This is probably strictly not a Great Debate, although it could be turned into one by challenging my premises. I’m posting it here, however, because I really want to have David, Gaudere, Dumb Ox, Andros, and Libertarian look over my dilemma, analyze the problem, and suggest intelligent solutions.
I mentioned on another thread that my faith in God is experiential, not metaphysical in origin. But like everybody else, I want a metaphysic to keep my thinking coherent (and I say everyone because even those who practice skepticism of all things supernatural have a metaphysical structure consisting of “if it ain’t amenable to science, it probably doesn’t exist at all”).
Then I reflected on the evidence I used to refute the literalist view of Genesis 1, and realized that my view of God is that He works through the laws of the world He made. Miracles? I hold with C.S. Lewis on this: according to Lewis, anything God is claimed to do in Scripture is not unnatural but super-natural – following natural law but “short-circuiting” it. In his example that is one of my favorites, any grapevine and the appropriate microorganisms can turn water into wine in the presence of soil and sunlight; Jesus simply sped up the process. The one seeming exception Lewis drew was that of the Resurrection, and in his view, that apparent exception said a great deal about what human destiny really is.
However, I found myself in a quandary. As I think is evident from my posts over the months, I would like to think that it is possible to show forth the existence and nature of God on objective evidence – though clearly we are nowhere near any practical demonstration of such a proof. The objective “evidence for God” is such as to sustain the belief of someone who has already committed to belief in Him, but is not such that a skeptic would buy it. The lives of committed believers are supposed to be better proof. To that, all I can say is, “I try.”
I think you see the dilemma in what I have said: if God works through natural processes and human decisions, how can one adduce objective evidence that distinguishes His work from what would happen if He were not in charge? I believe there is a solution to this question – but that in itself is a faith-based concept, not a rational view. Any thoughts?
I don’t think God intended ofr science to ever be able to prove that something he did, was something He did. Just as I don’t believe he wanted science to be able to prove He exists. Why? Because he made us creatures of choice…FREE choice. If God were undebatably Factual to all then you wouldn’t REALLY have a choice would you. I have also come to the conclusion that if God did everything in a way I could understand and rationalize, then either I am just GREAT, or He isn’t all that great. For God to true be what He is, He works and thinks outside our box. Sure he MAY do things inside, he is still outside.
I think I got alittle off topic (if ever I was ON topic) But it sounds good don’t it
I love the “if God gave more evidence, you would have no choice” argument. Geez, I guess I should be mad at my mom for not giving me a choice to believe if she exists. As to God being falsifiable: every possible concept of God cannot be falsified, since any omnipotent being could hide His existence, although individual Gods could be. However, I don’t know of any major religion that has a falsifiable God, one that makes risky predictions that could absolutely prove God doesn’t exist if they fail to come true (at least without waiting until death or Judgement Day). Those religions that have made predictions about the date of the end of the world or somesuch have thus far managed to wiggle out of the fact that their predictions have failed, anyhow; you can always rely on “mysterious ways” or “God is not bound by what our mortal minds can comprehend” if you get stuck.
Despite not being one of the thinkers on your list, I wil chime in anyway with two observations.
What dividing line can be drawn between unnatural and supernatural? The rate of change of water into wine, to use the example you cited, is itself subject to a natural law every bit as much as the actual change. What difference does it make which law is being violated?
As science advances, we are accustomed to seeing natural processes explained by a greater and greater degree of understanding of the underlying natural laws. But ultimately, the entire workings of the universe must reduce to certain irreducable natural laws. What could possibly distinguish the workings of God from just another irreducable natural law?
I am not so sure I believe that everything God does is only super-natural. Just because God invented science, does not mean that he always has to use it. I am not a big beliver in the “poof and God made it so” thing, but I do know he COULD go poof there it is.
Gaudere,
I would like to point out that predicition made by PEOPLE are not the ones made by a religion. I am a Christian, but just because I say something is going to happen does not mean that my religion agrees with me. Now if the holy text of the religion agrees…and I don’t just mean it kinda in general does, that’s different. I do knop that the Bible doesn’t list many dates of when something is going to happen.
And I never understand why people poo poo the “mysterious ways” thing. I find it far more beliveable to think of there being things that we don’t understand that to think that all think MUST be within our meager understandings.
How about a GUT that somehow also proves the universe to be infinite in both space and time?
Wouldn’t that falsify God?
Hey, if that wouldn’t what would?
[quote] Polycarp wrote:
I think you see the dilemma in what I have said: if God works through natural processes and human decisions, how can one adduce objective evidence that distinguishes His work from what would happen if He were not in charge? I believe there is a solution to this question – but that in itself is a faith-based concept, not a rational view. Any thoughts?*
And then…
I disagree with Sghoul and believe all things MUST be within our meager understandings. It might take millenia or eons to grow our brains and knowledge to that point but there isn’t any reason to think that this can’t be the case (within certain imposed limits like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle).
Einstein said God doesn’t roll (or play?) dice with the Universe. Even assuming God created the Universe God created it to follow defineable and knowable rules. However, I think therin lies a potential answer to the OP.
If at some point in the distant future (or tomorrow for that matter) we come to a brick wall in understanding that basically says we can find absolutely NO explanation for why this thing or phenomenon does what it does you may have found the proof you’re looking for. Science frequently runs into unexplainable phenomena but usually scientists are convinced an answer can be found given enough study (and usually they do). What I am describing is something scientists look at, puzzle over for a few decades, and throw their hands in the air and flatly claim it is unknowable to our finite minds. Hence, only God’s omnipotence could ‘explain’ what’s happening. It’s ‘Magic’ or the hand of God at work!
Indeed, as scientists probe closer and closer to creation they may find the hand of God since at some point it is not possible to know what is going on.
(I.e. What happened BEFORE the Big Bang to set it off? This is a great niche for God to sit in since ‘before the Big Bang’ is a meaningless concept to us poor humans [no time yet] but it may be argued that’s not a limitation that would hamper God.)
Thanks all, and (to Izzy in particular) I did not mean I was seeking for the input of just those five people, but that I was posting here because I particularly wanted the insights they have. JMullaney is another whose view would be useful, and I’m sure I’ve left people off.
Kyberneticist, I see your point. But traditional philosophy makes the distinction between preceding event and ontological cause. Dumb Ox’s 12th-Century namesake pointed out that God the Father could be Jesus’ father even though Jesus as God the Son was co-eternal with him because as First Cause He was the cause of everything else. Like a well-written time-travel story, ontological causality is a good way to develop Excedrin headache i (Sqrt -1), but I think you can see that the question of whether God “caused” a universe infinite in time and space (and therefore perpetual) can be distinguished from the common-or-garden-variety “He was there first and made it” type of causality we’re used to. If I climb into a time machine, go back to '75, and suggest to Mike Linehan of the Chicago Reader, “Hey, how about running a column that answers people’s off-the-wall questions?” does that make me ontologically prior to the origin of this board?
more seriously, i don’t believe that the experience of god (whether God exists) can ever be objective. it’s always a subjective experience between a human and divinity. there’s no way you could prove god any more than you could prove to someone else that you had a certain dream last night.
Einstein knew this. Remember, he said the quote “G-d doesn’t play dice.” He believed there was a G-d who instituted an orderly pattern of existence, and he (Einstein, not G-d) set out to understand the nature of that pattern…not to speculate that it might have occurred without a G-d.
He said that in the context of trying to understand the implications of QM, because the implications of randomness bothered him. As it happens, he was wrong; there is randomness at that level.
He also said, “I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it,” and “I do not believe in immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it.”
So he was a deist, rather than a believer in traditional Judeo-Christian religion. Still (despite what he refused to accept of quantum mechanics), I think he considered the universe’s orderly structure the work of an intentional creator, which addresses the statement I was responding to.
I’m not sure that you can, if you limit your realm of inquiry to “natural processes and human decisions.” In other words, if God only worked through natural processes and human decisions, which theoretically could occur without Him, then those processes and decisions would not necessarily offer evidence of Him. Personally, I do not believe the arenas of His works are that limited.
The nature of God, to me, is inherently “super-natural,” not merely natural. IMO, there is nothing within the natural world which is absolutely provable as being His work alone. Even my own absoulute faith in His existence and goodness, while rationally arrived at, is, at bottom, a matter of instinct or intuition, and therefore is not objectively “provable” to someone who does not feel it himself. Our realm of inquiry is limited to the natural world, because that is all we know. That doesn’t mean that is all there is.
Reminds me of a joke. A Student of science and a Professor of science are golfing, and at the first tee the student, never having played before, goes first. So he swings and hits the ball, but it is a terrible slice which heads off in to the woods, bounces off a few trees, and lands in a bird’s nest. Almost immediately, a bird swoops down, grabs the ball it its clutches and flies off with it, dropping it onto the road that runs along the first hole. It bounces into the back of a beat-up pick-up truck which carries it aways towards the hole until the truck hits a bump and the ball bounces back onto the fairway. But it rolls straight across into a sand trap. But at that very instant, an underground watermain breaks, shooting the ball out of the trap and onto the putting green where a passing squirrel hits it with its tail, knocking it straight into the hole. The Student’s jaw drops as he can’t believe what he’s seen. Finally he says, “Wow. What is the chance of that happening?” The Professor thinks for a moment, scratches his goatee, and finally says, “Well, the chance is one hundred percent – it just happened.”
I don’t think there is any way to convince a commited skeptic. There is always a pedestrian answer for everything.
In my humble experience, when I lived a life of Faith as best I could, aside from the miracles of loaves and fishes I witnessed, ultimately what I saw of “proof” of God came down to what science might well right off as Chaos Theory. You would think that natural processes and human decisions would result in a very random universe, but my experience was that there is an underlying order which can not be easily explained away. Although I never expected the next unlikely occurance, it got to the point where such occurances no longer seemed remarkable to me. But strictly, if you happen to fully live out the faith, and are also a pure skeptic, there is no reason not to write off any underlying order as coincidence – or, possibly, you would not have the same experience were God not with you. But, like all science, such an experiment must ultimately be witnessed by the individual for the person to judge for themselves – such is the nature of it as fortunate would have it.
I don’t know exactly what a “god” is, but if we suppose it must be omnipotent, than I can certainly think of ways to test some candidate entity for godhood. I can also suppose that since our knowledge and intelligence is finite, there must necessarily be constraints on our testing ability, such that we might say, “Entity X might be a god”, or “Entity Y is not a god”, but never, “Entity Z is a god”. That is, all we can really say is that it is sufficiently advanced relative to us that we cannot distinguish it from a god. Let’s call this “relative godhood” - it looks omnipotent to the limits of our testing ability. All actual gods, and potentially some sufficiently advanced non-gods, might fall into this category.
Then, I’m not sure I entirely understand the intent of your question - are you supposing a cooperative god, or an incooperative one? In the later case, certainly any moderately advanced being can hide itself from us, so no, I don’t think we could find objective evidence of a god that didn’t want to be found. But in the former case, it seems to me that we might test it for relative godhood, and given an entity that passes, assert, “This entity is at least a relative god, and might or might not be an absolute god as well”. Even finding something that met the weaker condition of relative godhood would be awfully interesting. I’m not sure that it’s possible to “prove” absolute godhood without also being a god one’s self.
As one of those skeptical science-oriented types, I wouldn’t have too many problems calling something “God” if it seemed omnipotent to the limits of our ability to tell whether it was. Perhaps the distinction is academic at that point.
I asked God this: “How can we adduce objective evidence that distinguishes your work from what would happen if you were not in charge?”
He replied, “You will recognize my work if you recognize me. I cannot be found in the atoms, but in your heart. I am not your scenery; I am your longings. I can move the atoms, but so can you! I can do great things, but you can, too! I am you. I leave you to decide whether any work is mine. But do not look for the Living among the dead.”
What I understand God to be saying is that evidence, per se, is arbitrarily attributable. Dr. Ramachandran, for example, in positing a possible relation between God and the limbic system based on observation of epileptics, made these comments:
Beleive it or not, scientists do not generalyy have any interest in proving or disproving the existence of a deity, since it falls squarely out of their stated realm.
In 1986, the scientific community, in a rare example of unity, drew up a seven page document (with 32 pages of footnotes; these are scientists after all) defining the goals and methods of science, agreed upon by many of the best scientific academies and Nobel laureates. The paper was in response to the attempt in Louisiana to require so-called “creation science” be taught along side evolutionary theory. It specifically states that science is not interested in that which cannot be tested, and is not equipped to pass judgements about supernatural explanations, leaving that to the domain of religious faith. (I recommend Michael Shermer’s book "Why People Beleive Wierd Things, 1997. Chapter 11 talks about this subject).
For me, faith is a stricly personal thing between me and whatever I believe is out there. It has nothing to do with how I feel about science, and frankly, if it was sufficiently simple that it could be defined by a mere human brain, I’d be mightily disappointed and probably stop believing in it.
