Over the past few weeks, I’ve been recording conversations about my new book, “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious,” and one of the striking things — not unexpected, but still interesting — is how different people react to different arguments for being religious or believing in God.
You’ll get one very smart interlocutor for whom it seems perfectly reasonable to consider religious possibilities in light of the evidence for order and design at the deepest level of the universe, but who just can’t swallow the idea that there might be supernatural realities — visions, encounters, literal miracles — that inherently evade the capacities of modern science to measure and dissect. Then you’ll get another person for whom it’s the reverse, for whom the primary case for religion is experiential, while attempts to discover God in, say, the cosmological constant leave them cold.
My own view is more promiscuous: I think that the most compelling case for being religious — for a default view, before you get to the specifics of creeds and doctrines, that the universe was made for a reason and we’re part of that reason — is found at the convergence of multiple different lines of argument, the analysis of multiple different aspects of the existence in which we find ourselves.
Consider three big examples: the evidence for cosmic design in the fundamental laws and structure of the universe; the unusual place of human consciousness within the larger whole; and the persistence and plausibility of religious and supernatural experience even under supposedly disenchanted conditions.
Each of these realities alone offers good reasons to take religious arguments seriously. Indeed, I think each on its own should be enough to impel someone toward at least a version of Pascal’s Wager. But it’s the fact that a religious perspective makes sense out of all of them — why the universe seems calibrated for our appearance and why consciousness has a supernatural-seeming dimension and why even nonbelievers report having religious experiences — that makes the strongest case for some form of belief.
But do I have a favorite argument within this larger run of converging claims? I was thinking about this while reading the effort by the prolific and precocious (he’s apparently still an undergraduate) essayist who writes under the name Bentham’s Bulldog to rank or grade a long list of arguments for God’s existence.
I’m not sure I could manage such a ranking. (To be honest, there are some arguments on his list that I can’t claim to fully understand.) But I do generally think that the arguments related to the experiential — supernatural, mystical occurrences and miracles — are underrated, especially among professional arguers, relative to more philosophically driven claims.
However, the supernaturalist case inevitably relies on anecdata and subjective reports in a way that other arguments do not. For those allergic to such claims, a different underrated argument that I’d be inclined to emphasize is what you might call the argument from intelligibility, which sits at the intersection of two lines described above — the line of evidence from the fine-tuning of the universe and the line of evidence from the strange capacities of human consciousness.
The fine-tuning argument, to oversimplify, rests on the startling fact that parameters of the cosmos have been apparently set, tuned very finely, if you will, in an extremely narrow range — with odds on the order of one in a bazillion (that’s a technical number, don’t question it), not one in a hundred — that allows for the emergence of basic order and eventually stars, planets and complex life. To quote Bentham’s Bulldog, this would seem like a pretty strong prima facie case for some originating intelligence: “If there is no God, then the constants, laws and initial conditions could be anything, so it’s absurdly unlikely that they’d fall in the ridiculously narrow range needed to sustain life.” (The book I recommend for a longer discussion of these questions is the physicist Stephen Barr’s “Modern Physics and Ancient Faith,” which is a couple of decades old but has a cool, judicious spirit that stands out from the crowd.)
The strongest materialist counter-explanation for these wild-seeming coincidences is a conceit very familiar from today’s pop culture and comic-book movies — the idea of the multiverse, which answers the apparent bazillion-to-one odds against our own lifebearing universe appearing accidentally by postulating a bazillion universes that we unfortunately can’t see or taste or touch. From this postulate, you get the conclusion that we’re in a universe capable of sustaining living observers because of a selection effect; the non-lifebearing universes don’t get observers because, well, they’re non-lifebearing (instead of being filled with alt-superheroes, as in the Marvel multiverse), and we’re the one-in-a-bazillion case by definition, because that’s the only situation where an observer could exist.
I think that argument has a lot of obvious weaknesses; moreover, along with the reasons to doubt that the multiverse hypothesis actually describes reality, there are also reasons to doubt that if it did describe reality, it would actually undermine the argument for design and God.
But let’s stipulate just for the sake of argument that we might be in a multiverse, that the apparent fine-tuning that enables self-aware life-forms might be there because these parameters and conscious observation itself are just a package deal.
Even then there is still a strange jackpot aspect of our position that cries out for explanation: We aren’t just in a universe that we can observe; we’re in a universe that’s deeply intelligible to us, a cosmos whose rules and systems we can penetrate, whose invisible architecture we can map and plumb, whose biological codes we can decipher and rewrite and whose fundamental physical building blocks we can isolate and, with Promethean power, break apart.
This capacity of human reason is mysterious, on one level, in the same way that consciousness itself is mysterious: As the philosopher Thomas Nagel puts it in his critique of materialism, “Mind and Cosmos,” it is “not merely the subjectivity of thought but its capacity to transcend subjectivity and discover what is objectively the case” that presents a problem for a hard materialism, since under materialist premises our thoughts are ultimately determined by physical causation, raising questions about how they could possibly achieve objectivity at all. (There is an even more intense argument that even having our thoughts align as they do with physical reality is extremely unlikely and miraculous, but I’ll just direct you down that rabbit hole rather than explore it.)
But the success of human reasoning is remarkable even if you wave away the problem of consciousness and assume that evolutionary pressure suffices to explain some modest form of successful reasoning — that the response to stimuli that enabled early Homo sapiens to recognize the patterns, say, of a predator’s behavior ended up having adaptive use beyond just panther dodging, granting our hominid ancestors some kind of basic capacity of understanding.
Even then, it seems likely that in many, many potential universes those capacities would have hit a ceiling in terms of what they could accomplish, that there would have been either inherent limits on our ape-minds or complicating aspects of the hidden architecture preventing superficial understanding from ever going really deep. It seems dazzlingly unlikely that an accidental observer would just keep on cracking codes at each new level of exploration, as the practical gave way to the theoretical, the simple to the complex, the intuitive to the far more mysterious, without any obvious evolutionary pressure forcing each new leap.
“Is it credible,” Nagel asks, “that selection for fitness in the prehistoric past should have fixed capacities that are effective in theoretical pursuits that were unimaginable at the time?” Evolution’s pressures on our capacities are for prehistoric survival, not discovering calculus or E=mc². So why should capacities that evolved because we needed to hunt gazelles and light fires also turn out, mirabile dictu, to be capacities that enable us to understand the deepest laws of physics and of chemistry, to achieve manned spaceflight, to condense all of human knowledge onto a tiny piece of silicon?
Suppose that as a child you developed a private language to use with your siblings or your friends — a simple set of codes, slightly more sophisticated than pig Latin, with the eminently practical purpose of enabling private communication that grown-ups wouldn’t understand. Let that stand for the survival-driven tool kit of our primeval ancestors.
Now suppose that much later in life you discovered that this childish system enabled members of your circle of friends to read and understand a set of ancient texts, as complex as Shakespeare and Aristotle put together, that contained all the secrets of Mayan astronomy, Greek philosophy and Egyptian mysticism, and that you happened to discover hidden in the attic of your childhood home.
Would you just assume, “Well, I was a bright kid and putting one over on grown-ups really builds linguistic skills; no wonder I was able to read the Ancient Book of Esoteric Knowledge that just happened to be hanging around in my vicinity”?
Or would you accept the more obvious conclusion — that you and your friends were characters in a larger story and that the book was in some sense placed there for you?
As the previous line suggests, the intelligibility of the cosmos is perhaps not exclusively an argument for the existence of God. Rather it’s more of an argument for a position that some people who concede divine possibilities are still inclined to doubt — not only that God exists in some distant, unfathomable form, but also that his infinite mind and our finite minds have some important connection, that we actually matter in the scheme of things and that in fact our own godlike powers are proof of something that was claimed by the old religions at the start: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him.”
Part of the foregoing is adapted from the forthcoming book “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.”
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On Thursday, Feb. 13, at 7 p.m., I’ll be in conversation with Kenneth L. Woodward on religion and the themes of my new book at the Athenaeum Center for Thought and Culture in Chicago. Tickets are available here.
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