Contemporary theists and atheists, in their debates with one another, tend to invoke gap arguments that mirror each other. For the theist, God-of-the-gaps arguments are designed to introduce mind into an explanation; for the atheist, multiverse-of-the-gaps arguments are designed to eliminate mind from explanation.

Here’s an example from physics: the value of the cosmological constant is so near to absolute zero that it appears to have been fine-tuned for bringing about life’s existence. How do we account for this? Theists tend to attribute the improbability of the number to the mysterious purposes of God; atheists to the power of the multiverse to generate improbable things.

Both explanations (prematurely) fill a gap in our knowledge. The truth is that we don’t know why the cosmological constant is so near to zero.

According to physicist Stephen Barr, the cosmological constant “tells how much gravitational pull is exerted by ‘empty space’” (Modern Physics and Ancient Faith, University of Notre Dame Press 2003, pg. 129). That number is a decimal point accompanied by 120 zeros with a lonely little 1 at the end (10^-120).

That’s a dinky number. In relation to the matter in our universe, it’s not even a grain of sand. It’s half a grain of sand.

Here’s Stephen Barr again (129):

[W]hether the cosmological constant is exactly zero or just fantastically small, physicists are confronted by a very deep puzzle. In physics, if a number is either exactly zero or extremely small there is usually a physical reason for it. For example, the mass of the photon is believed to be exactly zero; that is understood to be the consequence of a fundamental symmetry of the laws of physics called ‘electromagnetic gauge invariance.’ So far, no one has been able to find the physical reason why the cosmological constant is small or zero. This failure is the so-called ‘cosmological constant problem,’ and is considered by many scientists to be the deepest unsolved problem of physics.

Barr notes that if the cosmological constant had been a positive number even just a little bit larger than what it is, our universe would have known a “ferocious eternal expansion”; if it was a measurable negative number, it would have known rapid expansion followed by rapid collapse. These are both bad conditions (obviously) for life (129-130):

It turns out to be a very fortunate thing for us that the cosmological constant is so small. If it were not, the universe would not have been able to have a nice steady existence for the billions of years required for life to evolve. . . .

In order for life to be possible, then, it appears that the cosmological constant, whether it is positive or negative, must be extremely close to zero—in fact, it must be zero to at least 120 decimal places. This is one of the most precise fine-tunings in all of physics.

If a theist infers from this that God must surely exist, you can expect an atheist, on hearing of it, to cry foul, asserting (properly) that God-of-the-gaps conclusions have a bad track record. Like so many other premature explanations overturned by the advance of science, this one may find itself, through additional research, upended as well.

Therefore, if you don’t have a scientific explanation for something—the big bang, the origin of life, consciousness—you shouldn’t be content to reflexively invoke God as a causal place holder for perplexity and consider yourself basically done with the question.

God-of-the-gaps arguments may even be folly on strictly theist terms, for if God exists and is the ultimate or first cause of all things, He may still have set in motion secondary material causes for events which science, given time, will come to identify.

But what about multiverse-of-the-gaps arguments? Are they any less dubious than God-of-the-gaps arguments?

Multiverse-of-the-gaps arguments work in the following way: whenever something an atheist wants to believe in seems highly improbable—such as that no mind ever causally precedes or influences matter—he or she simply introduces a number into the discussion large enough to make the improbable suddenly seem probable. Indeed, if the number is really big, even the vastly implausible can take on the appearance of being inevitable.

Positing literally trillions upon trillions of multiverses gets you, on any implausible event, as large a number as you like to make an implausibility go away. For multiverse proponents, everything becomes possible to those that believe in the multiverse.

In, for example, a refereed scientific paper available online, biologist Eugene Koonin invokes the multiverse to account for abiogenesis (the origin of life from nonlife). He states his thesis in the following manner:

[T]he stage for Darwinian selection is set by anthropic selection of complex systems that rarely but inevitably emerge by chance in the infinite universe (multiverse).

Multiverse speculation can also be used, not just to account for an absence of evidence, but to explain away things that clearly already exist (or, at least, appear to). Take human free will. If you’re a strict materialist, even when human minds are quite obviously present in the world, they are, a priori, assumed not to be causal agents: free will is an illusion; only determinate physics and chemistry really cause things to happen.

For instance, I think I’m typing these words right now because it’s my purpose to do so; I assume they’re appearing on the screen because I intend them to. It’s quite evident to me that I have a mind that acts freely upon my environment.

At least this is what I believe. It’s my explanation of what’s happening, but it’s not a scientific explanation. So say strict materialists. Actually, I’m neither a necessary nor sufficient explanation for what I’m typing.

What’s happening at this moment, using multiverse-of-the-gaps reasoning, is the following: my typing is a causal product of forces that have been blindly interacting with one another since the big bang energized them 13.7 billion years ago, so no one is to blame for what gets written. It’s just the way the ball (the bang) bounces. In this big bang universe, the cosmological constant happened to be consonant with the evolution of life, and I’m a phase state that some of the atoms of the universe are passing through right now. All of this was inevitable because we are embedded in a multiverse. Conscious beings, doing exactly what we’re all doing right now, under the illusion of intentionality, were bound to happen sooner or later. And it will all happen exactly the same way again, trillions upon trillions of multiverses from now, when, far in the future, our big bang’s initial conditions, by chance, repeat themselves and play the movie again.

Thus it is with multiverse-of-the-gaps reasoning that purpose is eliminated from explanation and the human will, seeming to act upon the world, is accounted for—or rather, discounted—as a trick of perception; a delusion (as belief that the mind of God has influenced the creation of the cosmos is also a delusion).

But what if I were to say the following:

I think I should take mental states more seriously than this. Quantum physicists, after all, seem to find paradoxes in the nature of existence and the behavior of particles depending on when (and whether) observers choose to look in on experiments (think of Schrodinger’s famous cat here). Maybe mind is not merely an epiphenomenon of nature, but really, really has causal effects on matter. This leaves room, not just for me to act, but for God to act. Just as what I’m typing is the way it is because my mind willed it, so perhaps the universe is the way it is because the mind of God willed it. Maybe the universe simply wouldn’t be the same without my mind and God’s mind acting upon it.

To which the strict materialist might retort:

That’s not science—not a scientific explanation.

But, quite obviously, neither the mentalist nor materialist explanations are based in empiricism, but philosophy. They’re both hunches about ultimate things absent conclusive data to settle the matter. Taking minds seriously as causal agents generates logically possible accounts for what we observe and not taking minds seriously as causal agents generates logically possible accounts for what we observe.

So we are left with an impossible-to-decide-with-confidence dilemma: do we fill our gaps in knowledge with faith that the determinate multiverse exists—or that human contra-causal (libertarian) free will and God exist?

Or do we maintain staunch agnosticism about such matters?

Here’s Stanford physicist and multiverse theorist, Leonard Susskind, explaining the God problem posed by the cosmological constant:

_____

You are home.

_____

Image source: NASA (Suomi Satellite, January 4, 2012)

Science is not merely about discovering continuities in nature that can be described by a seamless naturalistic story. Sure, areas of science are like that. But science also presents us with discontinuities that resist naturalistic just-so stories. The most widely cited of these is the singularity of the Big Bang. A singularity is a discontinuity for which explanations in terms of ordinary physical processes break down.

It’s not that scientific investigation stops at a singularity. It’s just that the usual way of doing science, looking to ordinary processes that we’ve seen active in other contexts, no longer works. Granted, it is no explanation of a singularity merely to say “God did it.” But a singularity can be studied on its own terms, and the natural forces that may have played a role on either side of it may be studied and their inability to bridge the gap may also be assessed. Such singularities, proponents of intelligent design argue, have happened throughout the history of life. Life presents us with numerous singularities, everything from the Cambrian explosion to the emergence of some (but not all) novel proteins.

I think that William Dembski’s observations here are fair ones. There are moments in history where jaw-dropping disjunctures occur (the Big Bang itself, life, and consciousness are three obvious ones). They arrive unexpected and seem to be products of unique, even otherworldly (transcendent) processes.

In fact, there’s something downright messianic about some past events. Were there John the Baptists preceding these, we would not have believed any of them:

• “Prepare ye the way, for a big bang cometh nigh!”
• “Behold, as water to wine or lead to gold, humdrum chemistry shall turn to biochemistry!”
• “Look, the kingdom of self awareness, reason, imagination, and language is at hand! The planet of apes you now see shall birth on this round globe—Shakespeare!“

These are such things as DMT-induced psychedelic trips are made on, but they all came to pass; they really, really happened. For Dembski, these historical disjunctures make the resurrection of Jesus seem downright plausible.

It’s nice to think the universe might not be done delivering flabbergasting surprises. Those who have dialed into DMT report that their consciousness appears to be taken out of their bodies to exotic cosmic realms. And I can’t help but think of Steve Jobs’s dying words:

Oh, wow! Oh, wow! Oh, wow!

What makes you so sure there’s only one world?

_____

Maybe hope—even hope that death is not the last word—should “spring eternal” because the cosmos itself springs.

As a liberal who plans to vote for President Obama in November, I nevertheless can’t think of anything that Governor Daniels says here that isn’t reasonable.

Why didn’t this guy run for President of the United States? I didn’t even know there were such sane Republicans in leadership anymore.

Behold a Republican making a speech devoid of Obama hatred, gross distortions, craziness, and indecency. How curiously odd.

_____

My guess is that, if Mitt Romney manages to con enough red meat conservative primary voters to vote for him and not Newt Gingrich, and wins the nomination, that he’ll immediately tack “left” and start talking exactly like Mitch Daniels does here.

Romney will do this calmly, systematically, repeatedly. It’s quite obvious that, if he does, he’s got a high probability of winning.

The weak Republican field and ridiculous beliefs of the Republican base voters obfuscate the real political climate for 2012. Not until watching Governor Mitch Daniels’ speech have I really absorbed just how vulnerable President Obama is to a crushing electoral defeat in November. Independents will salivate to a Daniels-like message. Mitt Romney knows this. It’s why he’s trying so hard to win the Republican primary. Newt Gingrich, were he to win, might very likely blow the lay up.

What would Freud say? Here’s the Boston Globe this morning:

I wonder whether this was done in Boston by an anti-religion zealot or just a thoughtless teen out and about for kicks. Maybe somebody lost his wife or children in a car accident and is mad at God, but it’s hard to believe that the target was picked completely at random.

If it was, then why not just choose a storefront sign to knock down? Why Jesus?

We live in a time where a lot of people (not without justification) are pissed at the stupidity and politicized rancor and violence that goes with so much contemporary religion. Thus, this could be the work of a particularly coarse and inarticulate atheist.

Or it might be the product of an internal religious dispute: a Protestant or Muslim attacking a Catholic Church. It’s not an unknown phenomenon for monotheists to break each other’s stuff. Here’s a drawing, for example, of Calvinists gleefully “cleansing” a Catholic Church in Geneva in the the 16th century:

_____

When we think of iconoclasm, we perhaps first imagine the destruction of temples or the smashing of idols, as in the following fearful gesture of iconoclasm, under the Taliban-like reign of the zealous monotheist Jehu, recorded in the Bible, in II Kings 10:26-27:

And they brought forth the images out of the house of Baal, and burned them.

And they brake down the image of Baal, and brake down the house of Baal, and made it a draught house unto this day.

A “draught house” is a polite way for the King James translators to tell us that the ruins of Baal’s temple were used by the Judeans as a place to take a piss.

But before non-monotheists get too smug here, it should be remembered that iconoclasm has disturbing precedents not just on the “Jerusalem” side of Western cultural history, but also is represented on the pagan “Athens” side as well, as when Aristophanes, in his comic play, Clouds, ends it with the burning of the school of Socrates. Plato famously attributed at least part of the reason for Socrates’s death to the popular prejudicial passions inflamed against him by Aristophanes’s play.

History suggests that the destruction of cultural symbols typically forebodes, not just the end of civil dialogue, but the marginalizing and destruction of people.

This is why we need to find out the person(s) who did this and why they did it.

_____

And don’t forget the end of George Bush’s sanctioning of torture. That’s a big one.

Approving indefinite detention of American citizens, however, is a historic blunder of this president. But maybe Chris Hedges will fix that one:

I know that Lincoln is oversized on the Mall, but there’s just something wrong about this King depiction. I can’t put my finger on it.

_____

Image source: Wikipedia Commons.

_____

UPDATE: Curiously, the sculptor is Chinese, not an American. His name is Lei Yixin. And he went to art school in the years immediately following the Cultural Revolution. Here’s the sculptor before his totalitarian-feeling, overwrought production.

_____

Can we start over?

Image Source: Wikipedia Commons.

_____

UPDATE II: I think I’m able to articulate my objection to the memorial a bit more clearly after letting my repulsion percolate a bit:

King looks like he has a police state backing him rather than before him.

Put another way, King looks like the static guarantor of a new, officially sanctioned and monolithic, status quo, not the contrarian outsider that he, in fact, was, stepping forward against an unjust system. This is King appropriated by bureaucratic elites tone deaf to both art and nonconformity; the overpowering guardian of a closed door, blocking it; not one who persistently sought entrance.

King’s models were Tolstoy, Thoreau, Gandhi, and Jesus. Can anyone imagine these figures memorialized in such a pose and on so ridiculous a scale? The sculptor’s own casual and human stance in the above photo is much more in keeping with King’s general demeanor than the statue itself.

____

And calling into Rush Limbaugh’s radio program today, a hysterical Rick Santorum supporter had this exchange with him:

I feel like he [Rick Santorum] is the true conservative.  I am from Pennsylvania, and they are rooting for him up there because they know that he truly lives and breathes conservatism through his whole life.

RUSH:  Yeah.

CALLER:  I’m so disappointed at these South Carolinians for being snowed by the media, and I fear for my one-year-old and two-and-a-half-year-old, and I feel like — and maybe it’s a conspiracy theory — but if Obama wins in November, that this country will fall into communism.  Maybe it’s being too fearful, but I can expect anything.

RUSH: You ought to get my buddy Mark Levin’s book, Ameritopia.

CALLER: Oh.

RUSH: His point is we already have.

CALLER: Absolutely.

The leaders of the modern conservative movement—Limbaugh, Santorum, Gingrich—don’t correct this kind of stupidity, but passively ride atop it as a means to greater power—or even feed it (as Limbaugh does above).

But this is the soulless path of the demagogue. And it’s what the declining and decadent phase of what was once a romantic movement now sounds like. This is not Barry Goldwater’s movement; it’s George Wallace’s. It has no sense of proportion; no real interest in reason or truth.

If Santorum or Gingrich achieve the Republican nomination, may they be repudiated by the broader electorate at the polls in November. It will take a couple of election cycle losses before the Republican Party starts easing its way toward sanity (and even basic decency) again.