A Common Form of Erroneous Thinking about the Universe
This essay may be something of a non sequitur compared to usual LW topics. I wrote it some time ago and have long been sitting on it, waiting to discover a place to share it. I have just spent some time stripping it down to bones for this forum. I wrote it because I kept hearing while listening to or reading debates about religion, often involving Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens (the Mighty Hitch), objections from religious types that contained some form of the argument:
“Some aspect of the universe or of an object present in the universe exhibits such a high level of complexity that it can be concluded that it is not a natural product of the universe. It indicates the existence of X [usually God].”
I think that my response to this argument is relevant to this community because scientists and philosophers also make judgments about the complexity and the orderedness of the universe, indeed so have I, and I think that my objections to the above – patently silly – argument can be generalized to critique the statements of these latter two groups as well. To it, then:
It is difficult to find sympathy for any opinion about the qualities of the universe predicated on the notion that a particular quality is beyond the capabilities of nature to produce unaided. Such opinions can be as extreme as those of the religious who find the complexities of life as grounds for inferring the existence of a Creator or a mild as the casual observation that a natural occurrence is unusually or unexpectedly beautiful or orderly. I recently found myself holding an opinion of the latter type concerning the human brain and the immense chemical and electrical complexities that effect its qualities. There is some bizarre intuition that suggests the question, “How can nature alone do something so great/complex/impressive?” I intend to here demonstrate that this intuition is specious and silly, and should be avoided by those who would make rational judgments.
All of our opinions about what is naturally possible must be based, by definition, on observations of nature. Ultimately, some observation of nature grounds your reasoning about nature. I take it that a moment of thought will confirm this in the reader. Nature, by plain logic, cannot defy these opinions except when these opinions are themselves spurious. To formalize: if all of your judgments about X come from observations of X, X cannot have properties that contradict these judgments unless these judgments are incorrect themselves.
You may argue that our opinions of nature need not be based on observations of nature and that we can come to judgments about a thing without reference to that thing. You and I hold two contradictory opinions about knowledge and how to come to it, at least as concerns objects in nature and nature itself. I will not spend time arguing for a materialist and scientific approach in this essay, as others have done it better and have works readily available.
The strangeness of claims that defy the dependence of judgment on observation is obvious when dealing with claims about the unnaturalness of objects:
“Such a thing is unnatural.”
“How do you know?”
“By observing nature.”
“But the unnatural thing is as much a part of nature as the things you think are natural.”
“Yes. Wait, what?”
The same sort of objection applies to claims that nature is too “well-tuned” to be strictly natural. Again, from where have you derived your opinion of what is the natural level of “tunedness”? If you think that nature seems well-tuned, then it must be the case that one of the qualities of nature is its well-tunedness in this particular case.
There is, I think, in judgments of the above form, an implicit comparison taking place, and it is from this unacknowledged comparison that the error arises. When you say that nature is surprisingly or especially one way, to what are you comparing it? What is this thing that has given you your ideas about what is unsurprising or normal in nature if it is not nature itself. The inability to answer this question reveals the problem.
This world is the realm within which we have formed all of our opinions about greatness, order, impressiveness, etc. How then can a piece of the world defy these opinions except if the opinions are based on incomplete data or on bad reasoning or lousy observations. Obviously these opinions of the world are wrong, not the world. The natural world cannot fail to live-up to its own nature.
This argument begs the question, it is only works if God does not exist. You’re trying to prove that there is no God, and everything is created naturally.
Your say:
This statement is correct if there is no outside force helping the Universe along. But if there is a God then what you are observing is not natural, it was put in place, or at least helped along, by a divine being.
Note that I am an atheist, this is just a standard rebuttal.
Uh, could you change the font back to normal? I’m finding this one harder to read, maybe because it’s a bit smaller.
We can’t even begin to tell what’s “natural” until we’ve got a larger sample of universes, preferably combined with information about whether they were created or meddled with or just happened.,
In an absolute sense, everything which exists is natural but we could be living in an entirely natural simulation.
This argument seems to depend on eliding the technical and colloquial uses of the word “natural.”
That is: if I find the canonical wristwatch lying in the desert, am I justified in concluding it is a natural product?
In one sense, no: it’s overwhelmingly likely to have been artificially constructed and intelligently designed.
In another sense, yes: there it is in the natural world, what else could it be but natural? Wristwatches are among the things that humans create and occasionally misplace in deserts as an expression of our nature.
The latter sense is technically correct, but the former sense is what most people actually mean. In particular, when creationists and the like declare that life is too complicated to arise naturally, they mean something much more like the former sense than the latter.
Admittedly, they then confuse matters further by contrasting natural phenomena with divine phenomena… but then they model divine phenomena as essentially like human-mediated artificial phenomena, which sort of muddles the whole thing.
I’m reminded of a friend of mine, an atheist and an active member of his local church, who gave a guest sermon a while back on the subject of evolution; his theme was that the traditional creationist model does not give God enough credit.
Even if we take as a given that speciation, or the origin of life itself, is an expression of divine volition, he argued, surely a god who performs miracles to do those things is less impressive than a god who creates the Universe in such a way that those things are natural expressions of its construction?
Seen that way, he concluded, the modern view of the origin and evolution of life gives more glory to God than the traditional view, and should be embraced by the truly devout on those grounds.