The invisible gardener of miracles

In Intelligent Life, there’s an interesting article on a parable written by the philosopher John Wisdom. Here is said parable in full:

Two people return to their long neglected garden and find, among the weeds, that a few of the old plants are surprisingly vigorous. One says to the other, “It must be that a gardener has been coming and doing something about these weeds.” The other disagrees…They pitch their tents and set a watch. No gardener is ever seen. The believer wonders if there is an invisible gardener, so they patrol with bloodhounds but the bloodhounds never give a cry. Yet the believer…insists that the gardener is invisible, has no scent and gives no sound. The sceptic doesn’t agree, and asks how a so-called invisible, intangible, elusive gardener differs from an imaginary gardener, or even no gardener at all.

This seems to be a pretty watertight way of concisely showing how unnecessary God is. However, it doesn’t succeed quite as well as at first it seems. The argument—that a God which can’t be seen or whose presence can’t be felt in any remotely tangible way is basically the same as an imaginary God or no God at all—is sound. However, there is a subtle flaw: it focuses on the isolated plants, and there are many religious believers who do not believe because of individual miracles, but rather because of the general miraculousness of the universe.

There are two ways we can think of miracles. The first is the more obvious sense: when something simply transgresses the known physical laws of the universe in a way that is utterly unprecedented. This has never been shown to have happened (except when explanations have quickly been found afterwards), so we cannot take that possibility seriously. The other way to think of a miracle is as something astoundingly, breathtakingly amazing, which we may intuitively say cannot be explained, but of course, there is no logical reason to think that this is so. The obvious example of this is life, and especially human life. We are by far the most complex mechanisms in the known universe, capable of such astounding achievements, none of which are particularly easy to explain. Most people can agree that we humans are, at least in the loose sense, miraculous.

Now, when a believer intuits that the universe is unimaginable without a creator, this is often because they attribute this ineffable sort of miraculousness to the universe in general. But it is clear that this second sense of miraculousness is not objectively measurable—at least, not in the clear way that the first sense is. It is we humans who are awestruck by the sublimity of the universe and by the complexity and sophistication of ourselves. If there were no humans in the universe, there would be no way to objectively quantify any miraculousness the universe may have. The only way we can come close to quantifying it is by somehow measuring our brain’s reaction to it, which clearly shows that there could be no such thing as miraculousness without a consciousness to perceive it.

In Wisdom’s parable, our type of believer would perhaps not be struck so much by the plants that are surprisingly vigorous, but by some sense that the beauty of the garden, as neglected as it is, and the beauty of the world in general, cannot be explained by mere science, and therefore must be explained by something divine. And it is certainly true that, as far as science may explain all the workings of the universe, the language of science is wholly unsatisfying to our taste for the numinous. However, it is clear that the logic, such as it is, is faulty. The feeling for the mysterious cannot be dismissed as barbarian: it is undoubtedly a central part of human life, a chief driver of the invention and innovation of mankind, and a cause of the greater part of all our art. But even though this feeling may be a good one on which to base one’s life’s work, it is clearly not a foundation on which to build an objective hypothesis about the universe.