Matter: The Astonishing Hypothesis

In a number of recent posts I have been gradually building a case to explain how one could have rational beliefs about God apart from argument or evidence. Moreover, I have argued that if God in fact exists, then one could have properly basic knowledge of God. We are now getting to the point where we are picking up speed: at last the argument is moving forward.

Even so, I have determined that it is important to pull off the main route and onto a cul-de-sac for a few moments to offer some supplementary comments. What I want to do is clear up two very different ways of thinking about God: the way I am proposing and the alternative "hypothesis" view. This is important because insofar as my readers persist in thinking only of the hypothesis view of God, they are likely to misfire in their reading of the developing argument.

The hypothesis view is captured in the title of Vic Stenger's book God: The Astonishing Hypothesis (a title that hearkens back to J.L. Mackie's classic The Miracle of Theism: how astonishing and miraculous that there should be theists!). In my experience, the average atheist, agnostic, naturalist, or humanist thinks about God, and the epistemology of religious belief, in the way captured in Stenger's title. That is, they seem to assume that if we are to believe in God it will be as a hypothesis to explain things about the world.

While this might be a legitimate way to justify a very minimal concept of God, Ockham's Razor's sharp edge makes it unlikely that much else will be justified. Certainly it would seem exceedingly unlikely that such doctrines as the Trinity would ever be justified as part of a hypothesis to explain features of the world. As a result, the more one is prone to think about God as a hypothesis (and in particular, the more rich one would like the proposed concept of God to be), the more "astonishing" the hypothesis appears.

This hypothesis view might be cause for worry if it were the only way to think about God or the epistemology of religious belief. But it is not. And if atheists et. al really want to understand the way religious people construe their own epistemology of belief, they need to get over the assumption that the only way to have knowledge of God is as a hypothesis inference.

As an example of how strange this God-hypothesis line of reasoning is to the religious mainstream, I ask you to consider another book: Matter: The Astonishing Hypothesis written by Stic Venger. In the book, Venger (a doppelganger of Stenger who exists in a nearby possible world) argues for idealism. That is, he argues that all we need to explain our experience are minds and their sensations. (For instance, as I sit in my chair now, I feel the cool breeze from the window, I see the bluish glow of light from the computer screen, I smell the autumn air, and so on. My conscious life (and yours) is a bewilderingly complex network of sensations. When you think about it, all that is immediately present in any given moment to the individual is that person's mind and sensations.)

Venger points out (following 18th century idealist George Berkeley) that this is all you need to explain the world. Precisely what you don't need is matter (that is, extended substance). Since matter adds nothing to one's experience of the world (everything can be explained by minds and sensations alone), matter is an ad hoc, explanatorily redundant and suitably astonishing hypothesis which Ockham's razor slices off and leaves to rot on the butcher's bloody tiled floor.

Kudos to Venger for an interesting argument. Nonetheless, it will strike most of us as a bizarre way to think of the world external to mind. Extended substance is not a hypothesis superadded to everything else we experience. It is an ineluctable part of our experience, a basic belief that we find ourselves with as we undergo conscious experience. I have apple sensations and I naturally believe there is an extended apple-substance that goes along with them. It is a properly basic belief.

Right now there may be only one idealist (or phenomenologist) in 10,000 people (or 100,000 people, or 1 million people). But what if one in two people eventually are persuaded by the idealists like Venger that matter is an astonishing hypothesis? No matter how many idealists are running around in the future, their arguments will always strike me as a topsy-turvey analysis (at least so far as I can see).

And so it is for religious people and their experience of God. For them, God is not an extraneous hypothesis added to belief: it is part of their basic experience of the world.

So if atheists et. al want to engage religious people more constructively, they should do so by attacking the core assumptions of the religious. And that means not simply guffawing at how astonishing the "God hypothesis" is, for this is a strawman of belief. Rather they should focus on attacking the assumption that God experience could be properly basic like belief in a world of extended substance.

At this point there will be a temptation for some atheists to refuse to engage the religious person. Instead, they will insist that religious belief is bizarre, strange, not possibly properly basic for anybody. I would urge those folk to read Berkeley's Principles of Human Knowledge and his Three Dialogues. One will find there a clever philosopher at pains to establish that the external world is a bizarre and unnecessary inference. Insofar as the atheist et. al finds Berkeley's analysis to fall flat, please know that this is how religious believers find your proclamations about the bizarre nature of religious belief.

Finally, for those who simply cannot tolerate the idea that different people have different starting points on what is rational or could constitute knowledge I have two comments. First, keep in mind that I have not declared by fiat the basic rationality of religious belief. Rather, I have offered an argument comparing an atheist's analysis to an idealist's. Insofar as the latter is unconvincing, so is the former.

And second, if you still cannot tolerate the fact that "astonishing" is in the eye of the beholder, just wait awhile longer. I am working on a time machine which, when it is finished, will enable you to travel back to the Enlightenment when reason had a capital R and everything but that which was believed by certain educated elites (of which I am sure you are one) was astonishing.

One final footnote: I just came across a couple other books in the bargain bin. One was on solipsism and was titled Other Minds: The Astonishing Hypothesis. The other was on the Buddhist doctrine of anatta and was titled Mind: The Astonishing Hypothesis.

I hope you can see where this is going...