Sophisticated arguments for God

Over at his website (which most of us call a blog), Jerry Coyne has been discussing sophisticated theology and illustrating this with reference to a book (“Questions of Truth”) by Polkinghorne and Beale.  As part of that discussion, Jerry has compiled a list of arguments that are often presented as evidence for God:

1. The Big Bang: what got it started in the first place? After all a quantum vacuum isn’t nothing.
2. Why is science possible at all?  The human ability to apprehend truth must be a gift from God, since it couldn’t have evolved (see Plantinga)
3. The “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics” proves that God designed the universe
4. Ditto for the existence of physical “laws”
5. Only God could have give us the “innate” human sense or morality (see Francis Collins)
6. The “fine-tuning” of the universe (that is, the values of physical constants) is evidence for God
7. The appearance of humanoid creatures on the planet—creatures capable of apprehending and worshiping a God—is evidence of His handiwork.

Indeed, these are arguments that I often see presented by theists when asked for evidence.  I most commonly see them presented as arguments for Christianity, though I have occasionally seen some of them presented as arguments for Islam.

The first thing to note is that while these arguments are often presented as evidence, they are not actually evidence.  That is to say, there is no strictly logical derivation from what is presented to what is claimed.  These arguments are typically presented as part of an appeal to emotion, rather than as an appeal to logic.

The next thing to note, is that these arguments work better as arguments for deism than as arguments for Christianity.  For the arguments are based on a broad view of our universe.  They are not based on specific interventions in the world.  So, at best, they argue for a non-interventionist god who created the universe, and then allowed it to unfold without further intervention.  That proponents of an interventionist religion such as Christianity use these arguments, is really an admission that there is no credible evidence of divine intervention in the world.

I’ll now comment on the arguments in that list.

1: (the big bang).  The thing to note here, is that the big bang is a model designed to explain the evidence.  It might yet be wrong.  At sometime in the future, perhaps a different and better model will be used.  The argument for a deity is of the form “It seems to look like X; therefore it must have been produced by Y.”  That sort of argument always seems dubious.  When we use what is observed to try to determine what made that observation possible, we are guessing.  When we make these kinds of guesses in ordinary life, we recognize that further investigation is required so that we can have more than mere guesswork.  In the case of the big bang, the same should apply.  We should skip the guess work, and carry on with further scientific investigation of the cosmos.

2: (the possibility of science)  It is surprising to me that theists argue this.  That they do shows the extent to which they grasp at straws.  For the most part, science is a systematic evidence based study of nature.  I’m not sure why theist would question this possibility.

3: (the effectiveness of mathematics) For myself, I never saw anything unreasonable about the use of mathematics in science.  Given that science uses systematic methods, it is to be expected that some of that systematicity will show up in the way that they have structured their description of nature.  Part of the problem comes from philosophers of science, who often don’t seem to understand how science works.  This leads to a mistaken view that mathematics could not be useful unless the world itself had mathematical properties.

4: (existence of physical laws)  This, too, is a puzzle.  It ought to be obvious that the laws of physics are human constructs.  There seems to be a mistaken belief that if the laws of physics are constructs, then the world itself is a construct.  I’m not sure why this mistake is so commonly made.  People do not say “because the English language is a construct, therefore the world described in English is a construct.”

5: (sense of morality)  It seems obvious to me that our moral sense comes from the culture, and does not depend on a deity.

6: (fine tuning)  Part of the mistake here is the same as in item 3.  And partly, the mistake is in assuming that the world was made for us, when the evidence shows that we evolved to be adapted to the world that was already here.

7: (humans have big brains and complex cognitive systems)  This is just the solution that evolution has provided.  The world is continually changing, and biological systems need to adapt.  One strategy for that is to have high reproductive rates and allow natural selection to manage the adaptation.  An alternative strategy is to have organisms which have high adaptive abilities in their behavior.  The insects seem to be following the first of those strategies, and mammals seem to be following the second.  That we have large brains compared to other mammals, is because we evolved as a social species.  Social interaction requires large brains.

In summary, I find those arguments for God to be very weak.