Video Transcript: Lesson 25

Dr. Clouser - all right, we're about now to take into consideration and assess  naturalist candidates for divinity. That is to say somebody has rejected that. It's  God the Creator. There's no transcendent creator and but rather the divine  reality, the reality that's self existent, that everything else depends on, is of some nature, some character, corresponds to a certain kind of properties and laws  that we experience, that the world exhibits to us. And the candidates for these,  historically speaking, have been such things as mathematical the ancient  Pythagoreans, I pointed out in an earlier talk, thought that all things were made  of numbers. Nobody quite goes that far today, and they certainly don't worship  them as the Pythagoreans did, but there are still people that think that the reality in which we live is basically mathematical. Werner Heisenberg said things like  that, that the ultimate laws of nature were going to turn out to be eternal laws,  mathematical laws for motion. Other people have held that the basic reality is  spatial. There were people who held held not so long ago, especially that the  that space is infinite and eternal it self existed, and space spontaneously  generates matter, and from there on, the story is that the things are physical,  and that explains everything about our world. And so the physical is also one, a  person who thinks of the basic reality, the basic character of reality, that in which we find ourselves as physical, is called a materialist in philosophy. That doesn't  mean somebody who's out only grubbed for as much money or as many  physical things as they can own. It doesn't mean that. It means that, basically,  reality has physical properties and laws, and some of those who hold that  position go so far as to try to argue that reality has only physical properties and  laws that all the rest of we seem to experience in our everyday experience is an  illusion. Other people have held that it's not just physical, but say logical. That's  been a popular one as well, that the laws of logic are the ultimate laws of reality,  and that they, in interacting with matter, produce the kind of world we find  ourselves in. That's been a long standing argument, that it's logic. Aristotle held  the logical laws to be the very laws of being. Let's just confine ourselves to these for now. These aren't the only candidates that have been put forward, but they're also mix and match combinations of these. There have been people that have  said it's mathematical plus physical. No, it's logical plus physical. Others have  actually held that the nature of reality is really sensory, and I just use that as a  term to approximate the view that we call phenomenalism. That sounds very  strange the average person. And I'm glad that it does, because it's nuts. It holds  that all we really know are sensations, our sensations. So what we see, taste,  touch, hear and smell, blobs of color arranged in certain ways, certain kinds of  sounds. So that's reality. That's all we could ever know. So those are the things  that are self existent and explain our reality insofar as it can be explained. And  the logical positivists of the 20th century held that it's sensory plus logical. The  sensory is what comes to us. The logical is what we impose on that and try to  make sense of it. These are all candidates, and I call them naturalist candidates.

That's the term naturalism. That means all there is is the universe or the  multiverse, if you think there are many universes, but all there is of the natural  stuff, there's nothing supernatural. There's no Creator God that is called all this  into existence. And so in each proposal that these that that whatever it is that's  divine has this character, there is an argument made for it being that in  philosophy, and we're going to assess those arguments. Now, what I want to do  in order to test them is to try to conceive of reality being as they claim it is. That  sounds overly simple. It's going to turn out to be a little more complicated, but  nothing you can't handle. Let's take, for example, our friends, the materialists,  who want to say that everything is basically Physical. Physical properties and  laws are self existent. They don't have a creator. Everything else is made out of  combinations. Physical things with physical properties under physical laws. So  this has independent existence. Remember, that's what divine means. It's  independent. It's non dependent. However you want to put it, I've been using the word self existent when I talked about other divinity beliefs. So this has to be  independent of all the rest, that's why it's the ultimate reality is of that nature. So  

Bob Zomermaand - let me jump in. Is there? Is that the kind of thing that comes  into play when you have someone like Stephen Hawking, who died recently,  talking about the universe as it is could not have been anything different,  because the characteristics of physical things have to be this way. Is that what  you're saying  

Dr. Clouser - Not quite. It's close. It's close for Hawking, and I'm going now by  his last book. I read the last one that some others, but maybe not all, but also  the last one and the he assumes already that the universe is is fundamentally  physical, and it's the physical properties and laws that explain what's going on.  

He for him, if you have space, time, and you have any kind of matter that, plus  the law of gravitation, is going to eventually produce the universe as we  experience it, okay? So he kind of mixes things together. When he says it  accounts for the universe, He doesn't mean the origin of the entire universe. He  means how the universe now is arranged. So we can explain that just with  matter space and the law of gravitation. But of course, a Christian would say,  Where did matter space in the law of gravitation come from? God created them.  And the reason that Hawking rejects that is that he's thinking only of God as an  explanation for how it came to be arranged the way it is. Yeah, okay, not how it  came to be at all, not why there's anything whatsoever. The answer to that is  because God Self existed and created other things that that's ruled out for him,  but you still think of God as a hypothesis that people make in order to plug gaps  in their understanding of the way the universe, of the way we find the universe  now, and since he finds there are no gaps to plug, he said, Well, I don't need  that hypothesis. I hope it's clear by now that my argument that throughout this 

course has been that belief in God is not a hypothesis. It's not an invention that  we come up with in order to plug our explanatory gaps. Belief in God is an  experience report. People experience God, and we've talked about that some  length. I'm not going to repeat all that now, but let's take these claims for other  gods, right, other divinities, and say, Can we conceive of any of these being  independent of all the rest? And I'm going to argue we can't, can't conceive of  them. That won't stop materialists from having the physical side of reality appear irresistibly to be divine, that will be their self evident divinity, belief, or the people  who said it was space or numbers or logic or sensations or combinations, I grant that they have their experience of self evidence as we have ours with respect to  what we find to be divine, but there's a big difference between belief in God and  belief that it's the physical or the spatial or the mathematical or the logical so on. 

Bob Zomermaand - Now, when you're saying divine, it's your Do they ever call it  divine, or do they just say this is self existent, or it has always? 

Dr. Clouser - that's right. They often use terms like self sufficient, okay? And so  on. They're not going to, rarely, rarely, but sometimes they do, oh, sometimes.  So Richard Dawkins, for example, will say, Well, I think it's the universe that's  divine, that's, that's all, that's, my God, there's a, there's a that's not just  metaphorical talk, in my view, that's, he's recognizing what he's really doing.  Okay, yeah, I was wondering if anybody did that, or did they just rarely, but it  does have okay, there's a materialist biologist who said, I know I'm not a  materialist, because science gives that to me. I bring my materialism to doing  science, and it's it's why we sometimes draw end up with conclusions that sound counterintuitive or wildly wrong. That's okay, but that's what materialism  requires. That's my faith, my holy faith. That's a bit pretty amazing, but, but that's not just metaphor, see, I'm saying that's literally right, okay, okay, okay, so  independent or self existent, and it's what everything else depends on. The self  existent origin of all else is the way I put it back when we were talking about.  Different religions and so on. So now we're going to make a thought experiment, and the thought experiment is going to be to try to conceive of the physical  independently of all the rest. And before we do that, I have to give you a little  more background. And it may seem at first, this background has nothing to do  with the subject, but it has a lot to do with it. And so I offer it subject to  connection, as they say in court. And this has to do with the fact that things  exhibit these properties in two ways to our experience. Things have  mathematical, spatial, physical, logical, sensory, they seem to have all these  kinds of properties, and the two ways they have them that are exhibited to our  experience are, I'm going to call them Active and passive. So let's take a  mathematical example. The earth we know to be the third planet from the Sun.  The Earth has that property actively. That means it doesn't depend on us or 

anything else. It has the third property of the sun from being the third planet from the Sun, whether we know it or not, or whether there are people to know it or  not, but that's its active property. It also has the property of being countable. And if it didn't have that property, we couldn't have counted it. We wouldn't know it to  be the third planet from the Sun, countable. Now, a lot of people would say, well, that's just us projecting that onto the earth that will fly unless the planet actually  has that property. We couldn't count it. You can't get away with saying, Well, I  can count that planet, but it's not countable. That's self contradictory. So these  passive properties are real, and they're just as crucial to our knowledge as are  the active ones. Take, for example, the spatial The Earth is locatable. In space, it has a location at any given time, it has a location actively, it's locatable by us.  That's a passive property, but things have physical properties, both actively and  passively. They have logical properties, but this one, because this has been  such a repeated candidate for divinity, saying things have passive logical  properties. What could that mean? Only statements and arguments have logical  properties, such as the property being true or false, or the property being  contradictory or contrary, or a logical argument has the characteristic of being  valid, that is, if its premises are true, its conclusion must also be true. But that  only applies to stuff in language, and I'm standing here saying, No, that's not  true passively, this marker that I'm using has logical properties. What would that  be? Well, how about the property of being logically distinguishable by us? It's  also logically conceivable by us. So passively speaking, everything that we  experience has some logical property or other, it has its own logical identity.  Same thing here, something can be read or sensory, and also we experience it  as being read and so on. So what I'm saying is that we have passive properties  as well as active that we there are such things, and we experience them that  way, and that. In fact, if you try to subtract from any of these, the passive  properties, the whole thing disappears before your eyes. Let's see if I can make  that clear. Let's stick with our friends, the materialists, and see what here's the  claim is reality is either exclusively physical or basically physical. And basically  physical means, if there's anything non physical, it's produced by the physical.  Okay, so either things have only this or so for everything, whatever it's either  physical or produced by the physical.  

Bob Zomermaand - For example, a produced by the physical would be an idea.  Really isn't a physical thing, right? But my brain is what is producing it,  

Dr. Clouser - okay, that's right, that's right. So that's a good example, because  that's one of the ones they worry about the most, whether the. Physical can  actually explain how someone could have an idea or an emotion or a desire,  because they seem so irresistibly non physical. But their claim is going to be  everything is either exclusively physical or produced by the exclusively physical. 

And this brings us to a key word in this, what they want to identify there as the  self existent. Origin of everything else is the purely physical. Something's purely  physical, even if every single thing in the universe also has non physical  properties somewhere buried in the in the core of the reality of that thing, there  is the purely physical. There are the purely physical realities that generate  everything else. That's true about it. Okay, that's another way of just saying what they need to deal with the purely because if they're going to saying this is the  nature of the Divinity, they can't leave it in relation to these. It's got to be able to  exist independently.  

Bob Zomermaand - Yeah, I was just going to say so, if you're saying purely  physical, yeah, then when it's purely physical, I can't count it. Is that the  

Dr. Clouser - Oh, yeah, that's where we're going. That's right. Okay, that's right.  If it's purely physical, then it's not going to have any passive mathematical  properties. Purely, right, right, purely issue because numbers aren't related to  one another by physical laws. Numbers don't fall to the ground if unsupported  numbers are related to one another by mathematical laws, and the number isn't  a physical object. So if you're going to think of something as purely physical,  you've got to subtract any quantity from it whatsoever that it's not even  countable. It's also the case that spatial shapes and locations aren't physical  objects.  

Bob Zomermaand - I would have a hard time conceiving of a physical item that  didn't exist in space.  

Dr, Clouser - I didn't say that. It's the other way around. Oh, physical things do  exist in space, I think that's right, of course, but we can abstract just the spatial  shape or the spatial location, and that's not a physical object. That spatial  shape, suppose we stick with the planet Earth, and it's slightly elliptical, okay?  That shape we deal with, we measure. We kept using calculations all the time.  But that shape itself is not a physical object. It's not a solid, liquid, gas or a  plasma, okay, yeah. And there are spatial laws, similarly with the physical itself  that we're trying to conceive here and put in the purely, this is the what  generates everything else. Well, purely, purely that, right? That means it's not, it  doesn't have logical properties either. But in that case, it's not logically distinct  from anything else. If you can't distinguish it, logically distinguish it from anything else, you don't know what you're talking about. No way. When you say, logically  distinguish. That's right, according to the principles of identity and non  contradictory. Yeah, a thing cannot both be true and false in the same sense, the same time, and everything is it's is what it is, okay? 

Bob Zomermaand - But I can't look at your marker and say, well, that doesn't  exist, because because you can logically demonstrate it does is that what you  say, Okay, I missed,  

Dr. Clouser - no. So what we did with the mathematical and you saw right away,  if it's something purely physical, then it can't be counted. Yeah, all right, if it's  purely physical can't be distinguished according to the laws of logic. It can't  because you you've dumped the law of identity and the law of non contradiction. Oh, okay, so you don't have the law of non contradiction, and everything is and  isn't, whatever it is which that's cut. That's why contradictions are ruled out. So  I'm saying that no, no, in that case, all right away, you don't have any idea what  you're talking about, because if you can't distinguish it from anything else, you  literally don't know what you're talking about. Similarly, if it's purely physical, it  can't be sensory, perceived. That doesn't usually bother them, but the logic,  yeah, and there's another one. This is one that's often been proposed as a  divinity belief. But if something's purely physical, it's also divorced from the  linguistic passive properties, and it can't be spoken of. So whatever the heck this is, it's not independent of the rest. I can't even call it purely physical, because  that linguistic term, yeah, I'm saying we have no, no concept of that at all. Now  you can, you can reply to that, okay, I don't have a concept, but it can be a  limiting idea. Okay, a limiting idea is an idea we have that we can't parse, we  can't pull it apart, we can't analyze it, and so on. But we have these in addition  to concepts. Yes, and that's right, it's an idea. It's an idea that the physical side  is self evidently, what is divine generates everything anything else, if there is  anything else, and and I can't conceive of it purely, but I have the idea that it's  the physical side of things that are what they really are at the at their most basic, and it's only the physical. Now here's what happens to this. You can have this  intuition. I've conceded that the the naturalist. There are naturalists who to  whom they had, they have the same experience with respect to the  mathematical or the spatial or the physical that I have with respect to God.  When I read the gospel, that's the truth about God from God. One of the famous materialists I heard give a lecture one time said, if you ask me why I'm a  materialist, not sure what I'd say. He said, it's not because of the arguments. I  guess I just have to say reality looks irresistibly physical to me. That's a good  description of it's self evident to me that this is the right one, so they can do that. But the point I want to make now is that people everywhere, all day, every day,  have dozens and hundreds of self evident beliefs form in their mind. Normal  sense perception gives us hundreds of them. Every day. We look out the  window, we see it's a nice day or it's raining. We look, we look up the street and  the bus is coming. So we step back out of the street. It's self evident the bus is  coming. You can't say, prove to me that your perception corresponds to you  can't do that. You can't you don't need to, though. Okay, so here's the here's the 

point. Normally, people everywhere spontaneously test beliefs, even though  they're self evident, even though their experience is self evident. I just gave a  couple of examples of perceptual beliefs that man, people test them all the time. Did you see? What I saw is, I don't think it's raining. Oh, but it is. Check again. I  look outside. There's drizzle. I miss the drizzle. Okay, that's for perceptual  beliefs. Same thing happens about memory beliefs that are self evident. I know  my name, address, telephone number, but if we talk about the family picnic we  had three years ago, and I say, So and so is missing, that's how I remember it.  That's self evident to me, but somebody else says, Oh no, she wasn't. She was  there really well, we get out photographs and we check and I'm wrong, because  sometimes beliefs aren't infallible. If you remember our session about that,  similarly, when we come to the beliefs that were biasedly called Rational  intuitions, it was called Rational only because people like such as Plato and  Aristotle wanted it to turn out that only rational truths, only the laws of logic or  math, fell under this that last kind but I've already pointed out, so does the belief  in other minds, and so do divinity beliefs. So it's not it's not unbiased. To call  these intuitions rational. They include the rational, but there's more than that,  and divinity beliefs are experienced as self evident as well.  

Bob Zomermaand - Somebody wants to talk to you, I think your phone  

Dr. Clouser - that's too bad. I thought I shut this off. Sorry about that. That does  not show that I'm in demand. Shows that somebody's trying to sell me  something. Yeah, all right, so we, we naturally, spontaneously check on beliefs,  even if they're self evident. The same thing happened. The same thing happens  even when we're dealing with with such abstract subjects as logic and  mathematics. We said, this is supposed to be an axiom. Is that right? Can we  check on it? The famous, famous example is that the great mathematical  logician Gottlieb Frege once set out a set of axioms that from which we would  get set theory trying to reduce mathematics to logic and and he had his  particular set, and Bertrand Russell constructed a proof that the sets  inconsistent. They can't all be true because it ends at a contradiction. So that's  there are ways we check on that stuff. Now here's my point, that naturalist belief  can't be checked. There's no way to test it because you don't know what you're  talking about. Okay, you try to talk about the purely physical that's already  disappeared. As soon as you take away the passive properties of these other  kinds, you're not thinking of anything at all anymore.  

Bob Zomermaand - Okay, just gonna say is that when you try to get to that  purely physical idea. Why? Yeah, the categories with which to not even speak,  

Dr. Clouser - the idea of the purely physical is empty. Yeah, there is no content. 

When you take away logical distinctness, the ability to be referred to in  language. You take away spatiality and any quantity and so on, you don't know  what you're talking about anymore. That's the argument. And that doesn't that  doesn't prove that that self evident belief is false, but what it does do is make it  untestable. You can't claim that there are pragmatic advantages to putting that  putting your money here for what it is that is the divine reality. There are no  pragmatic advantages to what you can't conceive of at all. What happens is that  the materialist flips back and forth from talking about the purely physical, and  then whenever they make an argument, it's the physical in relation to all the  others. It's not purely physical. It's the physical as it is subject to logical laws are  locatable in space and centrally perceivable.  

Bob Zomermaand - What I was, this is a thought going through my head. Then,  as you're talking so as a Christian, I look at at some of the you know, I read a lot  and and I read some of these, these things they were there, they talked about,  you know, we're looking for the grand idea is that, is that what people are talking about, the grand unifying theory of the universe.  

Dr. Clouser - That's right, I've spoken of what it is that somebody accords the  status of divinity, but people have used other terms for this, yeah, metaphysical  stuff, metaphysically ultimate and so on. Now the grand, grand unified theory is  what Hawking and others wanted in physics, but they're already assuming the  universe is only physical. Yeah, what they need is a brand unified physics, and  that will be the explanation of everything, because everything is only physical.  But that begs the question that we're talking about, we're talking about whether,  whether this is a legitimate self evidency intuition as to what it is that's divine or  metaphysically ultimate, whatever term you want to use. And I'm saying that with that experiment and thought that we just went through, what is the what is  physical that has no quantity is nowhere. It's not not logically distinct, can't be  perceived and can't be spoken of. Well, it's not anything we know now. Now my  point about this is that this, these intuitions that I think I can show the same  thing. It doesn't matter which one of these you plug in and test. You can't think of it apart from the rest. You can't conceive of it as being apart from the rest. But  unless it, unless whatever the divine reality is that's characterized, these are the  nature. These are supposed to be the nature of the divine reality. But unless that kind of thing can't exist independent of the rest, it can't be the cause of the rest.  

Bob Zomermaand - Yeah. And I was then, you know, proceeding on from that,  then, as I think of, Well, God is the Creator of all this, yeah. And the way God  made me, the way he made you, the way he made other people is that we need  all of these other things to describe any one thing that's right, that's right is that  that's right. Okay, 

Dr. Clouser - so it's not that I've now proven that being a materialist is based on  a self evident divinity belief that's false, but, but one that can't be tested. What  what a scientist does is never conceiving of matter as purely physical. Matter is  sensorily immovable, including being observing the results of experiments or  reading out what the Hadron Collider shows up on the on the computer  readouts. It has to do with, certainly matter as logically conceived, but don't exist or not. It's spatially locatable. It's mathematically calculable. You take  mathematically calculable away from physics. There's no physics.  

Bob Zomermaand - Yeah. What I've seen is that it's been said that mathematics  is the language, yes, of all the rest of the science, okay, okay, well, okay, that,  you know,  

Dr. Clouser - there's a bit of a bias That's extremely important. Yeah, I'm  contrasting this unfavorably with belief in God. Belief in God, I'm going to say, is  testable, whereas the stringent materialism is not. And the fact that they switch  back and forth from talking about the purely physical to treating it as though it's  not purely physical, makes the creates the illusion that that they have defended  this, this claim. They haven't. They haven't come within miles of it talking about  physical as it is, in space and subject to mathematical laws and logical laws.  And so it is not talking about the purely physical. So materialist like Paul  Churchill on page three, you just get started reading one of his books, and it  says. Well, there's nothing, however problematic about relating everything to the purely physical. That's the sentence of bottom of page three. Well, yes, there is  there. You can't, you don't know anything as purely physical, yeah. So he uses  that, that very term, oh, it's common. I'm okay. Materialists speak about this all  the time. Okay, yeah. And I'm saying that may be self evident to you, but it can't  be tested. And I'm saying about belief in God, it can be Well, so what do I  mean? I certainly don't mean we put God in the test tube. What I mean is that  we put belief in God to the test in our lives compared to our experience. What  sorts of things might confirm belief in God? Well, if you remember, I define  religious experience as any experience that generates, deepens or confirms a  religious belief. Lots of events confirm belief in God, for Christians and for that  matter, for Jews and Muslims. First off, answers to prayer. We pray for  something, sometimes something that seems highly unlikely, and it occurs  anyway. The answer to prayers that we have on behalf of other people are often  not answered the way we like, but there are still plenty of times it does happen  on other cases of we mentioned, the near death experiences, at least one of  which I challenge anyone to explain his oxygen deprivation of the brain, where  my friend sees another friend that he didn't know had died, who tells him, in this, in this episode, that he died. And when my friend comes to again, he called, tries

to call him up, and his wife says he died last month. There are all sorts of  experiences that do this, and including other kinds of religious experiences than  seeing the Word of God to be true, the sense of God's presence. And we talked  about all of that under religious experience. So there are all these experience  experiential ways that belief in God can be confirmed and strengthened. The  materialist can't confirm and straighten strengthen his at all, because he never  deals with the physical as purely and yet, that's what his claim is. So that claim  can't be tested. So what I'm saying about this is that each rests on an  experience of self evidence as to what it is that has, is the divine reality that  generates everything else. But what you pick some aspect of the universe  around us, such as quantitative, the spatial, the physical, the logical, the sensory and so on, then what happens when you try to isolate it is your very notion of it  disappears, and there's no way to test it in thought, in imagination, let alone in  practice. And so it comes out on the short end of the stick compared to belief in  God, and that's the experiment in thought.