Sunday, September 7, 2008

Why I Am Not an Atheist: Bertrand Russell Considered

Bertrand Russel sets out to explain why he is not a Christian (Link to article). His strategy (in part): to refute the theistic argument.


His refutation of “The natural Law argument” is interesting. The argument, as I understand it, begins by asking, “Why does nature behave as it does?” The theist gives an initial answer: because nature is governed by law. Why is it governed by law? For the theist, the correct answer is his own--God. Both answers are unacceptable for Russell. First, who is to say that nature behaves according to law? What is law anyway? Its the inherently necessitated mode of behavior of something. But for Russell, “We now find that a great many things we thought were natural laws are really human conventions.” The behavior isn’t really ordered or necessitated to a certain way; our minds imposed an order, "a convention," on it. And fundamentally, at the atomic level, nature is irregular, tell tale sign of chance: “Where you can get down to any knowledge of what atoms actually do, you will find they are much less subject to law than people thought, and that the laws at which you arrive are statistical averages of just the sort that would emerge from chance.” If there is no order, there is no need for One to do the ordering. Even if there natural laws, they don’t imply a divine law giver. Such an inference, according to Russell, falls to a dilemma: either God has no reason for ordering nature the way he did, or he is bound by what reason there was and thus he is useless as a law-explainer. Either you end up fundamentally without law or with unexplained law.


So goes the rebuttal. Now it’s my turn.


The second point first. I don’t feel the prick of this dilemma’s horns. What would be so bad about having law stop at some point, say, for why God ordered nature the way he did? This pains only given the auxilary hypothesis that nothing in nature can be exempt from law/ordered behavior. The theist never holds that all of nature must be subject to laws, but that those parts which are so subject require explanation, which only God provides. On the other horn, Russel assumes that if God has a reson, then he is obligated by that reason. So, if I have a reason for not burrning Russel's article, I abstain from burning it only under compulsion? And, what would be so bad about having God give according to some law? Certainly not the reason Russell gives! He holds that if one gives a proximate explanation for a law, without explaining how law relates to that explanation, they have done nothing. This is fundamentally the same as “who designed the designer?” rebuttal to the design argument. But what we are confronting is the behavior (or design) of the world , and it needs to be explained. Simply because I don’t explain my explanation does not mean I have not explained something! Are proximate explanation not proximate because they are not ultimate?! Besides, sometimes explanations come to a stop, and that’s OK (see Alvin Plantinga). In fact, if they did not, you’d get an infinite regress (See William L Craig).


On to the first point. First, i believe it is in doubt that the behavior of atoms is characterized by chance. Perhaps by probability, by then why are the probabilities the way they are? In either case (chance or probability), we have not discovered the cause. We have posited mystery— X happens (perhaps with a certain regularity), and something else could have happened, but we aren’t sure why it didn’t. And yet this, chance, is a better explanation than God? By no means am I taking offense at someone arguing against the explanatory power of theism. I am simply shocked that someone is saying that chance, which posits no known cause, is a better explanation. Saying, “I don’t know what caused it” is today more rational than saying “Someone caused it.” A curious place to arrive indeed.

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