God, Santa, and The Tooth Fairy

[Jehanne]

Belecqua and I were focusing on the category error of comparing material things within the universe to immaterial things that transcend the universe, in the same way that it is a category error to ask for the size of an idea. It may very well be that our responses are not landing because we are not properly hearing the objection, not just here but in an adjacent thread about God and Science. I will try to steel man this particular skeptical objection to belief in God as the best I can.

Whereas Belacqua and I are saying it is irrational compare immaterial things with material things, the competing claim is that there are no things that are immaterial to begin with. If God were real then He would have physical effects because everything real is material. As such if there are no credible examples of God’s material affect, then God seems, at best, like an “unnecessary hypothesis”. So main challenge is something like, “Give me an example something immaterial.”

But does that objection apply to the fundamental claim of the theist? The theistic claim is that God is a common feature of all material reality. Not just parts of reality; the whole of reality. God is the reason material reality even exists.  As such, it seems irrational to binary sort the material universe into “god” and “not god” piles. (Christology deals with this apparent paradox but obviously is well beyond the scope of this discussion.)

In reply though, I would offer a counter challenge to the idea that everything is material. Show me anything that is material. What do you really know about matter? Things are solid? Apparently, their mostly empty space. And then when you get right down to it, it seems fundamental reality can be credibly described as “structured nothingness”. In truth, idealism remains a credible metaphysical option.

IMHO a complete picture of reality not only describes its contents but also accounts for our ability to make sense of it. I believe the universe is intelligible because reason transcends physical universe. For example, imagine there was some truly irrational anomaly in the universe, perhaps some effect that defied the very laws of known physics. Would we restrict our reasoning to known physics? No.  More than likely, we would expand our notions of what is possible in physics to discover the larger reality. I am not saying then expand and use god to explain the anomaly. No. The point is this: Reason must be valid. And that warrants giving primacy to mind rather than to matter, or at least taking it seriously.

Now, sure, a theologian might be referring to the Ground of Being but the faithful pray to Jesus. Again, Christology is complex…and there is a point. The central claim Christianity is Jesus crucified and risen from the dead. But that’s another discussion, for another day.

I agree with Professor Richard Dawkins -- God if he/she/it exists, is complex, more so than an amoeba. We do not observe God, nor do we observe complex things that do not arise from simpler things unless those things are specially created, namely, by Us.

As for comparing God to Santa and/or the tooth fairy, I think that the concept of God is even more absurd. For starters, believers ascribe to God infinite attributes, but, as Cantor proved, there are an infinite number of infinite sets, only one of which is countable, namely, the set of natural numbers and those sets that have a bijection with the natural numbers, and hence, the same cardinality. No one imputes infinite attributes to Santa and/or the tooth fairy. For instance, does God know all the digits of the number pi? It's like asking if God can make a rock so big that he cannot lift it? Paradoxes, such as these, are never discussed about Santa and/or the tooth fairy.

Religions exist because they meet the psychological and social needs of their adherents.