Arguments why God (very probably) exists

Does God exist? Michael Peligro, CC BY-ND

Note from Editor of The Conversation US: This is a revised version of the original piece. We have done so to make explicit the author’s expertise with regard to the subject of this article. We have also incorporated important context that was missing in the original version.

The question of whether a god exists is heating up in the 21st century. According to a Pew survey, the percent of Americans having no religious affiliation reached 23 percent in 2014. Among such “nones,” 33 percent said that they do not believe in God – an 11 percent increase since only 2007.

Such trends have ironically been taking place even as, I would argue, the probability for the existence of a supernatural god have been rising. In my 2015 book, “God? Very Probably: Five Rational Ways to Think about the Question of a God,” I look at physics, the philosophy of human consciousness, evolutionary biology, mathematics, the history of religion and theology to explore whether such a god exists. I should say that I am trained originally as an economist, but have been working at the intersection of economics, environmentalism and theology since the 1990s.

Laws of math

In 1960 the Princeton physicist – and subsequent Nobel Prize winner – Eugene Wigner raised a fundamental question: Why did the natural world always – so far as we know – obey laws of mathematics?

As argued by scholars such as Philip Davis and Reuben Hersh, mathematics exists independent of physical reality. It is the job of mathematicians to discover the realities of this separate world of mathematical laws and concepts. Physicists then put the mathematics to use according to the rules of prediction and confirmed observation of the scientific method.

But modern mathematics generally is formulated before any natural observations are made, and many mathematical laws today have no known existing physical analogues.

Einstein Memorial, National Academy of Sciences, Washington, D.C. Wally Gobetz, CC BY-ND

Einstein’s 1915 general theory of relativity, for example, was based on theoretical mathematics developed 50 years earlier by the great German mathematician Bernhard Riemann that did not have any known practical applications at the time of its intellectual creation.

In some cases the physicist also discovers the mathematics. Isaac Newton was considered among the greatest mathematicians as well as physicists of the 17th century. Other physicists sought his help in finding a mathematics that would predict the workings of the solar system. He found it in the mathematical law of gravity, based in part on his discovery of calculus.

At the time, however, many people initially resisted Newton’s conclusions because they seemed to be “occult.” How could two distant objects in the solar system be drawn toward one another, acting according to a precise mathematical law? Indeed, Newton made strenuous efforts over his lifetime to find a natural explanation, but in the end he could say only that it is the will of God.

Despite the many other enormous advances of modern physics, little has changed in this regard. As Wigner wrote, “the enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and there is no rational explanation for it.”

In other words, as I argue in my book, it takes the existence of some kind of a god to make the mathematical underpinnings of the universe comprehensible.

Math and other worlds

In 2004 the great British physicist Roger Penrose put forward a vision of a universe composed of three independently existing worlds – mathematics, the material world and human consciousness. As Penrose acknowledged, it was a complete puzzle to him how the three interacted with one another outside the ability of any scientific or other conventionally rational model.

How can physical atoms and molecules, for example, create something that exists in a separate domain that has no physical existence: human consciousness?

It is a mystery that lies beyond science.

Plato. Elizabethe, CC BY-NC-ND

This mystery is the same one that existed in the Greek worldview of Plato, who believed that abstract ideas (above all mathematical) first existed outside any physical reality. The material world that we experience as part of our human existence is an imperfect reflection of these prior formal ideals. As the scholar of ancient Greek philosophy, Ian Mueller, writes in “Mathematics And The Divine,” the realm of such ideals is that of God.

Indeed, in 2014 the MIT physicist Max Tegmark argues in “Our Mathematical Universe” that mathematics is the fundamental world reality that drives the universe. As I would say, mathematics is operating in a god-like fashion.

The mystery of human consciousness

The workings of human consciousness are similarly miraculous. Like the laws of mathematics, consciousness has no physical presence in the world; the images and thoughts in our consciousness have no measurable dimensions.

Yet, our nonphysical thoughts somehow mysteriously guide the actions of our physical human bodies. This is no more scientifically explicable than the mysterious ability of nonphysical mathematical constructions to determine the workings of a separate physical world.

Until recently, the scientifically unfathomable quality of human consciousness inhibited the very scholarly discussion of the subject. Since the 1970s, however, it has become a leading area of inquiry among philosophers.

Recognizing that he could not reconcile his own scientific materialism with the existence of a nonphysical world of human consciousness, a leading atheist, Daniel Dennett, in 1991 took the radical step of denying that consciousness even exists.

Finding this altogether implausible, as most people do, another leading philosopher, Thomas Nagel, wrote in 2012 that, given the scientifically inexplicable – the “intractable” – character of human consciousness, “we will have to leave [scientific] materialism behind” as a complete basis for understanding the world of human existence.

As an atheist, Nagel does not offer religious belief as an alternative, but I would argue that the supernatural character of the workings of human consciousness adds grounds for raising the probability of the existence of a supernatural god.

Evolution and faith

Evolution is a contentious subject in American public life. According to Pew, 98 percent of scientists connected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science “believe humans evolved over time” while only a minority of Americans “fully accept evolution through natural selection.”

As I say in my book, I should emphasize that I am not questioning the reality of natural biological evolution. What is interesting to me, however, are the fierce arguments that have taken place between professional evolutionary biologists. A number of developments in evolutionary theory have challenged traditional Darwinist – and later neo-Darwinist – views that emphasize random genetic mutations and gradual evolutionary selection by the process of survival of the fittest.

From the 1970s onwards, the Harvard evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould created controversy by positing a different view, “punctuated equilibrium,” to the slow and gradual evolution of species as theorized by Darwin.

In 2011, the University of Chicago evolutionary biologist James Shapiro argued that, remarkably enough, many micro-evolutionary processes worked as though guided by a purposeful “sentience” of the evolving plant and animal organisms themselves. “The capacity of living organisms to alter their own heredity is undeniable,” he wrote. “Our current ideas about evolution have to incorporate this basic fact of life.”

A number of scientists, such as Francis Collins, director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, “see no conflict between believing in God and accepting the contemporary theory of evolution,” as the American Association for the Advancement of Science points out.

For my part, the most recent developments in evolutionary biology have increased the probability of a god.

Miraculous ideas at the same time?

For the past 10,000 years at a minimum, the most important changes in human existence have been driven by cultural developments occurring in the realm of human ideas.

In the Axial Age (commonly dated from 800 to 200 B.C.), world-transforming ideas such as Buddhism, Confucianism, the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, and the Hebrew Old Testament almost miraculously appeared at about the same time in India, China, ancient Greece and among the Jews in the Middle East, groups having little interaction with one another.

Many world-transforming ideas, such as Buddhism, appeared in the world around the same time. Karyn Christner, CC BY

The development of the scientific method in the 17th century in Europe and its modern further advances have had at least as great a set of world-transforming consequences. There have been many historical theories, but none capable, I would argue, of explaining as fundamentally transformational a set of events as the rise of the modern world. It was a revolution in human thought, operating outside any explanations grounded in scientific materialism, that drove the process.

That all these astonishing things happened within the conscious workings of human minds, functioning outside physical reality, offers further rational evidence, in my view, for the conclusion that human beings may well be made “in the image of [a] God.”

Different forms of worship

In his commencement address to Kenyon College in 2005, the American novelist and essayist David Foster Wallace said that: “Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.”

Even though Karl Marx, for example, condemned the illusion of religion, his followers, ironically, worshiped Marxism. The American philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre thus wrote that for much of the 20th century, Marxism was the “historical successor of Christianity,” claiming to show the faithful the one correct path to a new heaven on Earth.

In several of my books, I have explored how Marxism and other such “economic religions” were characteristic of much of the modern age. So Christianity, I would argue, did not disappear as much as it reappeared in many such disguised forms of “secular religion.”

That the Christian essence, as arose out of Judaism, showed such great staying power amidst the extraordinary political, economic, intellectual and other radical changes of the modern age is another reason I offer for thinking that the existence of a god is very probable.

Robert H. Nelson, Professor of Public Policy, University of Maryland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

South Africa is failing on COVID-19 because its leaders want to emulate the First World

The township of Khayelitsha in Cape Town. South Africa has adopted First World COVID-19 responses for Third World reality.

COVID-19 infections are rising sharply in South Africa – and Latin America. This is fitting: South Africa resembles the countries of South America more than those of its home continent.

It has become common to point out that COVID-19 has highlighted South Africa’s inequalities. It is less common, but just as important, to recognise that inequality shapes how the country is governed, ensuring that, while South Africa is located in Africa, those who govern it may be closer to their counterparts in Latin America.

The first reason South Africa has been unable to stem the tide of infections is that its strategy always assumed a severe epidemic was inevitable. It is hard to fight anything if you assume you are bound to lose. This followed advice from South Africa’s medical scientists, almost all of whom embrace this view despite the fact that scientists in other parts of the world have helped to prevent great damage.

Why is this? Possibly because their points of comparison on the pandemic were not Asia and parts of Africa where infections were curbed, but the rich countries of the global North, many of which were overwhelmed. They also probably assumed that while some countries might be able to prevent a severe outbreak, South Africa could not.

If so, this would reveal a common way of thinking in South Africa: the belief that the country must compare itself to the rich countries of the North – but that it will never match up.

Capacity problems

This pessimism is born of the view that South Africa’s government has very limited capacity. The failure to curb COVID-19 does show glaring capacity gaps. But the problem is not, as critics usually assume, a lack of technical know-how. It is, rather, a particular view of the world and the difficult relationship between those who govern and the governed.

Despite appearing to give up before the fight began, South Africa could have contained COVID-19 had it done what its government said it would do: create an effective testing and tracing programme which would identify people with the virus, trace their contacts and isolate them if they were infected.

The government likes to boast about the large number of tests its many community health workers have conducted. It talks much less about why testing has not stemmed the virus: a bottleneck at the National Health Laboratory Service, which supports provincial and national government health departments.

In May, doctors complained that it took on average a week to receive COVID-19 test results for outpatients and three to four days for patients in hospitals. Other doctors reported cases in which it took weeks to receive results. At the end of May, Gauteng, the country’s economic hub, was waiting for test results for over 20,000 people.

Testing can contain COVID-19 only if results are received speedily so that the contacts of infected people can be traced. The laboratory backlog meant that testing and tracing could not work no matter how many tests were conducted and how many health workers were hired.

This seems to be an obvious technical failure. Some test results were, according to doctors, lost, which seems to show that the lab was simply not up to the task. But the real problem may be that the government put far too much faith in a high-tech laboratory which was, because too much was expected of it, simply overwhelmed (hence the lost results).

By contrast, Senegal, a far poorer country, knowing that it had no laboratory service that could have coped, developed a test which cost only $1 and produced results very quickly.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa.

So, South Africa believed it had capacity which it lacked. It also assumed that a laboratory which operated like those in rich countries was the most effective way to test for COVID-19. And so, unlike Senegal, it failed to come up with a solution fitted to its needs. Again, the desire to be like the North made it impossible to contain the virus.

Elitist approach

The second problem is that the behaviours which are needed to stem COVID-19 are very difficult for most South Africans – those who live in the formerly blacks-only urban townships and in shack settlements. Overcrowding makes physical distancing very hard, clean water may not be available for hand washing and people are forced to travel in full minibus taxis.

The government could have overcome these problems if it had chosen to work with people in these areas to find ways to protect themselves. But it did not try – it relied on instructing people to do things they clearly could not do.

To South Africa’s elite, of which the government is now a part, people in low-income townships lack sophistication and maturity: poverty is confused with inability. And so there is no point in working with them.

The problem here is the government’s lack of political capacity, its inability to form a relationship with voters which would enable them to work together against a common threat.

Why is South Africa governed this way? Unlike other sub-Saharan African countries and like several Latin American countries, South Africa is both “First World” and “Third World”. A significant section of its people lives like, and measure themselves by the standards of, the affluent in North America and Western Europe.

This is why it has facilities other African countries lack and why it insists on relying on them.

People who live in “First World” conditions also find it much easier to lobby politicians. That is why the government’s claim that it would be guided only by the science of COVID-19 collapsed as lobby groups persuaded it to open activities which allowed the virus to spread.

But most people live in the same conditions as the poor of the “Third World”. Facilities designed for the “First World” one-third of the population cannot meet the needs of the other two-thirds. The elite’s deep admiration for the “First World” ensures that the government always wants to rely on what works only for the one-third because only this is “respectable”.

The issue is not that many South Africans are wealthy and live well – so do elites in other African countries. It is that the country is divided into two worlds. An entire economy and social system serves one-third of the people and excludes the rest from its benefits. This shapes attitudes as well as who gets what. The government may be elected by people outside the charmed circle but it is a product of it, hence its response to COVID-19.

Exceptionalism

Another consequence, common to South Africa and much of Latin America, is that those who live in “First World” conditions tend to see those who don’t as people who have not attained their exalted standards: they must be told what to do and controlled if they do not listen. Working with the majority to fight the virus isn’t possible when they are seen as “backward” embarrassments.

Many South Africans like to think the country is unique in sub-Saharan Africa. Its contrasts of wealth and poverty certainly are one of a kind. Its response to COVID-19 shows how much this prevents the government from doing what it needs to do.

Steven Friedman, Professor of Political Studies, University of Johannesburg

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.