Sunday, April 8, 2007

Can We Find Evidence for the Divine Properties In the Universe?

Recall that the classic approaches to the proof for the existence of God have particular challenges with regard to the Divine properties. The teleological argument purports to show that there must have been a divine designer who is responsible for the order and complexity of the cosmos. Such an argument, if it is successful (they are not), will give us the conclusion that the being responsible for the universe must have had enough power to create the universe. It is not at all clear that a teleological argument could ever give us omnipotence from that evidential ground alone. Even though it may take an incredible amount of power to create a whole universe, even a complex, and highly ordered one, we can readily imagine first, a being who has it in his power to create the universe, but doing so is all that he can do. It will exhaust his power completely to do so. He will not have any more power beyond that to rectify or change anything about that universe. In fact, we could imagine a being for whom the task is so near the limits of his power that the act of creating the universe destroys him.

Now, by contrast, we can imagine a being that is something more like the traditional characterization by western theists of God. An omnipotent being, as God is by hypothesis, could build this, or any other logically possible universe. Doing so would not generate any taxation on his power, or push him to his limits. Creating this universe, or even one that is more complex, more highly ordered, would be effortless for such a being.

The challenge for us, of course, is that we are behind the veil on this alleged act of creation. So even if the teleological argument goes through and gives us compelling evidence that some divine, supernatural being must have had a hand in the creation of the universe, what evidence could we possibly find from within that universe that would inform us to a reasonable degree about whether the being that did the act was of the first weaker sort, or of the latter omnipotent sort?

I see no such evidence. No matter how impressive an act of creation we determine must have given rise to the universe we inhabit, it will always be an open question whether the being who performed that act had just enough power to pull it off, and was utterly weakened or even destroyed thereafter, or had enough power to do that act, and to repeat it, to change it, or any of the other acts that would be within the scope of omnipotence.

And that's just the challenge to the teleological argument on the question of power. Suppose the teleological argument succeeds (it doesn't), would we then have sufficient grounds to conclude that the supernatural agency involved was omniscient? Or was he just smart enough to perform that act? The only answer to these sorts of challenges that the theist might make is to argue that omnipotence and omniscience are necessary to perform an act like create all of the universe. But since it is readily imaginable that some being of great power and knowledge, but not full omnipotence and omniscience, could perform the act, how will it be possible that the theist can argue that omnipotence and omniscience are necessary? Such arguments will not succeed. There are too many open questions from behind the veil. Unlike Toto, who yanks aside the curtain for Dorothy, we cannot get a privileged glimpse into what the wizard is up to and what sorts of tools and powers the wizard has at his disposal.

And those are just the problems for omnipotence and omniscience. What about omni-benevolence, or infinite goodness, or omni-justice? In the history of the debate over the teleological argument, it has been exceedingly rare that the proponent of the argument has been willing to argue that we can get any goodness, much less infinite goodness, as a property of the responsible supernatural being from an examination of the artifact created. That is, while many have argued that it will take great power and knowledge, even infinite power and knowledge to build this universe. No one is foolish enough to argue that there are properties empirically manifest in the universe that make it resoundingly evident that whoever or whatever was responsible for creating was certain to possess an infinite amount of love for that creation, moral superiority, goodness, or justice.

Indeed, the classic theodicies struggle long and hard just to try to make it plausible that the divine being responsible for the universe might possibly have good intentions behind all the horrors, and unfathomable suffering that sentient creatures here undergo. That is, defenses of God have expended vast amounts of energy and ink just to make this conclusion reasonable: the staggering amounts of seemingly pointless suffering in the world could possibly be compatible with the existence of an omnibenevolent being because that being might have good reasons for making it appear that he does not exist, for allowing moral evil to go unchecked, for standing by while tsunamis, earthquakes, plagues, hurricanes, and pestilence wrecks complete havoc.

The insurmountable challenge for the theist who would put all his or her eggs in the teleological basket should now be clear. The teleological theist needs an argument from the apparent complexity and order that we can observe in the universe that is strong enough for omnibenevolence that it can meet the challenge of evil. But ironically, all that teleological arguments and theodicy accounts of evil have tried to show is that God might still possibly be infinitely good despite the overpowering evidence to the contrary. Without a compelling argument for omnibenevolence from some quarter, the promisory note we were given in connection to the problem of evil challenge is not met. The answer to the problem of evil was something like, "well, God might possibly still be infinitely good despite all this apparently pointless suffering because he might have good reasons for tolerating it." But then when our attention turns towards those arguments for the existence of God that might give us some real reasons to think that God is infinitely good we don't even find an adequate argument for the conclusion that the creator of the universe is good at all. Honestly, if one were to examine all the events in the world and all the suffering, would it be manifest that whoever was in charge of the show even cared at all about what was happening to those puny beings down there? It is manifestly obvious that whoever is in charge of the show is not omnibenevolent.

So where do we get the check we were offered for the bill of evil paid? Where is the argument that gives us any more grounds to think that God actually is good than the modest assertion that he might possibly be infinitely good?

And we cannot tolerate any more slippage from mere possibility to probability. There appears to be nothing but possible legs holding up the table of theism--no real legs.

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