Possibility of God Existing & Venus Being Made of Cheese
How Reality's Weirdness Defeats an Atheist Argument
About the Author
Bryan Frances is the world’s only intellectual wisdom coach. He’s a former professor of philosophy & logic, doing research & teaching at universities in the US, UK, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. He teaches you how to become the wisest thinker in the room—which is different from being the most knowledgeable or having the highest IQ. Contact for a free session.
Here’s something that most of us agree on: God’s existence looks simply incredible compared with our unproblematic knowledge about the world. One hears remarks to this effect all the time—even from deeply reflective & intelligent religious people. I once heard:
A prominent religious philosopher joke, at the beginning of a public lecture, that he has this “invisible friend” whom he talks to. He was intentionally comparing himself to a child or crazy person. The joke worked.
Another religious philosopher say, before beginning a lecture that was premised on the truth of theism, that he realized that many audience members will take that premise to be about as plausible as the idea that the Easter Bunny really exists. He was wise to make the observation: a great many people in philosophy today consider theism to be so implausible as to not be worth talking about.
It’s tempting for many people to think that theism is about as outlandish as the idea that Venus is made of cheese. But wait just a moment:
The proposition that Venus is made of cheese could be made non-outlandish.
Suppose we found out that Saturn is made of chocolate, Mars is made of frozen yoghurt, Neptune is a gazillion rutabagas, and Jupiter is nothing more than a huge bag of onions smashed together. Well, then the Venus-cheese proposition would no longer be incredible. We still would have no evidence for the Venus-cheese proposition. Fair enough. But we could no longer say it’s beyond the pale.
Similarly, if we discovered an invisible person who was omniscient but not omnipotent, and a visible person who could create whole clusters of galaxies with just thought or will, then perhaps theism would no longer be incredible compared to our unproblematic knowledge of reality. That’s because we would have found entities that are pretty similar to God, just like in the Venus/cheese case.
Okay, but so what?
Suppose an intelligent & highly informed theist engages an intelligent & highly informed atheist in debate. They will inevitably cover some of the standard, non-stupid arguments for and against theism. One thing that some atheists miss is that there are theists who are genuine experts, in the exact sense that they are be able to do both of the following:
Cast wholly reasonable doubt on a good portion of the atheist’s counters to pro-theism arguments.
Reveal important defects in the arguments against theism.
That’s all great and to the credit of a (small) group of theists. But at this point in the theist-atheist debate the atheist who has been paying attention typically doesn’t give up. Instead, he will say something like this:
Yeah, but theism is just so damn crazy compared to what we already definitely, uncontroversially, know! So, you need some pretty incredible evidence in order to back up theism.
There is something right about this remark, even if it’s not clear what it is. (Lots of our insightful remarks are like that.) This atheist is claiming, in her first sentence, that the theistic hypothesis that there is a person who created the universe (!), is all powerful (!), is all knowing (!), and supremely good (!)—is just plain nuts compared with what we definitely know about the universe. I used to agree.
Now I don’t.
My thesis: there is excellent reason to doubt the premise “Theism is crazy compared to what we already definitely know about reality”. I suspect that given what we already know about reality, theism isn’t so weird. Roughly put, I’m saying that even if theism is like the idea that Venus is made of cheese, we have learned from science and philosophy that Saturn is made of chocolate, so the Venus-cheese idea isn’t so weird.
Hopefully I don’t need to say that none of these reflections make me a theist. Or atheist.
The Weirdness of Science & Philosophy
Science and philosophy have proven that reality is bizarre. Even when we don’t know the answers to big questions, we know enough to know that that the truth will be highly counterintuitive. Let’s look at a dozen examples, made about as brief as possible.
EXAMPLE 1. The sizes of things are almost comically extreme. You are a grain of sand on earth, which is a grain of sand in the solar system, which is a grain of sand in our galaxy, which is a grain of sand in our universe, which might (we don’t know) be a grain of sand in all of reality. That’s weirdness on steroids.
EXAMPLE 2. Suppose two things happen at almost the same time, as far as you could tell: you turn on the oven, call that event X, and some person honks the horn in her car, call that event Y. It seems obvious that exactly one of the following has got to be true: either X happened before Y, Y happened before X, or they happened at the same time. But no: according to the standard interpretation of the theory of relativity, from some physical perspectives X happened before Y; from others, Y happened before X; and from yet others X and Y happened at the same time. None of the perspectives is the “right” one. How X and Y are temporally related to one another is perfectly objective in the sense that it doesn’t depend on what any person thinks or feels, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with language or thought, but it does depend on the physical facts from which X and Y are assessed.
EXAMPLE 3. Quantum mechanics is probably the most impressive theory ever, at least outside of mathematics. But there is a version of quantum mechanics, developed from the work of physicist David Bohm, which says, roughly, that the entire universe consists of just one particle that exists in a physical space of almost unlimited dimensions. The activity of that one particle generates the entire universe, including people. No one knows whether Bohm’s one-particle view is true, but as I’ve been told, it’s taken seriously as a live option since it can account for all experimental results. Or, consider the Many-Worlds idea of how to interpret QM. Or all the stuff about non-locality. It’s all insane.
EXAMPLE 4. When we examine nature, we learn that biological life is incredible: over millions of years of fluctuations, things like eyes and hearts can come about naturally just by changing in accord with the laws of nature. Now, some theists will say that God designed the laws of nature. I don’t know of any good evidence for that view, but my point here is just this: microscopic particles zooming around obeying the laws of nature, naturally produced all the wonderful biological things on earth, and that fact is just incredible no matter how the laws of nature came about.
EXAMPLE 5. Here’s another completely amazing thing: did the universe have a beginning, with the Big Bang perhaps, or did it always exist? There are just three possibilities, and each one is utterly bizarre:
The universe had no beginning, so it goes back in time infinitely. So the question ‘Where did matter come from?’ has no real answer.
The universe had a beginning, but nothing caused it to start up. So the birth of matter had no cause whatsoever. It just started up without anything at all making it happen.
The universe had a beginning, and something—call it X—caused it to happen. So X would have to be non-physical, since it caused the beginning of the physical universe: X is a non-physical thing (or group of things) causing the universe to happen.
Exactly one of (1)-(3) has simply got to be true (as those are the only possibilities) and yet each one is mind-boggling.
EXAMPLE 6. Under one incredibly intuitive notion of “exactly as many”, there are exactly as many positive integers as there are positive plus negative integers. Mathematical reality is bizarre that way.
EXAMPLE 7. According to some totally informed, highly intelligent people who have thought about this issue for years and years, there are three main live possibilities when it comes to figuring out the relation of human consciousness to physical reality.
Option 1: Conscious processes in our minds are just some quite special, high-level physical processes in the brain, involving neurons and being made up of the movements and other activities of molecules.
Option 2: Conscious processes in our minds are not high-level physical processes in the brain at all but are something completely novel.
Option 3: Conscious processes in our minds are high-level physical processes in the brain, like in option 1, but they aren’t “quite special” (as option 1 says) since consciousness is also universal: everything is conscious. Even electrons are conscious, although their consciousness is fantastically primitive compared to ours because they don’t have emotions or thoughts or anything very much like them.
I can’t discuss 1-3 here, but each is quite counterintuitive in significant ways.
EXAMPLE 8. We all feel as though we have a significant degree of free will, not just when we’re deciding whether to buy apples or oranges but when we are deciding where to live, whom to marry, what political or religious ideas are true, and so on. Even if we do have some significant free will—depending on what meaning you’re assigning to “free will”—it seems pretty clear that our decisions don’t have nearly as much free will as we think they do. That is, (i) there are multiple causal factors that lead to your major decisions, and (ii) in a great many of your major decisions, the bulk of the causation is occurring through factors that you’re unaware of and that don’t amount to evidence in any sense. You think you married him because he’s funny, good looking, smart, in love with you, a good lover, and successful. Those factors were relevant, sure, but most of the causal work was done by things you’re clueless about. (Only old people know this.)
EXAMPLE 9. No one with an intelligent, informed, adult mind doubts the amazing practical power of mathematics. And yet, the people who investigate its foundations don’t agree at all about what makes mathematical statements so useful. Most experts think those statements are true, but there’s no consensus on what makes them true and each proposal is bizarre in some way.
EXAMPLE 10. We all know that many statements are vague. “His shirt is red” can be hard to assess if his shirt has a color on the borderline of redness. “There’s a pumpkin by the tree” is hard to evaluate when the pumpkin is a certain borderline distance from the tree. When it comes to figuring out what vagueness is, expert opinion is all over the place, when considered through history. Right now, believe it or not, the most expertly-endorsed theory says that if the pumpkin is N nanometers from the tree, the sentence is true, but if it’s N + 1 nanometers away, then the sentence is false. How weird is that?
EXAMPLE 11. Plato has no idea what Socrates just said, but out of jealousy he says “What Socrates just said isn’t true”. Socrates, who has no idea what Plato just said, says, out of admiration of Plato, “What Plato just said is true”. Their respective sentences seem to refer to each other and generate a paradox. Despite over two millennia of work on this problem, from philosophers, logicians, and mathematicians, there’s no significant consensus whatsoever. Some experts today think truth is just plain incoherent. They don’t mean that truth is “relative” or “contextual” or “subjective”. No, they mean that the notion of truth is as incoherent as the notion of a naked woman with blue jeans on. Damn.
EXAMPLE 12. If there is a theory of color that is endorsed by the greatest percentage of color scientists, it’s probably the theory that says trees and tables aren’t green, brown, or any other color. The world around us is utterly colorless. Philosophers aren’t quite as enamored by that theory, but they have no significant consensus on what color is.
Philosophical Lessons from Weirdness
Disagreement about the solutions to the mysteries is rife. And this remains true despite many centuries of investigation into the mysteries by a good portion of the best and brightest minds that have ever walked on our planet.
There is no argument here for theism.
Instead, what we have is an argument that reality is incredibly strange—so strange, in fact, that the oddness of theism is not good evidence that it’s false. We have discovered that Saturn is in fact made of chocolate; hence, the idea that Venus is made of cheese isn’t so crazy anymore.
Again, I am not saying that any of this weirdness from science and philosophy provides decent evidence for theism: it does not. But when atheists think to themselves that theism is utterly bizarre, they should remind themselves that that’s not a good reason to think it’s unlikely to be true. We already know that the universe is filled with the bizarre, so it would be foolish of us to reject theism just because it’s bizarre when viewed through a narrow mindset, ignoring the fruits of science and philosophy.