From the Reader Mailbag: Is God in the Same Category as a Lucky Ball (Part II)?

This week we continue our discussion of whether or not God can be viewed as a kind of lucky object.  As a reminder, here is the question from a reader that we are pursuing:

Reader Question: The question is how any system of reasoning could say definitively that something doesn’t exist? Like you said correctly it can’t be done 100% for sure, because it could very well be that we just haven’t seen the evidence. BUT! And it is a big but for a reason – that statement in itself provides absolutely no more weight to the existence of miracles as to the existence of other cultural phenomena. I could say millions of people have experienced and would attest to the reality of ‘lucky objects’ for instance. Is there any evidence for these lucky objects? Not so far aside from easily turnable and interpretable personal experience. But so far as our trusted techniques of testing go that have unveiled untold knowledge about the natural world, there so far appears to be no evidence of lucky objects actually conferring skewed chances for people.

Last week, I pointed out that maybe the reader is a little too quick to disbelieve in lucky balls.  This week, we’ll take a different tack by granting the argument and seeing where it takes us.

To summarize your argument: We have evidence-by-absence against lucky objects (undoubtedly true); we trust that evidence; that trust is rational; therefore why don’t we follow the same logic of evidence-by-absence with the supernatural?  That’s a fair argument. So let’s turn now to the question: What about the overlap between the cultural phenomenon of believing in the lucky object, and the cultural phenomenon of believing in a miraculous God?  Are those two things in the same category, and if so, what does that mean?

There is a sense that I agree with you – there is some overlap between the two.  They are both constructions shaped by culture; they are both about forces beyond nature.  So it is certainly one possibility that our belief in lucky balls and God both represent cultural misfires, so to speak – and thus, it is possible to argue that, to the degree we can “disprove” the lucky ball, that shows how an essentially “false” cultural belief can grow up.  By proxy, this might show a process for how we have a “false” belief in the supernatural.

Fair enough. Let’s assume for a moment that we could definitively prove that there is no such thing as a lucky object.  Let’s also assume that the lucky ball and God are in a similar category of culturally-believed, culturally-communicated items.  What does this mean? 

Consider a parable.  If I wanted to find out if my back yard had rattlesnakes, how confident could I ever be in saying “no, there are no rattlesnakes?”  I could do hundreds and hundreds of searches over fifty years.  If I never found a single rattlesnake, I could be reasonably certain that there were no rattlesnakes there…although it is still possible I missed one.  In this case, evidence-by-absence is somewhat meaningful, because the possible scope of enquiry is very small.  Now, imagine instead that my question was “are there rattlesnakes in the Rattlesnake wilderness?”  (It turns out that this is a potentially controversial question).  The Rattlesnake wilderness is like 60,000 acres full of mostly-wild country.  There are some reasons to think it possible that rattlesnakes might exist there, even though it is unclear if anyone has ever seen one.  It would be far more difficult to definitively prove from evidence-by-absence that there were no rattlesnakes there.  I mean, you could say that you haven’t seen any; but as the scope of enquiry widens, the arrogance of asserting confidence due to a lack of positive evidence also becomes greater. 
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So too here.  Belief in the supernatural, writ large, differs from the lucky ball in that the supernatural implies a huge range of things that are very difficult to directly disprove.  While in a sense that makes it an irritating and untestable theory of life from a scientific point of view, it also means that it is hard to find a definitive scientific test to disprove it.  It’s like evolutionary theory – its major strength (its breadth and all-encompassing flexibility) is also its major weakness (it explains almost too much, therefore it is hard to specifically disprove).  Whereas the lucky ball is a very narrow idea that at least opens itself to very specific hypotheses, making an inability to find evidence for those hypotheses at least somewhat meaningful, the larger belief in supernaturalism is not so easily cornered.

To change the metaphor, it is the difference between asserting that there is no alien life on the moon because we haven’t found it yet and asserting that there is no alien life in the rest of the universe because we haven’t found it yet.  They are in the same domain of enquiry, but the first, while not foolproof, is a meaningful deduction from evidence-by-absence…the second is simply silly.  The scope of the universe is too vast.

Similarly, the possibility of the supernatural is a fairly large canvas, and there are some good reasons to believe in it, even if you have no definitive proof of its existence.  The possibility of a lucky ball is a question much smaller in scope; lack of evidence for it isn’t definitive, but I do grant that it is more meaningful. Thus, although belief in miracles and belief in the lucky ball are in some sense related, they are wildly different in scope…and thus wildly different with regard to our current question of the possibility of evidence-by-absence. 

That much is pretty basic.  Now, as I mentioned earlier, I do think the overlap between lucky balls and God is real, and I meant that.  But I think they are in the same category in the same sense in which I think Osiris is in the same category as Jesus.  They are both about the possibility of the supernatural, about forces beyond normal natural processes occurring.  In my mind, though, the real question we ought to be asking is: Why on earth do so many people believe in the lucky ball? Well, I’d say in part it’s because we are primed to believe in supernatural things.  And why is that?  If we assume that (a) there is no actual effect of a lucky ball, yet (a) people believe in the effect of said ball…well, what does that mean? The fact that Santa Claus is not real does not change the fact that we WANT him to be real.  To some degree, we want to believe in magical objects. Arguing that because people create fake gods = there is no real God is like arguing that because people create counterfeit money, there is no real money.  Well, it may be so – but maybe the existence of counterfeits points to (rather than disproves) the existence of the real thing?  Both hypotheses are equally plausible, and therefore we are back where we started by pursuing that line of reasoning.

By the by, since you seem to have such a high faith in science, are you also willing to consider the scientific evidence from the medical community that intercessory prayer on behalf of a third person actually works?  It’s a controversial issue (see a biased run-down with a materialist slant here), and I haven’t read any of the research myself because I think it’s a stupid approach (I mean, really, do you think God, after millennia of withholding His full glory and countless times demonstrating His complete unwillingness to be manipulated by humans, is suddenly going to reveal Himself in a double-blind study from Columbia?)…but my point is that there is certainly at least some evidence that third-party prayer works – even when the person in question does not know they are being prayed for.

To summarize the last two posts:  My response to the lucky ball argument is probabilistic.  It suggests that (a) it is actually possible that using evidence-by-absence in the case of even a very narrow idea like the lucky ball will lead you to close your mind too early to the truth – it may turn out that there is such a thing as a lucky ball.  It further suggests that (b) even if evidence-by-absence works in the case of the lucky ball, the lucky ball is a very narrow idea for which evidence-by-absence would have a better chance of working; whereas belief in miracles implies a large range of potential things that make it tough to disprove.  Thus, the combination of these two things makes me think that my original argument still holds: It is not very skeptical…certainly not very scientific…to be a tried-and-true materialist, to be someone that rules out up front the possibility of the miraculous.  I do not think this is a very good intellectual position.  Agnosticism about the question is respectable; but narrow-minded materialism turns a blind eye to positive evidence for the possibility of the miraculous, not due to scientific skepticism, but for pre-existing philosophical reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with science…or facts.