I had hoped Stuart Buck would come in and dissociate himself from Richard Feder’s flimsy arguments. But, alas, he takes Mr. Feder’s side. He says I’m not “open-minded.” Okay, well, that charge has always been the last refuge of those who can’t prove their case. But I must confess—my mind really is closed to sloppy and dishonest arguments.
Mr. Buck’s rather irritated with my point that we shouldn’t plug in mysteries where answers ought to go. I pointed out that if we’re trying to explain a phenomenon, and someone says “it’s magic,” that doesn’t really answer the question. We’re trying to explain one thing in terms of another—say, to explain the origin of species in terms of the non-random selection among random variables. Such an explanation is useful because it allows us to explain phenomena in terms that don’t just repeat the question. It’s like a dictionary—it’s always best to define one word with other words, than to define the word by reprinting the word. Appeals to magic do the latter. A scientist says, “This is a mystery. I wonder why Y happens,” and Stuart Buck says “Well, the explanation is that it’s a mystery.” That doesn’t really help much. At most, it just explains Y in terms of Y.
Now, Buck says, Suppose that we see the phenomenon Y happening. Someone says that X must be the cause. It is absolutely, totally, and completely [absolutely, totally and completely? Wow!-TMS] beside the point to say, “But we don’t have an explanation for X itself.” So what? That’s no basis for ignoring X. If X is the cause of Y, that’s just the way things are. It would be nice to have an explanation for X too, but we can know that X caused Y even if we don’t know (yet) that W caused X.
Sure, but the person who says X is the cause is providing a naturalistic explanation of the phenomenon. He’s positing a corporeal, naturalistic God, rather than a mystical, omnipotent Operator of the Universe. I’m sure that for Stuart Buck, God is an Englishman, but for others, God is an all-powerful Being Who can do anything He wants. And that sort of explanation is just ipse dixit:
“Why did phenomenon Y happen?”
“Because God made it happen.”
But that answer could be applied to Y and not-Y equally. What we want to know is why Y happened instead of, say, Z, which did not happen, but which, had it happened, could be explained with equal plausibility by appealing to God’s will. Statement Q is worthless unless it is at all possible to say not-Q.
The rest of Buck’s post just repeats his misunderstanding. He says that I and Dawkins “rely on a principle akin to this: ‘Nothing can count as an explanation unless it explains everything, without pointing to anything that is currently unexplained.’” This is truly an absurd mischaracterization of my argument. What I’ve said—and so clearly that I can’t really think Buck misses it by accident—is that nothing counts as an explanation if it explains everything. Buck’s “It’s Magic!” answer would explain every conceivable alternative state of facts. It is therefore worthless as an explanation.
Buck says “Neither I nor anyone else has ever implied that every phenomenon should be slapped with a supernatural explanation willy-nilly.” I’m not sure that’s true, as I’ve explained above. But he continues: “[a]s it happens, the fairies-causing-rain explanation doesn’t work. But why? Not because fairies themselves haven’t been explained satisfactorily[, but]...because there’s no evidence that there are fairies or that they caused the rain in the first place.” Well, isn’t this what I’ve been saying since the beginning? But, Mr. Buck, aren’t you just being dogmatic about fairies? Any time I say that fairies cause the rain, you accuse me of lying or mistake, and besides, you insist there simply must be some natural explanation. You’re just being a dogmatist! (And anyway, you can’t prove there aren’t Rain Fairies!)
But to keep this clear, even if there were evidence of rain-causing fairies, that would not necessarily make them a good explanation of rain, if these fairies were also equally plausible explanations of non-rain. That is, if fairy activity is identical during rainy and dry spells, then they would be a bad explanation of rain, even given evidence of their existence. If I say “gravity causes rain,” that would be a bad explanation of rain even though gravity does really exist (and even though gravity is, in fact, at least partly responsible for rain, come to think of it!)
What I’m trying to say is this: Rain Fairies are not necessarily an appeal to mysticism. As I said earlier, this might actually be a naturalistic explanation: an explanation of a phenomenon in terms of another phenomenon, which could be entirely rational, and entirely disprovable, silly as it might sound. We could run experiments and so forth. It’s not a mystical explanation, like “It was God’s will.” A mystical explanation is an appeal to undisprovable reasons. It says, essentially, “this phenomenon cannot be explained.” Shifting the Mystery to a higher ground is only acceptable so long as we can move on to the higher ground and explain that Mystery. The problem is when the Mystery gets shifted to a shelf that is beyond all possible reach—as in, “Well, God just made it that way.” This answer can be applied with equal explanatory value to every conceivable state of facts, and at every step of the analysis. If we answer “How did Joe die?” with “He was murdered by Jack,” then yes, we will then need to answer “Why did Jack murder him?” and so forth—there are always more questions. But these questions are answered in sequence, so that eventually, you get down to another explanatory realm. See further Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law 118-120 (New York: Modern Library, 1994) (1965). But a truly magical answer doesn’t really answer anything, because the exact same answer would fit everywhere and for every state of affairs. The problem isn’t Mystery-shifting; it’s Mystery-shifting without profit. That’s the difference between we don’t understand it yet and it surpasseth all understanding.
But, if Stuart Buck wants to believe in the clockmaker God of the deists, entirely comprehensible, measurable, predictable by some reasoned calculus, then that’s great! Now he just needs to provide some evidence of the existence of that God. So far he has not done so.
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