The following is excerpted from a social media challenge from a Richard Dawkins supporter. He wrote: “if there are sound logical reasons to entertain the possibility of some sort of transcendence, I’ve never heard any.”
There are all sorts of logical reasons that point to the existence of transcendence, although none rise to the level of a priori “proofs.” Kant believed that it’s impossible to prove or disprove God’s existence. This is undoubtedly right. But this doesn’t mean that belief in the transcendent is irrational.
First, consider the big cosmological question of “why?” That is, why does our cosmological system exist and not some other? Or why does our cosmological system exist at all? Empiricists have no easy answer to this — they simply respond “that’s the way things are” — and then move on down the road. Because empiricism does not have the tools to address this very foundational question about everything that exists, they typically ignore the question as nonsensical.
But the question is not nonsensical, it’s just that you may have to look outside the scientific method to address it — perhaps through teleology — but at any rate the answer may transcend science.
This idea is akin to Aristotle’s prime mover argument, i.e., the suggestion that there must be a primary, uncaused cause of all motion and change in the universe. You can call this unmoved mover “God” or whatever you like. But, again, the idea is suggestive of transcendence.
Then there’s the hard problem of consciousness. How is it that from all the inert matter in the world, that somehow consciousness arises? Scientists have had a hard time addressing this question for many reasons, not the least of which is that the scientific method deals with objective phenomena, and consciousness, by definition, is purely subjective.
Neuroscientists try to get around this conundrum by turning subjective phenomena into objective data points — through brain scans and the like. But brains scans are not the same thing as conscious experience. You can scientifically study an apple all you like, but unless you take a bite, what can you really know?
What does this have to do with transcendence? One answer to the hard problem of consciousness has been posited by panpsychism; i.e., the notion that consciousness makes up the fundamental “stuff” of existence. But again — consciousness is subjective, not objective. So, who or what is the subject of this fundamental stuff? It would be something that necessarily transcends existence.
The Hardboiled Materialist
The hardboiled materialist might respond that you don’t need notions of the transcendent to explain all of this, that eventually science will provide the answers. But when it comes to these foundational questions, it’s hard to see how. Instead, logical paradoxes result.
The hardboiled materialist might respond to the cosmological first-mover argument by pointing to gravity or quantum forces or some other cosmological “primitive” beyond which nothing more can be said. But “gravity” is not nothing. The laws of physics are not nothing. They work as given, but why? And why do they exist at all?
The hardboiled materialists might point to the principle of Occam’s razor — that is, the idea that the least complicated solution is probably the right one. Why drag transcendence into the equation? But here, for reasons cited above and probably others, the principle of Occam’s razor would seem to support notions of transcendence.
Pragmatism and Free Will
And finally, I would say that there exists pragmatic reasons to believe in the transcendent. This is because empiricism cannot easily explain freedom of will. Many materialists believe that freedom of will does not exist at all. But without freedom of will all of our notions of justice and morality collapse. Without freedom of will, we have no agency. Our lives lose meaning.
— Jake Cordero