Parting shot, part 6

Being allowed to suffer to make possible a great good is a privilege, even if the privilege is forced upon you.

This quote from chapter 6, "Why God Allows Evil" sums up Swinburne's theodicy. Why is there so much suffering in this world? According to Swinburne this is the way it has to be if we are to have morally significant choices. He offers an argument which seems to run along the same lines as John Hick's "soul-making" theodicy. There is suffering because it is a great good for us to be able to choose between good and evil. And we can only obtain knowledge of good and evil from experience, so there has to be suffering at about the level we find in our world.

To most normal people the quote above is morally repulsive. It is hard to not react emotionally. However, I grant Swinburne the right to have his argument analyzed coolly and rationally. And as philosophers like Michael Martin ("Atheism: A Philosophical Justification") have pointed out, there are several faults with it. Among them are:

1) If God created natural evil to provide data for reliable inductive knowledge, he hasn't done the job properly. For example, certain very rare diseases cannot be studied reliably.

2) If God is omnipotent, he could have provided us with other ways of knowing about the consequences of our actions than through inductive inferences (after all, "other ways of knowing" figure prominently elsewhere in religious discourse).

3) It is far from clear that God has the right to inflict suffering for the cause of some greater good.

I think the last point is very important. Swinburne uses the example of a parent: a mother or a father has the right to put his children through a certain amount of misery in order to achieve some higher good. But there is a huge difference in scale here. Parents are not allowed to torture their children to death in order to teach them a lesson. This is something that Swinburne effectively grants his God the right to do. But as I see it, even if I grant God the right, it doesn't follow that exercising this right is morally good.

To take a personal example: My father died of cancer eleven years ago. His last months were full of crushed hopes and pain. What would Swinburne say was the greater good that was achieved by my father dying in this way? Did it help science in finding a cure for cancer? Certainly not. Was it to bring the family closer together? It didn't. Was it to teach us to suffer patiently and trust in God? Wouldn't be necessary if there were no suffering, and didn't work anyway. All I got out of it was a shock and a few years later a series of panic attacks followed by hypochondria that it took me a long time to get over. If you ask the rest of my family I think they would have to return a similarly negative answer to what they got out of this experience, even though they are religious. A very valuable lesson indeed. Thank you for that one, God.

Another problem I find with Swinburne's theodicy is that he goes so far in extolling the value of suffering that it makes it hard to see the point of heaven. If learning through painful experience is so great, then it would seem best to keep this process going forever. And it shouldn't be a big problem for God to invent new ways for us to suffer, he seems to have had no problems so far.

I think this is a general problem with theodicies. If heaven is possible at all, why bother with this painful intermediate stage? And if our ability to choose freely between good and evil is so valuable, why don't we get to keep this ability in heaven?

But I must return to the quote from Swinburne at the start of this post. It is impossible not to be repelled by it. Most people who suffer greatly have no idea of why they are suffering, and certainly no feeling that they are suffering for some greater good. No person has any right to come along and tell them that they are in a privileged state. To do so, you have to be a sick person indeed. And that one word sums up my opinion of Swinburne's theodicy: sick.

Parting shot, part 5

The next piece of data Swinburne considers is the existence of conscious human beings:

But consciousness, I shall be arguing, cannot be the property of a mere body, a material object. It must be a property of something else connected to a body; and to that I shall give the traditional name of soul. At some time in evolutionary history bodies of complex animals become connected to souls, and this, I shall be arguing, is something utterly beyond the power of science to explain. But theism can explain this - for God has the power and reason to join souls to bodies.

So Swinburne is a dualist: our thoughts are caused by some non-material stuff. He spends most of the chapter trying to argue that materialism is in principle incapable of providing an explanation of consciousness. Some of these arguments have fairly obvious problems. In one of them, Swinburne imagines a situation where a mad surgeon splits the brain of person A and transplants the right and left halves to different bodies. Which body does person A now occupy. This can only be a problem if you already assume that A's personality is something that exists independently of his brain, so Swinburne begs the question. For more detailed objections to Swinburne's arguments, see this link.

The reason I don't want to spend much time on Swinburne's arguments for dualism are twofold. First, even if there were no materialistic explanation for consciousness, it does not follow that we have immaterial souls. Maybe consciousness is just a brute fact. Maybe it is an illusion. Maybe we don't understand enough about consciousness means to formulate the problem properly.

Second, dualism is a problematic position for several reasons, one of which being the wealth of data showing unquestionable links between consciousness and states of the brain. If there is a soul, it must undeniably be able to interact with matter. So, just like in the case of the non-embodied deity, we have non-physical stuff influencing physical stuff. And if you think Swinburne is going to explain the nature of this interaction, you are in for an disappointment. All he has to say on the matter is the following:

Anything is a substance if it can cause an event, or if something can cause a change in it. So, as well as material substances, substances which occupy volumes of space, there may be immaterial ones as well, which do not occupy space.

And how exactly does that work? If the mysterious mind-substance can cause events in our brains and vice versa, on what level does the interaction take place? Can we measure it? Give a mathematical description of it?

As far as I see it, if the soul is immaterial it cannot interact with matter, and hence cannot explain consciousness. If the soul interacts with matter, it is not immaterial, just a new form of matter which we should be capable of examining in the lab, describing mathematically etc.

In the next part: Swinburne's theodicy.

Parting shot, part 4

A brief recap: Swinburne has so far defined what he means by "God", given an account of what he considers to be a good explanation, and argued that the God hypothesis is simple (involves few entities and few arbitrary assumptions). So far he has not given any arguments for theism, but he has set up the machinery for the special type of inductive argument he makes use of. I won't go into the mathematics here, but the idea is that you start out with a set of observations and a hypothesis you want to test. Prior to making the observations your hypothesis has a certain probability of being true, P(H!B) ("probability of H given B), where H is the hypothesis and B is the background information, i.e., what relevant knowledge you have apart from the observations to be explained. This probability is often called the prior probability of the hypothesis. If we call the observations O, what we want to find is P(H!O,B), the probability of the hypothesis being true given the observations and the background information. This can be difficult to estimate, but Bayes' theorem states that

P(H!O,B) = P(O!H,B)P(H!B) / P(O!B)

This makes it possible to at least assess whether the observations increase or decrease the probability of H being true relative to its value on the background knowledge alone if we can estimate how likely the observations are given the hypothesis. A good hypothesis should make the observations we have made very probable.

This kind of reasoning is frequently used when testing models against data in my field of research, cosmology. Based on my experience there are three points I would like to make.

First, in cosmology we have ways of assigning precise numerical values to these probabilites. In Swinburne's case the notion of a good fit to the "data" is going to be much more vague. Second, note the dependence on the prior, i.e., how probable we thought the hypothesis to be prior to making the observations. In cases where we have good data (e.g. precise measurements and a lot of them) the prior doesn't play a huge role. Even if we were way off in our initial assumption, the data will be able to tell us so and put us on the right track. But if the data are less precise our estimate of the probability of the hypothesis after the observations is going to be dominated by the prior. So the quality of the data has to be good. And if we don't have a precise notion of what it means for a model to be a good fit to the observations this problem gets worse.

Finally, the whole procedure does not make sense if the prior probability of the hypothesis is zero of undefined. If we know from the outset that our hypothesis is impossible, then no amount of data can make it probable. And if we cannot assign a value to the prior, it doesn't make sense to say that the data increase or decrease the probability of the hypothesis. I think that the fact that we have not seen a single example of non-embodied minds means that the probability of the God hypothesis is undefined.

Swinburne obviously thinks differently. He doesn't assign a specific value to the prior, but he must certainly assume it is some positive value. But unless his observations have large discriminatory power the final probability he assigns to his hypothesis is going to be dominated by his prior. In other words, Swinburne will think that God likely exists because he thought so at the outset.

After these lengthy introductory comments I will now start on chapter 4, "How the existence of God explains the world and its order". Swinburne starts off thus:

It is extraordinary that there should exist anything at all. Surely the most natural state of affairs is simply nothing: no universe, no God, no nothing. But there is something. And so many things. Maybe chance could have thrown up the odd electron. BUT so many particles!

The last two paragraphs reveal a surprising lack of understanding of physics. If one particle can appear spontaneously, there is no reason why not more can provided conservation of charge, energy, momentum etc. are fulfilled. But my main beef is with the first two paragraphs. The more I think about it, the more certain I feel that it doesn't make much sense to be puzzled about why there is something rather than nothing. Is "nothing" a real option? We know that there is something now. And as far back as we can make observations there has been something. The statement "There is something" is true at all times in the history of the universe. Swinburne is entitled to feel that this is an extraordinary state of affairs, but something more than personal incredulity is required for serious arguments for the existence of a deity.

A discussion of why materialism cannot answer this question follows. Again it reveals Swinburne's muddled understanding of modern physics where he tries to make things that are fairly well understood (e.g. why electrons don't spontaneously change into photons) appear mysterious. I am, however, willing to concede what I think is the main point, namely that physics cannot explain physics. The dispute is really about whether it makes sense to look for a "deeper" explanation, and whether the God hypothesis can provide it.

Swinburne now argues that the God hypothesis makes the existence of a universe of the kind we live in likely. If God exists he can create any kind of universe (or not), and clearly (according to Swinburne) it is a good thing to create a universe with humans. Hence God will do it. Several objections can be raised against this.

First of all, note that the state of nothing that Swinburne regards as the most natural state of affairs also implies there being no God. Thus, he has not provided a full answer to the question of why there is something rather than nothing. He has merely said that if we start out with God instead of nothing, we should also expect to find that there is a universe. But why God instead of nothing? Swinburne to his credit does not think that the existence of God is logically necessary. But he thinks God is a necessary being in the sense that he does not depend on anything else for his existence. Nothing can cause him to exist or cease to exist. There is a conservation law for deities. This, however, can at best explain why God, if he exists, is eternal. As long as the statement "There is no God" does not entail a logical contradiction, God's existence still needs an explanation unless you postulate it as a brute fact. And if you do allow that, why is it wrong to postulate the existence of a universe as a brute fact? Given the obscurity of the notion of God, and the relative simplicity of the universe in the first stages of the Big Bang, it is not obvious that theism is more intellectually satisfying than materialism.

Another objection is that it is not obvious why God should create just the kind of universe we find ourselves to be living in. Being omnipotent God can create any kind of universe allowed by the rules of logic. Swinburne is aware of this, but says that there are some classes of universe that God will prefer. For example, he will prefer universes with conscious beings capable of choosing freely between good and evil to lifeless universes. But within the preferred class God can pick and choose as he pleases. The only problem, at least as I see it, is that Swinburne has deprived his God of desires. This makes it hard to see how God can be driven to choose at all between two objectively equally good alternatives. If God has no personal whims, then what can possibly move him to pick one alternative above another? This is a recurring problem in Swinburne's book. He seems to underestimate the role played by desires in making us act. Obviously he thinks God is very different from humans, but we are the only personal beings we have any experience with, and this experience is our only guide when assessing Swinburne's arguments. Swinburne seems to think that if universe A is better than nothing, then that fact alone is enough to make God create universe A. But if I ask why this is so, the answer has to be that either this is because God desires the good (so he has desires after all) or because there is a sense in which universe A is objectively good compared to nothing and a mechanism (not only a rule, because rules can be disobeyed) that forces God to choose the objectively good. If the latter is the case, then surely God is limited by more than the laws of logic.

Swinburne makes an excursion into the fine-tuning argument, but since I have written at length about this earlier I will just note that his version of it suffers from the same weaknesses as any other and refer to the article I co-authored with Steve Zara for details.

Towards the end of the chapter there is a discussion of the Hawking-Hartle "No Boundary Proposal" for the initial conditions of the universe. Swinburne's discussion is based on Hawking's popular exposition of the model in "A brief history of time", and sadly it seems that Swinburne has misunderstood it completely as he seems to think that Hawking suggests that time is cyclical. This is not what the proposal suggests at all. What it does say is that when you take quantum mechanics into account, you can get a universe much like ours spontaneously appearing from a state with no space, time or matter. Furthermore, you can construct a model where the universe has a finite past but no beginning in time. Again Swinburne shows that his understanding of physics is seriously lacking.

Swinburne closes the chapter as follows:

Note that I am not postulating a "God of the gaps", a god merely to explain the things which science has not yet explained. I am postulating a God to explain what science explains; I do not deny that science explains, but I postulate God to explain why science explains. The very success of science in showing us how deeply orderly the natural world is provides strong grounds for believing that there is an even deeper cause of that order.

I beg to differ. Swinburne doesn't even bother to look for a gap. He just postulates that there is one. In spite of the fact that there has not been a single moment in time when the universe did not exist, Swinburne thinks that this state of affairs is somehow unnatural. Apparently it is much more natural that a non-physical personal being with infinite powers exists, and that this person without any comprehensible motives creates the universe we find ourselves living in. Swinburne concludes that the existence of God makes the existence of our universe probably. Apart from all the other objections I find that on his definition of God it is without extra assumptions impossible to estimate the probability of God doing anything at all.

Parting shot, part 3

In chapter 2 of "Is there a God?" Swinburne laid out his view on explanations. One of the criteria a good explanation had to satisfy was that of simplicity. Chapter 3 is called "The simplicity of God", and the aim is stated clearly on page 41:

The thesis of this book is that theism provides by far the simplest explanation of all phenomena. Materialism is not, I shall argue, a simple hypothesis, and there is a range of phenomena which it is most unlikely ever to be able to explain .

What are Swinburne's reasons for saying that materialism is not a simple hypothesis? As far as I can understand him, materialism is complex because (1) there a lot of particles in the universe and (2) it is a mystery why their properties don't change with time and why, say, a lot of particles happen to have the same properties.

It is hard to know what to say about this view except that it is a load of tosh. In modern physics, particles are just different states of objects we call fields. For example, the theory of electromagnetism has an electron field and a photon field. States with different numbers of electrons and photons correspond to different excited states of these fields. The fact that two electrons have the same properties are just a consequence of the mathematical properties of the theory. That, say, the charge of an electron stays the same throughout time is again just a consequence of the theory, more specifically its invariance under a certain class of symmetry transformations.

All the particles in the universe are states of just a handful of fields. Their properties and whatever conservation laws constrain them follow from a few basic symmetry principles. Particle theorists are working towards even simpler explanations involving fewer fields. But even with what we know now I see no reason to consider materialism a complex hypothesis.

What are Swinburne's reasons for calling theism a simple hypothesis? Here we go:

Theism claims that every other object which exists is caused to exist and kept in existence by just one substance, God. And it claims that every property which every substance has is due to God causing it or permitting it to exist. It is a hallmark of a simple explanation to postulate few causes. There could in this respect be no simpler explanation than one which postulated only one cause. Theism is simpler than polytheism. And theism postulates for its one cause, a person, infinite degrees of those properties which are essential to persons - infinite power (God can do anything logically possible), infinite knowledge (God knows everything logically possible to know), and infinite freedom (no external cause influences which purposes God forms: God acts only in so far as he sees reason for acting.) The hypothesis that there is an infinitely powerful, knowledgeable and free person is the hypothesis that there is a person with zero limits (apart from those of logic) to his power, knowledge, and freedom. Scientists have always seen postulating infinite degrees of some quantity as simpler than postulating some very large finite degree of that quantity, and have always done the former when it predicted observations equally well.

The main problem here is one of the points Richard Dawkins makes in his "Ultimate Boeng 747" argument: we have no reason to think that intelligence is associated with simplicity. Consciousness appeared late in the history of the universe as the temporary (and accidental) result of a long process of gradual evolution from the simple towards the complex. I have never seen Swinburne, or any other theist for that matter, explain how you can have thoughts without a brain, working software without any hardware to run it on. I feel entirely justified in refusing Swinburne to just define the problem away.

I won't allow his analogy between science and theism either. True, sometimes physical theories are simplified by assuming some quantity (or, more often, some ratio of quantities) is infinite. For example, when deriving Kepler's laws from Newton's laws, we sometimes simplify the calculations by assuming that the Sun is infinitely more massive than the planets. This means that the planetary masses drop out of some of the equations (it is, however, straightforward to do the calculation without this assumption). The point is, we know that this is an approximation made in order to simplify the calculation. No physical theory can make explicit reference to infinite quantities. And whenever a calculation gives an infinite result it is taken as a bad sign.

Swinburne tries to make the idea the infinity equals simplicity seem more plausible by arguing that it is the same as postulating zero limits. For example, God's infinite power is the same as there being no limit to his power. Again, I don't see how that makes theism simple. He gives the photon rest mass as an example: scientists have preferred to postulate that the photon as zero rest mass rather than a very small, non-zero rest mass. But this example will not do. We have a reason for taking the photon rest mass to be zero, because the symmetries that underly the theory of electromagnetism demand that it should be so. In fact, whenever a particle rest mass is found to be zero, we have found that there is a reason for it in the form of a symmetry principle.

So I conclude that Swinburne has given no good reasons to think that materialism is a complex hypothesis, and no good reasons to think that theism is a simple one.

Parting shot, part 2

I continue blogging my way through Swinburne's "Is there a God?". In my previous post I looked at the first chapter where he tries to define what he means by "God", and concluded that I had problems with his definition.

Chapter 2 deals with explanations: what kinds of explanation are there, and what does it take for an explanation to be considered good. Swinburne talks about two types of explanation:

Here we have two kinds of explanation. The first, in terms of powers and liabilities, is inanimate explanation. The second, in terms of powers, beliefs, and purposes, is intentional,...

I don't have any immediate objections to this, except to note for future reference that one has to be careful about when it is appropriate to invoke personal explanations. We can only reasonably appeal to them in cases where experience leads us to expect that intention and purpose are involved. And even then we may be wrong. If I come home and find the kitchen window shattered and a stone lying on the floor, I might easily explain this as the result of someone intentionally throwing a stone at the window in order to break it. This is, sadly, the sort of result one can expect from the work of personal agents in my neighbourhood. But another possibility is that a powerful storm passed and blew the stone through my window. In my opinion the kind of personal explanation that Swinburne wants to invoke only makes sense when we have good reasons to think that there are intentions behind the phenomenon to be explained. One then runs a huge risk of begging the question, and I think Swinburne does just that when he later on says that the explanation for why there is a universe can only be a personal one.

Swinburne lays down four criteria for what constitutes a good explanation. It should
1) lead us to expect the observations to be explained
2) be simple
3) fit in with our background knowledge
4) be better than rival explanations

He then argues that it is not a requirement that an explanation should make predictions of new phenomena that are later verified. The important thing is that it explains whatever observations we have. It is obvious why he does that: he has no intention of making any predictions from his God hypothesis.

I have reservations on this point. In science we do not in general trust a model solely because it explains the observations available at the time it was constructed. It is far too easy to come up with models that can do that. It has to make predictions about what we should expect to find in later observations, and these predictions need to be correct. Swinburne's point is that in many cases the data are of a historical character, so that it is not possible to make experiments. But we never have a complete set of observations. For example, even though the fossil record is laid down in stone, so to speak, new ones are found all the time. And evolution by natural selection makes predictions about what we should expect to find. The fact that these predictions have been confirmed strengthens our belief in the theory. The only statements Swinburne can derive from the God hypothesis that come close to what can be called predictions concern events that take place after we die.

On the final page of the chapter, Swinburne says the following:

Just as we may need to postulate unobservable planets and atoms to explain phenomena, so we may need to postulate non-embodied persons if such an explanation of the phenomena satisfies the four criteria better.

This is the core of his strategy. He looks for phenomena that, he claims, science cannot explain and where he can boldly state that only a personal explanation will do. And if a non-embodied person can serve as an explanation, then he is justified in believing that such a thing can exist, despite the fact that he has given us no explanation of how non-embodied persons can think, feel or act.

Parting shot, part 1

During the last year I have spent quite a lot of my time reading books devoted to arguments for and against the existence of a deity. It has been interesting, but I have now reached a point when I feel I have had enough. There are still a few books on my shelf that I haven't opened yet, but I have decided to postpone reading them. I want to spend more time reading, doing and writing about science. But before I bid the subject temporarily farewell I want to blog my way through two of Richard Swinburne's books: "Is there a God" and "Was Jesus God?". The first one deals with theism in general, the second with Christianity. They are basically popularised versions of his more technical books. It may not be entirely fair to focus on the watered-down version of his work, but I have also read both "The coherence of theism" and "The existence of God", and as far as I can tell there isn't anything in them that can save his project from the shortcomings of the popularized versions.

The first chapter of "Is there a God", the topic of this post, deals with how God is to be defined. It is basically "The coherence of theism" boiled down to one chapter. Swinburne says

Theism claims that God is a personal being - that is, in some sense a person. By a person
I mean an individual with basic powers (to act intentionally), purposes, and beliefs.

I see a potential problem already at this stage. If Swinburne's deity were a material being, fine. But he soon makes clear that this is not the case. God is not made of matter, has no parts, no spatial location, and no volume. Does our experience indicate that a person without these properties can exist? He is basically saying that God is a mind without a body. So his claim is not only that the mind is separate from the brain, but that it also can exist without a brain. Nothing in our experience suggests that this is likely. Even if I were to grant that there is some strange mind-stuff floating around in my body, as far as I know it did not exist before my body existed. Swinburne needs to provide a model for how there can be minds without brains, and as far as I can see he hasn't done this anywhere in his writings.

He then goes on to add properties to his deity. One of them is omnipotence, and he takes the standard qualification that this does not entail being able to perform logically inconsistent tasks like creating a round square. Fair enough.

God also knows everything that it is logically possible for him to know, and hence he is omniscient. Here again there is a qualification: God cannot know in advance what humans freely choose to do. If we are to have the kind of free will Swinburne thinks we have, then God cannot know what we are going to choose before we have chosen. The question of what it means to have free will and whether we have it is not a topic I wish to get stuck on here, so I will accept the definition and move on.

According to Swinburne, God is also perfectly free. And here things get a bit interesting.
Human beings have limited free will. But God is supposed to be not thus limited. He is perfectly free, in that desires never exert causal influence on him at all. Not merely, being omnipotent, can he do whatever he chooses, but he is perfectly free in making his choices.

I find this confusing. Having desires seems to me to be an important part of being a person. Did God not desire to create a universe? If he can choose between actualizing a good state A and a bad state B, does he not desire to arrange things so that A occurs? In addition to swallowing the possibility of a non-physical mind, we are also asked to accept that this mind has no desires. It would take a lot of argumentation to convince me that such a thing would constitute a personal being.

From these three properties, omniscience, omnipotence, perfect freedom, Swinburne goes on to deduce further properties of his deity. One of them is that he is the creator and sustainer of the universe, since being omnipotent creating universes is one of the things he can do, and being perfectly free he could have chosen not to create or can choose to destroy the universe after it is created. Swinburne's argument here is of relevance for his discussion in later chapter of the evidence for God, so I will postpone discussion of it.

God is also perfectly good. Swinburne says that this follows from perfect freedom and omniscience, because a perfectly free person will always choose the overall best course of action, and an omniscient person will always knows what is to the overall best. It strikes me as odd that Swinburne also thinks the absence of desires in the deity is essential to his perfect goodness:

But a person free from desires who formed his purposes solely on the basis of rational considerations would inevitably do the action which he believed (overall) the best one to do, or (if there is not, the person believes, a best action, but a number of equal best actions) one of the equal best actions.

This is just plain weird. God does not desire to do good things? Isn't desiring the good part of being good? Isn't desiring a certain outcome often the motivation for doing anything at all? This being reminds me of dr. Watson's outburst to Sherlock Holmes: "You are like a machine!" Maybe God does what it is good simply because it is somehow rational. But isn't that because he wants to be rational? Perhaps he cannot be anything but rational. But again, he then seems more like a machine than a person.

Central to this argument is Swinburne's take on ethics. He thinks there are absolute moral truths, but that they (or at least most of them) exist independently of God. I certainly agree that morality needs no divine grounding, but I find it hard to understand what it could possibly mean to say that there are absolute moral truths if one by that means that they can be arrived at purely by logical reasoning. Ethics is based on the fact that we have desires and emotions. We prefer one state of affairs to another. If God has no desires, he can't possibly be a moral agent.

There are, however, some moral obligations that Swinburne thinks follow from the existence of God. One is that we ought to worship God:

God is a generous benefactor. One of the most fundamental human obligations (i.e. duties) is (within limits) to please our major benefactors - to do in return for them some small favour which they request in return for the great things they have given us. If theism is true, God is by far our greatest benefactor, for all our other benefactors depend for their ability to benefit us on God's sustaining power. We owe God a lot. Hence (within limits), if God tells us to do certain things, it becomes our duty to do them. Just as (within narrow limits) it becomes our duty to do certain things if our parents (when we are children) tell us to do them, or the state tells us to do them, or the state tells us to do them, so (within wider limits) it becomes our duty to do things if God tells us to do them. For example, it would not be a duty to worship God especially on Sundays if God did not tell us to do so; but if God tells us to worship him then, it becomes our duty.

I find this not only wrong, but also a sickeningly servile. I agree that we should try to return favours, but there is a difference between returning favours and worshiping. Demanding to be flattered for doing a good deed is not generally considered an endearing quality. If I lend money when you are in a tight spot, I would consider it unethical if you didn't return the favour should you have the opportunity to do so at a later time. But if I demanded that you should bow your head and thank me for the great thing I had done for you every Friday after lunch, then not only would I be considered wicked, but also loopy. And if God hasn't got any desires, he cannot possibly want us to thank and worship him. If we do worship him, it must be just in order to satisfy some kind law that says that this is how it has to be.

Swinburn then goes on to argue that God has the properties above necessarily. All this means is that if a being hasn't got them, he isn't God. I see no point in arguing with that. But then he goes on to saying that God is in some sense a necessary being:

...God's own existence is the only thing whose existence God's action does not explain.. For that there is no explanation. In that sense God is a necessary being, something which exists under its own steam, not dependent on anything else.

This is a different notion of necessary existence than the traditional one found in, e.g., ontological proofs where it is taken to mean logically necessary existence. If God exists, according to Swinburne, his existence is a brute fact. That is all fine and dandy, but then I cannot see why one could not just as well say that the existence of the universe is a brute fact and stop there.

All in all, I cannot see that Swinburne has provided a definition of God that makes sense. Sure, he can write down logically coherent sentences about him, but the concept of a person involved is one we have no experience of, and the probability for such a person to exist is at best undefined. Can a mind exist without a body? We have no reason to think so. Can a person exist and be a moral agent without having desires? I don't think so.

Even though I find Swinburne's definition unsatisfactory I will soldier on and comment on the remaining chapters of the book. His argument will be that with this definition of God, the existence of such a being is the best explanation of several facts about the universe. Crucial to this argument is Swinburne's take on explanations and the distinction between inanimate causation and intentional causation. This will be the subject of my next post.

What the New Atheists have meant to me

A lot of the criticisms of the so-called New Atheists has come from their fellow atheists, and focuses more on tactics than content. As someone who converted from Christian theism to atheisms in the wake of reading books like "The God Delusion" and the debates they ignited, I would like to add my two insignificant cents.

I was brought up in a fairly conservative version of Christianity that focused more on having the right set of beliefs than on the emotional aspects of the faith. I never had any strong religious experiences, and I was never encouraged to seek them either. Most importantly, perhaps, throughout most of my years at school none of my friends were religious, so I got accustomed to the fact that having no faith was just as normal as having one, perhaps even more so. And as soon as I moved away from home and the influence of my parents, I saw more and more clearly that the prejudices I had been brought up with just didn't cut it in the real world. I got to know atheists who were nice, friendly, wonderful people with the highest moral ideals. I had to deal with the fact that my sister chose to train for ministry in the Norwegian church, even though the Bible clearly said that women should keep quiet in church. As a practical guide to life, the version of Christianity I had been brought in was useless.

So as the years went by, I adopted my beliefs. I got to know, thanks to the aforementioned sister, the liberal version of Christianity. This allowed me to make my faith consistent with my ethics, but still required me to retain a certain amount of superstition like a belief in a triune god and the resurrection of Jesus. As the years went by and my understanding of the scientific method improved, I found it increasingly difficult to hang on to those beliefs. At one point, about ten years ago, I came very close to giving up faith altogether. But I had two main problems with that. The first, and the greatest, was the sense of loyalty to my family and a fear of what they would say and do if I told them that I was no longer a Christian. The second problem was a lack of self-confidence: A lot of really smart scientists are religious, and many philosophers and theologians claim to have "advanced" reasons for believing in God and the Christian gospel. As a mediocre physicist with no training in philosophy and theology, who was I to question these people?

The critical time came when I was asked to write an article on cosmology and religion for a Norwegian academic periodical, "Church and Culture". I started reading a few books on the relation between science and religion. In the article I concluded that no strong conclusion could be drawn either way about the existence of deities. I did, however, notice that the religious side of the argument didn't seem to value clarity highly. They saved God by relegating him to regions outside space and time. I couldn't see what that meant, but thought that I was just too stupid to understand.

And now, finally, comes my point. The fact that brilliant people like Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett and Harris treated "advanced" theology with ridicule gave me the confidence to trust my own intellect which told me that they were right. The problem with theology isn't that I am too dumb to understand the reasons why it was true. The problem is that it is a load of rubbish.

Those who complain about the "New Atheists" being strident and shrill are wrong. Dawkins & co are intellectually honest, and I don't think I am the only one who through their work has found the courage to trust their own inner conviction and wake up to reality. A reality which turns out to be much more fantastic when it is not lensed through the goggles of religious faith.