srdiamond comments on The Neglected Virtue of Scholarship - Less Wrong

177 Post author: lukeprog 05 January 2011 07:22AM

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Comment author: PhilGoetz 05 January 2011 06:05:11PM *  1 point [-]

In another debate with Bill Craig, atheist Christopher Hitchens gave this objection: "Who designed the Designer? Don’t you run the risk… of asking 'Well, where does that come from? And where does that come from?' and running into an infinite regress?" But this is an elementary misunderstanding in philosophy of science.

I agree that Hitchens should have looked to see what answers theists give to that question. (And he might have; since theists usually respond instead by saying that God is eternal, meaning outside of time and cause and effect, and therefore in no need of having a cause.) But I disagree that there are any more substantive objections to theism. "Who designed the designer?" is the best single knockdown argument against theism.

The question "where did God come from?" is not qualitatively the same as the question "how do you know your observation that a dropped bowling ball falls is correct?" In science, the answer to every "why" is something that is known with more certainty. Entropy decreases as you trace the epistemological/causal chain back up its causes. Theism, by contrast, boils down to the claim that entropy always increases as you trace back the causal chain. A being X must have been created by some being Y with greater entropy (complexity). The scientific epistemological chain converges; the theistic one diverges.

ADDED: This is basically the same as Tim Tyler's comment below.

Comment author: [deleted] 05 January 2011 10:19:16PM *  0 points [-]

I think the logical incoherence of theism is a stronger knock down argument. The most devastating criticism of theism relates not to what caused god but what causes his actions. God is conceived as an all-powerful will, subjecting it to the same simple argument that disposes of libertarian "free will." Either God's conduct is random or determined. But conceiving of god as something other than a will makes god otiose. If god acts randomly, the description is indistinguishable from the universe simply being random; if god is determined that is indistinguishable from the universe is simply determined.

Who created the creator is a good argument, but it isn't decisive. To say god must be more complex than the universe 1) is denied by theists, who call god uniquely simply; and 2) leaves the theist with one (weak) counterargument, inasmuch as it means treating god as a mechanism rather than something that is, well, supernatural. The theist says the causal requirements that govern matter don't apply, and we're unwarranted in generalizing our observations about the material world to the characteristics of god.

Ultimately, you can't avoid getting down to the really basic question: what is this god. If he's not a deterministic entity, what's the alternative to his behavior being random? [Actually, I'm not sure raw randomness is coherent either, but you don't have to take the argument that far.]