God? Very Probably

Five Rational Ways to Think about the Question of a God

Robert H. Nelson

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781498223751
  9781498223775
• eBook ISBN:
  9781498223768
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

In recent years, a number of works have appeared with important implications for the age-old question of the existence of a god. These writings, many of which are not by theologians, strengthen the rational case for the existence of a god, even as this god may not be exactly the Christian God of history. This book brings together for the first time such recent diverse contributions from fields such as physics, the philosophy of human consciousness, evolutionary biology, mathematics, the history of religion, and theology. Based on such new materials as well as older ones from the twentieth century, it develops five rational arguments that point strongly to the (very probable) existence of a god. They do not make use of the scientific method, which is inapplicable to the question of a god. Rather, they are in an older tradition of rational argument dating back at least to the ancient Greeks. For those who are already believers, the book will offer additional rational reasons that may strengthen their belief. Those who do not believe in the existence of a god at present will encounter new rational arguments that may cause them to reconsider their opinion.

1

Introduction

In this book I will be looking to persuade you that the probabilities favor the existence of a god, relying on rational forms of argument accessible not only to traditional devout believers but to current self-professed atheists as well. In other words, I will not be relying on arguments from “faith alone.” For those who already believe that a god exists, I will for some of them be adding additional rational arguments to support their already existing views; for nonbelievers at present, I will be offering rational reasons for why they might want to reconsider their position. My conclusion does not necessarily mean exactly the Christian God of history but it does mean the existence of a god of some kind whose essence is supernatural. That is, as I dare to suggest, an important theological conclusion in and of itself, even if it does not conform fully to a traditional Christian understanding.

My rational case for a (very probable) god, as I should say at the outset, will not “prove” that a god exists. “Proof” (actually, in science this means a long record of uncontradicted empirical confirmation that can never be absolutely final) is feasible in the scientific investigation of the natural world but in the case of a supernatural essence, such as a god, there is no similar method of knowledge verification available. Thus, to concede that a scientific “proof” is necessary to estimate the likelihood of the existence of a god would be to concede from the outset that a god is unlikely. Indeed, because this demand is impossible to satisfy, the insistence on a “proof” of a god in the manner of the scientific method is a part of the rhetorical arsenal of those who stridently assert the nonexistence of any god. Yet, the largest part of the ordinary knowledge by which we guide our lives is not based on any such forms of scientific proof.

It is further evidence of the fundamentalist worship of science in our own times that most of the scientific faithful remain altogether blind to the supernatural miracles that routinely surround their daily existence. Foremost among these supernatural miracles, as a leading contemporary American philosopher Thomas Nagel explained in 2012, is human consciousness. Nagel writes that human “consciousness is the most conspicuous obstacle to a comprehensive naturalism that relies only on the resources of physical science” to understand the world. Indeed, he concludes that we will simply have to face the fact that “the existence of consciousness seems to imply that the physical description of the universe . . . is only part of the truth” of human existence, requiring an acknowledgement of the necessity of some kind of supernatural elements of a reality that “threatens to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture” that dominates so much of contemporary thinking—especially among the educated elites in the United States and Europe.1

Similar to Nagel, the Oxford philosopher Daniel Robinson writes that “consciousness introduces a new ingredient in the perceptual transactions between organisms and environments. The ingredient is the actual state of experience itself, what may be called a ‘mental’ state presumably widespread in the animal kingdom.” In order for a human being (or other animal) “to possess such a mental state,” it is necessary, as Nagel has also long said, that “there is something that it is to be that organism—something it is like for the organism” to perceive its own existence. It follows logically that since the “standard reductionist accounts of the mental”—accounts that seek to reduce consciousness to physical terms alone—“are essentially indifferent to the subjectivity of such experience, the accounts are fatally incomplete” as a statement of the full human condition. Despite the many best efforts of philosophical reductionists to offer an effective rejoinder, as Robinson considers in 2008, “Nagel’s argument retains its power.”2

It is remarkable that no even remotely plausible scientific hypothesis has yet been offered as to how our brains that exist in observable and measurable time and space might create the mental contents of our consciousness that exist outside measurable time and space. As the distinguished contemporary philosopher Colin McGinn puts it, “since we do not observe our own states of consciousness, nor those of others, we do not apprehend these states as spatial.” If we were to seek to explain consciousness in scientific materialist terms, it would mean “that something essentially non-spatial emerged from something purely spatial—that the non-spatial is somehow a construction out of the spatial. And this looks more like magic” than a scientifically comprehensible truth.3

As McGinn thus suggests, it will always be outside the scope of the physical sciences to explain how material events occurring in the physical world of our bodies and brains create the complex nonmaterial thoughts—such as the contents of this book as I have written it—that populate our mental universe. How did atoms and molecules create this sentence that I am writing at this moment? Did “I” have anything to do with it, or was it simply materially predestined in advance, as Pierre Laplace in the early nineteenth century argued in principle for everything that would happen in the future of the world? Is it merely my own human hubris that I think that “I” had a great deal to do with it—or even that “I” exist as an autonomous and independently thinking human being? These are of course questions of ancient philosophical and religious interest but the religion of scientific materialism, having no plausible answers, largely ignores them today.

Sigmund Freud, as himself a self-professed atheist who denied the existence of a god, and was seeking to confirm the modern scientific faith that the methods of physics can be extended to explain everything in the world, even the events of human consciousness, once claimed that he had established a mental physics of the “forces” of the interactions among separate parts of the human mind that was capable of explaining scientifically the workings of human consciousness. But Freudianism is now seen more commonly to have been a new modern religion rather than an exercise of anything like the scientific method—not many people take the scientific claims of Freud seriously any more.

For human beings, their consciousness precedes matter, not the other way around; the very concept of “matter” is itself a creation of the human mind. The “material world” (even as we can only perceive this “world” in our minds today) and the “mental” (again even this is a matter of our own internal perceptions of one distinctive part of human consciousness) are two separate elements of the same ultimately mental contents of human consciousness. Quantum mechanics in the twentieth century added a radically new element in that the manner of our conscious perceptions, even of the external world, could seemingly change drastically what we actually perceived as this outside “reality.” In other words, there was no fundamental reality other than the—admittedly complex and surprising—reality of human consciousness and its perceptions of itself and the “outside” world. The central importance of human consciousness in quantum mechanics meant that the scientific materialism that today dominates the thinking of so much of the American university world, and large parts of wider American elites, was effectively dead as a matter of ultimate truth.

For example, the historical reality for us of the “physical universe” of protons and other atomic and subatomic particles over as much as a billion years or more, as the brilliantly imaginative Princeton physicist John Wheeler once observed, is not finally determined, amazingly enough, until a human observation occurs. Astonishingly by commonsense standards, if there is one form of observation, then more than a billion years of subatomic history as we perceive it comes out one way, if there is another form of human observation, this history comes out another way. As Wheeler writes,

The idea is old that the past has no existence except in the records of today. In our time this thought takes new poignancy in the concept of Bohr’s elementary quantum phenomenon and the so-called delay choice experiment. Ascribe a polarization, a direction of vibration, to the photon that began its journey six billion years ago, before there was any Earth, still less any life. [All this is] meaningless! Not until the analyzer [the observational instrument] has been set to this, that, or the other specific chosen orientation, not until the elementary quantum phenomenon that began so long ago—and stretches out, unknown and unknowable, like a great smoky dragon through the vast intervening reach of space and time—has been brought to a close by an irreversible act of amplification [observation]; not until a record has been produced of either “yes, this direction of polarization” or “no, the contrary direction of polarization”; not until then do we have the right to attribute any polarization to the photon that began its course so long ago. There is an inescapable sense in which we, in the here and now, by a delayed setting of our analyzer of polarization to one or another angle, have an inescapable, an irretrievable, an unavoidable influence on what we have the right to say about what we call the [subatomic] past.4

Eugene Wigner, another great Princeton physicist (winner of the Nobel prize in 1963) who, also like Wheeler and unusually for a working physicist, occasionally ventured into philosophical explorations of the larger meaning for understanding human reality of quantum mechanics and other twentiet-century developments in physics, once examined such matters of the centrality for physics of consciousness in an essay, “Remarks on the Mind-Body Question.” Wigner wrote that as a result of twentieth-century physics “the very study of the external world led to the conclusion that the content of consciousness is an ultimate reality.” In quantum mechanics, “all knowledge of wave functions is based, in the last analysis, on the ‘impressions’ we receive” as conscious beings. Given the ultimate priority of consciousness, the quantum physics understanding of reality leads to an intellectual outcome where “solipsism may be logically consistent” with the current state of scientific thinking in physics but it is beyond doubt that “monism in the sense of [scientific] materialism is not” compatible with contemporary physics.5

As Wigner puts it most simply, we ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Thinking About God
• Chapter 3: God the Mathematician
• Chapter 4: Darwinism as Secular Fundamentalism
• Chapter 5: Scientifically Inexplicable
• Chapter 6: Divine Agency in Recorded Human History
• Chapter 7: Secular Religion, Christianity, and Modernity
• Chapter 8: Conclusion
• Bibliography