There is a deep and perennial and profoundly human impulse to approach the world with a DEMAND, to approach the world with a PRECONDITION, that what has got to turn out to lie at THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE, that what has got to turn out to lie at THE FOUNDATION OF ALL BEING, is some powerful and reassuring and accessible image of OURSELVES.

Okay. And right after it, we have….

That's the impulse that the What the Bleep films seem to me to flatter and to endorse and (finally) to exploit - and that, more than any of their particular factual inaccuracies - is what bothers me about them. It is precisely the business of resisting that demand, it is precisely the business of approaching the world with open and authentic wonder, and with a sharp, cold eye, and singularly intent upon the truth, that's called science.

Spot the obvious contradiction.

Why demand that reality only conform to the deliverances of scientific reasoning if it's a Bad Thing to 'demand' that reality conform to human ways of thinking about reality, as if reasoning by scientists wasn't itself a quintessentially human way of thinking about reality, one that most distinguishes us from animals?

Why is scientific thinking ok, but, say, poetic thinking, is not ok when it comes to thinking about the world? The data, we'll be told. But why are scientific data more epistemically normative than the experiential data that informed the poetry of Blake, or Hopkins, or Eliot, or the Hebrew psalmists?

What's really going on with this Mythic Tale of Fearless Copernican Heroes, who bravely inform the rest of us about reality's scientifically revealed cold indifference to human concerns and wishes, and what neither dimasok or Albert (whose book on the philosophy of quantum mechanics I used some years ago) seem to grasp, is the mistaken, indeed, incoherent thought that lies behind the Flying Spaghetti Monster type of parody of theism. It's what I call the Goldfish Bowl objection, since it was in that form I first encountered it.

There's a goldfish, living in a goldfish bowl. The goldfish infers that there must be a Big Goldfish beyond the bowl, who created both the little goldfish and the bowl.

The reason this is to misunderstand how religious people think about God is that it takes the goldfish morphology and the bowl of water in which the goldfish lives as being the key phenomena to be explained. But of course, it's really the goldfish's putative reasoning mind, and the concomitant capacities to experience self-aware rational consciousness and to grasp value, that is the central thing to be explained, not goldfish morphology or the existence of a bowl filled with water.

In short, such parodies miss the point of theistic belief, which is to explain the existence of Reason and Value. Theism is the view that Reason and Value are necessarily attributes of minds, and it posits a metaphysically ultimate Mind as the ultimate metaphysical basis of reality. What counts is therefore not anthropic or goldfish morphology (which is one reason God is not a magic man sitting on a cloud in the sky with long white hair and a beard), but rationality. Without implicitly endowing the goldfish with a rational mind (which it uses to infer the existence of the Great Big Goldfish beyond the bowl), such parodies wouldn't appear to 'work', even as parodies.

Now one could try to say that reason and value as such are still expressive of unscientifically warranted anthropocentrism, and hence should not be relied on to make inferences beyond our universe. But of course, both dimasok and Albert insist that human reason should be our guide to reality; and they both express negative value judgements about wishful thinking.

The logical incoherence of insisting upon science as the only normative form of thought while simultaneously decrying the idea that the world be subject to human modes and criteria of thought is thus blatant. (And, I might add, par for the course among the Master Race known as 'Brights'.)

But then, if to avoid such incoherence we agree that reason is the proper basis for thinking about reality, then an abductive inference to a metaphysically ultimate reality that is intrinsically and pre-eminently rational is much more reasonable than an inference to an ultimate reality that's intrinsically devoid of rationality. (Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism stems from this basic insight.) In other words, theistic metaphysics is quite reasonable in comparison to materialist metaphysics.

The truth is Intelligent Design does not conflict with the Creations view of creation or the Evolutionist view of Evolution. In fact it gives you a way to unify the two.

Sure, and the concept of fruit unifies apples and oranges.

That's why I brought the two pieces above, to continue exploring the universe and let the new data modify our theories. Your belief in God does not irritate me. What irritates me is that the reasons you believe in God are something I cannot share

Considering we've never met, and I have yet to spell out my reasons for my belief in God - what are you talking about? Or maybe, just may, those reasons don't really matter to your atheism because…

there are no logical reasons for that other than "that's what I want".

Or maybe not. I don't really know your reasons for your (I assume) atheism, and you're certainly not giving any good reasons here.

God doesn't solve the problem of evil. Science doesn't solve the problem of evil. The world JUST IS, evil or not, it wasn't created to satisfy your or anyone else's curiosity. What else is there to say? I haven't seen a single argument put forth that was any more convincing than the other hogwash spouted by religion about the problem of evil or any other problem. GOOD & EVIL are in your head, not out there in the cold vacuum cosmos.

Your honor, I call Steven Weinberg to the stand.

With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil. But for good people to do evil — that takes religion.

Your honor, to please the court, Richard Dawkins.

If you want to do evil, science provides the most powerful weapons to do evil; but equally, if you want to do good, science puts into your hands the most powerful tools to do so.

Deluded fellows. Someone ought to send a little science their way!

… I could go on, but why bother? You aren't convinced by the arguments you've seen. And that, apparently, is all that matters - that I disagree, that others disagree, is meaningless. You can't be wrong, and I must be wrong, period. End of story.

What's your point? You have this emotional need to equalize people, to somehow find redeeming qualities in each and every one of them, whether they're scientists or believers - why is that?

Redeeming qualities? I pointed out nothing but negatives, really, other than complimenting the What the Bleep? people for their animation and some illustrations of points. Are you just trying to call me emotional because I pointed out how frantic you were coming across?

Scientists write books that the universe is pointless, we are not special and nothing ultimately matters NOT BECAUSE they WANT to make these statements (do you honestly believe that I don't wish this incompetent universe to be at least a little bit better with an overseering higher intelligence, afterlife, etc), but because that's what the DATA SHOWS.

…And some scientists think the data shows otherwise. And many people, such as myself - though I'm certainly not a scientist - have a look at the various arguments and claims and, while accepting all the science, find the conclusions of Dawkins, Weinberg, and others utterly wrong. In other words, the data doesn't objectively show any such thing, because the data can be taken in a variety of ways - this before realizing that we're going to be getting one heck of a lot more data, possibly neverending.

As for what you wish - how should I know? Maybe you do, maybe you don't. But 'I believe in something you think is bad, and obviously believing in something you think is good would be better, therefore I must be completely informed and correct about this' isn't very persuasive.

You can demand something of a movie you're filming, of a video game you are making, of a book you are writing, but not of the universe you're in!

And I'm saying that scientists are - believe it or not - human beings, prone to projecting their same demands onto the books they write, regardless of how pessimistic it may seem to others. In other words, many atheists are easily placed alongside those advocates of religion, paranormal, new-age, and crackpot (string?) theories. I'm sure, just as with proclaimed theists, many of them care little about the metaphysical realities and are more concerned with political or social aims when they discuss such things. Maybe many more find the prospect of a God or similar idea downright distasteful compared to a universe where no man is subject to any power, even if life is finite. Maybe many have no strong personal belief either way, but acclimate to their culture and follow their colleagues' lead.

But the real question is: If there's no good or evil, right or wrong, the world 'just is', and man's universal destiny is death and eternal oblivion.. why do you put so much care and emotion into arguing this? 'Just because you want to'? Are you dancing to determinist notes, pointless thoughts orchestrated by billions of years of ateleological evolution that just happen to be primed to make your 'there is no God' meme survive?

Your ace in the hole here seems to be '1) Everyone would like to believe in God, 2) but some/many scientists don't, so 3) obviously The Truth is winning out over their desires, and 4) in theists, desires are winning out over The Truth'. I'm calling 1 ridiculous, for a reason you may be able to relate to: Human beings are not so simple. Crack open an abnormal psychology book sometime and have a tour of what humans can desire. Or just meditate on the old maxim 'Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it'.

You're trying desperately to make this into an either-or decision, when there's no need to do so. 'Chalk it up to religion' instead of science? I have an idea; How about we continue the long tradition of exploring and understanding our universe, and let the discoveries and data interact with our respective philosophies? I can sit around and do my best to learn about the quantum world, biology, cosmology, and the rest while retaining a belief in God. Does this irritate you? If so, I'm sorry - but I'm going to keep at it. As will many others.

That's why I brought the two pieces above, to continue exploring the universe and let the new data modify our theories. Your belief in God does not irritate me. What irritates me is that the reasons you believe in God are something I cannot share, even though we're basically on the same ground in terms of accepting the scientific picture. You can certainly believe in God if that makes you feel better, but there are no logical reasons for that other than "that's what I want".

As for the problem of evil - sarcasm aside, it sounds like you don't really know what to say. What irritates you more: The fact that theologians, philosophers, and believers still try to explore those problems? Or the fact that sometimes, they manage to make some good points in the process? For my part, I don't mind people pointing out real flaws and problems in theological or philosophical answers. Then again, I don't feel threatened or irritated at the prospect of people truly thinking about things, even if though I may disagree with their conclusions.

God doesn't solve the problem of evil. Science doesn't solve the problem of evil. The world JUST IS, evil or not, it wasn't created to satisfy your or anyone else's curiosity. What else is there to say? I haven't seen a single argument put forth that was any more convincing than the other hogwash spouted by religion about the problem of evil or any other problem. GOOD & EVIL are in your head, not out there in the cold vacuum cosmos.

I find 'regular folks' to more often than not believe in God (or at least profess such) while not doing all that much digging in science, philosophy, or even the Bible (or whatever religious authority they happen to subscribe to.) I've also run into plenty of atheists who do much the same, and are more likely to augment their arguments with a clip from Family Guy than, say, the writings of David Hume. There are atheists out there who loudly proclaim their belief in evolution and don't understand the first thing about it - but what does that matter to me insofar as the arguments themselves go? It's one thing to wish people were more educated. It's another to believe that unless they don't agree with me, they aren't truly educated. That seems an awful lot like fanaticism, doesn't it?

I do agree that the atheists should take their fair share of flak as well due to the reasons you mentioned, no doubt. Looking at it from this angle then, atheists by a sheer stroke of luck managed to somehow align themselves with the mainstream science while religious people have simply chosen the wrong path from the get-go.

Be careful, dimasok, your emotional need for your belief is showing. Far from the 'sharp, cold eye, singularly intent upon the truth'. Also, boring fairy-tales that no one would make a movie about? Mel Gibson and Charlton Heston would be surprised to hear that.

My emotional need? I'm scientific enough in order for my emotions not to be a major hurdle in any discussion, so you could forgive me here, since I didn't dream science up.

As for the What The Bleep films - absolutely, it's entirely possible to take scientific discoveries and data and put one heck of a spin on them, beyond the data. But so what? Why call out the What the Bleep people for manipulating science (And, while I admired some of their animations and illustrations of the topics, I was not impressed with the movie), yet when other scientists write books or declare that the universe is pointless, humans are not special, and nothing ultimately matters, that's okay - despite it being exactly what the What The Bleep? people were doing, but in a different direction?

What's your point? You have this emotional need to equalize people, to somehow find redeeming qualities in each and every one of them, whether they're scientists or believers - why is that?
Scientists write books that the universe is pointless, we are not special and nothing ultimately matters NOT BECAUSE they WANT to make these statements (do you honestly believe that I don't wish this incompetent universe to be at least a little bit better with an overseering higher intelligence, afterlife, etc), but because that's what the DATA SHOWS. If something tomorrow turned all of science upside down with a unique experiment that demonstrated, say, that everything in that movie was true and that God existed, we could change reality just by wishing for it, etc then science would change accordingly to accommodate the new findings.

I don't think you truly comprehend the bolded part of that quote:

There is a deep and perennial and profoundly human impulse to approach the world with a DEMAND, to approach the world with a PRECONDITION, that what has got to turn out to lie at THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE, that what has got to turn out to lie at THE FOUNDATION OF ALL BEING, is some powerful and reassuring and accessible image of OURSELVES.

The makers of that movie DEMAND for reality to be the way they want and they will go to any lengths to distort the findings to yield the picture of reality THEY WANT. Same goes with advocates of religion, paranormal, new-age and a barrage of individual crackpot theories you can find on every corner of the web - they have a DEMAND for reality to be the way they desire and nothing science will ever say would satiate this demand (btw, string theory and the simulation argument are steeped in the same predicament). You can demand something of a movie you're filming, of a video game you are making, of a book you are writing, but not of the universe you're in! Just because someone came up with religion, paranormal & new-age theories or what have you doesn't mean that the universe is simply going to gobble it up and run along with every kooky theory! And please I beg you don't try to connect our consciousness with the universe and the observer-dependent collapse of the wavefunction because then we'd slide into solipsistic discussions that are always harbingers of trouble… I cannot prove that the sun exists when i'm not looking at it, but it is absurd for me to think like that given what science demonstrated and it's certainly fairly obvious that if I'd wish for the sun to set tomorrow morning, it wouldn't no matter how hard I concentrated.

So science has to cater to every whim and fancy now? Great. Behold the power of wishful thinking. If that's the case, then let's all branch out into our individual multiverses where we have the universes we want to toy around with! It would certainly fit me!

Fine. Let's chalk it up to religion then which is a delicious alternative to science, absolutely, i'm all for it. Let's solve the problem of evil by alluding to God and that we can't see the entire picture which does take its course per god's plan.

You're trying desperately to make this into an either-or decision, when there's no need to do so. 'Chalk it up to religion' instead of science? I have an idea; How about we continue the long tradition of exploring and understanding our universe, and let the discoveries and data interact with our respective philosophies? I can sit around and do my best to learn about the quantum world, biology, cosmology, and the rest while retaining a belief in God. Does this irritate you? If so, I'm sorry - but I'm going to keep at it. As will many others.

As for the problem of evil - sarcasm aside, it sounds like you don't really know what to say. What irritates you more: The fact that theologians, philosophers, and believers still try to explore those problems? Or the fact that sometimes, they manage to make some good points in the process? For my part, I don't mind people pointing out real flaws and problems in theological or philosophical answers. Then again, I don't feel threatened or irritated at the prospect of people truly thinking about things, even if though I may disagree with their conclusions.

What is a believer in your book? Someone who goes to church and does all of these ridiculous rituals (no matter what religion he/she belongs to) and when asked to justify his actions, refers to some holy book? Where exactly did you find believers who DID NOT reject science? Did you mean to say there are certain scientists who despite all of their advanced work in theoretical physics believe in some sort of higher power? If so, yeah, there are some of those and it's not COMPLETELY irrational. But the REGULAR FOLKS out there? Gimme a break.

I find 'regular folks' to more often than not believe in God (or at least profess such) while not doing all that much digging in science, philosophy, or even the Bible (or whatever religious authority they happen to subscribe to.) I've also run into plenty of atheists who do much the same, and are more likely to augment their arguments with a clip from Family Guy than, say, the writings of David Hume. There are atheists out there who loudly proclaim their belief in evolution and don't understand the first thing about it - but what does that matter to me insofar as the arguments themselves go? It's one thing to wish people were more educated. It's another to believe that unless they don't agree with me, they aren't truly educated. That seems an awful lot like fanaticism, doesn't it?

90% have no idea what science or religion are and haven't studied them beyond what's written in their holy scripture (not much other than boring and unoriginal fairy-tales that no studio would ever bother moving to the silver screen)

Be careful, dimasok, your emotional need for your belief is showing. Far from the 'sharp, cold eye, singularly intent upon the truth'. Also, boring fairy-tales that no one would make a movie about? Mel Gibson and Charlton Heston would be surprised to hear that.

As for the What The Bleep films - absolutely, it's entirely possible to take scientific discoveries and data and put one heck of a spin on them, beyond the data. But so what? Why call out the What the Bleep people for manipulating science (And, while I admired some of their animations and illustrations of the topics, I was not impressed with the movie), yet when other scientists write books or declare that the universe is pointless, humans are not special, and nothing ultimately matters, that's okay - despite it being exactly what the What The Bleep? people were doing, but in a different direction?

Also, yes - if people stop believing in God, then.. people will stop believing in God "in a jiffy". Point taken.

The cosmological argument? Let's just forget how recent it is that yelling that there could be no 'beginning of the universe' was the intellectual mainstay, and ignore the discovery of apparent fine-tuning in the known universe. No, let's file those thoughts away, chalk it up to 'it is because it is', and forget about it. Matter addressed - see how easy it is to resolve a problem when you don't put your mind to it?

Fine. Let's chalk it up to religion then which is a delicious alternative to science, absolutely, i'm all for it. Let's solve the problem of evil by alluding to God and that we can't see the entire picture which does take its course per god's plan.

What seems to annoy Carroll most - and you, really, dimasok - is the fact that many believers actually do not reject science, but instead accept it happily as a way to better inform themselves about the God (or maybe gods) they believe in.

What is a believer in your book? Someone who goes to church and does all of these ridiculous rituals (no matter what religion he/she belongs to) and when asked to justify his actions, refers to some holy book? Where exactly did you find believers who DID NOT reject science? Did you mean to say there are certain scientists who despite all of their advanced work in theoretical physics believe in some sort of higher power? If so, yeah, there are some of those and it's not COMPLETELY irrational. But the REGULAR FOLKS out there? Gimme a break. 90% have no idea what science or religion FUNDAMENTALLY are and haven't studied them beyond what's written in their holy scripture (not much other than boring and unoriginal fairy-tales that no studio would ever bother moving to the silver screen) and what they read about the Big Bang some time ago, perhaps when they were in high school (not that I blame them for it, but they should at least get all of the facts straight before choosing to reject or embrace science for all the wrong reasons).

I'll quote David Albert a leading QM scientist to illustrate the problem of humanity:

It seems to me that what's at issue (at the end of the day) between serious investigators of the foundations of quantum mechanics and the producers of the "what the bleep" movies is very much of a piece with what was at issue between Galileo and the Vatican, and very much of a piece with what was at issue between Darwin and the Victorians. There is a deep and perennial and profoundly human impulse to approach the world with a DEMAND, to approach the world with a PRECONDITION, that what has got to turn out to lie at THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE, that what has got to turn out to lie at THE FOUNDATION OF ALL BEING, is some powerful and reassuring and accessible image of OURSELVES. That's the impulse that the What the Bleep films seem to me to flatter and to endorse and (finally) to exploit - and that, more than any of their particular factual inaccuracies - is what bothers me about them. It is precisely the business of resisting that demand, it is precisely the business of approaching the world with open and authentic wonder, and with a sharp, cold eye, and singularly intent upon the truth, that's called science.

That's exactly what religious people are doing. If they will stop demanding, God will disintegrate in a jiffy.

I just wonder when these beliefs in prehistoric God would evaporate already"¦

Probably because lines like this…

"Can God microwave a burrito so hot that He Himself cannot eat it?" The reason why problems such as this are so vexing…

…are rolled out by people who think the matter is settled. Yes, the burrito so hot that God cannot eat it argument has been one of the most damning critiques of theism. Did you know there's no Taco Bell in the Vatican? Now you understand why.

What seems to annoy Carroll most - and you, really, dimasok - is the fact that many believers actually do not reject science, but instead accept it happily as a way to better inform themselves about the God (or maybe gods) they believe in. Dawkins is happy when believers assert that the world is 6000 years old and the devil has been planting dinosaur bones in the earth. He grinds his teeth when they point out the powerful creative forces at work in the universe, from the quantum level to the biological level to the cosmological level. Carroll chides theists for question begging with regards to infinite chains of causes, then goes on to talk about the "unpurposeful meanderings of matter" - if he's found a way to detect purpose in the universe, he should share it. Dembski would be appreciative.

The most amusing thing is, Sean Carroll's biggest point - and biggest plea - is apparently for theists to… stop asking questions. The problem of evil? Impossible to answer, give up now, thank you. Nevermind Alvin Plantinga's extraordinarily effective response to the logical problem of evil, and the good arguments that address the evidential problem. It's a fool's errand. The cosmological argument? Let's just forget how recent it is that yelling that there could be no 'beginning of the universe' was the intellectual mainstay, and ignore the discovery of apparent fine-tuning in the known universe. No, let's file those thoughts away, chalk it up to 'it is because it is', and forget about it. Matter addressed - see how easy it is to resolve a problem when you don't put your mind to it?

What I Believe But Cannot Prove
Sean at 3:43 pm, April 11th, 2007

Each year, John Brockman's Edge asks a collection of deep thinkers a profound question, and gives them a couple of hundred words to answer: The World Question Center. The question for 2005 was What Do You Believe Is True Even Though You Cannot Prove It? Plenty of entertaining answers, offered by people like Bruce Sterling, Ray Kurzweil, Lenny Susskind, Philip Anderson, Alison Gopnik, Paul Steinhardt, Maria Spiropulu, Simon Baron-Cohen, Alex Vilenkin, Martin Rees, Esther Dyson, Margaret Wertheim, Daniel Dennett, and a bunch more. They've even been collected into a book for your convenient perusal. Happily, these questions are more or less timeless, so nobody should be upset that I'm a couple of years late in offering my wisdom on this pressing issue.

Most of the participants were polite enough to play along and answer the question in the spirit in which it was asked, although their answers often came down to "I believe the thing I'm working on right now will turn out to be correct and interesting." But to me, there was a perfectly obvious response that almost nobody gave, although Janna Levin and Seth Lloyd came pretty close. Namely: there isn't anything that I believe that I can prove, aside from a limited set of ultimately sterile logical tautologies. Not that there's anything wrong with tautologies; they include, for example, all of mathematics. But they describe necessary truths; given the axioms, the conclusions follow, and we can't imagine it being any other way. The more interesting truths, it seems to me, are the contingent ones, the features of our world that didn't have to be that way. And I can't prove any of them.

The very phrasing of the question, and the way most of the participants answered it, irks me a bit, as it seems to buy into a very wrong way of thinking about science and understanding: the idea that true and reliable knowledge derives from rigorous proof, and anything less than that is dangerously uncertain. But the reality couldn't be more different. I can't prove that the Sun will rise tomorrow, that radioactive decays obey an exponential probability law, or that the Earth is more than 6,000 years old. But I'm as sure as I am about any empirical statement that these are true. And, most importantly, there's nothing incomplete or unsatisfying about that. It's the basic way in which we understand the world.

Here is a mathematical theorem: There is no largest prime number. And here is a proof:

Consider the list of all primes, pi, starting with p1 = 2. Suppose that there is a largest prime, p*. Then there are only a finite number of primes. Now consider the number X that we obtain by multiplying together all of the primes pi (exactly once each) from 2 to p* and adding 1 to the result. Then X is clearly larger than any of the primes pi. But it is not divisible by any of them, since dividing by any of them yields a remainder 1. Therefore X, since it has no prime factors, is prime. We have thus constructed a prime larger than p*, which is a contradiction. Therefore there is no largest prime.

Here is a scientific belief: General relativity accurately describes gravity within the solar system. And here is the argument for it:

GR incorporates both the relativity of locally inertial frames and the principle of equivalence, both of which have been tested to many decimal places. Einstein's equation is the simplest possible non-trivial dynamical equation for the curvature of spacetime. GR explained a pre-existing anomaly "” the precession of Mercury "” and made several new predictions, from the deflection of light to gravitational redshift and time delay, which have successfully been measured. Higher-precision tests from satellites continue to constrain any possible deviations from GR. Without taking GR effects into account, the Global Positioning System would rapidly go out of whack, and by including GR it works like a charm. All of the known alternatives are more complicated than GR, or introduce new free parameters that must be finely-tuned to agree with experiment. Furthermore, we can start from the idea of massless spin-two gravitons coupled to energy and momentum, and show that the nonlinear completion of such a theory leads to Einstein's equation. Although the theory is not successfully incorporated into a quantum-mechanical framework, quantum effects are expected to be unobservably small in present-day experiments. In particular, higher-order corrections to Einstein's equation should naturally be suppressed by powers of the Planck scale.

You see the difference, I hope. The mathematical proof is airtight; it's just a matter of following the rules of logic. It is impossible for us to conceive of a world in which we grant the underlying assumptions, and yet the conclusion doesn't hold.

The argument in favor of believing general relativity "” a scientific one, not a mathematical one "” is of an utterly different character. It's all about hypothesis testing, and accumulating better and better pieces of evidence. We throw an hypothesis out there "” gravity is the curvature of spacetime, governed by Einstein's equation "” and then we try to test it or shoot it down, while simultaneously searching for alternative hypotheses. If the tests get better and better, and the search for alternatives doesn't turn up any reasonable competitors, we gradually come to the conclusion that the hypothesis is "right." There is no sharp bright line that we cross, at which the idea goes from being "just a theory" to being "proven correct." Rather, maintaining skepticism about the theory goes from being "prudent caution" to being "crackpottery."

It is a intrinsic part of this process that the conclusion didn't have to turn out that way, in any a priori sense. I could certainly imagine a world in which some more complicated theory like Brans-Dicke was the empirically correct theory of gravity, or perhaps even one in which Newtonian gravity was correct. Deciding between the alternatives is not a matter of proving or disproving; its a matter of accumulating evidence past the point where doubt is reasonable.

Furthermore, even when we do believe the conclusion beyond any reasonable doubt, we still understand that it's an approximation, likely (or certain) to break down somewhere. There could very well be some very weakly-coupled field that we haven't yet detected, that acts to slightly alter the true behavior of gravity from what Einstein predicted. And there is certainly something going on when we get down to quantum scales; nobody believes that GR is really the final word on gravity. But none of that changes the essential truth that GR is "right" in a certain well-defined regime. When we do hit upon an even better understanding, the current one will be understood as a limiting case of the more comprehensive picture.

"Proof" has an interesting and useful meaning, in the context of logical demonstration. But it only gives us access to an infinitesimal fraction of the things we can reasonably believe. Philosophers have gone over this ground pretty thoroughly, and arrived at a sensible solution. The young Wittgenstein would not admit to Bertrand Russell that there was not a rhinocerous in the room, because he couldn't be absolutely sure (in the sense of logical proof) that his senses weren't tricking him. But the later Wittgenstein understood that taking such a purist stance renders the notion of "to know" (or "to believe") completely useless. If logical proof were required, we would only believe logical truths "” and even then the proofs might contain errors. But in the real world it makes perfect sense to believe much more than that. So we take "I believe x" to mean, not "I can prove x is the case," but "it would be unreasonable to doubt x."

The search for certainty in empirical knowledge is a chimera. I could always be a brain in a vat, or teased by an evil demon, or simply an AI program running on somebody else's computer "” fed consistently misleading "sense data" that led me to incorrect conclusions about the true nature of reality. Or, to put a more modern spin on things, I could be a one of Boltzmann's Brains "” a thermal fluctuation, born spontaneously out of a thermal bath with convincing (but thoroughly incorrect) memories of the past. But "” here is the punchline "” it makes no sense to act as if any of those is the case. By "makes no sense" we don't mean "can't possibly be true," because any one of those certainly could be true. Instead, we mean that it's a cognitive dead end. Maybe you are a brain in a vat. What are you going to do about it? You could try to live your life in a state of rigorous epistemological skepticism, but I guarantee that you will fail. You have to believe something, and you have to act in some way, even if your belief is that we have no reliable empirical knowledge about the world and your action is to never climb out of bed. On the other hand, putting aside the various solipsistic scenarios and deciding to take the evidence of our senses (more or less) at face value does lead somewhere; we can make sense of the world, act within it and see it respond in accordance with our understanding. That's both the best we can hope for, and what the world does as a matter of fact grant us; that's why science works!

It can sound a little fuzzy, with this notion of "reasonable" having sneaked into our definition of belief, where we might prefer to stand on some rock-solid metaphysical foundations. But the world is a fuzzy place. Although I cannot prove that I am not a brain in a vat, it is unreasonable for me to take the possibility seriously "” I don't gain anything by it, and it doesn't help me make sense of the world. Similarly, I can't prove that the early universe was in a hot, dense state billions of years ago, nor that human beings evolved from precursor species under the pressures of natural selection. But it would be unreasonable for me to doubt it; those beliefs add significantly to my understanding of the universe, accord with massive piles of evidence, and contribute substantially to the coherence of my overall worldview.

At least, that's what I believe, although I can't prove it.

Some of you may be wondering: "Does God exist?" Fortunately, Richard Dawkins has written a new book, The God Delusion, that addresses precisely this question. As it turns out, the answer is: "No, God does not exist." (Admittedly, Dawkins reached his conclusion before the Cards won the World Series.)

Nevertheless, there remains a spot of controversy "” it would appear that Dawkins's rhetorical force is insufficient to persuade some theists. One example is provided by literary critic Terry Eagleton, who reviewed The God Delusion for the London Review of Books. Eagleton's review has already been discussed among some of my favorite blogs: 3 Quarks Daily, Pharyngula, Uncertain Principles, and the Valve (twice), to name a few. But it provides a good jumping-off point for an examination of one of the common arguments used against scientifically-minded atheists: "You're setting up a straw man by arguing against a naive and anthropomorphic view of `God'; if only you engaged with more sophisticated theology, you'd see that things are not so cut-and-dried."

Before jumping in, I should mention that I have somewhat mixed feelings about Dawkins's book myself. I haven't read it very thoroughly, not because it's not good, but for the same reason that I rarely read popular cosmology books from cover to cover: I've mostly seen this stuff before, and already agree with the conclusions. But Dawkins has a strategy that is very common among atheist polemicists, and with which I tend to disagree. That's to simultaneously tackle three very different issues:

1. Does God exist? Are the claims of religion true, as statements about the fundamental nature of the universe?
2. Is religious belief helpful or harmful? Does it do more bad than good, or vice-versa?
3. Why are people religious? Is there some evolutionary-psychological or neurological basis for why religion is so prevalent?

All of these questions are interesting. But, from where I am sitting, the last two are incredibly complicated issues about which it is very difficult to say anything definitive, at least at this point in our intellectual history. Whereas the first one is relatively simple. By mixing them up, the controversial accounts of history and psychology tend to dilute the straightforward claim that there's every reason to disbelieve in the existence of God. When Dawkins suggests that the Troubles in Northern Ireland should be understood primarily as a religious schism between Catholics and Protestants, he sacrifices some of the credibility he may have had if he had stuck to the more straightforward issue of whether or not religion is true.

Right out of the gate, Eagleton bashes Dawkins for dabbling in things he doesn't understand.

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology"¦

What, one wonders, are Dawkins's views on the epistemological differences between Aquinas and Duns Scotus? Has he read Eriugena on subjectivity, Rahner on grace or Moltmann on hope? Has he even heard of them?

These questions, of course, have absolutely no relevance to the matter at hand; they are just an excuse for Eagleton to show off a bit of erudition. If Dawkins is right, and religion is simply a "delusion," a baroque edifice built upon a foundation of mistakes and wishful thinking, then the views of Eriugena on subjectivity are completely beside the point. Not all of theology directly concerns the question of whether or not God exists; much of it accepts the truth of that proposition, and goes from there. The question is whether that's a good starting point. If an architect shows you a grand design for a new high-rise building, you don't have to worry about the floor plan for the penthouse apartment if you notice that the foundation is completely unstable.

But underneath Eagleton's bluster lies a potentially-relevant critique. After all, some sophisticated theology is about whether or not God exists, and more importantly about the nature of God. Eagleton understands this, and gamely tries to explain how the concept of God is different from other things in the world:

For Judeo-Christianity, God is not a person in the sense that Al Gore arguably is. Nor is he a principle, an entity, or "existent": in one sense of that word it would be perfectly coherent for religious types to claim that God does not in fact exist. He is, rather, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever, including ourselves. He is the answer to why there is something rather than nothing. God and the universe do not add up to two, any more than my envy and my left foot constitute a pair of objects.

Okay, very good. God, in this conception, is not some thing out there in the world (or even outside the world), available to be poked and prodded and have his beard tugged upon. Eagleton rightly emphasizes that ordinary-language concepts such as "existence" might not quite be up to the task of dealing with God, at least not in the same way that they deal with Al Gore. A precisely similar analysis holds for less controversial ideas, such as the Schrödinger equation. There is a sense in which the Schrödinger equation "exists"; after all, wavefunctions seem to be constantly obeying it. But, whatever it may mean to say "the Schrödinger equation exists," it certainly doesn't mean the same kind of thing as to say "Al Gore exists." We're borrowing a term that makes perfect sense in one context and stretching its meaning to cover a rather different context, and emphasizing that distinction is a philosophically honorable move.

But then we run somewhat off the rails.

This, not some super-manufacturing, is what is traditionally meant by the claim that God is Creator. He is what sustains all things in being by his love; and this would still be the case even if the universe had no beginning. To say that he brought it into being ex nihilo is not a measure of how very clever he is, but to suggest that he did it out of love rather than need. The world was not the consequence of an inexorable chain of cause and effect. Like a Modernist work of art, there is no necessity about it at all, and God might well have come to regret his handiwork some aeons ago. The Creation is the original acte gratuit. God is an artist who did it for the sheer love or hell of it, not a scientist at work on a magnificently rational design that will impress his research grant body no end.

The previous excerpt, which defined God as "the condition of possibility," seemed to be warning against the dangers of anthropomorphizing the deity, ascribing to it features that we would normally associate with conscious individual beings such as ourselves. A question like "Does `the condition of possibility' exist?" would never set off innumerable overheated arguments, even in a notoriously contentious blogosphere. If that were really what people meant by "God," nobody would much care. It doesn't really mean anything "” like Spinoza's pantheism, identifying God with the natural world, it's just a set of words designed to give people a warm and fuzzy feeling. As a pragmatist, I might quibble that such a formulation has no operational consequences, as it doesn't affect anything relevant about how we think about the world or act within it; but if you would like to posit the existence of a category called "the condition of possibility," knock yourself out.

But "” inevitably "” Eagleton does go ahead and burden this innocent-seeming concept with all sorts of anthropomorphic baggage. God created the universe "out of love," is capable of "regret," and "is an artist." That's crazy talk. What could it possibly mean to say that "The condition of possibility is an artist, capable of regret"? Nothing at all. Certainly not anything better-defined than "My envy and my left foot constitute a pair of objects." And once you start attributing to God the possibility of being interested in some way about the world and the people in it, you open the door to all of the nonsensical rules and regulations governing real human behavior that tend to accompany any particular manifestation of religious belief, from criminalizing abortion to hiding women's faces to closing down the liquor stores on Sunday.

The problematic nature of this transition "” from God as ineffable, essentially static and completely harmless abstract concept, to God as a kind of being that, in some sense that is perpetually up for grabs, cares about us down here on Earth "” is not just a minor bump in the otherwise smooth road to a fully plausible conception of the divine. It is the profound unsolvable dilemma of "sophisticated theology." It's a millenia-old problem, inherited from the very earliest attempts to reconcile two fundamentally distinct notions of monotheism: the Unmoved Mover of ancient Greek philosophy, and the personal/tribal God of Biblical Judaism. Attempts to fit this square peg into a manifestly round hole lead us smack into all of the classical theological dilemmas: "Can God microwave a burrito so hot that He Himself cannot eat it?" The reason why problems such as this are so vexing is not because our limited human capacities fail to measure up when confronted with the divine; it's because they are legitimately unanswerable questions, arising from a set of mutually inconsistent assumptions.

It's worth the effort to dig into the origin of these two foundational notions of God, in order to get straight just how incompatible they really are. Until the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, Israelite religion was straightforwardly polytheistic, as much as the Greeks or Romans or Norse ever were. Originally, the Canaanite High God El (often translated simply as "God" in modern Bibles) was a completely distinct creature from Yahweh (often translated as "the Lord"). It's not until Exodus 3:6 that Yahweh asserts to Moses that he should be identified with El, the God of Abraham. (Why do you think that Yahweh's very First Commandment insists on not having any other gods before him?) Remnants of Judaism's polytheistic origins linger on throughout the Scriptures, which are an intricately-edited pastiche of various earlier sources. Psalm 82, for example, describes Yahweh making a power play at a meeting of the various gods (the "Council of El"):

1 God presides in the great assembly;
he gives judgment among the "gods":

2 "How long will you defend the unjust
and show partiality to the wicked?
Selah

3 Defend the cause of the weak and fatherless;
maintain the rights of the poor and oppressed.

4 Rescue the weak and needy;
deliver them from the hand of the wicked.

5 "They know nothing, they understand nothing.
They walk about in darkness;
all the foundations of the earth are shaken.

6 "I said, "˜You are "gods";
you are all sons of the Most High.'

7 But you will die like mere men;
you will fall like every other ruler."

8 Rise up, O God, judge the earth,
for all the nations are your inheritance.

The quotes around "gods," of course, are nowhere in the original Hebrew; they were inserted by the translators (this is the New International Version), who were understandably squeamish about all this talk concerning "gods" in the plural.

The development of Hebrew monotheism from its polytheistic beginnings is a long and complicated story that contemporary historians only incompletely understand; see this review of a book by Mark Smith of NYU to get some flavor of current thinking. But the crucial point is that the emergence of One God was an essentially political transformation. The ancient Hebrews, surrounded by other unfriendly nations, promoted their tribal deity Yahweh to the position of the most powerful god, promising dire consequences for any backsliders who would choose to worship Ba'al or Asherah or other pretenders (as Ahab and Jezebel learned the hard way). From there, it was a short doctrinal leap (requiring only the imaginative re-interpretation of a few Scriptural passages) to declare that Yahweh was the only God out there "” the well-known others weren't merely subordinate, they were imaginary. Even in its own right, this claim was somewhat problematic, as Yahweh had to serve double duty as the God of the Hebrews and also the only god in existence. But the conception of God as some sort of being who cared about the fate of the people of Israel was relatively sustainable; none of the Prophets went around defining Yahweh as "the condition of possibility," or even ascribing characteristics of omniscience and omnipotence to the deity.

Meanwhile, the ancient Greeks were developing monotheism for their own purposes "” essentially philosophical rather than political. They had quite the robust pantheon of individual gods, but it was clear to most careful thinkers that these were closer to amusingly anthropomorphic fairy tales than to deep truths about the structure of the universe. Unsurprisingly, the monotheistic conception reached its pinnacle in the work of Aristotle. In the Metaphysics, he presented a version of what we now know as the cosmological argument for the existence of God, which (in Wikipedia's rendering) goes something like this:

1. Every effect has a cause.
2. Nothing can cause itself.
3. A causal chain cannot be of infinite length.
4. Therefore, there must be a first cause; or, there must be something which is not an effect.

Admittedly, this is merely an informal paraphrase of the argument. But the more careful versions don't change the essential fact that these days, the cosmological proof is completely anachronistic. Right after step one "” "Every effect has a cause" "” the only sensible response is "No it doesn't." Or at least, "What is that supposed to mean"?

To make sense of the cosmological argument, it's important to realize that Aristotle's metaphysics was predicated to an important extent on his physics. (Later variations by theologians from Aquinas to Leibniz don't alter the essence of the argument.) To the ancient Greeks, the behavior of matter was teleological; earth wanted to fall down, fire wanted to rise toward the heavens. And once it reached its desired destination, it just sat there. According to Aristotle, if we want to keep an object moving we have to keep pushing it. And he's right, of course, if we are thinking about the vast majority of macroscopic objects in our everyday world "” which seems like a perfectly reasonable set of objects to think about. If you push a book along a table, and then stop pushing it, it will come to rest. If you want it to keep moving, you have to keep pushing it. That "effect" "” the motion of the book "” without a doubt requires a "cause" "” you pushing it. It doesn't seem like much of a leap to extend such an analysis to the entire universe, implying the existence of an ineffable, perfectly static First Cause, or Unmoved Mover.

But the God of the Judeo-Christian Bible is very far from being "Unmoved." He's quite the mover, actually "” smiting people here, raising the dead there. All very befitting, considering his origin as a local tribal deity. But utterly incompatible with the perfect and unchanging Aristotelian notion of God.

For the past two thousand years, theology has struggled to reconcile these two apparently-conflicting conceptions of the divine, without much success. We are left with fundamentally incoherent descriptions of what God is, which deny that he "exists" in the same sense that hummingbirds and saxophones do, but nevertheless attribute to him qualities of "love" and "creativity" that conventionally belong to conscious individual beings. One might argue that it's simply a hard problem, and our understanding is incomplete; after all, we haven't come up with a fully satisfactory way to reconcile general relativity and quantum mechanics, either. But there is a more likely possibility: there simply is no reconciliation to be had. The reason why it's difficult to imagine how God can be eternally perfect and also occasionally wistful is that God doesn't exist.

In fact, in this day and age the flaws in Aristotle's cosmological proof (just to pick one) are perfectly clear. Our understanding of the inner workings of the physical world has advanced quite a bit since the ancient Greeks. Long ago, Galileo figured out that the correct way to think about motion was to abstract from messy real-world situations to idealized circumstances in which dissipative effects such as friction and air resistance could be ignored. (They can always be restored later as perturbations.) Only then do we realize that what matter really wants to do is to maintain its motion at a constant speed, until it is explicitly acted upon by some external force. Except that, once we have made this breakthrough, we realize that the matter doesn't want to do anything "” it just does it. Modern physics doesn't describe the world in terms of "causes" and "effects." It simply posits that matter (in the form of quantum fields, or strings, or what have you) acts in accordance with certain dynamical laws, known as "equations of motion." The notion of "causality" is downgraded from "when I see B happening, I know it must be because of A" to "given some well-defined and suitably complete set of information about the initial state of a system, I can use the equations of motion to determine its subsequent evolution." But a concept like "cause" doesn't appear anywhere in the equations of motion themselves, nor in the specification of the type of matter being described; it is only an occasionally-appropriate approximation, useful to us humans in narrating the behavior of some macroscopic configuration of equation-obeying matter.

In other words, the universe runs all by itself. The planets orbit the Sun, not because anything is "causing" them to do so, but because that's the kind of behavior that obeys Newton's (or Einstein's) equations governing motion in the presence of gravity. Deeply embedded as we are in this Galilean/Newtonian framework, statements like "every effect has a cause" become simply meaningless. (We won't even bother with "A causal chain cannot be of infinite length," which completely begs the question.) Conservation of momentum completely undermines any force the cosmological argument might ever have had. The universe, like everything in it, can very well just be, as long as its pieces continue to obey the relevant equations of motion.

Special pleading that the universe is essentially different from its constituents, and (by nature of its unique status as all that there is to the physical world) that it could not have either (1) just existed forever, nor (2) come spontaneously into existence all by itself, is groundless. The only sensible response such skepticism is "Why not?" It's certainly true that we don't yet know whether the universe is eternal or whether it had a beginning, and we certainly don't understand the details of its origin. But there is absolutely no obstacle to our eventually figuring those things out, given what we already understand about physics. General relativity asserts that spacetime itself is dynamical; it can change with time, and potentially even be created from nothing, in a way that is fundamentally different from the Newtonian conception (much less the Aristotelian). And quantum mechanics describes the universe in terms of a wavefunction that assigns amplitudes to any of an infinite number of possibilities, including "” crucially "” spontaneous transitions, unforced by any cause. We don't yet know how to describe the origin of the universe in purely physical terms, but someday we will "” physicists are working on the problem every day.

The analogy to a penthouse apartment atop a high-rise building is quite apt. Much of the intricate architecture of modern theology is built on a foundation that conceives of God as both creator and sustainer of the world and as a friendly and loving being. But these days we know better. The Clockwork Universe of Galileo and Newton has once and for all removed the need for anything to "sustain" the universe, and the "creation" bit is something on which we are presently closing in.

In fact, although it is rarely discussed in history books, the influence of the conservation of momentum on theological practice is fairly evident. One response was a revival of Pyrrhonian skepticism, which claimed that it was simply wrong even to attempt to apply logic and rationality to questions of religion "” claiming that you had "proven" the existence of God could get you accused of atheism. The other, more robust response, was a turn to natural theology and the argument from design. Even if the universe could keep going all by itself, surely its unguided meanderings would never produce something as wonderfully intricate as (for example) the human eye? The argument doesn't hold up very well even under purely philosophical scrutiny "” David Hume's devastating take-down in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, interestingly, actually pre-dates William Paley's classic statement of the argument (1779 vs. 1802). Hume, for example, points out that, even if the argument from design works, it allows us to conclude next to nothing about the nature of the Designer. Maybe it was a team? Maybe our universe is a rough first draft for a much better later universe? Or even just a mistake? (Okay, that has something going for it.)

But then, of course, Darwin's theory of natural selection undercut the justification for the design argument just as thoroughly as classical mechanics undercut the justification for the cosmological argument. Indeed, the unpurposeful meanderings of matter in the universe can produce the wonderful intricacies of the human eye, and much els