god's existence philosophy essay

Unit 2: Metaphysics

Aquinas’s Five Proofs for the Existence of God

St. Mary's Press

The Summa Theologica is a famous work written by Saint Thomas Aquinas between AD 1265 and 1274. It is divided into three main parts and covers all of the core theological teachings of Aquinas’s time. One of the questions the Summa Theologica is well known for addressing is the question of the existence of God. Aquinas responds to this question by offering the following five proofs:

1. The Argument from Motion: Our senses can perceive motion by seeing that things act on one another. Whatever moves is moved by something else. Consequently, there must be a First Mover that creates this chain reaction of motions. This is God. God sets all things in motion and gives them their potential.

2. The Argument from Efficient Cause: Because nothing can cause itself, everything must have a cause or something that creates an effect on another thing. Without a first cause, there would be no others. Therefore, the First Cause is God.

3. The Argument from Necessary Being: Because objects in the world come into existence and pass out of it, it is possible for those objects to exist or not exist at any particular time. However, nothing can come from nothing. This means something must exist at all times. This is God.

4. The Argument from Gradation: There are different degrees of goodness in different things. Following the “Great Chain of Being,” which states there is a gradual increase in complexity, created objects move from unformed inorganic matter to biologically complex organisms. Therefore, there must be a being of the highest form of good. This perfect being is God.

5. The Argument from Design: All things have an order or arrangement that leads them to a particular goal. Because the order of the universe cannot be the result of chance, design and purpose must be at work. This implies divine intelligence on the part of the designer. This is God.

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Problems of Belief & Unbelief

Does god exist, william lane craig says there are good reasons for thinking that he does..

On April 8, 1966, Time magazine carried a lead story for which the cover was completely black except for three words emblazoned in bright, red letters against the dark background: “IS GOD DEAD?” The story described the so-called ‘Death of God’ movement then current in American theology. But, to paraphrase Mark Twain, it seemed that the news of God’s demise was “greatly exaggerated.” For at the same time that theologians were writing God’s obituary, a new generation of young philosophers was re-discovering His vitality.

Back in the 1940s and ’50s it was widely believed among philosophers that any talk about God is meaningless, since it is not verifiable by the five senses. The collapse of this Verificationism was perhaps the most important philosophical event of the twentieth century. Its downfall meant a resurgence of metaphysics, along with other traditional problems of philosophy which Verificationism had suppressed. Accompanying this resurgence came something altogether unanticipated: a renaissance of Christian philosophy.

The turning point probably came in 1967 with the publication of Alvin Plantinga’s God and Other Minds , which applied the tools of analytic philosophy to questions in the philosophy of religion with an unprecedented rigor and creativity. In Plantinga’s train has followed a host of Christian philosophers, writing in professional journals and participating in professional conferences and publishing with the finest academic presses. The face of Anglo-American philosophy has been transformed as a result. Atheism, although perhaps still the dominant viewpoint in Western universities, is a philosophy in retreat. In a recent article, University of Western Michigan philosopher Quentin Smith laments what he calls “the desecularization of academia that evolved in philosophy departments since the late 1960s.” (‘The Metaphilosophy of Naturalism’, Philo , Vol 4, #2, at philoonline.org ). Complaining of naturalists’ passivity in the face of the wave of “intelligent and talented theists entering academia today,” Smith concludes, “God is not ‘dead’ in academia; he returned to life in the late 1960s and is now alive and well in his last academic stronghold, philosophy departments.”

The renaissance of Christian philosophy has been accompanied by a resurgence of interest in natural theology – that branch of theology which seeks to prove God’s existence without appeal to the resources of authoritative divine revelation – for instance, through philosophical argument. All of the traditional philosophical arguments for God’s existence, such as the cosmological, teleological, moral, and ontological arguments, not to mention creative, new arguments, find intelligent and articulate defenders on the contemporary philosophical scene.

But what about the so-called ‘New Atheism’ exemplified by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens? Doesn’t it herald a reversal of this trend? Not really. As is evident from the authors it interacts with – or rather, doesn’t interact with – the New Atheism is, in fact, a pop-cultural phenomenon lacking in intellectual muscle and blissfully ignorant of the revolution that has taken place in Anglo-American philosophy. It tends to reflect the scientism of a bygone generation, rather than the contemporary intellectual scene.

Eight Reasons in Support of God’s Existence

I believe that God’s existence best explains a wide range of the data of human experience. Let me briefly mention eight such cases.

(I) God is the best explanation why anything at all exists.

Suppose you were hiking through the forest and came upon a ball lying on the ground. You would naturally wonder how it came to be there. If your hiking buddy said to you, “Forget about it! It just exists!” you would think he was either joking or just wanted you to keep moving. No one would take seriously the idea that the ball just exists without any explanation. Now notice than merely increasing the size of the ball until it becomes coextensive with the universe does nothing to either provide, or remove the need for, an explanation of its existence.

So what is the explanation of the existence of the universe (by ‘the universe’ I mean all of spacetime reality)? The explanation of the universe can lie only in a transcendent reality beyond it – beyond space and time – the existence of which transcendent reality is metaphysically necessary (otherwise its existence would also need explaining). Now there is only one way I can think of to get a contingent entity like the universe from a necessarily existing cause, and that is if the cause is an agent who can freely choose to create the contingent reality. It therefore follows that the best explanation of the existence of the contingent universe is a transcendent personal being – which is what everybody means by ‘God’.

We can summarize this reasoning as follows:

1. Every contingent thing has an explanation of its existence.

2. If the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation is a transcendent, personal being.

3. The universe is a contingent thing.

4. Therefore, the universe has an explanation of its existence.

5. Therefore, the explanation of the universe is a transcendent, personal being.

– which is what everybody means by ‘God’.

(II) God is the best explanation of the origin of the universe.

We have pretty strong evidence that the universe has not existed eternally into the past, but had a beginning a finite time ago. In 2003, the mathematician Arvind Borde, and physicists Alan Guth and Alexander Vilenkin were able to prove that any universe which has, on average, been expanding throughout its history cannot be infinite in the past, but must have a past spacetime boundary (i.e., a beginning). What makes their proof so powerful is that it holds so long as time and causality hold, regardless of the physical description of the very early universe. Because we don’t yet have a quantum theory of gravity, we can’t yet provide a physical description of the first split-second of the universe; but the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem is independent of one’s theory of gravitation. For instance, their theorem implies that the quantum vacuum state which may have characterized the early universe cannot have existed eternally into the past, but must itself have had a beginning. Even if our universe is just a tiny part of a so-called ‘multiverse’, composed of many universes, their theorem requires that the multiverse itself must have had a beginning.

Of course, highly speculative physical scenarios, such as loop quantum gravity models, string models, even closed timelike curves, have been proposed to try to avoid this absolute beginning. These models are fraught with problems, but the bottom line is that none of these theories, even if true , succeeds in restoring an eternal past for the universe. Last year, at a conference in Cambridge celebrating the seventieth birthday of Stephen Hawking, Vilenkin delivered a paper entitled ‘Did the Universe Have a Beginning?’, which surveyed current cosmology with respect to that question. He argued that “none of these scenarios can actually be past-eternal.” Specifically, Vilenkin closed the door on three models attempting to avert the implication of his theorem: eternal inflation, a cyclic universe, and an ‘emergent’ universe which exists for eternity as a static seed before expanding. Vilenkin concluded, “ All the evidence we have says that the universe had a beginning.”

But then the inevitable question arises: Why did the universe come into being? What brought the universe into existence? There must have been a transcendent cause which brought the universe into being – a cause outside the universe itself.

We can summarize this argument thus far as follows:

1. The universe began to exist.

2. If the universe began to exist, then the universe has a transcendent cause.

3. Therefore, the universe has a transcendent cause.

By the very nature of the case, that cause of the physical universe must be an immaterial (i.e., non-physical) being. Now there are only two types of things that could possibly fit that description: either an abstract object like a number, or an unembodied mind/consciousness. But abstract objects don’t stand in causal relations to physical things. The number 7, for example, has no effect on anything. Therefore the cause of the universe is an unembodied mind. Thus again we are brought, not merely to a transcendent cause of the universe, but to its Personal Creator.

(III) God is the best explanation of the applicability of mathematics to the physical world.

Philosophers and scientists have puzzled over what physicist Eugene Wigner called “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics.” How is it that a mathematical theorist like Peter Higgs can sit down at his desk and, by pouring over mathematical equations, predict the existence of a fundamental particle which, thirty years later, after investing millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours, experimentalists are finally able to detect? Mathematics is the language of nature. But how is this to be explained? If mathematical objects like numbers and mathematical theorems are abstract entities causally isolated from the physical universe, then the applicability of mathematics is, in the words of philosopher of mathematics Mary Leng, “a happy coincidence.” On the other hand, if mathematical objects are just useful fictions, how is it that nature is written in the language of these fictions? The naturalist has no explanation for the uncanny applicability of mathematics to the physical world. By contrast, the theist has a ready explanation: When God created the physical universe He designed it in terms of the mathematical structure which He had in mind.

We can summarize this argument as follows:

1. If God did not exist, the applicability of mathematics would be just a happy coincidence.

2. The applicability of mathematics is not just a happy coincidence.

3. Therefore, God exists.

(IV) God is the best explanation of the fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life.

In recent decades scientists have been stunned by the discovery that the initial conditions of the Big Bang were fine-tuned for the existence of intelligent life with a precision and delicacy that literally defy human comprehension. This fine-tuning is of two sorts. First, when the laws of nature are expressed as equations, you find appearing in them certain constants, such as the gravitational constant. The values of these constants are independent of the laws of nature. Second, in addition to these constants, there are certain arbitrary quantities which define the initial conditions on which the laws of nature operate – for example, the amount of entropy (disorder) in the universe. Now these constants and quantities fall into an extraordinarily narrow range of life-permitting values. Were these constants or quantities to be altered by less than a hair’s breadth, the life-permitting balance of nature would be destroyed, and life would not exist.

There are three live explanatory options for this extraordinary fine-tuning: physical necessity, chance, or design.

Physical necessity is not, however, a plausible explanation, because the finely-tuned constants and quantities are independent of the laws of nature. Therefore, they are not physically necessary.

So could this fine-tuning be due to chance? The problem with this explanation is that the odds of all the constants and quantities’ randomly falling into the incomprehensibly narrow life-permitting range are just so infinitesimal that they cannot be reasonably accepted. Therefore the proponents of the chance explanation have been forced to postulate the existence of a ‘World Ensemble’ of other universes, preferably infinite in number and randomly ordered, so that life-permitting universes like ours would appear by chance somewhere in the Ensemble. Not only is this hypothesis, to borrow Richard Dawkins’ phrase, “an unparsimonious extravagance,” it faces an insuperable objection. By far, the most probable observable universes in a World Ensemble would be worlds in which a single brain fluctuated into existence out of the vacuum and observed its otherwise empty world. So, if our world were just a random member of the World Ensemble, by all probability we ought to be having observations like that. Since we don’t, that strongly disconfirms the World Ensemble hypothesis. So chance is also not a good explanation. Thus,

1. The fine-tuning of the universe is due to either physical necessity, chance, or design.

2. The fine-tuning of the universe is not due to physical necessity or chance.

3. Therefore, the fine-tuning of the universe is due to design.

Thus, the fine-tuning of the universe constitutes evidence for a cosmic Designer.

(V) God is the best explanation of intentional states of consciousness.

Philosophers are puzzled by states of intentionality . Intentionality is the property of being about something or of something. It signifies the object-directedness of our thoughts. For example, I can think about my summer vacation, or I can think of my wife. No physical object has intentionality in this sense. A chair or a stone or a glob of tissue like the brain is not about or of something else. Only mental states or states of consciousness are about other things. In The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions (2011), the materialist Alex Rosenberg recognizes this fact, and concludes that for atheists, there really are no intentional states. Rosenberg boldly claims that we never really think about anything. But this seems incredible. Obviously, I am thinking about Rosenberg’s argument – and so are you! This seems to me to be a reductio ad absurdum of his atheism. By contrast, for theists, because God is a mind, it’s hardly surprising that there should be other, finite minds, with intentional states. Thus intentional states fit comfortably into a theistic worldview.

So we may argue:

1. If God did not exist, intentional states of consciousness would not exist.

2. But intentional states of consciousness do exist.

(VI) God is the best explanation of objective moral values and duties.

In our experience we apprehend moral values and duties which impose themselves as objectively binding and true. For example, we recognize that it’s wrong to walk into an elementary school with an automatic weapon and shoot little boys and girls and their teachers. On a naturalistic view, however, there is nothing really wrong with this: moral values are just the subjective by-products of biological evolution and social conditioning, and have no objective validity.

Alex Rosenberg is brutally honest about the implications of his atheism here too. He declares, “there is no such thing as… morally right or wrong.” ( The Atheist’s Guide to Reality , p.145); “Individual human life is meaningless… and without ultimate moral value.” (p.17); “We need to face the fact that nihilism is true.” (p.95). By contrast, the theist grounds objective moral values in God, and our moral duties in His commands. The theist thus has the explanatory resources to ground objective moral values and duties which the atheist lacks.

Hence we may argue:

1. Objective moral values and duties exist.

2. But if God did not exist, objective moral values and duties would not exist.

(VII) The very possibility of God’s existence implies that God exists.

In order to understand this argument, you need to understand what philosophers mean by ‘possible worlds’. A possible world is just a way the world might have been. It is a description of a possible reality. So a possible world is not a planet or a universe or any kind of concrete object, it is a world-description. The actual world is the description that is true. Other possible worlds are descriptions that are not in fact true but which might have been true. To say that something exists in some possible world is to say that there is some consistent description of reality which includes that entity. To say that something exists in every possible world means that no matter which description is true, that entity will be included in the description. For example, unicorns do not in fact exist, but there are some possible worlds in which unicorns exist. On the other hand, many mathematicians think that numbers exist in every possible world.

Now with that in mind, consider the ontological argument , which was discovered in the year 1011 by the monk Anselm of Canterbury. God, Anselm observes, is by definition the greatest being conceivable. If you could conceive of anything greater than God, then that would be God. Thus, God is the greatest conceivable being – a maximally great being. So what would such a being be like? He would be all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good, and He would exist in every logically possible world. A being which lacked any of those properties would not be maximally great: we could conceive of something greater – a being which did have all these properties.

But this implies that if God’s existence is even possible , then God must exist. For if a maximally great being exists in any possible world, He exists in all of them. That’s part of what it means to be maximally great – to be all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good in every logically possible world. So if God’s existence is even possible, then He exists in every logically possible world – and therefore in the actual world.

1. It is possible that a maximally great being (God) exists.

2. If it is possible that a maximally great being exists, then a maximally great being exists in some possible world.

3. If a maximally great being exists in some possible world, then it exists in every possible world.

4. If a maximally great being exists in every possible world, then it exists in the actual world.

5. Therefore, a maximally great being exists in the actual world.

6. Therefore, a maximally great being exists.

7. Therefore, God exists.

It might surprise you to learn that steps 2-7 of this argument are relatively uncontroversial. Most philosophers would agree that if God’s existence is even possible, then He must exist.

So the question is, is God’s existence possible? Well, what do you think? The atheist has to maintain that it’s impossible that God exists. That is, he has to maintain that the concept of God is logically incoherent , like the concept of a married bachelor or a round square. The problem is that the concept of God just doesn’t appear to be incoherent in that way. The idea of a being who is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good in every possible world seems perfectly coherent. Moreover, as we’ve seen, there are other arguments for God’s existence which at least suggest that it’s possible that God exists. So I’ll just leave it with you. Do you think, as I do, that it’s at least possible that God exists? If so, then it follows logically that He does exist.

(VIII) God can be personally known and experienced.

This isn’t really an argument for God’s existence; rather it’s the claim that you can know God exists wholly apart from arguments, by personally experiencing him. Philosophers call beliefs grasped in this way ‘properly basic beliefs’. They aren’t based on some other beliefs; rather they’re part of the foundation of a person’s system of beliefs. Other properly basic beliefs would be the belief in the reality of the past or the existence of the external world. When you think about it, neither of these beliefs can be proved by argument. How could you prove that the world was not created five minutes ago with built-in appearances of age like food in our stomachs from the breakfasts we never really ate and memory traces in our brains of events we never really experienced? How could you prove that you are not a brain in a vat of chemicals being stimulated with electrodes by some mad scientist to believe that you are reading this article? We don’t base such beliefs on argument; rather they’re part of the foundations of our system of beliefs.

But although these sorts of beliefs are basic for us, that doesn’t mean that they’re arbitrary. Rather they’re grounded in the sense that they’re formed in the context of certain experiences. In the experiential context of seeing and feeling and hearing things, I naturally form the belief that there are certain physical objects which I am sensing. Thus, my basic beliefs are not arbitrary, but appropriately grounded in experience. There may be no way to prove such beliefs, and yet it’s perfectly rational to hold them. Such beliefs are thus not merely basic, but properly basic. In the same way, belief in God is for those who seek Him a properly basic belief grounded in their experience of God.

Now if this is so, then there’s a danger that philosophical arguments for God could actually distract your attention from God Himself. The Bible promises, “Draw near to God and he will draw near to you.” (James 4:8) We mustn’t so concentrate on the external arguments that we fail to hear the inner voice of God speaking to our hearts. For those who listen, God becomes a personal reality in their lives.

In summary, we’ve seen eight respects in which God provides a better account of the world than naturalism: God is the best explanation of

(I) Why anything at all exists.

(II) The origin of the universe.

(III) The applicability of mathematics to the physical world.

(IV) The fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life.

(V) Intentional states of consciousness.

(VI) Objective moral values and duties.

(VIII) God can be personally experienced and known.

William Lane Craig is Research Professor of Philosophy at the Talbot School of Theology, California, and founded the organization Reasonable Faith (please visit reasonablefaith.org ). His book, A Reasonable Response , is due out soon, answering questions unbelievers and believers often pose.

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3 (page 25) p. 25 Arguments for the existence of God

Published: February 2018
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Is it possible to prove that God exists? There is certainly no shortage of arguments that purport to establish God’s existence, but ‘Arguments for the existence of God’ focuses on three of the most influential arguments: the cosmological argument, the design argument, and the argument from religious experience. Before examining these arguments, it first considers the very enterprise of attempting to establish God’s existence. What should we expect from an argument for God’s existence? What would it take for such an argument to be successful? The attempt to justify claims about the nature and existence of God on the basis of commonly accepted truths is known as natural theology.

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Arguments for the Existence of God

Introduction, general overviews.

Anthologies
Assessing Arguments
Anselm’s Proslogion
Modal Ontological Arguments
Gödel’s Ontological Argument
Aquinas’s Five Ways
Arguments from Sufficient Reason
Arguments from Contingency
Kalām Cosmological Arguments
Biological Arguments for Design
Cosmological Fine-Tuning Arguments for Design
Moral Arguments
Arguments from Religious Experience
Arguments from Miracles
Arguments from Consciousness
Arguments from Reason
Aesthetic Arguments
“Cumulative” Arguments
Pascal’s Wager

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Arguments for the Existence of God by Graham Oppy LAST REVIEWED: 26 February 2020 LAST MODIFIED: 26 February 2020 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195396577-0040

Philosophical discussion of arguments for the existence of God appeared to have become extinct during the heyday of logical positivism and ordinary language philosophy. However, since the mid-1960s, there has been a resurgence of interest in these arguments. Much of the discussion has focused on Kant’s “big three” arguments: ontological arguments, cosmological arguments, and teleological arguments. Discussion of ontological arguments has been primarily concerned with (a) Anselm’s ontological argument; (b) modal ontological arguments, particularly as developed by Alvin Plantinga; and (c) higher-order ontological arguments, particularly Gödel’s ontological argument. Each of these kinds of arguments has found supporters, although few regard these as the strongest arguments that can be given for the existence of God. Discussion of cosmological arguments has been focused on (a) kalām cosmological arguments (defended, in particular, by William Lane Craig); (b) cosmological arguments from sufficient reason (defended, in particular, by Richard Gale and Alexander Pruss); and (c) cosmological arguments from contingency (defended, in particular, by Robert Koons and Timothy O’Connor). Discussion of teleological arguments has, in recent times, been partly driven by the emergence of the intelligent design movement in the United States. On the one hand, there has been a huge revival of enthusiasm for Paley’s biological argument for design. On the other hand, there has also been the development of fine-tuning teleological arguments driven primarily by results from very recent cosmological investigation of our universe. Moreover, new kinds of teleological arguments have also emerged—for example, Alvin Plantinga’s arguments for the incompatibility of metaphysical naturalism with evolutionary theory and Michael Rea’s arguments for the incompatibility of the rejection of intelligent design with materialism, realism about material objects, and realism about other minds. Other (“minor”) arguments for the existence of God that have received serious discussion in recent times include moral arguments, arguments from religious experience, arguments from miracles, arguments from consciousness, arguments from reason, and aesthetic arguments. Of course, there is also a host of “lesser” arguments that are mainly viewed as fodder for undergraduate dissection. Further topics that are germane to any discussion of arguments for the existence of God include (a) the appropriate goals at which these arguments should aim and the standards that they should meet, (b) the prospects for “cumulative” arguments (e.g., of the kind developed by Richard Swinburne), and (c) the prospects for prudential arguments that appeal to our desires rather than to our beliefs (e.g., Pascal’s wager).

There are few works that seek to provide a comprehensive overview of arguments for the existence of God; there are rather more works that seek to give a thorough treatment of arguments for and against the existence of God. Mackie 1982 is the gold standard; its treatment of arguments for the existence of God remained unmatched until the publication of Sobel 2004 . Other worthy treatments of a range of arguments for the existence of God—as parts of treatments of ranges of arguments for and against the existence of God—include Gale 1991 , Martin 1990 , and Oppy 2006 . The works mentioned so far are all products of nonbelief; they all provide critical analyses and negative assessments of the arguments for the existence of God that they consider. Plantinga 1990 is an interesting product of belief that also provides critical analyses and negative assessments of the arguments for the existence of God that it considers, although in the service of a wider argument in favor of the rationality of religious belief; first published in 1967, this work was clearly the gold standard for analysis of arguments for the existence of God prior to Mackie 1982 . Of the general works that provide a more positive assessment of arguments for the existence of God, consideration should certainly be given to Plantinga 2007 and, for those interested in a gentle but enthusiastic introduction, Davies 2004 .

Davies, Brian. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Wide-ranging introduction to philosophy of religion that includes a discussion of ontological arguments, cosmological arguments, teleological arguments, arguments from religious experience, arguments from miracles, and moral arguments. Good coverage of a range of arguments for the existence of God.

Gale, Richard. On the Nature and Existence of God . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Entertaining and energetic discussion of ontological arguments, cosmological arguments, arguments from religious experience, and pragmatic arguments (e.g., Pascal’s wager).

Mackie, John. The Miracle of Theism: Arguments for and against the Existence of God . New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Superb presentation of cumulative case argument for atheism. Considers ontological arguments, cosmological arguments, teleological arguments, moral arguments, arguments from consciousness, arguments from religious experience, arguments from miracles, and Pascal’s wager. Benchmark text for critical discussion of arguments for the existence of God.

Martin, Michael. Atheism: A Philosophical Justification . Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990.

Comprehensive cumulative case for atheism. Considers ontological arguments, cosmological arguments, teleological arguments, arguments from miracles, arguments from religious experience, Pascal’s wager, and minor evidential arguments. Worthy contribution to the literature on arguments for the existence of God.

Oppy, Graham. Arguing about Gods . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511498978

Detailed discussion of cosmological arguments, teleological arguments, Pascal’s wager, and a range of other arguments. Discussion of ontological arguments that supplements Oppy 1995 (cited under Ontological Arguments ). Also includes some discussion of methodology: the mechanics of assessment of arguments for the existence of God.

Plantinga, Alvin. God and Other Minds: A Study of the Rational Justification of Belief in God . Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990.

Groundbreaking discussion of cosmological arguments, ontological arguments, and teleological arguments. Instrumental in setting new standards of rigor and precision for the analysis of arguments for the existence of God. First published in 1967.

Plantinga, Alvin. “Appendix: Two Dozen (or so) Theistic Arguments.” In Alvin Plantinga . Edited by Deane-Peter Baker, 203–228. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511611247

A collection of sketches or pointers to what Plantinga claims would be good arguments for the existence of God. Divided into (a) metaphysical arguments (aboutness, collections, numbers, counterfactuals, physical constants, complexity, contingency), (b) epistemological arguments (positive epistemic status, proper function, simplicity, induction, rejection of global skepticism, reference, intuition), (c) moral arguments, and (d) other arguments (colors and flavors, love, Mozart, play and enjoyment, providence, miracles).

Sobel, Jordan. Logic and Theism: Arguments for and against Beliefs in God . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Brilliant discussion of major arguments about the existence of God. Contains very detailed analyses of ontological arguments, cosmological arguments, teleological arguments, and arguments from miracles. Brought new rigor and technical precision to the discussion of these arguments for the existence of God.

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185.148.24.167

Overview – Does God Exist?

A level philosophy looks at 4 arguments relating to the existence of God . These are:

The ontological argument
The teleological argument
The cosmological argument

The problem of evil

There are various versions of each argument as well as numerous responses to each. The key points of each argument are summarised below:

Ontological arguments

The ontological arguments are unique in that they are the only arguments for God’s existence that use a priori reasoning. All ontological arguments are deductive arguments .

Versions of the ontological argument aim to deduce God’s existence from the definition of God. Thus, proponents of ontological arguments claim ‘God exists’ is an analytic truth .

Anselm’s ontological argument

“Hence, even the fool is convinced that something exists in the understanding, at least, than which nothing greater can be conceived. For, when he hears of this, he understands it. And whatever is understood, exists in the understanding. And assuredly that, than which nothing greater can be conceived, cannot exist in the understanding alone. For, suppose it exists in the understanding alone: then it can be conceived to exist in reality; which is greater. […] Hence, there is no doubt that there exists a being, than which nothing greater can be conceived, and it exists both in the understanding and in reality.” – St. Anselm, Proslogium , Chapter 2

Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) was the first to propose an ontological argument in his book Proslogium .

His argument can be summarised as:

By definition, God is a being greater than which cannot be conceived
We can coherently conceive of such a being i.e. the concept is coherent
It is greater to exist in reality than to exist only in the mind
Therefore, God must exist

In other words, imagine two beings:

One is said to be maximally great in every way, but does not exist.
The other is maximally great in every way and does exist.

Which being is greater? Presumably, the second one – because it is greater to exist in reality than in the mind.

Since God is a being that we cannot imagine to be greater, this description better fits the second option (the one that exists) than the first.

Descartes’ ontological argument

Descartes offers his own version of the ontological argument:

I have the idea of God
The idea of God is the idea of a supremely perfect being
A supremely perfect being does not lack any perfection
Existence is a perfection
Therefore, God exists

This argument is very similar to Anselm’s , except it uses the concept of a perfect being rather than a being greater than which cannot be conceived .

Descartes argues this shows that ‘God does not exist’ is a self-contradiction . Hume uses this claim as the basis for his objection to the ontological argument.

Gaunilo’s island

Gaunilo of Marmoutiers (994-1083) argues that if Anselm’s argument is valid, then anything can be defined into existence. For example:

The perfect island is, by definition, an island greater than which cannot be conceived
We can coherently conceive of such an island i.e. the concept is coherent
Therefore, this island must exist

The conclusion of this argument is obviously false.

Gaunilo argues that if Anselm’s argument were valid, then we could define anything into existence – the perfect shoe, the perfect tree, the perfect book, etc.

Hume: ‘God does not exist’ is not a contradiction

The ontological argument reasons from the definition of God that God must exist. This would make ‘God exists’ an analytic truth (or what Hume would call a relation of ideas , as the analytic/synthetic distinction wasn’t made until years later).

The denial of an analytic truth/relation of ideas leads to a contradiction. For example, “there is a triangle with 4 sides” is a contradiction.

Contradictions cannot be coherently conceived . If you try to imagine a 4-sided triangle, you’ll either imagine a square or a triangle. The idea of a 4-sided triangle doesn’t make sense.

So, is “God does not exist” a contradiction? Descartes (and Anselm) certainly thought so.

But Hume argues against this claim. Anything we can conceive of as existent , he says, we can also conceive of as non-existent . This shows that “God exists” cannot be an analytic truth/relation of ideas, and so ontological arguments must fail somewhere.

A summary of Hume’s argument can be stated as:

If ontological arguments succeed, ‘God does not exist’ is a contradiction
A contradiction cannot be coherently conceived
But ‘God does not exist’ can be coherently conceived
Therefore, ‘God does not exist’ is not a contradiction
Therefore, ontological arguments do not succeed

Kant: existence is not a predicate

Kant argues that existence is not a property (predicate) of things in the same way, say, green is a property of grass .

To say something exists doesn’t add anything to the concept of it.

Imagine a unicorn. Then imagine a unicorn that exists . What’s the difference between the two ideas? Nothing! Adding existence to the idea of a unicorn doesn’t make unicorns suddenly exist.

When someone says “God exists”, they don’t mean “there is a God and he has the property of existence”. If they did, then when someone says “God does not exist”, they’d mean, “there is a God and he has the property of non existence” – which doesn’t make sense!

Instead, what people mean when they say “God exists” is that “God exists in the world” . This cannot be argued from the definition of God and could only be proved via ( a posteriori ) experience. Thus the ontological argument fails to prove God’s (actual) existence.

Norman Malcolm’s ontological argument

Kant’s objection to the ontological argument is generally considered to be the most powerful argument against it.

So, in response, some philosophers have developed alternate versions that avoid this criticism.

Malcolm accepts that Descartes and Anselm (at least as presented above) are wrong.

Instead, Malcolm argues that it’s not existence that is a perfection, but the logical impossibility of non-existence ( necessary existence , in other words).

This (necessary existence) is a predicate, so avoids Kant’s argument above. Malcolm’s ontological argument is as follows:

Either God exists or does not exist
God cannot come into existence or go out of existence
If God exists, God cannot cease to exist
Therefore, if God exists, God’s existence is necessary
Therefore, if God does not exist, God’s existence is impossible
Therefore, God’s existence is either necessary or impossible
God’s existence is impossible only if the concept of God is self-contradictory
The concept of God is not self-contradictory
Therefore, God’s existence is not impossible
Therefore, God exists necessarily

Malcolm’s argument essentially boils down to:

God’s existence is either necessary or impossible (see above)
God’s existence is not impossible
Therefore God’s existence is necessary

Possible response:

We may respond to point 8, as discussed in the concept of God section , that the concept of God is self-contradictory.

Alternatively, we may argue that the meaning of “necessary” changes between premise 4 and the conclusion (10) and thus Malcolm’s argument is invalid. In premise 4, Malcolm is talking about necessary existence in the sense of a property that something does or does not have. By the conclusion, Malcolm is talking about necessary existence in the sense that it is a necessary truth that God exists. But this is not the same thing. We can accept that if God exists , then God has the property of necessary existence, but deny the conclusion that God exists necessarily.

Teleological arguments

The teleological arguments are also known as arguments from design.

These arguments aim to show that certain features of nature or the laws of nature are so perfect that they must have been designed by a designer – God.

Hume’s teleological argument

In Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion , Hume considers a version of the teleological argument (through the character Cleanthes ), which he goes on to reject (through the character of Philo ).

“The intricate fitting of means to ends throughout all nature is just like (though more wonderful than) the fitting of means to ends in things that have been produced by us – products of human designs, thought, wisdom, and intelligence. Since the effects resemble each other, we are led to infer by all the rules of analogy that the causes are also alike, and that the author of nature is somewhat similar to the mind of man, though he has much larger faculties to go with the grandeur of the work he has carried out. By this argument… we prove both that there is a God and that he resembles human mind and intelligence.” – Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Part 5

Hume’s argument here draws an analogy between things designed by humans and nature:

The ‘fitting of means to ends’ in human design (e.g. the fitting of the many parts of a watch to achieve the end of telling the time) resemble the ‘fitting of means to ends’ in nature (e.g. the many parts of a human’s eye to achieve the end of seeing things)
Similar effects have similar causes
The causes of human designs (e.g. watches) are minds
So, by analogy , the cause of design in nature is also a mind
And, given the ‘grandeur of the work’ of nature, this other mind is God .

William Paley: Natural Theology

William Paley (1743-1805) wasn’t the first to propose a teleological argument for the existence of God, but his version is perhaps the most famous.

The reason for this is that a watch, unlike the stone, has many parts organised for a purpose. Paley says this is the hallmark of design:

“When we come to inspect the watch, we perceive (what we could not discover in the stone) that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose , e.g. that they are so formed and adjusted as to produce motion, and that motion so regulated as to point out the hour of the day.” – William Paley, Natural Theology, Chapter 1

Nature and aspects of nature, such as the human eye, are composed of many parts. These parts are organised for a purpose – in the case of the eye, to see .

So, like the watch, nature has the hallmarks of design – but “ with the difference, on the side of nature, of being greater and more” . And for something to be designed, it must have an equally impressive designer .

Paley says this designer is God.

Hume: problems with the analogy

Hume (as the character Philo) points out various problems with the analogy between the design of human-made objects and nature, such as:

We can observe human-made items being designed by minds , but we have no such experience of this in the case of nature. Instead, designs in nature could be the result of natural processes (what Philo calls ‘generation and vegetation’).
The analogy focuses on specific aspects of nature that appear to be designed (e.g. the human eye) and generalises this to the conclusion that the whole universe must be designed.
Human machines (e.g. watches and cars) obviously have a designer and a purpose. But biological things (e.g. an animal or a plant, such as a cabbage) do not have an obvious purpose or designer – they appear to be the result of an unconscious process of ‘generation and vegetation’. The universe is more like the latter (i.e. a biological thing) than the former (i.e. a machine) and so, by analogy, the cause of the universe is better explained by this unconscious processes of ‘generation and vegetation’ rather than the conscious design of a mind.

An argument from analogy is only as strong as the similarities between the two things being compared (nature and human designs). These differences weaken the jump from human-made items being designed to the whole universe being designed.

Hume: Spatial dis order

Hume (as the character Philo) argues that although there are examples of order within nature (which suggests design), there is also much “vice and misery and disorder” in the world (which is evidence against design).

If God really did design the world, Hume argues, there wouldn’t be such disorder. For example:

There are huge areas of the universe that are empty, or just filled with random rocks or are otherwise uninhabitable. This suggests that the universe isn’t designed but instead we just happen, by coincidence, to be in a part that has spatial order.
Some parts of the world (e.g. droughts, hurricanes, etc.) go wrong and cause chaos. Hume argues that if the world is designed , these chaotic features suggest that the designer isn’t very good.
Animals have bodies that feel pain and that could have been made in such ways that they could have happier lives. If God designed animals and humans, you would expect He would make animals and humans in this way so that their lives would be easier and happier.

These features are examples of spatial dis order – features that wouldn’t make sense to include if you designed the universe.

Hume argues that such examples of disorder show that the universe isn’t designed. Or, if the universe is designed, then the designer is neither omnipotent nor omnibenevolent (as God is claimed to be).

Hume: causation

Hume famously argues that we never experience causation – only the ‘constant conjunction’ of one event following another. If this happens enough times, we infer that A causes B.

For example, experience (ever since you were a baby) tells you that if one snooker ball hits another (A), the second snooker ball will move (B). You don’t actually experience A causing B, but it’s reasonable to expect this relationship to hold in the future because you’ve seen it and similar examples hundreds of times.

But imagine that you take a sip of tea and at the same time your friend coughs. Would it be reasonable to infer that drinking the tea caused your friend to cough based on this one instance? Obviously not. The point is: You cannot infer causation from a single instance.

Applying this to teleological arguments, Hume (as the character Philo) argues that the creation of the universe was a unique event – we only have experience of this one universe. And so, like the tea example, we can’t infer a causal relationship between designer and creation based on just one instance.

Hume: finite matter, infinite time

“Instead of supposing matter to be infinite, as Epicurus did, let us suppose it to be finite and also suppose space to be finite, while still supposing time to be infinite. A finite number of particles in a finite space can have only a finite number of transpositions; and in an infinitely long period of time every possible order or position of particles must occur an infinite number of times.” – Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Part 8

Hume’s objection here assumes the following:

Time is infinite
Matter is finite

Given these assumptions, it is inevitable that matter will organise itself into combinations that appear to be designed.

It’s a bit like the monkeys and typewriters thought experiment:

Given an infinite amount of time, a monkey will eventually type the complete works of Shakespeare.

This is the nature of infinity. It’s inevitable that the monkey will write something that appears to be intelligent, even though it’s just hitting letters at random.

The same principle applies to the teleological argument, argues Hume: Given enough time, it is inevitable that matter will arrange itself into combinations that appear to be designed , even though they’re not.

Darwin: evolution by natural selection

Charles Darwin’s (1809-1882) theory of evolution by natural selection explains how complex organisms – complete with parts organised for a purpose – can emerge from nature without a designer.

For example, it may seem that God designed giraffes to have long necks so they could reach leaves in high trees. But the long necks of giraffes can be explained without a designer , for example:

Competition for food is tough
An animal that cannot acquire enough food will die before it can breed and produce offspring
An animal with a (random genetic mutation for a) neck that’s 1cm longer than everyone else’s will be able to access 1cm more food
This competitive advantage makes it more likely to survive and produce offspring
The offspring are likely to inherit the gene for a longer neck, making them more likely to survive and reproduce as well
Longer necked-animals become more common as a result
The environment becomes more competitive as more and more animals can reach the 1cm higher leaves
An animal with a neck 2cm longer has the advantage in this newly competitive environment
Repeat process over hundreds of millions of years until you have modern day giraffes

The key idea is that – given enough time and genetic mutations – it is inevitable that animals and plants will adapt to their environment, thus creating the appearance of design.

This directly undermines Paley’s claim that anything that has parts organised to serve a purpose must be designed.

Swinburne: The Argument from Design

Swinburne’s version of the teleological argument distinguishes between:

Examples of order in nature ( spatial order )
And the order of the laws of nature ( temporal order )

Swinburne accepts that science, for example evolution , can explain the apparent design of things like the human eye (i.e. spatial order) and so Paley’s teleological argument does not succeed in proving God’s existence. However, Swinburne argues, we can’t explain the laws of nature (i.e. temporal order) in the same way.

For example, the law of gravity is such that it allows galaxies to form, and planets to form within these galaxies, and life to form on these planets. But if gravity had the opposite effect – it repelled matter, say – then life would never be able to form. If gravity was even slightly stronger, planets wouldn’t be able to form. So how do we explain why these laws are the way they are?

Unlike spatial order, we can’t give a scientific explanation of why the laws of nature are as they are. Science can explain and predict things using these laws – but it has to first assume these laws. Science can’t explain why these laws are the way they are. In the absence of a scientific explanation of the laws of nature, Swinburne argues, the best explanation of temporal order is a personal explanation.

We give personal explanations of things all the time – for example, ‘this sentence exists because I chose to write it’ or ‘that building exists because someone designed and built it’. Swinburne argues that, by analogy, we can explain the laws of nature (i.e. temporal order) in a similarly personal way: The laws of nature are the way they are because someone designed them.

In the absence of a scientific explanation of temporal order, Swinburne argues, the best explanation is the personal one: The laws of nature were designed by God .

Multiple universes

Hume’s earlier argument (finite matter, infinite time) can be adapted to respond to Swinburne’s teleological argument.

But instead of arguing that time is infinite, as Hume does, we could argue that the number of universes is infinite.

This idea of multiple universes is popular among some physicists, as it explains various phenomena in quantum mechanics.

But anyway, if there are an infinite number of universes (or even just a large enough number), it is likely that some of these universes will have laws of nature (temporal order) that support the formation of life. Of course, when such universes do exist, it is just sheer luck. If each universe has randomly different scientific laws, there will also be many universes where the temporal order does not support life.

Is the designer God?

Both Hume and Kant have argued that even if the teleological argument succeeded in proving the existence of a designer , this designer would not necessarily be God (as defined in the Concept of God section).

For example:

God’s power is supposedly infinite ( omnipotence ), yet the universe is not infinite
Designers are not always creators. Designer and creator might be two separate people (e.g. the guy who designs a car doesn’t physically build it)
The design of the universe may be the result of many small improvements by many people
Designers can die even if their creations live on. How do we know the designer is eternal , as God is supposed to be?

Cosmological arguments

cosmological argument for the existence of the universe

The Kalam Argument

The Kalam argument is perhaps the simplest version of the cosmological argument in the A level philosophy syllabus. It says:

Whatever begins to exist has a cause
The universe began to exist
Therefore, the universe has a cause

Aquinas: Five Ways

St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) gave five different versions of the cosmological argument. A level philosophy requires you to know these three:

Argument from motion

Argument from causation.

Contingency argument

Aquinas’ first way is the argument from motion .

“It is certain, and evident to our senses, that in the world some things are in motion… It is [impossible that something] should be both mover and moved, i.e. that it should move itself. Therefore, whatever is in motion must be put in motion by another. If that by which it is put in motion be itself put in motion, then this also must needs be put in motion by another, and that by another again. But this cannot go on to infinity, because then there would be no first mover, and, consequently, no other mover; seeing that subsequent movers move only inasmuch as they are put in motion by the first mover… Therefore it is necessary to arrive at a first mover, put in motion by no other; and this everyone understands to be God.” – Aquinas, Summa Theologica , Part 1 Question 3

A summary of this argument:

E.g. a football rolling along the ground
E.g. someone kicked the ball
If A is put in motion by B , then something else ( C ) must have put B in motion, and so on
If this chain goes on infinitely, then there is no first mover
If there is no first mover, then there is no other mover, and so nothing would be in motion
But things are in motion
Therefore, there must be a first mover
The first mover is God

Aquinas’ second way – the argument from causation – is basically the same as the argument from motion, except it talks about a first cause rather than a first mover:

E.g. throwing a rock caused the window to smash
C is caused by B , and B is caused by A , and so on
If this chain of causation was infinite, there would be no first cause
If there were no first cause, there would be no subsequent causes or effects
But there are causes and effects in the world
Therefore, there must have been a first cause
The first cause is God

Argument from contingency

Aquinas’ third way relies on a distinction between necessary and contingent existence. It’s a similar distinction to necessary and contingent truth from the epistemology module.

Things that exist contingently are things that might not have existed.

For example, the tree in the field wouldn’t exist if someone hadn’t planted the seed years ago. So, the tree exists contingently. Its existence is contingent on someone planting the seed.

So, using this idea of contingent existence, Aquinas argues that:

Everything that exists contingently did not exist at some point
If everything exists contingently, then at some point nothing existed
If nothing existed, then nothing could begin to exist
But since things did begin to exist, there was never nothing in existence
Therefore, there must be something that does not exist contingently, but that exists necessarily
This necessary being is God

Descartes’ Cosmological Argument

Descartes’ version of the cosmological argument is a lot more long-winded than the Kalam argument or any of Aquinas’ .

The key points are along these lines:

I can’t be the cause of my own existence because if I was I would have given myself all perfections (e.g. omnipotence, omniscience, etc.)
I depend on something else to exist
I am a thinking thing and have the idea of God
Whatever caused me to exist must also be a thinking thing that has the idea of God
Whatever caused me to exist must either be the cause of its own existence or caused by something else
If it was caused by something else then this something else must also either be the cause of its own existence or caused by something else
There cannot be an infinite chain of causes
So there must be something that caused its own existence
Whatever causes its own existence is God

There’s a bit more to Descartes’ version than this. For example, he talks about a cause needed to keep him in existence and how there must be ‘as much reality’ in the cause as in the effect. But the points above constitute the main argument.

Leibniz: Sufficient reason

Note: This is another cosmological argument from contingency , like Aquinas’ third way above

Leibniz’s argument is premised on his principle of sufficient reason. The principle of sufficient reason says that every truth has an explanation of why it is the case (even if we can’t know this explanation).

Leibniz then defines two different types of truth:

Truths of reasoning: this is basically another word for necessary or analytic truths
Truths of fact: this is basically another word for contingent or synthetic truths

The sufficient reason for truths of reasoning (i.e. analytic truths) is revealed by analysis. When you analyse and understand “3+3=6”, for example, you don’t need a further explanation why it is true.

But it is more difficult to provide sufficient reason for truths of fact (i.e. contingent truths) because you can always provide more detail via more contingent truths. For example, you can explain the existence of a tree by saying someone planted a seed. But you could then ask why the person planted the seed, or why seeds exist in the first place, or why the laws of physics are the way they are, and so on. This process of providing contingent reasons for contingent facts goes on forever.

“Therefore, the sufficient or ultimate reason must needs be outside of the sequence or series of these details of contingencies, however infinite they may be.” – Leibniz, Monadology , Section 37

So, to escape this endless cycle of contingent facts and provide sufficient reason for truths of fact (i.e. contingent truths), we need to step outside the sequence of contingent facts and appeal to a necessary substance. This necessary substance is God , Leibniz says.

Is a first cause necessary?

Most of the cosmological arguments assume something along the lines of ‘there can’t be an infinite chain of causes’ (except the cosmological arguments from contingency ). For example, they say stuff like there must have been a first cause or a prime mover .

But we can respond by rejecting this claim. Why must there be a first cause? Perhaps there is just be an infinite chain of causes stretching back forever.

infinite chain of causes cosmological argument

An infinite chain of causes would mean an infinite amount of time has passed prior to the present moment
If an infinite amount of time has passed, then the universe can’t get any older (because infinity + 1 = infinity)
But the universe is getting older (e.g. the universe is a year older in 2020 than it was in 2019)
Therefore an infinite amount of time has not passed
Therefore there is not an infinite chain of causes

Hume’s objections to causation

Another assumption (or premise) of many of the cosmological arguments above (not so much the contingency ones) is something like ‘everything has a cause’.

But Hume’s fork can be used to question this claim that ‘everything has a cause’:

Relation of ideas: ‘Everything has a cause’ is not a relation of ideas because we can conceive of something without a cause. For example, we can imagine a chair that just springs into existence for no reason – it’s a weird idea, but it’s not a logical contradiction like a 4-sided triangle or a married bachelor.
Matter of fact: ‘Everything has a cause’ cannot be known as a matter of fact either, says Hume. We never actually experience causation – we just see event A happen and then event B happen after. Even if we see B follow A a million times, we never experience A causing B, just the ‘constant conjunction’ of A and B.

Further, in the specific case of the creation of the universe, we only ever experience event B (i.e. the continued existence of the universe) and never what came before (i.e. the thing that caused the universe to exist).

This all casts doubt on the premise of cosmological arguments that ‘everything has a cause’.

Russell: Fallacy of composition

Bertrand Russell argues that cosmological arguments fall foul of the fallacy of composition . The fallacy of composition is an invalid inference that because parts of something have a certain property, the entire thing must also have this property. Examples:

Just because all the players on a football team are good, this doesn’t guarantee the team is good. For example, the players might not work well together.
Just because a sheet of paper is thin, it doesn’t mean things made from sheets of paper are thin. For example, a book with enough sheets of paper can be thick.

Applying this to the cosmological argument, we can raise a similar objection to Hume’s above : just because everything within the universe has a cause, doesn’t guarantee that the universe itself has a cause.

Or, to apply it to Leibniz’s cosmological argument : just because everything within the universe requires sufficient reason to explain its existence, doesn’t mean the universe itself requires sufficient reason to explain its existence. Russell says: “the universe is just there, and that’s all.”

Ok, but everything within the universe exists contingently
And if everything within the universe didn’t exist, then the universe itself wouldn’t exist either (because that’s all the universe is: the collection of things that make it up)
So the universe itself exists contingently, not just the stuff within it
And so the universe itself requires sufficient reason to explain its existence

Is the first cause God?

Aquinas’ first and second ways and the Kalam argument only show that there is a first cause . But they don’t show that this first cause is God .

So, even if we accept that there was a first cause, it doesn’t necessarily follow that God exists – much less the specific being described in the concept of God .

So, even if the cosmological argument is sound, it doesn’t necessarily follow that God exists.

This objection doesn’t work so well against Descartes’ version because he specifically reasons that there is a first cause and that this first cause is an omnipotent and omniscient God .

Similarly, you could argue that any being that exists necessarily (such as follows from Aquinas’ third way and Leibniz’s cosmological argument ) would be God.

The problem of evil uses the existence of evil in the world to argue that God (as defined in the concept of God ) does not exist.

These arguments can be divided into two forms:

The logical problem of evil is a deductive argument that says the existence of God is logically impossible given the existence of evil in the world
The evidential problem of evil is an inductive argument which says that, while it is logically possible that God exists, the amount of evil and unfair ways it is distributed in our world is pretty strong evidence that God doesn’t exist

And evil can be divided into two types of evil:

One final definition: a theodicy is an explanation of why an omnipotent and omniscient God would permit evil.

The logical problem of evil

“Epicurus’s old questions have still not been answered. Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then where does evil come from?” – Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Part 10

J.L. Mackie: Evil and Omnipotence

Inconsistent triad.

The simple version of Mackie’s argument is that the following statements are logically inconsistent – i.e. one or more of them contradict each other:

God is omnipotent
God is omnibenevolent
Evil exists

Mackie’s argument is that, logically, a maximum of 2 of these 3 statements can be true but not all 3. This is sometimes referred to as the inconsistent triad .

He argues that if God is omnibenevolent then he wants to stop evil. And if God is omnipotent, then he’s powerful enough to prevent evil.

But evil does exist in the world. People steal, get murdered, and so on. So either God isn’t powerful enough to stop evil, doesn’t want to stop evil, or both.

In the concept of God , God is defined as an omnipotent and omnibenevolent being. If such a being existed, argues Mackie, then evil would not exist. But evil does exist. Therefore, there is no omnipotent and omnibenevolent being. Therefore, God does not exist.

Reply 1: good couldn’t exist without evil

People often make claims like “you can’t appreciate the good times without experiencing some bad times”.

This is basically what this reply says: without evil, good couldn’t exist.

Mackie’s response

Mackie questions whether this statement is true at all. Why can’t we have good without evil?

Imagine if we lived in a world where everything was red. Presumably, we wouldn’t have created a word for ‘red’, nor would we know what it meant if someone tried to explain it to us. But it would still be the case that everything is red, we just wouldn’t know.

It’s a similar story with good and evil.

God could have created a world in which there was no evil. Like the red example, we wouldn’t have the concept of evil. But it would still be the case that everything is good – we just wouldn’t be aware of it.

Reply 2: the world is better with some evil than none at all

You could develop reply 1 above to argue that some evil is necessary for certain types of good. For example, you couldn’t be courageous (good) without having to overcome fear of pain, death, etc. (evil).

We can define first and second order goods:

First order good: e.g. pleasure
Second order good: e.g. courage

The argument is that second order goods seek to maximise first order goods. And second order goods are more valuable than first order goods. But without first order evils, second order goods couldn’t exist.

Let’s say we accept that first order evil is necessary for second order good to exist. How do you explain second order evil ?

Second order evils seek to maximise first order evils such as pain. So, for example, malevolence or cruelty are examples of second order evils.

But we could still have a world in which people were courageous (second order good) in overcoming pain (first order evil) without these second order evils. So why would an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God allow the existence of second order evils if there is no greater good in doing so?

Reply 3: we need evil for free will

We can develop the second order evil argument above further and argue that second order evil is necessary for free will. And free will is inherently such a good and valuable thing that it outweighs the bad that results from people abusing free will to do evil things.

So, while allowing free will brings some suffering, the net good of having free will is greater than if we didn’t. Therefore, it’s logically possible that an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God would allow evil (both first order and second order) for the greater good of free will.

An omnipotent God can create any logically possible world
If it’s logically possible to freely choose to act in a way that’s good on one occasion, then it’s logically possible to freely choose to act in a way that’s good on every occasion
So, an omnipotent God could create a world in which everyone freely chooses to act in a way that’s good

In other words, there is a logically possible world with both free will and without second order evils.

This, surely, would be the best of both worlds and maximise good most effectively: you would have second order goods, plus the good of free will, but without second order evils. This is a logically possible world – the logically possible world with the most good.

So, why wouldn’t an omnipotent and omniscient God create this specific world? Second order evils do not seem logically necessary, and yet they exist.

Alvin Plantinga: God, Freedom and Evil

Plantinga argues that we don’t need a plausible theodicy to defeat the logical problem of evil. All we need to show is that the existence of evil is not logically inconsistent with an omnipotent and omnibelevolent God.

So, even if the explanation of why God would allow evil doesn’t seem particularly plausible, as long as it’s a logical possibility then we have defeated the logical problem of evil .

Free will defence

Even Mackie himself admits that God’s existence is not logically incompatible with some evil (first order evil). But his argument is that second order evil isn’t necessary .

Plantinga argues, however, that it’s logically possible (which is all we need to show to defeat the logical problem of evil) that God would allow second order evil for a greater good. His argument is as follows:

A morally significant action is one that is either morally good or morally bad
A being that is significantly free is one that is able to do or not do morally significant actions
A being created by God to only do morally good actions would not be significantly free
So, the only way God could eliminate evil (including second order evil) would be to eliminate significantly free beings
But a world that contains significantly free beings is more good than a world that does not contain significantly free beings

In short, this argument shows that it’s at least logically possible that God would allow second order evil for the greater good of significant freedom.

Perhaps God could have created the world where everyone chose to only do morally good actions ( as Mackie describes above ) – but such a world wouldn’t be significantly free. Free will is inherently good and so significant free will could outweigh the negative of people using that significant free will to commit second order evils.

Natural evil as a form of moral evil

The free will defence above explains why an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God would allow moral evil. But it doesn’t explain natural evil.

When innocent people are killed in natural disasters, it doesn’t seem this is the result of free will. So, even if an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God would allow moral evil, why does this kind of evil exist as well?

Plantinga argues that it’s possible natural evil is the result of non-human actors such as Satan, fallen angels, demons, etc. This would make natural evil another form of moral evil, the existence of which would be explained by free will.

Even if this doesn’t sound very plausible , it’s at least possible . And remember, Plantinga’s argument is that we only need to show evil is not logically inconsistent with God’s existence to defeat the logical problem of evil.

The evidential problem of evil

Unlike the logical problem of evil , the evidential problem of evil can allow that God’s existence is possible .

However, it argues the amount and distribution of evil in the world provides good evidence that God probably doesn’t exist.

Innocent babies born with painful congenital diseases
The sheer number of people currently living in slavery, extreme poverty or fear
The millions of innocent and anonymous people throughout history killed for no good reason

We can reject the logical problem of evil and accept that God would allow some evil. But would an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God allow so much evil? And to people so undeserving of it?

The evidential problem of evil argues that if God did exist, there would be less evil and it would be less concentrated among those undeserving of it.

Free will (again)

Sure, God could have made a world with less evil. But this would mean less free will. And on balance, having free will creates more good than the evil it also creates.

OK, maybe God would allow some evil for the greater good of free will. But it seems possible – simple, even – that God could have created a world with less evil than our world without sacrificing the greater good of free will.

For example, our world exactly as it is, with the same amount of free will, but with 1% less cancer. God could have created this world, so why didn’t He?

The evidential problem of evil could insist that the amount of evil – or unfair ways it is distributed – could easily be reduced without sacrificing some greater good, and so it seems unlikely that God exists, in this world, given this particular distribution of evil.

John Hick: Evil and the God of Love

Soul making.

Hick argues that humans are unfinished beings. Part of our purpose in life is to develop personally, ethically and spiritually – he calls this ‘soul making’.

As discussed above , it would be impossible for people to display (second order) virtues such as courage without fear of (first order) evils such as pain or death. Similarly, we couldn’t learn virtues such as forgiveness if people never treated us wrongly.

Of course, God could just have given us these virtues right off the bat. But, Hick says, virtues acquired through hard work and discipline are “good in a richer and more valuable sense”. Plus, there are some virtues, such as a genuine and authentic love of God, that cannot simply be given (otherwise they wouldn’t be genuine).

This explanation goes some way towards explaining why God would allow the amount and distribution of evil we see. He then addresses some specific examples of evils that may not seem to fit with an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God:

Why God allows animals to suffer

The evidential problem of evil can ask Hick why God would allow animals to suffer when there is no benefit. After all, they can’t develop spiritually like we can.

Hick’s response is that God wanted to create epistemic distance between himself and humanity – i.e. a world in which his existence could be doubted. If God just proved he existed, we wouldn’t be free to develop a relationship with him.

Why God allows such terrible evils

Hick argues that it’s not possible for God to just get rid of terrible evil – e.g. baby torture – and leave only ordinary evil. The reason for this is that terrible evils are only terrible in contrast to ordinary evils. So, if God did get rid of terrible evils, then the worst ordinary evils would become the new terrible evils. If God kept getting rid of terrible evils then he would have to keep reducing free will and thus the development of personal and spiritual virtues ( soul making ).

Why God allows such pointless evils

Hick argues that pointless evils – e.g. anonymously dying in vain trying to save someone – are somewhat of a mystery. However, if every time we saw someone suffering we knew it was for some higher purpose (i.e. it wasn’t pointless), then we would never be able to develop deep sympathy.

Again, this goes back to the soul making theodicy: without seemingly unfair and pointless evil, we would never be able to develop virtues such as hope and faith – both of which require a degree of uncertainty.

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The Existence of God

Other essays.

The existence and attributes of God are evident from the creation itself, even though sinful human beings suppress and distort their natural knowledge of God.

The existence of God is foundational to the study of theology. The Bible does not seek to prove God’s existence, but rather takes it for granted. Scripture expresses a strong doctrine of natural revelation: the existence and attributes of God are evident from the creation itself, even though sinful human beings suppress and distort their natural knowledge of God. The dominant question in the Old and New Testaments is not whether God is, but rather who God is. Philosophers both Christian and non-Christian have offered a wide range of arguments for God’s existence, and the discipline of natural theology (what can be known or proven about God from nature alone) is flourishing today. Some philosophers, however, have proposed that belief in God is rationally justified even without theistic arguments or evidences. Meanwhile, professing atheists have offered arguments against God’s existence; the most popular is the argument from evil, which contends that the existence and extent of evil in the world gives us good reason not to believe in God. In response, Christian thinkers have developed various theodicies, which seek to explain why God is morally justified in permitting the evils we observe.

If theology is the study of God and his works, then the existence of God is as foundational to theology as the existence of rocks is to geology. Two basic questions have been raised regarding belief in God’s existence: (1) Is it true ? (2) Is it rationally justified (and if so, on what grounds)? The second is distinct from the first because a belief can be true without being rationally justified (e.g., someone might irrationally believe that he’ll die on a Thursday, a belief that turns out by chance to be true). Philosophers have grappled with both questions for millennia. In this essay, we will consider what the Bible says in answer to these questions, before sampling the answers of some influential Christian thinkers.

Scripture and the Existence of God

The Bible opens not with a proof of God’s existence, but with a pronouncement of God’s works: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” This foundational assertion of Scripture assumes that the reader not only knows already that God exists, but also has a basic grasp of who this God is. Throughout the Old Testament, belief in a creator God is treated as normal and natural for all human beings, even though the pagan nations have fallen into confusions about the true identity of this God. Psalm 19 vividly expresses a doctrine of natural revelation: the entire created universe ‘declares’ and ‘proclaims’ the glorious works of God. Proverbs tells us that “the fear of the Lord” is the starting point for knowledge and wisdom (Prov. 1:7; 9:10; cf. Psa. 111:10). Denying God’s existence is therefore intellectually and morally perverse (Psa. 14:1; 53:1). Indeed, the dominant concern throughout the Old Testament is not whether God is, but who God is. Is Yahweh the one true God or not (Deut. 4:35; 1Kgs. 18:21, 37, 39; Jer. 10:10)? The worldview that provides the foil for Hebrew monotheism is pagan polytheism rather than secular atheism.

This stance on the existence of God continues into the New Testament, which builds on the foundation of the uncompromising monotheism of the Old. In his epistle to the Romans, the apostle Paul insists that God’s “eternal power and divine nature” are clearly perceived from the created order itself. Objectively speaking, there can be no rational basis for doubt about the existence of a transcendent personal creator, and thus there can be no excuse for unbelief (Rom. 1:20). Endued with a natural knowledge of our creator we owe God our honor and thanks, and our failure to do so serves as the primary basis for the manifestation of God’s wrath and judgment. The apostle’s robust doctrine of natural revelation has raised the question of whether anyone can truly be an atheist. The answer will depend, first, on how “atheist” is defined, and second, on what precisely Paul means when he speaks of people “knowing” God. If the idea is that all men retain some genuine knowledge of God, despite their sinful suppression of natural revelation, it’s hard to maintain that anyone could completely lack any cognitive awareness of God’s existence. But if “atheist” is defined as someone who denies the existence of God or professes not to believe in God, Romans 1 not only allows for the existence of atheists – it effectively predicts it. Atheism might then be understood as a form of culpable self-deception.

Paul’s convictions about natural revelation are put to work in his preaching to Gentile audiences in Lystra and Athens (Acts 14:15–17; 17:22–31). Paul assumes not only that his hearers know certain things about God from the created order but also that they have sinfully suppressed and distorted these revealed truths, turning instead to idolatrous worship of the creation (cf. Rom. 1:22–25). Even so, his appeals to general revelation are never offered in isolation from special revelation: the Old Testament Scriptures, the person of Jesus Christ, and the testimony of Christ’s apostles.

Elsewhere in the New Testament, the question of the existence of God is almost never explicitly raised, but rather serves as a foundational presupposition, an unquestionable background assumption. One exception would be the writer to the Hebrews, who remarks that “whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him” (11:6). In general, the New Testament is concerned less with philosophical questions about the existence of God than with practical questions about how sinners can have a saving relationship with the God whose existence is obvious. As in the Old Testament, the pressing question is never whether God is, but who God is. Is Jesus Christ the revelation of God in human flesh or not? That’s the crux of the issue.

Arguments for the Existence of God

Consider again the two questions mentioned at the outset. (1) Is belief in God true ? (2) Is it rationally justified ? One appealing way to answer both questions affirmatively is to offer a theistic argument that seeks to infer God’s existence from other things we know, observe, or take for granted. A cogent theistic argument, one assumes, would not only demonstrate the truth of God’s existence but also provide rational justification for believing it. There is a vast literature on theistic arguments, so only a sampling of highlights can be given here.

The first generation of Christian apologists felt little need to argue for God’s existence for the same reason one finds no such arguments in the New Testament: the main challenges to Christian theism came not from atheism, but from non-Christian theism (Judaism) and pagan polytheism. Not until the medieval period do we find formal arguments for the existence of God offered, and even then the arguments do not function primarily as refutations of atheism but as philosophical meditations on the nature of God and the relationship between faith and reason.

One of the most famous and controversial is the ontological argument of St. Anselm (1033–1109) according to which God’s existence can be deduced merely from the definition of God, such that atheism leads inevitably to self-contradiction. One distinctive of the argument is that it relies on pure reason alone with no dependence on empirical premises. Various versions of the ontological argument have been developed and defended, and opinion is sharply divided even among Christian philosophers over whether there are, or even could be, any sound versions.

Cosmological arguments seek to demonstrate that that the existence of the universe, or some phenomenon within the universe, demands a causal explanation originating in a necessary first cause beyond the universe. St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) famously offered “Five Ways” of demonstrating God’s existence, each of which can be understood as kind of cosmological argument. For example, one of the Five Ways argues that any motion (change) has to be explained by some mover (cause). If that mover itself exhibits motion, there must be a prior mover to explain it, and because there cannot be an infinite regress of moved movers, there must be an original unmoved mover : an eternal, immutable, and self-existent first cause. Other notable defenders of cosmological arguments include G. W. Leibniz (1646–1716) and Samuel Clarke (1675–1729), and more recently Richard Swinburne and William Lane Craig.

Teleological arguments , which along with cosmological arguments can be traced back to the ancient Greeks, contend that God is the best explanation for apparent design or order in the universe. Simply put, design requires a designer, and thus the appearance of design in the natural world is evidence of a supernatural designer. William Paley (1743–1805) is best known for his argument from analogy which compares functional arrangements in natural organisms to those in human artifacts such as pocket watches. While design arguments suffered a setback with the rise of the Darwinian theory of evolution, which purports to explain the apparent design of organisms in terms of undirected adaptive processes, the so-called Intelligent Design Movement has reinvigorated teleological arguments with insights from contemporary cosmology and molecular biology while exposing serious shortcomings in naturalistic Darwinian explanations.

In the twentieth century, the moral argument gained considerable popularity, not least due to its deployment by C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) in his bestseller Mere Christianity . The argument typically aims to show that only a theistic worldview can account for objective moral laws and values. As with the other theistic arguments there are many different versions of the moral argument, trading on various aspects of our moral intuitions and assumptions. Since such arguments are typically premised on moral realism —the view that there are objective moral truths that cannot be reduced to mere human preferences or conventions—extra work is often required to defend such arguments in a culture where moral sensibilities have been eroded by subjectivism, relativism, and nihilism.

Cornelius Van Til (1895–1987) gained some notoriety for his forceful criticisms of the “traditional method” of Christian apologetics which capitulated to “autonomous human reason.” Van Til held that any respectable theistic argument ought to disclose the undeniability of the triune God revealed in Scripture, not merely a First Cause or Intelligent Designer. He therefore advocated an alternative approach, centered on a transcendental argument for the existence of God, whereby the Christian seeks to show that human reason, far from being autonomous and self-sufficient, presupposes the God of Christianity, the “All-Conditioner” who created, sustains, and directs all things according to the counsel of his will. As Van Til put it, we should argue “from the impossibility of the contrary”: if we deny the God of the Bible, we jettison the very grounds for assuming that our minds have the capacity for rational thought and for reliable knowledge of the world.

Since the renaissance of Christian philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century, there has been renewed interest and enthusiasm for the project of developing and defending theistic arguments. New and improved versions of the classical arguments have been offered, while developments in contemporary analytic philosophy have opened up new avenues for natural theology. In his 1986 lecture, “Two Dozen (or so) Theistic Arguments,” Alvin Plantinga sketched out an entire A to Z of arguments for God, most of which had never been previously explored. Plantinga’s suggestions have since been expanded into a book-length treatment by other philosophers. The discipline of Christian natural theology is thriving as never before.

Basic Belief in the Existence of God

Still, are any of these arguments actually needed? Does confidence about God’s existence have to be funded by philosophical proofs? Since the Enlightenment, it has often been held that belief in God is rationally justified only if it can be supported by philosophical proofs or scientific evidences. While Romans 1:18–21 has sometimes been taken as a mandate for theistic arguments, Paul’s language in that passage suggests that our knowledge of God from natural revelation is far more immediate, intuitive, and universally accessible.

In the opening chapters of his Institutes of the Christian Religion , John Calvin (1509–1564) considers what can be known of God apart from special revelation and asserts that a natural knowledge has been universally implanted in mankind by the Creator: “There is within the human mind, and indeed by natural instinct, an awareness of divinity” ( Institutes , I.3.1). Calvin speaks of a sensus divinitatis , “a sense of deity,” possessed by every single person in virtue of being created in God’s image. This internal awareness of the Creator “can never be effaced,” even though sinful men “struggle furiously” to escape it. Our implanted natural knowledge of God can be likened in some respects to our natural knowledge of the moral law through the God-given faculty of conscience (Rom. 2:14-15). We know instinctively that it’s wrong to lie and steal; no philosophical argument is needed to prove such things. Similarly, we know instinctively that there is a God who made us and to whom we owe honor and thanks.

In the 1980s, a number of Protestant philosophers led by Alvin Plantinga, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and William Alston developed a sophisticated defense of Calvin’s notion of the sensus divinitatis . Dubbed the “Reformed epistemologists,” they argued that theistic beliefs can be (and normally should be) properly basic : rationally justified even without empirical evidences or philosophical proofs. On this view, believing that God exists is comparable to believing that the world of our experience really exists; it’s entirely rational, even if we can’t philosophically demonstrate it. Indeed, it would be quite dysfunctional to believe otherwise.

Arguments Against the Existence of God

Even granting that there is a universal natural knowledge of God, there are unquestionably people who deny God’s existence and offer arguments in their defense. Some have attempted to exposed contradictions within the concept of God (e.g., between omniscience and divine freedom) thereby likening God to a “square circle” whose existence is logically impossible. At most such arguments only rule out certain conceptions of God, conceptions that are often at odds with the biblical view of God in any case.

A less ambitious approach is to place the burden of proof on the theist: in the absence of good arguments for God’s existence, one ought to adopt the “default” position of atheism (or at least agnosticism). This stance is hard to maintain given the many impressive theistic arguments championed by Christian philosophers today, not to mention the Reformed epistemologists’ argument that belief in God is properly basic.

The most popular atheistic argument is undoubtedly the argument from evil. The strong version of the argument maintains that the existence of evil is logically incompatible with the existence of an all-good, all-powerful God. The more modest version contends that particularly horrifying and seemingly gratuitous instances of evil, such as the Holocaust, provide strong evidence against God’s existence. The problem of evil has invited various theodicies : attempts to explain how God can be morally justified in permitting the evils we encounter in the world. While such explanations can be useful, they aren’t strictly necessary for rebutting the argument from evil. It is enough to point out that given the complexities of the world and the considerable limitations of human knowledge, we are in no position to conclude that God couldn’t have morally justifying reasons for allowing the evils we observe. Indeed, if we already have grounds for believing in God, we can reasonably conclude that God must have such reasons, whether or not we can discern them.

The Existence of God: Key Arguments Essay

The existence of God has been a big subject in philosophy, and attempts to prove or disprove his existence have been made since time immemorial. Famous philosophers such as Rene Descartes, St. Thomas Aquinas, and William Paley have all conceived arguments to prove the existence of God. Although there are many other arguments trying to prove the existence of God, nevertheless, the arguments proposed by the three above-mentioned thinkers have the most significance in philosophy. This essay is going to provide two arguments for the existence of God.

The anthropic principle is an argument of the existence of a reasonable plan for the structure of the Universe. According to this argument, only God may create the complex structure of nature, universe, and life on the Earth. Such phenomena as a fixed distance of Earth from the Sun, the presence of the Earth’s rotation, the existence of a satellite of certain sizes, minerals and resources could be created only under the control of someone mighty.

The cosmological proof of the existence of God was developed by the ancients (in particular, by Aristotle) and is most often found in the following form. Everything in the world and everything, the entire universe as a whole, has a reason for its existence. Furthermore, the argument states that it is impossible to continue this sequence, the chain of causes indefinitely – somewhere there must be a root cause that is already no other is conditioned (Reichenbach, 2022). Otherwise, everything turns out to be groundless, hanging in the air.

Finally, the transcendental proof of the existence of an ideal world and God was partially discovered by Kant and can be presented as follows. There is a world outside of space and time – the spiritual world, the world of intelligence, thought, and free will, which is proved by the presence in every person of thoughts. According to the argument, this world can relate to the past and the future, that is, ‘travel’ into the past and the future, as well as being instantly transported to any point in space.

Reichenbach, Bruce. (2022). Cosmological Argument. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2022 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.). Web.

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1. IvyPanda . "The Existence of God: Key Arguments." July 22, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-existence-of-god-key-arguments/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "The Existence of God: Key Arguments." July 22, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-existence-of-god-key-arguments/.

William Paley’s Philosophy Argument of God’s Existence
Teleological Argument of William Paley
Clarke's Cosmological Argument
Religions and Philosophical Currents
The Views and Works of Dalai Lama and John Hick
Postmodern Existentialism and Spirituality
Augustine’s Spiritual Mentoring and Manichaeism
Aspects of Religious Exclusivism

To arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves.

36 ARGUMENTS FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD

...For close to two decades Cass Seltzer has all but owned the psychology of religion, but only because nobody else wanted it, not anyone with the smarts to do academic research in psychology and the ambition to follow through. It had been impossible to get grants, and the prestigious journals would return his manuscripts without sending them out for peer review. The undergraduates crowded his courses, but that counted, if anything, as a strike against him in his department. The graduate students stayed away in droves. The sexy psychological research was all in neural network modeling and cognitive neuroscience. The mind is a neural computer and the folks with the algorithms ruled.

But now things had happened — fundamental and fundamentalist things — and religion as a phenomenon is on everybody's mind. And among all the changes that religion's new towering profile has wrought in the world, which are mostly alarming if not downright terrifying, is the transformation in the life of one Cass Seltzer.

First had come the book, which he had entitled The Varieties of Religious Illusion, a nod to both William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience and to Sigmund Freud's The Future of An Illusion. The book had brought Cass an indecent amount of attention. Time Magazine, in a cover story on the so-called new atheists, had ended by dubbing him "the atheist with a soul." When the magazine came out, Cass's literary agent, Sy Auerbach, called to congratulate him. "Now that you're famous, even I might have to take you seriously. ...

Introduction

By John Brockman

"What is this stuff, you ask one another," says the narrator in Rebecca Newberger Goldstein's new novel 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, "and how can it still be kicking around, given how much we already know?"

We have very short memories.

It was in April 2006 that President George W. Bush, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, and Senator John McCain all announced their support of teaching Intelligent Design in public schools. This assault on science and on the separation of church and state was a mobilizing moment for the Edge community which responded to this initiative with book of essays by 16 eminent scientists entitled Intelligent Thought, excerpts from which appeared on Edge.

At the time, three and a half years ago, no one was using the phrase "the new atheists". In fact, in early 2006 only Sam Harris's book The End of Faith (2004), and Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking the Spell(February, 2006) had been published. It was in response to the highly organized and well-financed campaign by the religious right that led champions of rational thinking such as Jerry Coyne , Richard Dawkins , Daniel C. Dennett, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, A.C. Grayling , and P.Z. Myers to mount an unrelenting campaign against the purveyors of superstition, supernaturalism, ignorance ... and their apologists (the self-proclaimed "moderates", or to use more apt terms, the "accommodationists", or the "faitheists").

The term "the new atheists" came into play in early 2007, followed by "I am an atheist, but". This is hardly the lingo of the far right. In fact, you don't have to leave the pages of Edge to read variations on this meme from some very distinguished and respected scientists. But what some appear to be saying is "I am an atheist but... other people, not as smart as I am, require religion (a) to get through the day, (b) to create sustainable societies, (c) to have moral values, etc. Others, intellectually lazy, afraid, or unable to invent their own personal narratives, simply wear their parents' old ideas like a hand-me-down suit, defaulting to the maudlin sentimentality that is the soundtrack to the American mind.

Now, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, known to Edge readers as a philosopher who has interesting things to say about Gödel and Spinoza, among others, enters into this conversation, taking on these and wider themes, and pushing the envelope by crossing over into the realm of fiction.

Goldstein isn't the first novelist to appear on Edge, nor the first to discuss religion. In October 1989, the novelist Ken Kesey came to New York spoke to The Reality Club. "As I've often told Ginsberg," he began, "you can't blame the President for the state of the country, it's always the poets' fault. You can't expect politicians to come up with a vision, they don't have it in them. Poets have to come up with the vision and they have to turn it on so it sparks and catches hold."

It's in this spirit that Edge presents a brief excerpt from the first chapter, and the nonfiction appendix from 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (21,250 words).

REBECCA NEWBERGER GOLDSTEIN is a philosopher, a novelist, and Edge contributor. She is the author of the nonfiction works Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity, and Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel. Her other novels include The Mind-Body Problem and Properties of Light: A Novel of Love, Betrayal, and Quantum Physics, and 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein's Edge Bio page

Chapter I: The Argument from the Improbable Self

Something shifted, something so immense you could call it the world.

Call it the world.

The world shifted, catching lots of smart people off guard, churning up issues that you had thought had settled forever beneath the earth's crust. The more sophisticated you are, the more annotated your mental life, the more taken aback you're likely to feel, seeing what the world's lurch has brought to light, thrusting up beliefs and desires you had assumed belonged to an earlier stage of human development.

What is this stuff, you ask one another, and how can it still be kicking around, given how much we already know? It looks like the kind of relics that archeologists dig up and dust off, speculating about the beliefs that once had animated them, to the best that they can be reconstructed, gone as they are now, those thrashings of proto-rationality and mythico-magical hypothesizing, and mostly forgotten.

Now it's all gone unforgotten, and minds that have better things to think about have to divert precious neuronal resources to figuring out how to knock some sense back into the species. It's a tiresome proposition, having to take up the work of the Enlightenment all over again, but it's happened on your watch. You ought to have sent up a balloon now and then to get a read on the prevailing cognitive conditions, the Thinks watching out for the Think-Nots. Now you've gone and let the stockpiling of fallacies reach dangerous levels, and the massed weapons of illogic are threatening the survivability of the globe.

None of this is particularly good for the world, but it has been good for Cass Seltzer. That's what he's thinking at this moment, gazing down at the frozen river and regarding the improbable swerve his life has lately taken. He's thinking his life has gotten better because the world has gone bonkers. He's thinking zealots proliferate and Seltzer prospers.

It's 4 a.m., and Cass Seltzer is standing on Weeks Bridge, the graceful arc that spans the Charles River near Harvard University, staring down at the river below, which is in the rigor mortis of late February in New England. The whole vista is deserted beyond vacancy, deserted in the way of being inhospitable to human life. There's not a car passing on Memorial Drive, and the elegant river dorms are darkened to silent hulks, the most hyper-kinetic of undergraduates sedated to purring girls and boys.

It's not like Cass Seltzer to be out in the middle of an icy night, lost in thought while losing sensation in his extremities. Excitement had gotten the better of him. He had lain in his empty bed for hours, mind racing, until he gave up and crawled out from under the luxe comforter that his girlfriend Lucinda Mandelbaum had brought with her when she moved in with him at the end of June. This comforter has pockets for the hands and feet and a softness that's the result of impregnation with aloe vera. As a man, Cass had been skeptical, but he's become a begrudging believer in Lucinda's comforter, and in her Tempur-Pedic pillow, too, suffused with the fragrance of her coconut shampoo, making it all the more remarkable that he'd forsake his bed for this no-man's stretch of frigid night.

Rummaging in the front closet for some extra protection, he had pulled out, with a smile he couldn't have interpreted for himself, a long-forgotten item, the tricolor scarf that his ex-wife, Pascale, had learned to knit for him during the four months when she was recovering from aphasia, four months that had produced, among other shockers, an excessively long French flag of a scarf, which he wound seven and a half times around his neck before heading out into the dark to deal with the rush in his head.

Lucinda's away tonight, away for the entire bleak week to come. Cass is missing Lucinda in his bones, missing her in the marrow that's presently crystallizing into ice. She's in warmer climes, at a conference in Santa Barbara on "Non-Nash Equilibria in Zero-Sum Games." Among these equilibria is one that's called the "Mandelbaum Equilibrium," and it's Cass's ambition to have the Mandelbaum Equilibrium mastered by the time he picks her up from the airport Friday night.

Technically, Lucinda's a psychologist, like Cass, only not like Cass at all. Her work is so mathematical that almost no one would suspect it has anything to do with mental life. Cass, on the other hand, is about as far away on the continuum as you can get and still be in the same field. He's so far away that he is knee-deep in the swampy humanities. Until recently, Cass had felt almost apologetic explaining that his interest is in the whole wide range of religious experience — a bloated category on anyone's account, but especially on Cass's, who sees religious frames of mind lurking everywhere, masking themselves in the most secular of settings, in politics and scholarship and art and even in personal relationships.

For close to two decades Cass Seltzer has all but owned the psychology of religion, but only because nobody else wanted it, not anyone with the smarts to do academic research in psychology and the ambition to follow through. It had been impossible to get grants, and the prestigious journals would return his manuscripts without sending them out for peer review. The undergraduates crowded his courses, but that counted, if anything, as a strike against him in his department. The graduate students stayed away in droves. The sexy psychological research was all in neural network modeling and cognitive neuroscience. The mind is a neural computer and the folks with the algorithms ruled.

Next had come the girl, although that designation hardly does justice to the situation, not when the situation stands for the likes of Lucinda Mandelbaum, known in her world as "the Goddess of Game Theory." Lucinda is, pure and simple, a wondrous creature, with adoration her due and Cass's avocation.

And now, only today, as if his cup weren't already gushing over, had come a letter from Harvard, laying out its intention of luring him away from Frankfurter University, located in nearby Weedham, about twelve miles upriver from where Cass is standing right now. After all that has happened to Cass over the course of this past year, he's surprised at the degree of awed elation he feels at the letter bearing the insignia of Veritas. But he's an academic, his sense of success and failure ultimately determined by the academy's utilities (to use the language of Lucinda's science), and Harvard counts as the maximum utility. Cass has the letter on him right now, zippered into an inside pocket of his parka, insulating him against the elements.

The night is so cold that everything seems to have been stripped bare of superfluous existence, reduced to the purity of abstraction. Cass has the distinct impression that he can see better in the sharpened air, that it's counteracting the near-sightedness that has had him wearing glasses since he was twelve. He takes them off and, of course, can't see a thing, can barely see past the nimbus phantom of his own breath.

But then he stares harder and it seems that he can see better, that the world has slid into sharper focus. It's only now, with his glasses off, that he catches sight of the spectacle that the extreme cold has created in the river below, frozen solid except where it quickens through the three graceful arches of the bridge's substructure, creating an effect that could reasonably be called sublime, and in the Kantian sense: not cozily beautiful, but touched by a metaphysical chill. The quickened water has sculpted three immense and perfect arches into the thick ice, soaring fifty or sixty feet to their apices, sublime almost as if by design. The surface of the water in the carved-out breaches is polished to obsidian, lustered to transparency against the white-blue gleam of the frozen encasement, and perspective askew, the whole of it looks like a cathedral rising endlessly, the arches becoming windows that open into vistas of black.

Standing dead center on Weeks Bridge, in the dead of winter in the dead of night, staring down at the three enormous arches sublimely carved into the Charles, suggesting a cathedral shaped into the ice, Cass is contemplating the strange thing that his life has become.

To him. His life has become strange to him. He feels like he's wearing somebody else's coat, grabbed in a hurry from the bed in the spare bedroom after a boozy party. He's walking around in someone else's bespoke cashmere while that guy's got Cass's hooded parka, and only Cass seems to have noticed the switch.

What has happened is that Cass Seltzer has become an intellectual celebrity. He's become famous for his abstract ideas. And not just any old abstract ideas, but atheist abstract ideas, which makes him, according to some of the latest polls, a spokesperson for the most distrusted minority in America, the one that most Americans are least willing to allow their children to marry.

This is a fact. Studies have found that a large proportion of Americans rate atheists below Muslims, recent immigrants, gays, and Communists, as "sharing their vision of American society." Atheists, the researchers reported, seem to be playing the pariah role once assigned to Catholics, Jews, and Communists, seen as harboring alien and subversive values, or, more likely, as having no inner values at all, and therefore likely to be criminals, rapists and wild-eyed drug addicts.

"As if," as Cass often finds himself saying into microphones, "the only reason to live morally is out of fear of getting caught and being spanked by the heavenly father."

Cass Seltzer has become the unlikely poster boy for this misunderstood group. His is a good face for counteracting the fallacy of equating godlessness with vice. Handsome, but not in a way to make the squeamish consider indeterminate sexual orientation, Cass's fundamental niceness is written all over him. He's got a strong jaw, a high ovoid forehead from which his floppy auburn hair is only just slightly receding, and the sweetest, most earnest smile this side of Oral Roberts University. Is this a man who could possibly go out and commit murder and mayhem, rape our virgin daughters and shoot controlled substances into his veins?

Cass is still trying to assimilate the fact that his book has become an international sensation, translated into twenty-seven languages, including Latvian. He understands that it's not just a matter of what he's written — as much as he'd like to believe it is — but also a matter of the rare intersection of the preoccupations of his lifetime with the turmoil of the age. When Cass, in all the safety of his obscurity, set about writing a book that would explain how irrelevant the belief in God can be to religious experience — so irrelevant that the emotional structure of religious experiences can be transplanted to completely godless contexts with little of the impact lost; and when he had also, almost as an afterthought, included as an Appendix thirty-six arguments for the existence of God, with rebuttals, his claim being that the most thorough demolition of these arguments would make little difference to the felt qualities of religious experience, he'd had no idea of the massive response his efforts would provoke.

For the most part, fame is agreeable to Cass. For one thing, people treat him more nicely. It's a revelation to learn what a nice bunch of upright mammals we're capable of being. Everybody happily, gratefully, applies the Golden Rule when it comes to interacting with the famous. Thou must treat the famous as thou wouldst wish to be treated thyself. Easy! If only everybody could be famous, we would all be effortlessly altruistic.

The atheist with a soul. Cass always smiles at the absurdity of the phrase. But which is the more absurd element, he wonders. The truth is — and what's the good of a man contemplating an inhumanly frozen world at 4 a.m. if no truth-telling ensues? — that Cass is somewhat at a loss to account for what he has done. How to explain those 36 Arguments for the Existence of God (see Appendix), all of them formally constructed in the preferred analytic style, premises parading with military precision and every shirking presupposition and sketchy implication forced out into the open and subjected to rigorous inspection?

Cass had started out with all the standard arguments for God's existence, the ones discussed in philosophy classes and textbooks: The Cosmological Argument (#1), The Ontological Argument (#2), The Classical Argument from Design (#3A), the arguments from Miracles, Morality, and Mysticism (#'s 11, 16, and 22, respectively), Pascal's Wager (#31) , and William James's Argument from Pragmatism (#32). He had also analyzed the new batch of arguments recently whipped up by the Intelligent Design crowd, to wit, The Argument from Irreducible Complexity (#3B), The Argument from the Paucity of Benign Mutations (# 3C), The Argument from The Original Replicator (#3D), The Argument from The Big Bang (#4), The Argument from the Fine-Tuning of the Physical Constants (#5), and The Argument from the Hard Problem of Consciousness (#12). But then he had gone beyond these, too, attempting to polish up into genuine arguments those religious intuitions and emotions that are often powerfully evocative but too sub-syllogistic to be regarded as actual arguments. He had tried to capture under the net of analytic reason those fleeting shadows cast by unseen winged things darting through the thick foliage of the religious sensibility.

So Cass had formulated The Argument from Cosmic Coincidences (#7), appealing to such facts as these: that the diameter of the moon, as seen from the earth, is the same as the diameter of the sun, as seen from the earth, which is why we can have those spectacular eclipses when the corona of the sun is revealed in all its glory. He had formulated The Argument from Sublimity (#34), trying to capture the line of reasoning lurking behind, for example, the recent testament of one evangelical scientist who had felt his doubts falling away from him when he was hiking in the mountains and came upon a frozen waterfall — in fact a trinity of a frozen waterfall, with three parts to it. "At that moment, I felt my resistance leave me. And it was a great sense of relief. The next morning, in the dewy grass in the shadow of the Cascades, I fell on my knees and accepted this truth — that God is God, that Christ is his son and that I am giving my life to that belief."

For the right observer, Cass supposed, the triptych cathedral etched out in the ice below might yield a similar epiphany.

Cass had named the twenty-eighth in his list "The Argument from Prodigious Genius", though privately he thinks of it as "The Argument from Azarya." The astonishment of beholding genius, especially when it shows up in child prodigies, is so profound that it can feel almost like violence, as if a behavioral firestorm has devastated the laws of psychology, leaving us with no principles for explaining what we're seeing and hearing. "It's as if these children come into the world knowing" are words that Cass had heard twenty years ago, inspired by a child who could see the numbers and thought that they were angels.

And then there's The Argument from the Improbable Self (#13), another one that engages Cass in a personal way. He had struggled to squeeze precision into the sense of paradox he knows too well, the flailing attempt to calm the inside-outside vertigo to which he's given, trying to construct something semi-coherent beneath that vertiginous step outside himself that would result from his staring too long at the improbable fact of his being identical with . . . himself.

If somebody hasn't experienced this particular kind of metaphysical seizure for himself, then it's hard to find the words to give a sense of what it's like. Cass had experienced it as a boy, lying in bed and thinking his way into the sense of the strangeness of being just this.

Cass had had the lower bunk bed. Both he and Jesse, his younger brother, had wanted the higher bunk, but, as usual, Jesse had wanted what he wanted so much more than Cass had wanted it, with a fury of need that was exhausting just to watch, that Cass had let it go. Lying there awake on his lower bunk, Cass would think about being himself rather than being Jesse.

There was Jesse, and here was Cass. But if someone were looking at the two of them, Jesse there, Cass here, how could that observer tell that he, Cass, was Cass here and not Jesse there? If it got switched on them, everything the same about them, the body and memories and sense of self and everything else, only now he was Jesse here and there was Cass there, how would anybody know? How would he know, how would Jesse? Maybe a switch had already happened, maybe it happened again and again, and how could anybody tell?

The longer he tried to get a fix on the fact of being Cass here, the more the whole idea of it just got away from him. If he tried long enough to grasp it, then he could get the fact of being Cass here to blank out of existence and then come dribbling weakly back in, like a fluorescent fixture flickering on and off toward death. He would get the sense of having been shot outside of himself, and now was someone who was regarding his being Cass Seltzer as something like his being in the sixth grade, just something about him that happened to be true. Who was that Other that he was who was regarding his being Cass Seltzer as if he didn't have to be Cass Seltzer? The sense of giddiness induced by these exercises could be a bit too overwhelming for a kid in a lower bunk bed.

It could be a bit overwhelming still.

"Here I am," Cass is saying, standing on Weeks Bridge and talking aloud into the sublimely indifferent night.

Cass knows he needs to tamp down his tendencies toward the transcendental. It isn't becoming in America's favorite atheist, who is, at this moment, Cass Seltzer, who is, somehow or other, just this here.

"Here I am."

How can it be that, of all things, one is this thing, so that one can say, astonishingly — in the right frame of mind, it is astonishing, with the metaphysical chill blowing in from afar — "here I am."

When you didn't force yourself to think in formal reconstructions, when you didn't catch these moments of ravishments under the lens of premises and conclusions, when you didn't impale them and label them , like so many splayed butterflies, bleeding the transcendental glow right out of them, then . . . what?

It's even hard at a time like this to resist the shameful narcissistic appeal of reasonings like The Argument from Personal Coincidences (#8) and The Argument from Answered Prayers (#9) and The Argument from A Wonderful Life (#10). William James had rebuked the "scoundrel logic" that calculates divine provenance from one's own goody-bag of gains, and Cass couldn't agree more with the spirit of James, but here it is, his bulging goody bag, and call him a scoundrel for feeling personally grateful to the universe when, at this same moment that he is standing on Weeks Bridge and tossing hosannas out into the infinite universe, there are multitudes of others whose lives are painfully constricting with misfortunes that are just as arbitrary and undeserved as his own expansive good luck, but Cass Seltzer does feel grateful.

At moments like this could Cass altogether withstand the sense that — how hard to put it into words — the sense that the universe is personal, that there is something personal that grounds existence and order and value and purpose and meaning — and that the grandeur of that personal universe has somehow infiltrated and is expanding his own small person, bringing his littleness more in line with its grandeur, that the personal universe has been personally kind to him, gracious and forgiving, to Cass Seltzer, gratuitously, exorbitantly, divinely kind, and this despite Cass's having, with callowness and shallowness aforethought, thrown spitballs at the whole idea of cosmic intentionality?

No, no, that doesn't capture it either. Those words are far too narrowed by Cass's own particular life, when what it is he could feel, has felt, might even be feeling now, has nothing to do with the contents of Cass's existence, but rather with existence itself, Itself, this, This, THIS . . . what?

This expansion out into the world which is a kind of love, he supposes, a love for the whole of existence, that could so easily well up in Cass Seltzer at this moment, standing here in the pure abstractions of this night and contemplating the strange thisness of his life when viewed sub specie aeternitatus, that is to say from the vantage point of eternity which comes so highly recommended to us by Spinoza.

Here it is then: the sense that existence is just such a tremendous thing, one comes into it, astonishingly, here one is, formed by biology and history, genes and culture, in the midst of the contingency of the world, here one is, one doesn't know how, one doesn't know why, and suddenly one doesn't know where one is either or who or what one is either, and all that one knows is that one is a part of it, a considered and conscious part of it, generated and sustained in existence in ways one can hardly comprehend, all the time conscious of it, though, of existence, the fullness of it, the reaching expanse and pulsing intricacy of it, and one wants to live in a way that at least begins to do justice to it, one wants to expand one's reach of it as far as expansion is possible and even beyond that, to live one's life in a way commensurate with the privilege of being a part of and conscious of the whole reeling glorious infinite sweep, a sweep that includes, so improbably, a psychologist of religion named Cass Seltzer, who, moved by powers beyond himself, did something more improbable than all the improbabilities constituting his improbable existence could have entailed, did something that won him someone else's life, a better life, a more brilliant life, a life beyond all the ones he had wished for in the pounding obscurity of all his yearnings, because all of this, this, this, THIS couldn't belong to him, to the man who stands on Weeks Bridge, wrapped round in a scarf his once-beloved ex-wife Pascale had knit for him for some necessary reason that he would never know, perhaps to offer him some protection against the desolation she knew would soon be his, and was, but is no longer, suspended here above sublimity, his cheeks aflame with either euphoria or frostbite, a letter in his zippered pocket with the imprimatur of Veritas and a Lucinda Mandelbaum with whom to share it all.

Appendix: 36 ARGUMENTS FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD

1. The Cosmological Argument

1. Everything that exists must have a cause. 2. The universe must have a cause (from 1). 3. Nothing can be the cause of itself. 4. The universe cannot be the cause of itself (from 3). 5. Something outside the universe must have caused the universe (from 2 & 4). 6. God is the only thing that is outside of the universe. 7. God caused the universe (from 5 & 6). 8. God exists.

FLAW 1: can be crudely put: Who caused God? The Cosmological Argument is a prime example of the Fallacy of Passing the Buck: invoking God to solve some problem, but then leaving unanswered that very same problem when applied to God himself. The proponent of the Cosmological Argument must admit a contradiction to either his first premise — and say that though God exists, he doesn't have a cause — or else a contradiction to his third premise — and say that God is self-caused. Either way, the theist is saying that his premises have at least one exception, but is not explaining whyGod must be the unique exception, otherwise than asserting his unique mystery (the Fallacy of Using One Mystery To Pseudo-Explain Another). Once you admit of exceptions, you can ask why the universe itself, which is also unique, can't be the exception. The universe itself can either exist without a cause, or else can be self-caused . Since the buck has to stop somewhere, why not with the universe?

FLAW 2: The notion of "cause" is by no means clear, but our best definition is a relation that holds between events that are connected by physical laws. Knocking the vase off the table caused it to crash to the floor; smoking three packs a day caused his lung cancer. To apply this concept to the universe itself is to misuse the concept of cause, extending it into a realm in which we have no idea how to use it. This line of skeptical reasoning, based on the incoherent demands we make of the concept of cause, was developed by David Hume.

COMMENT: The Cosmological Argument, like the Argument from the Big Bang, and The Argument from the Intelligibility of the Universe, are expressions of our cosmic befuddlement at the question: why is there something rather than nothing? The late philosopher Sydney Morgenbesser had a classic response to this question: "And if there were nothing? You'd still be complaining!"

2. The Ontological Argument

1. Nothing greater than God can be conceived (this is stipulated as part of the definition of "God"). 2. It is greater to exist than not to exist. 3 . If we conceive of God as not existing, then we can conceive of something greater than God (from 2). 4. To conceive of God as not existing is not to conceive of God (from 1 and 3). 5. It is inconceivable that God not exist (from 4). 6. God exists.

This argument, first articulated by Saint Anselm (1033-1109), the Archbishop of Canterbury, is unlike any other, proceeding purely on the conceptual level. Everyone agrees that the mere existence of a concept does not entail that there are examples of that concept; after all, we can know what a unicorn is and at the same time say "unicorns don't exist." The claim of the Ontological Argument is that the concept of God is the one exception to this rule. The very concept of God, when defined correctly, entails that there is something that satisfies that concept. Although most people suspect that there is something wrong with this argument, it's not so easy to figure out what it is.

FLAW: It was Immanuel Kant who pinpointed the fallacy in the Ontological Argument: it is to treat "existence" as a property, like "being fat" or "having ten fingers." The Ontological Argument relies on a bit of wordplay, assuming that "existence" is just another property, but logically it is completely different. If you really could treat "existence" as just part of the definition of the concept of God, then you could just as easily build it into the definition of any other concept. We could, with the wave of our verbal magic wand, define a trunicorn as "a horse that (a) has a single horn on its head, and (b) exists." So if you think about a trunicorn, you're thinking about something that must, by definition, exist; therefore trunicorns exist. This is clearly absurd: we could use this line of reasoning to prove that any figment of our imagination exists.

COMMENT: Once again, Sydney Morgenbesser had a pertinent remark, this one offered as an Ontological Argument for God's Non-Existence: Existence is such a lousy thing, how could God go and do it?

3. The Argument from Design

A. The Classical Teleological Argument 1. Whenever there are things that cohere only because of a purpose or function (for example, all the complicated parts of a watch that allow it to keep time), we know that they had a designer who designed them with the function in mind; they are too improbable to have arisen by random physical processes. (A hurricane blowing through a hardware store could not assemble a watch.) 2. Organs of living things, such as the eye and the heart, cohere only because they have a function (for example, the eye has a cornea, lens, retina, iris, eyelids, and so on, which are found in the same organ only because together they make it possible for the animal to see.) 3. These organs must have a designer who designed them with their function in mind: just as a watch implies a watchmaker, an eye implies an eyemaker (from 1 & 2). 4. These things have not had a human designer. 5. Therefore, these things must have had a non-human designer (from 3 & 4). 6. God is the non-human designer (from 5). 7. God exists.

FLAW: Darwin showed how the process of replication could give rise to the illusion of design without the foresight of an actual designer. Replicators make copies of themselves, which make copies of themselves, and so on, giving rise to an exponential number of descendants. In any finite environment the replicators must compete for the energy and materials necessary for replication. Since no copying process is perfect, errors will eventually crop up, and any error that causes a replicator to reproduce more efficiently than its competitors will result in that line of replicators predominating in the population. After many generations, the dominant replicators will appear to have been designed for effective replication, whereas all they have done is accumulate the copying errors which in the past did lead to effective replication. The fallacy in the argument, then is Premise 1 (and as a consequence, Premise 3, which depends on it): parts of a complex object serving a complex function do not, in fact, require a designer.

In the twenty-first century, creationists have tried to revive the Teleological Argument in three forms:

B. The Argument from Irreducible Complexity 1. Evolution has no foresight, and every incremental step must be an improvement over the preceding one, allowing the organism to survive and reproduce better than its competitors. 2. In many complex organs, the removal or modification of any part would destroy the functional whole. Examples are, the lens and retina of the eye, the molecular components of blood clotting, and the molecular motor powering the cell's flagellum. Call these organs "irreducibly complex." 3. These organs could not have been useful to the organisms that possessed them in any simpler forms (from 2). 4. The Theory of Natural Selection cannot explain these irreducibly complex systems (from 1 & 3). 5. Natural selection is the only way out of the conclusions of the Classical Teleological Argument. 6. God exists (from 4 & 5 and the Classical Teleological Argument).

This argument has been around since the time of Charles Darwin, and his replies to it still hold.

FLAW 1: For many organs, Premise 2 is false. An eye without a lens can still see, just not as well as an eye with a lens.

FLAW 2: For many other organs, removal of a part, or other alterations, may render it useless for its current function, but the organ could have been useful to the organism for some other function. Insect wings, before they were large enough to be effective for flight, were used as heat-exchange panels. This is also true for most of the molecular mechanisms, such as the flagellum motor, invoked in the modern version of the Argument from Irreducible Complexity.

FLAW 3: (The Fallacy of Arguing from Ignorance): There may be biological systems for which we don't yet know how they may have been useful in simpler versions. But there are obviously many things we don't yet understand in molecular biology, and given the huge success that biologists have achieved in explaining so many examples of incremental evolution in other biological systems, it is more reasonable to infer that these gaps will eventually be filled by the day-to-day progress of biology than to invoke a supernatural designer just to explain these temporary puzzles.

COMMENT: This last flaw can be seen as one particular instance of the more general and fallacious

Argument from Ignorance:

1.There are things that we cannot explain yet. 2. Those things must be caused by God.

FLAW: Premise 1 is obviously true. If there weren't things that we could not explain yet, then science would be complete, laboratories and observatories would unplug their computers and convert to condominiums, and all departments of science would be converted to departments in the History of Science. Science is only in business because there are things we have not explained yet. So we cannot infer from the existence of genuine, ongoing science that there must be a God.

C. The Argument from the Paucity of Benign Mutations 1. Evolution is powered by random mutations and natural selection. 2. Organisms are complex, improbable systems, and by the laws of probability any change is astronomically more likely to be for the worse than for the better. 3. The majority of mutations would be deadly for the organism (from 2). 4. The amount of time it would take for all the benign mutations needed for the assembly of an organ to appear by chance is preposterously long (from 3). 5. In order for evolution to work, something outside of evolution had to bias the process of mutation, increasing the number of benign ones (from 4). 6. Something outside of the mechanism of biological change — the Prime Mutator — must bias the process of mutations for evolution to work (from 5). 7. The only entity that is both powerful enough and purposeful enough to be the Prime Mutator is God. 8 .God exists.

FLAW : Evolution does not require infinitesimally improbable mutations, such as a fully formed eye appearing out of the blue in a single generation, because (a) mutations can have small effects (tissue that is slightly more transparent, or cells that are slightly more sensitive to light), and mutations contributing to these effects can accumulate over time; (b) for any sexually reproducing organism, the necessary mutations do not have to have occurred one after the other in a single line of descendants, but could have appeared independently in thousands of separate organisms, each mutating at random, and the necessary combinations could come together as the organisms mate and exchange genes; (c) life on earth has had a vast amount of time to accumulate the necessary mutations (almost four billion years).

D. The New Argument from The Original Replicator 1. Evolution is the process by which an organism evolves from simpler ancestors. 2. Evolution by itself cannot explain how the original ancestor — the first living thing — came into existence (from 1). 3. The theory of natural selection can deal with this problem only by saying the first living thing evolved out of non-living matter (from 2). 4. That non-living matter (call it the Original Replicator) must be capable of (i) self-replication (ii) generating a functioning mechanism out of surrounding matter to protect itself against falling apart, and (iii) surviving slight mutations to itself that will then result in slightly different replicators. 5. The Original Replicator is complex (from 4). 6. The Original Replicator is too complex to have arisen from purely physical processes (from 5 & the Classical Teleological Argument). For example, DNA, which currently carries the replicated design of organisms, cannot be the Original Replicator, because DNA molecules requires a complex system of proteins to remain stable and to replicate, and could not have arisen from natural processes before complex life existed. 7. Natural selection cannot explain the complexity of the Original Replicator (from 3 & 6). 8. The Original Replicator must have been created rather than have evolved (from 7 and the Classical Teleological Argument). 9. Anything that was created requires a Creator. 10. God exists.

FLAW 1: Premise 6 states that a replicator, because of its complexity, cannot have arisen from natural processes, i.e. by way of natural selection. But the mathematician John von Neumann showed in the 1950s that it is theoretically possible for a simple physical system to make exact copies of itself from surrounding materials. Since then, biologists and chemists have identified a number of naturally occurring molecules and crystals that can replicate in ways that could lead to natural selection (in particular, that allow random variations to be preserved in the copies). Once a molecule replicates, the process of natural selection can kick in, and the replicator can accumulate matter and become more complex, eventually leading to precursors of the replication system used by living organisms today.

FLAW 2: Even without von Neumann's work (which not everyone accepts as conclusive), to conclude the existence of God from our not yet knowing how to explain the Original Replicator is to rely on The Argument from Ignorance.

4. The Argument from The Big Bang

1. The Big Bang, according to the best scientific opinion of our day, was the beginning of the physical universe, including not only matter and energy, but space and time and the laws of physics. 2. The universe came to be ex nihilo (from 1). 3. Something outside the universe, including outside its physical laws, must have brought the universe into existence (from 2). 4. Only God could exist outside the universe. 5. God must have been caused the universe to exist (from 3 & 4). 6. God exists.

The Big Bang is based on the observed expansion of the universe, with galaxies rushing away from each other. The implication is that if we run the film of the universe backward from the present, the universe must continuously contract, all the way back to a single point. The theory of the Big Bang is that the universe exploded into existence about 14 billion years ago.

FLAW 1: Cosmologists themselves do not all agree that the Big Bang is a "singularity" — the sudden appearance of space, time, and physical laws from inexplicable nothingness. The Big Bang may represent the lawful emergence of a new universe from a previously existing one. In that case, it would be superfluous to invoke God to explain the emergence of something from nothing.

FLAW 2: The Argument From the Big Bang has all the flaws of The Cosmological Argument — it passes the buck from the mystery of the origin of the universe to the mystery of the origin of God, and it extends the notion of "cause" outside the domain of events covered by natural laws (also known as the universe) where it no longer makes sense.

5. The Arguments from the Fine-Tuning of Physical Constants

1. There are a vast number of physically possible universes. 2. A universe that would be hospitable to the appearance of life must conform to some very strict conditions: Everything from the mass ratios of atomic particles and the number of dimensions of space to the cosmological parameters that rule the expansion of the universe must be just right for stable galaxies, solar systems, planets, and complex life to evolve. 3. The percentage of possible universes that would support life is infinitesimally small (from 2). 4. Our universe is one of those infinitesimally improbable universes. 5. Our universe has been fine-tuned to support life (from 3 & 4). 6. There is a Fine-Tuner (from 5). 7. Only God could have the power and the purpose to be the Fine-Tuner. 8. God exists.

Philosophers and physicists often speak of "The Anthropic Principle," which comes in several versions, labeled "weak," "strong" and "very strong." All three versions argue that any explanation of the universe must account for the fact that we humans ( or any complex organism that could observe its condition) exist in it. The Argument from Fine-Tuning corresponds to the Very Strong Anthropic Principle. Its upshot is that the upshot of the universe is . . . us. The universe must have been designed with us in mind.

FLAW 1: The first premise may be false. Many physicists and cosmologists, following Einstein, hope for a unified "theory of everything," which would deduce from as-yet-unknown physical laws that the physical constants of our universe had to be what they are. In that case, ours would be the only possible universe. (See also The Argument from the Intelligibility of the Universe,# 35, below).

FLAW 2: Even were we to accept the first premise, the transition from 4 to 5 is invalid. Perhaps we are living in a multiverse (a term coined by William James), a vast plurality (perhaps infinite) of parallel universes with different physical constants, all of them composing one reality. We find ourselves, unsurprisingly (since we are here doing the observing), in one of the rare universe that does support the appearance of stable matter and complex life, but nothing had to have been fine-tuned. Or perhaps we are living in an "oscillatory universe," a succession of universes with differing physical constants, each one collapsing into a point and then exploding with a new big bang into a new universe with different physical constants, one succeeding the other over an infinite time span. Again, we find ourselves, not surprisingly, in one of those time-slices in which the universe does have physical constants that support stable matter and complex life. These hypotheses, which are receiving much attention from contemporary cosmologists, are sufficient to invalidate the leap from 4 to 5.

6. The Argument from the Beauty of Physical Laws

1. Scientists use aesthetic principles (simplicity, symmetry, elegance) to discover the laws of nature. 2. Scientist s could only use aesthetic principles successfully if the laws of nature were intrinsically and objectively beautiful. 3. The laws of nature are intrinsically and objectively beautiful (from 1 & 2). 4. Only a mind-like being with an appreciation of beauty could have designed the laws of nature. 5 . God is the only being with the power and purpose to design beautiful laws of nature. 6. God exists.

FLAW 1: Do we decide an explanation is good because it's beautiful, or do we find an explanation beautiful because it provides a good explanation? When we say that the laws of nature are beautiful, what we are really saying is that the laws of nature are the laws of nature, and thus unify into elegant explanation a vast host of seemingly unrelated and random phenomena. We would find the laws of nature of any lawful universe beautiful. So what this argument boils down to is the observation that we live in a lawful universe. And of course any universe that could support the likes of us would have to be lawful. So this argument is another version of the The Anthropic Principle — we live in the kind of universe which is the only kind of universe in which observers like us could live — and thus is subject to the flaws of Argument #5.

FLAW 2: If the laws of the universe are intrinsically beautiful, then positing a God who loves beauty, and who is mysteriously capable of creating an elegant universe (and presumably a messy one as well, though his aesthetic tastes led him not to), makes the universe complex and incomprehensible all over again. This negates the intuition behind Premise 3, that the universe is intrinsically elegant and intelligible. (See The Argument from the Intelligibility of the Universe, #35 below.)

7. The Argument from Cosmic Coincidences

1. The universe contains many uncanny coincidences, such as that the diameter of the moon, as seen from the earth is the same as the diameter of the sun, as seen from the earth, which is why we can have spectacular eclipses when the corona of the sun is revealed. 2. Coincidences are, by definition, overwhelmingly improbable. 3. The overwhelmingly improbable defies all statistical explanation. 4. These coincidences are such as to enhance our awed appreciation for the beauty of the natural world. 5. These coincidences must have been designed in order to enhance our awed appreciation of the beauty of the natural world (from 3 & 4). 6. Only a being with the power to effect such uncanny coincidences and the purpose of enhancing our awed appreciation of the beauty of the natural world could have arranged these uncanny cosmic coincidences. 7. Only God could be the being with such power and such purpose. 8. God exists.

FLAW 1: Premise 3 does not follow from Premise 2. The occurrence of the highly improbable can be statistically explained in two ways. One is when we have a very large sample. A one-in-a-million event is not improbable at all if there are a million opportunities for it to occur. The other is that there is a huge number of occurrences that could be counted as coincidences, if we don't specify them beforehand but just notice them after the fact. (There could have been a constellation that forms a square around the moon; there could have been a comet that appeared on January 1, 2000; there could have been a constellation in the shape of a Star of David, etc. etc. etc.) When you consider how many coincidences are possible, the fact that we observe any one coincidence (which we notice after the fact) is not improbably but likely. And let's not forget the statistically improbable coincidences that cause havoc and suffering, rather than awe and wonder, in humans: the perfect storm, the perfect tsunami, the perfect plague, etc.

FLAW 2: The derivation of Premise 5 from Premises 3 and 4 is invalid: an example of the Projection Fallacy, in which we project the workings of our mind onto the world, and assume that our own subjective reaction is the result of some cosmic plan to cause that reaction. The human brain sees patterns in all kinds of random configurations: cloud formations, constellations, tea leaves, inkblots. That is why we are so good at finding supposed coincidences. It is getting things backwards to say that, in every case in which we see a pattern, someone deliberately put that pattern in the universe for us to see.

COMMENT: Prominent among the uncanny coincidences that figure into this argument are those having to do with numbers. Numbers are mysterious to us because they are not material objects like rocks and tables, but at the same time they seem to be real entities, ones that we can't conjure up with any properties we fancy but that have their own necessary properties and relations, and hence must somehow exist outside us (see The Argument from Our Knowledge of The Infinite, #29, and The Argument from Mathematical Reality, #30 below). We are therefore likely to attribute magical powers to them. And, given the infinity of numbers and the countless possible ways to apply them to the world, "uncanny coincidences" are bound to occur (see FLAW 1). In Hebrew, the letters are also numbers, which has given rise to the mystical art of "gematria," often used to elucidate, speculate, and prophesy about the unknowable.

8. The Argument from Personal Coincidences

1. People experience uncanny coincidences in their lives (for example, an old friend calling out of the blue just when you're thinking of him, or a dream about some event that turns out to have just happened, or missing a flight that then crashes). 2. Uncanny coincidences cannot be explained by the laws of probability (which is why we call them uncanny). 3. These uncanny coincidences, inexplicable by the laws of probability, reveal a significance to our lives. 4. Only a being who deems our lives significant and who has the power to effect these coincidences could arrange for them to happen. 5. Only God both deems our lives significant and has the power to effect these coincidences. 6. God exists.

FLAW 1: The second premise suffers from the major flaw of the Argument from Cosmic Coincidences: a large number of experiences, together with the large number of patterns that we would call "coincidences" after the fact, make uncanny coincidences probable, not improbable.

FLAW 2: Psychologists have shown that people are subject to an illusion called Confirmation Bias. When they have a hypothesis (such as that daydreams predict the future), they vividly notice all the instances that confirm it (the times when they think of a friend and he calls), and forget all the instances that don't (the times when they think of a friend and he doesn't call). Likewise, who among us remembers all the times when we miss a plane and it doesn't crash? The vast number of non-events we live through don't make an impression on us; the few coincidences do.

FLAW 3: There is an additional strong psychological bias at work here: Every one of us treats his or her own life with utmost seriousness. For all of us, there can be nothing more significant than the lives we are living. As David Hume pointed out, the self has an inclination to "spread itself on the world," projecting onto objective reality the psychological assumptions and attitudes that are too constant to be noticed, that play in the background like a noise you don't realize you are hearing until it stops. This form of the Projection Fallacy is especially powerful when it comes to the emotionally fraught questions about our own significance.

9. The Argument from Answered Prayers

1. Sometimes people pray to God for good fortune, and against enormous odds, their calls are answered. (For example, a parent prays for the life of her dying child, and the child recovers.) 2. The odds of the beneficial event happening are enormously slim (from 1). 3. The odds that the prayer would have been followed by recovery out of sheer chance are extremely small (from 2). 4. The prayer could only have been followed by the recovery if God listened to it and made it come true. 5. God exists.

This argument is similar to The Argument from Miracles below, except instead of the official miracles claimed by established religion, it refers to intimate and personal miracles.

FLAW 1: Premise 3 is indeed true. However, to use it to infer that a miracle has taken place (and an answered prayer is certainly a miracle) is to subvert it. There is nothing that is less probable than a miracle, since it constitutes a violation of a law of nature (see The Argument from Miracles, #11, below). Therefore, it is more reasonable to conclude that the correlation of the prayer and the recovery is a coincidence than that it is a miracle.

FLAW 2: The coincidence of a person praying for the unlikely to happen and its then happening is, of course, improbable. But the flaws in The Argument from Cosmic Coincidences and The Argument from Personal Coincidences apply here: Given a large enough sample of prayers (the number of times people call out to God to help them and those they love is tragically large), the improbable is bound to happen occasionally. And, given the existence of Confirmation Bias, we will notice these coincidences, yet fail to notice and count up the vastly larger number of unanswered prayers.

FLAW 3: There is an inconsistency in the moral reasoning behind this argument. It asks us to believe in a compassionate God who would be moved to pity by the desperate pleas of some among us — but not by the equally desperate pleas of others among us. Together with The Argument from A Wonderful Life, it appears to be supported by a few cherry-picked examples, but in fact is refuted by the much larger number of counterexamples it ignores: the prayers that go unanswered, the people who do not live wonderful lives. When the life is our own, or that of someone we love, we are especially liable to the Projection Fallacy, and spread our personal sense of significance onto the world at Large.

FLAW 4: Reliable cases of answered prayers always involve medical conditions that we know can spontaneously resolve themselves through the healing powers and immune system of the body, such as recovery from cancer, or a coma, or lameness. Prayers that a person can grow back a limb, or that a child can be resurrected from the dead, always go unanswered. This affirms that supposedly answered prayers are actually just the rarer cases of natural recovery.

10. The Argument from A Wonderful Life

1. Sometimes people who are lost in life find their way. 2. These people could not have known the right way on their own. 3. These people were shown the right way by something or someone other than themselves (from 2). 4. There was no person showing them the way. 5. God alone is a being who is not a person and who cares about each of us enough to show us the way. 6. Only God could have helped these lost souls (from 4 & 5). 7. God exists.

FLAW 1: Premise 2 ignores the psychological complexity of people. People have inner resources on which they draw, often without knowing how they are doing it or even that they are doing it. Psychologists have shown that events in our conscious lives—from linguistic intuitions of which sentences sound grammatical to moral intuitions of what would be the right thing to do in a moral dilemma—are the end-products of complicated mental manipulations of which we are unaware. So, too, decisions and resolutions can bubble into awareness without our being conscious of the processes that led to them. These epiphanies seem to announce themselves to us, as if they came from an external guide: another example of the Projection Fallacy.

FLAW 2: The same as FLAW 3 in The Argument from Answered Prayers, #9 above.

11. The Argument from Miracles

1. Miracles are events that violate the laws of nature. 2. Miracles can be explained only by a force that has the power of suspending the laws of nature for the purpose of making its presence known or changing the course of human history (from 1). 3. Only God has the power and the purpose to carry out miracles (from 2). 4. We have a multitude of written and oral reports of miracles. (Indeed, every major religion is founded on a list of miracles.) 5. Human testimony would be useless if it were not, in the majority of cases, veridical. 6. The best explanation for why there are so many reports testifying to the same thing is that the reports are true (from 5). 7. The best explanation for the multitudinous reports of miracles is that miracles have indeed occurred (from 6). 8. God exists (from 3 & 7).

FLAW 1: It is certainly true, as Premise 4 asserts, that we have a multitude of reports of miracles, with each religion insisting on those that establish it alone as the true religion. But the reports are not testifying to the same events; each miracle list justifies one religion at the expense of the others. See FLAW 2 in the Argument from Holy Books, #23 below.

FLAW 2: The fatal flaw in The Argument from Miracles was masterfully exposed by David Hume in An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Chapter 10, "On Miracles." Human testimony may often be accurate, but it is very far from infallible. People are sometimes mistaken; people are sometimes dishonest; people are sometimes gullible — indeed, more than sometimes. Since in order to believe that a miracle has occurred we must believe a law of nature has been violated (something for which we otherwise have the maximum of empirical evidence), and we can only believe it on the basis of the truthfulness of human testimony (which we already know is often inaccurate), then even if we knew nothing else about the event, and had no particular reason to distrust the reports of witness, we would have to conclude that it is more likely that the miracle has not occurred, and that there is an error in the testimony, than that the miracle has occurred. (Hume strengthens his argument, already strong, by observing that religion creates situations in which there are particular reasons to distrust the reports of witnesses. "But if the spirit of religion join itself to the love of wonder, there is an end of common sense.")

COMMENT: The Argument from Miracles covers more specific arguments, such as The Argument from Prophets, The Arguments from Messiahs, and the Argument from Individuals with Miraculous Powers.

12. The Argument from The Hard Problem of Consciousness

1. The Hard Problem of Consciousness consists in our difficulty in explaining why it subjectively feels like something to be a functioning brain. (This is to be distinguished from the so-called Easy Problem of Consciousness, which is not actually easy at all, and is only called so in relation to the intractable Hard Problem. See FLAW 3 below.) 2. Consciousness (in the Hard-Problem sense) is not a complex phenomenon built out of simpler ones; it can consist of irreducible "raw feels" like seeing red or tasting salt. 3. Science explains complex phenomena by reducing them to simpler ones, and reducing them to still simpler ones, until the simplest ones are explained by the basic laws of physics. 4. The basic laws of physics laws describe the properties of the elementary constituents of matter and energy, like quarks and quanta, which are not conscious. 5. Science cannot derive consciousness by reducing it to basic physical laws about the elementary constituents of matter and energy (from 2, 3, and 4). 6. Science will never solve the Hard Problem of Consciousness (from 3 and 5). 7. The explanation for consciousness must lie beyond physical laws (from 6). 8. Consciousness, lying outside physical laws, must itself be immaterial (from 7). 9. God is immaterial 10. Consciousness and God both partake in the same immaterial kind of being (from 8 and 9). 11. God has not only the means to impart consciousness to us, but also the motive, namely, to allow us to enjoy a good life, and to make it possible for our choices to cause or prevent suffering in others, thereby allowing for morality and meaning. 12. Consciousness can only be explained by positing that God inserted a spark of the divine into us (from 7, 10, & 11). 13. God exists.

FLAW 1: Premise 3 is dubious. Science often shows that properties can be emergent: they arise from complex interactions of simpler elements, even if they cannot be found in any of the elements themselves. (Water is wet, but that does not mean that every H¬2 0 molecule it is made of is also wet.) Granted, we do not have a theory of neuroscience that explains how consciousness emerges from patterns of neural activity, but to draw theological conclusions from the currently incomplete state of scientific knowledge is to commit the Fallacy of Arguing from Ignorance.

FLAW 2: Alternatively, the theory of panpsychism posits that consciousness in a low-grade form, what is often called "proto-consciousness," is inherent in matter. Our physical theories, with their mathematical methodology, have not yet been able to capture this aspect of matter, but that may just be a limitation on our mathematical physical theories. Some physicists have hypothesized that contemporary malaise about the foundations of quantum mechanics arise because physics is here confronting the intrinsic consciousness of matter, which has not yet been adequately formalized within physical theories.

FLAW 3: It has become clear that every measurable manifestation of consciousness, like our ability to describe what we feel, or let our feelings guide our behavior (the "Easy Problem" of consciousness) has been, or will be, explained in terms of neural activity (that is, every thought, feeling, and intention has a neural correlate). Only the existence of consciousness itself (the "Hard Problem") remains mysterious. But perhaps the hardness of the hard problem says more about what we find hard — the limitations of the brains of Homo sapiens when it tries to think scientifically — than about the hardness of the problem itself. Just as our brains do not allow us to visualize four-dimensional objects perhaps our brains do not allow us to understand how subjective experience arises from complex neural activity.

FLAW 4: Premise 12 is entirely unclear. How does invoking the spark of the divine explain the existence of consciousness? It is the Fallacy of Using One Mystery To Pseudo-Explain Another.

COMMENT: Premise 11 is also dubious, because our capacity to suffer is far in excess of what it would take to make moral choices possible. This will be discussed in connection with The Argument from Suffering, #25 below.

13. The Argument from The Improbable Self

1. I exist in all my particularity and contingency: not as a generic example of personhood, not as any old member of Homo sapiens, but as that unique conscious entity that I know as me. 2. I can step outside myself and view my own contingent particularity with astonishment. 3. This astonishment reveals that there must be something that accounts for why, of all the particular things that I could have been, I am just this, namely, me (from 1 & 2). 4. Nothing within the world can account for why I am just this, since the laws of the world are generic: they can explain why certain kinds of things come to be, even (let's assume) why human beings with conscious brains come to be. But nothing in the world can explain why one of those human beings should be me. 5. Only something outside the world, who cares about me, can therefore account for why I am just this (from 4). 6. God is the only thing outside the world who cares about each and every one of us. 7. God exists.

FLAW: Premise 5 is a blatant example of the Fallacy of Using One Mystery To Pseudo-Explain Another. Granted that the problem boggles the mind, but waving one's hands in the direction of God is no solution. It gives us no sense of how God can account for why I am this thing and not another.

COMMENT: In one way, this argument is reminiscent of the Anthropic Principle. There are a vast number of people who could have been born. One's own parents alone could have given birth to a vast number of alternatives to oneself—same egg, different sperm; different egg, same sperm; different egg, different sperm. Granted, one gropes for a reason for why it was, against these terrific odds, that oneself came to be born. But there may be no reason; it just happened. By the time you ask this question, you already are existing in a world in which you were born. Another analogy: the odds that the phone company would have given you your exact number are minuscule. But it had to give you some number, so asking after the fact why it should be that number is silly. Likewise, the child your parents conceived had to be someone. Now that you're born, it's no mystery why it should be you; you're the one asking the question.

14. The Argument from Survival after Death

1. There is empirical evidence that people survive after death: patients who flat-line during medical emergencies report an experience of floating over their bodies and seeing glimpses of a passage to another world, and can accurately report what happened around their bodies while they were dead to the world. 2. A person's consciousness can survive after the death of his or her body (from 1) 3. Survival after death entails the existence of an immaterial soul. 4. The immaterial soul exists (from 2 & 3). 5. If an immaterial soul exists, then God must exist (from Premise 12 in The Argument from the Hard Problem of Consciousness, #12, above). 6. God exists.

FLAW : Premise 5 is vulnerable to the same criticisms that were leveled against Premise 12 in the Argument from the Hard Problem of Consciousness. Existence after death no more implies God's existence than our existence before death does.

COMMENT: Many, of course, would dispute Premise 1. The universal experiences of people near death, such as auras and out-of-body experiences, could be hallucinations resulting from oxygen deprivation in the brain. In addition, miraculous resurrections after total brain death, and accurate reports of conversations and events that took place while the brain was not functioning, have never been scientifically documented, and are informal, secondhand examples of testimony of miracles. They are thus vulnerable to the same flaws pointed out in The Argument from Miracles. But the argument is fatally flawed even if Premise 1 is granted.

15. The Argument from the Inconceivability of Personal Annihilation

1. I cannot conceive of my own annihilation: as soon as I start to think about what it would be like not to exist, I am thinking, which implies that I would exist (as in Descartes' Cogito ergo sum), which implies that I would not be thinking about what it is like not to exist. 2. My annihilation is inconceivable (from 1). 3. What cannot be conceived, cannot be. 4. I cannot be annihilated (from 2 & 3). 5. I survive after my death (from 4) The argument now proceeds on as in the argument from Survival After Death, only substituting in 'I' for 'a person,' until we get to: 6. God exists.

FLAW 1: Premise 2 confuses psychological inconceivability with logical inconceivability. The sense in which I can't conceive of my own annihilation is like the sense in which I can't conceive of those whom I love may betray me—a failure of the imagination, not an impossible state of affairs. Thus Premise 2 ought to read "My annihilation is inconceivable to me.", which is a fact about what my brain can conceive, not a fact about what exists.

FLAW 2: Same as Flaw 3 from The Argument from the Survival of Death.

COMMENT: Though logically unsound, this is among the most powerful psychological impulses to believe in a soul, and an afterlife, and God. It genuinely is difficult—not to speak of disheartening— to conceive of oneself not existing!

16. The Argument from Moral Truth

1. There exist objective moral truths. (Slavery and torture and genocide are not just distasteful to us, but are actually wrong.) 2. These objective moral truths are not grounded in the way the world is but rather in the way that the world ought to be. (Consider: should white-supremacists succeed, taking over the world and eliminating all who don't meet their criteria for being existence-worthy, their ideology still would be morally wrong. It would be true, under this hideous counterfactual, that the world ought not to be the way they have made it.) 3. The world itself — the way that it is, the laws of science that explain why it is that way — cannot account for the way that the world ought to be. 4. The only way to account for morality is that God established morality (from 2 and 3). 5. God exists.

FLAW 1: The major flaw of this argument is revealed in a powerful argument that Plato made famous in the Euthyphro. Reference to God does not help in the least to ground the objective truth of morality. The question is: why did God choose the moral rules he did? Did he have a reason justifying his choice that, say, giving alms to the poor is good, while genocide is wrong? Either he had a good reason or he didn't. If he did, then his reasons, whatever they are, can provide the grounding for moral truths for us, and God himself is redundant. And if he didn't have a good reason, then his choices are arbitrary—he could just as easily have gone the other way, making charity bad and genocide good—and we would have no reason to take his choices seriously. According to theEuthyphro argument, then, the Argument from Moral Truth is another example of The Fallacy of Passing the Buck. The hard work of moral philosophy consists in grounding morality in some version of the Golden Rule: that I cannot be committed to my own interests mattering in a way that yours do not just because I am me and you are not.

FLAW 2: Premise 4 is belied by the history of religion, which shows that the God from which people draw their morality (for example, the God of the Bible and the Koran) did not establish what we now recognize to be morality at all. The God of the Old Testament commanded people to keep slaves, slay their enemies, execute blasphemers and homosexuals, and commit many other heinous acts. Of course, our interpretation of which aspects of Biblical morality to take seriously has grown more sophisticated over time, and we read the Bible selectively and often metaphorically. But that is just the point: we must be consulting some standards of morality that do not come from God in order to judge which aspects of God's word to take literally and which aspects to ignore.

COMMENT : Some would question the first premise, and regard its assertion as a flaw of this argument. Slavery and torture and genocide are wrong by our lights, they would argue, and conflict with certain values we hold dear, such as freedom and happiness. But those are just subjective values, and it is obscure to say that statements that are consistent with those values are objectively true in the same way that mathematical or scientific statements can be true. But the argument is fatally flawed even if Premise 1 is granted.

17. The Argument from Altruism

1. People often act altruistically — namely, against their interests. They help others, at a cost to themselves, out of empathy, fairness, decency, and integrity. 2. Natural selection can never favor true altruism, because genes for selfishness will always out-compete genes for altruism (recall that altruism, by definition, exacts a cost to the actor). 3. Only a force acting outside of natural selection and intending for us to be moral could account for our ability to act altruistically (from 2). 4. God is the only force outside of natural selection that could intend us to be moral. 5. God must have implanted the moral instinct within us (from 3 & 4). 6. God exists.

FLAW 1: Theories of the evolution of altruism by natural selection have been around for decades and are now widely supported by many kinds of evidence. A gene for being kind to one's kin, even if it hurts the person doing the favor, can be favored by evolution, because that gene would be helping a copy of itself that is shared by the kin. And a gene for conferring a large benefit to a non-relative at a cost to oneself can evolve if the favor-doer is the beneficiary of a return favor at a later time. Both parties are better off, in the long run, from the exchange of favors.

Some defenders of religion do not consider these theories to be legitimate explanations of altruism, because a tendency to favor one's kin, or to trade favors, are ultimately just forms of selfishness for one's genes, rather than true altruism. But this is a confusion of the original phenomenon: we are trying to explain why people are sometimes altruistic, not why genes are altruistic. (We have no reason to believe that genes are ever altruistic in the first place!) Also, in a species with language, namely humans, committed altruists develop a reputation for being altruistic, and thereby win more friends, allies, and trading partners. This can give rise to selection for true, committed, altruism, not just the tit-for-tat exchange of favors.

FLAW 2: We have evolved higer mental faculties, such as self-reflection and logic, that allow us to reason about the world, to persuade other people to form alliances with us, to learn from our mistakes, and to achieve other feats of reason. Those same faculties, when they are honed through debate, reason, and knowledge, can allow us to step outside ourselves, learn about other people's point of view, and act in a way that we can justify as maximizing everyone's well-being. We are capable of moral reasoning because we are capable of reasoning in general.

FLAW 3: In some versions of the Argument from Altruism, God succeeds in getting people to act altruistically because he promises them a divine reward and threatens them with divine retribution. People behave altruistically to gain a reward or avoid a punishment in the life to come. This argument is self-contradictory. It aims to explain how people act without regard to their self-interest, but then assumes that there could be no motive for acting altruistically other than self-interest.

18. The Argument from Free Will

1. Having free will means having the freedom to choose our actions, rather than their being determined by some prior cause. 2. If we don't have free will, then we are not agents, for then we are not really acting, but rather we're being acted upon. (That's why we don't punish people for involuntary actions—such as a teller who hands money to a bank robber at gunpoint, or a driver who injures a pedestrian after a defective tire blows out.) 3. To be a moral agent means to be held morally responsible for what one does. 4. If we can't be held morally responsible for anything we do then the very idea of morality is meaningless. 5. Morality is not meaningless. 6. We have free will (from 2- 5). 7. We, as moral agents, are not subject to the laws of nature, in particular, the neural events in a genetically and environmentally determined brain (from 1 and 6). 8. Only a being who is apart from the laws of nature and partakes of the moral sphere could explain our being moral agents (from 7). 9. Only God is a being who is apart from the laws of nature and partakes of the moral sphere. 10. Only God can explain our moral agency (from 8 & 9). 11. God exists.

FLAW 1: This argument, in order to lead to God, must ignore the paradoxical Fork of Free Will. Either my actions are predictable (from my genes, my upbringing, my brain state, my current situation, and so on), or they are not. If they are predictable, then there is no reason to deny that they are caused, and we would not have free will. So they must be unpredictable, in other words, random. But if our behavior is random, then in what sense can it be attributable to us at all? If it really is a random event when I give the infirm man my seat in the subway, then in what sense is itme to whom this good deed should be attributed? If the action isn't caused by my psychological states, which are themselves caused by other states, then in one way is it really my action? And what good would it do to insist on moral responsibility, if our choices are random, and cannot be predicted from prior events (such as growing up in a society that holds people responsible)? This leads us back to the conclusion that we, as moral agents must be parts of the natural world-- the very negation of 7.

FLAW 2: Premise 10 is an example of the Fallacy of Using One Mystery to Pseudo-Explain Another. It expresses, rather than dispels, the confusion we feel when faced with the Fork of Free Will. The paradox has not been clarified in the least by introducing God into the analysis.

COMMENT: Free will is yet another quandary that takes us to the edge of our human capacity for understanding. The concept is baffling, because our moral agency seems to demand both that our actions be determined, and also that they not be determined.

19. The Argument from Personal Purpose

1. If there is no purpose to a person's life, then that person's life is pointless. 2. Human life cannot be pointless. 3. Each human life has a purpose (from 1 & 2). 4. The purpose of each individual person's life must derive from the overall purpose of existence. 5. There is an overall purpose of existence (from 3 and 4) 6. Only a being who understood the overall purpose of existence could create each person according to the purpose that person is meant to fulfill. 7. Only God could understand the overall purpose of creation. 8. There can be a point to human existence only if God exists (from 6 & 7). 9. God exists.

FLAW 1: The first premise rests on a confusion between the purpose of an action and the purpose of a life. It is human activities that have purposes—or don't. We study for the purpose of educating and supporting ourselves. We eat right and exercise for the purpose of being healthy. We warn children not to accept rides with strangers for the purpose of keeping them safe. We donate to charity for the purpose of helping the poor (just as we would want someone to help us if we were poor.) The notion of a person's entire life serving a purpose, above and beyond the purpose of all the person's choices, is obscure. Might it mean the purpose for which the person was born? That implies that some goal-seeking agent decided to bring our lives into being to serve some purpose. Then who is that goal-seeking agent? Parents often purposively have children, but we wouldn't want to see a parent's wishes as the purpose of the child's life. If the goal-seeking agent is God, the argument becomes circular: we make sense of the notion of "the purpose of a life" by stipulating that the purpose is whatever God had in mind when he created us, but then argue for the existence of God because he is the only one who could have designed us with a purpose in mind.

FLAW 2: Premise 2 states that human life cannot be pointless. But of course it could be pointless in the sense meant by this argument: lacking a purpose in the grand scheme of things. It could very well be the there is no grand scheme of things because there is no Grand Schemer. By assuming that there is a grand scheme of things, it assumes that there is a schemer whose scheme it is, which circularly assumes the conclusion.

COMMENT: It's important not to confuse the notion of "pointless" in Premise 2 with notions like "not worth living" or "expendable." It is probably confusions of this sort that give Premise 2 its appeal. But we can very well maintain that each human life is precious—is worth living, is not expendable—without maintaining that each human life has a purpose in the overall scheme of things.

20. The Argument from the Intolerability of Insignificance

1. In a million years nothing that happens now will matter. 2. By the same token, anything that happens at any point in time will not matter from the point of view of some other time a million years distant from it into the future. 3. No point in time can confer mattering on any other point, for each suffers from the same problem of not mattering itself (from 2). 4. It is intolerable (or inconceivable, or unacceptable) that in a million years nothing that happens now will matter. 5. What happens now will matter in a million years (from 4). 6. It is only from the point of view of eternity that what happens now will matter even in a million years (from 3). 7. Only God can inhabit the point of view of eternity. 8. God exists.

FLAW: Premise 4 is illicit: it is of the form "This argument must be correct, because it is intolerable that this argument is not correct." The argument is either circular, or an example of the Fallacy of Wishful Thinking. Maybe we won't matter in a million years, and there's just nothing we can do about it. If that is the case, we shouldn't declare that it is intolerable—we just have to live with it. Another way of putting it is: we should take ourselves seriously (being mindful of what we do, and the world we leave our children and grandchildren), but we shouldn't take ourselves that seriously, and arrogantly demand that we must matter in a million years.

21. The Argument from the Consensus of Humanity

1. Every culture in every epoch has had theistic beliefs. 2. When peoples, widely separated by both space and time, hold similar beliefs, the best explanation is that those beliefs are true. 3. The best explanation for why every culture has had theistic beliefs is that those beliefs are true. 4. God exists.

FLAW: 2 is false. Widely separated people could very well come up with the same false beliefs. Human nature is universal, and thus prone to universal illusions and shortcomings of perception, memory, reasoning, and objectivity. Also , many of the needs and terrors and dependencies of the human condition (such as the knowledge of our own mortality, and the attendant desire not to die) are universal. Our beliefs don't arise only from well-evaluated reasoning, but from wishful thinking, self-deception, self-aggrandizement, gullibility, false memories, visual illusions, and other mental glitches. Well-grounded beliefs may be the exception rather than the rule when it comes to psychologically fraught beliefs, which tend to bypass rational grounding and spring instead from unexamined emotions. The fallacy of arguing that if an idea is universally held then it must be true was labeled by the ancient logicians consensus gentium.

22. The Argument from the Consensus of Mystics

1. Mystics go into a special state in which they seem to see aspects of reality that elude everyday experience. 2. We cannot evaluate the truth of their experiences from the viewpoint of everyday experience (from 1) 3. There is a unanimity among mystics as to what they experience. 4. When there is unanimity among observers as to what they experience, then unless they are all deluded in the same way, the best explanation for their unanimity is that their experiences are true. 5. There is no reason to think that mystics are all deluded in the same way. 6. The best explanation for the unanimity of mystical experience is that what mystics perceive is true (from 4 & 5). 7. Mystical experiences unanimously testify to the transcendent presence of God. 8. God exists.

FLAW 1 : Premise 5 is disputable. There is indeed reason to think mystics might be deluded in similar ways. The universal human nature that refuted the Argument from the Consensus of Humanity entails that the human brain can be stimulated in unusual ways that give rise to universal (but not objectively correct) experiences. The fact that we can stimulate the temporal lobes of non-mystics and induce mystical experiences in them is evidence that mystics might indeed all be deluded in similar ways. Certain drugs can also induce feelings of transcendence, such as an enlargement of perception beyond the bounds of effability, a melting of the boundaries of the self, a joyful expansion out into an existence that seems to be all One, with all that Oneness pronouncing Yes upon us. Such experiences, which, as William James points out, are most easily attained by getting drunk, are of the same kind as the mystical: "The drunken consciousness is one bit of the mystic consciousness." Of course, we do not exalt the stupor and delusions of drunkenness because weknow what caused them. The fact that the same effects can overcome a person when we know what caused them (and hence don't call the experience "mystical") — is reason to suspect that the causes of mystical experiences also lie within internal excitations of the brain having nothing to do with perception.

FLAW 2: The struggle to put the ineffable contents of abnormal experiences into language inclines the struggler toward pre-existing religious language, which is the only language that most of us have been exposed to which overlaps with the unusual sensations of an altered state of consciousness. This observation casts doubt on Premise 7.See also The Argument from Sublimity, #34 below.

23. The Argument from Holy Books

1. There are holy books that reveal the word of God. 2. The word of God is necessarily true. 3. The word of God reveals the existence of God. 4. God exists.

FLAW 1: This is a circular argument if ever there was one. The first three premises cannot be maintained unless one independently knows the very conclusion to be proved, namely that God exists.

FLAW 2: A glance at the world's religions shows that there are numerous books and scrolls and doctrines and revelations that all claim to reveal the word of God. But they are mutually incompatible. Should I believe that Jesus is my personal savior? Or should I believe that God made a covenant with the Jews requiring every Jew to keep the commandments of the Torah? Should I believe that Mohammad was Allah's last prophet and that Ali, the prophet's cousin and husband of his daughter Fatima, ought to have been the first caliph, or that Mohammad was Allah's last prophet and that Ali was the fourth and last caliph? Should I believe that the resurrected prophet Moroni dictated the Book of Mormon to Joseph Smith? Or that Ahura Mazda, the benevolent Creator, is at cosmic war with the malevolent Angra Mainyu? And on and on it goes. Only the most arrogant provincialism could allow someone to believe that the holy documents that happen to be held sacred by the clan he was born into are true, while all the documents held sacred by the clans he wasn't born into are false.

24. The Argument from Perfect Justice

1. This world provides numerous instances of imperfect justice — bad things happening to good people and good things happening to bad people. 2. It violates our sense of justice that imperfect justice may prevail. 3. There must be a transcendent realm in which perfect justice prevails (from 1 and 2). 4. A transcendent realm in which perfect justice prevails entails the Perfect Judge. 5. The Perfect Judge is God. 6. God exists.

FLAW: This is a good example of the Fallacy of Wishful Thinking. Our wishes for how the world should be need not be true; just because we want there to be some realm in which perfect justice applies does not mean that there is such a realm. In other words, there is no way to pass from Premise 2 to Premise 3 without the Fallacy of Wishful Thinking.

25. The Argument from Suffering

1. There is much suffering in this world. 3. Some suffering (or at least its possibility) is a demanded by human moral agency: if people could not choose evil acts that cause suffering, moral choice would not exist. 4.Whatever suffering cannot be explained as the result of human moral agency must also have some purpose (from 2 & 3). 5. There are virtues — forbearance, courage, compassion, and so on — that can only develop in the presence of suffering. We may call them "the virtues of suffering." 6. Some suffering has the purpose of our developing the virtues of suffering (from 5). 7. Even taking 3 and 6 into account, the amount of suffering in the world is still enormous — far more than what is required for us to benefit from suffering. 8. Moreover, there are those who suffer who can never develop the virtues of suffering--children, animals, those who perish in their agony. 9. There is more suffering than we can explain by reference to the purposes that we can discern (from 7 & 8). 10 There are purposes for suffering that we cannot discern (from 2 and 9). 11. Only a being who has a sense of purpose beyond ours could provide the purpose of all suffering (from 10). 12. Only God could have a sense of purpose beyond ours. 13. God exists.

FLAW: This argument is a sorrowful one, since it highlights the most intolerable feature of our world, the excess of suffering. The suffering in this world is excessive in both its intensity and its prevalence, often undergone by those who can never gain anything from it. This is a powerful argument against the existence of a compassionate and powerful deity. It is only the Fallacy of Wishful Thinking, embodied in Premise 2, that could make us presume that what is psychologically intolerable cannot be the case.

26. The Argument from the Survival of The Jews

1. The Jews introduced the world to the idea of the one God, with his universal moral code 2. The survival of the Jews, living for milliennia without a country of their own, and facing a multitude of enemies that sought to destroy not only their religion but all remnants of the race, is a historical unlikelihood. 3. The Jews have survived against vast odds (from 2). 4. There is no natural explanation for so unlikely an event as the survival of the Jews (from 3). 5. The best explanation is that they have some transcendent purpose to play in human destiny (from 1 and 4). 6. Only God could have assigned a transcendent destiny to the Jews. 7. God exists.

FLAW 1: The fact that the Jews, after the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans, had no country of their own made it more likely, rather than less likely, that they would survive as a people. If they had been concentrated in one country, they would surely have been conquered by one of history's great empires, as happened to other vanished tribes. But a people dispersed across a vast diaspora is more resilient, which is why other stateless peoples, like the Parsis and Roma, have also survived for millennia, often against harrowing odds. Moreover, the Jews encouraged cultural traits — such as literacy, urban living, specialization in middleman occupations, and an extensive legal code to govern their internal affairs --that gave them further resilience against the vicissitudes of historical change. The survival of the Jews, therefore, is not a miraculous improbability.

COMMENT: The persecution of the Jews need not be seen as a part of a cosmic moral drama. The unique role that Judaism played in disseminating monotheism, mostly through the organs of its two far more popular monotheistic offshoots, Christianity and Islam, has bequeathed to its adherents an unusual amount of attention, mostly negative, from adherents of those other monotheistic religions.

27. The Argument from The Upward Curve of History

1. There is an upward moral curve to human history (tyrannies fall; the evil side loses in major wars; democracy, freedom, and civil rights spread). 2. Natural selection's favoring of those who are fittest to compete for resources and mates has bequeathed humankind selfish and aggressive traits. 3. Left to their own devices, a selfish and aggressive species could not have ascended up a moral curve over the course of history (from 2). 4.Only God has the power and the concern for us to curve history upward. 5. God exists.

FLAW: Though our species has inherited traits of selfishness and aggression, we have also inherited capacities for empathy, reasoning, and learning from experience. We have also inherited language, and with it a means to pass on the lessons we have learned from history. And so humankind has slowly reasoned its way toward a broader and more sophisticated understanding of morality, and more effective institutions for keeping peace. We make moral progress as we do scientific progress, through reasoning, experimentation, and the rejection of failed alternatives.

28. The Argument from Prodigious Genius

1. Genius is the highest level of creative capacity, the level which, by definition, defies explanation. 2. Genius does not happen by way of natural psychological processes (from 1). 3. The cause of genius must lie outside of natural psychological processes (from 2). 4. The insights of genius have helped in the cumulative progress of humankind — scientific, technological, philosophical, moral, artistic, societal, political, spiritual. 5. The cause of genius must both lie outside of natural psychological processes and be such as to care about the progress of humankind (from 3 and 4). 6. Only God could work outside of natural psychological processes and create geniuses to light the path of humankind. 7. God exists.

FLAW 1: The psychological traits that go into human accomplishment, such as intelligence and perseverance, are heritable. By the laws of probability, rare individuals will inherit a concentrated dose of those genes. Given a nurturing cultural context, these individuals will, some of the time, exercise their powers to accomplish great feats. Those are the individuals we call geniuses. We may not know enough about genetics, neuroscience, and cognition to explain exactly what makes for a Mozart or an Einstein, but exploiting this gap to argue for supernatural provenance is an example of The Fallacy of Arguing from Ignorance.

FLAW 2: Human genius is not consistently applied to human betterment. Consider weapons of mass destruction, computer viruses, Hitler's brilliantly effective rhetoric, or those criminal geniuses (for example electronic thieves) who are so cunning that they elude detection.

29. The Argument from Human Knowledge of Infinity

1. We are finite, and everything with which we come into physical contact is finite. 2. We have a knowledge of the infinite, demonstrably so in mathematics. 3. We could not have derived this knowledge of the infinite from the finite, from anything which we are and come in contact with (from 1). 4. Only something itself infinite could have implanted knowledge of the infinite in us ( from 2 and 3). 5. God would want us to have a knowledge of the infinite, both for the cognitive pleasure it affords us and because it allows us to come to know him, who is himself infinite. 6. God is the only entity both that is infinite and that could have an intention of implanting the knowledge of the infinite within us (from 4 & 5). 7. God exists.

FLAW: There are certain computational procedures governed by what logicians call recursive rules. A recursive rule is one that refers to itself, and hence it can be applied to its own output ad infinitum. For example, we can define a natural number recursively: 1 is a natural number and if you add 1 to a natural number, the result is a natural number. We can apply this rule an indefinite number of times and thereby generate an infinite series of natural numbers. Recursive rules allow a finite system (a set of rules, a computer, a brain) to reason about an infinity of objects, refuting Premise 3.

COMMENT: I n 1931 the young logician Kurt Gödel published a paper proving a result called the Incompleteness Theorem (actually there are two). Basically, what Gödel demonstrated is that recursive rules cannot capture all of arithmetic. So though the flaw discussed above is sufficient to invalidate Premise 3 , it should not be understood as suggesting that all of our mathematical knowledge is reducible to recursive rules.

30. The Argument from Mathematical Reality

1. Mathematical truths are necessarily true. (There is no possible world in which, say, 2 plus 2 does not equal 4, or in which the square root of 2 can be expressed as the ratio of two whole numbers.) 2. The truths that describe our physical world, no matter how fundamental, are empirical, requiring observational evidence. (So, for example, we await some empirical means to test string theory, in order to find out whether we live in a world of eleven dimensions.) 3. Truths that require empirical evidence are not necessary truths. (We require empirical evidence because there are possible worlds in which these are not truths, and so we have to test that ours is not such a world.) 4. The truths of our physical world are not necessary truths (from 2 and 3). 5. The truths of our physical world cannot explain mathematical truths (from 1 and 4). 6. Mathematical truths exist on a different plane of existence from physical truths (from 5). 7. Only something which itself exists on a different plane of existence from the physical can explain mathematical truths (from 6). 8. Only God can explain mathematical truths (from 7). 9. God exists.

Mathematics is derived through pure reason — what the philosophers call a priori reason — which means that it cannot be refuted by any empirical observations. The fundamental question in philosophy of mathematics is: how can mathematics be true but not empirical? Is it because mathematics describes some trans-empirical reality — as mathematical realists believe — or is it because mathematics has no content at all and is a purely formal game consisting of stipulated rules and their consequences? The Argument from Mathematical Reality assumes, in its third premise, the position of mathematical realism, which isn't a fallacy in itself; many mathematicians believe it, some of them arguing that it follows from Gödel's incompleteness theorems (see the COMMENT in The Argument from Human Knowledge of Infinity, #30 above). This argument, however, goes further and tries to deduce God's existence from the trans-empirical existence of mathematical reality.

FLAW 1: The inference of 5, from 1 and 4, does not take into account the formalist response to the non-empirical nature of mathematics.

FLAW 2: Even if one, Platonistically, accepts the derivation of 5 and then 6, there is something fishy about proceeding onward to 7, with its presumption that something outside of mathematical reality must explain the existence of mathematical reality. Lurking within 7 is the hidden premise: mathematical truths must be explained by reference to non-mathematical truths. But why? If God can be self-explanatory, as this argument presumes, why then can't mathematical reality be self-explanatory — especially since the truths of mathematics are, as this argument asserts, necessarily true?

FLAW 3: Mathematical reality — if indeed it exists — is, admittedly, mysterious. But invoking God does not dispel this puzzlement; it is an instance of "The Fallacy of Using One Mystery to Pseudo-Explain Another." The mystery of God's existence is often used, by those who assert it, as an explanatory sink hole.

31.The Argument from Decision Theory (Pascal's Wager)

1. Either God exists or God doesn't exist. 2. A person can either believe that God exists or believe that God doesn't exist(from 1). 3. If God exists and you believe, you receive eternal salvation. 4. If God exists and you don't believe, you receive eternal damnation. 5. If God doesn't exist and you believe, you've been duped, have wasted time in religious observance, and have missed out on decadent enjoyments. 6. If God doesn't exist, and you don't believe, then you have avoided a false belief. 7. You have much more to gain by believing in God than not believing in him, and much more to lose by not believing in God than believing in him (from, 3, 4, 5, & 6) 8. It is more rational to believe that God exists than to believe that he doesn't exist (from 7).

This unusual argument does not justify the conclusion that "God exists." Rather it argues that it is rational to believe that God exists, given that we don't know whether he exists.

FLAW 1: The "believe" option in Pascal's wager can be interpreted in two ways.

One is that the wagerer genuinely has to believe, deep down, that God exists; in other words, it is not enough to mouth a creed, or merely act as if God exists. According to this interpretation, God, if He exists, can peer into a person's soul and discern the person's actual convictions. If so, the kind of "belief" that Pascal's wager advises — a purely pragmatic strategy, chosen because the expected benefits exceed the expected costs — would not be enough. Indeed, it's not even clear that this option is coherent: if one chooses to believe something because of the consequences of holding that belief, rather than being intuitively convinced of it, is it really a belief, or just an empty vow?

The other interpretation is that it is enough to act in the way that traditional believers act: say prayers, go to services, recite the appropriate creed, and go through the other motions of religion.

The problem is that Pascal's wager offers no guidance as to which prayers, which services, whichcreed, to live by. Say I chose to believe in the Zoroastrian cosmic war between Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu to avoid the wrath of the former, while the real fact of the matter is that God gave the Torah to the Jews, and I am thereby inviting the wrath of Yahweh (or vice-versa). Given all the things I could "believe" in, I am in constant danger of incurring the negative consequences of disbelief even though I choose the "belief" option. The fact that Blaise Pascal stated his wager as two stark choices, putting the outcomes in blatantly Christian terms — eternal salvation and eternal damnation — reveals more about his own upbringing than they do about the logic of belief. The wager simply codifies his particular "live options," to use William James's term, for the only choices that seem possible to a given believer.

FLAW 2: Pascal's wager assumes a petty, egotistical, and vindictive God who punishes anyone who does not believe in him. But the great monotheistic religions all declare that "mercy" is one of God's essential traits. A merciful God would surely have some understanding of why a person may not believe in him (if the evidence for God were obvious, the fancy reasoning of Pascal's wager would not be necessary), and so would extend compassion to a nonbeliever. (Bertrand Russell, when asked what he would have to say to God if, despite his philosophical atheism, he were to die and face his Creator, responded, "Oh, Lord, why did you not provide more evidence?') The nonbeliever therefore should have nothing to worry about — falsifying the negative payoff in the lower-left-hand cell of the matrix.

FLAW 3: The calculations of expected value in Pascal's wager omit a crucial part of the mathematics: the probabilities of each of the two columns, which have to be multiplied with the payoff in each cell to determine the expected value of each cell. If the probability of God's existence (ascertained by other means) is infinitesimal, then even if the cost of not believing in him is high, the overall expectation may not make it worthwhile to choose the "believe" row (after all, we take many other risks in life with severe possible costs but low probabilities, such as boarding an airplane). One can see how this invalidates Pascal's Wager by considering similar wagers. Say I told you that a fire-breathing dragon has moved into the next apartment and that unless you set out a bowl of marshmallows for him every night he will force his way into your apartment and roast you to a crisp. According to Pascal's wager, you should leave out the marshmallows. Of course you don't, even though you are taking a terrible risk in choosing not to believe in the dragon, because you don't assign a high enough probability to the dragon's existence to justify even the small inconvenience.

32. The Argument from Pragmatism

(William James's Leap of Faith)

1. The consequences for the believer's life of believing should be considered as part of the evidence for the truth of the belief (just as the effectiveness of a scientific theory in its practical applications is considered evidence for the truth of the theory). Call this the pragmatic evidence for the belief. 2. Certain beliefs effect a change for the better in the believer's life — the necessary condition being that they are believed. 3. The belief in God is a belief that effects a change for the better in a person's life. 4. If one tries to decide whether or not to believe in God based on the evidence available, one will never get the chance to evaluate the pragmatic evidence for the beneficial consequences of believing in God (from 2 and 3). 5. One ought to make 'the leap of faith' (the term is James's) and believe in God, and only then evaluate the evidence (from 1 and 4).

This argument can be read out of William James's classic essay "The Will to Believe." The first premise , as presented here, is a little less radical than James's pragmatic definition of truth in general, according to which a proposition is true if believing that it is true has a cumulative beneficial effect on the believer's life. The pragmatic definition of truth has severe problems, including possible incoherence: in evaluating the effects of the belief on the believer, we have to know the truth about what those effects are, which forces us to fall back on the old-fashioned notion of truth. To make the best case for The Argument from Pragmatism, therefore, the first premise is here understood as claiming only that the pragmatic consequences of belief are a relevant source of evidence in ascertaining the truth, not that they can actually be equated with the truth.

FLAW 1: What exactly does effecting "a change for the better on the believer's life" mean? For an antebellum Southerner, there was more to be gained in believing that slavery is morally permissible than in believing it heinous. It often doesn't pay to be an iconoclast or revolutionary thinker, no matter how much truer your ideas are than the ideas opposing you. It didn't improve Galileo's life to believe that the earth moved around the sun rather than that the sun and the heavens revolve around the earth. (Of course, you could say that it's always intrinsically better to believe something true rather than something false, but then you're just using the language of the pragmatist to mask a non-pragmatic notion of truth.)

FLAW 2: The Argument from Pragmatism implies an extreme relativism regarding the truth, because the effects of belief differ for different believers. A profligate, impulsive drunkard may have to believe in a primitive retributive God who will send him to Hell if he doesn't stay out of barroom fights, whereas a contemplative mensch may be better off with an abstract deistic presence who completes his deepest existential world view. But either there is a vengeful God who sends sinners to Hell or there isn't. If one allows pragmatic consequences to determine truth, then truth becomes relative to the believer, which is incoherent.

FLAW 3: Why should we only consider the pragmatic effects on the believer's life? What about the effects on everyone else? The history of religious intolerance, including inquisitions, fatwas, and suicide bombers, suggests that the effects on one person's life of another person's believing in God can be pretty grim.

FLAW 4: The pragmatic argument for God suffers from the first flaw of The Argument from Decision Theory (#31 above) — namely the assumption that the belief in God is like a faucet that one can turn on and off as the need arises. If I make the leap of faith in order to evaluate the pragmatic consequences of belief, then if those consequences are not so good, can I leap back again to disbelief? Isn't a leap of faith a one-way maneuver? "The will to believe" is an oxymoron: beliefs are forced on a person (ideally, by logic and evidence); they are not chosen for their consequences.

33. The Argument from the Unreasonableness of Reason

1. Our belief in reason cannot be justified by reason, since that would be circular. 2. Our belief in reason must be accepted on faith (from 1). 3. Every time we exercise reason we are exercising faith (from 2). 4. Faith provides good rational grounds for beliefs (since it is, in the final analysis, necessary even for the belief in reason — from 3). 5. We are justified in using faith for any belief that is so important to our lives that not believing it would render us incoherent (from 4). 6. We cannot avoid faith in God if we are to live coherent moral and purposeful lives. 7. We are justified in believing that God exists (from 5 & 6). 8. God exists.

Reason is a faculty of thinking, the very faculty of giving grounds for our beliefs. To justify reason would be to try to give grounds for the belief: "We ought to accept the conclusions of sound arguments." Let's say we produce a sound argument for the conclusion that "we ought to accept the conclusions of sound arguments." How could we legitimately accept the conclusion of that sound argument without independently knowing the conclusion? Any attempt to justify the very propositions that we must use in order to justify propositions is going to land us in circularity.

FLAW 1: This argument tries to generalize the inability of reason to justify itself to an abdication of reason when it comes to justifying God's existence. But the inability of reason to justify reason is a unique case in epistemology, not an illustration of a flaw of reason that can be generalized to some other kind of belief — and certainly not a belief in the existence of some entity with specific properties such as creating the world or defining morality.

Indeed, one could argue that the attempt to justify reason with reason is not circular, but rather, unnecessary. One already is, and always will be, committed to reason by the very process one is already engaged in, namely reasoning. Reason is non-negotiable; all sides concede it. It needs no justification, because it is justification. A belief in God is not like that at all.

FLAW 2: If one really took the unreasonability of reason as a license to believe things on faith, then which things should one believe in? If it is a license to believe in a single God who gave his son for our sins, why isn't it just as much a license to believe in Zeus and all the other Greek gods, or the three major gods of Hinduism, or the angel Moroni? For that matter, why not Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy? If one says that there are good reasons to accept some entities on faith, while rejecting others, then one is saying that it is ultimately reason, not faith, that must be invoked to justify a belief.

FLAW 3: Premise 6, which claims that a belief in God is necessary in order to have a purpose in one's life, or to be moral, has already been challenged in the discussions of The Argument from Moral Truth (#16 above) and The Argument from Personal Purpose (#19 above).

34. The Argument from Sublimity

1. There are experiences that are windows into the wholeness of existence — its grandeur, beauty, symmetry, harmony, unity, even its goodness. 2. We glimpse a benign transcendence in these moments. 3. Only God could provide us with a glimpse of benign transcendence. 4. God exists.

FLAW: An experience of sublimity is an aesthetic experience Aesthetic experience can indeed be intense and blissful, absorbing our attention so completely while exciting our pleasure that they seem to lift us right out of ourselves. Aesthetic experiences vary in their strength, and when they are overwhelming, we grope for terms like "transcendence" to describe the overwhelmingness. Yet for all that, aesthetic experiences are still, more than likely, internal excitations of the brain, as we see from the fact that ingesting recreational drugs can bring on even more intense experiences of transcendence. And the particular triggers for natural aesthetic experiences are readily explicable from the evolutionary pressures that have shaped the perceptual systems of human beings. An eye for sweeping vistas, dramatic skies, bodies of water, large animals, flowering and fruiting plants, and strong geometric patterns with repetition and symmetry, was necessary to orient attention to aspects of the environment that were matters of life and death to the species as it evolved in its natural environment. The identification of a blissfully aesthetic experience with a glimpse into benign transcendence is an example of The Projection Fallacy, dramatic demonstrations of our spreading ourselves onto the world. This is most obvious when the experience gets fleshed out into the religious terms that come most naturally to the particular believer, such as a frozen waterfall being seen by a Christian as a manifestation of the Christian trinity. One does not detract anything from the sublimity of aesthetic experiences by seeing them for what they are, namely sublime aesthetic experiences. Music, too, produces such experiences, though there we know exactly who the creators were.

35. The Argument from the Intelligibility of the World

(Spinoza's God)

1. All facts must have explanations. 2. The fact that there is a universe at all — and that it is this universe, with just these laws of nature — has an explanation (from 1). 3.There must, in principle, be a Theory of Everything that explains why just this universe, with these laws of nature, exists (from 2. Note that this premise should not be interpreted as entailing that we have the capacity to come up with a Theory of Everything; it may elude the cognitive abilities we have.) 4. If The Theory of Everything explains everything, it explains why it is the Theory of Everything. 5. The only way that the Theory of Everything could explain why it is the Theory of Everything is if it is itself necessarily true (i.e. true in all possible worlds). 6. The Theory of Everything is necessarily true (from 4 & 5). 7. The universe, understood in terms of the Theory of Everything, exists necessarily and explains itself (from 6). 8. That which exists necessarily and explains itself is God (a definition of "God"). 9. The universe is God (from 7 & 8). 10. God exists.

Whenever Einstein was asked whether he believed in God, he responded that he believed in "Spinoza's God." This argument presents Spinoza's God. It is one of the most elegant and subtle arguments for God's existence, demonstrating where one ends up if one rigorously eschews the Fallacy of Invoking One Mystery to Pseudo-Explain Another: one ends up with the universe, and nothing but the universe: a universe which itself provides all the answers to all the questions one can pose about it. A major problem with the argument, however, in addition to the flaws discussed below, is that it is not at all clear that it is God whose existence is being proved. Spinoza's conclusion is that the universe that is described by the laws of nature simply is God. Perhaps the conclusion should, rather, be that the universe is different from what it appears to be — no matter how arbitrary and chaotic it may appear, it is in fact perfectly lawful and necessary, and therefore worthy of our awe. But is its awe-inspiring lawfulness reason enough to regard it as God? Spinoza's God is sharply at variance with all other divine conceptions.

The argument has only one substantive premise, its first one, which, though unproved, is not unreasonable; it is, in fact, the claim that the universe itself is thoroughly reasonable. Though this first premise can't be proved, it is the guiding faith of many physicists (including Einstein). It is the claim that everything must have an explanation; even the laws of nature, in terms of which processes are explained, must have an explanation. In other words, there has to be an explanation for why it is these laws of nature rather than some other, which is another way of asking for why it is this world rather than some other.

FLAW: The first premise can be challenged. Our world could conceivably be one in which randomness and contingency have free reign, no matter what the intuitions of some scientists are. Maybe some things just are ("stuff happens"), including the fundamental laws of nature. Philosophers sometimes call this just- is-ness "contingency" and, if the fundamental laws of nature are contingent, then even if everything that happens in the world is explainable by those laws, the laws themselves couldn't be explained. There is a sense in which this argument recalls The Argument from the Improbable Self. Both demand explanations for just this-ness, whether of just this universe or just this me.

The Argument from the Intelligibility of the Universe fleshes out the consequences of the powerful first premise, but some might regard the argument as a reductio ad absurdum of that premise.

COMMENT: Spinoza's argument, if sound, invalidates all the other arguments, the ones that try to establish the existence of a more traditional God—that is, a God who stands distinct from the world described by the laws of nature, as well as distinct from the world of human meaning, purpose, and morality. Spinoza's argument claims that any transcendent God, standing outside of that for which he is invoked as explanation, is invalidated by the first powerful premise, that all things are part of the same explanatory fabric. The mere coherence of The Argument from The Intelligibility of The Universe, therefore, is sufficient to reveal the invalidity of the other theistic arguments. This is why Spinoza, although he offered a proof of what he called "God," is often regarded as the most effective of all atheists.

36. The Argument from The Abundance of Arguments

1. The more arguments there are for a proposition, the more confidence we should have in it, even if every argument is imperfect. (Science itself proceeds by accumulating evidence, each piece by itself being inconclusive.) 2. There is not just one argument for the existence of God, but many — thirty-five (with variations) in this list alone. 3. The arguments, though not flawless, are persuasive enough that they have convinced billions of people, and for millennia have been taken seriously by history's greatest minds. 4. The probability that each one is true must be significantly greater than zero (from 3). 5. For God not to exist, every one of the arguments for his existence must be false, which is extremely unlikely (from 4 ). Imagine, for the sake of argument, that each argument has an average probability of only .2 of being true. Then the probability that all 35 are flase is (1-0.2)^35 = .0004, an extremely low probability. 6. It is extremely probable that God exists (from 5).

FLAW 1: Premise 3 is vulnerable to t he same criticisms as the Argument from the Consensus of Humanity. The flaws that accompany each argument may be extremely damaging, even fatal, notwithstanding the fact that they have been taken seriously by many people throughout history. In other words, the average probability of any of the arguments being true may be far less than .2, in which case the probability that all of them are false could be high.

FLAW 2: This argument treats all the other arguments as being on an equal footing, distributing equal probabilities to them all, and rewarding all of them, too, with the commendation of being taken seriously by history's greatest minds. Many of the arguments on this list have been completely demolished by such minds as David Hume and Baruch Spinoza: their probability is zero.

COMMENT: The Argument from the Abundance of Arguments may be the most psychologically important of the thirty-six. Few people rest their belief in God on a single, decisive logical argument. Instead, people are swept away by the sheer number of reasons that make God's existence seem plausible — holding out an explanation as to why the universe went to the bother of existing, and why it is this particular universe, with its sublime improbabilities, including us humans; and, even more particularly, explaining the existence of each one of us who know ourselves as a unique conscious individual, who makes free and moral choices that grant meaning and purpose to our lives; and, even more personally, giving hope that desperate prayers may not go unheard and unanswered, and that the terrors of death can be subdued in immortality. Religions, too, do not justify themselves with a single logical argument, but rather set themselves up to minister to all of these needs and provide a space in people's lives where large questions that escape answers all come together and co-mingle, a co-mingling that, in itself, can give the illusion that they are being answered.

[Excerpted from 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, New York: Pantheon Books. Forthcoming, January, 2010. Copyright © 2010 by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. All rights reserved. Published with permission.]

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Moral Arguments for the Existence of God

Moral arguments for God's existence may be defined as that family of arguments in the history of western philosophical theology having claims about the character of moral thought and experience in their premises and affirmations of the existence of God in their conclusions. Some of these arguments are on all fours with other theistic arguments, such as the design argument. They cite facts that are claimed to be evident to human experience. And they argue that such facts entail or are best explained by the hypothesis that there is a God with the attributes traditionally ascribed to him. Other moral proofs of God's existence take us away from the patterns of argument typical of natural theology. They deal in our ends and motives. These variants on the moral argument for God's existence describe some end that the moral life commits us to (such as the attainment of the perfect good) and contend that this end cannot be attained unless God as traditionally defined exists

1.1 Crude Arguments from Moral Normativity

1.2 sophisticated arguments from moral normativity, 2.1 the basic argument and its exemplification in kant, 2.2 the secular problem of evil, 2.3 moral order and moral skepticism, 3. practical arguments: moral despair and moral discouragement, bibliography, other internet resources, related entries, 1. arguments from the normativity of morality.

Many examples of theoretical arguments for God's existence start from the fact of ethical normativity. Human beings are aware of actions as being right and wrong, obligatory and forbidden. Such awareness carries with it the thought that they are “bound” to do some things and bound to avoid doing others. Moral qualities have a bindingness attached to them shown in the force of the moral “ought” and the moral “must”. If I make a promise, the promise creates ( ceteris paribus ) an obligation to deliver what is promised. The normative fact is, first, not dependent on my own goals and ends and, second, possessed of a universal force. The fact that I am bound by the normative truth “do what you promised” does not hold because I have ends which I cannot achieve unless I fulfill the promise. The imperative is not what Kant styled a “hypothetical” one. It is rather “categorical”. It binds no matter what my particular goals are (see Kant 1996/1973 67; 4/414). That is linked to its universal dimension. I have an obligation to deliver what I promised, because anyone who makes a promise thereby ( ceteris paribus ) obligates him- or herself. The obligation created by the promise holds independent of my particular goals because it reflects a universal rule, holding at all times and places and applying to any human being as such.

Now we have a fact from which moral arguments for God's existence can proceed: there appear to be morally normative facts/qualities in the world. Many of these arguments claim that the postulation of God provides the best explanation of this fact. We must use “appear” to record the fact, because there is a venerable line of thought in philosophy contending that moral bindingness is not real. It is a projection on the part of the human mind. It is no more “out there” in the world-minus-us than is (on some accounts) a secondary quality like taste. I say that the whisky tastes sweet, appearing to ascribe a quality to it. But in truth there is no sweetness in this mix of chemicals. I am projecting a reaction which I and others have toward it. So: we can be realists or anti-realists about the existence of moral normativity.

Such projective accounts of moral normativity, of moral qualities and facts, offer one naturalistic explanation of the appearance of normativity. A projective explanation thus avoids the need to posit God as the best explanation of the fact that moral normativity appears to exist. Proponents of theoretical moral arguments will contend that projectionism is false to our experience and gives rise to forms of moral skepticism that are corrosive of moral thought and action. We cannot rule on such issues here. (For a very clear form of moral projectionism see Mackie 1977.)

A template for a moral argument for God's existence can now be given.

Argument I:

It appears to human beings that moral normativity exists.
The best explanation of moral normativity is that it is grounded in God.
Therefore God exists.

This schematic argument incorporates an inference to best explanation. We must now distinguish and set out Crude versus Sophisticated applications of this template.

Arguments styled thus depend on drawing a close analogy between moral requirements and human law.

It is tempting to say that the fact that my having made a promise creates an obligation because of the existence and authority of a corresponding moral rule: “Promises are to be kept ( ceteris paribus )”. Human law has authority because of two things: promulgation and enforcement by an appropriate authority. Authoritative human law is decided upon and published by something in the community/state possessing sovereignty over the community. But it is not enough that sovereign authority decide upon law and publish what it decides. It must attach sanctions to infringement, and it must have the means of detecting infringement and applying the sanctions.

A crude moral argument can be constructed using the analogy between morality and human law.

Argument II:

Moral normativity is best explained through the existence of authoritative moral rules.
Authoritative moral rules must be promulgated and enforced by an appropriate moral authority.
The only appropriate moral authority is God.
Thus, given that there is moral normativity, there is a God.

Steps in this argument need filling out. A. E. Taylor relies on the analogy between human law and “moral law” when he notes that a law cannot be valid unless there is “an intelligence which recognizes and upholds it”. He goes on to note that it cannot be human intelligence that provides the needed recognition and upholding of moral law, since the moral law holds everywhen and everywhere whereas the human mind is limited in its comprehension and scope (Taylor 1945: 92-3). The appropriate promulgator and enforcer must have authority over all human beings at all times and places, indeed over the whole cosmos (on the assumption that the “moral law” applies to all personal, rational beings as such). Thus the only intelligence and will that can be the source of the moral law is that found in a sovereign God.

The analogy with human law behind the moral argument can proceed further to stress the role of sanction in giving force to law. Breaches of law must attract punishment if law is to have authority. In his Letter concerning Toleration , Locke contends that one of the few religious stances that the commonwealth cannot tolerate is atheism (see Locke 1993, 426) for non-theists have no motive to act upon their promises and oaths. So they cannot be fit participants in civil contracts or be trusted when they appear before courts of law. Minus a belief in God, there is no reason to suppose that ignoring moral norms will not pay. Indeed, there is every reason — given the way the world goes — to assume that it can often pay to take no account of moral norms. Of course, human communities try to attach sanctions to moral wrongdoing through the mechanisms of the human law and of social disapproval. But premise (6) above is true so far as the enforcement aspect of an authoritative source of rules is concerned. Only a God of the traditional kind who adjusts rewards and punishments in the long run can ensure that immoral conduct gets its due sanction. These points about sanction can provide a separate argument for God's existence, albeit it is implicit in Argument II.

Argument III:

Moral norms have authority.
If they have authority, there must be a reliable motive for human beings to be moral.
No such motive could exist, unless there was an omniscient, omnipresent, wholly just agent to attach sanctions to behavior under moral norms.
There is a God.

Criticism of these crude forms of the moral argument is well established in the literature. The work in Argument II is being done by the analogy between human law and moral norms. J.S. Mill famously criticized this analogy at the root. There are two possible aspects to those things we called laws, according to Mill. Law can exist first as deliverance from some person or body of persons. Law can secondly exist as a rule with authority. Many laws exist in the second mode without them being laws in the first mode (Mill 1957, 26). Here are some examples (not Mill's):

If someone affirms both “ p ” and “ p implies q ”, he or she cannot deny “ q ”.
It is wrong to believe both “ p ” and “not- p ” at the same time.

Both the above statements have normative force over our speech and thought. The non-theist will argue that it makes no sense to say that their authority derives from an act of legislation — not even if the legislator is God. This is because the notion of legislation implies choice: in an act of legislation someone or some body decides to promulgate this or that rule. But the “norms of reason” as illustrated above hold in the absence of any coherent alternatives to them. (NB: it is argued by some thinkers that even such “norms of reason” derive their authority from God in some fashion — see Devine 1989, 88-89.)

If we accept Mill's point that the one aspect of law does not entail the second, then premise (5) in Argument II is seen to rest on an assumption that is open to question, viz. “All authoritative norms are based on the acts of a legislator”. Agreeing with Mill means agreeing that what is true of some authoritative norms is not true of all; some can have authority without being promulgated and enforced by a sovereign will. The non-theist will then contend that moral norms are of this kind, thus rejecting premise (5). Independent argument can be offered for the conclusion that moral principles are necessarily true (see Swinburne 1976, 7-9). The non-theist will further contend that Mill's point and the examples of “norms of reason” also entail that Argument III has questionable steps. The so-called Law of Non-Contradiction above has authority, but its authority does not depend on their being a Great Logician in the sky ready to sanction infringements of it. Nor is it coherent to suppose that “norms of reason” are hypothetical, rather than categorical imperatives. The normative force of the Law of Non-Contradiction does not derive from something of the sort “If you want to think logically, you must abide by this rule”. In the sense relevant to this discussion, there is no choice between thinking logically and illogically (cf. Shafer-Landau 2005, 113).

Argument III is open to other, more obvious objections. It identifies motives with self-interested motives. Yet there are many different kinds of motives. Morality itself generates its own motives. Thus there can be motives operative in morality other than those of expediency and self-interest appealed to in Argument III. This can be seen more clearly when we amplify our picture of morality further by bringing in reference to the virtues. As well as morality containing knowledge of rules, it also promotes the virtues. Virtues are broad traits of character, habits of choice, which at once arise out of obeying moral norms and also lie behind such practice. The just person is not one who is merely aware of the norms that delineate justice. He or she is one who has a disposition to act in certain ways. This disposition is a compound of belief, emotion and perception. The emotion element means that one who is just will feel, for example, distaste at the contemplation of unjust acts and states of affairs.

If the acquisition of the virtues is given an important place in the moral life, the point that morality binds regardless of self-interest and expediency gains an extra dimension. Mention of the virtues brings with it the thought that morality is to be seen as the means whereby the human good is attained. The virtues have been thought of as the highest human excellences. To conceive of the virtues as the highest excellences, to be pursued above other human achievements and traits, is another way of making the point that morality binds. Given the notion that the virtues are the human excellences, a strong tradition dating from Greek philosophy has taught that possession of them constitutes the good for human beings. Moral thought and action is unified by a teleology in which the virtues are the constitutive means of attaining a good, perfected life. Morality, via the virtues, constitutively leads to the human good. One who has the virtues thus has a structure of motives that goes beyond mere self-interest and the desire for long-term reward. Such a person loves just (and other right) acts for their own sake. He or she has a conception of what is good for them of which the virtues are a constitutive part. They no longer have to be motivated in conduct by what the non-virtuous characterize as “self-interest” because that which is their self has been modified. They simply will not be happy breaking their promises. Thus the crude opposition between morality and self-interest breaks down.

The crude Argument III should be brought face to face with a final difficulty. The non-theist will claim that it denies one of the main features of moral normativity. Kant's distinction between hypothetical imperatives and the imperatives of morality entails that moral facts are intrinsically normative. Extrinsic normativity attaches to the rule “If you want to take your car on a long journey, fill the tank with petrol”. The normative force of this requirement derives from the desire it is predicated upon. However, the fact that I have promised to do something is intrinsically normative. It provides me with goals. Argument III, and its thought that God must exist to attach a fail-safe system of rewards and punishments to moral rules, is avowing that moral facts are not intrinsically normative. Bindingness does not attach to them per se . It attaches to them only in so far as they engage with my long-term desire to avoid punishment, and thus pain.

Discussion of arguments I to III above does not deal with all attempts to show that the normativity of ethics provides grounds for thinking that God must exist. More sophisticated arguments do not (explicitly) trade on the analogies between moral law and human law to which significant objections have been made. Robert Adams provides an example of these more sophisticated arguments (Adams 1987, 144-163). His argument may be summarized as follows.

Argument IV:

Moral facts exist.
Moral facts have the properties of being objective and non-natural.
The best explanation of there being objective and non-natural moral facts is provided by theism.
Therefore the existence of moral facts provides good grounds for thinking theism is true.

Premise (13) refers to the fact that rightness and wrongness attaches to actions. These properties are recognized as objective in the sense that they hold or not regardless of human opinion. They are non-natural in the sense that “they cannot be stated entirely in the language of physics, chemistry, biology, and human or animal psychology” (Adams 1987, 145). Such facts could be accounted for from within non-theistic world views, such as Platonism. However, theism provides a much more intelligible explanation via the notion that rightness is one and the same property as the property of being commanded by God (wrongness consists in being forbidden by God). So the argument in essence states that we must have a metaphysics that accounts for the existence of objective, normative facts and that a theistic metaphysics fits the bill better than any alternative.

Arguments like IV, having eschewed the short cut of the simple analogical arguments considered above, are impossible to expound and appraise in short order. Complex metaphysical debate is needed to show that alternative, non-theistic, metaphysical systems cannot cope with objective normative facts, or if they can, are implausible on other grounds. Arguments like IV do suggest that the price of physicalism (as defined by Adams) is the abandonment of objective normativity. But the question at issue is whether a non-theistic moral realist has to be a physicalist. Proponents and opponents of the moral argument may agree that morality is one of those many phenomena which show that there is more to the real world than meets the physicalist's eye. This sets the non-theist the task of working out a metaphysics for morals (see Korsgaard 1996, McNaughton 1988 and Shafer-Landau 2005 for such attempts to account for the existence of objective normativity).

Direct objections to Argument IV flow from its appeal to a divine command theory of ethics. That God has commanded something is both an objective and non-natural fact and deemed to be creative of normativity. Objections to divine command theories of ethics are numerous. Most of these stem from forms of the Euthyphro dilemma. The debate about divine command theories of ethics cannot be explored here. Yet we should note an important implication of that debate for moral arguments for God's existence. These arguments invite a tu quoque that consists in contending that theism provides no better explanation of the facts of morality than non-theism.

One ready response to divine command theories of ethics is that they would make moral norms arbitrary. If rightness just is what is commanded by God, then whatever God commands is right. If God chose to command murder it would be right. This criticism of divine command theory is related to another, generally accepted, claim about moral, normative facts: as well as being objective and non-natural they are supervenient on other facts. It is because of the nature of acts of murder in relation to their circumstances that they are wrong. What a divine command explanation of the wrongness of murder threatens to do is to cut the wrongness of murder off from its basis in the nature of murder. Hence it is a bad explanation and this form of moral argument cannot succeed.

Adams' moral argument comes with a refinement on the idea of divine commands creating rightness which avoids the immediate force of the above objection. It is the prescriptions and proscriptions of a loving God that create rightness and wrongness. This modified divine command theory has two important aspects to it. First it brings back a kind of supervenience. It is because God sees that certain acts are beneficial or harmful to those affected by them that he commands or forbids them. Second it effectively makes a distinction between the realms of axiology (concerned with the good, the valuable) and deontology (concerned with duty and obligation). There is moral value of a kind independent of God. There is good and bad, there is benefit and harm. But it is the notion that we are obliged or under a duty to realize good through action and avoid bringing about harms that is to be explained through the thought that these deontological properties are created by divine will (see Alston 1989, 253-273). “Right” and “wrong” signify these deontological properties.

Having got thus far into the territory surrounding Argument IV, we can show how a non-theist would respond to it. Premise (14)

will be questioned. Note first that the existence of the “norms of reason” (see above) provides a clear counter-example to this premise. There is a deontological property failing to affirm the consequent in a modus ponens with admitted true premises is wrong whose existence does not appear to the non-theist to be at all well explained via the commands of the God of theism. The non-theist will then ask why, if this is so, moral deontological properties cannot arise minus a divine command. Perhaps deontological properties such as requiredness , being obligatory and oughtness simply supervene on axiological properties of the kind Adams admits exist logically prior to God's commands. Why cannot the existence of axiological properties on their own give us good and often overwhelming reasons for doing this and avoiding the other? Hence obligations and duties arise out of the recognition of value. Goodness gives rise to rightness, badness to wrongness.

Despite the fact that we have moved to sophisticated arguments from normativity to God as the best explanation, we still seem to be stuck with the debate opened up by Mill: how reliable is the analogy with human law some moral arguments for God's existence rely on? Proponents of all forms of the moral argument considered so far appear to hold that there can be no deontological properties without some law making. And the only candidate for the source of that law making is God. Non-theists deny this. They will present the following dilemma. When God sees that some acts are highly beneficial and others highly harmful, is or is he not obliged to legislate for the former and against the latter? Take the first horn and we have an instance of a deontic property ( God being bound to command or forbid this act ) arising from axiological properties minus God's commands. Take the second horn and the non-theist will object that we are back to the arbitrariness afflicting non-modified divine command theories of ethics.

From the discussion of moral arguments for God's existence and the fact of normativity we can conclude two things: (i) that the merits of such arguments are bound up with the merits of divine command theories of ethics (see Sagi and Statman 1995 for a detailed survey of such theories); and (ii) that if such arguments are to succeed they may need to cast their nets wider. They may need to encompass best explanations for normativity in other areas, such as logic, and for the existence of axiological facts as well as normative facts.

2. Arguments From Moral Order

Many forms of moral argument for God's existence are variations on the following format.

Argument V:

Morality is a rational enterprise.
Morality would not be a rational enterprise if there were no moral order in the world.
Only the existence of God traditionally conceived could support the hypothesis that there is a moral order in the world.
Therefore, there is a God.

The rationality of morality cited in (16) refers to the fact that the moral life generates certain ends, specifically the pursuit of the ethical perfection and happiness of moral agents. The moral order cited in (17) refers to the belief that the world is such that these ends can be realized. The most famous version of the argument from moral order is found in the writings of Kant (variously formulated in different texts post 1781). Kant's “moral proof” can be summarized thus.

Argument VI:

It is rationally and morally necessary to attain the perfect good (happiness arising out of complete virtue).
What we are obliged to attain, it must be possible for us to attain.
Attaining the perfect good is only possible if natural order and causality are part of an overarching moral order and causality.
Moral order and causality are only possible if we postulate a God as their source. (See Kant 1996/1962, 240; 5/124-5)

The perfect good in (20) incorporates two alleged central aims of the moral life. We are not merely obliged to perform individual acts of virtue but to become virtuous. For Kant that means becoming such that there will be a complete harmony between the maxims of our actions and the moral law. But human beings as finite rational beings are also “creatures of needs”. They have many non-moral goals and ends. The very respect for the moral law that is at the heart of the moral life bids us set store by the flourishing of these finite rational agents. So the complete good for the human moral agent must be happiness arising out of virtue. (21) tells us that “ought implies can”. It cannot be true that we ought to seek an end if there is no chance of our attaining it. (22) and (23) point to the fact that the world as it appears to us is governed by morally blind causes. These causes give no hope whatsoever that pursuit of moral virtue will lead to happiness. They do not even give hope that we can become morally virtuous. Human agency is beset by weaknesses that make the attainment of virtue — in the absence of external aid — seem impossible. Human agents are in addition subject to contingencies that can cut short attempts to grow to moral maturity and perfection. The being postulated in (23) has omniscience and omnipotence combined with perfect goodness. Thus it will ensure that the pursuit of a virtuous state is possible through external aid (as in grace) and will promise an immortality where the moral journey can be completed. It will also ensure that in the long run happiness will result from virtue. Its existence would mean that there is a perfect moral causality at work in the world.

Kant's argument turns around the contrast between the apparent lack of moral order in the world and the alleged need for a real moral order in the world if the necessary goals of the moral life are attainable. There are many other authors who have arguments from moral order turning around this same contrast and moving to the same conclusion (see Hare 1996, Sorely 1918, Taylor 1930, Zagzebski 1987).

The schematic argument from moral order (Argument V) has as its first premise the claim that morality is a rational enterprise. One way of interpreting Kant's version — Argument VI — is as claiming that human reason faces contradiction (the absurdum practicum — see Wood 1970, 100) unless it believes in the existence of God. Practical reason is committed as a matter of strict duty to realize the goal of moral perfection. It is also committed as a requirement of consistency in agency to seek the maximal satisfaction of its given ends. If there is no moral order in the world then it cannot pursue both of these commitments together.

Premises (16) and (17) in Argument V and (20) in Argument VI present the rationality of morality as dependent on it having the goal of seeking the human good. One line of response to the argument from moral order is to deny that morality does have that goal. The critic can make this point in respect of both parts of the goal: happiness and moral perfection.

Concerning happiness it can be argued that moral agents cannot be convicted of irrationality if they abandon pursuit of their own happiness upon the realization that their duties and obligations get in the way, for they are under no rational necessity to pursue their own happiness. If this point is sound, there is no absurdam practicum because practical reason is not committed to the pursuit of two ends that apparently conflict. Kant's definition of happiness as that “state of a rational being in the world in the whole of whose existence everything goes according to his wish and will” (Kant 1996/1962, 240; 5/124) might seem to clinch the matter. But the definition is ambiguous. Happiness could be the state where all my felt, personal desires are satisfied. Or it could be the state where all my intentions are fulfilled. While it is true that no one acts rationally who does not seek to maximally fulfill his or her intentions, a person may have lots of intentions not directed at fulfilling his or her personal desires. I may consciously forswear satisfaction of my personal desires by, for example, adopting a life of service to others. Kant's other definition of happiness, which he seems to take as equivalent to the first, then comes into play: happiness is a fulfilled, satisfied life (see Kant 1996/1973, 49; 4/393). I may not find such a life of self-sacrifice personally fulfilling, but then I did not adopt it in order to be happy. (For more on this reply to Kant see Byrne 1998, 70ff and Byrne 2007, 101ff.)

The critic may thus contend that we are not bound by practical reason itself to have a plan of life bent on pursuit of happiness. In reply, it has been stated that “If we are to endorse wholeheartedly the long-term shape of our lives, we have to see this shape as consistent with our happiness” (Hare 1996, 88). Let us assume that non-theists who realizes that moral demands restrict the pursuit of happiness in a world not under divine governance are unable to endorse wholeheartedly the long-term shape of their lives. On the face of it that does not entail that they act irrationally. Their world is not a perfect world and they might feel sad that it is not, but they will no doubt think that accepting such realism is a lower price to pay than believing in God.

The other half of the absurdum practicum is the duty to become morally perfect. In Kantian terms, moral perfection for finite creatures is a state of complete virtue. Our wills will be irreversibly set on a policy of acting on maxims dictated by the demands of impartial right. The Kantian claim is that as well as having obligations to do this or that act of virtue, we have an overarching obligation to achieve a state of virtue through acting on specific obligations. To those who affirm that we have no such obligation, the response from proponents of the argument from moral order is that this is an unacceptable lowering of the moral demand (see Hare 1996, 29-30). This part of the argument from moral order has separate force from that dealing with the inability of a secular world-view to guarantee happiness for the virtuous. If morality's rationality depends on our being able to fulfill the aim of being virtuous, then — given undeniable facts about the contingency and frailty of the human condition — no naturalistic outlook can establish morality's rationality.

One response to this strand of the Kantian argument consists in stressing the way the human institution of morality can strengthen human character and promote the living of virtuous lives (see Kekes 1990). Another response depends on the distinction between becoming virtuous as an end and becoming virtuous as a duty. A non-theist may argue as follows. There is an overarching end to morality: achieving a state of virtue. We are not under an obligation to achieve that end in itself. We have obligations to do particular acts of virtue. If we fail to do those particular acts, we do fail to meet our obligations. But we do not fail in a further obligation to become virtuous. Becoming virtuous is an asymptotic goal. It is one that arises from more specific goals, and is thus necessary but this does not mean that we are guilty if we fail to meet it. Asymptotic goals can function as goals even though we know full well that they can never be met. They regulate our lives, while they do not create duties to attain them. The non-theist thus draws a distinction between Kantian virtue as a necessary end of the moral life and as a duty (see Byrne 2007, 110ff).

The above response relates to the famous “ought implies can” principle in step (21) of Argument VI above. Adams suggests that a viable riposte to this part of the moral argument is “In any reasonable morality we will be obligated to promote only the best attainable approximation of the highest good” (Adams 1987, 152). Thus our duty is merely to do our best to be virtuous. There is no question that proponents of the argument from moral order will again categorize this as an unacceptable lowering of the moral demand. Adams' point can, however, be strengthened by the distinction between ends and obligations above. We do not need to give up the goal of being virtuous if we recognize only the obligation to achieve the best available approximation to a state of complete virtue. We can have a regulative end without a corresponding obligation.

Variants of Argument V in Kant and other sources exemplify the secular problem of evil. The facts that make the realization of the ends of morality impossible are reflections of the underlying truth that our world is beset by evil. Evil is present in the human will and character. It is present in the course of events that distributes happiness and misery without regard to the claims of justice. The core of Argument V is that morality is irrational or pointless given evil unless we posit an agency capable of defeating evil. That agency has to be trans-human because it is one of the facts about evil that it manifests itself in weaknesses which beset the human character and will at root, thus making our agency imperfect.

The argument from moral order hereby throws up a striking paradox. On the one hand, evil in the world serves as the ground for an argument for God's existence. On the other, that same evil serves as a ground for thinking that there is no God. The evil pointed to in the moral argument highlights the evil that is the basis of the more famous problem of evil in arguments for God's non-existence. In particular, the fact of evil provides an interesting tu quoque to any version of Argument V. Such arguments point to evil and state that, on the premise that morality is a rational enterprise, there must be a God whose providence shows that such evil is but a temporary or surface feature of our world. But if there is such a God, why is there this evil in the first place? If there was a God, there would be a moral order and a vital premise of the argument from moral order would be false. The God of theism, if actual, is working now to remedy the defects in the human will and ensure that the course of events supports the goals of virtue. So how can it be that this God appears to be doing no such thing? (See Kekes 1990, 27-8.)

Attempts to rebut this counter to the moral argument would take us too deep into the structure of theodicies (accounts from within theism of how evil exists within a divinely providential world). A good example of how such a rebuttal goes can be found in ch. 18 of W.P. Sorely's Moral Values and the Idea of God . A divine power to support morality's ends is linked to the need to allow human beings freedom in an imperfect-seeming world to confront evil via their own free choices, with the assurance that an omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent agency will bring those choices to fruition.

The Kantian argument from moral order has been seen to be full of complexities. A simpler version of a moral order argument (see Zagzebski 1987, 299-300) goes thus.

Argument VII:

Morality would not be a rational enterprise unless good actions increase the amount of good in the world. (Morality has to be efficacious if it is to be rational.)
There is no evidence that the amount of good in the world is increasing through our good acts.
Therefore we must assume that there is extra-human agency on the side of the good.

Argument VII is more negative than positive. It attempts to reduce a naturalistic outlook to absurdity (the absurdity of moral skepticism). Other steps are needed to get to the conclusion that the most plausible non-naturalistic world view is theism.

Argument VII can be strengthened by the following fact. In acting upon obligation I will frequently be giving up the chance to fulfill my personal preferences. This means that some good will be foregone in a typical moral action. If moral action is not efficacious in the production of moral good, then it may decrease the net amount of potential good. Thus it may be irrational (see Zagzebski 1987, 300 and Layman 2002, 304 and passim).

The argument for (26) is empirical: looking around the world there is no evidence that the amount of good is increasing and the amount of evil decreasing. Since it must be on premise (24), there is need to suppose that the world as we see it is not the sum of it as it really is. Good will eventually arise from moral acts but will only be visible when divine agency brings it about in the future.

Let us assume that defenders of a secular, naturalistic world view will not question (26) so far as it concerns the effects of virtuous action. In that case, they must either concede that morality is irrational (part, perhaps, of the absurdity of life in a universe without God) or argue that the good produced by virtuous action is not wholly or mainly in its effects. They may note in this regard important consequences of Aristotle's account of virtuous actions. Virtuous actions are not merely the means to the good, as plugging in the kettle is the means to heating the water. The good for a human being is a kind of living and acting: it is in part constituted by acts we perform and the dispositions behind them. Virtuous, good actions are worthwhile for the sake of the activity involved in doing them. They will have ends beyond themselves. Thus an act of generosity will seek the improvement of another's lot. But such an act also constitutes its own end. It is worthwhile doing it even if it fails in its external end. So, if a naturalist follows Aristotle, she or he can say that right action is a manifestation of the human good and as such the human good will in part exist regardless of the consequences of right action. (See Sherman 1989, 114 ff for these arguments.)

Zagzebski's version of the moral order argument is supplemented by the following proof based on the idea that naturalism entails moral skepticism.

Argument VIII:

Morality would not be a rational if moral skepticism were true.
There is much too much unresolved moral disagreement for us to suppose that moral skepticism can be avoided if human sources of moral knowledge are all that we have.
Therefore we must assume that there is an extra-human, divine source of moral wisdom. (Zagzebski 1987, 295-299)

The naturalist can do two things with this argument. One is to question (30) and the other is to question whether the remedy in (31) works. As to (30), it is true that we can cite many long-standing moral disagreements in a society at any one time (as witness abortion, capital punishment and the like). But it may be claimed that over most of their daily decisions human beings know what the morally correct thing to do is. A common list of fundamental moral rules (forbidding lying, stealing etc, commanding honesty, the honoring of promises etc) will be acknowledged by most moral agents. The same is true for a common list of higher moral principles (give to each their due, respect persons as ends in themselves etc). It is not, the critic will say, that we cannot act because we are surrounded by so much moral uncertainty. As to (31), how are we to take the idea that a providential God will solve moral skepticism? The theist's God aids us through “moral knowledge in divine revelation and the teachings of the Church” (Zagzebski 1987, 302). But the naturalist will say that theists differ over where revelation is to be found and how to interpret it. They differ over what is the true church and then over how to interpret what their chosen church says. Religious division seems as rife as moral. And we need moral knowledge in order to make cogent judgments as to the location and teaching of the divine word.

The various arguments from moral order considered so far have begun from the premise

The aim of such arguments is to show that if there is no source of moral order morality will collapse. It will cease to be a sustainable enterprise. Kant himself states at one point that if the highest good cannot be attained then the moral law, which bids us to seek it “must be fantastic and directed to imaginary ends and must therefore in itself be false” (Kant 1996/1962, 231; 5/114). This suggests that, if the ends of morality cannot be attained, there would no longer be any obligations and duties (Kant in fact denies this inference in other places: see Kant 2000/1962, 316-317; 5/450-2). But it is possible to frame a moral argument with a more modest conclusion: there is a moral advantage in accepting theism. Adams has a version of this argument.

Argument IX:

It would be demoralizing not to believe there is a moral order to the universe.
Demoralization is morally undesirable.
There is a moral advantage in believing that there is a moral order in the universe.
Theism provides the best theory of the source of moral order.
Therefore there is a moral advantage in accepting theism. (Adams 1987, 151)

Douglas Drabkin has a “moral argument for undertaking theism” which moves along similar lines.

Argument X:

Morality demands that we ought to aspire to become as good as we can be.
If there is no source of moral order in the world, then the project of becoming as good as we can be is fraught with difficulties.
These difficulties would be taken away if we were assured of the truth of theism.
Therefore we have a moral reason for getting ourselves in a state whereby we can come to be believe in the truth of theism. (Drabkin 1994, 169)

Let us assume that a non-theist will accept the general premise that it would be better for human beings if there was a divine source of moral order. Thus the non-theist could accept the premise that it would be to our practical and moral advantage to believe in a divine source of moral order. To some degree or other, atheism is demoralizing.

The above concession allows the airing of a major issue in considering moral proofs of God's existence of the kind that appeal to the need for moral order. They may be charged with arguing from premises about what we need or would like to be true to conclusions about the likelihood of the reality being thus and so. That a truth is demoralizing is no reason to think it is false. That it would be good if a claim is true is no reason to believe that claim. These conclusions follow from the transparency of belief. Believing p is transparent in the first person case. The following three questions are equivalent — that is, a yes or no answer to any one entails the same answer to any of the other two:

p ? [Is there a God?]
Do I believe that p ? [Do I believe that there is a God?]
Ought I believe that p ? [Ought I to believe that there is a God?]

In particular there cannot be reasons for giving a yes answer to (42) that are not reasons for thinking that p , that are not reasons for thinking that there is a God. Now the reasons for thinking that there is a God in Adams' argument do not bear upon the likelihood that there is a God, so cannot be reasons for thinking that I should adopt this belief. That the world would otherwise make some of our goals harder to obtain, would otherwise leave some of our deepest needs unmet, is not a reason for believing that it is not as it appears to be — devoid of moral order.

These versions of moral argument partake of the flavor, and thus of the difficulties, that surround the pragmatic arguments for religious belief found in writers such as Pascal and James. They will meet with the same response: this is wishful thinking dressed up as argument. The non-theist may press this specific point: only if one is convinced prior to these arguments of the premise that

The world is likely to be organized so as to meet our deepest human needs

will one find them cogent. But (44) is just the kind of hypothesis that would be false if there is no God. Arguments such as IX and X thus look circular.

It should be noted that Kant considers and rejects this kind of criticism of arguments from moral order. He admits that argument forms of this type are generally fallacious, while claiming that his argument is different in a relevant respect. He appeals to needs to fuel belief that there is a God but they are “needs of reason”. They are not grounded on “inclination” but on “an objective ground of the will” (Kant 1996/1962, 255 n ; 5/143 n ).

Drabkin's argument in fact escapes the above objections. It claims that the moral ills that would afflict us if there were no God give us ground, not for the belief that there is a God, but for undertaking “the project of coming to believe that there is a God” (Drabkin 1994: 171). This involves things like going over one's reasons for rejecting belief in God to see if they hold up and checking most carefully reasons for thinking there is a God.

Perhaps this is a point at which proponents and opponents of moral arguments for God's existence might agree on. Moral considerations give all a reason to examine the proposition that there is a God very seriously. For if there is no God, morality is a more perilous enterprise than if there is.

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EpistemeLinks: Kant
EpistemeLinks: Philosophy of Religion

1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology

Philosophy, One Thousand Words at a Time

Design Arguments for the Existence of God

Author: Thomas Metcalf Category: Philosophy of Religion Word count: 1000

The universe, or some of the objects in it, exhibit order, complexity, efficiency, and perhaps purpose. Many everyday objects with those features—e.g., watches and houses—were intentionally designed.

Should we conclude, therefore, that some of the “natural” objects in the universe, or the universe itself, was also intentionally designed?

If so, that designer might be God.

This essay introduces design arguments for the existence of God.

Photo from Astronaut Alexander Gerst Aboard The International Space Station

1. The Arguments

The standard ‘Design’ or ‘Teleological’ arguments for theism hold that there is evidence of design in nature and that this is evidence for the existence of God. [1]

There are three general versions of this argument:

‘Biological Design Arguments’ claim that God designed some or all of the biological organisms in the universe. [2]
‘Physical Design Arguments’ (or ‘Cosmic Design’ arguments) claim that God designed something about the large-scale structure and contents of the universe, or its laws of nature, or the small-scale structure of its components. [3]
‘Fine-Tuning Arguments’ claim that God intentionally chose the physical laws, fundamental constants, and initial conditions of the universe so the universe would permit complex, biological life. [4]

2. The Evidence

Biological organisms arguably exhibit interesting order, complexity, and purpose: e.g., the human eye. By analogy, if you were to find and examine a camera lying in a field somewhere, you would be irrational to conclude that it had formed mindlessly and naturally. You should instead notice that it has many parts, each serving a particular purpose, working together for a valuable, general function. But, of course, the human eye also has many parts, each serving a particular purpose, working together for a valuable, general function. [5]

One version of these arguments holds that some biological systems exhibit ‘irreducible complexity.’ This occurs when some system would not be adaptive or useful unless all of its parts were present simultaneously. [6] As a simplified analogy, suppose that your immune system has two subsystems: a subsystem that detects and identifies invaders, and a subsystem that kills invaders and infected cells. [7] If your immune system lacked the first type of subsystem, then it would either not kill invaders, or it would also kill your own, healthy cells. If your immune system lacked the second type of subsystem, then it wouldn’t do anything to the invaders it detected. Only if both types are present is the immune system adaptive. But surely—the proponent of the argument insists—it’s extremely unlikely that both subsystems should have independently evolved at the same time. Yet, of course, God could have created them both at once, thereby creating a well-functioning immune system.

The physical universe itself, in the large scale, may also exhibit evidence of design. [8] Perhaps the planets’ orbiting their stars, and the probability-clouds of electrons, are orderly enough to remind us of the carefully-planned motion of mechanical systems inside a human-designed machine. Of course, someone might object that the planets are simply following the laws of conservation of angular momentum and gravity, [9] but the proponent of the physical design-argument can reply that laws of nature are also evidence of a designer. [10] Last, scientists generally agree that if certain features of the universe were slightly different— say, if gravity were somewhat stronger or weaker—then living beings like us would be physically impossible. [11] And there are allegedly very many other examples of laws, constants, and initial conditions that must be delicately balanced for life to exist. Yet here we are. So, the argument goes, either we got extremely lucky—perhaps as lucky as winning the lottery several times in a row [12] —or God “fine-tuned” the universe to permit life like us.

3. Objections

While design arguments have skilled defenders, most philosophers have not yet been persuaded. [13]

One potential problem with biological design arguments is that we know of a powerful mechanism that can mindlessly produce order, complexity, and purpose: the mechanism of evolution by natural selection. [14] This might even explain “irreducible complexity.” [15] For example, a species might evolve to have a simple immune-system in which the same system both identifies and attacks invaders; and then evolve, in addition, a second kind of subsystem, which only identifies invaders (thereby enhancing the power of the general immune system); and then evolve a third kind, which only attacks; and then cease to have the original system that does both.

Another potential problem with biological design arguments is that living creatures may exhibit evidence of “poor design.” [16] For example, human beings might have been better-designed if we didn’t use the same tube both to breathe and to swallow food. And we are vulnerable to several tragic, untreatable genetic diseases, such as Tay-Sachs disease, [17] which chiefly affects young children. Given the hypothesis of a divine designer who is much-more-intelligent than we, it is puzzling that some creatures exhibit poor design.

The philosopher David Hume challenged biological and physical design arguments in various ways. For example, he wondered whether God himself needs a designer, and whether mindless motion and laws might produce the order and complexity we observe. One might also ask how much we can conclude about a designer when we only have one universe to examine, and we have no track record of having observed universe-designers. And design arguments, in general, might better-support the hypothesis that there is an imperfect designer, or that there were many designers —both of which hypotheses are incompatible with traditional monotheism. [18]

Last, fine-tuning arguments have been critiqued by arguing that life-permission isn’t so surprising, even given the hypothesis of atheism. Maybe we live in a multiverse of universes with varying laws and constants; maybe there is a more-fundamental, simpler principle that generates a life-permitting set of further laws; and maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that we— living beings—live in a life -permitting universe. [19] How could it be otherwise?

4. Next Steps

Some philosophers endorse design arguments, but few of these philosophers believe that these arguments prove the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, morally perfect God. [20] Therefore, to decide whether God exists, we must consider other arguments for theism, and weigh the evidence from design against any evidence against the existence of God that we might have.

[1] For landmark examples, see Aquinas (2006 [1265-1274]: Ia, 2, 3); Hume (1998 [1779]: Part 2); and Paley (2006 [1802]).

[2] Other than the items cited in the previous note, see Behe (1996) and Dembski (1998) for biological design-arguments.

[3] Swinburne (2004), Chapter 8.

[4] Collins (2012).

[5] Paley (2006 [1802]), Chapter 3.

[6] Behe (1996), pp. 130-31.

[7] Cf. Janeway et al . 2001.

[8] Hume ( op. cit. ), Part 2.

[10] Swinburne (1968), p. 202.

[11] Collins (2012), §§ 2.2-2.4.

[12] For example, Collins (2012: § 2.3.2) argues that even the strength of gravity could not have varied by more than one part in 10 60 and allowed the universe to permit life. If you have a one-in-10 8 chance of winning a lottery, then mathematically, to win that lottery seven times in a row (assuming no cheating and independent trials) is still more probable than ending up with just the right strength of gravity among 10 60 possible strengths. And the strength of gravity is allegedly only one of the many constants that needed to be fine-tuned to permit life like us.

[13] See Bourget and Chalmers (2014), p. 476, for evidence that most philosophers have rejected arguments for the existence of God.

[14] See for example Dawkins (2015).

[15] Shanks and Joplin (1999).

[16] See Charles Darwin (1999 [1859]), Chapter 14. See also Gould (1980). Swinburne (1968, p. 201) notes that this may even be true in physical design-arguments

[17] Walker (2006).

[18] Hume ( op. cit .).

[19] Collins (2012), §§ 5-7. See The Fine-Tuning Argument for the Existence of God by Thomas Metcalf.

[20] Swinburne (1968), p. 199. Collins (2012) himself presents his argument as evidential.

Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologiae, Questions on God , ed. Leftow, Brian and Davis, Brian. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006 [1265-1274].

Behe, Michael J. Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution . New York, NY: Touchstone, 1996.

Bourget, David and Chalmers, David J. “What do Philosophers Believe?” Philosophical Studies 170 (3) (2014): 465-500.

Collins, Robin. “The Teleological Argument,” in Craig, William Lane and Moreland, J. P. (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology (Malden, MA and Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2012), pp. 202-281.

Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species . New York, NY: Bantam Dell, 1999 [1859].

Dawkins, Richard. The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2015.

Dembski, William A. The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance through Small Probabilities . New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Gould, Stephen Jay. The Panda’s Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History . New York, NY and London, UK: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1980.

Hume, David. Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion , 2 nd ed., ed. Popkin, Richard H. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co., 1998 [1779].

Janeway, Charles et al. Immunobiology , 6 th ed. New York, NY: Garland Science Publishing, 2005.

Paley, William. Natural Theology or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity . New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2006 [1802].

Shanks, Niall and Karl H. Joplin. “Redundant Complexity: A Critical Analysis of Intelligent Design in Biochemistry.” Philosophy of Science 66 (2) (1999): 268-82.

Swinburne, Richard. “The Argument from Design.” Philosophy 43 (165) (1968): 199-212.

Swinburne, Richard. The Existence of God , 2 nd ed. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Walker, Julie. Tay-Sachs Disease . New York, NY: Rosen Publishing Group, 2006.

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About the Author

Tom Metcalf is an associate professor at Spring Hill College in Mobile, AL. He received his PhD in philosophy from the University of Colorado, Boulder. He specializes in ethics, metaethics, epistemology, and the philosophy of religion. Tom has two cats whose names are Hesperus and Phosphorus. shc.academia.edu/ThomasMetcalf

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Indeed, one famous argument for God's existence—the ontological argument—attempts to show that God's existence follows from the very concept of God. We won't attempt to examine all of the arguments that have been offered for theism, but will instead focus on just three of the most influential arguments: the cosmological argument, the ...
Pragmatic Arguments and Belief in God
Kahane's intricate argument is counter to the conventional view that God's existence is something that all should hope for, since this world would, arguably, be the best or among the best of all possible worlds if God were to exist. ... "The Will to Believe," The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, New York: Dover ...
Arguments for the Existence of God
Introduction. Philosophical discussion of arguments for the existence of God appeared to have become extinct during the heyday of logical positivism and ordinary language philosophy. However, since the mid-1960s, there has been a resurgence of interest in these arguments. Much of the discussion has focused on Kant's "big three" arguments ...
Teleological Arguments for God's Existence
Teleological Arguments for God's Existence. First published Fri Jun 10, 2005; substantive revision Wed Apr 5, 2023. Some phenomena within nature exhibit such exquisiteness of structure, function or interconnectedness that many people have found it natural to see a deliberative and directive mind behind those phenomena.
Anselm: Ontological Argument for the God's Existence
Existence. One of the most fascinating arguments for the existence of an all-perfect God is the ontological argument. While there are several different versions of the argument, all purport to show that it is self-contradictory to deny that there exists a greatest possible being. Thus, on this general line of argument, it is a necessary truth ...
PDF Arguments for the Existence of God Introduction General Overviews On
philosophy. However, since the mid-1960s, there has been a resurgence of interest in these arguments, both within and beyond the academy. ... arguments for God's existence) The premier on-line resource for any topic in philosophy. A work in progress, so
Does God Exist?
A level philosophy looks at 4 arguments relating to the existence of God. These are: The ontological argument. The teleological argument. The cosmological argument. The problem of evil. There are various versions of each argument as well as numerous responses to each.
The Existence of God
Scripture and the Existence of God. The Bible opens not with a proof of God's existence, but with a pronouncement of God's works: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.". This foundational assertion of Scripture assumes that the reader not only knows already that God exists, but also has a basic grasp of who this God is.
The Existence of God: Key Arguments
This essay is going to provide two arguments for the existence of God. The anthropic principle is an argument of the existence of a reasonable plan for the structure of the Universe. According to this argument, only God may create the complex structure of nature, universe, and life on the Earth. Such phenomena as a fixed distance of Earth from ...
The existence of God: a philosophical introduction
On Which 'God' Should Be the Target of a 'Proof of God's Existence'. David Twetten - 2006 - The Proceedings of the Twenty-First World Congress of Philosophy 8:75-80. ... Proof for the Existence of God in Classical Indian Philosophy. John Vattanky - 2007 - Forum Philosophicum: International Journal for Philosophy 12 (1):1 - 15.
36 ARGUMENTS FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
1. The Jews introduced the world to the idea of the one God, with his universal moral code. 2. The survival of the Jews, living for milliennia without a country of their own, and facing a multitude of enemies that sought to destroy not only their religion but all remnants of the race, is a historical unlikelihood.
Moral Arguments for the Existence of God
Many forms of moral argument for God's existence are variations on the following format. Argument V: Morality is a rational enterprise. Morality would not be a rational enterprise if there were no moral order in the world. Only the existence of God traditionally conceived could support the hypothesis that there is a moral order in the world.
Design Arguments for the Existence of God
Related Essays. The Fine-Tuning Argument for the Existence of God by Thomas Metcalf. Interpretations of Probability by Thomas Metcalf. Bayesianism by Thomas Metcalf. About the Author. Tom Metcalf is an associate professor at Spring Hill College in Mobile, AL. He received his PhD in philosophy from the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Religions
In this paper, I examine Aristotle's cosmological proof of God's existence, Avicenna's metaphysical proof, and Thomas Aquinas's five-way proof. By comparing these proofs, I argue that philosophers and theologians take different approaches to proving God's existence not only because they follow different epistemological principles but, more fundamentally, because they construct ...
5 arguments for and against the existence of God
The problem of evil is the most famous argument against the existence of an all-powerful and loving god. It's also old. For example, it provides the central theme of the Book of Job in the ...
Proof For The Existence Of God Philosophy Essay
The ontological argument was presented by philosophers including St. Anselm and René Descartes. The argument puts forward that the existence of God is obvious and self-evident. The formulation of logic they proposed is presented below: God is the greatest conceivable being. It is greater to exist than not to exist.
(PDF) Existence of God: A Philosophical Aspect
The existence of God is a subject of debate in the philosophy of religion. ... to be utilized as a logical reason for the existence of God. In this paper I will try to elucidate the fundamental ...
Knowledge of God's existence
Revealed theology is the theory that knowledge of God can be gained from God's revelation to us e.g in Jesus and the Bible. This results in revealed knowledge which is based on faith that what is received is from God. Typically, both Catholics and protestants believe in revealed theology.