Would "complete understanding" disqualify God?

[Safia]

As a disclaimer, I know very little of philosophy, metaphysics, etc., so this might really be an unintelligent train of thought, but I’ve been turning it over in my head and would like to hear others’ thoughts.

From what I understand of atheist scientists, philosophers, etc., the ability to explain everything scientifically – i.e., love as a biochemical process in the brain, a result of evolution which makes human mating easier (I don’t care whether this evolutionary argument is, in itself, true – just citing an example!), or the big bang as a physics-driven process – disqualifies any possibility of God.

My feeble brain can’t wrap itself around how this could possibly be true.

Isn’t it possible that the absolute symmetry and synchrony of our universe is God-created? Is there any single line of argumentation out there that compellingly argues (again, truth value unconsidered) why scientific explanations are irreconcileable with God?

I’ve also been thinking about conciousness. It could be said (I think), that it’s via our consciousness that we are able to experience, love, admire, etc., and that there’s a biological backing to all these processes which stem for consciousness (our soul, we’d say). But what if consciousness can be scientifically proven to be a biological process? Would that “complete understanding” of how our world fits together disqualify the possibility of God?

God transcends everything, so He can make anything possible.

But does our value as humans decrease the more we know about ourselves? The more we can attribute to explanations of the natural versus supernatural? There seems to be so little mystery to humanity these days, at least in the culture.

Just thoughts. Not sure how right or wrong I am about any of it. I’m curious what others think.

 

[Jaaanosik]

As a disclaimer, I know very little of philosophy, metaphysics, etc., so this might really be an unintelligent train of thought, but I’ve been turning it over in my head and would like to hear others’ thoughts.

From what I understand of atheist scientists, philosophers, etc., the ability to explain everything scientifically – i.e., love as a biochemical process in the brain, a result of evolution which makes human mating easier (I don’t care whether this evolutionary argument is, in itself, true – just citing an example!), or the big bang as a physics-driven process – disqualifies any possibility of God.

My feeble brain can’t wrap itself around how this could possibly be true.

Isn’t it possible that the absolute symmetry and synchrony of our universe is God-created? Is there any single line of argumentation out there that compellingly argues (again, truth value unconsidered) why scientific explanations are irreconcileable with God?

I’ve also been thinking about conciousness. It could be said (I think), that it’s via our consciousness that we are able to experience, love, admire, etc., and that there’s a biological backing to all these processes which stem for consciousness (our soul, we’d say). But what if consciousness can be scientifically proven to be a biological process? Would that “complete understanding” of how our world fits together disqualify the possibility of God?

God transcends everything, so He can make anything possible.

But does our value as humans decrease the more we know about ourselves? The more we can attribute to explanations of the natural versus supernatural? There seems to be so little mystery to humanity these days, at least in the culture.

Just thoughts. Not sure how right or wrong I am about any of it. I’m curious what others think.

On the contrary, more we know we are getting closer to God.
The science tries to discover truth and at the end there is only one Truth.
Science and religion are not supposed to contradict each other because they are talking about the same Truth.
If it happens then one or the other or both will adjust at the end.

 

[empther]

As for the Big Bang,
which incidentely was first proposed by a Jesuit and nobody believed him,

something exploded fourteen billion years ago. What exploded? It was something, not nothing. Where did it come from? What made it explode? Either there was something before it or that really was the beginning of time and God started it all. Or, if there was something before the Big Band nevertherless you can’t go back into an infinite past. Every event happened a finite time ago. And so, you still need God to start it all.

As for consciousness,
animals have conscious but not intellect. They do what they do because they have to. They have no choice. There is no variety in their routine.

Enter human beings.

Just one example of how the human mind rises above any organization of matter.
You watch the movie Gone With the Wind. The next day, somebody shows you ten frames from the film. Not only do you recognize the movie, you know how each of the frames fit into the story, you remember the sounds of the voices of the actors, and you can relate all the other knowledge you have about the history of the Old South to the scenes in the film. For example: the word “Gettysburg” is flashed on the screen. You know that was a titanic battle in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and that soon after Abraham Lincoln went there to deliver the Gettyburg Address, which remiinds you that Lincoln freed the slaves, he was shot by John Wilkes Booth, one of his generals later became President Grant who took office during a period of political corruption scandals, which reminds you that during Grant’s term he was approached by a Frenchman who wanted to build the Statue of Liberty, which was eventually built, and the Statue greeted millions of European immiigrants, including the fictional Vito Corleone the patrarch in the The Godfather movies, which reminds you of the diversity of the American people and how you have behaved with people from other etnic groups etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc…

No computer could do this. Much less a biological organism which is only interested in finding enough food to stay alive.
Human beings have a spiritual soul which nature could not produce. God is in charge.

 

[Barbkw]

As for the Big Bang,
which incidentely was first proposed by a Jesuit and nobody believed him,

An article on Monsignor Georges Lemaître with photo of him & Albert Einstein in 1933.

catholiceducation.org/articles/science/sc0022.html

 

[Theophorus]

From what I understand of atheist scientists, philosophers, etc., the ability to explain everything scientifically – i.e., love as a biochemical process in the brain, a result of evolution which makes human mating easier (I don’t care whether this evolutionary argument is, in itself, true – just citing an example!), or the big bang as a physics-driven process – disqualifies any possibility of God.

My feeble brain can’t wrap itself around how this could possibly be true.

Isn’t it possible that the absolute symmetry and synchrony of our universe is God-created? Is there any single line of argumentation out there that compellingly argues (again, truth value unconsidered) why scientific explanations are irreconcileable with God?

I’ve also been thinking about conciousness. It could be said (I think), that it’s via our consciousness that we are able to experience, love, admire, etc., and that there’s a biological backing to all these processes which stem for consciousness (our soul, we’d say). But what if consciousness can be scientifically proven to be a biological process? Would that “complete understanding” of how our world fits together disqualify the possibility of God?

God transcends everything, so He can make anything possible.

But does our value as humans decrease the more we know about ourselves? The more we can attribute to explanations of the natural versus supernatural? There seems to be so little mystery to humanity these days, at least in the culture.

Just thoughts. Not sure how right or wrong I am about any of it. I’m curious what others think.

God is not a ‘God of the gaps’ -can’t explain it blame God. Science cannot disqualify any possibility of God. God is the first cause of everything, He is the cause of all other causes. Nor are scientific explanations irreconcilable with God they simply do not(at least from the experimental sciences alone) give the full picture.

i.e lets assume that Love is in fact caused by biochemical processes( I would say its more than that but anyway), biochemical processes are caused by the fact of the brain, which is caused by evolution, which is caused by something else etc etc. but this cannot go on infinitely as we know that the universe began. It to had a cause, time, space, motion, change every existent knowable reality was caused by something it did not spontaneously pop into existence.

Now ‘nothing comes from nothing’ as the saying goes, something started the ball rolling, and that something which began creation, could not have been itself created. this uncreated creator is God, not from revelation but Scientific (philosophical) deduction.

The experimental sciences can only explain how something works/exists not why it exists in the first place. The ‘how’ of love can to a certain extent be explained by biochemical processes, but the why of love cannot totally be explained by this method alone.

Now I’ve heard some physicists claim that the universe came from nothing, but if the potential to become something results in something, then whatever it is, even if all it was, was potential to become, then that is still not nothing!

The more we come to know, the more the realisation of our true value should increase, The rational intellect,which separates us from the animals, is unique to Man. I believe it is God given, and it would be wrong not to use it.

 

[Shike]

There seems to be so little mystery to humanity these days, at least in the culture.

The real mystery lies in how we as a culture seem to regress morally the more and more we advance in scientific understanding.

You seem to be onto something, how faith and reason do not contradict (science being only one small sliver in the realm of reason).

If you’re looking into jumping further into philosophy, I would suggest the book The Last Superstition by Edward Feser. And among other things, he discusses Scientism (that science is the only method to know truth, or even that all truths are scientific). Take a look.

 

[thegreatdebater]

I love this question. All of these Scientific explanations of how the world came to be are merely theories because you cannot prove them. It does not matter how eloquently they are explained because none of us were there to witness it. Therefore none of them disqualify the possibility of God.

Another great question arises out of this one. What is the one thing we as Christians don’t completely understand. The answer is God. Man in his finite being cannot fabricate the Idea of an infinite being. It must have come from an Infinite source.

 

[Alberti_Devoveo]

Fr Spitzer tackles this question (somewhat) in his New Proofs book. It’s pretty good, if you have (a) the time to read it and (b) knowledge of physics/cosmology & philosophy to get through it without re-reading it over & over again.

 

[Alterum]

Hi Safia,

There are arguments which attempt to show that, if “everything” can be explained without reference to God, belief in God is unreasonable. These arguments usually appeal to some kind of principle of parsimony or simplicity, and they also involve other presumptions about physics and metaphysics. For instance, there is one argument I’ve seen (adapted from an argument against mental causation), which relies on certain claims about the physical world (metaphysical fundamentalism, causal completeness of the physical, non-overdetermination of events) to argue that, since all events have complete physical causes in principle accessible to scientific inquiry, God is superfluous because there is no additional explanatory work for Him to do in the world.

I’d actually be inclined to agree, in a very basic way, with some of the reasons underlying such arguments. But the principles which they adopt as axioms are flawed, and what is assumed for the sake of argument – that science can explain “everything” – is absurd.

Given your examples concerning love and consciousness, I suggest reading more about intentionality. In principle, mental events (like the perception of color) are irreducible to physical events. (Of course, I wouldn’t reduce perception, much less love, to a mental event.) One way of making the point very briefly is to consider that the truth-maker (that in virtue of which the thing is true) of some proposition about a mental event, say, “I see red now,” is not and cannot be any physical event.

So I would not grant “atheist scientists” the claim that even many apparently physical events can be completely explained scientifically. In order to make that claim, the proponent should tell you what it means to give a complete explanation (in which nothing at all is left unexplained), and what counts as valid scientific explanation (there is plenty of philosophical debate around this topic). Since philosophers of science are still struggling with the nature of scientific explanation – they can no longer naively appeal to natural laws and efficient-causal processes without making their own metaphysical assumptions about such laws and about causality – I doubt that any serious philosopher should want to make the claim that I suggest rejecting. This makes no mention of the wealth of things which are simply not open to scientific scrutiny: you suggested love, which implies more broadly that moral truths are inaccessible to natural science.

I should also say that there are, in my view, absolutely decisive arguments against biological or physical reductionism, which demonstrate the incoherence of those positions.

Those considerations are separate from your other questions: whether scientific explanation is compatible with belief in God. I haven’t seen a serious argument that it isn’t; of course it is, and there’s no reason to think otherwise, since all truth is from the same source. Neither are mathematical, philosophical, aesthetic, historical, social, etc., explanations incompatible with belief in God.

 

[Safia]

What is the one thing we as Christians don’t completely understand. The answer is God. Man in his finite being cannot fabricate the Idea of an infinite being. It must have come from an Infinite source.

Is that necessarily true? What about all the theories of the anthropology of religion + community? What would have Hitchens said about that, I wonder?

 

[Safia]

Hi Safia,

There are arguments which attempt to show that, if “everything” can be explained without reference to God, belief in God is unreasonable. These arguments usually appeal to some kind of principle of parsimony or simplicity, and they also involve other presumptions about physics and metaphysics. For instance, there is one argument I’ve seen (adapted from an argument against mental causation), which relies on certain claims about the physical world (metaphysical fundamentalism, causal completeness of the physical, non-overdetermination of events) to argue that, since all events have complete physical causes in principle accessible to scientific inquiry, God is superfluous because there is no additional explanatory work for Him to do in the world.

I’d actually be inclined to agree, in a very basic way, with some of the reasons underlying such arguments. But the principles which they adopt as axioms are flawed, and what is assumed for the sake of argument – that science can explain “everything” – is absurd.

Given your examples concerning love and consciousness, I suggest reading more about intentionality. In principle, mental events (like the perception of color) are irreducible to physical events. (Of course, I wouldn’t reduce perception, much less love, to a mental event.) One way of making the point very briefly is to consider that the truth-maker (that in virtue of which the thing is true) of some proposition about a mental event, say, “I see red now,” is not and cannot be any physical event.

So I would not grant “atheist scientists” the claim that even many apparently physical events can be completely explained scientifically. In order to make that claim, the proponent should tell you what it means to give a complete explanation (in which nothing at all is left unexplained), and what counts as valid scientific explanation (there is plenty of philosophical debate around this topic). Since philosophers of science are still struggling with the nature of scientific explanation – they can no longer naively appeal to natural laws and efficient-causal processes without making their own metaphysical assumptions about such laws and about causality – I doubt that any serious philosopher should want to make the claim that I suggest rejecting. This makes no mention of the wealth of things which are simply not open to scientific scrutiny: you suggested love, which implies more broadly that moral truths are inaccessible to natural science.

I should also say that there are, in my view, absolutely decisive arguments against biological or physical reductionism, which demonstrate the incoherence of those positions.

Those considerations are separate from your other questions: whether scientific explanation is compatible with belief in God. I haven’t seen a serious argument that it isn’t; of course it is, and there’s no reason to think otherwise, since all truth is from the same source. Neither are mathematical, philosophical, aesthetic, historical, social, etc., explanations incompatible with belief in God.

This is exactly what I needed! Thank you.

 

[carn]

But what if consciousness can be scientifically proven to be a biological process? Would that “complete understanding” of how our world fits together disqualify the possibility of God?

Science can never disqualify God.

Assume for a moment that not God created this universe, but some lets say morally neutral being simply interested in testing its universe creation abilities. We could know one thing for certain about such a being - it would be intelligent beyond anything we can currently comprehend, because we cannot fully comprehend the laws of this universe but that being certainly is able to.

Now if such a being created this universe, it would have spent thought upon, what it might develop into. And certainly one possibility would have been intelligent science conducting life. Then the being would have had and immidieate choice - does it create the universe so, that science can find evidence of creation or that science cannot find. After all it had the choice to make the rules, so had a choice what science is actually able to find.

If it had chosen to hide creation from science, science would face the task to find evidence of the actions of a being, existing outside of this universe, vastly intelligent, aware of what science can achieve and willing to hide - that makes sucesfully “catching” the being pretty unlikely.

Now if we assume God made this universe, he is not only more intelligent, but all knowing and therefore ignoring other contraints had without error the choice to be detectable by science or to be non-detecable.

The only question then is, why He should have chosen to be non-detectable by science.

The best argument with science is by the way slightly different. Since dawn of man, man has thought gods or spirits or whatever to influence this world. Some men thought a god is sitting on a cloud and throws lightning when angered. Others thought the sun to be chariot steered by some god. And many other things.
For all things, where men once thought some god is reponsible and which were sucesfully analyzed by science, no god was found. So so far, whenever man claimed “This is done by a god.” and science could check, the answer is “No, we were in error.”

From this atheists conclude, that likely for all other things, where man claims “This is done by a god.”, the result would be the same, if it could be checked. Even for things, which never can be checked, like universe creation. In different words “We do not know the number of swans out there, we will never see them all, but whenever someone claimed there is a black swan and we could realy see it, it was white. Therefore all remaining claims of black swans are likely wrong.”

Now that argument has something, it can be very convincing. But it is not proving anything.

 

[fhansen]

But does our value as humans decrease the more we know about ourselves?

It has nothing to do with knowledge but has everything to do with what we think we know about ourselves-and with a human tendency towards cynicism and a rejection/rebelliousness against God. It takes time and some diligence to learn what love means.

 

[samiam1611]

Hi Safia,
You ask some good questions, and have gotten some good answers. Alterum’s was very good especially. I will add a few of my thoughts.

From what I understand of atheist scientists, philosophers, etc., the ability to explain everything scientifically… disqualifies any possibility of God.

My feeble brain can’t wrap itself around how this could possibly be true.

No wonder you can’t wrap your brain around this - I think your understanding is flawed. By that I mean, I doubt that most atheist scientists, philosophers etc would say that!

While scientific explanations may disprove the supernatural cause of certain phenomenom that has at one time or another by one culture or another been attributed to a deity, that does not mean all god concepts can be dismissed.

If a person’s God concept is especially of the “God of the gaps” type, learning scientific explanations might be enough to make the person rethink their beliefs which would perhaps lead to disbelief.

No scientific explanation that I can think of can disprove god concepts such as belief in “a higher power,” deism, panentheism, etc.

 

[thegreatdebater]

Is that necessarily true? What about all the theories of the anthropology of religion + community? What would have Hitchens said about that, I wonder?

What I was trying to say was that since man is a finite being he cannot possibly comprehend God. If we could, He would not be an infinite being. The difference between the God we believe in many other religions is that we claim not to understand God. That is what proves his existence to me. He is a mystery.

 

[carn]

One way of making the point very briefly is to consider that the truth-maker (that in virtue of which the thing is true) of some proposition about a mental event, say, “I see red now,” is not and cannot be any physical event.

I should also say that there are, in my view, absolutely decisive arguments against biological or physical reductionism, which demonstrate the incoherence of those positions.

I do not think there are such decisive arguments. Mainly because we do not know what conscious and intelligence are, we cannot argue in any way that its physical or not.

And the idea that the mind is only physical could be testable one day. If the mind is purely physical, then it must be possible to simulate an exact copy on a computer - an intelligent, feeling, experiencing machine. Computers powerful enough are at least 50 years of. And having the computer does not mean one already knows how to “program” a human mind. But if the mind is physical, it must be possible.

(And even if such a thing might exist one day, it doesn’t prove anything about God, as He might have chosen to create a universe where such things are possible.)