Tonight I begin leading a small group here in Houghton, NY, called "Reasonable Faith". The name is taken from the book by William Lane Craig of the same title. Dr. Craig also has an apologetics website, www.reasonablefaith.org. I'm looking forward to a good discussion about many interesting topics related to apologetics, some of which I've already covered in previous blog entries. To kick things off, I wanted to bring an old post out from the archives titled, "What evidence were you expecting, anyways?" I'm hoping this will lead to some discussion here on the blog, but if not, at least I'll be talking about it tonight with my small group!
The atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell was famously asked what he would say if after he died he found himself standing before the God in whose existence he did not believe, and God asked him, “why didn’t you believe in me?” Russell’s reply was, “not enough evidence, God, not enough evidence!”
I was having a blog debate with an atheist not long ago. The atheist said, “after centuries of theism and all of the searching we’ve done without finding any evidence, I think we’re justified in discarding religion and moving on.”
In my response, I conceded that we can be justified in disbelieving the existence of some entity E if we expect certain kinds of evidence in the case of E’s existence, and after thorough investigation that evidence does not turn up. I then asked the atheist what evidence he was expecting to find in the case of God’s existence which had not turned up.
Being the good sport that I am, I offered a couple of suggestion for him to consider while formulating his answer. For starters, I said, if God existed we might expect to find that the universe had a beginning rather than finding that the universe had always existed. Hey, wait a minute. According to a considerable amount of evidence that cosmologists have discovered, the universe did have a beginning. That’s pretty interesting when you think about it, since according to the First Law of Thermodynamics (also known as the Law of Conservation), matter can neither be created nor destroyed, only transformed into energy (and vice-versa). So if there is no God, we might well expect that the universe had always existed. In fact, that was the dominant view among cosmologists in the early part of the 20th century before the Big Bang theory became widely accepted.
Another bit of evidence that we might anticipate if God existed is evidence of design in the structure of the universe itself (as opposed to it being a haphazard jumble). Again, the evidence for design based on the fine-tuning of the universe for life is extremely well documented. The structure of the universe both in terms of the values of the fundamental constants of physics and the initial conditions at the very first moment of the universe’s existence had to be within a staggeringly small range in order for life to exist. Even the skeptic Fred Hoyle was so impressed by this cosmic fine-tuning that he remarked that it appeared that a superintellect had monkeyed with the physics, as well as with chemistry and biology. He further commented that the numbers were so overwhelming “as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.” Since Hoyle wrote that statement, the list of “anthropic coincidences” (those values that are necessary for a life-sustaining universe) has continued to grow longer.
My atheist interlocutor never did answer the question as to what evidence he expected to find in the case of God’s existence that hadn’t turned up. That seemed a little odd to me. If you’re going to conclude that there is no evidence for something, I think you should have some idea of what evidence you might expect. I wonder what Bertrand Russell would have said in answer to that question. Maybe after he died he did say to God “not enough evidence!”, I don’t know. If so, I can imagine God saying in response, “what evidence were you expecting, anyways?”
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About me
- John Fraser
- My ministry in Hungary involved teaching theology and training Hungarian church planters. I have a great interest in apologetics as well as missions.
6 comments:
I have heard Craig make that argument. However, I have also heard the argument Craig makes when someone does delineate the evidence they would expect to find if God existed. Here is what he said in a debate with Austin Dacey:
Now in this speech I would like to examine Dr. Dacey's arguments on behalf of atheism to see whether they pass philosophical muster.
All five of his arguments share the same basic form: Step one is to say that if God existed, we should expect to find "blank," and you fill in the blank, step two is “but we do not find blank” and therefore one concludes that God does not exist.
Now I want to make two general comments about this style of argumentation: First of all, its enormously presumptuous. Basically, what Dr. Dacey is saying is that if God doesn’t fulfill our expectations, then we should conclude that He doesn’t exist. But who says that God has to fulfill our expectations? How can we predict with any confidence what God would do if He existed? If we find that our expectations aren’t met, then isn’t it the better part of discretion and humility to reexamine and perhaps revise those expectations? We’re simply not in a position to dictate to God that He has to act in accordance with our expectations.
In other words, Craig thinks that we have no right to expect anything other than what we observe. Therefore, whatever we observe proves God's existence since it is exactly what we should expect.
Vinny,
Thanks for the reply. If I understand you correctly, you're saying that Craig is contradicting himself or perhaps engaging in special pleading. Without more details of the context, it's hard for me to comment much beyond what I've said. Perhaps Craig is saying that he disagrees with the "blanks" that Dacey offers.
You said, "In other words, Craig thinks that we have no right to expect anything other than what we observe."
I don't think that's what Craig said, at least not in the quote you gave. He said that we have no right to have God fulfill our expectations. I'm talking about what actual evidence we would expect if God existed. Craig is talking about what God would do if he existed. The video clip doesn't show what expectations Craig is referring to, but I would presume that Dacey would argue that the world should have less suffering than it does if God exists. To that, Craig would undoubtedly respond by saying "how do you know that?"
That isn’t how Craig responded though. He responded by criticizing the idea that we can make arguments based on our expectation of how God would do things. If this is so, it is true for his arguments as well.
If “how do you know that?” is a valid response to Dacey, it is a valid response to your argument as well. If God created the universe, why should we see fundamental constants at all? God could have created a universe in which the speed of light is not constant. He could have created a universe in which the forces that hold together the atom vary over time and space. He could have created a universe with no discernible beginning rather than one whose expansion and contraction could be extrapolated? What reason do you have for anticipating that God would create a universe with what appears to you as design rather than one that appeared as a haphazard jumble?
BTW, the rest of the debate is available on YouTube as well. The problem of suffering is one of the issues that Dacey raises.
Vinny,
One thing I would point out is that the argument I'm defending here is mine, not Craig's. So the question of what Craig said about expectations isn't really directly relevant to anything I've said.
The basic idea, however, is that when something is designed, it is designed for a purpose. A "haphazard jumble" that was designed would be designed for some purpose also, but what purpose would that be? In that case it would be indistinguishable from something that was not designed but was simply a random event. So given the choice between whether the universe is a result of a random event or design, the inference that it is designed is unavoidable.
That the universe is suitable for life is unquestioned. Given the number of astounding "coincidences" that had to occur in order to result in life, the idea that it was a result of undirected processes really doesn't hold any water.
The argument from design is a different argument.
The argument you were making was that evidence of a beginning and evidence of design and structure are consistent with what we might expect if there was a God.
The challenge to that is whether we should we have any particular expectations about what we should find. God could have created a universe that was not expanding in the way that ours is, in which case we would not be able to extrapolate back to a big band. What reason do you have for expecting God to create a universe in which the beginning was discernible through human reason? God could have created a universe in which the Laws of Thermodynamics do not hold. What reason do you have for expecting God’s design to be discernible to humans?
The problem with an argument based on expectations is that any universe is consistent with what we might expect to find if there is a God because God could create things in any manner that he pleased. Therefore, our expectations give us no means to distinguish a universe that was created by God and one that was not.
The argument that we can infer a directed process from the universe in which we find ourselves faces a similar problem.
Consider a deck of cards dealt into four bridge hands of thirteen cards. The odds that each player will receive thirteen cards of a single suit are 1 in 53,644,737,765,488,792,839,237,440,000 or 1 in 53.6 septillion. If that were to occur, we might think that someone had stacked the deck.
However, it is also true that the odds of any particular distribution of cards are 1 in 53.6 septillion. If we went purely on the probability, we would have to conclude that any deal was the result of a directed process. And yet we know that any deal can be the result of a completely random shuffling process. We need something more than probability to tell us that the process was directed.
It may be true that the odds of a universe that supports life randomly occurring out of a big bang are unfathomably tiny. However, it may be equally true that the odds of any particular universe randomly occurring out of any particular big band are unfathomably tiny. It doesn’t prove that there was a directed process any more than the tiny chance of a particular card distribution does.
How do you discern that an unfathomably unlikely outcome was produced by a process that is directed rather than random?
Vinny,
You said, “The argument you were making was that evidence of a beginning and evidence of design and structure are consistent with what we might expect if there was a God.”
Yes. The first of those is a form of the cosmological argument, the second is a form of the teleological or design argument. I’m not sure what the issue is.
You said, “What reason do you have for expecting God’s design to be discernible to humans?”
This is a bit of an odd question. The real question is why would the universe be discernible to humans if it was the result of undirected processes. As Einstein said, the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible. Physicist Eugene Wigner expanded on this observation in his seminal paper, “The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences.” There is no reason at all to expect a correlation between abstract mathematics, which can be arrived at by pure reason, and the physical universe if the universe is just a random event. So your reasoning is backwards. We start with our observations about the universe to infer where it came from.
You said, “If we went purely on the probability, we would have to conclude that any deal was the result of a directed process. And yet we know that any deal can be the result of a completely random shuffling process. We need something more than probability to tell us that the process was directed.”
There are at least two major flaws with your illustration. First, the probability of a life-sustaining universe appears to be much, much lower than getting a hand with all the same suit. Some of the individual factors are fine-tuned on the order of 10^40, and there are many such factors. The probability you’ve calculated for the card analogy is 5.3 * 10^29. Secondly, while it’s true that the odds for any given hand are the same as getting all cards of one suit, that fact by itself means that the odds are astronomically in favor of getting something OTHER than all cards of one suit. In other words, you’ve got the probabilities backwards. It’s a virtual certainty that you won’t get all cards of one suit, even if you dealt cards for your entire lifetime (based on the probability you've given). For the universe to be able to sustain life, the parameters are fantastically narrow. The odds are astronomically against a life-sustaining universe based on sheer probability.
You said, “It may be true that the odds of a universe that supports life randomly occurring out of a big bang are unfathomably tiny. However, it may be equally true that the odds of any particular universe randomly occurring out of any particular big band are unfathomably tiny. It doesn’t prove that there was a directed process any more than the tiny chance of a particular card distribution does.”
This is mistaken for the reasons I’ve given above. The odds are astronomically against a universe that can sustain life.
You said, “How do you discern that an unfathomably unlikely outcome was produced by a process that is directed rather than random?”
Because that’s the only rational inference in such a scenario. That’s why SETI researchers look at signals from outer space to see if they correspond to a discernible pattern, such as all of the prime numbers or something like that. The assumption is that random noise doesn’t produce those kinds of patterns. The chances are that if they received a signal with all of the prime numbers up to, say, 10^10, that it was the product of intelligent design, not random chance. Only skeptics who are looking to avoid making an inference to God deny this principle!
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