I am in fact surprised that two Iranian philosophers (yes, from the Department of Philosophy of Science, Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Islamic Republic of Iran) are even allowed to publish this paper, which refers to God, not Allah, and doesn’t mention the Qur’an. Well, that’s a good question, but not the question masticated in this paper in the journal Open Theology (click title to read or see the pdf here.
What we have is the usual kind of Sophisticated Theology™: a paper raising a question based on unsupported premises (there is a god that is kind, omnipotent and loving), and which then goes on to make up an answer about how certain baffling phenomena in the Universe can comport with such a god. Normally the topic of such inquiry is theodicy: why there is evil (especially “natural evil,” like childhood cancer or earthquakes) in a world made and run by such a god. This time, though, the topic is randomness. How, the sweating pair of theologians ask, can true randomness, untouched by God, exist in his Universe? More than that: how can true randomness, as part of the evolutionary process, unerringly wind up producing a species made in God’s image. As the authors ask, pretending to be puzzled:
. . . . from a theological perspective, the randomness and lack of purpose in the evolutionary process appear to conflict with God’s power, sovereignty, and wisdom.
Theologians cannot let this stand, for nothing can be allowed to conflict with God’s assumed wonderfulness and power. Nor do they assume that the randomness and lack of purpose in evolution comes from—could it be?—Satan. No, in the end it’s all part of God’s plan.
The authors first discuss two types of randomness: stuff that appears to be random to us but in reality could be understood, or even predicted, if we had perfect knowledge. Whether a coin comes up heads or tails (or edge!) is this type of randomness.
The other type, which the authors take it upon themselves to comport with God, is fundamental, unpredictable (“ontological”) randomness—chance inherent in a system that cannot be predicted, even with perfect knowledge. Quantum-mechanical “randomness”, or quantum probabilistic outcomes, are of this type. As the authors say:
In contrast, the real challenge for the relationship between God and the world lies in the existence of ontological or metaphysical randomness, which suggests that chance is an inherent aspect of the world’s structure and is inseparable from its dynamic nature. Ontological randomness cannot simply be viewed as a reflection of our inability to gain a certain understanding or a cognitive deficiency in comprehending the physical world. In other words, ontological randomness suggests a type of randomness inherent in the fundamental indeterminacy of the natural world. When every explanation of cosmic, macroscopic, and even biological phenomena relies on the principles of particle physics – which itself is characterized by intrinsic indeterminacy and stochastic events – it appears that we are confronted with ontological randomness.
. . . Ontological randomness. . . refers to events that cannot be predetermined in principle. Contrary to the views of proponents of ID, evolutionists argue that randomness is inherently non-purposeful. It is not merely a matter of attributing randomness to mutations due to our limited epistemic capacity to analyze the complex systems involved in the causal processes – similar to our inability to fully understand the causes of earthquakes or the movement of airborne particles. Rather, the fundamental indeterminacy of these processes means that no one can predict when they occur, much like our lack of access to the origins of nuclear emissions from Uranium-238.
Now the authors assume that evolution is driven by ontologically random mutations (“random” meaning, in the evolutionary sense, that the chance that a mutation will occur has nothing to do whether it will increase or decrease the bearer’s reproduction). This itself may not be a good assumption, for, if we had perfect knowledge, we might be able to predict when and where a change in the DNA might take place. The role of quantum phenomena in mutation (if there is such a role) is still unknown.
But let’s be charitable and assume that yes, mutations in the evolutionary process are like movements of electrons: ontologically unpredictable. How could such a process not reflect decisions of God and yet wind up with his most desired of all “creations,” Homo sapiens.
Here’s the authors’ answer:
Our preferred reconciliation does not view the relationship between God and the natural world as a dualistic one. Any dualistic perspective ultimately leads to the problem of interaction and, consequently, the “God of the gaps” fallacy. Instead, we embrace the open theistic view, which holds that the world exists within God. Although the divine transcends the natural world, it is also immanent within it; thus, the evolutionary process occurring in the world unfolds as a manifestation of God’s self-expression and self-consciousness.
The world is progressing toward God’s self-consciousness through the evolutionary process, which has culminated in human beings who exist within the natural world, are part of nature, and possess awareness of both their surroundings and of God Himself. In this perspective, the process of evolution becomes a revelation of God’s nature. God reveals Himself in the universe by becoming increasingly self-conscious, and this self-consciousness fosters freedom; true freedom arises from autonomy rather than heteronomy, and autonomy is rooted in self-awareness. The divine is indeed the sovereign designer and intelligent architect of the world, but does not merely create from a position of supreme distance. As Carl Schmitt notes, “The sovereign, who in the deistic view of the world, even if conceived as residing outside the world, had remained the engineer of the great machine, has been radically pushed aside. The machine now runs by itself.“
If you detect a whiff of pantheism here, you’re right, and the authors admit it (bolding is mine):
According to our panentheistic and open-theistic view, God is the designer of the world, which serves as a revelation of the divine mind and nature. God does not reside outside the world; rather, the divine is immanent within it and transcendent of it. The world does not operate on autopilot. The randomness we observe in the world signifies divine sovereignty and omnipotence, granting the world the necessary freedom to reveal its nature, which simultaneously unveils the nature of God.
Of course that last bit is totally made up, for the authors have no way of knowing that this is true of God (remember, they can’t even show us that there’s a God). This disproves the idea that the “clash” of ideas instantiated by freedom of speech will eventually arrive at the truth. Theology is one disproof of that idea, for it and its understanding of gods haven’t advanced one iota despite many clashes of ideas.
But of course God being all-knowing, somehow must have realized that the randomness He himself created would produce, with the help of natural selection, a creature made in His own image. Isn’t that special?
These lucubrations are part of what is called “open theology,” in which God grants the world freedom. Not just physical freedom, but its result, real free will (which of course the authors see as ontologically unpredictable, though it isn’t). In their drive to make up a concept of God that comports with ontological randomness, they hit on an answer that isn’t new: God wanted a world with maximal freedom because such a world is the best of all possible worlds:
The traditional view of divine sovereignty is often characterized by the notion of God having full control over every event, leading to the idea of eternal predetermination. This dominant perspective in the history of Abrahamic religions posits that the existence of ontological randomness implies that the entire system is not under God’s control, allowing for procedures that operate without purpose under divine sovereignty. However, according to open theism, we should comprehend God’s sovereignty in harmony with divine mercy. Thus, divine sovereignty does not imply a paternalistic control over all things; rather, it embodies the granting of freedom. The truly powerful agent bestows life and freedom, enabling others to flourish instead of confining and controlling them. The Almighty is not merely an omni-controller or authority but a liberator, allowing all creatures to choose their own paths according to their inherent potential and encouraging them to reveal their capabilities. This process of world disclosure is itself a manifestation of God and contributes to divine self-consciousness.
So God’s at the wheel after all, and the freedom he bestowed on the world includes the freedom of children to die of cancer and of the tectonic plates to cause death-dealing earthquakes and tsunamis. (This kind of theodicy the authors don’t explain.)
I can’t bear to go on much longer as I watch the sweat-sodden authors make a virtue of necessity, but I’ll quote one more bit to show how they do this. As one sees so often in Sophisticated Theology™, they simply attribute their solution to another theologian, as if citing yet another shill somehow justifies their own “solution”:
As Bradley eloquently explains, power, when understood in the context of mercy and love, does not necessitate complete control; rather, it signifies the full endowment of freedom and life. The omnipotent is the one who most effectively enables creatures to experience life freely, filled with love and happiness. Certainly, God has a distinct plan, a desired program, and a unique teleology for creation; however, this teleology unfolds through its manifestation in nature, as the natural world evolves through its history.
. . . From this perspective, the randomness present in mutations reflects the freedom that God grants to all creatures. Through the evolutionary process, the world progresses toward an outcome of self-consciousness. Consequently, human beings emerge as the result of this evolutionary journey, possessing the capacity to understand their place in the world and, as part of the natural order, becoming aware of the world itself.
It always amazes me that theologians who can offer no convincing proof of a god’s existence are so sure about god’s nature and his methods. How do they know this stuff? The answer is that they don’t: they are either making stuff up or stealing ideas from their predecessors.
You may have noted that yes, there is teleology here. There is surely not complete freedom, as a rerun of evolution, if quantum mechanics has any effect on mutations, would not necessarily produce either consciousness or humans. And yes, the randomness isn’t true ontological randomness because it is biased towards getting what God wants (my bolding):
. . . . if we see God as immanent in the world and, so, in a panentheistic view according to which God is transcendent of the world but is not separated from nature, then we can explain why nature is biased toward the marvelous. The reason is that nature is manifesting God’s marvelous beauty.
To that, all I can say is “oy vey!”
In the end, then, the authors have produced nothing new. They’ve espoused pantheism, in which the God-who-is-in-everything has set up the world so it produces “the marvelous”, i.e. H. sapiens. This is not novel, and it’s not even ontological randomness. It is hooey. And two Iranian philosophers of science have gotten paid to produce it. The only question is not why they go on about this stuff at such length, but how the journal Open Theology was willing to publish a paper with such a mundane answer. Do they apply no critical standards? The answer is in the second word of the journal’s title.
The biggest question, though, is how I can be on an Arctic trip and have time to go after such bushwah. The answer to that one is that today is a sea day, and I don’t have a book to read or wish to watch television.
h/t: B. Charlesworth
Under today’s Jesus & Mo post I commented with a link to last week’s cartoon, which as it happens is right on target for this post! It must be God’s will.
It’s funny to read the lucubrations as if they lost a bet and are trying to get out of paying up.
PCC(E) : “… today is a sea day”
I like that idea …
Or as if they’re trying to win a bet.
Apologetics always looks and feels like a parlor game. The card says “You live in a world controlled by a perfect, all-loving God. But your child gets a fatal brain tumor. Reconcile.
Extra points for eloquence and smugness. Go!”
Then everyone votes how you did.
I see no way in the Apologetics model to distinguish between a world controlled by an evil god and one controlled by a good God. The evil god may use good to better highlight the evil, in a mirror image of how the good god supposedly uses evil to highlight the good.
I honestly can’t see how anyone past the age of 11 believes this stuff…
Somehow the word “loving” does NOT come to mind when thinking of the angry Islamic god Allah. So I don’t see how that’s a problem for them. Christians, on the other hand, do have that problem.
Oy vey is right. I pity these folks who accept false premises and then torture themselves in their efforts to render them sensible. They proceed to tie themselves into knots—severely restricting blood flow to their brains—until an oxygen-deprived delusion springs forth to save them.
Oy vey!
How can true moral responsibility derive from a free will based on ontological randomness? Can a God justly punish anyone under these conditions?
In much the same way that determinism won’t get you there, neither will real randomness get you to a place of moral responsibility or divine justice.
By linking freedom and randomness, I’m afraid the authors have accidentally shown their asses.
“They’re” 🙂
Ha! I took it as if written correctly. Like wearing chaps while forgetting the jeans and boxers….and it’s not Pride Season.
Now you have me wondering.
Yes, it works even better. A virtuous typo.
Not a typo, you pedantic prig.
(A tough crowd today)
I am sorry you have any “down time” at all on such a wonderous trip, but thanks for these ruminations on sophisticated theology™. These thoughts are helpful for me because, though their efforts are futile, my wife and her dear friends sometimes try to make me more spiritual by quoting the brain-droppings of some theologian. Reading your thoughts helps me hone mine.
But I sure do hope you have more time seeing walruses (walri?), polar bears, and other arctic wonders.
Thanks for the travelogue!
…and the gravel!
“Brain-droppings”: I like it.
It’s the internet jake. As a kid, my access to other peoples thoughts (and brain-droppings) went through a publishing filter such as Britannica, World Book, or an edited and published book. No longer…anything does on the interweb….1%ers, 5%ers, alongside peer-reviewed journals. Knowledge: some assembly required.
I’ll read the paper later, and re-read your comments as Iran and randomness are two separate areas of my interest.
True randomness, math randomness and “real world” randomness are concepts that I’ve learned most people really – REALLY don’t understand. Concepts like “random rarely looks random” b/c things “clump” statistically.
And nobody teaches statistics anymore, sadly. (Pinker is also troubled by this omission at Harvard undergrad he said).
And so randomness is as terrifying as death. Which is why, like fear of death, the … “faith community” cling to “God explains everything” and the more totalitarian the religion (Shia’ Islam, let’s say…) the greater the reliance on God. Bc the way we’re evolved blame, reciprocal altruism and accountability are bred into us by evolution’s contest for survival of species, groups and tribes.
Primitive cultures have NO grip of randomness and everything – every unexplained or misunderstood death, say, every little tragedy has to be SOMEBODY’S fault.*
*Usually Da Joos, 🙂
This is 100% in Aboriginal society, (according to Mungo Manic).I’ve noticed it myself in the Islamosphere where you see “evil eye” jewelry and stuff.
Rationality tries to teach randomness but fails next to the all-explanatory god.
Pantheism – this is a particular bug bear of PCC(E) and he’s burned a lot of fuel over the centuries fighting it – rightly. But I’ve always thought pantheism is so ridiculous – ab initio – that it requires little attention. (just my opinion)
Just a funny bit – then I’ll let you go: maybe our sweaty Iranian scholars should apply for funding from Templeton? I’d love to see that application!
all the best Northern Seafarer!
D.A.
NYC
Every minute of every day, living things are being munched, crunched, stalked, ripped apart, parasitized, burned, drowned, buried alive, orphaned, and abused.
This is the marvelous nature of reality that God, overflowing with love and mercy, has created???
One of the oldest dodges for explaining away divine contradictions is to just go Meta. An all-powerful God with randomness in the universe ? God incorporates randomness in His non-random nature. And He is the universe of the universe. Ta da!
That doesn’t make rational sense?
Well, God’s nature of Perfection includes and accounts for something not making sense because that way it makes even more sense. So there.
The sophisticated can keep this up forever.
The article under discussion illustrates the progress that Theology has made in its thousands of years of intense
lucubration/twaddle. How unfair that universities with Theo departments nonetheless fail to include departments devoted to voodoo, Astrology, UFOlogy, alien abductions, and like scholarly subjects. Fortunately, grievance study scholarship has begun to remedy this institutional imbalance.
The bird you pictured is, I think, a light phase of the Northern Fulmar (Fulmarus glacialis). Nice!
Thanks. I thought it was a gull (I think that all white seabirds are gulls except for albatrosses!).
As noted by Wikipedia, “Though similar in appearance to gulls, fulmars are in fact members of the family Procellariidae, which includes petrels and shearwaters.” Note the prominent “tubenose” atop the upper mandible in your photo. Because of this feature, the Procellariidae are often called the “tubenosed birds.”
There were many things that I was expecting before I read this piece. Encountering Carl Schmitt was definitely not one of them.
Yes, I wonder if the authors realize that Schmitt was an avid member of the Nazi party, and remained an unrepentant Nazi until his death. Oy gewalt!
Apropos of the photo, are these philosophers trying to gull us?
This is an interesting read. https://www.thefp.com/p/white-man-who-pretended-to-be-black-poet?utm_campaign=260347&utm_source=cross-post&r=p9cwy&utm_medium=email
Re “the world exists within God. Although the divine transcends the natural world, it is also immanent within it”, these Philosophers seems to have skipped their Logic and Analytic classes. “Inside outside” is not the slightest advance over vanilla pantheism. Or The Matrix for that matter.
It’s worth noting that on some variants (“interpretations”) of quantum mechanics, electron movements aren’t ontologically random. Everettian QM is a case in point. The randomness comes from our not knowing – after an experiment is done but before we look at the results – which “branch” of the resulting overall state we are in. (Reference)
There’s also a useful concept in-between epistemic randomness and ontological randomness, which occurs when an observer not only doesn’t have sufficient information to predict something, but couldn’t, by physical law have sufficient information. That’s the situation we are all in, with regard to quantum-mechanical decoherence/collapse results. Reference (final section)
Real free will isn’t ontologically unpredictable, I agree. It is unpredictable in that middle way, but that’s no big deal, as lots of things are, albeit not all for the same reasons. But in another way, it is a big deal, because people easily confuse one type of randomness for another, and often think that free will requires ontological randomness due to those confusions.
Aldous Huxley, as a result of his experimentations with psychedelics, concluded that consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe and that brains evolved to channel and filter that consciousness to attending and responding to select stimuli in ways that facilitate the organism’s survival and reproduction. What the Iranian authors are saying seems somewhat similar to that, though posed as a theological issue (which for Huxley and most other psychedelicists it was not). And there still remains what Chalmers called the “hard problem” of consciousness, which is: why should arrangements of matter and energy have subjective experiences? For example, why should a 700 nm wavelength hitting the retina result in the subjective experience of the color red? That is indeed a great mystery – perhaps the greatest of all.
AH’s Doors of Perception impressed me greatly at an impressionable age. But his and others’ similar ruminations on ultimate reality are IMO cautionary examples of habitually thinking so far outside the box that one forgets where the box is, or even that there ever was a box.
And, ISTM, the Hard Problem is plausibly not that hard, e.g. Dennett’s Consciousness Explained.
The title was a joke. Dennett did not explain anything of the sort in that book.
To clarify, here is a famous quote by Dennett: “Are zombies possible? They’re not just possible, they’re actual. We’re all zombies. Nobody is conscious….” I agree that from an objective scientific standpoint we all look like zombies – we have brains with lots of electrochemical interactions that drive muscular contractions that we call behavior. But simply denying the subjective aspect does not eliminate it, and does nothing to address the Hard Problem.
I had a very different experience reading it. IIRC, none of it seemed an extended joke. Instead, it led me to “convert” from being (in Dennett’s words) a Mysterian into an Illusionist.
BTW, no-one¹ is denying the importance of the subjective experiences of consciousness; the (hard) problem is what such experiences really are. IOW, a problem of Ontology, not Phenomenology.
. . . . .
¹ Except maybe some die-hard old-school Behaviourists. “It was great for you. How was it for me?” (That is a joke, just not a good one 🙂.)
How can consciousness possibly be an illusion?? An illusion requires subjective consciousness to perceive it!
I find this a fun topic to discuss. Here’s an example I gave to my biopsych class: Imagine that you are given two choices – one, you can have everything you’ve ever wanted as a nonconscious zombie, or two, you can’t have everything you want but you have subjective experiences – in other words, a life. I think its pretty clear which option most people (other than Dennett perhaps) would choose.
This is a response to your subsequent comment in this thread, where you mention non-conscious zombies getting everything they ever wanted; however, it does not offer me a reply option below.
Now, I’ll start by saying I’m very jet lagged and fuzzy-headed today, so I may have missed something, but something didn’t make sense to me. One of the options you give your students is: you can have everything you’ve ever wanted as a nonconscious zombie. However, ‘wanting’ surely requires conciousness as wanting is a conscious experience. So is it not true that a nonconcious zombie could never want or have wanted anything in the first place?
Ah, I think I’ve just realised what you meant: your students could have anything they’ve ever wanted as the conscious human beings that they are now, but be destined not to experience any of it as nonconcious zombies. Doh!
Crikey, I really am fuzzy-headed. It seems I currently have the comprehension level of a nonconcious zombie. I need to get some sleep!
That’s a Thing, Ms. Knox and Mike, I learned in my research and personal interest in psychedelics for all my adult life now. (It is what started me on studying brain science in fact): Of psychedelic taking people some understand how the brain reacts to exogenous chemicals, how our serotonin H2A receptors react to the chemical of LSD, say.
But there is a cohort of “pychonauts” who actually believe the drugs are some kind of doorway/gateway to “reality” and the hallucinations are actually real. The latter, I’ve found, are often given to religious/magical thinking whereas the former (that there are neurochemical reasons for one’s trip) trend more scientific. Kind of an IQ test I’d say, were I uncharitable.
Nevertheless, even if one thinks the DMT/ ayahuasca goblins are real… there should be enough trips for everybody.
“Walk into splintered sunlight – its your way through dead dreams to another land.” Jerry Garcia, Box of Rain.
D.A.
NYC
Ah Jerry, Olivia, Brian….
We grow old.
Neither Leary nor Huxley thought hallucinated DMT goblins or any other such images were real. That silliness comes from some of the more foolish young-uns of today. And I know that there are many who took psychedelics and never had any sort of insight from them, although recent clinical trials of high dose psilocybin by Griffiths and colleagues found that in a safe, controlled setting, most subjects in the high-dose condition did have what they called revelatory experiences. As did the atheist Steve Jobs.
Jeff, to clarify. my thought experiment proposed to the students – i.e., sentient beings with goals and wants – that they could either have all they ever wanted but only by becoming nonconscious zombies, or they could just go on living their lives as sentient beings without getting all they ever wanted. Get it now?
It has always seemed to me that “why should arrangements of matter and energy not have subjective experiences” is an equally valid question.
Most don’t, a few do
The contrary view is
Panpsychic woo-woo
It’s all fine as long as we remember it is Creative Writing and file it under Fiction.
This paper is a bit surprising to me! I wonder what the Iranian ayatollahs would think of their ideas, and will they be in trouble? It sort of agrees with Qadar which declares that Allah is all-knowing and all-powerful, having knowledge of everything that has happened and will happen. Yet Qadar also claims that humans have free will and can make choices. More self contradicting, screwed up theology of a different species! “The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head.” Terry Pratchett
Oddly enough, quantum mechanics has an interpretation along related lines. “Superdeterminism” posits that everything is fully deterministic, including (somehow) determining that only certain particular measurements¹ will ever actually be made. Like cheating on a test by getting all the questions ahead of time. This seems insufferably weird, but so does QM in general. Leave your intuitions at the door.
. . . . .
¹ A technical term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measurement_problem
I for one cannot even consider ‘theology’ a valid human intellectual endeavor! And most probably those ‘products’ that are derived from it are no more than counterfeit pretense or as scritpure suggests, ‘chasing after wind’ and humanities greatest own goal and self deception.
Some of your criticisms hold the paper to standards you wouldn’t for any other field of inquiry.
“a paper raising a question based on unsupported premises (there is a god that is kind, omnipotent and loving)”
It’s published in a theology journal so it’s not surprising that it assumes basic principles of theology as premises. Is every publication in an evolutionary biology journal supposed to quote the totality of evidence for evolution before discussing the experiment in question? No, they assume evolution is true as a basic premise because there have already been numerous publications supporting it. Analogously, there are plenty of publications that argue in favor of the above three theological premises. Obviously you’re free to think none of those arguments are valid but they exist and it’d be unreasonable for the authors of the paper here to discuss them in entirety before getting to their point.
“Of course that last bit is totally made up, for the authors have no way of knowing that this is true of God (remember, they can’t even show us that there’s a God)”
The passage you quoted is an attempted explanation of the world given the assumptions that 1) there is genuine randomness in the world and 2) God is all-powerful and has a distinct plan for the world. To say they “totally made it up” is literally true as I suppose any idea anyone conceives of is “made up”. But the idea was conceived as a potential explanation of randomness despite a divine plan, not for no reason. By analogy to evolution again, Darwin proposed common descent and natural selection (amongst other phenomena) as an explanation for numerous observed facts about the world. It’s reasonable to credit Darwin with conceiving the idea of natural selection but saying he “made it up” would imply it was totally baseless. He “made it up” as an attempted explanation of the world given various premises. Natural selection wouldn’t be directly tested until later. Obviously that raises the valid point of whether or not the authors of the theology paper can “test” their claim.