Counterpoint to F. Earle Fox's "Ethical Monotheism: Why Christians Cannot Rightly Back Down"

Today's subject tackles the idea of "Ethical Monotheism", as presented in an essay by F. Earle Fox.  The essay was written as an unpublished op-ed for the Washington Times in response to the debate regarding the Ten Commandments in American courtrooms, and is located on Fox's webpage at the following location:

http://theroadtoemmaus.org/EM/Fox/LtEd/WT%2003h30%20EthMonoth.htm

In this particular essay, Mr. Fox attempts to show why the Christian faith is the basis of the American legal system and why it should stay that way.  His points, as I understand them, are as follows:

• The Christian God is the sole source of morality. 
• Secular law without God is coersion only, with no moral legitimacy. 
• Because secular law has no moral legitimacy, it has to resort to coersion, and is inherently unworkable. 

There is a plain and obvious problem with Mr. Fox's essay, however.  While I understand that Mr. Fox is a devout Christian, not everyone is.  I understand that Mr. Fox believes in a sovereign Christian God, and if one were to assume the Christian God exists, his viewpoint might have merit.  However, that assumption is not an easy one to make, and not one that I ever would.  Not only do you have people like me who would never make such an assumption, you have others that have made other assumptions that are not compatible with Mr. Fox's beliefs.  

Mr. Fox's essay actually accentuates the problem of religion in politics, and it does it very well.  Imagine if we were to replace Christianity in this essay with Islam, and replace God with Allah, and change the author to someone with a Muslim name; the logic is identical, but instead it advocates for an Islamic based system instead of a Christian one, and it works within that context because Muslims believe that Allah is sovereign and the sole source of morality.  The end result is different, but the rationale is exactly the same, and this becomes illogical because a valid argument cannot support two opposing premises.  

The root of the problem here is faith.  Faith allows Mr. Fox to make claims about the Christian God and his sovereignty, just as it would allow a mullah to make claims about Allah and his sovereignty.  Likewise, I can also claim faith in a completely made-up deity, and claim that he/she/it also has sovereignty with just as much validity.  Of course, for the exact same reasons that Mr. Fox can dismiss my faith, I can also dismiss his.  Whatever can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.  

The end result of faith in government, is that it strives to subvert democracy.  Democracy thrives when the populace is educated, and open to honest discussion.  This means that people need to be able to change their minds when presented with a better argument.  However, people who truly believe that their god is only true unquestionable arbiter of morality are rarely open to discussion.  Mr. Fox's essay is a prime example of this; he asserts that the only valid government is a Christian government, everyone else be damned.  When you have a society filled with these kinds of people, democracy devolves into a struggle to hit your oppenents over the head with your "indisputable" faith.  

It is in this case that law becomes coercion of the worst kind; instead of coercion of a government accessible to the people, Mr. Fox wants to offload that to a coercion by a God that nobody can talk to or reason with, and which not everyone believes.  Democracy at this point is dead, and only Theocracy remains.  The Founding Fathers understood this; this is why the Constitution was designed for a government representative of all peoples, partially by excluding a religious test for public office.  

Mr. Fox says, "The secularist who wants the ordered freedom of a democratic republic, a society based on self-government, a society able to choose (or unchoose) its own leaders, is thus in the unhappy position of wanting something he cannot have except at the price of something he is not willing to grant."  No, Mr. Fox, we cannot have it so long as the faithful throw away democratic principles in favor of an invisible tyrant. 

Deconstructing Father Robert Spitzer's interview regarding the Cosmological Argument for the Existence of God.

For my first official published post on this blog, I am going to tackle an interview sent to me by a friend regarding the Cosmological Argument for the existence of God.  The interview was given by Catholic Answers Live, and posted on Nov 14, 2011, at the following address:

http://www.catholic.com/radio/shows/the-existence-of-god-6369

Information on Fr. Spitzer can be found on his Wikipedia page, found here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Spitzer_(priest)

I will be tackling each point in the interview by marking the time stamp from the above interview and providing counterpoints below.  

6:22 Fr. Spitzer Tries to pin Negative Proof Fallacy on Hawking while admitting he doesn't commit the fallacy. The problem is, though you cannot disprove the supernatural with natural evidence, you can't prove the supernatural either.  You can not easily infer that God exists or does not exist in this case; and even if one could logically infer the existence of God, you could not infer the attributes of God, meaning that the Christian God is no more likely than Zeus, Thor, Odin or Gorglax, the god worhipped by the lizard peoples of Xroglan 8.  Given that the only source of information regarding the supernatural is the human psyche, it is not a very convincing argument for Catholicism.  

7:26 Here Fr. Spitzer gives what is known as the "God of the Gaps" argument.  This argument essentially consists of the following:

• Science has not discovered the totality of all knowledge. 
• Therefore science has gaps.
• Whatever gaps remain in science can only be explained by God.  

This is actually a very old argument, dating back thousands of years, used to describe mysterious planetary motion that we now have a very good understanding for.  What exists at the center of this argument is a certain arrogance that says, "Things we do not currently know, we can never know."  Through time, the scientific process has done a lot to shrink the gaps in human knowledge, and as a result, the God of the Gaps also shrinks.  Neil deGrasse Tyson addresses this argument very eloquently in an essay entitled, "The Perimeter of Ignorance", located here.  

9:00 Here is an interesting double standard as presented by Fr. Spitzer.  In this case he rails on String Theory for having no observable evidence, even though he himself admitted that there was no supernatural evidence for God, either.  So why believe in God, and not String Theory? 

11:00  Oversimplifies the nature of "nothing", then overtly applies the God of the gaps fallacy by stating that God had to cause something from nothing (@11:20), making the statement even though previously he stated that you could not prove (or disprove) supernatural existence with natural evidence.  The problem with the oversimplification of nothing is this: 

Nothingness is only defined by its lack of observable energy or matter.  Science (as far as I am aware) is not making the claim that the Universe came from complete nothingness, only that all matter and energy were compacted into a nearly infinitely small and dense package.  Nothingness surrounded that package, and when the Big Bang exploded, the outer edge of traveling energy and matter became the boundary to our observable universe.  It is helpful to think of the Big Bang, not as a distant event in the past, but as an event that is still occuring.  As the Universe expands, it is continuously turning the nothingness into the somethingness of our Universe, contrary to Spitzer's claim.  

12:00 Again, reiterates God of the Gaps fallacy. 

13:20  A probabilistic fallacy by suggesting that the current state of our universe had to be guided by design because of the extremely low probability that our current low entropy universe exists.  If I go to a beach with a trillion grains of sand, and pick one at random, there is a 1 in a trillion chance that i will pick any given grain.  Therefore, the grain I do pick up would naturally assume that I picked it on purpose because of the low probability I would pick it by chance.  The other problem here, is Fr. Spitzer does not explain why a low entropy Universe is particularly special.  Just because we were the grain of sand on the beach that got picked, are we safe to assume that others do not have special properties to allow for intelligent life, or that the existence of intelligent life is a particularly special attribute?  

23:00  At this point, Fr. Spitzer makes the claim that for any theory where universes are inflationary, there is a point in the past where these universes had to spawn from nothing.  The BVG Theorem that he cites is apparently the new frontier of apologetics; since apologists like William Lane Craig can no longer use the Big Bang theory as their theorem of choice due to the fact that general relativity no longer makes sense at the quantum level.  However, the BVG Theorem never makes the claim that multiverses come from nothing; they only claim that theories involving inflationary universes are incapable of explaining the complete past.  What this means is that, instead of suggesting that multiverses inflated from nothing, they suggest that there is a point in the past where inflationary theory no longer makes sense.  From the paper:

"Many inflating spacetimes are likely to violate the weak energy condition, a key assumption of singularity theorems. Here we offer a simple kinematical argument, requiring no energy condition, that a cosmological model which is inflating -- or just expanding sufficiently fast -- must be incomplete in null and timelike past directions. Specifically, we obtain a bound on the integral of the Hubble parameter over a past-directed timelike or null geodesic. Thus inflationary models require physics other than inflation to describe the past boundary of the inflating region of spacetime."

In the words of Vilenkin himself:

The theorem says that if the universe is everywhere expanding (on average), then the histories of most particles cannot be extended to the infinite past. In other words, if we follow the trajectory of some particle to the past, we inevitably come to a point where the assumption of the theorem breaks down—that is, where the universe is no longer expanding. This is true for all particles, except perhaps a set of measure zero. In other words, there may be some (infinitely rare) particles whose histories are infinitely long.' [...] I then asked Vilenkin, “Does your theorem prove that the universe must have had a beginning?” He immediately replied, No. But it proves that the expansion of the universe must have had a beginning. You can evade the theorem by postulating that the universe was contracting prior to some time.'

Stenger, Victor J. (2011-05-19). The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning: Why the Universe Is Not Designed for Us (Kindle Locations 1610-1621). Prometheus Books. Kindle Edition.

29:40  Great question from a kid named James, who asks, "When God created the world [sic], who created God?"  Fr. Spitzer gives a rather puzzling answer; "the question assumes that everything needs a cause, and you don't need to do that in any kind of a proof. The only thing that needs a cause is something that has a beginning, or something that's contingent...the reason we think our universe needs a cause is because our universe likely has a beginning."  He goes on to state that there is all kinds of evidence that our universe had a beginning, and therefore, requires a cause.  

    This is an oversimplification of current cosmological theory.  As I understand it, the theory only uncovers the beginnings of the current universe as we know it, but beyond the barrier in the past where relativity breaks down, we really have no idea as to the events prior.  It is important to reiterate that nowhere in the current scientific model is it stated that the universe is generated from nothing.  

31:40:  A caller Cecil essentially makes the Argument from Beauty. Fr. Spritzer replies with an example of mathematical equations, likely referring to fractals or the mandelbrot set.  While these are indeed beautiful (ex, here), he fails to provide an argument as to whether or not they are transcendentally beautiful, as opposed to the sense of beauty being generated within the human psyche.  

35:00 Fr. Spritzer again commits the same probabilistic fallacy that I mentioned above.  It should be noted that stating that the universe is fine tuned for life is dubious at best, especially considering that 99.9999999+% of the universe is inhospitable to human life.  It is also important to note that Fr. Spritzer is making the assumption that human life is the only important factor to consider for the fine tuning of the universe.  While it is possible to surmise that human life is not possible with slight variations of universal constants, it is not possible to say that all life is not possible, and illogical to say that human existence is the necessary goal of the universe.  

In closing, I find it interesting that the book that Fr. Spitzer was plugging is titled "

New Proofs for the Existence of God", yet he did not present anything resembling a proof for any god at all, much less the Christian/Catholic God.  The Cosmological Argument is hardly a new one, and in my mind, it is not a very convincing one.

~Joe