> All this is very interesting. Perhaps I'm showing my ignorance here,
> but what is the argument against the idea that, if the physical world
> is too complex to be explained without a creator, then the existence
> of a creator capable of producing such a world is at least as
> inexplicable as the creatorless existence of the world?
Perhaps we could go back to Thomas Aquinas for this. His proofs for the existence of God were not the same as the contemporary one from the complexity of the observed world, but his position on the knowability of God could probably be applied to the contemporary "provers." Namely, if certain statements about the observed universe are true, then an infinitely wise, etc., intelligence must exist to explain them. However, the full nature of this infinite intelligence cannot be known by us, because our minds are too limited to penetrate such mysteries fully. Hence, we must make use of revealed truth to fill out the picture.
People who reject this position (like me, and also you, I suppose) often argue that even if these "proofs" proved what they are supposed to (which they don't, because of various flaws that have been exhaustively discussed in the literature), the ultimate resource to an authoritative text which must be believed to speak the truth just because T. Aq. (and his friends) say so makes those proofs unnecessary. If we have to believe what the authoritative texts tell us, we may as well believe that the deity or deities they speak of exist in the first place. What's the point of going through all the elaborate business of offering "proofs"?
Of course, T. Aq. also says that the existence of God, though rationally provable (he thinks), is also revealed because there are those without sufficient intelligence to understand the rational arguments.
On Dec 14, 2004, at 4:33 PM, Jim Farmelant wrote:
(about Hook's criticisms of Aquinas)
I tend to agree with Hook's criticisms, but from a little different
direction. The problem with T. Aq.'s "analogical" variety of meaning is
that the analogy he is referring to is, roughly: "X as it applies to
God : X as it applies to human beings and the rest of the created world
:: God the Creator (who is infinite, i.e., unlimited in any way) : the
created world" (where X is a property such as "good," "intelligent,"
"just," "powerful," etc.). In other words, "God is good" in an
"infinite" or "unlimited" sense, not like the goodness of humans, and
God is creative and powerful in an "infinite" sense (which, by the way,
is why T. Aq. thinks the chain of causation from effect to cause to
cause of that cause ... stops at God, since being unbounded in any way,
he doesn't something else to bring him into existence.)
The problem with this, though, is that once you call God "infinite" in this metaphysical sense (different from the mathematical meaning of the word), you no longer have any way of giving an understandable meaning to what you are saying about the fellow, since language that is understandable to humans must use words which are defined by limiting their meanings. Or as Hook puts it, there is no way to control the appropriateness of God-talk.
As it is often said, theology is a kind of intellectual tennis played without a net.
OTOH, the closest to an honest way of talking about God is the "negative way," the _via negativa_, in which one admits that there is no way of speaking intelligibly about what God is like, only what he is *not* like. I don't think it's quite completely honest, because statements about God with "not" in them are just as lacking in meaning as ones without "not," as far as I can see.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org _____________________________ It isn’t that we believe in God, or don’t believe in God, or have suspended judgment about God, or consider that the God of theism is an inadequate symbol of our ultimate concern; it is just that we wish we didn’t have to have a view about God. It isn’t that we know that “God” is a cognitively meaningless expression, or that it has its role in a language-game other than fact-stating, or whatever. We just regret the fact that the word is used so much. — Richard Rorty
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org _____________________________ "Simply by being human we do not have a common bond. For all we share with all other humans is the same thing we share with all other animals -- the ability to feel pain." -- Richard Rorty