So you seem to be endorsing a general principle here: for any case of complexity, “God did it” is a terrible explanation.
Well, I think there are counterexamples. Consider this case of complexity: Tomorrow, we wake up and discover that the stars of the Milky Way have been rearranged and increased in brightness so that we can plainly read the text of John 3:16 in the sky, even during the day. What a weird phenomenon! Unsurprisingly, the Christians say “God did it!” Even many religious skeptics are convinced that God did it.

In some sense you are correct, there are counter examples. But in another, you’re cheating, BIG TIME. To be full correct what needed to be said for full accuracy was “God did it is a terrible explanation…based on the data we have available to us at the moment.” But does that really need to be said? Can’t we automatically assume it’s true? I will assert with a high degree of confidence that human beings do not randomly turn into giant insects, despite what happens in Kafka’s “Metamorphosis”. And I think you would agree with such a claim But, what if we woke up tomorrow and witnessed this happening on a regular basis? We’d be forced to change our position wouldn’t we? But once again, this is true for any idea we have of how the world works. All our ideas are based off the information currently available to us. And you are being hypocritical in criticizing Luke for not making this clarifaction while not abiding by this standard yourself. Your counter example starts off with the idea of tomorrow, but what if there is no tomorrow? What if the world ends today, 5 minutes from now. Sure it might seem like there will be a tomorrow based on our current knowledge, but what if there isn’t? And as for waking up, that’s another whole set of assumptions…

You respond: “Nope, sorry, ‘God did it’ is a terrible explanation of any case of complexity, and let me tell you why…”
The problem with offering “God did it” as an explanation is that such an explanation has low plausibility…
Why, in this case, is it not plausible to say God did it? Seems pretty plausible to me. Are you just reporting that it’s implausible to *you*, an atheist? Well why should that worry the rest of us? Why think that a good explanation must be plausible to those who disbelieve in the entities postulated by the explanation? That’s an unreasonably high standard for explanations!

“Why, in this case, is it not plausible to say God did it? Seems pretty plausible to me. Are you just reporting that it’s implausible to *you*, an atheist? Well why should that worry the rest of us? Why think that a good explanation must be plausible to those who disbelieve in the entities postulated by the explanation? That’s an unreasonably high standard for explanations!”

-I’d say that it’s currently an implausible explanation, due to lack of any supporting evidence. This puts in on equal footing with any other explanation that could possibly be proposed for how the universe began. Sure, it could be right, but so could any arbitrary explanation I could propose.

“…is not testable…
Why does it have to be testable to be a good explanation? I’m more convinced that, in this case, “God did it” would be a good explanation than I am that good explanations must be testable. And in a very broad sense of possibility, this explanation is testABLE: we could ask God if he did it, and he could say ‘yes’ or ‘no’. That’s a test for the truth of the explanation. So, in that sense of “testable,” this explanation is testable. Why do you think “God did it” isn’t testable? And why do you think that’s important?”

-In the case of your counter example, God did it would be an explanation to consider. But what you’re proposing is an event unlike anything we’ve ever observed that would force us to fundamentally rethink everything we thought we knew about how the universe worked. But I could propose a similar event for any other idea that currently has no real evidence to support it. The point of testability is that it should ultimately let us determine if an explanation is true or false. And “God did it” is currently untestable. Is it really that surprising that an explanation without supporting evidence that can’t be tested is being called terrible? What term would you use to refer to it?

“…has poor consistency with background knowledge…
This seems pretty question-begging. I think “God did it” coheres quite well with *my* background knowledge, and the background knowledge of billions of other theists around the world and throughout history. Do you just mean to report why *atheists* won’t like “God did it” as an explanation? Again, why think that a good explanation has to cohere with the background knowledge of people who disbelieve in the entities postulated by the explanation? That’s an unreasonably high standard for explanations.”

-I think there are different definitions of background knowledge at work here. I’d be willing to assert that “God did it” as an explanation for the existence of the universe isn’t supported by any data we’ve obtained while studying the origins of the universe. We have certain information available to us, we want an explanation based on this information that is suggested by our data and does a good job of explaining it. I don’t think that’s unreasonable.

“…comes from a tradition (supernaturalism) with extreme explanatory failure…
I have three worries about this: first, why think that this explanation has to “come from” any tradition at all? And what does it mean for an explanation to “come from” a tradition? When I see the hairdryer out and say “My wife did it,” did that explanation “come from” some tradition? Which one? If the wifediddit explanations don’t come from a tradition, why think Godiddit explanations must come from a tradition?
Second, it looks like we’ll have a generality problem here. How does one determine which tradition an explanation comes from? If we say that “God did it” comes from supernaturalism (a very general, broad tradition), then perhaps we’ll run into many problems (we can grant that there have been a lot of failed supernatural explanations in the past). But if we say “God did it” comes from Lutheran Protestantism Christianity (a more specific, narrow tradition), we’ll run into fewer problems (though the Lutherans may have offered some failed explanations in the past, surely they’ve offered fewer than all the supernaturalists in the past). And if we say “God did it” comes from the tradition of scientifically informed theists (a super specific tradition), we’ll run into very few problems, if any. So even if we grant that explanations must “come from” a tradition, why should the theist accept that his explanation “comes from” the problematic general tradition, rather than the unproblematic specific tradition?”

-I think the worry here is mainly that “God did it” for the birth of the universe is simply another “God of the gaps” argument the likes of which has been seen time and time again throughout history. This isn’t a reason to automatically reject this explanation, but I’d say that it’s a strong hint that we should poke around for quite a while in search of a non-supernatural explanation before we begin to consider supernatural ones.

“Third, the history of naturalism itself is littered with explanatory failure. Read Lucretius’ De Rerum Naturae: completely naturalistic, and completely wrong. Read Aristotle’s naturalistic explanations of the natural world: he was really wrong very often. Ptolemy was wrong. Newton was wrong. Either special relativity or quantum mechanics is wrong, since they contradict. The entire history of science is a history of overturning wrong explanations. That overwhelming history of failure has even moved some people to be very skeptical of our current favored explanations! In any event, naturalists have been wrong at least as often as they’ve been right, throughout history. So if theistic explanations are in trouble because of their track record, so are naturalistic explanations! And even more so, from the perspective of a theist. I think theistic explanations have been right way more often than you do, and I think naturalistic explanations have been wrong way more often than you do. So the question of which has a better track record is really controversial, and it seems pretty question-begging to assert that theistic explanations have a worse track record. I’d think you’d actually need to prove that.”

-You are correct in that natural explanations have often been shown to to be wrong, that’s the real reason we require testability. Without it we can’t separate wrong ideas from right ones. With “God did it” there’s really no way to approach the question of whether this is a correct explanation or not. That’s why naturalistic explanations have always managed to eventually get it right in the past despite numerous failures. And if no data points to it, and we can’t test it, why should we even consider it?

“…lacks simplicity…
Why think that “God did it” lacks simplicity? How could any explanation be *more* simple, especially in the star-spelling-John-3:16 situation as I described it?”

-Well it introduces the concept of God which itself is very complex without really providing any information on what is going on.

“…offers no predictive novelty…
I’m not super-sure what this means, but I doubt it’s necessary for a good explanation. I guess it means something like “issues new predictions.” I see the hairdryer out again. I posit this explanation: “My wife did it.” Seems like a really good explanation to me. But does it “offer predictive novelty”? If not, then offering predictive novelty isn’t necessary for a good explanation. If so, what are the novel predictions, and why couldn’t “God did it” offer the same sort of novel predictions in the star-spelling-John-3:16 case?”

-I’d say that “God did it” does in that case, of course predictive novelty is based on the idea that future data you gather will support your theory, and in this case you’re waiting not on just mere data collection but on an event so fundamentally different from anything that has ever happened that it will cast doubt on much of what we know.

“…and has poor explanatory scope.
I don’t really get this one either. Do you mean that “God did it” doesn’t explain very much? Well, big deal. There are lots of good explanations that don’t explain very much. “My wife did it” explains why there’s a hairdryer out, and not much else. Still, it’s a darn good explanation. If we see John 3:16 written in stars, “God did it” seems like a darn good explanation, even if it doesn’t explain much else.
So, I don’t think you’ve given us much reason to think that “God did it” is a terrible explanation. You haven’t even given much reason to think that it’s not a good explanation! Is this what Dawes was up to, or did he have more to say?”

-”Wife did it” provides a model of how a specific household item moved from one location to another by interaction with living humans. This can be extended to other house hold items and beyond allowing for the creation of a theory on how humans interact with objects. “God did it” really doesn’t tell us anything. We want be able to use our theories to construct nice mathematical models of how certain events transpired. Ok, so lets model the beginning of the universe based on “God did it.” So God did it, and that’s basically as far as we can get, our understanding of what is going on hasn’t really improved.

If a theist claims that the big bang is an insufficient explanation because it does not give causal explanation, then you can demonstrate that, by the same faulty logic, their own God fails to pass the same test.

I would only use this argument to show the failure of the principle objection when made by the theist.

This is the time to illustrate that their argument is a form of special pleading. That it is logically inconsistent, and fails immediately by way of reason, with no need for physical evaluation.

Good article though. I really had to delve deep into what my position is and why. I love that.

Just so you know, I don’t endorse a ‘one less god’ argument. ‘One less god’ is a rhetorical flourish meant to show believers that they know quite well what it is like to disbelieve in gods.

Thanks for the link to your take on the Stephen Henry Roberts’ quote. Your principled objection to epistemic double standards is a bracing and worthy challenge. And, I might add (as you do), that no view is immune, as when belief in God is psychologized or located in the brain without noting the self-referential implications for not believing. I’ll be adding some engagement with your thoughts in my own essay on the “one less god” idea. Regards.

I wasn’t sure if your comment was to anybody in particular, but speaking for myself, I frame the argument in Aristotle’s language which I find convincing. While I don’t want to copy and paste my entire argument here, Koons summarizes it well enough for a blog comment:

Aristotle argues that the First Cause must be a being of “pure act”, a being whose nature it is to be actual. This seems to mean that there is for the First Cause no distinction between potentiality and actuality. The First Cause has no accidents: every property it has, it has essentially. This entails that the First Cause is immutable, since it lacks exactly that feature that explains the changeability of other substances.

You can find more details here, if interested.

Also, re: the quote at the top of my page, see here.

The question “Why is God the best explanation for that” comes in at one or another premise of the argument. For example, Craig’s version of the teleological argument:

1. The fine-tuning of the universe to support life is either due to law, chance or design.
2. It is not due to law or chance.
3. Therefore, the fine-tuning is due to design.

Here, the “Why is design the best explanation?” comes in to cast doubt on premise #2.

In the Kalam argument, this question comes into play on premise 4, which seeks to establish that God is the cause of the universe. Or, here is Craig’s moral argument:

1. If God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist.
2. Objective moral values do exist.
3. Therefore, God exists.

Here, our best explanation question comes into play on premise 1.

(I use Craig’s versions because they are short and syllogistic.)

That being said, I think your shorthand use of “God did it” as the supposed conclusion of the arguments of natural theology is an unfortunate mischaracterization, especially considering the question at hand of appropriate explanation. These arguments, when carefully articulated, are indeed closely analogous to the forms of reasoning in theoretical physics: because of e, some entity x must exist with property p; we’ll give it the name y. The unseen postulate in such an argument is ascribed only the property or properties implicated by e, say a charge of -1. Likewise, as far as the argument goes, the careful theist will be content with stipulating only the properties that follow. That is why we have all those terms of art like “an uncaused cause”, “an unmoved mover”, “a designer”, “a necessary being”, etc.

If the theist has been appropriately modest in their conclusion, the question that you suggest should be asked instead — “Why is God the best explanation for that?” — will be answered by a return to the argument to see if it is valid. For, in that case, “God” is just y, the name he gave for x with property p, and the argument is supposed to have shown that such an entity must exist to explain e. “God” is a freighted term, and I don’t mean to deny that calling y “God” is bound to conjure up more than the argument is purported to demonstrate. But at least in academic philosophy of religion, I find that as a rule, care is taken to proscribe the entailments of a given argument. (Of course, if it needs to be said, if x is taken to be the God of Abraham, additional legwork will be required.)

By the way, if the slaughterhouse is still open, it may be time to give your tagline from Roberts another look (bit.ly/aIAtRG). Luke, you are a much appreciated voice in the conversation about ultimate reality from both sides of the aisle. No small feat. Thanks, and keep up the good work.

To me,the key word in this sentence is “new”.
God is not a new question or a new puzzle to the question of complexity in the world. It’s the same question.

Hermes: As such, I refer back to the first law of thermodynamics.

Specifically, how does your comment “That which is eternal requires no cause, by definition.” not apply to both your preferred deity and the universe?

* If it does not apply to either, then I’m happy to drop it just on your assurance you that you swear not to argue that it applies to your deity again.

* If it does apply to your deity only, I’m still waiting for you to say *how*.

* If it applies to both, then I’d also like to know that is your position as well.

cl: Yet, keen readers will note that who introduced the term was never an issue which makes Hermes’ response a non-sequitur. In addition, earlier in the thread in commenter Paul’s hypothetical discussion – exactly as I allege – the reader will find,

Exactly, a keen reader will indeed note things like the actual order of the quotes cited in each of our examples. That you made an issue of “eternal”, though, and did it first does indeed make it an issue. If not, why bring it up later on? Why not ignore it like a bad dream? Seems cluttered and inefficient if you didn’t mean it in each instance.

What Would E.B. White Do?

I will leave it to those keen readers to judge for themselves. All 5 (3?) of the remaining stalwarts at this point.

My question to you cl is this: Are you coming here with your A game? I’ll state right up front that I’m not. You have ~maybe~ 80% of my attention and quite a bit less of my care, yet I’m not someone who considers his livelihood to be writing. It’s good that you do have that profession, and I am not knocking it. Yet, it’s not mine. Because of that, I could be somewhat forgiven for making goofs (like the “you cut lopped off” mistake I made earlier). Order and attribution, though, seem like big errors unlike redundant extra words.

For the keen readers, I leave the following;

Cl’s comment: “eternal requires no cause” appears about 75 lines before Paul’s “I don’t quite understand how God is eternal vs the material is eternal is a better explanation”. No hand waving required.

Am I missing something?

(FWIW, I ignore E.B. White on a constant basis. It’s easy, though, he’s dead. Consistently so.)

cl: Without potency, it would seem this universe couldn’t “iterate itself” into the next.

Hermes: Why do you need it to?  

What? Silence? Hmmm…

If, however, the point about the free-energy efficiency of the universe is relevant to the debate in any way, it falls to you to explain how. (Polymeron, to cl)

Then,

In his hypothetical exchange back up in the thread, commenter Paul asked why the universe couldn’t be eternal. (cl, to Polymeron)

Then,

No, he didn’t. Talk about ‘eternal’ was your addition, not his. (Hermes, to cl)

Yet, keen readers will note that who introduced the term was never an issue which makes Hermes’ response a non-sequitur. In addition, earlier in the thread in commenter Paul’s hypothetical discussion – exactly as I allege – the reader will find,

ATHEIST: Hey Theist so we know that matter can neither be created nor destroyed. We know that approx 15 billion years ago this universe came to be from a point singularity. Do you have any reason to think that the matter contained within this incredibly dense and hot point singularity has not existed eternally? We know matter exists, so I don’t quite understand how God is eternal vs the material is eternal is a better explanation” (Paul, to cl, ital. mine)

So yes, he did, and it’s all right there in the thread for anyone to see.

cl: In his hypothetical exchange back up in the thread, commenter Paul asked why the universe couldn’t be eternal.

No, he didn’t. Talk about ‘eternal’ was your addition, not his. In response to his long fictional conversation, you cut lopped off the end and made this comment;

cl: God is eternal. I know certain atheists view this as a cop-out, but it’s really not. That which is eternal requires no cause, by definition. Overly simplistic, I admit, but sometimes it’s better to keep these things simple.

As such, I refer back to the first law of thermodynamics.

cl: Without potency, it would seem this universe couldn’t “iterate itself” into the next.

Why do you need it to?

In his hypothetical exchange back up in the thread, commenter Paul asked why the universe couldn’t be eternal. Though technically we could suppose it can, “why can’t the universe be eternal” is a poor counter for the reasons I went into. Without potency, it would seem this universe couldn’t “iterate itself” into the next.

cl: Some posit matter, energy, space and time as an eternal series of iterations, but it would seem to me that a dead universe lacks potency.

Why? Better yet, *how* does it ‘lack potency’ and more important *how* is that ‘lack of potency’ relevant in describing and understanding reality as it actually is? (Within the scope of the universe definition agreed on before.)

If, however, the point about the free-energy efficiency of the universe is relevant to the debate in any way, it falls to you to explain how.

That’s why I asked what your preferred model was. Some posit matter, energy, space and time as an eternal series of iterations, but it would seem to me that a dead universe lacks potency. Of course if this universe is actually one of many sparks in a macro-explosion, that wouldn’t seem to be a problem.

Does that make sense?

If your statement is a casual observation, then it can go uncontested and without further comment. We can likewise agree that the universe can be eternal but not orange, or eternal but not smell like lilacs – possibly correct observations that nonetheless have no bearing on the discussion.

If, however, the point about the free-energy efficiency of the universe is relevant to the debate in any way, it falls to you to explain how.

Regards,
Polymeron.

I apologize if I have misinterpreted the assumptions at the base of your argument, but that is because you have not, in fact, laid out your argument yet.

Apology accepted, but note that I was never really making an argument here. I came to the thread, saluted Luke for debunking a bunk atheist objection to a common theist argument, then Hermes took some shots to which I responded, which may have lent the perception of an argument.

As far as my “argument,” it’s really quite simple and I laid it out in a clear, concise language in my last comment:

I’m not saying the fact of the “dying universe” requires a Creator. My original comment was in response to the “why can’t the universe be eternal” counter. I grant atheists and skeptics that the universe can be eternal, but counter that it cannot be eternally efficient.

If you think any of that is unreasonable, I’m open to hearing why.

Thanks.

The Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Religion (2005), Cosmological Arguments, by William Rowe, pp. 107 onwards.

I am in full agreement again, even though I don’t choose patience, and am siding with tactical impatience in this instance.

I am sure you are prepared for the tedium of dragging out each and every assumption. I suspect 3-4 more whoppers framed in the guise of ‘Well, of course I meant that, not the other thing!’. Blindness or an intentional attempt at dragging you down? It could be either.

BTW, parsimonious doesn’t mean ‘I like it more’. You are still left with how.

As for boredom, that was your complaint. I suggest giving into it and letting this one die. Maybe a later draft will make things gel for you?

You know where to find me if you want a better attitude and my full attention. I’ve already spent enough on a soon to be abandoned blog comment thread. That is all. The rest is up to you.