One is tempted to sigh, "There they go again." The headline to Kathy Gilsinian's Columbia Spectator story reads, "Does God Exist? Yes, Mathematician Says." The mathematician in question, Dr. William Hatcher, spoke at Columbia's Warren Hall, is an adherent of the Baha'i faith, and doesn't strike me as all that rational.
Mind you, I wasn't there to hear Dr. Hatcher speak, so I'm relying on Gilsinian's report. But it's not promising.
First, we're told that "Hatcher began his discussion with an introduction to Aristotlean [sic], or attributional, logic and its shortcomings."
Aristotle purported to have proven the existence of God, but he did so based on a kind of logic that deals with properties of objects, an approach, he argued, that's less than satisfying considering that God's attributes cannot be perceived....In relational logic, we want to know how the object relates to other objects. It turns out that the relational approach often yields more useful information [than Aristotlean [sic] attributional logic]."
Well, we saw that coming, didn't we? Logic as recognized by Aristotle has "shortcomings." In particular, it seems, that inconvenient bit about A is A. Can't have that. Nice sidestep, too, about how "God's attributes cannot be perceived." What, then, are we trying to "relate?" What, then, is to be perceived about God at all?
Gilsinian continues:
The proof itself rests on four principles, the first of which is the assertion that something exists. Even if the world is an illusion, he pointed out, an illusory self, contemplating an illusory universe, is still something that exists.
(What is illusory is that anything is being discussed here.)
Further, he said, everything that exists does so because of some cause, and the "principle of sufficient reason" states that every phenomenon is either caused by something external or caused by itself, but never both. "Everything that exists has to have a reason for existing," he said.
Working from these principles, Hatcher first defined what he called "the minimum criteria for Godhood," and then set about trying to prove the existence of a phenomenon to fit those criteria. God, he said, must exist and be unique, and must be self-caused as well as being the cause of everything else. "Every existing phenomenon is the end effect of a causal chain of possibly infinite length, starting with God," he said.
He then delved into Avicenna's discussion of the part-whole relationship. "All known physical phenomena are composites, except possibly the elementary particles of quantum mechanics," he stated. Thus, if A is a component of B, then B is composite, and furthermore a composite cannot be a cause of one of its components, because it could not exist without all its components in place.
From these definitions, he said, one can infer that the universe is a composite of all phenomena. He inferred that the universe itself, then, cannot bring any of its own components into being, as it could not have existed before the existence of the components.
Then, the universe could similarly not be self-caused, since it is caused by the aggregation of its components, and so there must be some object, G, that causes the universe but is not the universe itself. G must then be universal because it is a cause, directly or indirectly, of every component in the universe.
He concluded that G is the unique uncaused phenomenon, because, as the cause of everything, it can't be caused by something else.
My god. Can we say "fallacy of composition?" "Begging the question?" And this is simpy egregious linguistic sleight-of-hand: "the universe is a composite of all phenomena (my emphasis)," but "God is not part of the universe itself."
This is a mathematician reasoning? No wonder so many kids hate math in school.
Here's Gilsinian's final paragraph:
David Kline, CC '07, said he was impressed, even though he felt that the logical proof of God, far from justifying faith, only requires a different kind of faith. But, with that faith in reason so characteristic of Columbia students, he said he appreciated that the talk was "a purely logical representation of the existence of God and not the meaning of God."
"Faith in reason." We have a long, long way to go.
Posted by Craig Ceely at February 23, 2004 03:42 PM