Janssen Responds to Drost
Response to C.R. Drost, by Wes Janssen:
In discussions such as these it is too often the case that one or both of the arguers indulges in 'talking past' the opposing arguer, presumably thinking that his own points are too significant to be overcome or too definitively relevant to 'listen' to the countermanding argument(s). I have sometimes caught myself doing this, Mr. Jacobsen has done this, and you do no better. The statements that you have submitted to Mr. Jacobsen's site appeal to a couple of rather standard arguments of dogmatic "skepticism". With all due respect, I fear that I cannot be very kind to these arguments. If I mischaracterize them, and I try not to by citing your specific arguments, then I should apologize in advance. I certainly cannot mischaracterize your arguments as egregiously as you have misrepresented mine, as we shall see in what follows. The first thing we might do is to recognize sloganeering and appeals to the ad hominem for what they are, and thereafter try to avoid them.
Skepticism or dogmatism?
From a Nazi prison, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote of dealing with the ardent dogmatist: ". . . One feels in fact, when talking to him, that one is dealing not with the man himself, but with slogans, catchwords and the like, which have taken hold of him. He is under a spell, he is blinded..." Such a spell has ever gripped the common "skepticism" (we will get to the "slogans and catch words" shortly). A sober skepticism is less opposed to the idea that a given conclusion might be better indicated than a contrary conclusion, than it is opposed to strident dogmatism. You say of skepticism, "it is far more than ['a useful tool'], it is an examination into our own uncertainty, an allowance of our own uncertainty to take precedence over belief." In what manner is this "examination", this "allowance", not a useful tool (you say that it is "more")? This is not a trivial question; it is begged by your statement, one that implies reference to something "far more" significant than a methodological 'tool' of inquiry. If skepticism is "far more than" a means of testing and refining one's understanding, what "more" is it? This "allowance of our own uncertainty to take precedence over belief" is a philosophical 'way of life' perhaps? If a philosophy, a philosophy of what? Deferred judgement? Epistemology, noetics, logic, ethics -- all are so much quicksand if we're talking about a belief that belief is unwarranted. If conclusions (presumably including tentative conclusions) are not acceptable, then what is to be done with such a conclusion itself? If belief lacking universal or mathematical "proof" is unwarranted, what is to be done with such a non-provable belief itself? In this view, "skepticism" is simple dogma.
As a skeptic of the purely methodological variety, my observation of the absolute/dogmatic variety is similar to that articulated by Kant. If skepticism is "more" than methodology it is dogma, and as such, paralytic, and far less than a useful tool.
Slogans and catchwords: "The God of the Gaps".
Your foray into a "God of the Gaps" characterization opens with this: "Wes Janssen has an unfortunate tendency to say 'Nothing scientific explains this phenomenon, so God is responsible.'" Not only do I not have a "tendency to say" such a goofy thing, I simply have never said it. Nor would I ever, for reasons I will outline below. (My arguments instead tend toward "where science best explains the world, we find that it indicates God is responsible," which is quite opposite your characterization).
A "God of the Gaps" characterization appeals to a certain completeness or equivalent adequacy to our understanding in identifiable areas. In your words: "These arguments come from there being a gap in our understanding." Such an appeal has no foundation in either science or theology. It presumes non-gaps (areas of complete human knowledge which have eliminated God's presence verifiably) which can thereby define "gaps". Neither pure science nor pure theology can presume anything of the sort. In Towzer's words, "The 'why' of natural law is the living 'voice' of God immanent in His creation." And that the "speaking Voice" of God is "indeed the only force in nature." Think of this in terms of Hawking's statement, "What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe." Thus God is seen (whether by theism or the agnostic Hawking) as both nature's present author of instruction and warrant for existence. I do not believe that in all of theism there is an opposing view. In this view, universal to theism, where is the non-"gap", that 'place' from which human genius has eliminated God? Obviously, human knowledge, scientific or otherwise, cannot define a non-gap, much less identify one. I'll treat this a bit further, so as to make this as clear as I can. If there can be no non-gaps to define gaps, there can be no gaps. Human genius is confined, at best, to a few (or many, if that characterization makes one feel better) gaps in the vast expanse of our ignorance. If human "knowledge" can constitute something real that we have claimed from our antecedent but somehow lessened ignorance, we must admit to a human 'genius'/'knowledge' of the gaps. Logically, God cannot be so confined.
Your "God of the Gaps" is reprised for your summation: "It irritates me to see the 'God of the Gaps' argument, which has too many holes in it to work (and worse, the 'ontological argument,' which is flawed from its outset)." I make neither argument and might more truthfully offer that it is rather irritating to be falsely represented. There are obvious reasons why a theist would not suggest that God has been, or ever could be, relegated to the gaps in human genius. The "God of the Gaps" mantra belongs mainly to the slogan collection of the dogmatic "skeptic". If we are to claim that God is relegated to (or manifested primarily in) the "gaps" in our knowledge, then it must be our knowledge that defines the gap. There is no "gap" without non-gaps to bound or define a gap, much as there is no valley without relatively elevated lands (non-valley) to bound and define it. Again, where exactly in all our accumulated knowledge, have we excluded God? We find no "gap" to which we can confine God because we find no non-gap from which we can exclude God. It seems to me that any theist, regardless of his understanding of creation, must understand God to be the external 'guarantor' of "the true Schrödinger equation", so to speak. That is, the author of the (non-material) mathematical axioms that both instruct and reveal nature. The gap/non-gap construct has no relation to an entity that can never be excluded. Both classical and process theology understand God as such an author and guarantor. No gaps, no non-gaps, no boundaries, just irritating slogans. One must notice that you decry the employment of scientific quantification in teleological arguments (we will treat this also) and that you also decry what you claim to be the absence of scientific quantification (your very own irritating "God of the Gaps"). Your stated position is that arguments are to be dismissed if they appeal to science and dismissed if they do not appeal to science. An argument that examines quantitative inference must either include those quantities or not include them (although I'm very uncertain as to how the latter approach could be reasonably constructed). I see no middle ground in which data is to be neither included nor excluded. Apparently any/all teleological or theistic consideration that relates to the physical world must be outlawed (by virtue of either referencing or not referencing quantification). That's convenient. We certainly detect a heavy aspect of the ad hominem in your rulings. My own approach is certainly to try and make account of what we find and what we think we know. Many scientists, on all sides of these issues, do the same. For example, the astronomer Chet Raymo, a self-proclaimed skeptic, suggests that empiricism is the only sound basis of epistemological judgements, characterizing theism as "airy-fairy" (Skeptics and True Believers, 1998). While theoretical particle physicist Gerald Schroeder, a theist, observes this: "The solidity of iron is actually 99.9999999999999 percent startlingly vacuous space made to feel solid by ethereal fields of force having no material reality at all" (The Hidden Face of God, 2001). The point he is here in the process of making is that matter and energy, the stock and trade of philosophical materialism, are themselves materially quite "airy-fairy". Reductionistic science leads us to specific information. The appeal here is to what science has discovered about the quantum world, not to the unknown. Nature is ultimately reduced to ethereal mathematical axioms, in Schroeder's words, an "immaterial wisdom". I will guess that if you don't like his conclusion you will want to attribute it to his ignorance of something you posit might be known someday and that you would presumably find more agreeable. That would be a very personally convenient and a comfortably 'slippery' position I suppose. But it essentially denies the possibility of knowledge, even in principle. After all, the same contention might be offered against the "knowledge" that you may hope to one day find agreeable.
"Proof" and that which "we cannot verify."
You speak a great deal of proof/proving/disproving/verification. I count at least nine such references in your statements. This begs some consideration. You say, "But to be more true to Janssen's writing, halfway down the paragraph he notes that science can not disprove a God-theory for creation. He fails to realize that THIS DOES NOT MAKE ANY STEPS TOWARD PROVING GOD." Here, after claiming an aspiration to "be more true to Janssen's writing," you launch directly into all those capital letters about "PROVING GOD". "Fails to realize"? "PROVING GOD"? I think we're in need of a cow to feed this to. I have never claimed to "make any steps toward proving God." When I speak, for example of a calculated probability of no better than one over infinity, I speak of a significant inference, not a proof. Your arguments against what you refer to as my 'proofs' are your arguments against your straw man characterizations. The existence of God can neither be proved nor disproved, not if the standard is empirical verification or logical completeness as the human mind might grasp it. Likewise, the nature of God cannot be proved or disproved. If an entity not contained by the material world lent itself to empirical verification -- an idea that is itself not logically complete -- then theistic "faith" would not be possible. I have never argued that God could be so proven. This is not a point of contention. If a proof is to be unassailable, in the sense that certain mathematical axioms are generally seen as being unassailable, then very little can be proved. As any logician can tell you, we cannot "prove" that Abraham Lincoln ever existed. (If you want to say that we can, I will have to take you to task on that.) Mathematical proof does not lend itself to very many propositions. Of course, given a dispassionate examination of the evidence, which is to say 'inference', it is more reasonable to conclude that Lincoln existed than to believe he did not. I have obviously referred many times to probability and have compared explanations and theories as to their comparative feasibilities. This is not only the appropriate way to conduct most considerations, it is generally the only way. Individuals charged with crimes are not proven -- in a classically logical or mathematical sense -- to be guilty or not guilty. Such judgements are rendered by employment of a "preponderance of evidence" standard. This is, in fact, the standard by which you probably "know" your birthday. Attorneys like to talk about what they have "proved" and disproved, but they speak only of reasonable inference. "Proof," in a purely logical or mathematical sense, is an absurd standard in most considerations. Please look again at my arguments, I do not claim anything so irrational as to have "proven" anything. I leave that to the F. Lee Bailey's of the world. If we cannot strive to be honest about an adversarial argument, then all is straw.
We also notice your statement, "Nothing scientific explains this, so other explanations are not useful." Whether you have understood it as such or not, the statement and your recurring demand for proof resound of the Wittgensteinian standard known as the "verification principle." The standard, simply stated, is that only empirically falsifiable statements are permitted potential "meaning" ("meaning" meaning essentially "grounding" to Wittgenstein). Positivism, which traces to Wittgenstein's principle, claims thus to reject metaphysics. All aesthetic, theological and ethical/moral judgments are proclaimed "meaningless." It turns out that many of the statements that are typically made in the course of the work of science are also judged "meaningless." Positivism denies both "reality" and "truth" because such concepts must contain metaphysical (thus "meaningless") judgments. Positivism claims that "the world" is only that which can be verified to be consistent with other allowed (similarly grounded) statements. Positivism, the would-be anti-metaphysic metaphysic, has obvious problems. The verification principle immediately fails to survive its own test. To say that only that which can be empirically verified has meaning, is not a falsifiable statement, it is a metaphysical judgment. Logical positivism's judgments concerning "meaning," must contain, by their own standard, no meaning. It is interesting that one of the few prominent thinkers of our day who calls himself a positivist, Stephen Hawking, is famous for his wanderings into metaphysics and for rather distancing himself from the verification principle where he sees that it simply must fail to be anything but convenient foolishness. Positivism is the gun at its own temple, and the verification principle is the bullet in its own brain. If your demand for "proof" is oriented to something other than the verification principle, we wonder what it is.
Cosmology: "The very beginning."
You are correct to observe that exactly what happened at "the very beginning" is beyond the domain of human science. In terms of demanding verification or "proof" I suppose that you could deny that the big bang ever happened. If your standard for warrant is a kind of airtight "verification," then you would have to doubt the big bang scenario and perhaps you do, I don't know. But some of us like to know/understand as much as we can. This may reasonably involve conclusions that are not proved but are substantially inferred by the preponderance of evidence. Regarding "the very beginning," it is not as if there are no inferences to be considered when we look at what science can treat mathematically, beginning at the so-called Planck moment, something greatly less than a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the creation event. Scientific/mathematical information here is not "0" or "none", and is far from it. In principle, what is "known" here approaches mathematical proof much more closely than does your knowledge of your own birth date. And this is the quantification that I have cited, as have physicists and philosophers of nearly every stripe. Positivists (like Hawking) do this. Realists (like Penrose, Davies, etc) do this. To imply that the numbers I cite in this regard provide anything other than inferences about what happened that trillionth of a trillionth of a second before human science becomes possible, is again less than honest on your part. You again strike a blow to your own straw man. When, for example, Hawking concludes from what can be mathematically examined (we might use capital letters for "can be") in the early universe, he concludes there are but two inferences: the intent of God or the so-called weak anthropic principle (which is to say, we got lucky unexplainably -- "just because"). Hawking, raised an atheist and now a positivist, certainly does not reach this conclusion because he wants to. His conclusion here is not oriented to "0" information, as you have suggested. And it is not generally held to be a controversial conclusion, it is pretty much accepted, I might have cited another physicist, perhaps Paul Davies. You have complained that I attempt to make my points "sound scientific," at least as they relate to cosmology. The complaint itself sounds like an appeal to the ad hominem, something rather like 'look out folks, he's trying to pull a fast one here.' I concede that this characterization is mine but think it is conceptually accurate. My arguments undoubtedly reflect my interests and my studies. I read a great deal of physics, philosophy, logic, and theology and would expect my arguments to reflect this. I generally tend to cite sources, at least by name, even in informal discussions such as these. If I make mistakes in terms of science, those things can be cited specifically. Now, if I tried to sound say, musical, then I would be attempting deception!
Your "Causality" statements are, in your own word, arbitrary. But one has to notice your statement that the big bang might be somehow traced to "such an infinity of potential causes." Perhaps you "skeptics" know something theoretical physicists do not (?). It's a very odd statement: "we don't have the ability to vary large amounts of different variables out of a complete variable list in a spaceless area, much less the computers needed to run regressions and chi-square tests on such an infinity of potential causes." If that is to relate to anything scientific, I have no idea what it could be. A so-called quantum void is an 'irreducible nothingness' which is not coherently understood as containing an "infinity of potential causes." Proposing a single, fleeting fluctuation is problematic enough. We all make rather horrid arguments at times, I suppose, so I'll not throw stones here. But it is instructive that "skeptics" appeal to such fancy.
Your statements concerning 'time' do not seem to distill into an argument that can be treated. Augustine's characterization of God's extra-temporal existence as being an "eternal simultaneity" is, it seems to me, logically adequate. It is consistent with an "existence" (perhaps we should say 'supra-existence') without physical extension. How would beings such as ourselves understand this better? I don't know. There are no statements to be made of sequence outside of 'real' time. I don't think that this has been contended.
You wanted to take a few more whacks at the "percent" piñata. You say, "Percent ALWAYS means a ratio standardized such that its denominator is 100." Paul Jacobson and I have both said the same thing in different words. This is not a point of contention. I have pointed out that there are two generally acceptable conceptual treatments of the numerator in statistical usage. That is all. I concede again that I may have explained this poorly and that the whole 'issue' could have been avoided if I had stated that argument in different words. In my taking (what I thought was) one last kick at that carcass I carelessly stated that the definition of percentile was practically synonymous with that of percent/percentage. There's no good reason for me to have said that and you were correct to observe this. We will place the word 'percentile' in the C.R. Drost column. If anything that has been said in any of these considerations is 'tangential', this is it.
As regards your 'paragraph 5' rebuttal: Of the origin of life you say "Here we have a place where God can have an influence... but anything can have an influence there!" Really? A causal influence? Anything? This is a "skeptical" argument? Sounds outlandish, quantified scientific examinations countermand your statement (see Crick, for example), might we ask for "proof"? Logical inference? Or is "skepticism" to be selectively applied to denying God only?
Theology and a different kind of gap:
As regards your theological foray ('paragraph 7' comments): You say:
"God is clearly a being in a sense that we can't intuitively 'get' (a form of being that exists outside of sequence)... but Janssen's ideas showed that he understood as well. Still, Janssen demonstrates that he does not believe in a traditional God, and the question is... If God is aspectless and formless, then doesn't the effort to argue God's existence not matter, because from a practicable point God doesn't exist? The work wasn't so much arguing the possibility that the universe was created: it was arguing about Gods that have traits." I am not sure what you expect "a traditional God" to be. Perhaps one that is easily defeated by sufficiently clever arguments? An anthropomorphous candy-stork clerk or a hurler of lightening bolts? No, I believe in the same God that the wisest theologians and humblest saints have believed in for many centuries. As you say, we struggle greatly to define God, if there is a tradition that has 'God' completely encircled by human understanding, then we would have a theology of a "traditional God" which most theologians and thinking theists would have to reject. The great Greek thinkers of antiquity saw that God cannot be conformed to human understanding, as did the Hebrew theologians, David, Solomon, Isaiah, the writer of Job, and Philo. Imperfect as our description of extra-cosmic "traits" must be, be cannot try to talk about something without alluding to traits, so far as we can grapple with them, as in your characterization, "exists outside of sequence", which, we note, is a trait. The arguments here have a hard time defining themselves. You ask "If we say that God created the universe, then how does it follow that God is either good or just?" The question is more than a bit misleading, but can nonetheless be generally treated as stated. If the created universe, nature's laws and constituent existence, including our little blue island in space and our own conscious selves, are "good" (and existence indeed seems good if compared to non-existence), then we can suggest that the Archetype of goodness is itself good. Similarly, if constituent existent beings (let us say Jacobsen, Drost, and Janssen) are free to question whether God is good, then this creator who does not demand bound automatons is reasonably considered both good and just, and so forth. But as I say, your questions here appeal less to reason than to muddied waters and human ignorance. If we wanted to make your argument here sound as dubious as it seems to me to be, but by employment of a snappy slogan, we might call your argument a "Skepticism of the Gaps"!
Leading into your conclusions, you say "to say that you are doing the Lord's work has always been presumptuous." Of course, if you take a look at my comments to Mr. Jacobsen you will find that I have not made that claim. Rather I questioned why he is so certain as to what God does and does not do; would or would not do, and tried to illustrate a reason he should question his certainty. You have also made statements describing what God would and would not do ("Jacobsen's own thoughts would be pushed. . .", etc.). We wonder if claiming to thus know what God would and would not do "has always been presumptuous"? [Possibly having offered ideas in this vein myself] I will only suggest that it would be prudent for all to be careful about throwing stones in this regard (I saw yours coming when I wrote what I did to Jacobsen).
Conclusion.
Your conclusion was a return to your "God of the Gaps" theme and has been treated above. My conclusion is that that your "skepticism" is selectively applied dogmatism. You speak of "searching" but you virtually forbid finding answers. You seek a cacophony of supposedly "valid" ideas that often need no support, to swamp important questions in an artificially embellished abyss of doubt. Ideas that are merely imagined (that the origin of life might be traced to "anything", for example), or are logically unsupportable (your cosmological "infinity of potential causes", for example) are held to be antithetical equalizers to quantification and to far more thoroughly reasoned conclusions. You are the happily hung juror. Polkinghorne says, "There is a way of proceeding in conceptual matters whose method is to define away any inconvenient difficulty. All the really tricky questions are declared meaningless, despite the fact that they are sufficiently well comprehended to give rise to perplexity." While this observation is apparently directed toward logical positivism, it applies also to your virulent vision of "skepticism." Positivism claims to be anti-metaphysical but is itself metaphysical. Your school of "skepticism" may envisage itself as being anti-dogmatic, but is itself highly dogmatic. "'Tis skepticism" you say, but 'tis dogmatism.
In discussions such as these it is too often the case that one or both of the arguers indulges in 'talking past' the opposing arguer, presumably thinking that his own points are too significant to be overcome or too definitively relevant to 'listen' to the countermanding argument(s). I have sometimes caught myself doing this, Mr. Jacobsen has done this, and you do no better. The statements that you have submitted to Mr. Jacobsen's site appeal to a couple of rather standard arguments of dogmatic "skepticism". With all due respect, I fear that I cannot be very kind to these arguments. If I mischaracterize them, and I try not to by citing your specific arguments, then I should apologize in advance. I certainly cannot mischaracterize your arguments as egregiously as you have misrepresented mine, as we shall see in what follows. The first thing we might do is to recognize sloganeering and appeals to the ad hominem for what they are, and thereafter try to avoid them.
Skepticism or dogmatism?
From a Nazi prison, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote of dealing with the ardent dogmatist: ". . . One feels in fact, when talking to him, that one is dealing not with the man himself, but with slogans, catchwords and the like, which have taken hold of him. He is under a spell, he is blinded..." Such a spell has ever gripped the common "skepticism" (we will get to the "slogans and catch words" shortly). A sober skepticism is less opposed to the idea that a given conclusion might be better indicated than a contrary conclusion, than it is opposed to strident dogmatism. You say of skepticism, "it is far more than ['a useful tool'], it is an examination into our own uncertainty, an allowance of our own uncertainty to take precedence over belief." In what manner is this "examination", this "allowance", not a useful tool (you say that it is "more")? This is not a trivial question; it is begged by your statement, one that implies reference to something "far more" significant than a methodological 'tool' of inquiry. If skepticism is "far more than" a means of testing and refining one's understanding, what "more" is it? This "allowance of our own uncertainty to take precedence over belief" is a philosophical 'way of life' perhaps? If a philosophy, a philosophy of what? Deferred judgement? Epistemology, noetics, logic, ethics -- all are so much quicksand if we're talking about a belief that belief is unwarranted. If conclusions (presumably including tentative conclusions) are not acceptable, then what is to be done with such a conclusion itself? If belief lacking universal or mathematical "proof" is unwarranted, what is to be done with such a non-provable belief itself? In this view, "skepticism" is simple dogma.
As a skeptic of the purely methodological variety, my observation of the absolute/dogmatic variety is similar to that articulated by Kant. If skepticism is "more" than methodology it is dogma, and as such, paralytic, and far less than a useful tool.
Slogans and catchwords: "The God of the Gaps".
Your foray into a "God of the Gaps" characterization opens with this: "Wes Janssen has an unfortunate tendency to say 'Nothing scientific explains this phenomenon, so God is responsible.'" Not only do I not have a "tendency to say" such a goofy thing, I simply have never said it. Nor would I ever, for reasons I will outline below. (My arguments instead tend toward "where science best explains the world, we find that it indicates God is responsible," which is quite opposite your characterization).
A "God of the Gaps" characterization appeals to a certain completeness or equivalent adequacy to our understanding in identifiable areas. In your words: "These arguments come from there being a gap in our understanding." Such an appeal has no foundation in either science or theology. It presumes non-gaps (areas of complete human knowledge which have eliminated God's presence verifiably) which can thereby define "gaps". Neither pure science nor pure theology can presume anything of the sort. In Towzer's words, "The 'why' of natural law is the living 'voice' of God immanent in His creation." And that the "speaking Voice" of God is "indeed the only force in nature." Think of this in terms of Hawking's statement, "What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe." Thus God is seen (whether by theism or the agnostic Hawking) as both nature's present author of instruction and warrant for existence. I do not believe that in all of theism there is an opposing view. In this view, universal to theism, where is the non-"gap", that 'place' from which human genius has eliminated God? Obviously, human knowledge, scientific or otherwise, cannot define a non-gap, much less identify one. I'll treat this a bit further, so as to make this as clear as I can. If there can be no non-gaps to define gaps, there can be no gaps. Human genius is confined, at best, to a few (or many, if that characterization makes one feel better) gaps in the vast expanse of our ignorance. If human "knowledge" can constitute something real that we have claimed from our antecedent but somehow lessened ignorance, we must admit to a human 'genius'/'knowledge' of the gaps. Logically, God cannot be so confined.
Your "God of the Gaps" is reprised for your summation: "It irritates me to see the 'God of the Gaps' argument, which has too many holes in it to work (and worse, the 'ontological argument,' which is flawed from its outset)." I make neither argument and might more truthfully offer that it is rather irritating to be falsely represented. There are obvious reasons why a theist would not suggest that God has been, or ever could be, relegated to the gaps in human genius. The "God of the Gaps" mantra belongs mainly to the slogan collection of the dogmatic "skeptic". If we are to claim that God is relegated to (or manifested primarily in) the "gaps" in our knowledge, then it must be our knowledge that defines the gap. There is no "gap" without non-gaps to bound or define a gap, much as there is no valley without relatively elevated lands (non-valley) to bound and define it. Again, where exactly in all our accumulated knowledge, have we excluded God? We find no "gap" to which we can confine God because we find no non-gap from which we can exclude God. It seems to me that any theist, regardless of his understanding of creation, must understand God to be the external 'guarantor' of "the true Schrödinger equation", so to speak. That is, the author of the (non-material) mathematical axioms that both instruct and reveal nature. The gap/non-gap construct has no relation to an entity that can never be excluded. Both classical and process theology understand God as such an author and guarantor. No gaps, no non-gaps, no boundaries, just irritating slogans. One must notice that you decry the employment of scientific quantification in teleological arguments (we will treat this also) and that you also decry what you claim to be the absence of scientific quantification (your very own irritating "God of the Gaps"). Your stated position is that arguments are to be dismissed if they appeal to science and dismissed if they do not appeal to science. An argument that examines quantitative inference must either include those quantities or not include them (although I'm very uncertain as to how the latter approach could be reasonably constructed). I see no middle ground in which data is to be neither included nor excluded. Apparently any/all teleological or theistic consideration that relates to the physical world must be outlawed (by virtue of either referencing or not referencing quantification). That's convenient. We certainly detect a heavy aspect of the ad hominem in your rulings. My own approach is certainly to try and make account of what we find and what we think we know. Many scientists, on all sides of these issues, do the same. For example, the astronomer Chet Raymo, a self-proclaimed skeptic, suggests that empiricism is the only sound basis of epistemological judgements, characterizing theism as "airy-fairy" (Skeptics and True Believers, 1998). While theoretical particle physicist Gerald Schroeder, a theist, observes this: "The solidity of iron is actually 99.9999999999999 percent startlingly vacuous space made to feel solid by ethereal fields of force having no material reality at all" (The Hidden Face of God, 2001). The point he is here in the process of making is that matter and energy, the stock and trade of philosophical materialism, are themselves materially quite "airy-fairy". Reductionistic science leads us to specific information. The appeal here is to what science has discovered about the quantum world, not to the unknown. Nature is ultimately reduced to ethereal mathematical axioms, in Schroeder's words, an "immaterial wisdom". I will guess that if you don't like his conclusion you will want to attribute it to his ignorance of something you posit might be known someday and that you would presumably find more agreeable. That would be a very personally convenient and a comfortably 'slippery' position I suppose. But it essentially denies the possibility of knowledge, even in principle. After all, the same contention might be offered against the "knowledge" that you may hope to one day find agreeable.
"Proof" and that which "we cannot verify."
You speak a great deal of proof/proving/disproving/verification. I count at least nine such references in your statements. This begs some consideration. You say, "But to be more true to Janssen's writing, halfway down the paragraph he notes that science can not disprove a God-theory for creation. He fails to realize that THIS DOES NOT MAKE ANY STEPS TOWARD PROVING GOD." Here, after claiming an aspiration to "be more true to Janssen's writing," you launch directly into all those capital letters about "PROVING GOD". "Fails to realize"? "PROVING GOD"? I think we're in need of a cow to feed this to. I have never claimed to "make any steps toward proving God." When I speak, for example of a calculated probability of no better than one over infinity, I speak of a significant inference, not a proof. Your arguments against what you refer to as my 'proofs' are your arguments against your straw man characterizations. The existence of God can neither be proved nor disproved, not if the standard is empirical verification or logical completeness as the human mind might grasp it. Likewise, the nature of God cannot be proved or disproved. If an entity not contained by the material world lent itself to empirical verification -- an idea that is itself not logically complete -- then theistic "faith" would not be possible. I have never argued that God could be so proven. This is not a point of contention. If a proof is to be unassailable, in the sense that certain mathematical axioms are generally seen as being unassailable, then very little can be proved. As any logician can tell you, we cannot "prove" that Abraham Lincoln ever existed. (If you want to say that we can, I will have to take you to task on that.) Mathematical proof does not lend itself to very many propositions. Of course, given a dispassionate examination of the evidence, which is to say 'inference', it is more reasonable to conclude that Lincoln existed than to believe he did not. I have obviously referred many times to probability and have compared explanations and theories as to their comparative feasibilities. This is not only the appropriate way to conduct most considerations, it is generally the only way. Individuals charged with crimes are not proven -- in a classically logical or mathematical sense -- to be guilty or not guilty. Such judgements are rendered by employment of a "preponderance of evidence" standard. This is, in fact, the standard by which you probably "know" your birthday. Attorneys like to talk about what they have "proved" and disproved, but they speak only of reasonable inference. "Proof," in a purely logical or mathematical sense, is an absurd standard in most considerations. Please look again at my arguments, I do not claim anything so irrational as to have "proven" anything. I leave that to the F. Lee Bailey's of the world. If we cannot strive to be honest about an adversarial argument, then all is straw.
We also notice your statement, "Nothing scientific explains this, so other explanations are not useful." Whether you have understood it as such or not, the statement and your recurring demand for proof resound of the Wittgensteinian standard known as the "verification principle." The standard, simply stated, is that only empirically falsifiable statements are permitted potential "meaning" ("meaning" meaning essentially "grounding" to Wittgenstein). Positivism, which traces to Wittgenstein's principle, claims thus to reject metaphysics. All aesthetic, theological and ethical/moral judgments are proclaimed "meaningless." It turns out that many of the statements that are typically made in the course of the work of science are also judged "meaningless." Positivism denies both "reality" and "truth" because such concepts must contain metaphysical (thus "meaningless") judgments. Positivism claims that "the world" is only that which can be verified to be consistent with other allowed (similarly grounded) statements. Positivism, the would-be anti-metaphysic metaphysic, has obvious problems. The verification principle immediately fails to survive its own test. To say that only that which can be empirically verified has meaning, is not a falsifiable statement, it is a metaphysical judgment. Logical positivism's judgments concerning "meaning," must contain, by their own standard, no meaning. It is interesting that one of the few prominent thinkers of our day who calls himself a positivist, Stephen Hawking, is famous for his wanderings into metaphysics and for rather distancing himself from the verification principle where he sees that it simply must fail to be anything but convenient foolishness. Positivism is the gun at its own temple, and the verification principle is the bullet in its own brain. If your demand for "proof" is oriented to something other than the verification principle, we wonder what it is.
Cosmology: "The very beginning."
You are correct to observe that exactly what happened at "the very beginning" is beyond the domain of human science. In terms of demanding verification or "proof" I suppose that you could deny that the big bang ever happened. If your standard for warrant is a kind of airtight "verification," then you would have to doubt the big bang scenario and perhaps you do, I don't know. But some of us like to know/understand as much as we can. This may reasonably involve conclusions that are not proved but are substantially inferred by the preponderance of evidence. Regarding "the very beginning," it is not as if there are no inferences to be considered when we look at what science can treat mathematically, beginning at the so-called Planck moment, something greatly less than a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the creation event. Scientific/mathematical information here is not "0" or "none", and is far from it. In principle, what is "known" here approaches mathematical proof much more closely than does your knowledge of your own birth date. And this is the quantification that I have cited, as have physicists and philosophers of nearly every stripe. Positivists (like Hawking) do this. Realists (like Penrose, Davies, etc) do this. To imply that the numbers I cite in this regard provide anything other than inferences about what happened that trillionth of a trillionth of a second before human science becomes possible, is again less than honest on your part. You again strike a blow to your own straw man. When, for example, Hawking concludes from what can be mathematically examined (we might use capital letters for "can be") in the early universe, he concludes there are but two inferences: the intent of God or the so-called weak anthropic principle (which is to say, we got lucky unexplainably -- "just because"). Hawking, raised an atheist and now a positivist, certainly does not reach this conclusion because he wants to. His conclusion here is not oriented to "0" information, as you have suggested. And it is not generally held to be a controversial conclusion, it is pretty much accepted, I might have cited another physicist, perhaps Paul Davies. You have complained that I attempt to make my points "sound scientific," at least as they relate to cosmology. The complaint itself sounds like an appeal to the ad hominem, something rather like 'look out folks, he's trying to pull a fast one here.' I concede that this characterization is mine but think it is conceptually accurate. My arguments undoubtedly reflect my interests and my studies. I read a great deal of physics, philosophy, logic, and theology and would expect my arguments to reflect this. I generally tend to cite sources, at least by name, even in informal discussions such as these. If I make mistakes in terms of science, those things can be cited specifically. Now, if I tried to sound say, musical, then I would be attempting deception!
Your "Causality" statements are, in your own word, arbitrary. But one has to notice your statement that the big bang might be somehow traced to "such an infinity of potential causes." Perhaps you "skeptics" know something theoretical physicists do not (?). It's a very odd statement: "we don't have the ability to vary large amounts of different variables out of a complete variable list in a spaceless area, much less the computers needed to run regressions and chi-square tests on such an infinity of potential causes." If that is to relate to anything scientific, I have no idea what it could be. A so-called quantum void is an 'irreducible nothingness' which is not coherently understood as containing an "infinity of potential causes." Proposing a single, fleeting fluctuation is problematic enough. We all make rather horrid arguments at times, I suppose, so I'll not throw stones here. But it is instructive that "skeptics" appeal to such fancy.
Your statements concerning 'time' do not seem to distill into an argument that can be treated. Augustine's characterization of God's extra-temporal existence as being an "eternal simultaneity" is, it seems to me, logically adequate. It is consistent with an "existence" (perhaps we should say 'supra-existence') without physical extension. How would beings such as ourselves understand this better? I don't know. There are no statements to be made of sequence outside of 'real' time. I don't think that this has been contended.
You wanted to take a few more whacks at the "percent" piñata. You say, "Percent ALWAYS means a ratio standardized such that its denominator is 100." Paul Jacobson and I have both said the same thing in different words. This is not a point of contention. I have pointed out that there are two generally acceptable conceptual treatments of the numerator in statistical usage. That is all. I concede again that I may have explained this poorly and that the whole 'issue' could have been avoided if I had stated that argument in different words. In my taking (what I thought was) one last kick at that carcass I carelessly stated that the definition of percentile was practically synonymous with that of percent/percentage. There's no good reason for me to have said that and you were correct to observe this. We will place the word 'percentile' in the C.R. Drost column. If anything that has been said in any of these considerations is 'tangential', this is it.
As regards your 'paragraph 5' rebuttal: Of the origin of life you say "Here we have a place where God can have an influence... but anything can have an influence there!" Really? A causal influence? Anything? This is a "skeptical" argument? Sounds outlandish, quantified scientific examinations countermand your statement (see Crick, for example), might we ask for "proof"? Logical inference? Or is "skepticism" to be selectively applied to denying God only?
Theology and a different kind of gap:
As regards your theological foray ('paragraph 7' comments): You say:
"God is clearly a being in a sense that we can't intuitively 'get' (a form of being that exists outside of sequence)... but Janssen's ideas showed that he understood as well. Still, Janssen demonstrates that he does not believe in a traditional God, and the question is... If God is aspectless and formless, then doesn't the effort to argue God's existence not matter, because from a practicable point God doesn't exist? The work wasn't so much arguing the possibility that the universe was created: it was arguing about Gods that have traits." I am not sure what you expect "a traditional God" to be. Perhaps one that is easily defeated by sufficiently clever arguments? An anthropomorphous candy-stork clerk or a hurler of lightening bolts? No, I believe in the same God that the wisest theologians and humblest saints have believed in for many centuries. As you say, we struggle greatly to define God, if there is a tradition that has 'God' completely encircled by human understanding, then we would have a theology of a "traditional God" which most theologians and thinking theists would have to reject. The great Greek thinkers of antiquity saw that God cannot be conformed to human understanding, as did the Hebrew theologians, David, Solomon, Isaiah, the writer of Job, and Philo. Imperfect as our description of extra-cosmic "traits" must be, be cannot try to talk about something without alluding to traits, so far as we can grapple with them, as in your characterization, "exists outside of sequence", which, we note, is a trait. The arguments here have a hard time defining themselves. You ask "If we say that God created the universe, then how does it follow that God is either good or just?" The question is more than a bit misleading, but can nonetheless be generally treated as stated. If the created universe, nature's laws and constituent existence, including our little blue island in space and our own conscious selves, are "good" (and existence indeed seems good if compared to non-existence), then we can suggest that the Archetype of goodness is itself good. Similarly, if constituent existent beings (let us say Jacobsen, Drost, and Janssen) are free to question whether God is good, then this creator who does not demand bound automatons is reasonably considered both good and just, and so forth. But as I say, your questions here appeal less to reason than to muddied waters and human ignorance. If we wanted to make your argument here sound as dubious as it seems to me to be, but by employment of a snappy slogan, we might call your argument a "Skepticism of the Gaps"!
Leading into your conclusions, you say "to say that you are doing the Lord's work has always been presumptuous." Of course, if you take a look at my comments to Mr. Jacobsen you will find that I have not made that claim. Rather I questioned why he is so certain as to what God does and does not do; would or would not do, and tried to illustrate a reason he should question his certainty. You have also made statements describing what God would and would not do ("Jacobsen's own thoughts would be pushed. . .", etc.). We wonder if claiming to thus know what God would and would not do "has always been presumptuous"? [Possibly having offered ideas in this vein myself] I will only suggest that it would be prudent for all to be careful about throwing stones in this regard (I saw yours coming when I wrote what I did to Jacobsen).
Conclusion.
Your conclusion was a return to your "God of the Gaps" theme and has been treated above. My conclusion is that that your "skepticism" is selectively applied dogmatism. You speak of "searching" but you virtually forbid finding answers. You seek a cacophony of supposedly "valid" ideas that often need no support, to swamp important questions in an artificially embellished abyss of doubt. Ideas that are merely imagined (that the origin of life might be traced to "anything", for example), or are logically unsupportable (your cosmological "infinity of potential causes", for example) are held to be antithetical equalizers to quantification and to far more thoroughly reasoned conclusions. You are the happily hung juror. Polkinghorne says, "There is a way of proceeding in conceptual matters whose method is to define away any inconvenient difficulty. All the really tricky questions are declared meaningless, despite the fact that they are sufficiently well comprehended to give rise to perplexity." While this observation is apparently directed toward logical positivism, it applies also to your virulent vision of "skepticism." Positivism claims to be anti-metaphysical but is itself metaphysical. Your school of "skepticism" may envisage itself as being anti-dogmatic, but is itself highly dogmatic. "'Tis skepticism" you say, but 'tis dogmatism.