Authors: Unknown
Given
that the number of particles of any one type, say electrons, is large,
Swinburne thinks it too much of a coincidence that so many should have
the same properties. One electron, he could stomach. But billions and
billions of electrons,
all with the same properties,
that is what really excites his incredulity. For him it would
be simpler, more natural, less demanding of explanation, if all
electrons were different from each other. Worse, no one electron should
naturally retain its properties for more than an instant at a time;
each should change capriciously, haphazardly and fleetingly from moment
to moment. That is Swinburne's view of the simple, native state of
affairs. Anything more uniform (what you or I would call more simple)
requires a special explanation. 'It is only because electrons and bits
of copper and all other material objects have the same powers in the
twentieth century as they did in the nineteenth century that things are
as they are now.'
Enter
God. God comes to the rescue by deliberately and continuously
sustaining the properties of all those billions of electrons and bits
of copper, and neutralizing their otherwise ingrained inclination to
wild and erratic fluctuation. That is why when you've seen one electron
you've seen them all; that is why bits of copper all behave like bits
of copper, and that is why each electron and each bit of copper stays
the same as itself from microsecond to microsecond and from century to
century. It is because God constantly keeps a finger on each and every
particle, curbing its reckless excesses and whipping it into line with
its colleagues to keep them all the same.
But
how can Swinburne possibly maintain that this hypothesis of God
simultaneously keeping a gazillion fingers on wayward electrons is a
simple
hypothesis? It is, of course, precisely the opposite of
simple. Swinburne pulls off the trick to his own satisfaction by a
breathtaking piece of intellectual
chutzpah.
He
asserts, without justification, that God is only a
single
substance.
What brilliant economy of explanatory causes, compared with all those
gigazillions of independent electrons all just happening to be the same!
Theism
claims that every other object which exists is caused to exist and kept
in existence by just one substance, God. And it claims that every
property which every substance has is due to God causing or permitting
it to exist. It is a hallmark of a simple explanation to postulate few
causes. There could in this respect be no simpler
explanation than one which postulated only one cause. Theism is simpler
than polytheism. And theism postulates for its one cause, a person
[with] infinite power (God can do anything logically possible),
infinite knowledge (God knows everything logically possible to know),
and infinite freedom.
Swinburne
generously concedes that God cannot accomplish feats that are
logically
impossible, and one feels grateful for this forbearance.
Having said that, there is no limit to the explanatory purposes to
which God's infinite power is put. Is science having a little
difficulty explaining X? No problem. Don't give X another glance. God's
infinite power is effortlessly wheeled in to explain X (along with
everything else), and it is always a supremely
simple
explanation
because, after all, there is only one God. What could be simpler than
that?
Well,
actually, almost everything. A God capable of continuously monitoring
and controlling the individual status of every particle in the universe
cannot
be simple. His existence is going to need a
mammoth explanation in its own right. Worse (from the point of view of
simplicity), other corners of God's giant consciousness are
simultaneously preoccupied with the doings and emotions and prayers of
every single human being - and whatever intelligent aliens there might
be on other planets in this and 100 billion other galaxies. He even,
according to Swinburne, has to decide continuously
not
to
intervene miraculously to save us when we get cancer. That would never
do, for, 'If God answered most prayers for a relative to recover from
cancer, then cancer would no longer be a problem for humans to solve.'
And
then
what would we find to do with our time?
Not
all theologians go as far as Swinburne. Nevertheless, the remarkable
suggestion that the God Hypothesis is
simple
can
be found in other modern theological writings. Keith Ward, then Regius
Professor of Divinity at Oxford, was very clear on the matter in his
1996 book
God, Chance and Necessity:
As a
matter of fact, the theist would claim that God is a very elegant,
economical and fruitful explanation for the existence
of the universe. It is economical because it attributes the existence
and nature of absolutely everything in the universe to just one being,
an ultimate cause which assigns a reason for the existence of
everything, including itself. It is elegant because from one key idea
-the idea of the most perfect possible being - the whole nature of God
and the existence of the universe can be intelligibly explicated.
Like
Swinburne, Ward mistakes what it means to explain something, and he
also seems not to understand what it means to say of something that it
is simple. I am not clear whether Ward really thinks God is simple, or
whether the above passage represented a temporary 'for the sake of
argument' exercise. Sir John Polkinghorne, in
Science and
Christian Belief,
quotes Ward's earlier criticism of the
thought of Thomas Aquinas: 'Its basic error is in supposing that God is
logically simple - simple not just in the sense that his being is
indivisible, but in the much stronger sense that what is true of any
part of God is true of the whole. It is quite coherent, however, to
suppose that God, while indivisible, is internally complex.' Ward gets
it right here. Indeed, the biologist Julian Huxley, in 1912, defined
complexity in terms of 'heterogeneity of parts', by which he meant a
particular kind of functional indivisibility.
71
Elsewhere,
Ward gives evidence of the difficulty the theological mind has in
grasping where the complexity of life comes from. He quotes another
theologian-scientist, the biochemist Arthur Peacocke (the third member
of my trio of British religious scientists), as postulating the
existence in living matter of a 'propensity for increased complexity'.
Ward characterizes this as 'some inherent weighting of evolutionary
change which favours complexity'. He goes on to suggest that such a
bias 'might be some weighting of the mutational process, to ensure that
more complex mutations occurred'. Ward is sceptical of this, as well he
should be. The evolutionary drive towards complexity comes, in those
lineages where it comes at all, not from any inherent propensity for
increased complexity, and not from biased mutation. It comes from
natural selection: the process which, as far as we know, is the only
process
ultimately capable of generating complexity out of simplicity. The
theory of natural selection is genuinely simple. So is the origin from
which it starts. That which it explains, on the other hand, is complex
almost beyond telling: more complex than anything we can imagine, save
a God capable of designing it.
At a
recent Cambridge conference on science and religion, where I put
forward the argument I am here calling the Ultimate 747 argument, I
encountered what, to say the least, was a cordial failure to achieve a
meeting of minds on the question of God's simplicity. The experience
was a revealing one, and I'd like to share it.
First
I should confess (that is probably the right word) that the conference
was sponsored by the Templeton Foundation. The audience was a small
number of hand-picked science journalists from Britain and America. I
was the token atheist among the eighteen invited speakers. One of the
journalists, John Horgan, reported that they had each been paid the
handsome sum of $15,000 to attend the conference, on top of all
expenses. This surprised me. My long experience of academic conferences
included no instances where the audience (as opposed to the speakers)
was paid to attend. If I had known, my suspicions would immediately
have been aroused. Was. Templeton using his money to suborn science
journalists and subvert their scientific integrity? John Horgan later
wondered the same thing and wrote an article about his whole experience.
72
In it he revealed, to my chagrin, that my advertised involvement as a
speaker had helped him and others to overcome their doubts:
The
British biologist Richard Dawkins, whose participation in the meeting
helped convince me and other fellows of its legitimacy, was the only
speaker who denounced religious beliefs as incompatible with science,
irrational, and harmful. The other speakers - three agnostics,
one Jew, a deist, and 12 Christians (a Muslim philosopher canceled at
the last minute) - offered a perspective clearly skewed in favor of
religion and Christianity.
Horgan's
article is itself endearingly ambivalent. Despite his misgivings, there
were aspects of the experience that he clearly valued (and so did I, as
will become apparent below). Horgan wrote:
My
conversations with the faithful deepened my appreciation of why some
intelligent, well-educated people embrace religion. One reporter
discussed the experience of speaking in tongues, and another described
having an intimate relationship with Jesus. My convictions did not
change, but others' did. At least one fellow said that his faith was
wavering as a result of Dawkins's dissection of religion. And if the
Templeton Foundation can help bring about even such a tiny step toward
my vision of a world without religion, how bad can it be?
Horgan's
article was given a second airing by the literary agent John Brockman
on his 'Edge' website (often described as an on-line scientific
salon)
where it elicited varying responses, including one from the
theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson. I responded to Dyson, quoting from
his acceptance speech when he won the Templeton Prize. Whether he liked
it or not, by accepting the Templeton Prize Dyson had sent a powerful
signal to the world. It would be taken as an endorsement of religion by
one of the world's most distinguished physicists.
'I
am content to be one of the multitude of Christians who do not care
much about the doctrine of the Trinity or the historical truth of the
gospels.'
But
isn't that exactly what any atheistic scientist
would
say,
if he wanted to sound Christian? I gave further quotations from Dyson's
acceptance speech, satirically interspersing them with imagined
questions (in italics) to a Templeton official:
Oh,
you want something a bit more profound, as well? How about. . .
'I
do not make any clear distinction between mind and God. God is what
mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension.'
Have
I said enough yet, and can I get back to doing physics now? Oh, not
enough yet? OK then, how about this:
'Even
in the gruesome history of the twentieth century, I see some evidence
of progress in religion. The two individuals who epitomized the evils
of our century, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, were both avowed
atheists.'* (*
This calumny is dealt with in Chapter 7.)
Can
I go now?
Dyson
could easily refute the implication of these quotations from his
Templeton acceptance speech, if only he would explain clearly what
evidence he finds to believe in God, in something more than just the
Einsteinian sense which, as I explained in Chapter 1, we can all
trivially subscribe to. If I understand Horgan's point, it is that
Templeton's money corrupts science. I am sure Freeman Dyson is way
above being corrupted. But his acceptance speech is still unfortunate
if it seems to set an example to others. The Templeton Prize is two
orders of magnitude larger than the inducements offered to the
journalists at Cambridge, having been explicitly set up to be larger
than the Nobel Prize. In Faustian vein, my friend the philosopher
Daniel Dennett once joked to me, 'Richard, if ever you fall on hard
times . . .'
For
better or worse, I attended two days at the Cambridge conference,
giving a talk of my own and taking part in the discussion of several
other talks. I challenged the theologians to answer the point that a
God capable of designing a universe, or anything else, would have to be
complex and statistically improbable. The strongest response I heard
was that I was brutally foisting a scientific epistemology upon an
unwilling theology.^ Theologians had always defined God as simple. Who
was I, a scientist, to dictate to
theologians that their God had to be complex? Scientific arguments,
such as those I was accustomed to deploying in my own field, were
inappropriate since theologians had always maintained that God lay
outside science.
^This
accusation is reminiscent of 'NOMA', whose overblown claims I
dealt with in
Chapter 2.