The Mother Of All Cop-Outs

I wrote this post up a while ago and it was accidentally erased before I could post it, significantly dampening my enthusiasm for it. This isn't going to be as long as the original was.

This is basically a response to a debate between Richard Dawkins, a prominent neo-atheist and personal favorite of mine, and Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Science and prominent religious scientist. They're asked by the moderator about the vast improbability of the universe. Dawkins explains by saying that maybe the six physical constants that had to be "just right" for life to exist are somehow tied to each other, reducing the improbability, or maybe we're in a multiverse system that reduces the improbability even more; but in either case, science can respond with a confident, "We don't know yet, but we're working on it." Collins then said that with his god the improbability is removed, because his god needs no explanation. Dawkins responds that that is, in his opinion, the mother of all cop-outs. And I have to agree.

I've heard other people make the same argument, people who are otherwise quite reasonable and among my most reasonable counterparts in religious arguments. The idea is that somehow, God doesn't need an explanation. One can simply say, in answer to the question of "why is there something instead of nothing," because god said so, and that's the end. But why? That's my question.

God, it strikes me, either exists or doesn't; and note that I am here defining God as an intelligent force that created this universe and exists in some sense outside of it. Note that this would include the proverbial "science experiment" theory that we are just a tiny little subsection of a larger universe, as might happen in particle accelerators. And if he exists, then he must have come into existence at a certain point, before which he did not exist, in which case he needs an explanation, too, for having come into existence out of nothing. And if he has existed forever, somehow, and never was nothingness and never had to come into being, then he needs an explanation for that. And moreover, if god can have existed forever without a beginning, why can't the universe? In fact, I've heard a scientific theory that suggests that in some sense the universe might have done just that.

The point here, in a sense, is that god is not allowed to exist outside of science. This results less from how god is defined than from how science is defined: it is all-encompassing, all-devouring. If there is a question of fact that can be asked, science makes it its business to investigate that question. If God exists in any sense other than in the imaginations and/or spiritual lives of individual human beings, then he is in the domain of science (and if he exists in that sense, he's in the domain of psychology). Science claims jurisdiction, and therefore, if you accept its claim of having jurisdiction over all matters of fact, it's laws, a.k.a. the rules of logic and evidence, apply to all matters of fact. What this means is that anyone who claims that god exists outside the rules of science and/or logic, or doesn't need an explanation or whatever, is challenging directly the claim that science can address any issue of fact. This includes, evidently, the director of the NIS.