Religion & Law

Primeval Philosophical Simplicity

By John Pieret

The Wall Street Journal has dueling essays from Karen Armstrong and Richard Dawkins.

PZ Myers has looked upon what Dawkins hath wrought and saw that it was good. PZ actually adds something to the debate but Jerry Coyne, predictably, acts like the toady to the schoolyard bully, proclaiming his "victory" even after his hero tripped over his own feet while trying to catch his latest victim.

The most interesting thing from Armstrong is her claim that modern Western faith made an error attempting to put belief in God on a scientific basis:

... Sir Isaac Newton had claimed that his cosmic system proved beyond doubt the existence of an intelligent, omniscient and omnipotent creator, who was obviously "very well skilled in Mechanicks and Geometry." Enthralled by the prospect of such cast-iron certainty, churchmen started to develop a scientifically-based theology that eventually made Newton's Mechanick and, later, William Paley's Intelligent Designer essential to Western Christianity. ...

But the Great Mechanick was little more than an idol, the kind of human projection that theology, at its best, was supposed to avoid. God had been essential to Newtonian physics but it was not long before other scientists were able to dispense with the God-hypothesis and, finally, Darwin showed that there could be no proof for God's existence. This would not have been a disaster had not Christians become so dependent upon their scientific religion that they had lost the older habits of thought and were left without other resource.

In the past, many of the most influential Jewish, Christian and Muslim thinkers understood that what we call "God" is merely a symbol that points beyond itself to an indescribable transcendence, whose existence cannot be proved but is only intuited by means of spiritual exercises and a compassionate lifestyle that enable us to cultivate new capacities of mind and heart.

... Ken Ham's bizarre Creation "Museum", which on the one hand repeatedly rejects the power of human reason, while on the other constantly throws up pseudo-scientific displays that mimic those of real museums, trying to illustrate the apocalyptic fever dreams of a world-destroying flood with mechanistic explanations, from floating islands of logs that carried the koalas to Australia to faux-authentic maps of the path of the tidal wave that killed everyone; the literature of creationism is also thick with 'feasibility studies' of the engineering of the Ark, estimates of how many species could have fit aboard, peculiar adoptions of physics software that, by diddling certain inputs, they use to justify such nonsense as hydroplate theory, explanations of the distribution of fossils by hydrologic sorting, etc., etc., etc.

... [M]odern religion has rushed to emulate the trappings of science, where every explanation must have an epistemological foundation in real world observations ... [inventing] natural processes that assist their enfeebled deity ...

Mystical explanations are thought to be deep; the truth is that they are not even shallow.

What is so special about life? It never violates the laws of physics. Nothing does (if anything did, physicists would just have to formulate new laws?it's happened often enough in the history of science). ...

Never once are the laws of physics violated, yet life emerges into uncharted territory. And how is the trick done? The answer is a process that, although variable in its wondrous detail, is sufficiently uniform to deserve one single name: Darwinian evolution, the nonrandom survival of randomly varying coded information. We know, as certainly as we know anything in science, that this is the process that has generated life on our own planet. ...

To midwife such emergence is the singular achievement of Darwinian evolution. It starts with primeval simplicity (empasis added) and fosters, by slow, explicable degrees, the emergence of complexity: seemingly limitless complexity?certainly up to our human level of complexity and very probably way beyond. ...

Darwinian evolution may not be the only such generative process in the universe. There may be other "cranes" (Daniel Dennett's term, which he opposes to "skyhooks") that we have not yet discovered or imagined. But, however wonderful and however different from Darwinian evolution those putative cranes may be, they cannot be magic. They will share with Darwinian evolution the facility to raise up complexity, as an emergent property, out of simplicity, while never violating natural law.

Where does that leave God? The kindest thing to say is that it leaves him with nothing to do, and no achievements that might attract our praise, our worship or our fear. Evolution is God's redundancy notice, his pink slip. But we have to go further. A complex creative intelligence with nothing to do is not just redundant. A divine designer is all but ruled out by the consideration that he must at least as complex as the entities he was wheeled out to explain.

Full post as published by Thoughts in a Haystack on September 12, 2009 (boomark / email).