Wow. Holy Archons of the Ancient Aeons. I just found out that in 2011 the online edition of Psychology Today published an article arguing Thomas Aquinas proved God exists and science can go stuff it. Called “The Scientific Atheism Fallacy: How Science Declares that God Is Dead, But Can’t Prove It” (tagline: “Without proof, should a scientist be an atheist?”). A patron asked me to do a write up. This thing is just a ton of face-palm moments, exposing the philosophical incompetence of its author, “Nicholas Kardaras Ph.D.,” psychotherapist and second-rate hipster wooist.

Seriously. Kardaras’s bio says he’s a “University professor, psychotherapist and recovering former nightclub owner” who used to hobnob with all kinds of famous people he names (like “Uma Thurman” and “JFK Jr.”!) in his dope club, but then discovered that Plato and Pythagoras (literally the worst philosophers of renown from the Greek era, who ended up being wrong about almost literally everything) are, like, totes the bomb, and whom he proves right with “some of the most cutting edge advances in the fields of quantum mechanics and consciousness research” so you can “catch a glimpse of that trippy realm called Ultimate Reality.”

Pause for a moment.

Okay. We’re back.

That’s from the ad copy for Kardaras’s book How Plato and Pythagoras Can Save Your Life, which is about how you should follow the health and therapy advice of ancient superstitious nutcases with no science credentials even by their own day’s standards. (Like, I guess, a scientist should?) But hang that. We’re going to talk about everything wrong with his article for Psych Today.

What Does It Mean to Be a Scientist?

Kardaras opens with this snide stream of hilarity…

A scientist has to be an atheist; that seems to be the pervading popular wisdom these days. Yahoos, snake handlers and Bible freaks are “true believers,” but sober men and women of science can’t possibly believe in such fairy tales.

The thinking goes that if a person is smart and educated, then obviously they get that God is a convenient psychological crutch and religion nothing more than a social mechanism designed to reign in our baser tendencies-tendencies that, if uncontrolled by the do’s and don’ts of religion, would lead to societal anarchy.

This idea that atheism is the ideology of choice for the more educated and enlightened and can be the only mind-set of the rational and scientifically minded is certainly in literary vogue as evidenced by best sellers such as Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great (2007) and Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion (2006).

They reflect a cultural climate where so-called smart people–academics, scientists, intellectuals, and wannabe intellectuals–declare themselves atheists with a capital A and tow the company line: since God, or cosmic sentience, can’t be affirmatively proven (or even observed) via scientific methodology, then those empirically unobservable things can’t exist. Thus, anything beyond our observable material reality is considered right up there with Big Foot and the Chupacabra.

Okay. Lots wrong here.

First, scientists and “intellectuals” don’t say we should be atheists because God “can’t be affirmatively proven” as a scientific theory; they say we should be atheists because we have no business affirming a theory that has no clear articulation and has never been verified. Like, indeed, Big Foot and the Chupacabra. What it means to be a scientist, is to not declare as fact, what has never been confirmed by any reliable method. It means to reject unreliable methods of knowing things about reality.

Second, Kardaras briefs only a few elements of error theory in the sociology of religion (mockingly described as the “crutch” theory and the “control” theory). There are actually several functional causes of religious belief that have been proposed (including these), some even backed by scientific evidence (see Chapter 25 of Malcolm Murray’s Atheist’s Primer, Dennett’s Breaking the Spell, and Vyse’s Believing in Magic). You know what a scientist would do? Discuss those actual theories, and the evidence adduced for them. Rather than mocking science.

Third, using sloppy language like “can’t exist” here, suggests we may be looking at a crap philosopher at work. No disciplined critic claims “the Chupacabra can’t exist,” which is to confuse logical possibility with factual improbability. Sure, colloquially, people will often use the language of impossibility to mean extreme improbability (I have already quite thoroughly covered that). But when you are trying to make a precise or accurate argument about this, particularly if you are about to bring up a distinction between logical and empirical argument (as Kardaras is about to do), you don’t reinforce that confusion by being overly colloquial about the very distinction you intend to argue.

Scientists can’t claim to be scientists, and at the same time accept unverified woo theories of reality…without being hypocrites. It would be different if a scientist were to say, “Well, this god theory of the origination of the properties, behavior, and content of the universe is a viable model that works well, but we can’t affirm it’s true until we have ruled out other equally capable theories with observations.” That would be consistent with the scientist’s pledge to reject unreliable methods of ascertaining universal facts about reality (and any scientist who doesn’t reject unreliable methods in that domain, is by definition a pseudoscientist). But that would entail agnosticism, which is essentially just weak atheism. It remains the lack of belief, a-theism.

But in fact, “this god theory of the origination of the properties, behavior, and content of the universe is a viable model that works well” is false. There is no working god theory of anything in the sciences. You won’t find any peer reviewed journal article articulating any “god did it” model for anything…the universe, the mind, life, anything whatever. No such theory has ever been coherently articulated in any fashion usable by science. So a scientist can’t even be an agnostic about this pseudoscientific theory—in the way he may be, for example, about Eternal Inflation Theory or Superstring Theory or any particular theory of the origins of life or operation of the human mind.

Even “the Chupacabra” theory is better articulated, more coherent, and scientifically viable, than any God theory of anything. It’s just extremely improbable: because it has no foundation in any known science (it fails on epistemic prior probability) and has no scientifically credible evidence (it fails on epistemic likelihoods). So a scientist shouldn’t even be an agnostic about Chupacabras. Any more than they should be agnostics about “gremlins cause some planes to crash” or “there are telepaths who can mind-control witnesses in court.” So just do the math: “there is a vast invisible superhuman telepath” is by definition vastly less credible than “there are telepaths who can mind-control witnesses in court.” So by the logical law of hypothetical syllogism, scientists should be atheists, for the same reason they should disbelieve there are telepaths controlling witnesses in court. If the latter is extremely improbable, and the former is even more improbable than the latter, then the former is even more improbable than extremely improbable. Not impossible; but unquestionably unbelievable. Therefore you should not believe it. QED.

That’s how science works. And, incidentally, how logic works. Take note.

That’s Not How Science & Logic Work

Kardaras, by contrast, gets science and logic totally wrong. Check out the next section of his article (emphasis now added):

[I]t’s this matter of proof and evidence that gets to the source of the modern conflict between science and religion: science demands affirmative proof for what’s essentially un-provable in the scientific arena. But perhaps, just perhaps,  when it comes to “proof ” regarding God, the evidentiary burden should instead fall on the atheists to prove that there is not a God or, at the very least, that there isn’t some sort of cosmic purpose. Think about it; if an atheist is so quick to invoke science as their guiding rationale in their belief in a random universe, then shouldn’t they prove it?

Because, really, if any scientists proudly and self-assuredly declare themselves atheists (Richard Dawkins and Stepehen Hawking-you know who you are!), then they’re not only being intellectually dishonest, but they’re also going counter to the guiding principles of the thing that they profess to love so much: Science.

In science, we can’t affirmatively know or assert something until we’ve empirically proven it; absent any such affirmative data, the true and proper scientific stance should be one that echoes Socrates’ credo of “I know that I don’t know”. (Socrates is said to have been dubbed by the Oracle at Delphi the smartest man in all of Greece because he alone was smart enough to realize that “I know that I know nothing.”)

Thus, without any affirmative scientific proof that God does not exist, the default position should be one of agnosticism–of “I don’t know since I don’t have enough data one way or another.”

Okay. Lots wrong here.

Let’s go one item at a time…

Socrates Said “I Drank What!?”

First, let’s get rid of this ridiculous test for Socrates being “the smartest man in all of [ancient] Greece.” The God Apollo said so! Why, hoo dow, that’s sure some impressive science there, pard’ner! Plus, um, it’s not smart—the statement Kardaras claims Socrates was praised for, wasn’t even true. Socrates knew lots of things; and even claimed to know lots of things—and claiming you don’t know anything, is dumb. Alas, Kardaras’s history also sucks. There is no evidence Socrates ever said this; much less that the Delphic Oracle praised him for saying it.

The truth is that the Oracle merely proclaimed no one was wiser than Socrates. Which can mean many were as wise as Socrates; which in turn could make the Oracle’s assertion that no one was wise, and therefore everyone was as wise as Socrates…the Oracle infamously loved that kind of verbal trickery, as all fake psychics do. But whatever the case, Socrates himself pondered why the Oracle would say that, and Socrates (not the Oracle) concluded it must have been because:

I am wiser than [the wisest man I know]; it is likely that neither of us knows anything worthwhile, but he thinks he knows something when he does not, whereas when I do not know, neither do I think I know; so I am likely to be wiser than he to this small extent, that I do not think I know when I do not know (Plato, Apology 21c-e).

Or so Plato tells us; this is conspicuously not in Xenophon’s own sourced account of the same trial. He tells us something quite different:

Hermogenes further reported that when the jurors raised a clamour at hearing these words, some of them disbelieving his statements, others showing jealousy at his receiving greater favours even from the gods than they, Socrates resumed: “Hark ye; let me tell you something more, so that those of you who feel so inclined may have still greater disbelief in my being honoured of Heaven. Once on a time when Chaerephon made inquiry at the Delphic oracle concerning me, in the presence of many people Apollo answered that no man was more free than I, or more just, or more prudent.” (Xenophon, Apology 14)

Socrates then goes on to give evidence the Oracle was right, by appealing to how virtuously he behaved. No mention of it being because “I know that I know nothing” or any such nonsense. Socrates instead says, “would not a person with good reason call me wise, who from the time I began to understand spoken words have never stopped seeking after and learning every good thing I could?” (Ibid. 16) and “I am adjudged by some people supreme in what is man’s greatest blessing—education” (Ibid. 21). Quite the opposite sentiment, don’t you think?

Even Plato’s (probably bogus) version of what happened, does not have Socrates say what Kardaras wants. Socrates there does not say he knows nothing. He says “I do not think I know when I do not know.” Which is a much more sensible sentiment. He’s basically saying, “I’m wise, because I actively avoid the Dunning-Kruger effect.” Would that Kardaras followed Socrates’ advice. But to the pertinent point, this is not a statement about “we should be agnostic about any x when we have no evidence for x.” Because you can have tons of evidence against x, both directly (all popular deities are refuted by vast reams of data) and indirectly (all past science establishes giant invisible telepaths are the least likely explanation of anything, including anything as yet unexplained).

As again the hypothesis of telepaths controlling court witnesses: we don’t need direct evidence against them; we don’t need to publish a science paper “proving” they don’t exist. We already know their existence is extraordinarily unlikely, so unlikely in fact that we have no need of any further proof. Until such time as some evidence appears to indicate they do exist…which evidence we then examine by testing the “telepath” hypothesis against competing theories of the same evidence…which tests have always ruled out the supernatural, case after case after case. So we should not be “agnostic” about telepaths manipulating the justice system. We should simply not believe any such thing. The burden is on the one who proposes they exist. Not on the one who concludes they don’t. Because the latter conclusion is based on a vast quantity of accumulated scientific knowledge of how the world does and doesn’t work.

Thus the burden falls on the one who wishes to contradict all that we’ve learned about the world. Not on the one who learns from all that we’ve learned about the world. Real scientists build on past discoveries. They don’t ignore them.

How Science & Logic Actually Work

Second, it’s false to say there is “no data” pertaining to the existence of invisible spirit monsters. There is tons of data. All of it negative. To the point of making such creatures innately, extremely, improbable.

Third, it’s false to say “the evidentiary burden should instead fall on the atheists,” because science has already established a vast burden against anything supernatural.

Fourth, it’s false to say that admitting this is “intellectually dishonest” or “going counter” to science. What’s dishonest is erasing the entire past history of discoveries in science about how things work and what sorts of things exist and operate in the world, and then concluding there is “no data” pertaining to the question of what kinds of things do and don’t exist. What’s going counter to science, is affirming things are true that have never been tested or demonstrated by any evidence whatever—and are even contradicted by tons of evidence.

We can be agnostic about actually viable theories—of such things as consciousness or life or speciation or the cosmos—but no god theory has any scientific viability whatever. No “god did it” theory predicts the specific parameters of the Standard Model or even simple facts like the size and age of the cosmos. No “god did it” theory predicts why life is constructed from chemical DNA computers and masses of cooperating microbes—why we are just colonies of single-celled organisms. No “god did it” theory explains any specific features of human consciousness. And on and on. God is everywhere a pseudotheory. All any such theory ever consists of is “And god…[hand wave hand wave hand wave]…therefore, we are made of single-celled organisms and gluons hold atoms together and we can smell cinnamon.”

That’s why scientists reject god hypotheses. The same reason they reject all other supernatural and woo junk.

Kardaras even exposes how pseudoscientific his theory is when he equates God with “some sort of cosmic purpose.” Way to be super fucking vague there. Let’s totally submit this to a peer reviewed science journal: “Humans Are Made of Cells Because of Some Sort of Purpose.”

“We Should Totally Go Back to the Middle Ages,” Says Some Fool Psychologist

Kardaras then throws away all scientific evidence accumulated over many centuries against the supernatural as even a category of thing, and runs back to Medieval Times to quote a science-illiterate theologian as an authority on the Nature of Reality and Explanation of All Things. You can’t act more unlike a scientist than that. But alas. Kardaras frames his closing section thus:

[H]ere’s the thing: there is a logically consistent proof for the existence of God. It’s not commonly taught in most public schools, but Thomas Aquinas, the thirteenth-century philosopher and theologian developed his “five proofs for the existence of God” hundreds of years before an apple dropped on Newton’s head.

In essence, Aquinas argues that “something” (i.e., us, the universe) can’t arise from “nothingness,” that “something” (namely God) had to be the “cause” of all things and of all “movement.” (This notion borrows heavily from Aristotle’s “Unmoved Mover” conception of what we might call God.)

Which is all a massive logical fail. The reason Aquinas isn’t taught in schools today, is the same reason we don’t teach angelology and magic in schools. The Scientific Revolution overturned all the primitive superstitious nonsense of the Middle Ages. We know better now. Why? Because we started using this thing called science to understand reality—instead of armchair bullshit. Aquinas’s “Five Proofs” are all unsound or invalid as written. We’ve long known this. Modern attempts to “fix” them also fail. They fail logically. And they fail scientifically.

First, it simply isn’t true that “something can’t arise from nothing.” We only know what happens to something (a spacetime full of virtual particles constrained by a governing nature). We have never observed a “nothing.” So we have no idea what actual nothings can do. But since by definition they are governed by no rules whatever, for all we know they certainly could spontaneously produce things. What’s to stop them? The presumption that “nothing” is constrained by a law about what nothings can and can’t do is not only unscientific (we have no evidence it’s true), it’s also self-contradictory. If there is a rule governing what a nothing “can’t” do, it’s no longer a nothing, but something: the presence of a physical law. That you then can’t explain the existence of.

Second, it also isn’t true that anything ever had to “arise” at all. After all, if God can just always exist without explanation, so can existence without a God. The science of the Big Bang has only established that the current configuration of the universe began. We have no evidence that all existence, much less time itself, ever began. Many of the most viable and predictively successful cosmological theories entail or allow a past eternal cosmos. And if we are to explain how time began, we can no longer appeal to any causal theory. Because causes by definition precede events in time; but there cannot have been a cause before time. Because before time, there was no time. Switching to a timeless causal theory leaves us wholly unmoored by any logic or evidence: we have no evidence, and thus no knowledge, regarding how “times” begin (only of how things begin in time); and if God can simultaneously exist with the universe and cause it, then anything can simultaneously exist with the universe and cause it, including all kinds of things that aren’t gods.

And remember, God, as a scientific theory, doesn’t even explain anything.

But Kardaras sticks to the jumbled arguments of his favorite Medieval, scientifically ignorant monk, claiming:

Aquinas’s second key idea has to do with the universe’s tendency towards order, which seems to contradict the chaos of the laws of entropy; in other words, the order that comes from disorder leads to a conclusion that the universe has some sort of purposeful unfolding. Some might call this a form of universal DNA encoded into the existential fabric to guide, over the course of roughly 15 billion years, the evolutionary development of an inanimate, subatomic, pre-Big Bang speck into the sentient and reasoned being that’s reading this blog.

Here I am a bit lost. Where did Aquinas say any of this? None of the science Kardaras refers to was known to Aquinas. And none of Aquinas’s “Five Ways” addresses “the universe’s tendency towards order.” Kardaras must mean Aquinas’s “Fifth Way,” but that was an argument about design, in particular why certain objects move towards certain ends rather than others—a completely obsolete concept long ago abandoned by science. It was not an argument about the increasing of order. And testing (and so far consistently everywhere refuting) Aquinas’s premise here is exactly what modern science has been doing ever since. We have found that in fact we can explain the directedness of natural objects without intelligence: the planets need no engineer, to explain why they orbit as they do; life needs no engineer, to explain how it evolved as it has, or even how it began. And so on. On down to every single thing. Today, many proposed models of the Big Bang can fully explain all the laws and constants of physics without appealing to any intelligence.

And let’s be clear. Abandoning the entire history of science, to follow some ignorant, obsolete, and completely wrong dude from the Middle Ages, is the exact opposite of “being a scientist.”

But let’s also address Kardaras’s own science illiteracy, which he has here compounded with Aquinas’s.

The Law of Entropy was not discovered until centuries after Aquinas. Nor does that law say things don’t tend towards order. It says things only tend toward order by creating disorder. In fact, science has firmly established that increasing order is an inevitable product of mindless, unguided laws of physics (e.g. crystalization, solar system formation, molecular chaining). All that the Second Law says is that this all comes at the expense of disordering some of the world elsewhere. Crystals form, by casting off heat; which cast-off heat is more disordered than it was. But the crystal itself is more ordered than it was. The sum total of energy has become, on balance, more disordered; but by creating new order in the process. This is science 101. There is no scientist worth even a fetid dingo’s kidney who would honestly claim we need to explain where “order” comes from within the cosmos. Where order comes from has been the principle occupation and achievement of science since the age of Newton.

The Big Bang was also not discovered until centuries after Aquinas. Who would have shit a brick if he knew the universe was actually 14 billion years old, that the earth didn’t even exist in it until over 10 billion years had passed, that the earth had been sitting around for almost 4 billion years before even humans existed, and that single celled organisms (which Aquinas also would’ve shit a brick over discovering the existence of) were six times more evolved than animals (including humans) and have ruled the earth thirty times longer than humans have, and that all of this can be explained without any intelligent intervention at all, that it all would have unfolded on its own, according to laws and principles solidly proven by science. After he recovered from his swoon and swallowed some Tums, Aquinas would perhaps try to rescue his now totally-fucked argument by converting it into some kind of Fine Tuning argument (which seems to be what Kardaras is trying to do). But even that we now know is crap. Which is why no “God Did It” theory of the Big Bang has ever passed peer review in the sciences.

Let’s Stop Defending Stupid Medieval Shit

Yes. All this medieval, science illiterate, pseudoscientific garbage is in Psychology Today. Sad.

Kardaras senses there is something hinky about this. So he tries defending it…

Yes, admittedly Aquinas’s proof relies on reason and logic; for those seeking C.S.I.-style evidence of God, sorry. Nor do we have the George Burns version of God testifying in a courtroom or revealing himself to a befuddled John Denver.

Instead, all we have is a thirteenth-century proof from a long-dead philosopher. That, and wondrous and miraculous creation itself—flowers, and babies, and rainbows, and luminous stars and galaxies, and, perhaps most amazing of all, this amazing thing called the human mind with its seemingly infinite ability to create and to imagine.

But even if everything that I’ve just mentioned doesn’t convince the atheist that there’s more to the universe than meets the eye, I have yet to see the compelling proof or the scientific evidence that God or cosmic purpose does not exist.

Dude. There is a shit ton of scientific evidence that God does not exist, and that cosmic purposes don’t explain anything we observe. That’s why all logically consistent scientists don’t believe in either. And none of Aquinas’s “Five Ways” were logical proofs. Even if they are mistaken as such, all of them are formally unsound. That’s why they aren’t found in the sciences anymore. Alongside bloodletting and tests for witchcraft.

As experts point out “the five ways are not complete arguments,” because at best “we should expect to find some suppressed premises in these arguments,” so “the five ways are simply five ways of beginning to demonstrate God’s existence,” and thus not actual formal proofs thereof. They also all contain false premises. And vacuous conclusions.

Aquinas’s first three ways all rely on a claim about infinities later formally refuted by Georg Cantor and Bertrand Russell; and only demonstrate that if there is a first cause of everything, there is a first cause of everything (whether temporally or ontologically). Which is a tautology, entirely compatible with atheism. His fourth way relies on a false premise that human concept-space determines the content of real-space—e.g. if I can think of the best Millennium Falcon, there must be an actual Millennium Falcon. Nope. That’s called the Existential Fallacy. There is a reason no Ontological Argument has ever achieved formal validity.

Meanwhile, Aquinas’s fifth way relies on a premise that was afterward thoroughly refuted by modern science: that patterns of behavior in the universe must be set by intelligent action, and not accidental concordances of properties. Newton proved the solar system’s order, required no designer; Darwin proved the order in the biosphere, required no designer; Chaotic Inflation entails all order in the fundamental constants would require no designer; etc. The premise is dead. And thereby so is the argument. That’s what science did to Aquinas. So why are we choosing Aquinas over science? Only someone who rejects science would ever do that. And such a person, cannot legitimately call themselves a scientist.

The fact is, science has already discovered why there are “flowers, and babies, and rainbows, and luminous stars and galaxies, and, perhaps most amazing of all, this amazing thing called the human mind.” It has explained all of those phenomena (with the singular exception of qualia, but odds are it will get that one down too…theism has no viable theory of it anyway). And it has done so without once appealing to intelligences or purposes of any kind. That’s the great and fantastic achievement of modern science, and why modern atheists are right to say science has refuted the existence of God.

Still, maybe there could be some obscure weird god, wholly alien to any popular theology. A god with no concern for us whatever, with no desire to use any of its powers anymore even to speak to us, or who wants to deceive us, or who is trapped by some inconceivably bizarre metaphysical chains that almost wholly disempower it, preventing it from doing anything whatever anymore (even speaking), and having also compelled it to make no other universe but one that looked exactly like the only kind of universe that could be observed if there wasn’t a god. Requiring a set of unbelievable, indeed literally inconceivable, coincidences—for which we have no evidence whatever. No one should believe such an absurd thing. We would more likely be sims in some alien kid’s desktop computer. Literally. That’s actually more likely. And yet it’s pretty damned unlikely. But you won’t see any science papers proving that false. So must Kardaras be an agnostic about living in The Matrix? By his own reasoning, yes. Except scientists already know that thesis is massively improbable, and thus requires no disproof. That’s why they are scientists. Consistent scientists will conclude the same about twisted invisible mega-ghosts. Which are not only the most improbable things conceivable, they may even be outright impossible.