Does God Explain Anything At All? (Part 1)

doctor(logic) says no, God does not explain anything at all. We're going to start exploring that in a fresh way here.

I just re-read the comment thread following the post on "God of the Gaps." I haven't been much involved in that conversation, but essentially that's the position dl has been taking there, in discussion with Holopupenko and SteveK. Drawing on that and much previous experience, I'm going to try to state what dl believes explanation is, and why God doesn't qualify as one.

For just this post, I'm invoking a tight topic limit on our comments. Many may disagree with dl's position, and others may like it. We'll get a chance later to talk about that. This thread is just for finding out for sure what his position his. (I think I've done something like this before, but I'm not sure.) Clarifying questions and comments are in order; criticisms and statements of agreement are not. We need to get to the point where we all agree on what we're talking about, before we actually start the conversation.

I think I can come close to stating his position already, though. First, for doctor(logic), explanation must be more than a restatement of observations. As he wrote,

"Suppose we make some observations. Though I cannot perceive any particular mechanism that predicts these (or future) observations, would it be explanatory to say that "some ultimate theory of nature did it"? Would our observations be explained if I said that 'there is some unknown law of physics (that may well apply only to this one time and place), and that law is what led to the observations we just made'?

"I think you would reject that I have explanations for my observations. This is what I mean by emptiness and triviality of explanation. If you say that there is some unknown agency or law that causes what we observe, whatever we observe, we're just restating our observations, not explaining them. We ought not be content with having given a name to the unknown thing that caused what we see."

This seems fair enough, if I may break the rule I just wrote, of not stating agreement.

Second, explanations must be more than trivial. He has some specific meanings for that. First, the explanation must have some substance to it beyond mere words. For example,

"What if Bob proposed that as-yet-undiscovered laws of biochemical evolution precisely describe the origin of life on Earth (abiogenesis). Not that Bob knows what these laws are, but merely that such laws could explain OOL [origin of life]. By this proposal, has Bob explained OOL?... [Y]ou and I would both agree that such a proposal has no merit as an explanation."

So far, so good. Now, what kind of substance is required? For doctor(logic), one thing that does not qualify is a vague reference to God:

"You need that level of detail or else you're just restating observations. There's a universe because God wanted it. There's Niagara Falls because God wanted it. Pulsar emissions are the way they are because God wanted it. Why do we have love? Because God wanted it. Why was there a Holocaust? Because God wanted it. God wanted it is not an explanation. It's just being used to state what we already know. It never tells us what will happen tomorrow. It never connects pulsars emissions to anything else. God wanted it' never connects the existence of love to the Holocaust. 'God wanted it' is merely a way to make some people feel better about not knowing the answers."

Then what actually is called for? Predictiveness, testable under a material model. Here's one such statement:

"What I am saying is that a mere restatement of observations cannot explain those observations. You have to be able to interpolate or extrapolate from the observations to claim an explanation. If all you can do is draw dots over your existing data points, you're not explaining anything. If that counted as explanation, everything would be trivially explained.  "Consequently, it is not enough to propose some unspecific, unspecified force that allegedly accounts for the observations. If I were to say that my observations were caused by force F which has unmeasurable property P, and F makes no predictions, would F be an explanation of the observations? I don't think so."

I think it's fair to say that dl intends this to mean that predicted observations must be measurable, material phenomena. Now, it's hard for me to understand how this interpolation or extrapolation could happen unless the explanans (the proposed explanation) is also measurable and material. I see extrapolation and interpolation in terms of a graph with x and y axes, and I don't know how that would work if both are not measurable. This position is not something doctor(logic) has expressly committed to, as far as I can recall, so I will leave it as a question, whether that's what he means or not. In fact, I suppose I might be over-interpreting to say that even the predictions must be measurable material phenomena, but I don't think I am.

Testability is crucial in doctor(logic)'s model. He holds this up as an example of an insufficient explanation, just on account of its last clause:

"E2 = Our experimental data set X is caused by God through his power of will, but no future experimental result can be predicted."

Frequently doctor(logic) has said that such predictiveness is necessary for all explanation. There is never any valid explanation without it.

Finally, he sees all explanations that refer to God as vacuous, for God could be invoked to explain anything, and to avoid all further pursuit of explanation:

"If someone wanted to believe that generic god or generic theory of everything were explanatory, that's their choice, but they would then be saying that there's no such thing as the unexplained. Your pizza contains $500 baked into the crust? God somehow arranged for the money to appear in your pizza crust! Explained!! Your iPod never runs out of power? The theory of everything and initial conditions were somehow arranged so that your battery is everlasting! Explained!!

"Not."

In the same comment he explains why he takes this view of explanation:

"I happen to think criteria for explanations ought to:

"1) reflect our intuition that some things are still unexplained (i.e., they should not trivially explain everything),

"2) reflect our intuition that restating observations is distinct from explaining them,

"3) provide a potential way to infer that the explanation is the correct one.

"Prediction achieves these goals because it enables the explanation to say something about observations we have yet to make, and thereby provides an opportunity to infer that we have the correct explanation."

In summary, I think doctor(logic)'s view of explanation is that

⁃ A) An explanation must be more than a restatement of observations

⁃ B) An explanation must have substance beyond mere words

⁃ C) Vague references to God do not qualify under (B)

⁃ D) Predictiveness does qualify

⁃ E) Predictiveness is understood to be in terms of measurable, material results (possibly, correlating to a measurable, material, explanans)

The question for now is whether this is an accurate statement of his position. When we come back to explore how tenable his position is--in light of his own criteria, and others we'll propose--it will be on a new thread.

Part of a Series

• Part 1

• Part 2

• Part 3

• Part 4

Posted: Fri - September 7, 2007 at 03:57 PM |

Thinking Christian by Tom Gilson getCategoryName("<$CategoryUUID$>");

Does God Explain Anything At All? (Part 1)

Thinking Christian by Tom Gilson