The power of metaphor

In my inbox today, news that the Dutch edition of my novel August (to be called Willoos, I believe) is on its way. International editions are great that way, bringing with them the bonus of thinking again about a book that otherwise has faded into the past. Coincidentally, the first book I ever had published, Lester, popped into my head while I was out running during the week. Or more specifically, a particular story one of the characters tells in that book, a story I hadn’t thought about for years, came back to me. And the thing is, that story and the novel August, are linked in a way I hadn’t previously realised.

August is a novel that attempts to grapple with the problem of free will. Its two main characters are trapped upside down in a car, after it has tumbled down a hillside, and as the novel progresses and they tell one another their stories, we get to understand how it is they have come to be together in these circumstances. At the time of writing it, I had been reading and thinking about free will a lot, and attempted in the novel to give a dramatic form to my understanding of what is potentially a fairly dry and abstract philosophical notion. In hindsight, I didn’t entirely succeed, in part because my understanding of the issue I wished to represent came too late in the process, and a great deal of the early drafts consisted of me groping my way towards understanding. As is often the case with a novel, some aspect of the early drafts puts down roots, and no matter how you try to rethink the story, that element remains stubbornly in place.

So, while I eventually reached an understanding of the aspect of free will I wished to highlight (a tricky notion that maybe I’ll write about next time) the story I’d committed to didn’t quite deliver up that element. And then, during this week, I realised that I’d already written about exactly this issue before, in the form of a story an old tramp tells to two teenagers in Lester. And that was more than a decade before I’d consciously started to think about the issue of free will. The striking thing, when I realised this, was that the metaphor I used in that earlier novel, captured the essence of what I wanted to say about free will, much better than the August version. And there’s a lesson in there somewhere, both about the writing process, and about the way understanding develops.

With regard to writing, the lesson is that it’s very easy to end up trying too hard. Although a story should be motivated by the desire to say something about the world, when that message becomes too explicit, and the desire to tell it too didactic, something vital about the creative process is lost. To create in some sense is to discover, and when a piece of writing is really beginning to work, the process of developing it is full of surprise and indeed playfulness.

In terms of understanding, very often we comprehend something before we can fully explain it. Which is to say, very often the appropriateness of a metaphor is clear to us well before we can explain exactly what it is the image is conveying. We sense meaning, if you like, the sensation of connections forming in a manner that is consistent and satisfying, even if we can’t quite produce a blueprint for the final thought. Art often does this, I think: to view, to read, or to listen can create an experience akin to understanding. In schools we tend to ask ourselves, what does it mean for a student to know something? Our answers necessarily include some form of demonstration, a student understands a concept if they can apply it to an unfamiliar situation, say, or compare and contrast it with a similar but distinct notion. And that is reasonable; ultimately real understanding does deliver up those capacities. But knowledge is also a feeling, a sense of rightness, of fit, or indeed intellectual peace, that is not so easily dissected.

In the literature we more often aim at the second type of understanding. When we read a great passage in a novel, there is a moment of recognition, of ‘yes, this is how it is to be human’, and it is very often not the type of recognition that is easily translated into the dry and rigorous terms of a philosophical proposition. There is something delightful about the necessary looseness of fit between concept and expression, it provides the wriggle room in which we may invent.

The story in Lester did not quite rise to those heights, but it was nevertheless odd for me to realise how clearly I had anticipated, in narrative form, an understanding I would later struggle mightily to develop intelelctually.

I can’t leave this without at least nodding to the content of that story. It involved three travellers, each trying to row their way across a lake, and each confronted by the fact that while they had control of one oar, beside them sat fate, and it controlled the motion of the second. One person chose to ignore fate, paid no attention to what the other oar was doing, and simply tried with the single oar to make their way across the lake. Predictably, the journey was one of maddening circles. The second traveller not only acknowledged fate, but sat back and let it row him to his destiny. Again, unsurprisingly, the boat travelled in hopeless circles. It was only the third who understood that in order to progress, it was necessary first to observe the motion of the second oar and then adjust his own strokes accordingly. They could not get exactly where they wanted when they wanted, but they did get somewhere.

And that simple story (made more poetic in the novel) ultimately said as much about free will in two pages, than August managed to do with more than a hundred times the word count. Which in itself is a metaphor of sorts, I suppose.

First among equals

I wonder if there is any more insidious myth in our modern society than the myth of competition. That our worth as individuals can only be gauged by measuring ourselves against others, and that it is only by rising above them that we can hope for any sort of future.

I was reminded of how strong the comparison instinct is when having a conversation the other day about how easily one can fall into the most absurd thought patterns regarding one’s own children. How attentive we become when the parents of similarly aged children report on the various visible signs of progress. Who’s sleeping how long, who’s sitting up, who has teeth, is eating vegetables, has smiled, pointed, can hold a pencil, walk, remember whole nursery rhymes, do differential equations… And while your rational side is quite comfortable dismissing the whole conversation as paranoid nonsense (it’s tremendously uncommon, when walking down the street, to come across an adult still stuck in the crawling phase, they get it eventually) who can honestly say they haven’t at some point felt a momentary twinge of concern? Maybe my child doesn’t measure up. The sky is falling.

The obsession of the times is easily read in such moments. We care, it seems to me, beyond all proportion, about the intellectual development of our children. I don’t mean will they be able to read and write and speak and listen, all of which matter very much. Rather I mean, is my child going to be smart (which is to say smarter than other children)? And this, I’m sure, matters far less than we imagine.

As a school teacher, I am well aware that what is perhaps nothing more than an amusing aside in the early years, can later develop into something much more sinister. As parents are encouraged, via the most ponderous and unimaginative assessment regimes, to focus almost solely on the child’s relative development (above or below the national standard, by how much?) we begin to define our children’s lives in terms of success and failure. This would be bad enough in itself, but given that we actually mean relative success and failure, it’s even worse. Because, as soon as you define failure as an inability to outstrip your neighbours, you render society helpless in addressing that failure. It’s become a built in feature of the society.

From here we fret about zoning, or getting our child into the right school. We hope the classes will be streamed (so long as our child is in the top stream of course, but they will be, there are places waiting for those whose parents fret.) Money is wasted on tutors, schools feel obliged to chase down publishable results, education is reduced to an anaemic imitation of its potential. Anxiety in our young people rises, they find it harder and harder to work out what they want to do with their lives, because we have sold them on the lie that only the select few can have a worthwhile future.

And what a lie it is. It only takes a moment’s reflection to realise that none of the most valuable things in our lives are best understood using a competitive model. We laugh louder when others laugh with us, we learn better when others learn around us, we love better when others around us love, we live better when others around you live well. We are essentially social creatures, and the quality of our individual futures is crucially shaped not by our ability to rise above, but by our ability to work within. As a teacher I look not to the students that top the academic tables, but those that have learned the knack of happiness, and social engagement. Yes, I wish they’d shut up sometimes, but their enthusiasm for living that fills me with hope, and makes my job worthwhile. Individual school grades are an awful predictor of future success, no matter how you measure it. So is the age of teething. And our children will only grow to be smart when their parents stop worrying about things that are so very stupid.

Priorities

And suddenly a fortnight has slipped by without managing to add a new post. I knew I’d slip up eventually. The reason is predictable as it is heartening. I have been too busy living in the world to stop and write about it. While Socrates may have had it right when he said the unexamined life is not worth living, it’s surely equally true that the unlived life is not worth examining.

So, I’ve been busy as a father, a teacher and, intermittently, as a writer, and all of things seem somehow more important than this. There’s much to be said, I think, for working out one’s priorities and allotting your time accordingly. The alternative is allow the urgent to crowd out the important, and be cursed with the attendant regret.

So, with a couple of writing projects requiring my attention (a screenplay that needs constant massaging, and a novel only one more pass away form submisison) I think I shall change the header from weekly to occasional and let the action dictate the pace of the commentary.

Not that there isn’t plenty to write about, this being a day where our teachers took to the streets to protest the direction of educational policy, and the beginning of a week where I intend to embark upon an inquiry learning experiment in the classroom. So, the next series, when it comes, will be education focussed.

But first, there’s a film to be written (two boys out at night witness a scene they do not understand. In the morning one of them is dead, apparently hanged…) and a novel to tweak (teenage boys, twins, one has suffered a life threatening accident, and the doctors propose a shocking solution…) and a life to be lived. Not necessarily in that order.

In praise of uncertainty

If you were looking for an agnostic hero figure, you could do worse than Protagoras, an ancient Greek philosopher from the 5th century BC. It was he who was credited with the observation ‘the fire burns the same everywhere, but the law of the land differs from place to place.’ Without wishing to become hopelessly romantic about the classical age, snippets like that still take my breath away. To an agnostic, and I suspect a good many atheists, the distinction Protagoras noted is a crucial one. In this last post of agnosticism, I want to do nothing more than nod towards the joys of an agnostic stance. Joys for me, that is, I don’t for one moment expect everybody else to feel the same.

The nature of fire is one of those areas where reality constrains our models to such an extent that we are left with little, if any, wriggle room. Fire burns, rain makes us wet, collisions redistribute energy and that’s just the way it is. Of course, to be human is to be interested in much more than physical relationships. We are poets, story tellers, readers of mood and motivation, incurably social, curious and romantic. We move in a world not just of models, but of laws and lore. And it is this through this aspect of our nature that we experience a world that is much more flexible, where reality leaves us unconstrained in our speculations to the extent that two entirely contradictory stances might be thought of as equally well supported by our collective experiences.

The agnostic is defined by the way they respond to these contradictions. The response is to say ‘given that an equally reasonable and well informed person may validly reach the opposite conclusion, I have insufficient faith in my own conclusion to do anything other than suspend belief. I don’t know which of the competing viewpoints is more likely to be true, I can’t trust my own instincts on the matter, given others’ instincts take them in such opposite directions, and so I shall refrain from belief. To return to the metaphor I favour, a coin spins through the air. What will it be? I don’t know, is the agnostic answer.

This is not to say this is how we should respond. Agnosticism makes no claim that its stance is superior, or indeed more likely to uncover the truth, than belief. Indeed, it is less likely to hit the target, given it isn’t even taking a shot. Many believers, whilst acknowledging their belief is no more reasonable than the alternative, nevertheless choose to take the plunge, to respond to that model of reality that most deeply resonates with their own experience of the world. I accept such a stance may bring the individual many advantages. Before leaving this topic, all I want to do is offer for consideration some of the advantages that might accrue to the non-believer.

For me, the first is to do with intellectual consistency. I just don’t buy the pragmatic argument. Yes, a certain type of belief might feel right, and this feeling might deliver up certain advantages, but I don’t know how to make an argument from the personally useful to the objectively true. And I enjoy going where an argument will take me. I find that satisfying. The only arguments I can construct take me away from pragmatism, and I follow them.

A second advantage is that I don’t have to construct a case to explain why my intuition is superior to that of my fellow travellers’. I would find it extremely hard to construct such a case, perhaps impossible. Were I a Christian, I would have to explain how it is the Christian intuition is superior to say the Islamic one. I have no idea how I’d do that. More broadly, how to explain why the theistic instinct is better than the atheistic one? How indeed to explain why, in a God-centred world, some fully informed and open individual can find no hint of their creator? Yes, one could try to get by without explaining the difference. Perhaps it’s just a mystery. But for me this only shifts the problem (whose mystery explanation is the best?) Agnosticism gives me a way of avoiding this problem.

For me, agnosticism also support a special sort of curiosity. The less one has invested in an investigation, the more open one can be to its possible end points. Take life after death. One way to attack a problem like this is to first work out what we mean by life, and indeed consciousness, and attempt to build a model of how that works. From there, we might look at what constraints such a model places on the soul, and away we go. I may be poorly read in the area, and jump in with counter examples, but I don’t see a lot of this happening amongst those who are presumably most interested, those who believe in an afterlife. To cite a slightly shallow example, if I had a soul, and I died, which version of my conscious state would the soul recover had I slowly deteriorated with Alzheimer’s? Would my continuing soul be thus afflicted, and if not, would it therefore be bereft of the memories accumulated during the declining phase? And in what sense am I still me, if disconnected from my memories? Clearly I’m not at all well versed in theology, but whatever the current answer to these types of questions, it hasn’t seeped out into the public arena. My fear would be, that having made a belief commitment, I’d stop asking those questions that most challenged the belief. That’s the sort of nature I have to contend with, at least, and agnosticism offers me a certain protection from my innate intellectual cowardice.

Agnosticism also elevates story in a way that I find deeply satisfying. If I can not know, then I must understand my world not through knowledge, but through speculation. Agnosticism frees me to embrace the essential romanticism of the story teller, loving the story exactly because of its pragmatic appeal, of the way it resonates, sings even, makes my life richer. It is to embrace that aspect of the self that is the inventor, loving the product no less because it is an invention. Indeed, perhaps loving it more, for how glorious is our capacity to invent?

Agnosticism supports tolerance, it supports curiosity, it supports intellectual humility and it supports playfulness. Believers will of course find their own way to these same qualities, but for me, as best I can tell, agnosticism is the vehicle that can take me there. What’s not to like?

Best guesses

I feel like I’ve reached the home straight, in this attempt to explain my agnosticism. Thus far I’ve argued that none of the arguments for believing in either side of the theistic divide are compelling, and I’ve done this by attempting to look at what seem to me to be the strongest cases. That one can not be compelled by reason to choose a side is not sufficient to justify agnosticism, but it is necessary.

The next step is to consider why, in the absence of compelling arguments in its favour, one might still wish to adopt a belief. One reason might be pragmatism, that the belief simply works for the individual, so why not? In my last post I argued that in order to accept his argument, one needs to put some fairly severe pressure on the definition of belief. Hope feels like a more accurate term.

All that’s left is to first check that my own beliefs (and I have many) do not fall prey to the same criticisms I’ve levelled at religious belief, which is today’s task, and then show why, in matters of truth, I personally prefer to accepting uncertainty to committing to a contested position (and that’s next week). Then I’ll leave it there, and look for something lighter to write about for a while, by way of contrast.

One challenge to agnosticism is the rather obvious observation that one can not be agnostic about everything (or at least not without stretching the definition of agnosticism past breaking point). I believe that the earth is round, that the sun is hot, that being hit by a speeding bus would hurt, that my family are not figments of my imagination, and so it goes on. To live, to interact with the world, is to believe. There appears to be no way around this.

Belief is not the same thing as certainty, of course. If it were, then we would have no need for the word believe, we’d just say know instead. So yes, it is perhaps possible that all my beliefs are off base, that I am a brain in a vat, the play thing of a cosmic computer programme, a composite illusion stitched together from infinite partial versions… choose your favourite sci-fi geekiness and insert here. And of course, if reality really does exceed our perception in some fundamental way, then what chance it also exceeds our imagination, such that the above thought experiments are also hopelessly inadequate. Reality is not only stranger than we imagine, to paraphrase Haldane, but stranger than we can imagine.

Evolution gives us cause to consider our intellectual limitations, too. Just as the trees, the snails and the amoebas have evolved to process only limited amounts of the available information, so, we might imagine, have we. And just as the limpet can not ask, why do I not understand probability, we can not begin to wonder at the things our puny brains are missing.

Even our best guesses are continually subject to revision; the history of science reminds us concepts that once seemed central to our understanding (the ether, elan vital, absolute time and space) can go by the wayside, and one should expect there are more revelations yet to come.

So, when I speak of believing, I don’t speak of certainty. I speak of models that are both necessarily incomplete, and subject to future improvement. And yet, while remaining agnostic about so many things, I happily commit to belief in other areas. Why the difference?

For me it comes down to a phrase I’ve already used, that of the best guess. At the end of the last post I mentioned the problem of induction. Why is it justifiable to expect the world to be sufficiently uniform to reward expectations? Isn’t the only justification available the one I’ve already rejected, that of pragmatism? Some philosophers have offered a way around this problem by noting, that although we can’t justify this expectation, nor can we replace it. One put it this way: ‘to the extent that we can know anything, we know it through induction.’ That is to say, choose not to commit to the belief that the sun will rise in the east tomorrow (okay, depends where you live, but more east than west) and what is the alternative, and furthermore, how would you ground it? Natural Selection is itself a backward looking process, and that’s how we were put together. To use the past to predict the future (and where it’s important enough, knowledge of the past can be transmitted through our genes, look at our language instincts) is basic to the way we function. Yes, perhaps it’s all been a vast cosmic joke and tomorrow the rules will change, but if they do, none of us will see it coming, because there’s no alternative model on the table.

And this is what I mean by a best guess, a situation where there’s no serious alternative available, where it’s impossible, without mangling the language completely, to say a competing viewpoint is equally reasonable. Can we say, to expect the bus collision to do us damage is one perspective, but if others see it differently, that’s equally valid? I don’t think so. To see the child step out into the road and not pull them back because of commitment to some obscure philosophical point would requite a special kind of stupid.

And when I think about the things I believe, I find they have this characteristic, that they are borne of our collective experience, such that there is general agreement these represent our best guess for now. Take as your starting point, that the model that has worked best in the past represents the best bet for the future, and all else follows. Does standing in the rain make me wet? Yes. Do children need to be exposed to language in order to learn it? Yes. Is mine the only conscious mind in the universe? No. Do I share a common ancestor with rat in the ceiling (your days are numbered)? Yes. Is their regularity in the universe? Yes. And so it goes on. Not all these beliefs are empirically grounded, their characteristic is just that they represent, in some meaningful sense, our best current guess.

Sometimes it’s because we know of no alternative, other times it’s because the odds are weighted heavily against that alternative – I might be given a lottery ticket and could reasonably expect/believe it to not be the winner. To believe otherwise, and extend the mortgage on the back of it, would be nuts, even though the alternative expectation doesn’t represent an impossibility.

Another way of thinking of this is to consider reality a constraining force. For all its unknowns, reality is such that some beliefs appear to be forced moves, we’re left without an option. In such a case belief in a model can be justified as representing the best guess available.

The agnostic’s stance is to say, when we move beyond such constraints, such that contradictory beliefs may be reasonably held, then I choose to withhold belief. I would claim that such an approach has two major advantages (and of course a number of disadvantages, which is why agnosticism itself can’t be thought of as a forced move) and I want to look at these in my last post in this series.

Pragmatism

George Bernard Shaw once wrote that the fact the believer might be happier than the sceptic is no more relevant than the fact the drunkard is happier than the sober man. The relevance he had I mind, I suspect, was relevance to the truth of the matter. Just because believing something is so might make you happy, he suggested, is no good reason for thinking that thing is true. The pragmatist would be inclined to disagree.

I have a certain sympathy for pragmatism, and it’s probably the defence of belief (both theistic and atheistic) that I find hardest to dismiss. In this post I want to briefly outline how the pragmatic defence of belief works, and then explain why I’m not entirely convinced with it. Or rather, I think there’s an alternative way of looking at belief that sits much more comfortably with me. But first the defence itself.

The pragmatic theist’s line might go something like this: Yes, we understand that there is no slam dunk argument available to tell us whether it is more or less reasonable to believe in God. We would even go so far as to say this type of belief doesn’t yield to calculations of probability. We don’t know if it’s more or less likely that God exists. But, unlike the agnostic, we do not treat this profound uncertainty as cause to withhold belief. Rather, we would argue, that in the absence of any defeating arguments or evidence, it makes perfectly good sense to believe that thing that we know through experience makes our lives all the richer. To refuse to do this, on the grounds that in the absence of verifiable knowledge, one should withhold belief, is akin to cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face. The principle of withholding knowledge itself relies upon a belief of sorts, and one that is equally impossible to establish, so if it just comes down to a choice between impossible to establish beliefs, then what could better justify this choice than the likely outcome for the believer?

This is sometimes framed as a doctrine of hopeful belief. In the absence of defeaters, one is warranted to believe in that which one hopes to be true. Atheists often employ a similar line of reasoning when they suggests, in the absence of a compelling case either way, believing in absence is the better path. Scratch beneath the surface and their notion of what is better often has a whiff of pragmatism about it too (if we refrain from believing in that we wish were true, we safeguard ourselves against wilful delusion).

So, isn’t the pragmatic case entirely reasonable? If we can’t rule an option out, and we find that believing in it improves our lives, isn’t belief the sane way to go? At this point many are tempted to rush in and construct the case against the opposition’s pragmatic virtue. No, claim some atheists, religion doesn’t make you feel better at all, look at all the harm it’s caused. Nonsense, returns the believer. Look at the progress our particular religion has laid the foundation for, your reading of history is mighty selective. And that, clearly, is not the sort of argument one could reasonably expect to be resolved. But, unless one accepts the premise, that usefulness is a reasonable guide to truth, then the argument is on some level a pointless one.

So, is there any way of equating usefulness to truthfulness? My instinct is to say no. I can think of any number of situations where a person might derive great pleasure from believing things where that pleasure is a lousy guide to truth. The person who misreads their lottery ticket and believes they have won might have a tremendously exciting time planning their spending spree and perhaps even indulging in some pre-claim celebrations, but the joy it brings them does not appear to be able to affect the truth of the outcome. The way I want the world to be, and the way it actually is, don’t appear to be related in the way that pragmatism seems to imply. Consider the person who hears a rumour their partner is being unfaithful. Sure, it might make them feel much better to believe this isn’t so, but that in itself can’t change the past. Isn’t belief about something other than trying to put the best spin on things? Isn’t belief, by definition, about trying to figure out what’s actually going on?

Perhaps in this case, definition is the whole thing. Consider this statement: ‘I have no idea whether that coin is going to be heads or tails, but I’ve bet on heads, and so I believe that’s what it will be. I’m an optimist.’ And ‘I don’t know whether it will be heads or tails, but based on past experience, I do believe it won’t land exactly on its side.’ I’m not convinced belief in these two cases is referring to the same thing at all. One refers to how we hope the world will turn out, and the other to how we genuinely expect the world to turn out. I understand the person who says ‘I hope this is true, and will behave as if it is’. That, I would suggest, is a stance more about hope than it is about belief. But, when the person says ‘I hope this is true, and so I believe it is’ some fine line of discomfort has been crossed for me. I want to say, fine, but that’s not what I mean when I speak of belief. Or rather I want to ask, how is belief any different from hope, in your case. In which case, why not use the word hope instead? Wouldn’t that be more honest?

In other words, I appear to be psychologically incapable of believing something is true just because I want it to be. At the point where I realise hope is the primary reason for my belief, my belief withers. I can not personally sustain belief in the face of the knowledge that this is just a position I have arrived at simply because it makes me feel good. I want belief to somehow be about more than that.

Of course, there is one pesky counter example to this line of reasoning, and that is the regularity of the universe. Isn’t it true that I expect the sun to rise in the east tomorrow for entirely pragmatic reasons? Don’t I understand that there is no compelling argument in favour of this expectation, beyond its tremendous usefulness? Give up on regularity, and we are lost. And doesn’t that make my dismissal of pragmatic belief inconsistent?

I think there might be a way around this problem, to do with what I think of as a theory of best guesses. I’ll try to lay that out next time.

Beginning at the beginning

I can’t escape the feeling that this week’s post is going to expose a fundamental misunderstanding on my part. I say this because the argument I want to examine is one that many apparently smart people find compelling, and yet I’ve never been able to see how it works, except at a rhetorical level. Maybe this is because the argument is indeed much weaker than many assume, or maybe it’s because I haven’t fully understood it. If the latter, hopefully someone out there will explain to me the error of my ways.

The argument in question is the argument that says God is the best explanation we have for the fact we exist at all. A simplified version of it goes something like this. In the world, we experience events and circumstances as things which have causes. Why are you wet? I stood out in the rain. Why did that cliff face erode? Wind and rain and wave action from below ate it away, etc. Everything we experience can be traced back to a prior cause. Why then the universe? Why does anything exist? We can trace physical existence all the way back to the Big Bang if we like, we might even be able to show, given the nature of our universe, that the Big Bang was itself inevitable, but still we might ask, well why is this the physical nature of the universe? Why is it not some other way? What is it that caused the circumstances that made it come into being?

We might at this point posit another universe, from which our own inevitably sprung, but this shifts the argument to that universe. Why did it exist? Either, the reasoning goes, we stretch back through infinity, or we must stop with a prime mover, some thing that was not caused, but nevertheless caused creation. And this, according to some theistic lines of reasoning, is God. God, some argue, makes more sense than an infinite regress, and so believing in God is more reasonable than not.

And I have to admit I find this argument unimpressive at every level (hence the sneaking suspicion I’m misframing it.) To begin with, the idea that all things must have a cause strikes me as more of a psychological quirk than a fact of existence. Yes, we understand the world best by thinking in terms of cause and effect, but does that really make it a necessary law of existence? Might it not be that some things just do happen for no reason whatsoever, and might not existence be exactly that sort of thing? Some of our most accurate physical models work by treating events as essentially causeless, so for example at the level of the very small, we describe the characteristics of sub-atomic particles using probability functions, where on average they conform to certain patterns, but in the individual case their behaviour is purely random. This is not to say that there can’t be some hidden level of causation at work, but it does give us at least reason to pause before announcing that causality is part of the universe’s very fabric.

Next up, the linear model of causation, where the preceding event causes the current one, works well within a framework of time that has one event happening strictly after another. But, move outside of time and space (notice we have no word to make that sentence sensible, ‘outside’ beyond’, whatever term you choose is tethered to time and space) and what are we even talking about? What came before the big bang? If we think in terms of the big bang event creating time and space, then before the big bang there was no before, nor any outside or beyond. The question itself becomes meaningless. People speak of this prime mover causing existence as if the idea of being outside of space and time makes perfect sense to them, and I’m suspicious of that.

How weird might reality really be? I suspect we have nothing like the capacity to sensibly answer that question. Existence might be to our brains what calculus is to the mind of a garden snail. And yet we, with typical overconfidence, are happy to assert that whatever existence is like, it will conform to this rather human-centric rule of cause and effect. (Could the effect not even be the cause, if we allow causation backwards through time? And if not, why not?)

My other big problem with the argument is that it doesn’t give us God, in any traditional sense. All it gives us is some thing that must, by its very nature, exist. So, if we accept, for reasons unknown, the idea that every thing must have a cause, apart from the one thing that is uncaused and hence allows all other things to be, then what characteristics must we assign to that concept? It seems to me, for the argument to work, the only quality this God figure needs to have is that it necessarily exists. So, on that basis, is the most parsimonious explanation not that the universe itself necessarily exists? God is existence. God’s qualities then are simply the qualities of the universe. There need be no purpose, no love, no moral qualities, just being. At this point the universe the naturalist believes in and the God the theist believes in are identical.

The real import of the existence argument then, I suspect, is not as much logical as psychological. We can not say, for there to be existence, there must be a God, nor can we argue reasonably that existence makes God more likely. The more honest argument is that a particular type of God helps us make sense of existence, and I have no doubt that for some people this is true. It’s not true for me, my nature is such that the choice appears to be between a universe I can’t make proper sense of, or a delightful range of Gods I can’t make sense of either. And so I am forced to live with mystery. And that suits me very well indeed.