Science AND Faith in Middle-earth

[Aiwendil]

HerenIstarion:

There are two fallacies here, I think.

First, the how/why issue. You say that this:

"why does the world exist?" "Because God exists, and God wants the world to exist".

. . . is the answer to a "why" question but not a "how" question. Yet it would be just as satisfactory an answer to the question "how did the world come to exist?" And the answer about spectral lines would be just as satisfactory an answer to the question "why are there spectral lines here?" as "how do the spectral lines come about?" The two questions have the same logical structure - each asks for a fact or set of facts which, together with certain premises, implies the conclusion. Now, if one wants to use a convention where questions relating to certain subject matter are designated "why" questions and others "how" questions, that's fine, but the difference is then an arbitrary one and, I think, not one supported by the connotations of natural language. In any case, the point is that there is no subset of such questions which science, in principle, is not concerned with, except insofar as the empirical confirmation criterion restricts the kinds of answers it gives.

The second fallacy is the "first cause" fallacy. The root of this mistake is the assumption that for every fact, there is some unique other fact or set of facts that explain (i.e. logically imply it). This leads people like Aquinas to conclude the existence of God, since some fact is thought to be needed to explain the basic physical laws. But the assumption is incoherent, since, just as the theist asks for an explanation of the basic physical laws and posits God to provide it, one could go further and ask for an explanation of God, then for an explanation of that explanation, and so on ad infinitum. Now there is a tradition of theist claims to the effect that the God explanation is special in such a way that it does not require a further explanation, or that it explains itself. The validity of such a claim is where the argument would lie if we were to continue down this road (which it's probably best we don't do). Let me just point out, though, that the difficulty for the theist here is that he or she needs to alter the assumption that "for every fact, there is some explanation" in such a way that it would logically still require an explanation to exist for basic physical laws but not for the existence of God.

Putting that aside, I think that the correct thing to say about first causes is simply that they are not required, logically. There is no theorem that states that for every fact there is a unique, non-circular explanation.

Of course, the mere logic of the situation, even if it shows that the first cause argument cannot prove the existence of God, certainly does nothing to disprove the existence of God. And fortunately so, or else in my view the facts about Middle-earth would be not only fictional but logically incoherent. I do not think that they are. They are different facts than the ones that are true in the real world, but (except for contradictions among different incarnations of the legends) they do cohere.

Davem wrote:

Mythic worlds tend to be flat - not because of ignorance, but because a flat earth is (potentially) infinite - it can contain anything imaginable - endless forests, purple oceans, green suns, a man in the moon, mountains which reach to the stars.

some even attempt to show the whole extent of M-e, even to laying out the locations of Aman, & the far eastern regions of M-e. This destroys the magic of possibility by setting limits.

In short, its not Faerie, because Faerie cannot be fitted within limits.

You make a good point about flat worlds. But the fact is that in no version of the mythology was Arda ever intended not to be finite. As I argued in the canonicity thread, Arda is not Faerie. "Faerie" is not a single, well-defined place, real or imaginary - it's a network of images, associations, archetypes, etc. Middle-earth, on the other hand, is a well-defined (excepting the ambiguity resulting from the multitude of versions) imaginary place. It would be a wholly different mythology if Arda were literally infinite in extent.