One point I’d like to make is that even if someone were to say that we are open to “non-material explanations, it doesn’t mean that “god” which usually means some kind of agent/mind is the best explanation. Maybe some other supernatural force is the explanation. More work has to be done if one were to make some kind of argument that god is a better explanation than other examples.
I agree, but I often find people who argue that “there’s no natural explanation so it must be god” and when I point this out to them, they scoff at me and say that once I agree to supernatural, that’s basically agreeing to god. They are fundamentally misunderstanding my point that they are making a claim that god is the cause when they can’t substantiate the argument to god.
If there is a reasonable, verifiable account where said designer comes and tells us he made it, and reveals some stuff about himself (such as that he is a monodeity, he protects the underprivileged, and hates cheeseburgers) I think it is justified to conclude that he is the designer.
No, I'm saying that what looks design is a product of natural causes which are themselves simple and plausible, and therefore don't raise the question of who designed them.
Somebody pointed out to me that you responded to my last comment but just on the main thread. In response:
I don't find it plausible at all that a highly creative result that appears designed can be the product of a simple cause that doesn't itself contain the potential for design. I see that as impossible. To me, it's no better than saying that the creative result just magically sprang into existence on its own because "that's just how things happen". If you are able to trace the designed product back to forces of nature, then that just obviously means the force of nature are not simple and contain within them the potential for this creative result. This is not a gap, but is my basic reasoning.
A moshol. I see some very creative, amazing stuff on my computer. Like...Microsoft Windows. Not perfect. Very flawed sometimes. But amazing. Where is it coming from? I remove the back of my computer and see a green chip. To a novice like myself, the green chip looks quite simple. The amazing creative result must be coming from the simple green chip. But when I probe further, I find out that the green chip is not simple at all, but contains the potential for design and more. So I google, where did that chip come from. I trace it to a building in the Netherlands somewhere. Seeing the building in Google Maps, it doesn't look so complicated. Not different than any warehouse. Certainly not as sophisticated as the chip itself. Ah, I tell myself. The simple building can create a sophisticated chip with Microsoft Windows. But then I find out what is going on inside the bulding...
Hard disagree. Take something like natural selection. The ingredients are far simpler than the end result, yet this simple and fairly intuitive mechanism known as natural selection is capable of molding simple life forms into complex and elaborate beings. The same case for the cosmos. All we need is the table of elements (or on the subatomic level, the quantum particles table) governed by several basic laws, and assuming the initial conditions of the universe it will plausibly self-assemble into stars, planets, galaxies, and superclusters, filled with many of the marvelous cosmic phenomena. Take the one planet out of billions which has conditions to form H2O, allow life to emerge from chemical processes (which are themselves arrangements of physical processes), and life can emerge and adapt to the conditions of the planet. So on and so forth. I concede there are gaps such as 1. the initial conditions of the universe (which either way are poorly understood), 2. the physical constants in the laws themselves (which may or may not be variable), 3. the origin of life, (which theoretically is physically possible, the question is as to the mechanism of origin,) 4. the origin of consciousness (which may very well simply be another result of natural selection, it's hard to say when we don't have consciousness properly defined), and several other major gaps, along with innumerable gaps in the details of every natural process we do know of. With regard to the minor form of gaps it would be utterly ludicrous to suggest that they are unique and outside the physical framework, and the same point, although less strong, can be argued for the major gaps as well.
I guess this is where we disagree. I think those examples are endlessly complicated. And those aren't even the simplest examples you could have given. Even a snowflake relies on endlessly complicated laws of physics and chemistry that we have only scratched the surface of. Nothing simple about it.
Complicated means something different from complex. It might be difficult for our minds to grasp, but they are comprised of a few fundamental concepts and axioms which is what I mean when referring to their simplicity (similar to how you might say gods Essence is simple although we cannot grasp it).
Again, disagree strongly. I don't believe a beautiful snowflake is formed by a few simple concepts, but many complex ones of which we are only beginning to scratch the surface of. But even simpler. Take the simplest "design" you can think of. Let us say a square. Euclid tells us how to construct a square. "Let AB be the given straight line. It is required to describe a square on the straight line AB. Draw AC at right angles to the straight line AB from the point A on it. Make AD equal to AB. Draw DE through the point D parallel to AB, and draw BE through the point B parallel to AD." We need a universe with concepts of points, straight lines, parallel lines, right angles, line segments, line segments that equal each other. Then we need to put them all together in the right measures in the right positions. This is not simply taking a mishmash of random simple rules and throwing them together to get a design. This requires a designer.
I'm assuming you're referring to the the classical sources such as shaar habechina or the Gemara with the mashal of the artist.
Those arguments fall into the first category IMO because of the qualification I offered about the factors themselves which you discuss as well.
I do not agree that the perspective should be no chance > therefore designer. Rather, the natural theory which relies on extreme chance is implausible and should therefore be rejected, and we should instead look for a natural theory which does not rely on chance. Indeed, most scientific theories to account for why things are the way they do not rely on extreme chance, and that would indeed be a reason to reject the theory. Two exceptions that come to mind are the fine tuning argument, and abiogenesis. However, both those science does not actually claim to be able to account for it, rather we don't know why it happened that way (plus abiogenesis as other issues). I would argue in both cases that they are god of the gaps, and we should not assume that there is no material explanation which is indeed plausible.
The first kind of argument I was referring to is more abstract. Ultimately the world is amazing and full of potential, and it's only like that because of the fact that it's such an intricate system, and although nature can account for it, the mere fact that nature led to such a system should indicate that the system itself is the tool of a designer. (This is one form of that argument there are others, but none are appealing to specific phenomena how they came to be). That is in arguments from design that the god of the gaps does not threaten, but it's vulnerable to its own criticisms.
I would argue there is a third issue: processes that arrive naturally but consistently buck the odds. If God works behind the scenes that's what we would expect.
A second issue is that this post ignores the biggest, unsolvable gap: the formation of life. As the famously quotemined quote goes (paraphrased) it is far easier for all of life to have evolved than the first cell to have formed. We can't even form it in a laboratory and the possibility of it is usually mocked as spontaneous generation. Induction is useless here at least until some life is created in a laboratory.
That issue is a great point, but it's not what god of the gaps addresses directly. That's more like the anthropic principle or other similar points.
I forgot to mention abiogenesis, I really should've. That's probably the most relevant example to this discussion, and depends how formidable of an objection you consider the god of the gaps fallacy (?) to be, plus it's obviously influenced by the various scientific findings of the lack thereof.
I have more to say on this issue, and IYH will comment further, but for me, one of the biggest problems with the "God of the Gaps" objection is that as scientific knowledge progresses, the number of gaps becomes greater, not lesser. The universe has become infinitely vaster than anybody imagined 2000 years ago, not just in terms of area, but in terms of intricacy and number of concepts. And as the universe has expanded unimaginably, so has the number of things that need to be explained, and that we yet have no explanation for. And so induction would tell me that this process will continue, and we will continue explaining things, while the number of things that are left unexplained will continue multiplying. It's turtles all the way down. I wrote a fun little moshol about the "God of the Gaps" a while back here https://irrationalistmodoxism.substack.com/p/death-from-the-sky
I just read the post that you linked, and it definitely illustrates its point very well, but I don't think its addressing the same discussion as the one in this post. I was discussing events within the physical world and if we should have confidence that there is a physical explanation, while you were addressing the 'why' of the whole system. Why should there be nature, why should it have certain fundemental laws, etc. That is a question of ontology (assuming that we are discussing laws which are irreducible to more fundemental laws), and is worthy of a discussion, but it's not god of the gaps per se. I would not argue that the 'why' is simply a gap, it's obviously in a different category and needs a non-physical explanation.
I would argue that although we are discovering more phenomena in need of an explanation, we have no basis to weaken our induction that physical events contain a physical explanation. This is similar to someone who never left a certain town, and all his observations in the town fit within a certain framework. Even if he leaves the town or his town grows and he doesn't yet understand the new observations, the underlying principles he observed are still worthy of being the default position to be applied to the new phenomena.
I think there are two reasons why this induction doesn’t work.
1. What your induction is really saying is that we can currently explain aspect A of design with physical B and C, and aspect X of design with physical Y and Z, and therefore, we project that will similarly be able to explain aspect B with physical D and E, and aspect Y with AA and AB, etc. But the induction doesn’t stop anywhere. It doesn’t say that we will ultimately be able to explain all aspects of design, A, B, C, D, E…AA, AB, with one final ZZ. It just branches out infinitely. So now at best you have projected an infinite chain of physical causes. This doesn’t appear to be a natural explanation for anything.
2. I don’t think it makes sense to put all the myriad scientific explanations under the umbrella of “physical” when they manifestly appear to have nothing to do with each other. The physical object that brings the rain is the cloud. The physical force that moves the cloud is the wind. The physical energy that generates the cloud is sunlight striking the ocean. The physical force that moves the planets is gravity. The physical force that keeps atoms together is something completely different. The physical force that explains the movement of the stars and galaxies is not quite gravity, maybe “dark matter”. We have no theory of everything that puts these all together yet, and no reason to predict that we will ever discover one. Induction won’t help us here. To say that we will use induction to determine what is behind gravity, and predict that it will be something physical like gravity but also completely different but also eventually we will discover the theory of everything so it won’t be different- doesn’t quite make sense to me. To use your town analogy, a person left his small farming village of 500 people. Farming is all he ever knew, the idea of factories is something that never crossed his mind. After about 30 years, he hears that his hometown has grown into a metropolis of 5 million, yet he still assumes it’s a farming economy and wonders how there is room for so many farms.
1. Your appeal to infinite regression is simply another form of saying that *something* in principle breaks this pattern and cannot be accounted for within a naturalistic framework. Aside from the fact that this essentialy appealing to the conclusion of the kalam cosmological argument, I don't think this provides us a license to reject specific phenomena we empirically observe as being the absolute limit of natural laws. This is because the induction by definition establishes that events *within* our empirical observations consistently follow this specific pattern, and appealing to the necessity of the system as a whole is phenomena which is by definition not subject to empirical inquiry (as the tools necessary to analyze it are not the same tools which led us to any of the observations in question).
2. Many of the examples you provide for disparate forces are fallacious, as we know that most of these forces are reducible to a very limited set of basic laws which essentially govern the complex phenomena which arise from it. However, it is correct that as of yet we have no unifying theory of physics, and we currently have three fundemental forces. The first is the electroweak force, which is described by quantum electrodynamics, the second is the strong nuclear force which is described by quantum chromodynamics, and the third is gravity which is described by the theory of relativity. While there has been significant progress in combining the first two through what is known as the grand unifying theory, gravity is currently more of a challenge to unify through what is called the theory of everything, although there are some strong attempts such as string theory or loop quantum gravity. There are some philosophical arguments to suggest that in principle a theory of everything does exist, a weaker argument for that is from occams razor, while a stronger argument is from ontological monism. So I would quicker assume that physical processes are indeed one fundemental law which manifests many different ways.
However, there are those that argue that there is not necessarily a theory of everything, although this is not the standard view amongst physicists and philosophers, but I still don't think that is sufficient to remove the induction. First of all there is still at least an induction that everything operates under one of these two laws, and second of all I think an argument can be made that both laws are laws within materialism, as opposed to supernatural explanations which appeal to metaphysical forces, which is ontologically a seperate category.
The Kalam cosmological argument is very important, but that’s not where I was going with this. Your idea was that by argument from induction, you can make the “God of the Gaps” objection stronger or more rigorous. My point is that your induction doesn’t do that. Because the idea of “God of the Gaps” is that as we continually explain the design the universe through naturalistic processes, God is forced to “retreat” into ever smaller “gaps” in our understanding, and will eventually “disappear” as an explanation for anything. But if I am right that the gaps are just increasing as our conception of the universe expands, then the “God of the Gaps” idea is off the mark, and your induction doesn’t help with that. Predicting that we will have infinite branching chains of natural explanations might or might not be an attempt to “get rid” of God (כביכול), but I don’t think that’s the “gaps” argument. It’s something else.
My other point was that our “ultimate” explanations are constantly evolving, so I don’t think your induction makes sense. While 1000 years ago, the ultimate explanation for an apple falling to the ground might be that it is made of the earth element and draws itself to the earth, Newton came and told us there is a force called gravity, and then Einstein told us that gravity means that mass bends the curvature of spacetime, and X will come along in 50 or 100 years and tell us something different which will resolve many of the gaps in the Theory of Relativity, and so on. You have absolutely no clue what the nature of that or its many successors will be, the only thing you are certain of is that the explanation will never be God. But why? If God is the Mind that created the universe, why would our long and branching path never lead to Him? I don’t see how induction tells you that. משל למה הדבר דומה? Somebody starts climbing a mountain and argues by induction that since we didn’t reach the top of the mountain on day 1 and day 2 and day 3, we will never reach the top of the mountain, and therefore the mountain has no top. I’m not saying we will reach the top, maybe the mountain is infinitely tall, I’m saying that we can’t use induction for this.
This is all as regards to your method of induction, and your application of it to “God of the Gaps”. However, I don’t think “God of the Gaps” addresses the argument from Design in the first place, but does something quite different, as I will explain in a different comment.
1. Your first point is attacking a straw man. The position you are arguing against sounds suspiciously like the god of the gaps argument I rejected; that the place for God is getting smaller and smaller. I do not think that is a good argument. The argument I was proposing is that when approaching a phenomena which we don't know why it happened, we have a strong inductive inference that it is a physical event with physical causes as opposed to being the limits of science which can only be explained by appealing to the supernatural. (Why this applies to design as well I will address in a response to your other comment.)
IOW, your argument seems to be as follows: God of the gaps is an induction from the fact that the gaps were always shrinking, therefore they will continue to shrink in the future until god is eliminated completely. If so, we can object that the the gaps are growing, not shrinking.
I have some issues with that point as well, but it is irrelevant, because that was not my argument. The induction is not about gaps shrinking, the induction is about the underlying mechanisms. Even though we may find enormous gaps, that doesn't counter the induction so long as it isn't demonstrated that they have a supernatural cause, and it doesn't even weaken the induction since there is no particular reason to say that these gaps are different than what we do understand, and the fact that we don't have as of yet a physical explanation is likely simply due to our ignorance, not because they are outside the domain of natural phenomena. I hope this distinction and why your argument doesn't threaten my induction is clear.
2. Your second point is not appealing to specific phenomena, rather to naturalism itself. You seem to be proposing an argument that naturalism may turn out to be fundementally a divine process (which is actually likely under theism), and we have no induction telling us what it might look like when we have the actual 'theory of everything'.
This is irrelevant to the discussion at hand. Whatever the nature of materialism itself, this does not affect whether there are phenomena which fit within the framework of materialism. IOW, even if this is true, it is still plausible, and per my induction, likely, that all phenomena we observe are themselves physical processes, although at high resolution physical processes aren't actually something which look similar to what we usually call physical.
I actually think you're almost certainly correct, and whatever levels we may discover in the future may look far more bizarre than relativity or quantum mechanics. However, we have no reason right now to assume that it is associated with a tri-omni or even merely intelligent or conscious being (from this point alone). Therefore, it is relevant to discuss god of the gaps, as otherwise we may be inclined to point to observations and claim they are sidestepping the natural framework and demonstrate the existence of the supernatural which can operate outside of physics. I don't think that is acceptable because it violates the inductive inference that it almost certainly does operate within naturalistic processes.
>>>Because the idea of “God of the Gaps” is that as we continually explain the design the universe through naturalistic processes, God is forced to “retreat” into ever smaller “gaps” in our understanding, and will eventually “disappear” as an explanation for anything. But if I am right that the gaps are just increasing as our conception of the universe expands, then the “God of the Gaps” idea is off the mark, and your induction doesn’t help with that.
The GOTG argument is that you explain what you understand and when you get to what you don't understand, you say, "god did it." But that with scientific progress, more and more heretofore supernatural explanations are explained with naturalistic explanations.
But to say that we have more and more questions as science progresses is not to debunk the GOTG argument, because explanations only ever improve with science. Previously miraculous explanations give way to science and previous science gives way to better science. But science never gives way to religion. It can't because religion doesn't actually engage reality, and so it has no explanatory power. If it did, it would be a method of observation, hypothesis, testing and confirmation and we'd just call it science. It's similar to sincerely asking why there are no really good data on alternative medicines, and the answer is that once we've demonstrated efficacy and validity, we just call it "medicine."
So yes, you can find Neil deGrasse Tyson on YouTube talking about how the gaps are shrinking, but the most precise way to understand that is that each unknown realm, be it why is there thunder and lightening or where does the Sun go at night or why do I keep fainting...each of those questions is a fraction and all of those fractions need to be added together, and when we first have a question the denominator is large and the numerator is small, and over time, with scientific progress, the numerators grow larger and larger as they approach the denominators because we discover more and more about each particular field or discipline until we know enough that we can predict an eclipse or detect an anomalous fetal heartbeat and perform an emergency caesarean section. The unknowns shrink means that we increase our knowledge about each particular thing, so that we used to know just 'that' and we approach knowing 'why' until we understand it well enough that there's no more heavy research into it because we understand everything there is to know to take care of the problems we see. Until we perhaps realize there are more problems or even more solutions before we can detect or relate the problems. The incorrect way to look at it is that all of scientific ignorance is one big denominator and with each discovery of more unknown, we are increasing the overall denominator in greater quantities than we are increasing the overall numerator.
>>>Predicting that we will have infinite branching chains of natural explanations might or might not be an attempt to “get rid” of God (כביכול), but I don’t think that’s the “gaps” argument. It’s something else.
To think of science as "getting rid" of god is the wrong way to look at things. Rather, people once came up with stories about there being a god or a bunch of gods. And we merely grow up, as a species, to observe that these stories were unnecessary to explain the things we thought they were necessary for and that there's no reason to think they are true. You can't observe a god and positing one is never necessary and doesn't help provide answers to anything because it's the same as saying, "because." It provides no predictive power and no useful guidance as to what there is, why anything is or how we can better relate to or prevent or improve anything. The best ideas of the bible and the koran and the thousand other holy scriptures, whether they be wash your hands or don't kill your neighbors, can be good advice without the need for making up stories about angels and demons, arks with animals, witches conjuring up dead prophets, plagues of blood or revelations on mountaintops.
There's no need or ability to get rid of god any more than there is to get rid of alchemy. We are not cleansing our lives of the deleterious effects of Venus rising, but we rather just ignore when Venus rises, unless you want to watch it for fun. The exceedingly likely fact that there are no gods is just a realization we've been able to reach as the pettiness and quaintness of our previously held ancient traditions becomes more and more transparent.
>>>My other point was that our “ultimate” explanations are constantly evolving, so I don’t think your induction makes sense. While 1000 years ago, the ultimate explanation for an apple falling to the ground might be that it is made of the earth element and draws itself to the earth, Newton came and told us there is a force called gravity, and then Einstein told us that gravity means that mass bends the curvature of spacetime, and X will come along in 50 or 100 years and tell us something different which will resolve many of the gaps in the Theory of Relativity, and so on. You have absolutely no clue what the nature of that or its many successors will be, the only thing you are certain of is that the explanation will never be God. But why?
You're here describing how observation and hypothesis formation and testing works to debunk (or partially debunk) previously held inaccurate (or partially inaccurate) understanding of the universe.
The reason why the answer will never be god is the same reason why impurity will never be revisited as an explanation for best hygiene or sexual practice. Whatever we discover, and we don't really know what will or even can become known about the vastly underappreciated world or microbiota, whether it relates to keeping your fruits and vegetables fresh, or preventing the spread of sexually transmitted disease, but we just know that impurity is not a candidate explanation. It's magical thinking, the mechanism wouldn't fit into anything we currently have a framework for and while it could happen, there's no reason to think it was ever suggested in the first place for a good reason. So, too, god.
>>>If God is the Mind that created the universe, why would our long and branching path never lead to Him?
There's no reason to suppose a god. I don't even understand your question here, really.
>>>I don’t see how induction tells you that. משל למה הדבר דומה? Somebody starts climbing a mountain and argues by induction that since we didn’t reach the top of the mountain on day 1 and day 2 and day 3, we will never reach the top of the mountain, and therefore the mountain has no top.
The problem here is that you are comparing things that we understand with things that we don't understand. What you should rather do is say suppose we go hiking in the forest and we don't see bigfoot. Thousands of people do this for hundreds of years and there are isolated reports of bigfoot, but as documentation methods improve over time (almost everyone has a phone with a camera and we have GPS maps) and magical thinking has decreased over time (other than religious thinking, almost no one believes in magic anymore), and yet, where's the evidence for bigfoot? Likely every reasonable person rejects the secret or unknown existence of furry hominids living in the forest. But why? Because what was claimed without evidence can be rejected without evidence.
>>>I’m not saying we will reach the top, maybe the mountain is infinitely tall, I’m saying that we can’t use induction for this.
Why do you not worry that maybe there are bigfoot hominids in the forest and they are endangered and their unsure future can ruin the ecosystem in their absence? Should he have a save the spotted bigfoot society? No...we're not at all concerned and we're not afraid of them attacking us while camping, either.
>>>This is all as regards to your method of induction, and your application of it to “God of the Gaps”. However, I don’t think “God of the Gaps” addresses the argument from Design in the first place, but does something quite different, as I will explain in a different comment.
You are using special pleading to support your idea of a god that you have adopted because of indoctrination. No amount of referring to inductive reasoning can produce evidence for or a good reason to claim a god.
>>>Of the various arguments that are commonly presented to attempt to demonstrate the existence of God, perhaps the most common category is teleological arguments, or the arguments from design. Some forms of this argument are from biological design, the anthropic principle, and the ecology of the universe or planet. Recently, the most common form of this argument offered is known as the fine-tuning argument. All these arguments attempt to demonstrate that elements of the universe could not have arisen randomly or through natural processes, and there must have been an Intelligent Being who designed it to exist in a specific way.
Even if compelling the best these arguments could ever do is substantiate deism. In order to arrive at theism, and certainly one particular theism over another, we'd need evidence that the god not only still exists but that he's the God of Moses. And with sufficient evidence for the God of Moses (assuming you're trying to make these arguments as a Jew...others will be making these arguments to back Jesus or Mohammed or Brahma), you don't need teleological arguments because they don't help.
As such, I never understood the thrust of these arguments.
If we were to be successful at establishing that an intelligent being designed the universe, it would open the door to the possibility and higher plausibility of the torah being true. However, ultimately I agree that it is another major step and should not be considered implied by the teleological argument.
Oh, I understand that, but the idea that we're looking for 'permission to believe' is comical. Schroeder, Kelemen, Kaplan and the other kiruv rabbis from Aish and the Discovery program, etc make a lot of noise with their books and their talks, but it seems to amount to much ado about nothing.
Fill a room with a hundred people who are already believers for bad reasons (indoctrination) and talk to them about arguments from cosmology and anthropic principles and teleology and they come away thinking that the kiruv establishment has properly defended Judaism and gives them massive confidence when trying to talk to their high school and college-aged children who have questions or more. But it's a red herring, if you ask me. For the FFB, though, they don't know how to spot it...t's like they don't know their colors and they don't know what a fish is.
I agree, however we have to be careful not to fall into the trap of 'persmission to deny', and avoid engaging seriously in arguments that attempt to demonstrate the validity of various theistic claims merely due to the rejection that it's coming from 'indoctrination'.
It sounds to me that you're trying to be witty here by contrasting permissions, but to make assertions without evidence is not at all the same as denying assertions without evidence.
So take monsters and bigfoot and unicorns, or Dawkins' favorite, fairies in the garden. To claim that there are fairies in the garden one ought to have evidence, and very good evidence at that. But to deny that there are fairies, one needed have any evidence at all. All one needs to to review the evidence in favor and find it unsatisfactory, and this really ought not to be a partisan issue, where someone's review of the evidence is scoffed at for being deliberately shallow. We should assume good faith in one another that we're all really trying to reach the truth and to do so in the best way possible.
There's no good evidence for god and so permission to believe, as I put it above, is hereby revoked, or rather, it should never have been granted in the first place. Just like permission to believe in fairies is revoked, or more precisely, should never have been granted in the first place. There's no permission to believe in crystal healing or tarot cards or astrology as a means of choosing a job or a spouse.
None of this is to say that the door is closed to evidence for the existence of god. But just like none of us believe in fairies, and yet evidence can be provided at any time, and we'd all be very excited to find good evidence and have a world with fairies in it, the same is true for a god. Like butterflies or not, it's exciting to find another species that we've never known about before. So, too, a god. The person who cares about truth and reality warmly welcomes any and all changes to their mindset that are based on new information. As Sam Harris puts it, we're all waiting for good evidence of a god...it's just not forthcoming. And pretending that arguments that have been bouncing around for 1000 years is the key is silly. It's dishonest and it's misleading.
To recap, no one has permission to believe and without evidence, you don't need permission to deny...it's merely the default position. No one who's serious is interested in avoiding engaging in serious discussion or argument about facts, figures, data or evidence. Unless I am misunderstanding what you meant.
And as far as indoctrination goes, it means the "process of inculcating a person or people into an ideology uncritically." Why would there be any reason to accept anything uncritically? There are no free passes to truth. Everything is weighed on its merits, regardless of how many temples have already been built in honor of the god that turns out to not have any good reasons to believe in.
"All one needs to to review the evidence in favor and find it unsatisfactory". That's exactly my point. If you flippantly reject any serious review of the evidence and just mark it up to indoctrination, that is insufficient for disbelief. Rather, one must engage in the evidence, recognize and strengths and point out it's flaws, and then offer an appraisal of the truth value of the proposition in light of the evidence.
Granted, many so called 'evidences' are not worth seriously engaging in, as they are so flawed that they are remarkably unconvincing to any decently educated and rational person. However, there are some arguments or pieces of evidence that are indeed worthy of examination, and I'm afraid many of the New Atheists you so admire do not properly understand or appreciate the theistic arguments they callously reject. (I am not claiming that they are ultimately successful at establishing theism, but they aren't necessarily silly pseudo-intellectual arguments.)
>>>If you flippantly reject any serious review of the evidence and just mark it up to indoctrination
>>>Granted, many so called 'evidences' are not worth seriously engaging in, as they are so flawed that they are remarkably unconvincing to any decently educated and rational person.
First, let me say I find your tone properly and fairly balanced.
Secondly, let me say that I find these two comments to engage with one another so that the second neutralizes the first. I don't know any of the thinkers I am so fond of to be flippant and I think they consider the arguments properly. I find there to be no good reason or evidence not as a cart before the horse, but as a cart after the horse. In other words, when Harris, Hitchens, Dennett, Dawkins, deGrasse Tyson, Coyne, Pinker or anyone else I've missed or not yet become familiar with stakes out the positions they do, I judge them (the positions) to be staked out fully in response to the propositions they have been presented with. I don't find them to be anything other than fully reacting to what they observe.
>>>However, there are some arguments or pieces of evidence that are indeed worthy of examination
1) What arguments / pieces of evidence are worthy of examination that are not being examined?
2) What examination results do you think are being suppressed?
>>>I'm afraid many of the New Atheists you so admire do not properly understand or appreciate the theistic arguments they callously reject
I take issue with your use of the term 'callous.' To be precise, I've looked it up and it means "showing or having an insensitive and cruel disregard for others." Sometimes, one man's sensitivity to rules and discipline is seen by another as insensitivity to his feelings. Is that what you mean? Without getting political at all (is that possible?) some people complain that to deport an illegal alien is insensitive and counterproductive and cruel because having been in the country (illegally) for 5 or 10 or 30 years, they now have children here who are considered legal citizens, and how terrible it is to break apart a family. But if the act of trespassing is illegal and the acts of rape or selling cocaine are illegal (if not in magnitude or danger to others, but just speaking plainly about whether something is legal or illegal), and we have no qualms about arresting and incarcerating the rapist or the drug dealer even though they have young dependents, doesn't that demonstrate a bias in favor of illegal aliens?
Of course there are so many confounding variables in this example and how it might translate as an analogy, but insofar as it can serve as an analogy, how much of the cruelty you imply by use of the term 'callous' can be immediately written off because it's focusing on feelings and not truth? And that's a sincere question, not a rhetorical one where I'm trying to show that I already know the answer?
What, precisely, is callous about saying that the arguments in favor of gods and religion have been assessed and found to lack sufficient merit?
>>>I am not claiming that they are ultimately successful at establishing theism, but they aren't necessarily silly pseudo-intellectual arguments.
Take any of the broad New Atheists mentioned above. None of them are hurtfully or spitefully anti-religion. Dawkins does get quite riled up, but when he's confronted by someone who's asking real questions an providing real answers (and, so not Cardinal Pell or Jordan Peterson), he's quite sober and level headed.
And I disagree that arguments for god are not silly or pseudo-intellectual. To fall prey to cognitive fallacies is, I would contend, anti-intellectual. To fall prey to innumeracy is, I would argue by definition, anti-intellectual. To push your position regardless of these flaws can be described in a number of ways, including but not limited to being silly or ridiculous. So I'm really wondering what you mean here.
While my other comments addressed your "induction", I don't think that's the most important objection. Rather, I don’t believe “God of the Gaps” addresses the argument from Design at all. What I think it does well is address arguments from ignorance. Like, to say we don’t know how lightning works, so it must be God. Or we don’t know how clouds form, so it must be God. Or we don’t know how life emerged, so it must be God. That’s when “God of the Gaps” is a good rhetorical response, not because we can use induction to predict that we will find a natural explanation, but because it just rhetorically demonstrates the weakness of these arguments from ignorance. It basically says, your whole argument for God is just based on current gaps in scientific knowledge, and is liable to be nullified by the next scientific theory addressing those gaps. It’s not a prediction that we will come actually up with a theory, it’s just a rhetorical statement of the weakness of the argument, that it’s liable to be cancelled at any moment by new facts on the ground.
But the argument from Design is not an argument from ignorance in the first place, and isn’t susceptible to nullification by the next possible scientific theory on the horizon. The argument from Design was always about the design of the whole world. The world appears to have been fine tuned for unbelievably complex and intricate expressions of life and physics and chemistry. It looks like a machine. You can point to components in the machine that move other components, you can point to complex internal processes, but it’s still a machine that was designed by Somebody outside of itself. Just because Darwin (thinks he) found a plausible natural mechanism for the variation of the species doesn’t make the argument from Design go away, and doesn’t confine it to any gaps.
I want to distinguish between two kinds of arguments from design, one I think the god of the gaps addresses, and one it does not. One form of the argument is for example the origin of life. Since it is so complex, the argument goes, it could not have arisen through natural processes alone, and indicates a higher intelligence which without it life could not have existed. This is fallacious, as we should continue to assume that it can be a result of a natural process as I argued. Therefore, pointing to intricate 'design' is not sufficient to claim there must have been a supernatural cause, as there likely was a natual cause capable of eventuating this result.
The second form of the teleological argument is not appealing to the lack of natural causes, rather it is pointing to the end result and saying that this seems purposefully arranged, although it may have been brought about through naturalistic processes. This is a seperate argument, and the god of the gaps is not intended as an objection to this.
However, we must be careful to note that even claiming that the natural causes are so improbable they themselves must have been arranged by a supernatural being falls into the first category, not the second. This is because at most it pushes the question back one step. Granted, these factors can bring about this amazing result, but what brought about these factors? Claiming pure chance is implausible (granted the premises of the argument), and answering that there is no natural cause which brought about these factors and it must be attributed to the supernatural is also god of the gaps. (This would apply to the fine-tuning argument from physics.) Per the inductive inference, it should be considered far more plausible that there was a natural explanation as opposed to something beyond nature. (However, in a pre-darwinian world, one might argue that the induction cannot succeed when discussing matters of origin, as opposed to events within natural history.)
Therefore, the second category, which you seem to be focusing on, is limited to an argument which concedes the plausibility of natural explanations, yet still demands an explanation of the end result, such as the argument from the totality of nature, which seems rather marvelous and aligns with a purpose. (I personally think such arguments are extremely weak, but that was not the aim of this post.)
I’m not familiar with the first form of the argument you mentioned, but I believe the second is the classic form stated by the Jewish philosophers.
But your line “that even claiming that the natural causes are so improbable they themselves must have been arranged by a supernatural being falls into the first category, not the second”, I think is incorrect. When people say that natural causes are improbable, that is equivalent to saying that the system couldn’t have arranged itself by chance. It’s like the analogy of the tornado in a junkyard creating a Boeing 747. Sure, you can claim that there’s a natural cause, but any natural cause you can imagine or can’t imagine would also have to be arranged, and couldn’t have just been by chance. Just like you wouldn’t accept that there was some unknown, chance natural cause which caused a tornado to assemble a Boeing 747. In fact, I think you probably agree with this, since you say “claiming pure chance is implausible”. So we are left with something that was not by chance, but was designed, which implies a Designer. Not a Designer as the immediate next step, but a Designer as the ultimate cause, a Designer with a very long arm, who put into motion as many natural causes as you want to reach the result. This is not God of the Gaps.
Now when I read your line “However, in a pre-darwinian world, one might argue that the induction cannot succeed when discussing matters of origin, as opposed to events within natural history.” I’m not even sure that there is anything we are disagreeing about. Because I have no problem (in theory) with somebody pushing back the Designer 100 trillion years if it tickles his fancy. The point is that we have a design which implies a Designer.
I'm assuming you're referring to the classical sources such as Shaar Habechina and R' Akiva's mashal with an artist, and IMO they fall into the first category, as per my qualification that as long as the naturalistic explanations are insufficient it remains a gap, which you discuss further. The reason why I consider it a gap is that as long as the naturalist explanation relies on extreme chance, that it is a serious flaw in the theory and we ought to say that we don't have a satisfactory expanation. Being that we don't have an explanation, we ought to assume that there is a naturalistic explanation just is there is for any of the gaps that we filled in the past (while there was never a gap that was filled with a demonstrable supernatural explanation, scientifically or otherwise).
The first form of the argument I was referring to is more abstract. One formulation would be that although we may have a naturalistic account for how nature allowed the world to develop as it has, nevertheless the fact that the world is a marvelous place and seems to contain a purpose with and is a well oiled machine should indicate that nature itself is the tool of a designer. This argument is not subject to god of the gaps, although it is succeptible to other criticisms. (I do concede that the classical sources incorporate both, and probably would not have recongnized the distinction as nature was not understood in the same way is it today.)
The way I look at it, when I see something that seems obviously designed, it's a not a question whether it was designed or not. It's not a choice of "created naturally by chance" or "created unnaturally by a designer". It's not like I say, well, it's possible that it was created naturally by chance, but that theory has serious difficulties, so we have a gap in our knowledge, and we need to wait for the next scientific discovery. No, I say the idea that it's created by chance is just patently ridiculous. As the Chovos Halevavos writes:
So the designed object is definitely designed, whether by natural means or by supernatural means. There is no gap in our knowledge about whether the thing was designed or not. The only question is if it was designed by natural means or by supernatural means. But saying it was designed by natural means just pushes that question back one step, since the natural means likewise must have been arranged and couldn't have happened on its own by chance. The gap in our knowledge is rather in the nature of the Designer and the means He (or she or it or they-כביכול) used.
>>>The way I look at it, when I see something that seems obviously designed, it's a not a question whether it was designed or not.
You are begging the question here. Our contention is that what you are seeing is decidedly not obviously designed. I don't mean this sarcastically at all, but that should be obvious, and so to come to the table assuming that as premise zero is the problem here.
To say that everything's designed is to say that there's nothing that's not designed. This means you can't compare your hypothesis, you can't test your hypothesis and you can't reject your hypothesis.
>>>It's not a choice of "created naturally by chance" or "created unnaturally by a designer". It's not like I say, well, it's possible that it was created naturally by chance, but that theory has serious difficulties, so we have a gap in our knowledge, and we need to wait for the next scientific discovery. No, I say the idea that it's created by chance is just patently ridiculous.
You are here reiterating your fallacious point above. Now, when Simon responds by saying "you reject chance but so do we," I would say that's being imprecise.
The currently prevailing theory of neo-Darwinism (meaning the "new" composite theory based on Darwin's initial findings from the early 1800s coupled with much more detailed and contemporary understandings of many biological sub-fields which were not understood well at the time, such as genetics and biochemistry), is that natural selection is a ratchet system. Just like a ratchet will make small, incremental improvements to the tightening of a bolt, natural selection is a phenomenon that we observe whereby more certain traits are selected for over certain other traits. And what traits are selected for over others? The ones that provide greater reproductive advantage to the organisms that bear them. All of that selection pressure is provided by the environment, but when we say environment, we mean all things in the universe other than the gene for the trait we're focusing on here. And so the habitat can be a selection pressure, where trees that are present and afford climbing opportunities to both reach food and avoid predators serves to select for better climbers and fliers. But the existence of trees, in this situation, was by chance. Even in the presence of trees, another way to reach food and avoid predators would be to dig into the soil or venture into the water, and so there's really selection pressure not specifically for trees at all, but rather, for anything that increases food access and decreases predation. Without trees, the selection would just be for, in this example, digging and swimming. The fact that there are trees around can be seen as a chance occurrence.
Similarly, where do these traits come from? Sure, once they arise from genetic mutation, they can be selected for, but that they arose at all and that further mutation in favor of a direction toward greater climbing or swimming or digging ability, that's all chance. There is genetic variability for all genes, just like almost all traits we observe occur on a bell curve, with greatest proportions of the population falling near the mean and within one standard deviation. In other words, the vast majority of manifested traits fall out just below (34%) or just above (34%) the average, which accounts for a combines 68% of all observed traits, whether that be height or grip strength in adult male humans or claw length in leopards or tail length (used for balance during running) in cheetahs or blubber thickness in seals. We observe much smaller incidence of greater variation (the area between 1 and 2 standard deviations), in the amount of 13.6% for each -1 to -2 and 1 to 2, for combined 27%. That added to the 68% of one standard deviation totals about 95% of all observed specimen. And then there's 3 standard deviations and 4 and 5...it's infinite because the tails extend infinitely.
So random mutations arise and they are randomly occurring to this person or that, to some great extent. A random mutation for greater arm strength will benefit a wing or a flipper or a digging arm (up to a point at which longer is no longer better), but likely not an amphibian arm, and so natural selection does it's work. The bell curve is observable and it's the basis for all of evolutionary theory. And so while the ratcheting effect is not at all random, the genesis of mutations and the fact that they occur in an environment where such a mutation would be favorable, yes, that would be considered completely and utterly a result of chance. But when there are billions of opportunities, slight chance becomes inevitable.
>>>As the Chovos Halevavos writes:
I'm not saying that you meant this as an argument from authority, and likely you just meant it to source your subsequent quote. But just to clarify, know that all positions ought to be dealt with based on the merit of their arguments, not the holiness or importance of the source because they.
I only needed to get 10 words in to completely reject this passage as baseless, but I read through it anyway. We have a name for the positions that are based on "gee whiz, how can that be?!" and it's called the argument from incredulity and it's a bad argument. Recognize that there's so much we didn't know and there's now so much more that we still don't know (because questions about the universe multiple faster than answers arise) and sentiments like this are so transparently quaint and ridiculous...in other words, deserving of ridicule. Not because the people who have them or assert them are being gratuitously referred to as idiots, but because we're all ignorant until we're not, and being from the 11th century, what's obvious is that Bahya ibn Paquda was quite ignorant.
>>>So the designed object is definitely designed, whether by natural means or by supernatural means.
This is also rejected. Bell curves as observed in nature are not designed even though they might appear designed to the untrained eye. This is essentially what we're arguing, and this is essentially the point it seems you're missing. There is no design. People design cabinets and then they improve them and we get better cabinets, just like they design watches and soap dispensers and jet engines, and improvements are being made over time. But the natural world demonstrates no evidence for design. It's merely a trope put out by those who a) don't fully appreciate the universe and b) who are indoctrinated to think that it's designed and read bad arguments by ill-informed charismatic religious leaders who give speeches and write books about things they don't fully understand.
>>>There is no gap in our knowledge about whether the thing was designed or not.
I would agree to this statement, but not at all in the way you likely intended for it to be interpreted.
>>>The only question is if it was designed by natural means or by supernatural means.
I already addressed this point above.
But saying it was designed by natural means just pushes that question back one step, since the natural means likewise must have been arranged and couldn't have happened on its own by chance.
>>>Objection: asked and answered. It was not designed and not arranged. It could have happened on it's own and we have observed it and will continue to observe it. It makes perfect sense to someone who's informed about both biology and mathematics, but hard to understand for people who are well verses in neither, especially when they lived thousands of years ago before these fields were barely understood.
>>>The gap in our knowledge is rather in the nature of the Designer and the means He (or she or it or they-כביכול) used.
You are presupposing a designer, which is invalid move #1. Then you use that presupposition to make all forms of wild claims for which you have no evidence.
You're repeatedly mentioning pure chance. I agree that chance is not an explanation, rather we look for an explanation that is plausible. The current body of scientific knowledge supports the claim that what seems like design is actually a result of plausible natural processes, and that give rise to this strong induction even when it is stil unknown as of yet. The only argument left is from the fact that nature is capable of such things suggests that it is the tool of a designer.
Please tell me what 'design' you think is improbable aside from abiogenesis and finetuning, assuming we accept evolution.
I’m only mentioning pure chance in contrast to design. We can stop talking about pure chance if we both agree that pure chance is not responsible for something that appears designed. And once we stop talking about chance, we can stop talking about probability. The only question is what is the designer that's responsible for this design. You say by induction that it is most likely an (as of yet unknown) natural process, rather than a supernatural God. I say this induction falls into the infinite regress trap mentioned by the Chovos Halevavos and other philosophers, because your creative natural process also had to be arranged by something or somebody. This is the point where the argument from Design uses part of the Cosmological argument.
>>>But your line “that even claiming that the natural causes are so improbable they themselves must have been arranged by a supernatural being falls into the first category, not the second”, I think is incorrect. When people say that natural causes are improbable, that is equivalent to saying that the system couldn’t have arranged itself by chance. It’s like the analogy of the tornado in a junkyard creating a Boeing 747.
First posited by Frank Hoyle, the tornado in a junkyard analogy is a bad argument. Dawkins himself discusses it in The God Delusion, and really, without intending here to take what may appear as a cheap shot against you in ad hominem fashion, whenever it's used, it seems clear to me that the person repeating it isn't seriously interested in discussing these points and debating the issues. One of the most famous books that discusses this topis is Dawkins' book, and if someone is truly interested in this discussion, isn't that an important book to read? So maybe you didn't know that it was, and so I'm not writing here to attack you personally, but it must be said that if people put forth arguments that Dawkins' dispatches handily, shouldn't discussions on the existence of a god occur after one has read that book and found flaws in Dawkins' arguments? To me, that's a good starting point. I have a similar reaction when someone argues against use of the terminology atheist vs agnostic, which Dawkins similarly rejects, and for good reason and with good explanation. Sure, everyone comes into this topic of debate at different levels, and once upon a time I also hadn't yet read The God Delusion, but it should really should be required reading.
So I refer you to that book as to why Hoyle's analogy is a bad one, but to summarize it, evolution by natural selection is an incremental process of improved adaptation whereby each step is necessarily an advantage over the previous step. You can also see Dawkins' work entitled Climbing Mount Improbable, which is my favorite of his works. A tornado is not incremental at all. In this analogy, a tornado whips through a junkyard and builds, from scratch a 747, which is, of course, ridiculous. This is thus a strawman argument, because no one who endorses evolution would ever suggest anything similar to a tornado in a junkyard being able to construct a 747.
>>>Sure, you can claim that there’s a natural cause,
The only thing we are aware of are natural causes. As such, the only likely candidate for anything is a natural cause. This opening clause is thus already headed in the wrong direction.
>>>but any natural cause you can imagine or can’t imagine would also have to be arranged, and couldn’t have just been by chance.
It seems that these are all the options (can and can't imagine) and so the elaboration must have been for emphasis, but I find your argument lacking in substance, and so your emphasis to be off.
And you keep making claims with no evidence. Why does a natural cause need to be arranged?
>>>Just like you wouldn’t accept that there was some unknown, chance natural cause which caused a tornado to assemble a Boeing 747.
We know what tornadoes are and we know how they work and a tornado in a junkyard is in fact similar to a de novo creation, which we observe in our mind as something that can't have occurred. The explanation given, that there's a god, is likely something that is deemed unlikely. Where did a god come from? Who created him? How could there be something so complex as a god arising de novo? Positing a god makes things much more complicated, not easier.
>>>In fact, I think you probably agree with this, since you say “claiming pure chance is implausible”.
Have you considered that nothing is less plausible than there being a god?
>>>So we are left with something that was not by chance, but was designed, which implies a Designer.
We do not agree with your premise, and so we do not agree with your conclusion.
>>>Not a Designer as the immediate next step, but a Designer as the ultimate cause, a Designer with a very long arm, who put into motion as many natural causes as you want to reach the result.
I don't know what this means.
>>>This is not God of the Gaps.
Or this. I mean, I understand what these words mean, but I cannot see how you got from there to here.
>>>Now when I read your line “However, in a pre-darwinian world, one might argue that the induction cannot succeed when discussing matters of origin, as opposed to events within natural history.” I’m not even sure that there is anything we are disagreeing about. Because I have no problem (in theory) with somebody pushing back the Designer 100 trillion years if it tickles his fancy.
I find this irrelevant.
>>>The point is that we have a design which implies a Designer.
Again, claims made with no evidence. Pre-supposing mystical and magical and supernatural without evidence. Baseless claims about how things cannot be natural, and so they must be supernatural. Your ideas are supported by themselves, but they need to be supported by evidence, or else it's cyclical.
One point I’d like to make is that even if someone were to say that we are open to “non-material explanations, it doesn’t mean that “god” which usually means some kind of agent/mind is the best explanation. Maybe some other supernatural force is the explanation. More work has to be done if one were to make some kind of argument that god is a better explanation than other examples.
Yes, I think this is obvious.
I agree, but I often find people who argue that “there’s no natural explanation so it must be god” and when I point this out to them, they scoff at me and say that once I agree to supernatural, that’s basically agreeing to god. They are fundamentally misunderstanding my point that they are making a claim that god is the cause when they can’t substantiate the argument to god.
Yes we would need revelation for that.
What do you mean by revelation?
If there is a reasonable, verifiable account where said designer comes and tells us he made it, and reveals some stuff about himself (such as that he is a monodeity, he protects the underprivileged, and hates cheeseburgers) I think it is justified to conclude that he is the designer.
Yeah this connects with our other conversation w e are having. I don’t have reason to trust that revelation.
No, I'm saying that what looks design is a product of natural causes which are themselves simple and plausible, and therefore don't raise the question of who designed them.
Somebody pointed out to me that you responded to my last comment but just on the main thread. In response:
I don't find it plausible at all that a highly creative result that appears designed can be the product of a simple cause that doesn't itself contain the potential for design. I see that as impossible. To me, it's no better than saying that the creative result just magically sprang into existence on its own because "that's just how things happen". If you are able to trace the designed product back to forces of nature, then that just obviously means the force of nature are not simple and contain within them the potential for this creative result. This is not a gap, but is my basic reasoning.
A moshol. I see some very creative, amazing stuff on my computer. Like...Microsoft Windows. Not perfect. Very flawed sometimes. But amazing. Where is it coming from? I remove the back of my computer and see a green chip. To a novice like myself, the green chip looks quite simple. The amazing creative result must be coming from the simple green chip. But when I probe further, I find out that the green chip is not simple at all, but contains the potential for design and more. So I google, where did that chip come from. I trace it to a building in the Netherlands somewhere. Seeing the building in Google Maps, it doesn't look so complicated. Not different than any warehouse. Certainly not as sophisticated as the chip itself. Ah, I tell myself. The simple building can create a sophisticated chip with Microsoft Windows. But then I find out what is going on inside the bulding...
Hard disagree. Take something like natural selection. The ingredients are far simpler than the end result, yet this simple and fairly intuitive mechanism known as natural selection is capable of molding simple life forms into complex and elaborate beings. The same case for the cosmos. All we need is the table of elements (or on the subatomic level, the quantum particles table) governed by several basic laws, and assuming the initial conditions of the universe it will plausibly self-assemble into stars, planets, galaxies, and superclusters, filled with many of the marvelous cosmic phenomena. Take the one planet out of billions which has conditions to form H2O, allow life to emerge from chemical processes (which are themselves arrangements of physical processes), and life can emerge and adapt to the conditions of the planet. So on and so forth. I concede there are gaps such as 1. the initial conditions of the universe (which either way are poorly understood), 2. the physical constants in the laws themselves (which may or may not be variable), 3. the origin of life, (which theoretically is physically possible, the question is as to the mechanism of origin,) 4. the origin of consciousness (which may very well simply be another result of natural selection, it's hard to say when we don't have consciousness properly defined), and several other major gaps, along with innumerable gaps in the details of every natural process we do know of. With regard to the minor form of gaps it would be utterly ludicrous to suggest that they are unique and outside the physical framework, and the same point, although less strong, can be argued for the major gaps as well.
I guess this is where we disagree. I think those examples are endlessly complicated. And those aren't even the simplest examples you could have given. Even a snowflake relies on endlessly complicated laws of physics and chemistry that we have only scratched the surface of. Nothing simple about it.
Complicated means something different from complex. It might be difficult for our minds to grasp, but they are comprised of a few fundamental concepts and axioms which is what I mean when referring to their simplicity (similar to how you might say gods Essence is simple although we cannot grasp it).
Again, disagree strongly. I don't believe a beautiful snowflake is formed by a few simple concepts, but many complex ones of which we are only beginning to scratch the surface of. But even simpler. Take the simplest "design" you can think of. Let us say a square. Euclid tells us how to construct a square. "Let AB be the given straight line. It is required to describe a square on the straight line AB. Draw AC at right angles to the straight line AB from the point A on it. Make AD equal to AB. Draw DE through the point D parallel to AB, and draw BE through the point B parallel to AD." We need a universe with concepts of points, straight lines, parallel lines, right angles, line segments, line segments that equal each other. Then we need to put them all together in the right measures in the right positions. This is not simply taking a mishmash of random simple rules and throwing them together to get a design. This requires a designer.
Nice claim, no evidence. That doesn't convince me, and shouldn't convince you either.
I'm assuming you're referring to the the classical sources such as shaar habechina or the Gemara with the mashal of the artist.
Those arguments fall into the first category IMO because of the qualification I offered about the factors themselves which you discuss as well.
I do not agree that the perspective should be no chance > therefore designer. Rather, the natural theory which relies on extreme chance is implausible and should therefore be rejected, and we should instead look for a natural theory which does not rely on chance. Indeed, most scientific theories to account for why things are the way they do not rely on extreme chance, and that would indeed be a reason to reject the theory. Two exceptions that come to mind are the fine tuning argument, and abiogenesis. However, both those science does not actually claim to be able to account for it, rather we don't know why it happened that way (plus abiogenesis as other issues). I would argue in both cases that they are god of the gaps, and we should not assume that there is no material explanation which is indeed plausible.
The first kind of argument I was referring to is more abstract. Ultimately the world is amazing and full of potential, and it's only like that because of the fact that it's such an intricate system, and although nature can account for it, the mere fact that nature led to such a system should indicate that the system itself is the tool of a designer. (This is one form of that argument there are others, but none are appealing to specific phenomena how they came to be). That is in arguments from design that the god of the gaps does not threaten, but it's vulnerable to its own criticisms.
I would argue there is a third issue: processes that arrive naturally but consistently buck the odds. If God works behind the scenes that's what we would expect.
A second issue is that this post ignores the biggest, unsolvable gap: the formation of life. As the famously quotemined quote goes (paraphrased) it is far easier for all of life to have evolved than the first cell to have formed. We can't even form it in a laboratory and the possibility of it is usually mocked as spontaneous generation. Induction is useless here at least until some life is created in a laboratory.
That issue is a great point, but it's not what god of the gaps addresses directly. That's more like the anthropic principle or other similar points.
I forgot to mention abiogenesis, I really should've. That's probably the most relevant example to this discussion, and depends how formidable of an objection you consider the god of the gaps fallacy (?) to be, plus it's obviously influenced by the various scientific findings of the lack thereof.
I have more to say on this issue, and IYH will comment further, but for me, one of the biggest problems with the "God of the Gaps" objection is that as scientific knowledge progresses, the number of gaps becomes greater, not lesser. The universe has become infinitely vaster than anybody imagined 2000 years ago, not just in terms of area, but in terms of intricacy and number of concepts. And as the universe has expanded unimaginably, so has the number of things that need to be explained, and that we yet have no explanation for. And so induction would tell me that this process will continue, and we will continue explaining things, while the number of things that are left unexplained will continue multiplying. It's turtles all the way down. I wrote a fun little moshol about the "God of the Gaps" a while back here https://irrationalistmodoxism.substack.com/p/death-from-the-sky
I just read the post that you linked, and it definitely illustrates its point very well, but I don't think its addressing the same discussion as the one in this post. I was discussing events within the physical world and if we should have confidence that there is a physical explanation, while you were addressing the 'why' of the whole system. Why should there be nature, why should it have certain fundemental laws, etc. That is a question of ontology (assuming that we are discussing laws which are irreducible to more fundemental laws), and is worthy of a discussion, but it's not god of the gaps per se. I would not argue that the 'why' is simply a gap, it's obviously in a different category and needs a non-physical explanation.
I would argue that although we are discovering more phenomena in need of an explanation, we have no basis to weaken our induction that physical events contain a physical explanation. This is similar to someone who never left a certain town, and all his observations in the town fit within a certain framework. Even if he leaves the town or his town grows and he doesn't yet understand the new observations, the underlying principles he observed are still worthy of being the default position to be applied to the new phenomena.
I think there are two reasons why this induction doesn’t work.
1. What your induction is really saying is that we can currently explain aspect A of design with physical B and C, and aspect X of design with physical Y and Z, and therefore, we project that will similarly be able to explain aspect B with physical D and E, and aspect Y with AA and AB, etc. But the induction doesn’t stop anywhere. It doesn’t say that we will ultimately be able to explain all aspects of design, A, B, C, D, E…AA, AB, with one final ZZ. It just branches out infinitely. So now at best you have projected an infinite chain of physical causes. This doesn’t appear to be a natural explanation for anything.
2. I don’t think it makes sense to put all the myriad scientific explanations under the umbrella of “physical” when they manifestly appear to have nothing to do with each other. The physical object that brings the rain is the cloud. The physical force that moves the cloud is the wind. The physical energy that generates the cloud is sunlight striking the ocean. The physical force that moves the planets is gravity. The physical force that keeps atoms together is something completely different. The physical force that explains the movement of the stars and galaxies is not quite gravity, maybe “dark matter”. We have no theory of everything that puts these all together yet, and no reason to predict that we will ever discover one. Induction won’t help us here. To say that we will use induction to determine what is behind gravity, and predict that it will be something physical like gravity but also completely different but also eventually we will discover the theory of everything so it won’t be different- doesn’t quite make sense to me. To use your town analogy, a person left his small farming village of 500 people. Farming is all he ever knew, the idea of factories is something that never crossed his mind. After about 30 years, he hears that his hometown has grown into a metropolis of 5 million, yet he still assumes it’s a farming economy and wonders how there is room for so many farms.
1. Your appeal to infinite regression is simply another form of saying that *something* in principle breaks this pattern and cannot be accounted for within a naturalistic framework. Aside from the fact that this essentialy appealing to the conclusion of the kalam cosmological argument, I don't think this provides us a license to reject specific phenomena we empirically observe as being the absolute limit of natural laws. This is because the induction by definition establishes that events *within* our empirical observations consistently follow this specific pattern, and appealing to the necessity of the system as a whole is phenomena which is by definition not subject to empirical inquiry (as the tools necessary to analyze it are not the same tools which led us to any of the observations in question).
2. Many of the examples you provide for disparate forces are fallacious, as we know that most of these forces are reducible to a very limited set of basic laws which essentially govern the complex phenomena which arise from it. However, it is correct that as of yet we have no unifying theory of physics, and we currently have three fundemental forces. The first is the electroweak force, which is described by quantum electrodynamics, the second is the strong nuclear force which is described by quantum chromodynamics, and the third is gravity which is described by the theory of relativity. While there has been significant progress in combining the first two through what is known as the grand unifying theory, gravity is currently more of a challenge to unify through what is called the theory of everything, although there are some strong attempts such as string theory or loop quantum gravity. There are some philosophical arguments to suggest that in principle a theory of everything does exist, a weaker argument for that is from occams razor, while a stronger argument is from ontological monism. So I would quicker assume that physical processes are indeed one fundemental law which manifests many different ways.
However, there are those that argue that there is not necessarily a theory of everything, although this is not the standard view amongst physicists and philosophers, but I still don't think that is sufficient to remove the induction. First of all there is still at least an induction that everything operates under one of these two laws, and second of all I think an argument can be made that both laws are laws within materialism, as opposed to supernatural explanations which appeal to metaphysical forces, which is ontologically a seperate category.
Sorry, was busy with Yom Tov, now I am back.
The Kalam cosmological argument is very important, but that’s not where I was going with this. Your idea was that by argument from induction, you can make the “God of the Gaps” objection stronger or more rigorous. My point is that your induction doesn’t do that. Because the idea of “God of the Gaps” is that as we continually explain the design the universe through naturalistic processes, God is forced to “retreat” into ever smaller “gaps” in our understanding, and will eventually “disappear” as an explanation for anything. But if I am right that the gaps are just increasing as our conception of the universe expands, then the “God of the Gaps” idea is off the mark, and your induction doesn’t help with that. Predicting that we will have infinite branching chains of natural explanations might or might not be an attempt to “get rid” of God (כביכול), but I don’t think that’s the “gaps” argument. It’s something else.
My other point was that our “ultimate” explanations are constantly evolving, so I don’t think your induction makes sense. While 1000 years ago, the ultimate explanation for an apple falling to the ground might be that it is made of the earth element and draws itself to the earth, Newton came and told us there is a force called gravity, and then Einstein told us that gravity means that mass bends the curvature of spacetime, and X will come along in 50 or 100 years and tell us something different which will resolve many of the gaps in the Theory of Relativity, and so on. You have absolutely no clue what the nature of that or its many successors will be, the only thing you are certain of is that the explanation will never be God. But why? If God is the Mind that created the universe, why would our long and branching path never lead to Him? I don’t see how induction tells you that. משל למה הדבר דומה? Somebody starts climbing a mountain and argues by induction that since we didn’t reach the top of the mountain on day 1 and day 2 and day 3, we will never reach the top of the mountain, and therefore the mountain has no top. I’m not saying we will reach the top, maybe the mountain is infinitely tall, I’m saying that we can’t use induction for this.
This is all as regards to your method of induction, and your application of it to “God of the Gaps”. However, I don’t think “God of the Gaps” addresses the argument from Design in the first place, but does something quite different, as I will explain in a different comment.
Thank you for clarifying.
1. Your first point is attacking a straw man. The position you are arguing against sounds suspiciously like the god of the gaps argument I rejected; that the place for God is getting smaller and smaller. I do not think that is a good argument. The argument I was proposing is that when approaching a phenomena which we don't know why it happened, we have a strong inductive inference that it is a physical event with physical causes as opposed to being the limits of science which can only be explained by appealing to the supernatural. (Why this applies to design as well I will address in a response to your other comment.)
IOW, your argument seems to be as follows: God of the gaps is an induction from the fact that the gaps were always shrinking, therefore they will continue to shrink in the future until god is eliminated completely. If so, we can object that the the gaps are growing, not shrinking.
I have some issues with that point as well, but it is irrelevant, because that was not my argument. The induction is not about gaps shrinking, the induction is about the underlying mechanisms. Even though we may find enormous gaps, that doesn't counter the induction so long as it isn't demonstrated that they have a supernatural cause, and it doesn't even weaken the induction since there is no particular reason to say that these gaps are different than what we do understand, and the fact that we don't have as of yet a physical explanation is likely simply due to our ignorance, not because they are outside the domain of natural phenomena. I hope this distinction and why your argument doesn't threaten my induction is clear.
2. Your second point is not appealing to specific phenomena, rather to naturalism itself. You seem to be proposing an argument that naturalism may turn out to be fundementally a divine process (which is actually likely under theism), and we have no induction telling us what it might look like when we have the actual 'theory of everything'.
This is irrelevant to the discussion at hand. Whatever the nature of materialism itself, this does not affect whether there are phenomena which fit within the framework of materialism. IOW, even if this is true, it is still plausible, and per my induction, likely, that all phenomena we observe are themselves physical processes, although at high resolution physical processes aren't actually something which look similar to what we usually call physical.
I actually think you're almost certainly correct, and whatever levels we may discover in the future may look far more bizarre than relativity or quantum mechanics. However, we have no reason right now to assume that it is associated with a tri-omni or even merely intelligent or conscious being (from this point alone). Therefore, it is relevant to discuss god of the gaps, as otherwise we may be inclined to point to observations and claim they are sidestepping the natural framework and demonstrate the existence of the supernatural which can operate outside of physics. I don't think that is acceptable because it violates the inductive inference that it almost certainly does operate within naturalistic processes.
>>>Because the idea of “God of the Gaps” is that as we continually explain the design the universe through naturalistic processes, God is forced to “retreat” into ever smaller “gaps” in our understanding, and will eventually “disappear” as an explanation for anything. But if I am right that the gaps are just increasing as our conception of the universe expands, then the “God of the Gaps” idea is off the mark, and your induction doesn’t help with that.
The GOTG argument is that you explain what you understand and when you get to what you don't understand, you say, "god did it." But that with scientific progress, more and more heretofore supernatural explanations are explained with naturalistic explanations.
But to say that we have more and more questions as science progresses is not to debunk the GOTG argument, because explanations only ever improve with science. Previously miraculous explanations give way to science and previous science gives way to better science. But science never gives way to religion. It can't because religion doesn't actually engage reality, and so it has no explanatory power. If it did, it would be a method of observation, hypothesis, testing and confirmation and we'd just call it science. It's similar to sincerely asking why there are no really good data on alternative medicines, and the answer is that once we've demonstrated efficacy and validity, we just call it "medicine."
So yes, you can find Neil deGrasse Tyson on YouTube talking about how the gaps are shrinking, but the most precise way to understand that is that each unknown realm, be it why is there thunder and lightening or where does the Sun go at night or why do I keep fainting...each of those questions is a fraction and all of those fractions need to be added together, and when we first have a question the denominator is large and the numerator is small, and over time, with scientific progress, the numerators grow larger and larger as they approach the denominators because we discover more and more about each particular field or discipline until we know enough that we can predict an eclipse or detect an anomalous fetal heartbeat and perform an emergency caesarean section. The unknowns shrink means that we increase our knowledge about each particular thing, so that we used to know just 'that' and we approach knowing 'why' until we understand it well enough that there's no more heavy research into it because we understand everything there is to know to take care of the problems we see. Until we perhaps realize there are more problems or even more solutions before we can detect or relate the problems. The incorrect way to look at it is that all of scientific ignorance is one big denominator and with each discovery of more unknown, we are increasing the overall denominator in greater quantities than we are increasing the overall numerator.
>>>Predicting that we will have infinite branching chains of natural explanations might or might not be an attempt to “get rid” of God (כביכול), but I don’t think that’s the “gaps” argument. It’s something else.
To think of science as "getting rid" of god is the wrong way to look at things. Rather, people once came up with stories about there being a god or a bunch of gods. And we merely grow up, as a species, to observe that these stories were unnecessary to explain the things we thought they were necessary for and that there's no reason to think they are true. You can't observe a god and positing one is never necessary and doesn't help provide answers to anything because it's the same as saying, "because." It provides no predictive power and no useful guidance as to what there is, why anything is or how we can better relate to or prevent or improve anything. The best ideas of the bible and the koran and the thousand other holy scriptures, whether they be wash your hands or don't kill your neighbors, can be good advice without the need for making up stories about angels and demons, arks with animals, witches conjuring up dead prophets, plagues of blood or revelations on mountaintops.
There's no need or ability to get rid of god any more than there is to get rid of alchemy. We are not cleansing our lives of the deleterious effects of Venus rising, but we rather just ignore when Venus rises, unless you want to watch it for fun. The exceedingly likely fact that there are no gods is just a realization we've been able to reach as the pettiness and quaintness of our previously held ancient traditions becomes more and more transparent.
>>>My other point was that our “ultimate” explanations are constantly evolving, so I don’t think your induction makes sense. While 1000 years ago, the ultimate explanation for an apple falling to the ground might be that it is made of the earth element and draws itself to the earth, Newton came and told us there is a force called gravity, and then Einstein told us that gravity means that mass bends the curvature of spacetime, and X will come along in 50 or 100 years and tell us something different which will resolve many of the gaps in the Theory of Relativity, and so on. You have absolutely no clue what the nature of that or its many successors will be, the only thing you are certain of is that the explanation will never be God. But why?
You're here describing how observation and hypothesis formation and testing works to debunk (or partially debunk) previously held inaccurate (or partially inaccurate) understanding of the universe.
The reason why the answer will never be god is the same reason why impurity will never be revisited as an explanation for best hygiene or sexual practice. Whatever we discover, and we don't really know what will or even can become known about the vastly underappreciated world or microbiota, whether it relates to keeping your fruits and vegetables fresh, or preventing the spread of sexually transmitted disease, but we just know that impurity is not a candidate explanation. It's magical thinking, the mechanism wouldn't fit into anything we currently have a framework for and while it could happen, there's no reason to think it was ever suggested in the first place for a good reason. So, too, god.
>>>If God is the Mind that created the universe, why would our long and branching path never lead to Him?
There's no reason to suppose a god. I don't even understand your question here, really.
>>>I don’t see how induction tells you that. משל למה הדבר דומה? Somebody starts climbing a mountain and argues by induction that since we didn’t reach the top of the mountain on day 1 and day 2 and day 3, we will never reach the top of the mountain, and therefore the mountain has no top.
The problem here is that you are comparing things that we understand with things that we don't understand. What you should rather do is say suppose we go hiking in the forest and we don't see bigfoot. Thousands of people do this for hundreds of years and there are isolated reports of bigfoot, but as documentation methods improve over time (almost everyone has a phone with a camera and we have GPS maps) and magical thinking has decreased over time (other than religious thinking, almost no one believes in magic anymore), and yet, where's the evidence for bigfoot? Likely every reasonable person rejects the secret or unknown existence of furry hominids living in the forest. But why? Because what was claimed without evidence can be rejected without evidence.
>>>I’m not saying we will reach the top, maybe the mountain is infinitely tall, I’m saying that we can’t use induction for this.
Why do you not worry that maybe there are bigfoot hominids in the forest and they are endangered and their unsure future can ruin the ecosystem in their absence? Should he have a save the spotted bigfoot society? No...we're not at all concerned and we're not afraid of them attacking us while camping, either.
>>>This is all as regards to your method of induction, and your application of it to “God of the Gaps”. However, I don’t think “God of the Gaps” addresses the argument from Design in the first place, but does something quite different, as I will explain in a different comment.
You are using special pleading to support your idea of a god that you have adopted because of indoctrination. No amount of referring to inductive reasoning can produce evidence for or a good reason to claim a god.
>>>Of the various arguments that are commonly presented to attempt to demonstrate the existence of God, perhaps the most common category is teleological arguments, or the arguments from design. Some forms of this argument are from biological design, the anthropic principle, and the ecology of the universe or planet. Recently, the most common form of this argument offered is known as the fine-tuning argument. All these arguments attempt to demonstrate that elements of the universe could not have arisen randomly or through natural processes, and there must have been an Intelligent Being who designed it to exist in a specific way.
Even if compelling the best these arguments could ever do is substantiate deism. In order to arrive at theism, and certainly one particular theism over another, we'd need evidence that the god not only still exists but that he's the God of Moses. And with sufficient evidence for the God of Moses (assuming you're trying to make these arguments as a Jew...others will be making these arguments to back Jesus or Mohammed or Brahma), you don't need teleological arguments because they don't help.
As such, I never understood the thrust of these arguments.
If we were to be successful at establishing that an intelligent being designed the universe, it would open the door to the possibility and higher plausibility of the torah being true. However, ultimately I agree that it is another major step and should not be considered implied by the teleological argument.
Oh, I understand that, but the idea that we're looking for 'permission to believe' is comical. Schroeder, Kelemen, Kaplan and the other kiruv rabbis from Aish and the Discovery program, etc make a lot of noise with their books and their talks, but it seems to amount to much ado about nothing.
Fill a room with a hundred people who are already believers for bad reasons (indoctrination) and talk to them about arguments from cosmology and anthropic principles and teleology and they come away thinking that the kiruv establishment has properly defended Judaism and gives them massive confidence when trying to talk to their high school and college-aged children who have questions or more. But it's a red herring, if you ask me. For the FFB, though, they don't know how to spot it...t's like they don't know their colors and they don't know what a fish is.
I agree, however we have to be careful not to fall into the trap of 'persmission to deny', and avoid engaging seriously in arguments that attempt to demonstrate the validity of various theistic claims merely due to the rejection that it's coming from 'indoctrination'.
It sounds to me that you're trying to be witty here by contrasting permissions, but to make assertions without evidence is not at all the same as denying assertions without evidence.
So take monsters and bigfoot and unicorns, or Dawkins' favorite, fairies in the garden. To claim that there are fairies in the garden one ought to have evidence, and very good evidence at that. But to deny that there are fairies, one needed have any evidence at all. All one needs to to review the evidence in favor and find it unsatisfactory, and this really ought not to be a partisan issue, where someone's review of the evidence is scoffed at for being deliberately shallow. We should assume good faith in one another that we're all really trying to reach the truth and to do so in the best way possible.
There's no good evidence for god and so permission to believe, as I put it above, is hereby revoked, or rather, it should never have been granted in the first place. Just like permission to believe in fairies is revoked, or more precisely, should never have been granted in the first place. There's no permission to believe in crystal healing or tarot cards or astrology as a means of choosing a job or a spouse.
None of this is to say that the door is closed to evidence for the existence of god. But just like none of us believe in fairies, and yet evidence can be provided at any time, and we'd all be very excited to find good evidence and have a world with fairies in it, the same is true for a god. Like butterflies or not, it's exciting to find another species that we've never known about before. So, too, a god. The person who cares about truth and reality warmly welcomes any and all changes to their mindset that are based on new information. As Sam Harris puts it, we're all waiting for good evidence of a god...it's just not forthcoming. And pretending that arguments that have been bouncing around for 1000 years is the key is silly. It's dishonest and it's misleading.
To recap, no one has permission to believe and without evidence, you don't need permission to deny...it's merely the default position. No one who's serious is interested in avoiding engaging in serious discussion or argument about facts, figures, data or evidence. Unless I am misunderstanding what you meant.
And as far as indoctrination goes, it means the "process of inculcating a person or people into an ideology uncritically." Why would there be any reason to accept anything uncritically? There are no free passes to truth. Everything is weighed on its merits, regardless of how many temples have already been built in honor of the god that turns out to not have any good reasons to believe in.
"All one needs to to review the evidence in favor and find it unsatisfactory". That's exactly my point. If you flippantly reject any serious review of the evidence and just mark it up to indoctrination, that is insufficient for disbelief. Rather, one must engage in the evidence, recognize and strengths and point out it's flaws, and then offer an appraisal of the truth value of the proposition in light of the evidence.
Granted, many so called 'evidences' are not worth seriously engaging in, as they are so flawed that they are remarkably unconvincing to any decently educated and rational person. However, there are some arguments or pieces of evidence that are indeed worthy of examination, and I'm afraid many of the New Atheists you so admire do not properly understand or appreciate the theistic arguments they callously reject. (I am not claiming that they are ultimately successful at establishing theism, but they aren't necessarily silly pseudo-intellectual arguments.)
>>>If you flippantly reject any serious review of the evidence and just mark it up to indoctrination
>>>Granted, many so called 'evidences' are not worth seriously engaging in, as they are so flawed that they are remarkably unconvincing to any decently educated and rational person.
First, let me say I find your tone properly and fairly balanced.
Secondly, let me say that I find these two comments to engage with one another so that the second neutralizes the first. I don't know any of the thinkers I am so fond of to be flippant and I think they consider the arguments properly. I find there to be no good reason or evidence not as a cart before the horse, but as a cart after the horse. In other words, when Harris, Hitchens, Dennett, Dawkins, deGrasse Tyson, Coyne, Pinker or anyone else I've missed or not yet become familiar with stakes out the positions they do, I judge them (the positions) to be staked out fully in response to the propositions they have been presented with. I don't find them to be anything other than fully reacting to what they observe.
>>>However, there are some arguments or pieces of evidence that are indeed worthy of examination
1) What arguments / pieces of evidence are worthy of examination that are not being examined?
2) What examination results do you think are being suppressed?
>>>I'm afraid many of the New Atheists you so admire do not properly understand or appreciate the theistic arguments they callously reject
I take issue with your use of the term 'callous.' To be precise, I've looked it up and it means "showing or having an insensitive and cruel disregard for others." Sometimes, one man's sensitivity to rules and discipline is seen by another as insensitivity to his feelings. Is that what you mean? Without getting political at all (is that possible?) some people complain that to deport an illegal alien is insensitive and counterproductive and cruel because having been in the country (illegally) for 5 or 10 or 30 years, they now have children here who are considered legal citizens, and how terrible it is to break apart a family. But if the act of trespassing is illegal and the acts of rape or selling cocaine are illegal (if not in magnitude or danger to others, but just speaking plainly about whether something is legal or illegal), and we have no qualms about arresting and incarcerating the rapist or the drug dealer even though they have young dependents, doesn't that demonstrate a bias in favor of illegal aliens?
Of course there are so many confounding variables in this example and how it might translate as an analogy, but insofar as it can serve as an analogy, how much of the cruelty you imply by use of the term 'callous' can be immediately written off because it's focusing on feelings and not truth? And that's a sincere question, not a rhetorical one where I'm trying to show that I already know the answer?
What, precisely, is callous about saying that the arguments in favor of gods and religion have been assessed and found to lack sufficient merit?
>>>I am not claiming that they are ultimately successful at establishing theism, but they aren't necessarily silly pseudo-intellectual arguments.
Take any of the broad New Atheists mentioned above. None of them are hurtfully or spitefully anti-religion. Dawkins does get quite riled up, but when he's confronted by someone who's asking real questions an providing real answers (and, so not Cardinal Pell or Jordan Peterson), he's quite sober and level headed.
And I disagree that arguments for god are not silly or pseudo-intellectual. To fall prey to cognitive fallacies is, I would contend, anti-intellectual. To fall prey to innumeracy is, I would argue by definition, anti-intellectual. To push your position regardless of these flaws can be described in a number of ways, including but not limited to being silly or ridiculous. So I'm really wondering what you mean here.
Looking forward to your response. :)
While my other comments addressed your "induction", I don't think that's the most important objection. Rather, I don’t believe “God of the Gaps” addresses the argument from Design at all. What I think it does well is address arguments from ignorance. Like, to say we don’t know how lightning works, so it must be God. Or we don’t know how clouds form, so it must be God. Or we don’t know how life emerged, so it must be God. That’s when “God of the Gaps” is a good rhetorical response, not because we can use induction to predict that we will find a natural explanation, but because it just rhetorically demonstrates the weakness of these arguments from ignorance. It basically says, your whole argument for God is just based on current gaps in scientific knowledge, and is liable to be nullified by the next scientific theory addressing those gaps. It’s not a prediction that we will come actually up with a theory, it’s just a rhetorical statement of the weakness of the argument, that it’s liable to be cancelled at any moment by new facts on the ground.
But the argument from Design is not an argument from ignorance in the first place, and isn’t susceptible to nullification by the next possible scientific theory on the horizon. The argument from Design was always about the design of the whole world. The world appears to have been fine tuned for unbelievably complex and intricate expressions of life and physics and chemistry. It looks like a machine. You can point to components in the machine that move other components, you can point to complex internal processes, but it’s still a machine that was designed by Somebody outside of itself. Just because Darwin (thinks he) found a plausible natural mechanism for the variation of the species doesn’t make the argument from Design go away, and doesn’t confine it to any gaps.
I want to distinguish between two kinds of arguments from design, one I think the god of the gaps addresses, and one it does not. One form of the argument is for example the origin of life. Since it is so complex, the argument goes, it could not have arisen through natural processes alone, and indicates a higher intelligence which without it life could not have existed. This is fallacious, as we should continue to assume that it can be a result of a natural process as I argued. Therefore, pointing to intricate 'design' is not sufficient to claim there must have been a supernatural cause, as there likely was a natual cause capable of eventuating this result.
The second form of the teleological argument is not appealing to the lack of natural causes, rather it is pointing to the end result and saying that this seems purposefully arranged, although it may have been brought about through naturalistic processes. This is a seperate argument, and the god of the gaps is not intended as an objection to this.
However, we must be careful to note that even claiming that the natural causes are so improbable they themselves must have been arranged by a supernatural being falls into the first category, not the second. This is because at most it pushes the question back one step. Granted, these factors can bring about this amazing result, but what brought about these factors? Claiming pure chance is implausible (granted the premises of the argument), and answering that there is no natural cause which brought about these factors and it must be attributed to the supernatural is also god of the gaps. (This would apply to the fine-tuning argument from physics.) Per the inductive inference, it should be considered far more plausible that there was a natural explanation as opposed to something beyond nature. (However, in a pre-darwinian world, one might argue that the induction cannot succeed when discussing matters of origin, as opposed to events within natural history.)
Therefore, the second category, which you seem to be focusing on, is limited to an argument which concedes the plausibility of natural explanations, yet still demands an explanation of the end result, such as the argument from the totality of nature, which seems rather marvelous and aligns with a purpose. (I personally think such arguments are extremely weak, but that was not the aim of this post.)
I’m not familiar with the first form of the argument you mentioned, but I believe the second is the classic form stated by the Jewish philosophers.
But your line “that even claiming that the natural causes are so improbable they themselves must have been arranged by a supernatural being falls into the first category, not the second”, I think is incorrect. When people say that natural causes are improbable, that is equivalent to saying that the system couldn’t have arranged itself by chance. It’s like the analogy of the tornado in a junkyard creating a Boeing 747. Sure, you can claim that there’s a natural cause, but any natural cause you can imagine or can’t imagine would also have to be arranged, and couldn’t have just been by chance. Just like you wouldn’t accept that there was some unknown, chance natural cause which caused a tornado to assemble a Boeing 747. In fact, I think you probably agree with this, since you say “claiming pure chance is implausible”. So we are left with something that was not by chance, but was designed, which implies a Designer. Not a Designer as the immediate next step, but a Designer as the ultimate cause, a Designer with a very long arm, who put into motion as many natural causes as you want to reach the result. This is not God of the Gaps.
Now when I read your line “However, in a pre-darwinian world, one might argue that the induction cannot succeed when discussing matters of origin, as opposed to events within natural history.” I’m not even sure that there is anything we are disagreeing about. Because I have no problem (in theory) with somebody pushing back the Designer 100 trillion years if it tickles his fancy. The point is that we have a design which implies a Designer.
I'm assuming you're referring to the classical sources such as Shaar Habechina and R' Akiva's mashal with an artist, and IMO they fall into the first category, as per my qualification that as long as the naturalistic explanations are insufficient it remains a gap, which you discuss further. The reason why I consider it a gap is that as long as the naturalist explanation relies on extreme chance, that it is a serious flaw in the theory and we ought to say that we don't have a satisfactory expanation. Being that we don't have an explanation, we ought to assume that there is a naturalistic explanation just is there is for any of the gaps that we filled in the past (while there was never a gap that was filled with a demonstrable supernatural explanation, scientifically or otherwise).
The first form of the argument I was referring to is more abstract. One formulation would be that although we may have a naturalistic account for how nature allowed the world to develop as it has, nevertheless the fact that the world is a marvelous place and seems to contain a purpose with and is a well oiled machine should indicate that nature itself is the tool of a designer. This argument is not subject to god of the gaps, although it is succeptible to other criticisms. (I do concede that the classical sources incorporate both, and probably would not have recongnized the distinction as nature was not understood in the same way is it today.)
The way I look at it, when I see something that seems obviously designed, it's a not a question whether it was designed or not. It's not a choice of "created naturally by chance" or "created unnaturally by a designer". It's not like I say, well, it's possible that it was created naturally by chance, but that theory has serious difficulties, so we have a gap in our knowledge, and we need to wait for the next scientific discovery. No, I say the idea that it's created by chance is just patently ridiculous. As the Chovos Halevavos writes:
וְיֵשׁ בְּנֵי אָדָם שֶׁאָמְרוּ שֶׁהָעוֹלָם נִהְיָה בְּמִקְרֶה מִבְּלִי בּוֹרֵא שֶׁהִתְחִילוֹ וְיוֹצֵר שֶׁיְּצָרוֹ. וּמִן הַתֵּמַהּ בְּעֵינַי אֵיךְ תַּעֲלֶה בְּדַעַת מְדַבֵּר בְּעוֹדֶנּוּ בִּבְרִיאוּתוֹ כַּמַּחְשָׁבָה הַזֹּאת וְאִלּוּ הָיָה בַּעַל הַמַּאֲמָר הַזֶּה שׁוֹמֵעַ אָדָם שֶׁיֹּאמַר בְּמַאֲמָרוֹ בְּגַלְגַּל אֶחָד שֶׁל מַיִם שֶׁהוּא מִתְגַּלְגֵּל לְהַשְׁקוֹת חֶלְקָה אַחַת שֶׁל שָׂדֶה אוֹ גִּנָּה וְחוֹשֵׁב כִּי זֶה נִתְקַן מִבְּלִי כַּוָּנַת אֻמָּן שֶׁטָּרַח בְּחִבּוּרוֹ וְהַרְכָּבָתוֹ וְשָׂם כָּל כְּלִי מִכֵּלָיו לְעֻמַּת הַתּוֹעֶלֶת הָיָה לוֹ לְהַפְלִיא וּלְהַגְדִּיל הַרְבֵּה עָלָיו וְלַחְשֹׁב אוֹתוֹ בְּתַכְלִית הַסִּכְלוּת וִימַהֵר לְהַכְזִיבוֹ וְלִדְחוֹת מַאֲמָרוֹ
So the designed object is definitely designed, whether by natural means or by supernatural means. There is no gap in our knowledge about whether the thing was designed or not. The only question is if it was designed by natural means or by supernatural means. But saying it was designed by natural means just pushes that question back one step, since the natural means likewise must have been arranged and couldn't have happened on its own by chance. The gap in our knowledge is rather in the nature of the Designer and the means He (or she or it or they-כביכול) used.
>>>The way I look at it, when I see something that seems obviously designed, it's a not a question whether it was designed or not.
You are begging the question here. Our contention is that what you are seeing is decidedly not obviously designed. I don't mean this sarcastically at all, but that should be obvious, and so to come to the table assuming that as premise zero is the problem here.
To say that everything's designed is to say that there's nothing that's not designed. This means you can't compare your hypothesis, you can't test your hypothesis and you can't reject your hypothesis.
>>>It's not a choice of "created naturally by chance" or "created unnaturally by a designer". It's not like I say, well, it's possible that it was created naturally by chance, but that theory has serious difficulties, so we have a gap in our knowledge, and we need to wait for the next scientific discovery. No, I say the idea that it's created by chance is just patently ridiculous.
You are here reiterating your fallacious point above. Now, when Simon responds by saying "you reject chance but so do we," I would say that's being imprecise.
The currently prevailing theory of neo-Darwinism (meaning the "new" composite theory based on Darwin's initial findings from the early 1800s coupled with much more detailed and contemporary understandings of many biological sub-fields which were not understood well at the time, such as genetics and biochemistry), is that natural selection is a ratchet system. Just like a ratchet will make small, incremental improvements to the tightening of a bolt, natural selection is a phenomenon that we observe whereby more certain traits are selected for over certain other traits. And what traits are selected for over others? The ones that provide greater reproductive advantage to the organisms that bear them. All of that selection pressure is provided by the environment, but when we say environment, we mean all things in the universe other than the gene for the trait we're focusing on here. And so the habitat can be a selection pressure, where trees that are present and afford climbing opportunities to both reach food and avoid predators serves to select for better climbers and fliers. But the existence of trees, in this situation, was by chance. Even in the presence of trees, another way to reach food and avoid predators would be to dig into the soil or venture into the water, and so there's really selection pressure not specifically for trees at all, but rather, for anything that increases food access and decreases predation. Without trees, the selection would just be for, in this example, digging and swimming. The fact that there are trees around can be seen as a chance occurrence.
Similarly, where do these traits come from? Sure, once they arise from genetic mutation, they can be selected for, but that they arose at all and that further mutation in favor of a direction toward greater climbing or swimming or digging ability, that's all chance. There is genetic variability for all genes, just like almost all traits we observe occur on a bell curve, with greatest proportions of the population falling near the mean and within one standard deviation. In other words, the vast majority of manifested traits fall out just below (34%) or just above (34%) the average, which accounts for a combines 68% of all observed traits, whether that be height or grip strength in adult male humans or claw length in leopards or tail length (used for balance during running) in cheetahs or blubber thickness in seals. We observe much smaller incidence of greater variation (the area between 1 and 2 standard deviations), in the amount of 13.6% for each -1 to -2 and 1 to 2, for combined 27%. That added to the 68% of one standard deviation totals about 95% of all observed specimen. And then there's 3 standard deviations and 4 and 5...it's infinite because the tails extend infinitely.
So random mutations arise and they are randomly occurring to this person or that, to some great extent. A random mutation for greater arm strength will benefit a wing or a flipper or a digging arm (up to a point at which longer is no longer better), but likely not an amphibian arm, and so natural selection does it's work. The bell curve is observable and it's the basis for all of evolutionary theory. And so while the ratcheting effect is not at all random, the genesis of mutations and the fact that they occur in an environment where such a mutation would be favorable, yes, that would be considered completely and utterly a result of chance. But when there are billions of opportunities, slight chance becomes inevitable.
>>>As the Chovos Halevavos writes:
I'm not saying that you meant this as an argument from authority, and likely you just meant it to source your subsequent quote. But just to clarify, know that all positions ought to be dealt with based on the merit of their arguments, not the holiness or importance of the source because they.
<<<וְיֵשׁ בְּנֵי אָדָם שֶׁאָמְרוּ שֶׁהָעוֹלָם נִהְיָה בְּמִקְרֶה מִבְּלִי בּוֹרֵא שֶׁהִתְחִילוֹ וְיוֹצֵר שֶׁיְּצָרוֹ. וּמִן הַתֵּמַהּ בְּעֵינַי אֵיךְ תַּעֲלֶה בְּדַעַת מְדַבֵּר בְּעוֹדֶנּוּ בִּבְרִיאוּתוֹ כַּמַּחְשָׁבָה הַזֹּאת וְאִלּוּ הָיָה בַּעַל הַמַּאֲמָר הַזֶּה שׁוֹמֵעַ אָדָם שֶׁיֹּאמַר בְּמַאֲמָרוֹ בְּגַלְגַּל אֶחָד שֶׁל מַיִם שֶׁהוּא מִתְגַּלְגֵּל לְהַשְׁקוֹת חֶלְקָה אַחַת שֶׁל שָׂדֶה אוֹ גִּנָּה וְחוֹשֵׁב כִּי זֶה נִתְקַן מִבְּלִי כַּוָּנַת אֻמָּן שֶׁטָּרַח בְּחִבּוּרוֹ וְהַרְכָּבָתוֹ וְשָׂם כָּל כְּלִי מִכֵּלָיו לְעֻמַּת הַתּוֹעֶלֶת הָיָה לוֹ לְהַפְלִיא וּלְהַגְדִּיל הַרְבֵּה עָלָיו וְלַחְשֹׁב אוֹתוֹ בְּתַכְלִית הַסִּכְלוּת וִימַהֵר לְהַכְזִיבוֹ וְלִדְחוֹת מַאֲמָרוֹ
I only needed to get 10 words in to completely reject this passage as baseless, but I read through it anyway. We have a name for the positions that are based on "gee whiz, how can that be?!" and it's called the argument from incredulity and it's a bad argument. Recognize that there's so much we didn't know and there's now so much more that we still don't know (because questions about the universe multiple faster than answers arise) and sentiments like this are so transparently quaint and ridiculous...in other words, deserving of ridicule. Not because the people who have them or assert them are being gratuitously referred to as idiots, but because we're all ignorant until we're not, and being from the 11th century, what's obvious is that Bahya ibn Paquda was quite ignorant.
>>>So the designed object is definitely designed, whether by natural means or by supernatural means.
This is also rejected. Bell curves as observed in nature are not designed even though they might appear designed to the untrained eye. This is essentially what we're arguing, and this is essentially the point it seems you're missing. There is no design. People design cabinets and then they improve them and we get better cabinets, just like they design watches and soap dispensers and jet engines, and improvements are being made over time. But the natural world demonstrates no evidence for design. It's merely a trope put out by those who a) don't fully appreciate the universe and b) who are indoctrinated to think that it's designed and read bad arguments by ill-informed charismatic religious leaders who give speeches and write books about things they don't fully understand.
>>>There is no gap in our knowledge about whether the thing was designed or not.
I would agree to this statement, but not at all in the way you likely intended for it to be interpreted.
>>>The only question is if it was designed by natural means or by supernatural means.
I already addressed this point above.
But saying it was designed by natural means just pushes that question back one step, since the natural means likewise must have been arranged and couldn't have happened on its own by chance.
>>>Objection: asked and answered. It was not designed and not arranged. It could have happened on it's own and we have observed it and will continue to observe it. It makes perfect sense to someone who's informed about both biology and mathematics, but hard to understand for people who are well verses in neither, especially when they lived thousands of years ago before these fields were barely understood.
>>>The gap in our knowledge is rather in the nature of the Designer and the means He (or she or it or they-כביכול) used.
You are presupposing a designer, which is invalid move #1. Then you use that presupposition to make all forms of wild claims for which you have no evidence.
You're repeatedly mentioning pure chance. I agree that chance is not an explanation, rather we look for an explanation that is plausible. The current body of scientific knowledge supports the claim that what seems like design is actually a result of plausible natural processes, and that give rise to this strong induction even when it is stil unknown as of yet. The only argument left is from the fact that nature is capable of such things suggests that it is the tool of a designer.
Please tell me what 'design' you think is improbable aside from abiogenesis and finetuning, assuming we accept evolution.
I’m only mentioning pure chance in contrast to design. We can stop talking about pure chance if we both agree that pure chance is not responsible for something that appears designed. And once we stop talking about chance, we can stop talking about probability. The only question is what is the designer that's responsible for this design. You say by induction that it is most likely an (as of yet unknown) natural process, rather than a supernatural God. I say this induction falls into the infinite regress trap mentioned by the Chovos Halevavos and other philosophers, because your creative natural process also had to be arranged by something or somebody. This is the point where the argument from Design uses part of the Cosmological argument.
>>>But your line “that even claiming that the natural causes are so improbable they themselves must have been arranged by a supernatural being falls into the first category, not the second”, I think is incorrect. When people say that natural causes are improbable, that is equivalent to saying that the system couldn’t have arranged itself by chance. It’s like the analogy of the tornado in a junkyard creating a Boeing 747.
First posited by Frank Hoyle, the tornado in a junkyard analogy is a bad argument. Dawkins himself discusses it in The God Delusion, and really, without intending here to take what may appear as a cheap shot against you in ad hominem fashion, whenever it's used, it seems clear to me that the person repeating it isn't seriously interested in discussing these points and debating the issues. One of the most famous books that discusses this topis is Dawkins' book, and if someone is truly interested in this discussion, isn't that an important book to read? So maybe you didn't know that it was, and so I'm not writing here to attack you personally, but it must be said that if people put forth arguments that Dawkins' dispatches handily, shouldn't discussions on the existence of a god occur after one has read that book and found flaws in Dawkins' arguments? To me, that's a good starting point. I have a similar reaction when someone argues against use of the terminology atheist vs agnostic, which Dawkins similarly rejects, and for good reason and with good explanation. Sure, everyone comes into this topic of debate at different levels, and once upon a time I also hadn't yet read The God Delusion, but it should really should be required reading.
So I refer you to that book as to why Hoyle's analogy is a bad one, but to summarize it, evolution by natural selection is an incremental process of improved adaptation whereby each step is necessarily an advantage over the previous step. You can also see Dawkins' work entitled Climbing Mount Improbable, which is my favorite of his works. A tornado is not incremental at all. In this analogy, a tornado whips through a junkyard and builds, from scratch a 747, which is, of course, ridiculous. This is thus a strawman argument, because no one who endorses evolution would ever suggest anything similar to a tornado in a junkyard being able to construct a 747.
>>>Sure, you can claim that there’s a natural cause,
The only thing we are aware of are natural causes. As such, the only likely candidate for anything is a natural cause. This opening clause is thus already headed in the wrong direction.
>>>but any natural cause you can imagine or can’t imagine would also have to be arranged, and couldn’t have just been by chance.
It seems that these are all the options (can and can't imagine) and so the elaboration must have been for emphasis, but I find your argument lacking in substance, and so your emphasis to be off.
And you keep making claims with no evidence. Why does a natural cause need to be arranged?
>>>Just like you wouldn’t accept that there was some unknown, chance natural cause which caused a tornado to assemble a Boeing 747.
We know what tornadoes are and we know how they work and a tornado in a junkyard is in fact similar to a de novo creation, which we observe in our mind as something that can't have occurred. The explanation given, that there's a god, is likely something that is deemed unlikely. Where did a god come from? Who created him? How could there be something so complex as a god arising de novo? Positing a god makes things much more complicated, not easier.
>>>In fact, I think you probably agree with this, since you say “claiming pure chance is implausible”.
Have you considered that nothing is less plausible than there being a god?
>>>So we are left with something that was not by chance, but was designed, which implies a Designer.
We do not agree with your premise, and so we do not agree with your conclusion.
>>>Not a Designer as the immediate next step, but a Designer as the ultimate cause, a Designer with a very long arm, who put into motion as many natural causes as you want to reach the result.
I don't know what this means.
>>>This is not God of the Gaps.
Or this. I mean, I understand what these words mean, but I cannot see how you got from there to here.
>>>Now when I read your line “However, in a pre-darwinian world, one might argue that the induction cannot succeed when discussing matters of origin, as opposed to events within natural history.” I’m not even sure that there is anything we are disagreeing about. Because I have no problem (in theory) with somebody pushing back the Designer 100 trillion years if it tickles his fancy.
I find this irrelevant.
>>>The point is that we have a design which implies a Designer.
Again, claims made with no evidence. Pre-supposing mystical and magical and supernatural without evidence. Baseless claims about how things cannot be natural, and so they must be supernatural. Your ideas are supported by themselves, but they need to be supported by evidence, or else it's cyclical.