Laura Knight-Jadczyk
In the previous post, we discussed the Cosmological Argument according to Philip Goff. Apparently, because of his “Cosmic Sin Intuition” (“it would be immoral for an all-powerful being to deliberately create a universe like ours”), no Omni-God can exist; i.e. a god who has the attributes of omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence; emphasis on the omnibenevolence part. Goff says: “Those who deny cosmic purpose cannot explain cosmological fine-tuning, believers in the Omni-God cannot explain the evil and suffering we find in the world.”
So, having disposed of any idea of an
Omni-god, Goff proposes to explore “Cosmic Purpose Without God.” This is actually one of the more entertaining
chapters in the book.
Goff starts off by complaining about people
getting stuck in dichotomies such as that between the traditional God of
Western religion and materialist atheism.
He notes that there are other options in between these two
extremes. And he’s right enough on that,
in my opinion. So he is going to explore
three options:
· Non-Standard Designers: Intelligent cosmic designers, but without the perfect qualities of the Omni-God.
· Teleological Laws: Impersonal laws of nature with goals built into them.
· Cosmopsychism: The idea that the universe is a conscious mind with purposes of its own.
Under the heading of
Non-Standard Designers, he first introduces “The Evil Designer
Hypothesis”. For some people, the
easiest way to make sense of the horrible suffering of living things is to
postulate an Evil Designer. That is,
after all, pretty much what the Gnostics did. So, we in the West (and elsewhere to some
extent), are left with this legacy of an Omni-God created as a psychological
defense against political realities on the ground. The battles between
materialists and creationists have largely been fought within this frame. So
Goff is correct when he decries thought dichotomies such as those between
Richard Dawkins’ ‘meaningless universe” and the Pope’s all-powerful and
all-loving creator. And he is right to
bring in ideas for exploration that are different options than just those
two.
Considering the Evil
Designer hypothesis, I wonder why Goff didn’t mention how old and venerable
this idea is? He writes in a rather
silly way about this idea, arguments suited more to a 10 year-old child than a
sincere discussion. At the end he states
that “The Evil Designer Hypothesis is just as implausible as the Good Designer
Hypothesis.” He has apparently never
read Gurdjieff and the Eastern tale of the Magician and the Sheep.
But, moving on: Goff
next entertains ‘The Simulation Hypothesis’. This is actually sillier than the
Evil Designer Hypothesis. He writes:
Perhaps our creator is just a normal scientist in a technologically
advanced civilization where simulated universes can be created with ease. To avoid both the problem of evil for the
Good Designer Hypothesis and the problem of good for the Evil Designer
Hypothesis, we can suppose that our creator has some purpose independent of how
well or how badly humans and other animals are doing. … This is a hypothesis in
which our universe has a purpose, but not the kind of purpose religion
typically envisages. We exist to serve
the intellectual advancement of our creator.
One of Goff’s objections to the simulation hypothesis is the thesis of ‘substrate independence’. That is, whether consciousness depends more
on structure or more on stuff. He doesn’t think his consciousness could run on
a computer because it is not made up of the same kind of ‘stuff’ his brain is
made of, i.e. gooey stuff.
He also points out
that if we suppose we are a simulation, we have only deferred the explanation
for Fine Tuning. Our creators would also
have to be Fine Tuned for life too, so who Fine Tuned them?
Next he presents the
idea of An Amoral Designer, a designer with no conception of good and evil just
a basic impetus to create. He rejects this because such a hypothesis lacks any
predictive power. He proposes a way
around this: a designer that is responsive to value which is not the same as a perfectly good designer. Or, how
about two of them: a Good Designer and a Bad Designer? (Another very old idea.)
Goff’s favorite idea
is the ‘Limited Designer Hypothesis’. He
writes:
Maybe our creator is only able to create from a very simple starting
point, such as a Big Bang singularity, and has limited flexibility in the kinds
of laws of nature she (sic) can establish in her (s9c) universes; she can
fiddle with numbers, but that’s it. Hence,
the only way she can create intelligent life is by creating a universe with the
right numbers, so that life will eventually evolve. This cosmic designer knew that this would
create a hell of a lot of suffering along the way, and was pained by this fact,
but it was either that or nothing and she judged, somewhat reasonably, that it
would be better to have the imperfect universe we find ourselves in rather than
no universe at all.
His answer to what it
is that limits the designer’s powers is very weak:
Explanations have to end somewhere.
Why can’t it just be a fundamental fact about the cosmic designer that
she is able to do some things but not others?
Why think that a cosmic designer has to be all-powerful? … But the constraint on powers under
consideration here is pretty simple: the cosmic designer can only create from a
Big Bang singularity a universe with physics of a particular form. This is a simply hypothesis that accounts for
the data as we find it. What’s not to
like? … It’s above my paygrade to work this out.
In summary, whilst I reject the Omni-God hypothesis, I am open to the
possibility of a non-standard designer hypothesis. However, design is not the only way to make
sense of cosmic purpose…(Goff)
And so, the next
proposal is ‘Teleological Laws’. Here he brings in Thomas Nagel’s book Mind and Cosmos. In this book, Nagel rejects both
neo-Darwinism and the Omni-God. He thinks that any philosophy that is unable
to include ‘mind’ is pretty much no philosophy at all. He states that not only is mind fundamental,
but that the world is intelligible to our minds and this intelligibility is no
accident. Nagel is also
anti-materialist. He writes:
“Materialism is the view that only the physical world is irreducibly
real, and that a place must be found in it for mind, if there is such a
thing. This would continue the onward
march of physical science, through molecular biology, to full closure by
swallowing up the mind in the objective physical reality from which it was
initially excluded.” (Nagel, Thomas. (2012). Mind and Cosmos. Oxford: Oxford University Press.)
Nagel argues that trying
to explain how life could arise from inorganic matter has never been achieved within
the materialist neo-Darwinian framework.
And what about the appearance of reason via evolution? Nagel points that
it’s impossible to explain our human minds with their rational cognitive
capacities in reductive terms of any sort. The mind problem for materialists is
that we know even if subjectivity is the irreducible feature of consciousness,
we are not locked in our own interiority.
Nagel writes: “It is not merely the subjectivity of thought but its
capacity to transcend subjectivity
and to discover what is objectively the case that presents a problem.” Though our reason is not infallible, it’s
generally pretty good at acquiring objective knowledge, especially when working
with others. For the evolutionists,
reason is nothing but a fluke. What Goff
calls Experiential reasoning, however, according to Nagel, rules out any materialist
mechanism as it needs to be thoroughly intentional. And here we meet ‘teleological’.
Nagel insists that
value is a real feature of the world that cannot be accounted for in
quantitative descriptions. The features of the world we experience are real
even if they can be explained in terms of chemicals, sounds, light etc. Nagel begins his chapter on ‘value’ with:
“The idea of teleology implies some kind of value in the result toward which
things tend, even if teleology is separated from intention, and the result is
not the goal of an agent who aims at it.”
So, basically, Nagel’s
proposal, as explicated by Goff, is that we are used to laws of Nature that
move from past to future; what if there are laws of Nature that move from
future to past?
The inherent weakness
in this is, as Goff notes, that it is hard to make any sense of the idea of
purpose in the absence of mind or consciousness. But, he suggests we can just try to get used
to the idea. He then writes:
It seems, therefore, rather fortuitous that, of all the goals our
universe might have had, it happens to be directed towards something of great
value. Does this push us back to the
idea of a good designer who instituted the teleological laws in order to ensure
that the universe is directed towards something of value?
Maybe, says Goff. But then he takes us one step deeper:
Another option is to accept that the universe has the goals it does
because they are good, but to insist that there is no deeper explanation of why
the universe had good goals. …
explanations have to end somewhere.
But Goff doesn’t want
to end it there as it is unsatisfying.
Teleological laws are the most parsimonious accounts of cosmic purpose. They simply accept the brute existence of
cosmic purpose without feeling the need to postulate any deeper explanation of
it. On the other hand, the deeper
explanation of cosmic purpose provided by non-standard designer hypotheses is
an attractive feature. We arguably have
a tie here, with one theory ahead in terms of parsimony, the other ahead in terms
of explanatory depth. The idea would be
to find a way of securing the extra explanatory depth but with minimal cost in
terms of postulating extra entities.
Fortunately, there is such a theory: rather than postulating a
supernatural designer, we can instead ascribe mentality to the universe
itself.
And that is the segue
to the next chapter ‘A Conscious Universe’.
That will be the next post.
Meanwhile, for those who like esoteric tidbits, here is Gurdjieff’s story of the Evil Magician:
"But there are a thousand things which prevent a man from
awakening, which keep him in the power of his dreams. In order to act
consciously with the intention of awakening, it is necessary to know the nature
of the forces which keep man in a state of sleep.
"First of all it must be realized that the sleep in which man
exists is not normal but hypnotic sleep. Man is hypnotized and this hypnotic
state is continually maintained and strengthened in him. One would think that
there are forces for whom it is useful and profitable to keep man in a hypnotic
state and prevent him from seeing the truth and understanding his position.
"There is an Eastern tale which speaks about a very rich magician
who had a great many sheep. But at the same time this magician was very mean.
He did not want to hire shepherds, nor did he want to erect a fence about the
pasture where his sheep were grazing. The sheep consequently often wandered
into the forest, fell into ravines, and so on, and above all they ran away, for
they knew that the magician wanted their flesh and skins and this they did not
like.
"At last the magician found a remedy. He hypnotized his sheep and
suggested to them first of all that they were immortal and that no harm was
being done to them when they were skinned, that, on the contrary, it would be
very good for them and even pleasant; secondly he suggested that the magician
was a good master who loved his flock so much that he was ready to do anything
in the world for them; and in the third place he suggested to them that if
anything at all were going to happen to them it was not going to happen just
then, at any rate not that day, and therefore they had no need to think about
it. Further the magician suggested to his sheep that they were not sheep at
all; to some of them he suggested that they were lions, to others that they
were eagles, to others that they were men, and to others that they were
magicians.
"And after this all his cares and worries about the sheep came to
an end. They never ran away again but quietly awaited the time when the
magician would require their flesh and skins.
"This tale is a very good illustration of man's position.” (P. D. Ouspensky: In Search of the Miraculous (1950) Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd London.)
P.S. 06-04-24 10:40 (AJ)
Caught my attention:
Linear graviton as a quantum particle
Maciej Przanowski, Michał Dobrski, Jaromir Tosiek, Francisco J. Turrubiates
That is all new to me. Need to study it as I do not want be a sheep (neither to be a wolf in a sheep clothing).
P.S. 11-04-24 (A.J.) My paper on the subject "Love is Light" appeared online yesterday:
Mathematics 2024, 12(8), 1140; https://doi.org/10.3390/math12081140
Submission received: 25 January 2024 / Revised: 4 April 2024 / Accepted: 8 April 2024 / Published: 10 April 2024
P.S. 12-04-24 Laura's find:
"So, basically, Nagel’s proposal, as explicated by Goff, is that we are used to laws of Nature that move from past to future; what if there are laws of Nature that move from future to past?"
ReplyDeleteIt does seem like a conscious universe state would fine tune not only the past initial conditions but the future final conditions to make it compatible to come from the conscious universe state (big bang) and go back to it (very advanced life).
Interesting (for me) beginning of Thomas Nagel's book "The Last Word", Oxfor University Press 1997.
ReplyDelete"In the late 1970s I attended a seminar Saul Kripke gave at Princeton, in which he attacked various forms of relativism, skepticism, subjectivism, or revisionism about logic. He argued that classical logic could not be qualified in any of those ways, that it was simply correct, and that the only response to alternatives such as quantum logic, for example, was to argue against them from within classical logic. In any case, he pointed out, the skeptics all rely on it in their own thinking.
Since 1987 Ronald Dworkin and I have regularly taught together, and I have been exposed to his constant insistence that the only way to answer skepticism, relativism, and subjectivism about morality is to meet it with first-order moral arguments. He holds that the skeptical positions must themselves be understood as moral claims—that they are unintelligible as anything else. I would not go so far as that, but I have been led to the view that the answer to them must come from within morality and cannot be found on the metaethical level."
I found a couple of quotes from Nagel that made me feel rather sad for him:
ReplyDelete"I lack the sensus divinitatis that enables—indeed compels—so many people to see in the world the expression of divine purpose as naturally as they see in a smiling face the expression of human feeling." (Nagel, Thomas (2012). Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False. Oxford: Oxford University Press.)
"I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that." (Nagel, Thomas, The Last Word, Oxford University Press, 1997, P. 130)