Jerry shoots and scores!

Jerry, puffing himself up for winning a debate, writes

"As to why the universe is comprehensible, well, I fail to see how that provides evidence for God.  In fact, if there were a theistic God—and Haught is indeed a theist who thinks that God intervenes in the world—I would expect the universe to be not comprehensible"

Here we find two thoughts, illogically strung together. But both follow the standard "proof by the fact Jerry sez so." We are familiar with this construct:

Q: Science and Christianity are incompatible because: 

A) It has been demonstrated that peer-reviewed publications from believing scientists are detectably "different" from those of atheist scientists. A clever person can detect which papers in, say, Phys. Rev. Lett. are published by believers masquerading as scientists.

B) Theists must allow "it was a miracle" as an explanation for anomalous data. They say they don't--they say that they follow the scientific method--but we know what they are really thinking. 

C) Certain experiments are simply impossible for theists. Which ones are unimportant--some just are.  

D) Only faitheists and accomodationists disagree, and we all know that they are big fat dummies.

E) Jerry sez so. Oh, he throws about words like "epistemology" but the bottom line is: Jerry sez so.

The correct answer, of course, is E.


So here Jerry writes: 

As to why the universe is comprehensible, well, I fail to see how that provides evidence for God.

Now of course the comprehensibility of the universe is not direct physical evidence for god or anything else. But one can argue that of all we know about the universe it is the best apologetic for God. Better than anything ID has mustered. I wrote about that here, in The Unreasonable Success of Physics. In that post I quote Feynman, commenting on the success of science:

What is it about nature that lets this happen, that it is possible to guess from one part what the rest is going to do? That is an unscientific question: I do not know how to answer it, and therefore I am going to give an unscientific answer. I think it is because nature has a simplicity and therefore a great beauty. Richard Feynman, "Seeking New Laws," pp. 143-167, in Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law, New York: Modern Library, 1994. Quote is from p. 167.

Feynman recognizes that the success of science is due to something metaphysical: nature's simplicity and beauty. Others recognize it as exactly the kind of universe that God created and told us he created. We see it as prima facie evidence or at least faith affirming.


Not the Jerr. The  Jerr goes on:

In fact, if there were a theistic God—and Haught is indeed a theist who thinks that God intervenes in the world—I would expect the universe to be not comprehensible"

Thank you Jerry. Inventing a view of god that is incompatible with the universe and then declaring victory because god and the universe are incompatible is surely a scholarly approach worthy of emulation. Well played, sir.