Useful Fictions

Imagine that there are some bugs that live under the bark of a tree in a great forest. The bugs are tiny, and not especially long-lived, and have poor senses, but they're quite clever. They've managed to figure out the vaguest outlines of their tree and that their tree is growing. Some of the most clever bugs have extrapolated backwards and decided this means the tree originally came from a tiny speck they call "a seed". Some of the bugs believe this means that the seed must have been created and caused to sprout into a tree by an all powerful, all knowing and provident bug they call the Great Bug. Why else would the tree exist at all, let alone be so well suited to the lives of bugs? Some other bugs think there must be more trees, perhaps with bugs living in them too. Believers in the Great Bug scoff at these ideas, and shake their heads. Even if it were so, wouldn't that make the lives of bugs meaningless? This is at least an improvement over times past wh...

Two major categories of philosophical argument for God are arguments from being, and arguments from order. That there is something rather than nothing, and order rather than disorder, is taken to imply that there is an intelligent, willful creator - a God. But does this hold up to scrutiny? No - on the contrary, when understood in the most general and metaphysical sense, being and order are uncreatable - what I like to call “immune to fiat”. A supposed God might say "fiat lux", but cannot do the same for being and order. If there is something rather than nothing - being rather than utter nonbeing - then this cannot have a cause, since anything that might be called a cause must itself be in some sense. If being cannot have a cause, then it cannot be caused by a creator. If there is order rather than disorder, then this likewise cannot have a cause, since to say that something was caused is to presuppose that order was already in place. If it weren't, things would no...