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WillowOne's Positions

Argument from Scientific Discoverability

Form

  1. The universe is comprehensible to human minds. Albert Einstein: "the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility."
  2. On naturalism there is no reason why brains evolved to find food and mates on the savannah should be able to grasp quantum field theory or the geometry of spacetime. On theism it is expected: a rational creator made minds in his image to know his work.
  3. In the "Privileged Planet" form (Gonzalez and Richards, 2004): our position in the galaxy, our transparent atmosphere, our large Moon that produces perfect solar eclipses, and our stable star are not only what life needs but exactly what scientific discovery needs. Habitability and measurability coincide.
  4. Therefore the universe was made to be understood, and made by someone who wanted it understood.

My Positions

  1. Comprehensibility is partial, late, and hard-won. Our species took two hundred thousand years to arrive at Newton, and most living humans cannot follow general relativity. Understanding came through instruments, mathematics, writing, and four centuries of collective error-correction, not by direct insight. Quantum mechanics is the standard example of a theory nobody finds intelligible: physicists are told to "shut up and calculate" precisely because the world at that scale does not match the mind. A universe made for us to understand would not need all that scaffolding.
  2. Evolution predicts the pattern exactly. Our intuitions are reliable about medium-sized objects moving at medium speeds, and fail for the very small, the very fast, the very large, and the probabilistic, which is where evolution had no need to make them reliable (Owens Tryptic of Ignorance). Naturalism predicts a mind that is good at the savannah and extends itself by tools; theism predicts a mind made to know the cosmos. The first is what we find.
  3. Selection effect. A universe we could not understand at all would contain no science and no argument from discoverability. We study what we can study and call the result "the comprehensible universe" (Survivorship Bias, Texas Sharpshooter). Most of what exists is not discoverable from here: everything beyond the cosmological horizon, the ninety-five per cent of the universe's content that is dark, the interior of black holes.
  4. The Privileged Planet correlations are cherry-picked. Perfect eclipses are a coincidence of two ratios that holds only for a window of a few hundred million years as the Moon recedes; they were useful for one discovery (the 1919 light-bending test) that could have been made otherwise. Every planet has some features that would be scientifically convenient and others that would not; selecting ours and calling it designed for science is the Teleological Argument - Argument from Design with a telescope (Cherry-picking).
  5. A god who wanted us to discover the world would not hide himself. The universe is apparently built to be found out; its maker apparently is not (Divine Hiddenness). The argument proves too much for its own side.
  6. Even granted, "built to be understood" is not a person. The honest terminus is Deism, and Einstein, whose sentence opens the argument, was explicit that he meant Spinoza's God and not a personal one.

Sources

  • Einstein, A., "Physics and Reality", Journal of the Franklin Institute 221 (1936)
  • Gonzalez, G. and Richards, J., The Privileged Planet (2004)
  • Plantinga, A., "Two Dozen (or so) Theistic Arguments", in Walls and Dougherty (eds), Two Dozen (or so) Arguments for God (2018)
  • Sober, E., "The Design Argument", in Mann, W. (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Religion (2004), on observation selection effects

Also see