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Religion & Law

: Thoughts in a Haystack

Burned By Chestnuts

By John Pieret

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I do wish Jerry Coyne would stick to biology, at which he is great, and leave philosophy, at which he is, to say the least, not great, alone. At a minimum, he could refrain from sneering at that which he does not understand.

Coyne's latest stab (in all senses of the word) at philosophy is in response to an article at The Daily Dish by Jim Manzi entitled "In Defense of Robert Wright against Jerry Coyne." I'm not particularly interested in Manzi's argument (which he has further defended here, and here) but in Coyne's response to it. Coyne starts off with this:

There could, of course, be a divine plan that happens to coincide with The Big Bang, evolution, and all the materialistic processes we study, and we wouldn't be able to disprove that. Deistic evolution, in which a god starts everything off and then retires, could be a divine plan, though of course it's not the sort of divine plan that many religious people would accept.

So far, so good. That's is, I think, a correct description of the philosophical limits of science ... as far as it goes. But deism of a sort intended by Coyne is not exhaustive of the possible ways a god with sufficient abilities could operate to achieve a plan. And Coyne knows that, since he has, himself, addressed other potential ways a god could influence the world without being detectable by science. In particular, he took notice of Francis Collins' suggestion (also advanced by Ken Miller) of the logical possibility that such a god could act in the realm of quantum uncertainty.

Coyne continues:

All that science can do on this front is to seek evidence for a divine plan of a certain type, and either support or falsify that plan. Some divine plans ? for example, those that preclude innocent people or animals from needless suffering ? have already been ruled out by science. Science has also dismissed any divine plan that involves an omnipotent and omnibenevolent god. Science and reason, then, can have things to say about Divine Plans.

There are, of course, a lot of assumptions hidden in that "needless." This in nothing but a slight variation on "the argument from evil." As I've already addressed once before, this argument suffers from the problem of how to define "evil," keeping in mind that Coyne, himself, for purposes of the argument, is granting the potential existence of an omniscient being who may be looking at the life we know as the infinitesimally short prelude to an eternal life he/she/it is granting to human beings. In such a case, what counts as "suffering" and "evil" is very much up for grabs, a point that the "traditional religions" (that Coyne and other atheists love to fall back on when faced by more sophisticated theologians) readily acknowledge in such formulations as "the ways of God are mysterious." Still, if people sophisticated in the ways of philosophy such as Colin McGinn and Jonathan Miller can trot out the argument from evil for purposes of a television show (knowing full well, I suspect, that it isn't as simple as that), I can hardly fault Coyne for doing the same for a blog post.

But Coyne takes it a step further and states that science has "dismissed any divine plan that involves an omnipotent and omnibenevolent god." At the very least this is horribly confused. The argument from evil is ancient, going back at least to Epicurus, and, while the Greeks of Epicurus' time could be said to have had science, it wasn't science that he appealed to for an understanding of what "evil" is. In fact, science adds nothing to that question even to this day.

However, Coyne really hits his philosophical know-nothingism stride with his response to Manzi's invocation of the "first cause" argument:

Oh dear. This chestnut is so old that it's fossilized. And the answer to this claim hasn't changed for decades: why is God any more an "uncaused cause" than is the universe, or the "physical laws" themselves? God is always called the "uncaused cause" without further explanation, but that simply won't do. If He was an uncaused cause, what did He do before creating everything? Hang around twiddling His thumbs?

To grab the low hanging fruit first, does Coyne really think his juvenile taunt about God twiddling his thumbs adds anything to the discussion of a philosophical problem that has engaged the greatest minds since the time of Plato and Aristotle? Even if he does, here is an instance where science at least suggests a response that Coyne himself has appealed to (quoting Sean Carroll with approval) in countering the claim that the "multiverse" is a desperation move by scientists in response to the "fine tuning" of physical constants favorable to the existence of life:

[V]arious theoretical attempts to explain phenomena that we directly observe right in front of us ? like gravity, and quantum field theory ? lead us to predict that our universe should be one of many, and subsequently suggest that we take that situation [the existence of the multiverse] seriously when we talk about the "naturalness" of various features of our local environment.

But, if the multiverse is real, then God may have been creating and tending to an infinite number of universes all throughout eternity, instead of twiddling his thumbs. Not much of an argument, I grant, but fully commensurate to Coyne's. Furthermore, Coyne's "argument" is indicative of his inability to form a consistent philosophy that integrates his own knowledge across the various arguments he makes.

The more substantial problem with Coyne's reaction to this 'fossilized chestnut' is that he has the first cause argument exactly backwards. It is not that "God" is inherently superior to an eternal universe as a candidate for the "unmoved mover," it is that whatever unmoved mover there might be breaks the cause --> effect relationship that is at the heart of what we call "natural." Whichever you choose, you are calling into question naturalism, both methodological and metaphysical. No less an atheist light as E.O. Wilson has acknowledged, in his On Human Knowledge, that the question "why is there something instead of nothing" is a difficult one for atheists. And, if the world, at the most fundamental level of its very existence, is not the result of cause preceding effect, how can we be sure it holds anywhere in science? The importance of cause preceding effect to our scientific understanding is well explained in a post by Dr. Steven Novella (discussing how we can know that the brain causes "mind"):

[O]ne of the primary arguments used by dualists is the notion that brain activity only correlates with mental activity ? and since correlation alone does not prove causation, it is possible that the mind causes brain activity, or that some third thing causes both. Logically speaking, this is true. These are always the options to explain a correlation between A and B: A causes B, B causes A, or C causes A and B. ...
It is a well established tenet of science and philosophy that causes precede their effects. An effect cannot occur prior to a cause. If someone gets lung cancer before they start smoking, no reasonable person would attempt to blame the cancer on the smoking. Therefore, if brain activity causes the mind then we would expect that brain activity would generally begin prior to the mental effects caused by the brain activity. If, rather, the mind causes the corresponding brain activity then we would expect a mental experience to happen before the brain activity. If some third phenomenon causes both mental activity and the corresponding brain function, then we would expect both to occur simultaneously, although either could precede the other if there were differing lag times for the mind and the brain.

In effect, Coyne's response to the first cause argument is to deny that, as far as the material world is concerned, cause necessarily precedes effect, which, in turn, calls into question the ability of science to deliver "truth." And given that science is, itself, the best argument for naturalism, calling the cause/effect relationship into question is a self-defeating proposition. And if naturalism fails as an explanation of the fundamental question of why something rather than nothing exists, what is the alternative? What is the proper word to describe an uncaused cause?

Of course, the first cause argument does not, in and of itself, go to the existence of a personal god. But, as Dawkins argues in The God Delusion, even if you can't prove something in one go, it is legitimate to make arguments that increase the "probability" of one explanation over another.

There may be some cogent reply to the first cause argument, though I've seen none that is compelling. But blithely dismissing it with unfounded arrogance as an 'old chestnut,' while advancing an argument that raises as many problems as it solves, is as grating as any creationist bafflegab.
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Full post as published by Thoughts in a Haystack on September 08, 2009 (boomark / email).