Reply #205: Reflections on Flew's new position

[Stunster]

I remember reading Flew when I was a philosophy undergraduate. The piece, I think, points up the tremendous difficulty in supposing that our universe, with its specific physical laws, could have come into being by chance.

Consider the idea that you have a huge barrel in front of you, containing 10 million straws of differing lengths. Unless you pull out the shortest one, you will be shot on the spot by an automatic light-sensitive weapon which instantly registers the length of the straw you draw. You pull a straw out, and there's no shooting. You are hugely relieved and amazed to be alive.

Now consider two versions of the same story: a) this is the only drawing that takes place; b) millions of similar drawings are simultaneously taking place all over the world.

If the situation is b, then your relief will still be great, but there's no reason to suppose a conspiracy to save your life----somebody, somewhere had to draw the shortest straw, and it may as well be you. There's no great surprise in that. Indeed, the probability that there would be one survivor of the drawing would be 1. I.e., it's a certainty. But suppose the situation is a. The probability that there would be a survivor of such a drawing is 10 million to 1 against, or 0.0000001. This is a reason not just for surprise, but for believing that the drawing was fixed or designed to ensure your survival. It is far more likely that the drawing was fixed, than that you survived by sheer chance.

Well, if there is only one universe, then the chances of it being so structured as to be capable of evolving human beings are far smaller than 10 million to 1 against, if the structuring occurs by random chance. It is vastly more likely to have been designed that way. Similarly, if you came across a rock in Iran, upon which were marks which, if read as Greek letters, said (when translated into English) "Alexander the Great fought a victorious battle in this place against the forces of the Persian king", it would be irrational to believe that the letters were carved by random erosion, rather than by some ancient Greek.

To deal with this problem, the Multiverse Hypothesis has been proposed. This has the effect of making the situation described above a b-type one. There are, on this hypothesis, untold billions, or possibly an infinity, of 'straw-drawings'---i.e. universe-creations. It is thus certain, or very likely (if you make the number of creations high enough) that one universe will have a physics like ours, and will therefore generate beings like us.

But the Multiverse Hypothesis suffers from the problem that all the other universes are inherently unobservable by us. This immediately violates the scientific method. And so we have the supremely ironic result that a colossally huge number of unobservable entities are posited, while eschewing the scientific method, for the sole 'ad hoc' purpose of denying the existence of *one* unobservable (God). This is perhaps the most egregious violation of Ockham's Razor ever proposed. Furthermore, there is no way of knowing what the random universe-generating mechanism could possibly be like, or of observing it, or of understanding why it should exist at all. It would seem purposeless, utterly devoid of reason, and ridiculously extravagant from an ontological point of view that there should be such a thing. But the same charge can't be levelled against theism, since its ultimate being is supremely endowed with purpose and reason and value (and in classical theism at least, is ontologically simple, timeless, and perfect).

So, it is easy to see why Flew should now feel compelled to admit the existence of an intelligent creator. He does not, however, think that this being is involved in our lives, and prefers to conceive of God deistically, rather than theistically.

But surely there is reason to believe that an *intelligent, rational* creator God *would be* involved with his creatures? Are there any examples of human beings, acting as intelligent, rational creators and designers, *not* being involved with the things they make or design? Hardly any, and if there are such cases, we would be strongly inclined to say that the act of design/creation would be *irrational* in those circumstances. A person who made things for no reason would be considered at best odd, if not insane. A person who made things simply to look at them would be odd. Ah, but what about artists---isn't that what they do? Well, actually, artists make things so that *other people* can look at them. If the artist makes things which only she will look at, it is usually only done in the context of preparing art for the public---practice drawings, first drafts, etc. The ultimate goal is to share the artist's art with others.

Of course, some people make things just for their own amusement. But in such cases, they *interact* in some fashion with the thing they've made---they play with it, or use it in some way, because they derive enjoyment from doing so. But what enjoyment would someone derive from creating a universe, whose most interesting inhabitants one would then choose not to communicate or interact with in any fashion? Why would a rational being go to the trouble of making rational beings, but then not have anything to do with those other rational beings? Even in our own fictional accounts of creating supposedly rational entities like Frankenstein or the 2001 Space Odyssey computer, there is always interaction between the creator and the creature. Sometimes there is even some kind of emotional relationship.

I submit that it would be a lot more natural if a divine creator interacted or communicated somehow with his creatures, and decidedly odd if he did not.

A further consideration is that the universe is not just an arena where scientific physics plays out. It's also a moral arena. Why should that be? Was it just an accident that the intelligent designer god whom Flew now posits made the universe, and then had morality come into the world as an *unforeseen, accidental by-product*. I don't think that's plausible.

All the rational creatures we're familiar with are also moral agents---agents, that is, who are capable in principle of entering into moral relationships. Why would a rational creator not be also a moral agent? And if the creator is a moral agent, that would mean that the creator would have an understanding of moral value. But moral value arises precisely in relationship with other moral agents. Hence, a rational creator who is also a moral agent--as one would expect him to be (and certainly Kant would insist that all rational beings are ipso facto moral beings)---such a creator would know that moral value would arise in the creator's relating meaningfully to the rational moral creatures he has made.

Now of course, one might object that this is all only what we would expect, and reality might be different. But on the hypothesis that there is a rational, intelligent designer/creator of the world, our expectations in this regard are ultimately the result of that creator making the world and us the way the world and we are. Our expectations in this regard would, in short, have been 'put there' by the creator. Why would the creator do such a thing if the expectations were invalid or bore no relation to reality? The only reason a creator would do such a thing would be malicious desire to deceive us.

What is the likelihood that an intelligent, rational creator of the universe would be malicious? Well, on some theories of morality (notably Kant's), to be rational entails being moral. Or to put it another way, immorality is a species of irrationality. But if a Flew-type god is highly or supremely rational, which seems implicit in the notion of being the creator of the whole world, and therefore of all the rational minds within it, then on Kantian grounds we should doubt that the creator is malicious.

Even leaving Kant to one side, there seems to be a contradiction or at least a strong incongruity between Flew's obvious admiration for the extraordinarily intelligent design of life-systems in the universe, and the idea that the being responsible for this design is malicious. For one thing, it seems possible that a being with malevolent creative intentions would have made life-systems much more frustrating or painful than they naturally seem to be. Among sentient creatures, pain is the exception rather than the rule. Normal, healthy sentient beings are satisfied, and the very notion of 'normal health' indicates that the overall nature of the design of life is not malevolent, since it suggests that health, not pain or illness, is the norm. One just needs to look at most kids in a school yard at break-time to see that they are happy to be alive. Why would a malevolent creator not make their lives worse?

It will, of course, be objected that there is a great deal of suffering, pain and disease in the world, not least among children. But is this really and mainly the fault of the way nature is designed? Or is it really and mainly because of human choices? Recent studies, just to take an almost random sample of many, suggest that exposure to benzene is harmful, and that chronic stress is linked to cellular aging:

Benzene Exposure Linked to Blood Changes

Fri Dec 3, 3:22 AM ET
By PAUL RECER, AP Science Writer

WASHINGTON - Blood changes, including a steep decline in disease-fighting white cells, have been found in workers persistently exposed to low levels of benzene, a common industrial chemical known to pose a leukemia risk at high concentrations.

Wed Dec 1, 1:49 AM ET

LOS ANGELES (AFP) - Chronic stress appears to shorten the life of the body's immune cells, and may compromise the body's ability to fight off disease, US researchers said.

....Thus, a good deal of human illness appears to be due to choices which we ourselves make, rather than something necessitated by nature. Of course, if determinism is true, then the creator is causally responsible for our choices. But the truth of determinism is far from being established, and in any case determinism seems incompatible with what we know about nature from quantum mechanics. And if we are responsible for our own choices, then that means we are responsible for our bad choices---both morally bad choices, and ones that are merely imprudent or mistaken.

Furthermore, most sentient beings cling to life. Among humans, most people appear to prefer life to death, and this seems almost universally true of other sentient beings. People in general seem to be glad that they are alive, even grateful. There are exceptions. But that's the point---they're exceptions. A malevolent creator would surely have seen to it that they were not exceptions, but rather the norm. Though why a putatively rational, intelligent creator would purposely create beings whose normal inclination would be towards suicide is itself a question that seems to negate its own premiss.

On the whole therefore, we seem to have little reason to suppose that the rational/intelligent creator god posited by Flew would act from malice. Hence there'd be little reason to suppose that the creator would purposely try to deceive his creatures as regards their expectations. And among our expectations is the expectation that any rational creature is likely also a moral agent who will therefore know that moral value arises in and through choosing to relate and interact as a rational/moral being with other similar beings, if one can. Hence there seems little reason to doubt this expectation (since there seems little reason to suppose that the creator would be a malicious deceiver), and hence we are probably justified in expecting that the creator of the world would choose, if possible, to relate and interact with us.

What evidence is there that the creator has chosen to do so? Well, it strikes me that there is a colossal amount of such evidence, if we consider simply the tremendously widespread phenomenon of religious experience. By that term I include everything from a natural disposition to believe in the existence of a divine being, to special experiences of apparent communication with such a being. The former has been the norm for a long time in most cultures---few cultures or civilizations have been 'naturally' atheistic, or at least naturally disposed to believe that there are no supernatural beings. On the contrary. And the latter type of experience is well attested in the mystical literature of all the world's major religions. At least some of these accounts have more than the ring of truth (in the sense that the mystical writer appears to be telling the truth about what she has felt, seen, or otherwise experienced), and many of them are compelling in other ways too, especially the ones linked to dramatic and impressive moral transformations for the better. Certainly this kind of transformation has long held by the mainstream theorists of the major religions to be a criterion of authenticity with respect to the claimed experiences (other criteria include such things as the experiencer's consistency, known capacity for honesty, integrity, and modesty, lack of interest in profiting financially, general psychological health, etc). Other religious experiences include a not insignificant number of cases of people claiming to have witnessed healing miracles.

And there is of course a very large body of monotheistic literature attesting to religious experience of a transcendent God who desires us to understand the centrality of the moral life, and desires to forgive us for and save us from our moral failures and other bad choices. In short, many people claim to have experienced some kind of interaction with the creator.

Flew would dismiss all this. But it's surely important to see that, a priori, there seems little reason to doubt that a rational, intelligent creator would also be a moral creator and would therefore *desire* moral interaction with those of his creatures who were themselves moral beings. And it's surely important to see that, a posteriori, there is an enormous number of people who claim to have been the recipients of, and to have engaged in, moral interaction with the divine creator of the world.

Since I myself have had two extraordinary experiences of interacting with God, and many ordinary or everday religious experiences (such as feelings of peace in prayer, or being moved by the love of God and neighbor exhibited by others), I find it hard to accept that what seems to be quite likely on a priori grounds---namely, that a rational creator of the world would also be moral and would desire moral interaction with his creatures---is not also something that we have good reason to believe has actually occurred, in fact, quite frequently.