Creationism Is at an End
Oct 29th, 2007 by Micah Tillman | 49 Comments |
Which just means I will have said my peace (piece?) after this post on the subject. All we have left to talk about is Creationism’s third issue-group, “How to understand what Philosophy says.”
(The first was discussed here and here, and the second was discussed here).
Philosophical Issue (1): If the ex nihilo, nihil fit principle doesn’t apply to a God, that God can do just about whatever that God pleases.
There is nothing logically absurd about what Genesis 1-3 describes, so it “could have happened” (however you read “it”) if there is such a God. The Evolutionary Story is not a logical necessity, in other words, so it is not illogical to choose another story instead.
Philosophical Issue (2): Given that ex niilo, nihil fit, does the Evolutionary Story require an increase in ordered complexity (form) or genetic information? And if so, from whence does this ordered complexity or information come?
Is the contrast between “open” and “closed systems” enough to explain the apparent violation of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics? For instance, what is the mechanism that would transfer the order from outside the system into the system?
(These are just questions and I assume there are answers, given the fact that people have been arguing about this for a long time. I just might happen not to know them.)
Philosophical Issue (3): Is the Creation Story about an immoral God? Why would God bother to make all this if God knew the mess it was going to become? (I have an answer to that, but I’ll have to talk about it later.) That is, is the God Character used in Creationism consistent, believable? Is a mechanical process, multiple gods, or a time-bound, fallible god a better choice of protagonist?
Philosophical Issue (4): Can Science, depending as it does on representing nature via mathematics, provide a full description of the World? What if there is an aspect of reality that is unmathematizable? (Take, for instance, the traditional problem of incommensurate lines [e.g., the side and diagonal of a square]. Can mathematics describe even such simple relations, and if not, why think it can properly represent the World as a whole?)
How does Goedel’s Theorem affect an attempt to represent all of reality through mathematics? Isn’t a mathematical view of the world monistic, and isn’t monism incapable of explaining itself? That is, doesn’t the fact that we can know the world show that we are outside of it in some sense? How can a mathematical, evolutionary theory account for this (as it would seem to require at least some form of dualism)?
Philosophical Issue (5): Is Evolution Theory scientifically disprovable (in theory)? That is, can it be tested using the scientific method? If not, then is it Science?
And is the historical component of Evolutionary Theory scientifically disprovable (in theory)? That is, can it be tested using the scientific method? If not, then is it Science?
If you know answers to any of these questions, I’d be very interested to hear them.
Is the contrast between “open” and “closed systems” enough to explain the apparent violation of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics? For instance, what is the mechanism that would transfer the order from outside the system into the system?
The answers are “yes” and “sunlight.” The Earth isn’t a closed system because it receives a massive influx of energy every day from the Sun. In the same way, if we sealed up your house, you could still clean up your house (but only until you ran out of water). In that case, it’s a closed system and you’d still be creating more disorder than order (you’d be expelling disordered energy in the form of heat just as the Sun does). If we don’t close up your house, there is obviously no scientific problem with your cleaning it up.
Can Science, depending as it does on representing nature via mathematics, provide a full description of the World? What if there is an aspect of reality that is unmathematizable?
This is a good question. Einstein once said, “Science is mathematical not because the world is simple, but because it is complex. It is only its mathematical properties that we can discover.” Now, I personally disagree with Einstein. I believe philosophy can give us real (non-mathematical) answers to questions, so I’m probably on your side here though there’s nothing particularly mathematical about the theory of evolution. I must object to the idea that irrational numbers are somehow a problem for mathematics, though. How Pythagorean of you.
I actually refuse to answer questions concerning Godel’s Theorem, since I don’t believe the Theorem has any particularly important philosophical implications. So I refuse to assume it applies until my interlocutor demonstrates to me that it does.
Is Evolution Theory scientifically disprovable (in theory)? That is, can it be tested using the scientific method? If not, then is it Science?
And is the historical component of Evolutionary Theory scientifically disprovable (in theory)? That is, can it be tested using the scientific method? If not, then is it Science?
Yes, it is falsifiable. If we were (for example) to find dinosaur bones in the same layer as early hominids (non-fraudulently, please) with no other explanation possible than that they lived at the same time, this would represent a potential falsification of the hypothesis. However, it’s more difficult to claim that it’s testable. There aren’t any real laboratory experiments we can do to test it. (It has already passed every one science has been able to think of thus far.)
I sympathize with your (assumed) objection. “But even if we found such a thing, science would bend over backwards to try to explain it.” I actually think that’s quite true, but that’s because it’s late days for evolutionary theory. Evolution now has such an enormous wealth of reinforcing evidence supporting it, that it’s nearly impossible for it to be false. It’s much more likely that any such new evidence is fraudulent or mistaken. In the early days, though, the theory would have fallen apart had it been presented with similar evidence. Since then, we’ve done dig after dig after dig and all have supported the theory. Don’t get me wrong; Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection may not necessarily be right (or at least not right all the time). So there is still some hope for Theistic Evolution, but I don’t hold out any for your other two groups - 6-Day Creationism and Progressive Creationism.
Thanks Andrew!
Help me understand the cleaning house example a little more, though.
Also, it’s not clear to me how energy entering a system is the same thing as order being transfered from outside the system into the system.
Really? I thought that the theory could ultimately be reduced to issues of chemistry and probability. Aren’t those both mathematical?
Hee hee! Never been accused of Pythogoreanism before. :-) How is it not a problem for math if there is some obvious phenomenon which it cannot represent?
One of these days I’ll read up on Goedel’s Theorem enough to be able to do something other than ask leading questions about it.
I’d believe that if there weren’t people who said that it is one of the most illogical, contradicted-by-the-evidence theories ever to have been produced. So what’s a guy to do?
You’ve been on digs? It’s interesting to me how much we have to rely on witnesses for Science. Like a jury trial almost.
Help me understand the cleaning house example a little more, though.
I don’t know if I’d go so far as to call it an example. If you’re cleaning your house, you are (apparently) creating more order than disorder. In fact, however, you’re creating more disorder since the energy you burn as heat is disordered. However, you can continue to create as much order as you’d like because you’re accepting an influx of energy from an outside source (ultimately the Sun). When you eat, you are able to build muscles and use the energy consumed in order to create order in your own body, which you can then use to create further order in your environment. That energy comes from somewhere. In this case, it’s from the food and, ultimately, the Sun. The Solar System isn’t a closed system, either, but it’s close enough for our purposes. The order created by evolution is overwhelmed by the disorder that the Sun is creating by burning off its energy in the first place. That energy can create order, without violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics, because the net result is still greater disorder. (The enormous entropy created by the Sun consuming its fuel overwhelms the order created here on Earth.) My example was merely to show, in a common sense way, how order can be created without violating the Laws of Thermodynamics.
Really? I thought that the theory could ultimately be reduced to issues of chemistry and probability. Aren’t those both mathematical?
Chemistry isn’t fully mathematical, but certainly I didn’t mean to say that evolution didn’t have some mathematical basis. However, most biologists aren’t particularly gifted mathematicians and don’t need to be.
How is it not a problem for math if there is some obvious phenomenon which it cannot represent?
The square root of two can’t be represented mathematically? That’s news to me; I use it all the time. Granted, if I want an exact answer, I refrain from approximating it with a decimal representation. But why is mathematics constrained to represent everything in decimals or fractions? I don’t see it. Pythagoras was a very smart man, though, and he thought the same way you did.
I’d believe that if there weren’t people who said that it is one of the most illogical, contradicted-by-the-evidence theories ever to have been produced. So what’s a guy to do?
I see what you’re saying. I agree that you’re at the limits of what you can accept from authority. The best I can say is stop listening to experts on both sides and evaluate the evidence for yourself. That’s what I did several years ago (spurred on by a disagreement with a creationist, who made me more carefully consider my reasoning) and I was completely convinced.
There are very good reasons to believe the theory is implausible. The human mind is not equipped naturally for thinking on time scales as vast as evolution’s time scale and I sympathize with the argument that it’s a difficult theory to accept. (This is why everybody, I think, accepts “micro-evolution,” but balks at “macro-evolution.” Micro-evolution is on an observable time scale and cannot reasonably be denied. Macro-evolution takes many human lifetimes. However, there is no particular reason to make such a distinction between micro and macro, since macro-evolution only requires a sufficiently accumulated number of micro changes, and you’ll find that not many scientists make such a distinction.) Every objection I’ve seen to evolution can be broken down and answered in reasonably precise detail. E.g. Behe’s argument for “irreducible complexity” is fairly easily disposed of.
You’ve been on digs? It’s interesting to me how much we have to rely on witnesses for Science. Like a jury trial almost.
English is an imprecise language. When I need precision, I wheel out mathematics. I personally feel free to use figures of speech which everybody actually understands. I see where you’re coming from, in that this use of “we” can occasionally lead to equivocation. However, there wasn’t much danger of that in this particular phrase. (I had a friend, with a philosophy degree of course, who used to point out every single time someone used “we” imprecisely like that.)
You’re not wrong about witnesses, of course. I require witnesses to testify to the very existence of China. Nevertheless, I have no serious doubts about its existence. Moreover, jury trials can reach conclusions “beyond a reasonable doubt,” despite popular myth to the contrary. Interestingly, the phrase “circumstantial evidence” has come to mean “weak evidence” by common usage, but it originally meant (and I think still does in legal circles) non-eyewitness evidence. Eyewitness evidence is considered “direct evidence” and everything else is circumstantial (though that includes eyewitness evidence which didn’t actually observe the crime being committed). Eyewitnesses can, of course, be mistaken (or even lying) and this should always be taken into account. But again I must stress my opposition to deductivism and inductive skepticism. Eyewitness testimony is evidence, even if it is not sufficient to entail the conclusion that things happened exactly as the eyewitness describes.
By the way, I don’t particularly wish to convince you on the subject of evolution. I am, however, somewhat disturbed by the Christian Right’s increasing willingness to accept postmodernist arguments (like that of Kuhn) in their zeal to refute evolution. (Or, for example, your own take on how perhaps we should believe Genesis, not necessarily because it’s true, but because it’s a good story.) If the Right starts accepting arguments against objective truth, I’ll have virtually no allies left. By all means, continue to believe Christianity, even creationism if you like, but please, please do so because you believe it’s true. Once you abandon that, it’s not even possible for me to have a reasonable debate anymore.
Thanks as always for another helpful reply.
In the energy/order explanation, however, I’m still not seeing the mechanism that changes the energy that comes from outside the system into order inside the system. What is it that’s using the energy to make the order?
Though now that I look at that question, I’m not so sure it has anything to do with the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics any more. Asking questions often helps me clarify what question I’m really asking, I suppose.
On the chemistry thing: Don’t they need to eventually translate everything into mathematical terms if they want precision?
On the square-root of 2 thing: Excellent point!
I’d agree if our interaction with language was only on the level of meaning. But language has emotional consequences, and emotions can cloud debates. And I think the use of the first-person plural is one way that emotions sneak in.
Regarding postmodernism: I didn’t know Kuhn was a post-modernist. I’m learning a lot. But I think you’ll find in general that it’s the Christian Left that is embracing postmodernism (see Brian McLaren, Jim Wallis, etc.).
I don’t want to make you feel abandoned by my argument that we should be taking Genesis 1-3 a lot more seriously than some people do. If it seemed like I was saying we should replace the scientific exploration of things with what Genesis says, then I didn’t make my point clear enough:
To even be talking like there’s a competition between the two, you have to assume that the two (Genesis and Science) are describing the same thing (the origin of the world/life). And you don’t have to make that assumption (in fact, you should not assume that Genesis and Science are describing the same things if you want to really understand what Genesis is saying. And you shouldn’t assume they’re describing different things either. You shouldn’t make any assumptions at all).
You’ll never see the Christian Right accepting arguments against objective truth. They are too modernist for that (at least according the the Christian Left [= Postmodernist Christians]). I’ve written a couple articles on my view of truth (here and here) because I think that both modernism and postmodernism have truth wrong.
PS
And if you read/listen to AiG and RTB, you won’t hear anything remotely post-modern sounding. So no worries. Christians will make good debate partners for a long time to come (or will continue to make crappy debate partners for a long time to come. Either way, they’ll still be debate partners. *chuckle*).
In the energy/order explanation, however, I’m still not seeing the mechanism that changes the energy that comes from outside the system into order inside the system. What is it that’s using the energy to make the order?
I’m not sure I understand the question. I suspect that you’re right and that it’s a deeper philosophical question which doesn’t have anything to do with the Laws of Thermodynamics. You may be on to a more profound philosophical objection, though. The best objections to evolution are philosophical.
On the chemistry thing: Don’t they need to eventually translate everything into mathematical terms if they want precision?
I suppose this is true. You could buy the whole reductionist argument and claim that what chemistry isn’t representing mathematically can be represented mathematically in physics.
On the square-root of 2 thing: Excellent point!
It is said of the Pythagoreans that when one of them came up with a proof that the square root of 2 was irrational on a sea voyage, his fellow Pythagoreans were so horrified they threw him overboard. (Personally, I don’t think this is true, but it’s a good story.)
I’d agree if our interaction with language was only on the level of meaning. But language has emotional consequences, and emotions can cloud debates. And I think the use of the first-person plural is one way that emotions sneak in.
There’s a good chance you’re right about this. E.g. you might claim that when I said “we” have done all these digs, that I might be emotionally associating myself with the scientists who did and feel personally attacked if someone were to claim they were frauds or liars. My own temperament is what the classics would have called “phlegmatic” (or possibly “sanguine”) so there isn’t much danger of that on my score.
Kuhn would have rejected the label of post-modernism, I think. However, his work has been used repeatedly by the post-modernists to claim “See! See! Even scientists can’t achieve objectivity. It must be impossible. They are merely the High Priests of a new religion out to enslave the masses.” (Actually, even Popper has been used this way. My own opinion is that the philosophy of science took a wrong turn due to the aforementioned “hysterical overreaction.” All we needed to do was continue to reject deductivism and inductive skepticism, while embracing inductive fallibilism more completely. Then we could try to be less overconfident of our opinions, like the Newtonians were, pre-Einstein.)
I certainly agree that it’s the Christian Left who have embraced post-modernism so far (and, frankly, to a lesser degree than the non-Christian Left). I am disturbed because I sense that the Christian Right shows signs of being willing to follow them into the abyss. I have long argued that post-modernism was a movement born of despair in the Left when the failures of Marxism had become apparent. Disturbed that the Marxist revolutionaries had created societies of totalitarian terror, they decided that this was always the way. that only power mattered and that truth was an impossibility, and should be abandoned as a goal. I have, on occasion, seen subtle signs that the Christian Right is willing to do the same thing over their despair at the evolution argument. Unfortunately, I can’t find a link for it, but I did see an article once by a preacher who argued that we should reject evolution by embracing postmodernism and claiming that not believing evolution leads to better moral consequences and we should refrain from believing it on that score. (I’m not sure he was serious; I think he was simply offering an argument that a post-modernist would find impossible to refute. On that, I think he succeeded.)
I can get behind your argument about how to read Genesis (probably). On your arguments about a third way between modernism and postmodernism, I am far less convinced. I have read your articles and I don’t object to your philosophy as a modernist method of arriving at objective truth. I do object to it as a “third option.” I don’t think I’m making a false dichotomy when I say that you either believe in objective truth or you don’t. In your case, I think you do, and your only difficulty is the (perfectly understandable) difficulty of what is the best way to arrive at it.
I like the way you put things in that last sentence. Sounds good to me.
My kudos to Andrew for what I consider to be a great set of answers to Micah’s questions–well done. If he has a website/bog I would appreciate a link. Thanks to you, Micah for your work in putting together a very interesting set of posts on Genesis 1-3. I will buy your book. I agree that the creation account is shockingly beautiful–and full of interesting mysteries (e.g. if the serpent was so crafty why didn’t he suggest to Eve that they eat from the tree of life first?).
Thanks Vance! If I find out Andrew’s blog/site I’ll make sure to post a link :-)
Thank you, Vance, though I’m not sure my answers were particularly helpful and they certainly weren’t very complete. I could also have added (for question 5) that Popper never convinced me that the falsificationist criterion is the only acceptable criterion for science, although I do not deny it’s a useful criterion. And, on question 4, clearly science can’t provide a complete mathematics-only description of the world since the world does not consist of nothing but mathematics.
I would also point out that science depends on philosophical truths for its justification. So if, in question 4, Mr. Tillman is objecting to the view sometimes called “scientism,” the lauding of science as the only means to truth and a corresponding disparagement of all other intellectual endeavors, then I am completely on his side in condemning it.
I did have a blog once, a terribly boring blog about epistemology and ethics, but I abandoned it, much to the disappointment of both of my readers. It is possible I might revive it eventually, but not any time soon.
*laugh* Yet another awesome comment.
I love to hear somebody say philosophy is so important. Makes me feel all warm and fuzzy on the inside!
I’d like to jump in and answer the question on thermodynamics, if I might.
Sunlight enters the ecosystem through the mechanism of photosynthesis. The biosphere isn’t a closed system because the sun blazes away, allowing plants to do their thing and create sugar which the rest of life depends on.
Most of the energy in these sugars is lost to entropy when the plants are consumed by herbivores but some of it remains; some of the remaining is then utilized by omniovers or carnivores. At each level, something like 90% is lost, though, mostly to things like body heat. This is why there’s a lot more grass than top-level predators; there has to be! For every 1 pound of predator you need way more than 100 pounds of plants. (In other words, only 10% of the calories made by plants make it to something like a cow… If the cow is eaten by a wolf, only 10% of the cow’s wieght is in turn utilized by the wolf. If the wolf is eaten by a .. well, I don’t know what eats wolves, and I suppose the picture is pretty clear anyway.)
One way to look at the whole thing, is to see the system as closed, but the sun as an integral part of it. On the whole, the ammount of useable energy goes down because for every single joule that’s captured by the Earth’s system and utilized in an increasingly complex way, there are millions of joules which just shoot off in all directions, becoming increasingly diffuse and useless.
Excellent! Thanks for the explication.
I’ll have to ponder, however, whether this actually explains how ordered complexity comes to be clumped in certain areas of the Universe (life-bearing planets) since the natural tendency of everything everywhere (according the the 2nd LoTD) is to become more disordered.
It’s just too late for me to think it all through at the moment.
My understanding of the 2nd LoTD is that the overall tendency is toward disorder… you can have temporary exceptions, as long as the total sum is disorder… A bit like a stream, I suppose; eddys and whirlpools might come off it in other direction, despite the fact that the overall flow is one direction.
Jeff is correct; you are reading too much into the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. Technically, entropy is merely a heat concept and the Second Law is “violated” in the way that seems to disturb you every time heat passes from a hot body to a cold body (since the hot body, which has lost heat, will now have less entropy). Nevertheless, the entropy of the entire system is always equal to or greater than the entropy of the system at a previous time.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics, like most scientific principles (despite what some scientists will tell you), doesn’t have any particularly profound philosophical implications. It certainly does not say that the natural tendency of everything everywhere is to become more disordered. It only refers to the entire system. There are innumerable isolated cases of greater order (every hot body cooling down) in nature.
There has to be more to it than just the sun. For example, a living plant converts the energy from the sun via the process of photosynthesis, but a dead plant simply decays faster. Where did photosynthesis come from? Surely the Second Law of Thermodynamics at least makes it more difficult for such a mechanism to arise by chance, does it not?
I sympathize with your opinion on the implausibility of the evolution of photosynthesis (though I don’t agree with it). But it really has nothing to do with the Second Law of Thermodynamics. I assume that you don’t think that the process of photosynthesis violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics. If it did, the Second Law would be obviously false.
The simplest statement of the Second Law is that it is impossible for a process to exist whose only effect is to transfer energy from a low-temperature system to a high-temperature system. Most of the statements people seem to make about evolution and the Second Law invoke it metaphorically, but the Second Law is not a metaphor. (It is no more correct than invoking “relativity” to argue against moral absolutes.)
The mechanisms necessary for evolution to occur are reproduction, inherited variation, and selection, none of which violate the Second Law. By the by, evolution does not happen by chance. That’s what the “selection” is all about.
No, I don’t think the process of photosynthesis violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Nothing violates it as far as we know. I should have been more specific. It appeared to me that the argument was being made that the only thing required for solving the problem was the sun. But the sun is only going to speed up the process of decay unless there is already a mechanism in place by which to convert the sunlight into energy. This mechanism would not be able to come about by chance, because it has to exist before the organism.
So evolution does not happen by chance because “selection” is involved? Is “selection” guided? I’d think not, since a species can be fit in one environment but unfit in another. Where it finds itself is pretty much a matter of chance, is it not? Or is there someone guiding the process in the background?
Andrew–
The heating and cooling example is helpful. Thanks!
I really enjoyed reading Seth Lloyd’s book Programming the Universe a little while back, in which he dealt with a bunch of these issues.
Caseyc, I’m not sure what you’re getting at in your first paragraph. Sunlight is already heat energy, but certainly photosynthesizing plants do have a mechanism to convert sunlight into chemical energy. However, that mechanism isn’t the only way to use sunlight’s energy. Lizards sunning themselves to warm their blood are using sunlight as energy in its raw state without converting it into anything else first. I have no idea why you say that the mechanism has to exist before the organism though clearly photosynthesis did exist before any organism currently living. Obviously, the theory of evolution does state that there were living organisms before photosynthesis evolved.
As for chance, I don’t deny that there’s chance involved in the process. The mutations which occur happen (more or less) by chance. As you point out, for any given individual there will be a lot of chance involved in whether it survives or not. However, which individuals survive, in the aggregate, obeys the Law of Large Numbers and is very much not a matter of chance. Similarly, the movement of gas molecules is (more or less) random, but you can live the lifetime of the Universe and never have all the gas in a room suddenly dart into the corners (a theoretical possibility, but a statistical impossibility). Selection is inevitable and inescapable.
Anyway, I don’t wish to engage in a full-fledged evolution debate. I was just pointing out that, if the Second Law of Thermodynamics is a problem for evolution, it’s a problem for life, period. And if it were a problem for life, it wouldn’t be true.
I think I see Caseyc’s question/point from the first paragraph. And it’s related to the larger question of the anti-evolutionary critique and why that critique ultimately fails.
If a biosphere were a truly closed system, if there was no way for energy to come into it, then ultimately, life would cease because eventually all the energy within that system would creep out of it through entropy.
There are a variety of ways that a biosphere might access outside energy to offset that energy lost to entropy. This access need not exist in all the organisms, if the other organisms can steal this energy through consuming the energy producers.
On earth, photosynthesis is almost the exclusive way that outside energy is pulled into the system.
However, there is a small number of highly unique critters that create bioenergy from undersea thermal vents. These biosystems are comparably simple. There tiny and aren’t many of them… but they set the precedent that life might arrange other ways of pulling energy into the system… who knows there might be Earthly or extraterrestrial alternatives to pulling energy into a system through other means.
Andrew, I think that the anti-evolutionary argument based on entropy fails… but I understand it a little differently than you seem to. Based on what I understand, the argument is based on the philsophical repurcussions of the argument. (I actually don’t think that the philsophical ramifications turn out to be false; the premise that the system is closed is where I see the problem.)
The claim is made that organization always requires an outflow of energy… We can see this anywhere from alphebetizing a card catalog to arrange a chain of amino acids into a protien: putting stuff together in a specific way requires energy.
As a result, over a given span of time we might expect to see a system grow less organized; this is for no other reason than as changes occur to a system they are unlikely to be random changes.
(Randomly place a card in a catalog, it isn’t likely to be in the right place; randomly shuffled amino acids on a protien; it isn’t likely to end up being a viable protien that acutally does something.)
The whole critique falls apart, as has been stated a bunch of times in this discussion by a bunch of people, because additional energy is brought into the system to mantain order.
Thanks Jeff!
Here’s something I’ve been wondering. If something is taking the energy and creating order from it (or taking the order from the energy and conglomerating it into more complex forms of ordered energy), what is the connection between the order of the thing that’s creating the order, and the order being created (or conglomerated)?
Photosynthesis allows energy to be converted to order, but photosynthesis is itself ordered.
Jeff, the only thing you said which I want to nitpick a bit is that photosynthesis is “almost the exclusive way that energy is pulled into the system.” It may literally be true, but it is misleading since people can then ask “how was this done before photosynthesis evolved?” Prior to that point, living creatures used oxidation-reduction reactions associated with weathering and hydrothermal activity. The descendants of these microorganisms still exist and continue to live that way to this day. Photosynthesis allowed access to energy orders of magnitude greater than could be obtained from these oxidation-reduction reactions. The energy from sunlight dwarfs the energy available from purely Earth-based sources, but those do exist — volcanoes, wind, water, plate tectonics, geothermal energy, etc. (I’m mostly pointing this out because I overlooked it myself when giving my original answer.)
Micah, again, I’m afraid I don’t understand your question. Is it a problem for an ordered being to use its energy to create more order? (If so, this is a problem for any theory of how life was created. Creationists presumably believe God has some sort of order of his own.)
Andrew–
I don’t think so. It’s just that order has to come from somewhere, right? Ex nihilo, nihil fit. I’m wondering how the two fit together. Like the structure of a snowflake somehow is based on the structure of the water molecule.
Never thought of God as having order. Well, I guess I have in that philosophers talk about God with respect to “form,” but I just never thought of the word “order” before. That would imply that God has parts, I think, which God, being absolutely simple (they say) doesn’t.
Anyhoo, it’s a kind of nifty idea.
In the realm of physics at least one of the mechanisms that leads to order (as we see it anyway) is matter finding a lower energy state than it had before. If you let a bowl of sugar water evaporate the resulting crystals have more order than the random collection of molecules that existed before. In this case the sugar molecules found a lower energy state to “freeze” into. Increasing order with biological systems, on the other hand, is something that is profoundly counter-intuitive to most of us ( http://meditations-on-an-eyeball.blogspot.com/2007/10/meditation-on-leaf.html ). The only time we see levels of complexity even approaching these biological systems is with man-made constructions. We rarely directly see or experience the dynamics in living systems where new, more complex forms gain dominance in time frames we can appreciate (e.g. drug resistance in diseases may be an example).
Ah, I actually don’t believe in “ex nihil, nihil fit.” I believe the fact that “something exists” is sufficient evidence for its falsification.
Formally,
1. If nothing can come from nothing, then nothing would exist.
2. Something does exist.
3. Therefore, it is not the case that nothing can come from nothing.
Andrew–
*smiles* That’s awesome.
Explain the first premise to me, though. Why not assume instead that something had always existed? That is, why assume that the universe had a beginning?
Micah, actually I’m sympathetic to that view since it would allow us to hold onto the common sense belief that “ex nihil, nihil fit.” I have never thought that the scientific consensus for the Big Bang has as much weight behind it as people seem to think. However, on that, I am wandering far outside my own studies. On the Copenhagen Interpretation, I am on much firmer ground. The Copenhagen Interpretation defies common sense and (more or less) must be false. It didn’t take a whole lot of research to discover other interpretations (Many Worlds or, my favorite, Bohm’s Interpretation) which lead to the exact same results and don’t have the metaphysical nonsense of Copenhagen. The Big Bang is not such a horrible theory, though, so I have spent very little time trying to critique it. There are prominent cosmologists who don’t believe the evidence for the Big Bang is overwhelming, though. (Einstein’s “cosmological constant,” which he himself described as the worst mistake he ever made, might yet win the day.)
However, just as there is an intuitive case for a timeless and always-existing universe, the Big Bang does make for a rather nice intuitive conclusion. That conclusion would be that infinity does not exist. Not only can things not be infinitely large (or infinitely old), one of the nice results of quantum mechanics is that things can’t even be infinitely small. Even time, it appears, comes in “discrete” chunks. Infinity causes a great many conceptual problems so it’s nice if we can just throw it away (except pure mathematicians, of course, who are probably stuck with it). The solution to Zeno’s Paradox, prior to quantum mechanics (that infinite sums can have finite limits) has always struck me as mathematical sleight-of-hand, explaining it without really explaining it. If the theory of quantum mechanics is correct, Zeno’s Paradox is actually explained. Time and space are not infinitely divisible.
I forget who it was who said that the true philosopher is the little girl who looks out her window and says, “But what I don’t understand, Mommy, is why is there something instead of nothing at all?” Arguably, causation only makes sense within a framework of existence, so it doesn’t make any sense to ask for a cause for existence itself, but again this strikes me as sleight-of-hand. I’m not arguing against causation, of course. I’ve been harping on about my opposition to inductive skepticism. The causal hypothesis has an enormous amount of weight behind it. However, I do (like any sensible person) still believe in inductive fallibilism. We can’t be certain that everything must have a cause.
Wow… There are parts of this discussion that are excelling well beyond my abilities to keep up.
There’s a bit of hard data backing up the bag bang theory… You are all probably familiar with it and I imagine there’s alternbative explanations, but for whatever it’s worth: not long after the theory had been put foreward some folks were involved with some other measurements. They couldn’t account for the background radiation they measured everywhere in the universe. When you adjusted for the expected dopler shift resulting from being far away from the origin of everything, (the point that the b.b. began at) this looked a whole lot like an echo of the initial “explosion.”
Andrew’s points around pre-photosynthetic energy are great ones. I alluded to the thermal vent critters with much less elequonce and clarity in my own post, but I don’t think I realized that they predate photosynethesizers.
Micah, your questions around the connection between order and the thing making the order… Is this kind-of a chicken-and egg question?
Are you asking about what sort-of structure is built into the universe that would cause entities to grow more ordered?
Jeff, my sincerest apologies. I went back and reread your post and completely missed the bit about the geothermal vent critters. Very sloppy reading on my part.
You’re right about the evidence for the Big Bang. I’m actually inclined to the view that it’s the best theory to fit the evidence we have. I’m just not convinced by it. I might for instance grant it “preponderance of the evidence” status, but surely not “beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Y’all are all entirely too knowledgeable and smart.
Thanks for the ongoing education!
Jeff–
I do believe that is a large part of what I’m asking. Descartes, for example, said that you can get everything you encounter in the world today (except the human soul) if God creates matter and the laws of the universe (the latter being the form that leads to more form).
Seth Lloyd says, in Programming the Universe that, once again, it’s the laws of the Universe that make all the quantum fluctuation randomness produce interestingly structuredly complex results, rather than just more randomness.
So I’m trying to figure out if the structured complexity (I don’t know where I’m getting that term. It just sounds good) that is life is something new, or just an expression of the underlying structure of something else.
I remember in Michael Crichton’s The Lost World (the book, not the movie) where Malcom gives this drunken though entirely inspiring speech about life being like a crystal: self-forming.
I think I understand the question now. Unfortunately, I don’t have a good answer. Certainly, the laws of physics (and chemistry) have an order to them. Moreover, it is also interesting that they aren’t necessarily true like the laws of logic. Try as one might, it is impossible to conceive of a world in which the Law of Identity and the Law of Contradiction do not hold, but it is fairly easy to conceive of a world where force does not equal mass times acceleration.
The Miller-Urey experiment seems to indicate that, given the right conditions, amino acids, a basic building block of life, spring up surprisingly easily abiotically. My chemistry isn’t good enough to be able to tell you if there are other chemical reactions equally or even more complicated; I suspect there are. I think it would, though, not be entirely wise to conclude that life is somehow written into the laws of chemistry. We think of amino acids as being building blocks of life, after all, only because we live after they became so. It is not nonsensical to speculate that life on some other planet might take a different path which doesn’t use amino acids at all. And, of course, it’s easy to conceive of a world in which the amino acids just sit there unused and never become part of a living cell. (The 1969 Murchison meteorite famously contained amino acids, for example, including amino acids not found on Earth or, more properly, are very rare on Earth because living creatures on Earth don’t use those amino acids.)
And that would get us into the question of what life is, if it’s not DNA based. Which would be fun :-)
One of the reasons I consider Theistic evolution to be more satisfying than atheistic evolution is because there are a handful of problems that atheistic evolution doesn’t have a good answer for. This is one of them. (I’m aware that it’s probably fallacious– or at least convenient– to introduce God whereever an account falters.) At any rate:
Once proto-life begins to replicate itself, once it develops some precursor to DNA, it’s natural to expect life to grow more complex whenever an increase in complexity carries an increase in suitabality to the environment…
Complex eyes develop because critters with them see things better than critters with less complex eyes.
But getting to the point of complexity where traits are passed down is a tremendous hurdle… Before this point is reached, there’s no good reason to expect increasing complexity other than chance.
There are a number of theories which explain possible ways life could have reached the point of replication. You’re correct that we do not know which of them (if any of them) is right.
However, it is an important principle that unexplained does not equal inexplicable. You’re not wrong that there are occasional evolutionary questions that we don’t know the answer to. For example, in a debate with one creationist, he kept harping on about how all amino acids used in life are left-handed, but amino acids developed in the laboratory are usually about equal numbers left-handed and right-handed. He correctly pointed out that scientists don’t know why this occurred, why life only uses left-handed amino acids (and right-handed sugars). However, is God really an explanation? God just likes left-handed amino acids and right-handed sugars? Of course, nobody on here is making an argument even remotely as poor as that one, but I’ve seen a zillion examples like that one given as supposed “problems” for evolution. Speaking for myself, I can’t think of a single question about evolution for which I think God would make a satisfactory or even a particularly handy answer.
That isn’t to say that there aren’t such issues. There are laws of the universe - the laws of physics, the laws of mathematics, the laws of morality. God makes a fairly handy explanation for where these laws come from (except for morality, oddly enough, where you run into the Euthyphro dilemma), but if we assume those laws, I don’t believe evolution is at all problematic. It is natural for humans to think in metaphors. If there are laws, it is logical for us to assume a lawgiver. The reason why I reject this (and remain an atheist) is because God is really not any explanation at all. I am perfectly content for there to be mysteries in the world. I long ago gave up my hope of solving every single one of my philosophical dilemmas.
I should point out here that I am not a materialist, by the way. While materialism is a completely appropriate assumption for science to make (and it absolutely should make that assumption to do science), one of the oddest claims I hear from many scientists is the claim that they have somehow proved this assumption. When carefully questioned, it is quite clear that they have simply confused the assumption they have to make to do science for gospel truth. They believe the fact that they make this assumption in order to do science and the fact that science has worked so well proves the assumption is true. This is really not any kind of argument since it’s simply not valid. Belief in some immaterial things helps me resolve a number of philosophical issues. I am not convinced materialism is wrong, though. The fact that I have difficulty solving some philosophical problems in a materialist way does not imply that no such solutions exist. And my difficulties are quite a bit short of proof.
Interesting Andrew. Explain the Euithyprho dilemna, please (pretty pretty please) I don’t remember/know that one.
You are right: It is a dangerous business to invoke God into science. I do it with care.
A reason I think it’s slightly more relevant to invoke it in the case of replication than it is to invoke it in the case of sugars is this:
Before life replicates, natural selection doesn’t count for much of anything. Until traits can incorporated into a thing and passed down, all we have is ranomness.
Even the most simple replicating critter is astoundingly complex. Even give geological time frames, the possibility of reaching it with natural selection helping things out is absurdly small.
Overall, it seems much more likely than we’ll come to some understandings of why only the right hand amino sugars end up in living critters. I don’t have any real evidence for this claim, I suppose, so I’ll concede it if challenged… but the reason that none of the hypothesis for the advent of replication are dominant over the others is mostly because they are all absurdly unlikely, on a purely mathematical level.
I guess in some ways I’m arguing for an extra-strong version of the anthropic principle.
I disagree with you on replication. You could try Richard Dawkins’s Blind Watchmaker for a fascinating (though probably false) theory on how replication could have developed. I found it fairly plausible and it’s one of the more far-fetched theories. By the way, I do not approve of Dawkins when he starts babbling about religion, but the man does know his biology.
The Euthyphro Dilemma, so called because it appears in Plato’s Euthyphro, is where Socrates asks the famous question, “Is something pious because it’s loved by the gods, or is it loved by the gods because it’s pious.”
For the first horn, if something is pious only because it’s loved by the gods, then it is ultimately arbitrary - the gods choose what is moral and what is not moral, and could, had they desired, have chosen something else (perhaps torturing people for fun would be a virtue). There’s no compelling argument one can make, ultimately, to someone who decides God isn’t worth obeying, since God isn’t commanding anything which is actually right, just whatever he wants done. Moreover, calling God “good” now makes no sense, since whatever he decides is good by definition. This horn is generally known as Divine Command Theory (something is good only because God commands it). Most Protestants and, interestingly, most atheists, accept this horn of the dilemma. Of course, they come to different conclusions because of this. The atheists generally come to the conclusion that there is no morality (because there is no God to give any commands), while of course the Protestants believe that there is a morality which stems from God’s commands.
The other horn of the dilemma is to decide that the gods love something because it is pious. In this case, the moral law precedes the gods. There is an objective fact of the matter; something is either good or it isn’t, but the gods (or God) is now, at best, a moral exemplar. He may be perfectly in accord with what is good, but he would be bound by moral law just like anyone else. This is the horn I accept. The limitations this places on God’s power are not a problem for me, of course, because I don’t believe in God. Many religious people also accept this horn. The Catholic Church is rather mealy-mouthed about this issue, including the usually straightforward (if convoluted) Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas’s answer to this issue is not ultimately very convincing. He tries to identify “the good” with God’s character, thereby claiming that this is a false dilemma.
So, while I do believe that there actually is an objective morality, the metaphysics of morality is rather mysterious whether or not one believes God exists (as long as you accept the horn that I do). I cannot get behind Divine Command Theory. If morality is merely the whim of some being, even if he is the most powerful being there is, then I fail to see any convincing reason why I should obey it. (If you say, “because it’s right,” all you’re saying to me is “you should obey him because he tells you to obey him.”)
Oh, by the way, I should comment on the first replicating things. They have been able to construct in the laboratory an RNA molecule capable of making endless copies of itself. This was guided, of course, and not spontaneous. It is possible that RNA-based life (of which none exists now) was a precursor to DNA-based life. However, even RNA, though much simpler than DNA, is still pretty complex and it doesn’t seem likely that it could have come about by chance. One of the more popular theories is that there was some kind of very simple proto-RNA (capable of replicating and catalyzing reactions), which is now extinct, having been outcompeted by its more successful progeny. Could such a thing have come about by chance? We don’t know since we don’t know exactly what we’re looking for.
The theory Dawkins expounded in The Blind Watchmaker (not his own) is that replicating silicate crystals in solution (which occasionally have flaws in their lattice structure) may have been the precursor to organic life. Some of these flaws may have catalyzed chemical reactions, allowing the crystals to, in a sense, shape their own environment (necessary for selection). Obviously, this is rather fanciful since you have to buy that these crystals eventually were selected to create organic molecules, initially for their own purposes to spread their lattice structure, and this would take a long and complicated line of reasoning. There are other “metabolism-first” theories which argue that there were other catalysts for the creation of life and replication came later.
The proto-RNA is much more plausible. I don’t think it requires a very great stretch to imagine a fairly simple replicating molecule coming about by chance under the right conditions. The fact that we don’t know of one is not an advantage, but it isn’t a killer either. The Earth’s environment is radically different from what it was when such a molecule might have been created, so it’s not surprising that it’s now extinct. And of course there wouldn’t be a fossil record.
Hmm. Very interesting stuff on early life. You know much more stuff than I on the topic. As for the issue of which is logically prior… God or morality… Wow. What an interesting topic.
I think I’ll side with Thomas Aquinus, at least a little bit, in so much as it does seem like a false dilemna. Let me try to sum up the options that I’m being offered, just to ensure that I’ve got these right:
Option A) is that morality is logically (or epistemologocally or metaphyiscially) prior to the being which created everything else.
Option B) is that morality is an arbitrary after thought; an accessory to the universe. The cosmos is a metaphorical outfit. Laws of morality, are something like earings. God happened to pick out green ones which match his eyes (uhhm, this metaphor is starting to get wierd.) We could just as easily imagine a universe where he picked out purple ones which match the polka dots on his shirt.
I’d like to propose an option C. (I’m sure that somebody else has proposed this before me in a more elegant way)
What if morality is defined as the choices that are in harmony with the actions of the creator himself? I wouldn’t want to say that the moral actions are always those identical to God’s actions… As a created being, there are clearly things which are inapropriate to me that would be fully appropriate to him.
For example, God is the center of being, reality etc. It is perfectally apropriate for God to set himself up as an object of worship. In fact, it would be immoral for God not to set himself up as an object of worship… On the other hand, it would be quite immoral for me to attempt to set myself up as an object of worship. I can act harmoniously with God by attempting to point others toward him, and not myself.
I think this explanation avoids both the horns set up because morality isn’t chosen arbitrarily by God on my account. God has a certain nature. Any time we act in a way which echoes this nature we are engaged in a moral act.
I’ll try and say some later about why I don’t feel that this position makes God a slave to morality.
Your option C appears to be the same as Aquinas’s. Goodness is rooted in God’s character. His commands are good because it is his nature to be good. My opinion on this is that Aquinas has taken the same horn as I have. Goodness is one of God’s properties and he has no control over it. This solution does mean that God has no external limitations, but it still makes God bound by morality and largely irrelevant to its existence or discovery.
I look forward to why you think I might be wrong on this. Loved your metaphor, by the way.
Thanks! Here’s how I see it:
The implication that God is “bound by morality and largely irrelevant to its existence or discovery” is rooted in secular/worldy implications about morality. So maybe this is where our discussion will break down.
People feel “bound” or “trapped” by morality in there every day lives. It’s not all together surprising that they might say God, if he exists and he is subject to a morality he did not arbitrarily choose, is similarly bound.
But truthfully, I’m not bound nor is anybody else by morality. We have freedom to choose whether we are moral or not. We choose to submit ourselves to moral authority.
I could choose today to be amoral or immoral. I could start robbing old ladies for money. I don’t, because on the whole, there are more benefits to being a good person than not.
I think maybe people want to have their cake and eat it to. We want the benefits of both morality and immorality. We want to have the old ladies money with out risking being caught, feeling guilty, etc.
God could do things inconsistent with the best way of doing things, I think, inconsistent with the way he has always done things before. (This is the way I defined morality last post) but he won’t and wouldn’t simply because it would be foolish. It would be like me waking up deciding that I’m going to change my life and start robbing old ladies.
I don’t see it as a limitation on God that he can’t have his cake and eat it to. We limit divine attributes all the time. Most of us agree that God can’t do logical contradictions. Even though omnipotent, God can’t create married bachelors or square circles.
Correspondingly, God couldn’t both be moral and not-moral at the same time. He wouldn’t be not-moral by itself. Therefore, all that’s left would be moral.
I’m not sure you’ve escaped the dilemma. If God has free will to choose to become immoral, then morality is still arbitrary. If he doesn’t, then he’s bound by it. Again, this isn’t necessarily a problem for you if you claim that goodness is part of God’s essential character, which is what I think you’re saying. Then he has no external limitations, simply the limitations of his own goodness. I find this an interesting thought actually. I’m pretty sure it implies that God has no free will when it comes to morality. You and I do, of course, but God doesn’t. To be fair, we probably wouldn’t have any free will if put in God’s position either. Many philosophers believe that, if presented with the supreme good, the will is necessitated. Only otherwise can it freely choose. (Is that Aristotle or Aquinas? I’m pretty sure it’s one or the other.)
However, from my point of view, the significant point about the ‘goodness is part of God’s character’ argument is that it does seem to imply that God isn’t particularly relevant to the existence or discovery of morality. I still believe this view serves to refute the Argument from Morality. (I.e. morality exists, therefore God must exist.) Don’t get me wrong; I don’t think the Argument from Morality is particularly forceful anyway, but the only way it might work is by choosing the other horn, Divine Command Theory, which makes God absolutely central to morality. (We can’t possibly discover it without somehow learning God’s commands.) But, if Divine Command Theory is true, then I’m not particularly interested in God’s commands since they cease to have moral force. God is now just a dictator with a whole lot of power behind him. On the other hand, if we accept the other horn (that morality is either independent of God or rooted in his character), then his “commands” become much more interesting since they would (presumably) reflect his perfect understanding of morality, something which all of us lack. It would then be God’s Reason which makes his commandments important rather than God’s Will.
Hmmm. I dusting off some intellectual cobwebs here. I haven’t done theology at this level since pop music was laden with synthesizers.
It seems to me that this whole argument is turning around how we define “free.” (As in ‘Is God free to behave in any moral way he chooses or is he bound to moral behavoir?)
I don’t see that God’s any different than his creations on this level. It’s not the case that a moral agent is literal enslaved to there morality. It’s always a theoretical option that a moral agent might behave immorally. A moral agent has surveyed the options and decide it in some way opposes the agents interests to act immorally. (We’ll have to broadly define interests here so that it includes altruistic options; the interests needn’t be selfish ones.)
If we look at a paralell case outside the realm of morality maybe it makes my point: I have no intentions to hit myself in the head with a hammer today. I simply won’t do it.
If somebody said “You’re just a slave to your anti-hammerism, all the truly free agents are hitting themselves in the head with a hammer.” We would see this as silly: I won’t hit myself in the head with a hammer because it doesn’t serve my agenda/interests. Could I hit myself in the head with a hammer? Of course I could. But why would I?
So God sets up the universe. He apparently has reasons for doing so. He operated in certain ways that fit his agenda… Creation, Love, etc. Because He was perfect, even in the beginning, he employed methods perfectally suited to his purposes for all eternity. He could choose in the year 2007 to operate differently, but the methods he chose were perfect so he’d have no reason to.
I may have misunderstood your Option C. You defined good as “choices that are in harmony with the actions of the Creator himself.” I thought that you were taking Aquinas’s “goodness is rooted in God’s character” tack. However, now I think you may have selected Option A in disguise (Divine Command Theory). The difference between your option and Divine Command Theory is simply that in your option, God isn’t giving commands to define morality. He’s defining it with his actions instead.
On the other hand, there is a very strong current of Option B. You seem to define morality (as I do) as a subset of reason. Why do an immoral thing when it’s obviously not what you ought to do? But this presupposes that morality exists independently of God. If morality doesn’t exist independently of God, then there isn’t any way to say that God “ought to do X” because not-X would be silly.
Yes, I think it’s fair to say that I’m drawing a bit on option A and a bit on option B in order to formulate my option C. I think it’s also fair to say that a distinction between my position and Aquinus’ is that I’m emphasizing actions while he emphasized commands.
However, I don’t see that my position ends up with either of the negatives you highlighted before. I’m not saying that morality is prior to or greater than God. I think whenever we look at God’s actions we can expect, by definition that they will be Godly, but this is not an expression of God’s subservience to morality; it’s a reflection of the fact that morality is the deepest form of rationality and God is ultimately rational.
On the other hand, morality isn’t the result of capricious or arbitrary choice either. If murder is not a rational act than anyone proclaiming it to be so– even God– wouldn’t make it so.
I suppose somebody might object “Well, if God can’t make murder a moral act then God is limited by morality”; I would say that this doesn’t work for the following reasons:
A) it’s irrelevant because God wouldn’t.
B) Most theology and religious philosophy proceed from the premise that God can’t do contradictions… It’s not a limit on omnipotence to say that God’s not omnipotent if he can’t create a square circle. If we were nit-picky about how we define omnipotence, we ought to define it as the ability to do any non-contradictory act. rather than the more simple and common “ability to do anything.”
I think there’s a real paralell: Somebody could say “Well God can’t make a square circle, therefore God is either limited or doesn’t exist” in the same way that they could say “God can’t make murder into a moral action… therefore God is either limited or doesn’t exist.”
But if morality is always the most rational course of action, by definition, and if murder is not a rational act, then by definition murder can never be made moral; it’s not much different than mutually exclusive definitions of square and circle; it doesn’t impact God’s character that he can’t reconcile these exclusives.
That’s how I see it.
First, a parenthetical correction: Aquinas did not focus on God’s commands. Aquinas believed it was God’s essence that was responsible for morality, not his commands. Divine Command Theory was explicitly rejected by Aquinas (though he agreed that God’s commands were always good).
I am 99% sure here that you’re actually siding with me now. Morality is independent of God; God is not the source of morality. He’s not necessarily bound by it any more than we are, but he doesn’t have a whole lot to do with it either. Note, that this does not imply that morality is “greater” than God. For one thing, I’m not sure what that would mean. So by and large I agree with your opinions on this. Saying that he is “bound” by morality is simply to say that if God wants to do what is good (and why wouldn’t he?), he is forced to choose the moral option. He cannot do whatever he likes and make it moral. (Of course, you can easily say, as I think you are, that God does do whatever he likes because he always likes the moral option.)
Personally, I believe this is the most logical option and I think theists eventually have to side with it, when they consider the matter very carefully. (Certainly, Socrates quickly led Euthyphro to select this option, but that was much easier in a polytheistic context. The Greeks never imagined the gods to be moral exemplars anyway.) In fact, theists use the Euthyphro Dilemma to try to undermine atheistic morality all the time. But, they say, if you’re just making up morality out of your own head (or from culture or from some other non-objective source), doesn’t that make it arbitrary and ultimately non-binding? They are right about this, but those believers in Divine Command Theory have failed to follow the logic and realize that it applies to all mind-dependent moral theories, even if that mind is God’s.
The only real problem this poses for theists (in my opinion) is that it smashes the Argument from Morality. Some people give as their chief reason for the existence of God that the existence of such a being would solve the metaphysical problem of why there is such a thing as morality. However, once we find that morality is independent of God, the existence of God no longer explains the existence of morality. We need a different explanation. Of course, this doesn’t constitute any sort of evidence that God doesn’t exist. It just removes a weapon from the theist’s arsenal. It cannot be the case, as some theists claim, that morality is impossible without God. (Except possibly in the sense that nothing would be possible had not God created the Universe.)
By the by, I must say that you’re one of the few people I have met who agrees with me 100% on what morality actually is. I could not agree more with your comment that “it’s a reflection of the fact that morality is the deepest form of rationality.” I wholly agree that morality is absolutely rational. Occasionally, people try to tell me that there is sometimes a disconnect between rationality and morality. I.e. that sometimes you have two options: the moral option and the rational option. I have not yet had anyone give me a satisfactory example of such a contradiction. When we say that an action is moral, what we are saying is “this is what we ought to do.” Now, if you tell me that that action is irrational as well, what exactly are you saying to me? That we ought not to do what we ought to do? Most of the time, I find that people have misdefined rationality to include the value-laden judgment that the rational thing to do is whatever is in one’s own best interest without any regard for anything else. Since this is not in line with our intuitive sense of morality, it naturally sometimes conflicts with what we believe is moral. But this is an entirely inappropriate moral definition. I suspect it might be motivated by economists, who frequently talk about “rational self-interest.” Talk about this enough and people begin to confuse rational self-interest with rationality itself. Rationality is ultimately a slave to morality. Why should we be rational? Because it’s moral to be rational.
Thanks Andrew.
I think I argued myself in circles a little bit and spun my wheels a bit for a while, as I hadn’t really explicitly considered some of this stuff.
I think in the end we do come quite close to holding similar positions particularly on the nature of morality itself as an ultimately rational act.
It seems to me that a theist still has an argument for God’s existence. This argument might be a bit weaker. But it seems to me it still holds.
If we admit that there is a coherent system undergridding the universe, where does this coherence come from? Even if admit the possibility of a universe without a creator, shouldn’t we expect such a universe not to be undergirded by moral law?
I’m not making the argument that laws imply a law giver. (I don’t think that’s very convincing)
We could program a computer (or utilize some other random-number generator) to create a system of laws… Sort of an electronic mad libs: Insert noun, insert command, insert verb.
Randomly, we’d end up with something like “Squirells are not allowed to roller skate.”
But if we ended up with a system that made sense, then doesn’t that imply an intelligence behind the whole thing?
The stronger version of the anthropic principle runs an argument similar to this, in terms of the physical laws at work in the universe. The common refutation is that the reasoning is circular: the only universe where people could come to formulate the anthropic principle is one where the laws of physics appear to work together to create matter and ultimately life.
It seems to me that this refutation doesn’t hold us much water if we focus on the coherence of morality. Morality might be a necessary ingredient for developed socieities, but it certainly isn’t an ingredient for matter or life; and therefore the unlikelihood of morality’s existence can’t be passed off as a necessary ingredient to people arguing about it.
Arrgh! I forgot one important thing… everything above is rather irrelevant with out this point, I think:
It doesn’t seem to me that there was some sort-of prexistent matrix or morality before God started creating. It seems to me that God poured reality into absolute and total nothingness.
I think the way in which he created was determined by his character. I don’t think he was a slave to his character any more than the rest of us are.
I think this manner of creating was perfectally logical and moral. But it flowed out of God and his nature.
Maybe this is the crux of my whole argument. (Or maybe I’m just confused and contradicting myself. I’ve begun to lose track.)
I think you’ve settled on Aquinas’s solution, which is fine with me. I vastly prefer it to Divine Command Theory. I do think that ultimately that boils down to my horn of the dilemma. While I agree with you that the existence of a cogent morality is a mystery, it is a lesser mystery than the existence of God with this morality as part of his character. (Since his character is exactly as complex as morality itself and then there’s more to him than just that.) I still dislike the theist solution of explaining a mystery with an even greater mystery and then pretending that the problem is now solved. (This should be considered distinct from disliking theists themselves. I like theists just fine.)
I begin my philosophical investigations with one basic assumption: everything yields to reason (eventually). The theist presents me with something inexplicable, God, and then denies that this can be explained. I find the existence of morality (and the laws of logic and mathematics) to be somewhat mysterious. While the laws of physics can be explained by the anthropic principle, the rationality of logic, mathematics, and morality is quite a bit stranger. (The first two because they must be true in any conceivable universe, so the anthropic principle cannot account for them.) I suspect, however, that the anthropic principle might still explain this. The fact that the universe seems rational to us is because we evolved into it. Since being able to figure out the logic of the universe was a survival advantage for us, our brains were ordered in accord with it. So if, for example, we lived in a world where the morality said: “squirrels aren’t allowed to rollerskate,” we would happily believe this and consider it to be perfectly logical. (I should point out that I believe the small number of self-evident moral truths that we use to build our morality are considerably simpler than that one, though. They are more along the lines of “I ought to believe only what is true.”) I will have to think more deeply about this option before I endorse it since I’m sure I haven’t considered all of its implications.
I do believe that God is still a “slave” to his character in your solution. The reason I think this is true is because God has perfect knowledge of morality (unlike us) and is therefore “compelled” to do the moral thing. You or I would as well if we had such perfect knowledge. It is not conceivable that God should ever be “akratic” (as Aristotle would have said), or suffer from weakness of the will and do the immoral thing even when he knows what the moral thing is. This can only happen to us frail mortals. I think you agree with this, actually, which is why you are so confident that God will never do anything immoral. You want to be able to claim simultaneously that it is both possible and not possible for God to act immorally, but I think eventually you have to agree that it’s not possible, due to the perfection of God’s character and knowledge. (As you say, though, I don’t think this is particularly problematic, any more than God’s inability to create a square circle. However, it does place interesting limitations on him, unlike the square circle limitation which has no practical consequences.)
Anyway, no worries about any confusion, Jeff. The English philosopher Strawson said that the ability to understand the Euthyphro dilemma was the mark of a philosophical turn of mind. Most people I have discussed the dilemma with, including both Christians and atheists, have been unable to appreciate the problem at all. They cling stubbornly to whichever horn they’ve got and deny there are any problems with it. (This comes up with those atheists who determine that morality is created by man. The Euthyphro dilemma applies equally well to them as to believers in God.)