36 Arguments for the Existence of God (51 page)

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

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.

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 #9 above.

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 join itself to the love of wonder, there is an end of common sense.”)

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

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 H
₂
O 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.

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.