Conceptual Instruments and Guides for Perceiving the Existence of God

Cicero: On the Nature of the Gods

Peter Wentz: Gray

I decided to compile and organise in one essay my years of reflections on theistic apologetics, the topic of "proving" the existence of God, and the approach I've settled on today. These reflections meanders through all kinds and fields of philosophical and theological topics, epistemology, psychology, philosophy of mind, nature, even Taoism, but over the years I've found my views here more or less settled and stable and don't feel the need to revisit or substantially revise them.

That said, the title of my essay, conceptual instruments and guides for perceiving the existence of God, may raise some eyebrows, and is very different from the usual "evidence" or "proofs" for the existence of God. To understand this approach we will need to lay some epistemic groundwork and foundation for this discussion.

Epistemic Standards?

It is usual to speak of standards of evidence and of proof, as if there were a measurable yardstick for determining the amount and weight of evidence, which then passes some sort of threshold to pass as "knowledge" before you can be said to be justified or know something. These are of course physical metaphors, if you ask how hot water needs to be before it boils, there is a definite number, 100 degrees Celsius. How much energy would be enough to lift or move this object, etc.

Yet how can we translate these physical measurable metaphors into epistemic normative terms? How can we determine what constitutes "enough" evidence? These are weighty (!) epistemological questions, but which I do not intend to enter. I will simply state my own position outright: these standards are a complete fiction summoned entirely out of the thin air, I am generally against the idea of epistemic normativity, as if there were some invisible ruler or measure of "amount" or "weight" of evidence with even more ethereal "thresholds" for evidence, we should not be misled by metaphors we cannot cash in in literal terms. I am more of an epistemic naturalist or view knowing as a causative affair, certain perceptions, arguments, or ideas cause you or motivate you to accept a proposition as true.

Although I do not intend to enter into a meta-epistemic argument about my position, to motivate (!) my position I would simply use a parallel field. We are familiar with the phrase "proof beyond a reasonable doubt" as a standard of evidence and proof in criminal trials. Before a jury can convict a person of a crime, potentially committing a person to a lifetime in prison or even death, the prosecutor has to prove his guilt "beyond a reasonable doubt". It is of interest that of late his formula has fallen into disfavour in English courts. The following is taken from a law of evidence textbook:

Richard Glover, Peter Murphy: Murphy on Evidence, Thirteenth Edition (2013)

This would be my approach. I would not be approaching this question of perceiving God's existence in terms of some ephemeral "standards" of reasonableness floating "out there", rather, in my discussions I would mention and refer to various ideas, concepts, suggestions, etc, which serve as pointers, telescopes and microscopes to guide you to see and perceive the reality of God for yourself, but they are not the thing itself to be seen, they merely point to the thing. It is then my hope that my pointing or demonstrative would so help you see the point I am trying to make such that it subjectively satisfies you and make you feel sure to "return a verdict" and accept the claim. If this method is "good enough" for the criminal law courts, where a person can be deprived of his or her freedom and even life, I believe that it should be good enough for our topic where the perception of the existence of God may very well lead to life-long changes to ourselves.

Here's another picture to help you see (!) the epistemic method here. Suppose we were in a forest or jungle searching for an obscure animal, or playing a game of Where's Wally, and then suppose I spot the animal or Wally and say, there it is! And then you ask where? All I can do is to point or guide your perception to where the animal or Wally's at. "The animal is under the tree with some yellow leaves, besides the blueberry shrubs." My discussion here would be highly analogous to pointing out where the animal is, I will help direct and focus your attention to aid you perceive and find the animal, but in the end, you have to look and see for yourself. My pointing and guides are not evidence of the existence of the animal in the sense of satisfying some standard, they are just tools and instruments to help you see. Galileo before complained that some of the philosophers who opposed him refused to look into the telescope to see his claims for themselves. I can provide the "telescope", the guide and "conceptual instruments" to help you see, but in the end, you have to look into the telescope yourself, and you would be right that the mere telescope or tool doesn't by itself constitute "evidence" for my claims.

Different Instruments for Different Things

As the issue of epistemology and methods are so deeply entangled with traditional theistic apologetics, I believe it necessary to continue clearing away from the epistemic assumptions we will have in approaching this question before we actually enter into it proper.

If we continue the metaphor of telescopes, we have no problems understanding that different entities require different instruments for perception. We use telescopes for the stars and microscopes for organisms. It is obvious then that the method for perceiving and understanding a claim depends on the contents and nature of the claim. To establish that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line in geometry would be very different from establishing that water boils at 100 degrees, the existence of electrons, and that of Napoleon. It would be in vain to attempt to establish mathematical propositions by attempting to measure every straight line in existence to determine that they are the shortest, or to conduct a repeatable experiment to verify that Napoleon once existed, it is not like we can create a parallel earth and run the history and see if Napoleon pops up, like performing a chemical reaction to see if a compound is produced.

So before we can provide the tools for perceiving the divine existence, we have to know what we are looking for in the first place, and what sort of thing God is.

Beginning with the Basics: God as a Cosmic Mind

Most traditional apologetics would begin with a definition of God which ascribes various omni-properties to Him, e.g. omnipotence, omnibenevolence, omniscience, eternality, infinite, etc, etc. Then having defined God as the whole package, there is the difficulty of how any evidence can possibly prove the whole package, along with substantive problems with the consistency of any individual property or with the package itself.

What I would propose here is something a lot more modest, and slower paced. I do not wish to embroil myself into substantive and controversial theses, say, concerning God's omnibenevolence, because "what is goodness?" itself is a landmine of philosophical controversies which I think it would be unwise to make as a precondition to settle before we can discuss God. (And in the interest of full disclosure, I am myself a theistic moral nihilist, so I would probably not accept 95% of most refined conceptions of omnibenevolence.)

Let's instead start with something a lot more basic: God is a mind, a "mind behind nature" or a mind "behind" the universe and cosmos, something along the lines of Cicero's quote at the start. This definition will be agnostic as to whether this mind is "benevolent", "evil", omnipotent, etc. We will attempt to bracket and segment as many questions and issues as possible.

Okay, so now we know what we are looking for, how can we go about looking for it?

Minds behind Bodies: Animals, Humans, and Nature

If we are talking about looking for a mind behind the body of the universe or nature, this highly suggests that the correct approach would be to see how we determine whether minds exists behind bodies in general. There are as such 2 issues at play here: (1) What exactly is a mind in the first place and (2) How can we tell that there is a mind behind a body? Do crabs, oysters, or trees have minds? How about ants, monkeys or fishes? Is there "the mind of the People" in some collective sense? Do A.I. or computers have minds? These are again substantive philosophical questions, which we obviously cannot enter into comprehensively, we will touch on certain points of them to move the discussion along, as long as it aids our perception, but we obviously cannot go into them in depth.

We will however begin with an extreme thought experiment to establish the "lower limits" of the discussion: there are two philosophical thought experiments of interest here: solipsism and the philosophical zombie. Solipsism is the thesis that only you have a mind, and no one else has it because you are literally incapable of telepathy and can't hear the thoughts of others. There is only your mind and that's it. (In the game Darktide, one of the psykers believes that he is in a dream and he is all alone, and everyone is simply part of his dream and have no minds.) A philosophical zombie is the idea that people are just meat machines, they have biologies and chemical reactions in their brains, but there is no consciousness or feeling or mind behind those eyes, they are mere zombies. A pure meat machine with no mind.

The following quotes from Tim Bayne's Philosophy of Mind: An Introduction and from the chapter "Chapter 11: Other Minds" would be particularly instructive. Bayne in the following quote addresses the "sceptical problem of other minds" which we just raised earlier:

His position and approach is directly isomorphic to the approach we will take here in how to perceive the divine mind. He refuses to start from the position of agnosticism of other minds and then proceed to justify our knowledge of it. He wants to just start from the assumption or presupposition that they are wrong, and his task isn't to justify the existence of other minds to the sceptic in the sense of providing "enough" evidence for their existence, but to simply explore what is the basis for claiming such a knowledge. We likewise approach the sceptical problem as merely a challenge to describe, not justify, how we come to know God, it is "not to prove that we have knowledge" of God by providing "enough" evidence, "but to identify the basis of this knowledge" and the methods for perceiving other minds, whether behind human bodies, monkeys, ants, trees or the whole universe.

The chapter's first main point is to discuss three different theories of "mindreading" or theories for how we come to know what other people are thinking. They are the "perceptual", that we can "see" the pain of others or "hear" their anger, "theory-theory", where we form a theory based on various data to explain their behaviour and postulate mental states, and finally, the "simulation" account, where we create a model of other people's mental states within our own minds and simulate in ourselves what the other person might be feeling. Thus, we imagine, "what would it be like to be such and such person under such and such scenario" and investigate in the "laboratory" of our own mind. He discusses the strengths and weaknesses of each account which I won't go into, however, there is no doubt that in reality we use all these three different methods for "knowing" what another person is thinking and feeling, none of them will be "decisive" or provide "enough evidence" of what another person is feeling or thinking, if at all. We do after all misunderstand people. But once more, the more instruments and methods we have for perceiving another mind, the larger our conceptual toolbox is for perceiving the divine mind. Let's now relate each of these methods to the divine mind.

The first is "perceptual" and that we can just directly "see" or "hear" people's feelings and emotions. If we assume that we can directly perceive people's emotions then clearly we have direct knowledge of other people's minds. However this parallels the religious experience/intuition claim of the theists. Some religious believers simply claim to directly perceive God in our hearts, their minds, or via ineffable prophetic visions. In our daily lives we often are so busy and interact with each other shallowly that we often do not spare a thought for how they are feeling or how their day have went, but when we focus our empathic perceptions as it were, we suddenly feel and see what other people are feeling, how tired they are, etc. Again, if we assume that people can directly perceive other people's emotions/the divine mind, then we have no problem on knowledge of minds, human and divine, in general. There are moments when we look at the sunset, or at the glory of nature and we focus, and somehow there is an ineffable perception of the divine mind behind it.

We shall move straight to the simulationist account because that's where he concentrates the weight of his arguments. Recall that the simulationist account argues that we "read" the minds of others by imagining or constructing a model of their mind in our own minds and simulating the results. By the simulationist account, we can know the existence of other minds by analogy and this has passed into the philosophical literature as the "analogical account". Thus, we infer the existence of other minds by analogy with our own, we argue that certain kinds of outward behaviour by other people should be associated with certain kinds of mental states because certain kinds of behaviour in our case are associated with certain kinds of mental states, etc. So my behaviour-mind connection should be analogous to yours. He proceeds to spend some time discussing various objections to this account and the counter arguments, etc.

However, at this stage, it should be pretty obvious that this is directly isomorphic to the "Watchmaker Analogy" argument for the divine design, that nature's order bears the marks of intelligence analogous to the ordering of certain materials into artefacts bearing the marks of human intelligence. So, in the philosophy of mind case, our own ordering of behaviour and outward actions bear the marks of certain mental states and emotions, ergo, by analogy, we can infer that other people's ordering of their actions and behaviour bears the marks of their mental states and emotion.

Before we go into the "theory-theory" account, I think here it would be useful to discuss the nature of this "organisation" and how it relates to "mind-like" qualities so that we know what we are theorising about.

The Mathematical Laws of Physics, Organisation and Minds

So far we have been discussing how to know or perceive other minds, but we have yet to address a much more fundamental question: what is a mind or consciousness? This is a philosophical mire which if we step into we will get sucked in pretty quickly. What I will instead do is to mention and discuss several theories of mind, which will illuminate the way towards perceiving the divine mind behind nature, regardless of which conceptual tool we in the end chose to accept as a true or proper account of the mind.

According to Daniel Dennett and other functionalists and reductionists about the mind, there is nothing so qualitatively special about human consciousness or human subjectivity, the mind just is a set of certain objective functional features, e.g. information processing system, cognitive capabilities, etc, which can be applied to anything which “performs the same functions” or “exhibits the same objective traits”, e.g. A.I. any other system which exhibits the same traits. Thus, consciousness is not a qualitative binary, yes or no, which someone, or something, possesses, it comes in various degrees and types which resembles each other in their complexity, extent, etc.

Functionalists use the term “multiple-realisability” to describe the idea that the same “mind-like” features or cognitive system can be “realised” or applied to many other different mediums or entities, other than humans. Thus, any information processing system which performs similar functions could be said to be a mind, they wouldn't be exactly like human minds (then again is any human mind exactly alike each other?), minds comes in various complexities, organisations and systems, but any sort of organised information processing would be a mind or at the very least, mind-like.

Now, does nature in fact exhibit such "organisation"? The very existence of mathematical laws of physics or laws of nature themselves are the informational organisation of nature. That the universe fits mathematical formulas itself seems to point or indicate a mind behind nature organising nature. In the words of Newton:

This of course will lead down the next rabbit hole: what is mathematics and the nature of mathematical organisation, such that it points to a mind? Again, this is another mire we can only touch lightly without allowing ourselves to be dragged too deeply.

The first thing to note that any  application of mathematics to physics is a contingent application, that is, it merely happens that a certain aspect of mathematics is applicable to some aspect of physical reality, but there is no real reason or necessity for the universe to so neatly conform to mathematical deduction. If we view mathematics as the creation and organisation of a mind (human or computer), then that the physical universe exhibit behaviour directly isomorphic to categories and organisations of the human mind is directly a mind-like quality.

There is an  objection which may occur to this account. The objection goes, if mathematics is a product of the human mind, and if the human mind is a product of nature, then doesn't it stand to reason that it would make perfect sense for nature itself to evolve beings which would encodes its own mathematical structure into their minds and capable of grasping the mathematical structure of the universe? But this "objection" merely explains how we came to have the capacity to create mathematical structures, it still wouldn't explain how the universe itself came to bear these structures. Even if no humans evolved, and nature did not birth beings who could grasp its own structure, the laws of physics would still be what they were and there would still be the question as to why would the universe conform to these mental structures independently of the existence of anybody around to create those structures for them to grasp.

Remember, we are not operating on the premise that there is something magically or qualitatively special about human minds, our premise is that anything at an abstract level with similar structures, organisations, information processing systems, etc, would be a mind, whether we are talking about squids, computers, nature or humans. Thus, even if there were no humans, these organised mind-like qualities would still be there.

Laws of Nature and Systems

Here is another philosophical angle to look at this issue: what is a law of nature? What does it mean to speak of a law of nature, as if nature were organised into laws, rules and regulations?

If you look at the Stanford philosophy entry there are several accounts of what constitutes a law of nature. The account which is of interest here is what is known as the “systems” account, where laws of nature are nothing more than deductive systems. To quote from them:

I won’t go into the pros and cons of this account in detail except to note two points: One supposed strength of this account is that it keeps within Humean constrains in not postulating mysterious metaphysical entities like universals or causation, etc, and it also keeps within the limits of Humean supervenience ““the doctrine that all there is in the world is a vast mosaic of local matters of particular fact, just one little thing and then another”.

However it is one core objection to this account which is of interest to us:

The objection here as such seems to be that the systems view of the laws of nature makes them look like “mind-dependent” or cognitive-shaped entities. However, instead of viewing this as a modus tollens, we can see this as a modus ponens instead. Since the laws of nature are mind-dependent and cognitive-shaped entities, therefore we can infer that the universe is maintained by mind-dependent or cognitive-shaped universal mind.

As such, any law of nature, physics, or information system in general, which conforms to mathematical system, would be "mind-like" or cognitively shaped, they are themselves the acts of a mind.

Degrees of Minds

One could object that all these are merely mind like and not literally a mind or otherwise one would be guilty of anthropomorphism, etc, etc, then we can push Dennett’s argument that a mind just is this ordered structure or system without any special remainder or qualitatively exotic extra “qualia” needed to make something a mind.

This of course is not a novel argument. The mathematician and philosopher Raymond M. Smullyan, as well as Asian philosophers, has already noted a similar point. In Smullyan fictional dialogue, Is God a Taoist? one merely needs to substitute “personal” for “mind-like” to see that more or less the same point is being made.

Again, we are not drawing a bright or clear line between human minds and all other minds, nor dependent on theories which argues the same. Our conception of a mind just needs be "rich" enough to encompass a range of phenomena to include the organisation which we do perceive in nature.

Concluding Thoughts: Will and Belief

I hope that this discourse has given enough tools and materials for perceiving the divine existence. One must be clear that by no means have these discussions established that the mind perceived is the God of Abraham Isaac and Jacob, or the God of the Bible. Those have to do with special revelation and how God specially intervenes in history and nature to reveal his will. It does not establish other qualities of God like that He is infinite, omnipotent, benevolent, etc. We will probably need to discuss the ontological argument for that as well as the nature and limits of logic. In the words of the Archbishop Cranmer:

Thus, Cranmer understood that there was a difference between knowing merely "what God were" and knowing "of his will towards us". The conceptual instruments here furnish tools for perceiving that God were, they are not empowered to guide us to know his will towards us.

There might however be a much more basic philosophical problem: I have been arguing about using these conceptual tools to aid oneself to see or perceive God, aren't I implicitly already assuming that there is something to be seen in the first place? Again, I can appeal back to our previous discussion on the problems of other minds, I assume that there are other minds, I only describe how and the methods for perceiving them, I don't purport to justify their existence or that there is anything for the methods to perceive.

In philosophy this is related to the theory that belief in the existence of God is properly basic. It is just "obvious" like how 1+1=2 or that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, and doesn't need justifying. You simply need to frame and describe the method for grasping it and they will "see" that it is true. If God is supposed to be an object of worship and praise for everyone, it would hardly do that He can only be grasped by those willing to wade through extensive philosophical discussions like this one. It has to be obvious even to a child.

This doesn't mean that it can't be proven, there are set theoretic proofs for 1+1=2 and advanced calculus arguments for the shortest distance between two points being a straight line. But a person who unironically really doubts that 1+1=2 isn't going to be persuaded by a very complicated argument from advanced set theory. Likewise, the discussions here are meant to provide additional tools and instruments to focus our attention to perceive God, but if you refuse to look into the telescope, no one can help you, just as there are some who actually unironically today reject basic arithmetic propositions.

In the end, accepting a belief is not just a matter of perception and experience, there is ultimately an element of subjective will and decision to believe, which goes back to the initial discussion on English law court "standards of proof": subjective satisfaction.