Argument for Theism

I read an argument for theism in the appendix for Anthony Flew's There is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind.

-I felt it was pretty interesting so hopefully others will too.

The “New Atheism”:
A Critical Appraisal of Dawkins, Dennett,
Wolpert, Harris, and Stenger

Roy Abraham Varghese

At the foundation of the “new atheism” is the belief that there is no God, no eternal and infinite Source of all that exists. This is the key belief that needs to be established in order for most of the other arguments to work. It is my contention here that the “new atheists,” Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Lewis Wolpert, Sam Harris, and Victor Stenger, not only fail to make a case for this belief, but ignore the very phenomena that are particularly relevant to the question of whether God exists.
As I see it, five phenomena are evident in our immediate experience that can only be explained in terms of the existence of God. These are, first, the rationality implicit in all our experience of the physical world; second, life, the capacity to act autonomously; third, consciousness, the ability to be aware; fourth, conceptual thought, the power of articulating and understanding meaningful symbols
such as are embedded in language; and, fifth, the human self, the “center” of consciousness, thought, and action.

Three things should be said about these phenomena and their application to the existence of God. First, we are accustomed to hearing about arguments and proofs for God’s existence. In my view, such arguments are useful in articulating certain fundamental insights, but cannot be regarded as “proofs” whose formal validity determines whether there is a God. Rather, each of the five phenomena adduced here, in their own way, presuppose the existence of an infinite, eternal Mind. God is the condition that underlies all that is self-evident in our experience. Second, as should be obvious from the previous point, we are not talking about probabilities and hypotheses, but about encounters with fundamental realities that cannot be denied without self-contradiction. In other words, we don’t apply probability theorems to certain sets of data, but consider the far more basic question of how it is possible to evaluate data at all. Equally, it is not a matter of deducing God from the existence of certain complex phenomena. Rather, God’s existence is presupposed by all phenomena. Third, atheists,
new and old, have complained that there is no evidence for God’s existence, and some theists have responded that our free will can be preserved only if such evidence is non-coercive. The approach taken here is that we have all the evidence we need in our immediate experience and that only
a deliberate refusal to “look” is responsible for atheism of any variety.
In considering our immediate experience, let us perform a thought experiment. Think for a minute of a marble table in front of you. Do you think that, given a trillion years or infinite time, this table could suddenly or gradually become conscious, aware of its surroundings, aware of its identity the way you are? It is simply inconceivable that this would or could happen. And the same goes for
any kind of matter. Once you understand the nature of matter, of mass-energy, you realize that, by its very nature, it could never become “aware,” never “think,” never say
“I.” But the atheist position is that, at some point in the history of the universe, the impossible and the inconceivable took place. Undifferentiated matter (here we include energy), at some point, became “alive,” then conscious, then conceptually proficient, then an “I.” But returning to our table, we see why this is simply laughable. The table has none of the properties of being conscious and, given
infinite time, it cannot “acquire” such properties. Even if one subscribes to some far-fetched scenario of the origin of life, one would have take leave of one’s senses to suggest that, given certain conditions, a piece of marble could produce concepts. And, at a subatomic level, what holds for the table holds for all the other matter in the universe.

Over the last three hundred years, empirical science has uncovered immeasurably more data about the physical world than could ever have been imagined by our ancestors. This includes a comprehensive understanding of the genetic and neural networks that underlie life, consciousness, thought, and the self. But beyond saying that these four phenomena operate with a physical infrastructure that is better understood than ever before, science cannot say anything about the nature or origin of the phenomena themselves. Although individual scientists have tried to explain them as manifestations of matter, there is no way possible to demonstrate that my understanding of
this sentence is nothing but a specific neural transaction. Granted, there are neural transactions that accompany my thoughts—and modern neuroscience has pinpointed the regions of the brain that support different kinds of mental activity. But to say that a given thought is one specific neural transaction set is as inane as suggesting that the idea of justice is nothing but certain marks of ink on
paper. It is incoherent, then, to suggest that consciousness and thought are simply and solely physical transactions.
Given the limited space here, I present an extremely condensed overview of the five fundamental phenomena that underlie our experience of the world and that cannot be explained within the framework of the “new atheism.” Amore detailed study will be found in my forthcoming book The Missing Link.

RATIONALITY

Dawkins and the others ask, “Who created God?” Now, clearly, theists and atheists can agree on one thing: if anything at all exists, there must be something preceding it that always existed. How did this eternally existing reality come to be? The answer is that it never came to be. It always existed. Take your pick: God or universe. Some- thing always existed. It is precisely at this point that the theme of rationality returns to the forefront. Contrary to the protestations of the atheists, there is a major difference between what theists and atheists claim about that which always exists. Atheists say that the explanation for the universe is simply that it is eternally existing, but we cannot explain how this eternally existing state of affairs came to be. It is inexplicable and has to be accepted as such. Theists, however, are adamant in pointing out that God is something that is not ultimately inexplicable: God’s existence is inexplicable to us, but not to God.
That God’s eternal existence has to have its own inner logic we can see, because there can be rationality in the universe only if it is grounded in ultimate rationality. In other words, such singular facts as our capacity to know and explicate truths, the correlation between the workings of nature and our abstract descriptions of these workings (what physicist Eugene Wigner called the unreasonable
effectiveness of mathematics), and the role of codes (systems of symbols that act in the physical world) such as the genetic and neuronal codes at the most fundamental levels of life manifest by their very being the foundational and all- pervasive nature of rationality. What this inner logic is we
cannot see, although traditional ideas about the nature of God certainly give some hints. For instance, Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann have argued that the divine attribute of absolute simplicity, when fully understood, helps show why God cannot not exist. Alvin Plantinga points out
that God understood as a necessary Being exists in all possible worlds.
Atheists may respond in two ways: the universe might have an inner logic for its existence that we cannot see; and/or we don’t need to believe that there has to be a Being (God) with its own inner logic for existing. On the first point, theists will say there is no such thing as a “universe” that exists beyond the sum total of the things that constitute it, and we know for a fact that none of the things in the universe have any inner logic of unending existence. On the second, theists are simply pointing out that the existence of the rationality that we unmistakably experience—ranging from the laws of nature to our capacity for rational thought—cannot be explained if it does not have an ultimate ground, which can be nothing less than an infinite Mind. “The world is rational,” noted the great mathematician Kurt Gödel.1 The relevance of this rationality is that “the order of the world reflects the order of the supreme mind governing it.”2 The reality of rationality cannot be evaded with any appeal to natural selection. Natural selection presupposes the existence of physical entities that interact according to specific laws and of a code that manages the processes of life. And to talk of natural selection is to assume that there is some logic to what is happening in nature (adaptation) and that we are capable of understanding this logic.
Returning to the earlier example of the marble table, we are saying that the very real rationality that underlies our thinking and that we encounter in our study of a mathematically precise universe could not have been generated by a rock. God is not an ultimate brute fact, but the ulti-
mate Rationality that is embedded in every dimension of being.
A new, albeit implausible, twist to the question of the origin of physical reality is Daniel Dennett’s claim that the universe “creates itself ex nihilo, or at any rate out of some-
thing that is well-nigh indistinguishable from nothing at all.” 3 This idea has been presented most clearly by another new atheist, the physicist Victor Stenger, who presents his own solution to the origins of the universe and the laws of nature in Not by Design: The Origin of the Universe, Has
Science Found God?, The Comprehensible Cosmos, and God: The Failed Hypothesis.

Among other things, Stenger offers a novel critique of the idea of the laws of nature and their supposed implications. In The Comprehensible Cosmos, he holds that these so-called laws are neither handed down from above nor built-in restrictions on the behavior of matter. They are simply restrictions on the way physicists can formulate their mathematical statements about observations. Stenger’s case is built on his interpretation of a key idea in modern physics, that of symmetry. According to most accounts of modern physics, symmetry is any kind of transformation that
leaves the laws of physics that apply to a system unchanged. The idea was initially applied to the differential equations of classical mechanics and electromagnetism and then applied in new ways to special relativity and the problems of quantum mechanics. Stenger gives his readers an overview of this powerful concept, but then proceeds to draw two incoherent conclusions. One is that symmetry principles eliminate the idea of laws of nature, and the other
is that nothing can produce something because “nothing”
is unstable!

Amazingly, Fearful Symmetry, a book by Anthony Zee, a
leading authority on symmetries, uses the very same facts adduced by Stenger to reach a very different conclusion: Symmetries have played an increasingly central role in our understanding of the physical world. . . . Fundamental physicists are sustained by the faith that the ultimate design is suffused with symmetries. Contemporary physics would not have been possible without symmetries to guide us. . . . As physics moves further away from everyday experience and closer to the mind of the Ultimate Designer, our minds are trained away from their familiar moorings. . . . I like to think of an Ultimate Designer defined by Symmetry, a Deus Congruentiae.4 Stenger argues that “nothing” is perfectly symmetrical because there is no absolute position, time, velocity, or acceleration in the void. The response to the question, “Where did the symmetries come from?” he says, is thatthey are exactly the symmetries of the void, because the laws of physics are just what they would be expected to be
if they came from nothing. Stenger’s fundamental fallacy is an old one: it is the error of treating “nothing” as a kind of “something.” Over the centuries, thinkers who have considered the concept of “nothing” have been careful to emphasize the point that “nothing” is not a kind of something. Absolute nothingness means no laws, no vacuums, no fields, no energy, no structures, no physical or mental entities of any kind—and no “symmetries.” It has no properties or potentialities. Absolute nothingness cannot produce something given endless time—in fact, there can be no time in absolute nothingness. What about Stenger’s idea, fundamental to his book God: The Failed Hypothesis, that the emergence of the universe from “nothing” does not violate the principles of physics, because the net energy of the universe is zero? This is an idea first floated by the physicist Edward Tryon, who said he had shown that the net energy of the universe is almost zero and that there is therefore no contradiction in saying that it came to be out of nothing since it is nothing. If you add up the binding (attractive) energy of gravitational attraction, which is negative, and the rest of the whole mass of the universe, which is positive, you get almost zero. No energy, then, would be required to create the universe, and therefore no creator is required.

Regarding this and similar claims, the atheist philosopher J. J. C. Smart points out that the postulation of a universe with zero net energy still doesn’t answer the question of why there should be anything at all. Smart notes that the hypothesis and its modern formulations still assume a structured space-time, the quantum field, and laws of nature.
Consequently, they neither address the question of why anything exists nor confront the question of whether there is an atemporal cause of the space-time universe. It is apparent from this analysis that Stenger leaves two fundamental questions unanswered: Why is there something and not absolute nothingness? And why does the something that exists conform to symmetries or form complex structures?
Zee deploys the same facts of symmetry referred to by Stenger to reach the conclusion that the Mind of the ultimate Designer is the source of symmetry. The laws of nature, in fact, reflect-underlying symmetries in nature. And it is symmetry, not simply the laws of nature, that points to the rationality and intelligibility of the cosmos—a rationality rooted in the Mind of God.
LIFE

The next phenomenon to be considered is life. In view of Tony Flew’s treatment of the matter in this volume, not much more needs to be said here on the question of the origin of life. It should be pointed out, however, that current discussions on the question don’t seem to even be aware of
the key issues. There are four dimensions of living beings. Such beings are agents, goal seekers, and self-replicators, and fourthly, they are semontically driven (their existence depends on the interplay between codes and chemistry). Each and every living being acts or is capable of action. And
each such being is the unified source and center of all its actions. Since these agents are capable of surviving and acting independently, their actions are in some fashion driven by goals (nourishment), and they can reproduce themselves; they are therefore goal-seeking, self-replicating autonomous
agents. Moreover, as Howard H. Pattee points out, you find in living beings the interaction of semiotic processes (rules, codes, languages, information, control) and physical systems (laws, dynamics, energy, forces, matter).
Of the books under study here, only Dawkins’s addresses the question of the origin of life. Wolpert is quite candid on the state of the field: “This is not to say that all the scientific questions relating to evolution have been solved. On the contrary, the origin of life itself, the evolution of the miraculous cell from which all living things evolved, is still poorly understood.”7 Dennett in previous works has simply taken it for granted that some materialist account must be right.
Unfortunately, on even the physico-chemical level, Dawkins’s approach is manifestly inadequate or worse. “But how does life get started?” he asks. “The origin of life was
the chemical event, or series of events, whereby the vital conditions for natural selection first came about. . . . Once the vital ingredient—some kind of genetic molecule—is in place, true Darwinian natural selection can follow.”8 How did this happen? “Scientists invoke the magic of large numbers. . . . The beauty of the anthropic principle is that it tells us, against all intuition, that a chemical model need only predict that life will arise on one planet in a billion, billion to give us a good and entirely satisfying explanation for the presence of life here.” Given this type of reasoning, which is better described as an audacious exercise in superstition, anything we desire should exist somewhere if we just “invoke the magic of large numbers.” Unicorns or the elixir of youth, even if “staggeringly improbable,” are bound to occur “against all intuition.” The only requirement is “a chemical model” that “need only predict” these occurring “on one planet in a billion, billion.”


CONSCIOUSNESS

Fortunately, things are not quite as bad in consciousness studies. There is today a growing awareness of awareness. We are conscious, and conscious that we are conscious. No one can deny this without self-contradiction—although some persist in doing so. The problem becomes insoluble when you realize the nature of neurons. First of all, neurons show no resemblance to our conscious life. Second and more important, their physical properties do not in any way give reason to believe that they can or will produce consciousness. Consciousness is correlated with certain regions of the brain, but when the same systems of neurons are present in the brain stem there is no “production” of consciousness. As a matter of fact, as physicist Gerald Schroeder points out, there is no essential difference in the ultimate physical constituents of a heap of sand and the brain of an Einstein.
Only blind and baseless faith in matter lies behind the claim that certain bits of matter can suddenly “create” a new reality that bears no resemblance to matter.

Although mainstream body-mind studies today acknowledge the reality and consequent mystery of consciousness, Daniel Dennett is one of the few remaining philosophers who continue to evade the obvious. He says that the question of whether something is “really conscious” is not interesting or answerable and affirms that machines can be conscious because we are machines that are conscious!
Functionalism, Dennett’s “explanation” for consciousness, says we should not be concerned with what makes up so-called mental phenomena. Rather, we should be investigating the functions performed by these phenomena. A pain is something that creates an avoidance reaction; a thought is an exercise in problem solving. Neither is to be thought of as a private event taking place in some private place. Ditto with all other supposedly mental phenomena.
Being conscious means performing these functions. Sincethese functions can be replicated by nonliving systems (e.g., a computer solves problems), there is nothing mysterious about “consciousness.” And certainly there’s no reason to go beyond the physical.

But what this account leaves out is the fact that all mental actions are accompanied by conscious states, states in which we are aware of what we are doing. In no way does functionalism explain or claim to explain the state of being conscious, of being aware, of knowing what we are thinking about (computers don’t “know” what they are doing). Still less does it tell us who it is that is conscious, aware, and thinking. Dennett, amusingly, says that the foundation of his philosophy is “third-person absolutism,” which leaves him in the position of affirming, “I
don’t believe in ‘I.’”
Interestingly, some of the strongest critics of Dennett and functionalism are themselves physicists—David Papineau, John Searle, and others. John Searle is especially
sharp: “If you are tempted to functionalism, I believe you do not need refutation, you need help.”10
In contrast to Dennett, Sam Harris has strongly defended the supraphysical reality of consciousness. “The problem, however, is that nothing about a brain, when surveyed as a physical system, declares it to be a bearer of that peculiar, interior dimension that each of us experiences as consciousness in his own case.” The upshot is startling: “Consciousness may be a far more rudimentary phenomenon than are living creatures and their brains. And there appears to be no
obvious way of ruling out such a thesis experimentally.” To his credit, Dawkins acknowledges the reality of both consciousness and language and the problem this poses.
“Neither Steve Pinker nor I can explain human subjective consciousness—what philosophers call qualia,” he said once. “In How the Mind Works Steve elegantly sets out the problem of subjective consciousness, and asks where it comes from and what’s the explanation. Then he’s honest enough to say, ‘Beats the heck out of me.’ That is an honest thing to say, and I echo it. We don’t know. We don’t understand it.”12 Wolpert deliberately avoids the entire issue of consciousness—“I have purposely avoided any discussion of consciousness.”



THOUGHT

Beyond consciousness, there is the phenomenon of thought, of understanding, seeing meaning. Every use of language reveals an order of being that is innately intangible. At the foundation of all of our thinking, communicating, and use of language is a miraculous power. It is the power of noting
differences and similarities and of generalizing and universalizing—what the philosophers call concepts, universals, and the like. It is natural to humans, unique, and simply mystifying. How is it that, from childhood, you can effortlessly think of both your dog Caesar and dogs in general? You can think of redness without thinking of a specific red thing (of course redness does not exist independently, but only in red things). You abstract and distinguish and unify without giving your ability to do these things a second thought. And you even ponder things that have no physical characteristics, such as the idea of liberty or the activity of angels. This power of thinking in concepts is by its very nature something that transcends matter.
If there are those who dispute any of this, consistency demands that they stop talking and thinking. Every time they use language, they are illustrating the all-pervasive role of meaning, concepts, intentions, and reason in our lives. And it is simply unintelligible to talk of intellection having a physical counterpart (there is no organ that performs understanding), although, of course, the data provided by the senses provide some of the raw material utilized by thought. Once you think about it for a few minutes, you will know instantly that the idea that your thought of some- thing is in any sense physical will be seen as unthinkably absurd. Let’s say you are thinking about a picnic you are planning with your family and friends. You think of different possible locations, people you want to invite, items you want to bring, the vehicle you will use, and the like. Is it coherent to suppose that any of these thoughts are in any sense physically constituted?
The point here is that, strictly speaking, your brain does not understand. You understand. Your brain enables you to understand, but not because your thoughts take place in the brain or because “you” cause certain neurons to fire. Rather, your act of understanding that eliminating poverty is a good thing, to take an instance, is a holistic process that is supraphysical in essence (meaning) and physical in execution (words and neurons). The act cannot be split into supraphysical and physical, because it is an indivisible act of an agent that is intrinsically physical and supraphysical. There is a structure to both the physical and the supraphysical, but their integration is so total that it makes no sense to ask if your acts are physical or supraphysical or even a hybrid of the two. They are acts of a person who is inescapably both embodied and “ensouled.”
Many misconceptions about the nature of thought arise from misconceptions about computers. But let’s say we’re dealing with a supercomputer like the Blue Gene, which does over two hundred trillion calculations per second. Our first mistake is to assume that Blue Gene is an “it” like a bacterium or a bumblebee. In the case of the bacterium or the bumblebee we’re dealing with an agent, a center of action that is an organically unified whole, an organism. All its actions are driven by the goals of maintaining itself in existence and replicating. Blue Gene is a bundle of parts that jointly or severally perform functions “implanted” and directed by the creators of the collection.
Second, the bundle of parts does not know what “it” is doing when “it” performs a transaction. Supercomputer calculations and mainframe transactions performed in response to data and instructions are purely and simply a matter of electrical pulses, circuitry, and transistors. The same calculations and transactions performed by a human person, of course, involve the machinery of the brain, but they are performed by a center of consciousness who is conscious of what is going on, understands what is being done, and intentionally performs them. There is no
awareness, understanding, meaning, intention, or personinvolved when the computer performs the same actions, even when the computer has multiple processors operating at superhuman speeds. The output of the computer has “meaning” for us (the weather forecast for tomorrow or your bank balance), but as far as the bundle of parts called the computer is concerned there are binary digits, 0’s and 1’s, that drive certain mechanical activities. To suggest that the computer “understands” what it is doing is like saying that a power line can meditate on the question of free will and determinism, or that the chemicals in a test tube can apply the principle of noncontradiction in solving a
problem, or that a DVD player understands and enjoys the music it plays.


THE SELF

Paradoxically the most important oversight of the new atheists is the most obvious datum of all: themselves. The ultimate supraphysical/physical reality that we know from experience is the experiencer itself, namely, ourselves. Once we acknowledge the fact that there is a first-person perspective, “I,” “me,” “mine,” and the like, we encounter the greatest and yet the most exhilarating mystery of all. I exist. To reverse Descartes, “I am, therefore I think, per-
ceive, intend, mean, interact.” Who is this “I”? “Where” is it? How did it come to be? Your self is obviously not just something physical, just as it is not just something supra- physical. It is an embodied self, an ensouled body; “you” are not in a particular brain cell or in some part of your body. The cells in your body keep changing and yet “you” remain the same. If you study your neurons, you will find that none of them have the property of being an “I.” Of course your body is integral to who you are, but it is a “body” because it constituted as such by the self. To be human is to be
embodied and ensouled.
In a famous passage in his A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume declares, “When I enter most intimately into what I call myself, . . . I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception.” Here Hume denies the existence of a self simply by
arguing that he (meaning “I”!) can’t find “myself.” But what is it that unifies his various experiences, that enables him to be aware of the external world, and that remains the same throughout? Who’s asking these questions? He assumes that “myself ” is an observable state like his thoughts and feelings. But the self is not something that can be thus observed. It is a constant fact of experience and, in fact, the ground of all experience.
Indeed, of all the truths available to us, the self is at the same time the most obvious and unassailable and the most lethal for all forms of physicalism. To begin with, it must be said that a denial of the self cannot even be claimed without contradiction. To the question, “How do I know I exist?” a professor famously replied, “And who’s asking?” The self is what we are and not what we have. It is the “I” from which arises our first-person perspective. We cannot analyze the self, because it is not a mental state that can be observed or described.
The most fundamental reality of which we are all aware, then, is the human self, and an understanding of the self inevitably sheds insights on all the origin questions and
makes sense of reality as a whole. We realize that the self cannot be described, let alone explained, in terms of physics or chemistry: science does not discover the self; the self discovers science. We realize that no account of the history of the universe is coherent if it cannot account for the existence of the self.


THE ORIGIN OF THE SUPRAPHYSICAL

So how did life, consciousness, thought, and the self come to be? The history of the world shows the sudden emergence of these phenomena—life appearing soon after the cooling of planet earth, consciousness mysteriously manifesting itself in the Cambrian explosion, language emerging in
the “symbolic species” without any evolutionary forerunner. The phenomena in question range from code and symbol processing systems and goal-seeking, intention-manifesting agents at one end to subjective awareness, conceptual thought, and the human self at the other. The only coherent way to describe these phenomena is to say that they are different dimensions of being that are supraphysical in one way or another. They are totally integrated with the physical and yet radically “new.” We are not talking here of ghosts in machines, but of agents of different kinds, some that are conscious, others that are both conscious and thinking. In every case there is no vitalism or dualism, but an integration that is total, a holism that incorporates physical and mental.
Although the new atheists have failed to come to grips with either the nature or the source of life, consciousness, thought, and the self, the answer to the question of the origin of the supraphysical seems obvious: the supraphysical can only originate in a supraphysical source. Life, consciousness, mind, and the self can only come from a Source that is living, conscious, and thinking. If we are centers of consciousness and thought who are able to know and love and intend and execute, I cannot see how such centers could come to be from something that is itself incapable of all these activities. Although simple physical processes could create complex physical phenomena, we are not concerned here with the relation of simple and complex, but with the origin of “centers.” It’s simply inconceivable that any material matrix or field can generate agents who think and act. Matter cannot produce conceptions and perceptions. A force field does not plan or think. So at the level of reason and everyday experience, we become immediately aware that the world of living, conscious, thinking beings has to originate in a living Source, a Mind.