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"Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little." -Edmund Burke
Thursday, April 17, 2008
God Explains Nothing
When theists are asked to justify their belief in God, they often respond that God is required toexplain some facet of reality that they consider otherwise unexplainable. God explains wherethe universe comes from, where life comes from, where morals come from, or why there issomething rather than nothing. Since science lacks the answers to these questions
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, theyclaim, we must look to religion. Enter God, stage left.This line of reasoning is, of course, a logical fallacy known as
argumentum ad ignorantiam
(argument from ignorance), and sometimes called the "God of the gaps" fallacy. Theargument's fault lies in the implicit assumption that the God explanation gains automaticcredence by virtue of humanity's general ignorance on the subject (or, as is often the case,the personal ignorance of the one advancing the argument). The existence of anything canonly be established via direct evidence, and the argument from ignorance offers none.Ignorance, of course, goes a long way toward explaining why religions exist in the first place.The major religions of today were born in an era when life and death phenomena such aweather, disease, and natural disasters were completely unexplained. Thus myths developedto explain what was then a complete mystery, and those myths grew into religions over thecourse of generations. Viewed from this perspective, "God of the gaps" has a long andinglorious history -- we now understand weather, disease, and natural disasters (to name justa few) without reference to the supernatural. Nevertheless, gaps in our collected knowledgeremain, and probably always will; it is a sad commentary on human rationality that many of ustend to cling to any explanation, however inadequate, rather then accept that we simply donot know.
 Argumentum ad ignorantiam
is closely related to what Richard Dawkins has dubbed the"argument from personal incredulity". This argument, most often deployed by fundamentalists,states that while, for example, the development of life does have a scientific explanation, it issimply too incredible to be believed. This argument can take forms ranging from theuninformed and willfully ignorant ("I just can't see how something as complex as the eye couldhave just formed itself") to the philosophically ridiculous ("When I consider the miracle of birth,I just can't believe there's no God"). Needless to say, reality is wholly independent of one'scapacity to accept it. The argument from personal incredulity has nothing worthwhile to sayabout the truth, but does say a great deal about the intellectual laziness of the person makingit.Even were arguments from ignorance and personal incredulity logically valid, they would stillsuffer from another fatal flaw -- the God explanation always regresses to the very problem itpurports to solve. If God explains how the universe (or life) came to exist, how did God cometo exist? If God is the source of morality, where did God get his morality? If God explains whythere is something rather than nothing, why is there God rather than nothing? God is a cheapanswer, a pseudo-explanation fit only for those who are unable or unwilling to think critically. A
 
general rule of science (not to mention common sense), known as the principle of parsimonyor Occam's razor, states that we should favor economy of explanation. Thus we can dispensewith any hypothesis that simply adds complexity and raises new questions, while lacking anyreal explanatory power in the final analysis. That seems to describe the God hypothesis quitewell, as God explains nothing.
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Science does, in fact, have a great deal to say on these topics, as I will explore in future posts. Intellectually honestreligious people tend to emphasise that scientific knowledge on such subjects is inadequate or incomplete; dishonestones tend to ignore, misrepresent, or remain ignorant of the state of scientific knowledge.
 Posted by Eric Ross at9:44 PM 1 comments Links to this post  Labels:argument from personal incredulity,argumentum ad ignorantiam,logical fallacies,  Occam's razor , Richard Dawkins 
Saturday, January 26, 2008
The Senseless Center
In the world of a moderate Christian, you can have your cake and eat it too. All of the pillars of modern science, including Big Bang cosmology and evolutionary biology, are held to be true,but Christianity is true also. Thus there is no conflict between science and religion , they aresimply different ways of knowing. If fundamentalists and atheists would just relinquish their dogmatic, extreme, uncompromising positions and embrace the middle ground thatmoderates have staked out, we would all live in a more harmonious world. Christianmoderates fashion themselves as peacemakers; they have the solution to the fruitless andoften polemic debate between the two "extremes". Sounds perfectly sensible, right?Actually, it's completely senseless. Christian moderates have committed the logical fallacyknown as
argumentum ad temperantiam
(argument to moderation), wherein the middleground between two positions is asserted to be the most reasonable merely by virtue of beingthe middle ground. The popular phrase
the truth lies somewhere in between
is essentially anappeal to
argumentum ad temperantiam.
While the middle ground is sometimes correct, it isentitled to no special claim on truth. Like any other claim, a middle ground claim must beestablished as true on the basis of evidence. On that score, moderate Christianity failsmiserably.To give just one popular example, moderate Christians usually claim that there is no conflictbetween the scientific story of the development of the universe (beginning with the Big Bangand ultimately leading to humans living on Earth via evolution) and the Bible (specifically theBook of Genesis). I have searched extensively for explanations of how to reconcile the two,and have found only weak rationalizations. I feel confident in asserting that no intellectuallysatisfying reconciliation exists.The first tactic moderates often employ is evasion. The Bible is not a scientific textbook, theysay, and ought not be read literally. The commentary at the beginning of my Bible (the NewRevised Standard Version) says the following:Chapters 1-3 deal with questions that have been asked in every age: "Where did the worldand its inhabitants come from?" ... Genesis says: God created everything (1:1). The bookdoes not give details as to when or how this was done. Innumerable fruitless arguments have
 
raged as people have tried to use Genesis to prove or disprove various scientific theories.Genesis is simply not intended to be a scientific report. Rather, Genesis is a confession of faith. It declares that God is the Creator of all, and human beings are the climax of God'screation.Similarly, Francis Collins
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, in hisTime magazine debatewith Richard Dawkins, said:St. Augustine wrote that basically it is not possible to understand what was being described inGenesis. It was not intended as a science textbook. It was intended as a description of whoGod was, who we are and what our relationship is supposed to be with God. Augustineexplicitly warns against a very narrow perspective that will put our faith at risk of lookingridiculous. If you step back from that one narrow interpretation, what the Bible describes isvery consistent with the Big Bang.These attempts are hand waving are meant to distract attention from, and avoid confronting,what Genesis actually says. In Genesis 1, the entire universe is created in six days. The earthis created on the first day; plants are created on the third day; the sun, moon, and stars on thefourth; and so on, with humans appearing last, on the sixth day, and God "resting" on theseventh.When pressed, moderates will declare this to be metaphor -- the "days" are not literal daysbut rather periods of time, perhaps even billions of years. To support this assertion, they pointout that the sun is not created until the fourth "day", and since it is impossible to have a daywithout the sun, the term must have another meaning. They may also point to phrases later inthe Bible, such as "with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years arelike one day" (2 Peter 3:8).This explanation is absurd. Even were we to allow the "days" is Genesis 1 to representbillions of years, the order is completely wrong. Science has taught us that the sun existedbefore the earth, and certainly before plants. Genesis has the earth created first, then plants,then the sun. Furthermore, we have strong textual evidence from elsewhere in the Bible thatthe six days of creation are meant as standard 24 hour days. In Exodus 20:8-11, the fourth of the famous ten commandments is given as:Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work.But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work. . . For in sixdays the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventhday.Clearly, God was not telling the Israelites to work for six periods of billions of years, then reston the seventh period of billions of years. Even if moderates could concoct an explanation for reconciling cosmology and evolution with the Bible (which I doubt), they would still have toclear the additional hurdle of showing why their position is more reasonable than the one thatboth fundamentalists and atheists hold -- that the Bible simply means what it says. Why wouldan omnipotent and omniscient God be such a poor communicator that he has misled scoresof generations of humans as to their origins, and placed the Bible on a collision course withscience? Why doesn't Genesis simply say what it means?Pushing further down this line of reasoning, the moderate Christian's entire religion begins tounravel. When cornered, moderates will reluctantly concede that Adam and Eve, and theGarden of Eden, never existed. They prefer to hang their hats on the life and teachings of 
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