God and Occam's Razor

Subtitle: Rambling thoughts on a plane about why I believe God is a defensible hypothesis, even while I respect and understand the atheist worldview.

This is pretty long. Sorry. I guess I bit off more than I could chew. Plus, this plane ride is insanely boring, and writing is a good distraction. Comments, of course, are welcome.

In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins has a chapter titled “Why There Is Almost Certainly No God.” The previous chapters had been spent (rightfully) shooting down the prototypical arguments for God’s existence: Aquinas’ Ontological Argument (a silly word game), Pascal’s Wager (the pros of belief outweigh the cons), Miraculous Revelations (“I saw the Pope in my piece of toast!”), etc. This chapter, however, is the only one which goes on the offensive, against the God Hypothesis. His argument is as follows: the existence of God is often argued by appealing to the complexity of the universe, the random formation of which is famously likened to a whirlwind creating a Boeing 747 in a junkyard. But throwing God into the mix doesn’t help things; to create the universe, God would need to be more complex, and hence they are replacing an unexplainable Boeing 747 with a similarly unexplainable “Ultimate Boeing 747.”

The analogy is, of course, only half serious. Dawkins knows that no religious person is trying to give an explanation for God as a naturally created being. His point is a much simpler one; the same as Russel’s Teapot, the Invisible Pink Unicorn, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, etc. Occam’s razor, the rule of theory preference which says the simplest theory which satisfactorily explains the evidence should be preferred. By fabricating the idea of an unseen “God” which governs the forces of nature, theists are adding an extra assumption which does not, by Dawkins’ standards, have any fundamentally predictive power. It’s a powerful criticism of all religion, and not one that should be easily dismissed.

It’s tempting to blow it off with “Who cares what Occam thought?” or, more seriously, “Even if it isn’t logically preferable, I can still believe it’s true.” But consider a world where this type of reasoning was practiced. Every natural phenomenon could have a scientific explanation to look for, but it would be just as easy (easier) to say “Zeus wanted it that way, and Zeus always gets what he wants” and leave it at that. There would be no scientific progress, nothing propelling us to ask “why?”

Things seem to get worse for religion when you look at the history of science. A few thousand years ago, most everything was explained in simple, ad hoc ways . Things fell to the earth because matter was evil, and the earth was more evil (Aristotle). Natural phenomena were caused by warring gods and goddesses. The earth was the center of the universe, and heaven surrounded it, past the planets and stars. Species were varied the way they were because they were specially, individually created that way ten thousand years ago. But slowly, natural explanations have been put forth – Newton’s theory of gravity, the interaction of charged particles, Einstein’s relativistic universe, Darwin’s Natural Selection. You’ll probably disagree that some (particularly, the last one) are really sufficient, but in the very least they show a clear tendency towards unification. Things previously thought to be unexplainable acts of gods are not always immune to natural explanation, and as our gaps in knowledge vanish, it stands to reason by induction that the gods of those gaps will too.

So how can my belief be reconciled with a deep appreciation for the natural sciences? Is God really just an unnecessary hypothesis, explaining the existence of one Boeing 747 by inventing a bigger one? I don’t think so. My reason is that there are at least three things, as far as I can tell, which stand in the way of a purely naturalistic worldview: the existence of the universe, the existence of consciousness, and the perception of beauty. These are, in my mind, unexplainable in principle, and are indicative of an insufficiency in science.

Scientists have managed to trace the universe back to a single event, The Big Bang. At this point in time, the universe was compacted in a very small space; if you believe String Theory, it was on the order of a single string (about ten to the negative thirty meters, if memory serves…I’m on an airplane, I don’t have internet). But to go from that singularity, to absolutely nothing, is a gap that we have no tools, physical or logical, to bridge. Nothingness cannot cause anything, by any stretch of scientific reasoning. If nothingness were given the power to “act”, it would be a purely ad hoc theory made to accommodate the Big Bang; we have no way of measuring, or verifying, anything on such an abstract level. Some theorize an overarching law, much like Natural Selection, which would cause says something along the lines of “The Universe Tends to Be”. But eternal laws in a vacuum are very much a philosophic idea, and really don’t seem too much unlike an eternal God. At the very least, they are both in the realm of metaphysics.

A naturalistic explanation of consciousness is something that, even though I do not believe in, intrigues me to no end. One of my current favorite authors, Douglas Hofstadter (Godel, Escher, Bach; I Am A Strange Loop) deals extensively with the subject. His claim is a reductionist one: in the end, consciousness is a purely physical phenomenon, and the illusions of free will and selfhood arise as epiphenomena of such complexity, but do not really exist. It’s not really a very startling idea; anyone fully committed to natural explanation must believe something similar. It’s very interesting, and makes for very beautiful analogies, but to me it is simply not convincing. Hofstadter adamantly believes it, and even in the face of the death of his wife, he determinedly argues that we are solely physical, solely deterministic. I applaud him for being so committed to his ideals, but it rings hollow to me. The inner “light” of consciousness we all feel eludes explanation, and, in my mind, it must always. Even if the brain is fully understood one day from a physical standpoint, that inner light will be no less mysterious.

Finally, I’ve said before that beauty seems to arise from complexity, and in a deep sense, it is truer than the mechanisms which underlie it. I don’t see that as an illusion, but rather indicative of a higher meaning than the physical universe. I’m not arguing, as some do, that the complexity itself is evidence (the Boeing 747 argument); it’s what the complexity seamlessly blurs into, the abstraction over and above the chaos. It’s easy to call it an illusion, but, like consciousness, we each experience it. If Hume and Kant are to be believed, our observations are of the utmost importance. To ignore such a deeply felt observation is to go against the spirit of inquiry, and natural law simply does not explain it.

Those were very brief, and I’m sure more posts in the future will ramble about them. But this post is already getting bloated enough. It might sound like I’m playing the same God-of-the-Gaps game I accused others of, but I’m really not. These “gaps”, and others like them, are simply not in the same realm as the natural sciences. They are phenomena which need explanations beyond natural law, and I say that knowing full well that natural law is always expanding. If the God Hypothesis can explain these things which a naturalistic framework cannot, then to append it to our natural explanations is not a violation of Occam’s Razor, but a unification. One hypothesis doesn’t, and shouldn’t, preclude the other.