36 Arguments for the Existence of God (55 page)

FLAW
1: What exactly does effecting “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 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 world-view. But either there is a vengeful God who sends sinners to hell or there isn’t. If one allows pragmatic consequences to determine truth, then truth becomes relative to the believer, which is incoherent.

FLAW
3: Why should we only consider the pragmatic effects on the
believer’s
life? What about the effects on everyone else? The history of religious intolerance, 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.

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).

1. There are experiences that are windows into the wholeness of existence—its grandeur, beauty, symmetry, harmony, unity, even its goodness.
   

2. We glimpse a benign transcendence in these moments.
   

3. Only God could provide us with a glimpse of benign transcendence.
   

4. God exists.
   

FLAW
: An experience of sublimity is an aesthetic experience. Aesthetic experience can indeed be intense and blissful, absorbing our attention so completely, while exciting our pleasure, 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.

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 cognitive abilities we have.)
   

4. If the Theory of Everything explains everything, it explains why it is the Theory of Everything.
   

5. The only way that the Theory of Everything could explain why it is the Theory of Everything is if it is itself necessarily true (i.e., true in all possible worlds).
   

6. The Theory of Everything is necessarily true (from 4 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 reason enough to regard it as God? Spinoza’s God is sharply at variance with all other divine conceptions.

The argument has only one substantive premise, its first one, which, though unprovable, 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.

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, which means that it has a probability of .8 of being false. Then the probability that all thirty-five are false is (1 – .8
   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.