The God of the Interstices

I finished the book last night (actually early this morning). Like Glenn, I wasn't overwhelmed by it. I felt like the author was very defensive, and didn't provide a really fair reading of the New Atheists points. Which is fine on one level, since it's exactly these sort of polemical, overly-mechanistic, debate-style tone that the New Atheists themselves promote in their writing. But on another level, I think he was trying to transcend that sort of thing, and didn't really succeed.

I think my biggest disappointment with the book was that there was no room in it for a God of miracles. Aczel starts from a position that any miraculous events, because they are beyond the explanation of science, must be apocryphal. This includes not only things like God causing the sun to stand still in the sky, but also central tenets of my belief like the Resurrection. In Aczel's view, science does and has disproved the God of the Bible (and Joseph Smith's First Vision). What's left is a God who does not communicate with man, who doesn't impact us in any material way, who is found in the parts of nature that are not yet explained by science. Not only does this conflict with my own (reasonable, IMO) belief in a God of action, but it seems like a losing proposition. Science will progress, and if your faith hinges on the fact that we haven't yet found an explanation for how molecules or cells first came to Earth, or what exactly consciousness is, then when science does eventually come up with answers to those questions, your faith will have no further place.

I did like several things about the book, however. I found the discussion of consciousness very interesting, and the most persuasive of his arguments (even though he admits he is most persuaded by the anti-anthropic principle). The failure of committed materialists (who believe people are really just biological computers) to recognize that model's fundamental inability to explain autonomy, introspection, and consciousness strikes me as one of their greatest blindnesses.

I disagreed, although not strongly, with his run down of the anthropic principle. Personally, I don't find the tuning of the fundamental parameters of the universe to be a particularly persuasive point. Furthermore, by rejecting the idea of the multiverse (which New Atheists use to justify the anthropic principle), I don't see how he can maintain that the apparent fine-tuning of parameters is remarkable. I mean, to me it seems like for something to be surprising or remarkable, you have to admit that there could have been some other outcome of events. In this case, that would mean that a universe could have existed that didn't have those parameters. Which is exactly the idea of a multiverse.

Anyway, I was glad I read the book, but I don't know that much from it will stick with me long-term. One final thought, a favorite story of mine that relates to these epistemological questions of evidence, truth, reason, etc. This is a story told by John Wisdom, an English philosopher in the post-WWII period: "Two people return to their long neglected garden and find among the weeds a few of the old plants surprisingly vigorous. One says to the other, ‘It must be that a gardener has been coming and doing something about these plants.’ Upon inquiry they find that no neighbour has ever seen anyone at work in their garden. The first man says to the other, ‘He must have worked while people slept.’ The other says, ‘No, someone would have heard him and besides, anybody who cared about the plants would have kept down these weeds.’ The first man says, ‘Look at the way these are arranged. There is purpose and a feeling for beauty here. I believe that someone comes, someone invisible to mortal eyes. I believe that the more carefully we look the more we shall find confirmation of this.’ They examine the garden ever so carefully and sometimes they come on new things suggesting that a gardener comes and sometimes they come on new things suggesting the contrary and even that a malicious person has been at work. Besides examining the garden carefully, they also study what happens to gardens left without attention. Each learns all the other learns about this and about the garden. Consequently, when after all this, one says, ‘I still believe a gardener comes’ while the other says, ‘I don’t,’ their different words now reflect no difference as to what they have found in the garden, no difference as to what they would find in the garden if they looked further and no difference about how fast untended gardens fall into disorder. … What is the difference between them?"