Tag Archives: Richard Swinburne

The God of the Gaps?

Post Author: Bill Pratt

A frequent refrain from skeptics of Christianity is that any time God is posited as the cause of just about anything, the Christian has committed the sin of “God of the gaps.”  Philosopher John Lennox explains the sin as follows: “the introduction of a god or God is an evidence of an intellectual laziness: we cannot explain something scientifically and so we introduce ‘God’ to cover our ignorance.”

Referring back to the previous blog post, is the supposition of Mr Ford as the cause of the motor car engine a “God of the gaps” move?  Lennox answers “no.”

Mr Ford is not to be found in the gaps in our knowledge about the workings of internal combustion engines.  More precisely, he is not to be found in any reason-giving explanations that concern mechanisms.  For Henry Ford is not a mechanism: he is no less than the agent who is responsible for the existence of the mechanism in the first place so that it all bears the marks of his handiwork – and that means the bits we do understand and the bits we don’t.

Bringing this point around to God, Lennox quotes philosopher Richard Swinburne.

Note that I am not postulating a ‘God of the gaps,’ a god merely to explain the things that science has not yet explained.  I am postulating a God to explain why science explains; I do not deny that science explains, but I postulate God to explain why science explains.  The very success of science in showing us how deeply ordered the natural world is provides strong grounds for believing that there is an even deeper cause for that order.

Science can explain what science can explain.  As we’ve developed previously on this blog, science is a limited enterprise that can give us knowledge about recurring physical mechanisms and physical events that occurred in the past.  To press science beyond these realms is folly.

Lennox concludes with these words:

The point to grasp here is that, because God is not an alternative to science as an explanation, he is not to be understood merely as a God of the gaps. On the contrary, he is the ground of all explanation: it is his existence which gives rise to the very possibility of explanation, scientific or otherwise.  It is important to stress this because influential authors such as Richard Dawkins will insist on conceiving of God as an explanatory alternative to science – an idea that is nowhere to be found in theological reflection of any depth.  Dawkins is therefore tilting at a windmill – dismissing a concept of God that no serious thinker believes in anyway.

Can the Mind Be Explained by Physics?

Post Author: Bill Pratt

Some naturalists are betting on it, because ultimately physical laws, in their worldview, have to explain everything.  For the naturalist, there is nothing but physical reality which is governed by physical laws.  That being the case, everything, including the human mind, must be reduced to the purely physical and mechanistic.

Philosophers have pointed out serious problems with this attempt to reduce the mind to physics.  In a fascinating discussion of the origins of modern science, philosopher Richard Swinburne explains that mental states have been purposefully excluded by scientists because mental states were not seen as anything that science could measure or investigate.  Here is Swinburne:

Thermodynamics was conceived with the laws of temperature exchange; and temperature was supposed to be a property inherent in an object.  The felt hotness of a hot body is indeed qualitatively distinct from particle velocities and collisions.  The reduction was achieved by distinguishing between the underlying cause of the hotness (the motion of the molecules) and the sensations which the motion of molecules cause in observers. . . .  But this reduction has been achieved at the price of separating off the [sensation] from its causes, and only explaining the latter.  All reduction from one science to another dealing with apparently very disparate properties has been achieved by this device of denying that the apparent properties (i.e., the ‘secondary qualities’ of colour, heat, sound, taste, etc.) with which one science dealt belonged to the physical world at all.  It siphoned them off to the world of the mental.

But then, when you come to face the problem of the sensations themselves, you cannot do this.  If you are to explain the sensations themselves, you cannot distinguish between them and their underlying causes and only explain the latter.  In fact the enormous success of science in producing an integrated physico-chemistry has been achieved at the expense of separating off from the physical world colours, smells, and tastes, and regarding them as purely private sensory phenomena.  The very success of science in achieving its vast integrations in physics and chemistry is the very thing which has made apparently impossible any final success in integrating the world of mind into the world of physics.

Swinburne’s point is profound.  Modern science was never meant to deal with the mind and its mental states.  Not only that, but its very avoidance of explaining the mind is what has made it so successful.  Naturalists who demand that science explain the mind are asking it to do the impossible.  Maybe the mind is not reducible to physical laws.  Maybe it’s just the opposite – physical laws are ultimately reducible to The Mind.