Deconstructing naturalism... is naturalism perfectly coherent?

[Fraggert]

Deconstructing naturalism... is naturalism coherent? Because today we equivocate rationality with naturalistic views of the environment in which we exist. If you have other views you are castigated as theistic or some other such pejoritive description. Wherein naturalism has become sacred sacrement, the ultimate arbiter of truth, the truth which all other truths must bow down to, or the omnipotent god of judgement for all other judgements.

So I must ask... Well is it completely coherent? It's one of the things I've always wondered about, I mean take 'the universe' or what we call 'our environment' we believe that all causes are unbroken chains (or networks) of prior causes and effects back (and now perhaps forward?) to some point X. Hence that is the underpinning of science, but I've always wondered about causal coherence of naturalism and whether naturalism itself was "clear" and not joined to some kind of "murky" mysticism like philosophical concepts.

The Internet encyclopedia of philosophy to give you a start....

The Case for Regularity

With the dawning of the modern, scientific, age came the growing realization of an extensive sublime order in nature. To be sure, humankind has always known that there is some order in the natural world ? e.g. the tides rise and fall, the moon has four phases, virgins have no children, water slakes thirst, and persons grow older, not younger. But until the rise of modern science, no one suspected the sweep of this order. The worldview of the West has changed radically since the Renaissance. From a world which seemed mostly chaotic, there emerged an unsuspected underlying order, an order revealed by physics, chemistry, biology, economics, sociology, psychology, neuroscience, geology, evolutionary theory, pharmacology, epidemiology, etc.


Naturalizing Philosophy

Even as recently as the Eighteenth Century, we find philosophers (e.g. Montesquieu) explicitly attributing the order in nature to the hand of God, more specifically to His having imposed physical laws on nature in much the same way as He imposed moral laws on human beings. There was one essential difference, however. Human beings ? it was alleged ? are "free" to break (act contrary to) God's moral laws; but neither human beings nor the other parts of creation are free to break God's physical laws.

In the Twentieth Century virtually all scientists and philosophers have abandoned theistic elements in their accounts of the Laws of Nature. But to a very great extent ? so say the Regularists ? the Necessitarians have merely replaced God with Physical Necessity. The Necessitarians' nontheistic view of Laws of Nature surreptitiously preserves the older prescriptivist view of Laws of Nature, viz. as dictates or edicts to the natural universe, edicts which ? unlike moral laws or legislated ones ? no one, and no thing, has the ability to violate.

Regularists reject this view of the world. Regularists eschew a view of Laws of Nature which would make of them inviolable edicts imposed on the universe. Such a view, Regularists claim, is simply a holdover from a theistic view. It is time, they insist, to adopt a thoroughly naturalistic philosophy of science, one which is not only purged of the hand of God, but is also purged of its unempirical latter-day surrogate, viz. nomological necessity. The difference is, perhaps, highlighted most strongly in Necessitarians saying that the Laws of Nature govern the world; while Regularists insist that Laws of Nature do no more or less than correctly describe the world.

Problems with Necessitarianism I ? Its Inverting the Truth-making Relation

Religious skeptics ? had they lived in a society where they might have escaped torture for asking the question ? might have wondered why (/how) the world molds itself to God's will. God, on the Prescriptivist view of Laws of Nature, commanded the world to be certain ways, e.g. it was God's will (a law of nature that He laid down) that all electrons should have a charge of -1.6 x 10-19 Coulombs. But how is all of this supposed to play out? How, exactly, is it that electrons do have this particular charge? It is a mighty strange, and unempirical, science that ultimately rests on an unintelligible power of a/the deity.

Twentieth-century Necessitarianism has dropped God from its picture of the world. Physical necessity has assumed God's role: the universe conforms to (the dictates of? / the secret, hidden, force of? / the inexplicable mystical power of?) physical laws. God does not 'drive' the universe; physical laws do.

A good example embodying the Regularists' view can be found in the proposition, attributed to Sir Thomas Gresham (1519?-1579) but already known earlier, called ? not surprisingly ? "Gresham's Law":

[Gresham's Law is] the theory holding that if two kinds of money in circulation have the same denominational value but different intrinsic values, the money with higher intrinsic value will be hoarded and eventually driven out of circulation by the money with lesser intrinsic value.

In effect what this "law" states is that 'bad money drives out good'. For example, in countries where the governments begin issuing vast amounts of paper money, that money becomes next-to-worthless and people hoard 'good' money, e.g. gold and silver coins, that is, "good" money ceases to circulate.

Why, when paper money becomes virtually worthless, do people hoard gold? Because gold retains its economic value ? it can be used in emergencies to purchase food, clothing, flight (if need be), medicine, etc., even when "bad" paper money will likely not be able to be so used. People do not hoard gold under such circumstances because Gresham's "Law" forces them to do so. Gresham's "Law" is purely descriptive (not prescriptive) and illustrates well the point Regularists insist upon: namely, that laws of economics are not causal agents ? they do not force the world to be some particular way rather than another. (Notice, too, how this non-nomological "Law" works perfectly adequately in explaining persons' behavior. Citing regularities can, and does, explain the way the world is. One does not need to posit an underlying, inaccessible, nomicity.)

The manner in which we regard Gresham's "Law" ought, Regularists suggest, to be the way we regard all laws of nature. The laws of physics and chemistry are no different than the laws of economics. All laws of nature ? of physics, of chemistry, of biology, of economics, of psychology, of sociology, and so forth ? are nothing more, nor anything less, than (a certain subclass of) true propositions.

6. Statistical Laws

Many, perhaps most, of workaday scientific laws (recall the first section above) are statistical generalizations ? e.g. the scientific claims (explanatory principles) of psychology, economics, meteorology, ecology, epidemiology, etc.

But can the underlying, the "real," Laws of Nature itself be statistical?

With occasional reluctance, especially early in the Twentieth Century, physicists came to allow that at least some laws of nature really are statistical, for example, laws such as "the half-life of radium is 1,600 years" which is a shorthand way of saying "in any sample of radium, 50% of the radium atoms will radioactively decay within a period of 1,600 years".

Regularists take the prospect (indeed the existence) of statistical laws of nature in stride. On the Regularists' account, statistical laws of nature ? whether in areas studied by physicists or by economists or by pharmacologists ? pose no intellectual or theoretical challenges whatsoever. Just as deterministic (i.e. exceptionless) laws are descriptions of the world, not prescriptions or disguised prescriptions, so too are statistical laws.

Necessitarians, however, frequently have severe problems in accommodating the notion of statistical laws of nature. What sort of metaphysical 'mechanism' could manifest itself in statistical generalities? Could there be such a thing as stochastic nomicity? Popper grappled with this problem and proposed what he came to call "the propensity theory of probability". On his view, each radium atom, for example, would have its "own"(?) 50% propensity to decay within the next 1,600 years. Popper really did see the problem that statistical laws pose for Necessitarianism, but his solution has won few, if any, other subscribers. To Regularists, such solutions appear as evidence of the unworkability and the dispensability of Necessitarianism. They are the sure sign of a theory that is very much in trouble.

Video games and Simulation - the world within a world.

I've always wondered if the universe actually consumes energy to exist "from the outside",
since even these so called statistical laws, everything that exists in the universe has some sort of dependency. i.e. we are dependent on the sun for sunlight and heat to exist and nourish plants and animals on the planet, we are dependent upon the earth's magnetic fields, we are dependent on water, etc, etc. All these dependencies are basically forms of energy that maintain our structure. So I have to wonder what maintains the universes structure... what are it's dependencies.

Now when we play a video game we are essentially running a world within a world, and that world must consume energy by necessity to exist, since it is energy dependent on the former world for it's existence. It would seem strange to me that something came into existence and no energy source was required for it's existence.

You get into what I call the "God is nature" arguments, where you replace a euphamism for an all powerful being for an "all powerful environment" i.e. the "it" the 'substance' be it energy or matter. Where the 'universe' is infinite (whatever that means).

So as naturalism emerged from necessitarian view (truth is imposed on reality via 'invioble' edicts), it slowly morphed into the regularist view that the 'laws' of nature are statistical descriptions of regularities, if this is the case, then human beings are laws of nature within the universe, since they can change the laws of nature (think of you catching a leaf falling from a tree) and change the course of nature, therefore we are really "law reversing" force or regularity reversing force in the universe, i.e. gods. Where we can bend regularities and create juxtopositions and combinations that create 'new' regularities (i.e. think taking disparate elements and manufacturing machines for transportation, and hence 'transportation' becomes a statistical 'regularity', as long as human beings exist anyway). Or planetary regularities only exist as long as our sun does, so does this imply that nature's regularities will some day 'die' as their dependent source does?

It seems to me that many regularities in the universe are both cyclical and some are permanent one-way processes (the creation of the universe as far as we know)... but if this is the case, what is fueling the universe and if we infinitely regress backward far enough is it logical to conclude an infinite 'power source' at some point?

 

[f95toli]

The universe does not need a "power source". In fact, if you sum all the energies of the universe you will get zero (this is known as "the free lunch").
You are correct in that you would need energy from an "outside" source to maintain the universe as it is today. However, that is not what is happening, the universe is changing ("decaying" if you want)
All processes produce some "waste" energy in the form of heat and that energy can never be fully recovered. Hence, in a few tens of billions of years the universe will "run out" of usefull energy and everything that will remain isradiation. This is known as "the heat death".
At the moment we don't know if that will ever happen, an alternative scenario is that the universe contracts into a "big crunch" before that.

 

[Fraggert]

So where did the energy come from to perform the "work" of expanding the universe? it still doesn't make sense, think of an expanding balloon, your expending energy and filling it with energy as well to cause it's expansion. This is why the self-existent universe doesn't seem very coherent, since we live in an expanding universe.

The 'decay' would be deflationary would it not, i.e. compressed energy dispersed to its limit, is what you're getting at in the 'heat death' of the universe correct? like a baloon losing all its air.

 

[pcy]

Hi,

Originally posted by: Fraggert
So where did the energy come from to perform the "work" of expanding the universe?

This is what I was taught in school, but that was 40+ years ago, the model may have developed since then.


As f95toli has already pointed out the total energy in the universe is zero and remains at zero.

There are many forms of energy and a complete audit is beyond my capabilities, which is why I cannot properly answer your question. However, it may help if we simply consider the universe at the instant of creation - when it was a point mass.


At that instant there was a huge -ve gravitational energy, counter balanced by the mass (and other) energies. Note: the graviational energy of two bodies is zero when they are an infinate distance apart, and -ve (representing the energy needed to push them an infinte distasnce apart) for any finite separation.

A (very) short time after the creation instant the positive enrgies would have been mass kinetic radiation, heat... all counterbalanced by and working against the -ve gravitational energies.


The key aspect of this model is that no work is being done, no energy created or destroyed... all that is happening is that energy of different types is being exchanged. There might of course be ienergy inflows and outflows in some small, local area of space like our galactic cluster, but overall there is no energy change - it's zero.



Peter

 

[beansbaxter]

This has to be the best thread I've ever seen in Highly Technical...I'm extremely curious to know more about this.

 

[CycloWizard]

Originally posted by: pcy
The key aspect of this model is that no work is being done, no energy created or destroyed... all that is happening is that energy of different types is being exchanged. There might of course be ienergy inflows and outflows in some small, local area of space like our galactic cluster, but overall there is no energy change - it's zero.

Work is simply one mechanism by which energy is transformed from one form to another. For example, consider hydroelectric power generation. Water flows downhill (potential energy to kinetic energy). Moving water spins a dynamo (kinetic energy to electrical energy). The amount of this second transition is generally called 'work' when you're discussing power cycles, but this is pretty arbitrary. 'Work' is generally defined as one volume exerting a force (or, in the analytical mechanical sense, applying kinetic energy) to another volume. 'Heat', the other general energy transfer mechanism, is the process of moving thermal energy from one volume to another. These are simply arbitrary names that people used to describe the most common classically-observed energy transformation mechanisms, but are not really necessary to describe the transformations occurring. /confusing ramble

 

[beansbaxter]

Your comment is a "first-cause" argument for the existence of an oustide "cause" for the universe. I think philosophers would call it some form of the cosmological and maybe if you stretch it the teleological argument.

Here is my current view: THERE ARE NO SENSICAL OR RATIONAL ARGUMENTS FOR OR AGAINST THE EXISTENCE OF GOD, THERE ARE ONLY ARGUMENTS FOR OR AGAINST OUR PARTICULAR DEFINITIONS OF THE ATTRIBUTES OR QUALITIES OF GOD. If you think you are arguing for or against God's existence, you are deluding yourself.

 

[PowerEngineer]

If you're really interested in current theories offered to explain the early universe and its expansion, you should read The Fabric of the Cosmos

:thumbsup:

 

[LumbergTech]

im not really qualified to talk about anything highly technical but i will throw in my 2 cents..

when you refer to our universe, it is easier to understand or at least comprehend a beginning or end..but when you expand that to everything...we know that something cant come from nothing, but the concept of a beginning really doesnt explain existence..

i think that its a real possibility that everything has always been here..that there is no such thing as a beginning except for in our minds in relation to perceptions and markers that we place on events and reformations of matter

 

[angminas]

The key aspect of this model is that no work is being done, no energy created or destroyed... all that is happening is that energy of different types is being exchanged. There might of course be ienergy inflows and outflows in some small, local area of space like our galactic cluster, but overall there is no energy change - it's zero.

I mean no offense to Peter with any of this. You didn't say whether you believed this- you just summed up a common theory, and I appreciate having it here to work with. This isn't directed at anyone in particular. I just tend to speak in "you" terms a lot- a bad habit, so I'm explaining it here. Anyone who doesn't like having their views challenged- nobody's making you read this.

But it's a fairy tale made up by people desperate to disprove God and act like they understand things they can barely even put into words, much less prove. Let's say you jog a mile and then you jog backward a mile. Wouldn't you still be tired as a result of doing work? What if you climbed a tree and then jumped back down, letting gravity reduce your potential energy? If someone asked what you were doing, would you say "Technically, nothing"? Does wearing noise-cancelling headphones mean that jet engines are silent? It sounds silly when you try to apply it to things we can actually observe and measure. But stretch it beyond all recognition to cover something we can't measure or understand, and they call it science!

If there is no energy, would you say there is no mass? If all our observable mass is countered by an equal mass of anti-matter, and anything we notice is just a self-cancelling fluctuation, one has to ask the question- a fluctuation in what? Caused by what? Bodies at rest tend to stay at rest, so where did the energy come from to trigger the fluctuation? If the energy of the universe is zero, it's not going to start exploding just for no reason! Galaxies aren't going to move away from us at nearly the speed of light unless something made them move. If our current existence is just an anomaly, and the natural state of the universe (its state when not acted on by an outside force) is the Big Crunch, what made it explode? What overcame the inertia of an infinite (or near-infinite) mass in a zero-energy state? If the Big Crunch wasn't a zero-energy state, where did the energy come from to put it in that state? Things with no energy don't move. They sit there, waiting for some force to act upon them, as it were. Bodies at rest tend to stay at rest. If the natural state of the universe is total entropy, what set the Bang-Crunch cycle in motion?

Basic logic aside, it's poor science. As if people have measured the limits of the universe so they can call it infinite. As if they can actually calculate the total energy of the universe. As if anyone really knows how a singularity would form before the so-called Big Bang. As if anyone understands how gravity really works. As if we have been precisely measuring the actions of the universe long enough that we can reliably project them backward 13.5 billion years. We learn new things all the time that make us rethink things. Physics, cosmology, evolutionary biology- they're all completely full of holes. Many just don't want to admit the holes, so they make up stories to explain them. You often hear things like "We used to think X, but now we know Y" or "We observed and recorded data, but we didn't understand it and it didn't fit our theory, until we realized that there must have been Z". This is code for "We don't really know very much, but since none of you at home have electron microscopes or radio telescopes, let's see you disprove this neat story we made up to explain what we found! As a special bonus, it proves there is no God, so do whatever you want!"

I read The Universe in a Nutshell by Stephen Hawking a few months back. I remember a graphic that showed the universe in a singularity before the Big Bang. It described it something like "radical, unknown laws of physics". So he can't explain it, and it seems impossible by what we have actually not just imagined, but observed, but he's confident enough in it to base his entire view of the universe on it, and teach others to do the same? This is a man we call a great thinker, a visionary, a genius. How much more will lesser minds grasp for anything convenient to make things fit the way they think they ought to? For more evidence of this, read some of the book reviews at the Amazon link. One person points out numerous flaws in the book, yet titles his review "A Genius Explains It All". Very human, and very unscientific.

Not that this kind of behavior is limited to evolutionists or creationists. Learning the truth, facing it, and admitting our own shortcomings is hard, and we often prefer cushier, more convenient ways of looking at things. More to the point, however, honesty doesn't tend to make best-sellers, modesty doesn't tend to get applause, and caution doesn't tend to get you on television.

This post is imperfect, of course...but the difference is, I admit it, and I don't go to schools teaching kids to think and talk just like me.

 

[pcy]

Hi,


As it happens, I do broadly beleive this theory. By "broadly" I mean that I fully accept that our knowledge is far from complete, and some details will change; but I'm confident that we are on the right path.


I see nothing in the theory I summarized that could possibly "disprove God", and none of the people whom I have ever met, or whose work I have read, showed the slightest interest in disproving the existance of God. Some were highly religious, others were not.

Science is an intellectual exercise aimed at constructing rational, causal, quantifyable models of the natural phenomena we see arond us. The theory achieves that - it explains the physical mechanisms by which the universe cuold have been created and the development process from that point forward; and it does this sucessfully in the sense that it accurately predicts what we do in fact observe and requires no discontinuity in the laws of physics at the instant of creation. Whether the laws of physics were written by a deity who instigated the creation, and what the situation might have been prior to the instant of creation is not a matter for scientific probing. Indeed, since time itself is an attribute of the matter/energy in the universe, such questions cannot even be asked, far less answered, in a scientific context.

Sorry, but the analogy of jogging a mile and back is irrelevant. I am not a closed system. I would feel tired, having indeed done work, converting chemical energy in my body into heat (mainly) to propel myself. By contrast the universe is a closed system, and within it no net work is done as a whole, though energy is transformed form one type to another all over the place and locally what we call "work" is indeed done.

Your other analagies fall to the same error. They describe local phenomena, where energy is flowing: it's only at the level of the entire universe that no work is done.

I did not say "no energy", I said zero total energy. In no way could that possibly imply "no mass". Total energy can be zero because graviational energy is -ve, as I explained in my first post. The universe is stuffed full of all sorts of things, but provided you except the mass <-> energy relationship essentially it's all energy. Plenty of things spattered around all over the place that can "fluctuate".

You are right when you say "If the energy of the universe is zero, it's not going to start exploding just for no reason! ...". There was a very good reason, which would in fact be equally valid whether the total energy were zero or not. At the instant of creation the entire universe was a point mass (qua uncertainty principal). That implies a huge energy concentration fuleing the explosion/expansion. Such a point mass has (or can have) net zero energy because of the large -ve graviational energy, but this has no power to prevent the expansion.

The requirement for net zero energy is necessary to explain how the creation is possible. Actually I beleive creation would be possible without such a requirement, but a universe with a net non-zero energy would have to wink out of existance again as the energy would heave to be repaid; but a universe with net zero energy can persist - as ours has patently done.

Actually, it's vey good science. People have calculated the total energy in the universe. The theory I'm describing (in very simplistic termes) does explain how the singularity that is the big bang can be formed according to the laws of physics as currently understood. The fact that we do not fully understand everthing is no reson to discard or disregard all knowledge: indeed people who are prepared to stand up and admit to what we don't know, and who will openly discuss the limits of out knowlwdge, are normally to be trusted when they tell us about what does seem certain. Nobody thinks Newton's laws of Motion were "wrong" just because Relativity cam along. Incomplete, certanly; but fundamentally on the right track.

The whole point about this theory is that is is an excellent example of attempting to learn the truth by examination of known phenomenon, conducting experiements, and constructing theories that explain the facts and which make testable predictions. This is the scientific method. Central to it is the willingness to descard or modify theories that fail to accord with reality. This theory is of course incomplete, but it has been tested to the fullest extent possible, work is ongoing; and the central ideas it proposes are, to me, compelling.




Peter

 

[Biftheunderstudy]

The problem is that many people here buzz words like Big Bang and Big Crunch, zero energy universe, etc. without the understanding that comes with using them.
Example: Galaxies are not being propelled away from us at near the speed of light, the space-time between galaxies is expanding, there is no force doing this it is just happening. Gravity is working to counter-act this but its losing as far as we can tell.

Cosmology is taught as a university level course for a reason, to understand what is happening you need Quantum Mechanics, Thermodynamics, E+M, Classical Mechanics and a lot of advanced math.

BTW PCY excellent post *applaud*

 

[WHAMPOM]

Originally posted by: Biftheunderstudy
The problem is that many people here buzz words like Big Bang and Big Crunch, zero energy universe, etc. without the understanding that comes with using them.
Example: Galaxies are not being propelled away from us at near the speed of light, the space-time between galaxies is expanding, there is no force doing this it is just happening. Gravity is working to counter-act this but its losing as far as we can tell.

Cosmology is taught as a university level course for a reason, to understand what is happening you need Quantum Mechanics, Thermodynamics, E+M, Classical Mechanics and a lot of advanced math.

BTW PCY excellent post *applaud*

The universe is evaporating. My own personal theory.

 

[CSMR]

Originally posted by: Fraggert
Deconstructing naturalism... is naturalism coherent? Because today we equivocate rationality with naturalistic views of the environment in which we exist. If you have other views you are castigated as theistic or some other such pejoritive description. Wherein naturalism has become sacred sacrement, the ultimate arbiter of truth, the truth which all other truths must bow down to, or the omnipotent god of judgement for all other judgements.

Is naturalism as described above (either type) opposed to theism? What would be a theistic denial of "regularism".
I don't think naturalism (as described above) claims to be the arbiter of all truth, only within a very particular class of statements.

I like your posted article btw. Normally philosophers are full of nonsense but there is some good analysis there. It would be interesting to explore exactly how "necessitarians" distinguish themselves from "regularism". Do they think that laws "cause" reality where "cause" is something outside any natural theory (not a law itself)?

I've always wondered about causal coherence of naturalism and whether naturalism itself was "clear" and not joined to some kind of "murky" mysticism like philosophical concepts.

How do you mean? Certainly in practice the relation betwwen theory and what we observe is murky, at least unless the theory is very good indeed.
I have a theory about causation which I can tell you if you are interested. It is certainly naturalistic and I think coherent. Oh and I am theistic too.

I've always wondered if the universe actually consumes energy to exist "from the outside",
since even these so called statistical laws, everything that exists in the universe has some sort of dependency. i.e. we are dependent on the sun for sunlight and heat to exist and nourish plants and animals on the planet, we are dependent upon the earth's magnetic fields, we are dependent on water, etc, etc. All these dependencies are basically forms of energy that maintain our structure. So I have to wonder what maintains the universes structure... what are it's dependencies.

Now when we play a video game we are essentially running a world within a world, and that world must consume energy by necessity to exist, since it is energy dependent on the former world for it's existence. It would seem strange to me that something came into existence and no energy source was required for it's existence.

When you are thinking of computer games worlds and our world you have one theory for both the real world and the computer game and within this theory you have a notion of energy. If you want to do the same thing with the universe and something outside you need a theory that goes beyond the universe with a concept of energy that goes beyond the universe.

So as naturalism emerged from necessitarian view (truth is imposed on reality via 'invioble' edicts), it slowly morphed into the regularist view that the 'laws' of nature are statistical descriptions of regularities, if this is the case, then human beings are laws of nature within the universe, since they can change the laws of nature (think of you catching a leaf falling from a tree) and change the course of nature, therefore we are really "law reversing" force or regularity reversing force in the universe.

Yes you are right, humans beings can change the laws of nature. Of course we don't.

 

[Agent11]

Originally posted by: angminas

But it's a fairy tale made up by people desperate to disprove God and act like they understand things they can barely even put into words, much less prove. Let's say you jog a mile and then you jog backward a mile. Wouldn't you still be tired as a result of doing work? What if you climbed a tree and then jumped back down, letting gravity reduce your potential energy? If someone asked what you were doing, would you say "Technically, nothing"? Does wearing noise-cancelling headphones mean that jet engines are silent? It sounds silly when you try to apply it to things we can actually observe and measure. But stretch it beyond all recognition to cover something we can't measure or understand, and they call it science!

It's net effective zero energy.



http://www.astrosociety.org/pubs/mercury/31_02/nothing.html
'If you drop a ball from rest (defined to be a state of zero energy), it gains energy of motion (kinetic energy) as it falls. But this gain is exactly balanced by a larger negative gravitational energy as it comes closer to Earth?s center, so the sum of the two energies remains zero.'


A very simple way to think of it is to add 4 + -4
=0
That doesn't mean that the 4 doesn't exist, or the -4.. it's just that they cancel each other out in the grand equation.

Also, I would not think that people who explain their existence with theology should bring up the subject of 'fairy tales' ...