Forget about entanglement. Who cares if some influence traveled faster than light? Still fits materialism. What you should care about is that Quantum Field Theory says particles are just disturbances in various fields. How material is a field? What even is a field? Doesn’t that sound suspiciously like the discarded idea of an ether?
Even the ether would be materialism.
The big-tent definition of materialism is that things behave according to the laws of physics. The outcome of anything could, in principle, be calculated, with some fudge factor for fundamental randomness. It’s a distortion when people who believe in some kind of non-materialism characterize their position as the default, just because not everything is concrete matter. The real question is whether things (including brains) behave according to the laws of physics, or by some incoherent idea of “something else.”
We have seen no evidence of this something else. Until that evidence is produced, materialism stands by default.
Many of the physicists who developed quantum mechanics in the first place, and many of the greatest physicists ever thought that it did.
Max Planck (Nobel Prize in Physics, originator of Quantum Theory):
“As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force, which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the matrix of all matter.”
“I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”
Werner Heisenberg (Nobel Prize in Physics, Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle):
“I think that modern physics has definitely decided in favor of Plato. In fact the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense; they are Forms, ideas which can be expressed unambiguously only in mathematical language.”
Wolfgang Pauli (Nobel Prize in Physics, Pauli exclusion principle):
“The layman always means, when he says ‘reality’ that he is speaking of something self-evidently known; whereas to me it seems the most important and exceedingly difficult task of our time is to work on the construction of a new idea of reality.”
Erwin Schrödinger (Nobel Prize in Physics, Schrödinger equation - the basis of Quantum Mechanics):
“The observing mind is not a physical system, it cannot interact with any physical system. … Sensations and thoughts do not belong to the ‘world of energy’.”
Max Born (Nobel Prize in Physics):
“There are metaphysical problems, which cannot be disposed of by declaring them meaningless. For, as I have repeatedly said, they are ‘beyond physics’ indeed and demand an act of faith. We have to accept this fact to be honest. There are two objectionable types of believers: those who believe the incredible and those who believe that ‘belief’ must be discarded and replaced by ‘the scientific method.’
Niels Bohr (Nobel Prize in Physics):
“I myself find the division of the world into an objective and a subjective side much too arbitrary. The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer. But that does not mean that it is not a genuine reality. And splitting this reality into an objective and a subjective side won’t get us very far.”
John von Neumann (Leading mathematician and physicist, with major contributions in dozens of different scientific fields):
“There probably is a God. Many things are easier to explain if there is than if there isn’t.”
Albert Einstein (Nobel Prize in Physics):
But science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion. To this there also belongs the faith in the possibility that the regulations valid for the world of existence are rational, that is, comprehensible to reason. I cannot conceive of a genuine scientist without that profound faith. The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.
…And no, their views have NOT been superseded by later discoveries in physics.
We don’t have any ‘evidence’ of materialism either, though. Anything we’ve ever been in contact with comes to us as a subjective impression; that subjective impressions have an underlying material cause is an assumption which, for instance, an idealist would deny. There are arguments for materialism that I happen to find persuasive, but putting the issue to an empirical measure is missing the point somewhat.
Definitely not everything. You can know everything there is to know about the state of someone’s neurons and the chemical and electrical signals sent between them, down to the molecular or atomic level, and it still won’t tell you what it’s like to be that person, feeling those feelings and thinking those thoughts. Science can’t tell us much about the subjective world at all.
Look at our understanding of pain. Thousands of years of medical progress, with high-tech MRIs and radiation treatments filling our hospitals, and the best they can do to understand pain is have the patient point to a cartoon frowny face next to a number between 1 and 10.
Studying subjective experience is not something science is really suited for. We can sort of probe at it with interviews and surveys, but that’s about it. If it’s that difficult finding out what a human cancer patient feels, how can a marine biologist hope to comprehend what it’s like to be a squid, shooting ink at predators and swimming around the ocean with its tentacles?
From Richard C. Lewontin, a highly distinguished evolutionary biologist, Professor of Biology at Harvard, author of The Genetic Basis of Evolutionary Change, and a number of other books:
“It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world but, on the contrary, that we are forced by an a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive."
Yep, Max Planck had beliefs that were definitely non-materialism.
The rest of the quotes you posted seem to be compatible with materialism, so I’m wondering what your point was in posting them. Maybe except von Neumann, who mentioned that he believed in a god.
What’s your idea of the definition of materialism?
I thought Schroedinger’s quote was an example of nonmaterialism. He was saying the mind is nonmaterial, right?
I see what you’re saying, and my interpretation when I read it was something else. I thought then that he was talking about how this thing that does the “observation” of an experiment need not be a conscious mind. But on re-reading I think I was wrong.
OK, Schroedinger and Planck.
The challenge of understanding what it is like to be a person is like the challenge of visualizing a universe with only a single particle. This universe has no dimension, and the very act of visualizing the particle from a vantage point violates the assumption of one particle. Likewise bringing our thoughts to the understanding of another person violates that understanding, since we see ourselves from a single perspective, not from outside.
We can’t comprehend what a squid feels, but we also can’t comprehend what our subconscious mind feels, or how it works. If we could it would be conscious. Expecting to think like a squid is kind of like the pathetic fallacy, since we can’t without bringing our human perspective to it.
As for pain, I think we are learning that 500 million years of evolution has made our bodies a bit more complicated than previous generations imagined.
Any programmer knows that code that has been hacked and modified over a long period is a lot harder to understand than code wrote from scratch. Our genes are extremely hacked.
I think that is not quite accurate. The genetic code developed, as you said, over a very long time. Different biological systems formed and advanced somewhat independently, but when they were combined, strange things began to happen. Natural selection allowed those systems to reach a balance with each other, to establish enduring organisms.
But what a programmer would call it is spaghetti code. Every little thing can affect every other little thing, more or less. There is some modularity to it, but not much. Changing one allele can have peripheral effects that one might be unprepared for. To call that mess “hacked” is an insult to hackers.
Can’t ever? Or doesn’t yet? I’m not being disingenuous, I actually don’t have a clue which one is closer to the truth.
The same can be said about idealism, however. OK, in one sense, idealism seems to have a leg up on materialism: after all, we directly perceive ideas; they’re the only things we’re ever in direct contact with. Plus, we get an answer to the question of how come subjectivity: because everything there is, is subjective in one way or another. It’s just how things are.
That’s not really much of an answer, though. It’s not explanatory, but merely accepts the mystery and posits it as fundamental. It’s just how things are, nothing more to say.
Materialism, on the other hand, at least offers the hope of an explanation of how subjectivity comes about. Now, I happen to be persuaded by arguments that this explanation isn’t accessible, due to the way the human mind is structured, but this signals merely an epistemic problem, a problem regarding what we can know, rather than a sort of ontological schism in the world. I can live with that: we already know there are boundaries to human knowledge.
Idealism, on the other hand, throws up new and (to me) more difficult problems. How can two people ever perceive the same thing? If I look at a tree, and you look at a tree, my idea of that tree will differ from yours. But in what sense are they then ‘the same tree’?
Moreover, how do ideas persist if nobody ‘has’ them? If there is a hidden cache of gold in a remote cave, and everybody who knows about it is long dead, then how does the mind know to form the idea of a cache of gold once some spelunker happens to chance upon it?
And how does the world ‘kick back’? The story of Doctor Johnson kicking the rock as a refutation of Berkeley is often told as a tale of frustration, but he made a good point: in kicking back, in frustrating our efforts, the world is directed against our intention; but if both spring from the same mind, it is difficult to see how that mind could act in opposition to itself.
This becomes even more difficult to explain regarding shared beliefs that are found to be false. Everybody thought the Michelson-Morley experiment would yield evidence for the ether in the form of differences of the propagation speed of light in different directions relative to the Earth’s movement; it didn’t. So that behavior of light seems to be independent of these beliefs, but what else is it, if all there is is mind, that determines the truth of the matter here?
There are ways to get around many of these difficulties. Berkeley, for instance, speculated that everything was an idea in the mind of God; God thus provides the unifying backdrop against which our ideas are evaluated.
But this yields new problems. If I cut my finger, is the pain I feel really God’s pain? Does that even make sense? Am I an idea in God’s mind that is itself a mind and has ideas? And, of course, whence God? In postulating God, Berkeley really just ends up introducing a backdrop reality independent of our minds in order to explain the observed continuity even in the absence of perception. But the role played by God here can perfectly well be played by the reality of a mind-independent, external world, without incurring all the baggage God brings into the picture.
Indeed, if we stipulate that there’s an external world that yields the truth-conditions for our perceptions, we have a—to me—much more plausible explanation of the above issues. There are troubles that remain, of course, but between idealism and materialism, the issues of the latter seem at least plausibly answerable, without essentially just having to accept that well, it’s just how things are (in which case we needn’t really start trying to find explanations at all).
So ultimately, beyond argument from authority, idealism just doesn’t seem all that attractive an option to me.
I agree with a lot of what you say, though not all.
I think one basic misconception that materialists commonly make is in understanding what is meant by the term ‘God’.
We can immediately discard the idea that God is an ‘old man with a beard sitting on cloud’ who created the universe at some fixed point of time and then let it run. This is an idea that can only be held by fools and fundamentalists, and has never been the way that the great thinkers of any religion have thought of God.
Setting up scarecrows and knocking them down may be enough for most materialists, but perhaps there are some who would prefer to engage with more serious intellectual arguments.
Here is a lengthy quote from David Bentley Hart’s book The Experience of God. I’ve put in in a spoiler because it’s very long, and not light reading, but perhaps it makes this point a bit clearer for those who care to read it.
[SPOILER]There are two senses in which the word “God” or “god” can properly be used. Most modern languages generally distinguish between the two usages as I have done here, by writing only one of them with an uppercase first letter, as though it were a proper name—which it is not. Most of us understand that “God” (or its equivalent) means the one God who is the source of all things, whereas “god” (or its equivalent) indicates one or another of a plurality of divine beings who inhabit the cosmos and reign over its various regions. This is not, however, merely a distinction in numbering, between monotheism and polytheism, as though the issue were merely that of determining how many “divine entities” one happens to think there are. It is a distinction, instead, between two entirely different kinds of reality, belonging to two entirely disparate conceptual orders. In fact, the very division between monotheism and polytheism is in many cases a confusion of categories. Several of the religious cultures that we sometimes inaccurately characterize as “polytheistic” have traditionally insisted upon an absolute differentiation between the one transcendent Godhead from whom all being flows and the various “divine” beings who indwell and govern the heavens and the earth. Only the one God, says Swami Prabhavananda, speaking more or less for the whole of developed Vedantic and Bhaktic Hinduism, is “the uncreated”: “gods, though supernatural, belong … among the creatures. Like the Christian angels, they are much nearer to man than to God.” Conversely, many creeds we correctly speak of as “monotheistic” embrace the very same distinction. The Adi Granth of the Sikhs, for instance, describes the One God as the creator of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. In truth, Prabhavananda’s comparison of the gods of India to Christianity’s angels is more apt than many modern Christians may realize. Late Hellenistic pagan thought often tended to draw a clear demarcation between the one transcendent God (or, in Greek, ho theos, God with the definite article) and any particular or local god (any mere “inarticular” theos) who might superintend this or that people or nation or aspect of the natural world; at the same time, late Hellenistic Jews and Christians recognized a multitude of angelic “powers” and “principalities,” some obedient to the one transcendent God and some in rebellion, who governed the elements of nature and the peoples of the earth. To any impartial observer at the time, coming from some altogether different culture, the theological cosmos of a great deal of pagan “polytheism” would have seemed all but indistinguishable from that of a great deal of Jewish or Christian “monotheism.”
To speak of “God” properly, then—to use the word in a sense consonant with the teachings of orthodox Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Sikhism, Hinduism, Bahá’í, a great deal of antique paganism, and so forth—is to speak of the one infinite source of all that is: eternal, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, uncreated, uncaused, perfectly transcendent of all things and for that very reason absolutely immanent to all things. God so understood is not something posed over against the universe, in addition to it, nor is he the universe itself. He is not a “being,” at least not in the way that a tree, a shoemaker, or a god is a being; he is not one more object in the inventory of things that are, or any sort of discrete object at all. Rather, all things that exist receive their being continuously from him, who is the infinite wellspring of all that is, in whom (to use the language of the Christian scriptures) all things live and move and have their being. In one sense he is “beyond being,” if by “being” one means the totality of discrete, finite things. In another sense he is “being itself,” in that he is the inexhaustible source of all reality, the absolute upon which the contingent is always utterly dependent, the unity and simplicity that underlies and sustains the diversity of finite and composite things. Infinite being, infinite consciousness, infinite bliss, from whom we are, by whom we know and are known, and in whom we find our only true consummation. All the great theistic traditions agree that God, understood in this proper sense, is essentially beyond finite comprehension; hence, much of the language used of him is negative in form and has been reached only by a logical process of abstraction from those qualities of finite reality that make it insufficient to account for its own existence. All agree as well, however, that he can genuinely be known: that is, reasoned toward, intimately encountered, directly experienced with a fullness surpassing mere conceptual comprehension.
By contrast, when we speak of “gods” we are talking not of transcendent reality at all, but only of a higher or more powerful or more splendid dimension of immanent reality. Any gods who might be out there do not transcend nature but belong to it. Their theogonies can be recounted—how some rose out of the primal night, how some were born of other, more titanic progenitors, how others sprang up from an intermingling of divine and elemental forces, and so on—and according to many mythologies most of them will finally meet their ends. They exist in space and time, each of them is a distinct being rather than “being itself,” and it is they who are dependent upon the universe for their existence rather than the reverse. Of such gods there may be an endless diversity, while of God there can be only one. Or, better, God is not merely one, in the way that a finite object might be merely singular or unique, but is oneness as such, the one act of being and unity by which any finite thing exists and by which all things exist together. He is one in the sense that being itself is one, the infinite is one, the source of everything is one. Thus a plurality of gods could not constitute an alternative to or contradiction of the unity of God; they still would not belong to the same ontological frame of reference as he.
Obviously, then, it is God in the former—the transcendent—sense in whom it is ultimately meaningful to believe or not to believe. The possibility of gods or spirits or angels or demons, and so on, is a subordinate matter, a question not of metaphysics but only of the taxonomy of nature (terrestrial, celestial, and chthonic). To be an atheist in the best modern sense, however, and so to be a truly intellectually and emotionally fulfilled naturalist in philosophy, one must genuinely succeed in not believing in God, with all the logical consequences such disbelief entails. It is not enough simply to remain indifferent to the whole question of God, moreover, because thus understood it is a question ineradicably present in the very mystery of existence, or of knowledge, or of truth, goodness, and beauty. It is also the question that philosophical naturalism is supposed to have answered exhaustively in the negative, without any troubling explanatory lacunae, and therefore the question that any aspiring philosophical naturalist must understand before he or she can be an atheist in any intellectually significant way. And the best way to begin is to get a secure grasp on how radically, both conceptually and logically, belief in God differs from belief in the gods. This ought not to be all that difficult a matter; in Western philosophical tradition, for instance, it is a distinction that goes back at least as far as Xenophanes (c. 570–c. 475 BC). Yet the most pervasive error one encounters in contemporary arguments about belief in God—especially, but not exclusively, on the atheist side—is the habit of conceiving of God simply as some very large object or agency within the universe, or perhaps alongside the universe, a being among other beings, who differs from all other beings in magnitude, power, and duration, but not ontologically, and who is related to the world more or less as a craftsman is related to an artifact.
At a trivial level, one sees the confusion in some of the more shopworn witticisms of popular atheism: “I believe neither in God nor in the fairies at the bottom of my garden,” for instance, or “All people are atheists in regard to Zeus, Wotan, and most other gods; I simply disbelieve in one god more.” Once, in an age long since vanished in the mists of legend, those might even have been amusing remarks, eliciting sincere rather than merely liturgical laughter; but, even so, all they have ever demonstrated is a deplorable ignorance of elementary conceptual categories. If one truly imagines these are all comparable kinds of intellectual conviction then one is clearly confused about what is at issue. Beliefs regarding fairies are beliefs about a certain kind of object that may or may not exist within the world, and such beliefs have much the same sort of intentional shape and rational content as beliefs regarding one’s neighbors over the hill or whether there are such things as black swans. Beliefs regarding God concern the source and ground and end of all reality, the unity and existence of every particular thing and of the totality of all things, the ground of the possibility of anything at all. Fairies and gods, if they exist, occupy something of the same conceptual space as organic cells, photons, and the force of gravity, and so the sciences might perhaps have something to say about them, if a proper medium for investigating them could be found. We can, if nothing else, disabuse ourselves of belief in certain gods by simple empirical methods; we know now, for example, that the sun is not a god named Tonatiuh, at least not one who must be nourished daily on human blood lest he cease to shine, because we have withheld his meals for centuries now without calamity. God, by contrast, is the infinite actuality that makes it possible for either photons or (possibly) fairies to exist, and so can be “investigated” only, on the one hand, by acts of logical deduction and induction and conjecture or, on the other, by contemplative or sacramental or spiritual experiences. Belief or disbelief in fairies or gods could never be validated by philosophical arguments made from first principles; the existence or nonexistence of Zeus is not a matter that can be intelligibly discussed in the categories of modal logic or metaphysics, any more than the existence of tree frogs could be; if he is there at all, one must go on an expedition to find him, or at least find out his address. The question of God, by contrast, is one that can and must be pursued in terms of the absolute and the contingent, the necessary and the fortuitous, potency and act, possibility and impossibility, being and nonbeing, transcendence and immanence. Evidence for or against the existence of Thor or King Oberon would consist only in local facts, not universal truths of reason; it would be entirely empirical, episodic, psychological, personal, and hence elusive. Evidence for or against the reality of God, if it is there, saturates every moment of the experience of existence, every employment of reason, every act of consciousness, every encounter with the world around us.
… Exactly the same confusion shows itself in the arguments that many contemporary atheists make: For instance, “If God made the world, then who made God?” Or the famous dilemma drawn, in badly garbled form, from Plato’s Euthyphro, “Does God command a thing because it is good, or is it good because God commands it?” … Not only do these questions not pose deep quandaries for believers or insuperable difficulties for a coherent concept of God; they are not even relevant to the issue. And, until one really understands why this is so, one has not yet begun to talk about God at all. One is talking merely about some very distinguished and influential gentleman or lady named “God,” or about some discrete object that can be situated within a class of objects called “gods” (even if it should turn out that there happens to be only one occupant of that class).
As it happens, the god with whom most modern popular atheism usually concerns itself is one we might call a “demiurge” (dēmiourgos): a Greek term that originally meant a kind of public technician or artisan but that came to mean a particular kind of divine “world-maker” or cosmic craftsman. In Plato’s Timaeus, the demiurge is a benevolent intermediary between the realm of eternal forms and the realm of mutability; he looks to the ideal universe—the eternal paradigm of the cosmos—and then fashions lower reality in as close a conformity to the higher as the intractable resources of material nature allow. He is, therefore, not the source of the existence of all things but rather only the Intelligent Designer and causal agent of the world of space and time, working upon materials that lie outside and below him, under the guidance of divine principles that lie outside and above him. He is an immensely wise and powerful being, but he is also finite and dependent upon a larger reality of which he is only a part. Later Platonism interpreted the demiurge in a variety of ways, and in various schools of Gnosticism in late antiquity he reappeared as an incompetent or malevolent cosmic despot, either ignorant or jealous of the true God beyond this cosmos; but none of that is important here. Suffice it to say that the demiurge is a maker, but not a creator in the theological sense: he is an imposer of order, but not the infinite ocean of being that gives existence to all reality ex nihilo. And he is a god who made the universe “back then,” at some specific point in time, as a discrete event within the course of cosmic events, rather than the God whose creative act is an eternal gift of being to the whole of space and time, sustaining all things in existence in every moment. It is certainly the demiurge about whom Stenger and Dawkins write; neither has actually ever written a word about God. And the same is true of all the other new atheists as far as I can tell.
To be fair to all sides, however, I should also point out that the demiurge has had some fairly vociferous champions over the past few centuries, and at the moment seems to be enjoying a small resurgence in popularity. His first great modern revival came in the Deism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a movement whose adherents were impatient with the metaphysical “obscurities” and doctrinal “absurdities” of traditional religion, and who preferred to think of God as some very powerful spiritual individual who designed and fabricated the universe at the beginning of things, much as a watchmaker might design and fabricate a watch and then set it running. In David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion this is the view of God advanced by Cleanthes and then elegantly dismantled by Philo (the traditional metaphysical and theological view of God is represented by Demea, though not very well, and against him Philo marshals an altogether different—and much weaker—set of arguments). And, while Deism had more or less died out before Darwin’s day, the argument from cosmic or biological design, which was its chief philosophical support, has never entirely lost its charm for some. The recent Intelligent Design movement represents the demiurge’s boldest adventure in some considerable time. … But, however compelling the evidence may seem, one really ought not to reverse the order of discovery here and attempt to deduce or define God from the supposed evidence of design in nature. As either a scientific or a philosophical project, Intelligent Design theory is a deeply problematic undertaking; and, from a theological or metaphysical perspective, it is a massive distraction.
To begin with, much of the early literature of this movement concerned instances of supposedly “irreducible complexity” in the biological world, and from these developed an argument for some sort of intelligent agency at work in the process of evolution. That would, of course, be a fascinating discovery if it could be shown to be true; but I do not see how in principle one ever could conclusively demonstrate such a thing. It could never be more than an argument from probability, because one cannot prove that any organism, however intricate, could not have been produced by some unguided phylogenic history. Probability is a powerful thing, of course, but notoriously difficult to measure in the realm of biology’s complex systems of interdependence, or over intervals of time as vast as distinct geological epochs. And it would be quite embarrassing to propose this or that organism or part of an organism as a specimen of an irreducibly complex biological mechanism, only for it to emerge later that many of its components had been found in a more primitive form in some other biological mechanism, serving another purpose. Even if all this were not so, however, seen in the light of traditional theology the argument from irreducible complexity looks irredeemably defective, because it depends on the existence of causal discontinuities in the order of nature, “gaps” where natural causality proves inadequate. But all the classical theological arguments regarding the order of the world assume just the opposite: that God’s creative power can be seen in the rational coherence of nature as a perfect whole; that the universe was not simply the factitious product of a supreme intellect but the unfolding of an omnipresent divine wisdom or logos. For Thomas Aquinas, for instance, God creates the order of nature by infusing the things of the universe with the wonderful power of moving of themselves toward determinate ends; he uses the analogy of a shipwright able to endow timbers with the power to develop into a ship without external intervention. According to the classical arguments, universal rational order—not just this or that particular instance of complexity—is what speaks of the divine mind: a cosmic harmony as resplendently evident in the simplicity of a raindrop as in the molecular labyrinths of a living cell. After all, there may be innumerable finite causes of complexity, but a good argument can be made that only a single infinite cause can account for perfect, universal, intelligible, mathematically describable order. If, however, one could really show that there were interruptions in that order, places where the adventitious intrusions of an organizing hand were needed to correct this or that part of the process, that might well suggest some deficiency in the fabric of creation. It might suggest that the universe was the work of a very powerful, but also somewhat limited, designer. It certainly would not show that the universe is the creature of an omnipotent wisdom, or an immediate manifestation of the God who is the being of all things. Frankly, the total absence of a single instance of irreducible complexity would be a far more forceful argument in favor of God’s rational action in creation.
As for theistic claims drawn from the astonishing array of improbable cosmological conditions that hold our universe together, including the cosmological constant itself, or from the mathematical razor’s edge upon which all of it is so exquisitely balanced, these rest upon a number of deeply evocative arguments, and those who dismiss them casually are probably guilty of a certain intellectual dishonesty. Certainly all of the cosmos’s exquisitely fine calibrations and consonances and exactitudes should speak powerfully to anyone who believes in a transcendent creator, and they might even have the power to make a reflective unbeliever curious about supernatural explanations. But, in the end, such arguments also remain only probabilistic, and anyone predisposed to explain them away will find plentiful ways of doing so: perhaps the extravagant hypothesis that there are vastly many universes generated by quantum fluctuations, of the sort Stephen Hawking has recently said does away with any role for God in the origin of the universe, or perhaps the even more extravagant hypothesis that every possible universe must be actual (the former hypothesis reduces the odds considerably, and the latter does away with odds altogether). But in a sense none of this really matters, because ultimately none of these arguments has much to do with God in the first place.
This is obvious if one considers the terms in which they are couched. Hawking’s dismissal of God as an otiose explanatory hypothesis, for instance, is a splendid example of a false conclusion drawn from a confused question. He clearly thinks that talk of God’s creation of the universe concerns some event that occurred at some particular point in the past, prosecuted by some being who appears to occupy the shadowy juncture between a larger quantum landscape and the specific conditions of our current cosmic order; by “God,” that is to say, he means only a demiurge, coming after the law of gravity but before the present universe, whose job was to nail together all the boards and firmly mortar all the bricks of our current cosmic edifice. So Hawking naturally concludes that such a being would be unnecessary if there were some prior set of laws—just out there, so to speak, happily floating along on the wave-functions of the quantum vacuum—that would permit the spontaneous generation of any and all universes. It never crosses his mind that the question of creation might concern the very possibility of existence as such, not only of this universe but of all the laws and physical conditions that produced it, or that the concept of God might concern a reality not temporally prior to this or that world, but logically and necessarily prior to all worlds, all physical laws, all quantum events, and even all possibilities of laws and events. From the perspective of classical metaphysics, Hawking misses the whole point of talk of creation: God would be just as necessary even if all that existed were a collection of physical laws and quantum states, from which no ordered universe had ever arisen; for neither those laws nor those states could exist of themselves. But—and here is the crucial issue—those who argue for the existence of God principally from some feature or other of apparent cosmic design are guilty of the same conceptual confusion; they make a claim like Hawking’s seem solvent, or at least relevant, because they themselves have not advanced beyond the demiurgic picture of God. By giving the name “God” to whatever as yet unknown agent or property or quality might account for this or that particular appearance of design, they have produced a picture of God that it is conceivable the sciences could some day genuinely make obsolete, because it really is a kind of rival explanation to the explanations the sciences seek. This has never been true of the God described in the great traditional metaphysical systems. The true philosophical question of God has always been posed at a far simpler but far more primordial and comprehensive level; it concerns existence as such: the logical possibility of the universe, not its mere physical probability. God, properly conceived, is not a force or cause within nature, and certainly not a kind of supreme natural explanation.[/SPOILER]
It is a god of a gap so small and so sufficiently neutered of power or influence or identifiable properties that one is left to question the utility is such a “God” or “god”.
What is the difference between the god described by David Bentley and no god at all?
What you are asking is roughly analogous to the question “What’s the use of the ocean to a wave on the ocean?”, or “Does it matter to the waves whether the ocean exists or not?”
Hart is basically saying that God is the substrate of all existence. In his words, that “all things that exist receive their being continuously from him.”
However, in the long passage I’ve quoted he is mostly talking about what God isn’t, before going into discussions of what he is or may be, in later chapters.
Not sure I agree with your analogy.
The ocean, being analogous to the universe, exists. I assume we won’t devolve into pedantry of defining existence.
Whether the universe and existence has/had a prime mover is what most people who talk about G/god is what they usually mean, IME.
To then speculate about the ocean/universe/existence imbued with an omnipresent yet impotent or infinitely benign god seems, pointless. It’s an unnecessary complication in a system that is so often described as being no more complex than absolutely necessary.
:smack: Once more, with feeling:
Whether the universe and existence has/had a prime mover is what most people mean when they talk about G/god, IME.
No. In the analogy the whole universe and everything that’s in it is analogous to the waves only, not to the ocean.
If you read through the whole of Hart’s passage properly - I know it’s very long - you’ll see what he’s getting at.
Again, that’s something very different, if by ‘prime mover’ you mean an object with certain qualities which causes certain effects. That’s a ‘demiurge’ in Hart’s terminology.