that the universe had to have a creator, then that same argument, if you accept it as valid, can apply just as well to God, implying that HE had to have a creator. And his creator would have had a creator, ad infinitum.

This is an absurd conclusion, therefore the argument is not valid. It’s a classic case of reductio ad absurdum, which involves provisionally accepting an argument as true, then seeing what conclusions it leads to. If it leads to an absurd conclusion, then the argument has to be false.

[CurtC]

@Sage_Rat

No one has ever said that, that I have seen. It adds complexity for there to be a designer, but whether that designer is or isn’t more complex than the universe isn’t particularly relevant.

I have seen people make that argument before, that a complex universe would need an even more complex creator. It makes me cringe, because I’m not so sure that an entity couldn’t build something more complex than itself.

[KellyCriterion]

@CurtC

I have seen people make that argument before, that a complex universe would need an even more complex creator. It makes me cringe, because I’m not so sure that an entity couldn’t build something more complex than itself.

Yeah, that’s the gist of what I was getting at.

In a sphere of existence that imposes no limitations… anything that manages to just exist could be an all-powerful, all-knowing entity. It’s impossible to know how much complexity (if any at all, as we understand complexity to be), is required from such an entity.

[Diogenes_the_Cynic]

At what amount of complexity is a “creator” required? Is the creator just under the minimum standard of complexity required to require its own creator. What is the scientific means of determining what level of complexity requires a magical creator and what doesn’t?

Relative complexity levels aside, the point is that if the universe needs a creator, then so does the creator. If the creator doesn’t need a creator, then neither does the universe. The rules are the same for both of them.