Swallowing the implications

Fun fact: The 'big bang' theory has some significant non-secular history. Did Lemaître approach the issue as a scientist in search of truth or a priest in search of theistically supporting evidence? I don't know, and while I've got my suspicions, I haven't dug up evidence to confirm or refute them. I just think it's interesting that what may, possibly, have been a look-gods-must-exist attempt today ends up being denounced as godless 'just-theory' speculation.

That came to mind when I was thinking about the notion of 'Intelligent Design' recently. I'll admit that, to date, I haven't been presented with any arguments for ID that weren't laced with invalidating holes, so I've moved from a position of "I'm skeptical, but they claim to be doing things rigorously, so they deserve a fair hearing" to "I quort that people who profess adherence to ID will employ gaps in their reasoning." That is to say, I've become biased based on consistent experiences.

If you can't support a position without using swiss-cheesed arguments, though, how could such a position persist? Shouldn't it be shot down by now? The usual cynical replies aside, it seems there would need to be something propping up a desire to keep pushing the point.

"One acts on assumptions. What do you assume?" asked the Player in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. If you assume that everything was created by something intelligent, then you'd know that while your current argument has problems, they're problems with the argument, not the conclusion... since you know that the conclusion is true. I won't say much about the dishonesty intrinsic a position in which "even if there's a flawless proof that something is false, it maintains that there must be a proof that the thing is true because... well... you know it's true!" beyond that it's dishonest and that if you're going to posit a universe which is inherantly contradictory, there's really no point trying to talk about it.

So, why was ID bringing the background of Big Bang theory to mind? Well, while most ID arguments I've seen are strictly flawed, I'll admit there are just some that, so far, only have holes in them. Perhaps those holes will get well and properly filled in at some point in the future, and there'll be a flawless proof that, yes indeed, everything has a designer. I'll admit, I would find that tough to swallow, and would go over the argument very carefully, but it could happen, and I'm not the type to reject it just because I know it has to be wrong, even if it isn't.

I think, though, that most theists on the planet would find it a lot tougher to swallow than I would. I expect that if people who really care about rigorous arguments start trying to make the case for ID work, it'll start to fall into the poor graces enjoyed by Evolution, Big Bang, and much of science in general. Not, however, because it would be more evidence that deities aren't necessary, but rather that it'd make mono (or even finite poly)-theism a much less tenable position.

I'm not about to go trying to lay out a rigorous argument for ID, but I'll outline why I think it'd be potentially terrifying for a lot of major religions.

Essentially, self-causality is either possible, or it's not. For an ID argument to be solid, one thing it needs to do is rule out the possibility of self-causality, since otherwise the universe could have no creator but itself, and I think that runs contrary to the point of most ID arguments. So, suppose it can be established that self-causality isn't an option. The universe, then, must certainly have a (designing) cause, which presumably is also established to be intelligent. And, self-causality not being an option you know three things: The 'designer' has a cause, that cause isn't itself, and that cause isn't the universe (this third item rests on the assumption that causation is transitive: If A causes B, and B causes C, then A can also be said to cause C). The designer's designer, similarly, has a designer (which isn't itself). In particular, there can be no ultimate designer (or 'first cause') since self-causality has been ruled out. Without the option for self-causation, the minimum count of designers designing designers is infinite, and there's no topmost one.

I imagine that accepting that gods exist at all (and that there are infinitely many of them) wouldn't be nearly as rough on me as accepting that your ultimate, highest, unsurpassed god is, necessarily, practically at the very bottom of an unending chain... far closer to you than to most designers. You don't even have the option of getting a better designer way higher up the chain, because no matter how far up you go, you're still talking about a designer who's practically at the very bottom and far closer to you than to most of the other designers.

On the one hand: "Woha, well, I guess there are gods." On the other hand: "My god is pitifully trivial and, in the grand scheme of things, infinitely unimportant."

That's gotta be rough.

One objection I can see to my prediction is that it doesn't take into account that modern ID arguments tend to be much more probabilistic in nature, and wouldn't explicitly claim that self-causation is impossible, but rather that it's only sufficiently unlikely that you shouldn't buy it, at least when talking about things so irreducibly complex that certain probabilities fall below certain arbitrary thresholds. I can see this objection because I think it's entirely possible for more complicated things to arise from less complicated ones, so I can imagine 'designers' that are far less complex than their 'designs'. The requirement of 'intelligence', however, sets some lower bounds on the allowed complexity for designers, however, and that bound is still a good deal higher than, say, the complexity of your favorite beetle organ.

Basically, if an ID argument is strong enough to demonstrate that it's probabilistically ridiculous to imagine the observable world without an intelligent designer, the argument's going to be more than strong enough to show it's at least as ridiculous to imagine that such a designer isn't, in turn, designed. While such a probabilistic argument does allow someone to say "Yes, but at -this- level, you really do have self-causation", it would also show that the most justified level to assume self-causation is the one without any designers at all. It wouldn't be necessary to start believing in an infinite stack of designers, but it would be provably worse to believe in one than to believe in none.

And now for a mathematical digression. It would seem that I'm implying that a solid probabilistic ID argument says "Belief in none is silly, believe in one is more silly, belief in two is even more silly, and so forth... but belief in infinitely many is not silly." And, indeed, that is the implication. If that seems awkward to you, I'm not going to just say "Well, that's the kind of thing that happens when you start mucking outside the finite", even though it's true. I'm going to present a similarly ackward, but hopefully much more accessible, infinite-weirdness situation.

Think about the counting numbers: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and so forth. I'm going to define a sequence of sets to think about: The initial set, Set-1, is just {1}. One element, which is the number 'one'. The next set, Set-2, you get by adding in the two next larger elements, and taking away the smallest element. The next larger elements are one and two, and the smallest element is also the only one: zero. Thus, Set-2 is {2,3}. Set-3 is made in a similar fashion: Add the two next larger, remove the smallest, you get {3,4,5}. Set-4 works the same way, you get {4,5,6,7}. Set-5? {5,6,7,8,9}. By this point, you may have noticed that Set-N has N elements, which are {N,N+1,N+2,...,2N-1}. If so, well done. If not, it really does work that way.

So, what happens when we go infinite? What's the set you get if you repeat this process infinitely many times? How bit is it?

Given how I led into this, you might guess correctly, but pretend you didn't have any hints or foreshadowing. People tend to see that at each step, the sets get bigger, so after infinitely many steps, you must have an infinitely large set, yeah? Alas, no. You end up with a completely empty set. Nobody home at all!

Seriously. I'm not joking. Just try to name even -one- number that would be in the final set. If there's infinitely many, there should be at least one, right? But 1 isn't in it, we kicked out 1 when we went to Set-2, and we never looked back. 39 isn't in there either... we kicked it out when we went to Set-40, and we never added it back in. Pick any number (call it X), and the sad truth is, X isn't in the set, because it got kicked out in the process of going to Set-(X+1).

A sequence of increasinly large sets, when you 'go out to infinity', leads you to a completely empty set. That's mucking about outside the finite, for you. Not so different from a sequence of increasingly improbable beliefs, when you 'go out to infinity', becoming the only probably belief.

So, honestly, I expect that the whole ID thing is going to go the way of the geocentric universe and the flat world (by which I don't mean 'becoming featured in Terry Pratchett's novels'). Still, if there really is enough truth behind the idea for something solid to be proved, I think it'll end up going the way of evolution and the big bang, in terms of being thoroughly unacceptable to many religious viewpoints.