Thirty-six arguments for the existence of
GOD
Source: Google.
CONTENTS
1. The Cosmological
Argument.
2. The Ontological
Argument.
3. The Argument from
Design.
A.
The Classical Teleological Argument.
B.
The Argument from Irreducible Complexity.
C.
The Argument from the Paucity of Benign Mutations.
D.
The Argument from the Original Replicator.
4. The Argument from
the Big Bang.
5. The Argument from
the Fine-Tuning of Physical Constants.
6. The Argument from
the Beauty of Physical Laws.
7. The Argument from
Cosmic Coincidences.
8. The Argument from
Personal Coincidences.
9. The Argument from
Answered Prayers.
10. The Argument from a
Wonderful Life.
11. The Argument from
Miracles.
12. The Argument from
the Hard Problem of Consciousness.
13. The Argument from
the Improbable Self.
14. The Argument from
Survival After Death.
15. The Argument from
the Inconceivability of Personal Annihilation.
16. The Argument from
Moral Truth.
17. The Argument from
Altruism.
18. The Argument from
Free Will.
19. The Argument from
Personal Purpose.
20. The Argument from
the Intolerability of Insignificance.
21. The Argument from
the Consensus of Humanity.
22. The Argument from
the Consensus of Mystics.
23. The Argument from
Holy Books.
24. The Argument from
Perfect Justice.
25. The Argument from
Suffering.
26. The Argument from
the Survival of the Jews.
27. The Argument from
the Upward Curve of History.
28. The Argument from
Prodigious Genius.
29. The Argument from
Human Knowledge of Infinity.
30. The Argument from
Mathematical Reality.
31. The Argument from
Decision Theory (Pascal’s Wager).
32. The Argument from
Pragmatism (William James’s Leap of Faith).
33. The Argument from
the Unreasonableness of Reason.
34. The Argument from
Sublimity.
35. The Argument from
the Intelligibility of the Universen (Spinoza’s God).
36. The Argument from
the Abundance of Arguments.
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 and 4).
6. God is the only thing that is
outside of the universe.
7. God caused the universe (from 5 and
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
about 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 why God must be the unique exception,
otherwise than asserting his unique mystery (the Fallacy of Using One Mystery
to 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 reasoning, based
on the unjustified demands we make on 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, is
an expression of our cosmic befuddlement at the question, why is there something
rather than nothing? The late philosopher Sidney 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 generalization. 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, Sidney Morgenbesser offered a
pertinent remark, in the form of The 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 organs 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 eye-maker (from 1 and 2).
4. These things have not had a human
designer.
5. Therefore, these things must have
had a non-human designer (from 3 and 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 the predominance of that line of replicators 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 and 3).
5. Natural selection is the only way
out of the conclusions of The Classical Teleological Argument.
6. God exists (from 4 and 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 New 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, fallacious Argument from Ignorance:
1. There are things that we cannot
explain yet.
2. Those things must be attributed to
God.
Flaw: Premise 1 is obviously true. If there weren’t things
that we couldnot 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 of 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. In other words, Premise 2 does not follow from Premise 1.
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 another 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 have
mated and exchanged genes; (c) life on Earth has had a vast amount of time to
accumulate the necessary mutations (almost
four billion years).
D. The
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 that the first living thing evolved out
of non-living matter (from 2).
4. That original non-living matter (call
it the Original Replicator) must be capable of (a) self-replication, (b)
generating a functioning mechanism out of surrounding matter to protect itself
against falling apart, and (c) 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 and The Classical
Teleological Argument). For example, DNA, which currently carries the
replicated design of organisms, cannot be the Original Replicator, because DNA molecules
require 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 and 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 proved 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 caused the universe
to exist (from 3 and 4).
6. God exists.
The Big Bang is based
on the observed expansion of the universe, with galaxies rushing away from one
another. 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 fourteen 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 Argument 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 and 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.” They all 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 the Fine-Tuning of Physical Constants 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 universes that does support the appearance of
stable matterand 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 another 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. Scientists 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 and 2).
4. Only a mindful 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 Anthropic Principle—we
live in the kind of universe that 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 and 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 are 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 improbable 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, et cetera.
Flaw 2: The derivation of Premise 5 from 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 backward to say that, in every case
in which we see a pattern, someone deliberately put that pattern in the
universe for us to see.
Aside: 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 Human
Knowledge of Infinity, #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 prophecy 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 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 day-dreams 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 numbers 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 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 that the beneficial event
will happen 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, #11 below, except that, 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). Therefore, it is more reasonable to conclude that the
conjunction of the prayer and the recovery is a coincidence than that it is a miracle.
Flaw 2: The coincidence of a person’s 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, The Argument from Perfect Justice, and The Argument from
Suffering, 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 and 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 above, it is clearly explained.
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 and 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 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
joins 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 to
explain why some brain processes are unconscious and others are conscious.)
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 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 consist
of 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, and 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 H2O 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 arises 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 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 and 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 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. 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 (if you could have wished for exactly that
number beforehand) 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
and 3).
5. If an immaterial soul exists, then
God must exist (from Premise 12 in The Argument from the Hard Problem of
Consciousness).
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 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’s 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 and
3).
5. I survive after my death (from 4). The
argument now proceeds as in The Argument from Survival After Death, only
substituting “I” for “people,” 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 that 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 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, in this hideous
counterfactual that the world ought not to be the way that they have made it.)
3. The world itself—the way it is, the
laws of science that explain why it is that way—cannot account for the way 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,
whereas 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 the Euthyphro 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 and 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, is
ultimately just a form 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 higher 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 points 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 having them 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 and 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, if we are to be
free, our actions 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 it me 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 what
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 Premise 7.
Flaw 2: Premise 10 is an example of the Fallacy of
Using One Mystery to 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 and 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 understands 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 and 7).
9. God exists.
Flaw 1: The first premise rests on 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 that 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.”
Confusions of this sort probably 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 a time a
million years distant from it in 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,
arrogantly demanding 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: Premise 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
arise not 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 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
and 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 widespread (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 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 we know
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 the
brain.
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 that overlaps with the unusual content 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 saviour? 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 Muhammad 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 Muhammad 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, whereas
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 requires 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 universe 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.
2. Suffering must have some purpose,
or existence would be intolerable.
3. Some suffering (or at least its
possibility) is 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 and 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
inducing the virtues of suffering (from 5).
7. Even taking premises 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, some who suffer 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 and 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 millennia 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: The fact that 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 (Gypsies), 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 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 inherited capacities for empathy, reasoning, and
learning from experience as well. We have also developed 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 that, 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, and 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 that 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 that both is
infinite and could have an intention of implanting the knowledge of the
infinite within us (from 4 and 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: In 1931 the young logician Kurt Gödel
published a paper proving The Incompleteness Theorem (actually there are two).
Basically, what Gödel demonstrated is that recursive rules cannot capture all
of mathematics. For any mathematical system rich enough to express arithmetic, we
can produce a true proposition that is expressible in that system but not
provable within it. So even 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 2 plus 2 does not equal 4).
2. The truths that describe our
physical world are empirical, requiring observational evidence.
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 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 3).
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 the necessary
truths of mathematics (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 the 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, #29, above). This argument, however, goes further and
tries to deduce God’s existence from the trans-empirical existence of
mathematical reality.
Flaw 1: Premise 5 presumes that something outside of
mathematical reality must explain the existence of mathematical reality, but
this presumption is non-obvious. Lurking within Premise 5 is the hidden
premise: mathematics must be explained by reference to non-mathematical truths.
But this hidden premise, when exposed, appears murky. If God can be
self-explanatory, why, then, can’t mathematical reality be selfexplanatory— especially
since the truths of mathematics are, as this argument asserts, necessarily
true?
Flaw 2: Mathematical reality—if indeed it exists—is,
admittedly, mysterious. Many people have trouble conceiving of where
mathematical truths live, or exactly what they pertain to. But invoking God
does not dispel this puzzlement; it is an instance of the Fallacy of Using One
Mystery to Explain Another.
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 by not believing in him, and much more to lose by not
believing in God than by believing in him (from, 3, 4, 5, and 6).
8. It is more rational to believe that
God exists than to believe that he doesn’t exist (from 7).
God exists God doesn’t exist Believe
Eternal salvation you’ve been duped, missed out on some sins
Don’t believe Eternal damnation you
got it right 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 genuinely 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, which creed 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, but 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 it does 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
non-believer. (Bertrand Russell, when asked what he would have to say to God,
if, despite his reasoned atheism, he were to die and face his Creator,
responded, “O Lord, why did you not provide more evidence?”) The non-believer
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 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 to be
interpreted 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 affecting “a change for
the better in the believer’s life” mean? For an antebellum Southerner, there
was more to be gained in believing that slavery was morally permissible than in
believing it’s heinous. It often doesn’t pay to be an iconoclast or a
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 pragmatism 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 worldview. 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, such as 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 Argument from Pragmatism 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 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 and 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, and 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, as to seem to lift us
right out of our surroundings. 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
responses 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 evidence for the Christian Trinity.
35. The Argument from the
Intelligibility of the Universe (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 should not be interpreted as requiring
that we have the capacity to come up with a Theory of Everything; it may
elude the ognitive 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 and 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 and 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
Explain Another: one ends up with the universe and nothing but the 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
itself provides all the answers about itself 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 reasons 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 not provable, 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 cannot be proved. 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 additional variations) so far,
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
thirty-five are false is (1 – 0.2)35 = .004, an extremely low probability.
6. It is extremely probable that God
exists (from 5).
Flaw 1: Premise 3 is vulnerable to the 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 unique conscious
individuals, who make 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 minister to all of these spiritual needs and provide a space in
our lives where the largest questions with which we grapple all come together,
which is a space that can become among the most expansive and loving of which
we are capable, or the most constricted and hating of which we are capable—in
other words, a space as contradictory as human nature itself.
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