technical images and linear text

Here’s a fun little discussion to take a look at, from the blog of Kirk Cameron’s ‘Way of the Master’ sidekick, Ray Comfort. I came across it through pure serendipity, because it’s linked back on the same CNN page from the article I wrote about last night.

Fundamentalist religion is a fascinating thing. It’s great for sparking atheist vitriol, and the necessary counterblasts of religious vitriol. Yet in the process of polemicization, atheists and advocates of religion tend to lose sight of the actual issues at stake. Putting my sanity at risk, I decided to throw a couple of pennies into the debate, and I thought I’d re-post my comments here for the edification of a rather less polemical crowd. I love reading when religionists and anti-religionists play with intensely philosophical ideas and pretend that they’re the first to come up with such notions. Religion and philosophy have long toyed with each others’ ideas, but it seems that religionists have now fully lost touch with the philosophical origins of their concepts.

Oh “Cypress Christian,” I particularly loved when you came up with your pat observation that “I love how they try to wriggle there way out of a straight forward question.” Apart from the funny there/their homonymy, we have the absurdity of trying to call Kalam’s cosmological argument ’straight forward.’ Since well before the time of Parmenides, this has been one of the most fundamental metaphysical questions ‘in existence.’ What does it mean to exist, and must all existing processes have a first cause? If one accepts the principle that they do, then indeed, you are 100% correct: the universe must have a first cause.

Unfortunately, this is just about the least straightforward of all conceivable questions. It’s absolutely not some creation ex nihilo of William Lane Craig, but simply one formulation of perhaps the most ancient problem of metaphysics. It might be prima facie simple, but it conceals all kinds of premises that don’t stand up to even the most cursory scrutiny. So here we go, I’m going to provide you with two refutations of the Kalam argument as proposed by religious folk, and then one tentative affirmation of its conclusions that almost certainly won’t lead in a direction they’ll like.

The first refutation stems from a denial of the initial premise : “Everything that begins to exist has a cause.” In the discussion, ‘Justin’ is already onto this line of reasoning. He says: “Name one thing that “began to exist” other than ‘the universe.’ Be careful that you do not refer to something that is simply a rearrangement of parts.” Logic tells us nothing without empirical premises, and there is no empirical confirmation for this premise of the Kalam argument. Phenomenological: yes; empirical: no. As Justin states, all that ‘exists’ in our actual space is a rearrangement of preexisting parts. Science shows that ‘everything which exists’ has no proximate cause for its existence but physical necessity and favorable circumstances. Given that I’m fairly sure religious ideologues don’t want to conclude that God is simply a handy name for physical necessity and favourable circumstances, this can’t be what Christians mean by cause. Their argument is thus inevitably circular, insofar as given the implied definitions of ’cause’ and ‘existence,’ the cause for the existence of the universe is also the cause for the material existence of every existing thing. With this argument, you’re essentially trying to infer the structure of the universe from the structuring of matter, on the basis of a false analogy. (cf. Aristotelian onto-theology). Faith is irrational: this isn’t really a bad thing, either, although some twisted ideologues might think so.

The second refutation stems from a denial of the conclusion, even with a hypothetical acceptance of its premise: I think ‘Justin’ must be a philosopher, because once again he comes around to a wonderfully nuanced argument. “The universe, as the sum of all that exists, cannot have a cause because its cause would not exist by definition.” This is essentially the non-affirmation of negative theology: “God is not,” because working from the vulgar definition of being, God must ‘be’ something which is *beyond* existence, ‘otherwise than being.’ If you want to argue that there is a first cause of the universe, and you accept the conventional physicist’s definition of the universe as totality of existence, then the cause of the universe simply, necessarily, does not exist. Justin then goes on to state that “nothing has ever been observed appearing de novo, regardless of causality… Since we have no idea whether or how it is that things “pop out of thin air” (as you say), we cannot say that a cause is required for those kinds of events.” Setting aside the question of quantum phenomena, logical arguments actually never prove the existence of God for this precise reason: the Universe appears, even to the physicist, to be a creation ex nihilo. The trouble is, we have no idea whether such spontaneous creation has anything like a ’cause,’ or what that ’cause’ could conceivably look like. We simply don’t know anything about causality prior to the Big Bang, or about anything prior to the beginning of the Universe as such.

So when Cypress Christian attacks Justin’s argument, his polemicization blinds him to the truths immanent within both of their positions. He claims that Justin’s position is essentially that “yes, the universe did begin to exist and everything that I’ve seen that begins to exist has a cause. But since I’ve never seen anything begin to exist out of nothing, as the universe must have (since it’s not infinite), then there just can’t be a cause. Although there is a perfectly logical explanation on how something could come from nothing (as it seemed to have done), we can’t say for sure so therefore I don’t believe it.” He says that as though it were somehow inherently inconsistent. Really, it’s little more than a concise statement of the state of contemporary cosmology, although, again, most contemporary physicists do observe particles popping in and out of existence all the time. The last sentence is particularly fun. There *are* a number of interesting possible expanations for creation “seeming to have come” ex nihilo, first and foremost amongst which would be the claim that the creation of the universe was just a favorable conjunction of physical circumstances on a dimensional plane beyond ourse. The universe ’seemed to come’ from nothing indeed, and may well have come from something specific: not the divine will of God, but a physically predictable phenomenon, at least with an adequate physics.

However, this leads us to the third possible solution to your beloved Kalam argument: we might even agree with it. Philosopher and Talmudic commentator Emmanuel Levinas’ beautiful Totality and Infinity is perhaps the finest philosophical argument for why science is by essence incomplete, and why the implied hopefulness of Justin’s position (‘one day we’ll interpret the causality of the universe scientifically!’) might not be justified. Since, as I said above, we simply know nothing of pre-universal causality, scientific reason gives us absolutely no reason to discard the ‘God hypothesis’ out of hand. There might, after all, be an omnipotent and omniscient Creator whose divine will caused the creation ex nihilo in the Big Bang: only a complete physics could tell us otherwise, and physics, like all scientific theory, is very much incomplete. So the tenacity with which religionists hold on to their God is in many ways justified and certainly not incompatible with science, even though the polemics of both sides might lead us to question these facts.

Why do such polemics persist?

The answer is about as straightforward as any philosophical solution can be. Scientists disagree with theology because it’s fundamentally incompatible with their view of nature. Religionists reject science out of hand because it’s not yet capable of refuting the real essence of their argument from causation. Here we can reach a compromise dissatisfying to both sides, and therefore just. Reason can never refute God’s existence, any more than it can prove it. Kierkegaard was well aware of this truth when he described the ‘leap of faith’ phenomenon, fundamentally beyond reason and fundamental to all religious thought (whether ‘fundamentalist’ or otherwise). You religionists have already made your leap of faith, and unlike so many dogmatic atheists, I myself congratulate you for it. Indeed, I wish I was capable of such a leap, as I’m sure do many materialist scientists, however unconsciously. The problem arises when fundamentalists attempt argue from the perspective of this leap and disguise its conclusions in the language of reason, as rational or logical premises. They’re trying to rationalize an irrational decision, which is an essentially human impulse, but in this case woefully misguided. Science is an incomplete system of truths, founded on essentially nothing but the hope of a complete truth ‘to come,’ thus constructing for itself its own proper messianism. Religion, by contrast, is a relatively ‘complete’ system of falsehoods, founded on one profound truth, really little more than a question: the universe exists, and so there must be some reason or sufficient cause, however ineffable, for its existence.

And so here is no natural opposition between science and religion. Unfortunately, scientific reason is incompatible with religious theology. Perhaps you’re familiar with another argument, at least as old as that of Kalam. (I don’t really feel like checking dates.) It’s called the Epicurean Paradox, and it was a favourite of David Hume. It goes like this: “Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?” Like any atheist, I agree wholeheartedly with the conclusion derived at from this paradox: God is neither able nor willing to exclude so-called ‘evil’ from this world, most likely because he operates in a dimension which transcends our categories of ‘Good’ and ‘Evil.’ Note, however, that this paradox says nothing of causation, only of the attributes which are to be ascribed to the cause. The Epicurean Paradox discards not the concept of a first cause, but the name ‘God’ for this cause, with its metaphysical baggage of nonsensical and inconsistent attributes. (I might add that, thanks to my modern understanding of l’arbitraire du signe, I would answer the final question of the Paradox simply as follows: we may as well keep calling the first cause God, suitably defined. It’s a good a name as any!)
Oh, ‘Cypress Christian.’ I apologize for dragging you so far out of your league. Here’s a philosophical argument that’s just as ’straightforward’ as yours ostensibly was, but I’d love to see you in the process of wrapping your head around this one. Your argument from causation certainly is onto something: and that something is the incompleteness of reason. Your religion, and its entire theology, is onto nothing: your image of God is incompatible with the image of the world He created. Thus science has always forced theology to adapt, even though it has never succeeded in troubling the God Hypothesis quite as much as it hopes. I’m coming around to religion myself, but certainly not any conventional theological one: my God, like that of Meister Eckhart, is not. He is not good, He is not evil, He is not just, nor does He have any of the analogical attributes you ascribe to Him. He does not exist, ought not rightfully even be called ‘he:’ it is simply the a priori cause of existence, eternally beyond ‘being.’ Thus my God is not in any way incompatible with the (non-)Gods of science. We know almost nothing of its attributes, and yet we can begin to draw inferences from physical science about this ‘Deus Absconditus’ and the necessary reasons for its decision to abscond.

Interestingly enough, we’ve come now to the premises of a much more productive debate. It’s silly – as philosophers at least since Kant have observed – to debate about the substance or attributes of the Divine. This can only lead to antinomies and absurdities. What we can argue about, as philosophers, scientists, and religionists, is whether, and to what extent, we can know God. This, unfortunately, won’t happen as long as scientists and religionists think they’re debating about substance or attributes. They’re really talking about epistemology, and unfortunately for fundamentalist religion, I think when cast in proper terms, the debate is pretty one-sided. Fundamentalist religion wants to have it both ways: it wants to argue for a faith in God which transcends reason, but then it wants to prove that it’s right to be faithful – using reason. Its implicit epistemology is essentially anti-rationalist. Luckily, for those without decided loyalties on other side of the basic polemic, ideological science doesn’t come out all that much better. It wants to be entirely rational, to make its rational system both complete and ‘total,’ and yet it always wants to deny the fact that its longest-held epistemological premise (that is to say, the knowability of the universe in its totality) still needs to be accepted by the scientist on blind faith.

I’m dying to hear what Mr. Comfort thinks about these ideas himself. My own irrational belief is that most people who are attracted to so-called ‘fundamentalist’ religious movements just don’t have it in themselves to make a real ‘leap of faith’ and recognize it as such: thus I’ll probably get no reply from Ray. Maybe my comment won’t even get posted on his site. It’s so unfortunate that scientific reason appears to have the monopoly on intellectual honesty, because it certainly doesn’t need to be this way. Religion can find a way to argue for the core of its philosophy in the face of materialist science, without resorting to dogmatism and polemicization, even though I’m left believing it never will. Prove me wrong, (religious) folks!