How to Recognize God?

[Tom Cohoe]

The following is relevant to theistic evolution, although it may not be immediately obvious.

How could we recognize God?

If God appeared as a marmot on a rock, or as a human, would we recognize God?

We would not. We would see a marmot, or a person. Multitudes saw a person 2,000 years ago, but none recognized God. Many accepted God as an act of faith, but faith based acceptance is not the same thing as recognition. So, if God appeared before us, how would we be able to know that it was God?

This is an important question, because we are challenged by atheistic scoffers, "If God exists, where is he?"

"God is the elephant that is not in the living room," they say.

In an age of science, nothing that we can recognize at all could be recognized as a supernatural entity ... as God. This is because if it is something we can recognize then there must be some pattern to it, and patterns which we observe are the objects of study of science. Ultimately, they are mathematically describable and that which we describe mathematically we say we have understood scientifically. Since science studies nature, what we have understood scientifically we will see as being part of nature. That which is part of nature is not supernatural. So we would not be able to recognize the supernatural aspect of God in nature, even if every cricket is an aspect of God.

Since what is regular is the subject of science and is thereby relegated to the category natural, the only perceivable thing left that could be the supernatural aspect of God is the irregular. By this, I mean something without pattern.

What perceivable thing could be without pattern?

The sequence of numbers typically obtained in consecutive rolls of an unbiased die has the appearance of being irregular, or, to use a better word ... random. If such a sequence were random, and there is a case to be made that it is pseudorandom rather than truly random, then we would have one of the simplest exemplars of the type of phenomenon which could be a perceivable supernatural aspect of God. It is a phenomenon in which nothing is recognizable.

We could recognize God only in that which is unrecognizeable.

It is a bit of a leap, but this illustrates that the answer to the title question is that the (supernatural) God cannot be recognized because there is nothing to recognize in that perceivable aspect of God. The only aspect of God that is recognizeable is natural.

A sceptic (to use Pascal's word) can not be shown anything that he would recognize as supernatural, because anything recognizable can be analyzed as part of nature.

He said, "The knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of God has been given to you, but to others I speak in parables, so that, "'though seeing, they may not see; though hearing, they may not understand." (Luke 8:10)
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This is relevant to theistic evolution, intelligent design, creation science, et al. For now, though, this is long enough.

 

[theFijian]

The following is relevant to theistic evolution, although it may not be immediately obvious.

How could we recognize God?

If God appeared as a marmot on a rock, or as a human, would we recognize God?

We would not. We would see a marmot, or a person. Multitudes saw a person 2,000 years ago, but none recognized God.

Didn't Peter recognise him?

[sup]15[/sup]"But what about you?" he asked. "Who do you say I am?" [sup]16[/sup]Simon Peter answered, "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God." [sup]17[/sup]Jesus replied, "Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by man, but by my Father in heaven.

So what was irregular about that?

 

[Tom Cohoe]

Didn't Peter recognise him?


So what was irregular about that?

Thank you for your reply, Fijian.

Yes of course, God can cause us to know something which we could not otherwise know. This is revelation, just as your bible quotation actually tells us.

So I must refine what I mean by recognition (I could not have expected otherwise).

For my present purpose, I refine recognition to be a recognition which has happened through the self nature ... through the sensory perception, prior knowledge, and reasoning ... alone, of the person who is doing the recognizing. It is a recognition which occurs without divine revelation or divine inspiration.

Then, I say, the supernatural aspect of God is unrecognizable. We would see only disorder.

 

[Tom Cohoe]

The first implication of the unrecognizability of the supernatural aspect of God is that any attempt to verify the existence of God through science must be doomed. The universe was intelligently designed by the supernatural God, but all we will find is nature.


Anything done by the supernatural God can only appear to be random.


This is actually very interesting and very important, because the theory of evolution is, in part, that random mutations give us the variation in individuals upon which natural selection operates to determine what survives.


Random is how any supernatural aspect of God must appear. We can know the supernatural God only through faith (divine revelation excepted).


Far from being a reason for despair, the random operation of mutation is the escape from the Blind Watchmaker of Richard Dawkins. It is not, after all, the Divine Watchmaker who is blind. It is us. We cannot see the Supernatural Watchmaker acting in Nature because any supernatural aspect of the Watchmaker must appear random to us. The Watchmaker is not a machine which we can analyze. God can understand us, but we cannot understand God.


Is this not the way it should be? That the inferior creature in nature cannot understand the superior, supernatural Creator? This is what we have always understood. The ways of God are mysterious. So they necessarily must be.


We can understand some aspects of God. These are the natural aspects. A natural aspect of God or God's work is subject to scientific study. So, a regularity in (read natural aspect of) God's work is that a billion years ago, random mutation and natural selection operated and five hundred million years ago they operated and today they still operate. The constancy of the mechanism of evolution is a regularity. This mechanism always has and, if it is God's plan, it always will operate as long as there is life on Earth. Consequently, we can have a theory of evolution. An irregularity in (read supernatural aspect of) God's work is the indeterminacy in the next particular mutation. What mutation will occur at what time and place is beyond science. No scientific theory can tell us whether the next gamma ray photon intercepted and disrupted into a mutation in a germ cell nucleotide of some individual of some species will be on that individual's chromosome 2 or 5, and it cannot tell us which nucleotide on the chosen chromosome will be disrupted.


Now, if the course of evolution were such that evolution could only have taken the path it has taken, a path leading to bipedal humans 13 billion years after the creation of the universe and the existence of Richard Dawkins, then evolution could be said to be entirely natural. It could be said that God could have no role after starting it off. The randomness of mutations would make no difference. Evolution would necessarily proceed inexorably to the same end regardless of the details of the sequence of changes in chromosomes over the eons. But evolutionary science does not hold that the course of evolution is deterministic. Rather, it holds that evolution has proceeded by a non deterministic (read random) path over a landscape of possibilities to a particular point today out of virtually countless possible present results. What chose the path and therefore the final result is supernatural.


If life on Earth is God's work, then it is certainly intelligently designed, but the demonstration of that supernatural intelligence is beyond science. Intelligent Design, as a science, could only demonstrate that life on Earth is the work of something natural. It could not find the work of God, only the absence of the work of the supernatural God. For that reason, we should pray that evolutionary scientists continue to refute the claims of intelligent design science.


It is a tenet of our faith that we know God through faith (or divine revelation), not scientific revelation.

 

[theFijian]

Was there a particular point you wanted to discuss?

 

[Tom Cohoe]

Well Fijian (if I may call you that), I'm interested in talking about any of the above, but of particular interest is the idea that any supernatural aspect of God must appear to be random.

 

[Mallon]

Random is how any supernatural aspect of God must appear.

Why? One of the foundations of science is that there is some predictable order to the universe. Indeed, this tenet is rooted in the Christian belief that an orderly God should produce an orderly creation. In fact, in the early days of science, many argued that the orderliness of the universe is evidence of God's existence.
I'm confused about why you think the opposite should be true.

 

[Tom Cohoe]

Mallon said:

Why? One of the foundations of science is that there is some predictable order to the universe. Indeed, this tenet is rooted in the Christian belief that an orderly God should produce an orderly creation. In fact, in the early days of science, many argued that the orderliness of the universe is evidence of God's existence.
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Yes, and we have a universe with some predictable order created by God. The implication of order, though, is that there are rules which the universe follows. Insofar as there are rules which have been discovered, though, there is no need for God to someone who does not want to believe. Where we see that rules discovered by science operate we see the natural aspect of God, i.e. nature. Since the end of the sixteenth century, we have had an explosion in the discovery of these rules, a state of affairs which has made it easier and easier to believe that God plays no role in the universe, which is deism at best. By the time of the French Revolution, the universe seemed to be completely deterministic according to the science of the day. Asked by Napoleon why he had not mentioned God in his book on astronomy, Laplace replied, “I had no need of that hypothesis (Je n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là.)”

An orderly universe is evidence of a loving God in the heart of a believer. He gave us this beautiful creation. To a non believer, an orderly universe is evidence that God is not needed. Rules discovered by science will do.

Actually, I would modify your statement, “in the early days of science, many argued that the orderliness of the universe is evidence of God’s existence”. I don’t think it was the order. Rather, it was the beauty and the mystery. I believe that militant, loud atheism arose in the premath of the French Revolution, as a direct consequence of the increasing scientific explanation for things which previously had been mysterious. France was the leading scientific country at the time, so in France mostly (but also to a lesser degree in all of Europe), the existence of quiet doubt which had always existed grew into disdainful and militant atheism.

Christianity has had a rough ride with science and its endless series of demonstrations that something once mysterious was actually following precise rules. The planets, for example, moved in a mystifying manner inadequately explained by epicycles. Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo brought forth rules and demonstrations which embarrassed the church and caused strife which is infamous to this day. Worse, Darwin showed that species, including man, arose following rules rather than by an inexplicable and random act of creation by God. We are still in knots about it … which is a great detriment to Christianity.

By the end of the nineteenth century, it seemed that there was no randomness - no indeterminacy - in the universe. Everything followed scientific rules. In 1871, James Clerk Maxwell said, “the opinion seems to have gotten abroad that in a few years all the great physical constants will have been approximately estimated, and that the only occupation which will then be left to men of science will be to carry on these measurements to another place of decimals”.

Even the “random mutations” of genes were only pseudorandom mutations - given measurements of sufficient accuracy of the state of the universe and given sufficient calculating power, a mutation could be accurately predicted just as the result of a coin toss could be calculated given sufficiently accurate measurement of all the factors involved. In short, it seemed to be a deterministic universe.

We know now, though, that mutations are truly random. There is no scientific explanation of the fact that mutation A happened rather than mutation B. There is no rule. It is a principal of quantum mechanics. To an atheist, nothing else is needed. To a believer, this true randomness is a place where the supernatural aspect of God can be seen. The atheist however, no longer has the assurance that all is explained. He can no longer say dismissively, “Je n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là.”. It is evident that something more is needed. The supernatural God will do and the atheist only resists.

In fact, true randomness is everywhere. Quantum level uncertainty is amplified not only by biological systems in their growth and reproduction, it is also amplified wherever small differences in initial states grow into large differences in later states, wherever non linearity is present in the various systems of our universe, wherever the phenomenon called chaos exists.

Order is evidence of nature only. To an atheist, that’s it. To one of faith, it is a natural aspect of God. Only in disorder is the supernatural aspect of God discernable, and in disorder there is nothing to recognize. God is with us, able to act undetectably at any time without violating the laws of science.
　

 

[theFijian]

Only in disorder is the supernatural aspect of God discernable, and in disorder there is nothing to recognize.

Emm... you keep saying this but I see no reason why I should accept or believe it apart from the assertion that since nature is ordered then apparently the supernatural must be disordered.

Edit: wait , or are you saying that where we see disorder in nature we are actually seeing the supernatural nature of God? Is this just a variation on God of the gaps?

 

[Tom Cohoe]

It is not the God of the gaps.

The God of the gaps is evoked, foolishly, where some detail of evidence remains to be discovered, especially with respect to evolution theory, but for which there is no special scientific reason to think that this detail cannot or will not be discovered. The only difficulty is that we are looking for the remains of things that died hundreds of thousands to millions of years ago.

What I am talking about is where it is part of the science itself that there is no scientific explanation for what happens. In quantum mechanics, when events occur, a choice has been made from superposed possibilities. Other than that the choice follows statistical laws, there is no rule for which state is selected. This is long settled science. Those who think that they have an explanation, or who think an explanation will be found tend to be thought of as crackpots by other scientists.

In the first case, the discovery of a "missing link" would be important but in no way surprising. In the second case, a scientific explanation would be revolutionary.

I am not asserting that where we see disorder we see the supernatural nature of God. I am saying, "could be". I am also saying that the supernatural nature of God could not be seen except as disorder, because where there is no disorder, there is a rule.

God does not follow rules.

 

[Tom Cohoe]

the assertion that since nature is ordered then apparently the supernatural must be disordered.

That is not quite my assertion.

It is not "nature is ordered, therefore the supernatural must be disordered". The premiss is different in two ways.

To correct the first difference I would change the premiss as you have it from "[what is] nature is ordered" to "what is ordered is nature". More formally, it would be a change from "all that is nature is ordered" to "all that is ordered is nature". It is reversed.

But, I am not trying to say that the supernatural is disordered. The thread title, after all, is "How to recognize God". I am trying to say something about human capability, not something about what God must be. So the second change to the premiss would be to change "all that is ordered is nature" to "all that appears to be ordered is nature".

As a formal syllogism, it would go.

1. All that appears to be ordered is natural.
2. The supernatural is not natural.
3. Therefore, the supernatural cannot appear to be ordered.

Now it is about what we can recognize. It is about human beings, not God.

My sloppiness of expression is the cause of the confusion.

 

[theFijian]

I am not asserting that where we see disorder we see the supernatural nature of God. I am saying, "could be".

Ok, so you're not saying it is God of the Gaps, just that it could be God of the Gaps?

I am also saying that the supernatural nature of God could not be seen except as disorder, because where there is no disorder, there is a rule.

God does not follow rules.

God acts in accordance with his own nature, and does not act contrary to his nature. These are the 'rules' which he follows.

1. All that appears to be ordered is natural.
2. The supernatural is not natural.
3. Therefore, the supernatural cannot appear to be ordered.

You premise is that only the natural is ordered. This has not been shown so 3 does not follow.

 

[Tom Cohoe]

You[r] premise is that only the natural is ordered. This has not been shown so 3 does not follow.

No, my premiss is:

All that appears to be ordered is nature
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which is not equivalent your putative restatement of my premiss:

Only the natural is ordered.
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because my premiss leaves open the possibility that the supernatural is ordered but appears [to us] to be disordered.

Ok, so you're not saying it is God of the Gaps, just that it could be God of the Gaps?

No.

[more later]

 

[Tom Cohoe]

[I deleted this accidental post which was just a copy of part of the post #13 - TC]

 

[theFijian]

No, my premiss is:

All that appears to be ordered is nature
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which is not equivalent your putative restatement of my premiss:

Only the natural is ordered.
​

because my premiss leaves open the possibility that the supernatural is ordered but appears [to us] to be disordered.

Uh ok, so only the natural appears [to us] ordered. The supernatural would not appear ordered to us [apparently]

No

So omphalos instead of god of the gaps?

 

[Tom Cohoe]

Uh ok, so only the natural appears [to us] ordered. The supernatural would not appear ordered to us [apparently]

Functionally, we have always called supernatural that which we couldn't understand. When, through science, we understood it, i.e., when we found the order that was there to be found, we said that it was just a natural phenomenon after all. E.G., St. Elmo's fire became electrical discharge. The supernatural retreated.

So yes, basically, you've got it.

So omphalos instead of god of the gaps?

These are just dismissive labels.

Fijian, have you thought about the implications of quantum mechanics?

 

[theFijian]

Functionally, we have always called supernatural that which we couldn't understand. When, through science, we understood it, i.e., when we found the order that was there to be found, we said that it was just a natural phenomenon after all. E.G., St. Elmo's fire became electrical discharge. The supernatural retreated.

So yes, basically, you've got it.

Indeed, classic God of the Gaps.

These are just dismissive labels.

That was a dismissive statement.

Fijian, have you thought about the implications of quantum mechanics?

Go on, you're dying to tell me!

 

[Tom Cohoe]

Indeed, classic God of the Gaps.

No it is not.

Whatever determines the choices made from the quantum mechanical probability distribution underlies everything that we observe. Every single thing that happens that we can know about is (as the Copenhagen interpretation calls it) the collapse of a wave function.

Everything.

That's no 'gap', for starters, my good buddy Fiji. It was what the evangelist Henry Drummond appealed for when he coined the sneer, "God of the gaps".

So what is making these choices that underlie everything that happens, then? Maxwell's demon? A pseudorandom number generator, the big computer in the sky?

Did you ever wonder why physicists are more likely than biologists to be theists? Why, for example, did John Polkinghorne, professor of physics at Cambridge University, one of the most prestigious physics universities in the world (home to Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell, Ernest Rutherford, and Steven Hawking, among many other illustrious physicists) go on to become an ordained priest in the Anglican Church?

I thought not.

All this, and more, to be explained.

 

[Tom Cohoe]

I am not asserting that where we see disorder we see the supernatural nature of God. I am saying, "could be".

Why "could be"?

Because, how, living in shadowland, could I know?

But then, what's the point of all these words?

The point is to have an answer for a sceptic who says, of God, "I have no need of that hypothesis. I'm rational (a favorite label of the sceptics for themselves)".

To this sceptic, we can say, "This isn't the nineteenth century. Science has found its limits. All is not explained. That hypothesis works. No scientific hypothesis does. I thought you said you were rational? It seems you have an irrational faith that God does not exist. Well there's evidence. You can make your choice, but it's faith either way. You can choose nihilism and an unexplained fundamental nature of the world, or you can choose life, love, meaning, and have an explanation."

But it has to be, "could be". Augustine advised as much almost two millenia ago. Who knows, a scientific revolution could occur and we could end up with a deterministic model for the universe again. Then TheFijian would be right to call me a gappy guy. Oh, except I said "could be", so I'd escape narrowly.

No. What arrogance to say that God must influence the world by what I've outlined above. It's just something to challenge the sceptics, who call themselves rational. And it's a heck of a lot smarter than looking for scientific proof that God plays a role in this world. We have been offered a way back from our fallen state. It is faith. Not scientific proof. What kind of idea of God do they have who think he's not smart enough to hide the fact of his existence from our eyes so we can prove scientifically he exists rather than depend upon faith? Science makes bad faith and faith makes bad science. Irreducible complexity is as dumb as using a literal reading of Genesis to drive away the theory of evolution.

 

[gluadys]

The point is to have an answer for a sceptic who says, of God, "I have no need of that hypothesis. I'm rational (a favorite label of the sceptics for themselves)".

To this sceptic, we can say, "This isn't the nineteenth century. Science has found its limits. All is not explained. That hypothesis works. No scientific hypothesis does. I thought you said you were rational? It seems you have an irrational faith that God does not exist. Well there's evidence. You can make your choice, but it's faith either way. You can choose nihilism and an unexplained fundamental nature of the world, or you can choose life, love, meaning, and have an explanation."

What arrogance to say that God must influence the world by what I've outlined above. It's just something to challenge the sceptics, who call themselves rational. And it's a heck of a lot smarter than looking for scientific proof that God plays a role in this world. We have been offered a way back from our fallen state. It is faith. Not scientific proof. What kind of idea of God do they have who think he's not smart enough to hide the fact of his existence from our eyes so we can prove scientifically he exists rather than depend upon faith? Science makes bad faith and faith makes bad science. Irreducible complexity is as dumb as using a literal reading of Genesis to drive away the theory of evolution.

What interests me even more than the reaction of skeptics to this sort of argument is the reaction of IDists. It seems that "faith" has become a pejorative word in their vocabulary. And Christians who appeal to faith have fallen into a cesspool called "fideism".