Tuesday 25 March 2008
Where's Wally?
I haven't joined a cult or otherwise gained or lost faith, I've been mostly in The Real World™ for the last few weeks. I am renovating a house and, irritatingly, it won't rebuild itself. When I have mollycoddled the walls into standing unaided, I will put my thinking hat back on. Until then, I am in overalls and wielding a cold chisel.
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3 comments:
It's almost as if, for people with real practical things to worry about, the question becomes meaningless :-)
Looking forward to the next instalment. Good luck with the house.
Oddly enough, I have managed to find sufficient prevarication time to read a collection of Richard Feynman letters and tinker with an old film camera. I can highly recommend both as alternatives to pondering the existence or relevance of supernatural beings.
I like this, it's by Paul Davies. Sorry for the interspersed references, I can let you know what they are if you like:
It has been argued (e.g. ref. [6]) that an infinite God is a simpler explanation for existence than just accepting the universe as a brute fact, and therefore to be preferred on the grounds of Occam’s razor. Dawkins [7] has countered that God must be at least as complex as the system that God creates. But considerable care in needed in using terms like “simple”
and “complex”. A branch of mathematics called algorithmic complexity theory [8] can be used to provide rigorous definitions of simplicity and complexity. One surprising feature of these definitions is that the whole can
sometimes be simpler than its component parts. Thus God-plus-universe can be simpler than either God or the universe in isolation. I shall return to this topic in Section ??.5.
A further difficulty with divine selection concerns the notion of free choice. Christian theologians traditionally assert that God is a necessary being (see, for example, ref. [9]), i.e. it is logically impossible for God to not exist. If so, we are invited to believe that a necessary being did not necessarily create the universe as it is (otherwise there is no element of choice and nature is
reduced to a subset of the divine being rather than a creation of this being). But can a necessary being act in a manner that is not necessary? On the other hand, if God is regarded as not necessary but contingent, then on what, precisely, is God’s existence and nature contingent? If we don’t ask,
we gain nothing by invoking such a contingent God, whose existence would then have to be accepted as a brute fact. One might as well simply accept a contingent universe as a brute fact, and be done with it. If we do ask, then we accept that reality is larger than God and that an account of the universe must involve explanatory elements beyond God’s being. But if we
accept the existence of such explanatory elements, why is there any need to invoke divine elements too?
There is a long tradition of attempts to reconcile a necessary God with a contingent single universe (see, for example, ref. [10]). But one is bound to ask, even if such reconciliation were possible, why God freely chose to make this universe rather than some other. If the choice is purely whimsical, then the universe is absurd and reasonless once more. On the other hand, if the choice proceeds from God’s nature (for example, a good god might make a
universe inhabited by sentient beings capable of joy), then one must surely ask: why was God’s nature such as to lead to this choice of universe rather than some other? This further worry would be addressed, in turn, only by proving – not only that God exists necessarily – but that God’s entire
nature is also necessary. Such a conclusion would entail proving that, for example, an evil creator capable of making a world full of suffering is not merely undesirable but logically impossible.
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