Spectrotheism

Epistemic status: Two parts, on different footing. I'd put about 80% on the first, that the last link leans toward structure, and it's the stretch of the bridge I expect to fail first if anything does. The last step, toward something that chooses, is a leap I take on purpose, so I don't put a number on it.

What follows is the route that took me to a particular view about where the universe comes from. I'm not trying to prove anything with it, and I'm not defending any religion, text or institution. I want to show the whole route, including the uncomfortable part, the point where the reasoning runs out and I have to decide whether to jump.

I don't start from “does God exist?” That question arrives already loaded with a character, a history, a list of attributes and a tradition behind it. The question I care about is smaller.

Any explanation of where the universe comes from has to stop somewhere. You could say the chain runs back forever, but then you'd still have to explain why there's a whole endless chain rather than none. Some think the last link explains itself because it couldn't have failed to exist, a line of thought that runs through Leibniz. Others think it's a brute fact with nothing behind it. Either way, there's a last link.

Aristotle already argued, some 2,350 years ago, that a chain of causes can't go back forever. His unmoved mover, though, explained motion in a cosmos he believed had no beginning. Today's naturalist runs into the same problem, whether the last link is a multiverse, a quantum fluctuation of the vacuum or a fact with no cause at all. Somewhere, every chain of whys runs into a wall with no further why behind it.

Whatever that last link is, it has to account for something odd. Many physicists argue that several constants of nature sit inside narrow ranges that allow complex chemistry and life. Fairly small changes, they say, would have produced a universe with neither. This is what's called the fine-tuning of the universe.

One of the most cited examples is the cosmological constant. Its measured value is enormously smaller than simple theoretical estimates suggest. The figure usually quoted is about 120 orders of magnitude, though it depends on the assumptions. Steven Weinberg argued in 1987 that if it were much larger, galaxies could never have formed.

The picture is disputed. Fred Adams, in a long 2019 review in Physics Reports, argues that stars can work over fairly wide ranges of some of these constants. And any claim that most combinations wouldn't work assumes we know how to put probabilities on values that could in principle have been anything. That's far from settled, and philosophers call it the normalizability problem (McGrew, McGrew and Vestrup, 2001).

Even so, to me it's the most uncomfortable fact naturalism has on the table.

The naturalist has real answers, and the best one combines two ideas. Suppose there are enormously many universes with different constants. We could only ever find ourselves in one that allows observers, so finding ourselves in a fine-tuned one is no surprise. I think that's the strongest answer available.

My doubt is about the first half. A mechanism that produces that much variety also needs explaining, and so does the fact that it exists instead of a trivial one, or none. The other option, calling it all a brute fact, doesn't say why it's this fact and not another. Neither answer is absurd, and neither comes free. They cost what any last link costs.

Some people take a shortcut here and say there's nothing to explain, since if the universe didn't allow life we wouldn't be around to notice. John Leslie answered this with a well-known example in Universes (1989). You're in front of a firing squad of expert marksmen, they all fire, and every shot misses. “If they'd hit me I wouldn't be here to wonder about it” is true, and it explains nothing. Either they meant to miss, or there were so many executions that someone was bound to survive one.

Leslie's example rules out “nothing to explain”, but it doesn't choose between intention and a huge number of tries.

My first version of this essay treated the whole thing as a choice between two options. Either the last link picks among possibilities, or it's a mechanism that doesn't care which one comes out. That was too crude, because there are really two separate questions.

The first is whether the last link has no particular direction or leans toward something, toward structure, say. The second is whether something chooses among the possibilities, or no one does. Put the two together and you get at least four positions.

A blind mechanism has neither a direction nor anyone choosing. Classical theism has something that chooses, with a full set of criteria. Then there's axiarchism, the view John Leslie defended in Value and Existence (1979), which says the universe exists because it's good. Value itself does the creating, so there's direction with no one choosing. The fourth box, something that chooses with no particular direction, is where my first version sat.

That box doesn't survive the evidence. Something that can choose isn't indifferent, fine, but that says nothing about what it would choose. I was leaving its preferences open on purpose. If they could be anything, though, a chooser that prefers dead universes is as likely as one that prefers structure. A universe that allows life then comes out exactly as probable as under a blind mechanism, and fine-tuning gives the chooser no advantage at all.

For the evidence to count, the last link has to lean toward structure. That's an attribute, and it has a cost.

Elliott Sober, among others, has pressed a classic objection to design arguments that bites here. If you credit a designer with exactly the goals that fit what you observe, you've tailored the hypothesis to the data. My answer is that “toward structure” is one of very few simple goals a directed origin could have. Most possible goals would be arbitrary, like producing one exact configuration out of countless others, and spelling them out would take an enormous amount of information. Leaning toward structure takes only a few words to say, so it doesn't pay the price of a hypothesis built to fit.

That doesn't make it free. Other goals are just as simple, like maximizing entropy or making everything uniform, and they give universes with no one in them. Part of why structure looks special to us may be that we're made of it. There's also a trade-off I can't fully escape. Defined broadly, structure includes a universe of perfect crystals, orderly and lifeless. Defined narrowly, as whatever life needs, it predicts life well but starts to look tailored. Even so, it's one of the cheapest goals a directed origin could have, and it's the only one the evidence asks for.

So the most the evidence can give me, if fine-tuning holds up, is an answer to the first question. The last link leans toward structure. On that point an axiarchist and I agree.

The second question is where the evidence runs out. By “choosing” I mean something that represents the alternatives and settles on one of them. A tendency represents nothing. It just goes where it goes. I can say what the difference is, but I can't point to a single observation that would tell the two apart.

Simplicity doesn't help me either. If you measure it by how much it takes to spell out a hypothesis, a tendency is far cheaper than something that weighs options. Read that way, Ockham's razor favors the axiarchist.

This is where the name comes from. What I call spectrotheism argues for one thing, that the last link leans toward structure. The evidence leaves open the whole range between a tendency and a chooser, and I take the step toward the chooser as a declared leap. What that chooser would be like stays open.

I don't know whether it's one or many, whether it's conscious in any sense like ours, whether it has anything like morality, or whether it cares what happens here. Every attribute I add is one more place where I could be wrong, so I only carry the one the argument needs.

There's already a term, generic theism, but it usually means the God that different traditions share, and that God is much fuller. David Ray Griffin's list for what he calls the generic idea of God runs to thirteen features. It starts with a personal being with purposes, perfect in goodness and wisdom, supreme in power, the creator of the universe. Mine argues for one attribute and leaps to a second.

Philosophers also have a name for the distance between what arguments like this establish and anything with religious content. It's called the gap problem, which Alexander Pruss describes as the gap between showing there's a first cause and showing there's a God. Arguments like mine usually work as one rung on a longer ladder, something to climb past on the way to a fuller God or a particular religion. Here there's no next rung. Spectrotheism stops on this side of the gap on purpose, and its own definition marks the point where the reasoning ends and the choice begins.

None of this is new. I got here on my own and only found out afterward that the road already had names. The closest version is in Hume. In Part XII of his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), the skeptic Philo ends up conceding “that the cause or causes of order in the universe probably bear some remote analogy to human intelligence.” That's almost exactly where I land, down to the “cause or causes”, which is my one-or-many.

In the same passage Philo suggests that a claim this thin affects nothing about how anyone lives, and that remains the classic objection to a view like mine. Scholars argue about whether Philo speaks for Hume.

Antony Flew, one of the most influential atheist philosophers of the twentieth century, changed his position in 2004, at 81, and became a deist without joining any religion. His first reason came from biology. In a letter to the writer Richard Carrier, he said he had one piece of relevant evidence. He couldn't see how any naturalistic theory could explain how the first reproducing species arose from DNA.

In There Is a God (2007), fine-tuning shows up as a second line of evidence. There he concludes that the only viable explanation is a divine Mind (review), which is a lot more than I'm willing to say. There's also a documented controversy over how much of that book he actually wrote, and questions were raised about his memory at the time. I mention him only because the road had been walked before.

All of this has a real cost. In practice, spectrotheism changes almost nothing. It doesn't tell me how to live, and it promises nothing after death. Someone could fairly say it's nearly the same as believing nothing. There's a point where stripping a hypothesis of attributes stops protecting it and starts emptying it, and I'm not sure where that line is, or that I haven't crossed it.

What it does commit me to is a claim about how reality is at bottom, and that claim could be false. Suppose physics showed that the constants couldn't have been different, or the probability problem turned out to be fatal. Then the reasoned part of this would fall, and I'd have to look at the rest again.

I think of all this as a bridge. Whatever the ultimate truth is, if there is one, it sits on the far side of a river nobody has crossed. With the tools we have, fine-tuning, probability, Ockham's razor and the rest, you can build a real stretch of that bridge. In my case it reaches as far as a last link that leans toward structure. Then the material runs out.

At that point you can do three things. You can jump toward a chooser, jump toward a tendency, or stay where you are and not jump at all. Staying is a perfectly respectable choice, and plenty of careful people make it. I jump anyway, toward the chooser, knowing it's the more complicated option.

When the evidence can't decide, something else has to, and for me it's what I find more plausible to begin with. I prefer a subject that chooses over an impersonal tendency, and I know that preference is part of the choice too. William James defended this kind of move in “The Will to Believe” (1896), for questions that matter, that you can't dodge and that evidence can't settle.

Nobody walks all the way across, whichever of the three they pick. If the argument that knocks this down shows up tomorrow, I'd rather find it than not look for it. Until then, that jump is where I put my faith.