The God of the Gaps

It is human nature to desire to understand the universe. It is a feature that only humans possess, and it has dictated the course of human history. Thousands of years ago, people had no conception of anything besides what they could see. They saw the sun in the sky and called it their god. The sun set, and they saw the moon so they called it another god. There existed such a diversity of life that seemed so ordered and purposeful. Plants grew, water flowed, fire burned, and with the limited understanding that these people had of the universe, it was natural to explain these occurrences with deities. Religion was humankind’s first attempt at explaining the world around them. Using religion to explain a phenomenon which might otherwise be explained by science is referred to as “the god of the gaps.”

                

 As centuries passed, human understanding of the universe expanded with the advancement of science. When people finally learned the nature of planets and stars, it became unnecessary and illogical to call them deities. When people learned why fire burned, why plants grew, and why water flowed, these explanations proved more satisfactory than the previous religious explanations. When DNA, natural selection, and evolution were explained, it was became apparent that random occurrences (mutations) can give the diversity of the natural world a seemingly ordered and purposeful appearance, with no need for an “intelligent designer.” As such, religion evolved with science. As more scientific knowledge was gained, the less relevance deities seemed to have in earthy affairs.

                

 One of the main arguments for the existence of God is known as “the cosmological argument.” The argument starts with the premise that everything that we can observe in nature is caused by something else. If a flower grows, it’s because a seed was planted. If a seed exists, it must have come from another flower. This could go on forever into infinity if the knowledge was available. But as you go further back in causation, you eventually reach the concept of the existence of the universe. A scientist would tell you that the universe was started by the big bang, but then the question is: What caused the big bang? If the universe exists, and everything that exists was caused by something else, it logically holds that something must have created the universe. The cosmological argument concludes that the creator of the universe must have been God, and that God has always existed and therefore does not require causality. It then also holds that because God has no cause, he is not a part of nature (supernatural) and therefore cannot be observed.

                 

The problem that people have with this argument is it seems like another extension of the “god of the gaps.” Our scientific knowledge about the origins of the universe are limited, and just as human history has shown, it is natural to try to explain the existence of the universe with religion. What will happen when science can explain the big bang? Will God be driven into irrelevancy? The cosmological argument implies that it is not possible to observe God, and since science exists almost entirely on the basis of observation, it seems unlikely that science and religion will ever find common ground. The cosmological argument makes it easy to be religious in a scientific world, just as the “god of the gaps” fallacy makes it easy to be nonreligious in a religious world. That’s not to say that a scientist can’t believe in God, but that any skepticism they might have would be understandable.

The Argument

In everyday language, what we usually describe as an “argument” is some number of people yelling at each other over a disagreement that they had. In contrast, a philosophical argument is defined as a conclusion that logically follows from existing conditions, and is put forth as a means of prompting a debate or asserting a position. The form of the philosophical argument is somewhat like an equation. The existing conditions, or premises, are stated in an order that is clear and logical. Then, after adding up the premises, a conclusion is drawn. An example of an argument would be something like this:

Premise 1: There are citizens living in poverty in the US.

Premise 2: To live in poverty is to suffer.

Premise 3: It is the responsibility of the US government to prevent its citizens from suffering.

Conclusion: It is the responsibility of the US government to prevent its citizens from living in poverty.

Notice that the conclusion is comprised of the premises. The conclusion must draw entirely on information from the premises, and use no outside information. In other words, the conclusion necessarily follows from the premises. 

The ability to criticize an argument is just as essential to the philosophical debate as the ability to form one, and can be done by addressing the argument’s “validity” and “soundness.” Challenging the validity of an argument means to question whether the conclusion really does necessarily follow from the premises. This is is why it is so important to make sure your conclusion is comprised of your premises. That way if it is accepted that the premises are true, then the conclusion must be true, and the validity of the argument cannot be challenged. To challenge the soundness of an argument means to question whether each premise is actually true. If a premise is not actually true, then the conclusion does not necessarily follow. In the above example, a Libertarian might question the soundness of premise 3, claiming that it is not the responsibility of the government to fix all of its citizens’ suffering. In that case, he would claim that the argument is not sound, and would reject the conclusion. It is much more difficult to challenge the validity of an argument, because good arguments are constructed in a way that they are valid by structure. Here is an example to illustrate that point:

P1: Apples are Bananas

P2: Bananas are Grapes

C: Apples are Grapes

The above example shows that a ridiculous argument can be valid while still being ridiculous. This argument is valid but not sound.

Arguments can also be sound, but not valid:

P1: Apples are Fruits

P2: Fruits are Healthy

C: People should eat Apples

In this argument, each of the premises is true, but the conclusion does not necessarily follow from the premises. A way to fix the validity of this argument would be to add “P3: Humans should do healthy things.” With that third premise, the argument is sound and valid.

The philosophical argument follows a specific form, and the ability to form and criticize an argument is the essence of a philosophical debate.

Cogito Ergo Sum

Even if you don’t know a thing about philosophy, you’ve probably heard the phrase “Cogito ergo sum” at least once in your life. This translates to “I am thinking, therefore I exist,” or “I think, therefore I am,” and it was an important thought in philosophical history. The thought was popularized by René Descartes in the 1600s after a long and frustrating thought experiment.

Descartes had been spending a long time searching for any idea at all that could be believed with undeniable certainty, but found that after rejecting all beliefs that could conceivably be doubted even in the slightest, he had absolutely nothing that he could call a certain truth. Think of it this way: an apple may look red to me, you, and everyone you ask, but Descartes would say that it is conceivably possible that the redness of the apple is just an artifact of the human eye or mind, and that the true color is impossible to be certain of. On an even deeper level, Descartes claimed that he couldn’t even be certain of the truthfulness of mathematical principles due to the fact that it is conceivably possible for them to all just be an elaborate trick being played on the people by some deity (or, today, we might say that it is conceivably possible that the physical and mathematical laws that govern our universe are actually programmed into our computer simulated reality by some higher life form).

At the end of it all, Descartes must have been frustrated. He had nothing he could hold as a baseline truth. But then a thought occurred to him: It was absolutely necessary that he, thinking of all of these things, existed. He found that this truth was so absolutely true that it could not be conceivably doubted, so he made it the fundamental principle of his philosophy. 

This idea is very interesting because it implies that you can only be sure of your own existence. If someone walks up to you and says, “Hey, I am thinking and therefore I exist,” you still cannot be certain that they are not a ghost, a computer simulation, a dream, hallucination, etc. You cannot even be certain that your own body actually exists. According to Descartes, the only thing one can be absolutely certain of is that his own mind exists. Everything else is completely uncertain.

Although this idea was made popular by Descartes, he did not invent it. There is evidence of “Cogito Ergo Sum” style thinking centuries before Descartes, but he was the first to state it in a philosophical context. His ideas are met with criticism, due to the fact that his attempt to achieve a logical approach to what can be known only raised more doubts than there ever were before. A lot of philosophers like Descartes’ initial idea, but do not like his solution to the problem of uncertainty, which relies on a belief in God being the omnipotent source of truth who would never deceive us. Many philosophers see this as a cop out, and as a result, the idea of skepticism is a philosophical hot topic to this day.

Realist vs Anti Realist

Sometime in the 300s BC, the Greek Philosopher Plato, writing in the voice of his teacher, Socrates, introduced his theory of Forms through a short thought experiment in Republic known as “the Allegory of the Cave.”  It can be summarized like this:

All your life you have been chained to a wall in a dark cave. Your head is restrained so you can only look at the blank wall in front of you. Behind you is a large fire, and every so often someone walks between you and the fire, holding a different object each time so as to cast a different shadow on the wall in front of you. The sound and smell of the fire, the constantly changing shadows on the wall in front of you, and the voices of your fellow captives are all that you think, know, and talk about. Suddenly, your captor releases you and allows you to walk around the cave. For the first time in your life, you see the fire. After noticing all the objects that your captor had carried to cast the shadows which you previously thought were reality, you come to understand their true origin. Eventually you are allowed outside of the cave, where the sun shines everywhere and you finally understand the true nature of your surroundings.

The theory of Forms is the idea that there are perfect, unchanging, and definitive truths (Forms) that exist separately from what we as humans think we know as truth. For example, a blue shirt is not blue in a dark room, therefore there must exist some perfect and unchanging idea of “blue” that exists outside of its characterization of the shirt. The quality of universal “blueness” exists independently of things that we call “blue.”  Similarly, an action that a person performs might not be viewed as appropriate or justified from every person’s point of view, but somewhere there must exist some ultimate Form of Justice. The quality of justice exists independently of whether we as humans think an action is just. The Forms are symbolized by the outside world in the allegory, known by Plato as the “realm of being” while the cave itself represents the ordinary world we as humans, or captives, perceive on a daily basis, called the “realm of becoming.” The constantly changing shadows represent the constantly changing world that we experience.

Plato’s views prompted a long philosophical debate that extends to modern philosophy. He believed that there is a ‘realm’ where universal truths and qualities exist independently of the actions and objects we label them with, a view known as the Realist or Platonist view. On the other side of the debate is the anti-realists or nominalists, who believe that there is no universal truth, and that the quality of anything is essentially in the mind of each individual person. The realist would believe that ideas, facts, ethics, or principles can exist without a single person knowing it, while the anti-realist would say that these are all human creations, and there is no ultimate truth. So which one are you?

Note: The allegory ends with you, the now enlightened one, returning to the cave to free your fellow captives and share your enlightenment. However, rather than seeming happy, they yell at you, call you crazy, and don’t even want to listen to you speak. This is may be symbolic of the fate of Plato’s teacher, Socrates, who refused the Athenian government orders to stop teaching philosophy and was eventually executed. It also suits to symbolize the issues that philosophers faced in those days when they tried to teach knowledge and wisdom to people.

Full text of the allegory: https://web.stanford.edu/class/ihum40/cave.pd