Cosmological Explanation and Occams Razor

Various quotations are taken from here. As usual quotes are in italics and myself in normal font.

So, has our scientific knowledge of the universe, of all that there is, progressed to the point that we can explain all that there is without having to invoke an uncaused causal agency? First, before one proceeds with any scientific account for an explanation, one must notice the metaphysical aspect of the question. This question is a philosophical question, not a scientific question. Can we extrapolate all causes to have the first cause be self-caused?  Using something within the system of “all that there is” to explain the system itself (“all that there is”) is circular. The whole notion is self-defeating.

The ancients tended to lean towards the simplest explanations (a tendency still practiced today with Occam’s Razor). The simplest explanation then seemed to be causal agency–attributing complex events to the will of the gods.

The ancients would attribute storms at sea to the god of the sea and volcanic eruptions to that respective god and so on. Perhaps we don’t need many gods to explain complex various events. It seems that if a god is needed to explain anything then we are left with one God.

Is the simplest explanation of all there is one uncaused causal agent or zero?

It seems that if we use Occam’s Razor to trim the causal agencies down to zero then we no longer have any explanation for anything. 1

Using a causal agent as an explanatory hypothesis doesn’t seem to be an arbitrary ad hoc explanation either, it seems to be the only appropriate explanation that sufficiently fits the explanandum. In the end, having one uncaused causal agent is the best answer to why there is something rather than nothing.

[1]Perhaps there simply is no explanation. Or at least, our tiny finite homo sapien brains simply can't know. But I suggest that it is perfectly reasonable to posit that there is an explanation of some sort- this is in line with our experience, and science itself. That is, things require an explanation, both in our experience and as William Lane Craig said in a recent debate, this is a key principle in science. And following the train of thought taken in the quotes here, it's reasonable to posit an unspecified uncaused agent as that explanation.

Secularism or Democracy?

A facebook discussion has piqued my curiousity.

The issue was gay marriage, which is irrelevant to what I'm about to write, but I want to quote the discussion to set the scene:

Person 1:
Sorry but your comment is very disappointing. Should a Christian girl who knows Gods word really have that opinion. Just sayin

Person 2:
To me, faith shouldn't be a part of the conversation - we are talking about a legal, secular institution in a free democratic society. Government shouldn't discriminate, pure and simple. And both bills before parliament guarantee religious freedom for churches to refuse to marry gay couples if they so wish.

Ignoring the question of gay marriage, I'd like to discuss the mentioning of "secularism" and "democracy". Both ideas are highly cherished by most people in first world Western countries like Australia, but my question is: Which takes precedence?

Democracy is based on the idea that ALL people must have an equal opportunity to have their say. Therefore, if so called "secularism" is going to ignore certain views, ANY views, a priori, before the public discussion even gets started, then to agree with that form of secularism is to admit that you're being undemocratic and discriminatory.

I believe people should always have a democratic right to argue on whatever basis they want to! Then let the majority decide if they're convinced or not- this is what democracy demands. It's the fairest way to do things. If secularism says that "faith cannot be part of the conversation" and therefore any faith viewpoints must automatically be ignored (as Person 2 implied), then that form of secularism should get thrown out, because democracy demands that people must be allowed to voice their opinion (1).

Here's another reason why democracy needs to take precedence over that form of "secularism": Otherwise, we'll soon have governments acting as thought police by deciding which people are actually allowed to speak their views, which views are allowed to be spoken and which views are not. Governments are there to serve the people, not the other way around!

I take it as basically self evident that we should all want to be living in fair societies where all people are allowed to voice their views. If so, then we cannot allow ourselves to uncritically accept the idea that certain viewpoints are to be ignored from the outset.

(1) Person 2 could be taken to be implying that, and this was how I interpreted their statement on my first reading. They might not have intended to imply that. Nonetheless, there are many people who do believe that faith should not be a part of bigger public conversations, and this post was addressed at that particular viewpoint and those bigger issues. The facebook comment was merely what got me thinking about these bigger issues.

My hope for atheists

Last weekend the Global Atheist Convention rolled into Melbourne. Atheism has become, for at least some atheists, a movement. Increasingly atheists are gathering together in public places, as we've seen with the Washington DC Reason Rally and the Global Atheist Convention. To be fair, the Global Atheist Convention attracted 5,000 people which is reportedly a quarter of the [i]weekly[/i] attendance of [i]one[/i] Australian church so we shouldn't get carried away when talking about the levels of gathering. Nonetheless, it is increasing.

But, what to make of this? One thing that's interesting to note is how far the atheist movement is straying from pure atheism.

On the one hand, atheists like to claim that atheism commits them to nothing. They're just committed to denying the existence of God, or so they like to say. And this is entirely true on one level. But by reading about the atheist convention, and glancing over the twitter accounts of internet atheists and atheist groups, and you would get a vastly different impression!

They love talking about gay marriage and child abuse and terrorism and tax exemptions and AIDS in Africa. It's almost like they're really doing their best to muddy the waters and fool everyone into thinking that being an atheist is about joining a reactionary political movement.

Many thinking atheists do realise that terrorism and wars have more to do with politics, sociology and human nature than they do with religion. They realise that you cannot judge a belief system by it's worst proponents who distort the original message. They realise that churches primarily have a social purpose rather than a profit making intention, and thus cannot be labelled businesses in any meaningful sense, and nor should they be paying income tax.

But then the moronic atheists come along screaming "RELIGION IS EVIL! 9/11 shows the problems with irrational thinking and superstition. Ergo, all religion should be wiped out. Duh! Religions are just money making scams anyway. Pass the plate around and watch them all get RICH! Oh and btw, the important issue of Gay marriage is even more evidence of the problems religion is causing society! Jesus probably didn't even exist so why would anyone follow him!" .... and the calm reflection of the thinking atheists is drowned out amidst the ruckus.

Here are all these people claiming to be rational, evidence based thinkers and they come up with nonsense like this- emotional stupidity, reacting to religion with the very same intolerant irrationalism that they accuse religion of being about.

So in the end there's a tension that's caused by all of this. You've got human nature which encourages people to join social groups. The internet has brought the world together and we're seeing atheists come out of their basements and attend reason rallies and atheist conventions and the like. But, there must be some cognitive dissonance happening when some attendees hear the sorts of comments I wrote above - which seriously, are not too far away from the beliefs of many of those who are attending these atheist events- and then realise how utterly stupid they are. "Hang on, I thought we were supposed to be the rational, clear thinking ones! What's going on here!?".

I hope this will help them realise firstly that no single belief/lack of belief, movement or group has a monopoly on thinking. And secondly, that respectful discussion is better than ridicule. But, that might turn out to be a dream. Still, I can dream, can't I?

Reason for Faith Festival Q n A Interaction: Resurrection

Tonight I attended a screening of the film Test of Faith, followed by a panel discussion. The event was part of the Reason for Faith festival, a response to the Global Atheist Convention backed by various Christian groups.

After the panel discussion, the audience had an opportunity to ask a question of the panellists. I asked a question which ended up being the most discussed question of the night! My question was responded to, and then I was asked to clarify, then it was discussed again, and finally Jack Scanlan responded to my question again in his closing remarks.

I listen to debates and panel discussions like this regularly, and it is easy to critique the views being expressed from the comfort of my computer, but it is more difficult with a microphone in a room full of people! I keenly await the recording to find out how articulate I was and whether it came out nearly as well as I wanted it to.

My question was asking for Scanlan's thoughts on looking at evidence through a broader lens, and specifically his thoughts on looking at the Resurrection argument accurately, as a Christian might understand it. That was what I was trying to get across. Scanlan is a molecular biology student, and was talking about the Resurrection. He cast the debate as a question of the reliability of historical documents vs the findings of science. His view, if I accurately heard it, was that biology has proven that people do not rise from the dead, and so you would need an unreasonable faith in historical documents to overcome this. On face value this view might appear compelling, but it misses the essence of the Christian claim. What biology tells us is that people don't rise from the dead via natural causes. But here's the issue: Christians aren't making the claim that Jesus was raised from the dead via natural causes. Christians claim that Jesus was raised from the dead by God. So I asked for his thoughts on this.

At first Scanlan fumbled through a response and concluded by saying that he would hope all evidence could be examined neutrally, without having our response impacted by prior beliefs. But this is clearly problematic, primarily because the world just doesn't work like that! Ideas do not exist in a vacuum. If you hear that someone you know has been arrested for a theft, you would be completely surprised....if said person was a well adjusted member of society. If, on the other hand, this person had a violent upbringing, an abusive father, and had a prior record of theft, then you wouldn't be very surprised at hearing about another crime, would you? So the point is this. Background evidence counts. As I wrote about previously, if God exists then miracles are possible. But if, like Graham Oppy, you believe that natural causes are all that exist, then miracles like a resurrection are inconceivably unlikely to you. So it's not as simple as looking at historical evidence on it's own. If you're determining the probability of what happened, you need to look at the big picture and cast your net a little wider. Or at the very least, you need to acknowledge the existence of your own presuppositions and their bearing on your response to the evidence. Scanlan had shown no respect or awareness of this vital issue, hence my question to him.

After clarifying my question (how effectively I'm not sure!) Dr Bruce Yabsley commented about the uniformity of nature. Modern science, going back to Newton, shows that nature is uniform, he said. This puts the sting in the tail of the argument that Resurrections simply do not happen. And this is a fair point. But unfortunatly Dr Yabsley didn't follow up those comments by acknowledging that the resurrection cannot be expected to conform to those regular patterns. If a resurrection did happen, then it happened once and at the command of a God who controls the universe and all the physical laws within it. It is not an event that we should expect would be repeated. The test tubes and telescopes may tell us that in every case ever recorded, Science shows that X, Y or Z happens this way or that way. That's all good and well. But if there is a lawgiver behind those laws then there is no reason why things cannot happen differently on one occasion. So again, the prior philosophical question of whether there is a God will have a direct bearing on how we interpret the historical evidence and the interaction of science with that historical evidence.

In his closing comment, Scanlan said that if there was good evidence for the Resurrection, he'd more easily believe that aliens did it than God. In one sense this response merely supported my argument about the need to understand your own presuppositions! Aliens, if they exist, are presumably natural entities rather than immaterial, supernatural beings, and, if you believe that life on other planets is probable (as Scanlan may or may not), then you might be inclined to believe this. For me, this idea is discounted by the fact that Jesus didn't ever mention "aliens". There is a historical context in which Jesus lived and into which he spoke, such that if there was good evidence, you would need to interpret the good evidence within that context. In short, there is historical evidence that Jesus was a Jew who claimed divinity as the Messiah appointed by God. Thus, if there was good evidence for a resurrection, you'd consider that God might have done it, rather than posulate an entity who has no prior connection with the context or the historical evidence whatsoever.

How NOT to review a book

I love reading, as I've written about before, and I usually review the books I read on Amazon.

Two recent events have raised the issue of how NOT to criticise or review a book. I will use these two examples to illuminate this common error.

The first occurred on facebook. John Dickson wrote an article criticising Andrew Bolt's attempt at Biblical criticism, and then this article was linked on the Public Christianity facebook page. A guy named Dave Singer responded with this gem:


I note that John offers, as usual, NO evidence whatsoever to support the claim that the Gospels are true.

He may as well call Andrew Bolt an idiot for thinking the Phantom Menace contradicts The Empire Strikes Back.

 I responded by pointing out that it's an error to judge an author by a standard that he never intended to meet. John Dickson's purpose wasn't to "provide evidence to support the claim that the Gospels are true", it was to show that the problems raised by Andrew Bolt aren't all that troubling at all. I also referred to Dickson's latest video where he talks about historical reasons to believe that the Resurrection accounts are historically plausible- 1. They're historically very early, 2. The testimony of women and 3. The conviction of knowledge (as opposed to belief) evidenced by the early followers.

A second example occurred on Amazon.com. A review of Christian Smith's The Bible Made Impossible was heavily critical of the book, on the basis that Smith's argument was "hoisted on it's own petard". The author of the review, S.D Parker, berated Smith because Smith apparently criticises the Bible for not being definitive enough, but Smith's own conclusions won't reach definitive agreement either! As I pointed out in response to Parker, Smith never intended for his own conclusions to reach definitive agreement! He clearly states that his views are merely some suggestions to get the discussion started on how to better approach the Bible, and not the final word. Further, Smith's argument was not against the Bible for not being definitive enough, it was against a particular view of the Bible (Biblicism) which implies the Bible should reach definitive agreement when it clearly doesn't! Big difference.

 

 

Smith devotes the second half of the book to arguing that the theology of the Bible does contain ambiguities (Chapter 6) and even the theological conclusions that we can reach are not entirely based on the Bible but are developed with later reflection and discussion (Chapter 7).

 

 

Parker was welcome to argue that Smith's suggestions don't work, but it was a simple error to criticise them for not being capable of reaching definitive conclusions. Smith never said they would! In fact quite the opposite. Not only did Parker misrepresent Smith's argument, but he judged Smith by a standard he never intended to meet.

 

 

It's interesting to note that Parker deleted that review the day after my response. The moral of the story here is that you can only judge a book by whether it sets out to do what it intended to achieve- NOT whether it achieved what YOU want it to achieve.

The Rally for Nothing in Particular

Larry Taunton wonders what an atheist world would really be like.

Christianity, whatever the faults of its adherents, has a rich intellectual tradition that has a comprehensive view of life. It has given rise to the West as we know it. Our laws, arts, governments, and the very framework of our thought find their meaning in Christianity. Take for example the central premise of the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident. That all men are created equal.”

As Indian philosopher and social reformer Vishal Mangalwadi points out, there is nothing self-evidential about the equality of men.

But in comparison what is atheism and what is it's history?

Atheism, by contrast, has no creed, no principles, no philosophy, and can give no guidance. It is but to have a settled disposition on a single question: is there a God?

As my friend the late atheist and journalist Christopher Hitchens conceded, “atheism is nothing in itself.”

That not withstanding, atheism does have a history—a bad history. By conservative estimates, the twentieth century, an experiment in secular governance, witnessed the deaths of more than 100 million people. That is more than all the religious wars in all previous centuries combined.

It gets worse...

Proponents of a society free from religious influence can point to no nation or civilization that was founded upon atheism that we might call even remotely good. The story of those regimes is well documented and may be summarized in a word—murderous.

What they can point to are secular societies that are still running off of their accumulated Christian capital. But beware. When the fumes in that tank are spent, tyranny cannot be far away.

In his farewell address, George Washington offered a sober warning: “Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.” This he deduced without the benefit of seeing the twentieth century. The eighteenth, it seems, was enough.

So as the rally for nothingness meets to celebrate, well, nothing in particular, reflect for a moment on the world they would give us. One need not imagine it. It has been done.

Larry Taunton, well said.

In a tweet he posted a day before the reason rally, Taunton issued a challenge.

The Reason Rally's stated purpose is to "promote secular values." Other than no God, I challenge atheists to name one of these "values."

As I've discussed before, it is reasonable to wonder whether there is even such thing as "secular values" or whether secularists are just hijacking values that were imported into modern day culture by Christianity and then claiming those values as their own.

It's also clear that many atheists have a rosy view of atheism and secularism, such that they fail to confront potential logical inferences arising from their own views, instead choosing to promote a version of secularism that is more in line with Christian thought. Julian Baggini is one such example. John Dickson's comment in his brilliant essay on religious violence, that I have quoted before, is worth repeating. In fact Dickson himself recently re-tweeted it.

Only one way of life is logically compatible with Christianity; any kind of life is logically compatible with atheism.

Bolt and Dickson on Biblical contradictions and Historical Errors

Conservative political journalist Andrew Bolt ventures onto writing about the Bible and John Dickson responds.

Lewis's Trilemma

C.S Lewis's Trilemma is probably the most famous argument in Christian apologetics.

The argument is thus:

"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. ... Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God."^[5]

The logic appears sound. It is hard to imagine someone going around claiming to be the Son of God, whilst just being a regular human male, unless they were either 1. totally deluded and suffering from seriously bad mental illness or 2. A complete liar.

But as with most arguments, the value of the argument depends on who it is addressed to and the underlying assumptions that are brought to the table.

The "trilemma" on it's own can only be addressed to people who already accept all of Jesus's teachings as being historical words that the historical Jesus actually spoke. In other words, the argument doesn't address the possibility that Jesus did exist but that he didnt say everything that was attributed to him OR that he didn't exist at all. Before you can use it, you need to either 1. assume or prove that Jesus made his various claims of divinity , or 2. you need to know that your audience already accepts this. Having said that, there are good historical reasons to suggest that Jesus did make claims to divinity- therefore once you've done that groundwork, then the argument may be put to use and could be effective to some degree, to a wider range of people than those who Lewis was originally addressing.

 

Lewis claims that people "often" say that Jesus was just a teacher, but his argument still isn't wholly effective even to that target audience. Many people in that category would have the objection that they simply can't accept any supernatural stuff- and that is why they stick to the moral teachings. I think that kind of objection requires philosophical arguments against naturalism per se, in addition to a historical argument such as the Trilemma. For someone who has a strong naturalist outlook that they bring to bear on the Jesus question, and who believes they have good independent reasons for believing naturalism, it is difficult to imagine them being convinced of Jesus's divinity merely by the Trilemma, even if they already accept the historicity of Jesus's claims to divinity. However in this instance, the Trilemma could form a part of an overall argument or set of arguments.

 

With the above qualifications in place, we can see that the Trilemma can have some value in showing that Christianity is reasonable.

So you want to be a Jesus mythicist?

Here's the guide on how.

Results of a survey on natural theological arguments

Results of a survey on natural theological arguments

Respondents were mostly professional philosophers and philosophy students.