Having read one of her books (Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism), which I liked, and knowing how Kathleen Stock (OBE) was hounded out of the University of Sussex for her gender-critical views, but has stood her ground since, I’ve been an admirer, though I haven’t followed her doings much. I see this from Wikipedia:
On 9 March 2023, Stock, alongside tennis player Martina Navratilova and writer Julie Bindel, launched The Lesbian Project. The purpose of the Lesbian Project, according to Stock, is “to put lesbian needs and interests back into focus, to stop lesbians disappearing into the rainbow soup and to give them a non-partisan political voice.”
Stock is a lesbian, and you see above, she doesn’t want gay women stirred into the “rainbow soup” with the “T”s Yet, at least from that book, I don’t see Stock as a transphobe, but rather as someone who thinks hard about the slippery concept of “gender” and who doesn’t see transwomen as fully equivalent to natal women.
But I have to ratchet back some of my admiration for Stock in view of what she has just published: a semi-laudatory review of a creationist/ID book, God, the Science, the Evidence by Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies. The Sunday Times also extolled the book (which is a bestseller, by the way); I dissected some of its arguments here. As far as I can tell—and the book isn’t yet available to me—the authors give the standard creationist guff touting a “God of the Gaps”, arguing that things that science doesn’t yet understand, like how the Universe began or how life began, are prima facie arguments for God. Of course they were once prima facie arguments for God about things we now have a scientific explanation for, like lightning and plague, but the new book apparently sees the existence of a complicated god as more parsimonious than saying “we don’t yet know, but all the evidence given for God that science has investigated has proven to be purely materialistic.”
Sadly, Stock has somewhat fallen for the God of the Gaps, to the extent that the book has “undermined her faith in science”.
If you subscribe to UnHerd, you can read Stock’s hyperbolically-titled review by clicking on the screenshot below, or you can read it for free as it’s archived here.
The very beginning of the review, in which Stocks ‘the eternal truths of religion” gets the review off to a bad start. (Is she joking here? I don’t think so.) There’s the usual incorrect noting that religiosity is increasing in the West. Then she says the god-of-the-gaps arguments have weakened her faith in science. Bolding is mine, and excerpts from Stock’s review are indented”
The eternal truths of religion are having a moment. Church pews are filling up with newcomers. Gen Z is earnestly discussing demons and sedevacantism on social media. This might, therefore, seem like a good time to publish a book which purports to lay out a positive empirical case for the existence of a supreme being.
God, the Science, the Evidence by Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies, out this week in English, is already a best-seller in Europe. It comes with endorsements from various luminaries, including a Nobel Prize winner in physics. Reading it hasn’t affected my religious tendencies either way, but it has definitely undermined my faith in science.
Leibniz once asked: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Bolloré and Bonnassie’s answer is that God originally decreed “let there be something”; and they think that 20th-century developments in physics, biology, and history support this hypothesis. Their basic strategy in the book is to keep asking “What are the chances of that?” in a sceptical tone, concluding that only the truth of Christianity can explain otherwise unlikely natural circumstances.
Now Stock isn’t completely laudatory about the book, especially its “Biblical” evidence for God (see below), but saying that her faith in science has been weakened by God-of-the-Gaps arguments means she thinks that their priors have increased to the point where scientific evidence for the Big Bang, the “fine-tuning” of the universe, the complexity of single-cell organisms, and “the stunning efficiency of the double helix”—all of this is weakened, strengthing the evidence for God or at least something divine. But even here she waffles, ultimately concluding that these arguments “empty nature of mystery”:
Fine-tuning arguments remain interesting, though. Ultimately, they don’t work to rationally justify Christianity, or indeed any other kind of concrete theology, because of the large gaps they leave. One big problem is about how to calculate the probabilities of physical laws being as they are; for on many secular views of the laws of nature, their being different from the way they are is, precisely, physically impossible. But even leaving aside that technical issue, God’s intentions in designing the universe still look worryingly vague: what was He calibrating the background physical laws for, exactly? Was it just to bring carbon into the universe; or carbon-based life forms, generally; or humans, specifically; or even just one human in particular — Liz Truss, say, or Craig from Strictly? Why did He adopt so painfully indirect and slow a manner of implementation, and not just magic up the Garden of Eden in a trice instead, like a pop-up at the Chelsea Flower Show? The nature of God also looks pretty vague, defined only as whoever it was that came up with the floorplans: are we talking just one cosmic architect, or a committee?
“Why did He not just magic up the Garden of Eden in a trice, like a pop-up at the Chelsea Flower Show?”
Effectively, then, though fine-tuning arguments empty nature of mystery, treating it like a piece of machinery we might one day fully understand, they return all the obscurity to God.
The problem is that although her points against fine-tuning are decent, and she raises several other arguments against a divine origin, she doesn’t like the creationist arguments not because there are materialist explanations for fine-tuning, but because she wants these things to remain a mystery. I suspect this because she says this at the end of her piece:
Perhaps, then, we are at an impasse: two mutually incompatible explanations of how we got here, each with its own measure of confusion and darkness. We could just stipulate that a creationist God, by definition, gets all the glamorous mystery, while the material world gets rational comprehensibility; He is whatever started things off, but that which we cannot otherwise hope to know. Or perhaps — and this would be my preference — we could give up flat-footed quests to prove the existence of the supernatural by rational means; we could start becoming alert to immanence, rather than simply hypothesising transcendence. That is: we could stop treating the natural world as if it were an Agatha Christie novel, where the only real mystery is how exactly the body got into the library.
I prefer our flat-footed attempts to explain things materialistically instead of becoming “alert to immanence,” whatever that means. What we see throughout the review is Stock not just sitting on the fence, but pirouetting on it, going from one side to the other. I still don’t know why her faith in science has been undermined, as God-of-the-Gaps arguments have been around for decades, if not centuries. I would note that my faith in Stock has been undermined.
But in one area her review is good. As I said, it’s the “evidence” that Bolloré and Bonnassie adduce for God from the Bible. Here’s a bit:
Or take the authors’ argument that the historical Jesus must have been the Messiah, by attempting to rule out more prosaic rival explanations. Jesus can’t have been just another wise sage wandering round the Levant, they suggest, because he sometimes said crazy things. Equally, though, he can’t have been a crazy man, because he sometimes said wise things. The possibility that both sages and madmen sometimes have days off seems not to have occurred. The next chapter is of similar argumentative quality: could the Jewish race have lasted so long, been so intensely persecuted, yet achieved so much — including producing “the most sold book in history” and achieving “many unexpected and spectacular military victories” — had God not been intervening on their behalf all along?
By the time you get to the book’s treatment of the Fatima “sun miracle” — not to mention the authors’ insinuation that God instigated it in order to precipitate the Soviet Union — images of Richard Dawkins leaping around with glee and punching the air become irresistible. As chance would have it, only this week Scott Alexander published his own, much more rigorous, exploration of the Fatima sun miracle than the one offered by Bolloré and Bonnassies in their chapter. I recommend that they take this as a sign from God, and give up the explanation game forthwith.
If you have the patience, do read Scott Alexander’s very long piece on the Fatima “sun miracle,” (Spoiler: he suggests a naturalistic explanation.)
What I don’t understand about Stock and her review,then, are four things:
1.) If Stock, as a philosopher, can skillfully debunk Biblical miracles, why doesn’t she adduce the other naturalistic explanations for fine tuning, the origin of life, and the complexity of one-celled organisms.? Granted, she does raise questions about why God would make the universe as it is, but stops there.
2.) How did the book “undermine her faith in science”. She’s not clear about this. Does she find God-of-the-gaps arguments somewhat convincing?
3.) What does she mean in the title “Science can’t prove the ineffable”? “The ineffable” means “things that cannot be expressed in words.” But of course stuff we don’t yet understand can’t be expressed in words simply because we don’t understand them, not because there’s something “transcendent” about them. If the title and subtitle are the work of an editor, well, I’ve always had the right to okay titles.
4.) What is the “immanence” she speaks of? Is this the usual interpretation that God is to be found everywhere in the world instead of outside of it? That is, is she a pantheist?” If so, what evidence does she have for “immanence,” or is that just something she chooses to believe? And does she worry about where this “immanence” she accepts comes from?If the Universe is really a god in itself, why could it not be a NOT-GOD in itself—that is, something purely naturalistic?
This is a murky review, ending without the reader able to know what Stock really tbinks. That’s unseemly for a philosopher.
h/t: Chris, Loretta
5) I want to ask her, “the universe had a beginning? That is self-refuting. Where is your explanation, if you are a philosopher, how something that contains everything could have something or someone outside of it that caused it?”
The answer is: the god of your imagination.
The formulation, “the universe had a beginning” is void on its face. There is no ‘outside.’ There is no alternative to existence. Existence exists.
Yeah exactly. They point to God as the ultimate explanation. So you ask…”ok, did God have a beginning?” The answer is “no of course not, He always existed.”
So…it’s ok to posit that certain things have always existed, as long as we call those things “God”?
I’m amazed that many smart people don’t spend the 30 seconds or so walking through this simple thought process, which lays bare the inherent contradiction and complete lack of explanatory power in religious “cosmology”.
Plato started this, at least in the West, or he inherited it. He glorified the existence of a “Noumenal Realm” which is ‘true reality.”
Meanwhile, the realm we scientists, engineers, and all knowledge workers inhabit is denigrated as a shabby vague shadow of reality.
Nothing will be right until mankind rejects Plato.
Platonic hatred?
I hate the legacy of Plato, 1) the invention of the supernatural “as a thing” with the add-on that objective reality is a pale shadow for slaves, and 2) for glorifying the first organized, mapped, totalitarian political system led by the elite who worship his supernatural realm, cynically called “philosopher-kings.”
My long-ago Philosophy 101 prof largely agreed with you. He said Plato was an excellent rhetorician; too bad he had so many bad ideas. Maybe his shadow-caster in the Ideal realm was much better 🙂.
Some philosophers have found it obvious that the universe was always there, while others insisted it must have had a beginning. None of them had hard evidence.
I am not sure we should read too much into Stock’s being a philosopher. She’s not Bertrand Russell. Her works include Philosophers on Music: Experience, Meaning, and Work and New Waves in Aesthetics. As for Science not being able “to prove the ineffable,” since ineffable means inexpressible or unutterable, how could it? If you can’t define the problem, how do expect to solve.
I’m comfortable with someone being well-informed on one topic and ignorant of another: it is true for many (most?) of us. For Stock to be sensible or even wise about lesbian matters, yet gullible and naive about cosmology and religion is simply an example of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect.
I see this as a reaction to the regressive “woke” left, which struggles to define what a woman is.
In the last Norwegian election, I even voted for the Christian Democratic Party, a moderate centrist party, due to their stance on sex/gender issues and their support for Israel.
As a staunch atheist and anti-creationist myself, I prefer moderate religious people, even those who favor creationism, over extreme “woke” green activists who apologize for Hamas and oppose Israel.
However, I find it disappointing that otherwise rational people choose pseudoscience.We live in a strange and deeply polarized world.
I will have to hold my nose and do the same here in Sweden. The only political party solidly against gender ideology and who have a serious political stance on Israel / Palestine (ie not demonising Israel and recognising islamism for what is its) are the Christian Democrats.
There’s a game that many philosophers play:
“If I can imagine it, my idea must be true” together with “If I can find a contradiction your idea must be false”.
Word games.
On the second…if I can find a genuine contradiction between two of your assertions, then at least one of them is false!
As I remarked in a comment a few days ago, I do think it is impossible for science to provide final answers about why the Big Bang happened and why the laws of physics are as they are. Give me ANY scientific question, and ultimately the chain of follow-up questions leads back to the geometry of spacetime and the fundamental physics of the quantum fields whose quanta are the quarks and leptons and force mediating bosons that inhabit spacetime. But then we can ask: “Why is spacetime that way and why do quarks and leptons and bosons behave that way instead of some other mathematically possible way?” I think there is no answer other than “The universe happens to be that way.” And I don’t find that anthropomorphic principles help here.
But religious people don’t seem to realize that the God hypothesis provides no final answers either. If you say that you believe in God, but you don’t ascribe any attributes to the Being, then the word “God” means nothing. But if you do attribute properties to God, e.g. perhaps you believe that God is kind and loving, or perhaps stern and vengeful, then you have the unanswerable question: “Why is God that way instead of some other imaginable way?”.
Whatever you believe or don’t believe, there are no “final answers” and we must simply live with that.
If you resort to God to explain the existence of the universe, then where did God come from?
It’s turtles all the way down. 🐢🐢🐢
Anthropic, not anthropomorphic. Barrow’s 700 page The Anthropic Cosmological Principle is a hard slog, but IMO worth it.
Right. Silly slip of the brain.
“Let’s think the unthinkable, let’s do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency
In other words, instead of throwing up our hands and saying “goddidit”, let’s commit to doing the hard work of solving the mysteries of the beginning of the universe, the origin of the cell, and, dare I say it, Life, the Universe, and Everything! We will learn interesting, unexpected, and very useful facts along the way!
“We will learn interesting, unexpected, and very useful facts along the way!” 42 x 👍
The alternative, of being unwilling to learn anything new, will lead to a wasted life and no progress for humanity.
When Stock uses phrases like “Science can’t prove the ineffable,” one has to wonder if she really understands science at all; and if her “faith in science” is undermined, I wonder if this is due to this lack of understanding and the usual discomfort of so many people with the provisional nature of science.
I dislike the phrase “faith in science” anyways. The word “faith” has too many connotations of believing something as a matter of personal conviction rather than by logic and dispassionate evaluation of evidence and general good epistemological thinking.
You have a point here. She certainly does not seem to have a good grasp of philosophy of science: She writes: “But the next section, focusing on “fine-tuning arguments”, puts us squarely in the territory of induction not deduction, and what philosophers like to call “inference to the best explanation” — treating the physical universe as if it were a murder scene, with you as Hercule Poirot, trying to work out whodunnit from the clues.”
IBE – inference to the best explanation – is not inductive but rather abductive. Of course induction, generalizations from observation, as well as deductive argumentation (such as the hypothetico-deductive method) can be part of the totality of arguments/evidence used for a greater abductive argument (consisting of auxiliary beliefs and theories a well as the main theory or conclusion which thus IBE is used to arrive at).
This is a pretty significant misrepresentation/mistake for a philosopher to make –
regardless if she is a philosopher of science or not, she ought to know this.
Stock claims to have had her faith in science undermined – what kind of a statement even is that? She speaks of faith in science, as if ‘science’ is a monolith, one thing, that is statically either right or wrong, and not an ongoing process of knowledge seeking, and she seems to be under the impression that faith is relevant to science. Even if it were, what is she even losing faith in: scientific institutions, scientific methodology, scientific knowledge, scientists, particular scientific disciplines?
This is one strange text: a mismash of ‘the feelz’ and ignorance/disinterest of what science is. This text is why we should all be vary to write on topics that are neither in our fields of interest nor ones we do not know much about.
Jerry, I know you don’t think much of my book, “Finding Darwin’s God.” However, I also reject the idea that “proof” of God’s existence can be found in what we don’t understand. Here’s what I wrote:
“As a Christian, I find the flow of their [creationist] logic particularly depressing. Not only does it teach us to fear the acquisition of knowledge, which might at any time disprove belief, but it suggests that God dwells only in the shadows of our understanding. I suggest that if God is real, we should be able to find Him somewhere else—in the bright light of human knowledge, spiritual and scientific.”
So please do tell us exactly how you found or how one can find this/these god/gods/goddess/goddesses “in the bright light of human knowledge, spiritual and scientific.”
… and how it is possible to know exactly which one of this/these god/gods/goddess/goddesses is the ‘real’ one?
Jared, the point of my comment was simply to point out that even a theist like me rejects the sort of God of the Gaps argument favorably reviewed by Stock. I wrote my comment to AGREE with Jerry’s take on that review. Please keep in mind that I’ve been in the trenches defending evolution for decades, even to the point of testifying in Federal court.
If you’d like more insight into my theological beliefs, I’d invite you to read my book.
I read your book a long time ago. I think you have something like this in it:
By ‘cosmological science’ if you are referring to the standard model of cosmology, then I don’t think your statement is true. The standard model of cosmology does not state that there was a beginning. Nor does it state that spacetime is a sensible concept through which to describe a universe at scales smaller than the Planck scale. We don’t even have an accepted theory of quantum gravity. The concept of ‘beginning’ need not apply to everything that we experience.
I realize what you were pointing out, and I am aware of your theological beliefs. Still, I’m sure the readers here would find it quite helpful if you would briefly summarize why the quoted statement is not entirely vacuous.
I’m not sure which statement you’re referring to. But I’ll respond to you and several other commenters this way:
1) The point of my remark was to support Jerry’s critique of Stock’s book review. I did so by pointing out that I – like many other theists – don’t find evidence for God in unsolved scientific problems (like, for example, the origin of life).
2) I realize that in this forum any confession of belief in God brings forth immediate challenges to support that belief, regardless of the content of the original post. That’s to be expected and it’s perfectly reasonable.
3) To me, the very nature of existence, which I have done my best to explore throughout my research career, makes greater sense in light of what I would call “the hypothesis of God.” Einstein once wrote that “The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility…The fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle.” To me, the question of why the world is comprehensible requires an answer. And the best answer I have found as to why our own meager intelligences can make sense of the world is that there is an even greater intelligence behind existence itself.
4) I do not claim, even for a second, that science can “prove” the existence of God. But I would say that to me, and to many other scientists, the very efficacy of the scientific enterprise to understand the world makes sense in light of the hypothesis of God.
Don’t you think that natural selection provides an answer to how we can make sense of the world? Please note that mine is a genuine question and not a challenge. I want to know.
Agreed, evolution will obviously be doing its best to program our brains to understand the world. This explanation only requires that the universe be ordered enough for that to be possible. There’s no need to invoke gods, which un-parsimoniously complicate the explanation without improving it.
Re comprehensibility, the Weak Anthropic Principle has something to say about that too.
Well, your prose concerning comprehensibility is of course quite lovely, but let’s face it: The statement “many things are (at least to some degree) comprehensible to the human brain, therefore god exists and/or ‘got did it'” is a complete and total non sequitur. But if that’s what does it for you, by all means, knock yourself out.
(And as Chetiya also intimated, “the very efficacy of the scientific enterprise to understand the world” may make “sense in light of the hypothesis of God,” but it also makes perfect sense in the light of human evolution, so this “argument” is hardly to be taken seriously.)
And I also have nothing against you or anyone else professing their belief(s). Just don’t be surprised or offended if I cannot take your profession any more seriously than another person’s profession of belief in “the feminine divine” or Brahma, Shiva and Vishnu, Moroni, the Thetan, or any other concoction, as it seems to me, of the human fantasy.
Ken, I’m trying to reconcile the first and third points you made above.
1) In the first point you say that you ‘don’t find evidence for God in unsolved scientific problems‘.
2) In the third point you say that the best answer you have found as to why our own meager intelligences can make sense of the world is that there is an even greater intelligence behind existence itself.
That we can make sense of the world is an empirical fact. Do you consider the question as to why we can make sense of the world to be a scientific question? If so, the best answer you have found to that scientific question is a ‘greater intelligence behind existence itself’. Is the greater intelligence God? If it is, then there seems to be a conflict between your two statements. Are you not seeing evidence for God in the unsolved scientific problem as to how we can make sense of the world? Or are you saying that ‘question’ and ‘problem’ are different things?
You may reconcile your statements by saying, for example, that you don’t see evidence for God in the unsolved problem of how we can make sense of the world, but the best answer you can find is God. That would be an answer without evidence. That’s fine. Religion can accommodate that.
Natural selection can answer questions as to why we have certain physical characteristics. You give plenty of examples in your books. I understand that natural selection might not answer the question as to how we can understand the world in the same detailed way. But when compared to the God hypothesis don’t you think natural selection at least offers an approach to a naturalistic explanation? Do you reject it? If so, why?
Or are you saying that even though natural selection can potentially explain how we can understand the world, God must exist to have created it? In that case, are you not once again positing God in answer to a scientific question?
Jerry is it possible you’ve partly misread Stock’s views? When she writes,
“Or perhaps — and this would be my preference — we could give up flat-footed quests to prove the existence of the supernatural by rational means”
I think she’s referring not to flat-footed scientists but to the Clouseau bros (Bolloré and Bonnassies).
I agree with you her last paragraph does not explain her first two paragraphs or her loss of faith in science. A generous reading might be that when she urges her readers to find immanence instead of assert transcendence (wtf?) she means we (scientists and other empiricists) should be open to beauty while we’re also trying to achieve understanding. She saves her real criticism for Bolloré and Bonnassies who she argues are trying but failing to use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house.
“Or perhaps — and this would be my preference — we could give up flat-footed quests to prove the existence of the supernatural by rational means”
She needs to read the late great Vic Stenger. In his neat little book “God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows that God Does Not Exist”, he tackles this question and argues that actually claims about supernatural phenomena can (in principle) be tested. This makes sense, as these supernatural phenomena interact with the natural world. He equates “immaterial” with “supernatural”, positing that evidence of the immaterial could arise. For example, incompatibility of events with laws of physics, miracles, evidence of cogitation without physical brains (suggesting existence of an immaterial soul), intercessory prayer, evidence of fine-tuned universe, etc.
The religious actually agree with this when it suits them, such as trying to prove miracles as evidence for god.
….trying to prove miracles as evidence for god.
I was reminded of David Hume’s argument, that if miracles are violations of natural laws, we can only identify something as a miracle when we have perfect and complete knowledge of natural laws. And that day is a long way off….
Yes, I agree with everything you stated. Also, Stenger’s book is a great read , definitely recommended.
How do people lose “faith” in science when they are using IT everyday?!
Mike,
I wonder whether Stock’s claimed loss of faith in science is really a broader feeling that the educated classes of the West have not clothed themselves in glory over the last decade or so. The widespread flight from rationality, objectivity, tolerance, and compassion for those with whom one disagrees prompts some to seek alternatives that the elite have long dismissed—even if those alternatives can share similar shortcomings.
“Or perhaps — and this would be my preference — we could give up flat-footed quests to prove the existence of the supernatural by rational means; we could start becoming alert to immanence . . .”
Stock’s statement about immanence suggests she is agnostic rather than atheist. She shows a theoretical openness to circumstantial evidence of the divine, whether it be in beauty as you note, or, paradoxically, in the utter ugliness that life can bring. Solzhenitsyn thought he found forms of both amidst the horror of the camps. He saw in the devout—almost alone—a radiance, a selfless sacrifice, and an unwillingness to betray others even if it cost them their own lives. He credits his conversion to this witness, seeing in it a form of evidence that their beliefs held truth.
Varlam Shalamov, an atheist and materialist until death, one who endured even more years in the Gulag, thought Solzhenitsyn sentimental. But Shalamov conceded that “I saw that the only group that retained a bit of their humanity, despite the starvation and abuse, were the religious, the sectarians, almost all of them — and the majority of the priests. The first ones to be corrupted, the most susceptible, are the party members and military men.” Or, the ideological, the climbers, and the utilitarian. I have seen people of all walks behave badly; I hope not to test my observations and character in the refining fires of a gulag.
If this circumstantial evidence is what Stock suggests by immanence, I agree that no other evidence is possible. Only subjective responses to the circumstantial remain. I place little stock in claims that “If I could see A, B, or C, then I would believe.” Smart people will always be able to explain away whatever appears before their eyes; Bulgakov in “The Master and Margarita” toys with this brilliantly. But as to why a Solzhenitsyn turns one way, and a Shalamov the other, it remains a mystery to me. After all, which of us can choose what we believe?
Re. “If I could see A, B, or C, then I would believe.” Smart people will always be able to explain away whatever appears before their eyes.
Well, to some degree, perhaps. But I can think of all kinds of things that would make me believe, e.g.: all the (especially Russian) weapons in and around Ukraine suddenly turning to Silly Putty; all the legs of children blown away by land mines suddenly growing back; if a giant hand had come down and stopped the tsunami of Christmas 2004 from killing 300,000 people; or god actually appearing and shouting “What the fuck have you idiots been doing for the last 6000 years!!!???” Whereupon he actually fixes things. I (or anyone else) could expand the list ad infinitum.
It’s not hard, really. It’s just all those things that never do happen. The things that actually do happen, which many people take to be miraculous, of course can always be explained away. One could even argue that the gods’ being so dreadfully absent is a rather good argument against their existence, even if it would be an argument from absence/silence.
The “why is there something as opposed to nothing”, somewhat similar as to the “why there is even a beginning in the first place” – both of which seem to imply that “something else” must have created this particular causality – is the stumbling block in a lot of people’s heads, including mine.
Thinking more probabilistically – there is only one way for there to be nothing but a bazillion ways for there to be something. Underneath may sit some form of field theory that always seems to exist, and that even the very notion of causality could be an emergent quality rather than an axiom. All very strange.
‘Why is there something as opposed to nothing?’ is another vacuous question. But the people who ask this question should make precise what they mean by ‘nothing’. In a mundane setting, ‘Why is there nothing in this cup?’ makes sense because the word ‘nothing’ takes on meaning from the context. But the question in the broad context of the universe, while being grammatically correct, is not meaningful. People are quick to abstract words like ‘beginning’ and ‘outside’ and apply it to the universe.
Religion can talk about God knowing everything and listening to our prayers without having to explain precisely what any of this means or how it can happen. It can talk about God being a ‘nonmaterial being who transcends nature’ [Finding Darwin’s God, Kenneth Miller] without having to explain exactly what it means. One demarcates nature and puts God outside.
I think religion manufactures problems. Take, for example, the problem of theodicy. Suffering is part of reality. Then we invent an all-loving God and ask ‘If God is all-loving, why is there suffering?’
I also think that religion creates a fake ignorance. First it creates a superhero like character who does things that we can’t fathom. Then it says that we can’t know how he does it because it is beyond nature or some such thing. It’s a mystery. Our minds are finite and God is infinite. It’s a miracle and that’s the point. If we could understand it, He would not be God!
I don’t agree that it’s vacuous. People in in physics, for example, state the standard model of known particles and the 4 forces, which they believe are almost at base level of the “something” (building blocks of everything) rather than the alternative of “nothing”.
If these particles and forces are indeed base level, they probably are not, but the argument does not change either way, then the question of why these axioms even exist becomes very BIG.
That’s what I meant when I wanted the word ‘nothing’ to be clarified. I think the question is: how is ‘nothing’ an alternative? How can ‘nothing’ be? Is it a physical state? If so, why do you call it ‘nothing’? I’m stopping here.
I agree; I think it’s a profound question. The answer, if I understand it correctly (and I probably don’t) is simply that there’s really no such thing as “nothing”–which may be what Chetiya was getting at.
We humans have an idea of “nothing” but it’s an illusion. That quantum field that Stock refers to always was. Apparently there’s mathematical proof that true “nothing” can’t exist (don’t ask me, I just live here in this universe.)
The way I think of it, the human tendency is to imagine “nothing” as the default, but we’re simply wrong. It’s a kind of cognitive bias. In reality, “something” is the default.
(I would love it if anybody who actually understands this stuff feels like correcting me/agreeing with me and telling me how wrong I am/how clever I am.)
Anagrams of theodicy:
• Dicey, tho’
• Theo: dic[e]y
• The id’ocy
It was Prof Plum in the dining room with the candlestick. A callous peice of work is Plum, like god and the universe. What do either care of piddly homo sapiens and its fellow creatures.
The difference is one is an invention of the invention of the other. I’d like to go on about the believing brain (already covered) thank eh god… and how staring into a deep hole (or gap) can make someone giddy and unsure, I don’t feel safe, la la but I won’t.
I am impatiently dismissive as the evidence of god is zilch, the evidence of a full on universe, is as big, wide and expansive as itself. It is wonderful that given that we live in a time not constrained and have individuals dedicated to studying its secrets, processes, challenges.
I ask, do we think we are going to last as long as the dinosaurs on our present trajectory? Jumping into holes and gaps I very much doubt it. But wait, Yea for WEIT, R Dawkins, Hitchens, et.al. critical thinkers of a hole (GSH) 🕳 we give ourselves a chance.
And on that point, the role of chance or luck is totally ignored. Roger Penrose (mathematical physicist, philosopher of science) has a word on that.
“Back in 2004, Penrose estimated the odds of a universe like ours forming by chance: 1 in 10^10^123. It’s not just improbable… it’s off the edge of probability itself.”
But here we are.
And while I’m here, Sean B Carroll’s,
“A Series of Fortunate Events
Chance and the Making of the Planet, Life, and You”
Very nice.
I had this thought just yesterday.
Ask a Christian if god created atoms, quarks, electrons, spacetime … I expect that they will answer yes. Ask, then, “Can you provide scientific evidence for the existence of god?” The response is likely to be along the lines of “separate magisteria” etc etc. Yet the things that they say god created have only been adduced scientifically, which automatically brings god into the realm of science-based inquiry.
I’ve noticed that several, although not all, British philosophers lapse into “immanence” or “transcendence”, which is really just evidence-free, human intuition based speculation about the nature of the universe, and which does not fit very well with the critical thinking approach that they teach, and profess to believe in.
I’ve wondered about this, and the only explanation I can come up with is that, in order to make philosophy relevant and worthwhile, they feel a need to distinguish their field from the more rigorous discipline of science.
Re faith in science — good thing that the practice of scientific research works whether or not one has faith. “It’s hard to argue with results.”
What could this mean: “the stunning efficiency of the double helix” other than K. Stock doesn’t care to try learn molecular biology and biochemistry? I enjoyed her book– Material Girls — but maybe it doesn’t take a deep or profound thinker to take down the shaky arguments around queer theory and transgenderism. Just don’t anyone tell her about RNA pseudoknots.
I suggest she read “Heretic” which came out earlier this year. It is a masterful debunking of Jesus as the Messiah and Son of God by showing that he was no more than many other prophets that existed around the same time, including the miracles he performed and his resurrection. If you have the time, you might enjoy reading it as well.