Re: Science and God

I found Keith Ward's argument to be fairly good. He really knows
science and its place in intellectual history -- better than most
scientists.

This is the reason that I argue atheist scientists should take Kant
and Schopenhauer on board. Kant's argument are profoundly destructive
of arguments for God, although he didn't come out as an outright
atheists. Schopenhauer did that for him :-)

So when you see a Christian trying to gain backing from Kant, you know
you have him! If you know your Kant. (Magee's summary of Kant will do
if you can't face the original).

If you know Kants arguments you can easily puncture Christian
arguments that pretend to gain backing from Kant. For instance Kant
hammers Ward's argument into pieces when you ask the Kantian question:
How can a non-physical God have a causal impact on a physical world?
As Kant argued at length, causality only acts in the empirical world
-- to attribute a non-physical origin of causality is nonsense.

Ward wants to put God outside the physical world so he can explain the
fact that we have not observed Him. But then he wants God to be able
to influence the world (otherwise he might as well not exist!) But if
he influenced the world he would be observed to be doing it. So Ward's
argument collapses in the simplistic contradiction at its heart.

Here's his core argument. There are probably other flaws in there. Any
more thoughts on Ward?:

"I shall adopt the rather minimal view that God is a non-physical
being of consciousness and intelligence or wisdom, who creates the
universe for the sake of distinctive values that the universe
generates.

If there is such a God, it follows that a non-physical conscious
intelligence is possible—so a materialist view that all existent
things must be physical, or must have location in space-time and must
be subject to the causal laws of such a space-time, must be false. It
follows that the nature of the universe must be compatible with being
the product of intelligent creation, and must contain states that are
of distinctive value and that could not otherwise exist."

"Some writers have supposed that science rules out any non-physical
beings or forms of causality. Auguste Comte propagated the nineteenth
century idea of a progress of humanity through three states of thought—
religious, metaphysical, and positive or scientific. The final stage
supersedes the others. Thus science renders belief in God obsolete.

But quantum physicists have decisively rejected Comte's philosophical
proposal that human sense-observations provide the ultimate truth
about objective reality. They more nearly vindicate Kant's alternative
proposal that our senses only reveal reality as it appears to us.
Reality in itself is quite different, and is accessible only through
mathematical descriptions that are increasingly removed from
observation or pictorial imagination (how do you picture a probability-
wave in Hilbert space?)."

"It is simply untrue that modern physics rules out the possibility of
non-physical entities. And it is untrue that science has established a
set of inflexible laws so tightly constraining and universally
dominating that they exclude the possibility of other forms, including
perhaps non-physical forms, of causal influence that we may not be
able to measure or predict. It is more accurate to say that
fundamental laws of nature are seen by many physicists as
approximations to an open, holistic and flexible reality, as we
encounter it in relatively isolated and controlled conditions.

An important fact about God is that if God is a non-physical entity
causally influencing the cosmos in non-physical ways, God's mode of
causal influence is most unlikely to be law-governed, measurable,
predictable, or publicly observable. To the extent that the sciences
describe regular, measurable, predictable, controllable, and
repeatable behavior, acts of God will be outside the scientific remit.
But that does not mean they cannot occur.

But this is not a scientific hypothesis. It posits no observationally
confirmable entities, and produces no specific predictions. It is a
philosophical hypothesis about the most adequate overall
interpretation of a very wide set of data, including scientific data,
but also including non-scientific data from history, personal
experience, and morality. And that is the fundamental point. It is not
science that renders belief in God obsolete. It is a strictly
materialist interpretation of the world that renders belief in God
obsolete, and which science is taken by some people to support. But
science is more ambiguous than that, and modern scientific belief in
the intelligibility and mathematical beauty of nature, and in the
ultimately "veiled" nature of objective reality, can reasonably be
taken as suggestive of an underlying cosmic intelligence. To that
extent, science may make a certain sort of belief in God highly
plausible."

Given his background, Ward appears to be the best intellectual canon
the Christians can fire these days. Good, perhaps. But not good
enough.

.

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