36 Arguments for the Existence of God (54 page)

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, 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.

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.

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 self-explanatory—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.

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).
   

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 marsh-mallows. 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.

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.