Brian Trapp's "'Starglider' on God as Explanation"
Some time ago Brian Trapp took
a look at a great science fiction writer's view of God. I have always
been an Arthur C. Clarke fan, as far back as reading short stories in
Boy's Life
magazine as a pre-teen. I don't think, though, that I've read
The Fountains of
Paradise, the book in which Clarke sets forth
this view. He puts it in the voice of "Starglider," a hyper-intelligent alien
computer:
"2069 June 08 GMT 1537.
Message 6943. Sequence 2. Starglider to
Earth.
"The hypothesis you refer to as God, thought not disprovable by logic alone, is unnecessary for the following reason.
"If you assume that the universe can be quote explained unquote as the creation of an entity known as God, he must obviously be of a higher degree of organization than his product. Thus you have more than doubled the size of the original problem, and have taken the first step on a diverging infinite regress. William of Ockham pointed out as recently as your fourteenth century that entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily. I cannot therefore understand why this debate continues."
Trapp's remarks on this refer back to considerable work he has done in response to a related argument, Richard Dawkins's infamous "747 argument," from The God Delusion. This later portion is especially worthy of note, since it represents a viewpoint not often even brought up for consideration. It's an approach to knowledge that I've been wanting to blog on for a long time, but it's very difficult to compress it into the short form of a blog entry. So I'm going to piggyback on Brian Trapp's work:
"First, forms of WDD like Dawkins' and Clarke's seem to assume that belief in God's existence is only legitimate if it does some necessary explanatory work over the world. I suppose this is right as far as scientific explanations of phenomenon go, but are all beliefs like this? Is no belief rationally acceptable if it fails to come at the end of some sort of abductive argument from known facts? In other words, does God's existence even need an explanation to be accepted as true? I don't think so. One can argue for God's existence on other grounds than explanatory ones, just as one can believe numerous propositions on non-explanatory grounds. I see a boll weevil in front of me. Do I accept the proposition, 'A boll weevil is in front of me,' because that proposition explains some known fact? Not really. My perceptual experience serves as an appropriate foundation for my belief about the boll weevil. In other words, I don't infer that the proposition is true from other facts or premises. My perception occasions the belief, and my belief in the boll weevil is justified."
Trapp is employing an argument Alvin Plantinga set forth in Warranted Christian Belief. It is possible, Plantinga says, that there is such a thing as direct awareness of God; God need not be the conclusion of a set of premises, or even the inductive result of a series of arguments from evidence. Plantinga does not say there is no such evidence, or that one cannot reasonably argue premises toward a conclusion that God exists; but rather that these need not be our only ways or reasons for knowing God.
Trapp continues,
"But it would be inordinately silly to say that a proposition P is rationally unacceptable simply because it fails to provide an explanation over some set S of facts. If we did that, there wouldn't even be a set of facts to explain, because then accepting those facts would be rationally unacceptable unless they explained some other set of facts, which in turn would need to explain some other set of facts, and so on ad infinitum. But any (foundationalist) system of knowledge needs facts that aren't explained by any other facts and that are acceptable a priori. Logical laws are good examples. For many, perhaps the majority, of committed religious believers, belief in God comes not at the end of some chain of inference but through a direct encounter with Him, thus making belief in Him properly basic."
To require every belief to rest on a foundation of other propositions, beliefs, or evidences is a self-defeating undertaking. There must be some basic set of beliefs. Belief in God may be "properly basic," that is, it can be true knowledge, and justified (or warranted) not (only) on the basis of other propositions or evidence, but by direct perception of God.
Now, I certainly expect to hear the objections, "How can we really know that it is true? How can we be sure we are not confusing this impression of God with an especially good pizza-and-beer? How can we distinguish one claim of this sort regarding God from another? For example, what does the traditional Protestant or Catholic Christian say to the Mormon who says their experience of God is confirmed by a "burning in the bosom"? (I may have the wording slightly wrong, but that's approximately what Mormons often say.)
There are several ways one could respond to this. The most important thing is to keep in mind what this argument is for. It's not intended as a proof of the existence of God, or of the superiority of Christianity over other beliefs. The work Plantinga gives it to do is this: to help show that the rationality of believing in Christ does not depend on Christian beliefs being utterly provable through other propositions or evidence.
Plantinga's whole exposition is, as I said, very difficult to condense. In his version it is remarkably clear and lucid. I don't know how he could have accomplished that in fewer words than the book he wrote, and I certainly couldn't do it. Throwing caution to the wind, though, I'm going to open up the topic anyway, regardless of how incomplete this opening must be.
In summary: Christian belief has evidential and philosophical support. Its rationality does not depend on that support, however, for belief in God may be properly basic.
P.S. Parableman Jeremy has also posted recently on a topic related to this; also here and other posts in that series.
"The hypothesis you refer to as God, thought not disprovable by logic alone, is unnecessary for the following reason.
"If you assume that the universe can be quote explained unquote as the creation of an entity known as God, he must obviously be of a higher degree of organization than his product. Thus you have more than doubled the size of the original problem, and have taken the first step on a diverging infinite regress. William of Ockham pointed out as recently as your fourteenth century that entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily. I cannot therefore understand why this debate continues."
Trapp's remarks on this refer back to considerable work he has done in response to a related argument, Richard Dawkins's infamous "747 argument," from The God Delusion. This later portion is especially worthy of note, since it represents a viewpoint not often even brought up for consideration. It's an approach to knowledge that I've been wanting to blog on for a long time, but it's very difficult to compress it into the short form of a blog entry. So I'm going to piggyback on Brian Trapp's work:
"First, forms of WDD like Dawkins' and Clarke's seem to assume that belief in God's existence is only legitimate if it does some necessary explanatory work over the world. I suppose this is right as far as scientific explanations of phenomenon go, but are all beliefs like this? Is no belief rationally acceptable if it fails to come at the end of some sort of abductive argument from known facts? In other words, does God's existence even need an explanation to be accepted as true? I don't think so. One can argue for God's existence on other grounds than explanatory ones, just as one can believe numerous propositions on non-explanatory grounds. I see a boll weevil in front of me. Do I accept the proposition, 'A boll weevil is in front of me,' because that proposition explains some known fact? Not really. My perceptual experience serves as an appropriate foundation for my belief about the boll weevil. In other words, I don't infer that the proposition is true from other facts or premises. My perception occasions the belief, and my belief in the boll weevil is justified."
Trapp is employing an argument Alvin Plantinga set forth in Warranted Christian Belief. It is possible, Plantinga says, that there is such a thing as direct awareness of God; God need not be the conclusion of a set of premises, or even the inductive result of a series of arguments from evidence. Plantinga does not say there is no such evidence, or that one cannot reasonably argue premises toward a conclusion that God exists; but rather that these need not be our only ways or reasons for knowing God.
Trapp continues,
"But it would be inordinately silly to say that a proposition P is rationally unacceptable simply because it fails to provide an explanation over some set S of facts. If we did that, there wouldn't even be a set of facts to explain, because then accepting those facts would be rationally unacceptable unless they explained some other set of facts, which in turn would need to explain some other set of facts, and so on ad infinitum. But any (foundationalist) system of knowledge needs facts that aren't explained by any other facts and that are acceptable a priori. Logical laws are good examples. For many, perhaps the majority, of committed religious believers, belief in God comes not at the end of some chain of inference but through a direct encounter with Him, thus making belief in Him properly basic."
To require every belief to rest on a foundation of other propositions, beliefs, or evidences is a self-defeating undertaking. There must be some basic set of beliefs. Belief in God may be "properly basic," that is, it can be true knowledge, and justified (or warranted) not (only) on the basis of other propositions or evidence, but by direct perception of God.
Now, I certainly expect to hear the objections, "How can we really know that it is true? How can we be sure we are not confusing this impression of God with an especially good pizza-and-beer? How can we distinguish one claim of this sort regarding God from another? For example, what does the traditional Protestant or Catholic Christian say to the Mormon who says their experience of God is confirmed by a "burning in the bosom"? (I may have the wording slightly wrong, but that's approximately what Mormons often say.)
There are several ways one could respond to this. The most important thing is to keep in mind what this argument is for. It's not intended as a proof of the existence of God, or of the superiority of Christianity over other beliefs. The work Plantinga gives it to do is this: to help show that the rationality of believing in Christ does not depend on Christian beliefs being utterly provable through other propositions or evidence.
Plantinga's whole exposition is, as I said, very difficult to condense. In his version it is remarkably clear and lucid. I don't know how he could have accomplished that in fewer words than the book he wrote, and I certainly couldn't do it. Throwing caution to the wind, though, I'm going to open up the topic anyway, regardless of how incomplete this opening must be.
In summary: Christian belief has evidential and philosophical support. Its rationality does not depend on that support, however, for belief in God may be properly basic.
P.S. Parableman Jeremy has also posted recently on a topic related to this; also here and other posts in that series.
Posted: Mon - October 15, 2007 at 12:06 PM |
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Published On: Dec 06, 2007 01:05 PM
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