Atheism and the Endlessness of Explanation
Science’s Promethean ethos and a world without foundations
If scientists end up positing something at the bottom of everything else that’s as good as being God, aren’t the atheists who are “naturalists” in adhering to science contradicting themselves, merely exchanging a personal deity for a remote, abstract one?
This kind of argument is in line with the philosophies of Rene Descartes and Immanuel Kant. Descartes thought the idea of God is innate to the human mind. Not only is reason inevitably led to some such concept of an absolute being, but this is supposed to be miraculous, which itself testifies to that being’s existence.
Likewise, Kant thought that our faculty of reason drives us to seek complete, final explanations, and “God” refers to whatever will end up unifying everything else, according to some metaphysical system.
A physical equivalent of God
Take, for example, Werner Heisenberg’s concept of quantum fluctuations, which are virtual particles that pop in and out of being due to the uncertainty principle. These particles arise randomly from nothing, annihilating each other yet amounting to nonzero vacuum energy, meaning that space isn’t so empty. Effectively, then, virtual particles are uncaused causes and represent the potential for infinite universes. Our universe may have begun as just such a quantum fluctuation that was amplified as the early universe’s seed inflated.
So why not call vacuum energy “God”? This infinitely filled nether vacuum would be the first cause. Sure, there’s no reason to think virtual particles are alive or intelligent or that they create universes with a benevolent goal in mind. But this kind of cosmological theory of everything would still have theological implications.
After all, God has long since been stripped of his exoteric personal trappings. Going back to Plato, philosophers have equated God with the absolute superbeing that adequately accounts for everything in nature. Plato called God “the good” and interpreted this as the unifying source of all ideal forms and imperfect particulars in the universe.
Likewise, mystics distinguish between theistic metaphors and the transcendent reality of God. While God may be personalized for mass consumption, intellectual elites understand that the traditional myths are simplistic and that the religious metaphors are incoherent and nonsensical.
If the quantum foam is effectively divine in being eternal, all-powerful, and perfectly creative, doesn’t atheism become impossible, a form of confusion? At best, the atheist could say she rejects this or that god or image of God, but not the need for explanations to be wrapped up in some absolute that might as well be called “God.”
Or so it would seem until we grapple with the confusion at work here.
Science’s Promethean ethos
Far from entailing theism, the scientific methods of explanation are inherently atheistic because they’re opposed to settling on any absolute. The scientist explains X by positing Y where Y likewise has to be explained by Z. If Y accounts for X, but Y is supposed to be self-explanatory without resting on any Z, the statement, “Y explains X” isn’t scientific.
Indeed, “Y explains X” would be misleading in that case because the notion of explanation at work would be vacuous. In so far as science is methodologically naturalistic, scientists assume a reductive mode of explanation. Explanations can be holistic, meaning that they needn’t take the whole’s behaviour to reduce to that of its parts, but these explanations can’t appeal to the miraculous. A genuine explanation illuminates by treating that which is to be explained as a system, mechanism, stage, level, or other objective, physical thing that can, in theory, be controlled.
In short, science rests on a Promethean ethos, according to which knowledge is supposed to be empowering and the purpose of liberated, intelligent species is to become godlike, to use their understanding of nature to build a better world.
Thus, the theorist who posits an absolute, a brute end to further investigation and something that must be taken for granted, that has no reason as to why it is as it is and thus no way for us to stand under that thing or to understand it and thereby have power over it is no scientist at all. Such a theorist would have betrayed the Promethean, humanistic ethos.
Compare this scientific instrumentalism with the principle of sufficient reason. The latter principle is that everything has a reason for why it’s so rather than otherwise. Theists like the philosopher GW Leibniz used this principle to attempt to prove that God must exist to explain why there’s something rather than nothing.
The problem is that “God” in this “explanation” would be just such an absolute miracle over which we can have no power; that is, God is supposed to explain everything else, but the principle of sufficient reason doesn’t apply to God. God can work in mysterious ways because he’s beyond our comprehension, which is to say God’s the exception to the humanistic enterprise. Saying that God explains why nature rather than nothing exists is to offer only a pseudo-explanation because God wouldn’t be just another natural thing that needs to be explained. We’d have no ability to tame or assimilate God.
The secular humanist’s ethos can be seen in the scientist’s discomfort with the seemingly inexplicable, fundamental physical constants that arise in cosmology. These constants include the masses of particles and the strength of fundamental forces, and they’re known only by measurement, not by a theory that explains why they’re so and not otherwise.
The physical constants are unsettling because measurement affords scientists only incomplete power over the phenomena, in principle. Although you can control what you measure because you know the extent of the thing, if you don’t understand why it has those dimensions, you’re still in the dark, which leaves the possibility that the thing in question might surprise and overcome the scientist in turn. That’s the mammalian root of this concern with the unexplained, and it’s why scientists are often seeking deeper and deeper explanations.
The end of these investigations would be the end of science — and not in the happy sense that scientists would finally have an explanation of everything. Instead, the final explanation would posit an absolute, a first cause that “explains” everything else but that wouldn’t in turn be explained by anything more fundamental. The first cause wouldn’t itself be naturalized or naturally ordered.
This would also entail that science has never been engaging in explanation in the first place. All explanations would become trivial and illusory if underlying them all were a miracle. If the “scientific” master theory ends up positing what is functionally a miracle, science would never have conformed to the humanist’s propaganda. Scientific progress would have been akin to a mirage, and all scientific understanding would be undermined by that first principle’s inexplicability.
Metaphysics for scientists and atheists
What this means is that the scientific ethos presupposes what philosophers call “antifoundationalism.” There are no absolutes in scientific explanations or indeed in any illuminating explanation. In the scientific picture of nature, there’s always more to discover because the human urge to dominate is never satiated.
Again, the driving force here is social and moral rather than metaphysical. We don’t know there’s necessarily no absolute or miraculous end to all explanations; instead, we have faith in that assumption because we’re ambitious and industrious and we trust in our right to exist and to fulfill our godlike potential to leave nothing standing in our way. Institutionally speaking, science is rather Faustian and Luciferian.
But how should we think of a type of universe that would sustain atheism, in metaphysical terms? We saw that nature might be grounded in an absolute called “God,” an absolute that’s supposed to provide for a final, complete “explanation” of reality — except that that explanation would be undone by that foundational miracle that instead vitiates the search for a totalizing, master theory.
We then analyzed the nature of scientific explanation to discover the instrumentalism at the heart of science. Atheism is possible (as in coherent) if scientific antifoundationalism is grounded in an irrational pursuit of power. To speak of the scientist’s “methodological” excuse for always seeking a deeper explanation and never settling for a self-evident miracle is only to speak euphemistically of the Luciferian ethos, of the quasi-Gnostic urge to be godlike by way of domesticating the wilderness, the so-called divinely created order.
Now we should be wondering what sort of domain isn’t subject to complete explanation. There are at least three possibilities. First, nature could consist of an infinite series of things, such that there’s always something else to discover and thus a means by which to dominate any given thing, by grasping the conditions that make that thing possible.
Notice that in this case there would be no “world” or “universe” in the sense of a cosmos or a coherent, ordered totality. There would be a continuum of universes, each shading off into the next. There would be a multiverse of universes, with an infinite series of foundations or fundamental laws of how universes form within that infinite space.
The point to emphasize is that the task of explanation would necessarily be incomplete because the domain that’s explicable would be endless.
A second possibility is that the universe might be limited but irrational, damaged or “fallen.” The reason you could always find another explanation is that the world might be fundamentally absurd, such that each explanation would be like an act of rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic. Explanations would only be flawed interpretations to match the incoherence of reality.
We might have assumed, on the contrary, that the only alternative to a perfectly ordered whole is chaos or random, dizzying, inexplicable disorder. Yet there’s a middle option, which is a world that’s only tantalizingly ordered because the ordered parts don’t hang together in the end, but would be like islands floating randomly and lost at sea. The natural order might amount to a temptation: we may be seduced by the apparent regularities into assuming they’re perfectly explicable, only to discover the order is partly subjective and is in any case frustratingly incomplete.
A key part of a third possibility is epistemological: the world might be perfectly ordered, but our cognitive capacities may be too limited to comprehend that order. Contrary to optimists, the cosmos might ultimately be beyond the understanding of any intelligent species that arises within it. The problem would be that the universe’s ability to be what it is would outstrip its potential for evolving intelligent life. Thus, the universe would always have the last laugh.
In any case, atheism isn’t incoherent since theism is a phony explanation that appeals to an absolute miracle. The nature of a world order in which explanations are genuine and illuminating supports our instrumental will to survive and dominate the environment.
That world would do so by being either (a) infinitely various in extent, (b) absurd, blackly comedic, and thus occupying no moral high ground against human hubris, or (c) inscrutable and thus irrelevant to our dealings except in so far as the apparent limits of our cognition might instill humility, a check on our worst impulses.
Where the theists go wrong is in positing that the chain of causation has to have a beginning, an unexplained First Cause. But the chain is infinite. Of making many explanations there is no end; every successful explanation immediately poses the next question, and turtles. The ultimate mystery—why does existence exist?—lies beyond the realm of causal explanation: not merely unexplained (yet), but intrinsically inexplicable.
God is simply a convenient name for this unreachable, unknowable, transcendent Truth Beyond Understanding, outside the infinite chain of explanation. Our scientific endeavors add links to our chain of knowledge and understanding, but do not—cannot—put us any closer to explaining the Inexplicable. There’s nothing to do but shrug your shoulders and live with it.
We do have a scientific First Cause: the Big Bang. And when I ask questions like why exactly it happened 15 Bn years ago and not earlier or later, I am told we not only don't know the answer yet, but the answer is fundamentally unknowable, because spacetime did not exist before the Big Bang, so a cause before the Big Bang did not exist.
At this point we have three choices:
1) Swallow that an uncaused natural event happened, a huge exception from the idea of causality.
2) Assume a supernatural cause, supernatural things don't need to be caused themselves, only natural things need a cause, supernatural very much means uncaused, exempt from the laws of nature like causality, so it is kinda neat. (This supernatural cause does not need to be god-shaped. It does not need to be personal or judgy about people and so on. Call it Tao.)
3) Bring back Aristotelean causality. Our modern theory of causality accepts only the efficient cause, that happens in time before the effect. An Aristotelean final cause happens after the effect.