Triangles: People, nature, and God

I'm a big fan of dumb arguments. I think there's something cute about this argument that recycling is overrated: if recycling were substantially more efficient than extracting raw materials from holes in the ground, you'd be paid to recycle. I would get lost doing cost-benefit analysis on energy savings and reduction of pollution. The problem is complicated enough that whoever's doing the study can fudge the numbers to favor their personal biases. Recycling might be good, but no one's made it worth my effort, so I can tell that I'm at least not doing a lot of harm by burning all my styrofoam cups and plastic bottles in the backyard.

Arguments for God's existence, based only on knowledge of nature, any of them from the young earth creationists' casting aspersions on radiometric dating, to the denial that abiogenesis could have occurred without divine intervention, to the argument that the universe itself is so fine-tuned it must have been made by an intelligent designer, all of these arguments are hideously complex. I like to think that I'm almost a smart person, and I haven't been able to work out the math on any of these for myself.

I've been on one side or the other of these sorts of arguments, and I now find them dull, to the point of pain. I'm ready to say, "The earth is 6,000 years old, it was made on October 22, 4004 BC, life can't come from non-life, we live in an incredibly complex universe that couldn't have been an accident, and bananas were designed with human consumption in mind." I would say this just to escape from this sort of discussion the next time I'm trapped in one. I'd like to see what happens next. I suppose this would make the argument a lot dumber; I'd prefer to talk about whether a personal God can be known through impersonal nature over talking about abiogenesis and astrophysics and accumulated aquatic aluminum.

From Disorientation

I suppose one could call this uncaused cause God, it's all semantics, that's fine. But, how does one make the jump from this uncaused cause to belief in Hashem or Allah or the Fates or the Triune God of Reformed Theology? When people ask each other, "Do you believe in God?" I don't think they mean, "Do you affirm that the universe results from an impersonal uncaused cause?" (Also, they rarely mean, "Do you believe in a divine essence who hates you?") Whenever I ask the question, I'm not directly looking for information or opinions on God, I'm trying to understand my interlocutor: the implied question is, "Do you try to relate to a god? How?" Nothing about causality or complexity or even beauty in the universe suggests that there's a big something that would care to interact with us.

So why do religious people try to demonstrate that their God can be known from observation of nature? Religious people who came to belief through mere study of the cosmos are rare. Most religious people were raised in their current religion. Most converts become converts not through a systematic exploration of alternatives, but through the influence of their friends.

I suppose that, for Christians in particular, the historicity of the resurrection is enough of a reason for belief for them. Likewise, Jews and Muslims would appeal to other supernatural historical events, the deliverance from Egypt and the giving of the Koran, respectively. (Non-monotheists tend to be less concerned with academic proofs that any God exists.) What stake do the religious have in the idea that God can be known from nature, if, in general, that's not how they themselves came to belief in God?

I first became interested in arguments about God and nature because I wanted to interpret the Bible literally; I didn't care much about proving God to other people, I was trying to reassure myself, that my beliefs about God were compatible with reality. I suppose that's one reason why I've had stake in the relationship between God and nature.

Another reason to talk about knowing God through nature is found in Romans 1:18-21:
18For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of those who by their wickedness suppress the truth. 19For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. 20Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made. So they are without excuse; 21for though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened.

It would be cruel of God to damn people without any warning. Jonah was sent to Nineveh not to evangelize, but to give a portent, like serving a legal summons or posting a notice on a condemned building. Instead of obeying God, Jonah fled to Tarshish because he didn't want the Ninevites to even have that warning. Likewise, those who believe that God is good and condemns some must assert that knowledge of what God requires can be found in nature.

This can be a beautiful idea, that God can be known from nature, because that means that regardless of race or culture or religious background, everyone can have some true knowledge about God; if this is the case, God is rather sporting and egalitarian.

I suppose that the strongest reason why religious people have stake in finding God in nature is that they already want to find him, period. Humans have a strong longing for a relationship with the divine. This attitude shapes our relating with everything.



People look at the Galle crater on Mars and see a happy face. Creatures with faces didn't move rocks into a face-shape to communicate with us. It looks like a face because whenever people see two dots over a line, we see a face. This is pareidolia, seeing patterns where there are none, simply because people look for patterns all the time. That people see a personal God in nature says more about people than God.

"I believe that, if a triangle could speak, it would say... that God is eminently triangular."
—Benedictus de Spinoza

Nature can't prove God exists

"Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for."—Douglas Adams, Is there an Artificial God?



Arguments for the existence of God based on observation of nature hinge on the idea that the universe is so complex that it would have taken a powerful intelligence to make it. Suppose that were true: the most that that argument could ever possibly conclude is that something very complex and big exists. I call that complex big thing the universe.

To set up any sort of proof for the existence of God, you have to answer the question, "Which God?"

When I say God, I mean someone powerful, personal, and good, someone who evokes worship from me. Isn't this why anyone would be concerned with the idea of God? If we're just talking about some ambiguous big thing, who cares what we call it or how we deal with it? The questions about God are all questions about meaning.

And, by powerful, I mean powerful enough to make the big bang happen. I don't want to worship Barack Obama by mistake.

That God would be personal is important, too; I think the cosmos is beautiful, but I don't worship it. What do you give a cosmos that has everything?

Well, not all arguments for the existence of God from study of nature try to advance the idea that God must be more complex than the universe. Some try to argue that God must exist because the universe is good. The universe would have had to have been made by something big, complex, and good. I think that this is what deists believe, at least, this is what my rabbit tells me she believes, and she's a deist.

Even if there is this complex, big, good thing, I can't tell if it has beaten or wooed me into good behavior, and I don't know why either of us should be concerned at all with the other.



All of these arguments from nature depend on some sort of embiggening assumption, that if the universe has some property, it must have been made by something that displays that property even more so. It's messy enough to apply that logic inside this universe. If I had an apple, but no knowledge of where apples come from, I couldn't say much about the apple's origin. I could look at the stem, and guess that the apple came off of something stemmish, but I couldn't say whether that stemmish thing was a tree or a vine or a bush or a peduncle emerging from the ground.

In conclusion, I'm going to wander around the student union building. Maybe I'll find some Christian evangelists who use arguments from nature to assert belief in God. I would pretend to be convinced by their arguments, then affirm belief in Waheguru of the Sikhs. Do you want to come with me?

Prayer, the anthropic principle, fun, sin, vegetarianism, and Christian agnosticism

When I tell believing Christians that I don't believe that God exists, but that I still practice Christianity, they often tilt their heads or cross their eyes. I explain that, for example, I still pray. 'Who do you pray to?' is a question I get a lot. I suppose my prayers go the same place as my believing friends' prayers. If God's not real (and I think he's not), they go nowhere, and if he is (and I hope he is) then I'm sure he can hear mine and theirs without straining; God is the one who makes prayer work. If prayer depended on the strength of one's belief, no one's prayers would do any good. I admit that I don't pray as much as I used to and that it is a little painful now that I don't believe that God exists. Even so, prayer doesn't feel terribly different to me now than it did when I was a believer.

I know that it sounds like I'm talking out of both sides of my mouth. I'm confused. The thing that holds faith and doubt together for me is the sheer fun of Christianity.

Jesus mocks Pharisees and hangs out with little kids. The most beautiful songs of worship are bound together with horrible, vile, racist, infanticidal anger. Jonah runs from God and God keeps catching him, with a storm and a monster and heat and a bug.

I'm a scientist, I spend my workdays laboring slowly and methodically, a small mistake I made once set me back a year. I like how Christianity doesn't bother to make much sense. Even so, it doesn't make sense in a sad and beautiful and good way, in the sort of way that people listen to jazz for fun and not experimental music.

I practice Christianity because I want to. I think that's why most people who call themselves Christians do so; in one way or another, it makes them happier. This is why it confuses me when Christians do evangelism by trying to make a hard sell, running up to someone on the boardwalk and accusing them of unspeakable acts or leaving cartoon booklets as tips in a restaurant or nagging or yelling or pulling a bait-and-switch or going door to door like cultists or putting irritatingly cute bumper stickers on their cars.

Some people like to argue that God exists by the anthropic principle, that if certain fundamental properties of the universe were ever so slightly different, then life as we know it wouldn't exist. Finding God in finely tuned numbers says nothing about whether God is interested in us, and if he isn't, I suppose the feeling would be mutual on my part.

I'm a scientist, I've spent a third of my life in college, I make charts for fun, I play with supercomputers on Friday nights, and I can't work out the numbers to see if it's even the case that fine-tuning is so special. Should only people smarter than me be able to know for sure that God is there?

However, the real reason why I think the anthropic principle is bogus is that it's boring. If the most persuasive way to know that God exists is by doing physics calculations, then I'm going to tell Grandma that I love her by sending her a copy of my simulations code; I'm sure she'll be impressed.

I used to be an obnoxious evangelist, and then I was a nerdy evangelist. I quit both when I couldn't annoy or convince myself into belief. Even when I was a believing Christian, guilt and certainty weren't enough for me to follow Jesus.

Christianity is a word for how I want things to be, and I don't simply mean 'love' or 'peace'; I'm not using Christianity as an old-sounding word for modern intellectual hipster virtues. When I talk about Christianity, I mean the historically grounded theologically orthodox Christianity.

I want a new world with no thorns and disease, where the ground is no longer toil to till. I want a city with a stream that runs through it, the Tree of Life growing on the bank of the stream. I want the lion to lie down with the lamb. I want people from all ethnicities living in peace and singing songs to God in their own languages.

Although I'd prefer hell to be empty, I want a place for free people to run from God. I want to sing songs that I don't like with some people I don't like every week. I prefer organized religion to disorganized religion, because, even if Christianity was made up by nomads suffering from heat stroke and mirages, they came up with something better than I would on my own. My religion would involve a lot of puns and math and Danish philosophy and it would probably kill me. I like the parts of Christianity that I don't like, because all the parts I didn't like I found out weren't really Christian or weren't really bad, difficult, perhaps, but not bad.

I like judgmental religious people, but I'd rather they figure out who to blame for 35,000 kids dying every day from hunger and preventable disease, and who to blame when my little brother gets made fun of. I even want them to blame me when I'm doing something wrong, and maybe I'll do the right thing instead. I like to talk about sin and despair and hubris because I know they're real for me, and not talking about them won't make them go away.

I don't want a Christianity in which I can just say a prayer or show up on Sunday morning or not cuss and be okay; I don't want a watered-down Christianity. I want Christianity to be as hard as it is, with Jesus calling me to death and sacrifice because I know that the things that are killing me aren't worth living for. I want Jesus to make it as easy as he can, though, because I can't fix me myself.

Enthusiasm about Christianity isn't the same as knowing that God is real, it doesn't do nearly as much to help me sleep better at night, but I don't know what I'd rather be enthusiastic about. Television is boring.

I used to tell people that I'm a vegetarian because I'm opposed to American over-consumption and mistreatment of animals in factory farms, but now I think I'll just say that I like to eat plants.

Intelligent design makes me a Christian agnostic

I'd categorize arguments for the existence of God into three categories*:

1. First cause
2. History
3. Experience

By first cause arguments, I mean arguments like the cosmological, teleological, and moral arguments, that is, that for the universe to move, something had to kick it into action, for it to have design, it must have a designer, and for rules to exist, a rule-giver must preside. By historical arguments, I mean people pointing to miraculous historical events like the Israelite exodus of Egypt, the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and the revelation of the Koran to Mohammed. By arguments from experience, I mean both people talking about internal spiritual experiences (a guiding light, for example) and eyewitness accounts of peculiar phenomena.

It seems to me that the first cause arguments, especially arguments like the anthropic principle and irreducible complexity, are today the most popular proofs of God's existence among smart believers. This is diabolical.


In He Is There and He Is Not Silent, Francis Schaeffer makes clumsy attempts at proving God's existence. What I love about this book, though, why I recommend it, actually, is that Schaeffer makes it clear that he's arguing for the existence of not just any sort of God, but the Personal-Infinite God.

If God's really real and really worth talking about, he'd interact with us in some personal way. Spinoza proved that God exists quite decisively, but in such a way that his God isn't worth writing Mom about. Scott Adams, my favorite Spinozist, says that this universe-God is even intelligent, in a sense. This isn't the same as God being personal.

I started writing this essay a year ago, and it stalled, because I thought that what bothered me most about these arguments from first cause is that they're deeply flawed. I realized that what bothers me more is that arguments from first cause don't work to establish God as a person who cares about us. That's the sort of God that I want to believe in.

That the most popular arguments for the existence of God don't point to the sort of God I need makes me think that God isn't real.

Jason doesn't buy the New Perspective on Paul because he doesn't trust theology that requires skill in parsing Greek verbs to be understood.

If God were real, we wouldn't fuss with learning modal logic notation to even understand Gödel's onotological proof of God's existence. We wouldn't mess with statistical mechanics to show that atheistic abiogenesis is unlikely. We'd say things like, 'Hey, you know Leper Larry? He's not a leper, anymore. Wild!' And we don't, and either God isn't real and I could be having a lot more fun getting into trouble, or he is and I am looking for him where he isn't, and you probably are, too.

*By wild coincidence, Wikipedia categorizes arguments for the existence of God into the same three categories that I do.

The Shady Side of Wisdom

In a previous post, I mentioned the article The Shady Side of Wisdom by George Mendenhall. In this article, Mendenhall uses linguistic evidence to demonstrate a late date of authorship for the first few chapters of Genesis, and exegetes the text in that cultural context. The major conclusion of this paper, that I was referring to, is not just that Genesis 1-3 can be read figuratively, but that reading them literally does injustice to the text, because a literal reading was not intended. If you want a copy of the article, let me know.

Why arguing for creationism is, in my opinion, ill-advised

Some time ago, I explained why I think that arguing in favor of Intelligent Design is almost completely misguided; rather than suggesting that ID is false, I said that only a very few people are even qualified to have such a discussion. In response, crooked deep down wrote

However, wouldn't you say that, for some people, what they perceive to be incontrovertible scientific evidence against the Bible is a fence that keeps them from loving Jesus, and we can help them along in their journey if we can knock a hole in that fence?

It's important to remember that crooked is a young earth creationist, so the discussion is completely re-framed, we need to distinguish between three positions:

1. Young earth creationism
2. Theistic evolution (ID)
3. Atheistic evolution

This astute reader observed that there are really two reasons to talk about theory of origin:

1. To convince somebody to accept Jesus
2. To reassure yourself that the Bible isn't inauthentic

One of the hiccups with ID is that it attempts 1, but not 2. That is, ID points us to an unnamed creator, but it doesn't make it any easier to read Genesis 1-3 as basically historical.

Young earth creationism attempts both, but fails altogether, because it is deeply incongruous with astronomy, geology, paleontology, paleoanthropology, and archeology, even when just considering the contention that the earth is 6,000 years old (or so). The talk.origins FAQ is the best place to start that I've found.

As far as the science of it is considered, I think creationism is pretty dumb, but I prefer not to think ill of creationists (exception: Kent Hovind). For the most part, creationism makes sense, if you've mostly been exposed to creationist literature. I think of creationism like I think of urban legends, people believe because people they trust believe, and that's completely reasonable, most of the time.

I don't think that belief in YEC is neutral; I think that it is destructive because of how it misrepresents nature and falsely engenders distrust in the scientific process. One example of how YEC harbors misinformation is in crooked's response:

For example, we might say that much-touted radiometric dating relies on a lot of assumptions that might not be true, or the whole thing with the decay of the earth's magnetic field being seemingly incongruous with an Earth much older than 10,000 years.

Again, I don't suspect any malice or evil on the part of crooked, or on the part of whoever told him that, but this is a good example of how YEC, like an urban legend or conspiracy theory, shows part of the information to produce misunderstanding of the whole.

Yes, the earth's magnetic field is currently weakening. This is normal. The contention that the earth can't be much older than 10,000 years depends on the assumption that that the magnetic field has been weakening monotonically, that is, that it has always been weakening. This is simply a very bad assumption; we know that the magnetic field, rather than decreasing steadily, fluctuates periodically, this is called geomagnetic reversal.

We know that geomagnetic reversals have taken place, many times, from several pieces of evidence, namely variation in magnetic polarity in adjacent rock layers. For example, at places where new rock forms continuously, like at the mid-Atlantic ridge, the magnetic polarity of a bit of the rock is like a snapshot of the earth's magnetic field from when that bit of rock was formed. Measurements like this actually confirm the geomagnetic reversal theory, and emphatically point to an old age for the earth.

If I had a friend who was considering becoming a Christian, but felt as if the Genesis account of creation didn't match with science, rather than teach him YEC, I'd instead tell him that Genesis 1-3 was actually written to be understood as myth. George E. Mendenhall's article, "The Shady Side of Wisdom" provides a good explanation of this. (This article is very difficult to find; if you want a copy, ask me.)

Mendenhall demonstrated from linguistic analysis that the text had a late date of authorship, based on the use of certain words that are relatively new. This, alone, doesn't take away from the understanding of the Genesis account as inspired, we just need to read it as an inspired myth that tells us much about who we are and who God is, but not so much about actual history. This isn't even a new idea, Augustine, among others, thought of Genesis 1-3 as basically mythical.

This is what I'd tell a friend considering becoming a Christian.

I hope that I walked the line between calling YEC the way I see it, but not being mean to my creationist readers. If you want to talk, well, origins, check the talk.origins FAQ first, then drop a comment.

Why arguing intelligent design is unproductive

I grew up reading many books on how to argue creationism, to defend the faith from the evolutionists. When I got to college, I saw that arguing creationism wasn't working at all. This was very strange, because I knew all the arguments. What I didn't realize for a very long time is that science interprets itself. Science is a communal endeavor, and it grows through discussions, not arguments. The standard of truth in science is now basically postmodern.

Science is very different now than it was a hundred years ago; it is staggering under its own weight. Science has become a community of specialists. About a half a dozen people in the world understand what it is that I'm doing for my research right now, and why it's important. If anyone outside of that very small group wanted to double-check my work, it would probably take him weeks of reading old journal articles, doodling on marker boards, asking questions, and messing about with computer simulations written in Fortran.

When articles that I write go up for peer review, the validity of my work is considered by some of the few people who can actually understand it. The confidence that scientists outside that circle can place on my work rests on the trustworthiness of my reviewers. In short, scientific truth is determined by the community. This is a postmodern standard of truth.

We scientists would like it if everything we knew in science could be reasoned from first principles, or tested quickly and easily in a lab setting. We don't want to have to use a postmodern standard of truth, but we have little choice. It's not quite so bad as it sounds; because science is based on experimentation, observation, and reason, it doesn't become unhinged from reality nearly as quickly as disciplines which are based more on opinion and ideology. And science works; we've sent astronauts to the moon, our life expectancies are much improved over what they were a hundred years ago, and I can buy a pizza for a dollar and cook it in four minutes.

If I, as an individual, were to argue against the consensus of the entire scientific community, I would be presumptuous. Thomas had the luxury of being able to touch the holes in Jesus' hands and feet, and the wound in his side; then he could believe. The scientific community is composed of people who are as skeptical as Thomas, but, when it comes to theory of origin, the evidence is not as plain to us as it was to Thomas. No one person can understand biochemistry in sufficient detail to be able to consider whether it is probable that even a single cell came about by chance. When it comes to problems that require such a high degree of specialization, it is unreasonable to expect a scientist to take my word over that of the community.