For many people, God simply seems unnecessary. They think as the astronomer Laplace is reputed to have said to Napoleon “I have no need of that hypothesis.” For people who think this way, the universe simply is. There is no need to, nor any purpose in, trying to explain how or why. Adding God to the picture just makes things more complicated. So there is no reason to believe God exists. This argument is a version of Ockham’s Razor. This is a precept of William of Ockham, a Franciscan friar and philosopher, and pioneer of modern nominalism. Nominalism vs Realism is the fundamental argument of all philosophy, since Plato and Aristotle, right up to our time and the post-modernism of Derrida, Foucault, Rorty et al. (Post-modernism isn’t actually post-modern at all, but that’s another a tale for another time). Ockham’s Razor is the claim that in any philosophical argument you should not “multiply entities beyond necessity.” In other words, you should not assume something exists if its existence is not proven and is not absolutely necessary to explain something you know does exist. Or in even more other words, the simplest explanation is usually the best. Ockham’s Razor is one of the best known ideas in philosophy, and some people treat it as gospel. The problem with it is that it is not an accurate reflection of the way the world works. The universe gives us no reason to assume that the simplest explanation for anything is always, or even often, the right explanation. Ellipses are more complex than circles, yet the planets orbit in ellipses. Climate, and atmospheric science generally, is ridiculously complicated. Nuclear physics suffers from an embarrassing multiplicity of “fundamental particles.” At best, a simplified version of Ockham’s Razor - check the simplest solutions first - is a useful thinking tool. If this is so, then the universe’s appearing to be simpler without God would not in itself be a sufficient reason to refuse to believe in Him. But even if we accept the stronger version, and assume the simplest explanation of any phenomenon is correct, theists (those who believe in God) are in a stronger position, because there is more complication in the atheist than the theist position. This is so because ours is a very odd universe indeed. For it to hold together in the way it does, and produce conditions suitable for life, a number of key factors have be very finely tuned. These include the strength of the weak nuclear force and the relative strengths of gravity and electro-magnetism. Variations of a tiny part of one percent in any of these factors (there are usually considered to be six of them) would mean a universe in which no life was possible. Some theorists insist this is not a problem. After all, we are here, and we wouldn’t be if any of those settings were different, so that’s just the way things are. It is like the lotto. The chances of any particular numbers coming up are small, but some numbers are going to come up, so it is meaningless after the draw to exclaim about the chances of those particular numbers being drawn. But this just won’t do. The chances of the universe’s settings being exactly as they are is not like one draw of lotto numbers, but like the same numbers being drawn ten times in a row. Two draws of the same numbers would be astonishing, Three draws and most people would think that someone had been tinkering with the machinery. Five draws in a row and it would be like, dude, what are we even talking about this for? And ten? Well, you get the idea. To put this another way, imagine the entire continent of Australia is covered with rose petals, all red except one which is white. A blind-folded person is flying somewhere over Australia and tosses a dart out of the plane at random. The dart hits the white petal. Spooky. Now imagine it happens again. And again. And again. That’s about as likely as our universe. That is, unimaginably, impossibly unlikely, unless someone has been tinkering with the machinery. Most physicists don’t believe our universe is the only universe and it just happens to be the way it is. That would be too ludicrous for words. Instead they believe in a multi-verse, sometimes called the landscape. This is an infinite number of universes, or at least, a very large number, some 10 to the power of 500; more than the number of atoms in our universe. In at least a few of them, the necessary constants are set so as to enable some stability (as opposed to expansion and immediate collapse, for example), and the possible formation of life. Ours is one of those few. Each of these universes has its own varying but frequently vast quantities of matter and energy. Each either popped into existence out of nothing for no reason (as the assumption is that our universe did), or has an infinite regress of causes. There is not a shred nor a string of evidence these universes exist. The whole massive edifice, which would put to shame the most ambitious medieval meta-physician, has simply been created out of thin air for one reason: to avoid the obvious and far more economical possibility that this one universe was created for a reason. I wonder what William of Ockham would think of that?
Posted on: Wed, 12 Jun 2013 08:51:55 +0000
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