I’m coming back to this one last time, because in the course of preparing a talk on a related topic, I stumbled across a clearer way of expressing myself.
Here’s a quick creation questionnaire for you:
- Do you believe in God, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen?
- Do you believe that the claim that God is the maker of heaven and earth, if true, provides a good explanation of the existence, or some of the characteristics, of the world in which we find ourselves?
- Do you believe that this claim provides an explanation of matters that would otherwise be inexplicable – such that this explanatory power constitutes a good reason for believing the claim?
- Do you believe that this claim stands or falls by its explanatory power – such that if it is shown not to have such explanatory power, it follows that it should be rejected?
- Do you believe that the meaning of the claim is constituted by its explanatory power, such that ‘God’ essentially means only what is needed to provide this explanatory power, and anything that follows from it?
I claim that
- these questions are semi-independent (in the sense that each question only arises if the previous question has been answered with a ‘Yes’, but that answering ‘Yes’ to the previous question does not determine the answer to the next question);
- Dawkins’ presentation of his argument is directed against those who give a ‘Yes’ answer to all five questions, though his argument only really relies on a ‘Yes’ to the first four.
I also claim that
- Any remotely orthodox Christian theology must answer ‘Yes’ to the first question
- There are orthodox Christian theologies that answer ‘No’ to both question 2 and question 3, some that answer ‘Yes’ to 2 and ‘No’ to 3, and some that answer ‘Yes’ to both.
- Any remotely orthodox Christian theology must answer ‘No’ to the fourth and fifth questions
If we’re looking for clarity then…
I don’t think we should progress past question #1 without asking – what do you mean by “maker of heaven and earth”?
I don’t think we should progress past question #2 without questioning the hedge “good” in “a good explanation of existence”.
(And sometimes there are differences in responses to questions that are directly addressed to the respondent, compared to questions that concern the beliefs of a third party.)
If there is no sense of explanation whatsoever then what is the claim “maker of heaven and earth” about?
Re: Comment 1
Question 1 simply asks whether there is some sense in which the person asked is happy to affirm that God is creator. If a person answers yes, the remaining questions might then help specify what sense they give to that phrase. Similarly with Question 2: I’m happy for the purpose of this questionnaire to leave the terms vague.
Re: Comment 2
The first thing to say is that answering ‘No’ to questions 4 and 5 is not, I think, the same as saying ‘there is no sense of explanation whatsoever’.
Secondly, if one asks how the language about God as creator made it in to the standard Christian creeds, the historical answer is (roughly speaking) that in the second and third centuries there were debates about the nature of salvation in Christ. To put it simply, the debate was between those who thought that the salvation they experienced in Christ should be understood as rescue from the prison of the natural, material world, and those who saw that salvation as having something to do with the fulfilment, completion and perfection of the natural, material world. When the creeds proclaim belief in a God who created the world and who became incarnate in Jesus Christ, they are in effect going for the second option.
Now, that’s a hastily sketched version of a complex bit of intellectual history – but I hope it shows how the Christian claims about creation might not have had very much to do with explaining features of the natural world, and yet have been bound up with ways in which Christians attempted to make sense of their experience of salvation and some of their deepest convictions about what that salvation meant and how it worked.
The history is covered fairly well in Gerhard May, Creatio ex nihilo; the best book I know on the logic of the Christian theological claim is Kathryn Tanner, God and Creation in Christian Theology.
> Most of the ways in which most Christians talk, think and practice in relation to what they call ‘God’ have, I claim, little to do with ‘explanation’ – certainly little to do with the kinds of explanation that Dawkins is talking about.
http://mikehigton.org.uk/?p=103
I’m trying to understand what ways you think do have to do with ‘explanation’.
“Explanations are stories of causes, and effects and … if successful, have an end. … If, then, God creates the world ex nihilo, out of nothing, God is not the explanation of the world. And, if God is not the explanation of the world, the creating (out of nothing) is not a kind of making.”
[p82-83 “Holiness, Speech and Silence” Nicholas Lash]
Rather than “God is not the explanation…” shouldn’t the conclusion be “God is not a successful explanation…”?
But saying ‘God is not a successful explanation…’ sounds like one is assuming that ‘explaining’ is what someone was trying to do. Why should we assume that?
Mostly, when I have been talking about ‘explanation’, I have had in mind a chain of reasoning that begins with some general fact about the natural world: that life exists, perhaps, or that organisms with the appearance of design exist, or that the world is fitted for human life, or that there exist animals that exhibit moral behaviour, or that the universe appears to be describable in terms of fundamental regularities, or that there exists anything at all. Some chain of reasoning is developed that argues that the only answer we can give to the question, ‘Why is this so?’ is ‘Because God exists’ – and this answer comes in the form of a clear description of what ‘God’ is, and of the mechanism by which God gives rise the observed fact with which we began. In saying that this is ‘the only answer we can give’ one might mean simply that we have found no other answer that works, or it might mean that somehow the nature of the required answer has been deduced from the question, such that it has been shown that any possible answer must have the key characteristics normally attributed to God.
My claim is that this kind of argument is a sideshow. It might be fun, but it doesn’t actually get to the heart of what ‘God’ means and has meant in mainstream Christianity. If you could demonstrate that any and every argument of this form fails, you would not thereby fatally undermine the Christian account of God. This kind of explanatory argument is not prominent in the historical development of Christian thinking about God (until about the seventeenth century), and I claim that it doesn’t actually relate all that closely to the central practices by which Christian faith is practiced and sustained today.
Now, our discussions have touched on two aspects of this argument. On the one hand, there has been the McCabe-and-Lash flavoured aspect, which has said that giving the answer ‘God’ to the question ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’, which initially looks like an explanation in the sense I have set out, actually turns out not to provide an explanation in that sense. And, yes, one might paraphrase part of their conclusion by saying, ‘If one is looking for an explanation (in the sense described), then one will have to admit that this is not a successful one.’ Neither of them wanted to claim that God was an explanation in the first place, however.
Now I find the Lash-McCabe line of argument interesting – but it is not my intellectual home territory. I have tended in the past to be very suspicious of the kind of theological enterprise that begins with questions like ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ I appreciate what McCabe, Lash and others like them show about the strangeness of the question and the strangeness of a theological ‘answer’ – but I still don’t really know what to make of their line of argument over all.
I’m more at home in the other line of argument that we have touched on: the one that says that Christian claims about God are, as it were, key structural elements in a story Christians have ended up telling about the salvation of the world in Christ. I don’t see any way to approach questions about the meaning, plausibility, or justification of Christian claims about God than by asking whether the story that Christians tell is a story that makes coherent, resilient, habitable sense of the world. (Elsewhere I have used the word ‘wordlview’ instead of ‘story. And I’m still very aware that both ways of talking make it sound too static, monolithic, and finished – but I’ll keep using the language temporarily, for the sake of argument.)
The big metaphysical themes – claims about unknowability, about analogy, about causality and the like – are not, as far as I see it, deductions from neutral observations of the natural world. They are deep structures of the story that Christians tell about the world: ways of articulating its deep grammar – the way that the claims made in that story work and relate to one another. The metaphysics and the story are inseparable, and stand and fall together. ‘Unknowability’, for instance, matters not as a curious move in an explanatory argument, that takes away with the left hand what has just been given with the right, turning an explanation into a non-explanation and leaving us no better off than we started. That kind of approach to it is at best a gesture in the direction of a Christian account of God’s unknowability; it is a hint or a suggestion that is not worth a great deal on its own. Rather, one has to start looking at what ‘knowledge of God’ has meant in the Christian tradition, attending to Christian practices of prayer, worship, and discipleship in which God is said to be known, and attending to the reflection on those practices and their implications in Christian theology, and looking at how that knowledge doesn’t seem to work in the ways that ordinary knowledge of a fact works… In other words, it’s a matter of teasing out and commenting on the patterns of Christian language about God.
Of course, there is something a bit like explanation going on. Christians claim that the story that they tell makes good sense of the world – that it is possible to read the world in Christian ways without having to close one’s eyes, stick one’s fingers in one’s ears, and sing loudly when apparent disconfirmations swim into view. If that’s all we mean by explanation – the claim that, as a matter of fact, an individual’s faith stands or falls by whether he or she finds that faith livable in this world – then I’m happy to accept that ‘explanation’ is part of the picture. But only if that is all we mean.
> … ‘explaining’ is what someone was trying to do. Why should we assume that?
Because of their constant talk of cause and purpose and contingency and dependence.
> I have had in mind a chain of reasoning that …
That seems quite specific and narrow – too narrow.
> Christians claim that the story that they tell makes good sense of the world…
That seems more than “a bit” like explain – “make clear or intelligible with detailed information etc.”
> If that’s all we mean by explanation – the claim that, as a matter of fact, an individual’s faith stands or falls by whether he or she finds that faith livable in this world …
No, not whether they individually find that faith livable, but whether, as a matter of fact, “the story that they tell” stands or falls.
Point 1: I don’t really understand your position. You have argued that McCabe and Lash do not provide a successful explanation. They, as you note, cheerfully agree: they say they are not offering a successful explanation. You then say that this is a problem, because they are clearly trying to offer a successful explanation – even though what they offer is not a successful explanation, and they acknowledge that.
Point 2: What is too narrow about it? When you criticise the theological position for not offering a successful explanation, what is it that it is not doing? From the arguments you’ve put forward, it seems to have something to do with the unknowability of God and of the mechanism by which God creates – so is it really so narrow to insist that to count as an explanation, an account would need to be clear about what God is and how God’s creative activity works?
Point 3: I’m in a bind here. If I say it’s more than a bit like explanation, you’ll presumably say it’s not a successful explanation – for the reasons just mentioned. After all, the story that Christians tell is a story that has at its heart a deeply mysterious God, whose power to create is beyond our comprehension. That fits into the story – it is, in fact, an important part of the way that this story hangs together – but it does mean that I’m dubious about calling it an explanation.
There’s a second point as well. If I call it an explanation, I think it sounds like one starts with a set of neutrally-described features of the world, and deduces or infers from them the theological claims that are supposed to provide the explanation. But what I’ve called ‘making good sense of the world’ does not require that we start with neutral descriptions of features of the world.
Point 4: As I’ve said before: I think the only ways of testing the truth of a worldview are by coherence, habitability and so on. So, roughly speaking, the only way of telling whether ‘as a matter of fact’ this story stands or falls is by seeing how much sense it allows one to make of the world. As I’ve said: I’m a nonfoundationalist, some kind of pragmatist: this is how I think epistemology works in general (not just in the case of theology). Earlier on, I offered the partial analogue of the strange claim that the world can be described in the language of mathematics. That’s not something you can prove in some foundationalist way, starting from indubitable premises and building up by deduction and inference. Rather, it is confirmed in practice – by the fact that it turns out to be possible to go on living in the world taking this assumption to be true.
> … even though what they offer is not a successful explanation, and they acknowledge that.
(It’s more puzzlement than a position.)
They claim not to offer explanation, while continuing to use the language of explanation, without giving any other characterization of what they offer – if they don’t intend it to be taken as explanation then what do they intend it to be taken as?
> … is it really so narrow to insist that to count as an explanation, an account would need to be clear about what God is and how God’s creative activity works?
I found it difficult to understand that an analogy that could never be justified would count as an analogy at all. Having accepted that we can postpone consideration of whether or not an analogy is justified, I don’t see why we would take a different approach with explanation.
> I’m in a bind here.
It’s felt a little unfair to pursue you for an understanding of what McCabe and Lash have written; on the other hand, as you say, “The metaphysics and the story are inseparable, and stand and fall together.”
> I’m dubious about calling it an explanation
Once we acknowledge that it is an explanation then there is the danger it will be seen as a lousy explanation. (I don’t think this is a bind of my making.)
> I offered the partial analogue of the strange claim that the world can be described in the language of mathematics.
Claiming that the world can be described in the language of mathematics is one thing; claiming that mathematics is the ultimate truth of the world would be a very different thing.
> Rather, it is confirmed in practice – by the fact that it turns out to be possible to go on living in the world taking this assumption to be true.
Even if we agree with F. Scott Fitzgerald – “The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function” – most of us seem to get along without any particular discomfort by holding opposed ideas in mind one after another.
Rather than “explanation”, perhaps the possibility to express “pure” worship.