Is Theism as Rational as Science or as Fanciful as Art?
Richard Swinburne’s pseudoscientific defense of theism
Richard Swinburne, the Oxford philosopher and Christian apologist argues for God’s existence by treating theism as quasi-scientific.
In “The Existence of God,” Swinburne says, “In fact, the hypothesis of the existence of God makes sense of the whole of our experience, and it does so better than any other explanation that can be put forward, and that is the grounds for believing it to be true.”
Just as scientists posit atoms, DNA, or forces like gravity to explain phenomena, Swinburne follows Thomas Aquinas in positing God to explain natural patterns that supposedly baffle scientists.
Swinburne’s theism
For instance, says Swinburne, “The most general phenomenon that provides evidence for the existence of God is the existence of the physical universe for as long as it has existed…This is something evidently inexplicable by science.” Supposedly, scientists can explain only how one state follows another in nature, based on a law that joins them. “But what science by its very nature cannot explain is why there are any states of affairs at all.”
In other words, God accounts for why there’s something in nature rather than nothing.
Next, says Swinburne, “is the operation of the most general laws of nature, that is, the orderliness of nature in conforming to very general laws of physics, from which the regularities of chemistry and biology follow.” The alleged problem for naturalists is that “what science by its very nature cannot explain is why there are the most general laws of nature that there are; for ex hypothesi, no wider laws can explain their operation.”
In other words, God accounts for why there’s a natural order in the first place, not just for the raw existence of anything rather than nothing.
In looking for a suitable explanation of these most general facts, Swinburne shifts from science to psychological or “personal” explanations. “Scientific explanation involves laws of nature and previous states of affairs. Personal explanation involves persons and purposes. If we cannot give a scientific explanation of the existence and orderliness of the Universe, perhaps we can give a personal explanation.”
Here, then, is his explanation:
The hypothesis of theism is that the Universe exists because there is a divine person who keeps it in existence and that laws of nature operate because there is a divine person who brings it about that they do. He brings it about that the laws of nature operate by sustaining in every object in the Universe its liability to behave in accord with those laws. He brings it about that the Universe exists by sustaining at each moment (of finite or infinite time) objects with the powers and liabilities codified by laws of nature including the laws of the conservation of matter energy, i.e. by making it the case at each moment that what there was before continues to exist. The hypothesis is a hypothesis that a person brings about these things for some purpose. He acts directly on the Universe, as we act directly on our brains, guiding them to move our limbs…
And Swinburne thinks the naturalist faces a dilemma since “personal explanation and scientific explanation are the two ways we have of explaining the occurrence of phenomena. Since there cannot be a scientific explanation of the existence of the Universe, either there is a personal explanation or there is no explanation at all.”
Scientific explanations are ruled out because they presuppose these most general features of nature. And these features should be explicable because they’re real, and we’re curious creatures so we might as well look for an explanation. The only type of explanation left is a psychological one, the positing of a person with purposes, intelligence, autonomy, and so on.
Moreover, he says, “The hypothesis that there is a divine person is the hypothesis of the existence of the simplest kind of person there could be.” Indeed, “The hypothesis that there exists a being with infinite degrees of the qualities essential to a being of that kind [such as omnipotence, omniscience, and perfect freedom] is the postulation of a very simple being.”
How do we know God is also good? Easy! “It follows from God’s perfect freedom that he will be subject to no influences deterring him from doing what he sees reason to do. That is what he believes good to do; and since being omniscient, he will always know what is good, he will always do what is good. He will be perfectly good.”
To make his theism seem more plausible, Swinburne has the audacity to speculate as to why God would have created the universe:
But if there is a God, it is not vastly unlikely that he should create such a universe. A universe such as ours is a thing of beauty, and a theatre in which humans and other creatures can grow and work out their destiny…A good God will want to create creatures such as humans, having a free choice between good and evil, a deep responsibility for themselves and each other, and an ability to form their own character in such a way as to love God; and for that we need bodies, places where we can take hold of each other and so hurt or benefit each other.
Proper standards for positing personhood
Swinburne’s confused on several fronts, though.
By calling theism a “hypothesis,” and pretending that he’s reasoning inductively, as though he were carefully observing how particulars add up to a general pattern, Swinburne frames his explanation as though it were just as valid as a scientific procedure.
But in fact, the patterns he’s trying to explain are metaphysical, so his explanation is philosophical. Theism, then, isn’t a hypothesis in any technical sense. Therefore, Swinburne’s long discussion of how his theistic argument satisfies four conditions of strong inductive arguments is a red herring. He says any such induction would need to show
that the “evidence must be the sort of phenomena you would expect to occur if the hypothesis is true”
that “the phenomena must be much less likely to occur in the normal course of things, that is if the hypothesis is false”
that “the hypothesis must be simple” (and I quoted above how he thinks a divine person is “a very simple being”)
and that “the hypothesis must fit in with our knowledge of how the world works in wider fields — what I shall call our background knowledge.”
And by the end, Swinburne celebrates how his arguments “satisfy well the three criteria given earlier for inductive arguments to an explanation.” After all, “The postulated divine person is a very simple one, and it is vastly improbable that the phenomena cited should occur by chance — e.g. that there should exist such an enormous number of atoms in the Universe, all of which behave in exactly the same human-life producing way.”
Again, all of that is irrelevant; indeed, it’s a distraction since Swinburne’s argument isn’t inductive.
He’s not looking at dozens of apples to realize that, based on those samples, all apples belong to a type of fruit. Instead, he’s seizing on some metaphysical, transcendental mysteries, such as that there’s something rather than nothing, and that there’s any order in the first place. Sure, you could find order wherever you look, in apples, molecules, and planets, but that’s not what Swinburne’s doing, citing many cases of things that exist in an ordered way, because that would be stating the obvious. How could anyone possibly falsify those assumptions by presenting something that doesn’t exist or that conforms to no pattern?
That there’s something rather than nothing and that things are intelligible rather than not are no ordinary data sets. On the contrary, we’re able to observe and to generalize inductively only because of such general features of the world.
Standards of induction, then, are irrelevant here, which is why Swinburne drops the pretense that he’s presenting a scientific hypothesis and moves to what he calls a “personal” explanation. Is folk psychology, then, inductive? That is, when we explain each other’s behaviour by positing a mind that occupies and controls its body, are we reasoning inductively?
Not strictly speaking since this mode of explanation is rather instinctive. We socialize with each other not just because this is reasonable but because we evolved to search for personal patterns. And as Daniel Dennett explains in Breaking the Spell, animism and theism overextend that “intentional stance,” just as we do in cases of pareidolia when we see faces in clouds or on burnt toast.
What are the standards, then, for personal or psychological explanations, given that Swinburne’s standards of induction are irrelevant? That is, how do we know we’re dealing with a person rather than with something impersonal, like a robot that’s only pretending to be a person or like a rock that just looks like it has a human face?
A couple of factors spring to mind. First, there’s the Turing Test in which you interact directly with the purported person to test whether the thing is intelligent, emotional, purposeful, and so on. In this case, we have in mind a model or an ideal of how a person behaves, and we compare some behaviour to that model.
Again, this isn’t inductive but abductive in that this reasoning reaches for the best explanation based on your personal knowledge of the relevant probabilities. Is it useful to apply the intentional stance to account for some behaviour, or is it easier to treat the thing as robotic or illusory?
Next, there’s our knowledge of how personhood emerges in nature from the brain. We’ve learned that people belong to a type of organism, existing alongside animals, plants, fungi, and so on, all of which have different physiological control systems. People are closest to animals and to mammals that have brains encased in skulls. So, if you want to know whether a robot or a rock is a person, you could do worse than to check if the thing has a brain or some such fiendishly complicated control center that acts as the mind’s material substrate.
Now that we’ve sorted through some of Swinburne’s epistemic confusions, we can ask how well theism does according to those two standards for psychological explanations. And obviously, theism’s failure here is spectacular.
We can’t perform the Turing Test on God since he’s not around. All we have is his alleged artifact (the natural universe). Likewise, we can’t check God’s body to look for a suitable neural substrate since again God’s not around. On the contrary, since God is supposed to exist outside space and time, he has no body or brain, according to the theological rigmarole.
What of Swinburne’s trichotomy that’s supposed to force the theist’s hand, as though we had to choose between science, psychology, and settling for no explanation of certain ontological facts?
This trichotomy is based on a category error since Swinburne presumes that ontology should be “explained” like any natural phenomenon. There’s no good reason to think, however, that we have any such all-purpose way of reasoning. Discourses can be relevant or helpful, depending on the domain, but they can also be misleading and counterproductive if they’re overstretched. Scientists clarified the nature of explanation by applying it to natural patterns, but just because that kind of reasoning works in that field doesn’t mean it applies to all philosophical questions. If philosophers could always explain things in that way, they’d be scientists.
Instead, great philosophers engage in other kinds of discourse. They create coherent worldviews by inventing or clarifying concepts, and in this respect they’re more like artists and mythmakers than scientists. Ironically, then, atheistic philosophy is closer to the essence of religion than is Swinburne’s pseudoscientific “natural theology.” The latter arose in Christianity as just a bit of medieval sophistry that saved face for Catholics who didn’t want to be upstaged by rationalistic or naturalistic philosophers like Plato or Aristotle, or by later scientists such as Galileo and Newton.
Theology is like philosophy, though, in being the study of stories that make sense of normative or metaphysical patterns that are beyond scientific methods of inquiry. And both theologians and philosophers address those deep questions — Why are we here? How should we live? Why is there something rather than nothing? — by telling stories, which again makes their disciplines artistic rather than strictly scientific.
The overriding problem with theism in the twenty-first century is that theism’s fictional narrative is archaic and stale on aesthetic grounds. It goes without saying that religious myths fail as scientific hypotheses. You might as well dismiss the Mona Lisa painting for failing as a cosmological model; of course, doing so would amount to a blatant category error. No, the question to ask about art is whether it ennobles the viewer’s character, or whether it sparks insights or leads to social progress by challenging an unjust institution’s status quo.
Here, Christianity fails miserably since for centuries Christians have abandoned Jesus’s countercultural perspective and politicized his vision to manage the institutions of Christendom. Moreover, Jesus’s vision is badly outdated since it was based on vast ignorance of our position in nature. So, in the twenty-first century, the Christian myth fails as art.
An assortment of theistic confusions and sophistries
How should we understand why there’s something rather than nothing? I’ve addressed that question elsewhere by clarifying the relevant concepts. In fact, nothing already exists alongside things all around us since things are partly subjective in that we conjure them in our imagination by analyzing the whole of nature and dividing it into parts that conform to our simplifying models or concepts, and the whole of natural being is already as good as nothing since it confounds that humanistic strategy. So, that metaphysical question dissolves itself.
And how should we understand why there’s a natural order? That question, too, fizzles since the order we find is partly subjective. What’s beyond our ability to understand, such as the Big Bang singularity, the interior of black holes, or what lies at the end of time would be as good as disordered. The point is that the only kind of order we’d credit is one that conforms to our ways of reasoning. Anything else would be alien and equivalent to disorder.
Thus, in effect, Swinburne’s presumption isn’t just that everything that exists is “ordered”; rather, it’s that everything is explicable to clever apes like us. But this would be just the bogus principle of sufficient reason that presupposes theism since the universal applicability of human modes of thinking would be miraculous. Instead, what scientists do is concede the tentativeness of their explanations, realizing that their models simplify in helping us understand the patterns around us. What we don’t yet understand is presently disordered, and that includes how everything in the universe, from quantum fluctuations to black holes to galactic clusters might amount to a cosmic monstrosity known as “the universe.”
Swinburne’s confused about the natural order, though, as is evident from what he says about the laws of nature. “Laws are not things,” he says, “independent of material objects. To say that all objects conform to laws is simply to say that they all behave in exactly the same way, that they have certain powers which they exert on other objects, and liabilities to exert those powers in certain circumstances.”
Yet he contradicts himself in the very next sentence: “To say, for example, that the planets obey Kepler’s laws is just to say that each planet at each moment of time has the power of moving in the way that Kepler’s laws state…” And he adds at the end of that paragraph, “We should seek a similar explanation for that vast coincidence we describe as the conformity of objects to laws of nature.”
So, first, laws are no different than the patterns into which natural things enter. But then the laws are independent after all, since now they’re scientific statements, like Kepler’s, to which some natural behaviour “conforms.”
I’ve clarified these issues elsewhere. Briefly, it’s worth pointing out here that the source of Swinburne’s confusion is theism itself since it’s theistic religion that popularized the mythic analogy between human lawgivers for societies and a divine lawgiver for nature. Strictly speaking, there are no laws of nature since nature isn’t a society populated purely by sociable organisms. “Law of nature” is only a figure of speech.
Scientists explain how nature works by generalizing, and those generalizations govern not nature itself but scientific ways of thinking about models. If the model is well-tested and productive, the modelled system may seem to “conform” to it, but that’s an illusion since every model simplifies, meaning that it leaves out much that doesn’t fit its parameters. Nature is always doing much that falls outside the model’s or the “law’s” explanatory power.
At to Swinburne’s characterization of the divine person as a deity worthy of worship, notice how his argument turns deductive rather than pseudo-inductive at that point. He deduces that God is good, with a just-so story, making it up as he goes along by helping himself to vacuous presumptions about the mentality of a cosmic creator.
God must be good, he says, because God would know everything, and he’d be powerful and free enough to do whatever he wants. Moreover, what God sees as being reasonable is supposed to be the very same as what he sees as being good to do. As Swinburne says, “That [what God has reason to do] is what he believes good to do.”
But that’s only an instrumental view of goodness. We could just as easily say that a serial killer deems as good the having of powerful weapons to make his job of killing folks easier. God’s goodness would be like the so-called lawfulness of Richard Nixon’s actions as president: his actions were lawful, Nixon said, infamously, because the president did them. Whatever the president does is lawful by mere default because there’s supposedly no higher judge in the country. Likewise, God would be good by fiat because his actions would flow from perfect, unchallengeable knowledge, power, and freedom.
The word “perfect” there, to which Swinburne resorts is likely question-begging since it has normative connotations. We think of what’s perfect as being what’s best. But were God already perfect in that sense, there would be no need to deduce that he’s also good. Instead, what Swinburne would need to say is that God’s knowledge, power, and freedom are “perfect” in being complete or unlimited in extent. This would be quantitative rather than qualitative absoluteness.
Once that’s clarified, though, it’s no longer so obvious that God would be good just because his powers are absolute. Indeed, when we reflect on what we mean by moral goodness, we should realize that morality makes sense only in a terrestrial, social context that would be alien to Swinburne’s divine person. So, the notion that God is “good” in any sense that we’d admire is another grotesque category error — as well as being a case of monstrous vanity on the theist’s part.
The only deity we’d be inclined to worship is one that lives up to our ideals. That anthropocentrism made sense in the ancient world when the Earth was deemed central to a relatively puny cosmos. Once scientists showed the basis of cosmological relativity, according to which our planet is just one of a great, mind-blowing many, we lost any reason to assume that the source of all those countless alien worlds would share our sense of propriety. Again, that presumption itself is just bizarre in twenty-first-century Oxford University.
And from that updated perspective, it follows that Swinburne’s just-so story about how God created the universe to achieve the “good” purpose of allowing life to evolve and to thrive is preposterous. How would we know that God cares more about life than about relatively empty space? Which is the means, and which is the end? Maybe God created what we call the natural order, including all the stars and planets, as a step to arriving at what he really wants, which is the maximal entropy that will remain practically forever when the stars all go out. And maybe the evolution of life is only a by-product, a necessary evil towards achieving that alien goal.
How do theists like Swinburne know that that’s false without presupposing their cosmic importance as persons, or without resorting to gullible, childish interpretations of archaic scriptures?
Lastly, we can remark on the nonsensicality of Swinburne’s talk of God’s “simplicity.” Why think that the positing of a complete, unlimited person is the positing of the simplest possible person, as Swinburne says? Is someone who’s missing a limb more complex than a fully intact human body? Is a disembodied mind simpler than an embodied one because the former lacks moving parts?
Here, Swinburne seems to mix up simplicity with unintelligibility since talking about a disembodied absolute mind is incoherent and equivocal. The divine person would be as “simple” as a round square. Neither has any complicated moving parts because neither amounts to anything at all.
In any case, whatever Swinburne means by “simplicity” is irrelevant, as I’ve said. The point of Occam’s razor is that the types of theoretical entities shouldn’t be multiplied beyond necessity. There’s no need to overextend our instinct for socializing, in the theistic manner, since there’s no need to pretend that theism is a legitimate empirical explanation, as opposed to being a mythic fiction or worldview that addresses unscientific, philosophical questions.
Simplicity is a standard for scientific models, and Swinburne’s theism is only pseudo-scientific and pseudo-inductive. Likewise, his prestige as an Oxford philosopher and apologist is evidently only pseudo-impressive.