1.  Making Sense of God
=======================
<Philosophy, n.>  A route of many roads leading from
nowhere to nothing.
  -- Ambrose Bierce, _The Devil's Dictionary,_ 1911

Philosophers, it seems, love to think our world rests on deep 
metaphysical principles, conveniently discovered from our armchairs.  
And the traditional favorite among such principles is, of course, God.  
Unfortunately, this God of the philosophers becomes a dumping ground 
for arbitrary metaphysical intuitions about Ultimate Things.  
Metaphysicians make a living cooking up convoluted arguments for God, 
while more skeptical philosophers keep busy poking holes in these 
proofs.  We need a better way to make sense of God---we should be 
arguing about what our world is like and how we can best explain it, 
not about First Causes or Necessary Beings.

1.  Something for Nothing
-------------------------
Our Gods do not always need elaborate theologies.  Many a religious 
person conceives of God as a totally overwhelming, literally awesome 
power; the details can wait.  Yet no religion is silent about its God.  
The Qur'an tells us, in 112 Al-Ikhlas, to

    Say "He is God; the one that is most unique; God the immanently
    indispensable.  He has begotten no one, and is begotten of none.
    There is none comparable to Him."

In these three sentences we get a hint of mystery, of greatness beyond
comparison, even an objection to Christian belief in an "only begotten
Son of God." We get words like "immanently indispensable," which can
keep generations of theologians at work trying to explain what the
text means.  Starting from an incomparably awesome being, we go on to
more complicated doctrines about God.  Believers do not hope to fully
grasp the divine reality, but they are sure a God created our universe
and sustains our present existence.  This God is entirely holy,
supremely worthy of worship, powerful beyond imagination.

God, then, is first of all something incomparably grand and glorious.  
Our God must be singular; it must serve as the ultimate explanation, 
the foundation of all value, the guarantee that Christianity (or 
Judaism, or Islam) is superior to its rivals.  Pagan gods may be able 
to dispatch lightning bolts against offending mortals, but the true 
God must be all-powerful.  This God must not only be good, but so good 
that even our slightest sin makes us worthless in comparison.  We must 
respond to God in fear and trembling, and then we must come to love 
God and desire to do the divine will.

This is a beginning, but if we want to know what we are talking about, 
we need to be more specific.  Metaphysicians rise to the challenge by 
giving God a list of infinite attributes.  Theologian Gerald Bray 
gives an example, derived from John of Damascus:

    Time (Beginning): without beginning,  uncreated, unbegotten
         (End):       imperishable, immortal, everlasting
    Space:            infinite, uncircumscribed, boundless,
                      of infinite power
    Matter:           simple, uncompound, incorporeal, without flux
    Quality:          passionless, unchangeable, unalterable, 
                      unseen[1]

Such a list makes God sound like a Near Eastern tyrant with his roll
of absurdly inflated titles.  Even so, it is a decent stab at
describing a God who is supposed to be incomparably great.  We can now
argue about God's attributes.  Few quibble about God being uncreated,
but philosophers will cross swords over how unchangeable or simple God
must be.  A changing God would seem to be imperfect, inappropriate for
an ultimate principle behind our world; on the other hand, it is hard
to think of a God we pray to, a personal God who acts on the world, as
eternally unchangeable.  Unfortunately, these disputes tend to devolve
into metaphysical gamesmanship.  Bray, for example, suggests the
essence of God is simple and unchanging while its _person_ embodies
complexity and flux.  "At the level of the person, which is the point
at which we enter into relationship with God, Christians insist that
there is a plurality in unity, which is not to be confused with the
simplicity of God's impersonal essence.  The result is that everything
which belongs to God's fixed and immutable essence is mediated to us
through the relationship we have with the persons."[2] Now we can have
a tedious argument over whether this simplicity wrapped in complexity
is excuse-making or legitimately having things both ways.

Defining what we mean by an incomparably great being is obviously
difficult, and it is not clear whether metaphysicians help us or
dazzle us with impressive but empty words.  However, metaphysics has a
great advantage.  God, being incomparably great, might not merely
happen to be there, but exist because it _must_ exist.  Someone
denying God would be committing a metaphysical, perhaps even a
logical, absurdity.  In other words, we might be compelled to
acknowledge the reality of a God just by armchair reasoning, provided
our head is screwed on right.  We would still have to fight over the
full list of divine attributes, but that would be just a matter of
clearing up the details.

Philosophers have long tried to get something for nothing this way.  
The metaphysician has no laboratory, but she hopes to discover some 
facts by pure thought; indeed, the most important fact of them all.  
Of course, the God of the philosophers is not much more than a vague 
Perfect Necessary Being.  But at least we would be able to prove that 
an incomparably great object of spiritual devotion is real.  Revealed 
religion, bolstered by philosophical respectability, can then tell us 
more about our salvation.  The Catholic Catechism, for example, 
follows the tradition of Thomas Aquinas and embraces metaphysical 
proofs of God:

    Created in God's image and called to know and love him, the person
    who seeks God discovers certain ways of coming to know him.  These
    are also called proofs for the existence of God, not in the sense
    of proofs in the natural sciences, but rather in the sense of
    "converging and convincing arguments," which allow us to attain
    certainty about the truth.

    These "ways" of approaching God from creation have a twofold
    point of departure: the physical world and the human person.[3]

Apparently philosophy tells us there is a God, since the world must
depend on a cause which is utterly beyond material things.  On top of
this, human experience confirms the existence of a soul, which can
only come from God.[4] The sensible person believes in God---though
she might still balk at accepting Papal authority.

Some philosophers take this certainty about God very seriously indeed,
claiming God is logically necessary---God's nonexistence is a
contradiction in terms.  This "ontological argument" is, naturally,
strictly a philosophers' disease.  Other classical proofs of God
manage to appeal to non-philosophers as well.  Cosmological arguments,
for example, claim an all-powerful, self-sufficient God must be the
cause of the material universe; even some scientists think the
universe needs a supernatural cause, or the laws of physics were
decreed by a God.[5] Design arguments answer questions like why there
is life and intelligence in the universe by declaring God made things
so.

With the help of the classical proofs, philosophy and God lived in 
harmony for many centuries.  Popular religion was perhaps too vulgar 
and superstitious in the philosophers' eye, and philosophers a bit too 
prone to fanciful reinterpretation of doctrine from the perspective of 
orthodoxy, but pious and metaphysical intuitions usually sat well 
together.  It was obvious that everything had to have a cause, that 
nothing came from nothing, that order required a designer.  And when 
we applied these intuitions to the natural world, we found it needed a 
First Cause beyond the universe, a God who imposed a purposeful plan 
on the world.

Of course, there were always skeptics; even devout philosophers who 
liked one argument but thought another was worthless.  After all, if 
our intuitions are truly universal principles, we have to wonder what 
caused the First Cause, and who designed the Designer.  The usual 
answer is that God, as a necessary and self-sufficient being, is an 
exception to the rule.  But now, it begins to look like all our God 
does is preserve our pet metaphysical principles by taking their loose 
ends, knotting them together, and sweeping the whole mess under a 
carpet called Ultimate Mystery.

Especially after the European Enlightenment, philosophers began to
subject the classical proofs to withering criticism.  Today many
philosophers are infidels, and the typical atheist argument starts by
ripping apart the traditional proofs of God.[6] Furthermore,
Enlightenment science made us more skeptical about grandiose
metaphysical schemes.  After Darwin, we learned that intricate
adaptive order did not require supernatural design; quantum physics
showed us a random subatomic realm in which events took place without
any cause.  The classical proofs began to look like failures.

Today, even many theologians agree that the old proofs do not work.
As Gerald Bray admits, "the so-called `proofs' for the existence of
God can be used only as supporting evidence for a belief which is
already held for other reasons."[7] Believers have to rely on
revelation---God's self-disclosure---not the assurances of
philosophers.  But the old proofs are still important for our concept
of God.  God still has to be a self-sufficient being who is somehow
the creating and sustaining cause of the world.  So arguments for God
continue to be informed by the classical proofs, even when they rely
on empirical evidence or religious experience.  And of course, in
philosophy, the proofs of God enjoy an immortality only truly bad
ideas can aspire to.  Something for nothing is too attractive a goal;
philosophers will embark on that quest just like some inventors will
always try to build perpetual motion machines.

In fact, new and improved versions of the classical proofs are still
going strong in the recent philosophy of religion.  Mathematicians
cherish shorter and more elegant proofs for already known theorems; it
seems philosophers love sophisticated ways to make old mistakes.  So
the God of the philosophers, still alive if not brimming over with
vitality, is a good starting point for us.

2.  A Necessary Being?
----------------------
The most ambitious proof of God is the ontological argument, claiming 
to show that God's existence is logically necessary.  This is also one 
of the simplest arguments.  It has many variations, but all boil down 
to saying God is defined to exist, therefore God exists.  Of course, 
scoffers are liable to say that with that sort of reasoning we can 
just as well declare that unicorns are defined to exist, and therefore 
unicorns exist.  But philosophers keep hoping there is something 
special about _God_ that will make the trick work.

The argument starts by defining God as an unsurpassable being.  We
should not even be able to conceive of anything greater---God should
not just be the greatest being around, but the most perfect being
possible.  And obviously, an actual being is better than something
which is a figment of our imagination.  A perfect being must exist,
since if it did not, it would not be perfect.[8] Having made God pop
into existence by sheer force of logic, philosophers now break out the
champagne.

This comes too easily not to suspect smoke and mirrors.  To begin
with, "greatness" or "perfection" in an argument like this is quite
arbitrary.  We could replace godly perfection with unicorn-likeness
and prove the existence of Mildred, the perfect unicorn.  A horse, for
example, is more unicorn-like than a rock.  So we look for a maximally
unicorn-like being.  Obviously, an actual unicorn is more perfectly
unicorn-like than a mere character in a fairy tale.  So Mildred must
exist.

There is something strange about this argument.  And if there is one
thing philosophers are definitely good at, it is exposing the
weaknesses of other philosophers' arguments.  Immanuel Kant pointed
out that "existence" was not some sort of property we could attach to
a concept, whether God or Mildred.[9] Color could be a property of
unicorns---we would recognize a red unicorn if we saw one.  But "I
encountered a nonexistent unicorn" (not the same as "I hallucinated a
unicorn"!) makes no sense.

So modern philosophers no longer say God is defined to be perfect,
perfection implies existence, hence God exists.  They say God is
defined to be perfect, perfection implies _necessary_ existence, hence
God exists.[10] This needs some translation.  We can imagine a world
with or without rocks or unicorns, and our brains will not overheat
from the effort.  God, being unsurpassably great, might be different.
God might exist in our world, but not like a rock which merely happens
to be here.  In our world, any other world imaginable, and even with
no world at all, God still might exist, because it would be impossible
for such a perfect being not to exist.  Indeed, it seems that if God
exists, it must exist out of necessity and not in a second-rate way
like a rock.  And if God is a necessary being, all sorts of wonders
take place.  A necessary being exists independently of other facts
about our world, so no more worries about scientists discovering we
live in a godless world.  Plus the only way a necessary being can fail
to exist is if it is impossible.  All or nothing.  Unless our idea of
a Perfect Being is unintelligible or self-contradictory, it _must_
exist.

Unfortunately, this sort of argument still leaves greatness quite
arbitrary, so it fails to dispel Mildred.  A perfect unicorn should
also have a first-rate existence, it would seem.  And since nothing
but a metaphysical imagination can distinguish between an object which
is real and one which is necessarily real, we can go ahead and define
a maximally unicorn-like being to exist necessarily.[11] Just like
God, if it is at all possible for Mildred to exist, then she must
exist.

Maybe we should ignore Mildred.  After all, a necessary unicorn is 
only a device to parody the philosophers.  There is nothing wrong with 
Mildred in a formal, logical sense, but intuitively Mildred is 
ridiculous.  God, on the other hand, is supposed to be eternal and 
self-sufficient, so perhaps we can legitimately call God logically 
necessary as well.  In that case, the ontological argument boils down 
to an intuition like:

(I1) It is possible---just barely possible, we need claim no 
    more---that an unsurpassably great being could exist.  This being 
    would be maximally excellent---omnipotent, morally perfect and so 
    on---and exist necessarily.

To some philosophers, (I1) makes a lot of sense.  Richard Gale,
however, points out that we can make up other intuitions which seem at
least as plausible as (I1), but are incompatible with (I1).  For
example:

(I2) It is possible---merely logically possible---that there could
    be a world in which morally unjustified evils take place.

If (I2) is true---and why not?---a necessary God is in trouble.[12] A
necessary God would exist and be morally perfect in all imaginable
worlds; therefore (I1) is no less than a demand that a morally
unjustified evil be impossible, not just that it does not happen in
our world.

There is more trouble ahead.  Maybe an unsurpassably great, maximally
excellent being makes no sense.  Consider Mildred.  Let us say the
perfect unicorn must be so fleet of foot that nothing can beat her in
a race.  If Gerald the pretty-good unicorn could pass Mildred by half
a neck, this would mean Mildred was not a maximally excellent unicorn
after all.  But this is no problem---maximum excellence means Mildred
can move to any spot instantaneously, so while Gerald might tie her,
he can never go faster.  If God's infinite attributes always
corresponded to "intrinsic maxima" like Mildred's speed, there would
also be no problem.[13] But now let us say Mildred should be
unsurpassably strong, able to beat any conceivable Gerald in a
tug-of-war.  Interestingly, the situation is different than with a
foot race: strength seems to have no intrinsic maximum, the way there
is no such thing as a largest number.  We can always imagine a Gerald
who could beat Mildred in a tug-of-war.  And since God is supposed to
be maximally great in just about everything, some of God's attributes
are bound to run into trouble.[14] An infinitely powerful God is fine,
but an unsurpassable God is dubious.

There is a way out.  We can _define_ God's attributes to be intrinsic
maxima.  Just like we are not committed to high school geometry and
work with strange non-Euclidean spaces when we have to, we can look
for alternative number theories.  And some unconventional number
theories define an "ultimate class" which has the largest conceivable
size within that number theory.[15] By declaring strength must be
measured in such a theory, we can make sure that Mildred has
unsurpassable strength.

Perhaps a similar trick will work for God.  Where God needs to be
unsurpassable, we define intrinsic maxima, and where we need to make
excuses for God, we say no maximum exists.  For example, Richard
Swinburne does not want to fault God for not making ours a maximally
good world, claiming "God cannot create the best of all possible
worlds, for there can be no such world---any world can be improved by
adding more persons to it, and no doubt plenty of other ways as
well."[16] But of course, how we tighten or loosen our intrinsic
maxima is completely arbitrary.  In fact, the whole ontological
argument is irredeemably infected with arbitrariness.  Our ideas of
perfection are too arbitrary to prevent Mildred appearing along with
God, even without Mildred we are left with a mess of conflicting
metaphysical intuitions, and the concept of an unsurpassable being can
only be patched up by arbitrary definitions.  In the face of such
rampant arbitrariness, the very idea of an argument compelling us to
accept God through logic alone becomes a bad joke.

No doubt ontological proofs will continue to tempt philosophers.[17]
But, as veteran philosopher Kai Nielsen says,

    Unless we happen to love solving puzzles, we are very likely, if
    we are interested in the philosophy of religion, to sigh with
    ennui at the appearance of yet another baroque but carefully
    crafted argument to prove that the denial of God's existence is
    self-contradictory.  There has to be, we think, something wrong
    somewhere in such an argument: the problem is, can it readily be
    located?[18]

Philosophers and theologians have a history of trying to be too clever 
in arguing about God.  But we cannot bring anything into existence, 
not even God, by definitional magic.  Some real-world facts, however 
minimal, will have to take the stage.


Perhaps the fact a material universe exists at all is just what 
philosophers need.  Something, metaphysicians think, must have caused 
the universe; and a God seems to be the kind of power who would go 
around causing universes.  Metaphysically, if not logically, God might 
be a necessary being, while the universe has no power within itself to 
come into being.

A naturalist, unlike a theist, takes the natural universe to be all
there is.  Ultimately, events have impersonal causes; or they are
uncaused---accidental.  Now, even if the world were a complete network
of natural causes, naturalism cannot explain how it happens to be that
_our_ network of causes exists and not another.  The universe remains
a brute fact, an uncaused reality, an accident.  But this is no defect
of naturalism.  Without venturing back into the swamp of logically
necessary beings, there is no avoiding brute facts which happen to be
true for no reason whatsoever.  As Antony Flew remarks, "The Principle
of Sufficient Reason---that there has to be a sufficient reason for
anything and everything being as it is, was, and will be---is not, as
has often been thought, necessarily true.  It is instead demonstrably
false."[19] Even theism cannot avoid brute facts, though God might be
a suitable brute fact underlying everything.  Demanding that
everything have a cause does nothing for such a God; we immediately
are tempted to ask what caused God, and doctrines about how God is
self-caused or is beyond causes are just evasions.  Deducing God from
grandiose metaphysical principles is an exercise in futility.[20]

So modern philosophers no longer say the universe must have a cause, 
which is God.  They say God is the most probable explanation for why a 
universe exists.

Perhaps a God would create a universe, while without God, it is less
probable that anything would exist.  So the fact we are here is
evidence supporting a God.  Fair enough, except that it is not clear
why a perfect, self-sufficient God would create a material universe.
Does God get lonely?  The Greek Platonists thought that any direct
involvement with the world would threaten their God with imperfection,
so they imagined lesser intermediates to be responsible for the
universe.  Our Abrahamic religious traditions imagine a more hands-on
sort of God, but why a perfect God would cause a universe, directly or
indirectly, remains something of a mystery.  Still, the existence of a
universe might be evidence for a hands-on God.

Let us see how this kind of argument works with a more earthly 
example.  Say we suspect there is an arsonist in town.  If we then 
come upon the charred remains of a house, this will be evidence for 
our suspicion.  Let us use some numbers to make the example more 
concrete.  The probability of a fire when there is an arsonist around 
should be fairly high, so say _if_ an arsonist is in town (a), 
there is a 90% chance there will be a fire (f).  Those of us 
addicted to symbols write this as P(f|a)=0.90.  Say that before 
learning about the fire, we consulted some crime statistics and 
figured there was only a 10% chance an arsonist was in town---in 
statistical jargon, we start with a prior probability P(a)=0.10.  
Now, informally, when a predicted event takes place, our suspicions 
get stronger.  Clearly, unless there is an even greater chance for a 
fire without arson, our suspicion that an arsonist is around should 
get stronger after we see a fire; or P(a|f)>P(a) for symbol-addicts.  
Bayesian statisticians have an equation for this:[21]

                     P(f|a)P(a)
    P(a|f) = ----------------------------
             P(f|a)P(a) + P(f|-a)(1-P(a))

Say there was only a 20% chance for a fire with no arsonist in town,
so P(f|-a)=0.20.  Plugging in the numbers, we get P(a|f)=1/3---our 10%
level suspicion that there might be an arsonist lurking around goes up
to 33% after a fire.

Philosophers want to do the same, substituting the universe for the
fire, and God for the arsonist.  If a universe (u) is more likely with
a God (g) than otherwise, the fact that there is a universe increases
God's probability, just like a fire is evidence for arson.  If
P(u|g)>P(u|-g), then P(g|u)>P(g).  But before we are impressed, let us
imagine a priest from the temple of fire showed up on the scene and
declared the fire was caused by a fire-demon.  These invisible spirits
cause fires where they pass, unless, of course, they are mollified by
a temple offering.  The priest says a fire-demon (d) always causes
fires, so P(f|d)=1.  This means P(d|f)>P(d).  But say that all the
probabilities involving the demon were the same as the arsonist,
except the prior probability P(d)=0.0001---we do not want to be
dogmatic and say fire demons do not exist, but they are a lunatic idea
anyway.  After we go through the calculation, we end up with
P(d|f)=0.0004---greater than before, but still negligible.  The priest
walks off in a huff.

Whether the universe is worthwhile evidence for a God depends on three
numbers.  P(u|g), the likelihood of God creating a universe, should be
large; P(u|-g), the probability of a universe without God, should be
small; and P(g), the probability of God independent of anything we
know about universes, should be large.  Now, we can bring P(u|g) close
to certainty by invoking theological mystery and requiring a hands-on
God.  But we do not have the faintest idea what P(u|-g) or P(g) might
be, only some metaphysical intuitions worth exactly their sale price.
With the fire, previous experience can guide us.  Crime statistics can
give us a fairly decent idea of how likely it is that a arsonist lives
in a community, what percentage of fires can be traced to arson, and
so on.  Experience also shows us that the fire-demon hypothesis is
pretty useless, even though it was designed to guarantee fires.  But
there is no way, for example, to select a representative sample of
universes and find out what proportion of them were created by a God.
We need to find the relevant probabilities without the benefit of
_any_ previous experience.

One possible solution is to favor simpler hypotheses over complicated
scenarios.  Scientists like simple theories, and in everyday life, we
prefer to explain fires by a single arsonist rather than a massive
conspiracy.  We like to assume the least about what we do not
know.[22] Richard Swinburne believes "theism is a very simple
hypothesis---the simplest hypothesis to provide an ultimate
explanation which there could be."[23] If we confine our explanations
to the natural world, we find a lot of complexity.  Even if a few
elegant laws of physics underlie everything, these laws remain brute
facts.  Furthermore, these laws describe how the physical state of the
world behaves, and this state remains one enormously complicated
possibility among countless alternatives.  Theism, in contrast,
promises to tie everything to a single ultimate cause; a cause so
simple it is without limits.  Very little information goes into the
philosophers' definition of God; just a sense of a perfect being with
ultimate creative power.

Unfortunately, simplicity is a complicated mess of a concept.  There
is no convincing account of exactly what simplicity is and why it
should be connected to high probability; so it is doubtful whether
there is a logical principle of simplicity fundamental to
probabilistic reasoning.[24] Simple representations of our environment
use up little memory and give fast results.  But this has no obvious
connection with truth; our models of the world often sacrifice
accuracy to practicality.  For example, say we want to avoid getting
eaten.  A model that takes a month to recognize a predator from visual
data is useless, even if it has a near-zero error rate.  And if it
records the past so perfectly that we need a monstrous brain capable
of carrying so much irrelevant detail, we have no way to escape the
predator anyway.[25]

But say we figure out how to determine probabilities based strictly on
the logical simplicity of hypotheses.  Say also that a Perfect
Necessary Being is a nice and simple hypothesis, rather than the vague
and messy idea it invariably is.  Even then, God is not a useful
hypothesis; indeed, it is more like a fire-demon than an arsonist.  An
arsonist is a complicated person and arson a complex process, while a
fire demon is a pure spirit responsible for nothing but causing fires.
But obviously, the simple hypothesis of a fire-demon is so
uninformative it is next to no improvement over saying a fire was
uncaused.  In fact, a strictly accidental fire makes more
sense---after all, nothing is quite as simple as nothing.  God, we
think, might be a simple hypothesis, guaranteed to cause a universe.
A fire demon is a simple hypothesis guaranteed to cause fires.
Simplicity and guaranteed results are not enough to recommend a
hypothesis.

Unlike Mildred the perfect unicorn, a fire-demon might be made into a
respectable idea.  If offerings to a fire-god actually prevented
fires, if the priests had a detailed theory about the behavior of
fire-demons which explained real fires, we would take fire-demons more
seriously.  Successful hypotheses tie together many real world facts,
showing that what previously might have looked like a haphazard
collection of facts fit a simpler pattern.  But the simple God of the
philosophers is thoroughly useless in explaining our actual world.
Even if someone came up with a believable argument that the existence
of a universe made God highly probable, we eventually have to ask
whether _our universe_ makes a God probable.  This is a very different
and a lot more relevant question.  And if all a theist can do is
repeat the same impersonal explanations a naturalist uses, only
tacking "God decreed it so" onto them, we might as well not bother
with God.

We need a God more like an arsonist and less like a fire-demon, and 
not at all like Mildred.  For centuries, philosophers have hoped to 
prove God from just about nothing but the concept of a Perfect 
Necessary Being.  This is not only a failure, it is a complete waste 
of time.

3.  The Impossible God
----------------------
Where does God stand, if the classical proofs fail?  This might not be 
that much of a disaster, since showing that the proofs of God do not 
work and proving God does not exist are not the same.  We do not 
believe in unicorns, but not because metaphysical arguments for the 
existence of unicorns fail.  The fact that we have no positive 
evidence for unicorns is more significant, but even this is not the 
whole story.  Unicorns do not fit our most reliable theories about the 
world.  The magical nature of a unicorn does not sit well with 
physics, and even an unmagical horse would be biologically peculiar.  
And we do not have any good reason to modify our theories to allow 
unicorns.

So it would seem the debate should now shift away from claims of
ironclad proof to asking whether a God helps explain our world.  But
infidels often try to take a short cut and dispel God with some
philosophical magic of their own.  For example, J.N.  Findlay once
produced an "ontological disproof" of God.[26] He agreed with the
intuition behind the God of the philosophers: God must be the
greatest, most perfect being.  But _if_ God must be so great we should
not be even be able to conceive of a world without God, then
philosophers have shot themselves in the foot.  Given the shoddy track
record of ontological arguments, we can no longer speak of logically
necessary beings with any confidence.  God the unsurpassable being
begins to look impossible.

Indeed, metaphysicians have been so spectacularly unsuccessful in
proving God, we have to wonder whether God makes sense at all.  God's
omni-attributes keep flirting with contradictions,[27] we are better
off without necessary beings, and philosophers seem determined to make
God irrelevant to real life.  The traditional metaphysical arguments
do not only fail to prove God, they lead us to suspect God is a
thoroughly confused notion.  Until the philosophers get their act
together and produce a claim which is at least intelligible, there is
nothing there even to criticize.  In 1864, Charles Bradlaugh wrote:

    The Atheist does not say "There is no God," but he says: "I know
    not what you mean by God; I am without an idea of God, the word
    `God' is to me a sound conveying no clear or distinct affirmation.
    I do not deny God, because I cannot deny that of which I have no
    conception, and the conception of which, by its affirmer, is so
    imperfect that he is unable to define it to me. . . ."[28]

Bradlaugh's words still ring true for the God of the philosophers.
But philosophers do not have a monopoly on God.  Few believe in just a
bare metaphysical theism; philosophical proofs are a way of supporting
much richer religious traditions.  Precisely because God cannot be
some sort of ultimate simplicity, theists have breathing room.  We can
reconsider how we should express religious intuitions about a
unimaginably great personal reality we are all dependent upon.  After
all, theologians often try and refine their statements about God; some
philosophers criticize our idea of God only in order to redesign
it.[29] A God who is not a perfect necessary being can still be
incomparably great in our world.

After the Enlightenment, when the intellectual mood became more
skeptical, the idea of God was put back on the drawing board.  We now
have many revised and improved Gods to choose from.  Unfortunately,
metaphysical habits die hard.  For example, some philosophers invented
"process theology," where we have a God vaguely like a life force of
the universe.  Among other attractions, this seemed to avoid the
confused idea of an unchanging God.  In Frank T.  Miosi's words,

    In the new theology, all reality is continuously undergoing
    modification and change.  God is also part of this, and far from
    being unrelated to the physical world, God is conditional and is
    affected by everything that happens in the world.  In the new
    theology, God's "absoluteness" is not the traditional final,
    unlimited, and unchangeable absoluteness.  In this system, God is
    absolute because the divine experiencing is composed of the
    totality of all experience, and when these increase, God
    increases.  Since the main quality of existence in this theology
    is experiencing in continuum, God is not the Unchangeable One but
    the ever more Becoming, ever more Involved One.[30]

This "new" talk about God seems, if anything, even less intelligible
than classical theism.  If sophisticated theologians so regularly
produce such obscure statements, we should suspect there is something
deeply wrong with God-talk.  All these doctrines seem to be very
earnestly making fact claims.  However, when a rival metaphysician
declares God is not the Becoming One but the One Unalterable in
Essence though not in Person, what is an innocent bystander supposed
to do?  Join the fun with another string of Capitalized Words?

Maybe the problem is traditional metaphysics, with or without God.
Mary Baker Eddy, the prophet of Christian Science, once insisted her
husband was poisoned.  But since there was no evidence, she declared
he must have "been killed by metaphysical arsenical poisoning, which
leaves no trace."[31] Metaphysics too often seems to be a respectable
way of talking nonsense.  If someone shows up saying the moon is made
of green cheese, we can discuss planetary science, bring up the Apollo
landings, maybe even set her right.  But someone claiming the moon is
made of Perfect Cheese which is self-existent in its Essential
Substance is either a metaphysician or a lunatic, best avoided in
either case.

Among modern philosophers, logical positivists are famous for their
desire to get rid of metaphysics.  They thought that only those fact
claims we had some way of verifying were meaningful.  The "God" of the
philosophers, since it was a metaphysical term with no possible
empirical consequence, was meaningless.[32] In other words,
positivists argued that if God leaves no trace on the world, it is no
better than Eddy's metaphysical poison.

If the positivist critique of metaphysics is to be useful, however, we
have to be clearer about what we mean by verification.  Positivists
too often put human observation at the center of their philosophy,[33]
while physical science routinely claims the existence of objects which
are quite unobservable in human terms.  For example, we cannot see a
proton in any ordinary sense.  But we might say we can see the tracks
a proton causes in a bubble-chamber experiment, so we have a way of
translating what a proton does into human observations.  So consider
quarks.  These particles make up protons, and they seem quite
impossible to observe individually.  The attraction between quarks
_increases_ with distance, so the energy we put into separating quarks
from one another always creates new quarks out of the vacuum.  Imagine
a rubber band we can never break, because the energy we put into the
elastic forms new rubber bands, leaving us with two intact rubber
bands, one in each hand.  We end up with more bound states of
quarks---like protons---before we can isolate any single quark.[34] An
overly zealous positivist might call a quark a "useful fiction," but
physicists are quite comfortable treating quarks as real.

This sort of thing happens in physics all the time.  Consider the
neutrino, another elementary particle which was first noticed in some
peculiar particle decays.  Physicists had known for some time that
there were quantities such as energy and momentum which were conserved
in all physical interactions.  These conservation laws had been
repeatedly confirmed by experiment, and had some appealing theoretical
explanations.  But suddenly there were these "weak" nuclear decays in
which it looked like energy, momentum, and a few more usually
conserved quantities just vanished.  Either this was an interaction
which violated conservation laws, or there was a hitherto unknown
particle---the neutrino---which carried off the seemingly unconserved
quantities.  Unfortunately, these rare weak interactions also seemed
to be all that neutrinos participated in.  So it looked like
physicists were inventing a new entity which had no function other
than to preserve certain principles they were fond of.

Today, the neutrino is a well-established member of our particle zoo.
This is not because we have managed to pick one up and look at it, but
because neutrinos have become an integral part of our physical
theories.[35] We expect, for example, that weak interactions should
produce a burst of neutrinos in a supernova, and that being massless
or almost massless, they should travel to Earth at the speed of light.
Some of these neutrinos interact with earthly matter, however rarely.
And these weak interactions produce decay products in such a way as to
provide a signature of passing neutrinos.  Looking at signals produced
in massive underground tanks of water, we are now able to detect
cosmic neutrinos.

Quarks and neutrinos are meaningful, but not because they are recipes
to obtain certain direct human observations.  To understand what
"neutrino" means, we have to become familiar with a whole network of
concepts in elementary particle physics.  A neutrino makes sense
because it has a role in our physical theories.  And our successful
theories are not metaphysical handwaving; they rely on rigorous
reality checks in very precise experiments.  By specifying what
difference neutrinos make in the world, our physics tells us how to
_observe_ neutrinos.

The positivists' insight was correct: those supposed metaphysical
facts which make no difference in the world make no sense.  And
theology produces what positivist A.J.  Ayer called "deeply
significant nonsense"[36] in abundance.  When God makes no contact
with reality, we have good reason to be unimpressed by Capitalized
Words and ask what difference God makes.[37] Presumably God did not
cough up a universe out of metaphysical necessity, and then retreat to
brood over eternal things.  In some way, God must be connected to the
world, perhaps even be fundamental to a correct view of the world.  Of
course, we cannot demand God fit an overly narrow sense of
verification.  God can be elusive, as long as it is elusive like a
neutrino and not like a perfect unicorn.  If we can come up with a
religious picture of the world, a theory in which God has a central
role, God will make sense.  And our religious traditions make plenty
of claims we can weave together for a religious view of our world.
After all, our religions claim revelations, mystical contact with a
fundamental personal reality, evidence for a creator from natural
science, and more.

Unfortunately, most modern, sophisticated doctrines of God shy away
from constructing a specifically religious picture of the world.
Liberal religion avoids possible clashes with secular knowledge,
preferring to lock science and religion into separate compartments.
On top of this, the desire for certainty runs deep in theology; many
feel, like bishop John Shelby Spong, that "any God that can be killed
ought to be killed."[38] But an invulnerable God cannot make a
difference in the world, and so we go back to trying to make God
appear in a puff of metaphysics.

Where such overly sophisticated doctrines are concerned, Bradlaugh was
probably right.  That kind of God makes no sense.  As Kai Nielsen has
long argued, the defects of such a God run deeper than flawed proofs
and inadequate evidence.  Modern metaphysicians talk about God but
fail to make claims with real content.  We do not even know what it
means for the unsurpassably great, wholly unanthropomorphic God of
sophisticated theism to exist or not.  Philosophers still say a God
exists and cares about us, but such religiously crucial fact claims
have become idle words.  We cannot even take a leap of faith against
the evidence and just accept such a God, for we have no idea what we
are supposed to be talking about.[39]

This does not, however, mean that infidels have won a great
philosophical victory and can go home secure in their unbelief.  That
is taking philosophy too seriously.  Most religious believers do not
give a damn about how the God of the philosophers fares.  If the
sophisticated God of Western philosophy is unintelligible, so much the
worse for that God.  Religious belief, for most people, involves
claims of revealed knowledge, a purposeful direction in human history,
a divine power shaping our world, miraculous signs from a supernatural
realm.  Certainly, many such beliefs are a disorganized mess, a lot
are plainly superstitious.  Yet they are real claims, not lofty but
vacuous metaphysical principles.  These claims give us a starting
point to see if we can construct a theory of the world in which an
awesome supernatural person is the central actor.  If this succeeds,
we can come back later and discuss how the God we have begun to grasp
might be unsurpassably great.  But if we can understand our world
without a God, God will have to go the way of unicorns and
fire-demons.

4.  A Religious Theory
----------------------
Constructing a religious theory of the world is not, of course, an 
easy task.  But philosophy and religious traditions give us plenty of 
intuitions about gods and demons, and what the world should be like if 
it were created and ruled by a God.  We can start by connecting these 
intuitions to each other, and asking what difference a God would make 
in the world.

Even metaphysical doctrines of God can be useful for our theory, as
long as we do not get too ambitious and try to prove God on the cheap.
For example, we want God to be "necessary" in some sense, even though
logical or causal necessity leads us into a swamp.  After all, we can
still say that everything _depends_ on God.[40] A bed of flowers, for
example, may depend on a gardener for its existence.  The gardener
planted the flower bed for her own purposes, arranged it, and still
maintains it as long as it exists.  There would be no flower bed
without the gardener, while the gardener does not depend on the
flowers, however much she may like them.  The flowers are not bound to
the gardener out of some deep metaphysical necessity, but they happen
to, as a matter of fact, depend on her.  Our world may have a similar
relationship with God: everything might, as a matter of fact, depend
on a divine power who created and sustains the world.

This is still a bit too ethereal,[41] but it is more promising.  We
can at least picture a cosmic theory which puts a God in a uniquely
self-sufficient position while everything else depends on God.  More
importantly, there is a traditional argument for God which tells us
how this kind of God makes a difference.  According to the Design
argument, we can infer that there is a God from the intricate
functional order we see in the universe.  Imagine we stumble upon a
flower bed.  Observing the orderly way the flowers are laid out, how
their colors blend into a harmonious scheme, how the soil is suited
for their growth, we realize there must be a gardener.  Without a
guiding intelligence, we would expect a random mess, not orderly rows
and unblemished colors.  The same argument, many scientists and
philosophers have thought, applies to the universe.  We behold a world
which sustains life, in which everything from atoms to plants and
animals fit together in harmony.  These are signs of intelligent
design.  Our universe could have been an amorphous mess, without life,
intelligence, or any of the complex interlocking structures which
excite our sense of wonder.  Intuitively, many of us think a
purposeless, accidental world would look like a featureless primal
chaos.  The complex order in our world, then, must trace to a guiding
intelligence who made the world for a purpose.

If we go no further than that intuition, design becomes yet another
metaphysical argument: complex order requires a designer, therefore
there is a God.  Skeptical philosophers eat this sort of argument
alive.[42] If, for example, design is an attempt to explain the
universe by an analogy to how humans create complex order, this is the
most tenuous of analogies.  We only distinguish between artifacts and
natural objects by using an immense amount of background knowledge
about humans and human creations, the sort of knowledge we have no
clue about when it comes to universes.  The analogy has other problems
as well.  Humans are more complex than their creations, so our analogy
suggests a complex God.  As biologist Richard Dawkins says, "If we
want to postulate a deity capable of engineering all the organized
complexity in the world, either instantaneously or by guiding
evolution, that deity must already have been vastly complex in the
first place."[43] So who designed God, an even more complex designer?

Still, design is a possible explanation for our world.  The universe
may be like a complex machine, where a God designed and built every
detail.  There are other possibilities.  Perhaps the universe
naturally became more complex the way a plant or baby grows up, while
God's involvement was analogous to planting the first seed.  Or maybe
we do not need a God.  The order we see is a result of impersonal
natural laws and accidents, as with a snowflake.  Even the sort of
intricate functional order we see in living things can come about this
way; "artificial life" researchers say they can obtain hints of such
order even on their computer screens.[44]

Design, then, is not another way of making God a metaphysically
necessary being, but it _is_ a possible explanation for our world.  A
theory which claims the world is designed, and which tells us about
God's specific purposes in designing what we see, could be a way to
make sense of God.

A serious religious theory would connect many aspects of our world to 
a common underlying theme.  The world might be designed for the 
comfort of humans, or for a sweeping drama of salvation.  Our theory 
should bring together multiple, independent lines of evidence.  For 
example, the notion of a designed universe and a specially created 
universe fit together nicely.  So we can ask whether what we know 
about the physical universe suggests it was created.  Creationist 
Henry M.  Morris tells us the laws of thermodynamics show there is a 
Creator:

    The Second Law (the law of decreasing available energy, as the
    universe heads downward toward an eventual "heat death," with the
    sun and stars all burned out) tells us that there must have been a
    primeval creation, or else the universe would already be "dead"!
    The First Law (law of energy conservation) tells us that no energy
    is now being created, so the universe could not have created
    itself.  The only scientific conclusion is that _"in the beginning
    God created the heaven and the earth"_ (Genesis 1:1).[45]

If Morris were correct about physics, we would have to suspect a 
supernatural creation.  Indeed, historically, physicists have often 
believed the second law of thermodynamics meant that everything 
started out from a state of order, and deteriorated from then on.  If 
this is true, perhaps this initial order came from a supernatural 
design.

Morris's "scientific" creationism is, of course, a very crude attempt
at harmonizing science and religious belief.  But his basic idea of
presenting a religious picture of the world and supporting it by
science is correct.  There is no doubt Morris's God makes a
difference.  Sophisticated theists can do something similar, though
they will take a more polished approach, the way many knowledgeable
people now argue that modern physical cosmology shows us there must be
a creator.[46] Ideas like design and creation need not remain in the
metaphysical swamp; they can be made into real claims about our world.


All this may still be too abstract.  Design and creation are very 
interesting, but they still only let us infer God's existence.  Some 
religious people claim we can have a more direct experience of God.  
Through revelation, we might get to know God.

The traditional God communicates with us supernaturally.  Muslim
apologists believe we are guided by "instinct, intuitions, inspiration
and prophetic dreams," even miracles which hint at the power and glory
of their source.  There is more: "The highest form of guidance has,
however, been revealed in a much clearer and more categorical way:
through the Word of God revealed to His prophets."[47] Scripture, they
say, is a supernatural communication of the highest degree; it lays
the basis for the religious life and is the standard to judge all
religious experience.

With or without holy writ, our popular religions are full of
supernatural beliefs.  People in all cultures have visions and are
possessed by spirits.  Perhaps we catch glimpses of a transcendent
reality in the extraordinary experiences of saints and mystics.
Religious theories portray a magical world, not only through popular
supernatural beliefs, but with sophisticated ideas as well.
Sociologist Peter Berger, for example, thinks our normal-seeming
reality is "haunted by that otherness which lurks behind the fragile
structures of everyday life."[48] Through the cracks in the mundane
order of the world, we catch glimpses of the spiritual reality behind
it all.

A religious theory must capture this intuition that there is a
spiritual reality beyond and superior to the natural order.  There
must be something more than an impersonal physical universe and our
everyday social life.  Reality must be deeply personal; all our
explanations of the world must lead back to the immaterial creative
mind who is God.  Even those philosophers who rely on traditional
proofs are trying to defend a view of the world in which there is
something almost magical about our minds, where we ultimately explain
events by purpose and personal choice, and where we are not accidents
coughed up by an indifferent world but souls with a role in a divine
plan.[49]

Different religions make different supernatural claims.  For example,
many religious beliefs include spirits who may be higher than humans
but are not quite gods.  The Catholic cosmos still includes such
"spiritual, non-corporeal beings" as angels and devils,[50] and
believers from all Abrahamic religious traditions still report
encounters with such spirits.  In a religious environment like the
modern New Age, believers might make contact with aliens---some who
have reached a higher spiritual level and lend a helping hand to
humans progressing towards enlightenment.

Now, it is sometimes hard to take beliefs like angels seriously---they
have a taint of popular superstition dripping with sentimentality.
And of course, God does not stand or fall with angels or aliens from
higher spiritual planes.  Religious liberals can even reinterpret
beliefs about spirits, like Buddhist intellectuals taking their
traditional demons to be psychological metaphors.  But _if_ we had
good reasons to believe in actual spirits, God would become more
credible.  Angels fit a theistic picture of the world very well, while
naturalists do not expect to find spirits of any sort.  This would at
least establish that there is a spiritual reality distinct from the
material world we ordinarily see.  God as pure spirit unlimited by a
material body would become easier to make sense of if we had examples
of immaterial spirits.

There are many different ways to understand claims like God designed
the world, or that there is a spiritual realm.  The basic idea behind
a religious theory is to make God an integral part of a spiritual
picture of our world---a theory which tells us how God makes a
difference.  Since there are many ways we can go about this task,
there is no magic argument to disprove God.  Any specific claim may be
shot down, of course.  But if there are no angels in our world, there
still may be a God.  While "God" takes on meaning within the network
of fact claims made in a religious theory, the vision of a deeply
spiritual world does not rest on any single one of these claims.
Similarly, no single argument will establish God's reality.  If we
ever find reason to believe in disembodied spirits, this will make God
more likely, but it is perfectly possible that a world with spirits
flitting around in the night still has no God.

Philosophers and theologians like armchair proofs of God.  But no
matter how these fare, religions paint a different picture of our
world than what infidels claim it to be.  The harmony of life
testifies to a God, the universe is ultimately explained by divine
creation, a salvation history took place as recorded in scriptures.
There is magic in the world, sustained by a mysterious but personal
transcendent reality.  Our moral convictions require a divine source
and assurance.  These are serious claims; they do not come only in the
shape of fundamentalist superstitions.  Furthermore, they are vital
for theistic religion.  For what becomes of God, if there is no
revelation, and the heavens do not declare a creator's glory?  Even if
we could be persuaded metaphysical arguments give us a Supreme Being,
how do we then worship this abstraction?

5.  The Great Programmer
------------------------
The claims religions actually make, like design in the world or a 
supernatural realm, should give us a good start on making sense of 
God.  But we cannot just get rid of the God of the philosophers and 
return to the basics.  Traditional religion makes real claims, but it 
includes a fair share of nonsense; there is good reason for 
philosophers to go in search of more sophisticated Gods.  Religion 
aims for more than theoretical truth---emotional satisfaction, moral 
vision and so on---so our doctrines of God usually tolerate a good 
measure of paradox.  With any sort of theism, we will face conceptual 
problems like reconciling our supposed free will with an omnipotent 
God who determines everything, or explaining how an all-good God 
created a world with so much evil.

This means we must keep pushing to make our religious theories more
concrete.  Intuitions about a spiritual reality combined with
traditional religious fact claims are just the beginning.  We want a
framework to make sense of divine attributes, one which provides a
stage for divine acts like creation and revelation.  At the same time,
we should retain a sense that we are struggling to talk about a
fundamentally mysterious reality.  Traditionally, the way to go about
such a task is to describe God metaphorically and analogically.[51]
All descriptions of God are partly inadequate, but some are useful
nonetheless.

So we need a metaphor, even something like the "toy model" a physicist
uses to start attacking a complicated problem---not a full-fledged
theory, but rather a tool for exploration.  In our technological
society, a computer metaphor will come in handy.  Scriptures always
use the language of their time to tell us something of their
mysterious and awesome deity; something we are familiar with may work
for us.  This does not mean replacing the Bible-God with a Cyber-God
for our time, but using metaphor and analogy to clarify our idea of
divinity.

When trying to explain creation, God used to be likened to a Great
Architect, or a Watchmaker responsible for the intricate design in
nature.  Catching up to the computer age, let us try a Great
Programmer.  We can think of our universe---including ourselves---as
part of a program designed and run by this Programmer.  Our own
computer programs can be quite complicated, including simulations of
everything from arrays of interacting atoms to living things.  Now,
thinking more like a science fiction writer than a metaphysician, we
can imagine ourselves in an analogous situation.[52] _We_ may be
creatures designed by a Programmer.  Perhaps the universe is actually
something like an enormous computer, presumably built to answer some
cosmic question.[53]

At first it is hard to take such an analogy too seriously.
Stereotypes being what they are, the first image we probably have is
God as a deranged hacker.  But in fact, the Programmer metaphor is
much more powerful than an Architect or Watchmaker, because
_computation_ is such a mathematically fundamental concept.  Our
physics, for example, can be described in computational terms, as a
"digital mechanics."[54] So it is not surprising that programming
should be used as an analogy in Design arguments since the very
beginning of computers.[55]

Now, as with any analogy, we should not be too literal-minded.  God is 
not typing away at a console.  The point is that the relationship 
between God and the universe can be conceived of similarly to that 
between a programmer and her program.  This will help us understand 
something about the traditional divine attributes, the relation of the 
creator to the created, and how mere finite mortals can get to know 
something about the God behind it all.

First of all, it is very easy to see how the Programmer is completely 
independent of the program.  When we program a computer, we determine 
what happens.  Our creation does not constrain us; we respond to what 
it produces as we choose.  If our world is analogous to a program, we 
and everything around us are totally dependent on the Programmer for 
our existence.  God the Programmer, on the other hand, is independent, 
creating the world out of free choice.

The program, of course, has its own rules of operation determining how
it runs.  These are its "laws of physics," or the instructions on how
to transform one internal state to another throughout the course of
the program.  If we are simulating a cluster of atoms, for example, we
may design things so that they behave according to Newtonian
mechanics.  But there is also the underlying reality of the computer;
what we see as atoms bumping into each other on our screen happens
because of patterns of electrical activity.  In our world, then, the
physics we see might only be a secondary reality.  The Programmer is
in control of the laws of physics, even the details of the program's
internal evolution.

When we simulate atoms, "time" is also under our control.  We compute
the state of the system at various steps, and observe its behavior.
The length of these steps is arbitrary, furthermore, we may want to
"run time backwards" every now and then, or play with the internal
program time any way we see fit.  So it becomes very natural to think
of the Programmer as standing eternally outside our stream of
time.[56]

If the Great Programmer stands outside our time, we can also
understand the act of creation better.  Our simulation of atoms may
start from a clearly special initial state, or it may be possible to
extrapolate internal program-time backward without limit.  But in
either case, the simulation needs a programmer to bring it into being.
This creation does not take place within program-time; there are no
previous states meaningful in terms of the program's own operation
except perhaps a "chaos" of haphazard bit-patterns.  By analogy, the
Programmer creates our world out of nothing, acting from outside of
time; whether our universe is eternal or bounded in our physical time
does not matter.

We program computers with a purpose in mind, and if we go to the 
trouble of ensuring complex objects appear within our program, our 
purpose usually has to do with their behavior.  The Great Programmer 
must then also have had a purpose in creating the world, though we may 
have some difficulty fathoming it.  But it is likely to involve the 
sentient creatures inhabiting the creation.  Perhaps the world is a 
dramatic stage on which they act out their moral choices.  On the 
other hand, it may also be that the creatures are an incidental 
byproduct, and our stars and supernovae are the Programmer's primary 
interest.  Still, at least it is easy to see that sentient creatures 
might be involved in the grand design.

So far, the Programmer metaphor is useful in understanding how God is
supposed to be so fundamental to the world, and yet so removed and
different from it.  We can also use it to understand how the
Programmer has all sorts of omni-attributes _relative to the
program._[57] That is, our Programmer can know everything involving
the program, be able to to do anything with it and so forth.  If we
act like metaphysicians and talk about the most powerful being
conceivable, we will run into difficulties---from the old "can God
create a stone God cannot lift?" to a host of knottier problems.  But
with a programming analogy we at least have a God who is relatively
omnipotent, which should be good enough anyway.

With enough resources, we can answer most any question regarding the 
programs we write.  Since we can play with program-time as we please, 
we can even make extra runs to answer questions regarding part or 
future states of the program, and intervene in the present 
program-time accordingly.  The Great Programmer should also be 
omniscient, able to answer any question about even the most minute 
detail of the world.

Omnipotence with respect to the program is also easy to understand.  
We control our creations, within the limits imposed by our ability 
and the computer's capacity.  The Great Programmer would be 
able to do most anything with the program.

An omnipotent Programmer could easily intervene in the normal course 
of operations as determined by the program's usual instructions.  God 
may want to provide miracles and revelations in order to disclose 
important facts to sentient creatures.  Furthermore, the Programmer's 
interaction with the world is by means entirely separate from ordinary 
physics.  When we alter the course of a program, say by directly 
manipulating the contents of the computer's memory, what happens is 
entirely unexpected from the point of view of the program's internal 
operations.  It is difficult to imagine how something entirely 
supernatural, not directly interacting with the material world, can 
still acquire information from the world and act on it.  But the 
Programmer analogy should convince us it can be done.[58]

A stickier question is how to get a God who promotes human happiness.
Our world seems supplied with a superabundance of nastiness, which
causes a good deal of difficulty for theology.  God is supposed to be
"omnibenevolent," but what this means gets very murky.  Even so, we
can easily discuss the excuses theologians make for God within our
analogy: that we are the creator's creatures to be disposed of any way
that pleases the Programmer; that suffering prepares our souls for
fellowship with the Programmer in the next life; and so on.  In any
case, it is plausible to think that the Programmer prefers the
sentient creatures of the world to behave in certain ways, and that
these creatures can either rebel or conform to the Programmer's will.

The sentient creatures within the program can have souls.  The
Programmer may choose to preserve the information about their
personality and memories after their deaths, to be reactivated in an
appropriate heaven or hell---perhaps after the original program is
terminated in an apocalyptic fashion.  These ensouled creatures may
even have been created in the image of the Programmer, sharing in
consciousness, personality, ability to make moral choices, and so on;
but truly be only an image, not participating in the deeper external
reality in the way the Programmer does.

We could continue; almost all traditional ideas about God can be 
interpreted within the Programmer picture.  The Great Programmer is 
only an analogy, a toy model, but it at least indicates we can flesh 
out an intelligible idea of God without resorting to metaphysical 
obscurities.  It gives us a way to think about ideas like omnipotence 
without getting bogged down in impossibilities.  Of course, this is 
only a beginning---many an intelligible proposal is still ludicrous.  
Nothing here absolves us from seeking good reasons to believe in a 
God.  We cannot declare God to be an invisible Programmer, a redundant 
entity for which we have no evidence.  Our analogy is just a way to 
get started; if it blossoms into a cosmic conspiracy theory with a 
Great Puppeteer undetectably pulling the strings of every atom, we are 
no better off than with the terminally obscure Gods philosophers keep 
dreaming up.

The Great Programmer would probably be rather elusive, but we can 
think of ways to look for relevant evidence.  We must find ways in 
which the natural order is disrupted, indicating a reality beyond the 
material world.  We must need a supreme personality beyond everyday 
naturalism in order to explain the world.  Orthodox theistic 
religions usually claim specific patterns of divine intervention, 
and signs of purpose in the universe.  The Great Programmer will come 
into its own if it anchors a supernatural theory of our world.

Is the Programmer a metaphor an orthodox theist might become
comfortable with?  Probably---provided we keep in mind the limitations
of our analogy.  If we demand God be exactly similar to a human
programmer, we will have to begin wondering what sort of physical
medium (analogous to the computer) our deity works with, or what kind
of society of gods the Programmer moves around in.  For a satisfying
theism, God must stand alone.  Perhaps we can stretch our analogy so
as to fold God and its "computer" together, picturing a universe which
is part of a God who includes but is larger than its creation.  But
even though there is room to play around, every analogy has its
breaking point.  If God is to remain somewhat mysterious without being
vacuous, this is only to be expected.  The perfect metaphor does not
exist; the Great Programmer is helpful but that is all.

Our toy model breaks when we stretch it, and it is too tidy and
simplistic.  The tale of a personal God acting in human history will
be fuzzier.  But the model does its work, showing us that we can do
better than handwaving when talking about a religious theory.  If we
cannot at least gather the typical supernatural claims religions make
together under a Programmer-like framework, it is hard to see how a
God makes sense at all.  Certainly, God cannot be a cosmic hacker;
certainly, God must be larger than this metaphor if it exists.  But we
must have a handle on divine reality somehow, otherwise "God" is no
more than a word invested with feelings of deep significance.

6.  Is God a Philosophical Problem?
-----------------------------------
God makes sense when woven into a network of supernatural claims---a 
religious theory describing a fundamentally spiritual world.  Such a 
God is not a conceptual necessity conjured up by philosophers, but a 
possibility to be examined in the light of the best of our serious 
knowledge.

If this is correct, the way we typically argue about God must change.
We usually think of the existence of a God as a philosophical problem;
indeed, as one of _the_ problems of philosophy.  From everyday
armchair theorizing to the kind of detailed analysis occupying the
pages of academic journals, our talk about God focuses on conceptual
puzzles and grand metaphysical schemes.  But after millennia of
philosophy, neither the questions nor the basic answers regarding
divinity have changed much.  Perhaps we now have a clearer
understanding of the issues, and we have undoubtedly learned a good
deal from the peripheral questions raised during the quest for God.
Yet there is also an air of sterility to the whole debate.  We too
often seem to be spinning our philosophical wheels.  The problem is
not God alone; philosophy often has difficulty producing cognitive
progress unless it manages to spin off sciences from its mainstream.
Perhaps, as Henry Kyburg says, one reason for this lack of progress is
that philosophy deals with "the (remaining) _hard_ problems."[59] But
continual floundering is also a sign of stagnation; it is at least
reason to explore other approaches.

So we need a different style of debate.  Religious believers claim God 
is a fact, and especially with modern science, we have learned a few 
things about how to sort out the likely from the improbable among fact 
claims.  To judge whether God is a good explanation for our world, we 
should be asking questions like whether the world looks like a product 
of design, whether magical or mystical claims lead us to supernatural 
realities, or whether orthodox salvation-histories are credible.  We 
should be discussing analogies like the Great Programmer, not 
wrangling over lists of infinite attributes.

Contemporary philosophers themselves often express skepticism about
metaphysical thought, even about the mainstream philosophical
tradition as a whole.  We have reason to suspect that the deep
significance we attach to traditional philosophy is merely a
long-standing prejudice of our intellectual culture.  Now, there is a
danger of reducing philosophy to a sort of conceptual therapy here,
and losing sight of some real and interesting questions.  But at least
certain kinds of philosophizing should probably become more like
literary criticism,[60] leaving other disciplines to muddle through
with questions of fact.

Of course, this skepticism can also cut against taking a 
science-inspired approach.  If we quit talking about metaphysical 
certainties, what deep reason is there to believe our science?  Why 
should we trust modern physics and say the earth is billions of years 
old, and ignore stories that it was created in six days?

There is _some_ merit to such worries.  After all, what we consider
worthwhile evidence is not entirely independent of the theories we
already trust.  It is tempting to give up and say we just have to take
God or a godless world as a fundamental metaphysical commitment.
However, not all theories are self-contained, and we do not walk about
inhabiting hermetically sealed worldviews.  We do have reality checks,
and while we cannot do without some kind of theoretical framework as a
_starting point,_ we are also able to consider rival claims.  In our
history, a six-day creation was long our starting point.  Modern
science has been an excellent way to break out of our cultural
assumptions and learn more.  Our culture has also been dominated by
the idea of God for a long time.  From that starting point, our
science has also led many of us to become thoroughgoing naturalists.

The best way to make progress with religious questions is to involve
our science, our history---the best of our secular knowledge.  Serious
religious belief and unbelief are both handicapped by their
overreliance on conceptual arguments.  Too many of us profess to
believe science and religion are separate domains; too often we
shudder to think science and religion may have something to say about
each other.  Liberal Christians say the fact of biological evolution
has no significance for religion.  Atheists say "Science can never
lead us to God.  It can't even try"[61] and concentrate on refuting
the classical proofs.  Neither are taking their fact claims seriously
enough.

There are good practical reasons behind the way we shy away from
letting religious and secular knowledge claims touch one another.  We
now live in a religiously diverse social world, where no one doctrine
reigns supreme.  Our religions can no longer be sustained as common
social beliefs;[62] but we can stuff our beliefs in separate
compartments and put up protective barriers of faith around God.  But
however practical this arrangement may be, it does not help us take
God seriously.  As Charles P.  Henderson points out while arguing
modern science reveals the glory of God,

    To defend religion by carving up reality so as to leave certain
    realms to science and certain realms to religion is a well
    intended maneuver that in one stroke eliminates the possibility
    that God can be what God must be; namely, the organizing principle
    of reality itself.[63]

Theists want to affirm that principle, atheists deny it.  We have 
enough of an idea of how to decide between rival fact claims to at 
least make a good beginning.

We should have a different debate about God, one which will rely on 
our natural and human sciences---without apologies.  This is not to 
deny that the study of religious fact claims will have its own 
distinct character.  God is not a problem in physics or history---the 
questions we need to address cut broadly across all our knowledge.  We 
will need a wide perspective as well as specialized expertise.  
Theology was once called Queen of the Sciences, providing a unifying 
framework for all intellectual disciplines.  It can no longer serve 
the same way---its subject matter is either too dubious or too 
specialized on particular scriptures or traditions.  Philosophers, 
however, can still take on such a broadly integrative role.  They just 
need to resist the temptation to get something for nothing.

Notes
-----

[1] Gerald Bray, _The Doctrine of God_ (Downers Grove: InterVarsity,
1993), p. 82.  See also pp. 213-214.

[2] _Ibid,_ p. 95.

[3] _Catechism of the Catholic Church,_ par. 31.

[4] _Ibid,_ par. 33.

[5] See Henry Margenau and Roy Abraham Varghese, eds., _Cosmos, Bios,
Theos: Scientists Reflect on Science, God, and the Origins of the
Universe, Life, and _Homo sapiens__ (La Salle: Open Court, 1992).

[6] Michael Martin, _Atheism,_ chap. 3-5.  Even relatively old and
introductory texts often do very well in refuting the classical
arguments, e.g. Michael Scriven, _Primary Philosophy_ (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1966), pp. 112-125.

[7] Gerald Bray, _The Doctrine of God,_ p. 110.

[8] See Anselm's _Proslogion,_ translated in John Hick, ed., _The
Existence of God_ (New York: Macmillan, 1964), pp. 25-27.  Anselm
makes some dubious metaphysical assumptions (Peter A. Angeles, _The
Problem of God: A Short Introduction_ (Buffalo: Prometheus, 1980),
pp. 11-13), but the argument can be restated without these.

[9] For a statement and defense in a modern idiom, see J.L. Mackie,
_The Miracle of Theism: Arguments for and Against the Existence of
God_ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp.  41-49.

[10] Alvin Plantinga, _God, Freedom, and Evil_ (New York: Harper &
Row, 1974), pp. 104ff; and Charles Hartshorne, _The Logic of
Perfection_ (La Salle: Open Court, 1962), p. 55.

[11] Michael Martin, _Atheism,_ pp. 89-90.

[12] Richard M. Gale, _On the Nature and Existence of God_ (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 224-237.  (I1) and (I2) are
paraphrased from Gale's propositions 76_3 and 87.

[13] Alvin Plantinga, _God, Freedom, and Evil,_ pp. 90-91.

[14] Michael Martin, _Atheism,_ chap. 12.

[15] W.V.O. Quine, _Set Theory and Its Logic_ (revised edition,
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969).  See section 43 on von
Neumann-Bernays set theory in particular, and pp. 323-324 for further
considerations relating to ordinal strength.  A maximal number arises
because the ultimate class is defined so as to prevent its being a
member of any set, and has the same cardinality as its power set.

[16] Richard Swinburne, _Is There a God?_ (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1996), p. 17.

[17] E.g. Clement Dore, _On the Existence and Relevance of God_ (New
York: St. Martin's Press, 1996), chap. 1.

[18] Kai Nielsen, "Against Ethical Rationalism," in E. Regis Jr.,
ed. _Gewirth's Ethical Rationalism: Critical Essays with a Reply by
Alan Gewirth_ (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 59.

[19] Antony Flew, _God, Freedom, and Immortality: A Critical Analysis_
(Buffalo: Prometheus, 1984), p. 52.

[20] See Michael Martin, _Atheism,_ pp. 96-106 & 118-124, for a survey
of deductive cosmological arguments.

[21] For a practical introduction, see Vic Barnett, _Comparative
Statistical Inference_ (Second Edition, New York: John Wiley & Sons,
1982), p. 192.  For a philosophical view, see Colin Howson and Peter
Urbach, _Scientific Reasoning: The Bayesian Approach_ (La Salle: Open
Court, 1989).

[22] This idea underlies "objective Bayesian" inference; see Roger D.
Rosenkrantz, _Inference, Method, and Decision: Towards a Bayesian
Philosophy of Science_ (Dordrecht: D.  Reidel, 1977).  Maximizing the
information entropy of probability distributions results in a
nonarbitrary prior.  However, this approach has its problems as well.
While maximum entropy methods are useful in statistical physics (E.T.
Jaynes, _E.T.  Jaynes: Papers on Probability, Statistics and
Statistical Physics,_ R.D.  Rosenkrantz, ed. (Dordrecht: D.  Reidel,
1983)), this is strictly in the context of well-established background
theories, so "information" is not theory-independent.  Perhaps
objective Bayesian approaches can be supplemented by recognizing a
process of iterative improvement: present theories, including measures
of information dependent on them, are _starting points._

[23] Richard Swinburne, _Is There a God?,_ p.\ 43.  My Bayesian
description of a cosmological argument is based on Swinburne's _The
Existence of God_ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), chap. 7.  He argues
non-theistic hypotheses have a very low prior probability
(pp. 287-288).  _Is There a God?_ presents a less technical exposition
in chap. 2, 3.  For critiques, see M. Martin, _Atheism,_ pp. 106-118;
J.L. Mackie, _The Miracle of Theism,_ pp. 95-101; and Keith
M. Parsons, _God and the Burden of Proof_ (Buffalo: Prometheus, 1989),
chap. 2.

[24] See, for example, Elliott Sober, "Let's Razor Ockham's Razor," in
_From a Biological Point of View: Essays in Evolutionary Philosophy_
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).  For a Bayesian basis
for simplicity, see William H.  Jefferys and James O.  Berger,
"Ockham's Razor and Bayesian Analysis," _American Scientist_ <80>:1
(1992), p. 64.

[25] Human brains compromise in this way too.  Our memories are not
static tape recordings extractable by hypnosis or other techniques,
but active reconstructions.  Our reasoning is a grab-bag of heuristic
procedures, often violating the rules of probabilistic inference.  See
Thomas Gilovich, _How we Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human
Reason in Everyday Life_ (New York: Free Press, 1991).  Bayesian
inference may still be correct in an ideal sense; C. Howson &
P. Urbach, _Scientific Reasoning,_ pp. 292-295.

[26] J.N. Findlay, "Can God's Existence be Disproved?," in Antony Flew
and Alasdair MacIntyre, eds., _New Essays in Philosophical Theology_
(London: Macmillan, 1955).  Against such views, see Richard H. Jones,
"The Religious Irrelevance of the Ontological Argument," reprinted in
R.H. Jones, _Mysticism Examined: Philosophical Inquiries into
Mysticism_ (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993).

[27] Anthony Kenny, _The God of the Philosophers_ (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1979), chap. 7.

[28] Charles Bradlaugh, "A Plea for Atheism," reprinted in Gordon
Stein, ed., _An Anthology of Atheism and Rationalism_ (Buffalo:
Prometheus, 1980), p. 10.

[29] See Introduction to Richard M. Gale, _On the Nature and Existence
of God._

[30] Frank T. Miosi, in Paul Kurtz, L. Fragell, R.  Tielman, eds.,
_Building a World Community: Humanism in the 21st Century_ (Buffalo:
Prometheus, 1989), p. 266.

[31] A.J. Ayer, _Language, Truth and Logic_ (2nd edition, New York:
Dover, 1952), pp. 114-120.

[32] Julius Silberger, Jr., _Mary Baker Eddy: An Interpretive
Biography of the Founder of Christian Science_ (Boston: Little, Brown,
1980), p. 143.

[33] This is particularly clear in Machian positivism; see Gerald
Holton, _Science and Anti-science_ (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1993), chap. 1-2.

[34] Kurt Gottfried and Victor F.  Weisskopf, _Concepts of Particle
Physics, volume I_ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), pp. 95-109.

[35] _Ibid._ For example, in the present standard model we expect
leptons like electrons to come in pairs like their quark counterparts.
The connection of neutrinos to aspects of particle physics is much
more extensive, of course.

[36] A.J. Ayer, "The Claims of Philosophy," reprinted in _The Meaning
of Life_ (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1990), pp. 1-17.

[37] For modern versions of a positivist-style claim that God is
conceptually incoherent, see Kai Nielsen, _God, Scepticism and
Modernity_ (Ottowa: University of Ottowa Press, 1989); and Antony
Flew, _God, Freedom, and Immortality,_ chap. 6.  See also Kenneth H.
Klein, _Positivism and Christianity: A Study of Theism and
Verifiability_ (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974).

[38] John Shelby Spong, _Resurrection: Myth or Reality?_
(HarperSanFrancisco, 1994), p. 22.

[39] Kai Nielsen, _Philosophy and Atheism: In Defense of Atheism_
(Buffalo: Prometheus, 1985), chap. 5.

[40] This kind of necessity is also known as _aseity._ John Hick, "God
and Necessary Being," _Journal of Philosophy_ <58> (1961),
pp. 725-734.

[41] Kai Nielsen (_God, Scepticism and Modernity,_ pp. 69-77) argues
aseity does not lead to any real fact claim.

[42] Michael Martin, _Atheism,_ chap. 5; the difficulties are not
limited to analogical design arguments.

[43] Richard Dawkins, _The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of
Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design_ (New York: W.W.  Norton,
1987), p. 316.

[44] Henry M. Morris, "The World and the Word," _Back to Genesis_ <93>
(1996).

[45] In practice, these arguments tend to have serious conceptual
defects; see Adolf Grunbaum, "The Pseudo-Problem of Creation in
Physical Cosmology," _Philosophy of Science_ <56> (1989) pp. 373-394;
and "Pseudo-Creation of the Big Bang," _Nature_ <344> (1990)
pp. 821-822.  Even so, the idea of tying the Big Bang to a religious
view of the world is an obvious possibility to explore, if religious
cosmologies are to be given cognitive content.

[46] See Claus Emmeche, _The Garden in the Machine: The Emerging
Science of Artificial Life_ (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1994).  Perhaps a higher-level analogy is appropriate with artificial
life, since complex order arises under conditions predetermined by
human programmers.  But the analogy is shaky: artificial life is a
process of blundering our way through, precisely because the end
results are too complicated for a conventional engineering design
approach.

[47] Thomas Ballantine Irving; Khurshid Ahmad; Muhammad Manazir Ahsan,
_The Qur'an: Basic Teachings_ (London: The Islamic Foundation, 1979),
p. 28.

[48] Peter L. Berger, _A Far Glory: The Quest for Faith in an Age of
Credulity_ (New York: Free Press, 1992), p. 145.

[49] See Richard Swinburne, _Is There a God?,_ for a philosophical
discussion pervaded by assumed special qualities of mind.  However,
note that even conservative believers are not committed to a crude
form of mind-body dualism; see William W.  Stevens, _Doctrines of the
Christian Religion_ (Nashville: Broadman, 1967), pp. 125-140.

[50] See _Catechism of the Catholic Church,_ par. 328-336, for how God
is often understood in the context of angelic beings.

[51] Without metaphor and analogy, revelation of a fundamentally
mysterious God is impossible.  See Bernard Ramm, _Special Revelation
and the Word of God_ (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1961),
pp. 40-43; for a conservative Protestant view.

[52] For example, Stanislaw Lem, _Memoirs of a Space Traveler_ (San
Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), pp. 35-51.

[53] Computer scientist Edward Fredkin speculates on this theme in
Robert Wright, _Three Scientists and Their Gods_ (New York: Times
Books, 1985).  Douglas Adams fans, of course, know that the answer is
"42."

[54] Edward Fredkin, "Digital Mechanics," _Physica D_ <45> (1990)
pp. 254-270.  See also William Poundstone, _The Recursive Universe:
Cosmic Complexity and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge_ (New York:
Morrow, 1985).

[55] Even Charles Babbage did so, much before a working computer
became possible.  See Geoff Simons, _Is God a Programmer?  Religion in
the Computer Age_ (Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1988), pp. 74-78.
Simons develops the Programmer analogy further in his book.

[56] In other words, an Augustinian conception of God and time.  See
Bertrand Russell, _History of Western Philosophy_ (London: George
Allen & Unwin, 1961), pp. 351-353.

[57] Omni-attributes are sometimes called "relative 
attributes," in the sense of "the attributes of God in relation 
to. . . creation." William W. Stevens, _Doctrines of the 
Christian Religion,_ p. 47.

[58] See Paul Edwards, _Reincarnation: A Critical Examination_
(Amherst: Prometheus, 1996), pp. 301-303, about the "modus operandi"
problem: how does a "pure mind" interfere?  The Great Programmer
analogy suggests God need not be a pure mind (whatever that means),
while remaining fully supernatural.
 
[59] Henry E. Kyburg, Jr., _Science & Reason_ (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1990), p. 13.  This is a somewhat peculiar
statement, considering that there are no lack of obnoxiously difficult
problems in our sciences.

[60] Richard Rorty, _Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature_ (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1979).  Rorty comes too close to
postmodern irrationalism, but his fallibilist, coherentist thrust has
merit.  See Kai Nielsen, _After The Demise Of The Tradition: Rorty,
Critical Theory, and the Fate of Philosophy_ (Boulder: Westview Press,
1991).

[61] Gordon Stein, "Why Scientists Should Study Philosophy," _Free
Inquiry_ <15>:1, 1994, p. 61.

[62] Peter L. Berger, _The Heretical Imperative_ (New York: Anchor,
1980), p. 24.

[63] Charles P. Henderson, Jr., _God and Science: The Death and
Rebirth of Theism_ (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1986), p. 16.

