Whats in a name?- In Act II, Scene I, Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
Lisa: A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.Bart: Not if you called 'em stench blossoms.- The Simpsons, Season 9, 'The principal and the pauper'
If you’ll be patient with me, I’d like to – briefly – talk about
another book I’ve been reading recently: Mind in Science by Richard L. Gregory
(LINK). The book’s larger interest is the ways in which technology has, throughout
history, influenced our thinking about the workings of the universe and our own
minds in particular. I bring
it up for a peripheral speculation the author makes early on in a chapter cataloguing
the development and kinds of technologies available to the Greeks and earlier
civilizations. The author speculates that the general lack – for much of human
history - of autonomous power sources other than living organisms may explain
some of the mystery and fascination that accrues to ‘Prime Movers’ or causal
initiators, and our tendency to understand them in terms of entities or beings.
The argument for a prime mover as well as its siblings
(Necessary Beings, First Cause etc.) is that in the normal mortal run of
things, change is apparently not self-initiating: movement requires a mover,
contingency requires a necessary precursor. If we follow this chain of
causation back, so the argument goes, we must come to a first cause, a prime
mover. So far so good: if we accept the assumption that the universe at large
requires a cause in the same way that events within the universe seem to, the
argument doesn’t seem unreasonable. My objective here isn’t to critique the
import of the argument itself – insofar as it rests on an assumption which is difficult
to evaluate in its validity, including in its “Big Bang” form – but rather to
address the use the conclusion is sometimes put. St. Aquinas uses theargument to support the case for a Christian god, but the argument was
formulated first (or at least recorded first) by Aristotle. Aristotle obviously wasn’t interested in supporting the case for Yahweh, but thought the
argument implied the existence of gods – plural – not a god. Clearly, even if we accept the need for a prime mover, the
argument says nothing more about the attributes of that prime mover: whether it’s
an entity or force; singular or plural; nice, nasty or naughty – or even if it
still exists. Even if you accept ‘movement requires a prime mover’, that in
itself lends no credence to ‘a prime mover equals (my) god’. To give a sense of
the kind of attributes that can sneak in and attach themselves if we accept the
attachment of the label ‘god’ to prime mover, I used the Wikipedia entry on the
‘Attributes of God in Christianity’ to create a word cloud – where the scaling
of the words indicates their relative frequency on the source page:
But, I actually don’t think that its theologians or religious
people who are the only – or most unthinking – culprits of allowing peripheral
and unjustified associations with the word ‘god’ in by the back door. It’s
understandable that if I want to make the case for my god, I interpret the ‘Prime
Mover’ in that context. I can reasonably add ‘prime mover’ to the list of
attributes I think my god has, as long as I don’t claim that attribute somehow ‘proves’ the other attributes.
Another trope you sometimes see in debates about god
is the proposition that very clever people believe in god, so who are you to
say nay? Einstein is a common example, despite being quite clear about what
kind of god he was talking about:
I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.- (Albert Einstein, 1954)
But then, why call it god? If what you mean is the Prime Mover,
or the Grand Architect or even just the Implicit Order, why add the theistic
connotations to what is usually – at its most ‘spiritual’ – a deistic
conception? I wonder if it’s because there’s a kind of wondrousness attached to
‘god’, and the deist or non-theist purveyors of this view want to express that
in relation to the world as they see it. As regular readers will know, I get that. But I sometimes think that by appropriating the language of ‘god’,
one might be propagating the view that non-religious perspectives are poor
relations to their religious counterparts, and that the only language these
feelings can be properly expressed in is religious. I don’t believe that is the
case, and I’d rather mainline the mystery of the world in as pure a form as I’m
capable rather than have it sugar-coated in borrowed epithets that – for me –
as much to obscure the wonder as reveal it.
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