A Rebuttal To Swinburn's The Existence Of God Part 1
I like Swinburne's writing, but his arguments are not sufficient to get to theism.
Swinburne has the views that I find the most persuasive of any theist. He thinks that God is not necessary, doesn’t think the Ontological argument works, and adopts a generally Bayesian approach. Given that he is, in my view, the best the theists had to offer, I thought it would be worth responding to his book. Thus I shall do this.
I’ll skip the first 4 chapters, because I largely agree with them, they’re mostly methodological bayesian clarifications.
Chapter 5
Swinburne defines theism as the view that “There exists now, and always has existed and will exist, God, a spirit, that is, a non-embodied person who is omnipresent.” He elaborates that God is also omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent. Swinburne goes on to claim that the prior in God is high, claiming
I propose to argue that it is a very simple hypothesis indeed. I shall begin to do this by showing how the divine properties that I have outlined fit together. A theistic explanation is a personal explanation. It explains phenomena in terms of the action of a person. Personal explanation explains phenomena as the results of the action of a person brought about in virtue of his basic powers, beliefs, and intentions. Theism postulates God as a person with intentions, beliefs, and basic powers, but ones of a very simple kind, so simple that it postulates the simplest kind of person that there could be.
A personal explanation is not a very simple one. This is because persons are complicated things, with a variety of goals, desires, and complex mental phenomena. One indicator of how complex something is relates to how easy it is to model mathematically. Modeling mathematically the Schroedinger equations is much easier than modeling an entire person, with all of their desires.
To see why this is the case, consider a question Yudkowsky has asked, namely, why isn’t the hypothesis a witch did it always simpler? The reason is because a witch is actually very complicated. Yudkowsky elaborates on how to measure complexity—and it fares rather poorly for personal explanations. This is because modeling a personal explanation requires far more information than an impersonal one.
To start with, theism postulates a God who is just one person,5 not many. To postulate one substance is to make a very simple postulation. He is infinitely powerful, omnipotent. This is a simpler hypothesis than the hypothesis that there is a God who has suchand-such limited power (for example, the power to rearrange matter, but not the power to create it). It is simpler in just the same way that the hypothesis that some particle has zero mass, or infinite velocity is simpler than the hypothesis that it has a mass of 0.34127 of some unit, or a velocity of 301,000 km/sec. A finite limitation cries out for an explanation of why there is just that particular limit, in a way that limitlessness does not.
Postulating one God may be simpler than postulating any specific number of God’s. However, it’s not at all clear that one God is more probable than any combination of more than one Gods. The odds of there being any number of Gods greater than 1 seems higher than the odds that there is only one God.
The argument from limits is just a non starter for reasons I lay out here. Postulating that the Sun has infinite heat is not more probable than some non infinite heat. Additionally, there’s a reference class problem for what is unlimited. The first thing can create matter, so maybe it’s unlimited in that regard, but we have no reason to think it’s unreasonable in all regards. Indeed, as I argue, a fully unlimited being is incoherent.
God’s beliefs have a similar infinite quality. Human persons have some few finite beliefs, some true, some false, some justified, some not. In so far as they are true and justified (or at any rate justified in a certain way), beliefs amount to knowledge. It would seem most consonant with his omnipotence that an omnipotent being have beliefs that amount to knowledge. For, without true beliefs about the consequences of your actions, you may fail to realize your intentions. True beliefs fail to amount to knowledge only if they are true by accident. But, if the divine properties are possessed necessarily, God’s beliefs could not be false, and so could not be true by accident. And, if an omnipotent being has knowledge, the simplest such supposition is to postulate that the omnipotent being is limited in his knowledge, as in his power, only by logic. In that case he would have all the knowledge that it is logically possible that a person have—that is, he would be omniscient.
This is just a way of getting from omnipotence to omniscience, but I don’t buy omnipotence in the first place. However, the path to omniscience is not straightforward. While lacking knowledge may foil aims, having knowledge might as well. I am, for example, very happy that I don’t know exactly what it was like to be brutally tortured to death, or to engage in sex acts I find grotesque. It seems God wouldn’t want the knowledge of what it was like subjectively for a child molestor to molest children.
For a person to act, he has to have intentions. A person could be omnipotent in the sense that whatever (logically possible) action he formed the intention to do, he would succeed in doing, and also omniscient so that he knew what were all the (logically possible) actions available to an omnipotent being in his situation, and yet be predetermined to form certain intentions. His intentions might be determined by causal factors outside his control, or at any rate, as are those of humans, greatly influenced by them. But, if a person is predetermined (or has an inbuilt probabilistic tendency) to act in certain specific ways, this means that a tendency to act in a particular way is built into him. But a person with an inbuilt detailed specification of how to act is a much more complex person than one whose actions are determined only by his uncaused choice at the moment of choice. Such a being I call a perfectly free being. Theism in postulating that God is perfectly free makes the simplest supposition about his choice of intentions.
This is not true at all. For one, I don’t even think that the notion of a being whose actions are determined neither by chance nor necessity is coherent. What is the third option?
Second, even if possible, why is it simple. If his will is determined by nothing predictable, then that means that every thoughts and aim he ever has is unexplained—making the theory much less simple.
Swinburne next argues for reasons internalism as a way to get to omnibenevolence. I agree with his move here.
The hypothesis of theism postulates not merely the simplest starting point of a personal explanation there could be (simpler than many gods or weak gods), but the simplest starting point of explanation for the existence of the universe with all the characteristics that I shall be analysing. We shall see this in detail in subsequent chapters, but the basic point is this. A scientific explanation, will have to postulate as a starting point of explanation a substance or substances that caused or still cause the universe and its characteristics. To postulate many or extended such substances (an always existing universe; or an extended volume of matter-energy from which, uncaused by God, all began) is to postulate more entities than theism. The simplest scientific starting point would be an unextended point. This, however, would have to have some finite amount or other of power or liability to exercise it (since what it will create would not be constrained by rational considerations), and so it would not possess the simplicity of infinity
But theism also has to postulate God exists and also has powers. It runs into the same problems. Thus, theism is not a good explanation. It has only superficial simplicity.
Furthermore, if some actual or postulated entity other than God is to provide a complete (or ultimate) explanation of phenomena, it needs to have added to it (in the case of a person) specific powers, beliefs, and intentions, or (in the case of an inanimate substance) specific powers and liabilities to exercise them. We need both the ‘what’ that causes, and the ‘why’ it causes. The advantage of theism is that the mere existence of God provides most of that extra ‘why’. The powers and beliefs of a God are part of his simple nature. And his perfect goodness constrains the intentions that he will form—he will, as we have seen, always do the best or equal best action or kind of action in so far as there are such, and no bad action. God chooses to bring about what he does in virtue of seeing the goodness of things; and, in so far as that still gives him an enormous choice of what to bring about, he chooses by a ‘mental toss up’. Thus for the theist, explanation stops at what, intuitively, is the most natural kind of stopping place for explanation—the choice of an agent. We ourselves make choices, and it seems to us as we do so that we are the source of one state of affairs coming about rather than another. Of course there may be some explanation of why we make the choices that we do. But we understand what is happening without having to make that supposition. Hence we have a familiar concept of an agent’s bringing 106 The Intrinsic Probability of Theism about through his choice the diversity of things, which it is natural to use in this context. It follows that the very existence of God entails most of the other elements involved in a full personal explanation of phenomena, requiring only the addition of his intention at the time (the limits to his possible intentions being set by his existence as a necessarily perfectly good being). Such a full explanation will also, we have seen, be an ultimate explanation. In the case of any actual or postulated inanimate substance, there is no reason to expect it to have the liability to exercise any powers it might have in this way or that way. That is, there is no reason to expect an always existing universe or a universe-creating entity to be of any one kind rather than any other, create a universe of any one kind rather than any other. By contrast, God’s goodness (which follows from his other properties) will lead us to expect to find a universe of one kind rather than another. And if, as I shall be arguing, the actual universe is of a kind we would expect to find, then theism will have considerable explanatory power. To postulate a rival hypothesis that has the same explanatory power, we would have to complicate the bare hypotheses that I have been discussing (an always existing universe, or an unextended point from which all began) by supposing that they had the requisite extra properties (always being of a certain kind, or creating a universe of a certain kind) for no very good reason—that’s just how it is. So, even if some rival actual or postulated substance was as such as simple as theism, it would have to be made a lot more complicated in order to have as much explanatory power as theism.
But theism also has to postulate this. Additionally, it could be that there’s some simpler parsimonious explanations based on strings or something similar that explain both reality and the powers of things to affect other things. Or perhaps the laws of physics lead to the emergence of physical things.
Chapter 6
Our understanding of what is good and bad is very limited. Some actions may be good or bad because of intrinsic qualities that they possess to which we as morally imperfect beings are totally insensitive. Some actions may be good or bad because of consequences that they have but of which we, as beings of very limited knowledge and intelligence, have not the slightest notion. Yet clearly most of us have some understanding of moral values. When we judge that it is good for us to feed the starving and help the weak, wrong to tell lies and break promises (all of this at any rate under normal circumstances), we make true moral judgements. And we are able to judge to some extent whether these actions would be good or wrong for us to do, as the case may be, if we were beings of different kinds—if we were very powerful or had created the people who are now starving. We reach judgements of general moral principle by reflecting on particular cases, and considering the grounds on which we judge that this action was bad and that one supererogatory. And then we can see whether the goodness (or whatever) of the action depends on certain features of the circumstances of the agent and time of his action, or whether the action would be good for any agent to do at any time. We can see, for example, that, although it might be good for me and perhaps also for you to punish a child of mine for breaking your window, it would not be good for a mere stranger to take upon The Explanatory Power of Theism 113 himself that task. We can see too that my obligation to keep a promise I have made to you would be entirely unaffected by how powerful I was; the obligation would remain even if I was omnipotent. Even on individual such matters we could be mistaken. Our understanding of most other things discussed in this book, and in most books about most things, is very limited and prone to error, but is such that we can grow in it. We have to make tentative judgements in the light of our understanding at the time of our investigation—in this matter as in all matters—bearing in mind the possibility of future revision. But it is wildly implausible to suppose that our understanding of what is morally good and bad is totally in error. And, if it was, I cannot see that we would have a concept of moral goodness at all.1 So, given some idea of moral goodness, we have some idea of the kinds of world that God, if there is a God, would be likely to bring about. If there is in some situation a unique best action, he will do it. God will therefore, I suggest, always keep his promises and tell the truth. But I suggest that it is not generally the case that there is before God a unique best action, or a set of incompatible equal best actions. If there could be a unique best of all the possible worlds that (it is logically possible) God could create, it would be a unique best act to create it. But, contrary to Leibniz,2 there could not be such a world.3 For suppose that there is such a world, W. W will presumably contain a finite or infinite number of conscious beings. Would a world be a worse world if, instead of one of these conscious beings, it contained another with the same properties—if, instead of Swinburne, it contained a counterpart of Swinburne who wrote an exactly similar book and in other ways had exactly similar properties and did exactly similar actions? Surely not. But then there will be no unique best of all possible worlds that God could create. If there could be a best of all possible worlds that God could create, that is, a world such that no world is better than it (although other worlds may be equally good), then it would be an equal best act to create such a world. But it seems almost equally implausible to suppose that there could be such a world. For again take any world W. Presumably the goodness of such a world, as I shall argue in more detail later, will consist in part in it containing a finite or infinite number of conscious beings who will enjoy it. But, if the enjoyment of the world by each is a valuable thing, surely a world with a few more conscious beings in it would be a yet more valuable world—for there would be no reason why the existence of the latter should detract from the enjoyment of the world by others—they could always be put some considerable distance away from others, so that there was no mutual interference. I conclude that it is not, for conceptual reasons, plausible to suppose that there could be a best or equal best of all possible worlds that God could create, and in consequence God could not in creating a world be doing a best or equal best action.4 But it is highly implausible to suppose that merely for that reason a God would not have created anything at all. We can also conclude that God will not do any action that is overall bad. If he brings about suffering, or permits other agents to do so, it must be that bringing about or permitting that suffering serves a greater good that could not be achieved without it, and God must have the right to impose that suffering on the sufferer. I shall be arguing in Chapter 11 that suffering does sometimes in this way serve a greater good, and that God does have limited rights to impose or permit suffering. But I shall also claim that he does not have the right to impose or permit unlimited suffering (for example, endless suffering) on anyone contrary to his or her choice.
If our understanding of good or bad isn’t totally in error then that takes out much of the skeptical theist route. If we can know anything about morality, one thing we know is that it’s bad when babies starve to death. If we can predict that God would bring about good world features, it seems we can also predict he wouldn’t bring about bad world features.
God must bring about something. Can he bring about other divine beings? I discuss this issue in Additional Note 1. In that case the inevitability of God bringing about something could be satisfied, on the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, by a first divine being (‘The Father’) bringing about ‘from all eternity’—which I understand as ‘at each moment of everlasting time’—the Son and the Spirit. In that case there would be no need for Aquinas to reject the Dionysian principle. The need for continuing creation could also be satisfied by the divine beings continously keeping each other in 118 The Explanatory Power of Theism
But God can bring about us with extra abilities—making us better off. This seems to be a version of the no best world objection, which I’ve addressed here.
Agents who have moral awareness with limited power and freedom, will in virtue of their limited freedom be subject to nonrational influences, temptations to do other than the good. Hence they will have significant free choice in the sense of a free choice that can make real differences to things for good or ill. The goodness of significant free choice is, I hope, evident.
Theism is a bad explanation of many of the non rational influences. Why would GOd make us subject to particular biases and other features that make us less rational. Even if we must be limited (which I don’t accept), theism can’t explain specific facts about non rational influences that make the world worse.
I also don’t accept that free choice is valuable intrinsically. When one’s on a roller coaster they don’t have much free choice, but it’s still good. Free choice is good if and only if it brings about desirable mental states—ones which God can cause because he is omnipotent without free choice.
God has reason also to create animals, beings simpler than humanly free agents, ones that spontaneously do good without having the free will to choose between good and evil; conscious beings who want (that is, have desires) to have various sensations and do various actions; and so get pleasure or enjoyment from having their wants satisfied. It would be good that they should learn what is to their benefit or harm, and use their knowledge and capacities spontaneously (not through free choice) to care for themselves and to prolong their life; and to care for each other and especially their young. No doubt snakes and fish get pleasurable sensations from 120 The Explanatory Power of Theism food and sex. And birds and rabbits rejoice in controlling their bodies to fly and run. They learn where food is to be had, and danger avoided, and through effort often get the food and avoid the danger. As we move up the evolutionary scale, we find animals whose actions are less a matter of instinct, and more a matter of learning and so of knowledge
This is a pretty common theme, but this seems to be the fallacy of understated evidence. Maybe God has a reason to create animals. But God certainly doesn’t have a reason to cause animals to mostly die at a very young age—almost certainly enduring more suffering than pleasure in their lives. Theism can’t explain why God doesn’t make animals much better off. Additionally, animals often act terribly immorally, committing teleological evils.
And finally, of course, God has reason to create a beautiful inanimate world—that is, a beautiful physical universe. Whatever God creates will be a good product; and so any physical universe that he creates will be beautiful, as are humans and animals. Consider the stars and planets moving in orderly ways, and plants growing from seed into colourful flowers and reproducing themselves. Even if no one apart from God himself sees such a world, it is good that it exists.
I have a few objections here.
This is the fallacy of understated evidence. Why does God make very ugly parts of nature and not make nature more beautiful?
A beautiful world isn’t good apart from being observed. If it were then the sum total goodness of an unobserved universe could surpass the goodness of all human well-being. If a beautiful unobserved galaxy is a little bit good, then infinite unobserved galaxies would be infinitely good.
I don’t think beauty is objective.
Theism can’t explain adequately why many people don’t find nature beautiful.
Humanly Free Agents Need Bodies I defined ‘humanly free agents’ as animate beings with moral awareness and limited freedom, power, and knowledge. They are persons of a limited kind. I claimed also that God would be unlikely to instantiate the kind of goodness that they possess in a minimum degree. If he makes humanly free agents, he will give them a significant amount of freedom, power, and knowledge. If their limited freedom is to be greatly valuable, it will be a freedom to choose between good and evil in the exercise of power to make deeply significant differences to themselves, each other, and the physical world by their choices (including the power to increase their powers and freedom of choice). They need to be able to cause in themselves and others pleasant and unpleasant sensations; investigate the world and acquire knowledge, and tell others about it.
This is once again the fallacy of understated evidence. Why wouldn’t God give us
Greater bodily control, making us suffer less. For example, why can’t we fly and why do we all di, often in painful ways.
Why make humans have limited cognitive abilities—making it very difficult to gain particular types of knowledge. This is especially true for severely mentally disabled people.
Why make unpleasant sensations that are horrific and non voluntary, like the pain of burning to death.
Why make it so difficult to communicate to others. For example, we could imagine a world in which people could telepathically communicate—giving others a total picture of their knowledge. This would be better and make humans better able to understand the world. For example, the world would be better if I could communicate the innefable sentiment that leads me to favor utilitarianism.
Why make there be moral patients who suffer, who are not moral agents? For example, animals and severely mentally disabled people plausibly can’t learn much or understand the world enough to make difficult choices, so why must they suffer?
Why create things like addiction which actively thwart people’s acting freely on their will?
It’s also not clear why the ability to choose to do evil is very important. I don’t have the freedom to destroy the world, yet that is no restriction on my freedom, and it doesn’t harm me.
They must be able through choice to influence the powers of themselves and others to acquire these beliefs and cause sensations, and to influence what they find pleasant or unpleasant; and to influence the ways (for good and evil ) in which they are naturally inclined to use their powers. They must be able to help each other to grow in knowledge, factual and moral; in their power to influence things; and in the desire to use their powers and knowledge for good. And they must also, in order to have significant responsibility, be able either through negligence or through deliberate choice to restrict their own and each other’s knowledge, powers, and desire for good. So these creatures must start life with (or acquire by natural processes) limited unchosen power and knowledge and desires for good and bad, and the choice of whether to extend that power and knowledge and improve those desires, or not to bother. And, if that choice is to be a serious one, it must involve some difficulty—time, effort, and no guarantee of success must be involved in the search for new knowledge and power, and improved desires. So creatures need to have at their disposal an initial range of basic actions. We may call the kinds of effects that a creature can (at some time) intentionally bring about by her basic actions her region of basic control. Creatures need an initial region of basic control. And, knowledge being a great good and necessary for control, creatures need also an initial range within which they can acquire largely true beliefs about what is the case. Let us call the kinds of such beliefs that a creature can acquire his region of basic perception. The region of basic control will have to lie within the region of basic perception. For creatures cannot bring about effects intentionally unless they know which effects they are bringing about. For us humans, certain states of our bodies are our region of basic control, and our region of basic perception consists of the observable states of things in a wide region encompassing our bodies
This can’t explain lots of things
Why don’t we have more or total control over our physical sensations. It’s strange that, for example, many people need to take medication to prevent them from having the sensation of abject misery all of the time.
Why can’t we help each other grow more in power and knowledge?
I don’t see how Swinburne gets from the premise that we need to be able to help people that we need to start as infants who know nothing.
This also can’t explain why there is irresolvable disagreement about morality and other things.
This can’t explain the numerous limits on states of affairs we can bring about.
This also can’t explain why most sentient beings die in infancy. If one claimed that the purpose of being a citizen was to be elected governor, then the fact that most citizens aren’t governors would be very relevant.
Further, if creatures are not merely to find themselves with beliefs about each other’s beliefs and purposes (which they will need to do if they are to be able to influence them), but to be able to choose to learn about each other’s beliefs and purposes and to communicate with them in the public way needed for cooperative action and cooperative rational discussion (which will involve language), they need to manifest their beliefs and purposes in a public way—that is, through their regions of basic control, which must therefore be physical regions. These regions need to behave in such a way that the simplest explanation of that behaviour is in terms of the beliefs and purposes (that is intentions) of creatures whose regions they are. In consequence, for example, we must be able to attribute to each other (on grounds of being the simplest explanation of the behaviour of others) beliefs sensitive to input—for example, to attribute to someone a belief that some object is present when light comes from some object on to their eyes; and purposes that—although not fully determined by brain states—do show some constancy
There are many possible ways communication could be made easier, e.g. telepathic communication. Additionally, this can’t explain numerous limits on people’s ability to communicate, including deafness, muteness, and all other things that hinder people’s ability to speak. This also can’t explain non choosen dispositions that people start with. For example, I didn’t choose to have utilitarian intuitions—I just have them.
It would be good that creatures should have the power not merely to extend their regions of control and perception beyond the basic, but that they should have the power to extend or restrict (or prevent being restricted by others or by natural processes) the regions of basic perception and control (including the ability to move) of themselves and others, and to extend or restrict the range of pleasant or unpleasant sensations and the desires to do this or that which they have. There need to be basic actions that creatures can do, or non-basic actions that they can learn to do, that under various circumstances will make differences to their capacities for basic action and perception, and to their sensations and desires. That involves there being natural processes that they can discover and so affect, that enable them to perform their basic actions and acquire and retain in memory basic perceptions, and diminish or increase pain or pleasure. And, if these processes are to be manipulable not merely by the human whose they are, but by other humans as well, they must be public processes. For this latter to be possible there needs to be a public place at which we or others can act to interfere with and so improve or damage the quality of our sensations and desires, and the extent of our capacity for basic actions and perceptions. We need not merely a region of basic control and a region of basic perception, but what I shall call a machine room. This is a public place where our intentions are translated into basic actions, and incoming stimuli are translated into sensations and beliefs, and processes give rise to desires and thoughts. When there is such a physical object, we and others can damage or improve these processes. In all these ways we need a controllable public region where we are. And so the existence of humanly free agents with significant freedom requires the existence of a physical universe
Why? God can’t limit his power, why is it good for us to be able to limit ours? This also can’t explain why humans naturally deteriorate even when we don’t desire to, merely as we age. It’s also not clear why we can’t be causally efficacious disembodied spirits.
In one or other of these ways, if they are to have the great good of being able to affect themselves and each other greatly for good or ill, finite creatures need bodies. Angels traditionally are finite creatures, but we cannot blind them or embrace them, because there is no place at which to direct our activity; we cannot capture them in order to affect them.
Disembodied spirits could be limited, especially if they’re causally efficacious. Pointing to facts about angels is not a logical limit on what God could do.
Mere telepathic communication with individual spirits does not allow for public discussion with many humans and spirits.
Why not have both telepathic communication and public communication. Also, what’s impossible about public telepathic communication, which anyone can pick up on, if they desire.
Since humanly free agents have desires and moral awareness, they will be capable of love and gratitude; and, since they are capable of significant growth in knowledge, they will be able to develop the metaphysical concepts that allow them to have the concept of God and so to love him if they come to believe that he exists.
This can’t explain many related things.
Lots of people don’t believe in God—there are non resistant non believers.
Many people say that even if they believed in God they couldn’t worship him because of atrocious things he did.
Why do so many humans lack moral awareness—and why is our moral awareness so flawed. Throughout most of human history, people’s moral awareness has lead them to conclude that slavery is fine.
Why do humans have bad desires that we don’t choose. For example, why are lots of humans sexually attracted to children?
Chapter 7
In this chapter, Swinburne presents and defends cosmological arguments.
From time to time various writers2 have told us that we cannot reach any conclusions about the origin or development of the universe, since it is the only one of which we have knowledge, and rational inquiry can reach conclusions only about objects that belong to kinds, for example, it can reach a conclusion about what will happen to this bit of iron only because there are other bits of iron, the behaviour of which can be studied. This objection has the surprising, and to most of these writers unwelcome, consequence, that physical cosmology could not reach justified conclusions about such matters as the size, age, rate of expansion, and density of the universe as a whole (because it is the only one of which we have knowledge); and also that physical anthropology could not reach conclusions about the origin and development of the human race (because, as far as our knowledge goes, it is the only one of its kind). The implausibility of these consequences leads us to doubt the original objection, which is indeed totally misguided
I don’t think we can have no knowledge, but we cannot infer facts that apply to objects within the universe must apply to the universe itself. We can’t deduce the age of the true universe, just from looking at our region of the physical universe.
Uniqueness is relative to description. Every physical object is unique under some description, if you allow descriptions that locate an object by its spatial position—that is, by its distance and direction from named objects. Thus my desk is the one and only desk in such and such an apartment; and that apartment is the penultimate one on the left in a certain row. And, even if you allow only descriptions in qualitative terms—for example, the one and only existing desk of such-and-such a shape, such-and-such a weight, with such-and-such carvings on its legs, and scratches on its top situated in an apartment that is the penultimate one in a row of apartments—it is still plausible to suppose that most physical objects have a unique description.3 In the first respect, the universe is, like all physical objects, pickable out by a unique description—‘the physical object consisting of all physical objects including the Earth spatially related to each other and to no other physical object’. In the second respect, too, the universe may well be describable by a unique description—for example, ‘the physical object consisting of physical objects that are all spatially related to each other and to no other physical object, governed by laws of nature L beginning from initial conditions I’ (where L and I are specified in detail ). In all this the universe is no more ‘unique’ than the objects that it contains. Yet all objects within the universe are characterized by certain properties, which are common to more than one object. My desk has in common with various other objects that it is a desk; and with various different objects, that it weighs less than a ton, and so on. The same applies to the universe itself. It is, for example, like objects within it such as the solar system, a system of material bodies distributed in empty space. It is a physical object and, like other physical objects, has density and mass. The objection fails to make any crucial distinction between the universe and other objects; and so it fails in its attempt to prevent at the outset a rational inquiry into the issue of whether the universe has some origin outside itself.
There is a crucial distinction: if the universe is all there is, then it is different from things within space time. Certain properties we infer may only apply to objects within spacetime, not to spacetime itself.
Yet there’s a bigger problem, namely, we have no idea what the fundamental universe is. It’s imminently possible that the universe is some string, law of nature, or something beyond our comprehension. We can’t infer very much about it given how little we know about it.
My assessment of the present state of science is that that is what it does tend to show. It suggests the simplest explanation of the current mutual recession of the galaxies (the groups of stars that get further and further apart from each other) is that this is a consequence of fundamental laws operating on matter-energy produced by an enormous explosion, the Big Bang, fifteen billion years ago. As we go backwards in time, matter was more and more dense. But if, as it appears, it would have been a physically impossible state for matter to be packed into a point with infinite density, the matter must have come into existence and the Bang caused its recession when it was packed very densely but not infinitely densely. However, new scientific data or further reflection on existing data might lead scientists to conclude that the best (that is, the simplest) explanation of the laws that operate in today’s relatively spaced-out universe is in terms of a more fundamental law that has the consequence that quite different less fundamental laws would have operated in an earlier and denser universe. Extrapolating backwards in accordance with these laws might lead to the conclusion that any Big Bang would have occurred in a very dense state produced by a previous contraction of the universe. But we can have no evidence of the operation of quite different laws in the past, unless their operation is a consequence of the simplest explanation of what is happening in the present. In so far as science shows that the fundamental laws11 of nature operating today are L, and that extrapolating L backwards leads to a physically impossible state, we have to conclude that there was a beginning to the universe-governed-by-today’s-laws and that we can have no knowledge of anything earlier than that. There might have been a physical universe governed by quite different laws, or there might have been no universe at all. But it is always simpler to postulate nothing rather than something; and so, in the absence of observable data made probable by the hypothesis that quite different non-fundamental laws were operating in the past, the hypothesis that the universe came into existence a finite time ago will remain the more probable hypothesis. But it is certainly possible that science might come to show that the fundamental laws governing our universe are such that we can extrapolate backwards for ever from the present state of the universe. Then evidence would support the claim that the universe is infinitely old. If we confine ourselves to scientific explanation, it will now follow that the existence of the universe (for as long as it has existed, whether a finite or an infinite time) has no explanation.
This seems very premature. I don’t think that science points to a universe of finite age—the big bang is just as far back as our models go, not the beginning of everything. We have no idea what, if anything, caused the big bang. There’s a similar question of what caused God? Now the answer will be generally that God is metaphysically necessary (something that Swinburne rejects), or that only a particular type of thing needs an explanation. However, the atheist can just suppose that the cause of the universe was one of the types of things that needs no explanation.
Like Leibniz, I conclude that the existence of the universe over finite or infinite time would be, if only scientific explanation is allowed, a brute inexplicable fact. And, as Leibniz also did, I conclude that there is the possibility of an explanation of that existence in personal terms. The existence of the (physical ) universe over time comes into my category of things too big for science to explain. If the existence of the universe is to be explained, personal explanation must be brought in, and an explanation given in terms of a person who is not part of the universe acting from without. This argument will need to be recast if it is to be put in terms of the substances-powers-and-liabilities account of scientific explanation, in which causes are objects (substances) with powers and liabilities. The principle about the cause of a collection of states then becomes: ‘a (full ) cause of the occurrence of a collection of states is any collection of (full ) causes of each, whose states as they cause are not members of the former collection’. But the S–P–L account has a different understanding from the amended Hempelian model of what are the states of objects. For the S–P–L account the ‘why’ in explanation is constituted by the powers and liabilities of substances (objects) that are properties of substances, and not by laws independent of the substances that they govern. So a full explanation of the existence of a substance will invoke a substance (either the same substance or another one) and its powers and liabilities; and a full explanation of the latter will also involve a substance, its powers, and liabilities. And the very factors that explain the existence of substances, the ‘why’ of explanation (in this model, powers and liabilities), now become explicable in the same terms as the ‘what’. It still follows, as before, that, if every state of the universe has a full cause in the universe at some earlier time causing it, then there will be no explanation within the scientific pattern of why there is a universe throughout all history, only of why it exists at any particular moment. But the question again arises as to whether the operations of each full cause itself depends on a more fundamental cause. As before, the latter cannot be a physical cause, for there are no physical causes apart from the universe itself and parts thereof. So the issue is whether a personal cause acting from outside the universe causes the causes within the universe to cause what they do. More precisely, the issue is whether the power of the universe to continue its existence into the next moment, and its liability to exercise that power, have no explanation at the time in question, or whether their existence and operation depend on a person who keeps them in existence and operating. Is the scientific explanation not merely a full, but a complete explanation; or does it itself have an explanation in terms of a person G who chooses to use the universe itself to keep the universe in being (as well as to bring it into existence, if it had a beginning)? If so, G by his continuing intention is the ultimate cause of there being a universe over infinite time. 144 The Cosmological Argument So, either way, there is the possibility of a person G being the ultimate cause of there being a universe at all; and being the complete cause of its existence at any particular moment. The issue is in effect the same on the two models of explanation (whether we think of laws as separate from, or in a way properties of, the objects that they govern); but it will be simpler, for purposes of exposition, initially to pose the questions in terms of the amended Hempelian model; and then revert subsequently to the S–P–L model.
Swinburne and I both agree that there is probably something with no deeper explanation. I don’t see a good reason to think that it is God.
The Argument to God For the reasons given in Chapter 3, the simplest explanation is, other things being equal, the most probable. Hence it is more probable, if there is such a G, that there is the simplest kind of G; and that—for the reasons discussed in Chapter 5—is a G of infinite power, knowledge, and freedom—that is, God. To postulate a G of very great but finite power, much but not all knowledge, etc., would raise the inevitable questions of why he has just that amount of power and knowledge, and what stops him from having more, questions that do not arise with the postulation of God. And even less simple, and so less probable, is polytheism, the supposition that the universe was created and is conserved by a committee of gods of limited power.
I disagree with these arguments for reasons discussed previously.
Swinburne next rejects the PSR, for reasons I agree with.
Chapter 8 Teleological Arguments
The orderliness of the universe to which I draw attention here is its conformity to formulae, to simple, formulable, scientific laws. The orderliness of the universe in this respect is a very striking fact about it. The universe might so naturally have been chaotic, but it is not—it is very orderly. And then there is the spatial order of the intricate arrangement of parts in human (and animal ) bodies. We have limbs, liver, heart, kidneys, stomach, sense organs, etc. of such a kind that, given the regularities of temporal order, our bodies are suitable vehicles to provide us with an enormous amount of knowledge of the world and to execute an enormous variety of purposes in it (as described more fully in Chapter 6). This is similar to the way in which parts of machines are arranged so as to produce an overall result from the operation of the machine; though—so far—machines intentionally constructed by humans are far less intricate than human bodies.
Natural laws are more simple than total chaos, because chaos leaves lots of things unexplained. Additionally, theism gives no good explanation of natural laws causing lots of suffering and confusingly relying on differential equations. Evolution explains biological complexity—and it’s probable in a big universe with predictable laws like ours. A universe with predictable laws can be explained by them being brute or by a big multiverse.
The fifth way is based on the guidedness of nature. Some things lacking awareness seek a goal—which is apparent from the fact that always or most usually they behave in the same way which leads to the best result. From this it is evident that it is not by chance but by intention that they reach their goal. Nothing, however, that lacks awareness tends to a goal, except under the direction of someone with awareness and with understanding; the arrow, for example, requires an archer. Everything in nature, therefore is directed to its goal by someone with understanding and this we call ‘God’.2 Aquinas argues that the regular behaviour of each inanimate thing shows that some animate being is directing it (making it move, so as to achieve some purpose, attain some goal ); and from that he comes—rather quickly—to the conclusion that one ‘being with understanding’ is responsible for the regular behaviour of all inanimate things (apart, maybe, from the behaviour for which humans and animals are responsible).
I don’t know what it means for nature to be goal directed. It follows predictable laws, but that’s more probable, for reasons already explained.
So how probable is it intrinsically that in a Godless universe there will be laws of nature at some level guaranteeing that things behave in very largely predictable ways? The answer to this question depends to some extent on what laws of nature are. I discussed in Chapter 2 three theories of this. There is first the immensely implausible Humean account developed by Lewis—that the conformity of all objects to laws of nature is just the fact that they do so conform; there is no more fundamental explanation of this conformity. It is just a brute fact that (both at a fundamental level and at a phenomenal level ) objects (substances) fall into kinds (electrons, positrons, pendula, seeds) in such a way that the simplest extrapolation from their past behaviour leads to generalizations that predict their future behaviour more or less correctly. In the near past, as in the more remote past, every positron has continued to attract every electron with exactly the same force inversely proportional to the square of their distances apart. There are innumerable other ways in which objects could have behaved, almost all of them such that the simplest extrapolation from their past behaviour would not have correctly predicted their subsequent behaviour. It is only if there is a common explanatory cause of the behaviour of objects that there is any reason to suppose that they will behave in the same way. And in a Godless universe on the Humean theory of laws of nature there is no more fundamental explanation of the coincidence in the ways in which objects behave. On this view ‘laws’ do not really explain the behaviour of objects, they merely describe it. Alternative accounts of laws of nature represent talk of ‘laws’ as talk about a feature of the world additional to the mere succession of events, a feature of physical necessity that is part of the world. As we saw in Chapter 2, this feature of physical necessity may be thought of 160 Teleological Arguments either as separate from the objects (substances) that are governed by it, or as a constitutive aspect of those objects. The former approach leads to a picture of the world as consisting of events (constituted perhaps by substances with their properties), on the one hand, and laws of nature, on the other hand; the most common version of this view claims that laws of nature are logically contingent relations between universals. The conformity of all objects to simple laws of nature consists on this account of the instantiation of quite a few universals each connected in simple ways to one or two other universals. If, despite the difficulties raised in Chapter 2, we adopt this account, the first question is why should there be universals connected to each other before they are instantiated, and why—if there is a universe, and so some universals must be instantiated—should quite a few universals be instantiated in such a way as to form a whole system of laws of nature. There might be many universals that were instantiated without bringing any other universals with them, so that there was no predictable effect of the instantiation. But on this account virtually all universals are connected to other universals. And there might be universals, but only ones of kinds instantiated once or twice in the history of the universe, rather than ones like ‘photon’ or ‘copper’ that are instantiated often and so can be used for useful prediction. And, again, the mathematical connections between the universals—for example, between the masses of bodies, their distance apart, and the gravitational attraction between them— might be of such complexity as never to be inferable from the past behaviour of objects. Now I suggest that a universe without connections between universals would be simpler than one with connections; and one with simpler patterns of connection would be simpler than one with such complicated patterns of connection that rational beings would not be able to infer the future behaviour of objects by means of the simplest extrapolation from their past behaviour. Among theories of the universe as a whole (which will thus have equal scope), simplicity is the sole indicator of intrinsic probability. It then follows that, if we give it the weight that I have urged that we should (so that a very simple theory is more probable than a disjunction of many more complex theories), it would be very probable that there would be no connections between universals at all—that the universe would be chaotic. But note that, if we give simplicity much less weight and suppose that a simpler theory is merely somewhat more probable Teleological Arguments 161 than a more complex theory, it might be that it is more probable that one of a disjunction of alternative sets of fairly simple connections between universals holds rather than no connections at all. But in that case, since there are a very large number of complex ways in which universals could be associated, and we are giving simplicity only a moderate weight, then it will be at least as probable that one of the complex connections between universals will hold as that one of the simple connections will hold—there being so many more (infinitely many more) of the former. Either way, it is going to be improbable that in a Godless universe there will be simple connections between universals, and so simple laws of nature.
Anthropics combined with a multiverse explain this—absent there being things that interact, we wouldn’t exist or be around to complain about this. Additionally, there might be some underlying fundamental explanation of both physical things and their interactions. We just don’t know enough to hold views. However, God is still less simple because he is both a being with a will AND has the ability to affect the world. Those not both existing seems more probable than them both existing.
I have been assuming so far that there is only one universe. But there may be many universes. If there were actually existing all possible universes, some of them will be law governed and it might be expected that we would find ourselves in such a universe. However, it would be the height of irrationality to postulate innumerable universes just to explain the particular features of our universe, when we can do so by postulating just one additional entity—God.
This is a confusion. Multiverse theories start from simple mathematical laws, and deduce complex multiverses from those. This is simple, because simplicity is about the starting assumptions. Also, God can do infinite things, so by this standard God isn’t simple.
Swinburne next argues that abiogenesis is implausible absent God. However, God is a prime example of abiogenesis—life coming from nothing. Furthermore, if there’s a multiverse or a very large universe, abiogenesis is inevitable eventually.
Swinburne next presents the fine tuning argument, which I’ve addressed here. He then presents the argument from beauty, which I’ve already addressed in this article.
In Part 2 of this series we’ll discuss chapter 9. Stay (finely) tuned.