You claim that science does not conflict with religion, but your definition of "religion" is basically "some very abstracted Being exists", a religion that I will call Maximally Pleasing Uncommited Abstractism. It's a motte and bailey. What percentage of the world's people are Maximally Pleasing Uncommited Abstractists? 0.001%?
People's religions almost always make much more definite concrete claims about the world. Judaism holds that the Earth was created 6,000 years ago, Moses parted the seas, the Earth flooded with Noah being the last human, etc. Christianity holds that all of these are true plus some more. Hinduism is a collection of hundreds of various folk religions, a panoply of Gods, the Vedas, and Advaita Vedanta. I could go on.
You can try to squirm out of this as being just stories or metaphors, but then you are just retreating back into Maximally Pleasing Uncommited Abstractism. Does Maximally Pleasing Uncommited Abstractism conflict with science? No, but it has been defined that way. The more interesting question is, "is Maximally Pleasing Uncommited Abstractism falsifiable?"
I'd imagine more than that. Lots of views are truth and yet unfalsifiable--for example, the claim that we're not brains in vats.
But anyways, I wasn't talking about my personal generic theism. I'm saying if a person is a rational Christian, I think that basically nothing we've learned in the last several thousand years should threaten their beliefs much.
What is your definition of "rational Christian" though? It seems like it is just defined so that it can never conflict with science.
But then the question becomes not, "do religion and science conflict," but, "does an unfalsifiable 'rational Christianity', which by definition will never conflict with science, conflict with science?"
It's a Christian who holds the most plausible views a Christian can hold, or at least not terribly implausible. It would be someone like Aron Wall, not Kent Hovind. It doesn't by definition never conflict with science--if, for instance, historians discovered Jesus's body in his tomb, that would conflict with it.
1. A rational Christian believes Jesus was resurrected. In this case the subtitle of your original post said, "There's no conflict. In fact, science favors the existence of God in various ways," but Jesus being resurrected clearly does conflict with science.
2. A rational Christian doesn't believe Jesus was resurrected. In this case we run back to the original problem, whereby it seems like the religion really doesn't say anything about the world except unfalsifiable maxims about an abstract being.
Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are all committed to theism, and the most popular version of theism amongst philosophers is perfect being theism (PBT), which is what this post is defending. So if your question is "what percentage of the world's people are committed to the view defended in this post (or something very similar to it)," the answer is probably "something like half of the world."
Now, obviously the major religions make other claims *in addition* to theism: Judaism claims that theism is true *and* that God made a covenant with the Jews, Christianity claims that theism is true *and* that Jesus is the divine son of God, Islam claims that theism is true *and* that Muhammad is the last and greatest prophet, etc. But nevertheless, adherents of these traditions have something in common: they're all theists.
Young earth creationism, not Christianity or Judaism, is committed to that. The Catholic Church for example fully accepts evolution (though I'm not Catholic, it's the largest branch).
"It’s a bad sign for your view of reality if the more you learn, the worse it gets. But with theism, the only good argument against it—the problem of evil—is old news. That the world contains bad things is not a discovery of contemporary science. While modern science and philosophy turns up numerous new arguments for God, the atheistic case has stagnated, seemingly failing to advance beyond the obvious observation that bad stuff happens. Of course, I’m not minimizing the challenge that that poses to theism—a huge amount of bad stuff does happen, and that’s really weird on theism—but I don’t get the same sense that greater discovery furnishes the case for atheism, the way I do for theism."
This seems like sort of a weird and cheap argumentative move. The existence of a being who is all good and has the power to do whatever he wants predicts states of affairs that are good, and predicts against states of affairs that are bad. It's very easy to say "really the only argument for atheism is the problem of evil", ie, the fact that we observe bad states of affairs. But by the same token, you could say "really the only argument for theism is the argument from good", ie, the fact that we observe good states of affairs.
In the same way that the "argument from evil" can be said to subsume what would otherwise be thought of as several distinct sub-arguments (such as: the argument from wild animal suffering, the evolutionary argument from evil, etc), so too the "argument from good" could be said to subsume basically all of the arguments for theism (fine tuning, psychophysical harmony, etc.)
So when you say "we've developed more arguments for theism as time has gone on but we've only had 1 argument for atheism the whole time" this just feels like a semantic trick. In the same way that, over time, we've arguably discovered new good things about the world that raise the probability of theism (such as psychophysical harmony), we have also, over time, discovered new bad things about the world that raise the probability of atheism (evolution, things like wild animal sentience and insect sentience, new natural diseases and ailments, etc.)
I notice that you included evolution, wild animal sentience, and insect sentience in your parenthesis along with disease under your "bad things about the world". I suspect that you actually meant to say that while all four are challenges to theism, only the last one, disease, is bad, because it refers to things that are inimical to human flourishing, while the others are just concepts, neither good nor bad in themselves. If I'm wrong, I stand corrected.
Doesn't look like a semantic trick to me. Looks like Bentham's is (perhaps falsely) asserting the arguments from evil are not independent from each other. Maybe a restating of the same problem slightly differently, or all solvable with the same satisfactory theistic explanation. Whereas the new arguments for theism are independent of each other.
I believe he's wrong (i.e. there's no 1 satisfactory theistic explanation for evils, or, if there is, there's a satisfactory athesitic explanation for the goods). So I disagree with the argument, but I don't see any trick. Where's the semantic trick?
> The most common idea of how science has falsified religion is that religion was intended to explain the gaps of science
I think you're downplaying the idea that science is seen as incompatible with religion because it directly contradicts a literal reading of the Bible. If you think (Christian) religion relies on the belief that the Bible is the literal and inerrant word of God, and the Bible is shown (by science) to be literally untrue, (Christian) religion seems less credible. It seems that the broad epistemic biases of evolution-deniers and Young-Earth creationists are motivated by resolving this contradiction than by concerns about the argument from biological design.
> Science has only really overturned one theistic argument—the argument from biological life
I this true? It feels like arguments about the implausibility that life orginated by chance used to be in vogue, but not anymore, so I figure this idea has been refuted. Does anyone know of a good paper that demonstrates the plausibility of abiogenesis? Or what the state of the research is? I tried looking up scientific criticisms of Intelligent-Design-type arguments, but they're mostly focused on stuff like methodogolical naturalism and education.
Yes, certainly some very implausible religious views are falsified by science.
Re the argument from biological life, we don't have a clear way of doing it but we've made a decent amount of progress. My sense is that most biologists are pretty optimistic. Furthermore, if we trust the inductive record of science, we should expect a natural explanation--though of course it might be that there are low odds of laws that enable the natural explanation.
I was mostly talking about the argument that naturalism can't explain the diversity of life, not the origin.
You remind me of a passage from C. S. Lewis book "The Pilgrim's Regress" in which our hero learns from Mr. Enlightenment that there is no God (who is called "The Landlord" in the book):
‘But how do you know there is no Landlord?’
‘Christopher Columbus, Galileo, the earth is round, invention of printing, gunpowder!!’ exclaimed Mr. Enlightenment in such a loud voice that the pony shied.
‘I beg your pardon,’ said John.
‘Eh?’ said Mr. Enlightenment.
‘I didn’t quite understand,’ said John.
‘Why, it’s as plain as a pikestaff,’ said the other. ‘Your people in Puritania believe in the Landlord because they have not had the benefits of a scientific training. For example, now, I dare say it would be news to you to hear that the earth was round—round as an orange, my lad!’
‘Well, I don’t know that it would,’ said John, feeling a little disappointed. ‘My father always said it was round.’
‘No, no, my dear boy,’ said Mr. Enlightenment, ‘you must have misunderstood him. It is well known that everyone in Puritania thinks the earth flat. It is not likely that I should be mistaken on such a point. Indeed, it is out of the question.”
Science as a methodological enterprise dispenses with many of the things you incorrectly attribute to it in the post. Science doesn't discover the fundamental nature of reality, it constructs and refines theoretical entities and explores the structural elements that are useful as being posited between said theoretical entities. Essences exist insofar as they are defined into existence by a theory as a suitable heuristic for working with a range of phenomena, but there's no a priori benefit that essences have over pluralist theories and alternate construals.
Now which one of these is more "fundamental?" That's a malformed question because science doesn't discover or work with fundamentality, it constructs theories - and when there isn't enough internal coherence to them, humans decide to splinter them off into different subject areas according to subjective human preferences. Sometimes people feel it's worth working out an alternate theory like the ones I linked above, and sometimes new theories with separate posits are worked out, according to the practitioners' goals and interests. But at no point is a last word reached, as all our theories are open to constant revision, reapplication, and remolding to fit the desires of the people who use them.
Scientific realism is refuted based on the plurality of alternate theories on offer. There's no metatheoretic reason to prefer GR with spatial curvature vs GR with no spatial curvature, besides considerations as to which theory you find easier to work with, which has the fewer posited entities you need to account for, which has the easier mathematical constructs to manipulate, etc. Scientific methods don't tell you which is truer or more correspondent with the world, so you're basically left with philosophical speculation that THIS particular theory is truer or more correspondent. And typically the discourse constructed around this philosophical speculation about the nature of scientific theories isn't fruitful - you never "check" the world for correspondence occurring or truth holding or whatever, through scientific methods or philosophical ones.
And let me a be bit more forceful to illustrate my point - I think you and most other people are conditioned into a certain sort of naivete regarding what science is and how it gets done. In school you're taught a lot of simplifying assumptions about the practice of science - like that one guy observes unexpected phenomena, comes up with a theory to explain it, observes the theoretical entities in question, establishes a new domain of science, and then everybody else comes in later and checks and verifies the minutia of the new theory.
These are themselves simplifying assumptions and heuristics that distort the truth of what occurs in the scientific enterprise. You are taught useful falsehoods as a kid, since if you go and do the easy entry-level experiments or demonstrations in e.g. chemistry, by human construct those entry-level experiments and demonstrations will have been set up so that you can use the most general and simple "scientific facts" in order to accomplish the intended goals of "scientific application". You're of course not subjected to the multiple debates about whether to teach Newtonian Mechanics with algebra, or derivatives, or differential equations, or lie algebras, because those are mostly useless to calculating where a baseball with a certain mass and force imparted on it will land.
These same distorting factors that occurred in your initial exposure to scientific theories occur in science themselves. Theories are continuously pruned, altered to fit data from other theories, have new methods introduced in working with them, and so on, that are geared towards making it more useful to accomplish things with the theories, but not necessarily to come closer to correspondence truth or the last word or whatever.
And insofar as these assumptions along the line of "simpler theories are truer," "more accurate theories are truer," "theories with fewer postulated essences are truer" are themselves not embodied in the considerations that shape the content of scientific theories, then religion is also not in a particularly epistemically virtuous space just because you can posit that e.g. God is ultimate simplicity or his esssence is existence or whatnot. But idk how to formulate a master argument to convince you of that, and I think you're better off just gaining first-hand knowledge working with scientific theories directly, especially since you're in college anyways.
I don't see why you're arguing about this if you're a scientific antirealist, if you're not willing to posit electrons to explain stuff why would you bother positing God to explain stuff?
I'm not pro God. I think Matthew is concocting an idealized and oversimplified model of how scientific theories work, and he's using that model as a standard to measure how successful religious theories of God should be (the more science-sounding they are the better). I think this is felicitous because a huge portion of the content of scientitic theories is "whatever works," not metaphysical essences or getting in touch with fundamental reality. So insofar as religious theories of God aren't workable/testable/verifiable, then there's no guarantee their superficial similarity to scientific theories is epistemically virtuous.
Do you have data showing science operates as you’re conjecturing? Ignoring the fact your big ramble looks like incoherent word salad.
Also such cringey & snarky condescension there, talking about "you're in college, go study & you'll see I'm right!" while presenting no empirical data. 🤦
If you want something resembling empirical data you can either go into labs and higher level science classes and observe for yourself science in action or you can read history of science or sociology of science books for a given domain, like the history of the species concept, the applicability of spdf electron orbitals, maybe a research methods textbook. I also linked the alternate construals of Relativity style theories that modify key assumptions like curved spacetime and use alternate mathematical tools to derive equivalent empirical predictions/achieve coherence with other "canonical" physical theories. Idk of any study that explicitly purports to test scientific realism though, so if you're holding out for that, then like I said I don't have a master argument.
Telling us “go do this” as if we have any burden for your empirical claim. 🤦 That's your work to do & present.
To be clear, we don’t grant observing “science in action” or reading “the history of science” will vindicate your conjecture. That’s called repeating your claim, Einstein.
Just link empirical data supporting your assertion. We’re not doing any wild goose chases. Very simple. No more dodging.
As I already explained, the papers I linked are empirical evidence against certain scientific realist presuppositions. If you're expecting me to link you THE paper that tests whether scientific realism is true with a scientific realism detector, then you are deeply confused and not tracking any part of the dispute.
And in general (obviously can't prove it in this comment) I don't think there's any essential characteristic that scientific theories have that can mark them as the last word. Consider precision of measurement as a plausible trait - even though some pop physicists will say we're made out of quantum fields, quantum field theory is considered an effective field theory - useful for calculations but many of its steps and processes and corrections are not expected to have any physical analogue, even among scientific realists. And as you look at more theories, there isn't really going to be this one guiding principle that shows you the theory's truth... it's all going to be a set of simplifying assumptions that are periodically curated for ease of humans working with the theory. So there's one argument - our putatively non-truth tracking desires encroach on our scientific methods and theories in order to make them easier for us to use rather than to search for the correspondent truth.
"But the monotheists who believed in a perfect being didn’t do this."
This is just objectively wrong. The early days of Christianity were full of "God did it" explanations. Some of the early contemporaneous canon were full of magic tricks Jesus did when he was a child. The Catholic church still canonizes saints for doing supernatural things.
Bart Ehrman has documented that Jesus' claims of divinity and supernatural power were a pretty common occurrence -- that is, many people claimed at one time or another to perform miracles and be the messiah. The only difference is he got more people to believe him.
Every now and then a new Jewish messiah gets a cult following. Even today there are people who believe Menachem Mendel Schneerson is the messiah.
And it doesn't stop there. The Council of Trent basically tries to take credit for anything good a person does. According to them, it wasn't my empathetic personality or strong upbringing by my parents or just circumstances that made me donate to a food bank. It was God.
But that wasn't what I was saying they didn't do. I was saying people didn't argue for God on the grounds he was needed to explain all the random events.
I think because science has pretty effectively falsified PARTICULAR religions, in the sense of literalist takes of those particular religions' scriptures which those religions tend to take as strongly inspired (Judaism, Christianity) or directly provided (Islam) by a particular mono god; and because until fairly recently the organised arms of those religions insisted on literal takes, this is (in principle, completely without justification) extended to (mono)theism as such. While I am an atheist, I don't find the "science proved Genesis wrong" to be a viable argument against theism as such at all.
It IS a stronger argument against specific religions, eg Christianity and Judaism ("it's all symbolic and not meant to be read literally" does feel like a bit of a cope) but not really a convincing one, ultimately.
As an aside, in effect, the modern persistence of literal interpretations of the scriptures becomes an argument AGAINST Christianity imo (no system which requires or at the minimum, allows me me to believe in obvious falsehoods about the material world could be conceivably true).
Imagine a universe wherein God does not actually exist. All apparent patterns are the consequence of naturalistic processes like evolution or gravity. How would that universe differ from this one?
As other commenters like Joe Schmoe have pointed out, this seems to conflate religious beliefs in practice with theism per se. It's just descriptively the case that religious people invoke (a rich and personal conception of) God to explain observed phenomena which have been or can be explained without invoking God.
Of course it's fine to say, “sure, in practice most religious people have more detailed conceptions of God, and sometimes falsely invoke that God to explain phenomena which don't call for supernatural explanations; but the point remains that science doesn't disprove theism per se”.
But two comments here: (i) I take “religion” to (conventionally) refer to people's in practice religious beliefs and practices, not theism per se. So it might be more accurate to argue that science doesn't conflict with theism, rather than religion.
And (ii) I am genuinely curious how you go from something like “being of pure act, whose essence is existence” to a being with personal features, which is (maximally) ‘good’, which thinks about us and knows us, and so on. I'm sure you've written about this, so I'm being lazy in failing to find the answer myself.
I agree that some religious views are falsified by scientific findings. My claim was that this should lead to a revision--if you think the earth is young, for instance, you shouldn't abandon religion, but just think the world is old.
Re 2) I don't think the being is pure act--that was just a conception some have given, where I was making fun of the idea it was falsified by science. I think God is a simple, perfect being. https://benthams.substack.com/p/10-ways-god-can-be-simple
As religious belief is a question of faith, this problem is inherently epistemological. Why should we believe any religions truth claims?
If a religion starts out making a wide constellation of claims (claims they claim are based in some divine truth) and slowly but surely so many of these claims are shown to be false, it doesn’t inspire confidence in the rest of their claims. They have shown themselves to be quite fallible!
Why should we believe this religion has access to divine truth? Even if they admit that many of their claims are false, how do we know the central claims aren’t false too? So far they haven’t given us much reason to believe otherwise.
Plus, this doesn’t even get into something even more damming. The process of revising religious truth claims in the face of scientific evidence is always the process of revising away everything that made religion so compelling/inspiring/beautiful in the first place. What you are left with is sterile and inert. Not to mention that it’s certainly unrecognizable to Jesus or the apostles. Nobody builds cathedrals for “simple, perfect beings”. They build them for God. To a being who could turn you into a pillar of salt or deliver you from eternal damnation. A being who decides if you eat this season, or if your children survive past the age of 10.
Bach didn’t write saint Matthew’s passion about a simple perfect being. Paradise lost wasn’t written about a simple, perfect being. Crusades weren’t fought over simple, perfect beings. They were fought over God.
If your simple, perfect being can’t do that, can’t inspire that… then you have already lost.
This is the exact same argument you are making in the end of the post: appeal to induction based on the fact that a particular hypothesis is becoming less and less likely with time.
Previously there were oh so many reasons for being a theist. You could've literally pull a finger into anything around you and ask "if not God then how?" and your opponent wouldn't be able to counter it with anything but completely unpersuasive "I don't know yet, but maybe in the future we will figure it out". But with the movement of time and the advancement of scientific progress humanity managed to answer more and more such questions, and the idea that we will find answer eventually became more and more justified. Nowdays arguments for the existence of God were pushed to poorly falsifiable realms, such as philosophy. But even there they are not completely safe.
> If one argues that God exists from, say, the De Ente argument—that there must be a being whose essence is existence from the fact that there are things that exist but do so non-essentially (for example, you exist, though you could have not existed if your parents hadn’t shtupped at the right time)—no scientific advance threatens that at all.
Not being able to be threatened by any scientific advances is not a good thing. It's a red flag, hinting that the theory is trying to evade falsifiability by any means necessary.
That said, there actually are some things that scientific advances can tell us about this argument. First of all, we can notice that science doesn't use the category of "essences" anymore. Turns out it's not really helpful for making accurate maps of reality. We are more about quarks nowdays. If your argument is based on outdated notions and can't be reformulated in a more preceise modern terms, it's more likely than not that the argument doesn't really work and only appears convincing due to the confusion encorporated in the ancient terminology.
Secondly, we know that our brains are cognition engines that obey conservation of energy. Being able to deduce the nature of reality without applying your senses, optimized by natural selection to correspond to this reality, would be a violation of it. And this De Ente argument looks very much like this - that I do not need to even look at reality at all, that I could've reasoned like this in any reality even the one where I didn't possess any senses correlated with it. This is very suspicious, to say the least - not the way cognition engines tend to produce accurate maps of the territory.
> each time we discover more fundamental explanations of things, the deeper laws seem to require a similar degree of fine-tuning
Not similar. Much less so. Before discovering evolution through natural selection it felt like all the variety of life is incredebly complex. But now we know that it reduces to existence of imperfect replicators. Likewise, if we discover, for example, that universes imperfectly replicate through black holes, then the whole complexity of fine-tuning every individual physical constant reduces to the existence of black holes in at least one universe.
> First of all, science tells us to look for unification—something simple that explains complex phenomena. But God has a decent claim to being the simplest kind of thing that there is.
No according our up-to-date metrics for complexity. God initially appeared very simple for human intuition, but the more we learned about what complexity is, the less simple the idea of God turned out to be.
> It’s very weird that bipedal apes who evolved to pass on their genes can figure out the fundamental nature of reality.
Not at all. If figuring out the nature of reality is positively correlated with passing on genes, then we expect that creatures evolved via natural selection will have more and more of such ability with time. Which is very obviously the case.
> As I studied more and more areas of philosophy, there seemed to be more puzzles for atheists—ones that theism effortlessly solves.
I think, here you are confusing your own history of learning things with humanity history of learning things. You just so happen to learn about philosophy later than you learned about science. But this is a backwards order. Science originated from philosophy - it's the kind of philosophy that actually appears to work. All the best philosophical ideas got into science while the rest stays either laying groundwork for scientific knowledge, or waiting to be properly formalized into science, or being unable to be formalized, due to being confused thinking based on primitive intuitions that ignore several hundreds years of our progress. And if it's the last kind of philosophy where you keep finding "evidence" for some hypothesis, it's really not a good sign for this hypothesis.
What science have done is to push God so far away as an explanation that you are looking for it in the multiverse. Our current picture of reality is that the field equations of 4 fundamental forces plug General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics explain everything that happens from mosquitoes to Black Holes.
The pure mistery of consciousness and existence are real and powerful, but the mechanist picture of the universe in its brutal indifference is a massive challenge even to abstract theism: for traditional religion is simply the end.
There are not simply “predictable natural regularities”: there is simply nothing else. The full picture from the Schroedinger equation in each elementary particles system to the complete workings of your brain is mostly complete.
Thanks to Darwin, Laplacian mechanism is mostly a full cosmovisión. He said to Napoleon about God “I don’t need that hypothesis”, but in my view in the first half of the XIX century the gap between mechanics and living beings was too wide to believe his philosophy. Now, even before Craig Venter, biology is reduced to Chemstry, and since quantum mechanics, chemistry to physics.
Still of course, the puzzle is complete, but we have one piece too much: consciousness. That is precisely Chalmers dualistic naturalism, isn’t it?
It is a distant God, that never answers your prayers, and that allows any kind of suffering if some blind equations imply it. I still can believe in that God, even love it, because the horrible reality is also elegant, and there is something instead of nothing. But it is not sweet Jesus…
Why not a Flying Spaghetti Monster? As long as we have a complete mechanist picture of reality, that additionally is full of cruelty and horror (also of intelectual elegance) what massive evidence is for the resurrection? Laplace didn’t need that hypothesis. What do you need it for?
It's also a terrible argument because it's based on imaginary historical facts. It assumes all religions are proto-scientific theories, that gods were invented to explain the mechanisms of natural phenomena, and that science and religion are engaged in the same explanatory project.
It's the modern mythology, the myth of human progress. Trans-humanism is the salvation myth that goes with it.
The only interesting thing about it is how that cultural narrative has developed in the context of the actual historical facts. We've ended up with a modern mythology that tells us we no longer have mythology. Myth signifies fiction in the modern world.
Interesting post! My own resistance to religion comes mostly from this territory so it's interesting to see it addressed explicitly.
I think the main "scientific objection" to religion is not an argument, but a thrust/vibe/culture. In general, the opposition comes from the scientific image eclipsing all others and seeming to not have room for a god. This force is obviously very powerful, and is at least a part of the broader cultural trend of secularization (regardless of its logical validity).
We could try to make the scientific objection to religion a philosophical argument. The medieval and early modern Gods had a lot to do with explanation, not necessarily of the tides or the seasons, but of everything, existence itself. Perhaps the best example is the Leibnizian cosmological argument. As the scientific image took over, we came to look more and more for scientific explanations, which work in certain ways and posit certain entities, but generally (perhaps for historical reasons or perhaps for principled ones) not God or gods. So, perhaps in the face of scientific advancement, this type of demand for explanation is no longer valid or God is no longer a valid postulate as an explanation.
Similarly, if we are doing broadly Quinean ontology, God seems like a very different kind of entity than the entities that our best theories are committed to. Of course, in discussing God in this way we're doing philosophy, but our philosophical ontology is supposed to be a principled extension of the sciences. Perhaps this is why there is a bias towards non-divine theories of moral knowledge, even though the divine explanation is simpler.
Good summation. I think if you want to trace the origin of the move to the scientific image, Kant might be a pretty good spot to put the marker. His Copernican revolution, that space and time are preconditions of thought meant we lost the rational warrant for conclusions about anything beyond our experience. Which meant we lost the foundation for the cosmological argument.
So I think you're right that it's about a rejection of particular types of explanation, rather than any statement of fact about the world. Unfortunately, that's a subtle distinction that is lost in popular culture and gets reduced to science-good, religion-bad.
This is a really helpful comment. I'm researching explanation and the philosophical demand for different types right now. The framing of Kant's revolution as maybe the shift in undermining cosmological arguments is great.
My Kant knowledge is weak, so I don't have much to add there. I wonder if another similar shift has to do with post-Newtonian science. I have the sense that Newton, with his hermetic principles had a different, more expansive view of scientific explanation than his successors. I'm not sure who the successor would be who marks the shift though. As is pointed out in this post, Einstein had weird not-so-empirical views as well.
I couldn't say much about that, but you seem to be moving between two distinct areas. There's explanation in the broad sense and scientific explanation is a subset of that. But I do think that's ultimately the source of this whole science vs religion contrast, the attempt to establish scientific explanation to the only meaningful type (eg logical positivism) and in the more vulgar forms, the only true or justified type (eg scientism).
God doesn't really explain neither fine-tuning, nor any philosophical problems he is so often credited. People think that he does only because we are medicre at recursion.
Imagine that we actually were absolutely sure that God exists and created the universe. And then someone asks for an explanation of fine-tuning:
- Well, of course our universe is finely tuned - God created it for us. The existence of God makes the existence of fine-tuned universe like ours very likely. There is nothing to explain here!
- No, not the fine-tuning of physical constants of the universe, the fine-tuning of our universe and our God. It seems so lucky that we got a God who makes the existence of our universe so likely. But what if instead we got a God who doesn't create any universe at all? Or a God who creates only lifeless universes?
- But then our universe wouldn't exist at all! How can such God be a God of our universe?
- My point exactly! With all likelihood our God and our universe wouldn't exist, so there has to be some kind of extra rule according to which our God definetely has to exist.
- There is! Our God is methaphysically necessary.
- Sure, but isn't it iself extremely convinient that our God just so happened to be metaphysically necessary? What if instead it was God who creates only lifeless universes to be metaphysically necessary?The fact that metaphysical necessity itself is so finetuned for our existence seems extremely improbable. Now if only there was some metametaphysical rule according to which our God is nessecary... Wait, I know! There has to be a Super God, who is metametaphysically necessary, determine the metaphysical necessity and creates all kinds of Gods, that would in turn create all kind of universes they are to create. That would totally explain the improbability of fine-tuning! It's so obvious, if you think about it. Of course there has to be more Gods! SIA also points to the same conclusion!
- How so? SIA claims that there are a lot of observers like you and me, but our God already creates all kind of observers like that!
- Not if he doesn't exist, and his existence is extremely low probable without the Super God. But moreover, consider SIA's reasoning from the position of God himself! He also should expect there to be a lot of observers like him. And God can't be wrong about it, because he is omniscient! It all points in the direction of the existence of Super God!
We can continue this chain of reasoning indefinetely, by passing the buck of improbability from the universe to God and then to Super God and then to Duper God and so on, without any reason to stop. But it should be clear that at no point we actually explain anything. We do not reveal that the situation was less improbable than we originally thought, we just try to hide the improbability under the rug of the next level of recursion and hope that noone will look there, invoking more and more powerful entities. And if we are to stop this chain of faulty reasoning, well, can just as well do it on the very first step.
Re 1: there are 100% (good) "object-level" arguments for god's existence. A, very partisan, view of ontology takes its task to be be mining science (or, more broadly, the body of human knowledge) for ontological commitments and/or extending science to questions it doesn't ask through appropriately similar means. God seems to me to be a very different kind of entity than those that science is concerned with. This seems to be a conflict. It seems like we (at least) take on some theoretical costs through extending our ontology in this way. Why take this view of ontology? That's a bigger question, and there's no law that says you need to be Quinean. Even if no, it still seems like there's a theoretical cost to adding a fairly different kind of entity.
Re 2: I'm not up enough on modern versions of the cosmological argument to really get into the weeds here, but it seems like there are fairly plausible things to say maybe relating to induction. Consider the space of things to be explained. We find scientific, natural explanations of some and other explanations of others. The scientific explanations revolutionize the world, and become very strongly established as the truth. The other explanations are more of a toss-up. It's harder to be super sure if they're true and they're less functional as explanations. It seems fair to say, on inductive grounds, that these, scientific ones, are the good explanations and the others are bad. Maybe the questions that demand the bad explanations are malformed/nonsense. Maybe the questions are good, but the answers are bad. I'm brainstorming here, but there might also be an inductive causal closure sort of argument. As we find natural/physical causes for natural/physical things, it seems harder to believe in a supernatural cause for natural/physical things.
As science progresses, the number of athiests appears to be dramatically expanding. By all indications, their numbers will continue to expand either through liberalization allowing people to have their own freer beliefs, or because non-religious authoritarians tend to be more successful than religious fanatics.
So outside of your purely theoretical bubble, the facts on the ground show that far from strengthening the case for God, technological progres is crushing it.
The fact that some force progressing correlates with less great religiosity doesn’t mean it’s the cause or that it undermines rational belief in religion. Like, you could say the same thing about history, but no one thinks that history undermines religious claims.
Wait, what? I say that history undermines religious claims. If one looks at all the bad stuff done by religious people, all the faiths which to their adherents seemed quite good but were then revealed to be false, and the fact that the world has existed for a long time instead of last thursday... my credence is lowered.
The number of atheists does not appear to be dramatically expanding. The data from Pew indicates that by 2050 the number of religiously unaffiliated (which includes atheists, agnostics, and people who don't want to be labeled, even if they believe in God) will decline from 16.4% of the global population in 2010 to 13.2% of the population in 2050. Pew has also found that, in the United States, that while 28% of the population is religiously unaffiliated, only 17% of that group are atheists. Currently it looks like only 9% of the global population would describe themselves as atheists.
Looks like the primary driver of religious growth is the differing fertility rates between poorer, more religious areas (primarily in Sub-Saharen Africa) and the rest of the world. Given the rapid decline of fertility of rates worldwide, and the association of wealth with that decline, it still doesn't seem like religion is suited for the long term.
(Also, it looks like the overwhelming majority of religious growth is concentrated in Islam, which Matthew thinks is overwhelmingly the least probable religion out of the bunch)
And? You wrote that "As science progresses, the number of atheists appears to be dramatically expanding." And that's simply not true: your "updated" source has the same numbers mine did, it's expected that the proportion of religiously non-affiliated (of which atheists are a minority) will shrink, not dramatically expand, over the next few decades. Atheists are a tiny minority of humans, and there is no sign of dramatic expansion despite science progressing.
In my own experience, my own atheism came about from a gradual process in my youth, which in my case was very much helped by living in a technological society. In my case, it included getting an education in engineering, and travel, especially spending a summer in a non-religious country ( Sweden as opposed to the US ).
I would draw a distinction between "there is a conflict between science and religion" on one hand and "science has falsified religion" on the other. I think there is a conflict, but science could turn out to be wrong! It has been wrong in the past.
You claim that science does not conflict with religion, but your definition of "religion" is basically "some very abstracted Being exists", a religion that I will call Maximally Pleasing Uncommited Abstractism. It's a motte and bailey. What percentage of the world's people are Maximally Pleasing Uncommited Abstractists? 0.001%?
People's religions almost always make much more definite concrete claims about the world. Judaism holds that the Earth was created 6,000 years ago, Moses parted the seas, the Earth flooded with Noah being the last human, etc. Christianity holds that all of these are true plus some more. Hinduism is a collection of hundreds of various folk religions, a panoply of Gods, the Vedas, and Advaita Vedanta. I could go on.
You can try to squirm out of this as being just stories or metaphors, but then you are just retreating back into Maximally Pleasing Uncommited Abstractism. Does Maximally Pleasing Uncommited Abstractism conflict with science? No, but it has been defined that way. The more interesting question is, "is Maximally Pleasing Uncommited Abstractism falsifiable?"
I'd imagine more than that. Lots of views are truth and yet unfalsifiable--for example, the claim that we're not brains in vats.
But anyways, I wasn't talking about my personal generic theism. I'm saying if a person is a rational Christian, I think that basically nothing we've learned in the last several thousand years should threaten their beliefs much.
What is your definition of "rational Christian" though? It seems like it is just defined so that it can never conflict with science.
But then the question becomes not, "do religion and science conflict," but, "does an unfalsifiable 'rational Christianity', which by definition will never conflict with science, conflict with science?"
It's a Christian who holds the most plausible views a Christian can hold, or at least not terribly implausible. It would be someone like Aron Wall, not Kent Hovind. It doesn't by definition never conflict with science--if, for instance, historians discovered Jesus's body in his tomb, that would conflict with it.
Okay, so I see two options here:
1. A rational Christian believes Jesus was resurrected. In this case the subtitle of your original post said, "There's no conflict. In fact, science favors the existence of God in various ways," but Jesus being resurrected clearly does conflict with science.
2. A rational Christian doesn't believe Jesus was resurrected. In this case we run back to the original problem, whereby it seems like the religion really doesn't say anything about the world except unfalsifiable maxims about an abstract being.
1. is correct. How does Jesus being resurrected conflict with science?
That's a good enough question which I don't have the time to get into, but I think that you should make a new post asking it.
What percent of Christains would you say are "rational Christains"? 10%? 1%? 0.01%?
Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are all committed to theism, and the most popular version of theism amongst philosophers is perfect being theism (PBT), which is what this post is defending. So if your question is "what percentage of the world's people are committed to the view defended in this post (or something very similar to it)," the answer is probably "something like half of the world."
Now, obviously the major religions make other claims *in addition* to theism: Judaism claims that theism is true *and* that God made a covenant with the Jews, Christianity claims that theism is true *and* that Jesus is the divine son of God, Islam claims that theism is true *and* that Muhammad is the last and greatest prophet, etc. But nevertheless, adherents of these traditions have something in common: they're all theists.
Young earth creationism, not Christianity or Judaism, is committed to that. The Catholic Church for example fully accepts evolution (though I'm not Catholic, it's the largest branch).
"It’s a bad sign for your view of reality if the more you learn, the worse it gets. But with theism, the only good argument against it—the problem of evil—is old news. That the world contains bad things is not a discovery of contemporary science. While modern science and philosophy turns up numerous new arguments for God, the atheistic case has stagnated, seemingly failing to advance beyond the obvious observation that bad stuff happens. Of course, I’m not minimizing the challenge that that poses to theism—a huge amount of bad stuff does happen, and that’s really weird on theism—but I don’t get the same sense that greater discovery furnishes the case for atheism, the way I do for theism."
This seems like sort of a weird and cheap argumentative move. The existence of a being who is all good and has the power to do whatever he wants predicts states of affairs that are good, and predicts against states of affairs that are bad. It's very easy to say "really the only argument for atheism is the problem of evil", ie, the fact that we observe bad states of affairs. But by the same token, you could say "really the only argument for theism is the argument from good", ie, the fact that we observe good states of affairs.
In the same way that the "argument from evil" can be said to subsume what would otherwise be thought of as several distinct sub-arguments (such as: the argument from wild animal suffering, the evolutionary argument from evil, etc), so too the "argument from good" could be said to subsume basically all of the arguments for theism (fine tuning, psychophysical harmony, etc.)
So when you say "we've developed more arguments for theism as time has gone on but we've only had 1 argument for atheism the whole time" this just feels like a semantic trick. In the same way that, over time, we've arguably discovered new good things about the world that raise the probability of theism (such as psychophysical harmony), we have also, over time, discovered new bad things about the world that raise the probability of atheism (evolution, things like wild animal sentience and insect sentience, new natural diseases and ailments, etc.)
I notice that you included evolution, wild animal sentience, and insect sentience in your parenthesis along with disease under your "bad things about the world". I suspect that you actually meant to say that while all four are challenges to theism, only the last one, disease, is bad, because it refers to things that are inimical to human flourishing, while the others are just concepts, neither good nor bad in themselves. If I'm wrong, I stand corrected.
Doesn't look like a semantic trick to me. Looks like Bentham's is (perhaps falsely) asserting the arguments from evil are not independent from each other. Maybe a restating of the same problem slightly differently, or all solvable with the same satisfactory theistic explanation. Whereas the new arguments for theism are independent of each other.
I believe he's wrong (i.e. there's no 1 satisfactory theistic explanation for evils, or, if there is, there's a satisfactory athesitic explanation for the goods). So I disagree with the argument, but I don't see any trick. Where's the semantic trick?
> The most common idea of how science has falsified religion is that religion was intended to explain the gaps of science
I think you're downplaying the idea that science is seen as incompatible with religion because it directly contradicts a literal reading of the Bible. If you think (Christian) religion relies on the belief that the Bible is the literal and inerrant word of God, and the Bible is shown (by science) to be literally untrue, (Christian) religion seems less credible. It seems that the broad epistemic biases of evolution-deniers and Young-Earth creationists are motivated by resolving this contradiction than by concerns about the argument from biological design.
> Science has only really overturned one theistic argument—the argument from biological life
I this true? It feels like arguments about the implausibility that life orginated by chance used to be in vogue, but not anymore, so I figure this idea has been refuted. Does anyone know of a good paper that demonstrates the plausibility of abiogenesis? Or what the state of the research is? I tried looking up scientific criticisms of Intelligent-Design-type arguments, but they're mostly focused on stuff like methodogolical naturalism and education.
Yes, certainly some very implausible religious views are falsified by science.
Re the argument from biological life, we don't have a clear way of doing it but we've made a decent amount of progress. My sense is that most biologists are pretty optimistic. Furthermore, if we trust the inductive record of science, we should expect a natural explanation--though of course it might be that there are low odds of laws that enable the natural explanation.
I was mostly talking about the argument that naturalism can't explain the diversity of life, not the origin.
You remind me of a passage from C. S. Lewis book "The Pilgrim's Regress" in which our hero learns from Mr. Enlightenment that there is no God (who is called "The Landlord" in the book):
‘But how do you know there is no Landlord?’
‘Christopher Columbus, Galileo, the earth is round, invention of printing, gunpowder!!’ exclaimed Mr. Enlightenment in such a loud voice that the pony shied.
‘I beg your pardon,’ said John.
‘Eh?’ said Mr. Enlightenment.
‘I didn’t quite understand,’ said John.
‘Why, it’s as plain as a pikestaff,’ said the other. ‘Your people in Puritania believe in the Landlord because they have not had the benefits of a scientific training. For example, now, I dare say it would be news to you to hear that the earth was round—round as an orange, my lad!’
‘Well, I don’t know that it would,’ said John, feeling a little disappointed. ‘My father always said it was round.’
‘No, no, my dear boy,’ said Mr. Enlightenment, ‘you must have misunderstood him. It is well known that everyone in Puritania thinks the earth flat. It is not likely that I should be mistaken on such a point. Indeed, it is out of the question.”
Science as a methodological enterprise dispenses with many of the things you incorrectly attribute to it in the post. Science doesn't discover the fundamental nature of reality, it constructs and refines theoretical entities and explores the structural elements that are useful as being posited between said theoretical entities. Essences exist insofar as they are defined into existence by a theory as a suitable heuristic for working with a range of phenomena, but there's no a priori benefit that essences have over pluralist theories and alternate construals.
For example, we can construct alternates to special relativity that don't feature length contraction, and we can construct alternatives to general relativity that don't posit curved spacetime. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339461551_Special_relativity_without_time_dilation_or_length_contraction https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation?paperid=89243 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternatives_to_general_relativity
Now which one of these is more "fundamental?" That's a malformed question because science doesn't discover or work with fundamentality, it constructs theories - and when there isn't enough internal coherence to them, humans decide to splinter them off into different subject areas according to subjective human preferences. Sometimes people feel it's worth working out an alternate theory like the ones I linked above, and sometimes new theories with separate posits are worked out, according to the practitioners' goals and interests. But at no point is a last word reached, as all our theories are open to constant revision, reapplication, and remolding to fit the desires of the people who use them.
Just seems like you're assuming scientific anti-realism without argument.
Scientific realism is refuted based on the plurality of alternate theories on offer. There's no metatheoretic reason to prefer GR with spatial curvature vs GR with no spatial curvature, besides considerations as to which theory you find easier to work with, which has the fewer posited entities you need to account for, which has the easier mathematical constructs to manipulate, etc. Scientific methods don't tell you which is truer or more correspondent with the world, so you're basically left with philosophical speculation that THIS particular theory is truer or more correspondent. And typically the discourse constructed around this philosophical speculation about the nature of scientific theories isn't fruitful - you never "check" the world for correspondence occurring or truth holding or whatever, through scientific methods or philosophical ones.
And let me a be bit more forceful to illustrate my point - I think you and most other people are conditioned into a certain sort of naivete regarding what science is and how it gets done. In school you're taught a lot of simplifying assumptions about the practice of science - like that one guy observes unexpected phenomena, comes up with a theory to explain it, observes the theoretical entities in question, establishes a new domain of science, and then everybody else comes in later and checks and verifies the minutia of the new theory.
These are themselves simplifying assumptions and heuristics that distort the truth of what occurs in the scientific enterprise. You are taught useful falsehoods as a kid, since if you go and do the easy entry-level experiments or demonstrations in e.g. chemistry, by human construct those entry-level experiments and demonstrations will have been set up so that you can use the most general and simple "scientific facts" in order to accomplish the intended goals of "scientific application". You're of course not subjected to the multiple debates about whether to teach Newtonian Mechanics with algebra, or derivatives, or differential equations, or lie algebras, because those are mostly useless to calculating where a baseball with a certain mass and force imparted on it will land.
These same distorting factors that occurred in your initial exposure to scientific theories occur in science themselves. Theories are continuously pruned, altered to fit data from other theories, have new methods introduced in working with them, and so on, that are geared towards making it more useful to accomplish things with the theories, but not necessarily to come closer to correspondence truth or the last word or whatever.
And insofar as these assumptions along the line of "simpler theories are truer," "more accurate theories are truer," "theories with fewer postulated essences are truer" are themselves not embodied in the considerations that shape the content of scientific theories, then religion is also not in a particularly epistemically virtuous space just because you can posit that e.g. God is ultimate simplicity or his esssence is existence or whatnot. But idk how to formulate a master argument to convince you of that, and I think you're better off just gaining first-hand knowledge working with scientific theories directly, especially since you're in college anyways.
I don't see why you're arguing about this if you're a scientific antirealist, if you're not willing to posit electrons to explain stuff why would you bother positing God to explain stuff?
I'm not pro God. I think Matthew is concocting an idealized and oversimplified model of how scientific theories work, and he's using that model as a standard to measure how successful religious theories of God should be (the more science-sounding they are the better). I think this is felicitous because a huge portion of the content of scientitic theories is "whatever works," not metaphysical essences or getting in touch with fundamental reality. So insofar as religious theories of God aren't workable/testable/verifiable, then there's no guarantee their superficial similarity to scientific theories is epistemically virtuous.
Do you have data showing science operates as you’re conjecturing? Ignoring the fact your big ramble looks like incoherent word salad.
Also such cringey & snarky condescension there, talking about "you're in college, go study & you'll see I'm right!" while presenting no empirical data. 🤦
If you want something resembling empirical data you can either go into labs and higher level science classes and observe for yourself science in action or you can read history of science or sociology of science books for a given domain, like the history of the species concept, the applicability of spdf electron orbitals, maybe a research methods textbook. I also linked the alternate construals of Relativity style theories that modify key assumptions like curved spacetime and use alternate mathematical tools to derive equivalent empirical predictions/achieve coherence with other "canonical" physical theories. Idk of any study that explicitly purports to test scientific realism though, so if you're holding out for that, then like I said I don't have a master argument.
Telling us “go do this” as if we have any burden for your empirical claim. 🤦 That's your work to do & present.
To be clear, we don’t grant observing “science in action” or reading “the history of science” will vindicate your conjecture. That’s called repeating your claim, Einstein.
Just link empirical data supporting your assertion. We’re not doing any wild goose chases. Very simple. No more dodging.
As I already explained, the papers I linked are empirical evidence against certain scientific realist presuppositions. If you're expecting me to link you THE paper that tests whether scientific realism is true with a scientific realism detector, then you are deeply confused and not tracking any part of the dispute.
And in general (obviously can't prove it in this comment) I don't think there's any essential characteristic that scientific theories have that can mark them as the last word. Consider precision of measurement as a plausible trait - even though some pop physicists will say we're made out of quantum fields, quantum field theory is considered an effective field theory - useful for calculations but many of its steps and processes and corrections are not expected to have any physical analogue, even among scientific realists. And as you look at more theories, there isn't really going to be this one guiding principle that shows you the theory's truth... it's all going to be a set of simplifying assumptions that are periodically curated for ease of humans working with the theory. So there's one argument - our putatively non-truth tracking desires encroach on our scientific methods and theories in order to make them easier for us to use rather than to search for the correspondent truth.
"But the monotheists who believed in a perfect being didn’t do this."
This is just objectively wrong. The early days of Christianity were full of "God did it" explanations. Some of the early contemporaneous canon were full of magic tricks Jesus did when he was a child. The Catholic church still canonizes saints for doing supernatural things.
Bart Ehrman has documented that Jesus' claims of divinity and supernatural power were a pretty common occurrence -- that is, many people claimed at one time or another to perform miracles and be the messiah. The only difference is he got more people to believe him.
Every now and then a new Jewish messiah gets a cult following. Even today there are people who believe Menachem Mendel Schneerson is the messiah.
And it doesn't stop there. The Council of Trent basically tries to take credit for anything good a person does. According to them, it wasn't my empathetic personality or strong upbringing by my parents or just circumstances that made me donate to a food bank. It was God.
But that wasn't what I was saying they didn't do. I was saying people didn't argue for God on the grounds he was needed to explain all the random events.
Why bring up miracles at all if not to argue for the existence of God?
I think arguing for miracles as evidsence of God is different from using it to explain random natural phenomena.
Nonetheless it's anti-scientific.
Why? What if there's good evidence for it--e.g. the Calanda healing?
Not anti-scientific, just beyond scientific method. Would you call arguing for moral facts anti-scientific?
I mean, I think moral facts can be can be discovered and especially explained scientifically, so no I wouldn’t.
I think because science has pretty effectively falsified PARTICULAR religions, in the sense of literalist takes of those particular religions' scriptures which those religions tend to take as strongly inspired (Judaism, Christianity) or directly provided (Islam) by a particular mono god; and because until fairly recently the organised arms of those religions insisted on literal takes, this is (in principle, completely without justification) extended to (mono)theism as such. While I am an atheist, I don't find the "science proved Genesis wrong" to be a viable argument against theism as such at all.
It IS a stronger argument against specific religions, eg Christianity and Judaism ("it's all symbolic and not meant to be read literally" does feel like a bit of a cope) but not really a convincing one, ultimately.
As an aside, in effect, the modern persistence of literal interpretations of the scriptures becomes an argument AGAINST Christianity imo (no system which requires or at the minimum, allows me me to believe in obvious falsehoods about the material world could be conceivably true).
Imagine a universe wherein God does not actually exist. All apparent patterns are the consequence of naturalistic processes like evolution or gravity. How would that universe differ from this one?
As other commenters like Joe Schmoe have pointed out, this seems to conflate religious beliefs in practice with theism per se. It's just descriptively the case that religious people invoke (a rich and personal conception of) God to explain observed phenomena which have been or can be explained without invoking God.
Of course it's fine to say, “sure, in practice most religious people have more detailed conceptions of God, and sometimes falsely invoke that God to explain phenomena which don't call for supernatural explanations; but the point remains that science doesn't disprove theism per se”.
But two comments here: (i) I take “religion” to (conventionally) refer to people's in practice religious beliefs and practices, not theism per se. So it might be more accurate to argue that science doesn't conflict with theism, rather than religion.
And (ii) I am genuinely curious how you go from something like “being of pure act, whose essence is existence” to a being with personal features, which is (maximally) ‘good’, which thinks about us and knows us, and so on. I'm sure you've written about this, so I'm being lazy in failing to find the answer myself.
I agree that some religious views are falsified by scientific findings. My claim was that this should lead to a revision--if you think the earth is young, for instance, you shouldn't abandon religion, but just think the world is old.
Re 2) I don't think the being is pure act--that was just a conception some have given, where I was making fun of the idea it was falsified by science. I think God is a simple, perfect being. https://benthams.substack.com/p/10-ways-god-can-be-simple
As religious belief is a question of faith, this problem is inherently epistemological. Why should we believe any religions truth claims?
If a religion starts out making a wide constellation of claims (claims they claim are based in some divine truth) and slowly but surely so many of these claims are shown to be false, it doesn’t inspire confidence in the rest of their claims. They have shown themselves to be quite fallible!
Why should we believe this religion has access to divine truth? Even if they admit that many of their claims are false, how do we know the central claims aren’t false too? So far they haven’t given us much reason to believe otherwise.
Plus, this doesn’t even get into something even more damming. The process of revising religious truth claims in the face of scientific evidence is always the process of revising away everything that made religion so compelling/inspiring/beautiful in the first place. What you are left with is sterile and inert. Not to mention that it’s certainly unrecognizable to Jesus or the apostles. Nobody builds cathedrals for “simple, perfect beings”. They build them for God. To a being who could turn you into a pillar of salt or deliver you from eternal damnation. A being who decides if you eat this season, or if your children survive past the age of 10.
Bach didn’t write saint Matthew’s passion about a simple perfect being. Paradise lost wasn’t written about a simple, perfect being. Crusades weren’t fought over simple, perfect beings. They were fought over God.
If your simple, perfect being can’t do that, can’t inspire that… then you have already lost.
> The problem is that this is terrible argument.
This is the exact same argument you are making in the end of the post: appeal to induction based on the fact that a particular hypothesis is becoming less and less likely with time.
Previously there were oh so many reasons for being a theist. You could've literally pull a finger into anything around you and ask "if not God then how?" and your opponent wouldn't be able to counter it with anything but completely unpersuasive "I don't know yet, but maybe in the future we will figure it out". But with the movement of time and the advancement of scientific progress humanity managed to answer more and more such questions, and the idea that we will find answer eventually became more and more justified. Nowdays arguments for the existence of God were pushed to poorly falsifiable realms, such as philosophy. But even there they are not completely safe.
> If one argues that God exists from, say, the De Ente argument—that there must be a being whose essence is existence from the fact that there are things that exist but do so non-essentially (for example, you exist, though you could have not existed if your parents hadn’t shtupped at the right time)—no scientific advance threatens that at all.
Not being able to be threatened by any scientific advances is not a good thing. It's a red flag, hinting that the theory is trying to evade falsifiability by any means necessary.
That said, there actually are some things that scientific advances can tell us about this argument. First of all, we can notice that science doesn't use the category of "essences" anymore. Turns out it's not really helpful for making accurate maps of reality. We are more about quarks nowdays. If your argument is based on outdated notions and can't be reformulated in a more preceise modern terms, it's more likely than not that the argument doesn't really work and only appears convincing due to the confusion encorporated in the ancient terminology.
Secondly, we know that our brains are cognition engines that obey conservation of energy. Being able to deduce the nature of reality without applying your senses, optimized by natural selection to correspond to this reality, would be a violation of it. And this De Ente argument looks very much like this - that I do not need to even look at reality at all, that I could've reasoned like this in any reality even the one where I didn't possess any senses correlated with it. This is very suspicious, to say the least - not the way cognition engines tend to produce accurate maps of the territory.
> each time we discover more fundamental explanations of things, the deeper laws seem to require a similar degree of fine-tuning
Not similar. Much less so. Before discovering evolution through natural selection it felt like all the variety of life is incredebly complex. But now we know that it reduces to existence of imperfect replicators. Likewise, if we discover, for example, that universes imperfectly replicate through black holes, then the whole complexity of fine-tuning every individual physical constant reduces to the existence of black holes in at least one universe.
> First of all, science tells us to look for unification—something simple that explains complex phenomena. But God has a decent claim to being the simplest kind of thing that there is.
No according our up-to-date metrics for complexity. God initially appeared very simple for human intuition, but the more we learned about what complexity is, the less simple the idea of God turned out to be.
> It’s very weird that bipedal apes who evolved to pass on their genes can figure out the fundamental nature of reality.
Not at all. If figuring out the nature of reality is positively correlated with passing on genes, then we expect that creatures evolved via natural selection will have more and more of such ability with time. Which is very obviously the case.
> As I studied more and more areas of philosophy, there seemed to be more puzzles for atheists—ones that theism effortlessly solves.
I think, here you are confusing your own history of learning things with humanity history of learning things. You just so happen to learn about philosophy later than you learned about science. But this is a backwards order. Science originated from philosophy - it's the kind of philosophy that actually appears to work. All the best philosophical ideas got into science while the rest stays either laying groundwork for scientific knowledge, or waiting to be properly formalized into science, or being unable to be formalized, due to being confused thinking based on primitive intuitions that ignore several hundreds years of our progress. And if it's the last kind of philosophy where you keep finding "evidence" for some hypothesis, it's really not a good sign for this hypothesis.
What science have done is to push God so far away as an explanation that you are looking for it in the multiverse. Our current picture of reality is that the field equations of 4 fundamental forces plug General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics explain everything that happens from mosquitoes to Black Holes.
The pure mistery of consciousness and existence are real and powerful, but the mechanist picture of the universe in its brutal indifference is a massive challenge even to abstract theism: for traditional religion is simply the end.
How does discover that there are predictable natural regularities threaten God? And how is this a new discovery of science?
There are not simply “predictable natural regularities”: there is simply nothing else. The full picture from the Schroedinger equation in each elementary particles system to the complete workings of your brain is mostly complete.
Thanks to Darwin, Laplacian mechanism is mostly a full cosmovisión. He said to Napoleon about God “I don’t need that hypothesis”, but in my view in the first half of the XIX century the gap between mechanics and living beings was too wide to believe his philosophy. Now, even before Craig Venter, biology is reduced to Chemstry, and since quantum mechanics, chemistry to physics.
Still of course, the puzzle is complete, but we have one piece too much: consciousness. That is precisely Chalmers dualistic naturalism, isn’t it?
Even if we have a complete model of physics, most theistic arguments would be intact. All of the ones I like would be certainly.
It is a distant God, that never answers your prayers, and that allows any kind of suffering if some blind equations imply it. I still can believe in that God, even love it, because the horrible reality is also elegant, and there is something instead of nothing. But it is not sweet Jesus…
Why can't God violate the natural laws to, say, resurrect Jesus?
Why not a Flying Spaghetti Monster? As long as we have a complete mechanist picture of reality, that additionally is full of cruelty and horror (also of intelectual elegance) what massive evidence is for the resurrection? Laplace didn’t need that hypothesis. What do you need it for?
It's also a terrible argument because it's based on imaginary historical facts. It assumes all religions are proto-scientific theories, that gods were invented to explain the mechanisms of natural phenomena, and that science and religion are engaged in the same explanatory project.
It's the modern mythology, the myth of human progress. Trans-humanism is the salvation myth that goes with it.
The only interesting thing about it is how that cultural narrative has developed in the context of the actual historical facts. We've ended up with a modern mythology that tells us we no longer have mythology. Myth signifies fiction in the modern world.
Interesting post! My own resistance to religion comes mostly from this territory so it's interesting to see it addressed explicitly.
I think the main "scientific objection" to religion is not an argument, but a thrust/vibe/culture. In general, the opposition comes from the scientific image eclipsing all others and seeming to not have room for a god. This force is obviously very powerful, and is at least a part of the broader cultural trend of secularization (regardless of its logical validity).
We could try to make the scientific objection to religion a philosophical argument. The medieval and early modern Gods had a lot to do with explanation, not necessarily of the tides or the seasons, but of everything, existence itself. Perhaps the best example is the Leibnizian cosmological argument. As the scientific image took over, we came to look more and more for scientific explanations, which work in certain ways and posit certain entities, but generally (perhaps for historical reasons or perhaps for principled ones) not God or gods. So, perhaps in the face of scientific advancement, this type of demand for explanation is no longer valid or God is no longer a valid postulate as an explanation.
Similarly, if we are doing broadly Quinean ontology, God seems like a very different kind of entity than the entities that our best theories are committed to. Of course, in discussing God in this way we're doing philosophy, but our philosophical ontology is supposed to be a principled extension of the sciences. Perhaps this is why there is a bias towards non-divine theories of moral knowledge, even though the divine explanation is simpler.
Good summation. I think if you want to trace the origin of the move to the scientific image, Kant might be a pretty good spot to put the marker. His Copernican revolution, that space and time are preconditions of thought meant we lost the rational warrant for conclusions about anything beyond our experience. Which meant we lost the foundation for the cosmological argument.
So I think you're right that it's about a rejection of particular types of explanation, rather than any statement of fact about the world. Unfortunately, that's a subtle distinction that is lost in popular culture and gets reduced to science-good, religion-bad.
This is a really helpful comment. I'm researching explanation and the philosophical demand for different types right now. The framing of Kant's revolution as maybe the shift in undermining cosmological arguments is great.
My Kant knowledge is weak, so I don't have much to add there. I wonder if another similar shift has to do with post-Newtonian science. I have the sense that Newton, with his hermetic principles had a different, more expansive view of scientific explanation than his successors. I'm not sure who the successor would be who marks the shift though. As is pointed out in this post, Einstein had weird not-so-empirical views as well.
I couldn't say much about that, but you seem to be moving between two distinct areas. There's explanation in the broad sense and scientific explanation is a subset of that. But I do think that's ultimately the source of this whole science vs religion contrast, the attempt to establish scientific explanation to the only meaningful type (eg logical positivism) and in the more vulgar forms, the only true or justified type (eg scientism).
I think our best theory is committed to God because he best explains fine-tuning, psychophysical harmony, and so on.
I don't know how finding a bunch of scientific explanations undermines the need for an ultimate explanation of contingent reality.
God doesn't really explain neither fine-tuning, nor any philosophical problems he is so often credited. People think that he does only because we are medicre at recursion.
Imagine that we actually were absolutely sure that God exists and created the universe. And then someone asks for an explanation of fine-tuning:
- Well, of course our universe is finely tuned - God created it for us. The existence of God makes the existence of fine-tuned universe like ours very likely. There is nothing to explain here!
- No, not the fine-tuning of physical constants of the universe, the fine-tuning of our universe and our God. It seems so lucky that we got a God who makes the existence of our universe so likely. But what if instead we got a God who doesn't create any universe at all? Or a God who creates only lifeless universes?
- But then our universe wouldn't exist at all! How can such God be a God of our universe?
- My point exactly! With all likelihood our God and our universe wouldn't exist, so there has to be some kind of extra rule according to which our God definetely has to exist.
- There is! Our God is methaphysically necessary.
- Sure, but isn't it iself extremely convinient that our God just so happened to be metaphysically necessary? What if instead it was God who creates only lifeless universes to be metaphysically necessary?The fact that metaphysical necessity itself is so finetuned for our existence seems extremely improbable. Now if only there was some metametaphysical rule according to which our God is nessecary... Wait, I know! There has to be a Super God, who is metametaphysically necessary, determine the metaphysical necessity and creates all kinds of Gods, that would in turn create all kind of universes they are to create. That would totally explain the improbability of fine-tuning! It's so obvious, if you think about it. Of course there has to be more Gods! SIA also points to the same conclusion!
- How so? SIA claims that there are a lot of observers like you and me, but our God already creates all kind of observers like that!
- Not if he doesn't exist, and his existence is extremely low probable without the Super God. But moreover, consider SIA's reasoning from the position of God himself! He also should expect there to be a lot of observers like him. And God can't be wrong about it, because he is omniscient! It all points in the direction of the existence of Super God!
We can continue this chain of reasoning indefinetely, by passing the buck of improbability from the universe to God and then to Super God and then to Duper God and so on, without any reason to stop. But it should be clear that at no point we actually explain anything. We do not reveal that the situation was less improbable than we originally thought, we just try to hide the improbability under the rug of the next level of recursion and hope that noone will look there, invoking more and more powerful entities. And if we are to stop this chain of faulty reasoning, well, can just as well do it on the very first step.
But it seems that Super God is super necessary.
Re 1: there are 100% (good) "object-level" arguments for god's existence. A, very partisan, view of ontology takes its task to be be mining science (or, more broadly, the body of human knowledge) for ontological commitments and/or extending science to questions it doesn't ask through appropriately similar means. God seems to me to be a very different kind of entity than those that science is concerned with. This seems to be a conflict. It seems like we (at least) take on some theoretical costs through extending our ontology in this way. Why take this view of ontology? That's a bigger question, and there's no law that says you need to be Quinean. Even if no, it still seems like there's a theoretical cost to adding a fairly different kind of entity.
Re 2: I'm not up enough on modern versions of the cosmological argument to really get into the weeds here, but it seems like there are fairly plausible things to say maybe relating to induction. Consider the space of things to be explained. We find scientific, natural explanations of some and other explanations of others. The scientific explanations revolutionize the world, and become very strongly established as the truth. The other explanations are more of a toss-up. It's harder to be super sure if they're true and they're less functional as explanations. It seems fair to say, on inductive grounds, that these, scientific ones, are the good explanations and the others are bad. Maybe the questions that demand the bad explanations are malformed/nonsense. Maybe the questions are good, but the answers are bad. I'm brainstorming here, but there might also be an inductive causal closure sort of argument. As we find natural/physical causes for natural/physical things, it seems harder to believe in a supernatural cause for natural/physical things.
As science progresses, the number of athiests appears to be dramatically expanding. By all indications, their numbers will continue to expand either through liberalization allowing people to have their own freer beliefs, or because non-religious authoritarians tend to be more successful than religious fanatics.
So outside of your purely theoretical bubble, the facts on the ground show that far from strengthening the case for God, technological progres is crushing it.
The fact that some force progressing correlates with less great religiosity doesn’t mean it’s the cause or that it undermines rational belief in religion. Like, you could say the same thing about history, but no one thinks that history undermines religious claims.
Wait, what? I say that history undermines religious claims. If one looks at all the bad stuff done by religious people, all the faiths which to their adherents seemed quite good but were then revealed to be false, and the fact that the world has existed for a long time instead of last thursday... my credence is lowered.
The number of atheists does not appear to be dramatically expanding. The data from Pew indicates that by 2050 the number of religiously unaffiliated (which includes atheists, agnostics, and people who don't want to be labeled, even if they believe in God) will decline from 16.4% of the global population in 2010 to 13.2% of the population in 2050. Pew has also found that, in the United States, that while 28% of the population is religiously unaffiliated, only 17% of that group are atheists. Currently it looks like only 9% of the global population would describe themselves as atheists.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2015/04/02/religious-projections-2010-2050/
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2024/01/24/religious-nones-in-america-who-they-are-and-what-they-believe/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_irreligion#:~:text=According%20to%20sociologist%20Phil%20Zuckerman,to%20750%20million%20people%20worldwide.
So I looked at an updated version of your source: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/12/21/key-findings-from-the-global-religious-futures-project/
Looks like the primary driver of religious growth is the differing fertility rates between poorer, more religious areas (primarily in Sub-Saharen Africa) and the rest of the world. Given the rapid decline of fertility of rates worldwide, and the association of wealth with that decline, it still doesn't seem like religion is suited for the long term.
(Also, it looks like the overwhelming majority of religious growth is concentrated in Islam, which Matthew thinks is overwhelmingly the least probable religion out of the bunch)
And? You wrote that "As science progresses, the number of atheists appears to be dramatically expanding." And that's simply not true: your "updated" source has the same numbers mine did, it's expected that the proportion of religiously non-affiliated (of which atheists are a minority) will shrink, not dramatically expand, over the next few decades. Atheists are a tiny minority of humans, and there is no sign of dramatic expansion despite science progressing.
In my own experience, my own atheism came about from a gradual process in my youth, which in my case was very much helped by living in a technological society. In my case, it included getting an education in engineering, and travel, especially spending a summer in a non-religious country ( Sweden as opposed to the US ).
Post should’ve been called “Science and Theism”
I would draw a distinction between "there is a conflict between science and religion" on one hand and "science has falsified religion" on the other. I think there is a conflict, but science could turn out to be wrong! It has been wrong in the past.