Advanced Philosophy

Atheism and the Endlessness of Explanation

Science’s Promethean ethos and a world without foundations

When “God” is used only as an empty placeholder to name whatever’s supposed to be at the bottom of everything else, atheism seems, at first glance, to become incoherent.

The philosopher Immanuel Kant may have started this presuppositional line of argument, according to which atheism is impossible because the idea of God is innate. In that our faculty of reason drives us to seek absolute, final explanations, and “God” refers to whatever the final explanation will ultimately discover.

Descartes also thought of the idea of God as innate, but his argument is cruder and more circular, since his point is just that our concept of God is miraculous, that it couldn’t have originated except as the handiwork of God.

A Physical Equivalent of God

Take, for example, Werner Heisenberg’s concept of quantum fluctuations, of virtual particles popping in and out of being due to the uncertainty principle. These particles arise randomly from nothing, annihilating each other yet amounting to nonzero vacuum energy, meaning that empty space isn’t so empty. These virtual particles are uncaused causes and represent the potential for infinite universes. Our universe may have begun as just such a quantum fluctuation which was amplified in an inflation of the early universe’s seed.

So why not call vacuum energy “God”? Either would be the first cause. Of course, there’s no reason to think virtual particles are alive or intelligent or that they create universes with a benevolent goal in mind.

But that’s hardly a compelling reason to disavow the theological implications of the scientific cosmologist’s theory of everything. After all, God has long since been stripped of his exoteric personal trappings. Going back to Plato, philosophers have equated God with the Absolute, or more precisely with the absolute superbeing that adequately accounts for everything in nature. Plato called God “the good” and interpreted this as the source of all ideal forms and imperfect particulars in the universe.

Likewise, mystical theists have long distinguished between theistic metaphors and the transcendent reality of God; these theists personalize God for mass consumption, while the intellectual elites understand that the metaphors are incoherent and nonsensical.

If the quantum foam is effectively divine (eternal, all-powerful, the creator of our universe), doesn’t atheism become impossible or a form of confusion? At best, the atheist could say she rejects this or that god or image of God, but not the need for explanations to be wrapped up in some absolute which might as well be called “God.”

Or so it would seem until we delve into the confusions at work here.

The Promethean Ethos of Science

Far from entailing theism, the scientific methods of explanation are inherently atheistic precisely because they’re opposed to settling on any absolute. A scientist explains X by positing Y where Y likewise has to be explained by Z. If Y explains X, but Y is supposed to be self-explanatory without resting on any Z, the statement, “Y explains X” isn’t scientific.

Indeed, that statement would be misleading, because its notion of explanation at work in it would be vacuous. In so far as science is methodologically naturalistic, science simply assumes a reductive mode of explanation. Explanations can be holistic, meaning that they don’t take the whole to reduce to a collection of parts, but these explanations can’t appeal to the miraculous. A genuine explanation illuminates by treating that which is to be explained as a mechanism that can, in theory, be controlled.

In short, science rests on a Promethean ethos according to which knowledge is supposed to be empowering and the purpose of liberated, intelligent creatures is to become godlike, to use our understanding of nature to build a better world.

Thus, the theorist who posits an absolute, an end to further investigation and something that has to be taken for granted, that has no reason as to why it is as it is and thus no way for us to stand under that thing or to understand it and thereby to have power over it is no scientist at all. Such a theorist would have betrayed the Promethean ethos.

Compare this scientific instrumentalism with the principle of sufficient reason. The latter principle is that everything has a reason for why it’s so rather than otherwise. Theists like the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz used this principle to attempt to prove that God has to exist to explain why there’s something rather than nothing.

The problem is that “God” in this “explanation” would be just such an absolute miracle over which we can have no power; that is, God is supposed to explain everything else, but the principle of sufficient reason doesn’t apply to God. God can work in mysterious ways, because he’s beyond our comprehension, which is to say God’s the exception to the Promethean, humanistic enterprise. Saying that God explains why nature rather than nothing exists is to offer only a pseudo-explanation because God wouldn’t be just another natural thing that needs explanation and thus that can be potentially tamed and assimilated by us.

The Promethean ethos can be seen in scientists’ discomfort with the seemingly-inexplicable, fundamental physical constants that arise in cosmology. These constants include the masses of particles and the strength of fundamental forces, and they’re known only by measurement, not by a theory that explains why they’re so and not otherwise.

The physical constants are unsettling because measurement affords scientists only incomplete power over the phenomena, in principle. Although you can control what you can measure, because you know the extent of the thing, if you don’t understand why it has those dimensions, you’re still in the dark, which leaves open the possibility that the thing in question might surprise and overcome the scientist in turn. That’s the mammalian root of the concern and why scientists are often seeking deeper and deeper explanations.

The end of these investigations would be the end of science — and not in the happy sense that scientists would finally have an explanation of everything. Instead, the final explanation would posit an absolute, a first cause that “explains” everything else but that wouldn’t in turn be explained by anything more fundamental.

This would entail that science has never been engaging in explanation in the first place. All explanations would become trivial and illusory if underlying them all were a miracle. If the “scientific” master theory ends up positing what is functionally a miracle, science would never have actually been as we currently deem it. Scientific progress would have been akin to a mirage, and all scientific understanding would be undermined by that which is fundamentally inexplicable.

Metaphysics for Scientists and Atheists

What this means is that the scientific ethos presupposes what philosophers call “antifoundationalism.” There are no absolutes in scientific explanations or indeed in any illuminating explanation. In the scientific picture of nature, there’s always more to discover because the human urge to dominate is never satiated.

Again, the driving force here is moral rather than metaphysical. We don’t know there’s necessarily no absolute or miraculous end to all explanations; instead, we have faith in that assumption because we’re ambitious and industrious and we trust in our right to exist and to fulfill our godlike potential to leave nothing standing in our way. Institutionally speaking, science is Faustian and Luciferian.

But how should we think of a type of world that would sustain atheism, in metaphysical terms? We saw that the world might be grounded in an absolute called “God” which allows for a final, complete “explanation” of reality — except that that explanation would be undone by the foundational miracle which turns out to be inexplicable, vitiating the search for that totalizing, master theory.

We then analyzed the nature of scientific explanation to discover the instrumentalism at the heart of science. Atheism is possible if scientific antifoundationalism is grounded in an irrational pursuit of power. To speak of the scientist’s “methodological” excuse for always seeking a deeper explanation and never settling for a self-evident miracle is only to speak euphemistically of the Luciferian ethos, of the urge to be godlike by humanizing the wilderness, the so-called divinely created order.

Now we should be wondering what sort of world isn’t subject to complete explanation. There are at least three possibilities. First, nature could consist of an infinite series of things, such that there’s always something else to discover and thus a means by which to dominate any given thing, by grasping the conditions that make that thing possible.

Notice that in this case there would be no “world” or “universe” in the sense of a cosmos or a coherent, ordered totality. There would be a continuum of universes, each shading off into the next. There would be a multiverse of universes, but with only an infinite series of “foundations” or fundamental laws of how universes form within that infinite “space.”

The point to emphasize is that the task of explanation would necessarily be incomplete because the domain that’s explicable would be endless.

A second possibility is that the universe might be limited but irrational, damaged or “fallen.” The reason you could always find another explanation is that the world might be fundamentally absurd, such that each explanation would be like an act of rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic. Explanations would only be flawed interpretations to match the incoherence of reality.

We might have assumed, on the contrary, that the only alternative to a perfectly ordered whole is chaos or random, dizzying, inexplicable disorder. Yet there’s a middle option, which is a world that’s only tantalizingly ordered because the ordered parts don’t hang together in the end, but would be like islands floating randomly and lost at sea. The natural order might amount to a temptation: we may be seduced by the apparent regularities into assuming they’re perfectly explicable, only to discover the order is partly subjective and is in any case frustratingly incomplete.

A key part of a third possibility is epistemological: the world might be perfectly ordered, but our cognitive capacities may be too limited to comprehend that order. Contrary to optimists, the cosmos might ultimately be beyond the understanding of any intelligent species that arises within it. The problem would be that the universe’s ability to be what it is would outstrip its potential for evolving intelligent creatures. Thus, the universe would always have the last laugh.

Interestingly, the monotheistic alternative ends up being indiscernible from the second option. In so far as God is a person whose existence is thus inconsistent with atheism, this deity must be psychologically flawed after all, since the exemplar of what someone would be like who is all-powerful and who lives forever by himself would surely be someone like Donald Trump, a grievously flawed character.

The best theodicy wouldn’t be a mere cover-up of God’s sins to account for nature’s evident moral imperfections, but an altogether darker theology than most religionists would be willing to entertain. Monotheism would entail:

• Cosmicism, the view that the higher powers are repugnant and inhuman,
• Existentialism, the convictions that life is absurd but that there are better and worse ways of dealing with that unappealing fact.

In any case, atheism is made impossible only vacuously when theism is turned into a phony explanation that appeals to an absolute miracle. The nature of a world in which explanations are genuine and illuminating supports our instrumental will to survive and to dominate the environment.

That world would do so by being either (a) infinitely various in extent, (b) absurd, blackly comedic, and thus occupying no moral high ground against human hubris, or (c) inscrutable and thus irrelevant to our dealings except in so far as the apparent limits of our cognition might instill humility, a check on our worst impulses.