Part V. Consequences of Anthropomorphism
Philo. Cleanthes denies a priori arguments for the existence of God, but thinks he can prove God’s existence and nature based on experience alone. The best candidate for an experience that might get us there is that of order in nature. The principle of his argument is as follows. We draw an analogy between two causal relations; based on the similarity of effects we infer a similarity of causes. The closer the similarity, the better the inference. He claims that insofar as we find it to be ordered, the universe is like a work of human design, and infers that the world was created by an intelligent designer, akin to a human mind.
This analogy is disastrous.
For starters, the effects are extremely dissimilar. The more we learn about the universe, the less it resembles human creations. Astronomy shows the immensity of the scale of the world; microscopes reveal its complexity in miniature. Anatomy, botany, chemistry, and physics point to an incomprehensibly complex system; human creations can hardly be said to resemble this production.
But things are much worse on the side of the supposedly similar causes. If we accept the analogy, we’ll have no basis to grant God any of the divine attributes. In fact we’ll have better reasons to deny them.
Infinity. We only experience nature as finite; we have no experience of infinity. Proportioning the cause to the effect, why would we say that the cause of the universe is infinite?
Perfection. There is no reason to infer from the order of the world that its creator is perfect. For one thing, we have nothing to compare it to, so on what grounds would we even say that the world is perfect or not?
But even if this world were perfect, and we somehow knew that, it’s still not clear that we’d be justified in attributing perfection to its creator.
Sometimes we encounter an incredible, apparently perfect work of human design, only to find out that its creator is an idiot. Maybe they’ve just copied someone else’s work. Maybe they screwed up a thousand times before getting it right. What if this perfect world was God’s thousandth attempt? How can we be sure that God didn’t botch an infinity of worlds prior to this one?
Unity. Most works of human design are actually collaborative efforts: lots of people contribute to its ideal design and physical construction. So why not imagine a multiplicity of Gods collaborating to create this world together? That would make the causes in our analogy bear greater resemblance to one another than the postulate of a single creator!
There is no phenomenon in nature, no possible experience, that could even provide us with the grounds to legitimately affirm the unity of the deity. Multiple Gods are just as thinkable as one without contradiction.
I can keep going. Human designers are all, in my experience, mortal. In what way does your analogy let us infer the immortality of the creator? In my experience, all human designers have a gender. Why isn’t your God gendered?
Even if I accept your analogy, everything is still up for grabs. This world might be extremely imperfect, for all we know: the product of a weak, inferior God: a young one blowing it on a rough draft, or a senile one past its design prime; the God that made this world might already be dead, and yet it keeps unfolding, one great big cadaverous mess… Nothing in experience contradicts these possible inferences based on the analogy of God as creator to human designers.
Demea is horrified.
Cleanthes. I deny all of this, obviously. But also, I can’t help but love that all of your ridiculous claims still implictly rely on my argument by analogy to design.
Part VI. The Animal-World Analogy and the Eternity of the World
Demea. If this is your idea of theology based on skeptical empiricism, count me out. If we don’t know whether the world is perfect, or whether God is, or if there are one or many Gods, or if they are alive or dead, what sense would there be in reverence and worship?
Philo. Yeah, it’s not great. I’m just saying that this form of argument a posteriori doesn’t let us settle any of those questions.
But let me try this out: I claim that the world more closely resembles an animal than a work of human design. All I have to work with are experiences, and that’s a better candidate for an analogue to the universe. I conclude that the world is an animal and that God is the soul of the world. If we want to use an analogy, I think this one is better than the machine or the house.
By the way, this hypothesis seems to be a better fit with experience in other ways. Modern theologians talk about God being pure mind, without body. But in our experience we never encounter ‘just a mind’; we only ever encounter embodied minds. It seems more reasonable to analogically transfer that to our idea of God than something never experienced.
Cleanthes. I see that your analogy works in some ways, but not in others. The universe has no sense-organs, no rational mind, no unified source of action, like animals do. If anything, it more closely resembles a vegetable.
But leaving that aside for a moment, doesn’t this hypothesis presuppose the eternity of the world? I think I can respond to that. Here are two arguments from experience that seem to suggest that the world is finite in duration, rather than eternal.
First, some might point to how recent the development of human knowledge has been. The idea is, if the world were eternal, wouldn’t we have figured out much more by now? Why are we still making radically new discoveries all the time? To be honest, I don’t love this argument, because human nature is such that we constantly forget and lose our newly acquired knowledge. All it takes to lose a whole civilization’s worth of acquired knowledge is that civilization’s collapse.
But I can strengthen the same basic claim by referring to more reliably lasting things, like ecological changes. These are not as tied to the fortunes of humanity, outlasting the falls of whole civilizations. So: we know that there have only been horses, cows, sheep, pigs, dogs, and corn in America for a few hundred years. Are you telling me that in the whole timeframe of an eternal world, these things never once migrated, never moved from one part of the world to this other?
If the world were eternal, there would be homogeneity in nature. But everywhere we find heterogeneity. That would only be possible, if the world were eternal, on condition that some radical catastrophe had taken place.
Philo. Okay. So why not allow that such catastrophes have taken place? The eternity of the world does not necessarily imply that everything must stabilize into perfect, homogeneous order. Why not imagine cycles of orderly stability and destabilizing ruptures? There’s nothing in that idea that contradicts either reason or experience.
Part VII. The Vegetable-World Analogy and Undecidability
Philo. I want to return to something you said earlier: that the world more closely resembles a vegetable than an animal. I can work with that; but then we should infer that the cause of the world resembles the causes of vegetables and animals, that is, that the cause of the world resembles generation or vegetation.
Demea. That seems impossible. How would a world come about by vegetation or generation?
Philo. We’re talking analogically here. The world is an egg; comets are the seeds of new planets…
Demea. But what data do you have to back this up?
Philo. None at all! That’s my point. It’s just as viable a hypothesis, because the analogy is so weak in the first place. I say that the world more closely resembles a plant or animal than a work of human design. So God must be like vegetation or generation.
Demea. But how do generation and vegetation work?
Philo. I don’t know! And I don’t need to! We count reason, instinct, generation, and vegetation among the powers that seem to produce orderly effects in the world. Each of them can be invoked as the principle for the order of the world as a whole, but there’s nothing to suggest that any one is better, for that purpose, than any other. It’s only our anthropomorphism, our partiality, that makes us prefer reason.
I don’t know how any of them ‘work’, to be honest. We don’t even know how reason works: the true mechanisms of the mind remain entirely unknown. The same goes for vegetation, but so what?
Demea. But doesn’t the well-ordered character of vegetation amount to a new argument for intelligent design? Vegetables are well-ordered; order presupposes a designer; so…
Philo. No, that just begs the question. Look:
Cleanthes says: The world is like a machine; so it is designed by something like a human mind. I can object: but minds and design presuppose the existence of animals that think, and so the generation of animals is prior to reason.
I say: the world is like an animal; so it is caused by something like animal generation. Cleanthes can object: but the orderly character of generation presupposes design, and so reason is prior to generation.
These are both equally viable. Experience gives us no principles by which to decide between these alternatives.
Cleanthes. I have to admit: you’re pretty inventive, coming up with all these counter-examples on the spot.
Part VIII. The Chaotic Hypothesis, or the Meaninglessness of Order
Philo. No, not really; I’m not especially creative. It’s just that the question is so badly formed that a ton of different response are equally plausible.
For the sake of argument, let’s be Epicureans, with a twist: the world is just matter, a finite collection of atoms in the void, lasting to and from eternity. Given an infinite amount of time, the atoms will eventually form every possible combination, giving rise to every possible world world sooner or later…
Demea. But this presupposes that matter can of itself be in motion without a voluntary agent.
Philo. So what? There’s no contradiction there.
We don’t need any other assumptions than matter in motion and an infinite amount of time to account for the appearance of order in nature. In fact, the eternity of time would imply that it must appear at some point.
And once some minimal order arises out of chaos like this, it tends to maintain itself. At that point, when we look at the world, we will always see order in it, and be able to imagine that there must have been some designer of that order.
Another way of saying that order tends to maintain itself is to say that what does not fit within that order tends to be destroyed. Once there is some order in nature, which we are here supposing will arise purely at random, that suffices to tend to exclude any disorderly phenomena from existing. So it’s useless to invoke ‘the adjustment of means to ends’, or the ‘harmony’ of natural systems: of course things that don’t fit don’t last!
This is why ‘there is order’ is always a bad premise: it proves nothing. Even on the hypothesis of a blind, chaotic material nature, we can imagine some order arising and working to weed out disorderly phenomena. The fact that we experience some order in nature proves nothing about nature or its cause.
Cleanthes. But how would that explain such incredible conveniences as the fact that we have eyes for seeing, or that labor is made easier by the existence domesticated animals, or that the existence of magnetism makes possible compasses and navigation?
Philo. Well, it doesn’t, really. But I’m not even necessarily committed to this hypothesis. I’m just saying it remains absolutely possible, and your argument cannot rule it out. By contrast, your anthropomorphic deity contradicts so much of our experience, which nevertheless it claims to be based on: it makes ideas prior to objects; it asserts some thinking thing without a body; it is weirdly confident positing infinity and perfection and unity, based on experiences in which none of those attributes are ever encountered.
In theological debates, the attacker always scores points, and the defender’s position always ends up looking weak. Only the skeptic always comes out on top.
gil morejón 