One-Post Wednesday: Limiting the Conversation

I have argued before that people who try to "Ockham's Razor" God out of existence are wrongheaded. Simplicity is an intellectual value, an epistemological value, one that is foundational to the scientific endeavor. But it is not the only such value. There are other values that have to be balanced out with simplicity. Predictive efficacy, explanatory power, instrumental efficacy... all these play a role. Is String Theory to be preferred because it explains so much? Or does its vast complexity mean it is rather unlikely to be true? These are the kinds of trade-offs scientists get involved in all the time.

One of these values is intellectual fertility, the expanding of the mind. New questions, new avenues of study and thought, whenever a theory, thought or idea spawns this kind of activity it is taken as a sign that it is true. An intellectually fertile theory is preferable to one that is less fertile, all things being equal.

Intelligent Design or Creationism are problematic not only because of Ockham's Razor but because of intellectual fertility. If everything ends with the explanation "God did it", that so limits our avenues of thought that it in and of itself has the mark of untruth. That is the consequence of a commitment to this epistemic value, which is foundational to the scientific endeavor.

But atheism, too, has an intellectual fertility problem. Questions of meaning, of purpose, these things are just not allowed in an atheistic world view. Today I sat with a group of youngsters as they explored the following question: "why does God allow evil?", "can good exist without evil?", "what would the world look life if it were ruled by a God of indifference rather than love?", and so on. These questions and the discussions that surrounded them were fantastic. And since they were questions we took seriously, and very seriously, then the discussion had a weight that allowed more and more questions to be explored.

Taking the universe as only objective fact and not subjective encounter, you can explore only the physical facts of the universe, i.e., its objective components. How does the world work? This is the limiting question of science. Taking the universe as subjective encounter and not objective fact, focusing only on the Mind behind it all, almost every physical encounter lacks any depth to it. There is no deep thinking needed and no new questions to be asked about the physical world.

Yet if the universe is looked at from within our subjective encounter with it, and beyond that subjective encounter. If we study the universe as "Thou" and "It", if we have both physical and non-physical modes of study, then we have a maximally intellectually fertile world. Of course this fact in and of itself cannot commend faith. You need reason to believe before you can start thinking about these things. I gave such reasons in my apologetics project. But the questions confronts one of whether to trust the data. I think that valuing an extension of conversation, a pushing of inquiry as far as it can go, gives one a reason to trust.