Is there an answer? Part 2.

I got a bit diverted by the comments for Part 1, and may have to just cut'n'paste some of that discussion into this new post as I covered a lot of what I was going to say.

I'm still pretty happy with the claim that the Universe does not need to "make sense" or adhere to a strict set of rules. We observe order in the Universe, and scientific models need order, and for scientific models to be useful they need to match with observation of the Universe to a reasonable degree, but that does not imply that the Universe itself requires order.

(that may be the worst sentence I've ever written ... perhaps I need some revolting instant coffee)

So why bother attempting to argue something that culminates in such an ugly sentence? Because the requirement of order is one of the premises behind one of the most common arguments for the necessary existence of a creator. And the old testament God is defined to be such a creator.

The argument goes something like this (cut'n'paste):

• order requires a designer
• the universe requires order

therefore:

• the universe requires a designer

The second premise is often expressed in empirical a posteriori terms as "the universe appears to have order", in which case the first premise should also be expressed in empirical terms as "order appears to require a designer" and would lead to an empirical thesis of "the universe appears to require a designer". This is quite interesting in itself and may even warrant a "Part 3". It falls down quite rapidly, however, since science has shown that lots of the apparent order in the Universe does not appear to require a designer at all and is perfectly well explained by random, un-designed events.

If we take the argument in a priori terms, rather than empirical terms, then the second assumption "the universe requires order" seems fairly arbitrary. Scientific models require order ... almost by definition. I genuinely cannot see why the same definition should apply to the Universe.

Question 3: what isn't the question?

There are always more questions than answers. This is a lazy aphorism but it is broadly true. The world is a complicated place and answering every single little question is neither possible nor useful. You need to decide which questions are important, and, perhaps more importantly, decide which questions are unimportant so you can avoid wasting time on them.

Here are some things that I'm not going to waste my time on:

Can God create an object too massive for God to move?

God can move anything. But God can create anything. Oh no! A paradox! It's easy to invent questions like this that appear to poke a logical hole in the idea of omnipotence. Try it for yourself. Literally minutes of fun. The fact that it is so very easy to formulate this sort of paradox ought to be a pretty good indication that it isn't a very useful paradox. It is, at best, an illustration of how you can invent a set of rules and (correctly or not) demonstrate them to be inconsistent. A simplistic version of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem if you like. (If you don't know about Gödel's theorem, it is well worth reading about. Good stuff to keep you awake at night.)

Bad things happen to good people.

God is omniscient and omnipotent but allows man to do bad things. This is a much (much) more interesting question than the first. But I'm side-stepping it altogether. Observant readers may have noticed that in the two previous posts I did not mention 'goodness' as one of God's attributes.

Two reasons for this:

1. there does not appear to be an unequivocal statement in the Old Testament that God is good. This may seem slightly odd, and the New Testament appears to be more committal on the subject, but I've had a good browse and a good Google and I've turned up nothing.
2. it does not provide any proof for the existence or non existence of God

The first reason may be a mistake on my part. (To repeat what I said earlier, I'm more than happy to be corrected on any biblical interpretation). The second reason is far more important.

If we assume that 'good' and 'bad' are subjective qualities, then the question "why do bad things happen?" can be reduced to a debate on whether or not the "bad things" are actually bad. This is moral philosophy. It should be taught as a compulsory subject to all children, but it isn't useful in the current context.

If instead we assume that there is an objective 'good' beyond the opinion of man, and that God is omniscient, then God knows with absolute certainty what is good and bad. But we do not. So we cannot derive any proof about the existence of God from the fact that we observe things that we consider to be 'bad'.

"Ah but!" I hear you myself say, "the Old Testament contains examples of God proclaiming that particular things are good or bad, and yet appearing to act in a contrary fashion."

Possibly true. But this would only be a conclusive contradiction if you were to accept that the words of God reported in the Old Testament form a comprehensive and infallible definition of what constitutes good and bad. There are, no doubt, some people who do accept this. Those people are unlikely to enter into an attempted rational debate on the very existence of God. This is probably the one and only circumstance where I will give any weight to the "God moves in mysterious ways" argument.

Definition 3: God part 2.

Back to God again. And back to the source (or as close as I can get to the source without learning a selection of bronze age middle eastern languages). There are clearly several other versions of the Old Testament in current use, but I don't have the resources to cross check every single one. I'm more than happy to take suggestions of variations and clashes in comments. For current purposes I am simply going to list the usual attributes of God and reference them to the appropriate bits of the King James version of the Old Testament.

Using Bartleby's excellent searchable reference books (one of the finer corners of the Internet) makes the task of finding the biblical definition of God easier. But still not very easy. As you might imagine, or know, the word "God" appears quite a lot in the old testament. The majority of these occurences are statements praising God, or advising God's followers how they ought to behave towards God, or reporting what God said or did, which helps to narrow it down.

In fact, there are relatively few direct statements about what God actually is. I haven't decided yet if that makes this job harder or easier.

The Eternal God

Arguably, one of the most fundamental qualities of God is that God has always existed and is not something that was created or came into being. (oh ... another nice feature of Bartleby is that it provides hyperlinked cross-references ... so if you find one statement in a reference, you can easily find related statements. Nice.)

Isaiah 44:6 "I am the first, and I am the last" and Isaiah 48:12 "I am he; I am the first, I also am the last". (according to Bartleby, this is also repeated in Revelations, but I'm only looking at the Old Testament).

That is fairly unequivocal as a statement: God existed before anything else.

The Creator

This one is easier. God is referred to as a creator in many many places.

Isaiah 40:28 "the everlasting God, the LORD, the Creator of the ends of the earth"
Isaiah 45:7 "I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things."

(I did look further than Isaiah, honestly. It is quite a good book though.)

And of course there is the whole of Chapter 1 of Genesis.

There are some slightly more equivocal statements which refer to God creating more specific and limited things like 'Israel' or 'righteousness', but overall the Old Testament has an uncontroversial position that God created everything.

An aside: there is a whole wealth of material on the internal consistency of the various creation stories in Genesis. I might delve into those at some point, but the intention at the moment is simply to list God's attributes and provide their biblical justification.

God the Trinity.

Happily, I've said that I am only using the Old Testament definition of God. The Trinity is one very good reason for doing that. It has spurned more brain aching theological debate than probably all other biblical questions combined and caused more splits in the church than anything else. It also narrows the scope to mainstream Christianity, as Judaism, Islam, and many smaller branches of Christianity do not accept that Jesus and God are one and the same. In short, I'm not touching it with a barge pole.

Corollary: do we believe in science?

While we're on the subject of belief, and in keeping with the general theme of meandering up and down side roads rather than heading straight to the point, a bit about belief and science.


I blithely stated here that science is not a belief system. Given that I also made the statement that belief is not enough, I probably ought to justify myself. I'm burdened with a few ounces of integrity.


It is often argued that accepting scientific claims requires belief and that this makes it comparable with other more conventional systems of belief like theism. But 'belief' is a many splendoured thing; it means a dozen things in a dozen contexts. We need to be very clear about what we mean by 'belief' in science before we make such a comparison.


Science exists.


OK. That should be fairly uncontroversial. It is equivalent to the "Elvis exists" example from earlier. When we say "I believe in science" we are not saying "I believe in the existence of science." So the statement "I believe in science" is not comparable with the statement "I believe in God" by this meaning of "believe".


Science is useful.


I would argue that when we say "I believe in science" we are instead using the other meaning of "I believe in the capabilities or qualities of science". We are stating that we believe that the scientific method is a useful tool.


Do we need to justify that belief? Is it subjective or controversial?


The scientific method is the set of tools and techniques by which we have created every piece of technology and every branch of medicine in the modern world. It has demonstrated its efficacy over centuries of almost alarmingly rapid progress. It quite clearly and unequivocally works. I genuinely cannot imagine any way in which this massive body of evidence can be regarded as either subjective or controversial.


But ... I'm going to allow it to be considered controversial. Just for the time being and for the purposes of this discussion. That's how generous I am. I am going to allow that the statements "I believe in Science" and "I believe in God" are comparable within this particular meaning of "believe".

Corollary to the corollary.

Thanks to Robin for pointing out a further clarification that needs to be made.

There is an important difference between the scientific method and a scientific model. The method is a method, a way of doing something. A very successful way of doing something. A model or theory is just a part of that method: an idea that pops out of a person's brain and is proposed as a useful model of some part of the observable world. Newton's idea of gravity was a model. How Newton expressed that model and tested it against observation is the scientific method.

So, there is another use of 'believe' that we should address.

I believe in a particular scientific model.

Again, this is not equivalent to "I believe in the existence of a particular scientific model". Reference libraries are chock full of journals crammed with scientific models. They definitely exist.

What is actually meant is "I believe in the utility of a particular scientific model". I think it is a good model. I think it agrees with what I observe in the outside world. I think it can tell me something useful that I have not yet observed in the outside world. As I said down there somewhere, models themselves are not true or false, so this phrase should not be interpreted as "I believe a particular scientific model is true".

Very importantly, the phrase "I believe in science" is not equivalent to "I believe in all scientific models". For one thing, scientists quite often disagree. Disagreement is an important part of advancing understanding. You cannot (honestly) claim to believe in every single scientific model since they do not necessarily agree with one another.

Question 2: is belief enough?

All you need is love. Love is all you need.

Before heading back up the road towards existence, a quick detour up a quite different path. Does it actually matter whether something exists or not? Is it sufficient that people believe in something? Is that the more important question?

Let's take a couple of examples. I like examples.

The Tooth Fairy. Children's milk teeth fall out. This is quite important for child development but not necessarily pleasant for the child involved. Some parents tell their kids a white lie involving a fairy who collects teeth from underneath children's pillows and replaces them with a coin. This apparently sweetens the blow of losing a tooth. As a bonus, the child can spend the coin on sweets and learn the principles of 'feedback' too.

Medical placebos. The placebo effect is when a person believes that they are receiving medical intervention, and that belief speeds up their recovery or otherwise improves their condition. They may simply be swallowing sugar capsules, or having their feet rubbed. The curative effect is in their minds and their imaginations but the effect is very real.

In both examples, the 'thing' does not exist. There is no tooth fairy and there is no medicine. Or is there? Arguably, the important 'thing' in the second example is the effect itself, not the imaginary medicine. Placebos work. This is a Good Thing™. It makes people better. The placebo effect exists.

God clearly doesn't fall easily into the same category as the tooth fairy. The tooth fairy quite categorically and uncontroversially does not exist. It's a deliberate lie to children. (no comment on whether that's a good or bad thing). So ... does God fall into the same category as a medical placebo? Is it more important that people believe in God and that this has a beneficial effect?

I'm going to argue a strong 'no' for several reasons. Firstly, the statement "God is a placebo" is quite condescending towards people who believe in God and condescension rarely leads anywhere constructive in a conversation. Even a monologue. Secondly, it's a cop out; it is saying "I'm not going to bother proving it one way or the other as it doesn't matter." In which case, why am I talking about it at all? Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, we know that medical placebos work, but we also know that they only work if the person receiving them doesn't know they are a placebo. The medical practitioner may or may not know that it is a placebo, but the patient must believe it is "real" medicine. See the double blind test for a fuller explanation.

If we substitute 'God' for 'placebo' in this statement, we are effectively saying "The priests and holy men may or may not know that God is real. But God works because the believers think he works." I don't mind this as an argument generally, but I've already said that I'm addressing the Abrahamic religions' definition of God. And they are fairly categorical that God is a real entity, and not something that exists only in the heads of believers.

Lemma 2: I believe in belief.

'Believe' is one of those horrible brain-action words with half a dozen meanings that overlap and clash with one another and with the meanings of other brain words like 'think' or 'know'. I believe I'll have another beer. I believe in Father Christmas. I believe Floyd Mayweather is the greatest living boxer. I believe you. They are notoriously difficult to translate because the way they overlap and cover the broad spectrum of 'thinking' differs from one language to another.

It's also one of those awkward concepts that lives in the mind rather than in the 'outside world' and so can be difficult or impossible to test. If I said "I live in England" or "I have three legs" then these assertions would be fairly easy to verify. If I said "I believe in the tooth fairy" then ... well ... I might do. And if I were cunning and lacking in moral fibre, I could make it quite difficult for somebody outside my brain to prove that I don't believe in the tooth fairy. We can't read people's brains very easily. That's why nobody trusts psychiatrists.

Let's narrow the broad word 'belief' down a bit and apply it to my contrived test statements from earlier:

1) I believe in Elvis
2) I believe in King Arthur
3) I believe in Harry Potter

There are still two different meanings here. Statements (2) and (3) are most sensibly interpreted as "I believe in the existence of X". But Elvis's existence isn't controversial, so that probably isn't what we mean in statement (1). The most likely interpretation of (1) is "I believe in the capabilities or qualities of X". Elvis is perhaps an odd choice here. It is probably clearer with something like "I believe in the president".

God is an awkard case. Perhaps not surprisingly. (remember God? I said I'd sneak back up on God). The statement "I believe in God" can be interpreted as either or both of the above meanings.

"I believe in the existence of God" and "I believe in the capabilities or qualities of God". (where the second statement presumably implies the first). So whenever we address this statement, we need to make completely clear what we mean.

Oh ... and the title of the post "I believe in belief". You could argue that you cannot prove that anybody else believes anything, since belief happens inside people's heads where you can't see it. This is in the same realm as arguing that you cannot prove that anything outside your own head exists. Diverting if you're a 17th century French mathematician or a student sipping cheap instant coffee. Not nearly diverting enough for me to bother about it here. Belief exists. People believe stuff and they believe in stuff. I'm taking that as given.

Definition 1: God

It is quite tricky to determine whether something exists until you have decided what the something actually is. So we'd better get that out of the way.


Religions, to their credit, have a long history of writing things down. And religions have a natural ownership of the concept of God, so the sensible place to look for a definition of God would be in the writings of a religion. Clearly there are many religions and they do not necessarily share a common definition of God, so I am going to take the God of the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) and take their shared definition of God from the Torah/Old Testament.


There is an added complication, of course, in the fact that the Torah/Old Testament exists in various translations and versions, and the precise interpretation of its contents is debated within and between the religious groups and subgroups and offshoots. I'll have to cross those bridges when I come to them.


(Small but important aside: I'm not going to attempt to define God myself, and I'm not going to attempt to address other people's more recent definitions of God. It is quite easy to invent something that can be cunningly disproved and dismissed, and it is equally trivial to invent something that is next-to-impossible to dismiss. But it's not interesting or useful or big or clever. If I wanted to burn straw men, I'd have invested in an ill-judged remake of a classic horror film. More on this later. Even if it isn't interesting.)

Question 1: what is the question?

The question "Does God exist?" is so loaded and yet so empty of detail that I've decided to avoid it altogether for a bit. I don't even know what type of question it is or what is meant by two out of three of the words. So I'm going to compare it to similar statements that I have a better chance of understanding. Then I'll creep up on the original question and see if I can catch it by surprise.

1) Elvis existed
2) King Arthur existed
3) Harry Potter exists

Same format: X exists or existed. Different values of X. This is Not Rocket Science™.

I can't compare with a single X as that would be begging the question (in the older and nicer sense), so I've chosen a selection of Xs that cover 'true', 'debatable', and 'false'. I've also chosen Xs that have enough in common that a useful comparison can be made. They don't necessarily have anything in common with God. Apologies if that offends any Elvis fans

What do we mean by 'exist' then? All the Xs above are recognisable names. They've all appeared in books and films. They've all probably had erotic internet fan fiction written about them. Is that enough to 'exist'? Not by any useful definition as I've deliberately chosen one obviously false statement.

(If you want to argue whether Harry Potter exists, there's probably a primary school nearby. If you want to argue whether or not it's possible to prove that Harry Potter does not exist, there's probably an undergrad common room nearby. I may join you in the common room later in the blog. Just don't offer me any of that nasty instant coffee.)

So a useful definition of 'exists' needs to be true for Elvis, false for Harry Potter, and debatable for King Arthur. Then I can worry about whether the statement 'God exists' is similar to any of the three examples. Then I go to hell for blasphemy regardless of the conclusion. Sorted.