Expert: Jeffrey Eldred - 8/8/2010

Question
QUESTION: Dear expert,

First, thank you for your last answer.

This time,
let's SUPPOSE that it's certain the Universe is designed by something intelligent and divine,
and let's SUPPOSE we'll have 2 possible hypothesises:

(1) An unique deity, who knows absolutely everything about the Universe, is the Designer.

(2) Several deities (each of them is limited to its own domain of competence: a god for designing humans, an other god for designing planets, and so on...) worked toghether to design the Universe.


Some theists claims that since the 2nd explanation makes more assumptions than the first one,
one should, according to Ockham's Razor, choose the simpler/economical explanation: which is the 1st hypothesis, to them.

In other words, polytheism would be less probable than monotheism.


Personnally, I've the impression there is something wrong in their argument, what about you?


         Sincerely

ANSWER: Applying Ockham's Razor:
Ockham's Razor is best for eliminating the number of rules and assumptions rather than eliminating the number of things that exist. For instance there have been times in particle physics where we theorized a particle that we didn't observe but would maintain the symmetry of the situation – the exception to the rule would be for the particle not to exist so it was the more unwieldy idea. If there is some sort of symmetry or similarity between the polytheistic deities though, they can be as simple an idea as monotheism. For instance if one claimed that every immaterial being that could exist does exist than there would be infinite beings but the idea itself is not that much more complex than a single unified one.

Polytheism that you briefly describe (each of them is limited to its own domain of competence: a god for designing humans, an other god for designing planets, and so on...) sounds more like the classical polytheistic religion where each god is distinct and rather arbitrary. Ockham's razor is probably is a pretty valid criticism of that view and it could further said that your chances of guessing exactly which way the divine labor is divided gets factorially larger with each additional deity.


Monotheism versus Polytheism:
But Ockham's Razor is the argument you only go to when all the information is there, not the first thing you consider. To use Ockham's Razor, though is really a specific case of the larger principle of parsimony: “the fewest assumptions for the most things explained is makes the best theory”, so Polytheism can be more complex and still win out if it better explains the universe. The big question this raises is how we know that the “Universe is designed by something intelligent and divine”[1]. For instance, most ontological arguments describe an ultimate being and most cosmological arguments describe an unified being – so both point towards monotheism. For the teleological argument, however, Hume makes a pretty strong case that this supports polytheism[2], because it relies on a designer of the world by analogy to human designers (which implies a committee).

The argument for morality (where people claim they observe objective moral facts or an uncanny moral consistency amongst humans) describe a consistent divine creation that points to a monotheistic God. But of course many traditional conceptions of morality in monotheism describe a moral model of good versus evil. Humans have the “free will” (whatever that means) to either succumb to temptation or submit to guidance, and humans seem to play the role that make the difference between one and the other. To me this can be used to argue an equally powerful second deity opposed to the first. The moral facts attest to the war, not the victory, and the choice offered to humans attests that neither deity can claim to be ruler of the universe. I don't know whether this Zoroastrian-style “duo-theism” counts as a monotheistic of polytheistic one.

What I call the argument from symmetry[3a], the variety of religious traditions, beliefs, and experiences point towards polytheism. One would think that if there was a single objective deity that all religions could agree on what His name is, what He wants us to do, what earthly places are important to Him, and who is among the saved. Instead we get a plethora of often contradictory interpretations in a mixture of religions - a mixture of deities could be a better explanation. There would probably even be motivation for these deities to describe themselves as the only way and all other religions as worshiping not competitors but nothing at all. In some parts of the Bible God, though, God refers to other deities in ways that imply their existence[4] (some of them can be explained away as descriptions of ideas, but not all can).

The problem of evil[3b] is a problem for an omniscient, omnipotent, benevolent, unified deity but not if there is a single weak deity (technically monotheistic, but feels like polytheism), divine powers divided amongst a host of (somewhat) opposed deities, or a tribalist religion [5]. If it is decided that God exists but the problem of evil is a real problem then this is a pretty convincing argument for polytheism because people lose parsimony when they come up with contrived theodicies to explain away evil.

Taking the inconsistency or the problem of evil to its logical extreme and leaving no room for a supernatural god of any sort that we can still describe a pantheistic [6] or Spinozist God [7]. It is unclear whether this is permitted by “the rules” and if so whether it would represent a monotheistic or (infinitely) polytheistic version of God(s). Similarly Hinduism, from what I understand, describes many “deities” as different aspects of one God (not unlike the Holy Trinity) which makes it unclear how it is classified.


Conclusion:
I do not think that it is a question that can be answered trivially. I think it is abundantly clear that there are multiple serious problems with the traditional monotheistic conception of God, however. If we ignore those problems, however than a monotheistic God is on the face of it more plausible than an arbitrary host of polytheistic Gods by Ockham's Razor.


Links:
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existence_of_god#Arguments_for_the_existence_of_God
[2] http://www.anselm.edu/homepage/dbanach/dnr.htm#A6  (specifically section [167] paragraph 2)
[3] http://en.allexperts.com/q/Atheism-2724/2009/12/Best-best-1.htm (for 3a see follow-up)
[4] http://www.holysmoke.org/hs00/bible2.htm
[5] http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/panelists/daniel_c_dennett/2010/01/pr
[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheist
[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinozism

---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: Thank you for your reply. It's very interesting.

But what do you mean by 'arbitrary' about gods of polytheism?

 
Consider the making of trains and all their surronding (railways, catenaries,..) "from zero":

=> For 1 person only, having a perfect knowledge of absolutely everything about train, mechanics, electricity, electronic and its components and being able to make them correctly is very unlikely .
=> we are thus limited intellectually by Nature.

However, if many people contribute to that making, that would be possible.

Similarly, knowing the number of Universe-Designer(s) would require a knowledge about the "divine dimension" (whether a Being therein is necessarly and essentially limited by the laws of that dimension) ?


What do you think about this?   

         sincerely

Answer
"But what do you mean by 'arbitrary' about gods of polytheism?":
I see now that your home country is France and maybe this informal usage of the word "arbitrary" is not familiar to you. The original meaning of arbitrary is something that is declared as a whim, or fiat, of a dictator or judge. As a consequence you don't only get things that are unjust, but things that are oddly specific and show an ignorance of other things in the universe. We could easily imagine arbitrary things working out a different way and there doesn't seem to be any good reason that it is the way that it happens to be.

So an arbitrary rule/feature are essentially anything that is superfluous or not parsimonious. Whatever the probability there is of there being a God, there is even less chance that there is a God and his color is purple. If we independently knew that purple was the best color, maybe the choice of purple wouldn't be seem so arbitrary. Things that are arbitrary aren't necessarily false, but they seem like a blind guess which is almost never bound to be right (why is god not orange? red? ultraviolet? and does it even make sense to assign God a color?)

So if were to say that our pantheon of gods included Zeus who managed the weather in the sky and Poseidon who managed the sea, it would seem a little bizarre given what we know that the two water systems are intimately connected and Zeus-Poseidon hybrid would make more sense then dividing them with an arbitrary line in the water-cycle. Of course if our pantheon was instead had a different god for every particle or for every discipline of science than maybe it would make slightly more sense.

In particle physics the masses of the various particles seem arbitrary. We don't know why they have those numbers that they do. Some theories attempt to explain why they are those specific numbers and that is a good feature for a theory to have. In the meantime we have to work off of what we know and leave the rest to be determined later. If we are talking about God (or gods) we are talking about a theory which is supposed to explain everything (with very little evidence) so an unarbitrary God (or gods) is a prime criteria.


"=> For 1 person only, having a perfect knowledge of absolutely everything about train, mechanics, electricity, electronic and its components and being able to make them correctly is very unlikely...Similarly, knowing the number of Universe-Designer(s) would require a knowledge about the "divine dimension" (whether a Being therein is necessarly and essentially limited by the laws of that dimension) ?"

I'm not sure what point you are making here, but I agree with both of them. If you are instead saying "It is hard enough for one human to understand the natural world, therefore it is much harder for a human to understand the supernatural world to the degree that could figure out whether god was One or many" than I agree with the point to. This is a good criticism of people knowing God exists (and that God likes followers of a certain religion) because it is arrogant to assume so much knowledge of the universe. In the scenario you proposed there would apparently be accurate knowledge that there is a God, but not any details of his features. This is an odd scenario to be put on and if that was truly the only thing that we knew than it would be hard to come up with any details about God.

If you are saying "Making a universe is a big complicated task therefore we probably need more than one designer to do it" and if so that is exactly the idea I was trying to convey in [2]. I