An unexpected feature of the universe is its order. How do you explain that the universe conforms to laws of nature? Perhaps these laws are the result of God exercising His will. However, God conforms to a law of nature which is that He can (so it is claimed) do anything. He cannot make himself have this ability to do anything. This represents an order of a sort for which God is not responsible, the way in which his thoughts become reality. But how is this order to be explained? Another solution that might be presented is to say there is no explanation as to why nature conforms to laws. The laws of nature are just brute facts. However for each possible world with ordered laws of nature there is a myriad of other possibilities in which brute facts could have become manifested. Thus the chances that a world would be manifested conforming to regularity would be slim. The brute facts proponent might argue that we have assumed that all the other chaotic possibilities each have an equal probability to the ordered possibility. But maybe there is a bias in favour of there being laws of nature. But then this would constitute a mechanism by which order has a good chance of existing. Without such a mechanism, the brute fact of the existence of laws of nature would be an amazing coincidence in which everything just happens to conform to a pattern.
I would argue that if apparent magic or miracles were possible there must be an underlying mechanism. Against this, Rupert Sheldrake in his book The Science Delusion suggested that one of the apparent delusions in the current practice of science was the belief that a mechanism must underlie any process. Essentially Sheldrake was claiming that there could be processes such as telepathy which would work without any such mechanism. I shall use a story by Agatha Christie, The Hound of Death, to illustrate my argument that contrary to Sheldrake, any ordered process must have a mechanism otherwise it would constitute an amazing coincidence. If you want to read The Hound of Death without having it spoiled by revelations in what follows, you may like to stop reading further until you have read the story.
The Hound of Death features a nun with supernatural powers. This would involve causing the death of persons after which objects near their bodies would be arranged in the shape of a hound. She was under the care of a doctor who was interested in learning the secret of her power. This secret would consist of the actions you need to take in order to exercise these powers. The doctor bungled these actions and accidentally caused the death of himself and the nun with the hound of death appearing near their bodies. Now suppose there is no mechanism which could explain how these powers worked. That would mean if you performed certain actions, these actions would invariably be followed by the deaths of certain persons with the hound of death appearing at the scene of death. This would mean the existence of a universe which would normally operate according to rules of science and physics etc but when humans carried out certain actions they would trigger the hound of death phenomenon. Now although the supernatural powers violate the normal laws of the universe they still have an order of their own in that events of a certain type (certain actions performed by humans) lead to events of another certain type (the deaths of certain persons with the hound of death appearing at the scene of their deaths). How is this order to be explained? We are told that there is no explanation, no mechanism. This constitutes the brute facts model of the universe and hence leads to the amazing coincidence as I have argued earlier from this model. Probably such an amazing coincidence would not happen. If the events of this story did happen then there would be an underlying mechanism. Perhaps the doctor would have clues as to what this mechanism was so that he could work out how he might acquire the same powers as the nun. Moreover, if it is just effectively a coincidence that certain actions trigger the hound of death phenomenon, then this casts doubt whether an actual causation is involved as opposed to just a correlation. Certain actions may be correlated to the deaths of persons with the hound of death appearing, but if we are to say that those actions caused the particular deaths concerned then we need a mechanism to relate the different events concerned otherwise we have just a mere correlation.
In the case of telepathy for instance if there was no mechanism to explain telepathy then what would be happening is that by an amazing coincidence people who were telepaths were having the same thoughts as other people. If you claim that no it is not an amazing coincidence but that the thoughts in telepaths were caused by the thoughts of other people, then you are attributing a mechanism to the process of telepathy because you are saying that something exists which guarantees that the thoughts appearing in telepaths are the same as those in other people, which is what would be a mechanism.
Alfred Hitchcock produced a film called The Birds which features birds of all kind making coordinated attacks on humans. No mechanism by which these birds could coordinate their attacks on humans was explored. The premise of the film seemed to be that the events described were inexplicable, having no underlying explanation or mechanism. The behaviour of the birds would then be based on the brute facts model of the world concerned. However, this opens the way for some birds not to cooperate in the attacks against humans, to engage in other random behaviours. The chances that all these birds would just happen to engage in the same behaviours directed against humans would be pretty slim unless there was a mechanical process which filtered out all other possible random behaviours.
The conclusion of this article then is that if a bodiless mind exists which we call God and He can make anything happen then there must be a mechanism which enables Him to do this. However, thinking up how an omnipotent spirit could work is a tough proposition. The way that the God hypothesis appears to work is that all the laws of nature are explained as God using his omnipotent powers to make nature work the way prescribed by the laws of nature. But then you would need to explain how these omnipotent powers themselves work which presumably as an example include making a rhinoceros appear out of nowhere and so forth. We are making the task of explaining the laws of nature harder for ourselves by insisting that God can do anything as opposed to the minimum necessary that would enable Him to start off the Big Bang. However, rather than trying to explain God's amazing abilities would it not be easier to come up with a mechanism that directly explains the laws of nature rather than introducing God as a middle man which involves explaining how a rhinoceros can appear out of nowhere or how a dead person with all their brain cells damaged can come back to life? This would be applying the principle of Occam's Razor where you would only assume the minimum that you need to postulate exists so as to save yourself the job of explaining what does not need to be explained.
