Contra-atheism
Jonathan Rowe on Apr 2nd 2006
Here is a statement of religious belief of mine which I wrote in the comments section of my blog a little while back.
Personally, I’m not an atheist and think there probably is a sentience behind the universe, that the universe, on a macro-level, probably has a “consciousness” which “sets up the rules” like E=MC squared.
However, the Supreme Intelligence who created the rules also choose to leave his/her/its/their presence undetected by such rules of empiricism. In other words, the existence of such a supra-intelligence is not a “falsifiable hypothesis.” And science is in the business of teaching only those things which are falsifiable. Thus, I don’t support teaching any of the myriad of intelligent design theories in science classes. Perhaps in public school philosophy classes, but not science classes.
So I guess that puts me somewhere between agnosticism and a very unorthodox kind of theism. I spend much time on my blogs criticizing the beliefs of some traditional orthodox religions. And indeed, I think that entire portions of the Bible are so unbelievable and absurd that I question the sanity of someone who does not read stories like Noah’s Ark, the Garden of Eden, Sodom and Gomorrah, as just that — stories and metaphors.
On the other hand, I’ve also encountered a number of “fervent” (I got in trouble for using the term “militant”) atheists who, in my eyes, are just as fanatical as fundamentalist Christians — Richard Dawkins types.
So for the rest of this post, I’m going to criticize such “fervent” atheism.
My biggest problem is this: In discussions, they act as though the existence or non-existence of God is falsifiable and the answer has been discovered: God(s) don’t exist; the material world is all there is. And then when you question them, they give often glib answers that are just as unsatisfactory as the answers given by religionists.
This post isn’t going be an exhaustive critique; I’ll point out a few things. First, I’m hung up on the fact that time/space/matter/and energy exist to begin with. If there is nothing beyond the material world, then nothing should exist; but something does exist. Science tells us that matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed. To which the atheist responds, the universe and its matter have always existed (and indeed, the big bang doesn’t disprove this — see the theory of the expanding and contracting universe). Time is infinite in both directions.
Well, I have a big logical problem with that. It’s possible that time is infinite in the forward direction. But that’s the thing about infinite — you never get there. It is not logically possible, on the other hand, that time is infinite in the backward direction. That would mean that we’ve already “done” infinite. And infinite is a concept which is never done.
As to the issue of infinite regress, if the first cause of the universe exists outside of the time/space/matter/energy framework, then we don’t need an answer as to “what caused the first cause.” That’s like saying, if a baker bakes a pie, then who baked the baker. Similarly it’s also possible that the “first cause” is not created, didn’t always exist ad infinitum, but didn’t just appear out of nowhere either, because, such an entity exists outside of time, and time didn’t exist until the first cause existed.
Again, I’m not saying that such a being does exist or that any of the religions have the answer, but simply that glib atheistic answers, at times, can be just as unsatisfactory, unproven and unprovable.
Filed in The Belfry, The Biosphere
“In discussions, they act as though the existence or non-existence of God is falsifiable and the answer has been discovered: God(s) don’t exist; the material world is all there is.”
You can’t assert that the proposition “God exists” is or is not “falsifiable” because the key term, “God,” is undefined. Granted, *your* “Supreme Intelligence” might not be falsifiable, but I’m sure you know that this isn’t exactly the same as what everyone always means by “God.” Indeed, many theists might not even acknowledge your SI as a valid “god” (it might not be “worthy of worship,” for example).
Anyway, in a lot of cases, the proposition “God exists” is falsifiable because the claim is clear enough and has sufficiently coherent implications that we can test. In other cases, it’s not falsifiable - but in such cases, the claim can be so incoherent that it’s effectively meaningless. At the very least, it may be pointless to bother with.
The material world *does* exist and, as far as we can tell, it’s all we have to work with, to study, and to rely upon. This isn’t precisely the same as “the material world is all there is,” but on a practical level it amounts to about the same. The material world is all there is as far as any practical use and study is concerned. Everything else is hope, faith, tradition… speculation, really, and not even credibly *informed* speculation.
Well, there are still many wonderful issues to tackle but simply because we don’t know everything we don’t have to stay silent about weirdo stories without any support which are something people use to feel better or to excuse tyranny.
If lack of knowledge means you have to jump to “antoromorphic super intelligent creator all powerful all doing etc.” then I’m equally justified in claiming that the creator is a magical green frog with superpowers or that the universe is a sphere on the back of a turtle. Most superstring theory stuff is like that anyway :-)
So, on some issues, quietism for all is best. But quietism. If religious individuals insist on claiming nonsensical stuff then nonreligious people are equally justified in showing the nonsensical nature of the claims.
[Oops, "<" signs confused the browser. Please let this corrected version replace my previous comment.]
Jon, nothing you’ve said here provides any reason to think God exists. You ask for the universe to have a first cause, but why think that cause must be an intelligent being? A much more parsimonious explanation would strip such superfluous characteristics from our “creator”, until we get down to the core attributes: timelessness and necessity. Let us attribute these characteristics to a simple point. We have no reason to assume that the point is intelligent or has any mental attributes.
Then “time began with a timeless point” (as Quentin Smith puts it). It is ‘eternal’ and atemporal in the same way that God is supposed to be, and thus does not require an infinite past. It exists of metaphysical necessity, as God is supposed to, so there is no question of why it exists (its non-existence is, ex hypothesi, impossible). This is still a recognizably atheistic cosmology.
In any case, we need not appeal even to this, because an infinite past is perfectly coherent. Your objection rests on a confusion. It does not take time for the present to be reached, any more than it takes distance for “here” to be reached. We may posit an infinite space without supposing anything to cross it. Similarly, we may posit an infinite temporal dimension without supposing anything (the “moving ‘now’”?) to have traversed that.
No, what’s incoherent is the supposition that there is a “moving ‘now’”, an ever-changing one-true-present, for this would commit us to infinitely many temporal dimensions.
As I wrote there: “For what is the ‘now’ moving through? Clearly not physical time, as that is instead what it moves along. To see the difference, suppose that the moving now started moving backwards in physical time. That is, it moves from 14 July, to 13 July, and so forth. As the ‘now’ progresses (along what?), it goes backwards in physical time. The “along what?” dimension cannot be physical time, because that is regressing, not progressing. It must be some meta-time: a ‘traveller-time’ dimension for the ‘now’ to move along.
This then threatens infinite regress, as one can raise questions about what the ‘now’ is moving through as it moves along meta-time. We seem to require a meta-meta-time. And so forth.”
Note that the fundamental temporal dimension, what I call “physical time”, is simply an ordering relation which represents events as “before” or “after” other events. For there to be an infinite past is simply for there to be no finite limit on how many events or ‘times’ get placed in the “before” relation (relative to the present time). Let our current time be represented by t=0, with past (”before”) times represented by negative numbers and future (”after”) times by positives. Then we are simply making the claim that for all t’<0, there is another t” such that t”<t’. In other words, there is no earliest time, just like there is no least integer.
These times can all exist “eternally”, as it were. Each moment represents itself as “present”, but there’s no sense to be made of a “moving ‘now’” that is the “one true present”. (There is no objectively privileged time. The term ‘now’, like ‘here’, is purely indexical, it has no metaphysical significance.)
A helpful analogy invokes the frames of a movie sequence. Each frame implicitly represents its own place in the sequence. If we jumbled up the frames, the represented characters wouldn’t notice. We could run the movie backwards (in our “traveller-time”), but that wouldn’t change the fact that the protagonists fell in love after they met, despite the fact that we see their happy ending before we see their introduction. And in fact we need not run the movie through a projector at all. There could be infinitely many “earlier” frames, and we need not run through them all for it to be true that John and Sally are getting married in this frame.
If all times exist in much the same way that all the movie frames exist, then there is no need to run through them one at a time. We don’t need a movie projector, and nor do we need a ‘moving now’. The frames, and physical moments, are enough on their own.
Besides, from inside a frame, or inside a moment, we couldn’t tell the difference anyhow. If God decided to start rewinding time, to “replay” the universe backwards, it wouldn’t change the fact that I wrote this comment after reading your post, despite the fact that God would see my typing before he saw my reading. That sort of external (’traveller’) time just isn’t the fundamental dimension of time at all. To suppose otherwise is a confusion.
(Finally, even if you believe in the absurdity of a “moving ‘now’”, note that it could reach the present through hyperacceleration. It could traverse the infinite distance of our physical temporal dimension in finitely many “meta-moments”. Just say that it is accelerating exponentially. It takes one meta-day for the ‘now’ to traverse the first physical day. The second physical day takes only half a meta-day. The next a quarter, and so forth. The corresponding infinite series sums to 2, so the “now” will have traversed infinitely many physical days by the end of its second meta-day.)
I agree with most of Richard’s criticism, and would like to address in a different way the key mistake “It is not logically possible, on the other hand, that time is infinite in the backward direction. That would mean that we’ve already “done” infinite. And infinite is a concept which is never done.” Time being infinite in the negative direction just means that for every instant t there is a previous instant t’. It doesn’t imply that anything has to “do” an infinite task. If the present is t0, from any previous moment t1 we would have a finite time interval between it and t0, so there is no thing “doing” an infinity. And the past and present are exactly symmetrical in this regard.
A more serious concern with the infinite past is in my opinion the second law of thermodynamics. If it holds without any restriction, then the only possibility for an infinite past would be that the entropy “decresae” as we go backwards in the past approaches assymptotically zero without ever attaining it, which seems strange. But perhaps the Second Law does not hold in all circumstances.
Still another possibility not discussed by you nor Richard is that time is not a fundamental feature of the world but an “emergent” concept, which loses validity at very small scales (such as close to the Big Bang). Recent developments in string theory may support this idea, although I’m not sure I can understand it’s meaning (and perhaps not even the string theorists can…)
Richard, et al. As an atheist, do you believe in reincarnation?
Remember that time is a lowly property of the vacuum, not the conductor of some chamber ensemble for all the universe, with its players Space, Energy, Matter, and Change fiddling away at their predetermined parts. For all his genius, that is one part of the picture that Newton had wrong. The atheist may find comfort, then, with the knowledge that although neither space nor time are infinite, it does not follow that they “began” in any recognizable sense. To say that time “began” at some moment, in the way a film begins with its first frame, is to make the same error of looking for the spatial coordinates where the universe started. The universe was smaller in the past than now - it is not, to remind you what you probably know, that galaxies are flying apart through space, but that space itself is somehow growing. Are we “gaining” space? Is space merely being “stretched”? Are such questions meaningful? In any case, we do know that space was smaller in the past than now, and far more dense in terms of energy and matter. Go back in time, and the universe shrinks. Go back far enough, and the universe disappears, like a balloon so deflated that it disappears. Time also disappears. This raises two concerns. First, it means that the beginning of the universe was not an event - events in the human experience requires a description in terms of spatial coordinates and time coordinates. At the beginning, there was really neither. The Time is finite in the past, but there is no well-defined beginning. This comment should bring neither fervent theists nor fervent atheists much comfort, however. The atheist is comforted that there was no “moment” of creation, but the theist can reply that this is all a non-sequiter. That the universe had no recognizable beginning does nothing to explain why it exists.
It is very arrogant to assume that concepts such as “God” or religion have been completely refuted. Some humility is needed, and we must acknowledge what can and cannot be proven. However, any arbitrary non-falsifiable statement is also impossible to refute fully (eg, Flying Spagetti Monsterism, pink invisible unicorn diety, angels push things down causing the “illusion” of gravity, etc), and that is why people may be too arrogant in their dismissal of the possibility of God.
That is why I think that a weak form of atheism, one that is simply very skeptical of religious/metaphysical ideas (eg. God, the afterlife, angels, etc) but does not go as far as to also make claims that cannot be investigated or proven is the best religious stance. It is a stance that merely waits for the evidence, and does not believe things until there is evidence.
I have to criticise you for your logic behind adding in your Supernatural being. It seems to be an argument from ignorance. At this point, we do not know any “logical” explanation for the ultimate origin of the universe, merely the earliest known events. Because of this lack of knowledge, your adding in your concept of diety as an explanation. Proof of God should be based on evidence, not a lack of evidence for something else!
I can also point out that there was a time when it was inconceivable how animals could have been created, so the argument from design (William Paley’s Watchmaker analogy is the most famous example of this) was concieved. And, people believed it. But it was also (in part) an argument from ignorance. Your argument may be the same, in that, in the future, a proper and logical explanation will be found.
It is also entirely possible that the ultimate cause of the universe may never be known, meaning that this issue may never be fully resolved.
I ask whether atheists/materialists believe in reincarnation because, if individuals are simply a particular collection of molecules, ask, what are the probabilities that the particular collection that is me or you will reappear as they once did, and the chances are infinitesimally small, but still not absolutely impossible. The chances may be one in some billion or trillion or whatever, but the *chance* is still there. And if matter and energy go on with time, infinitely, then chances are, I will reincarnate, simply because if you get to roll the dice infinite times then anything that is not excluded from the realm of probability will eventually happen.
And if time, along with space, matter, and energy move infinitely backwards, then chances are this isn’t the first time I or you or anyone have existed. In fact, we’ve always existed and always will.
Jon, I’m an atheist who (like most atheists) doesn’t believe in reincarnation. Also, again probably like most atheists, I’m not all that fervent. You make a Nietzschean argument for reincarnation, but there are a few problems with it:
- time may not be infinite
- if space is infinite (either infinitely big or infinitely divisible) then each state of the world has a probability of 0, so an infinite number of “rolls of the dice” needn’t bring about every possible state
- even if time is infinite (and even if space is finite), that doesn’t mean that the universe can be characterized as an infinite sequence of independent events (like rolls of a die). Maybe the universe follows a directional path (like endless expansion and entropy) so there is no repetition, or maybe it reaches a steady state, or maybe it only repeats a subset of its possible states.
And, even if there is an eternal recurrence, I don’t think that I’d call that “reincarnation”. Rather than the one you coming back to some form of life, in some way that is causally connected to the life that you lived, there would be infinitely many variations of you in the past and future, some identical but most with various differences from you (fading off into people who are different enough that you wouldn’t even consider them versions of you), and all causally unconnected to you. It’s not clear what we should think of these “twins” (should I identify with them and think “that guy is me“?), but it’s very different from thinking that after I die in this world I will continue my current life in another world.
Going back to the original post, I’m not sure if your attitude towards “fervent” atheists is justified, even taking your religious views as given. If I understand you correctly, you think that fervent atheists, unlike many fervent theists, have reasonable beliefs (so reasonable that you seem to say that your own view borders on agnosticism). Your main criticism is that they are overconfident and they don’t properly understand or grapple with the strongest arguments against their view. But if you pick just about any interesting topic where there isn’t a consensus, you’ll find plenty of people who act the same way. If some people arguing for atheism tend to take this tendency to a greater extreme than most other kinds of partisans, I would imagine that that’s mostly attributable to the fervor and the absurd beliefs of their main opponents in the debate, the fervent theists. (These aren’t counterarguments - just some thoughts that might temper your criticism of fervent atheists.)
Moving on to your cosmological argument against atheism. This argument is highly dependent on certain ways of thinking about time and causality, and (in addition to Richard’s more philosphical arguments), modern physics casts doubt on the way you’re using those concepts. Time, space, matter, energy, and causality don’t work the way most people think they work, even within our universe (the universe that seems to have begun about 13.7 billion years ago with the Big Bang), and it’s even less clear how anything like these concepts might apply once we start looking beyond our universe (if there even is anything beyond our universe). Einstein’s theory of special relativity, for instance, treats time and the three spatial dimensions as different dimensions in four-dimensional spacetime, which makes Richard’s analogy (it taking infinite distance to get “here”) appropriate. And consider the current theory of the Big Bang (this is how I understand it - mostly from pop physics books by people like Lee Smolin & Brian Greene - so anyone more knowledgeable should jump in and correct me). It’s not the case that the Big Bang caused stuff (matter & energy) to expand to fill the universe. Rather, the Big Bang was the beginning of the expansion of the universe itself (spacetime). So when you talk about infinite time extending before the Big Bang, it’s not clear what “time” even means in that context or (if it does have some coherent meaning) how we should be reasoning about it. (This could also threaten your argument for reincarnation.)
In response to the question “why is there anything?”, I find the answer “because of God” deeply unsatisfying, especially when there is no way of figuring out what this “God” is besides filling in whatever attributes seem necessary to allow it to plausibly fill this apparent explanatory gap in our understanding of a complicated and abstract topic. That just doesn’t seem like a productive approach for trying to understand things.
My arguments do seem to support a sort of agnosticism, what you might call cosmological agnosticism or uncertainty about the nature and origins of the universe, but that is different from religious agnosticism. They don’t, as far as I can tell, provide any reason to suppose that there is any sort of supernatural being, or anything sentient, conscious, or intelligent outside of the material universe, or anything that could reasonably be anthropomorphized as “God” or a creator. It seems to me that the “God” concepts that people have are derived from people’s experiences with actual conscious, intelligent creatures (themselves and other people), and then applied to very different, often confusing domains (like cosmology) where they just aren’t that appropriate.
Jon, I’m having trouble following the dialectic. Is the possibility of material “reincarnation” meant to be another objection to atheism, or are you just curious about our views here?
In any case, I certainly don’t believe in any kind of persisting immaterial soul/substance, thus ruling out the standard (supernatural) understanding of reincarnation. But I just as certainly think it’s possible that a materially indiscernible copy of me might materialize.
Whether we think that copy is me will depend on our views about personal identity. Most plausible views require some sort of causal connection between the two individuals. So my randomly materializing duplicate would not be me.
In any case, I tend reductionist about such matters. Once we describe all the intrinsic and relational properties that hold between the duplicate and myself, then we know all the facts there are to know. We may choose whether or not to call the obtaining of these facts “identity” (or even “reincarnation”). But such descriptions are not of any further fact beyond the material ones already described.
By reincarnation I think Jon really means total resurrection - even complete duplication of you, your life, your experiences, and everything else about you. There is no causal connection between the two - there is only the statistical certainty that you, being an ordered arrangement of matter and energy, will at some point in an infinite reality be duplicated in all your glory.
Re: the statistics of reforming/”reincarnation”… Your claim is not OK.
Only because time is infinite it does not follow that an infinity of combinations will be tried an infinite number of times. What you have is a case of indeterminacy, just like when you do a limit and you end up with infinity / infinity.
There’s an infinity of time but there are also infinite combinations. There’s no reason to assume that 1) there is more “infinity time” than “infinity combinations”; and 2) that over time all possible combinations are actualised.
It is possible for an owl to sit on top of a moose’s head while the moose is on a space ship. Did it happen? Will it happen? The infinite amount of time doesn’t guarantee that all posibilities will be reality.
Good point, Gabriel. Some infinities are greater than others. (If that sounds like a smartass comment, it isn’t. It’s true that some infinite sets are greater than others.)
Interesting,
I would suggest if somthing was to occur that was identical to you it would be you so that would be reincarnation AND that being would think it was you. there would be the same amount of continuality as you experiece between any two moments in your normal life. From a pure athiestic point of view I dont see how you could make the distinction since that you would remember being you etc.
But somthing different would have to happen for this to be relevant.
If you mean reserection like a perfect repeat of your life then I would suggest that is exactly what you are experiencing - “simultaniously”. You dont jump from the end of one to the start of another you go from the end of one to the end of the other. You would also be prone to contineue the new life by dying instantly.
I suggest there are not infinite combinations required to produce “me” there is a certain amount of space and a certain amount of energy occupying that space. In almost any given situation that could be given a probibility (a very low but finite one) However I am dubious if we have an infinite universe or infinite time.
Blair,
> But if you pick just about any interesting topic where there isn’t a consensus, you’ll find plenty of people who act the same way.
and they are all “wrong” in a sense. Just because that is what people do doesnt make it right.
> In response to the question “why is there anything?”, I find the answer “because of God” deeply unsatisfying
One could argue why isn’t there god? What is the ultimate end game of an infinite universe/multiverse?
A quick opinion, although it’s probably too late.
I believe in materialist reincarnation. Specifically, I believe after my death, my neurons will disseminate throughout the earth, soil, plants, vegetation, bugs, animals, pets, and people. Since, I believe my consciousness derives from my brain, and not the divine touch of God, then I will join other neurons in forming a new single consciousness. I will not “remember” that my brain was once pieces of a billion other brains, I will only be my current conscious self.
After my death, I will become a part of a million living creatures, yet each part of me will only know the creature I am in. We are all irrevocably entered into a non-stop cycle as long as there are living things around, whether we like it or not.
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