The False Dichotomy Between Theism and Naturalism: Why Ardent Atheists and Theists are Wasting People's Time

I want to discuss what I think is a false dichotomy between religion and science, or more correctly between theism and naturalism. It is a basic working assumption of 10s of thousands of Internet debaters along these fault lines that there is a fundamental choice that must be made between believing in a world where magical stuff happens and a world that must be conceived of as having no possibilities for such. I am using the term magic here as a shorthand for anything that breaks laws of nature i.e. of what we learn from physics and the other sciences. I could use the term “supernatural” but that term is problematic for reasons I can’t get into here.  Another term I like to avoid is “miraculous,” since it can be defined in ways that it can either encompass the operation of laws of nature or not.

It is a strange confluence that most of the ardent religious and most of the ardent atheistic naturalists agree on the following fundamental claim: The world either has magical elements or it does not. The bulk of religious people assert that it does, so they are able to assert their theism. The atheists assert that it does not, so they reject religion and assert the non-existence of gods or God.

This seems a false dichotomy.  As the longstanding tradition of diverse forms of so called "Deism" makes clear, it is possible for this world to be one in which no magic occurs, but that an ultimate source of it is some form of eternal agency.  Or it might be possible that there is no ultimate agency behind it, but that the world, despite originating in a purely non-agent eternal source, such as say chaotic matter, is still capable of manifesting mind-bending alterations and exceptions to the operations of laws of nature. The recent fictional portrayals of movie multiverses illustrate visions of such.

With all these possibilities on the table one must consider the question this way:

1. Reality (all possible worlds) is founded in a natural non-agent eternal source such as random matter.
2. Reality (all possible worlds) is founded in an eternal agent (or agencies) source.
3. The question of the manifestation of magical elements cannot, as a simple empirical matter, decide the issue of the existence of an eternal agency as the proposed ultimate source of reality.

So, the debate is not just about the existence of an eternal agent at the source of reality. The debate must also encompass the possibilities for “the magical” and to be real and its significance. But many on both sides seem committed to the belief that the mere presence of the magical can determine the judgement on the question of gods or God without major argument about why this dichotomy must be accepted. 

Radical breaches or inexplicable aspects of the operation of natural laws are compatible with either possibility being true. Indeed, there is a growing recognition of this possibility in popular culture.  There are untold numbers of people who are skeptical about or even outright hostile towards the God of traditional theism, who still none-the-less believe in all kinds of wonderous possibilities, such as UFOs, ESP, telekinesis, alternate universes, or more humble “spiritual” conceits such as that “love conquers all,” or that there is someone out that they are fated to love, or that moral obligations can transcend the brute realities of the exercise of power and so on.  As the saying goes “The truth is out there.”

And yet untold oceans of ink and digital bits are wasted trying to argue the issue based on this supposed unavoidable choice. But if one rejects the dichotomy and believes instead that the question of the existence of God or gods cannot be decided by empirical evidence or counter evidence for the existence of magical elements of reality, this opens a whole new issue. Can one avoid agnosticism about the issue of naturalism?  Regardless of arguments about the issue of God one must also resolve the independent question of naturalism, which is:

Can knowledge be obtained to decide the issue of whether reality can involve breaches to laws of nature?

One might be tempted to call this “the problem of miracles,” as many philosophers and theologians have traditionally done, but clearly it can include a host of other less traditionally religiously specific topics.  The problem of explaining the "everyday miracles" of human consciousness, the experience of meaning, free will and the power of moral obligation, and the possibilities of our speculations about alternate dimensions or universes, apparent evidence for fine tuning, the emergence of life from dead matter, and its very definition, etc. Theists have been accused of resting their faith irrationally on a “God of the Gaps”, which is to say, to feel entitled to believe in God as possible explanation for aspects of nature not yet fully explained.  But it is just as much a problem to believe in hoped for future naturalistic explanations of everyday phenomenon like these, which have so far avoided such.

In the meantime, people can speculate on such issues.  And to the extent that their reasoning about matters of practical ethics and sense of self-worth depend on it, utilize their best judgements about such matters.  Such philosophizing is an inescapable aspect of the human condition.  In the absence of the resolution of metaphysical and epistemological conundrums like those of naturalism or theism or their perceived conflict, people must make their best judgments and be prepared to defend those judgements based on their practical implications for themselves and others. 

In short, most theists are magical thinkers, but many atheists seem merely to be magical thinkers who have been disappointed. For example they both expect that the miraculous events portrayed in scriptures must actually have occurred just as they are presented if they are to be adjudged useful or "true," or meaningful and in doing so are unable to draw more subtle insights or to appreciate the beauty of these unique and often profound narratives. Both camps are wooden literalists, who miss the mundane miracle of scriptures, which is that they emerge through contingent processes of human imagination and reasoning working through immensely complex interactions of communities grappling with the implications of their metaphysical judgements through time. They are wonderous because they emerge from such natural processes, not despite of those origins. And that we today are also able to join in those discourses simply adds to the wonder.

So, there is a significant practical conclusion that can be drawn from consideration of the issue of the supposed forced choice between naturalism and theism. First, in the absence of resolution to such high metaphysical matters people have a more potentially achievable epistemological obligation of discussing the ethical, self-identity and practical benefits of their decision-making drawing on their working assumptions about these matters. So, exploring the psychological and sociological impacts of metaphysical postulates on the functioning of specific communities, whole societies and individuals is a practical intellectual imperative. Exploring the empirical benefits and harms of religious belief and practice or their rejection for individuals, religious groups and the academy, therefore, should have much greater priority than debates intended to decide the matter of the existence of God.

Second, the fact that people inclined towards naturalism believe that their work is done if the  possibilities of magic are put in doubt reveals that many of them simply assume that all deities by definition must be inclined towards magic and disinclined from creating naturalistic worlds. It is only by holding this assumption that they can draw the conclusion that evidence for the absence of magic allows them to proceed directly to the conclusion that no ultimate agency exists.  Otherwise, they would have to notice their obligation to provide an explanation for why the absence of magic necessarily implies the non-existence of an ultimate agent. This is what I call the real core question of theism:

Is there an obvious reason for a God not to make worlds like those naturalists might expect could emerge from purely natural (i.e. material) processes like the operation of chaotic matter?

The belief that gods or God would never make such worlds seems to be a mere assumption on the part of most naturalists, which again, they seem strangely to share with a substantial body of their theistic opponents.

So if the presence or absence of magic in reality cannot decide the matter of the existence of God, and since an apparent majority of theists and their naturalistic opponents share the belief that no creator gods or God would ever make naturalistic worlds, they may be wasting everyone's time with fruitless arguments that also distract from the discussion of two more critical metaphysical matters.  I wish the people debating the supposed conflict between naturalism and theism who flood my internet feeds, would move along.

AI Hype is a Distraction

I’ve been asked to speak on the social implications of AI, which I take to mean its ethical and political implications.  I suspect that I got this invitation because I teach a course on the Philosophy of Technology for which I have written a textbook (plug plug).  But I also suspect that I got it in part because I teach a course called “Minds: Natural and Artificial”, which focuses on the topic of “The Philosophy of Mind” and more particularly the issue called “the hard problem”, which considers the mysterious phenomenon of consciousness.  I won’t bore you with details, but I will note that the term AI often invokes in people’s minds issues of consciousness and the nature of mind and awareness.  One of the authors we read is Hubert Dreyfus who wrote a famous and contentious book called “What Computers Can’t Do” in which he argues that computers will never be able to manifest consciousness.  In the class I approach the “hard problem” as an open philosophical question.  It is a very fraught issue in which there is plenty of opportunity for debate.  I mention these points only because the question of whether computers can think often lurks in the background of discussions of “AI” and adds most of the frisson surrounding the term in people’s minds.

Many people associate AI with images like that of commander Data in a Star Fleet courtroom defending his right to be recognized as a person, or the robot from the movie iRobot pleading with Will Smith’s character to recognize the plight of his people at the hands of an exploitive humanity.  I mention my course and the “hard problem” because outside the context of a classroom, in more practical settings like this one, I feel obliged to speak more frankly about the prospects of machine intelligence.  I agree with Dreyfus that there are certain things that computers can’t do and that it is extremely unlikely that they will ever manifest a level thinking that would allow them to be considered independently creative or conscious.

Another issue I feel obliged to deal with is the issue of my technical grasp of the topic.  As a professor in the Arts and Humanities it might be easy to assume that I am somewhat out of my depth when it comes to a highly technical subject like artificial intelligence.  Computers are black boxes for most people, and philosophers might be considered about as far from the nuts-and-bolts of software engineering as you can possibly get.  I will just mention that I have been an active computer programmer, largely as a hobby, but in the past working on academic projects, for over 40 years.  I have written tens of thousands of lines of code over the years, including programs using what are typically described as AI techniques.  I would direct you to my Internet Archive collection of early 8-bit programs and my Github repository and pages to check my bona fides. (jggames.github.io and https://archive.org/details/AI8-bitBASICprograms)

So, on the issue of computer intelligence and creativity, I would qualify my prior opening remarks by stating that I think computer software, as has been well demonstrated over the past half century, can be a great aid to human creativity. For example, Eric Topol's 2013 book, The Creative Destruction of Medicine, illustrates some useful possibilities for developing software to take up the load of medical diagnosis and better information management desperately needed in public health systems.  And Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee’s The Second Machine Age, give a wonderful rundown on the economic positives of new tech.  But what these recent improvements in medicine and commerce illustrate is that what we are really concerned with is a much narrower definition of intelligence.  Computers can indeed “think” in the much more modest sense of carrying out tasks formerly carried out only in human brains. They have been doing so since at least the Antikythera mechanism built by the ancient Greeks to calculate astronomical events and the timing of the Olympic games, and ancient Chinese abacuses. There is nothing new about machines doing intellectual tasks except perhaps the recent substantial increases in the pace of change that is to be expected in a society at the apogee of a bonanza of cheap high intensity energy like that provided by fossil fuels over the last two centuries.

In brief, I see the term AI more as a contemporary buzz term, spurred by recent improvements in language recognition software in combination with advancements in visual and auditory generative programs made possible by access to vast amounts of data generated by the Internet. The recent tendency to use the term AI with its exciting connections to the “hard problem” is no doubt a convenient tool for anyone connected with the need to raise investment capital required in free market economies. But as a coder I really can’t see the term as anything more than a fund-raising or talent recruiting trick aimed at spurring on new projects dreamed up by software engineers. 

I am not alone in holding such views.  As Linus Torvalds, inventor of the Linux operating system put it in a recent interview, it represents a bunch of people "with their hands out" and another hype-cycle like crypto or "cloud native."  Others have written books about AI viewed primarily as a marketing device.  I will just mention Katie Crawford’s well-received “Atlas of AI” and Merideth Broussard’s Artificial Unintelligence.  Yuval Noah Harari has a fascinating chapter in his book Homo Deus on the new religions of Silicon Valley and what he calls “Data Religion.”  I would more observe that the real computer revolution occurred long before ChatGPT in the final four decades of the last century, when the application of mundane computer software and automation equipment de-industrialized our society and shrank the blue-collar sector from just over 35 percent of employment to something closer to 10 or 15 percent.  As economists and historians of deindustrialization have observed, most of that process did not result from the offshoring jobs but processes of automation carried on within our society.

If anything, offshoring occurred late in the process, the last decade or so, largely to help deindustrialized workers maintain their buying power.  Ten-dollar T-shirts from Asia have helped maintain family incomes that would have otherwise noticeably shrunk over the last decades.  The vast increases in productivity in the industrial sector was achieved as result of trillions of dollars of investment.  But trillions were also spent in the final four decades of the last century in the service sector as well, with almost no measurable increase in productivity measured, until recently.  As American economist Robert Solo famously quipped in 1987 “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics."

Through that period of deindustrialization people did not go on about the potential impacts of “artificial labour.”  The term “automation” was sufficient.  Since that time economists have been waiting for the shoe to drop in the service sector.  But employment just kept growing and growing in that sector, without significant attendant productivity growth, despite vast investments in computerization.  The result has possibly been the creation of a vast array of what David Graeber calls “bullshit jobs” in his provocative book of that title.  Sometimes I am inclined to think that AI is simply a term preferred by white collar workers, me included, who feel somewhat threatened by the impending true application of automation to our bloated sector.  It grants the process the higher level of cache that we feel our work deserves compared to that of our blue-collar fellows.  Which brings us to the first major moral issue regarding AI, which is the issue of technological unemployment.

It is an open question whether technological development can or will eventually lead to an acute crisis of employment rather than the wage stagnation and heightening itinerancy with which we are familiar.  This is an empirical issue and still to some extent a future issue.  We have been able to keep many people employed, or occupied with education, early retirement or social supports, although anyone familiar with the various drug and mental health epidemics will tell you about the limits of such efforts.  Recent studies aside suggesting that we might finally be seeing a decoupling of productivity growth from levels of employment growth, there is a robust philosophical and ethical debate going on about whether the work that we do have and can expect to have will be of an edifying nature, regardless of whether enough of the resulting wealth can be appropriately shared.  Some people argue for a guaranteed annual income or other wealth distributing schemes.  I would simply note that such proposals do not grapple with the more fundamental issue of the quality and meaningfulness of work.  Figuring out how to make such judgements and how to best ensure that human beings can have enough opportunity to apply themselves to meaningful tasks is a critical question that continues to vex regardless of proposals regarding the sharing of wealth.

In a somewhat related vein, there is the fundamental question raised by authors like Crawford, of the relation of AI to the more general environmental crisis.  It is a connection that is often overlooked, but it is a highly relevant observation to make, as she does in her book, that computers and electronics are high energy and resource intensive activities, both in their infrastructural requirements and typical applications.  One need only note that in the early 2000s the improvements made in Great Britain in terms of increases in energy efficiency achieved through intensive public actions and investments motivated global treaty obligations, were entirely offset by increases in energy requirements needed for the infrastructure of the digital revolution. Crawford’s exploration of the vast air-conditioned server farms needed to host our cat videos, not to mention the now vastly expanding AI infrastructures, is sobering.  But as Crawford also points out the infrastructure of AI is tightly interwoven with activities still primarily focused on exploiting natural resources, as has been the hallmark of commercial activity since the industrial revolution.  Nothing so far in the empirical data robustly indicates that AI represents a radical shift from this pattern of consumption. But the human species must collectively consider sustainable alternatives to this economic model as was well illustrated by MIT’s original 1972 Limits to Growth model and its recent updates in 1992, 2012 and 2022.

Finally, there are specific ethical issues related to the development of AI tools themselves and their application for specific purposes.  First, the development of Large Language Models and visual and auditory generative techniques have been highly dependent on access to vast amounts of human generated training data used to apply to the various “machine-learning” methods required to develop such applications.  These processes raise many issues regarding the use of “our” data to benefit other people’s commercial purposes. These include issues about copyright, intellectual property rights and privacy.  More broadly the incentive of big data companies to gain access to our information create many potential moral hazards regarding the farming of users for their information.  Since we are currently in the very midst of such processes of development it is easy to overstate the challenges and the difficulties of finding reasonable administrate and legal solutions.

A second example relating to application simply involves the possibilities of the new tools to facilitate new kinds of malfeasance, that we might be insensitive to simply because of the novelty of the activities attending the new tools.  This is an abiding issue of technological change. Are the newfangled automobiles love hotels on wheels for teenagers?  Is selling bootleg video tapes theft? Is hacking a kind of trespassing?  Is texting while driving recklessness?  And, of course, most recently, is not properly attributing material produced by machine a form of fraud?

A somewhat novel type of issue regarding AI development and application can be described by the term “the alignment problem” coined by Brian Christian in his book of the same title.  Since AI programing techniques like “machine-learning” apply the kind of programing techniques that coders at one time simply called “self-modifying code,” which we were told by our teachers represented the “ultimate” in programmer laziness and warned to absolutely avoid at all costs, means the resulting software has the unavoidable quality of a black box.  Unlike traditional algorithmic or heuristic methods, contemporary programmers don’t have a good grasp of how their system operate and will continue to operate in novel conditions.  This raises many issues about the handing over of tasks normally requiring human judgement to machines.  There are now famous instances of what used to simply be called “expert systems” manifesting hidden biases often resulting from tendencies buried deeply in the human created training data, but sometimes simply from the imponderables of the programing methods as such.

One specific example of an issue regarding the application of AI is the issue of robotic forms of warfare.  The questions of whether machines should be handed even greater levels of discretion regarding the exercise of lethal judgment on our behalf is a very challenging ethical question, although I would note that such issues have been around since poison gas and delayed action munitions.  So, I don’t think these types of questions are really an issue specific to what we are now calling AI.

I would to put most of these specific issues of development and use in the “scare the horses” category.  As in the case of the early automobile when people didn’t know how we would manage issues like maintenance, traffic flow and driving etiquette, these now largely forgotten vitriolic debates were quickly resolved.  But as the case of automobile would also suggest we might well have done a better job of looking at infrastructural issues, like what would happen with all the exhaust fumes coming out of vehicles and how their operating requirements would influence us in re-shaping our cities.  So, I would tend to weigh the issues of energy and resource use more highly.

It is a simple reality of physics that the development of AI to the degree being predicated by its main advocates will require vast increases in access to energy, both for running computer systems supporting AI processing, but also soon, for creating and storing the vast amounts of artificially created training data that will be needed.  The proposed levels of advances in machine learning will require much more data than even our prodigious current Net use could ever supply.  But the gurus of AI, when asked about these more mundane energy issues, quickly flip into modes of magical thinking, speaking about fusion and mining asteroids, and the like.

So, we cannot escape the preeminent technological issue of our age regarding energy.  And the complex systems of our energy systems raise many possible cases of whether there are some technological activities that simply should not be done, or as the Latins so concisely put it: ab esse ad posse non valet consequentia (just because something can be done doesn’t mean it should be)  Considering whether there are limits to the creation and application of technologies are not as deeply considered questions as they should be, although I would note the positive signs that this may be changing illustrated by Canada’s leading role in the international treaty banning landmines and recent efforts to limit single use plastics.

Finally, although the word “technology” is one of the most prominent terms of our age, the definition of this concept turns out to be a highly contested philosophical topic.  The fact that such a key term could be so philosophically confused and misunderstood stands itself as the main moral failing of our age.  As Marshall McLuhan so sagely put it, “the medium is the message.”  Interpreting the meaning of technology as such is the preeminent moral challenge of our time.

Bibliography

Topol, Eric. The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Health Care (2013)

Crawford, Kate. Atlas of AI (2021)

Broussard, Meredith. Artificial Unintelligence (2019)

Gerrie, James. A Plea for the Preservation of Early BASIC Game Programs Canadian Journal of

            Media Studies/Revue Canadienne d'études des médias,18(1) 2022, pp. 90-113.

Gerrie, James. "Software Preservation Insights on the Power of BASIC" in Game Science. Digital

            Humanities for Games and Gaming. (Disk Book). Melanie Fritsch, Stefan Höltgen,

            Torsten Roeder, Editors. Weimar: PolyPlay 2023.

Graeber, David. Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018)

Christian, Brian. The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values (2020)

Harari, Yuval Noah. Homo Deus (2015)