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1 Arguments for the Existence of God Peter S. Williams (MA. Mphil Arguments for the existence of God Peter S. Williams (MA. MPhil). Arguments for God work by making explicit the existence of real connections between God and Creation , so that one is put in the position of having to choose between acknowledging the conclusion or rejecting either the validity of the argument or the truth of one of the relevant premises. An argument for God places God in one balance pan and some other aspect of reality in the other pan and tries to establish a link between them such that the weight of the evidence raises the case for belief. There is nothing that cannot be used as the launch-point for an argument for the existence of God because God is related to the whole of reality. For example, the moral argument tries to establish the existence of a connection between objective moral value and God’s existence. If one acknowledges that the argument is logically valid but nevertheless wish to deny the conclusion, one must deny the existence of objective moral value. It is now received wisdom that arguments for God are cumulative, or, at least, are best approached cumulatively; that is, the weight of evidence for God accumulates as one adds arguments to an overall case that doesn’t rest on any one argument. In other words, the more different links between God and reality one can uncover the more rounded a picture of God one can build up and the more certain one can be that the arguments point to God. The design argument doesn’t provide much if any evidence for the existence of a necessary being, whereas the cosmological argument doesn’t provide much if any evidence for an intelligent designer; but put the two arguments together and they compliment each other to show that the universe has a necessarily existent intelligent cause. The moral argument adds that the designer is good, and so on. The arguments are like strands in a rope. Another good way to describe the procedure is the court analogy. Isolated pieces of evidence may be insufficient on their own to warrant convicting someone ‘beyond reasonable doubt’, but taken together the evidence does warrant conviction. Likewise with the case for God. The cosmological argument does not prove the existence of God. Nor do individual design arguments. But put all those arguments together, and the court may have to decide that God exists. In fact, I am fairly confident that some theistic arguments can stand alone, in particular the argument from objective moral value and the arguments from desire and absurdity. Nevertheless, the more arguments one can amass, the more chance one has of convincing the honest seeker. All this said, I am also convinced (by William James) that arguments for God are not necessarily for belief in God to be rational. Suppose you judged the evidence each way to balance out (or suppose you are unable to judge the evidence), you wouldn’t be irrational in following a gut instinct either to believe or to disbelieve. Ontological Argument What do we mean by ‘God’? Anselm suggested that we must mean something like ‘the greatest possible being’. If we can think of someone better than God, then that better being, and not ‘God’, would deserve our worship. So God, as ‘the being who deserves our worship’, must be a being a greater than which is inconceivable or impossible. 1 Anselm used this definition of God to argue that God must exist. After all, said Anselm, it is greater to exist in reality outside my mind than it is to exist only as an idea in my mind. But God exists as an idea in my mind at least, and so, as the greatest possible being, God must exist in reality as well. This argument is generally distrusted because it feels like a trick, and indeed it is a trick, albeit a very impressive one. The problem is that God does not exist as an idea in my mind – the idea of ‘God’, a being who exists independently of my idea of Him, exists in my mind. Perhaps the argument shows that if I accept a certain definition of God I must think of God as existing in reality on pain of self-contradiction, but why accept the coherence of this definition of God? It’s what we must mean by ‘God’, but perhaps the very notion of ‘God’ is ultimately incoherent; so the atheist might suggest. Still, Anselm has given us an intuitively impressive definition of God, and that is useful. Better, his definition can be used to argue thus: by definition, the greatest possible being must be a being that exists necessarily, that is, one that must exist if it is possible that it exist (because necessary existence is greater than unnecessary, contingent existence). If one accepts that it is possible that God exists, one must therefore accept that God exists necessarily. In other words, if you want to deny the existence of God, you must hold that God’s existence is not merely contingently false, but necessarily false, i.e. impossible. One way you might do that is to argue that the very notion of ‘greater than’ is meaningless because value is subjective. Thus the very idea of God requires the cogency of objective values. The Conceptual Argument This argument was made famous by Rene Descartes. Like the Ontological argument, it uses the very idea of God, but it works not from the idea of God as such, but from the fact that we have such an idea in the first place. How is it that finite, imperfect beings possess the concept of an infinite, perfect being? It might be suggested that our idea of God, like the idea of a unicorn, is produced by human imagination. If God is a bit like a human father, only perfect, then God is an imaginative projection of fatherhood with the imperfections removed. This attempt to explain away our idea of God sounds well enough, until we ask how it is that we recognize imperfections as imperfections unworthy of ‘God’? As Descartes said: “Now all these characteristics are such that the more diligently I attend to them, the less do they appear capable of proceeding from me alone; hence. we must conclude that God necessarily exists.” 1 It will not do to say that ‘God’ is an imaginary perfect being extrapolated from real imperfect beings without explaining how imperfect humans came to recognize imperfection as such: “the idea of infinite perfection is already presupposed in our thinking about all these things and judging them imperfect.” 2 The idea of perfection cannot be the result of a process which presupposes it! So from where do we get this idea of perfection? True, we recognize degrees of relative perfection - this man is a better father than that - but this implies that we possess a standard of perfection to employ in making such evaluations. Therefore, it would seem that the concept of a perfect being is innate to the human mind: 1 Rene Descartes, Meditations , (Cambridge, 1931). 2 Peter Kreeft & Ronald Tacelli, Handbook of Christian Apologetics , (Monarch, 1995), p69. 2 “I should not have the idea of an infinite substance – since I am finite – if it had not proceeded from some substance which was veritably infinite. For how would it be possible that I should know. that I am not quite perfect, unless I had within me some idea of a Being more perfect than myself, in comparison with which I should recognize the deficiencies of my nature?” 3 Cosmological Argument If anything exists its existence is either dependent upon the existence of one or more things beyond itself, or not. If not, it is an independent thing. Things are either dependent or independent, there is no third option. It is impossible for everything to be dependent, for there is nothing outside everything to depend upon. Therefore, if something exists, there must exist an independent thing. But something certainly does exist, “I think therefore I am”; so at least one independent thing certainly exists. This conclusion, I claim, is absolutely certain, but not very informative. This argument can also be cashed out in terms of necessary and contingent existence. We can add that you and I are apparently dependent things, that every physical thing is apparently dependent, which narrows our options with regards to identifying the independent thing. However, the atheist will want to identify the independent thing with the universe itself. Still, the cosmological dependency argument provides, as Dallas Willard puts it, a “logical space” for God in “an ontologically haunted universe”. If God exists He would certainly be an independent thing, whereas the atheist’s claim that the universe itself is independent seems to be worked out after the fact to avoid the inference to God. There is no necessity to think that the universe is independent (one can think of it as dependent upon God), whereas it is necessary to conceive of God as independent (anything dependent can’t be the greatest possible being). Arguments from Objective Value (Morality and Beauty) Objective moral and aesthetic judgements require objective standards of goodness and beauty that, it is argued, can only be found in the nature of God, who must therefore exist if objective moral and aesthetic truths exist. If such arguments are correct, not only does the existence of God imply the existence of objective value, the existence of objective value implies the existence of God. For morality: 1) only persons can prescribe behaviour, 2) only persons can obligate behaviour and 3) only a mind can contain a moral ideal.
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