Book Review: "God? Very Probably: Five Rational Ways to Think about the Question of God" by Robert H. Nelson (2015) Cascade Books.

True to its title, this book provides five rational ways to think about the question of God. An introductory chapter called “Thinking about God” explains: “it is the most important questions — dealing with issues at the greatest historical and social significance — that are the least suitable for applying the formal methods of social science quantitative analysis.” This is a generous admission from an economist, and Nelson is preeminent among scholars for his multiple books exploring the unacknowledged religiosity with which members of his profession espouse and apply their doctrines. His frank admission of the bad fit between the methods of economics, and the question of God, is a promising overture to what is sometimes a sensitive and insightful book. Though it’s well worth reading, the text seems hobbled by habits of thought—quantitative, evidence-oriented, and always probabilistic—that seem almost intractable.

The first of Nelson’s five rational ways is the subject of chapter 3: “God the Mathematician: The Miracle of Mathematical Order in the Natural World.” That highly stimulating subject is often discussed by physicists, not least by Nobel laureate Roger Penrose, whom Nelson deftly quotes. But just as it has proven unfeasibly difficult to explain how mathematics “governs” the physical world, it also seems quite difficult to explain why exactly this is a mystery in the first place. A parallel development has occurred in consciousness studies, where the Hard Problem of Consciousness remains more or less intractable—while alongside it, there has sprung up what is now called the Meta-Hard Problem of Consciousness: why exactly the original Hard Problem has the grip on us that it does. 

Throughout this book, whenever Nelson discusses the relationship between mathematics and the physical world (which he does quite a bit), he uses the language of active authority, governance, control, and so on. But as some commentators have recently pointed out (in response to the ubiquity of such language on this question), the mathematical laws of nature do not reach out and “govern” events. They are inferences of abiding patterns which great scientists have hit upon from observations of nature, in the field and the laboratory. 

Something more sophisticated is meant, despite how often we are told plainly “The physical world than is miraculously controlled by this non-material, mathematical world…” (66). This brings to mind the strange book by Robert Pepperell, recently reviewed here, called What Matter Feels: Consciousness, Energy and Physics (2024)---a panpsychist work in which the author insists that physicists across the centuries should be taken at their word when they say a stone “experiences” a force when impacted. For Pepperell, this means that a rock has a rudimentary but real proto-consciousness that feels things like impacts and the cold. But for most of the scientists he quotes about objects “experiencing a force,” the phrase is, of course, a metaphorical use of that verb. Nevertheless, Dr. Pepperell carries it with him into philosophical waters where that metaphoricity readily dissolves. 

Something similar may be happening when matter is said to be “controlled by” and “governed by” mathematical laws. Except it isn’t only popularizers and synthesizers like Pepperell, or Nelson, or myself, who use such language. As Nelson shows, some of the finest scientific and mathematical minds have been explicitly astonished by the power of math over the physics of nature, including Kurt Godel, Heinrich Hertz, Cheng Ning Yang, Eugene Wigner, and Edward Frenkel, Roger Penrose, and others. This makes them Platonists on this issue, which has plenty of adjacent entailments of its own, some of which (can) extend all the way to theism and the dualist picture of an immortal soul animating the mortal body. 

I hold those spooky ideas myself, so I dearly wish to catch sight of just why everyone deeper than I is so very surprised at nature’s conformity to mathematical regularities. I am surprised by the fine-tuning of the cosmos for life, and that’s comprised not only of the values of constants like lightspeed, the gravitational constant, and the mass of the proton, but also of the formulas that pertain to those values and activate them. Perhaps those are what is meant---yet it still feels as if something more profound is at issue that I still don’t get.

When three apples are placed on a table, it is not a mystery where the number three came in from. The threeness is an aspect of the event at hand, not an outcome directed by Mathematics in an act of will. Of course, the situation is different when the math in question is not arithmetic but, say, the Universal Law of Gravitation. Many are reluctant to suppose that God actively governs the universe by driving the mystery of gravity’s “spooky action at a distance.” They are less reluctant to think of God as framing that law of nature, and the others along with it, as designs for the Creation which He implemented “in the beginning.” That is where the “fine tuning” argument slots in. The values of the constants of nature (the mass of the electron, the ratio between it and the mass of the proton, etc.) appear to be exquisitely specific to the requirements of life’s eventual emergence from a lifeless physical universe. This abundance of satisfied narrow requirements, in turn, suggests the designing hand of a Creator. 

Efforts to refute that theistic inference proceed along the same general lines of argument that have proven so successful in biology: rather than direct creation by a designing God, complex organisms evolved from simpler ones through natural selection, a continuous competition among organisms whose differences result in differential rates of survival and inheritance. Those differences are themselves caused by random variation. 

That account of biology is hotly contested, but the point here is its awkwardness as a model for cosmogony (the part of cosmology that deals with the universe’s origin). If a random process called genetic mutation accounts for the differences among competing organisms, what could ever be its cosmic equivalent, that could result in the life-friendly universe we in fact do observe? How could multiple universes compete to produce this one, as multiple bacteria might compete to produce one “fittest” strain? The universe cannot have competitors. The universe is unique by definition.

In other words, what strikes me as strange about most arguments against the fine tuning argument is that they assume the nature of the universe is somehow inherently probabilistic. The values of the constants of nature are assumed to be the eventual results of some originary random process of variation. But there cannot have been such a process, as Nelson explains:

The fine-tuning has to precede the workings of the universe which is itself then fundamentally shaped in part by this fine-tuning—so something about the physical universe that would already require the fine-tuning cannot itself be said to have caused the fine-tuning that we observe. The physical universe was seemingly created out of nothing, there is no series of intelligible previous events to explain it, and it is thus an altogether unexplained miracle—or explainable only in supernatural terms—that the specific constants of nature of our universe are fine-tuned with such extraordinary exactness as to support life, and now finally the existence of human beings on earth such as me (41).

Yet elsewhere in the same book, Nelson seems to take for granted that metaphysical truths about ultimate reality are probabilistic, just like truth claims about events in the physical world: 

Although the best rational argument for the existence of God, and the best argument for the existence of other minds, may be philosophically analogous, it is still conceivable that one is correct and the other is incorrect, perhaps by random chance (it is after all a matter of probabilities), although human beings would not be able to resolve this issue by their own rational analysis ([my emphasis] p. 22). 

I submit that the existence of God, like the existence of other minds, is not a matter of probabilities at all. To be fair, Nelson’s book is subtitled, “Five Rational Ways to Think about the Question of God,” and this commitment to rationality makes probability an almost ineluctable feature of the his approach. Conversely, it also entails the rest of the left-brain’s standard epistemic equipment: a pursuit of certainty, driven by evidence and argumentation under logical rules of non-contradiction. I would be foolish glibly to attribute such limitations to a genius like Richard Feinman---but Nelson quotes him, too, calling the issue of God’s existence a probabilistic one: “He finds that in any case the question of God's existence is one of probabilities-as Feynman says, ‘is it 50-50 or is it 97 percent?’” (87). Perhaps I can dare frame a response from a safe distance away.

There really is a side to theism vs. atheism that concerns objective reality---the immanent side, not the transcendent side (William James was particularly effective on this subject). But the objective side of the question is continuous with the side that transcends the objective-vs-subjective duality, and this can be hinted at using an analogy with music. The person who weeps in the private darkness of the concert hall, swept up in the sublimity of Chopin or Satie or Beethoven, is saturated with an affective and spiritual reality to which a tone-deaf bean-counter is utterly oblivious, no matter how well informed he or she may be with the details of the printed score, the compression waves in the air, the acoustics of the violins, and the physiology of the eardrum and the temporal lobe. Is the difference between the worlds of these two very different people a probabilistic one? Is there any sense whatsoever in calling it a matter of probability as to which world is more true than the other (“Is it 50-50 or is it 97 percent?”)? Only one of the two worlds includes both, and it is the world of bittersweet tears, not that of value-neutral information. 

Nelson’s fourth chapter, on the limitations of Darwinism, includes a fine description of the intellectual poverty of militant atheist Richard Dawkins, and an homage to Lynn Margulis, the great evolutionary biologist whose intellectual independence proved crucial to the advancement of biological science at the close of the 20th Century. It notes how little of Darwin’s Origin of Species actually explains the speciation problem, and how little progress has been made on it in the intervening century and a half, despite the staggering achievements of molecular biology, genetics, embryology, and the growth of the fossil record. 

Chapter Five, on consciousness, was what motivated me to read the book, and for the most part it’s quite well done. Writing in 2015, Nelson repeats (p. 161) David Chalmers’ 1990’s claim that consciousness serves no discernible function for the organisms endowed with it. Since then, however, the claim has been strongly disproven by Mark Solms in The Hidden Spring (2021), who identified the function of consciousness as actionable feelings that give the subject appropriately prioritized motives for meeting multiple needs whose relative urgencies are always shifting in novel circumstances. Consciousness is feelings, whose purpose is to tell the organism how it’s doing, and what to do next. It isn’t Nelson’s fault that this was discovered some years after his book’s appearance. 

Another limitation is Nelson’s rather breezy engagement in the all-too-common practice of eliding the deep differences between Jewish and Christian theologies, with terms like Abrahamic, Judeo-Christian, and “the Jewish and Christian God” (162). The dim view I take of that practice, and my predecessors in that dim view such as Gershom Scholem and Arthur Cohen, will be familiar to readers of my book reviews on this blog and elsewhere (a particularly egregious offender is Anthony Kronman’s book After Disbelief (Yale U.P., 2021), my review of which is currently under consideration at Jewish Action).

Nelson does readers good service in emphasizing the role of fear in the rhetoric of materialism, and the hidden terror that pervades much of the most sweepingly materialist discourse found in consciousness studies and adjacent disciplines. People who don’t believe in the soul are oddly afraid of it, and this can be hard to notice if we expect fear to come exclusively from dualists who are scared of getting extinguished into oblivion by a death in a physicalist universe. This other fear---of being wrong on the other side, with a false negative about the soul and, with it, perhaps, the Divine---is driven by the unconscious worry that one might have to answer to a Creator for the ethical aspect of one’s metaphysics. If I am the creature of a Creator of whose existence I am unpersuaded, is my intellectual error a type of ingratitude? 

As Nelson discusses the nervousness of his materialist opponents, he cites two fascinatingly equivocal figures, the philosophers John Searle and Thomas Nagel, each of whom repudiates materialism and theism alike. What they do believe is much harder to sift out, but their frankness and intellectual independence are refreshing, with a revitalizing effect on the debate at large. Yet at some points Searle strikes a false note, adduced by Nelson thus:

As Searle explained, there had once been a widely held ‘Cartesian view that in addition to physical particles there are 'immaterial' souls or mental substances.’ Such views were often associated with a belief in God as the source of the soul. Whatever large problems he had with his fellow philosophers, Searle did agree with them that ‘nowadays, as far as I can tell, no one’ of any high professional reputation in the philosophical study of the mind ‘believes in the existence of immortal spiritual substances except on religious grounds. To my knowledge, there are no purely philosophical or scientific motivations for accepting the existence of immortal mental substances’ such as souls (177).

Perhaps not. But to take “high professional reputation” as some sort of meaningful criterion of philosophical seriousness is to write as if Thomas Kuhn never wrote The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. It is to forget the history of science and the sociology of knowledge, as well as the rivers of blood and ink that have been spilled over intellectual controversies like the Arian Heresy, the monophysite and monothelite controversies, the Albigensian Crusade, and all the other doctrinal wars and feuds between duelling experts, and between authorities and and insurgents, with both fools and sages to be found on each side. Moreover, Searle and those who quote this passage with uncritical approval (Nelson is not among them) are ignoring plenty of figures whose dualism or religious faith have not entirely prevented them from enjoying a measure of “high professional reputation.” 

If dualists thinkers like David Lund, David Ray Griffin, Freeman Dyson, or Bruce Greyson are said to have legitimate academic credibility, then the statement which asserts other wise is false. But if they don’t, then the statement is circular, since those who disdain their achievements generally do so on the grounds that they are dualists in the first place. Reputation aside, Searle has also written as if there were no vast fields of anomalous evidence for which dualism can account where materialism cannot: “To my knowledge, there are no purely philosophical or scientific motivations for accepting the existence of immortal mental substances’ such as souls.” 

I will close with a salient moment from Nelson’s discussion of the published encounter between Searle and Nagel:

While rejecting Dennett and other scientific materialist reductionists, Searle still maintained that any future correct argument about consciousness must be scientifically grounded in material fact and theory. As Nagel concludes, however, this is not viable, leading Searle to disguise what is really "an essentially dualistic claim [as developed in his 1992 book] in language that expresses a strong aversion to dualism"—and thus even Searle himself also falls prey to the philosophical contortions that have plagued the philosophy of mind in desperately seeking to uphold the naturalist orthodoxy (180).

I would add that Nagel disguised what is really an essentially theistic claim [as developed in his 2012 book, Mind and Cosmos] in language that expresses a strong aversion to theism.