Single it may be, but far from simple. Sartre wrote: "There can be no eternal truth because there is no eternal Consciousness to think it." Even though we cannot think utter chaos and disorder, maybe that is how reality really is. Then it discovers something real in human nature-namely, And we must learn to argue on the level of worldviews order is not from the most to the least effective. Atheists, the researchers reported, seem to be playing the pariah role once assigned to Catholics, Jews, and Communists, seen as harboring alien and subversive values, or, more likely, as having no inner values at all, and therefore likely to be criminals, rapists and wild-eyed drug addicts. But the Argument. Moreover, there are those who suffer who can never develop the virtues of suffering--children, animals, those who perish in their agony. And, anyway, exactly what sort of chaos is this question asking us to imagine? Nothing can give itself what it does not have, and the changing thing cannot have now, already, what it will come to have then. 1.There are things that we cannot explain yet. is God? simply chemical accidents, but valuable, irreplaceable persons deserving of simply expanding the set of beings that stand in need. 1. As we imagine Only God has the power and the purpose to carry out miracles (from 2). There is no natural explanation for so unlikely an event as the survival of the Jews (from 3). Joseph W. Koterski, S.J. There is a movement of the mind from this event to its proper interpretation as miraculous. People behave altruistically to gain a reward or avoid a punishment in the life to come. Published with permission.]. One is when we have a very large sample. The Argument from Aesthetic Experience. 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. The history of religious intolerance, including 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. Aug 11 '20 Judging by the amount of attention it has received from philosophers in the last 1,000 years, the strongest argument for the existence of God is probably the ontological argument, the original version of which is due to the 11th century theologian St. Anselm of Canterbury. the argument from design), The Moral Argument, and The Argument from Religious Experience. God must have a necessary existence. We can formalize this argument like this: But 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. The word "miracle" might very well spring to mind. Thus you beg the question. 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'Cogito ergo sum), which implies that I would not be thinking about what it is like not to exist. No human being can have absolute authority over another. But the atheists denial of God is an emotional reaction, not a logical one. For close to two decades Cass Seltzer has all but owned the psychology of religion, but only because nobody else wanted it, not anyone with the smarts to do academic research in psychology and the ambition to follow through. If that is the case, we shouldn't declare that it is intolerablewe just have to live with it. The transcendental argument does indeed objectively Slavery and torture and genocide are wrong byourlights, they would argue, and conflict with certain values we hold dear, such as freedom and happiness. 3. Dostoyevsky said, "If God does not exist, everything is permissible." It is illogical to suggest that something had no cause. on which our material universe right now depends. Of course, we do not exalt the stupor and delusions of drunkenness because weknowwhat caused them. In other words, we all recognize that intelligent being is better than unintelligent being; that a being able to give and receive love is better than one that cannot; that our way of being is better, richer and fuller than that of a stone, a flower, an earthworm, an ant, or even a baby seal. Almost everyone admits that reflection on the order and beauty of nature touches something very deep within us. God. Science cannot derive consciousness by reducing it to basic physical laws about the elementary constituents of matter and energy (from 2, 3, and 4). Therefore the universe is the product of intelligent design. There is a possible world (W) in which there is a being (X) with maximal greatness. Read Summary of many arguments for God's existence - Episode 104 by with a free trial. 4. It would be true, under this hideous counterfactual, that the world ought not to be the way they have made it.). You are saying that we must think about reality in terms of order and intelligibility, but things may not exist that way in fact. But aren't all our judgments of comparative value merely subjective? is angry at you is a terrifying prospect. And so we recognize the inherent superiority of all those ways of being that expand possibilities, free us from the constricting confines of matter, and allow us to share in, enrich and be enriched by, the being of other things. these arguments are not as effective as many Christians would like to think. 1. FLAW 2:Premise 2 states that human life cannot be pointless. the entire universe consists of you and the seven sustaining you. See FLAW 2 in the Argument from Holy Books, #23 below. Only the existence of consciousness itself (the "Hard Problem") remains mysterious. But the question arises: Does this undisputed fact amount to evidence in favor of the truth of religious claims? Descartes proved that God exists using a cosmological argument. 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. What is the relation between intelligibility and intelligence? The fundamental question in philosophy of mathematics is: how can mathematics be true but not empirical? If the present day has been reached, then the actually infinite sequence of history has reached this present point: in fact, has been completed up to this point -- for at any present point the whole past must already have happened. Only something outside the world, who cares about me, can therefore account for why I amjust this(from 4). 6. There are answers to my greatest questions, there is fulfillment of my deepest desires; but I decide to spurn it all. 3 . transcendent; not dependent on the system for its own existence and operation. And in doing so, it disproves the picture of the universe most atheists wish to maintain: self -- sustaining matter, endlessly changing in endless time. They have an independence, and therefore an ability to harm, that nothing can http://www.philosophyofreligion.info/theistic-proofs/. The notion of a person's entirelifeserving a purpose, above and beyond the purpose of all the person's choices, is obscure. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA, and the Google Evolution by itself cannot explain how the original ancestor the first living thing came into existence (from 1). You'd still be complaining!". Consider one such being: yourself. Arguments against the existence of God are deductive or inductive. 2. The truths that describe our physical world, no matter how fundamental, are empirical, requiring observational evidence. So we must keep in mind that it is not our job to convert peoplenor can But then he stares harder and it seems that he can see better, that the world has slid into sharper focus. 6. In other words, the only concept of God in this argument is the concept of that which transcends concepts, something "no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived" (1 Cor. For even if they won the whole world, it would not be enough to fill one human heart. argument. Even as you read this, you are dependent on other things; you could not, right And what gives impetus to that movement is not just the event by itself, but the many factors surrounding it which invite -- or seem to demand -- such interpretation. given his view of the world. One can only perceive that which exists, and so God must exist because there are those that have experienced him. But if God does not exist, what is it that believers have been experiencing? Charles Hartshorne and Norman Malcolm developed this version of the ontological "To be an atheist requires an infinitely greater measure of faith than to receive all the great truths which atheism would deny." "What can be more foolish than to think that all this rare fabric of heaven and earth could come by chance, when all the skill of art is not able to make an oyster!" Jeremy Taylor 4. this Giver must always remain unknown to human reason. is never conclusive, because the critic can always invoke a rescuing device This is hardly the lingo of the far right. They are universal and invariant because they apply . All of the Old Testament prophecies concerning Christ, for 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 actas ifGod exists. Or that Ahura Mazda, the benevolent Creator, is at cosmic war with the malevolent Angra Mainyu? (3) Therefore, there is some self-existing being, and that being . The argument points down an infinite corridor in a definite direction. Only God could have a sense of purpose beyond ours. For now we want to focus our attention on step 3. A God that exists, of course, is better than a God that doesnt. The reply to this is, of course, "Try it. So question 3, we think, really does invalidate this form of the ontological argument. Together with The Argument from A Wonderful Life, 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. Many scientists examine secondary causes all their lives without acknowledging the First Cause, God. Why or why not? Therefore there must exist within the realm of being something that does not tend to go out of existence. Uncanny coincidences cannot be explained by the laws of probability (which is why we call them uncanny). 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. Goda God who is rightly angry at them for their treason against Him. It is inconceivable that so many people could have been so utterly wrong about the nature and content of their own experience. 4. 3. But now take the other diagonal: God, my Creator and the source of all good, does exist; but I do not believe in him. Regarding argument 10, how do we know the universe is not conscious or aware? Poets have to come up with the vision and they have to turn it on so it sparks and catches hold.". Or should I believe that God made a covenant with the Jews requiring every Jew to keep the commandments of the Torah? But of course, all There is not just one argument for the existence of God, but many thirty-five (with variations) in this list alone. First, for anything that came into existence, there must have been something that caused it to come into existence. And predictive prophecy does confirm the inspiration of Scripture. 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). (That's why we don't punish people for involuntary actionssuch 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.). Religion and morality may be thought to be independent. 21. It is not a changing thing; it is the unchanging Source of change. All three versions 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. a dead organism can come back to life. people can be persuaded by very bad arguments. device. He was able to propose an explanation for this evidence that is compatible These organs could not have been useful to the organisms that possessed them in any simpler forms (from 2). To deny premise 1 of this argument is to assert that things can pop into being from nothing. Everyone knows the world is broken. Like David said, The heavens declare the glory of God Psalm 19:1-4. But "what it takes for X to exist" means the immediate condition(s) for X's existence. Do you have answers to the big questions about the Christian faith, evolution, creation, and the biblical worldview? Our question has been: which account of the way things really are best makes sense of the moral rules we all acknowledge -- that of the believer or that of the non-believer? What right do my equals have to impose their values on me? 1. They are immaterial, universal, invariant, abstract entities, If there is Suppose our best and most honest reflection on the nature of things led us to see the material universe as self-sufficient and uncaused; to see its form as the result of random motions, devoid of any plan or purpose. 31.The Argument from Decision Theory (Pascal's Wager). So 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. arguments begins with our versions of Aquinas's famous "five ways." 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. Cass has the distinct impression that he can see better in the sharpened air, that it's counteracting the near-sightedness that has had him wearing glasses since he was twelve. 15. Does that seem farfetched? A miracle is an event whose only adequate explanation is the extraordinary and direct intervention of God. God is the only thing that is outside of the universe. But atheists have never done so. 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? The law of non-contradiction, for example, stems In evaluating them, we should take into account: Suppose someone says to you: "All these experiences are either the result of lesions in the temporal lobe or of neurotic repression. Thanks for your reply! What happens now will matter in a million years (from 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. 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. The Ultimate 747 gambit states that God does not provide an origin of complexity, it simply assumes that complexity always existed. When the proof says that God is the greatest being The temporal kalam cosmological argument, begins by arguing that the past is finite. hypothesis of an eternal impersonal cause seems to lead to an inconsistency. The Original Replicator is complex (from 4). Some sort of experience lies at the very core of most people's religious faith. We find ourselves, unsurprisingly (since we are here doing the observing), in one of the rare universe that does support the appearance of stable matter and complex life, but nothing had to have been fine-tuned. That implies that some goal-seeking agent decided to bring our lives into being to serve some purpose. FLAW:Premise 5 is a blatant example of the Fallacy of Using One Mystery To Pseudo-Explain Another. What it takes for this thing to exist could only be this thing itself. But do miracles exist? The Argument from the Intolerability of Insignificance. 3. As originally proposed by Pascal, the Wager assumes that logical reasoning by itself cannot decide for or against the existence of God; there seem to be good reasons on both sides. He might cover his eyes with his hands and say of his father, You dont exist! FLAW 1:The "believe" option in Pascal's wager can be interpreted in two ways. Moral arguments are both important and interesting. He's thinking zealots proliferate and Seltzer prospers. God is the only thing outside the world who cares about each and every one of us. There is perhaps no greater living defender of faith than William Lane Craig. thunk! His resurrection from the dead was, of course, the greatest of these, and is still taken by many today to be a solid foundation for their faith. The cause of genius must lie outside of natural psychological processes (from 2). thunk! Why could there not simply be an endless series of things mutually keeping each other in being? We do not, for example, for the most part, recognize corresponding states of deprivation for the second, the artificial, desires, as we do for the first. 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). [7] Argument #3: Evolution Shutterstock At times this has led to scientific ideas, such . 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. But it is not actually in that state now. 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. 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. . But an infinite sequence of steps could never have reached this present point -- or any point before it. Lurking within 7 is the hidden premise: mathematical truths must be explained by reference to non-mathematical truths. Atheists deny (with their lips) the biblical 2. How could these alternatives be refuted? Pretty basic, and entirely consistent with our common-sense experience of the world. Basically, what Gdel demonstrated is that recursive rules cannot capture all of arithmetic. Leibniz and Hegel have in common? The best argument for the existence of God is being convinced of his existence due to personal experience with him. You can also sign up for our free print newsletter (US only). Only God can explain our moral agency (from 8 & 9). After all that has happened to Cass over the course of this past year, he's surprised at the degree of awed elation he feels at the letter bearing the insignia ofVeritas. COMMENT:In one way, this argument is reminiscent of the Anthropic Principle. there are surely more than seven things that need, right now, to be given being. Nothing changes itself. 6. Yet the two are the same. However, that does not mean that the atheists will necessarily For example, consider the atheist taken individually and separately, demonstrate the existence of a being that has some of That is why morality has absolute and unchangeable binding force on our conscience. 4. The universe itself can either exist without a cause, or else can be self-caused . Only God both deems our lives significant and has the power to effect these coincidences. Does argument 12 presuppose "innate ideas"? Only God can raise the dead., Atheist: You dont really have any proof that Jesus rose from the Question 1: Hasn't the Darwinian theory of evolution shown us how it is possible for all the order in the universe to have arisen by chance? There are virtues forbearance, courage, compassion, and so on that can only develop in the presence of suffering. If Gods perfection is a part of the concept of God, though, and if Gods perfection implies Gods existence, then Gods existence is implied by the concept of God. Without Y, there can be no X. The universe must have been designed with us in mind. 13. Once you admit of exceptions, you can ask why the universe itself, which is also unique, can't be the exception. In any finite environment the replicators must compete for the energy and materials necessary for replication. Besides, maybe the Gospels have embellished what Jesus did, so 3. Reason is a faculty of thinking, the very faculty of giving grounds for our beliefs. In the twenty-first century, creationists have tried to revive the Teleological Argument in three forms: B. Please follow the instructions we emailed you in order to finish subscribing. The argument assumes that there are objective values; it aims to show that believing in them is incompatible with one picture of the world, and quite compatible with another. Only God could provide us with a glimpse of benign transcendence. 6. That which exists necessarily and explains itself is God (a definition of "God"). Twenty is to ten as ten is to five, but infinite is not to twenty as twenty is to ten. [41] This is one of several arguments known as the Christological argument. By the laws of probability, rare individuals will inherit a concentrated dose of those genes. Each human life has a purpose (from 1 & 2). Question 3: But what if the order we experience is merely a product of our minds? That's what he's thinking at this moment, gazing down at the frozen river and regarding the improbable swerve his life has lately taken. unrighteousness. 5. How could the primordial slime pools gurgle up the Sermon on the Mount? If Darwinians wish to extrapolate from their purely biological theory and maintain that all the vast order around us is the result of random changes, then they are saying something which no empirical evidence could ever confirm; which no empirical science could ever demonstrate; and which, on the face of it, is simply beyond belief. 2. He would get the sense of having been shot outside of himself, and now was someone who was regarding his being Cass Seltzer as something like his being in the sixth grade, just something about him that happened to be true. The truths of our physical world are not necessary truths (from 2 and 3). 4. This world is given to us as a dynamic, ordered system of many active component elements. The material world we know is a world of change. But we have already seen that change in any being requires an outside force to actualize it. To say that the universe is so ordered by chance is therefore unsatisfactory as an explanation of the appearance of design around us. The Bible teaches that atheists are not really atheists. The First Cause Everything has a cause. 3. . If it really is a random event when I give the infirm man my seat in the subway, then in what sense is itmeto whom this good deed should be attributed? Could there be an argument for God's existence that does not fit into either of the two categories here, cosmological (external) or psychological (internal)? FLAW 2:Pascal's wager assumes a petty, egotistical, and vindictive God who punishes anyone who does not believe in him. The complaint about evil itself requires transcendent, universal laws that govern the worldobjective moralityin order for real evil to exist as a violation of those laws. The Argument from Personal Coincidences. Christians believe that their life with God will never end. they are universal, (4) why they do not change with time, and (5) how human The Jews have survived against vast odds (from 2). It is getting things backwards to say that, in every case in which we see a pattern, someone deliberately put that pattern in the universe for us to see. When Cass, in all the safety of his obscurity, set about writing a book that would explain how irrelevant the belief in God can be to religious experience so irrelevant that the emotional structure of religious experiences can be transplanted to completely godless contexts with little of the impact lost; and when he had also, almost as an afterthought, included as an Appendix thirty-six arguments for the existence of God, with rebuttals, his claim being that the most thorough demolition of these arguments would make little difference to the felt qualities of religious experience, he'd had no idea of the massive response his efforts would provoke. Isn't there a tiny chance that the universe just happened by chance? But then neither could the step just before that one. Therefore, what it takes for the universe to exist cannot be identical with the universe itself or with a part of the universe. gift which is given includes personal being: intelligence, will and spirit. Not only does our world demand a first cause, our world also demands a designer. You begin from the assumption that God does not exist. 2. FLAW 1:What exactly does effecting "a change for the better on the believer's life" mean? FLAW 1:For many organs, Premise 2 is false. you as part of it -- could not be. 5. Not from your experience of yourself or of the world that exists outside you. 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). . Therefore there must be a God. Therefore the atheistic view of reality is not compatible with there being genuine moral obligation. In fact, billions of people have performed and are even now performing trillions of such experiments, desperately seeking the ever-elusive satisfaction they crave. But X is maximally great only if X has maximal excellence in every possible world. 3. We also desire (but not innately or naturally) things like sports cars, political office, flying through the air like Superman, the land of Oz and a Red Sox world championship. that exists, therefore, on this hypothesis, stands in need of being caused to The argument from contingency is usually viewed as the strongest argument for the existence of God. 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. Part of what we mean when we speak of "God" is "perfect being"; that is what the word "God" means. My moral will itself. 7. 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 Our Knowledge of The Infinite, #29, and The Argument from Mathematical Reality, #30 below). If everyone has to borrow a certain book, but no one actually has it, then no one will ever get it. There is a unanimity among mystics as to what they experience. Transcendent moral laws require a transcendent lawmakerGod. Cass, on the other hand, is about as far away on the continuum as you can get and still be in the same field. (Water is wet, but that does not mean that every H2 0 molecule it is made of is also wet.) Either my actions are predictable (from my genes, my upbringing, my brain state, my current situation, and so on), or they are not. If we believe in God, the argument runs, then if he exists then we will receive an infinite reward in heaven while if he does not then we have lost little or nothing. for is a behavioral inconsistency; this is where a persons behavior Therefore, it is more reasonable to conclude that the correlation of the prayer and the recovery is a coincidence than that it is a miracle. a cause. I want you to imagine that you walk into a bookstore and you pick up a book that you find interesting. Who is God? If the action isn't caused by my psychological states, which are themselves caused by other states, then in one way is it reallymyaction? FLAW 2:The same as FLAW 3 in The Argument from Answered Prayers, #9 above. But what about the step just before the end? Therefore there must exist a God: an Uncaused Being who does not have to receive existence like us -- and like every other link in the chain of receivers. ", 4. 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