God? Very Probably: Five Rational Ways to Think about the Question of a God

by Robert H. Nelson, Herman E. Daly (Foreword)

In recent years, a number of works have appeared with important implications for the age-old question of the existence of a god. These writings, many of which are not by theologians, strengthen the rational case for the existence of a god, even as this god may not be exactly the Christian God of history. This book brings together for the first time such recent diverse contributions from fields such as physics, the philosophy of human consciousness, evolutionary biology, mathematics, the history of religion, and theology. Based on such new materials as well as older ones from the twentieth century, it develops five rational arguments that point strongly to the (very probable) existence of a god. They do not make use of the scientific method, which is inapplicable to the question of a god. Rather, they are in an older tradition of rational argument dating back at least to the ancient Greeks. For those who are already believers, the book will offer additional rational reasons that may strengthen their belief. Those who do not believe in the existence of a god at present will encounter new rational arguments that may cause them to reconsider their opinion. ""In God? Very Probably, Nelson makes the most compelling, challenging, comprehensive, and consequential analysis of how and why the advocates of the 'new atheism' have built their cases on unscientific grounds."" --Max L. Stackhouse, Rimmer and Ruth de Vries Professor of Reformed Theology and Public Life Emeritus, Princeton Theological Seminary ""In this engaging, illuminating book, Nelson offers an accessible, well-argued case for the rationality of belief in God. It is elegantly written and refreshingly free of academic jargon."" --Charles Taliaferro, Chair of the Department of Philosophy, St. Olaf College ""Although the thrust of this book is not to debate thinkers [like Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens], the self-contradictions of their positions are frequently exposed as by-products of broader discussions, and Nelson helpfully makes the connections. I believe readers will enjoy and benefit from the clear, informed, and honest reasoning in this book."" --Herman Daly, Emeritus Professor, University of Maryland ""Nelson has written a superb book, one that should be read by a wide spectrum of people: atheists, agnostics, deists, and committed Christians. His explanations for the existence of a god are thoughtful and draw upon the work of a wide range of scholars."" --P. J. Hill, Professor of Economics Emeritus, Wheaton College ""Nelson masterfully draws evidence from recent scientific discoveries and important arguments that bear on the question of the existence of a god. This is a thought-provoking, ambitious, and much-needed book with elements from the author's personal journey."" --Kaius Sinnemaki, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki Robert H. Nelson is a professor at the University of Maryland. Originally trained as an economist, he has written widely over the past twenty-five years on the ways in which the ""secular"" thinking of contemporary economics and the contemporary environmental movement have an underlying Christian content, with books including Reaching for Heaven on Earth: The Theological Meaning of Economics (1991), Economics as Religion (2001), and The New Holy Wars: Economic Religion versus Environmental Religion in Contemporary America (2010).

Genres: Religion

322 pages, Paperback

Published November 11, 2015

About the author

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Reviews

[Gillian Straine · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is well worth reading, even if rational arguments for God are normally a turn off. It is extremely well researched and presents new angles on scientific theories and their interpretation. This is a book written by an economist and so unusual in the field, and would be a valuable addition to a science and religion library.

[Jamey · Rating 4 out of 5]

True to its title, this book provides five rational ways to think about the question of God. An introductory chapter called “Thinking about God” explains: “it is the most important questions — dealing with issues at the greatest historical and social significance — that are the least suitable for applying the formal methods of social science quantitative analysis.” This is a generous admission from an economist, and Nelson is preeminent among scholars for his multiple books exploring the unacknowledged religiosity with which members of his profession espouse and apply their doctrines. His frank admission of the bad fit between the methods of economics, and the question of God, is a promising overture to what is sometimes a sensitive and insightful book. Though it’s well worth reading, the text seems hobbled by habits of thought—quantitative, evidence-oriented, and always probabilistic—that seem almost intractable.

The first of Nelson’s five rational ways is the subject of chapter 3: “God the Mathematician: The Miracle of Mathematical Order in the Natural World.” That highly stimulating subject is often discussed by physicists, not least by Nobel laureate Roger Penrose, whom Nelson deftly quotes. But just as it has proven unfeasibly difficult to explain how mathematics “governs” the physical world, it also seems quite difficult to explain why exactly this is a mystery in the first place. A parallel development has occurred in consciousness studies, where the Hard Problem of Consciousness remains more or less intractable—while alongside it, there has sprung up what is now called the Meta-Hard Problem of Consciousness: why exactly the original Hard Problem has the grip on us that it does.

Throughout this book, whenever Nelson discusses the relationship between mathematics and the physical world (which he does quite a bit), he uses the language of active authority, governance, control, and so on. But as some commentators have recently pointed out (in response to the ubiquity of such language on this question), the mathematical laws of nature do not reach out and “govern” events. They are inferences of abiding patterns which great scientists have hit upon from observations of nature, in the field and the laboratory.

Something more sophisticated is meant, despite how often we are told plainly “The physical world than is miraculously controlled by this non-material, mathematical world…” (66). This brings to mind the strange book by Robert Pepperell, recently reviewed here, called What Matter Feels: Consciousness, Energy and Physics (2024)---a panpsychist work in which the author insists that physicists across the centuries should be taken at their word when they say a stone “experiences” a force when impacted. For Pepperell, this means that a rock has a rudimentary but real proto-consciousness that feels things like impacts and the cold. But for most of the scientists he quotes about objects “experiencing a force,” the phrase is, of course, a metaphorical use of that verb. Nevertheless, Dr. Pepperell carries it with him into philosophical waters where that metaphoricity readily dissolves.

Something similar may be happening when matter is said to be “controlled by” and “governed by” mathematical laws. Except it isn’t only popularizers and synthesizers like Pepperell, or Nelson, or myself, who use such language. As Nelson shows, some of the finest scientific and mathematical minds have been explicitly astonished by the power of math over the physics of nature, including Kurt Godel, Heinrich Hertz, Cheng Ning Yang, Eugene Wigner, and Edward Frenkel, Roger Penrose, and others. This makes them Platonists on this issue, which has plenty of adjacent entailments of its own, some of which (can) extend all the way to theism and the dualist picture of an immortal soul animating the mortal body.

I hold those spooky ideas myself, so I dearly wish to catch sight of just why everyone deeper than I is so very surprised at nature’s conformity to mathematical regularities. I am surprised by the fine-tuning of the cosmos for life, and that’s comprised not only of the values of constants like lightspeed, the gravitational constant, and the mass of the proton, but also of the formulas that pertain to those values and activate them. Perhaps those are what is meant---yet it still feels as if something more profound is at issue that I still don’t get.

When three apples are placed on a table, it is not a mystery where the number three came in from. The threeness is an aspect of the event at hand, not an outcome directed by Mathematics in an act of will. Of course, the situation is different when the math in question is not arithmetic but, say, the Universal Law of Gravitation. Many are reluctant to suppose that God actively governs the universe by driving the mystery of gravity’s “spooky action at a distance.” They are less reluctant to think of God as framing that law of nature, and the others along with it, as designs for the Creation which He implemented “in the beginning.” That is where the “fine tuning” argument slots in. The values of the constants of nature (the mass of the electron, the ratio between it and the mass of the proton, etc.) appear to be exquisitely specific to the requirements of life’s eventual emergence from a lifeless physical universe. This abundance of satisfied narrow requirements, in turn, suggests the designing hand of a Creator.

Efforts to refute that theistic inference proceed along the same general lines of argument that have proven so successful in biology: rather than direct creation by a designing God, complex organisms evolved from simpler ones through natural selection, a continuous competition among organisms whose differences result in differential rates of survival and inheritance. Those differences are themselves caused by random variation.

That account of biology is hotly contested, but the point here is its awkwardness as a model for cosmogony (the part of cosmology that deals with the universe’s origin). If a random process called genetic mutation accounts for the differences among competing organisms, what could ever be its cosmic equivalent, that could result in the life-friendly universe we in fact do observe? How could multiple universes compete to produce this one, as multiple bacteria might compete to produce one “fittest” strain? The universe cannot have competitors. The universe is unique by definition.

In other words, what strikes me as strange about most arguments against the fine tuning argument is that they assume the nature of the universe is somehow inherently probabilistic. The values of the constants of nature are assumed to be the eventual results of some originary random process of variation. But there cannot have been such a process, as Nelson explains:

**The fine-tuning has to precede the workings of the universe which is itself then fundamentally shaped in part by this fine-tuning—so something about the physical universe that would already require the fine-tuning cannot itself be said to have caused the fine-tuning that we observe. The physical universe was seemingly created out of nothing, there is no series of intelligible previous events to explain it, and it is thus an altogether unexplained miracle—or explainable only in supernatural terms—that the specific constants of nature of our universe are fine-tuned with such extraordinary exactness as to support life, and now finally the existence of human beings on earth such as me (41).**

Yet elsewhere in the same book, Nelson seems to take for granted that metaphysical truths about ultimate reality are probabilistic, just like truth claims about events in the physical world:

**Although the best rational argument for the existence of God, and the best argument for the existence of other minds, may be philosophically analogous, it is still conceivable that one is correct and the other is incorrect, perhaps by random chance (it is after all a matter of probabilities), although human beings would not be able to resolve this issue by their own rational analysis ([my emphasis] p. 22).**

I submit that the existence of God, like the existence of other minds, is not a matter of probabilities at all. To be fair, Nelson’s book is subtitled, “Five Rational Ways to Think about the Question of God,” and this commitment to rationality makes probability an almost ineluctable feature of the his approach. Conversely, it also entails the rest of the left-brain’s standard epistemic equipment: a pursuit of certainty, driven by evidence and argumentation under logical rules of non-contradiction. I would be foolish glibly to attribute such limitations to a genius like Richard Feinman---but Nelson quotes him, too, calling the issue of God’s existence a probabilistic one: “He finds that in any case the question of God's existence is one of probabilities-as Feynman says, ‘is it 50-50 or is it 97 percent?’” (87). Perhaps I can dare frame a response from a safe distance away.

There really is a side to theism vs. atheism that concerns objective reality---the immanent side, not the transcendent side (William James was particularly effective on this subject). But the objective side of the question is continuous with the side that transcends the objective-vs-subjective duality, and this can be hinted at using an analogy with music. The person who weeps in the private darkness of the concert hall, swept up in the sublimity of Chopin or Satie or Beethoven, is saturated with an affective and spiritual reality to which a tone-deaf, zealous bean-counter is utterly oblivious, no matter how well informed he or she may be with the details of the printed score, the compression waves in the air, the acoustics of the violins, and the physiology of the eardrum and the temporal lobe. Is the difference between the worlds of these two very different people a probabilistic one? Is there any sense whatsoever in calling it a matter of probability as to which world is more true than the other (“Is it 50-50 or is it 97 percent?”)? Only one of the two worlds includes both, and it is the world of bittersweet tears, not that of value-neutral information.

Nelson’s fourth chapter, on the limitations of Darwinism, includes a fine description of the intellectual poverty of militant atheist Richard Dawkins, and an homage to Lynn Margulis, the great evolutionary biologist whose intellectual independence proved crucial to the advancement of biological science at the close of the 20th Century. It notes how little of Darwin’s Origin of Species actually explains the speciation problem, and how little progress has been made on it in the intervening century and a half, despite the staggering achievements of molecular biology, genetics, embryology, and the growth of the fossil record.

Chapter Five, on consciousness, was what motivated me to read the book, and for the most part it’s quite well done. Writing in 2015, Nelson repeats (p. 161) David Chalmers’ 1990’s claim that consciousness serves no discernible function for the organisms endowed with it. Since then, however, the claim has been strongly disproven by Mark Solms in The Hidden Spring (2021), who identified the function of consciousness as actionable feelings that give the subject appropriately prioritized motives for meeting multiple needs whose relative urgencies are always shifting in novel circumstances. Consciousness is feelings, whose purpose is to tell the organism how it’s doing, and what to do next. It isn’t Nelson’s fault that this was discovered some years after his book’s appearance.

Another limitation is Nelson’s rather breezy engagement in the all-too-common practice of eliding the deep differences between Jewish and Christian theologies, with terms like Abrahamic, Judeo-Christian, and “the Jewish and Christian God” (162). The dim view I take of that practice, and my predecessors in that dim view such as Gershom Scholem and Arthur Cohen, will be familiar to readers of my book reviews on this blog and elsewhere (a particularly egregious offender is Anthony Kronman’s book After Disbelief: On Disenchantment, Disappointment, Eternity, and JoyAfter Disbelief (Yale U.P., 2021), my review of which is currently under consideration at Jewish Action).

Nelson does readers good service in emphasizing the role of fear in the rhetoric of materialism, and the hidden terror that pervades much of the most sweepingly materialist discourse found in consciousness studies and adjacent disciplines. People who don’t believe in the soul are oddly afraid of it, and this can be hard to notice if we expect fear to come exclusively from dualists who are scared of getting extinguished into oblivion by a death in a physicalist universe. This other fear---of being wrong on the other side, with a false negative about the soul and, with it, perhaps, the Divine---is driven by the unconscious worry that one might have to answer to a Creator for the ethical aspect of one’s metaphysics. If I am the creature of a Creator of whose existence I am unpersuaded, is my intellectual error a type of ingratitude?

As Nelson discusses the nervousness of his materialist opponents, he cites two fascinatingly equivocal figures, the philosophers John Searle and Thomas Nagel, each of whom repudiates materialism and theism alike. What they do believe is much harder to sift out, but their frankness and intellectual independence are refreshing, with a revitalizing effect on the debate at large. Yet at some points Searle strikes a false note, adduced by Nelson thus:

**As Searle explained, there had once been a widely held ‘Cartesian view that in addition to physical particles there are 'immaterial' souls or mental substances.’ Such views were often associated with a belief in God as the source of the soul. Whatever large problems he had with his fellow philosophers, Searle did agree with them that ‘nowadays, as far as I can tell, no one’ of any high professional reputation in the philosophical study of the mind ‘believes in the existence of immortal spiritual substances except on religious grounds. To my knowledge, there are no purely philosophical or scientific motivations for accepting the existence of immortal mental substances’ such as souls (177).**

Perhaps not. But to take “high professional reputation” as some sort of meaningful criterion of philosophical seriousness is to write as if Thomas Kuhn never wrote The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. It is to forget the history of science and the sociology of knowledge, as well as the rivers of blood and ink that have been spilled over intellectual controversies like the Arian Heresy, the monophysite and monothelite controversies, the Albigensian Crusade, and all the other doctrinal wars and feuds between duelling experts, and between authorities and and insurgents, with both fools and sages to be found on each side. Moreover, Searle and those who quote this passage with uncritical approval (Nelson is not among them) are ignoring plenty of figures whose dualism or religious faith have not entirely prevented them from enjoying a measure of “high professional reputation.”

If dualists thinkers like David LundDavid Lund, David Ray Griffin, Freeman Dyson, or Bruce GreysonBruce Greyson are said to have legitimate academic credibility, then the statement which asserts other wise is false. But if they don’t, then the statement is circular, since those who disdain their achievements generally do so on the grounds that they are dualists in the first place. Reputation aside, Searle has also written as if there were no vast fields of anomalous evidence for which dualism can account where materialism cannot: “To my knowledge, there are no purely philosophical or scientific motivations for accepting the existence of immortal mental substances’ such as souls.”

I will close with a salient moment from Nelson’s discussion of the published encounter between Searle and Nagel:

**While rejecting Dennett and other scientific materialist reductionists, Searle still maintained that any future correct argument about consciousness must be scientifically grounded in material fact and theory. As Nagel concludes, however, this is not viable, leading Searle to disguise what is really "an essentially dualistic claim [as developed in his 1992 book [book:The Rediscovery of the Mind|51909]] in language that expresses a strong aversion to dualism"—and thus even Searle himself also falls prey to the philosophical contortions that have plagued the philosophy of mind in desperately seeking to uphold the naturalist orthodoxy (180).**

I would add that Nagel disguised what is really an essentially theistic claim [as developed in his 2012 book [book:Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False|13690432]] in language that expresses a strong aversion to theism.

[E · Rating 5 out of 5]

Robert Nelson’s book God? Very Probably: Five Rational Ways to Think About God was well-worth digging into. Nelson, though not a theologian, provides a cogent case for God’s existence, drawing heavily upon the writings of notable scholars from many different fields.

Nelson assumes some familiarity with the new atheism. As such, the book is best suited for individuals who have encountered writings of the new atheists or have some background with modern philosophical thinking on materialism, free will and other metaphysical topics. Nelson is overtly critical of the new atheism so that the book lends itself to those who are seeking a rational foundation for theism.

Nelson first elaborates on three of the most compelling and recurrent arguments in favor of God’s existence: the physical incomprehensibility of the quantum world, explaining the hard problem of consciousness (why, not how, brain matter can give rise to thoughts and sensations), and what he refers to as Darwinism. Nelson has no problems with evolution. What he takes issue with is whether natural selection and random mutation are sufficient to explain the existence of life. Why, in a world that tends toward disorder, does such a surprisingly diverse living world come about at all? Nelson rightly skirts the issue of creationism, asking simply if Darwinism alone is an adequate explanation for what we observe.

Nelson goes on to liken Darwinism to a religion – an act of faith. He extends this religious analogy to the new atheism and to most of the world’s belief systems. “Indeed,” writes Nelson, “there may in fact be no such thing as an entirely secular belief system … that lacks an underlying traditional religious message.” Presumably this is an extension of ideas developed in his mainstream economic work Economics as Religion.

Of course, Nelson’s definition of religion is broad, encompassing any bounded belief system that adheres to rules and practices and, perhaps most importantly, makes claims about universal truths. Still, it is the “persistence of the three Abrahamic faiths” of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam that Nelson singles out as his fifth rational argument for the existence of God.

His fourth argument is the existence of what Nelson refers to as miracles, which one could argue is a poor choice of words. The miracles to which Nelson refers have nothing to do with healing the blind or curing the sick but rather to significant events in human history. In this sense, they might be thought of more as cosmic nudges similar to those provided by the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Among the most basic miracles he posits are the human ability to harness fire, speech, and writing.

While I take issue with Nelson’s fourth and fifth arguments, they at least provided an uncommon perspective. At the same time, they are informed by Nelson’s career and research as an academic economist.

As mentioned, Nelson relies heavily on experts in their fields, as should be the case when delving into areas where the writer isn’t himself an expert. And while not all the experts represented mainstream ideas, all had reputable credentials. When I wasn’t familiar with a name I looked it up – a habit of late – and was always reassured. The breadth of information Nelson pulls together from many different scholars is impressive and is one of the great strengths of his book.

God? Very Probably isn’t perfect. I was disappointed by references to the supernatural, a word which carries similar baggage to the word miracle. Nelson, like virtually every other writer of which I’m aware, fails to appreciate the natural world may be far more extensive than perceived due to the limitations of the three-pound human brain. Just as all non-human animals are incapable of even comprehending what higher math is, for example, there may well exist aspects of the natural world that the human brain isn’t capable of comprehending – at least not in its present state of evolution. Thus, what Nelson deems supernatural might better be construed as beyond the limits of human comprehension.

The book’s sections weren’t tied together especially well. I often found myself asking “What does this have to do with the previous section?” or even worse, “What is the thesis of this chapter and how does this section support it?” Good as it is, a much better book is lurking within its pages.

Even so, God: Very Probably provides a powerful compendium of thought-provoking ideas for the soul-searching theist, especially one confronting modern philosophical orthodoxy. As philosophers Robert Koons and George Bealer point out (as quoted by Nelson), “materialism is a readily intelligible monistic worldview, appealing in its apparent simplicity, and a natural complement to the impressive ongoing successes in the natural sciences.” The allure of materialism is easy to understand, which is why Nelson’s thoughtful book is a well-reasoned breath of fresh air.

E. Andrew Boyd
Author of Beyond Comprehension: A Scientific Look at the Challenge of Knowing Everything
https://www.beyondcomprehension.info/

[David Seuss · Rating 5 out of 5]

Calmly and carefully reasoned

Robert Nelson explores a short list of reasons that might lead a completely rational person to choose to believe in God without reference to divine revelation or Biblical truth. Nelson starts with the proposition that good science and math are always correct and builds from there. I think anyone, believer, agnostic, or atheist, who is a “seeker” will benefit by reading this book. Having read it once I am going to go back and read it again. At the end, there is a test with just a few questions that will tell you if you believe in God, even if you don’t know you do. Read the book. Consider the test questions. Maybe a door will open you didn’t know was there.

[Constance Vincent · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting, but often repeated info. Could have been much less detailed, but has impressive research



An impressive amount of research and thought in this book, but perhaps too much. Especially about Darwinism and a few current atheist authors with whom this writer disagrees.