New Reading Torrent Coming My Way

I think a friend of mine is going to bring me Dawkin's book The God Delusion tomorrow to read. I will want to read it rather carefully but quickly (rather than stretching it out over a long time). It should inaugurate a reading program that will likely include Breaking the Spell and God: The Failed Hypothesis, and perhaps also Moral Minds, Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast, and Letter to a Christian Nation. Lots of reading - it never ends. :-} In the meantime, I spent my free time today enjoying a couple more chapters in a biography about Mercater. :-)

Now a few thoughts which I'm not sure if I've written down somewhere sometime before, and I find that sometimes writing down underdeveloped thoughts helps stimulate their development. So...

People want to find evidence of God's existence, usually by means of scientific investigation. If God could be described mathematically (which is really what people mean when they say they want to find evidence of His existence and presence, I think), then why wouldn't He be just another "law of nature"? And if He isn't another law of nature then why do we expect that He should be objectivizable to scientific study? People claim that if He exists there should be certain evidences that we can find, that we should be able to test empirical claims about His presence and that those tests should be replicable (the modern scientific method - I am not going to say anything in this entry about my opinion about the woeful state of working philosophy of science these days (that sentence had way too many prepositions - my apologies to the reader)). But is this kind of evidence available for people who lived 500 years ago in downtown London? Do we therefore reject the notion that so many of them existed?

Then there's the question about the problem of evil. The usual argument goes like this:

Premise 1) God is all-powerful.
Premise 2) God is all-loving.
Observation 1) Evil exists.
Conclusion 1) Since God does not stop evil from existing, He is either not all-powerful or not all-loving or both. Therefore the God of the Bible does not exist.

But what if evil did not exist? What if every time a person thought or did something evil, he was struck down? Well, again I see no reason why we scientists wouldn't chalk it up to a natural law - we could still reject God's existence on the basis of the predictability of His response to evil. Then we might complain that if God exists and is behind this predictable response to evil, He should prove it by witholding His response to evil - and then if He did we would all either accuse Him of being not all-powerful and/or not all-loving, or we would posit something like dark matter to account for the single exception to the otherwise perfectly good natural law. If more exceptions were made in order to get it out of our heads that there was a law of nature, then we would not be able to posit something like dark matter but instead we would have to posit much more indirect theories such as religion memes or primeval Oedipus complexes, or we would say that God is not all-powerful and/or not all-loving. And this is exactly what we have today. So in any event you just can't be satisfied: If evil did not exist, we would still have to deal with the problem of evil, but the question would be "why doesn't it exist". Perhaps it is actually useful to suppose that evil exists so that God could destroy it (which is one of the ideas I've heard about a lot in the last several years), so that in the future when it is completely taken away we will be able to answer the question "why doesn't evil exist?" The answer will be "because God destroyed it".

At any rate, I think the notion that we can rely on science to answer any and all question objectively once and for all is way overrated. Science can do a lot of cool things, but it also has limitations - some of them are only historical (i.e. we can't do something now, but in 100 years we will be able to), and I am not interested at this point in discussing what limitations are absolute. But something that seems to be very much overlooked (but this is changing) is history, and besides this the whole class of investigations into events that occur exactly once, and are therefore not replicable and not controlled. It seems that the whole world has "physics envy".

Ok, that's enough for now. Maybe I'll discuss "the scientific method" sometime. I think it would be interesting.