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“Explaining” the unexplained by means of the inexplicable
Gods live in gaps in human knowledge, they always have and probably always will. Of course the gaps grow ever smaller as our knowledge increases.
It is a common taunt of religious people that if you or science can't explain something that their god-magic is a better theory because it offers a better and fuller explanation. But in what way is “God did it” an explanation at all? God is a mystery, you are not allowed to ask why he does things or how he does them, or what his motives are and why. You are not allowed to ask why God wants there to be life and why he has to make the mechanics of it so damp and squishy. If souls and or spirits exist and contain all that is essential about a person why do these souls need to be grown in human bodies? Why not make them directly out of spirit-stuff? Is God's magic limited by rules he can't bend? If so in what way is he the Alpha and Omega?
God theories don't have explanatory power, they rely on magic and telling people to be satisfied with the answer given. The “explanation” that God made the universe demands answers for further questions such as why did he want to make a universe and why was there a god before there was anything else rather than the beautiful simplicity of absolutely bugger-all for timeless eternity? If he is perfect why would he want to have anything as imperfect as reality around the place?
If God predates the universe where does his intelligence, wisdom and experience come from? How can there be design without experience? Even wholly novel things are invented out of some form of experience, the iPod developed out of the walkman which was in turn just a shrinking of an existing product, the tape recorder. How would a being with no experience of anything, even hydrogen atoms, know how to create a universe conducive to life? To people who believe in magic this question wouldn't arise, such people don't know how profoundly difficult it is to bootstrap complexity. When your imagination thinks eggs are simple you are inevitably bound to come up with some very stupid ideas. The creation myths of the Jews was in many ways quite typical of the genre. It was not considered necessary to explain where the original creator god came from or why he had human characteristics. To primitive people it is self-evident that a god would be lonely and want company and would care what his creations did and would want to judge them. But why? We have no experience of being a magical being, except in our imaginations. In the imagination of Bronze Age pastoralists it is obvious that the universe was created by a being with the character of a human, a man, a Jew, a tribal elder of the Jews. Of course none of that makes any sense at all. If there really is a god out there we have no good reason to think that he would be at all concerned with our sex life or whether we believed in him. If you had the power to create the universe why would you be deeply concerned with the activities of your creations? Why would you consider it reasonable to wait until the end of time before passing judgment on them? This one really intrigues me, if bad behaviour annoys you why wait until death and/or the end of time (Christians don't seem clear about this one) before you do something about it? Any parent who treated their children like that would not be seen as worthy of worship, glory, laud and honour, they would have their children taken into protective custody.
How does God work? It seems that the only possible answer is by magic. God wills things into existence, turns mud into a man, a rib into woman and a beast into a snake. That is surely the M.O. of a magician.
What is Intelligent Design if not a description of a magical process that people refuse to probe and explain? There is no explanation, plausible or otherwise, offered for how intelligence can create design and bring it into being. What is the mechanism?
If there really was Intelligent Design at work in this world we would see animals and plants developing traits to benefit other organisms and The Big Plan. There would be horses born with saddles. Pigeons would relish eating cigarette butts. Cotton plants would mutate to grow their seed pods in the form of tampons, with colour coded strings to show the different absorbencies, and with tinsel for the Christmas period. Chickens would grow wanting to be killed and eaten. Dairy cattle would produce one bull calf in two thousand and women would be born with no more aspirations than being a mother, free whore and housekeeper. But that isn't the universe we live in. We live in a universe in which the design is clearly done by a blind designer, a designer who cannot foresee the future, a designer without any clear plan. Every animal and plant looks like it has been designed to ensure the survival of that particular type of organism and no other. No animal or plant sacrifices itself for the good of others.
Why did mammals develop without the ability to regenerate lost limbs which our ancestors presumably had, as many amphibians have today? What problem is there in retaining this ability? We have also lost the ability to trade DNA with widely separate species which bacteria have. They can pick up packages of DNA from other species and take advantage of new tricks (recently highlighted by the ability of bacteria to pick up antibiotic resistance from bacteria which are not even closely related). Wouldn't it be handy for some species of higher animals to pick up DNA from other species under the guidance of The Great Designer? Wouldn't cheetahs gain great advantage from the vastly more efficient lung designs perfected in birds? Wouldn't factory workers gain enormously from the addition of frog DNA so they could sit patiently for hours and then leap into action only when the appropriate stimulus comes along?
The coupling constant and other values which seem to be fine tuned for life seem to give evidence of either design or spectacular luck. But looked on another way they are entirely unremarkable for whatever conditions must exist for life to exist must have existed for us to boggle at the coincidence: it is logically impossible to contemplate the difficulty of life existing from inside a universe which does not allow for life. Also we have no way of knowing whether these remarkable values are in any way theoretically variable. For those of us who don't have the mathematics to seriously ponder the issues of cosmology we can have a go at wondering if pi could ever be a different value in a different universe. Could that value vary or is it simply the only value it could possibly be? We don't know and it isn't clear how to show whether of not the question makes any sense.
Are there really dials to be played with in creating a universe or is it only possible to make a universe in this way? Who can say what are the logical constraints on a god?
It is acceptable to say we don't know. We are not gods. We are not oracles. If we don't know the answer then admitting that we don't know is the correct answer. Religious people seem to be pleased that they don't know all the answers - “I don't know but God does!” actually gives them pleasure to say. For those who are not blinded and castrated by religion not knowing something is a challenge, we want to find out what we don't know. But as we don't know so much and so much of what we don't know is so hard to investigate we have to satisfy ourselves with accepting ignorance and being humble in the face of the immensity of the universe. Religious people seem to be happy with not knowing the details but with grasping the Big Picture as they see it. But that big picture is based upon faith not on knowledge and proof that would stand up to peer review and sceptical assessment.
I don't have faith that there is a non-magical explanation for everything. I view it as a more likely and more satisfactory explanation. To have taken scientific explanations as far as we have done and then to find that there is still magic lurking at the back of it all is frustrating to say the least. Of course the universe and reality is not meant to be understood and appreciated, and neither is it meant to be a mystery. Reality does not care whether it is understood or appreciated, it merely is. The concept of a meaning of life is boneheaded.
Most things don't have a meaning. Most people don't die for a reason, they die because their death is caused. We find it hard to distinguish between causes which are events which trigger other events, and causes which are reasons for actors to act, expressions of will and intention. Only a tiny minority of people ever truly die for a cause or lay down their lives for a cause. Most people just die or are caused to die. Dying in vain is not a tragedy, almost everybody does die in vain. Dying in vain is as normal as living in vain.
Forcing meaning into a life or a death is pernicious, especially if it causes people to think thoughts as sick as to believe that the reason their daughter was murdered was to cause her murderer to be held in prison for decades as if that is a reason to die, or to be born in the first place. We are not born to die, we are not born to fulfil a hidden purpose, even our own. Fate and destiny is an even more sick and pernicious set of self delusions than religion. “It was meat to be” is a lie. Nothing is meant to be, shit happens. That's the ultimate reality. To think otherwise is to reverse causation. I cannot believe that the Dark Ages happened for a reason, I can't believe that there was no better, faster, more efficient or more humane way to get from the Roman Empire to the industrial revolution than via centuries of ignorance, squalor and religiously inspired genocide. If there is a magician behind events he needs booing not worship.
It is completely revolting to contemplate how much energy has been channeled into honouring and worshipping the magician in the sky. Songs, prayers, hymns, poems, psalms, head bobs, full body prostrations, verbal ticks, scarcely conscious verbal constructions, choices in diet and dress and billions of candles burning while the poor die of cold and hunger. Add to that the gross obscenity that so many hamlets, villages, towns and cities have only one well built building, often covered with lavish decorations, jewels and gold standing empty while the people shiver in filthy hovels in their shade. Just look up at the sky, why would he need more than that? If there is god out there he's better off out there in among the stars and galaxies, filling every space. He has no need for a home that no matter how lavish we make it is a pathetic imitation of the glories of the universe.