I recently viewed Dr. David Wood’s video, Scooby-doo and the Case of the Silly Skeptic. The target of Wood’s criticism was Dr. Michael Shermer (pictured above), who defended a principle which he referred to as “Shermer’s Last Law,” in the course of a debate with Wood on October 10, 2016. According to this law, any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God. The reason is that technologically advanced aliens could easily produce effects that would look like miracles to us. As Wood puts it (paraphrasing Shermer’s argument): “They might be able to cure diseases instantly, or regenerate limbs, or change the weather. These kinds of things would seem miraculous to human beings, and so from our perspective, aliens who could do these kinds of things would be indistinguishable from God.” So if we saw something miraculous, how would be know that it’s God and not aliens?

In the debate, Wood fired back at Shermer, asking: “If you did want to know that God exists, wouldn’t you want some method to figure out if He exists, something that would lead you to the truth about that? According to Dr. Shermer, there can be no such method, because [for] anything God could possibly do, you could say, ‘Aliens did it.’ … So it’s built into the methodology that you could never know whether God exists or not. If it’s built into your methodology [that you can] never know the truth about something, then I have to question the methodology.” In his video, Dr. Wood added: “If somebody says to me, ‘Prove to me that statement X is true,’ but an examination of his methodology shows that he won’t allow anything to count as evidence that statement X is true, how can we take that demand for proof seriously?” Finally, Wood administered his coup de grace against those who demand proof of God’s existence: “When I use an atheist’s methodology against him, he can’t even prove his own existence,” since advanced aliens could make me believe that I am arguing with an atheist when in fact I’m not, simply by messing with my brain.

Wood also attacked Shermer’s hypocrisy for asking why God doesn’t detect amputees: even if He did, Shermer still wouldn’t be convinced of God’s existence. And how reasonable is it, asks Wood, for Shermer to believe the evolutionary naturalist myth that life originated from non-living matter, while at the same time insisting that the regeneration of a limb from living matter would somehow constitute proof of God’s existence?

Is Shermer simply being willfully perverse, as Wood seems to believe? Much as I profoundly disagree with Shermer, I would argue that his position is at least intellectually consistent, even if I also consider it to be unreasonable. Here’s why.

Why I think Shermer’s skeptical position is an intellectually consistent one

1. Philosophically speaking, there is nothing inconsistent in the position of someone who refuses to believe in God’s existence unless she has proof, or at least good evidence, that God exists. (Arguably, the person who says, “I won’t believe in anything unless I have proof or good evidence that it’s real,” is being self-referentially inconsistent, since there are some things – e.g. the external world – whose reality we just have to accept as given; but the skeptic who restricts the scope of this evidentiary principle to supernatural beings is perfectly consistent. Such a restriction might strike many people as rather ad hoc, but inconsistent it ain’t.)

2. There is also nothing obviously inconsistent in a skeptic maintaining, on independent grounds, that for any extraordinary effect E (e.g. the instantaneous regeneration of an amputated limb), the hypothesis that aliens produced the effect will always be more probable than the hypothesis that God did it. [And what might those “independent grounds” be? Perhaps the skeptic might argue that the existence of an all-knowing Being Who is absolutely simple – as classical theism insists that God is – is fantastically improbable, on antecedent grounds, as it is difficult to see how an utterly simple Being could give rise to the sheer variety and complexity of things that we see in this world.]

From these two premises, it follows that no effect, however extraordinary it may be, can provide good evidence that God exists. What this means is that if a theist is going to defend the reasonableness of belief in God when arguing with a skeptic who accepts the above premises, then it would be advisable to stick with ordinary effects, and then deploy a philosophical argument (say, the cosmological argument or the teleological argument) to show that the best explanation for these effects is God. But I digress.

What if the same skeptic mocks religious believers, asking them why God never heals amputees? (Or does He? See here.) The question is a perfectly legitimate one, since the absence of such healings is, on the face of it, puzzling if God exists. But if the skeptic goes on to admit that even such a healing wouldn’t convince her that God exists, is she being inconsistent? I think not. She is simply making two independent points: (i) the best sort of evidence that could possibly be adduced for God’s existence (namely, well-documented evidence for extraordinary miracles, such as the instantaneous healing of an amputee) appears to be lacking; and (ii) even this evidence wouldn’t be enough to show that God is real, anyway, since the antecedent probability of the existence of the God of classical theism is far lower than the probability of advanced aliens existing.

Let’s go back to Dr. Wood’s remark: “If somebody says to me, ‘Prove to me that statement X is true,’ but an examination of his methodology shows that he won’t allow anything to count as evidence that statement X is true, how can we take that demand for proof seriously?” Dr. Wood’s point is a rhetorically powerful one, but it seems to me that Dr. Wood is guilty of an equivocation here. For the skeptic is not saying that nothing could ever count as evidence for God; rather, what she is saying is that according to her own epistemic principles, any effect that would qualify as evidence for God would simultaneously as even better evidence for the existence of advanced aliens, since their existence is antecedently more probable than God’s. In other words, the classical theist’s definition of God is epistemically self-defeating, since it makes the task of establishing God’s existence with even a high degree of probability an impossible one. “Don’t blame me,” the skeptic might argue in her defense. “Blame your definition of the Deity. That’s where the real problem lies.”

Refuting the skeptic

So, what’s wrong with the skeptic’s two-step argument? I’m not going to attack the skeptic’s first premise. I think that for someone to argue that we ought to believe in a supernatural being, he needs to produce good evidence that such a being exists. In the absence of such evidence, I see nothing wrong with someone believing in such a being, simply because this belief makes his life meaningful. Fair enough. Far be it from me to scoff at beliefs that people hold onto, because their very sanity depends on their continuing to believe them. That’s not wishful thinking; it’s psychic self-preservation. If giving up your belief in the supernatural would make you sad, that shouldn’t deter you from pursuing the truth, even if hurts your feelings. But if you think that giving up such a belief would make you go crazy, then you’d be best advised to let sleeping dogs lie. So I don’t think fideism is necessarily irrational. However, if someone wants to tell me that I ought to accept his supernatural belief, then I think it is perfectly reasonable for me to demand good evidence – particularly in an age when different people’s beliefs about supernatural beings mutually conflict.

Where I would find fault with the skeptic is in the second premise of her argument: that for any extraordinary effect E, the hypothesis that aliens produced it is always more probable than the hypothesis that God did it. Even if we judge the existence of aliens to be antecedently more probable (given our background knowledge of the world) than the existence of the God of classical theism, we need to bear in mind the following:

(i) it doesn’t follow from this that for any effect E, the hypothesis that aliens produced E is more probable than the hypothesis that God did. There might be some highly specific effects (which I’ll discuss below), whose production by God (assuming He exists) would be vastly more probable than the production of these same effects by aliens. In that case, the degree to which these effects tend to confirm God’s existence might outweigh the antecedent improbability of the existence of God, when compared to aliens. That would tip the balance in God’s favor;

(ii) unless one is claiming that God’s existence is logically inconsistent with some known fact F, it follows that the antecedent probability of God’s existence, while low, is not zero or even infinitesimal. Given that the number N of events that have occurred in the observable universe is finite, and given that none of these events is logically inconsistent with God’s existence, it follows that the antecedent probability of God’s existence (from what we know about the world) will also be a finite number which is measurably greater than zero. Indeed, I would argue that for any simple hypothesis H, we should always rate its antecedent probability as greater than or equal to 1 in 10¹²⁰, which has been calculated by Seth Lloyd as the number of base-level events (or elementary bit-operations) that have taken place in the history of the observable universe. In a post I wrote several years ago, I argued that the antecedent probability of the existence of some supernatural agent(s) should be assigned a value of at least 1 in 10¹²⁰: “…[I]f we imagine embodied particle-sized intelligent beings scouring the cosmos from the moment of creation onwards, the maximum number of observations they could possibly make of naturalistic occurrences is 10¹²⁰, hence by Laplace’s sunrise argument, the prior probability they would rationally assign to a supernatural event would have to be 1 in 10¹²⁰.” That being the case, belief in a supernatural agent could be rendered reasonable by evidence which favors theism over naturalistic hypotheses by a factor of more than 10¹²⁰ to 1. How might this happen? The mathematician Charles Babbage (1791-1871), in Chapter 10 and Chapter 13 of his Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, makes the perspicuous observation that whereas the evidence against miracles increases an an arithmetic rate as non-miraculous occurrences accumulate over the course of time, the evidence for a miracle increases at a geometric rate, as the number of independent eyewitnesses increases. It therefore follows that even a vanishingly low antecedent probability of a miracle can be overcome by the testimony of a sufficient number of independent eyewitnesses;

(iii) theism is not the same as classical theism. Most people who believe in God hold Him to be omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent (although they might quibble amongst themselves about exactly what these terms mean). But when we look at the other attributes of the God of classical theism – changelessness, impassibility and simplicity, for instance – I think it is fair to say that: (a) most people care little for these attributes; (b) Scripture is at best an ambiguous witness in their favor, and the reasons why Jews, Christians and Muslims came to insist on God having these attributes are largely philosophical; and (c) today, however, many philosophers and theologians would dispute the claim that these attributes are an “all-or-nothing” package. Hence even if someone had what looked like a solid argument against one of the attributes traditionally ascribed to God, it wouldn’t necessarily constitute a good argument against God Himself.

I suggested above that even if the existence of advanced aliens is vastly more probable on antecedent epistemic grounds than the existence of God, the production of this or that miracle might turn out to be readily explicable only on the hypothesis that God exists, and astronomically improbable on all other hypotheses. But what sort of miracle are we talking about here? I’ll let a New Atheist answer that question.

Miracles that would overwhelmingly point to God rather than aliens as their cause

(The following section is excerpted from a previous post of mine on Uncommon Descent, written in 2014.)

[New Atheist Professor Jerry] Coyne has conceded that if he found the phrase “Made by Yahweh” in every human cell, he would tentatively conclude that God was responsible. In a post titled, What evidence would convince you that a god exists? (July 7, 2010), Coyne explicitly declared that if scientists found messages in our DNA, it would be reasonable to infer that God or other supernatural agents were responsible:

Over at AlterNet, Greta Christina describes six things that, if they happened or were observed, would convince her that God exists. These including magic writing in the sky, correct prophecies in sacred texts, accurate information gained during near-death experiences, followers of one religion being much more successful (in ways that couldn’t be explained by economic and social factors) than followers of other faiths. Go read it: she qualifies and explains all of these things in detail…

Making the same point, I provided my own list in a critique of the claim that science and faith are compatible:

There are so many phenomena that would raise the specter of God or other supernatural forces: faith healers could restore lost vision, the cancers of only good people could go into remission, the dead could return to life, we could find meaningful DNA sequences that could have been placed in our genome only by an intelligent agent, angels could appear in the sky. The fact that no such things have ever been scientifically documented gives us added confidence that we are right to stick with natural explanations for nature. And it explains why so many scientists, who have learned to disregard God as an explanation, have also discarded him as a possibility.

In a subsequent post titled, “Shermer and I disagree on the supernatural” (November 8, 2012), Professor Coyne was even more explicit, writing that he would “provisionally accept” the existence of “a divine being” if scientists discovered confirming messages written in our DNA:

I’ve previously described the kind of evidence that I’d provisionally accept for a divine being, including messages written in our DNA or in a pattern of stars, the reappearance of Jesus on earth in a way that is well documented and convincing to scientists, along with the ability of this returned Jesus to do things like heal amputees. Alternatively, maybe only the prayers of Catholics get answered, and the prayers of Muslims, Jews, and other Christians, don’t.

Yes, maybe aliens could do that, and maybe it would be an alien trick to imitate Jesus (combined with an advanced technology that could regrow limbs), but so what? I see no problem with provisionally calling such a being “God”; — particularly if it comports with traditional religious belief — until proven otherwise. What I can say is “this looks like God, but we should try to find out more. In the meantime, I’ll provisionally accept it.” That, of course, depends on there being a plethora of evidence. As we all know, there isn’t.

In an earlier post, titled, Can there be evidence for God? (11 October 2010), Coyne challenges New Atheist P.Z. Myers (who said that no amount of evidence for the supernatural would budge him) on this very point, appealing to the virtue of explanatory simplicity when pressed as to why he would take certain public signs (such as the healing of amputees by a man descending from the clouds who identified himself as Jesus) as evidence for God. In this post, Coyne specifically mentions healed amputees, but his point about there being an abundance of documentation would apply equally well to the discovery of a “Made by Yahweh” message in every human cell, which he mentioned in the passages cited above:

Now you can say that this is just a big magic stunt, but there’s a lot of documentation – all those healed amputees, for instance. Even using Hume’s criterion, isn’t it more parsimonious to say that there’s a God (and a Christian one, given the presence of Jesus!) rather than to assert that it was all an elaborate, hard-to-fathom magic trick or the concatenation of many enigmatic natural forces?

And your evidence-based conversion to God need not be permanent, either. Since scientific truth is provisional, why not this “scientific” truth about God as well? Why not say that, until we find evidence that what just happened was a natural phenomenon, or a gigantic ruse, we provisionally accept the presence of a God?

Coyne’s attitude here strikes me as eminently rational, and what I would expect from a man of science.

Are there any special miracles that can unambiguously be ascribed to God?

As we noted above, Professor Coyne would tentatively accept the existence of God, given the (well-documented) occurrence of certain specific miracles. But can we go further, and point to miracles (such as the resurrection of a man from the dead) which could only be caused by God, and which could therefore be unambiguously ascribed to God?

(The following section is an excerpt from an earlier post of mine on Uncommon Descent, written in 2014.)

[Thomistic philosopher Edward] Feser thinks that the resurrection of a dead body would be a clear-cut example of a supernatural event or miracle that in principle, only God could have caused:

Christ’s resurrection from the dead would be a paradigm case of such a miracle. But establishing such a miracle in turn requires a lot of philosophical stage-setting. It requires establishing God’s existence and nature, divine providence, the possibility in principle of miracles, the possibility in principle of a resurrection, and so forth. All this groundwork has to be established before the occurrence of a miracle like the resurrection can be defended. (Again, see the post just linked to for discussion of this subject.)

While I would agree with Feser that only a supernatural Being could raise a dead person back to life, as such an event would constitute a massive violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, I have to disagree with his implicit claim that a well-documented case of a corpse coming back to life could only be ascribed to God. For the problem is that what looks like a resurrection might not actually be a resurrection. Consider the following scenario. Suppose there is an advanced race of aliens who are capable of very quickly moving bodies wherever they choose, using technologies beyond our ken. The aliens are also capable of transforming one person’s appearance (including the DNA of their cells) into that of another person, in the twinkling of an eye, although such feats of course require an enormous amount of energy. To simulate a resurrection, then, all the aliens would have to is quickly remove the corpse from the scene, transform another individual into a replica of what the deceased person looked like while he/she was still alive, and rapidly transport that person to the place where the corpse was before – all in the space of a fraction of a second. Ridiculously far-fetched? Yes, of course. But is it demonstrably impossible? No.

Nor is there any reason in principle why an alien could not tamper with our visual systems and/or our memories, making us think that we had seen a dead person come to life even though nothing extraordinary had taken place.

To make matters worse for Feser, there is another possibility that he has to consider: that demons may be able to bring about or at least mimic the resurrection of a dead body. Consider the following passage from Exodus 7:

10 So Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh and did just as the Lord commanded. Aaron threw his staff down in front of Pharaoh and his officials, and it became a snake. 11 Pharaoh then summoned wise men and sorcerers, and the Egyptian magicians also did the same things by their secret arts: 12 Each one threw down his staff and it became a snake. But Aaron’s staff swallowed up their staffs. 13 Yet Pharaoh’s heart became hard and he would not listen to them, just as the Lord had said. (NIV)

Commenting on this passage in Exodus, St. Thomas Aquinas, writing in his Summa Theologica, vol. I, question 114, article 4, reply to objection 2, was willing to allow that demons can transform inanimate objects into frogs, using “certain seeds that exist in the elements of the world.” And although he went on to argue that demons could not raise a dead man back to life, he added that demons were perfectly capable of creating a “semblance of reality” so that “something of this sort seems to be effected by the operation of demons.” Demons are capable of producing collective hallucinations too: “the demon, who forms an image in a man’s imagination, can offer the same picture to another man’s senses.”

The point I’m making here is that even when evaluating miracles, we have to adopt a balance-of-probabilities approach. Yes, one might imagine an advanced race of aliens pulling off a stunt like that. But it’s not rational to suppose that aliens would do such a thing: first, we haven’t discovered any aliens; and second, even if they existed, it’s extremely unlikely that they would bother to pull religious pranks on us. And for all we know, demons may be capable of causing us all to suffer hallucinations. But we have no special reason to believe that they would – and if we believe that the world is governed by Divine Providence, such a scenario would seem especially unlikely. The most obvious interpretation of an event such as a dead person coming to life is that it’s a supernatural sign from Heaven. And that should be enough.

[Case study: the Resurrection]

The best defense of the Resurrection of Jesus on Bayesian probabilistic grounds that I have seen is The Argument from Miracles: A Cumulative Case for the Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth by Professor Tim McGrew and his wife, Dr. Lydia McGrew. What the authors attempt to demonstrate is that there is “a small set of salient public facts” that strongly supports belief in the resurrection of Jesus. Taking into account only the eyewitness testimony of the women at the tomb of Jesus, his twelve apostles and St. Paul, they calculate that the facts in question are 10⁴⁴ times more likely to have occurred, on the assumption that the Resurrection of Jesus actually happened, than that on the assumption that it did not. However, their argument makes no attempt to calculate the prior probability of a man rising from the dead.

(In my post, I go on to argue that using Laplace’s Sunrise argument, the prior probability of a man rising from the dead in the first century A.D. can be calculated as about 1 in a billion, rather than 1 in 10¹²⁰. Since 10⁴⁴ is much greater than one billion, the evidence supporting the Resurrection vastly outweighs the antecedent improbability of a Resurrection occurring. In any case, given that there were actually 500 witnesses to the Resurrection, we could still establish the reasonableness of belief in this miracle, using the lower figure of 1 in 10¹²⁰. In another post, titled, Good and bad skepticism: Carl Sagan on extraordinary claims, I also deal with the common skeptical objection that the witnesses to the Resurrection may have been the victims of mass hallucination.)

Conclusion

Dr. Shermer’s skeptical point that any extraordinary effect could have been either produced or simulated by advanced aliens is a valid one. But the inference he draws, that belief in God is never warranted by the evidence, is a faulty one. God may not be the only possible explanation of any particular event, however extraordinary. Nevertheless, He may be the only reasonable one.