by Graham Veale
The giant becomes Hogarth’s playmate, and Hogarth tries to hide it from the paranoid government official investigating reports of a UFO landing. But, inevitably, the US military catches up with Giant, and attempts to destroy it. In the battle, Hogarth is knocked unconscious. The giant assumes that his friend is dead; his anger triggers his original programming and he attacks the military with lethal force. The giant activates numerous advanced weapons systems, and destroys the armed forces surrounding it. In the panic, an officer calls in a nuclear strike that will not only destroy the robot, but Hogarth’s home town as well.
Up to this point of the film the Iron Giant had been at the mercy of his computer and his programming. While it was damaged, the Giant acted placidly. When its programming was restored, the Giant simply followed the path its makers mapped out for it. The Giant was controlled by events in its mechanical brain. These events caused desires and beliefs; and these beliefs and desires caused the giant to act in certain ways. The Giant was nothing more than an automaton.
But then Hogarth revives, catches up to his friend, and treats him like an agent. He tells him the town is doomed without the Giant’s help; but the Giant does not have to be a killer. ‘You are who you choose to be!’ The giant is reminded of his friendship with the young boy. And now, with all his conflicting beliefs and desires, the robot must make a choice. Persuaded of the value of human life, and his own desire to be like the heroes in Hogarth’s comic books, The Iron Giant chooses to sacrifice himself and save his friend. He flies directly into the oncoming missile, and is (seemingly) destroyed by the nuclear blast.
The movie’s ending is a cliché; but that only goes to show how familiar agent explanations are. We all sympathize with the movie’s premise that there is more to the Giant than the events in its head; we all know how it feels to choose between conflicting desires. When he is attacking the soldiers, the Giant is at the mercy of his programming. Events in the Giant’s mechanical brain explain his violence. However, when he chooses to plot a crash course with the oncoming nuclear missile, the events in the Giant’s brain are at the mercy of his purposes. The Giant is acting as an agent, not a machine. We cannot understand his actions without knowing who he is and the purpose of his sacrifice.
God-of-the-Gaps: A Guide for the Perplexed
We have established that there are two types of explanation that we can use to make sense of the world. There are scientific explanations, which explain events by appealing to impersonal laws and objects; and there are agent explanations, which appeal to the purposes and abilities of persons. Now, we have a concept of one agent, God, who has the power to explain the order, structure and complexity of our universe.
But, even if a personal explanation that appeals to God is a theoretical possibility, Richard Dawkins insists we simply have no need of it: ‘Historically, religion aspired to explain our own existence and the nature of the universe in which we find ourselves. In this role it is now completely superseded by science.’ Dawkins is raising the spectre of the ‘God of the Gaps’. People once appealed to the gods to explain natural events beyond their ken. However, as it uncovered the mechanisms that govern nature, science explained God away. We no longer appeal to Thor or Baal to explain lightning, because we understand the nature of electricity.
To understand the nature of ‘explaining away’, consider the death of Princess Diana by a car accident in an underpass by the River Seine. Such tragedies define a generation, and many believe that such events do not occur at random. Conspiracy theorists discern sinister forces at work. Diana was the mother of the heir to the British throne, and her boyfriend, Dodi al-Fayed, was a Muslim. The forces of British conservatism were horrified by their courtship. So wasn’t it something of a coincidence that both Diana and Dodi perished in the same crash? Isn’t it probable that British Intelligence engineered the ‘accident’ to rid the Queen of a troublesome Princess?
This conspiracy required numerous agents with fiendishly complicated plans. Spies followed Dodi and Diana for months, waiting their opportunity. When a chance presented itself one agent spiked their chauffeur’s drink. Then another followed them by car, so that he could blind that driver with a dazzling light. The British Secret Service then persuaded French authorities to arrange a cover-up. The conspirators’ exact motives are still a little unclear. Diana had previously dated a Muslim doctor without controversy; marriage to a Muslim would have caused no constitutional crisis. In any case there is no compelling evidence that Dodi and Diana were engaged or contemplating marriage.
Such conspiracy theories are extraordinarily complex. They hypothesise numerous agents with vast resources, subtle motives and convoluted schemes. They can account for every piece of evidence, but the price is an ever increasing complexity as more and more layers are added to the conspiracy to explain away the counter-evidence. The conspiracy theory can account for Diana’s death; but it is so complex that it hardly seems rational to consider it at all. Which leads us back to the lesson of the last chapter; if a complex theory can be avoided it should be.
In fact there is a much simpler explanation: this was a tragic accident. Dodi’s chauffeur, Henri Paul, lost control of the car because he had consumed a considerable amount of alcohol, and was driving well over the legal limit. Paul was speeding to avoid crowds of paparazzi. Unfortunately neither Diana nor Dodi were wearing a seat belt. The simplest and neatest explanation of all the facts is that Henri Paul drove dangerously whilst attempting to protect Dodi and Diana from the attention of the pursuing photographers. And that is what the official French inquiry, and Lord John Stevens official British investigation, concluded. 15
In this case the hypothesis of an accident ‘explains away’ the need for a conspiracy theory. The accident ‘hypothesis’ explains all the evidence, and removes any need for a conspiracy theory. We can account for all the facts without a network of villainous Lords and Dukes orchestrating the entire affair with the help of MI6. Now Dawkins, and New Atheists in general, believe that science similarly ‘explains away’ any evidence for the existence of God. Isaac Newton once argued that God guaranteed the predictable orbits of the planets. LaPlace showed that we had no need of that hypothesis. William Paley believed that God designed the body plans of complex organisms. Charles Darwin argued that Natural Selection could do that job without any divine tinkering.
Little by little, science is explaining God away—or so the story goes. But if we pause for a moment’s reflection, we can see that science is doing no such thing. One explanation can explain another away only when the two explanations are incompatible. Lord Stephen’s finding of an accident explains a conspiracy theory away because Diana’s death cannot have been both a tragic accident and murder. But we can gain a deeper understanding of Diana’s death by moving beyond the immediate causes of the accident. We cannot understand Diana’s death, and its impact, without understanding the destructive power of the free press in contemporary society.
Diana was travelling at high speeds to escape the attention of a horde of free-lance photographers. Why were the photographers so keen to photograph Diana? Why was Diana so desperate to escape the paparazzi that she would allow her chauffeur to drive recklessly? While the media did not intentionally hound Diana to her death, their pursuit of the Princess was relentless, ruthless and deadly. The destructive power of the media plays an important role in explaining Diana’s death. It does not conflict with the finding of an accident. In fact, it helps explain why an accident took place.
In the same way, theism illuminates the success of science. It is true that, over centuries, scientists have discovered laws of nature, and physical processes, which explain many of our observations. But, as Kepler, Galileo and Bacon would have told us, these discoveries do not explain God away. The first scientists were motivated to search for laws and mechanisms in nature precisely because they believed the universe was designed by a rational agent; they expected to find an ordered rational structure in nature. Theism and science are compati
ble because theism encourages us to seek laws and mechanisms out. Theistic explanations and scientific explanations are not in conflict.
Explaining the Bloodlands
Let’s reflect a little more on the nature of explaining away. Ian Kershaw follows most historians when he argues that ‘without Hitler, and the unique regime he headed, the creation of a programme to bring about the physical elimination of the Jews of Europe would have been unthinkable’. Yet in ‘Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin’ 16 Timothy Snyder draws attention to Heinrich Himmler’s role. Himmler was not only the head of the SS; Hitler had also charged Himmler with ‘strengthening Germandom.’ Essentially, Himmler was to establish the racial superiority of the German people. Still, Himmler was locked in a contest with several other leading Nazis for Hitler’s favour and political clout.
Then Germany invaded the USSR. This was a tremendous opportunity for Himmler. He could extend his racial policies into the Soviet Union as the German Army conquered territory. He ordered the slaughter of Jews, eventually insisting that women and children be shot alongside Jewish men. He directed the murders, controlled the bureaucracy and inspected the results. The result was homicide on an industrial scale. Himmler believed that he was creating a racial paradise for the German people; but he was also accruing more and more manpower, and gaining more political clout in the Nazi regime.
In September 1941, Hitler decided to expel German Jews into Eastern Europe. The ghettoes in Poland were already overcrowded. Some Nazi governors decided that it was easier to murder Jewish refugees than to house them; but it was Himmler who sought, and found, the most effective means of extermination. It was Himmler’s clients who founded Belzec. This was not a ‘concentration camp’ where inmates would be worked to death. Death camps like Belzec existed solely to poison men, women and children by the thousand. Trains transported millions of innocents to the gas chambers, where they would die within a few hours of arrival.
So does Himmler’s opportunism explain away Hitler’s responsibility for the Holocaust? Not at all—and Snyder and other historians are clear on this point. Himmler could only succeed insofar as he pleased Hitler; therefore Himmler’s actions actually confirm Hitler’s responsibility for the Holocaust. Himmler understood the Fuhrer’s utopian ambitions better than most; indeed he shared them. And he also knew that the key to greater power was always to anticipate and then meet Hitler’s expectations.
By late 1941 the German advance into Russia had stalled. At the same time America joined the war against Nazism. Hitler’s dream of building a vast German empire in the East was slipping away from him. So Hitler rewrote the script; the war was no longer a war for German empire. It was a war against Jewry—the eternal enemy of the German people. ‘The world war is here’ he told his most trusted henchmen ‘and the annihilation of Jewry must be the necessary consequence’. This was the Reich’s last achievable goal, and the Nazis devoted precious resources to the elimination of over 6 million people.
The decision to expel Jews from Germany in 1941, Germany’s failure to conquer Russia, and the ambitions of Heinrich Himmler all go some way to explaining the Holocaust. But they do not ‘explain away’ Hitler’s responsibility. The evil of the Holocaust would not have occurred without Hitler’s warped racial ideology and his pathological hatred of the Jewish people. Historians will continue to find other factors that made the Holocaust possible; but Hitler’s political vision must remain central to any explanation of the Holocaust. Himmler’s actions do not explain away the Fuhrer’s guilt; they confirm it.
Why God Won’t Be Explained Away
Scientific explanations do not explain theism away, because they confirm the hypothesis that our Universe has been designed. Explanations for the motion of the planets, or mechanisms like photosynthesis, do not ‘explain God away’. The revelations of science raise further questions—questions that point to a theistic answer. Why do we live in a universe that is governed by laws and mechanisms? Why did the history of life on earth result in such bewildering diversity and beautiful complexity? Theism answers that the universe was created, and is ordered, by a rational agent—God.
Jerry Coyne was not impressed when biologist Kenneth Miller argued that: ‘the fact that there are “laws” (regularities, really) in the Universe can be understood only as an act of God…’ Coyne sneered that this was just another ‘God-of-the Gaps’ argument.
The last claim is in fact a God-of-the-gaps argument, since it asserts that the best answer to the question, ‘Why are there scientific laws at all?’ is ‘God made them.’ Here Miller merely swaps ignorance for ‘God’ … 17
Miller’s argument is that theism explains why our universe contains an incomprehensible number of particles which all follow ordered patterns; an order which is so exquisite it can be described in the simple mathematical equations. Our universe did not have to be like this. We can conceive of universes in which particles are not governed by laws but rather act randomly. There are innumerably more ways for a universe to be disordered than there are for a universe to be ordered.
So why does our universe have such remarkable order and structure? It cannot be sheer dumb luck. Surely, it isn’t wildly implausible to suggest that a creator has ordered our universe this way? However, to Coyne’s mind, Miller was pointing to something Science was not yet able to explain, and assuming that this provided evidence for God’s existence. ‘God’ is just what we say when we can’t explain something. Science will inevitably come up with a more satisfying explanation in time.
But Coyne’s objection is confused. Miller was not pointing to gaps in our scientific accounts of nature, but to facts that science cannot explain in principle. Scientific explanations appeal to impersonal laws and objects. Now some laws (Kepler’s) can be explained by other laws (Newton’s); these, in turn, might be explained by further laws (Einstein’s). But sooner or later we’ll reach a set of laws that are just foundational. They won’t be explained by any other law. At this point scientific explanation breaks down. Science can’t explain why there are laws of nature because it needs the laws of nature to give explanations.
Physics cannot explain why there are laws of physics; so there are no ‘gaps’ in the scientific account that can be filled by later discoveries. God, however, provides a simple and powerful agent explanation for the laws of nature. God would have the power to make the universe behave in a law-like manner, and the beauty and order of our cosmos is something a rational agent would value. And we know that rational agents bring about ordered states of affairs, through art, law, poetry, music, and games.
Perhaps New Atheists would object that theistic explanations are pseudo-explanations because they do not propose a physical force, or physical mechanism, that we can observe and measure. But this objection would beg the question. Theistic explanations contend that the universe cannot be given an adequate explanation in terms of physical forces and mechanisms. Theistic explanations are agent explanations; and agent explanations argue that there is more to the world than physical forces and mechanisms!
The Moral Gap
So science cannot explain God away because, as the first scientists insisted, there is no incompatibility between theism and science. From the perspective of Christian theism, science is a great good that enables us to understand the wisdom of our creator. Furthermore, while the laws of nature cannot be ultimately explained by science, theism explains why the Universe behaves in an orderly fashion. Not only is science unable to explain theism away; the laws of nature confirm the truth of theism.
Science and theism are not in direct competition; scientific theories explain different events and objects within the universe. Theism explains the universe as a whole, not just the different parts and events within it. Providing evidence for God wouldn’t be like providing evidence for a type of particle or the Loch Ness Monster. We’re not (merely) talking about the existence of one more entity, or type of entity, in the universe. Rather, we are trying to explain the nature of the ent
ire universe; and theists argue that it makes sense to interpret the universe as a creation.
So the scope of the data that theism tries to explain is just too large to compare theism to a scientific theory. If God is real, we must change our view of the whole nature of the whole universe. The significance of every part of the cosmos changes if God created it. We would no longer view creation as the result of purposeless impersonal laws causing meaningless events. Rather the universe, in every part, would have an agent explanation. So if the universe has the appearance of purpose and design it provides evidence for a rational creator.
In fact, the findings of science provoke further questions that require God as an answer. But surely science provides the best prospect for human progress? Isn’t technological advance mankind’s only hope, given crises like global warming and the population explosion? That is doubtful. Scientific progress could face severe practical obstacles. Science cannot rewrite human nature. While it might enhance human capabilities one day, humans will still act in whatever way seems best to them.
Humans act irrationally; our best ideas are often repressed or excised in the war of all against all. Furthermore our laws and institutions, our customs and cultures, are all inherently fragile and susceptible to violence. We live in a society which nurtures specific values and skills, and provides the economic resources, which enable large scale in-depth scientific research. If that social structure should fall, scientific progress will fall with it. Without communities that value wisdom and truth, the pursuit of science will falter and die.