Arguing the Affirmative: RANDAL THE CHRISTIAN
Arguing the Negative: JOHN THE ATHEIST
Randal’s Opening Statement
If you spend any time listening to golden oldies radio, you’ve probably heard Tony Orlando’s seventies hit, “Knock Three Times.” The song is sung from the perspective of a lonely fellow who hears a knocking sound on the water pipes in his wall. Most of us, if we hear a knocking sound on our pipes, will probably assume that it is just produced by the changing temperature of hot water running through the pipes. But when this lonely fellow hears the knocking, he concludes that it is produced by the pretty girl living in the apartment below, presumably as some sort of flirtatious Morse code. Emboldened by this belief, the lonely fellow sings back to the girl to knock three times if she’d like him to come down and visit. Gosh, I hope for his sake that it wasn’t just the hot water.
In addition to being a fine introduction to the creepy side of seventies pop music, “Knock Three Times” is also a great way to introduce two kinds of causation much discussed by philosophers:
Event causation: the process in which one event causally contributes to another event.
Agent causation: the process in which an agent undertakes to cause an event and this undertaking does cause that event.[10]
Interestingly, these definitions are sufficiently broad that every event can be explained as the result of one or the other. That is, it was either caused by another event or by an agent. If we heard those pipes knocking, we’d probably conclude that a mere event cause (e.g., hot water) was at play. But our lonely fellow believes that an agent cause (i.e., the pretty girl) created the knock as a way to say hello.
Note the reference to undertaking in the definition of agent causation. This signals a key difference between event and agent causes. If you attribute something to an event, then it begs the question of a prior cause for that event. For example, if you explain the knocking pipes with recourse to the hot water flow, then you require another cause to explain the hot water flow. This may lead you back to the boiler, but then you need yet another cause to explain the boiler’s function, and so on. Agent causes are different since the explanation for their effects is rooted not in the prior event cause but rather in a reason, intention, or desired outcome. Thus agents can act to initiate new events without any prior determining event cause: they can choose to act. And in that sense they act as a sui generis cause.
Given the exhaustive nature of these two explanations, any particular event is the result either of a prior event or an agent. In the same way that we inquire about the cause of particular events in the universe like the knocking of pipes, so we can inquire about that truly stupendous event that happened 13.7 billion years ago when, according to the cosmologists, the universe sprang into existence out of nothing. As we seek causes to explain events in our experience, so we reasonably seek a cause to understand this grandest of all events. But which type of cause is the most plausible?
The prospects of appealing to an event cause to explain the universe’s origin are bleak for the reason already noted: event causes beg the question of prior causes. As a result, if we appeal to an event then we have to explain all the events prior to that event, and this leads to an infinite regress of causes that ultimately explains nothing. In addition, it is wholly ad hoc since we have no experience of infinite causal regresses. Finally, it offers no explanation of what caused this mysterious, infinite, causal series, and thus it is really a pseudo-explanation. This dilemma recalls the father who explains to his son that the earth rests on a turtle (an event cause). Then when his son asks what the turtle rests on, the father replies that it is turtles all the way down. Even if appealing to an infinite series of event causes manages to satisfy the curiosity of a child, it is not adequate as a metaphysical explanation of the universe.
This leaves us with one remaining option: an agent cause who can simply act out of will to bring about a novel event. This is exactly the kind of causation we require to explain the universe, one that is sui generis and thus can avoid the fatal infinite regress. Once we recognize that the only viable causal explanation is an agent, we can inquire about its identity. Not surprisingly, when the event to be explained is the absolute origination of the material universe (the whole shebang) there is only one viable agent cause, and that is God.
John’s Opening Statement
The best answer to the existence of the whole shebang is that we do not know fully—yet. Until science helps us solve this problem, we shouldn’t pretend to know. The ancient Ptolemaic model of the geocentric universe (i.e., solar system) was a complicated monster. What if people in that day simply said we don’t know whether the sun or earth was the center of it all? Before Isaac Newton, what if people simply said we don’t know how objects move? Before Charles Darwin, what if people simply said we don’t know why the various species exist? Before the discovery of plate tectonics, what if people simply said we don’t know why there are earthquakes? Before the rise of modern medicine, what if people simply said we don’t know why people got sick and died? Or before the rise of the mental health profession, what if people said we don’t know why people had bouts of manic depression? Why should these answers not be considered good ones? Compared to the “God did it” answer, they would have been the best answers—as we now know. The onslaught of modern science has solved so many mysteries it makes our heads spin. The God explanation has suffered so many huge hits that it’s surprising anyone continues to tout it at all.
Thomas Aquinas argued that God was the unmoved mover in a series of contemporaneous events stretching hierarchically up some sort of great chain of being. But such an argument is rendered bogus in light of the concept of inertia, which does away with the need to explain motion as requiring either an infinite regress of causes or an unmoved mover. And so it goes for all of the other cosmological and design arguments to the existence of God—something I won’t pursue further here.
Just look at it this way. Christians either argue from the gaps in scientific knowledge or they don’t. If they do, then they are arguing from ignorance (a known, informal fallacy), contrary to the success of science as it closes previous gaps only to uncover more of them. If they don’t, claiming instead that their God is merely the sustainer of creation, then God plus the universe looks indistinguishable from a universe without God at all. In either case it seems apparent that the God explanation is one we can do without as either based on ignorance or in rendering it superfluous.
As modern science advances, it creates an ever-increasing number of new mysteries that scientists are in the process of solving. So faith will probably always find a foothold in mystery. This is the reason why I must show Randal’s faith is impossible before he will ever consider it to be improbable, which is an unreasonable standard. My point is that science, not faith, solved the mysteries of the past, and it is science, not faith, that has opened up the number of new mysteries today. Faith by contrast has no method and solves no mysteries. Like a parasite it survives only as it clings to that which has life. Faith by itself produces nothing and is dead without mysteries.
As far as I can tell, even if there is a god of some kind, he may have only created what Edward Tryon and Stephen Hawking both describe as a “quantum wave fluctuation”[11] and then committed divine suicide afterwards, or died in order to create. Or instead, a god may exist who is guiding the universe ultimately toward an evil purpose but has maliciously chosen to present himself as benevolent to trick us. If such a trickster god exists, then all of the evidence leading Christians to conclude their good God exists was simply planted there to deceive us by that very same God. I can see no reasonable objection to these other god-hypotheses once we allow them into our equations. They are just as possible as what any Christian or Muslim or Jew believes. That’s why scientists cannot posit god explanations for answers to the origin of the universe, for once we allow them into our equations, most any god will do.
So even if there is a God who created the whole shebang, then as far as I can tell there is no reason to believe this god is Randal’s God. Such an entity is therefore an unnecessary hypothesis. It actually gets in the way of solving the mysteries of existence, as history repeatedly shows.
Randal’s Rebuttal
John thinks we should wait for science to explain the universe’s origin. He suggests, for example, that the “concept of inertia” (that is, Newton’s first law of motion) does away with the need for an “unmoved mover” (that is, an agent cause). But this reflects a fundamental failure to understand the problem. The entire universe, including all its energy and matter—Newton’s first law of motion—and even time itself sprang into existence out of nothing 13.7 billion years ago. Science can study the universe once it exists, but it can never explain what brought it into existence. To do that you reason not from a gap of ignorance but rather from the only type of cause known to be capable of producing the observed effect: an agent of great power. If that looks a lot like God, then so be it.
John’s Rebuttal
The only pseudo-explanation is the God explanation, as I explained. Why is this supposed agent exempt from all our experience that everything begins to exist and will cease to exist? And if he can be exempt, then why can’t the universe itself be exempt? To suppose this agent is a spiritual being who was timeless before creation actually makes things worse. When did this agent ever get a chance to choose his or her own nature or learn that which he or she knows? Can we really imagine a being who never learned anything? Can we really imagine a being who cannot think, since doing so means a conclusion has not been reached yet? How did this nonmaterial agent create a material universe out of nothing unless there is some aspect that this agent shares with a material world? How did a timeless being create the universe in time, since the very decision to create it would be simultaneous with the act of creating it? The universe would therefore be an eternal one if he created it at all, and such a being would never be found timeless. Finally, why did he create anything at all, since he neither needs nor wants anything at all?
Randal’s Closing Statement
John never challenged the claim that all events are caused either by a prior event or an agent. Nor did he explain how the universe’s absolute origin could be explained by a prior event. So our choice is clear: explain the universe via the only known type of cause (an agent) to produce the observed effect or invoke mystery and a misbegotten faith in the absolute power of science.
John’s Closing Statement
With Randal’s God explanation there is no reason to investigate why the universe exists, since he says science can’t do this. This is the standard theistic response to the unsolved mysteries of the past. Why keep betting on faith to solve them when it has solved nothing so far?