Hypotheses Like God Poem by gershon hepner

Hypotheses like God require
confirmation but we tend
to think that there’s a Power higher
without a proof, because we bend
hypotheses like God, preferring
to prove there must be one Prime Roller,
regarding all disproofs as erring,
though thoughts of nothing can be droller
than of a great, divine Prime Mover
who dwells in heaven as on earth,
and laughs at every failed disprover
of His existence with Godmirth.

Inspired by Michiko Kakutani’s review of John Allen Paulos’s review of “A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up” (“Prime Roller, Prepare to Meet a Wiseacre, ” NYT, January 22,2008:
Writing in clear, direct prose, Mr. Paulos shows how even everyday references to purpose and intention can be easily reformulated in scientific, nonpurposive terms. For instance, “The thermostat is trying to keep the house at a steady temperature” can be rephrased in terms of metals’ different rates of expansion: “When it gets hot, this metal expands faster than the other one and tips a switch turning the furnace off, and when it gets cool, the metal contracts faster, turning the furnace back on. No one is really attributing intentionality to the metals.” In his opening chapters Mr. Paulos uses simple logic to point up the gaping holes in the so-called first-cause argument. “Either everything has a cause, or there’s something that doesn’t, ” he writes. “The first-cause argument collapses into this hole whichever tack we take. If everything has a cause, then God does, too, and there is no first cause. And if something doesn’t have a cause, it may as well be the physical world.” What’s more, he notes, “the uncaused first cause needn’t have any traditional God-like qualities. It’s simply first, and as we know from other realms, being first doesn’t mean being best. No one brags about still using the first personal computers to come on the market. Even if the first cause existed, it might simply be a brute fact — or even worse, an actual brute.”…In the course of this volume Mr. Paulos does provide some interesting asides about the so-called “confirmation bias, a psychological tendency to seek confirmation rather than disconfirmation of any hypothesis we’ve adopted, however tentatively” (which would seem to have applications to the Bush administration’s use of intelligence in the prelude to the Iraq war) . And he also does an entertaining job of applying probability theory to people’s talk about miracles and amazing coincidences, which they’ve taken as evidence of the existence of God.Still, there is something perfunctory and hurried about all of Mr. Paulos’s arguments, which will be shrugged off by anyone who has made the leap of faith into belief, and which will seem obvious to anyone who is already a proud heathen. Indeed, the reader finishes this volume with the suspicion that it was a rushed and cursory project, turned out quickly in an effort to catch the coattails of Messrs. Hitchens, Dawkins and Harris.

1/22/08