The main event of God Fortnight1 is here, an event open to theists, atheists and anyone in between who cares about the big questions.
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Section 1 on Science and Induction was previewed last time. Here the weighty essay is reproduced in it entirety. If you engage with it seriously and deeply, it has the power to change your world completely. Let us begin.
Is the Problem of Evil Fatal for Theism?
Section 1: Science and the inductive challenge to God
Section 2: Free will, evil and the deductive challenge to God
Section 3: Tzimtzum as the elegant solution to the puzzle
Section 4 (conclusion): Affirming our freedom
Section 1: Science and the inductive challenge to God
Science has a very high opinion of itself; and in many ways this isn’t surprising. If you had brought us modern medicine and unprecedented technological development you’d be smug too. The benefits of science are clear for all to see and long may they continue. But though the fruits of science are sweet, it falls onto somewhat less fertile ground when attempting to make truth claims. Newton’s three laws of motion may be practically correct for all intents and purposes, but the work of Einstein shows that they fall short when trying to make some universal statement of truth. And when tackling the God debate, science shows itself to be even more wanting.
The problem with science is that it tries to divine truths through induction; meaning that by collecting an ever larger quantum of evidence, which tends towards a particular conclusion, it reasons that said conclusion is true. The problem though is that a single (reliable) piece of evidence to the contrary can bring the whole house of cards crashing down. The example par excellence is the darling of business schools everywhere: the case of the black swan. For centuries it had been assumed that all swans were white; a reasonable claim given that no non-white swan had been found. Yet upon their travels to the Australian continent, the Europeans discovered to their amazement that native swans could be black. The truth claim that “all swans were white” was found to be definitively false and the huge corpus of Eurasian evidence accumulated since time memorial had led us to that mistaken conclusion. Thus we must now reach the contrary position; that although inductive reasoning is practically useful, it is a flawed tool of philosophy.
Karl Popper is famous for his attack on induction, but conscious of the need to distinguish between science and puedo-science, he devised an alternative test: Falsification. Science, aware of its inductive limitations and humble in its claims regarding the human experience, should be aware that any claim is one solid piece of evidence away from dismissal (or at least amendment). What the true scientist should do, therefore, is to leave their conclusions - and the evidence on which they are based - open to attack. Any scientific claim should be precise and clear, allowing fellow professionals to disprove the finding by means of new evidence. That way, and with each new amendment to our knowledge to fit the evidence, we will get, slowly but surely, nearer to the truth.
A pseudo-scientist postulates imprecise theories that can be maintained regardless of new evidence. A real scientist isn’t afraid of criticism because scepticism is the very essence of their vocation.
In the matter of theism, the science v religion debate shows all the faults of “faith” in induction. As regards the former, New Atheist scientists argue that God doesn’t exist for want of evidence. Now let us concede for the sake of argument that no such evidence exists. The “there is no God” assertion then becomes a white swan proposition waiting to be disproved. One mere “sighting” of God would blow the clam to pieces. And even if that “sighting” never came, it would be no different to our perspective before Australian landfall. We would need to be humble in light of our knowledge yet undiscovered.
No scientific proposition can be definitively accepted for this very reason. And to those quoting Occam’s Razor, claiming that we don’t need God to live our daily lives, the theist would counter Isaac Newton. We didn’t need Einstein to improve the everyday utility of Newton (indeed Einstein’s discoveries may yet utterly obliterate us), but Jewish German genius was still correct to pursue scientific advancement. Utiliy and truthfulness are in no way synonymous.
But the fact remains that there is evidence of God; specifically in the thousands upon thousands of examples of personal religious experience, including in the life of the author. Whether that evidence is sufficient is an entirely different question. Though, as already described, it is questionable whether any quantum of scientific evidence about any matter is sufficient for truth (as opposed to everyday usefulness).
In a previous article, I explored why evidence of personal experience isn’t available to public display2: I likened publicly sharing experiences of the divine encounter with sharing one experiences in the bedroom and for the sake of relative brevity, I will not repeat that thesis here. But to these arguments, I would add the hard problem of consciousness.
In Thomas Nagel’s groundbreaking article “What is it like to be a bat?”, the philosopher noted we cannot even imagine what it is like to be the eponymous mammal, detecting as it does, its meals through an echo-radar system. The “what does it feel like”, experiential mental state of another - the subjective perspective of a different being - is entirely unavailable to us. Science supposes objectivity, that water can be reduced to H20 or that sound can be reduced to invisible sound waves, but in terms of our subjective experiences no such reductionism is possible. In the first place, we cannot access the mind of another (let alone that of a bat) or even imagine what some alien experience feels like. So evidence leading to objective science seems impossible. Even if we were to hook up an individual to a brain scan and see the image in a particular part of the brain move to the right when the subject touched a flame, that wouldn’t tell us anything about how the experience felt like (its “qualia” in philosophy speak). To be sure, it would show us that something is happening to the individual, presumably causing them pain, but about their actual mental state, it would remain silent.
To be clear, mental states are real. It isn’t religious hocus pocus or black magic abracadabra. Frank Jackson’s Mary’s Room thought experiment explains it well. Imagine a girl called Mary who is the world expert on colour. She knows all the scientific facts there are to know about colour and is a whizz on the colour-detecting brain scanner. She has read every book on the subject - indeed she has written many of them - and she is the world’s leading authority on the matter. But she has grown up in a world of black and white, never having experienced colour once in her life.
One day she exits her cocooned, monochromatic ghetto and enters the technicolour, Wizard of Oz world of Judy Garland. She sees red for the first time. Would she learn anything new? Would she have been imparted something different that her academic exploits had hitherto failed to teach her? The answer is yes. Her experience. Having seen red, she will finally know what red feels like. She will have glimpsed a whole new world of mental states. Ergo mental states are real and cannot be reduced to mere scientific equations.
Similarly, personal evidence of God is something personal, subjective, unknowable to the other, but nonetheless real to the subject.
By subjective, one neither denotes a matter of opinion nor (necessarily) an untruth, rather that it is an experience not subject to scientific reductionism. We cannot access the brain of another and thus we cannot even imagine what that experience feels like. It cannot be put into words and even if it could, those words would be manifestly insufficient. We, like Mary, could gather all the claimed evidence of different theists; we could interview them and observe them under a brain scan. But unless we experience what it’s like for ourselves, we will lack the personal qualia to discern exactly what believers in God are talking about.
Now personal experience of God may be flawed and it may not even prove the existence of God in an objective, scientific way (if that were even possible), but given that we cannot enter into the mind of the (intelligent) people who believe - or other people who believe if you yourself have experienced the divine - we are incapable of speaking of the subject scientifically. Even if God were a mere mental state, again, as with consciousness, it is a matter incapable of discussion. You need to experience it yourself and even then you are but one mind who may use words in a different way to other persons.
The absence of the ability to discuss scientifically doesn’t equate to untruth. To repeat an analogy I’ve used before: is love true? Can it be reduced to a scientific equation? Can it be discussed objectively? Can we divine the mental states of others who use the same word? Can we agree upon a fixed meaning of love? Just because love is an abstract, non-scientific concept doesn’t mean that it isn’t true.
The apparent evidence of love is all around us, in our relationships and within our families. Those who have experienced love know what it feels like and those who have been denied will not. No scan showing brain changes in the minds of those who love can capture anything about its qualia. The fruits of love in those affected by its glory can make us induce its truthfulness, but inductive reasoning is flawed. We, the lovers of the world, act as if it is true, all the while humbly acknowledging that we really know nothing.
If Karl Popper were here, he would say to me “falsification”, but as discussed in my article “The Problem with Atheism”, God as a concept is the ultimate abstraction. He/she/they/it It cannot be positively defined as a matter of definition and both Jewish and Islamic medieval philosophers (notably Maimonides) would concur. There is nothing at all that we can say about God as substance. The Almighty can only be spoken of through His actions, just as love speaks through the amour-made-manifest of every loving human being. Indeed the Maimonodean view would even be accepted by the most irreligious of the modern age. AJ Ayer famously said that he couldn’t define himself as an atheist given the inability to define the God concept adequately. He was correct. How can you disbelieve something you can’t even define?
Popper would also agree. He would undoubtedly say that science-like claims about God are nonsense. If you cannot define God; if you cannot divine the mental states of others; if you cannot make falsifiable claims about God; then religious science is puedo-science on steroids. No science claims about God are intelligible. Period. BUT that doesn’t necessarily mean that they are necessarily untrue. Indeed the mental states about God (if not the Divine One Himself) surely are true in much the same way as Mary’s experience of seeing red cannot be dismissed on the basis of pure scientific reductionism.
Nothing I have said so far proves God. Indeed I have put into question the entire positive scientific enterprise. Insofar as it claims that we may ever find the scientific truth about any matter, we must be as sceptical as a black swan.
However, just because something cannot be proved as true, doesn’t negate its apparent truth to the experiencing individual. Neither - of course - that science is profoundly useful, as the work of Newton and the modern scientific revolution more than amply demonstrate. The challenge to God, if it is to come at all, will not come from inductive reasoning. It will come from a far more powerful source; that of deduction. And if the premises which lead to “God does not exist” are all proved true, then theism is definitively dead and the concept of free will-human agency along with it. Furthermore, if humans are without agency, then punishment is purposeless and we are acting vainly in our quest for individual political action to rebuild the nation. The stakes couldn’t be higher.
It’s time to put our logical hats on…
