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Swallowing Camels with Peter Robinson
Uncommon Knowledge is a terrific show and I rarely miss it. This post is in response to the February 1st episode By Design: Behe, Lennox, and Meyer On The Evidence For A Creator.
Peter ended the interview by asking why these men have been rejected by the scientific community. I’d like to offer an answer that his guests will not, but that I think is close to the truth.
Science didn’t leave these men. These men left science.
I don’t say that lightly. Over the last couple of years we have witnessed “The Science” abused by erstwhile Men of Science to exclude those who hold marginal or unapproved views. My respect and my sympathy is with those who dare to challenge the orthodoxy — regarding public health, regarding climate, regarding energy, etc. — with information and with reason and with an open mind.
But this isn’t that. This isn’t the story of a handful of Davids taking on the Goliath of establishment belief armed with nothing but better ideas and greater intellectual honesty.
Peter is not himself a man of science, as he’s quick to admit (and as anyone who’s ever heard his comments regarding space exploration will already know). Peter’s guests, in contrast, have impressive credentials, and are charming, intelligent, and eloquent men. What they are not, alas, is men of science in the deep sense. Science is an exercise in humility and self-restraint. Those who practice it necessarily subscribe to an ethos, a framework of discourse, and a set of standards. These gentlemen have rejected that framework and the intellectual self-restraint that it implies. And they have stopped practicing science. Or, which seems less likely given their obvious intelligence, they have simply begun practicing it incompetently.
I’ve written on this topic before and I so I’ll keep this relatively brief.
The core of the argument these men make is that the universe and life within it is simply too improbable to have occurred without divine intervention.
They could make a different argument. They could argue that we don’t currently know of any mechanism by which the universe and life in it might have occurred, and that we can’t rule out divine intervention. They could also add that they personally are predisposed toward that explanation, but that it isn’t one they reach by way of science. That would be fair, and I’d respect that.
But what they can’t do while remaining both true to science and competent in its conduct is make this argument:
The evidence available to us suggests that divine intervention is the most plausible scientific explanation for the existence of the universe and the life in it.
That is the argument they’re making, and the flaws in that argument are sufficient justification to challenge their standing as men of science.
The problem is that divine intervention — what Meyer calls “The God Hypothesis” — isn’t explanatory. It’s like answering the question, “how does that rocket work” with the answer, “Elon Musk built it.”
Left unanswered is the question of “how.” (And I tip my hat to Peter for asking that question late in the interview, at about the 55-minute mark. No answer was forthcoming.)
The God hypothesis doesn’t tell us how God created the universe or life in it. One could as readily say that Elon Musk created the universe; at least we have some concrete evidence that Elon Musk exists. But neither claim has explanatory power. By what mechanism did the creator instantiate the universe? By what mechanism did that creator manipulate it to bring about life and intelligence?
Lacking explanatory power is only half the problem. The God hypothesis is fundamentally illogical.
Consider: Any being capable of creating the universe and of so comprehending its nature as to be able to direct it would, presumably, be at least as complicated as the universe itself. So how is it logical to simultaneously claim that the universe can’t just be the way it is while invoking the intervention of something even more improbably sophisticated and complex in order to explain it? What does that accomplish, other than to place the need to actually explain things — the need to “do science” — comfortably beyond reach?
And while it seems like a simplistic question, it really isn’t: Where did the creator come from? How does “always pre-existing” work, and why doesn’t that work to explain our own universe (which, again, is presumably less complicated than our creator would necessarily be)?
Occam’s Razor is not actually a scientific principle, merely a useful guide to how we think about and evaluate arguments. There’s nothing parsimonious to the God hypothesis. On the contrary, it asserts, under the guise of explaining, a new universe of laws, forces, actions, effects.
Invoking the God hypothesis to fill in the blanks in our understanding of the natural world is, truly, to strain at gnats while unquestioningly inviting far greater mysteries.
I think it would be great if Peter were to invite to his show two or three individuals who were respectful of the science and willing to engage the arguments brought up by this batch of guests. Not so-called “scientific atheists,” men who make the same leaps of faith as Behe and Meyer but in the opposite direction. Rather, it would be good to hear from people who approach both the science and the theology with respect and humility, who don’t declare the unknown to be unknowable, who don’t abandon rational materialism in favor of the supernatural when they run out of answers.
A closing thought and a pet peeve. Meyer continues to repeat the claim, as he did at about 51:45, that “We know from our uniform and repeated experience that information always arises from a mind.” He uses that claim to argue that instances of encoding encountered in nature must therefore also arise from a mind — have an intelligent designer.
This is a transparently circular argument. It is like declaring that everything that floats is a boat and the product of an intelligent creator, then noting that, since coconuts also float, they are clearly the product of an intelligent creator. Meyer wraps the idea in enough buzzwords to make it sound good, but it still doesn’t make sense.
Published in Science & Technology
“No one comes to the Father except through me,” is from the gospel of John, chapter 14, verse 6.
Many New Testament scholars doubt that Jesus actually said those words. But even if Jesus did say these words, this would not necessarily mean that Jesus was correct in what he said. He could have been deluded into thinking this was true.
There are lots of possibilities. Obviously, many Christians think that Jesus is the only path to salvation. But there are many people who grew up in Christian households, attended church regularly, read the Bible regularly, went to Bible college, studied in seminary and then concluded that Jesus never actually said the words “No one comes to the Father except for me” and never claimed that one must believe in his divinity to have salvation.
Many have concluded that Jesus was a failed apocalyptic prophet. That is a very standard view among many New Testament scholars.
You really have them going, Hank.
I love this and entirely agree. But I will just observe that whatever the failures of the men in the video are in this regard, (I don’t necessarily agree with your characterization of them but after reading your criticism, I feel I need to re-watch it to have a better sense for whether I do disagree and, if so, how strongly.) the failures of the anti-theistic community are absurdly, catastrophically, and even obscenely so. (cf. Covid19)
I think your analogy here is off. You’re shifting from the question of “what” to the question of “how”. I think they were grappling with “what best explains the nature of our existence given, for example, that it is a product of information”. A better analogy in this case is not, “how does that rocket work”, but “where did that rocket come from?” To say “Elon Musk built it” is a reasonable response. There is a separate question entirely, which I don’t think they got into much in the video, which is your question of “how” these things occurred. So I feel like you’re kind of placing an evidentiary burden on their conversation that isn’t germane to the point they were actually making. (This is why I think I need to go back and re-listen to see if my memory is playing tricks on me — it’s been several days since I watched it.)
I remember a construction worker telling me decades ago that “a piece of paper will lie there and let you write anything you want to write on it”. The words of a bunch of “scholars” don’t amount to a fart in a whirlwind. The argument has been going on for centuries and nothing has been settled. Frankly, who cares what “many people” think?
My only point is that one can’t reason to the existence of a God who is a willful being. Revelation is required.
Back to the topic of the post again for a moment, and this question of probabilities.
It isn’t an overstatement to say that the entire argument the guests present is that the universe is just too improbable to have arisen by any known process. What they are asserting is an inequality: that the probability of it happening as a result of any process we understand is less than that of a supernatural actor creating it.
As I mentioned earlier, to assert that inequality competently requires a corresponding probability to the right of the less-than sign: (p of natural processes) < (p of supernatural processes). Yet we’re never presented with any hint of the value of that second probability.
It isn’t sufficient — that is, isn’t scientifically responsible — to simply say “well, look at this hugely improbable thing; it must be that some other specific thing of completely unknown probability is nonetheless more likely to be the explanation.”
I understand the concept of probability if one is talking about the probability of rolling a seven or any other number. All possible combinations are known, and the probabilities are easy to calculate. Applying probability to existence seems ridiculous to me. Dawkins(?) said the existence of God is “improbable”. Pure stupidity.
Keith, good comment, thank you.
The questions in this discussion have always been about “how.” How did the universe come about, how did life originate, how did man acquire his intelligence. That’s the starting point. The gentlemen conclude that there is no explanation, and so they, not I, shift the focus from “how” to “what” (or, more accurately, who).
That was the point of my analogy. The question “how does that rocket work” is a question about processes, physics, natural laws. The response “Elon Musk built it” is incidental, and doesn’t in any way answer the question “how does it work?”
Similarly, the gentlemen in the interview offer no answer to the questions about how. They simply say
Elon MuskG-d did it. Claiming that natural processes couldn’t have created our universe as it is (a claim of which I’m skeptical) does not absolve them of attempting to explain just what processes could have created our universe as it is. Naming G-d is not describing a process. It’s simply giving a name to the phrase “it came about through some mechanism we can’t explain.”But we already knew that.
There’s certainly a lot of room for skepticism, given that we have exactly one example of a universe and we don’t yet know how much we don’t yet know about it. That makes it hard to assess the probabilities of things (physical constants, for example) that might yet prove to be interrelated in some way we don’t understand.
I agree that Dawkins is kind of a jerk for mixing science and religion. I don’t think Behe and Meyer should do it either. That’s my point.
This part is over my head, but I remember reading about the mathematical physicists who first worked out solutions to Einstein’s equations. Some solutions described universes very different from our own. That sounds suspiciously like he was describing something fundamental about existence itself, not just this universe. If one worked out all possible solutions to Einstein’s equations, maybe then we could talk about probabilities.
Hank, I wonder if you would have been satisfied if those interviewed had said that it would be literally impossible to say how creation happened, because you would have been asking people with less intelligence than the Creator to describe how a much more intelligent entity would have done it. No, I don’t think you would have found that satisfactory. I’m going through the video now, so I may have more to say when I finish it.
When I read your quotation of the statement “a piece of paper will lie there and let you write anything you want to write on it,” I immediately thought that you were going to mention that this applies to all of the ancient texts that we now call the Christian Bible.
I agree that you can apply that statement made by that construction worker to the written work of New Testament scholars. But you can also apply that statement to the Christian Bible and the Koran and the Book of Mormon and other so-called Holy books.
Obviously, we tend to think that some words that were written down by men have a close correlation to reality while other words that were written by men might be based on the writer being provided bad information or the writer being delusional or the writer being dishonest.
Teasing out which written words represent what actually happened compared to legendary development or a complete fraud is part of what makes ancient historical scholarship so difficult. Even figuring out what happened, historically, 70 years ago isn’t always easy, as the debate over “What Really Happened in Iran?” (how large of a role did the US CIA play in the removal of Mossadegh in Iran) demonstrates.
I may have said this at some point, long ago, but I’ll say it again: I think it is possible to claim that consciousness , empathy, intelligence and love are built into the structure of the universe. Not that everything in the universe is conscious or empathetic or (God knows) loving, but that the potential for consciousness and, from consciousness, empathy and from these love… were always present, and thus inevitable.
Human beings are conscious (that is, we are aware of our own, subjective state, e.g. “Hey, I just noticed that there’s a deer in my backyard!”) and we can and do use our self-consciousness to recognize and respond to the subjective state of another human being or, indeed, another organism (e.g. “that deer hasn’t noticed me, I can sneak up on it!”) This isn’t a controversial statement, but one that is well-supported by abundant evidence. Human beings perform all sorts of additional, extraordinary mental feats with our big, conscious brains, but other animals share at least some degree of consciousness and use it in more or less the same way. A wolf might not put it into words, but the wolf can also discern “that deer hasn’t noticed me.” This has obvious survival benefits for both predator and prey, so an evolutionary argument is easily made as to why consciousness and empathy emerged, and of course, Richard Dawkins et al will make an excellent case for why what we call love is “really just” kin-selection altruism, or the tit-for-tat of mutually-beneficial reciprocity. No love required and thus no God of love!
But evolution can only work with what already exists: It does not create ex nihilo. So the evolution of the wolf presupposes all that is built into the structure of the universe: Gravity, the speed of light, the speed of sound, the ability of molecules to link themselves into oxygen and all the other astonishing stuff that physicists and chemists and astronomers and cell physiologists and the rest keep discovering.
It seems to me that if water exists in our universe, then water is possible in our universe.
And given eternity (which is the amount of time the universe has to work with) everything that can be… will be. Everything that can happen will happen. What is possible is inevitable.
If human life is possible…then human life is, was, ever more shall be, inevitable. All the way back, billions of years ago, when the universe was just a bunch of hot rocks flying around, all the materials, forces and sheer time necessary for human beings (along with giraffes, rhododendrons, sharks and spirochetes) to come into existence were available. So human beings did come into existence. What else?
As a characteristic and condition, blessing and curse, of our human-ness, once we existed we began, however dimly and clumsily, to expand consciousness and empathy, to think, learn, discover, create, to be intelligent. Human beings also, and at the same time, began to love one another: began to be (and seek to be) loving. This means that love, too, has been present in the form of potential from the beginning.
Consciousness-as-potential, empathy-as-potential, intelligence-as-potential and love-as-potential:All of these were potential within a universe wherein potential will be realized.
As I am no doubt making painfully obvious, this is a difficult thing to describe, especially briefly but what it boils down to is that the logos—the information, the theory, the plan—essential for the creation of human beings was, indeed, there at the beginning and in some sense was the beginning. How do I know? Because we’re here.
That’s true, but as I said before, this is not a big issue for me. When I am asked about some things, I sometimes respond with, “I don’t know.” I guess I am more comfortable with ambiguity than most people are.
So I finished the video, and my response is similar to my #40 comment. I would add that if you are embedded in an atheist wordview which essentially prevents you from openly exploring the idea of a Creator, you would have no way of trying to understand the role of a Creator. What I found especially interesting (that might have been your reference to their saying a little on the “how”) is that they believe that our knowledge and understanding have come so far that it’s possible to know more than we could ever imagine–but we’re not there yet. They didn’t call their ideas hypotheses–maybe you found that unscientific–but I’m satisfied that they have explored many hypotheses over the years, and they found their current belief–that there is an intelligent Creator/mind at work–rational. To assume more than that would be putting themselves in the seat of G-d. I’m satisfied not knowing the how because I believe it is beyond my comprehension.
If one defines “God” the way many people do, a perfect being who is perfectly knowledgeable (omniscient), all powerful (omnipotent) and morally perfect (omnibenevolent), then Richard Dawkins’ statement that God is improbable seems correct.
If a perfect being (a being with moral perfection and infinite power and infinite knowledge) was the creator of the universe, we would not expect the creation to be the imperfect creation that it is.
We would expect an imperfect being to create an imperfect universe, perhaps because the creator lacks omnibenevolence and therefore doesn’t mind creating a world with huge amounts of suffering or perhaps because the creator lacked the power to create a morally perfect universe.
So, there are non-classical versions of God that might be probable. But when it comes to classical theism, I think Richard Dawkins is correct, on philosophic grounds, not scientific grounds.
You’re repeating yourself. Not all of us believe that G-d created a perfect universe, or intended to.
Right. In that case we have a God who is not omnibenevolent.
This is something that many Christians would object to. They argue that God is morally perfect, but somehow the world he created contains ooodles and ooodles of evil.
Now, many of these Christians try to get their God off the hook by saying, “Adam and Eve are to blame for all the evil in the world. Their disobedience against God resulted in the fall. That’s where evil got going.”
That’s just makes one wonder why this morally perfect, perfectly knowledgeable God left the goodness/evilness of the world he created up to the whims of two human beings, when he should have known (being as smart as he is) that there was a high risk of Adam and Eve failing.
It’s all very improbable as described by many Christians.
How much does “did it really happen?” matter? I ask, not because I’m doubting the veracity of scripture, but because I doubt whether scientific or historical verifiability is, or ever was, the point, at least when it comes to the stories in the Bible. (How much Kermit Roosevelt’s efforts in Iran altered the course of Iranian history is a different matter!)
One challenge is knowing which revelations are correct. For example, maybe St. Paul actually did hear the words of Jesus. Or perhaps St. Paul thought that he heard the words of Jesus but didn’t. Even someone who is sincere can be wrong.
Over the centuries many people have claimed to have heard the voice of God. But the rest of us have to rely on our intuitions and our critical thinking skills to decide on whether these peoples’ claims of hearing the voice of God are true claims or false claims.
A claim of revelation might be required. But a claim of revelation isn’t necessarily sufficient to persuade people who haven’t had the revelation themselves.
You assume that G-d’s saving some of the creation for humans to complete was a goof. I don’t agree. I also don’t believe in original sin; their big mistake was trying to deceive G-d about what they had done. In the Jewish tradition, G-d decided to somewhat withdraw some of his power in the world; that’s how he gave us free will. That action is called tzimtzum. You have a habit of injecting your belief of what He should have done or what He intended or how He would demonstrate his understanding of humans. I think He learned a lot about humans over time. Maybe he could have known everything that humans could/would do. Maybe he chose not to know in advance.
Interesting question.
When it comes to the Jesus resurrection stories, my sense is that most Christians think the “did it really happen?” question matters quite a bit.
After all, according to St. Paul, if Jesus was not raised, “your faith it futile and you are still in your sins.” (NRSV 1 Corinthians 15:17).
But we could ask the same question about whether Jesus actually did say, “No one comes to the Father except through me.” If Jesus didn’t say this, would this mean that there are other paths towards salvation other than faith in Jesus as Lord and Savior?
Another question would be, “What did Jesus say about divorce?” In the gospels, Jesus says certain things about divorce. So, if one were to conclude that “that sermon was never actually given by Jesus,” well, then that might change ones attitude towards divorce. Of course, there are parts of the Old Testament that talk about divorce too. But the same “did it really happen” questions could be posed to the Old Testament.
Some think that humans could not have evolved from other primates because of the first chapters of Genesis. But “did it really happen?” could apply to those chapters too.
I think it does matter if some alleged event portrayed in the Bible actually happened as presented or if it didn’t really happen at all or if it happened quite differently.
The free will argument doesn’t cut it for me.
Think of it this way. Let’s say that a parent sees his 5 year old son playing in the middle of a street. The parent sees a car coming.
The parent could run towards his son, taking him out of the road so that his son isn’t hit by the car. This would violate his son’s free will. But it will save his son from injury or death. So, a good parent gets his son out of the street.
A bad parent would simply say, “Well, this is a soul building exercise for my son, even if he dies in the process.”
This is why I don’t by the argument that God allows all of these terrible things to happen in this world (and not just the terrible things we are aware of but also the terrible things we aren’t aware of) in order to preserve “free will.”
To say, “God wants us to have free will. That’s why there is so much suffering in the world,” is to essentially concede that God is negligent, perhaps indifferent to human and animal suffering.
Perhaps this is the case. But then we are no longer talking about a morally perfect God. We are talking about an indifferent God.
But a “day,” as we know it, could not have existed before the Sun and Earth were created that established it.
You clearly don’t understand the notion of free will at all, and I’m not inclined to take the time to explain it.
I understand both compatibilist free will and libertarian free will as these are hot topics in philosophy discussions.
A bridge isn’t a bridge unless there is an open space beneath it. In other words, unless there’s some chance it will fall, however unlikely that might be given the circumstances of its construction.
Perhaps it is similar when it comes to the idea of moral perfection. A thing cannot be morally perfect unless there is some chance it would choose not to be. A bridge is not really a bridge if it’s just sitting on flat ground.
And anyway, the Christian view is that God is in the process of redeeming creation, bringing the Kingdom to our universe, and so the horrors and injustices of the past will be undone (I say “will be” but I’m not certain the passage of time isn’t an illusion. “Are undone” may be just as accurate from God’s point of view.)
I say this, I should note, agreeing with Henry’s points on the science of this.
But if there is life after death, even if you “die” – from being hit by a car as a child, or whatever – you aren’t really gone.
Under some Christian salvation theories, this only makes the situation worse.
If the 5 year old child gets hit by the car and dies and goes to hell because his parents brought him to Buddhist religious events and not Christian religious events, the child’s suffering is going to last forever.
I realize that not all Christians have this very exclusive view of salvation.
Also, would we actually praise a parent in this situation, one who simply lets his child get hit by a car becuase, after all, the child isn’t really gone? I think not.
You’d think “hard-core” Christians would have a good answer for that, but I haven’t heard one.
It would certainly be better if after millions of years of animal and human suffering on earth, at some point God intervenes and makes everything right.
But again, using a parent analogy. If a parent allows his son or daughter to suffer terrible pain for 50 years and then decides to intervene with something to relieve his son or daughter’s pain, one could praise the parent for doing this or one could criticize the parent for waiting so long.
Also, about 25 years into the suffering, the son or daughter might reasonably wonder whether this “promise of redepemption” is actually going to happen or if this is just something that is going to be talked about but never actually happens.
I also wonder about this “redeeming creation.” Some Christians think that only a minority of the human population will actually enjoy this redeeming of creation while the majority of the human population will suffer eternally in hell. That’s not every Christian who thinks this. But many Christians, including many on Ricochet, argue for this type of salvation theory.
That doesn’t make God appear a being of omnibenevolence by any stretch.
I have talked so some Catholics who say that people will be judged by what they knew about Jesus. I think what they mean is that the 5 year old child raised in Thailand by Buddhist parents who never heard about Jesus won’t be in hell for eternity because he never accepted Jesus as Lord and Savior but someone who did hear the gospel and rejected it could suffer annihilation (but not hell).
That’s interesting. But one wonders if God really thinks that everyone who hears the gospel preached should actually be persuaded by the arguments. If someone listens to the gospel preaching and thinks, “This sounds like an interesting story. But I somehow doubt that this is true,” would a Good God really think that eternity in hell for this person is appropriate?