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God and Supernaturalism

Thu, May 15, 2008 at 11:16 am Posted in Atheist Inquisitions, Religion, Theology

James has been having a discussion with Larry Moran over the issue of God as a “supernatural being”. (And from Larry’s post I have not the foggiest clue what “If this is the best they can do then theism is in big trouble” means in the slightest.)

Atheists largely appear to have criteria for existence that anything religious or metaphysical simply cannot provide - empirical evidence for the existence of something “living” or “sentient” or any other category we may apply to being.

However, if God exists, God must somehow have an existence that is outside of the set of empirical experience via the five senses or God is just one more cause among every other object without any significant differentiation. Certainly to suggest that God is irreducibly an equal partner in the set of all objects in cause/effect conditions is considered idolatry in the Judaeo/Christian traditions. Since, in such a case, we cannot control for the kind of physical evidence required for something to exist like God, God must not therefore exist or what we call “God” is some amalgamation of physical events and objects in whatever form we desire.

The problem is that we have many experiences in life that transcend the process of observation with the synthetic apparatus of the mind. Love, justice, peace, civility, equality, etc. are all such factors that move civilizations and direct human behavior far more than anything that can be controlled in a petri dish or can be observed through any scientific apparatus. We can scientifically observe the effects of these beliefs, but we cannot observe the beliefs themselves. True, our beliefs are structured according to our experience, but the structure of those beliefs is not empirical. Note: This is not to differentiate between subjective and objective, but between empirical and non-empirical. The difference is not all that subtle.

Objection 1: Even if you say you had an experience with God or a god of some sort, there can be many other naturalistic explanations such as delusion, hallucination, social determinism, etc. So why do you hold to the belief that what you experienced is God especially since the evidence for God’s existence is not forthcoming? The assumption here is that since there is no physical evidence of God, God must not exist therefore you must have experienced something else. The possibility that the experience occurred with a real existent is jettisoned before we can even offer this as a possibility.

Objection 2:  Why this God?  It is just an arbitrary decision!  To ask the question why this God as opposed to Zeus, Mithras, Allah, or Ganesha would be like asking me why I do not like fried cockroaches, speak English, eat pork, believe in the equality of women, and the civil right for gays to marry. Experience is always irreducibly informed and conditioned by our psycho-social development. Even if God has an existence outside of the physical set of possible objects in terms of cause and effect, we must experience God within these conditions. Field theory, game theory, various forms of evolutionary fitness, etc. are used to argue for the rationality of a belief, but that is quite after the fact of the reasons why people believe in certain things. In fact, if this is true, then belief in God is quite good for our evolutionary fitness. But this does not mean therefore, that God is part of the set of cause and effect, or that for God to exist this must be the case. Such would be a post hoc fallacy that is quite obvious.

To ask for a naturalistic explanation for God that meets certain scientific criteria is therefore a categorical error. It is like trying to argue for the existence of chairs by examining the flight patterns of bees.

Therefore the issue comes to what is compelling evidence and what is interesting evidence for the observer. Arguments that James is encountering are of this ilk. Why continue to beat the notion of supernatural like a dead horse? The alternative is simply not interesting. So I would ask atheists why they hold to their criteria for belief in the first place? What motivates the way you believe is perhaps a more important question than the content of the belief itself. Brow-beating the issue of super-naturalism might perhaps be more honest if atheists would faithfully acknowledge the impact of desire on their preference for a physicalism clothed in the oft indubitable acceptance of a neo-liberalism for which they do not argue the veracity on the same grounds they require for God.

Viewing 6 Comments

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    The only reason to think that any particular god is unfalsifiable is because that god is epistemologically equivalent to atheism, i.e., it is responsible for at most the creation of the universe and, beyond that, will have no effect whatsoever on anyone's life or afterlife, if such a thing exists. Notably, however, pretty much no popular gods actually fall into this category. So, while you may not want to rigorously examine the reasonable predictions that would follow from the existence of your specific God, purposefully leaving them vague doesn't help you convince anybody: if your God is really one that cannot be disproven empirically, it will never matter to anyone, and so atheism is just as rational as theism. Moreover, since the majority of religions posit a god that frequently and systematically intervenes in human life, the question of empirical evidence is entirely relevant to the existence of gods: if no empirical evidence can be found, or if all the purported evidence is empirically indistinguishable from non-evidence (such as in your case), then we can eliminate those gods from our consideration. In other words, you have it backwards when you say that atheists irrationally reject too much in rejecting your experience. Since you are positing an apparently arbitrary distinction between apparently identical events, you're going directly against everything that's apparent to the intellect and thus believing irrationally. Not that you should stop, necessarily - everyone's got something they hold to without solid grounding, but when you refer to emotions and other "higher" experiences of humans (which, for the record, can in and of themselves be empirically observed, as brain activity) as justification for belief, you've removed yourself from the realm of rationality.
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    I agree that many people have personal experiences that they interpret as some sort of contact with something they call God. The issue (for me) is how one extrapolates from that experience to the actual existence of God (i.e. God as something more than just an internal mental/emotional/physiological phenomenon that some people experience).
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    But to take it a step further, I am not so sure that my experience is so idiosyncratic that it is all that very unique. It is the shared experience among individuals that creates what sociologists call a plausibility structure to legitimate concurrent experiences in kind. Without that plausibility structure in place to legitimate it, I would probably be a rather devout agnostic today as my own pragmatist sensibilities would dictate.
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    Thanks for the clarifications. If your belief comes from your own idiosycratic experiences, I'm fine with that.

    As for the "we" language, it was not meant to refer to all atheists - merely to Dr. Moran and myself (since he posed the question in his post, and I repeated it in the comments).
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    I actually did answer that specific question on Larry's blog, maybe in another thread than the one that got you here.

    The quick answer is that it comes from experience of what I believe to be God understanding that what I believe to be God has been irreducibly conditioned by my psycho-social constructions of reality. This is quite satisfying to me and it works for me. And I understand the philosophical weakness of the pragmatist position for many, but there it is.

    And I don't think that arguments for God's existence will go anywhere. The better grounds for argument is whether belief in God is fundamentally irrational and even dangerous which is quite a powerful charge against religious belief. That is what interests me here. Arguing God's existence is an unfalsifiable claim either way and useless to brow-beat in my view.

    One more thing: The "we" language is not helpful either as if all atheists are united in some monolithic front. I would not want you to characterize all Christians under the same umbrella of degree of belief and I would not want Christians to do the same for atheists. But this kind of language perpetuates that untruth. It's pedantic I know, but worth mentioning. :-)
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    To ask for a naturalistic explanation for God that meets certain scientific criteria is therefore a categorical error.


    Actually, if you read Dr. Moran's post, the allegation is that "[T]heists maintain that there are very sophisticated arguments for the existence of God." The question is therefore: what are some good/sophisticated arguments for the existence of God? His post doesn't insist that it be a naturalistic argument, or that it be an explanation of God, or that it meet any scientific criteria. Only that it be a "good" and/or "sophisticated" argument. (Note that respondents are free to answer in the context of whatever God concept they favor.)

    Of course, what you consider good, sophisticated arguments may not meet Dr. Moran's criteria (or mine), and that may well lead to disagreements on the relevance of empirical evidence, etc. But we can't very well get that far unless someone will actually say, "I think a good, sophisticated argument for God's existence is X."

    In terms of your analogy, forget the bees, tell us why sophisticated chair-ists think chairs exist, in whatever terms chair-ists consider most relevant.

    Alternately, you could argue that Dr. Moran's premise is wrong. That theological scholars do not typically claim there are good sophisticated arguments for God's existence. That would make his question moot, but I haven't seen anyone take that position either.

    As an aside, your question about why atheists hold to their belief criteria is definitely a valid one. And I admit that my atheism is founded on a principle that I'm not sure can be independently justified. That is, I choose to consider empirical evidence as the critical factor in deciding what exists. You can certainly ask whether I have good, sophisticated arguments in favor of that principle, and frankly, I'm not sure that I could defend it very well.

    But, as they say in the schoolyard, we asked you first!

    ;-)

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