Cooking the books

I had a conversation the other day with some friends of mine who are atheists. We talked about the argument that the improbability of complex life suggests that it must have been deliberately created.

One friend countered by saying that, if complex life is statistically improbable, then an even-more-complex designer must be that much more improbable. Someone replied that this counter-argument was invalid because probability doesn't apply to God. While natural phenomena are goverened by the laws of the universe and are therefore subject to probability analysis, a supernatural God (assuming one exists) would not be. Probability is a function of time, and since our universe exists in time, probability applies. Assuming that God exists outside of time, probability doesn't apply to Him/Her/It. So the unlikelihood of life does not demonstrate the unlikelihood of God.

"That's a very convienent argument," my friend said. In a nutshell, she accused theists of weaselling out of the conversation, applying the laws of the universe when they suited their purposes (proving the improbability of uncreated life), but ignoring those same laws when they didn't.

At the time, I conceded that although I was arguing in good faith, the argument did look convenient and there was no way to prove otherwise. But I've reconsidered.

If I had retroactively defined God to exist outside of time, it would have been fair to accuse me of cooking the definition so as to avoid the scrutiny of probability theory. But that definition of God is biblical - it's at least 3,000 years old. Probability theory first arose in the 16th and 17th centuries, so it's safe to say that the concept of an eternal God predates any probabilistic arguments about His existence. So it's not a clever dodge to say that God's putative eternal nature nullifies any argument as to the improbability of His existence. The argument is either true, or it's an interesting coincidence. Either way, it seems to predate its rhetorical usefulness, so at the very least it's intellectually honest.

As a sidebar, I should note that physics, too, requires that if the universe was created, its creator must be eternal. Modern physicists seem to agree that there was no such thing as time before the big bang. St. Augustine said the same thing 1600 years ago in his analysis of Genesis 1. That's not a proof for the existence of God, but it does suggest that if there was a creator, current science agrees with 3,500-year-old theology on one of the creator's fundamental attributes. Since the science came thousands of years after the theology, you can't accuse theists of cooking the books.

So I retract my concession.

For starters

There's been a surge of late in what you might call "Evangelical Atheism" - atheism propounded with zeal and enthusiasm, and with an aim to winning new converts. Richard Dawkins is probably the best-known proponent.

The driving force seems to be the notion that reason and science are incompatible with the notion of "God" as described by conventional religion. If the two are incompatible, then they make mutually exclusive claims about the nature of the universe, and therefore scientists and people of faith are at odds with each other. You see this dynamic in the debate over teaching evolution, and in books such as Dawkins' The God Delusion. Sometimes it gets nasty.

I think this is misguided. The reason-vs.-faith debate arises when people on both sides of the divide make extravagant claims that are either unnecessary or unsupported by their source materials. Stripped of extraneous, unnecessary and unsupportable claims, the two seem perfectly compatible.

My goal here is to flesh out this argument and foster an open, respectful discussion. Books and blogs on all sides are far too concerned with scoring cheap points and indulging in cathartic rants for any of us to learn anything from them. I'm interested in an intellectually honest debate, and I hope to learn something.

I'm also interested in talking about faith and reason in broader terms. I'm not a scientist, and it would be rank folly for me to dive headfirst into a discussion that's been ongoing for thousands of years and pretend to contribute much new knowledge. But I analyze and argue for a living, so I think I can make some useful comments about the classic arguments and about how the mind has plenty of room for the spirit and vice versa.

Full-disclosure-time: I'm a Christian. I think it would have been perverse for God to outift us with curiosity and reason and then expect us not to use it: hence science. I think that science and theology look at the same things from different angles, and that the apparent differences between them are either bad science, bad theology, or just parallax.

I also think that, while science and reason likely can't prove the existence of God, neither can they disprove it. What we're left with is this: God may exist. We may believe, disbelieve, or remain unconvinced. But given the claims that people of faith make about God, we can't afford to ignore the question. And while I don't know that reason can solve the issue, open discussion can get us a lot closer than most people think.

So that's my stance. I'm looking forward to hearing from people who disagree with me. It should be fun.