Bout of Doubt, Round 4,994,847

So, my wife comes home last week and sees the complete mess strewn around the desk here, books splayed open, spine up, pages marked, scribbles of three Word documents, four Bibles all opened to the same passage and umpteen hundred Web pages open in my browser. For a brief moment, I feel like she's looking at me as if I were Ted Kaczynski hammering away at some old typewriter.

Perhaps, she's right.

She laughs and shakes her head, and we head out to dinner. We talk about the stock market, databases and computer games instead of what's really on my mind; we both know I need a break from my quest to discover The Truth . . . dun, dun, dun.

I had an entire journal entry written up that talks about my current bout of doubt and how other people have reacted to it. Instead, I think I'll just show you where I'm trying to focus my mind. So, here's a short list of things I've been trying to meditate on:

But he must ask in faith without any doubting (wavering), for the one who doubts (wavers) is like the surf of the sea, driven and tossed by the wind. ~ James 1:6

The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ. ~ II Corinthians 10:4,5. (This passage is very interesting in The Message as well)

Knowledge and doubt are inseparable to man. The sole alternative to 'knowledge-with-doubt' is no knowledge at all. Only God and certain madmen have no doubts. ~ Martin Luther

If ours is an examined faith, we should be unafraid to doubt. If doubt is eventually justified, we were believing what clearly was not worth believing. But if doubt is answered, our faith has grown stronger. It knows God more certainly and it can enjoy God more deeply. ~ C. S. Lewis

If I doubt, I exist. ~ St. Augustine

I believe; help my unbelief. ~ Mark 9:24

Anyone out there really suffer with doubt in their faith? How do you deal with it?

Evaluation of the Teleological Argument

Look round the world; contemplate the whole and every part of it: You will find it to be nothing but one great machine, subdivided into an infinite number of lesser machines, which again admit of subdivisions to a degree beyond what human senses and faculties can trace and explain. ~David Hume

I honestly don’t know how anyone can not stand in awe of the natural world, our bodies, our cells, the very particles that make up . . . well, everything. I am continually blown away by the natural world, both in it’s beauty and complexity. (The other night I caught The History Channel’s exploration of the brain--“the most complex machine in the known universe”--and was completely dumbfounded; well, my brain thinking about my brain is dumbfounded!) Indeed, the brain makes even the most complicated human invention look like a randomly tumbled stone. But does this complexity, this wonderfully amazing “machinery” we call life, compel us to believe in a creator? Does the “design” we see in nature require a Designer?

As with the other arguments for God's existence, there are some problems. First, the basic premise of the argument seems to require us to believe that bodies, organs, solar systems, ecosystems and planets behave as if they were machines. Paley (and others) want to say that our eyes, our cells, the very planet we live on is analogous to a machine (a watch in this case). This analogy has never seemed necessarily credible as it seems to break down rather quickly. Watches have makers; that much is clear. They are not made by themselves, but animals, plants, even planets and solar systems are self-replicating or self-organizing through the laws of physics. (It might be argued that the physical laws implies a creator, but that only says that God created a set of rules not the universe itself.) It breaks down because we are comparing non-living with living, self-sustaining with non-self-sustaining. Watches do not reproduce. Animals do, cells do. All of the systems we see today that appear to evidence design were formed through the use of preexisting materials; God, at least the God of the Bible, is said to have made the universe without that benefit. Without a doubt, the universe is a wondrous and complex thing, but an analogous argument never entirely convincing.

Next, while I am completely amazed by nature and how it appears that the universe evidences design, I am also aware at how wasteful and, dare I use the word, evil it can be. For all the carefully designed elements of life, there are also many maladaptions that seem to defy the notion of a thoughtful, entirely moral Designer. The abject waste of young life is an observable fact; it's pretty clear that for every "fit" individual in nature, there is massive majority of "unfit" individuals die before they can reproduce. Such waste must be addressed if I am to make claims about the perfect design of the natural world.

By way of a partial rebuttal to this objection: Sin may be a powerful explanation, but, if so, then we might not be able to have our cake and eat it too, perhaps, forcing us to make the rather weak claim that God only designed the good parts of nature. I personally think evil can be explained sufficiently to at least address this issue enough to set it aside.

There may be an "unconscious purpose" that has produced the appearance of design in the world. I can imagine, given some vast stretch of time, that the standard evolutionary story could become plausible. If a thousand monkeys hammered on a thousand keyboards for a hundred million years, something approaching the genius of Shakespeare could appear on the page through pure chance. But chance is not the only active force in nature: there is gravity, there are chemical interactions, there is natural selection (known most commonly by the tautological slogan: "survival of the fittest"). To my way of thinking, the all-to-common example of the human eye may have plausibly evolved gradually from a simple light-sensitive organelle through successive modifications, down to the variety of eyes we see today in the animal world. This doesn't mean that something has purposed to create an eye. Rather, it could be that my eyes are more adaptive than my ancestors and their eyes were more adaptive than their ancestors, etc., until we reach back in time to find a mildly photosensitive skin cell on some sort of primitive and completely unknown creature.

Finally, I think it is quite possible that we may be fooled into thinking that there is actual design, when there really isn't. Our brains, being, as I say, pattern--whether there really is a pattern or not--recognition machines, may be attempting to overlay meaning and cohesion onto the complexity we see. We see the amazing fine-tuning required for life on this planet (well, perhaps, life anywhere in the vastness of space), and we are required to interpret this data. Our limited perspectives and psychology may trick us into a false apprehension of purpose where there really is no purpose at all.

As probably the strongest line of reasoning for God’s existence, the teleological argument leaves some interesting questions even if I find the counter-arguments lacking. Even if this complexity leads me to the acceptance of a Grand Designer, what kind of God does the argument imply?

If I take the teleological argument at face value, I think I may be justified in saying that God likes death, suffering and meaninglessness as much as He likes life, pleasure and meaningfulness. God simply sets out the plans and hopes that things will turn out for the best. If you believe that God is the grand and wonderful designer of the universe, then how does one explain Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), Yersinia pestis (bubonic plague) or cancer? How does one explain why all animals (including, under normal conditions, humans) have far more offspring than usually don't survive until maturity? How does one explain earthquakes and famines? To me, this is not particularly good system design. (I could be wrong, of course, and I do think, as I've said, that a good argument can be constructed to tell us why evil is a necessary thing, but that’s for another time.)

I have studied evolution and I’ve studied creationism (in all their various permutations) and I find that either explanation is equally plausible. Both, though, have problems, crippling problems if you ask me. These problems require some kind of leap of faith to overcome. For some, the problems associated with the teleological argument are insurmountable, but for myself they do not hold me back from a belief in God. Indeed, while this argument does not come close, in my mind, of proving God's existence, it certainly makes for a plausible case. It seems likely that if there was a God, we could see some sort of design in the world and I think we see just enough of that to make it likely that God exists.

From the Depths CD Release

It looks like 'From the Depths: Songs of Hope and Healing' is compete and ready to be shipped. Over a year ago, the worship team at our church decided to put their considerable talents together to record music as a fundraiser for Jacob Wacker. Jacob was in a pretty serious accident last summer and barely survived. Today, he continues to struggle with paralysis and, I can only imagine, discouragement but he is planning on moving out on his own. Medical costs are, as you all know, nothing to sneeze at and he will continue to need support. While the CD's main focus has been as a fundraiser specifically for Jacob, it's been my hope that it would be appreciated by a wider audience.

You can get more info on the CD project, Jacob himself and even order the CD here: Jacob's Hope CD

PS. I started this post it looks like almost an entire year ago, but God has a way of moving things along in His own time.

Teleological Argument

The next argument I would like to address in my continuing quest to figure out why Lee believes in God, is the Teleological arguemnt, a subargument of the cosomological argument. In short, the argument goes something like this:

1. All things designed have a designer.
2. The universe (from galaxies to single cells) evendence design.
3. Therefore, the universe has a designer (and that is God).

Today the argument is most often accociated with the English theologian William Paley, who presented the argument in his 1802 book Natural Theology. Paley suggests that the analogy—watch is to watchmaker what universe is to God—pooves that there is a designer, because the universe, the planet, our eyes, even the very cells of our bodies exhibit positive signs of being designed. They are so dazzlingly complicated that they must have been intentionally created. Even if one had no real idea what the purpose of a particular part of the world, we reconginze the difference between an erroded stone and the complex mechinism of watch. In short, as A. C. Ewing demonstrates in the following passage, we are allowed to attribute design when we see complexity:

Suppose we saw pebbles on the shore arranged in such a way as to make an elaborater machine. It is theoretically possible to they might have come to occupy such positions by mere chance, but it is fantastically unlikely , and we should feel no heistation in jumping to the conclusion that they had been thus depositinted not by the tide by some intellegent agent. Yet the body of the simplest living creature is a more complex machine than the most complext ever devised by a human engineer.

Systems in nature, it is argued, appear to be not unlike machines built by human beings. Therefore, there is a Great Designer.

To avoid the weaknesses of an analogy (analogies always seem to break down, don’t they?), two supporting theories have gained groundin recent years: irreducible complexity and fine-tuning.

Since the mid-1990’s the teleological argument has been repackaged by supporters of Intelligent Design into what is known as irreducible complexity. First fully articulated by Michael J. Behe, irreducable complexity is

a single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic funtion, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning. An irreducibly complext system cannot be produced directly (that is, by continuosly improving the initial function, which continues to work by the same mechanism) by slight, successive modifications of a precursor system, because any precusor to an irreducibly complext system that is missing a part is by definition nonfuctional.

Even in the highly unlikely event that a complex system (say an eye or bacterial phygelum) came into existance by random, grandual and undesigned means, as complexity increases the less likely that it came to be without the benefit of a designer. Specifically, Behe is speaking about biological systems, but as early as the mid-1960’s larger systems, including the universe itself has been looked at in a similar light.

The other modern extension of the teleological argument has come from astronomy and astrobiology, namely the idea that the universe is finely tuned to support life and, for some, human life in particular. Astronomers had now identified more than 150 finely tuned characteristics. In the 1960s the odds that any given planet in the universe would possess the necessary conditions to support intelligent physical life were shown to be less than one in ten thousand. By 2001 those odds dramatically shrank to less than one in a number so large it might as well be infinity (10 to the 173th power). In other words, if the universe were actually different in any of those 150 ways, we wouldn’t be here at all.

For many observers, this would only be possible if the universe was indeed created to support life. And the creator of the universe is none other than God.

1. Anthropic Principle
2. Fine Tuning for Life on Earth
   

It's Been Fine to Have a Chance to Hang Around

Today, I begin my 43rd year on this lovely little planet. Which means, I’ve lived through 15,706 days (including 11 extra leap years days). About a third of that time was taken up in sleep, so I’ve been only been awake for about 27 or 28 years. Probably a bit less if I factor in sick time, recovery from surgeries, and my increasingly frequent late afternoon naps. I have no idea how many years of my waking life I’ve wasted watching TV and I’ll never get back the time I spent reading “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”. At any rate, I’ve always thought of birthdays as a great excuse to slow down and think about my life, to contemplate everything that has made me me.

I remember listening to "Poems, Prayers and Promises" by John Denver when I was growing up and thinking that it was a very sweet song, but it has only been since I've been married that I've really begun to appreciate it. I looked it up on YouTube the other day and was fondly impressed. I really like this version, because I've never sat around a fire passing a pipe. *grins*