Re: “Magical Thinking”:
Unfortunately too few persons who adopt a philosophy follow that philosophy to its natural conclusion and exhibit the implications.
An example is the Solipsist who wonders aloud why his philosophy isn’t more popular amongst his peers. (If he were genuinely Solipsist through-and-through, he wouldn’t waste his time wishing his philosophy were better accepted among people whom he suspects don’t exist to begin with!)
Another example is the Materialist. He holds that the Materialist Working Assumption adopted by practitioners of the scientific method is not, in fact, a Working Assumption, but is an actual Axiom about reality.
Now in practice, the Materialist Working Assumption (MWA) is: “Every event in our universe of space and time is Caused by earlier events.” It (the MWA) might be extended as follows: “These earlier events were Caused by still earlier events, which were Caused by still earlier events, and so on, deterministically, right back to the Big Bang.” And, crossing the line from Working Assumption to Philosophical Dead Horse, a person might add on: “The Big Bang, then, is the Ultimate Cause, and all other events are mere spinoffs from it.”
Now the MWA is absolutely required for the scientific method to function. The scientific method requires us to generate falsifiable hypotheses in the form “given these prerequisite conditions, THIS is what I predict will result.” Christians like Gregor Mendel and Georges Lema√Ætre make use of the MWA every bit as much as their Materialist counterparts in the sciences. They know, as any working scientist must know, that it clutters up one’s hypotheses needlessly if one constantly qualifies as follows: “Given these prerequisite conditions, THIS is what I predict will result, provided that God does not miraculously intervene to produce other, necessarily unpredictable, results.”
The difference is that the Christian says this qualification is needless clutter because he knows that miracles of the seemingly nature-defying variety are rarities (his scriptures requiring him to acknowledge as canonical less than a score such flashy events over a period of several thousand years). Miraculous intervention is therefore vanishingly unlikely to occur during his experiment in such a way as to alter the results. (And perhaps he also suspects he knows God’s character reasonably well and is reasonably sure He is not a Loki intent on such mischief.)
Meanwhile, the Materialist says the qualification is needless because God doesn’t exist, or may exist but never does miracles. He has the luxury of proving his first assumption on the basis of his first assumption.
In either case, the MWA is perfectly valid working equipment for the scientist. Since experiments must be repeated, the Christian knows that should His Lord’s well-attested sense of humor, or more likely humanity’s even better-attested fallibility, result in a seemingly irrational result in one experiment, additional experiments will relegate that observation to the role of statistical outlier.
Now it is acknowledged by all that the scientific method, and therein the Materialist Working Assumption, have been by far the most successful tools of man for learning about his universe. Why not, then (asks the Materialist) take it as read that the Working Assumption is no Assumption but an Axiom, and apply it to all events, at all times, Monistically?
The answer is that the Axiom is falsifiable, and is already falsified by the Big Bang itself.
Put simply: If we strictly require that all events (Effects) be determined by earlier events (Causes) then the Big Bang is, by definition, Supernatural. Or at least, Non-Natural. For Time began with the Bang; no events preceded it, and it is therefore either Uncaused, or Caused by something outside of the normal chain of Cause-and-Effect which the Materialist names “Nature.”
The Materialist has traditionally groped for various ways to escape this conclusion, but for nigh-on a hundred years has done so unsuccessfully.
First, he tries to show that the universe had no moment of beginning, but has always been. Hubble was disgusted with his own findings (the expansion of the universe) though he had the honesty to report them; Einstein tried to fudge his equations with a cosmological constant to produce a steady-state universe which was more appealing to his mind; others propose a cyclical, perpetually expanding-and-contracting universe; M-Theorists posit collisions of M-Branes in higher-dimensional space (which must be assumed to be temporally eternal; otherwise we have not solved the problem but only moved it back a bit).
In each case the results fall apart as ingloriously as Tycho Brahe’s geocentric model. The only model matching our observations of the current entropy state of the universe, the current mass of the universe, the current distribution of matter in the universe, and the current behavior of matter, is “A Day Without Yesterday.” This is setting aside the purely philosophical problems of assuming the possibility of an actual (as opposed to conceptual) infinite regress of days prior to the current moment in time.
The second Materialist escape route is to show that the universe is non-deterministic. But, then, no protection against miracles. So, scratch that. It either must be relegated the quantum level, leaving the universe in aggregate as a deterministic system, or it must be allowed that “God plays dice with the universe…and sometimes throws the dice in places where we can’t see them.” And so, perhaps, weights the dice when He so desires.
The third Materialist escape route is to object that, after all, it’s not required that Causes always precede their Effects. But then, again, the protection against miracle vanishes. For God, or indeed Time Travel, is every bit as able to work His/its will upon the past from a vantage point in the future as in the present or past.
The fourth objection is simply to say that the Big Bang was merely Uncaused. “Give us this one Uncaused event,” says the Materialist, “and I can explain the remainder as Caused.” Very well. But given that one Uncaused event may occur, why not more? Is there a cosmic limit: One uncaused event per universe? Or may others occur later? And if they occur, do they not appear, to anyone’s senses, as miraculous?
The fifth objection may begins a bit sulkily. “Very well, then; the Universe is Caused, but it has a Cause outside our space-time. And you can’t name that Cause ‘God’ because its cause was a merely Material type of Cause, not a Personal type of Cause.”
Aye, but there’s the rub. What kind of Cause, and does it exist in anything like Time (if not ours), or not? If we posit a time-flow proceeding from another space-time to cause the Big Bang in ours, we have only pushed the problem farther away from ourselves, without solving it. We must assume, at a minimum, NO time-like dimension in whatever other frame of reference that “bled over” into our own to cause the Big Bang.
Which brings the Materialist to an embarrassing pass: As he makes a list of the attributes required for a Cause Of The Universe that can fulfill all observations of entropy and matter and energy and space and time, his list shapes up this way: The Cause must be Outside Our Universe. The Cause must submit to no Time-Like Framework itself, and must in essence be Eternal and Self-Existent. The Cause must be Powerful enough to intervene to cause “uncaused” events in our space-time, including the creation of our space-time altogether.
The Materialist’s List is now, in fact, coming very close to the list of the attributes of God held by Theists of the Judeo-Christian tradition for perhaps six thousand years. How annoying, to scale such a mountain, with such Herculean effort, only to find at the summit a passel of priggish philosophers and theologians who apparently took some easier route and have been resting comfortably there for an eon!
The truth is that Theists claim a Personal Cause; Materialists claim an Impersonal one, and the primary reason for the preference of the first side is that they claim to have experienced Personal Interaction with this Person; and the primary reason for the preference of the second side is that they claim to have had no such interaction, and find assertions of such interactions to be incredible. Whether the incredulity comes more from a sense that the claimants are liars or persons given to flights of fancy, or from a feeling of sour grapes at having apparently been left out of God’s clique, is something only they can determine.
Regardless, “Magical Thinking” of a particular sort is required if we are to believe everything the physicists tell us about our universe. The Universe came into being Caused by either an Eternal Powerful Something, or an Eternal Powerful Someone, outside it. And there is no particular protection against that Someone, or even that Something, interacting with our space-time again. All we can say is that such interactions are apparently rare enough to slip below the laboratory radar, with the notable exception of creation itself.
Which is all the Theists have ever been saying. So, where’s the controversy, then?
