By Mathew Goldstein
The article Bad Theology, Bad Atheism is a recent effort by Nicholas Frankovich, the deputy managing editor of National Review to defend theism. For him, God is the answer to “the mystery that there is anything at all rather than nothing.” From this starting point he argues for Apophatic theology “which is the idea that the best we can do is specify what is not true of God.“
He acknowledges that the case against “the God of faith” is usually clear. He then dismisses that focus as reflecting “the decline of sound popular theology.” But when in the past was popular theology more sound than it is today? Knowledge about how the universe operates has increased. Popular theology may be slow to keep pace. But Mr. Frankovich offers no evidence that it has recently declined. The persistently poor quality of popular theology is a problem for advocates of theism that they tend to downplay and avoid confronting.
He complains that atheists are missing the point because, unlike theologians, they are not grappling with “the God of the philosophers”. Yet Mr. Frankovich tells us of “the inescapable truth that God and evil are simultaneously real.” So who is guilty of leaping to conclusions here? Theology is often poor quality philosophy because it tends to avoid anchoring its conclusions about how the universe operates in a best fit with the overall available empirical evidence. Theists who compare street theology with academic theology as if the latter is so much more compelling are mistaken, the latter is pervasively substantially flawed and anything but compelling.
The notion of absolute nothing is a generalization from our experience of less versus more. We should be careful about reaching conclusions regarding how the universe operates intuitively by generalizing that way. We experience slow versus fast, small versus large, but there is no such thing as absolute fastness, absolute smallness, or absolute largeness. Absolute nothingness is not a concept that has been demonstrated to be real by physics and therefore it is a concept that merits skepticism, like absolute somethingness.
In the world of our everyday experience there is an arrow of time which enables us to safely associate “causes” with subsequent “effects.” However, the arrow of time reflects a property of our universe originating with the Big Bang. The universe considered as all of reality (including the possibility of a multiverse) may not operate by the rule of cause and effect. When discussing the universe as a whole, the question “Why did this happen?” is at best premature. If there is an answer then we will have to wait for it, we are incapable of guessing the correct answer. The more meaningful question is “Could this have happened in accordance with the laws of physics?” The answer to that question in the context of the universe existing is yes. The demand for something more right now — a reason why the universe exists at all — is misdirected.
Some theists like to assert that God necessarily exists, unlike the universe which could plausibly have not. However, nothing a-priori exists necessarily and a god in particular plausibly does not exist. There is no known need for a god to explain how the universe operates. There is only one approach for reliably determining what exists that has a track record of success: Best fit with the overall available empirical evidence. Positing more than is empirically evidenced to exist is much more likely to get us to fiction than non-fiction. Philosophy alone cannot identify what exists. With or without a god, there are features of reality that have no explanation beyond “that’s just the way it is.” That is, after all, what Apophetic theology itself resorts to asserting.
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