Padding the Case for the New Atheism

[buffalo]

Excellent article.

Padding the Case for the New Atheism

Recently there has been a flurry of books from the “New Atheists.” Such figures as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens have been holding forth to state . . . well, not anything new.
The reason there is nothing new to say is that there cannot, by the nature of the discussion, be anything new to say. When it came to the question “Does God exist?,” St. Thomas could only think of two reasonable objections in the whole history of human thought.
Objection 1: It seems that God does not exist, because if one of two contraries be infinite, the other would be altogether destroyed. But the word “God” means that He is infinite goodness. If, therefore, God existed, there would be no evil discoverable; but there is evil in the world. Therefore God does not exist.
Objection 2: Further, it is superfluous to suppose that what can be accounted for by a few principles has been produced by many. But it seems that everything we see in the world can be accounted for by other principles, supposing God did not exist. For all natural things can be reduced to one principle which is nature; and all voluntary things can be reduced to one principle which is human reason, or will. Therefore there is no need to suppose God’s existence.
Every reasonable atheistic argument is a restatement of one or both of these basic points.

more…

 

[punkforchrist]

One complaint I often hear about theistic arguments is that they are old. One immediate problem with this objection is that if true, it proves too much. If old age invalidates some idea or belief, then logic and mathematics ought to be abandoned, and I don’t know of any atheist who thinks we should do that. Further, this atheistic objection actually undercuts itself. For, the problem of evil and superfluity of theism arguments are just as old as any theistic arguments. Will the New Atheists abandon these arguments on the basis that they are ancient? That’s doubtful.

Thanks for sharing.

 

[Lapin_Lascif]

I have read some of these tomes and I shall come a-galloping to the defense of my heretical brothers.

Hitchens does make a (I think) new argument in God is not Great that the 3 monotheisms are in essence totalitarian and that the last commandment is the first recorded mentioning of thought crime.
You can be convicted not just for what you do but for what you think about doing.

Another one would be Sam Harris’ observation about the link between the widespread practice of human sacrifice throughout history and the gruesome method that Christians deem a crucial part of their soteriology.

"Let the good news go forth: we live in a cosmos, the vastness of which we can scarcely even indicate in our thoughts, on a planet teeming with creatures we have only begun to understand, but the whole project was actually brought to a glorious fulfillment over twenty centuries ago, after one species of primate (our own) climbed down out of the trees, invented agriculture and iron tools, glimpsed (as through a glass, darkly) the possibility of keeping its excrement out of its food, and then singled out one among its number to be viciously flogged and nailed to a cross.

The notion that Jesus Christ died for our sins and that his death constitutes a successful propitiation of a “loving” God is a direct and undisguised inheritance of the scapegoating barbarism that has plagued bewildered people throughout history. Viewed in a modern context, it is an idea at once so depraved and fantastical that it is hard to know where to begin to criticize it."

That should do for now.

And if you have been, then please stop at once.

Lapin

 

[Touchstone]

One complaint I often hear about theistic arguments is that they are old. One immediate problem with this objection is that if true, it proves too much. If old age invalidates some idea or belief, then logic and mathematics ought to be abandoned, and I don’t know of any atheist who thinks we should do that. Further, this atheistic objection actually undercuts itself. For, the problem of evil and superfluity of theism arguments are just as old as any theistic arguments. Will the New Atheists abandon these arguments on the basis that they are ancient? That’s doubtful.

Thanks for sharing.

I think that misses the flaw in being “old”. When looking at Thomism, for example, it’s disparaged (quite correctly, I think) as “old”, not because it has been many years since its introduction, but because it is obsolete; it fails to apprehend and integrate the knowledge that has been acquired on the interim.

Aristotelian metaphysics and ideas like the PSR, are “old” in that they are not (ostensibly) cognizant of the serious challenges to human intuition that science has discovered in the last several centuries.

I think this idea is as old as human reasoning:

*ˆ’Je n’avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là.

*Unlike PSR or other indulgences in the intuition, parsimony and explanatory economy are “meta-objections”, a kind of heuristic about reasoning and thinking itself. That makes the principal basis for atheism, that God is just a superfluous concept (existentially speaking, I grant that religion may be expedient unto necessity as a matter of delusion or anodyne fancy for humans and human cultures at point) as “old as the hills”, yet as cutting edge as it comes.

The more we learn, the more superfluous and extraneous God is for our understanding and description of the world around us. It may be that parsimony and economy are to become obsolete someday; perhaps reality is not well discovered and modeled by economies and efficiences and uniformities at some point.

But the track record for parsimony is quite impressive as a heuristic. It’s old, I grant, but anything but obsolete, probably more compelling now than it ever was. The reverse is true for theistic arguments, particularly the Thomistic metaphysics that held to a kind of idolization of the intuition. That was more understandable in pre-scientific era. Today, such positions are epistemically quaint, I think, in light of the discovery and knowledge about the world around us that has been developed on the interim.

-TS

 

[liquidpele]

I think that misses the flaw in being “old”. When looking at Thomism, for example, it’s disparaged (quite correctly, I think) as “old”, not because it has been many years since its introduction, but because it is obsolete; it fails to apprehend and integrate the knowledge that has been acquired on the interim.

Aristotelian metaphysics and ideas like the PSR, are “old” in that they are not (ostensibly) cognizant of the serious challenges to human intuition that science has discovered in the last several centuries.

I think this idea is as old as human reasoning:

*ˆ’Je n’avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là.

*Unlike PSR or other indulgences in the intuition, parsimony and explanatory economy are “meta-objections”, a kind of heuristic about reasoning and thinking itself. That makes the principal basis for atheism, that God is just a superfluous concept (existentially speaking, I grant that religion may be expedient unto necessity as a matter of delusion or anodyne fancy for humans and human cultures at point) as “old as the hills”, yet as cutting edge as it comes.

The more we learn, the more superfluous and extraneous God is for our understanding and description of the world around us. It may be that parsimony and economy are to become obsolete someday; perhaps reality is not well discovered and modeled by economies and efficiences and uniformities at some point.

But the track record for parsimony is quite impressive as a heuristic. It’s old, I grant, but anything but obsolete, probably more compelling now than it ever was. The reverse is true for theistic arguments, particularly the Thomistic metaphysics that held to a kind of idolization of the intuition. That was more understandable in pre-scientific era. Today, such positions are epistemically quaint, I think, in light of the discovery and knowledge about the world around us that has been developed on the interim.

-TS

You have a wonderful way with words. Kudos!

 

[Betterave]

The more we learn, the more superfluous and extraneous God is for our understanding and description of the world around us. It may be that parsimony and economy are to become obsolete someday; perhaps reality is not well discovered and modeled by economies and efficiences and uniformities at some point.

But the track record for parsimony is quite impressive as a heuristic. It’s old, I grant, but anything but obsolete, probably more compelling now than it ever was. The reverse is true for theistic arguments, particularly the Thomistic metaphysics that held to a kind of idolization of the intuition. That was more understandable in pre-scientific era. Today, such positions are epistemically quaint, I think, in light of the discovery and knowledge about the world around us that has been developed on the interim.

Ha, that’s funny! “The more we learn…” I guess that depends on who ‘we’ is, and what ‘we’ are paying attention to. It’s ironic that Ockham’s razor (do you know who Ockham was?) was anticipated by Scotus (do you know who that is?) who felt that it was necessary, despite the principle of economy, to provide a much more elaborate proof of God’s existence than Aquinas did. But ‘we’ know all about how silly that idea was, don’t we? Yikes!

 

[Betterave]

I have read some of these tomes and I shall come a-galloping to the defense of my heretical brothers.

Hitchens does make a (I think) new argument in God is not Great that the 3 monotheisms are in essence totalitarian and that the last commandment is the first recorded mentioning of thought crime.
You can be convicted not just for what you do but for what you think about doing.

Another one would be Sam Harris’ observation about the link between the widespread practice of human sacrifice throughout history and the gruesome method that Christians deem a crucial part of their soteriology.

"Let the good news go forth: we live in a cosmos, the vastness of which we can scarcely even indicate in our thoughts, on a planet teeming with creatures we have only begun to understand, but the whole project was actually brought to a glorious fulfillment over twenty centuries ago, after one species of primate (our own) climbed down out of the trees, invented agriculture and iron tools, glimpsed (as through a glass, darkly) the possibility of keeping its excrement out of its food, and then singled out one among its number to be viciously flogged and nailed to a cross.

The notion that Jesus Christ died for our sins and that his death constitutes a successful propitiation of a “loving” God is a direct and undisguised inheritance of the scapegoating barbarism that has plagued bewildered people throughout history. Viewed in a modern context, it is an idea at once so depraved and fantastical that it is hard to know where to begin to criticize it."

That should do for now.

And if you have been, then please stop at once.

Lapin

By way of preamble: Knowing a lot is one thing. Being an ignorant bigot is another. Not being able to read is yet another.

Now my question is: what does any of what you have written have to do with philosophical proofs for and objections to God’s existence (i.e., the topic raised in the OP)?

 

[Betterave]

Obvious guy: But dialectical materialism isn’t true.
Marxist standing in bread line: Je n’avais pas besoin de cette hypothese-la.

Obvious guy: But you don’t know anything about metaphysics or Aquinas or the positive case for the truth of religion.
Devotee of scientism: Je n’avais pas besoin de cette hypothese-la.

 

[edwest2]

Repackaging and relabeling are two key elements of deception… and marketing. If you put the word new on a box of cereal, sales will go up. There is good research to back up this claim. Also, if you change the design of the box, a similar result can be achieved, but not always for a brand with low acceptability in the first place. After all, if you didn’t like the taste before, odds are, you won’t try it again.

Yes, human beings do rearrange the furniture or get new drapes or see some lamps they want to exchange for the old ones. But, change itself does not produce or make anything. Like that set of clothes you’ve been wearing for a while that you’ve grown tired of.

Professor Dawkins, and other atheists, saw the 9/11 attack as the perfect marketing tool for the new atheism. “See. This is what religion leads to.” I wonder what religious motive Josef Stalin had for killing millions.

In an effort to convince people that virtually everything about human society is “evolving,” marketing for the anti-theist movement proposes a future where human beings will finally be ‘free’ of the god idea. That science will take over the miraculous healing function, perhaps even eliminating death in the process, or so they say. Scientists have altered some aspects of our society. We no longer read by kerosene lamps or candles, need a horse and cart to get around, and travel to distant places no longer takes weeks or months. But in the middle of the technology boom of the 20th Century, mankind killed millions of people.

Still, there were those, perhaps with the best intentions, who looked at the current social order and wanted something more. Apparently, this was without realizing that great maxim: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

“I think that science fiction, even the corniest of it, even the most outlandish of it, no matter how badly it’s written, has a distinct therapeutic value because all of it has as its primary postulate that the world does change.” Robert Heinlein quoted at the Third Annual World Science Fiction Convention, 1941.

I have to disagree with Mr. Heinlein. Great truths or timeless truths, are timeless and great because they are just as applicable to modern man today as they were thousands of years ago. That is why we can watch a Greek play from 2,000 years ago today and get it. Man, himself, has not changed.

But back to the New Atheism. Christopher Hitchens said: “If we knew then what we now know, would we ever have become religious?” (from the National Catholic Register) Clearly, Mr. Hitchens believes that on some particular date, man realized that he just popped up on earth due to purely non-God, “natural,” forces. The irrational idea that some rock, at a certain distance from a star, with liquid water and the so-called ‘building blocks of life,’ will automatically produce life. It has not occurred to him, it seems, that scientists, today, cannot take a beaker of water, pour in the building blocks of life and see life floating around a few hours later.

Part of the New Atheism is the rude, in your face quality of some. This is multiplied by the learned bad examples all over the internet. Apparently, people who regard themselves as intelligent can’t express themselves without profanity and name calling. And books with titles like The God Delusion and Letter to a Christian Nation are intended to provoke.

So, no, it’s not new, just new packaging and labels. Just like new actors can get a certain haircut, the right clothes and makeup, and they look just like people from the 1950s.

Peace,
Ed

 

[liquidpele]

Professor Dawkins, and other atheists, saw the 9/11 attack as the perfect marketing tool for the new atheism. “See. This is what religion leads to.” I wonder what religious motive Josef Stalin had for killing millions.

Hey! For once I think we agree.
Both arguments (religion=terrorists, atheism=Stalin) are appeals to the emotional and invalid.

 

[Touchstone]

Ha, that’s funny! “The more we learn…” I guess that depends on who ‘we’ is, and what ‘we’ are paying attention to. It’s ironic that Ockham’s razor (do you know who Ockham was?) was anticipated by Scotus (do you know who that is?) who felt that it was necessary, despite the principle of economy, to provide a much more elaborate proof of God’s existence than Aquinas did. But ‘we’ know all about how silly that idea was, don’t we? Yikes!

Yeah, those names ring a bell. Science is a team sport, and it evolves, sometimes in fits and starts. Darwin not only gave us the theory of evolution, we can thank him for plogiston, too. Whoops. We acknowledge the insight and innovation of great ideas from the individuals who came up with them, but then we detach them – they must stand on their own merits going forward.

In Ordinatio, IIRC, Ockham does apply the principles of economy, emphasizing the oneness of God. I also think Ockham also collapsed Scotus’ distinctions between *per se causes *and per accidens causes, didn’t he?

Like so many great ideas, the originator had just a dim glimpse of the future scope and power of the idea. In this case, an ironic one as his efforts to improve the philosophical foundations for God and faith have become a withering intellectual blade against it.

-TS

 

[Touchstone]

In an effort to convince people that virtually everything about human society is “evolving,” marketing for the anti-theist movement proposes a future where human beings will finally be ‘free’ of the god idea. That science will take over the miraculous healing function, perhaps even eliminating death in the process, or so they say.

I think it’s a much more humble agenda than that. For my part, the expectation of miraculous healing is the problem. Technology advances are wonderful, but it’s a hard won fight to reverse engineer the working of the body and nature to make that happen. It’s not magic.

And ethically, atheism is free of the obligation to create cruelty and injustice as the price for it’s miracles. The “miraculous” healing of kidney stones, or goiter, or a sore back is the source of praise, and wonder. But the credulous rarely ponder the case of the 5 year old down the hospital corridor who just died in agony, after 24 months of a brutal fight for life against a malignant brain tumor. There is no callous God who favors the elect with goiter relief and stays his hand as the five year old succumbs to the vicious monster destroying his brain.

It’s nature, being natural, and we embrace knowledge and progress the honest, hard way; we earn it, and forego the cruelties and follies of the ‘miracle healing’. The problem identified isn’t who is doing the miracles, God or science, but rather the credulous belief in magic in the first place.

Scientists have altered some aspects of our society. We no longer read by kerosene lamps or candles, need a horse and cart to get around, and travel to distant places no longer takes weeks or months. But in the middle of the technology boom of the 20th Century, mankind killed millions of people.

Yes, but the horror and tragedy of that should be instructive; knowledge is power, and power changes things. Our ability to alter/help/destroy the environment, and to systematize the aid and/or oppression or even slaughter of man is unimaginably greater than it was in Aristotle’s time. That 20 million can be so efficient starved and killed under the cult of Stalin, or so many Jews murdered in industrial style speaks against the point I believe you are making. Things are different now, capabilities-wise. Fundamentally different.

I have to disagree with Mr. Heinlein. Great truths or timeless truths, are timeless and great because they are just as applicable to modern man today as they were thousands of years ago. That is why we can watch a Greek play from 2,000 years ago today and get it. Man, himself, has not changed.

Nature is slow, and evolutionary changes to man are unfathomably slow, given our short lifespans. But knowledge and culture exist apart from the genome, and they have done something of a “supernova” in the past few centuries. Our nature and instincts is likely very much like man’s 2,000 years ago, and probably not too different than (proto-)man’s 2 million years ago, but the culture and technology contexts for man are juggernauts. Knowledge is a cumulative, accelerating process. Or can be, if people are willing to work at it.

But back to the New Atheism. Christopher Hitchens said: “If we knew then what we now know, would we ever have become religious?” (from the National Catholic Register) Clearly, Mr. Hitchens believes that on some particular date, man realized that he just popped up on earth due to purely non-God, “natural,” forces. The irrational idea that some rock, at a certain distance from a star, with liquid water and the so-called ‘building blocks of life,’ will automatically produce life. It has not occurred to him, it seems, that scientists, today, cannot take a beaker of water, pour in the building blocks of life and see life floating around a few hours later.

I think one of the salient observations of science over the past century or so is that we shouldn’t suppose we must be able to form life in a paper cup at will before we apprehend the evidence, the consilience that points to emergence, and the conspicuous lack of anything that bears out theistic intuitions in physics.

Part of the New Atheism is the rude, in your face quality of some. This is multiplied by the learned bad examples all over the internet. Apparently, people who regard themselves as intelligent can’t express themselves without profanity and name calling. And books with titles like The God Delusion and Letter to a Christian Nation are intended to provoke.

Some of that is reprehensible indeed. Deplorable. But there’s an interesting dynamic at work; part of the “clout” of religion, especially that of established, organized religion appears to obtain just from the fact that it is rarely challenged, or “dissed”. One way to maintain the idea that a naked Emperor really has some nice new clothes is to insist on the polity of avoiding pesky questions about his clothes. I’m a proponent of spirited, but civil and fair debate and discourse (and objective/empirical/rational thinking on the evidence wherever possible), but there’s a healthy honesty in not genuflecting to theist history or metaphysics for genuflecting’s sake.

So, no, it’s not new, just new packaging and labels. Just like new actors can get a certain haircut, the right clothes and makeup, and they look just like people from the 1950s.

Peace,
Ed

I think that’s probably right. The “in your face” atheist’s unbelief is philosophically quite close to, say, Bertrand Russell’s in most cases. I think what is new in the “militancy” is the shrewd insight that much of religion gets by on suppressing and avoiding direct, frontal challenge. Religion has long “hidden” behind a brigade of courtiers, and many of the new atheists have figured out they can skip the courtier’s dance and go right for the main thesis and dialectic.

It wasn’t always thus.

-TS

 

[Hubriss]

After reading that article I don’t feel like writing a long reply. Mostly what I’ll say is it had its good moments and its painful moments.

Instead, here is an excellent video of a good atheistic argument, which I doubt can be considered anything but old. It is certainly not addressed by Thomas, but instead starts to refute St. Thomas’s arguments. If definitions for God are presented, they can almost always be shown to not have any basis in reality.

youtube.com/watch?v=5wV_REEdvxo

 

[punkforchrist]

I think that misses the flaw in being “old”. When looking at Thomism, for example, it’s disparaged (quite correctly, I think) as “old”, not because it has been many years since its introduction, but because it is obsolete; it fails to apprehend and integrate the knowledge that has been acquired on the interim. . . .

Could you give me an example of a piece of knowledge that has made Thomism obsolete? Quite often I never hear an argument attached to this assertion. Couldn’t I just as easily say, “When looking at the problem of evil . . . it’s disparaged as ‘old’ . . . because it is obsolete; it fails to apprehend and integrate the knowledge that has been acquired on the interim”?

Thomism is alive and well. Gilson, Maritain, MacIntyre, and Anscombe come to mind as examples of modern Thomists.

 

[edwest2]

To Touchstone -

I can assure you, things are not different now. I worked in health care for nearly ten years. I even had a chance to see some fundamental research first hand. I spoke with the hospital chaplain and asked him if he had seen any miracles. He said he had. God still exists. Miracles still happen. I think Christopher Hitchens provided a real insight, for me, when he said in the same National Catholic Register article, “If I saw a miracle, I would doubt the evidence of my own eyes.”

Here is dishonesty. If you see a miracle you should avert your eyes?

I have brought up the cloak of Guadalupe before. It’s been closely examined by experts. The Church has declared it was not painted by human hands. You can choose not to believe that or look into it. Secretary of State Clinton viewed it not long ago and asked, “Who painted it?”

I am in the process of studying the history of technology. A side effect of my research shows that politics is power. That usually translates into a small group of people sending their countrymen to kill a bunch of other people until favorable surrender terms are agreed upon or defeat, whichever comes first.

The military is always the first to get the best technology. Some of which then leaks out of the black world into the white world. The genius of our scientists has been under the thumb of the nilitary since World War II. No fundamental changes have occurred since then.

Peace,
Ed

 

[Touchstone]

Could you give me an example of a piece of knowledge that has made Thomism obsolete? Quite often I never hear an argument attached to this assertion. Couldn’t I just as easily say, “When looking at the problem of evil . . . it’s disparaged as ‘old’ . . . because it is obsolete; it fails to apprehend and integrate the knowledge that has been acquired on the interim”?

Thomism is alive and well. Gilson, Maritain, MacIntyre, and Anscombe come to mind as examples of modern Thomists.

Non-causality and non-locality at the quantum mechanical level. When some “effect” is visited upon one of a pair of particles, the wave functions of both change simultaneously (this is entanglement). Now, simultaneity becomes a problematic concept under Einsteinian GR, and this causes serious problems for the intuitive human notions of ‘causality’.

Simultaneous events are “frame-centric”; events may be seen as simultaneous in one reference frame, but in another reference frame these same events are NOT simultaneous. Not only that, but in different frames, A appears to happen before B, and in others, B before A.

There are, as you may know, lots of interpretations aimed at resolving this paradox. Without having to even select and look at one, we can understand the impact of the problem itself: causality, at the most fundamental level, is problematic, intractable.

That’s all challenge enough for Thomistic intuitions. But when one applies this, as Hawking and others have to cosmology, the result is a framework that reifies the Big Bang as a quantum event, subject to the same problems and paradoxes of causality. As a quantum-level singularity at t=0, we now acknowledge the prospect of the universe “just happening” in the same sense we apprehend what Bell’s Theorem – as ultimately probabilistic in nature – stochastic.

It’s important to note that none of this need be settled out thoroughly, or even adjudicated among various interpretations. The mere presence of these paradoxes and confounding observations that demand such interpretation seriously undermines the legitimacy of Thomist/Aristotelian intuitions. The “way we just know things are” obtains at macro levels, but it does NOT at quantum levels, and whaddya know, the entire universe itself was “quantum level” at the begining (so far as we know).

Given that, how do thinkers like Gilson and Maritain adapt to all this new information and evidence we have available to us now. How do intuitive notions of causality hold force in light of this – sheer will? blind faith in the intuition?

The reasoning mind does NOT need to commit to the conclusion that reality is “acausal all the way down” at the quantum level in some processes. Just its plausibility as a fact of our reality makes intuition untenable as an authority anymore, on this question.

-Touchstone

 

[Touchstone]

To Touchstone -

I can assure you, things are not different now. I worked in health care for nearly ten years. I even had a chance to see some fundamental research first hand. I spoke with the hospital chaplain and asked him if he had seen any miracles. He said he had. God still exists. Miracles still happen. I think Christopher Hitchens provided a real insight, for me, when he said in the same National Catholic Register article, “If I saw a miracle, I would doubt the evidence of my own eyes.”

Well, this calls forward a famous quote by Richard Feynman:

"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself–and you are** the easiest person to fool."**

Knowledge is a team sport; our experiences are ours, but a miracle is precisely the kind of thing a reasoning mind holds at a distance, waiting vetting, validation, testing beyond the meager capabilities of his solitary experience. Behold the credulous audiences for Criss Angel’s “Mindfreak” show. To think one solely able to judge a miracle is to commit a cardinal mistake at the outset, to beg to be fooled.

Here is dishonesty. If you see a miracle you should avert your eyes?

No, buy all means observe everything you can, as they may be clues. The crucial element is the understanding of the epistemic limitations of the solitary mind. Like Feynman says, you are the easiest person for you to fool. The beginning of objective knowledge is understanding this fundamental limitation. It’s fundamentally hubris anyway, that kind of idolization of the self, so the sooner that’s dispatched, the better all around, eh?

I have brought up the cloak of Guadalupe before. It’s been closely examined by experts. The Church has declared it was not painted by human hands. You can choose not to believe that or look into it. Secretary of State Clinton viewed it not long ago and asked, “Who painted it?”

I think the reasonable, objective conclusion would be “not”. We can digress into the whys and hows of that if you like (maybe a separate thread?).

I am in the process of studying the history of technology. A side effect of my research shows that politics is power. That usually translates into a small group of people sending their countrymen to kill a bunch of other people until favorable surrender terms are agreed upon or defeat, whichever comes first.

The military is always the first to get the best technology. Some of which then leaks out of the black world into the white world. The genius of our scientists has been under the thumb of the nilitary since World War II. No fundamental changes have occurred since then.

Peace,
Ed

Oh no. I sense the presence of tinfoil hats, and black helicopters flying overhead.

-Touchstone

 

[Lapin_Lascif]

By way of preamble: Knowing a lot is one thing. Being an ignorant bigot is another. Not being able to read is yet another.

Now my question is: what does any of what you have written have to do with philosophical proofs for and objections to God’s existence (i.e., the topic raised in the OP)?

Hogwash, fiddlesticks and poppycock!

The OP is an article that states in the first paragraph that the new atheists have nothing new to say.

I prove the author wrong twice without even trying.

Don’t feel too bad about your reading skills, Betterave. I am sure they will improve over time.

Lapin

 

[punkforchrist]

Touchstone, thanks for the reply.

Touchstone:

Non-causality and non-locality at the quantum mechanical level. When some “effect” is visited upon one of a pair of particles, the wave functions of both change simultaneously (this is entanglement). Now, simultaneity becomes a problematic concept under Einsteinian GR, and this causes serious problems for the intuitive human notions of ‘causality’.

Aristotle lists four different kinds of causes: efficient, material, formal, and final. The truth is, we may easily grant that QM is acausal in one sense, but these fluctuations are not uncaused in the sense that something comes from nothing. Ex nihilo nihil fit is the only principle that the Scholastics need in order for their arguments to work, and that principle has not only survived the most recent science, but has been confirmed by it. After all, there’s no radioactive decay apart from an actually existing atomic nucleus.

Simultaneous events are “frame-centric”; events may be seen as simultaneous in one reference frame, but in another reference frame these same events are NOT simultaneous. Not only that, but in different frames, A appears to happen before B, and in others, B before A.

There are, as you may know, lots of interpretations aimed at resolving this paradox. Without having to even select and look at one, we can understand the impact of the problem itself: causality, at the most fundamental level, is problematic, intractable.

It’s not causality per se that becomes problematic, but our knowledge of the relationship between causal entities (in certain instances). This is no more of a difficulty for causation proper than asking: which came first, the chicken or the egg? We still know that A and B are causally related.

That’s all challenge enough for Thomistic intuitions. But when one applies this, as Hawking and others have to cosmology, the result is a framework that reifies the Big Bang as a quantum event, subject to the same problems and paradoxes of causality. As a quantum-level singularity at t=0, we now acknowledge the prospect of the universe “just happening” in the same sense we apprehend what Bell’s Theorem – as ultimately probabilistic in nature – stochastic.

There’s a lot that can be said about Big Bang cosmology. Just out of interest, have you read the debate-book by Craig and Smith, Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology? It’s a great read, and it discusses the Hawking model at length. We don’t find that the Big Bang came from nothing, even if we postulate a quantum model.

In any case, most Scholastic arguments don’t even depend on the universe’s having a beginning (Thomas’ first way and Scotus’ modal argument, for example), so the point is rather moot.

It’s important to note that none of this need be settled out thoroughly, or even adjudicated among various interpretations. The mere presence of these paradoxes and confounding observations that demand such interpretation seriously undermines the legitimacy of Thomist/Aristotelian intuitions. The “way we just know things are” obtains at macro levels, but it does NOT at quantum levels, and whaddya know, the entire universe itself was “quantum level” at the begining (so far as we know).

I think that’s even a stretch right there, given that spontaneous quantum events remain on the quantum level. Regardless of which interpretation is given to QM, though, none of them violate the principle that being cannot arise from non-being. This isn’t speculative; it’s a first principle of rational inquiry.

Given that, how do thinkers like Gilson and Maritain adapt to all this new information and evidence we have available to us now. How do intuitive notions of causality hold force in light of this – sheer will? blind faith in the intuition?

In a similar way that I and others do. Michio Kaku and Victor Stenger are only able to say that science is inconsistent with Thomism by using “cause” equivocally, in a way that necessarily implies absolute physical determinism. Thomas himself would never have held to such a position.

The reasoning mind does NOT need to commit to the conclusion that reality is “acausal all the way down” at the quantum level in some processes. Just its plausibility as a fact of our reality makes intuition untenable as an authority anymore, on this question.

But even granting that QM is a defeater for one type of causation, it does not follow, or even imply, that the plausibility of another type of causation is suddenly suspect. Besides, not even every physicist agrees with a spontaneous interpretation of QM. See David Bohm, for example.

 

[Touchstone]

Touchstone, thanks for the reply.

Aristotle lists four different kinds of causes: efficient, material, formal, and final. The truth is, we may easily grant that QM is acausal in one sense, but these fluctuations are not uncaused in the sense that something comes from nothing. Ex nihilo nihil fit is the only principle that the Scholastics need in order for their arguments to work, and that principle has not only survived the most recent science, but has been confirmed by it. After all, there’s no radioactive decay apart from an actually existing atomic nucleus.

I don’t understand how you can say Ex nihilo nihil fit has survived, let alone has been confirmed, as at quantum levels, the concepts that depend on become intractable. That is, the quantum world doesn’t behave at all like the macroscopic world. So not only have we learned the severe limitations of our intuitions which are naturally “stuck” in the macroscopic world, we are also aware that the cosmological singularity was very probably **not a macroscopic event at all. **That is, when going from macroscopic scales and ensembles (where causality does obtain) to quantum levels, the rules change. *Ex nihilo nihil fit *is a macroscopic observation being applied to a context (QM) where the singularity occurred where those rules do not obtain, or at least we have no basis for understanding that they do at that level.

Here’s a short summary.

1. Macroscopic rules don’t apply to QM
2. The cosmological singularity (t=0) was a QM event, not a macroscopic event.
3. Therefore, Macroscopic rules don’t apply to the singularity.
4. *Ex nihilo nihil fit *is a macroscopic rule.
5. Per (1), Ex nihilo nihil fit does not apply to origin of our universe.

From here, one can respond and say “But that doesn’t show the universe came from nothing!”, and I would agree. But the crucial insight here is that we also retreat from the converse; neither can we say it came from something any more, because our warrant for came from something is been invalidated as a macroscopic rule being foisted on QM. The reasonable mind thus understands from QM that his intuitions (and tests!) remain forceful at macroscopic scales, but those same intuitions are not reliable on their face at the QM scale.

Thus, informed by developments in science, we accept that our Scholastic intuitions are misgiven at this level, and understand that those who persist in them in light of this are incorrigible on this issue. One needn’t conclude “the universe came from nothing” but rather “QM invalidates the very basis for relying on Ex nihilo nihil fit as authoritative in the first place”.

It’s not causality per se that becomes problematic, but our knowledge of the relationship between causal entities (in certain instances). This is no more of a difficulty for causation proper than asking: which came first, the chicken or the egg? We still know that A and B are causally related.

Well, no, that’s the whole problem. Saying “we still know they are causally related” is syntactic sugar, philosophy by definition. The whole point of that line of inquiry is that “causal” itself becomes a problematic concept.

There’s a lot that can be said about Big Bang cosmology. Just out of interest, have you read the debate-book by Craig and Smith, Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology? It’s a great read, and it discusses the Hawking model at length. We don’t find that the Big Bang came from nothing, even if we postulate a quantum model.

I have, and it’s a favorite topic of mine. Shorter William Lane Craig: *my intuitionism *is stronger than your Quine, you Hawking-Penrose. Indeed, a man’s intuitionism is unassailable without him setting it aside to be informed by reason.

I’m not particularly impressed with Quentin Smith, either, but this is WLC at the heights of his sophistry. Happy to discuss if you’d like.

As above, I’m not claiming we have some result that shows ‘the universe came from nothing’. It’s not at all clear how that would be established, even if it were true. But the point is, and here I think it’s clear after several similar comments from you that you are missing this, we don’t need to show that. All we need to do to dismiss Thomist metaphysics is understand that we are rightly agnostic on the matter. We have no basis for an a priori understanding one way or another. Aquinas begins with such an a priori, and it’s been shown now to be misplaced, unwarranted. We simply do not have a reasonable basis to begin with convictions one way or the other. To maintain such is to cling to intutionism in an incorrigible way.

In any case, most Scholastic arguments don’t even depend on the universe’s having a beginning (Thomas’ first way and Scotus’ modal argument, for example), so the point is rather moot.

Perhaps I drilled down too deep in that first response. Broadly speaking, science has become a systematized way to overthrow the intuition. Intuition is great at coming up with questions, and is indeed indispensible as a source of imagination and inspiration fro scientific discovery. And science does validates many human intutions, particularly those that are “local”, common to the milieu and scale of human beings. But importantly, science is a withering assault on the quality of man’s intuition in the general sense. Things we “just know”, turn out to be quite mistaken, and the more abstract and farther we get from common scales and the “neighborhood of our experience”, the more silly our intutions are show to be. This is QM – your intuitions are useless as a proxy for real knowledge.

-TS

(con’t)