by Jim Holt
“Right,” he said, with a faintly audible chuckle, as though he had heard this very point innumerable times before. “But then we would need to find a law of how these constants varied from universe to universe. If the simplest theory is one where the constants of nature undergo some change when a mother universe gives birth to a daughter universe, then that raises the question of why the multiverse is like that, as opposed to all the infinite other ways a multiverse might be. Those other multiverses would not give rise to universes with life. In any case, to posit a trillion trillion other universes to explain the life-fostering features of our universe seems slightly mad when the much simpler hypothesis of God is available.”
But is the God hypothesis really all that simple? There is, I was willing to concede, a sense in which God might be the simplest thing imaginable. The God of the theologians is defined as the entity—or “substance,” to use the technical term—that possesses every positive attribute to an infinite degree. He is infinitely powerful, infinitely knowledgeable, infinitely good, infinitely free, eternally existing, and so forth. Setting all the parameters equal to infinity makes a thing easy to define. In the case of a finite being, by contrast, you have to say it’s of such-and-such size and has such-and-such degree of power, that it knows this much and no more, that it began to exist at such-and-such time in the past, and so on. In other words, there is a long and messy set of finite numbers to specify.
Now, in science, infinity is a very nice number, along with its opposite, zero. Neither infinity nor zero needs an explanation. Finite numbers do need explanations, however. If the number 2.7 occurs in your equation, someone will always ask, “Why 2.7? Why not 2.8?” The simplicity of zero and infinity precludes such awkward inquiries. The same logic might be said to apply to God. If the cosmic creator could make a universe only of such-and-such mass, but no heavier, then the question would arise of why there was such a constraint on its power. With an infinite God, there are no such limits to be explained.
So the God hypothesis does possess a certain sort of simplicity. But Swinburne’s God is not mere infinite substance. He also intervenes in human history. He answers prayers, reveals truths, causes miracles to occur. He even incarnated himself in human form. This is a God that acts with complex purposes. Doesn’t the ability to act according to complex purposes imply a corresponding complexity within the agent? Swinburne himself, I had noticed, seemed to assume as much in some of his writings. For instance, in a 1989 essay he observed that we humans could have complex beliefs and purposes only because we had complex brains. Wouldn’t God, in order to accomplish what he does, have to be internally complex on a much vaster scale—infinitely complex, in fact?
Swinburne knit his tall brow a bit when I asked the question. But in an instant, it was unknit again.
“Humans need bodies if they are to interact with the world and benefit one another,” he said. “And that necessitates having a complicated brain. But God doesn’t need a body or a brain. He acts on the world directly.”
But, I objected, if God created the world for a purpose, if he has complicated designs for his creatures, then his mind must contain complicated thoughts. So the divine “brain,” even if it is wholly immaterial, must still be a complex medium of representation, mustn’t it?
“It isn’t logically necessary to have a brain of any kind to have beliefs and purposes,” Swinburne replied. “God can see all of creation without a brain.”
Wouldn’t the ability to see all of creation, brainlessly or not, imply something other than simplicity? If God possessed within himself all knowledge of the world, wouldn’t his internal complexity have to be at least equal to that of the world?
“Hmmmm,” Swinburne said, stroking his chin. “I see what you’re getting at. But look, there are all sorts of things I can do—tie my shoelaces, for example—without thinking about how I do them.”
Yes, I said, but you can tie your shoelaces only because you have complicated neural circuits in your brain.
“That is, of course, true. But it’s one truth that I can tie my shoelaces without thinking. It’s another truth that there are certain things going on in my brain. These are two truths about the world, and they are not necessarily connected with one another.”
I wanted to protest this weird mind-body parallelism he seemed to be buying into, this idea that mental processes and brain processes somehow stream along independently of each other. But I was afraid I was beginning to bore him.
“Let me put the point slightly differently,” Swinburne said, “by way of an analogy. Someone like Dawkins might claim that science never posits the kind of ‘omni’ properties—omni-knowledge, omni-power—that we ascribe to God. But let’s look at Newton’s theory of gravitation. This theory postulates that every particle in the universe has one power and one liability. The power is to exert gravitational force, and the liability is to be subject to it. And the power is an infinite one: each particle influences every other particle in the universe, no matter how far away. So serious physicists have attributed an infinite power to very tiny particles. It’s considered quite proper in science to attribute omni-properties to very simple kinds of objects.”
We had apparently reached an impasse on the issue of simplicity. So I tried to find another weak point in Swinburne’s case.
“It seems to me that your God is closer to an abstract ontological principle than to the heavenly father-figure that religious believers pray to,” I said. “There may be, as you say, a supremely simple entity that explains the existence and nature of the universe. And it may even have some personal characteristics. But to equate this entity to the one that is worshipped in churches seems a bit far-fetched. It’s easy to see how today’s religions grew out of animistic cults and then got more sophisticated, as magical notions of the world gave way to scientific understanding. But those primitive cults weren’t hooking on to anything transcendental.”
“I think that’s wrong,” Swinburne said, quite abruptly and with some severity. “I think it’s always been a matter of the transcendental. The God written about in the New Testament and some of the Old Testament is an omnipotent, omniscient, and all-good creator. And going right back to Jeremiah, you have the idea that the visible world holds evidence of the transcendental. Jeremiah talked of the ‘covenant of night and day’ that God has made. What this means is that the regular alternation of night and day shows the reliability of the creator. And this is, in essence, what philosophers call the argument from design—one of the central arguments for the existence of God. The early Christian, Jewish, and Islamic traditions all have this kind of transcendental thinking in their background. They just don’t talk about it a lot, because the issue back then was not whether there is a God, but what he was like and what he had done.”
Why, though, should someone who did not grow up in one of these traditions believe in such a God, one who cares about our actions and fates? Why not the abstract and aloof God of the eighteenth-century deists, or the impersonal God of Spinoza?
“Well,” Swinburne said, “those conceptions fail to take seriously the infinite goodness of the creator. Now, what would a good God do? It’s unlikely he’d create a universe and then not take an interest in it. Parents who leave their children to fend for themselves aren’t very good parents. You’d expect God to keep a connection with his creation, and if things go wrong, to help people to straighten them out. He will want to interact with his creation, but not be too obvious about it. Like a good parent, he’ll be torn between interfering too much and interfering too little. He’ll want people to work out their own destiny, to work out what is right and wrong and so on, without his intervening all the time. So he’ll keep his distance. But on the other hand, when there has been a lot of sin around, he will want to help people deal with it, especially those who want his help. He’ll hear their prayers and sometimes he’ll answer them.”
I mentioned the argument of some philosophers that the universe was brought into existence not by
a personal God, but by an abstract principle of goodness. That, after all, was what Plato believed.
“Philosophically, the idea of a Platonic principle of goodness is highly suspect,” he said. “But I have a particularly Christian problem with it. Such an abstract principle can’t deal with the problem of evil. There is, as we know, evil and suffering in the world. I have a theodicy—a view of why God should allow evil to happen. I think he allows it to happen because it’s logically necessary if certain goods are to be possible, the goods arising from our possession of free will. God is omnipotent. He can do anything that is logically possible to do. And it isn’t logically possible for him to give us free will and yet to ensure that we always use it in the right way.”
Swinburne paused to take a sip of tea. When he began talking again, his tone had grown almost homiletic. “Now, a good parent allows his children to suffer, sometimes for their own good, and sometimes for the good of other children. A parent who does that, I think, has an obligation to share the child’s suffering. Here’s an example, perhaps a superficial one. Suppose my child needs a special medicine that’s in short supply. I happen to have plenty of that medicine for my child. But suppose my neighbor’s child suffers from the same disease and also needs that medicine. If I share my supply with my neighbor, my own child will have just enough of the medicine to survive. It’s generally believed that it would be okay to make my child suffer so that the other child would survive too. But if I do this, I think I have an obligation to share my child’s suffering. And God has the same sort of obligation. If he makes us suffer for a good cause, there comes a point where he has an obligation to suffer with us. And an abstract principle of goodness can’t do that.”
Despite the gravity of his point, I detected a quaver of mirth in Swinburne’s voice, as if he was pleased by this intellectual twist.
“There’s also the Christian doctrine of the atonement,” he went on. “If my children do bad things to one another, they’re wronging me too, because I’ve lavished a lot of care in trying to prevent this from happening. So, in wronging one another, we wrong God too. What’s God going to do about that? Well, what do we do when we’ve wronged somebody? We make atonement. And there are four elements of atonement: repentance, apology, reparations, and penance. Humans have wronged God mainly by living the wrong sort of life. So how are we going to make it up? Well, we don’t have much time—or inclination—to lead perfect lives, so we can’t really make adequate reparations. On the other hand, making reparations is something that somebody else can help you with if you’re not in the position to do it. In the Christian account, Jesus lived the perfect life, the one that we should have lived. And even though we have lived bad lives, we can offer Jesus’s life in reparation for our own failings. In doing so, we show God that we take those failings seriously, so he will forgive us. That’s the Christian doctrine of the atonement—part Aquinas, part Anselm. It follows from the nature of goodness itself that God will get involved in his creation. That’s a sort of bridge between philosophy and Christianity.”
There was something numinous in his logic. The question Why is there something rather than nothing? had led this philosopher not just to God, but all the way to the historical person of Jesus Christ.
I became aware again of the crucifix hanging on the wall just behind him. Was Swinburne a Roman Catholic? Or was he a member of the Church of England?
“Neither,” he said. “I’m Eastern Orthodox.”
“Oh,” I blurted out, finding myself at a loss for anything to say.
But Swinburne turned out not to be orthodox in every sense. When I resumed the conversation, I raised the generally accepted theological axiom that God stands outside of time, apprehending the entire history of the cosmos at a glance from the unchanging perspective of eternity. Scholastic thinkers like Aquinas held that such timelessness was one of God’s perfections.
“I don’t endorse that view,” he said, “and I don’t think the Biblical writers did either. They thought of God as being within time, and I do too. The idea that there’s a before and an after for God, that there’s a sense to saying, ‘He did this first and then that,’ is coming back into fashion.”
Why, I wondered aloud, did philosophers of religion so often fail to agree on such fundamental matters? And why was there such a vast metaphysical gulf between Swinburne, who thought the God hypothesis furnished a scientifically viable explanation for the existence of the world, and philosophers like Grünbaum, for whom the very idea was absurd?
“That in itself is an interesting question,” Swinburne said. “And it’s not confined to the philosophy of religion. You find such radical disagreement in every branch of philosophy you can name. And it can have practical consequences. People change their views about the morality of war, of capital punishment, a whole range of moral issues, based on philosophical arguments. But philosophy is a terribly difficult subject, and sorting out the hardest questions in the finite time of a human life is asking a lot. And we’re not only finite, we’re imperfectly rational. Our prejudices creep into our philosophical thinking, especially when it touches on our lives. They cause us to look at certain arguments more carefully, more sensitively, and perhaps to overlook others. Many philosophers were brought up in strictly religious households. As adolescents, they found their religion in conflict with things that were obviously true, and they rebelled against it. Then later, when someone shows them a more appealing sort of religion, they’re not going to grasp it.”
For Swinburne, God was not only a supernatural being to be worshipped and obeyed, but also the terminus of an explanatory chain. One could go no further than God in the quest to resolve the mystery of existence. Swinburne was not a believer in the Principle of Sufficient Reason. He did not think there was an explanation for everything. The metaphysical task, as he saw it, was to find the right stopping point in explaining the world, the one that would minimize the part of reality that was left unexplained. And that stopping point should be the simplest hypothesis that can encompass all the evidence before us.
Still, I could not resist raising the question of why God himself exists. Swinburne had conceded that the “most natural” state of affairs was absolute nothingness: no universe, and no God either. He also thought that a reality consisting of a universe and no God—the kind of reality that atheists believe in—was at least conceivable. Here Swinburne was at odds with many of his theological allies. From Anselm to Descartes to Leibniz on down to present-day philosophical theists (like Alvin Plantinga, of Notre Dame), they have viewed God’s existence as a matter of necessity. Unlike our contingent universe, they held, God could not fail to exist; he contains within himself his own sufficient reason. Indeed, they insisted, his existence could be proved as a matter of logic. Swinburne dissented on this point. Where other philosophical theists talked of necessity, he talked of simplicity; and simplicity, as he saw it, made a hypothesis only probable, not undeniably certain. One could gainsay God’s existence, he held, without being convicted of illogic.
But would Swinburne go so far as to say that God’s existence was a “brute fact”?
“Yes, I would,” he replied. “I would say that. It’s not merely that there is no explanation for God’s existence. There couldn’t be an explanation. One of God’s properties is omnipotence. If anything happens to him, it’s because he allows it to happen. Therefore, if something else brought about God, it could only be because God allowed it to bring about God.”
Here was a line of reasoning I certainly hadn’t heard before. “So you’re not personally puzzled,” I said, “about why God exists—or, I don’t know, maybe you are puzzled.”
Swinburne chuckled—out loud, for once—and said, “I don’t think that anyone thought that God was a logically necessary being, not at least until Anselm came along with his ontological proof. And that’s halfway through the two millennia of Christianity. Anselm’s ontological argument was a bad, unnecessary turn for theology. Even Aquinas didn’t really beli
eve in it. So I’m not alone in thinking that God does not exist as a matter of pure logic. But I do think that God is a necessary being in the sense that he does not depend for his existence on anything else. And in that sense he’s ontologically ultimate, the ultimate explanation of all other things.”
I asked Swinburne to consider, just for the sake of argument, another possibility: that the universe exists as a brute fact, without any God to sustain it. Would the universe itself then be necessary in his sense, since it would not depend on anything else for its existence?
“That’s right!” he replied.
So the God hypothesis—even if it is accepted as more probable than the alternative, that of a complex universe which exists uncaused—does not fully resolve the mystery of existence.
“I must admit,” Swinburne said, “that part of me wants to know, wants some guarantee that there couldn’t not be a God. But I understand that it’s not logically possible to explain everything. You can explain A by B, B by C, and C by D, but in the end all you can do is find the simplest hypothesis that explains as much as possible of reality. That’s where explanation has to stop. And that intellectual stopping point, I claim, is God. As to why God exists, I can’t answer that question. I can’t answer that question.”
Could even Swinburne’s God, if we were able to ask him, answer it? “I am who am,” the voice from the burning bush announced to Moses. But did that voice ever ask, “Whence then am I?” If there were an explanation for God’s existence, then God, being omniscient, would know it. But if there really was no explanation—if he is indeed the Supreme Brute Fact—then he would know that too. He would know that his own existence as a contingent being was, in Swinburne’s words, “vastly improbable.” Would the divine mind be puzzled by its inexplicable triumph over the perfect simplicity of Nothingness?