From Electrons to God: A Closer Look at a Design Argument Proposed by a Commenter on this Blog

In this post I want to feature a discussion that emerged in an earlier post between two regular discussants on this blog (Dianelos Georgoudis and Burk Braun).

In an exchange in the commentary on my “Contemplating New Atheism’s Effects” post, Dianelos sketched out an argument against naturalism and in support of theism, one which relied in part on the premise that naturalism forces us to accept certain extraordinary claims about electrons. Burk responded with the following dismissive comment: “I would be quite interested in how you deduce a personal god from the electron.”

Now in a sense, Dianelos had already offered just such a deduction in his prior comment. Whether that deduction is sound is another matter—and we can take Burk’s comment as, perhaps, a flippant way to ask Dianelos to elaborate on and defend certain key premises of the argument. Dianelos has since responded with a brief elaboration, one that presents his argument as a variant on the design argument—but an interesting variant that hasn’t been addressed to my knowledge in the philosophical literature (it’s neither the fine tuning argument nor an argument from the supposed irreducible complexity of specific organic systems).

Burk responds in turn with some of the standard complaints against design arguments—basically, “Just because science hasn’t explained a phenomenon yet doesn’t mean science can’t or won’t, and positing God explains nothing.” While there’s something to the first part of this retort (although there are complexities I won’t get into now), the second part misses Dianelos’s central thesis, which is that theism and atheism are holistic ontologies (that is, understandings of the nature of existence) rather than explanatory hypotheses in the scientific sense, and that locating scientific claims within the theistic ontology renders them less extraordinary than they are when located within the atheistic ontology. As I take it, Dianelos is thus not offering God as an alternative to scientific explanations but, rather, as a holistic framework within which all scientifically derived explanations are understood. As such, I don't think it's quite the same kind of design argument that we see in the ID community in relation to biological examples of so-called “irreducible complexity.”

But let me leave these general issues aside so we can lay out the argument at issue more formally (as a deductively valid argument for theism) and then zero in on the details (specifically identifying vulnerable premises and the controversies and conversations they might stimulate). I think doing so is worthwhile because I think it will raise some interesting points of discussion; and because it is a distinctive design argument worthy of fuller development (it not only involves some non-traditional indicators of design but has a form that’s a bit different from that of a conventional design argument).

So, while preserving Dianelos’s original language as much as is consonant with formalizing it as a deductively valid argument, here is my reproduction of The Argument from the Electron to God.

1. Theism is the doctrine that all existence ultimately rests on the presence and will of a personal being.
2. Atheism is the contrary doctrine that it is not the case that all existence ultimately rests on the presence and will of a personal being.
3. Hence, if atheism is false, theism is true (and vice versa) (from 1, 2)
4. If it is not the case that all existence ultimately rests on the presence and will of a personal being, then all existence is ultimately autonomous, purposeless, and of a mechanical nature.
5. Naturalism holds that all existence is ultimately autonomous, purposeless, and of a mechanical nature.
6. Hence, if atheism is true, naturalism is true. (from 2, 4, 5)
7. Scientific research supports the claim (E) that electrons, which are physical primitives with no access to some computing machinery, nevertheless behave in ways that are highly computationally complex.
8. On the presumption of naturalism, claim (E) is an extraordinary (highly implausible) claim.
9. Hence, if naturalism is true, we must accept extraordinary claims. (from 7,8)
[Note: Premise 7 is taken to be one example among many for which the same kind of sub-argument 7-9 can be generated}
10. Any ontology which requires one to accept extraordinary claims should be rejected unless those who would endorse it provide compelling reasons to accept its truth despite the extraordinary implications.
11. No naturalist has provided compelling reasons to accept the truth of naturalism.
12. Hence, naturalism should be rejected as false. (from 9-11)
13. Hence, atheism should be rejected as false (from 6, 12)
14. Hence, theism should be accepted as true. (from 3, 13)

Now as laid out, this argument is valid. The question, then, is whether we should accept the premises. Premises 1, 2, and 5 are definitions—and even if Dianelos’s definitions do not track onto all contemporary usage, that doesn’t change the outcome of the argument if all other premises are correct. In other words, we can treat these definitions as stipulative (that is, nothing substantive hinges on how well these definitions fit with ordinary usage). That leaves premises 4, 7, 8, 10, and 11. Should all of these premises be accepted?

Well, I don’t know quite what I think of 4, but I’ll let it pass. With respect to 7, there are really two claims: first, that electrons behave in computationally complex ways; second, that electrons do not have access to any computing mechanism. I really don’t know enough to assess the first of these claims, but I’m very curious about it and would like to hear more about what sorts of behaviors Dianelos takes to exemplify computational complexity. Educate me!

With respect to the second claim, I wonder if naturalists might not try to invoke recent quantum research (which I don’t really understand) suggesting the possibility of some mode of immediate communication across great distances. Could the possibility of such communication make it possible for isolated electrons to have some kind of access to a sophisticated computational machinery comprised of scattered basic particles forming an organized system through these non-spatial channels of communication? Possibly (I don’t know)—but even if this suggestion is plausible it probably wouldn’t deflect Dianelos’s argument—first, because communication of spatio-temporal objects in the absence of any spatial proximity or mechanistic mode of communication might be taken as another claim that is problematically extraordinary when located within a naturalistic ontology; second, because the suggestion begins to gravitate towards a kind of pantheism in which a “universal mind” emerging out of the non-spatial, non-mechanistically produced interconnection of the basic building blocks of the universe guides the behavior of the basic particles that make up the universe—which is so close to theism (albeit in a pantheistic variation) that I doubt atheists would find it a satisfactory escape hatch from Dianelos’s argument. But further discussion about this would intrigue me.

Premise 8 is the key “design premise.” That is, it is the premise which holds that what we observe is very implausible given an ontology in which the properties of existing things are ultimately explained by blind mechanism and chance (but not similarly implausible given an ontology in which the properties of existing things are ultimately explained by agency). The observational claim (E), again, is that electrons behave “in computationally complex ways” (some elaboration of this would be welcome) but that they do not have access to a computing machine (such as a brain).

I’d say that what is posited in (E) does seem pretty strange if there is no other possible guidance system for computationally complex behavior than a mechanistic computational system. If such a system is the only thing that can reliably guide computationally complex behavior (that is, if there are no immaterial minds or intelligences not rooted in the organized complexity of a mechanical system like an organic brain or synthetic computer), then (E) imples that there are these basic entities that behave in computationally complex ways for no reason at all. It’s just what they do—act as if they are guided by intelligence in the absence of any guiding intelligence. Put another way, (E) is highly implausible given naturalism. On theism, by contrast, (E) would not imply that basic entities behave as if they are guided by intelligence in the absence of intelligence, because theism posits that all existent things have the properties they have by virtue of an underlying intelligence. Hence, if (E) is true (which I’m in no position to assess), it follows that there is a fact about the universe that is extraordinary on the assumption of naturalism but not extraordinary on the assumption of theism.

There is, of course, more to be said here—about the basis on which we judge a proposition to be extraordinary or implausible. But let’s move on for the moment, since this issue will come back.

Premise 10 won’t do as stated, but has to be modified—an once modified appropriately, it calls for a modification in 11 in order to preserve its validity.

Why do I say this? Well, 10 says in effect that we should reject P if P has implausible implications and there is no case for P more compelling than P’s implications are implausible. But suppose it is the case that not only does P have such implications (without an outweighing justifying argument), but so does not-P. In that case, given 10, we’d have to reject both P and not-P. And so, under conceivable circumstances, 10 would require that we reject the law of excluded middle (which holds that, for any proposition P, either P or its negation, not-P, is true). And so I think 10 needs to be reformulated to say something along the following lines:

10*: Any ontology which requires one to accept extraordinary claims should be rejected unless either (a) there are reasons to accept the ontology that are at least as compelling as the indicated implications are implausible, OR (b) the rejection of the ontology requires one to accept claims that are just as implausible.

[Note that if (b) is the case, it doesn’t follow that one should accept the ontology in question, only that one is no longer called to reject it based on its extraordinary implications. If one is saddled with extraordinary implications whether one accepts or rejects an ontology, the fact that it has extraordinary implications ceases to be, by itself, a good reason to reject it.]

But if we replace 10 with 10* we can validly make the inference to 12 only if we replace 11 with the following:

11*: No naturalist has provided compelling reasons to accept to truth of naturalism and no one has shown that rejecting naturalism (in other words, accepting theism) requires one to accept claims that are just as implausible.

Now, once we modify the final premise of the argument in this way, what we open up are, I think, two very difficult philosophical research projects. The first calls for a careful critical examination of all arguments in favor of naturalism. And, as I’ve said countless times, we cannot establish naturalism through a simple exercise of the scientific method; so these arguments for naturalism will be essentially philosophical, appealing to something other than empirical evidence alone (although presumably making use of empirical evidence as part of a broader philosophical case). The second research project calls for an assessment of the implications of a theistic ontology (relative to the known features of the world) to determine whether any of its implications are as extraordinary as those of naturalism.

But here we again confront the challenge of the criteria we use to decide whether we take a claim to be extraordinary. Of course, many atheistic naturalists take theism as in some way intrinsically implausible in itself. They contemplate the idea of agency behind the universe and it just seems to them, in an immediate way, to be incredible. What are we to do with such anti-theistic intuitions?

One might dismiss them as irrelevant. In the case of (E), its implausibility is presumably a function of naturalism’s own standards of what is plausible or implausible. Since naturalism’s only explanation for computationally complex behavior is the guidance of an evolved computing machine of some sort, seeing the former without the latter is extraordinary by naturalism’s own standards. That is, Dianelos seeks to point to an implication of naturalism that a naturalist would find implausible looking at it from a naturalist perspective. Parity would require that, for theism to be viewed as comparably problematic, it have implications that are extraordinary by theism’s own standards.

But there is more to be said. Are the only standards by which we can assess the reasonableness of a claim internal to a given comprehensive worldview? Or are there standards that transcend worldviews? And if so, what are they?

Once we descend into these sorts of issues, we find ourselves quickly enmeshed in a range of ongoing philosophical debates. And since I’ve already gone on long enough, what I’ll say here is that there are highly intelligent, thoughtful, sincere, intellectually virtuous people who fall on different sides of the various implicated controversies. And this leads me back to my own default position—namely that, given the finite human intellectual position, reasonable people can disagree about whether there is a God.