Category — Metaphysics

Or, at least, a guess at what it might consist of.

There’s an interesting debate going on between Jerry Coyne and P. Z. Myers on the provability of God’s existence. The standard atheist position on this matter seems to be disbelief for lack of evidence to the contrary, but that in principle it might be possible to conjure some piece of evidence that might prove, beyond reasonable doubt, that “God” exists. Coyne offers, as an example, a series of highly unlikely events, all perpetrated by a being calling himself Jesus. Myers rightly insists he still would not believe in God or Jesus if these happened. [Read more →]

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. [Read more →]

It seems to me that in the atheism/theism debate, neither side openly professes certainty, for fear that they will look like fundamentalists. If neither side is certain, then nobody can back up their view with real conviction. Let’s look at it this way. If someone were to tell you that object x exists, but that nobody in the world has seen it, your first inclination would be to doubt it, especially if the object has such extraordinary qualities that it would be very surprising if it was even possible to exist. However, you couldn’t say, x definitely doesn’t exist. The most you can say is that it probably doesn’t exist. But how do you accurately assess probabilities in such cases? Given that there are an infinite number of things that x could be, one would have to conclude that the probability, in this grand scheme, that x exists, is very low. As far as we know, God is as likely to exist as a unicorn.

But there are other things that we haven’t seen, yet we have reason to believe exist. The reason we believe that black holes are likely to exist is that they are postulated as a result of calculations which, as far as we know, are correct. There is no equivalent for God. There is no calculation which says the universe must have been consciously created. Scientific endeavour hasn’t led us to a definite conclusion about the beginning of the universe, but the evidence leads us further and further away from conscious creation.

In a world in which the idea that some unseen x might possibly exist is taken seriously, how are we to treat this x? Certainly, we should not treat it seriously according to how it is defined. If I say that x is a being such that if you don’t believe in its existence, you will suffer an eternity of pain (and that is its only property), again you will be disinclined to believe. There could be another being called y which has the property that if you believe in x, you will suffer an eternity of pain. How can you know which to believe in? They are equally likely to exist, and neither x nor y has any presence in our lives in any meaningful way, other than that we are told that they exist by people who have never seen them.

That is the reason why, despite a lack of evidence (if such a thing could ever be produced) that God doesn’t exist, there is no reason to believe. One’s life might be different if the idea of God was removed, but not if God himself were gone.

What makes something the same as something else?

It is obvious that two identical twins are not truly identical, because they do not, and cannot, inhabit the same space at the same time. But is “inhabiting the same space at the same time” a necessary or sufficient condition for identicalness? [Read more →]

There are many who believe ardently that free will is just an illusion, if not for any convincing positive proof, but merely for lack of convincing proof that it is real. So, in an effort to understand the problem better, I have constructed a thought experiment that might help the case of free will just a little bit. [Read more →]