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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
I think “hard-core” Christians don’t apply these kinds of moral tests to God, even though they would apply them to humans.
I think many “hard-core” Christians subscribe to what is called in philosophy of religion as Divine Command Theory, that morality is whatever God says it is and God can exempt himself from the moral commands that he asks others to follow.
If that is what is meant by omnibenevolence, well, okay.
Susan,
Thanks for your comments. Even saying that “it would be literally impossible to say how creation happened” is a statement that traduces the bounds of science. But that is close to (though not exactly) what these gentlemen are saying.
What they are saying is, as I mentioned above, that they believe the probability of some as-yet-unknown natural phenomenon bringing about the universe as we observe it is less than the probability that a supernatural intelligence exists and somehow created it.
They make some effort to assign probabilities to the naturalistic explanation, but not to the supernatural explanation. That’s not a sound basis for reaching a “scientific” conclusion, whatever their personal beliefs.
As I see, these men are essentially saying, “My intuitions tell me that the universe must have a supernatural cause, not merely a natural cause.”
That’s fine for people to use their intuitions. We can’t really avoid using them.
If I were to tell you that I had a conversation with my grandmother yesterday, even though she died over 20 years ago, you could just say, “Well your intuitions tell you that you had that conversation. So, I will go with you on that.” But you could just as easily say, “I think your subconscious mind played a trick on you, making you think that you were talking to your grandmother.”
Can we say that one explanation is more based on science than the other?
Did they call their conclusions scientific? Must they be scientific because they are scientists? Or is it enough for them to simply ascribe to these beliefs as humans?
Susan, that’s a fair question. The answer is yes, they are representing their conclusions as scientific conclusions, as beliefs justified by the scientific evidence. These are men with impressive scientific credentials. They use the language of science, they present their case as being built on a foundation of science, and they offer their conclusions as the rational conclusions based on that science.
That’s the whole of my objection. I have no objection to professions of faith. I just don’t like seeing science co-opted in an effort to make that faith seem somehow more than faith.
I think their claim is more modest than this. I think they are in large part reacting to the improbability of the naturalistic explanations as advanced by scientism (I choose that term advisedly and distinct from the more humble claims of actual science). They’re making an epistemological argument that, among other things, scientism doesn’t offer compelling answers to this question and many other important questions for that matter. The propensity of scientism proponents to suggest that rationality is their own exclusive domain is just so much posturing and I think these guys are shoving back in their way. That’s how I hear the arguments they’re making at least. Again, though, I haven’t had time to re-listen yet. But I will try to get around to it over the next few days.
(For unrelated reasons I’ve been binge reading C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy over the last few days and won’t have time for a redo of Uncommon Knowledge until I get through That Hideous Strength.)
So it’s not that they’re reasoning from a complex cause to an even more complex effect?
Rather, it’s that in this particular argument they’re going from one improbability to another, supposedly greater improbability?
And their argument, you take it, is based on the supposed improbability of these effects, and therefore should not end in a greater improbability?
Ok. Maybe the example of my kids doesn’t work.
I don’t think the universe necessarily has to have a cause of its existence. It is possible that the universe has always existed in some form or another.
Now, I realize that some people don’t think that an infinite regress is tenable. But if that’s the case, one might ask whether God existing eternally in the past is also an infinite regress.
But even if we were to conclude that the universe does require a cause of its existence, it’s not exactly clear what that cause of its existence would be. It could be supernatural or not supernatural. If it were supernatural, it might be indifferent to human beings.
One mystery (the cause of the universe) is being replaced with another mystery (some supernatural being/force caused the universe).
You’re basing your objections on your misunderstandings of their arguments. It would be better to clear up just what those arguments actually are.
But (unless you’re going to respond to #5), maybe the best we can do is this:
The arguments are not based on complexity (etc.) being improbable as such. The arguments, even without clarifying what they are, would be based on the improbability of such effects absent an intelligent cause. So there’s no built-in improbability in the premises that has to carry over into the conclusion. There’s just the facts considered in the premises.
And we’re supposed to assess this probability before assessing the evidence that He exists?
So you agree with Popper that falsifiability is the essential trait of a scientific claim?
But it’s not clear that it would be improbable for such effects absent an intelligent cause.
Yes, that’s part of my objection: that they are recoiling from inexplicable complexity by invoking a greater, still inexplicable, complexity.
Almost. They are going from what they assert is one great improbability to an alternative of unspecified and probably unknowable improbability, and implying that the latter is nonetheless presumably less improbable.
Again, almost. Their argument is based on the improbability of the naturalistic explanation; no effort is made to assess the probability of the supernatural explanation.
I suppose we can evaluate probabilities in any order we like. However, we shouldn’t attempt to assert the direction of the inequality (that is, whether natural probability > supernatural probability or vice versa) until both probabilities have been established with some reasonable confidence.
No, it’s not an overstatement. It’s just a misunderstanding.
Your clearest statement yet. Thank you.
Why on earth should we try to assess the probability of G-d prior doing to examining the evidence?
We have facts. They’re in biology textbooks.
If the probability that they could not have occurred by natural means is X%, then, until more evidence turns up, X% is the probability that a supernatural cause caused them.
Let’s talk about the word “compelling.” In this discussion, I’m talking about the scientific merit of the arguments they’re presenting. They are, after all, attempting to ground faith in science.
I don’t find the supernatural argument “compelling” in the sense of satisfying the requirements of sound scientific thinking. It may be emotionally satisfying, in that it fills in big gaps in our scientific knowledge with a black-box answer that frees us from engaging in further scientific inquiry. It may be reassuring, in that it makes the universe feel comprehensible, even if it doesn’t actually aid in that comprehension in any meaningful sense (since it doesn’t actually answer any of the questions about physical reality that were otherwise unanswered).
But I don’t find the supernatural hypothesis any more compelling than the naturalistic one. Less so, in fact, because at least we have a track record using the processes of scientific inquiry to gain understanding of the physical universe. We really don’t have that experience with supernatural explanations.
And, no, I don’t think they’re making modest claims. I think any modest claim would have to acknowledge that we have no more reason to favor an as-yet-undiscovered supernatural explanation than we do to favor an as-yet-undiscovered naturalistic explanation.
I agree with this.
To say that we don’t know how the universe came into existence (assuming that the universe didn’t always exist in some form or another) isn’t to say that the probability of the cause of the universe being natural, rather than supernatural, is high or low.
It is unknown.
Yes.
And, as I mentioned, I don’t think scientific claims are the only ones worth making—indeed, I think one reason conversations like this are often so unsatisfying is that we’re so trained to see science as the final authority. It’s not.
This is an unfalsifiable hypothesis: I love my grandson.
Is it true? I doubt anyone reading those words would bother to doubt it for a moment: Why would they? But I can’t prove that I love him. “Science” can’t prove that I love him or, for that matter, prove that I don’t. And yet, I expect you to believe me. And: You do. Right?
Is it important that I love my grandson?
In fact, isn’t my ability to love my grandson, my husband, my neighbor, or assorted grieving strangers in their time of need…the most important thing about me? More important by far than any provable facts: My sex, my age, how tall I am, how much cholesterol is floating around in my arteries. If, one day, someone wonders aloud “did this person, GrannyDude, actually exist?” the only reason he or she would care is because I loved well, or failed to.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40018244
Some people don’t think that an infinite regress of causes is tenable.
You do realize that they wrote their books to respond to this very claim of yours, don’t you?
That would seem to make sense, given that if the probability of something is p, then the probability of not-something is 1-p.
And, indeed, if we completely understood the natural world, we could then make such a statement. But consider what I actually wrote:
We don’t know what natural processes may exist that we don’t understand. Given that, we can’t really estimate the probability of a naturalistic explanation, versus a supernatural one.
What we can try to estimate is the probability that the universe came into being as a result of a naturalistic process that we understand. And if you subtract that probability from one, you get the probability that some other process, naturalistic or otherwise, accounts for the universe as we see it.
Given that we don’t yet know what we don’t yet know, there’s no basis for assigning a probabilistic value to supernatural causation.
No one’s “recoiling from inexplicable complexity.”
Their arguments don’t even mention any inexplicable complexity.
That’s why they use their arguments to establish the probability of a supernatural origin.
Ever considered the alternative philosophies of science?
Instead of falsifiability, why not verifiability? Or why not both?
Or why not Thomas Kuhn‘s sort-of-both-but-it’s-complicated?
No, that is easily falsifiable.
And it is, thankfully, not a claim which we would attempt to verify using science. Because, were it to come within the ambit of science, we’d have to agree that claim of your love for your grandson could be challenged by science.
And that’s the danger, in my opinion, of mixing science and faith. It threatens to undermine both.
But, per my comment #82, they attempt to do so by excluding unknown naturalistic causes from their ersatz equation.
Or maybe they just arbitrarily assign a high probability to a supernatural explanation. Certainly I’ve heard lots of talk of the improbability of a naturalistic explanation (known or unknown), but no discussion of the improbability of a supernatural explanation. (My suspicion is that they just dial it to 1.000 and are content with that.)
Maybe it wasn’t so clear.
Ok, let’s rewind.
So your point is that their arguments are based on our lack of knowledge of natural causes?
So your real point all along, and after all this magnificent unclarity, rested on taking their arguments as arguments ignorance?
Good grief. You understand those arguments about as well as you understand anything I say.
My point is that they conclude too much from our lack of knowledge of both natural and supernatural causes.