I thought it at last time to bring together a summary of the reasons why, over the years, I have tended to answer that question with a ‘yes’. The following are just summaries of topics I have or could expand further. Although I have a backlog of scattered writings on this matter, this is the first time I have attempted bring to together the strands from a variety of fields into a summary. The list below is likely to expand, but this is how it stands at the moment:1. Scepticism: A thoroughgoing and honest scepticism includes a sceptical attitude toward dogmatic atheism.
2. Scepticism, if too thoroughgoing leads to an evasive postmodern antifoundationalism, or alternatively, in a self-referencial loop, it starts doubt itself and acknowledges that there is, after all, such a thing as rational belief (in something).
3. The Contingency Conjecture: Computational theory tells us that although finite mathematical explanatory structures may (or may not) succeed in compressing cosmic variety into a few fundamental principles, it is not possible to compress those explanatory structures to nothing at all. Thus, a finite Cosmos can never be founded on logical necessity - it is a reification of the possible. ‘Possibility’ rather than self-sufficient necessity is the most salient logical character of the Cosmos. Hence, the hunt is on for Aseity, the self-entailing agent of creation.....
4. Aseity: Since the contingency conjecture suggests that the cosmos cannot explain itself and entails no contradiction if it did not exist, then my conclusion is that our cosmos should not exist. Since our contingent world, both its physical laws and substance, do exist then somehow it has been created from a logical and informational vacuum. The conjecture is, therefore, that there is something infinite out there with the property of aseity which both creates and sustains our contingent cosmos. (This is a reworking of the cosmological ‘argument’)
5. Exceptions to Occam’s Razor: Although the assumed a-priori organization of the cosmos makes it amenable to compressed explanatory structures, there is no logical guarantee that this should always be the case: a-priori complex entities can conceivably embed and explain simple elements. Hence Occam’s Razor cannot be used to challenge the a-priori complexity of a Deity.
6. Idealism: The idealism of Hume, Berkeley, Kant, Hegel and the logical and linguistic positivists compel us to acknowledge that the notion of non-sentient noumena is at the very least a deeply problematical concept. For these philosophers the a-priori perceiving and thinking mind has a central place in their philosophy and they expose the difficulty of conceiving reality without mind. This prompts one to wonder if sentience, and especially Divine sentience in all its complexity, is, in fact, a given and primary phenomenon. At the very least it looks as though it is meaningless to talk of noumena without invoking the concept of an up and running sentience.
7. Self-Referencing Consciousness Cognition: All attempts to “explain” conscious cognition using noumenal concepts like atoms, fields, computation and information are themselves, in the final analysis, artifacts of conscious cognition. In short the Mind can only be described in terms of its own mental artifacts (much like a computer language compiler can be written using the language it compiles). This kind of self-referencing and self-explaining property of mind may be the human analogue of Divine Asiety
8. End Time Simulation Logic: This is the joker in the pack: Recently some physicists have mooted the idea that we may be part of some kind of giant simulation, thus suggesting we are authored by a super background intelligence that looks suspiciously like a Deity! See my blog on Time Travel for this one!
http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2007_02_01_archive.html
9. The Declarative Universe: Well, if physicists can moot such exotic ideas then so can I. In this connection let me note a suspicious looking similarity between my Thinknet AI project and the way quantum mechanics works, and this hints, once again, that intelligence/sentience is an a-priori feature our universe. The nature of our world has a concordance with thought and computation. As one friend once suggested to me our contingent world is like a giant thought being sustained in a vast mind. (My friend wasn’t a philosopher, but based his idea on Acts 17:30). When we think of computer simulations we tend to think in terms of procedural algorithms following their determined path, but my own speculations suggest that the cosmic 'simulation' is closer to the declarative programming model rather than the procedural model. 'Simulation' may, in fact, be the wrong word: Since the contigent cosmos has no logical reason for existing it can only ever be a 'simulation'; for something that cannot exist of its own necessity 'simulation' is as real as gets. For us 'simulation' IS reality.
10. The Quantum Matrix: At the quantum mechanical level it really does look as though the cosmos is some kind of 'simulation' that only goes as far as simulating what is necessary. There is, I believe, a lack of symmetry down at the Quantum level suggesting a parsimonious use of information. Moreover, the quasi-random walk envelops of Quantum Mechanics only become “particles” when particles interact; at all other times those envelops merely measure possibility. In short the parts of the 'simulation' that are an unnecessary computational overhead are missing...
11. Chance: That great incompressible, randomness, is, it seems, at the heart of the quantum cosmos; it looks as though quantum randomness is not computationally generated but is an absolute and given input. Thus, the most complex and contingent thing we can think of, namely randomness, is posited as “just there”. Randomness, given time, is, in fact, ringing the changes on everything there possibly could be! It is far from being a trivial concept. What do they mean that the universe is “just chance”! Well, as I have already said there are exceptions to Occam’s razor and absolute randomness is one of them! Randomness is a case where the complex embeds and explains the simple (e.g. the simple binary outcomes of coin tossing are embedded in a complex sequence). Perhaps the vast information resources of contingent randomness point to that conjectured entity of infinite complexity, which sustains our contingent world. Whatever that entity is, if it exists, there is one thing we can say about it: it is highly complex.
12. Evolution: Resourced by the vast information supplies of a-priori randomness, current science conjectures that there has been enough time in our cosmos for those resources to innovate complex intelligent adaptive systems which, of course, being adaptive lock themselves in. However, whether these adaptive systems have been arrived at from the information content of random input or not, their self-sustaining character hints at something profound: that is, that in the vast platonic spaces of possibility there are self sustaining structures, which although they do not have logical necessity, are nevertheless a consequence once the complexity of randomness is posited. Likewise aseity may be a self-sustenance arising from some kind of preexistent infinite complexity. It is undoubtedly beyond our ability to imagine, but in the infinite platonic world of mathematics there may be an incredibly complex and infinite sentient configuration that has such great powers of self-sustenance that its existence is guaranteed to be eternally ‘locked in’. (This is a reworking of the ontological ‘argument’)
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13. Evolution: For the process of evolution to work (if it works) so many contingent precursors are required, not least a good supply of a-priori randomness, that it is no where near the logically self-sufficient 'creatorless' process that some think it to be. I am making no comment here is to whether or not evolution has actually happened - I am just commenting on its contigent status.
14. Other Minds: I believe, (although I have to admit it is more hope than belief) that it is possible to explain the human mind in full using conceptual artifacts like, atoms, neurons, information and computation. But in affirming this one must be aware that any such explanation is self-referencing – it is using the conceptual artifacts of conscious cognition to explain conscious cognition. The formal structure of such explanations, even if they succeed in covering everything, are not the thing-in-itself, but rather another mind’s view of other minds. Thus, ‘other minds’ present themselves to us as noumena. However, unlike ‘material’ noumena which empiricism suggests have a debatable meaning, we do at least know what it is like to be a mind – in contrast we certainly don’t know what it is like to be, say, an atom! Hence the noumena of conscious cognition have a better philosophical basis than ‘material’ noumena. Along with Searle I agree that there is an irreducible first person ontology in personhood. The 'third person' language of formal explanation simply disguises the fact that such explanations are, in the final analysis, cognitive artifacts and conceal the implicit role of the first person perspective required to formulate these explanations from cognita. So, if human personality is ultimately irreducible it is an ominous sign for dogmatic atheism.
15. Metaphysical World: Our Weltanschauung, if we have one, is only ever tested with a few experiential samples here and there. That Weltanschauung informs us about a world well beyond anything that can be tested even in principle. Given these sampling limitations complex objects like personality, society and God are not amenable to easy cognitive apprehension and have little chance of being “proved” with a small set of experiential samples. It is no surprise, then, that given the partiality of human experience and cognition and an entity whose prime posited attribute is that of complexity and/or personality, God, if he exists, has a very debatable ontology.
16. Keyhole Science: Science, as the careful social formalization of the testing procedure, puts further strictures and controls on our anecdotal experience and consequently reduces the experiential sampling keyhole even further. Science’s “guilty until proved innocent” criterion is a strict filter that helps block spurious claims and as such it is analogous to the precautionary strategies used in courts of law. However, as with legal courts, the unavoidable cost of the fussy epistemological method of science is that it is going to make heavy weather of complex domains, like politics, sociology, personality and above all theology; it also cannot easily cope with experiences that come in ones and twos.
17. Limits of Scientific Epistemology and Authority. For the man in the street (or field), science’s observational samples reach him via social texts. Moreover, the universality of scientific theories has more to do with the positing of all-embracing theoretical structures, which of necessity are textual. Hence, for the man in the street science is a textual phenomenon, and for the intelligent layman epistemology is largely a matter of handling texts. In fact for all of us knowledge about the grand sweep of the cosmos mostly reaches us through the texts of society, and it is our cognitive reaction (or lack of reaction) to these texts that is pivotal in forming and testing our Weltanschauung. In this respect science texts have no special authority apart from their appeal to our general mental toolkit of perception and reason. The social texts of formal science must therefore take their place side by side with historical and theological texts.
18. The God Instinct: History suggests that there is an instinctual/intuitive human understanding that the cosmos doesn’t contain its own explanation and that it points to something sentient beyond it (See for example Romans 1:19-20 and the history of human relations with the notion of Deity)
19. Theodicy: The existence of suffering and evil doesn’t so much challenge a belief in the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient loving God, as it does leave us with an existence dilemma: Are we really prepared to say that God should not have dragged our world out of contingency because of its burden of suffering and evil? Are we prepared to forego our own existence, because that existence is bound up with suffering and evil?
20. Generalised Copernicanism: Human Cosmic Insignificance, it is sometimes suggested, is a clear sign of our unimportance in the cosmic scheme of things and therefore evidence that there is no loving personal God. However, if we regard the universe as some kind of massive computation, the huge size of the cosmos may be connected with the “computational byproducts” of an important end result. As a wonderful Jewish saying goes: “For a single rose a field of thorns was spared”.
The above are rather general and speculative pointers suggesting that some highly complex entity with the property of aseity sustains our contingent world much like a mind sustains a thought. However, frankly, on the basis of the above alone the case for theism is no more obliging than the case for atheism. That’s always been my problem – I could no more convincingly rule in theism as I could rule it out. At best the points above provide a prima-facie case for theism. But even if I concluded that the above points convinced me of the existence of a deity, they reveal very little about the nature and motives of that deity; at most they point in that direction but provide no personal introduction. In fact a personal introduction may be impossible because ‘God’, if that’s the right name to use of Aseity, may be an utterly alien impersonal entity or principality. In that case it is likely that attempts to take the matter further would be fruitless. (However, one might wonder why an impersonal Aseity would sustain the high personality we find at the top of the complexity ladder. Moreover one might expect complex human nature to reflect something of the complexity of Aseity)
If that’s where it ended I think I would be agnostic, unsure where to go next. Actually, to be honest, I think know where I would go next – probably into disbelief; or at least disbelief in the existence of a gracious personal God: as far as the latter is concerned absence of evidence is truly evidence of absence because it seems to me very likely that any gracious personal God would reveal himself more clearly. Thus, in the absence of a clearer revelation my conclusion is that there is likely to be no gracious personal God. Agnosticism about the existence of a personal loving God is not a consistent position.
14. Other Minds: I believe, (although I have to admit it is more hope than belief) that it is possible to explain the human mind in full using conceptual artifacts like, atoms, neurons, information and computation. But in affirming this one must be aware that any such explanation is self-referencing – it is using the conceptual artifacts of conscious cognition to explain conscious cognition. The formal structure of such explanations, even if they succeed in covering everything, are not the thing-in-itself, but rather another mind’s view of other minds. Thus, ‘other minds’ present themselves to us as noumena. However, unlike ‘material’ noumena which empiricism suggests have a debatable meaning, we do at least know what it is like to be a mind – in contrast we certainly don’t know what it is like to be, say, an atom! Hence the noumena of conscious cognition have a better philosophical basis than ‘material’ noumena. Along with Searle I agree that there is an irreducible first person ontology in personhood. The 'third person' language of formal explanation simply disguises the fact that such explanations are, in the final analysis, cognitive artifacts and conceal the implicit role of the first person perspective required to formulate these explanations from cognita. So, if human personality is ultimately irreducible it is an ominous sign for dogmatic atheism.
15. Metaphysical World: Our Weltanschauung, if we have one, is only ever tested with a few experiential samples here and there. That Weltanschauung informs us about a world well beyond anything that can be tested even in principle. Given these sampling limitations complex objects like personality, society and God are not amenable to easy cognitive apprehension and have little chance of being “proved” with a small set of experiential samples. It is no surprise, then, that given the partiality of human experience and cognition and an entity whose prime posited attribute is that of complexity and/or personality, God, if he exists, has a very debatable ontology.
16. Keyhole Science: Science, as the careful social formalization of the testing procedure, puts further strictures and controls on our anecdotal experience and consequently reduces the experiential sampling keyhole even further. Science’s “guilty until proved innocent” criterion is a strict filter that helps block spurious claims and as such it is analogous to the precautionary strategies used in courts of law. However, as with legal courts, the unavoidable cost of the fussy epistemological method of science is that it is going to make heavy weather of complex domains, like politics, sociology, personality and above all theology; it also cannot easily cope with experiences that come in ones and twos.
17. Limits of Scientific Epistemology and Authority. For the man in the street (or field), science’s observational samples reach him via social texts. Moreover, the universality of scientific theories has more to do with the positing of all-embracing theoretical structures, which of necessity are textual. Hence, for the man in the street science is a textual phenomenon, and for the intelligent layman epistemology is largely a matter of handling texts. In fact for all of us knowledge about the grand sweep of the cosmos mostly reaches us through the texts of society, and it is our cognitive reaction (or lack of reaction) to these texts that is pivotal in forming and testing our Weltanschauung. In this respect science texts have no special authority apart from their appeal to our general mental toolkit of perception and reason. The social texts of formal science must therefore take their place side by side with historical and theological texts.
18. The God Instinct: History suggests that there is an instinctual/intuitive human understanding that the cosmos doesn’t contain its own explanation and that it points to something sentient beyond it (See for example Romans 1:19-20 and the history of human relations with the notion of Deity)
19. Theodicy: The existence of suffering and evil doesn’t so much challenge a belief in the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient loving God, as it does leave us with an existence dilemma: Are we really prepared to say that God should not have dragged our world out of contingency because of its burden of suffering and evil? Are we prepared to forego our own existence, because that existence is bound up with suffering and evil?
20. Generalised Copernicanism: Human Cosmic Insignificance, it is sometimes suggested, is a clear sign of our unimportance in the cosmic scheme of things and therefore evidence that there is no loving personal God. However, if we regard the universe as some kind of massive computation, the huge size of the cosmos may be connected with the “computational byproducts” of an important end result. As a wonderful Jewish saying goes: “For a single rose a field of thorns was spared”.
The above are rather general and speculative pointers suggesting that some highly complex entity with the property of aseity sustains our contingent world much like a mind sustains a thought. However, frankly, on the basis of the above alone the case for theism is no more obliging than the case for atheism. That’s always been my problem – I could no more convincingly rule in theism as I could rule it out. At best the points above provide a prima-facie case for theism. But even if I concluded that the above points convinced me of the existence of a deity, they reveal very little about the nature and motives of that deity; at most they point in that direction but provide no personal introduction. In fact a personal introduction may be impossible because ‘God’, if that’s the right name to use of Aseity, may be an utterly alien impersonal entity or principality. In that case it is likely that attempts to take the matter further would be fruitless. (However, one might wonder why an impersonal Aseity would sustain the high personality we find at the top of the complexity ladder. Moreover one might expect complex human nature to reflect something of the complexity of Aseity)
If that’s where it ended I think I would be agnostic, unsure where to go next. Actually, to be honest, I think know where I would go next – probably into disbelief; or at least disbelief in the existence of a gracious personal God: as far as the latter is concerned absence of evidence is truly evidence of absence because it seems to me very likely that any gracious personal God would reveal himself more clearly. Thus, in the absence of a clearer revelation my conclusion is that there is likely to be no gracious personal God. Agnosticism about the existence of a personal loving God is not a consistent position.
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However, my approach has been as follows: If there is a loving personal God and, moreover, a God of grace, that God is unlikely to leave us bereft of some kind of special revelation as to His nature. To cut a long story short I believe the revelation of God I have sought for is that found in the Christ of the Bible, the only quality revelation I have discovered. Why I think that Jesus Christ is THE revelation of God would itself be the subject of another list, but I will leave that for another time. I have to admit that it has all been a bit of gamble: “Go for it and see what happens: nothing ventured nothing gained”. Nonetheless, I believe that God graciously meets the sinful seeker where he is at. Moreover, once one has apprehended the Revelation in Christ, the rather general philosophical list above starts to provide insights into God’s glory, grace and day-by-day providence.
But there is one tremendous irony here. If I were to compile a list of reasons for not believing in the existence of God the items in that list would largely be drawn from the counter evidence provided by the behavior of many a fundamentalist Christains! In short, most of my intellectual time is spent protecting my faith, not from atheism, but from other Christains! Evolution and Creation? No problem, solve that one over breakfast! Suffering and Evil? Give me a harder problem! Inter-Christian spiritual rivalries? Gulp! In a world of competing spiritual grandees a spiritual low ender like me is pretty much out of the picture! Reach for The Open Gospel....
(http://viewsnewsandpews.blogspot.com/2006_11_01_archive.html)
But there is one tremendous irony here. If I were to compile a list of reasons for not believing in the existence of God the items in that list would largely be drawn from the counter evidence provided by the behavior of many a fundamentalist Christains! In short, most of my intellectual time is spent protecting my faith, not from atheism, but from other Christains! Evolution and Creation? No problem, solve that one over breakfast! Suffering and Evil? Give me a harder problem! Inter-Christian spiritual rivalries? Gulp! In a world of competing spiritual grandees a spiritual low ender like me is pretty much out of the picture! Reach for The Open Gospel....
(http://viewsnewsandpews.blogspot.com/2006_11_01_archive.html)
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