The Cosmological Argument is perhaps the classic argument for the existence of a God. Thomas Aquinas included it in his famous Five Ways, although over the years his argument has been constantly refashioned. It lives on in several distinct versions. I bring this up because of a “customer review” I came across on Amazon.com of a book by John Allen Paulos. The book is Irreligion: a mathematician explains why the arguments for God just don’t add up. The review is by M. Stringer.

Full disclosure: I read the review, I have not read the book.

Stringer, as it turns out, is quite critical of Paulos and his work.

As for Paulos’ book I would hesitate to describe it as even schoolboy philosophizing as it fails to reach any level of academic respectability and is, if anything, even worse than the aforementioned efforts from the `New Atheists’.

His first area of attack is the ‘first cause argument’ which Paulos states can be slightly amended to become the ‘cosmological argument’;

1. Everything has a cause, or perhaps many causes.
2. Nothing is its own cause.
3. Causal chains can’t go on forever.
4. So there has to be a first cause.
5. That first cause is God, who therefore exists.

There are however two major problems with Paulos’ version. Firstly no one in Western philosophical/theological history has even advanced the first cause/cosmological argument in this form. Paulos appears to have just made it up for this book. Secondly his version is not logically valid as the conclusion (5) does not follow from the earlier statements (1-4). All that is presented is a series of unconnected assertions unrelated to each other.

Stringer goes on to present what he considers a sound version of the cosmological argument (one popularized in recent years by the philosopher William Lane Craig). His seems shorter than what I recall as Craig’s version, but since brevity is a virtue, let’s take a look.

A good example a modern first cause argument is the Kalam cosmological argument rediscovered and improved in modern thought by William Lane Craig.

1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist
3. Therefore the universe has a cause

This argument is logically valid. The conclusion (3) follows deductively from 1 and 2.

Now, I’m not interested in contesting Stringer’s characterization of the book he’s reviewing—I for one am in no position to do so. Instead what I prefer to do is comment on this rather succinct version of the cosmological argument.  I am aware of course that Craig is a better source for the modern cosmological argument than an Amazon reviewer plucked out of the hat, but, here goes….

1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist
3. Therefore the universe has a cause

The short problem with this is that it assumes in the 2nd premise what it needs to prove, namely that everything (here referred to as “the universe”) began to exist.

Let’s take a closer look. This is supposed to be an argument for the existence of a Creator—and yet, it never mentions God or Creator. Of course, God is ever-present in the background, lurking, waiting for an opportunity to jump in. Let’s see if an opportunity presents itself.

Under the Microscope

The syllogism begins by asserting that everything that begins to exist has a cause. Why the phrase “begins to exist”?. It’s there so we can exclude God from the requirement to have a cause. Since by definition God is eternal, no beginning no end, premise #1 doesn’t apply to him.

That’s important. For the cosmological argument to work, it has to make the case that (A) “everything has a cause” and (B) “except God.” Obviously, a large part of the debate about whether the argument is successful centers on whether or not the exception made for God is warranted. What is unusual about Stringer’s version is that it doesn’t even mention God. Still, by asserting that physical things like the universe begin to exist and therefore must have a cause, the implication is that their cause must be something that does not begin to exist, i. e. God.

Yet, nothing in the argument requires causes to be non-physical. Nothing seems to prevent an infinite chain of physical causes; nothing, that is, other than the author’s bare assumption that premise #2 is correct. Well, not quite “bare.”  Actually, the idea is that premise #2 has been established by astrophysicists as a fact—after all, aren’t scientists in agreement that our universe began in a big bang which itself exploded from a singularity? Didn’t time itself have it’s beginning with that singular cosmic bang?

A glance at cosmology (the scientific study of the origin of the universe) makes it appear premise #2 is widely accepted as true, since most scientists heartily accept the big bang. And yet, for most cosmologists, I would argue, the term “universe” does not equal “all physical existence”. In fact, most scientists take it for granted that there is some kind of prior physical state which led to the singularity (itself a physical state) which led to the big bang and our current universe. And recently, some cosmologists (e.g. Stephen Hawking) are questioning the singularity anyway. Which means the big bang is not only not the beginning of all physical existence, it may not be the beginning of the universe either.

This is not fatal, of course. There is way too much uncertainty about the science of cosmology to say whether science will or will not end up supporting premise #2. The fact remains that if there is a God who created our physical world, then we ought to find ourselves living inside a world that had a definite origin at some specific point in the past, and prior to that point in the past nothing physical should be detectable. In fact, this fits reasonably well with current science. Sure, scientists talk about strings and multiverses in existence prior to the big bang—but at this point that’s just theorizing without evidence.

The Long and Short of It

So much for the short problem with the Kalem cosmological argument. But there is also a long problem—”long” in the sense that it won’t be as easy to explain, I’m afraid. But I will try.

There is a subtle problem with premise #1, and it involves the meaning of saying something has a cause. If one operates from a worldview based on mind before matter, then this premise is a founding principle. However, if one operates from a natural worldview (which rejects the principle of sufficient reason), then the negative of this premise is your founding principle. From this latter point of view, postulating “causes” is merely a useful way of describing the physical world.

Causes, in short, are a form of mental currency and not something “real” about matter. Technically, you might say, causes are imaginary. This viewpoint follows naturally from neurological constructivism and pragmatic empiricism. These approaches to understanding knowledge and science paint a picture of a relationship between thoughts about physical nature and the actual stuff of physical nature which is loose and indirect. In fact, it is just the sort of insufficient relationship evolutionary scientists should expect from “unguided” biological evolution.

Some of the key elements of this relationship can be summarized as follows. Knowledge is a virtual reality; its relationship to physical reality is like that of a useful map to the terrain the map represents; all of the logical relationships indicated by the map pertain to the map, not to the terrain. That is to say, the map is an analytical construction that has a synthetic relationship to the world it models. The map is only “true” to the extent that we find it a more useful model of the world than any alternative mappings we happen to have thought up. Knowledge, in other words, is something we invent to model the physical world by testing for usefulness. The scientific method codifies this process.

If matter comes first and mind evolves later (the premise of naturalism) then “causes” are just descriptions, and we choose our causal explanations based on their predictive usefulness, nothing else. The same applies for any non-causal explanations we might embrace, as well.

Imagine, now, if we were to restate Stringer’s cosmological argument from this natural perspective. It might look like this:

1. Everything that begins to exist can be usefully described.
2. The universe began to exist
3. Therefore the universe can be usefully described.

So we see that only by embracing a worldview which presumes that causal descriptions identify innate causal truths about the physical universe can the Kalam cosmological argument become an argument for God’s existence. But the notion that there are innate causal truths about or contained within physical existence is a notion that stems from a supernatural worldview (from mind before matter). It is inherently incompatible with a natural worldview, and no one with a natural worldview should accept it. (Some misguided atheists do, of course, but they are . . . well, misguided.)

We will find that if one accepts the premises of the supernatural worldview, it follows that the premises of the Kalam cosmological argument seem obviously true. If instead one hews to the premises of the natural worldview, the Kalam premises seem obviously false. We can be sure that the reverse is the case as well. Premises which seem obvious to advocates of the natural worldview will likely seem far from obvious to supernatural worldview advocates.

Here Comes the Judge

What we need, then, is a way to judge between the two worldviews independent of their inherent premises. I think this can be done. It involves first finding conclusions which differ between the worldviews and then comparing those conclusions to what we pretty much all agree are facts about the world. In short, which worldview best fits the facts, as we know them? This is not a philosophical endeavor so much as an empirical one—there will be no definitive answer that all can agree on. After all, pragmatic empiricism is the only tool we have to arbitrate this debate.

Notice that if I am right about this last point, in itself that supports the natural worldview. For the natural worldview entails that all matters of fact about existence must be brokered through pragmatic empiricism, the scientific method. But the supernatural worldview, it seems to me, entails that a shortcut to direct knowledge is possible, indeed that classical logical arguments can reveal facts about the world. I believe this contention can be shown to be unuseful, and has been shown unuseful again and again, as far as the determination of facts (rather than logical truths) is concerned.

There is another way to say this, which perhaps has more biological clarity. Over the course of the natural history of the earth, the brain has evolved into an organ which creates sensations which we refer to as the mind. This evolution has resulted in a relationship between “minding” and the physical reality that is the subject of that “minding” which is synthetic rather than analytic. Because the relationship is synthetic, pragmatic empiricism has become the best route to factual knowledge. Were the relationship analytic instead, then analytic statements would provide factual content about the world, and thus would have become the best route to factual knowledge. Yet things don’t work that way. That’s not the way the mind evolved.  Instead, only empirical statements provide factual content about the world—and this is just what we would expect if the premises of naturalism are true.

So what then are analytic statements “about”? They are about the organization of the mind itself, or perhaps more accurately, the organization of the brain’s “minding” faculty. In a real sense, of course, the brain’s “minding” faculty is something physical. So logical statements do have factual content in that limited sense. If I make an analytical statement, eg, 2 + 3  = 5 , I am making a factual claim about the organization of the minding faculty in my brain. Fair enough, but the organization of the minding faculty in my brain exists for the purpose of developing useful facts—descriptions, explanations and causes—about the physical world which lies outside my minding faculty. 2 + 3 = 5 tells me nothing factual about the world outside my minding faculty. That is precisely why we call math statements like that analytic rather than synthetic.

But this very state of things, it seems to me, supports the natural worldview and does not support—is not what would be expected in the case of—the supernatural worldview. With the latter, we would expect analytic statements, purely logical arguments, to provide factual knowledge about the world outside the mind. They do not, and that is one reason why I believe the natural worldview is far more useful as a worldview, why it “wins” the debate.

Terminology and Necessity

At this point let me say something about my terminology. Note that “fact” and “factual” in my usage do not equal “true”—when we say something is a fact we mean simply that it’s the most useful knowledge we’ve got (so far) on the matter, utilizing the pragmatic empiricism of the scientific method. Logical/mathematical knowledge can be “true” but it cannot, under this usage, be factual. Empirical knowledge, on the other hand, can be factual but it cannot be “true.” We can only continue to call factual knowledge “true” if first we redefine the term as a comparative meaning “more scientifically useful” than the alternatives it competes against. Again, this is just the method of pragmatic empiricism.

Now let me make a comment or two about another argument mentioned the book review above.

1. Everything has a cause, or perhaps many causes.
2. Nothing is its own cause.
3. Causal chains can’t go on forever.
4. So there has to be a first cause.
5. That first cause is God, who therefore exists.

As the reviewer points out, no one makes the cosmological argument this way because premise #1 forces God to also have a cause, and premise #2 prevents Him from being his own cause, which vitiates the conclusion. Note also that premise #1 and premise #3 are in flat contradiction: if everything has a cause then causal chains must go on forever. #4 follows from #3, but neither can be true if #1 and #2 are true.

So theologians try to make the argument work by asserting that premises #1 & #2 don’t apply to God but do apply to the physical world. But this is simply a case of special pleading based on confusing the physical world with our knowledge of the physical world. (I will explain this presently.)

Specifically, theologians traditionally define God as a “necessary” being and define the physical world as “contingent” instead of “necessary.” As I say, this is mere special pleading. But even if we accept it, the argument fails because if God is not a contingent sort of being then God can’t be a cause for contingent things—causality, in short, is a two-way street. Causes must be the sort of thing that can bring about what they cause. I have written about this in discussions of the cosmological argument elsewhere.

What does it mean to say something is “necessary”? Well, what is intended is that God’s existence be logically required, whereas the existence of physical things be not logically required. But really it is only another way of saying that something does or doesn’t have a cause—and we are back to special pleading. Can the theologian make a factual case for this distinction? Is there some way to show it is not special pleading? I don’t see how. Look at it this way: just because God was never created, why does it follow that God necessarily exists? Isn’t it just as possible that if God was never created God does not exist? Moving God outside the causal chain does not transform God into a necessary being.

I’m going to come back to this point in a minute, but now let’s consider the contingency side of the matter.

Contingency and Knowledge

The idea behind contingency is that if something has a cause or causes, then had those causes not occurred the something would never have come to exist. While this may seem to be true for individual things in the physical universe, importantly it is not true for the collection of all physical things. The existence of the collection of all physical things is logically necessary—therefore shouldn’t the entire collection (the physical universe in toto) fall into the same category of being necessary rather than contingent—and therefore like God, shouldn’t it be exempt from premises #1 & #2? The special pleading which supposedly exempts God must also exempt the universe taken in its entirety. (Note that the collection necessarily exists even if it’s an empty set.)

I think if we analyze this carefully we see that factual (synthetic) knowledge is “contingent” and analytic knowledge is “necessary”. The distinction is really not about the things known but about the manner in which we know them. Contingent things must be known empirically. Necessary things must be known logically.

There is a problem in this for the theist. It effectively denies that God’s existence is a factual matter and makes it a logical matter instead. That at once puts God into a category that prevents him from interacting as cause with the physical world (the “lack of contingency” problem). 2 + 3 = 5 is necessarily true, but that is because like all analytical knowledge it is not a reference to the world outside our “minding”. It is not a reference to anything factual. So the problem with the subtle cosmological argument is that its premises amount to simply asserting that the central claim of supernaturalism—that mind precedes matter—is true. This assumes what is to be proven, the fallacy of begging the question.

And anyway, it is not at all clear to me why individual physical beings which actually exist aren’t therefore “necessary” beings. True, our knowledge of them is synthetic, therefore merely factual, therefore uncertain to some extent. But it is a fallacy to assume that what it true for knowledge is equally true for the physical subject of that knowledge. We may always know through a glass darkly, but that is because knowing is a synthetic process based on pragmatic empiricism. Regardless of the uncertainty of what we know about a physical being, if it exists then it exists, it necessarily exists.

Whatever “contingent” steps led to your coming into existence, if you exist then you absolutely exist—you necessarily exist. What is, is. Things that exist exist regardless of logical argument or anyone’s factual knowledge of the matter. They exist regardless of what we know about them or how they came into existence.

A Different Necessity

But perhaps theists will reply that this is not what is meant by the term “necessary being”. What is meant is “a being who does not have to have a cause” a being who, if it exists, necessarily exists causeless. To this the special pleading objection obviously applies. For as I pointed out previously, advocates of the natural worldview maintain, as a necessary consequence of that worldview, that “causes” are simply knowledge-descriptions created by our brain’s ”mindings”—that it is a mistake to think that “causes” are true things, or that real physical things have innate causes. They only have the causes our minds find it useful to assign to them—causality literally exists in our minds and not outside our minds. Again, it is the mistake of confusing physical things with our mindings about them.

Thus to say something is contingent is simply to say that we can create knowledge about it through our minding process of pragmatic empiricism. That is, it is something that can be factually addressed. That’s all contingency really boils down to: if something is empirically knowable, subject to synthetic statements, it is contingent. If it is not empirically knowable then it is not contingent. Now we see the problem with defining God as non-contingent. It does serve to effectively distinguish God from the physical world, but at the cost of no longer being able to claim that God factually exists. God only theoretically exists, and the logical arguments which are supposed to “prove” that existence can only do so if we start them with premises which make God necessary rather than premises which do not. They amount to saying, “If things are such that God’s existence is entailed, then it follows that God’s existence is entailed.” True enough. But if things are such that God’s existence is not entailed, then God’s existence is not entailed.

Analytical arguments can’t settle factual questions. And ultimately, God’s existence is a factual question. Pragmatic empiricism, scientific method, is the only way to approach it. But any answer obtained this way will lack the certainty of truth. At best it will only be a fact, and therefore not a final answer.

Before proceeding, it is important to define God — otherwise no coherent discussion is possible. I define God as “the solitary, perfect, non-physical being who created the physical world.” By non-physical I mean “bodiless, not consisting of matter/energy (as those terms are used by physicists and other scientists).” Here then is an outline of my reasons for rejecting the existence of God, in order of importance:

A) In an argument to the best explanation, naturalism trumps supernaturalism.

My argument here is that a natural world view fits reality and is self-consistent. Supernaturalism (and therefore God) is not needed to explain existence and, more importantly, can’t explain it anyway. Whether we are attempting to account for the existence of human consciousness or the human body, of morality or the value of life, naturalism provides better explanations across the board. I’ve touched on some of these points in Why Are We Alive?, Does Life Have Meaning?, Thoughts, Feelings, & Faith, C. S. Lewis’ Moral Argument, Can General Atheism Be Proved?, The Key to Happiness, and An Irreverent Look at God, Sex, & Design. I’ve laid out the framework of the debate in What Atheists Have in Common and Naturalism’s Touchstone Proposition.

B) God Can’t Exist

B1 – The nature of the physical world makes a non-physical source impossible (the world isn’t something that could have been thought or imagined into existence)

My argument here is that the world is not informational in nature, and does not contain any mental substrate. If so it can’t be thought or conceived into existence. Furthermore, any attempt to define the nature of the physical world in a manner that avoids the impossibility of a creator results in a definition of the physical world which simply does not match reality (see reason A).

Note that a judgment about what physical existence is not lies at the heart of this second argument for atheism. The obvious issue for debate is whether this judgment about the nature of physical existence is correct and therefore whether it is possible for physical things to be conceived or thought into existence — ie, whether it is possible for essence to cause existence. It is my argument that essence is just explanation or description, and neither explanations nor descriptions can cause the physical existence of that which they describe. This represents a rejection of thousands of years of Western thought, yet is supported by modern science as well as arguments as old as the pre-Socratic Zeno of Elea. I have not written much on this yet, but will.

B2 – The nature of God makes creation of a physical world impossible (God has no means to create or interact with physical things)

I’ve introduced this argument in various forms previously. See God & Rocks, Thoughts & Trees, God’s Physical Problem and also Contingency and Necessity.

B3 – The nature of God is incompatible with the particular world we have (God is perfect but the world we have is imperfect)

The argument from perfection, also referred to as the problem of evil, was presented in Agnosticism Revisited and the Case for Atheism (this link should take you to the beginning of the perfection argument within that post).

C) There is insufficient evidence to believe in God or any supernatural world view

Many atheists start with C, implicitly assume A, and hardly touch B (except B3 when considering the problem of evil). Although I consider C the weakest of the three reasons for atheism, it has an important place — especially when considering imperfect gods and deities.

This is only an outline, of course. It’s gradually being fleshed out on this site.

Nash declared that Naturalism’s touchstone proposition is that

Nothing exists outside the material, mechanical (that is, nonpurposeful), natural order.

We see right away that in phrasing this, Nash put his Christian thumb on the scale. He made sure to throw in “mechanical” and “nonpurposeful” because that provides something juicy to attack. But how are they fundamental to Naturalism? In fact, I would argue that if Naturalism is true, then the world can not be mechanical. Mechanism and determinism are Trojan horses Christians like Nash try to give to the Naturalist camp, but which in fact are incompatible with it, as we shall see.

If Nash hadn’t had his pro-Christian thumb on the scale, naturalism’s touchstone proposition would have been simple and far-reaching:

Nothing exists outside the natural order.

Which means, quite simply, there is no supernatural order: no God, no heaven, no place for souls to survive death and depart to. One thing that might be added to the touchstone proposition, I suppose, is that the most reliable way to learn about the natural world is to apply the scientific method. In that case we would have

Nothing exists outside the natural order, and the most reliable way to understand that order is to apply the scientific method.

though I’m not sure what is lost in conciseness is worth the addition.

What is natural?

But I think there is a problem with using this as naturalism touchstone proposition. For in essence it defines naturalism by saying that everything is natural. But what does it mean to say that everything is “natural”. Does it really mean anything?

It might make more sense to say “everything is physical” rather than “everything is natural” — but even here we are burdened with the difficulty of explaining exactly what “physical” means. Well, we might declare that “physical” means whatever the physical sciences can study. Scientists are able to study what we routinely call “the physical world” because that world does things, and it leaves evidence of its doings. It is almost as if we are saying that if it doesn’t do something, if it doesn’t leave evidence of its existence, it doesn’t exist. Existence = Evidence.

But is this right? Certainly we can’t know of a thing’s existence if there is no evidence for it, but does that rule it out of existence?

It can’t. We had no evidence for the existence of neutrinos two centuries ago, yet neutrinos existed 200 years ago as certainly as they exist today. Even in 2007, things undoubtedly exist of which we currently know nothing.

Ah, but even if we were ignorant of it, neutrinos were doing things two centuries ago. Evidence logically requires an observer, and there were no observers of neutrinos then. However, in 1807 neutrinos were nonetheless doing things that in theory were observable. Existence = Possibility of Evidence.

But there is a problem with defining what is physical by its potential to produce evidence. God, according to theists, also produces evidence (the big bang, they claim, is one such example of God’s doings). That’s a problem because it means our definition of “physical” as anything whose doings are potentially observable is too broad: it doesn’t exclude clearly non-physical hypotheses like God.

It might be countered that God is excluded from being physical by His definition. After all, God is specifically “non-physical”. But the whole point is that we are trying to identify what distinguishes “physical” from “non-physical”, and the claim that physical things are those that yield evidence (or at least potential evidence) doesn’t work for making that distinction.

Of course, God can’t be detected directly. Yet neither can many things we definitely consider physical. We have no direct detection of the sun, only of its effects (photons, gravity etc), and this goes for a host of other “physical” entities.

What makes the God hypothesis different is how God is claimed to interact with the world. God’s way of doing things is not by moving but by thinking. God’s relationship to the world is that of a mind making things exist and happen by imagining what he wants. This gets us to the heart of the difference between naturalism and supernaturalism. The latter postulates mind before matter; the former matter before mind.

In other words, the difference between the two lies in a fundamental disagreement about when mind comes into the picture. According to naturalism, mind — intelligence, ideas, information — doesn’t exist in the beginning, and only comes into existence when organisms evolve with brains capable of creating sensations of thought. Supernaturalism tears the mind away from the brain and declares that mind was there in the beginning and created all. That is the crux of the disagreement.

Hold this thought. We’ll come back to it.

The Trojan Horse

Although I’ve identified the real distinction between naturalism and supernaturalism as a disagreement about when mind enters the picture, this has not been the usual approach to distinguishing the two worldviews. The typical approach has been to concentrate on naturalism as the belief that everything is physical or material. However, though it seems like we know what we mean by words like “physical” and “material”, as we saw earlier it is difficult to define them in a way that excludes what we don’t mean.

The attempt to get around this difficulty has led a good many thinkers to define “physical” as equivalent to our scientific knowledge of the world. The physical then becomes the same as the causal relationships found in our scientific theories — or at least those theories and laws which will be eventually found by scientists to be true. That scientific theories are “models” of the universe rather than the universe itself gets missed.

The resulting confusion is a boon for naturalism’s foes. To see how this works, let’s return to Faith & Reason. Nash quotes William Halverson, an advocate of naturalism, as follows,

The world is, to use a very inadequate metaphor, like a gigantic machine whose parts are so numerous and whose processes are so complex that we have thus far been able to achieve only a very partial and fragmentary understanding of how it works. In principle, however, everything that occurs is ultimately explicable in terms of the properties and relations of the particles of which matter is composed. Once again the point may be stated simply: determinism is true. [Halverson, Concise Introduction to Philosophy, p 394, quoted by Nash p 47]

Halverson accepted the Trojan horse. Indeed, he embraced it.

To put it bluntly, he is wrong. Both in his understanding of the nature of the world and in his understanding of Naturalism, Halverson is mistaken. The last sentence above encapsulates his error. He jumps from the observation that “in principle . . . everything that occurs is ultimately explicable” to the unwarranted assumption that such explanations control the world they explain and therefore “determinism is true”. The fact that a certain species can create extremely useful explanations of the world doesn’t mean that those explanations control the world or constitute its blueprint.

If we understand that the mind is the product of biological evolution then we are forced to accept that our understanding of the world can not be of the same nature as the world itself. The most useful explanations, for us humans, are of course deterministic explanations, but it is a mistake to assume that deterministic explanations can ever be perfect matches with the world (that is, that they can be “True”). To make that assumption is to fall for the supernatural fallacy that there exists some kind of “intelligence” embedded in the nature of existence. It is to map human knowledge against the physical world and then confuse the knowledge-map with the world, without realizing what you have done.

Meanings and relationships are, quite simply, created by the brain when it creates “objects” out of what is perceived. Knowing the world in such a fashion is useful and valid — if it weren’t our brains would never have successfully evolved as they have. But the crucial observation here is that our “minding” works perfectly well regardless of the actual nature of the world — one might almost say it works in defiance of the nature of the world. What physical reality inherently “is” doesn’t matter to the process of knowing which evolved in us. At any rate, what the world “is” will always remain ultimately unknowable. What we “know” is not the world but our knowledge of the world.

I don’t blame Nash and other Christians for applying the determinist tag to Naturalism: like Halverson, too many 20th century advocates of Naturalism have done the same. They are wrong, as an effort to understand intelligence in terms of biological evolution makes clear. The Trojan horse should be rejected.

The End of Knowledge

Another quote from Halverson is quite revealing.

If the theoretical goal of science — an absolutely exhaustive knowledge of the natural world — were to be achieved, there would remain no reality of any other kind about which we might still be ignorant.

I gather that Halverson may see practical limitations that will prevent this so-called “theoretical goal of science” from being achieved, but it is clear that he finds such a goal achievable in theory.

I do not. Halverson misunderstands the nature of human knowledge and, as a consequence, the nature of nature. Nevertheless, Halverson may at least have managed to progress a step beyond Bertrand Russell, who did in fact aver (in Has Man a Future, I believe) that someday science would discover absolutely everything there was to know about the world. In that book, Russell did not even see practical limits to complete knowledge.

Other naturalists have gone several steps past Halverson. They will tell you that science will never have complete knowledge, not just for practical reasons, but additionally because at the quantum level existence is random. At the quantum level existence doesn’t match up with the human desire for deterministic explanations, physicists have concluded.

A New Touchstone Proposition

The philosopher C. D. Broad observed,

If you start with a sufficiently narrow and inadequate view of nature you will have to postulate a God to get you out of the difficulties in which it lands you. E.g., if you insist that living organisms are mere machines, you have to postulate God to construct them out of unorganized matter.

Machines are unavoidably artifacts, the deliberate creation of some intelligent being or beings. But why should nature or anything in nature be considered a machine? It can only happen by confusing blueprints and maps. Machines follow a blueprint — a design — which was invented. But the natural world was not invented: it has a design which scientists can describe and map, but not a blueprint. The “design” observed by scientists is in fact an explanation, not a blueprint. If you get confused about this you end up with the mistaken assumption that design we observe in the natural world is of the blueprint variety.

Knowledge is a simulacrum of physical existence. Human knowledge stands in for the physical world in a very useful way, one which enables us to make intelligent decisions. But no description of the world controls or encompasses the world itself. If naturalism is true, it would be silly to think otherwise.

Earlier we identified the dispute between naturalism and supernaturalism as a dispute about when mind enters the picture. The supernaturalist maintains that mind — in the form of God — is there from the beginning, and essentially thinks the world into existence. The naturalist puts the world first and sees mind evolving later on. The supernaturalist says mind before matter; the naturalist says matter before mind.

As I wrote in “Can General Atheism be Proved?“,

Naturalism maintains that intelligence is a product of brains and that brains are a product of evolution. It follows from this that intelligence did not exist anywhere in the universe until organisms with brains evolved into being. Supernaturalism maintains the contrary: that intelligence existed well before brains were created. Intelligence (whether personified in a being or not) necessarily lies behind and prior to physical existence, according to the supernatural canon.

This brings us to my proposal for naturalism’s touchstone proposition:

Intelligence is a product of brains and brains are a product of evolution; therefore intelligence did not exist until organisms with brains evolved into being.

Defined this way, naturalism is a falsifiable hypothesis, which can be evaluated (as I argued also in “Can General Atheism be Proved?“) by

. . .investigating the world to determine whether the evidence we find fits better with the notion that intelligence existed at the beginning of the universe (before brains existed), or whether intelligence appeared with the evolution of organisms with brains. I maintain that such an investigation can be done, and that doing it is a rational process which will lead to a rational answer.

Summary: intelligence is a biological phenomenon caused by brains, and its existence is due to the evolution of organisms with brains. Everything else in the natural worldview follows from that.

Atheists don’t have a religion — but they do have something in common beyond what they disbelieve. What atheists share is a natural worldview.

Sometimes that worldview is a bit confused, incorporating too much from the still dominant supernatural worldview. But understood clearly, the natural worldview is simply the belief that body precedes mind. The supernatural worldview, of course, takes the opposite tact: that mind precedes body. We see right off from this that naturalism is not merely a refusal to believe in supernaturalism. It’s based on its own specific hypothesis about the nature of the world.

Logically speaking there are 3 possibilities concerning existence: physical before mental, mental before physical, and mental/physical concurrent. The first is naturalism, the second supernaturalism, and the third a hybrid which deserves a name of its own. We might call it “non-physical naturalism” or “hybrid supernaturalism” or, perhaps, pantheism.

A good many people today embrace this 3rd possibility, but whatever it is, it is not naturalism. An essential tenet of naturalism is physicalism, and physicalism locates naturalism firmly in the camp of “physical before mental.”

But isn’t it impossible to know which worldview is correct? Aren’t we forced to simply take our preferred choice on faith?

As a matter of fact, we are not. This may seem surprising, but it shouldn’t be. Whether mind or matter is primary is an empirical question, for the answer makes a difference to how we must acquire knowledge of the world. By studying how human knowledge actually works, scientists can reliably infer which worldview best fits our universe.

Now, it might be objected that no inference to the best explanation can be definitive. That’s true, of course. The scientific method is always a matter of inferring the best explanation for the evidence at hand, and as such it is always falsifiable (which simply means that new evidence may come to light and/or a better explanation be devised).

But this aspect of the scientific method is itself one of the key clues we have about which of these worldviews is correct. It’s long been recognized that the human mind employs two types of knowing. Following Kant, these are referred to as analytic and synthetic. All our knowledge about the world itself is of the synthetic sort, and we have found that we most reliably obtain synthetic knowledge when we employ the scientific method of inferring which abstract model best fits our evidence.

But our abstract models themselves consist of logical and mathematical relationships which we apprehend not synthetically but directly and analytically. Why would such a dual knowledge-system have evolved in humans? Well, it’s easy to comprehend its necessity in the context of naturalism. If existence has no underlying mental blueprint, then the world can’t be known directly. The only practical way to “know” such a physical world would be by the two-step process of devising analytic models and utilizing something like the scientific method to pick the most useful model based on its predictive value. Knowledge of the world therefore consists of “virtual” models (consequently “synthetic”) which are inherently falsifiable because none could ever be a match with any underlying mental reality (since under the model of naturalism no such mental substrate exists).

Since this seems to be a good description of how humans (especially those most successful knowers who are called scientists) actually come to know the world, the natural hypothesis fits well.

On the other hand, interestingly, there would be no need for such a synthetic process of knowing to evolve in humans if naturalism were false, since in that case the world would have an underlying mental substrate that could be known directly and analytically. The alternative worldviews do not fit well, since they cannot account for the necessity of knowing the world synthetically.

Put simply, we are forced to rely on synthetic knowledge of the world because we cannot in fact apprehend the world directly. The strong implication of this is that the physical world contains nothing capable of being apprehended directly: it contains no mental substrate. If so, naturalism is true and the other two worldview options are false.

My intent here is not to make a full-fledged argument for naturalism, but rather to buttress my point at the beginning: determining the correct worldview is something that can be done by investigating the nature of the world and of ourselves as knowers. Consequently, which worldview is correct is not a matter of faith but of scientific inference.

Summary: (1) We don’t have to rely on faith to know whether there is an intelligence behind the universe. (2) Atheists agree on a positive worldview: physical naturalism.

It follows that time only comes into existence once all three conditions are met. The most limiting condition is the 3rd, the existence of a being capable of doing the comparison, and I say this because 1 and 2 are known to come into existence billions of years before 3 comes into existence.

When Stephen Hawking and other cosmologists talk about time coming into existence with the big bang, they pretend that there is a scientist like them, a being capable of doing the comparison which creates time, right back there at the beginning of our universe looking on. That of course is a conceit. Since time is a comparison, it can only exist in a mind. Unless one is a theist (Hawking and most other cosmologists are not), one has to admit that time cannot exist until the evolution of organisms with minds capable of doing the right sort of comparison.

The scientific conceit is that we are right there at the big bang, looking on. If there is change occurring and a standard clock by which to measure it, why then “time” exists because the 3rd necessity — us — is looking on from our objective perch billions of years in the future. But if the 3rd element can be billions of years in the future why can’t the 1st element — the standard clock — also be billions of years in the future? In this case element 2 is all that really needs to be present before we can in our conceit declare the existence of time.

And the implication is this: the big bang is when that 2nd element — change — had its beginning.

That can’t be, and most cosmologists will agree with me on this. Change is an interaction and it cannot start cold from nothing. If the singularity is truly unchanging then it never changes. No big bang ensues, and our universe never gets started. Something must have been going on inside or outside the singularity for a big bang to result, and that mean the big bang cannot be the beginning of change.

To think otherwise is to abandon methodological naturalism. But it is also to do nothing other than declare that the impossible and inconceivable happened: that something unchanging suddenly changed for no possible explanation.

It is the same impossibility that theists assert of God: that unchanging deity suddenly and inexplicably changed and so created our world of change. Both God and an unchanging singularity represent the abandonment of explanation. Both beg the question: how can the unchanging ever lead to anything different, since it must change to do so?

Embracing that impossibility we find both theism and bad science.

Theists counter by maintaining that the something, God, is unlike everything in one very important respect. It differs from everything in that God is a “necessary being” while everything (else) is “contingent”. Contingent here refers to things which interact in a causal chain with other things. A creates B, B creates C, C creates D in this interaction of cause and effect. Thus A, B, C and D are “contingent”. But if A is contingent then something must have created A.

Ah, but if A is God then nothing created A. The causal chain is broken by saying that A is a “necessary” being — which means, simply, uncaused. God’s existence doesn’t require the existence of anything else.

But is this anything other than a word game?

The Two-Way Street

The first problem is that causality is a two-way street. Effects have causes, but those causes have to be the sort of thing which can make those effects happen. Causality, in short, is an interaction. Which means that for God to be capable of interacting with the physical world in a way which enables God to create and move things, God must be contingent or have some contingent component. Declaring God “necessary” makes God incapable of creating contingent things or else renders God an inexplicable being who has both contingent and non-contingent parts which can’t possibly interact.

Theism can’t escape from this dilemma. Either God has no contingent aspect and therefore can’t be the source of the world’s contingency — can’t be the Creator — or else God has both contingent and non-contingent aspects and the problem of the “impossibility” of an infinite series of causes gets shoved into God’s nature. This last leaves a God who begins as an uncaused necessary being but in some unexplainable way transforms into a contingent being capable of engaging in a causal chain.

If something unmoving could be the cause of movement, theists would have a chance. But something which doesn’t move or change can’t move or change other things. Nor can it transform itself into something which moves and changes.

The Logical Necessity of the Series

The only way out for the theist is to claim that with God they are talking about a different kind of causality: logical causality, not contingent or historical causality. For example, the members of a series (e.g.: “the generations of Homo sapiens”) cannot exist unless as a matter of logical necessity the series itself (Homo sapiens) already exists. God must create the series (Homo sapiens) since the series is logically necessary before the individual contingent members of the series (generations of individual Homo sapiens) can exist.

But notice that it makes no difference whether the series contains finite or infinite members: the series as a whole stands in the same logical relationship to its members either way. The series of Homo sapiens could contain contingent Homo sapiens connected in a causal chain for all infinity, and the existence of the “series” would still be logically necessary before it could be assigned any members.

Put another way, if members of a series exist (no matter how many or few) then by logical necessity the series itself must exist.

But this line of argument fails to get us to God. For if everything in the physical universe is part of a contingent series, the series itself which by logical necessity must exist is not “God” but rather “the universe”. The argument only demonstrates that by logical necessity if anything in the universe exists, the universe must necessarily exist.

The Author of the Series

But I imagine theists arguing that I have missed the point here. For their point is that there must be a mental source for this abstract category that constitutes the series itself, and this is so whether the series is “Homo sapiens” or “the universe.” A member of a series cannot be the author of the series itself of which it is a member. (The series is logically precedent to its being populated with members, in other words).

But this crashes for the theist. It crashes because we only have to imagine a series which also includes God. If God is a member of a series then God cannot — by the same reasoning — be the author of the series of which God is a member.

Do such series exist? Absolutely. There is the series of “deities and Gods worshipped by humans.” More to the point, there is the series of “everything that exists.” If God is a member of that series, then God cannot be the author of the series. If God is not a member then God does not exist.

In fact, series are only descriptions of like or related things, and the author of these descriptions and series is not God but us. Logical relationships and “necessities” apply only to our thoughts and not to the actual physical things we think about.

Consider, for example, the series which contains “the generations of Homo sapiens.” If we follow the causal chain of that series backward in time we find H. sapiens imperceptibly changing into H. erectus then H. habilis then Australopithecus. If we look back far enough eventually we find members of the series are no longer discernable even as primates but only as mammals, further back still and they are no longer mammals but vertebrates and so on until eventually we leave even the animal kingdom behind.

Physical reality is not constrained by the logical categories we choose for describing it. And those logical categories owe their existence and logical necessities not to God but to us. They prove our existence, not God’s.

However that article received a comment from Max, an agnostic, which deserves serious attention. Although agreeing that I did “a good job pointing out the irreconcilable difficulties in a particular concept of God,” one which “embodies specific attributes,” Max argued that I “left the basic idea of god untouched.”

Although Max doesn’t “believe in Allah, or Jesus, or any and all specific mythic representations of god,” he is still agnostic rather than atheist since he doesn’t “disbelieve in the very idea of god.” In fact, Max wrote,

You did not present an argument at this level. Nor will you ever, since the concept of god in abstract of a specific mythic tradition is a completely non-falsifiable proposition, and thus cannot be affirmed or denied by any rational means.

He fleshed this objection out at the end of his comment this way:

If you argue against the existence of god, must you not pin that argument on some imagined attribute(s) of god. The problem is that as soon as you imagine god’s attributes you cease talking about the idea of god, and start talking about some specific imagined representation of god. You can disprove a billion representations without ever even addressing the concept of god itself.

Although Max left his comment over a year ago, I never got around to replying. I’m rectifying that now.

When Is a Concept Not a Concept?

My first question for Max is this: what is the concept of God if that concept involves no specific attributes? If the nature of a concept is unspecified, then it seems to me that the concept can’t be discussed because no one has any idea what is being discussed.

If I say, “X exists, but X has no attributes and no one can say what X is,” what am I claiming? I suppose Max is correct in saying that my “X” is non-falsifiable, but maybe that is only because “X” doesn’t have a meaning, and no actual concept is being asserted.

Likewise, if “God” is a meaningless word, one which doesn’t refer to any specified concept, then yes “God” is non-falsifiable — but only because meaningless words aren’t claims or propositions at all. There is no idea behind them.

I suspect that Max’s “abstract” concept of God does have “content” of some sort or another. It must, or else nothing remains. It is evident from his comment that Max rejects “perfection” as an attribute of God. Remove that attribute and the concept of God still has meaning. But what if we also remove the attribute of “creator”, the attribute of “being” and (for good measure) the attribute of “existing”? As far as I can see, nothing usable would remain: “God” would become a meaningless word, unfalsifiable but also undiscussable.

A Minimum God

Max doesn’t reveal what he believes the abstract concept of God is, but I’m confident that it involves a God with attributes. Existence must be one of those attributes, otherwise Max could have no good objection to calling himself an atheist. It is also likely that Max would posited this God as the cause of the physical world and our human existence. God, no matter how abstractly conceived, would hardly be God (or worth bothering about) otherwise.

Such a God need not be conceived as a personal being. Perhaps what is meant by the term is simply the intelligence behind the physical universe, an intelligence responsible for the world’s existence and nature. Max, I assume, would say that such a concept of God

is a completely non-falsifiable proposition, and thus cannot be affirmed or denied by any rational means.

But Max would be wrong.

The notion that there’s an intelligence behind existence is nothing less than the claim that naturalism is false. If naturalism is true, it follows that there is no intelligence behind or prior to the physical universe, so to maintain otherwise is to deny the truth of naturalism. The assertion above therefore amounts to the claim that philosophical naturalism “cannot be affirmed or denied by any rational means.” This claim is false and I will show why.

To do so, all that is required of me is to reveal by what rational means the truth or falsity of naturalism can be determined. In fact, I don’t have to provide a convincing case for naturalism, I only have to demonstrate that a rationally convincing case is possible.

Naturalism v Supernaturalism

Naturalism maintains that intelligence is a product of brains and that brains are a product of evolution. It follows from this that intelligence did not exist anywhere in the universe until organisms with brains evolved into being. Supernaturalism maintains the contrary: that intelligence existed well before brains were created. Intelligence (whether personified in a being or not) necessarily lies behind and prior to physical existence, according to the supernatural canon.

The question Max poses, then, is whether there is a rational way to decide between these two alternatives. There clearly is. We simply have to compare the intellectual case for believing intelligence preceded the existence of brains with the intellectual case for believing intelligence did not. If one case is stronger than the other, we will know which viewpoint — naturalism or supernaturalism — better fits the evidence we have. This is an inherently rational process, and is the sort of thing that scientists (as well as non-scientists, of course) do all the time.

I wrote that we “simply” have to compare the two intellectual cases — but of course the debate on this point is hardly “simple”. But the complexity of the debate only underscores the fact that it is a rational debate, one in which both sides vie to provide the most satisfactory account of the evidence we have about when intelligence entered the picture.

In Agnosticism Revisited and the Case for Atheism I wrote about the distinction between specific atheism and general atheism. Specific atheism, I said

is that atheism which purports to disprove the existence of the Judeo/Christian/Islamic monotheistic God

and the Argument from Perfection which I presented there pertained to specific atheism. On the other hand, I wrote that general atheism

is an outgrowth of the scientific/philosophical case for naturalism. Advocates of general atheism like to begin their arguments with well-established science (evolution, the physiology of vision or of the brain) and move on to conclusions about the nature of human knowledge and its relationship to the world—conclusions which if correct eliminate supernaturalism (and therefore eliminate any supernatural God or gods).

It is general atheism which pertains to the debate we have here.

Smoking Guns

The case for naturalism (or the opposing case for supernaturalism) is far too complex to present now, and at any rate that is unnecessary for the scope of this entry. That scope, it is important to remember, is to refute Max’s claim that the most abstract concept of God “cannot be affirmed or denied by any rational means.” I have taken the most “abstract” concept of God to mean some kind of pre-existing intelligence responsible for the creation of the world (hopefully Max would agree). And I have pointed out that this gets us right to one of the central disputes (perhaps the central dispute) separating naturalism from supernaturalism: Is intelligence the product of brains or are brains the product of intelligence?

This is answered by investigating the world to determine whether the evidence we find fits better with the notion that intelligence existed at the beginning of the universe (before brains existed), or whether intelligence appeared with the evolution of organism with brains. I maintain that such an investigation can be done, and that doing it is a rational process which will lead to a rational answer.

In fact, I believe there are some smoking guns which indicate that naturalism is the correct answer. I have mentioned a couple of these in other blog entries.

1) Thoughts (and by proxy disembodied intelligence) can’t do anything without a physical body to do the doing. Therefore intelligence cannot bring the universe into existence or be its cause. I’ve presented the case for this position in God & Rocks as well as in Thoughts & Trees and God’s Physical Problem.

2) The existence of two types of knowing (analytic and synthetic) is prima facie evidence that there are two types of things to be known: the physical world and concepts. If supernaturalism were true we would expect there to only be one type of knowing — analytic. If naturalism were true, both analytic and synthetic knowing would need to exist in order for physical organism to “know” the world. This is touched on in Two Types of Knowing as well as in Thoughts & Trees

3) Although the Principle of Sufficient Reason holds for analytic knowledge, it appears to be false for synthetic knowledge. If there was an intelligence behind the universe, the Principle of Sufficient Reason would be true for both synthetic and analytic knowledge (thus one type of knowledge would suffice — see #2). But the fact that synthetic knowledge is best acquired through the process of methodological naturalism (together with the factual possibility of incomplete and incorrect synthetic knowledge), makes it clear that the Principle of Sufficient Reason is false for synthetic knowledge. It follows that synthetic knowledge is not something innate in the physical world which our minds discover, but rather is the result of pragmatic empiricism. This fits naturalism perfectly, but can hardly be reconciled with supernaturalism. I touched on this in Thoughts & Trees — but much more attention needs to be given it.

As for the arguments presented by the other side, such as the design and information arguments, I dispelled them in Theism’s Rose-Colored Glasses. (See also Mind, Matter & Divine Creation.) Other atheists have written volumes dispelling these supernatural assertions.

Of course, Max may not find my smoking guns convincing. But he must admit that those of us who are atheists have not “left the basic idea of god untouched.” And he must admit that the concept of God in its most abstract form (as some kind of pre-existing intelligence) can be investigated by rational means and — it is at least a possibility — be found false.

Atheology.com is all about rectifying this situation, of course. But first, what do I have in mind when I say that most atheists don’t have a robust enough argument against this higher-class theism?

Blind Atheism

The most common argument for atheism goes something like this:

1) there should be a presumption of atheism – i.e. the burden of proof falls on those who assert the existence of God (you can’t expect non-believers to prove a universal negative)
2) there is no adequate logical or empirical evidence for God’s existence, therefore the burden has not been met
3) personal experiences (“God spoke to me”) can never be substantiated, so they can’t be used to meet the burden.
4) faith is wholly inadequate, so don’t even bring it up.

The famous atheist philosopher Antony Flew wrote the book on the presumption of atheism (see Flew’s “The Presumption of Atheism”), but a few years ago Flew came around to the viewpoint that theists have indeed met the burden of proof. Flew has now concluded there is a God, and he has become a deist. Flew’s conversion represents a serious challenge to atheism, and also represents one of the best examples of intelligent theism. To be sure, Flew still rejects revealed religion and does not believe in a “personal” God — despite the glee of some Christians, Flew is nowhere near to becoming a Christian. But just as certainly Flew is no longer an atheist. He no longer accepts point 2 above. There is in his view adequate evidence for the existence of God.

Goodbye Courtroom Analogy

But the situation is worse than this implies. Why? Because the burden of proof / presumption of atheism argument Flew popularized never really made much sense anyway. Flew used a courtroom analogy, where the burden quite properly falls on those who assert the positive: that x did y. But the debate between atheists and theists does not take place in a courtroom: no one is on trial, no one is at risk of jail time for their belief or non-belief. There is no defendant whose right to a fair trial needs to be protected by a presumption of innocence.

Even the argument that you can’t prove a universal negative is not necessarily true: we can be very certain there are no married bachelors anywhere, even in the most distant galaxy. But there is something else flawed about this whole burden of proof approach. Philosophical “proofs” can never establish matters of fact. The debate about God’s existence is a debate about which hypothesis — the natural one or the supernatural one — is most convincing. It is a factual question, not one that can be “proved” philosophically. Failure to provide that kind of “proof” means nothing. The better model for determining matters of fact is found in the method of science.

If we look to science we find that Flew’s assertion about burden of proof doesn’t apply: in actual practice the burden of proof is on new proposals and the presumption is in favor of the established scientific position. For example, if someone wants to argue that quarks are a myth, the burden is on them to make a convincing case for their assertion — not on the vast majority of scientists who believe in quarks. Imagine if the quarks-are-a-myth minority presented no alternative hypothesis and merely announced,

You can’t expect us to prove that no quarks exist, because after all no one can prove a universal negative. No, you need to show us a real quark and not merely rely on inferences and the quark hypothesis. We need to see real proof.

Obviously they would be ignored, or if not ignored ridiculed. If we want a real life example of the same principle, we need only look at the small cadre of scientists who are evolution-deniers. In their mind the burden of proof is on evolutionary scientists to find all the “missing links” in the fossil record; whereas they, the small minority of scientists who are deniers, see no obligation to produce scientific evidence for their own position.

In actual practice (outside of the courtroom) the burden is always on the minority to convince the majority, not the other way around. Extrapolating from this, it is clear that since we live in a world dominated by belief in God, the burden of proof is on atheists to make the case that God’s existence is unlikely, that naturalism better fits the evidence.

Atheism Out of Context

This is where atheism has a problem. You see, most atheists don’t recognize that they even have an alternative hypothesis to offer. They are stuck on the notion that atheism is simply the withholding of belief in God and nothing more. For them, atheism has no context.

They fail to see that what animates atheism is naturalism. Without its connection to naturalism, atheism is blind.

They also fail to see that intelligent theists have some pretty good arguments. Atheists need to be able to knock those arguments down. Unfortunately, my experience is that typically atheists aren’t good at doing that. Most atheists don’t even know about informed theism, since they have only come in contact with puff-ball theists. And on the other side of the coin, most are completely unprepared to make a case for naturalism.

Atheists tend to be arrogant. They are too stuck up on saying to the overwhelming majority who represent the dominant consensus: “prove you are right”. That simply won’t fly. Atheists have the burden because they are a minority. It is the same burden all scientists in a minority have: to show that the dominant consensus is seriously if not fatally flawed, and to demonstrate that they have a better hypothesis.

If atheists do this will they convert puff-ball theists? Probably not. But the door will be opened to intelligent debate with informed theists. And atheism will no longer be quite so blind.

Even if we concede the doubtful proposition that God can think thoughts, those thoughts can’t get anything done. And we all know this. A thought of a tree can’t bring an actual tree into existence. Thoughts are simply incapable of being anything other than, well, thoughts. If anyone doubts this obvious truth, they can prove me wrong by simply imagining a tree into real existence.

Thoughts can’t move, create or destroy anything in the physical world. This is not because our human thoughts aren’t strong enough, or because we are “only human”. Rather, the limitation is inherent to the nature of thoughts. Thoughts can’t do any real, physical work because thoughts are a type of experiencing, and nothing more. We use thoughts to guide our physical actions, but it is those physical actions (using our hands and arms and legs and so on) which do all of our actual doing.

Thoughts, in other words, are useful only because we have bodies with which to carry those thoughts out. God has no body, and therefore God’s thoughts would be useless.

In face of such an obvious difficulty, how can theists continue to think that the concept of God as Creator remains viable? The answer, I believe, is that they have a very fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the world. This misunderstanding is encapsulated by the “principle of sufficient reason.”

The principle of sufficient reason is the idea that physical reality can be sufficiently — that is to say, completely — explained. It assigns a kind of magic to words, so that the right combinations of words, it is imagined, can equal the essence of something. In fact, the very word essence is often used to mean the sufficient reason behind a thing or object.

It is all a kind of word magic. Theists imagine that our explanations of the world somehow capture the essence of physical things, indeed that the essence is those explanations. This allows them to fancy that God can think the explanation behind physical things and in so doing bring those things into existence.

Explanations simply aren’t like that.

The first clue that physical things don’t have an explanatory essence of this sort lies in the fact that we have two types of knowing instead of just one. Some knowledge does indeed have an inherently knowable essence: when we acquire this such knowledge we recognize it immediately as necessarily true. The certainty that 212 + 212 = 424, the impossibility of married bachelors, the discovery that the interior angles of a triangle = 180 degrees; these are all examples of knowledge which is necessarily true. Philosophers call this type of knowing analytic.

But there is a different kind of knowledge, that which we acquire empirically about the physical world. This type of knowing is termed synthetic. There is nothing necessarily true about the colors of physical objects, nor about their shapes, hardnesses, and so on. We can indeed develop explanations why they have the color, shape, or hardness they have, but those explanations are never necessarily true.

In short, those explanations do not lock into an underlying sufficient reason or explanatory essence behind physical objects for the simple reason, I submit, that no such thing exists. Physical objects are, at least in this ultimate sense, unexplanable. It might be better to say it this way: there is a mismatch between explanations of the physical world and that physical world itself. Furthermore, such a mismatch does not exist for analytic knowledge. In the case of analytic knowledge, there is a match between explanation and essence.

If there are two types of knowing, synthetic and analytic, it suggests (strongly, I would say) that there exist two types of things to be known: physical things and concepts.

So now, let’s go back to the question of God creating the physical world by thinking it into existence. We know now that the principle of sufficient reason applies to concepts, but not to physical objects. This means that words should be capable — should be magical enough, you might say — to bring concepts into existence simply by stating them. This certainly seems to be the case.

But since the principle of sufficient reason does not apply to physical objects, it follows that there is nothing to state about them that could ever bring them into existence. Words belong to a different realm. Concepts likewise belong to a different realm. They are powerless to bring the physical things of our world into existence.

Thoughts and concepts cannot be a means of creating the world. This leaves God, who has nothing else, powerless.

But it has always been the wrong question. The more important question is this: can God lift any rock at all? The answer would appear to be no.

God’s problem, of course, is that He’s not a body-being; He doesn’t have a body. (Which means also, strictly speaking, God can’t be He since God lacks genitalia — but we’ll politely ignore that little detail.)

Theists, we know, scoff at the notion that God requires a body to do anything. Even atheists generally consider this a pretty weak argument. And yet no one, theist or atheist, can imagine how God, a purely spiritual infinite being with no specific location in space, interacts with the physical world.

It’s not that God is in a different location than the universe; rather God has no location at all. God is also timeless: no moving parts. And that’s the crux of the problem: logically speaking it’s impossible for any being defined as God is defined to do anything.

Doing involves change, and the changeless — as a matter of definition — can’t change. Doing something with a physical world involves being someplace, in some physical location, and then interacting with constantly changing physical things. At every step required for doing anything with the physical world, God’s definition gets in the way and makes the interaction impossible.

Ah, but God can just have an idea and it will happen. God doesn’t have to interact with anything, He merely has to think a thought.

The Limitation of Thought

But this doesn’t work either. Even if we concede the doubtful proposition that God can think thoughts, those thoughts can’t get anything done. And we all know this. A thought of a tree can’t bring an actual tree into existence. Thoughts are simply incapable of being anything other than, well, thoughts. If anyone doubts this obvious truth, they can prove me wrong by simply imagining a tree into real existence.

Thoughts can’t move, create or destroy anything in the physical world. This is not because our human thoughts aren’t strong enough, or because we are “only human”. Rather, the limitation is inherent to the nature of thoughts. Thoughts can’t do any real, physical work because thoughts are a type of experiencing, and nothing more. We use thoughts to guide our physical actions, but it is those physical actions (using our hands and arms and legs and so on) which do all of our actual doing.

Thoughts, in other words, are useful only because we have bodies with which to carry those thoughts out. God has no body, and therefore God’s thoughts would be useless.

At this point, the theist’s typical response is to assert that nothing we know about thoughts applies when thinking about God’s thoughts. His thoughts are not like our thoughts at all but infinitely more powerful, and yes, His thoughts can bring matter into existence. Yes they can.

Which is simply an admission of defeat. Theists insist the answer is God, even though they know it is an answer chock full of contradiction and impossibility. Faith alone makes it work.

If only faith could.