Reflections on the Krauss/Craig Debate

Last week Dr. William Lane Craig debated Dr. Lawrence Krauss at North Carolina State University. We had the privilege of having Dr. Craig here at OSU last year. Dr. Craig is a philosopher and has published extensively on a wide variety of topics such as cosmology and the resurrection of Jesus. One of Dr. Craig’s doctorates was on the cosmological argument which was done under Dr. John Hick. Needless to say, Craig’s cosmological argument has been one of the most discussed arguments in philosophy of religion for quite some time. Dr. Krauss is an American Theoretical Physicist who is Professor of Physics, Foundation Professor of the School of Earth and Space Exploration and Director of the Origins Project at the Arizona State University. He is the author of several bestselling books, including The Physics of Star Trek.

I did enjoy listening to Krauss speak. He is very engaging and stimulating. The topic was whether there was evidence for God’s existence. I already see Krauss has written his take on the debate. According to Krauss, there are those who need to be reassured of their religious convictions in a group setting. So Craig was the one who is called to such as task. As much as Krauss likes to think Craig is simply reassuring the faithful, Krauss is now doing the same thing by reassuring the faithful on the atheist side that Craig’s arguments were off target. Anyway, I will make some comments here that I feel are worth discussing.

#1: Krauss says he a scientist, but Craig is a philosopher. He also said on several occasions that it is intellectual laziness to point to God as an explanation.

Once again, we are back to the scientism. In Ian Barbour’s book Religion in an Age of Science, Barbour describes scientism’s exalted view of the scientific method. As Barbour says:

“Science starts from reproducible public data. Theories are formulated and their implications are tested against experimental observations. Additional criteria of coherence, comprehensiveness, and fruitfulness influence choice among theories. Religious beliefs are not acceptable, in this view, because religion lacks public data, such as experiential testing, and such criteria of evaluation. Science alone is objective, open-minded, universal, cumulative, and progressive. Religious traditions, by contrast, are said to be subjective, closed-minded, parochial, uncritical, and resistant to change.”

Since Krauss doesn’t have a philosophy background he doesn’t seem to recognize that science can’t be done apart from philosophy. For those that assert that all truth claims must be scientifically verifiable end up making a philosophical assumption rather than a scientific statement. Also, anyone that holds to a “strong” scientism ends up committing the reductive fallacy by taking one area of study and reduces all reality to this one area alone.

Furthermore, since science tests the observable, is this the correct way to approach the existence of God? What tends to be forgotten is the insistence that God must be a visible/material object which can be observed with the five senses is to commit a category mistake. A category mistake is to assign to something a property which applies only to objects of another category.

As J.P. Moreland says, “It is a category fallacy to fault colors for not having smells, universals for not being located at only one place, and God for not being an empirical entity. From the Orthodox Christian view, God, if He exists at all, is an infinite Spirit. It is not part of the nature of a spirit to be visibly empirically as a material object would be. It is a category fallacy to ascribe sensory qualities to God or fault him for not being visible.” (Scaling the Secular City: A Defense of Christianity (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1987), 227.

Having said this, although we can’t observe God as a material object, we can observe the effects in the world and make rational inferences from the cause to the effect. This is generally called “The inference to the best explanation model,” because it takes into account the best available explanation in our whole range of experience and reflection. This type of explanation is commonly called “abduction” since it is a type of reasoning that is different from induction and deduction. The “inference to the best explanation model,” is sometimes synonymous with the “cumulative case” method. The cumulative case method is more like the brief that a lawyer makes in a court of law or that a literary critic makes for a particular interpretation of a book. The cumulative case method is an informal argument that pieces together several lines or types of data into a sort of hypothesis or theory that comprehensively explains that data and does so better that any alternative hypothesis.

Krauss also said the universe is not “fine tuned.” I have read other physicists who would disagree with him such as Robin Collins-see here. You can also read some of John Polkinghorne’s work here.

I was not surprised at all that Krauss offered the multi-verse theory. Sorry, but finding another universe will only lead to more questions. For example:
1. Even if we could show evidence for multiple universes this would only multiply the need for a Creator and Designer because each one would need creation and fine tuning to get started.
2. If true, who or what is keeping these universes from colliding?
3. There is no known mechanism that exists for generating such universes.
4. That itself would require impressive design.

Let me get back to the philosophy issue. Naturalism (as currently discussed and advocated by Richard Dawkins, Krauss and other atheists, etc) is not a discovery of science. It must always be viewed as a presupposition of science as presently practiced. For example, both Dawkins and Francis Crick both admit that while the world shows every indication it is designed and have purpose, they add one qualification; it only looks that way. In other words, while the design is evident, it can be explained without resorting to any Designer. Therefore, nature is the mechanism that can account for everything. As Vern Poythress says:

“ Methodological naturalism says roughly that modern science does conduct itself and should continue to conduct itself with the assumption that in the areas that it investigates, all the particular events and all the general patterns take place according to general laws that for practical purposes can be regarded as impersonal; and even if there are some exceptions, these are best ignored for the sake of getting on with the task of science. Methodological naturalism can be converted in some people’s minds into ontological or metaphysical naturalism, the view that there is no personal God and that the physical domain is all that there is. For philosophical and religious reasons, some people use methodological naturalism as a stepping stone toward ontological naturalism. But logically the two are distinct. Methodological naturalism more modestly proposes a practical restriction on the kind of hypotheses that scientists may consider, based partly on the pragmatic argument that the restriction will help science make progress rather than getting caught in fruitless byways. A number of people maintain that science by definition has a firm commitment to excluding the supernatural.” (see Redemming Science: A God Centered Approach, pgs 261-264).

Richard Lewontin’s comments in his January 9, 1997 article, Billions and Billions of Demons summarizes how naturalistic philosophy impacts the entire scientific process:

“ Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.”

The Confusion Over Primary and Secondary Causes

Two of the most crucial principles of science are causality and uniformity. Causality is the relationship between an event (the cause) and a second event (the effect). The principle of uniformity derives its name from the uniform experience on which it is based. When I look around the world, I see two kinds of causes- natural and intelligent. I also know that through repeated observation that certain kinds of causes regularly produce certain kinds of effects. For example, wind on sand (or water) produces waves. Heavy rain on dirt results in erosion, and so on. These what are called natural, or secondary causes.

Their effects are produced by natural forces whose processes are an observable part of the ongoing operation of the physical universe. In addition to secondary causes, there are primary/intelligent causes. Natural laws do nothing and set nothing into motion. A “law of nature” is a description of what happens when no agent (whether it be divine, human, etc) is interfering or intervening into the casual order. Intelligence is a primary cause. For example, when we come across a sandcastle on the beach, we never assume that waves and sand did it on it’s own without any outside agency/intelligence.

Likewise, we would never think that a natural law on it’s own would produce the faces on Mount Rushmore. As we know, nature can’t by itself produce skyscrapers or computers. And in an experimental sense, when we see glance inside a laboratory, we also know that nature by itself can’t show how life came from non-life. Nor can we attempt to reduplicate the Big Bang apart from human agency/intelligence. The list goes on.

So convinced are we by previous repeated experience that only intelligence produces these kinds of effects that when we see even a single event that resembles one of these kinds of effects we invariably posit an intelligible cause for it.

If you study the history of science there was a period where the some of the founders of modern science did not allow for all causes to be explained by natural, or secondary causes. In other words, they allowed for both a primary Cause (that being God/An Intelligent Agent as the originator of things) and secondary causes-the operation of the world.

When Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749-1827) corrected Isaac Newton’s misbelief that God intervened to correct the elliptical orbits of the planets, Laplace offered a naturalistic explanation of the development of the solar system. James Hutton (1726-1797) and Charles Lyell (1797-1875) explained geological processes by natural causes apart from any non-natural interference. Charles Darwin (1809-1882) later offered a natural explanation for the emergence of the species. This led to the need to explain the operation of the world instead of its ultimate origin; therefore, the search for secondary causes overshadowed the need for a primary cause. So we see that theism was reduced to deism and then set the stage for atheism. (see N.L Geisler, Systematic Theology, Vol 2. (Minneapolis, MI: Bethany House, 2003), 509.

In the world of the New Atheists, science is limited to the following range of concerns:
1. Science only is concerned with the material aspects of the natural world.
2. Science restricts itself to the secondary causes and would forgo consideration of a primary cause (such as a divine/intelligent primary cause) as part of the explanatory structure.
3. Science seeks to reduce the systems observed to their component parts as a way of simplifying observation and explaining the behavior of the higher levels of organization (see T. Peters and Gaymon Bennett. Bridging Science and Religion (London: SCM Press, 2002), 72-73.

In the end, we see the reductionism in this method. In the reductionist model, all natural phenomena can be understood in terms of lower and more elementary levels of existence, all the way down to particle physics, consciousness reduced to biology, biology reduces to chemistry, chemistry reduces to physics, and all physics reduces to the “behavior” or elementary particles and forces. (see T. Peters and Gaymon Bennett. Bridging Science and Religion (London: SCM Press, 2002), 72-73.

Why does this matter? Because no matter how evident it is that nature by itself can’t account for anticipatory, specified, or irreducible complexity, it won’t matter for Krauss. He will keep looking for a natural cause. Hence, the rules of the game have already been determined by the scientific establishment.

#2 The Resurrection/Miracles

As soon as I heard Krauss speak about the resurrection of Jesus, I knew he was out of his area of expertise. He doesn’t have a background in Biblical Studies, historiography, and most importantly, philosophy. After all, you can’t even construct an historical method apart from philosophy. Craig’s work on the resurrection speaks for itself (see his Reasonable Faith: 3rd edition). Once again, it is naturalism that Krauss punts to in his rejection of the resurrection of Jesus. If one has decided that many of the events in the New Testament are not possible (because of an a priori commitment to naturalism), it will impact how they interpret the evidence (after examining it). But whether a miracle has occurred is not determined by a priori probabilities but by a posteriori facts. For someone like Krauss, I don’t think the resurrection of Jesus is even a remote possibility. It is evident that it is ruled out in advance so far ahead of time that no amount of evidence would ever convince him.

Hence, there is no need to do historical apologetics with Krauss. Furthermore, Krauss ends up repeating David Hume’s arguments against miracles. But I doubt Krauss doesn’t know that much of contemporary philosophy has found Hume’s arguments faulty. If anything, the continual insistence to compare Jesus’ resurrection with other so-called miracle claims in other religions without adequate research is where I will borrow the phrase Krauss used. It is “intellectual laziness.” I have written more about this here: Or, you can read Daniel Bonevac’s article called The Argument from
Miracles here.

Questions from the audience:

As I listened to the questions in the audience, I could tell that it was the first time many had heard the arguments that Craig and Krauss presented. Questions like “What caused God?” just showed me that there needs to be more time for discussion on these topics.

Next up for Dr. Craig is Sam Harris. They will be debating tonight at Notre Dame on the topic of morality and whether the foundation for it is natural or supernatural.