Choice in Dying

For some time now there has been a breakdown in relationship within the community of nonbelievers. On the one side are the new atheists — the strident, uncompromising, “fundamentalist” atheists of song and story — and on the other side are the accommodating atheists, those who are prepared to get their fingers dirty — or burned — playing in the same sandbox as religious believers. An example of accommodationism can be found in Robert Asher’s article over at the Huffington Post, where he unashamedly casts himself as a believer – of sorts, and of what sort is the question – and an accommodationist, and tries to justify his position. Jason Rosenhouse responds to Asher over at Evolutionblog, and a very good response it is too. It might make my own take on it irrelevant, but I wanted to add a bit more, and this is it.

Accommodationism in this context is, briefly stated, the belief that the scientific worldview is compatible with the religious world view, and that one can not only be an unashamed religious believer at the same time as being a reputable scientist, but, more importantly, that religious beliefs themselves are consistent with the findings and confirmed discoveries of science. Now, to a certain extent this could be entirely superficial and incontestable, so long as religious beliefs did not impinge at any point on the findings of science. This, in fact, is the kind of accommodationist that Robert Asher pretends to be. Indeed, he takes some pains to divorce religion from science, thus protecting religious belief from one of the most salient features of science — namely, that the scientific consensus changes over time. Whatever science may discover, Asher’s religious belief will remain untouched by the ravages of scientific change and discovery. The problem, though, is whether this belief has any content, or whether he has tried to sneak some content into his religious believing unobserved.

One of the problems with the God of the Gaps was that when the gaps were closed, religion was left holding the bag. Take the gap that Hume tried to close — and very nearly succeeded. In a passage of the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion Hume comes startlingly close to stating the theory of evolution by natural selection. Reading the passage for the first time I had the feeling that evolution was on the tip of Hume’s tongue (or at the end of his quill), but he simply did not have the evidence to back up the thought that the universe might have had some principle of order within itself that could have created the variety of living things (in particular) with which we are so familiar.

Let’s take it step by step. First, Hume’s theory of evolution, where he comments on the “curious adjustment” of the parts of animals and vegetables to each other:

I would fain know [says Philo, Hume's persona] how an animal could subsist, unless its parts were so adjusted? Do we not find, that it immediately perishes whenever this adjustment ceases, and that its matter corrupting tries some new form? It happens, indeed, that the parts of the world are so well adjusted, that some regular form immediately lays claim to this corrupted matter: And if it were not so, could the world subsist? [Dialogues, Part VIII, Bobbs-Merrill edn., 185; my italics]

Then we have to go back where he considers the ultimate Boeing 747 argument:

Throw several pieces of steel together, without shape or form; they will never arrange themselves so as to compose a watch: Stone and mortar, and wood, without an architect, never erect a house. But the ideas in a human mind, we see, by an unknown, inexplicable œconomy, arrange themselves so as to form the plan of a watch or house. [Part II, Bobbs-Merrill edn., 146]

This argument, in terms of the creation of a Boeing 747, was attributed to Fred Hoyle by Chandra Wickramasinghe, and it goes like this:

Hoyle said that the probability of life originating on Earth is no greater than the chance that a hurricane, sweeping through a scrapyard, would have the luck to assemble a Boeing 747. [The God Delusion, 113]

The solution is natural selection, and Hume was, as we have seen, tantalisingly close. Hume points out that we cannot justly compare the origins of the universe with the way that houses and other artifacts are produced by human and animal intelligence; we cannot compare parts to the whole in this way. As Hume says:

Thought, design, intelligence, such as we discover in men and other animals, is no more than one of the springs and principles of the universe … But can a conclusion, with any propriety, be transferred from parts to the whole? [op. cit., 147; my italics]

As he had said on the preceding page:

For aught we can know a priori, matter may contain the source or spring of order originally, within itself, as well as mind does. [146]

The point is that there was a theoretical gap. Plug god into the gap, and we have the principle of order which created the human mind, as well as the order of the universe and of the life-world. This gap is now closed. We don’t need a designer in order to get (the appearance of) design. We don’t need an intelligence, a mind, to create order. We can in fact observe order arising out of disorder and imperfection.

But Hume then takes it farther, and reminds Cleanthes (in the person of Philo, Hume’s persona) – and us, of course — of Simonides, who, according to the story, was asked What God was? and “desired a day to think of it, and then two days more,” and then on indefinitely, and then Hume comes to the point:

Could you even blame me, if I had answered at first, that I did not know, and was sensible that this subject lay vastly beyond the reach of my faculties. [149; Hume's emphasis]

And then he goes on to remark that it is perfectly rational to infer from the constant conjunction of two things, that when one occurs we can infer the existence of the other; but he complains that he cannot see how a similar argument can have any place

… where the objects, as in the present case, are single, individual, without parallel, or specific resemblance. [loc. cit.]

It is simply not enough to argue by analogy from the creations of human and animal intelligence to the claim that the universe as we know it came about through a similar process. We just don’t know, and it should not be an embarrassment to us to acknowledge our ignorance. There may seem to be a gap here, says Hume, but there is no reason to fill it, by analogy, with the only thought, design and intelligence with which we are familiar, that  is, as it is known in human beings and other animals.

Now, back to Asher, who comes at this problem from a very strange angle — and we ought to see how strange this angle is. Anti-theists, like many theists, he says, seem to think that for there to be evidence of a god, the god would have to leave some kind of human-like remains behind, such as empty tombs or design in nature. Here are some of his words:

Many anti-theists agree: if God exists, “he” has to leave behind evidence in a human-like fashion. Notably, such a perspective is at the core of the so-called “intelligent design” movement, which claims to find evidence for clever intervention in biology, relegating what its adherents call “natural” and “random” to the profane. But why can’t a “designer” act through nature? In describing the natural mechanisms behind the evolution of the eye, Charles Darwin similarly asked “have we any right to assume that the Creator works by intellectual powers like those of man?” [Origin, original edn., 188]

As Jason Rosenhouse says, this is a caricature. No one is saying that god has to do anything. Here are his words:

We simply observe that a God who works entirely through natural forces is hard to distinguish from no God at all.  We ask for the evidence that God exists, and since nature fails so completely to provide that evidence we begin to suspect that maybe there is no God.

But this just returns us to Hume’s problem, which is also Rosenhouse’s. Darwin’s point, though, is the same as Hume’s. Darwin was not talking about a creator. He was saying that we have no reason to suppose that a creator is involved in the process. We wouldn’t be able to distinguish the process from the creator — precisely Rosenhouse’s point. That is, creation simply won’t work as an explanation for the evolution of eyes, because we have an adequate explanation in the processes of evolution by means of “numerous, successive, slight modifications.” If we didn’t, as Darwin points out, his “theory would absolutely break down.” (op. cit., 189) Darwin is not saying (as Asher surprisingly suggests) that divine agency need not resemble human agency. He is saying that evolution by natural selection is an adequate account of how life came to be as it is, without introducing agency of any kind. We simply have no basis for positing agency at all.

Hume thought in terms of adjustments between living creatures, and how one organism perishes when this adjustment breaks down, and its matter tries a new form, but he had no explanation for the mechanism by which this process of (what now call) evolution takes place. So he asks why we can’t simply say, “We don’t know”? This is important, because “We don’t know” is a better answer than an analogy to human and animal intelligence and purpose. If ”the creative energy that we call god” (as the Archbishop of Canterbury called it in his conversation with Richard Dawkins) acts through nature, why should we accept that it is more than energy? After all, as Darwin points out, when we are thinking in terms of evolution, the process itself is exhaustively described by random mutations and natural selection, a completely, self-contained, natural process which does not need “creation,” if by the word ‘creation’ we are thinking in terms of a conscious, thinking being who creates things in the way that human beings create ships and sealing wax.

Asher says that

The idea that divine agency has to resemble human agency, and that it is somehow deviant from nature, has been challenged for many years.

But this is not true. If, in fact, he sees god as creating through natural processes, this is as anthropomorphic as anyone could desire, and it is simply false to suggest that the quote from Darwin that he provides is in any sense an account of agency which does not resemble human agency. The analogy is still doing all the work in the background, even though he doesn’t notice it, and the processes of evolution are still modelled on the way that human beings, with foresight and planning, go about making things like iPads and telephones, atomic bombs and automobiles. And if that’s not what he has in mind, then his words explain nothing. If god’s method of creation is different from the kind of planning and foresight that goes into building a ship, then what method does Asher have in mind? This is the point of Philo’s asking why “I do not know” is not as good an answer as we can give to the question of how the universe itself came into being. We do not know. Is that so hard to understand?

Asher goes on to say that he believes in god:

I believe in an agency behind the laws of nature, one which pervades but does not replace the mechanisms expressed in those laws.

Fine, he believes in a ghost in the machine. Let’s grant him that. But in what way has he shown that there is a compatibility between that belief and the laws of nature? He says he is an accommodationist, but what is he accommodating to what? The Archbishop of Canterbury called it a “creative energy,” Asher calls it “an agency behind the laws of nature.” But what do either of those claims amount to? In what way have they got beyond Hume’s scepticism? The point is that, when it comes to the crunch, and want to talk about their god, both the archbishop and Asher are reduced to saying that there is a something, they know not what, behind the existence of the universe. And we can, after all, agree with them. There is certainly something there, but to call that something an agency is going far beyond any of the evidence that we have. All we have are the processes of the natural world, but not a shred of an idea what it would mean to speak of these processes as being or requiring agency.

In his conversation with Richard Dawkins the archbishop said that he believed that the Bible was inspired. He spoke about a creative energy that we call god. But it is very hard to link the one with the other. There is no reason to suppose that the creative energy of which the archbishop speaks is not comprised of the electromagnetic and other forces that physicists have discovered. There is not one single thread that connects these forces to the being called god of which the religions speak, a being who “inspires” the writers of what have become the sacred texts of the various religious traditions. As Rosenhouse says:

This agency, did it create the world through an act of its will or not?  If it did, then I fail to see how it is importantly different from the anthropomorphic God he criticizes.  If it did not, then whatever it is, it surely is not the God who lies at the heart of the world’s religions.

Precisely! What Asher does is to sneak the anthropomorphic god into the background of his story, and then forget about it, but it comes back at the end and makes a nonsense of his argument. As Hume points out, the agency that we know best is our own. If Asher wants to claim an agency behind the laws of nature, as he puts it, what kind of agency did he have in mind? All attempts to describe a god in such a way as to shield it from this criticism will founder on this rock, unless, indeed, as Rosenhouse points out, the god we have in mind is indistinguishable from the laws of nature themselves. This is Einstein’s and Spinoza’s god, and no one that I know would seek to demonstrate that this god does not exist, for it is, in the end, identical to nature and its laws. To get beyond this to a god that cares and inspires is to launch out into the deep indeed — for there be dragons there.