Can one assert a mysterious, naturalistic explanation to undercut all god arguments?

Question

I had been pondering this for a while and was wondering if there is any literature on the idea of undercutting all possible god hypotheses through the following trick (instead of simply saying that there’s no good reason to believe in a god).

Ignoring the ontological argument for a bit which is deductive, almost all arguments for a god rely on something that we see in the world that requires an explanation and then proposing that a god explains it.

My question is this: Instead of focusing on the fact that a god may be just an argument out of ignorance, or trying to find a naturalistic explanation, as most atheists do, can’t one just play the tu quoque card and simply assert a “mysterious” naturalistic hypothesis that is just as mysterious as the theistic one?

For example, suppose a theist says that the universe needs an explanation. Can’t one then just say that the universe is necessary through some unknown, mysterious way or made through some unknown, but godless, mysterious way? After all, when a god is proposed as an explanation for anything, that seems to execute their actual effect in completely unknown and mysterious ways, even by the theist’s own admission.

When someone says that fine tuning requires an explanation, can’t someone then say that the constants were just necessary in some mysterious way or has some other mysterious explanation that doesn’t involve a god?

It seems that no matter how reality turns out, the atheist seems to have a trump card. Sure, the atheist may not have an explanation for the beginning of the universe, but it seems that he can come up with a simpler and yet equally mysterious explanation as a god.

Note that the purpose of this wouldn’t be to come up with a serious competing hypotheses to theism. Rather, it would be to show how empty theistic explanations are. If one cannot rule out a mysterious natural explanation, then one is essentially never justified to believe in a god, which is just as mysterious but more complex.

Answer 1

One can always counter a mysterious explanation with a second explanation which is alike mysterious. But why should one do so?

The only reason I see is to show how mysterious the first explanation is. E.g., I consider this the driving force behind The Flying Spaghetti Monster "explanation".

It is no good idea to descend to the level of the proponent and to copy a strategy which oneself refuses. Doing alike does not solve the original issue, at best it removes some obstacles on the way.

Answer 2

Sure, it's a game open to all players. If you want to invoke an explanation that does away with god but relies instead on something like an imaginary power of nature, you are free to do so. You just need to make sure that you don't introduce anything that can be disproved, and you are up and running. One disadvantage of your approach, if your aim is to get support for the idea, is that it doesn't seem to be designed to hook in the gullible in quite the same way that some religions are. You need to introduce some motivation for belief, like the idea that doubters will burn in a fiery pit for eternity, while those who contribute to the financial standing of your institution will live forever in their idea of heaven. Some kind of inspirational backstory for the idea would be good too- maybe it was found on stone tablets by divers searching for Atlantis, or some such idea. Saying that it came up on Philosophy SE won't have the same cachet. You'll also need some mysterious guru-like figurehead to front the whole show, but you'll be natural for that!

Answer 3

Both the ancient Greek cosmogonical myth and the Ιndian one, speak of a cosmic egg that contained inside it the semen, which fertilized the egg and the universe begun. The interest thing is that both myths are almost identical and do not consider a God-like entity to have been the cause of creation. Subsequently all Greek philosophers based their understanding of the creation in this context: logos. Note that the major eastern religions (Buddhism, Taoism and others) do not contain the concept of God either. Monotheistic religions personified these naturalistic forces of creation as a concrete entity: God.

In our days, all these discusions about creation - to my understanding - are just a conceptual inability to understand how can something be materialized without a cause or in other words, how can a cause be embedded/implanted in its actualization without an external intervention or design.

Answer 4

One might say that such an assertion would undercut all mysterianistic God-based "arguments," but what about those which are not so mystery-minded? I would offer Axiogenesis: An Essay in Metaphysical Optimalism as a valiant attempt to demystify first the question, "Why is there something instead of nothing?" and then the possibility of at least Leibnizian creationism about the world (that a divine being created the world in an understandable way, for a generally, if not altogether particularly, understandable reason). To wit (this is less Rescher's reasoning per se nota, more mine, to be sure):

1. If it is possible for things to be created, it would be good to create them.
2. If something is good, it is possible at least in general.
3. Some possibilities require actual particulars to go through.
4. So for some examples of creation to be possible, it is required that there be some actuality beforehand.
5. Actual possibility is equivalent to possible actuality.
6. Possible actual possibility is equivalent to actual possible actuality.
7. (5) and (6) can be iterated an arbitrary/infinite number of times.
8. (Inference from the preceding) There is a possibly infinite amount of abstract actuality available for the sake of possible creation.
9. So, for some possible good things that we experience as actual also, we can infer that if they were creatable, and it would have been good if they were created, then the power of creation is intelligible modulo the possibility of their being created as good. QED

We would, then, assume somewhere various things about abstract goodness, abstract possibility, abstract actuality, abstract creatability, etc. but these assumptions are not necessarily incomprehensible, neither are they less (or even perhaps more) comprehensible than an unintentional, non-creationistic alternative (that the world exists just according to impersonal, general laws, say, and then either through otherwise-unfounded necessity or pure randomness). So to say, the abstract complexity of a set of impersonal laws of physics, dependent on (or constitutively reflected from) the domain of infinite mathematical possibility (e.g. Tegmark's Level 4 multiverse, or Wolfram's "ruliad", or even Langan's "self-configuring, self-processing language" (when Langan's thesis is, contra its originator himself, not taken theologically)), is either roughly on a par, or otherwise incommensurate, with the abstract complexity of a self-aware actus purus et ens simplicissimum creating the world through, and as, a fountain of action-theoretic worth. QED, again, indeed...

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Actually(!), if we go with Kant's diagnosis of the problem, the issue is more that the theistic explanation isn't complex enough compared to the non-theistic one, here: but also the non-theistic solution is too complex, taken at face value. This is insofar as Kant says that the theism-friendly horns of the antinomian dilemmatique are one and all too small for the understanding, whereas the infinity-minded empiricist totalizations are too large for this. Whereof in this context, we might say that a mysterious empiricist explanation might be apparently ideologically worse than a mysterious theistic explanation, but non-mysterious empiricism is (again) roughly on the same footing, in a reciprocal manner, as mysterious theism.

Answer 5

Yes and no.

If we take claims for which a god is offered as an explanation, we can roughly separate these into 2 categories:

• Claims that already have some reasonable or possible naturalistic explanation.

  This applies to most theistic claims. If nothing else, there's generally the possibility that someone is lying, that they were hallucinating or otherwise deceived, or that our models of physics are incomplete. Although there are commonly much more specific explanations.

  We can argue about how likely these things are, but such specific explanations would be much more rational than some mysterious alternative. Just because theists use it in their reasoning doesn't mean that's a rational thing to do.

  Although atheists are also fine with saying "I don't know", so this could arguably be the "mysterious" alternative that you're looking for.

• Claims that have no possible naturalistic explanation.

  There is arguably only 1 claim here (and we have no good reason to believe it's true): natural reality itself was caused by something (i.e. basically the premise of the Kalam cosmological argument, as it's commonly used and understood).

  This is somewhere between special pleading, moving the goalposts and begging the question (or just a questionable assertion): if you were to propose anything natural that caused natural reality, that in itself is part of natural reality and the theist can just say that was caused by something. We've gotten all the way back to the Big Bang, and now they say "well, what caused the Big Bang" (never mind that they typically strawman that as something coming from nothing, even though it's only really apologists who are making that claim).

  The very claim that they're looking to find an explanation for is already asserting that there's something outside of the natural world, and only really a deity would meet that criteria.

  So a natural explanation wouldn't make sense for that claim, but we can instead point out that they're begging the question.