So the But what this ultimate cause is in itself remains, so far, a mystery. Logic points to the existence of God. Charles Hartshorne and Norman Malcolm developed this version of the ontological This argument presents Spinoza's God. The argument has only one substantive premise, its first one, which, though unproved, is not unreasonable; it is, in fact, the claim that the universe itself is thoroughly reasonable. Yet the way these facts are used is not decisive. A being not limited in these ways cannot "come" to be or "cease" to be. Sometimes people who are lost in life find their way. the argument in the first place. Reason is a faculty of thinking, the very faculty of giving grounds for our beliefs. Miracles typically involve the suspension of the natural operation of the universe as some supernatural event occurs. (There are many answers to this question; mention as many as you can. 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). Some physicists have hypothesized that contemporary malaise about the foundations of quantum mechanics arise because physics is here confronting the intrinsic consciousness of matter, which has not yet been adequately formalized within physical theories. When the magazine came out, Cass's literary agent, Sy Auerbach, called to congratulate him. Or perhaps we are living in an "oscillatory universe," a succession of universes with differing physical constants, each one collapsing into a point and then exploding with a new big bang into a new universe with different physical constants, one succeeding the other over an infinite time span. If atheistic materialism is true, then there could be no laws That implies that some goal-seeking agent decided to bring our lives into being to serve some purpose. thunk! The Original Replicator is complex (from 4). The argument goes like this: "1. Might it mean the purpose for which the person was born? For if atheists are right, then no objective moral values can exist. 4. 6. Obviously if you believe that some extraordinary event is a miracle, then you believe in divine agency, and you believe that such agency was at work in this event. Most people who first hear it are tempted to dismiss it immediately as an interesting riddle, but distinguished thinkers of every age, including our own, have risen to defend it. It is of course the third premise that is crucial. If these seven The Arguments from the Fine-Tuning of Physical Constants. 5. 29. The task would -- could -- never be completed. Yet for all that, aesthetic experiences are still, more than likely, internal excitations of the brain, as we see from the fact that ingesting recreational drugs can bring on even more intense experiences of transcendence. This world is given to us as a dynamic, ordered system of many active component elements. Only something which itself exists on a different plane of existence from the physical can explain mathematical truths (from 6). The Argument from Personal Coincidences. But the atheistic one is incompatible with there being moral obligation. Christian: "The Bible claims that God exists, and that it is His Word to us. FLAW 2:For many other organs, removal of a part, or other alterations, may render it useless for its current function, but the organ could have been useful to the organism for some other function. But we have found a compelling, and admirably succinct version (written almost twenty years before Miracles) in H. W. B. Joseph's Some Problems in Ethics (Oxford University Press, 1931). People do win 1: Whatever Begins To Exist Has A Cause *Nothingness has no properties and therefore no causal ability. We have done our best to simplify it. more awesomeness, more joy. It is far more plausible, and far more probable, that the universe is the way it is because it was created by God with life in mind. This is a powerful argumentagainstthe existence of a compassionate and powerful deity. There are experiences that are windows into the wholeness of existence its grandeur, beauty, symmetry, harmony, unity, even its goodness. Whether any of these arguments for the existence of God is successful, of course, remains controversial. 6. Maybe a switch had already happened, maybe it happened again and again, and how could anybody tell? Not that we would have to believe in God after witnessing this event. 17. Always the same thing: more -- and not less -- intelligibility; more -- and not less -- complex and intricate order. The whole vista is deserted beyond vacancy, deserted in the way of being inhospitable to human life. If not, how and when did the idea of God get into our minds? 26. Heres why. They are attempts to confront us with the radical insufficiency of what is finite and limited, and to open minds to a level of being beyond it. 4. The belief in God is a belief that effects a change for the better in a person's life. COMMENT:This last flaw can be seen as one particular instance of the more general and fallacious. Therefore, these things must have had a non-human designer (from 3 & 4). path simply will not work., Atheist: Just because you cannot imagine a gradual stepwise way of That fact must be faced. in collaboration with the others. So there must be something uncaused, something on which all things that need But we grant that there are many steps to travel from objective moral values to the Creator of the universe or the triune God of love. But this is impossible, for God is "that than which a greater cannot be thought.". the kind of being we humans directly know. Moral arguments are both important and interesting. code all stem from a Christian worldview. In that case, ours would be the only possible universe. Thus our material universe necessarily requires, as the sufficient reason for its actual existence as an operating whole, a Transcendent Creative Mind. The first premise is certainly true-even those resistant to the argument admit it. So it is with the proofs. It is most plausible to believe that they have not. both outer and inner. Rationality This puts you in a very awkward position. And if I am the one who locked myself in this prison of obligation, I can also let myself out, thus destroying the absoluteness of the obligation which we admitted as our premise. But what about the step just before the end? But that It is the Holy Spirit that must 10. These three things depend on each other. what chemicals do. Even a skeptic will admit that the testimony we have is deeply impressive: the vast majority of humans have believed in an ultimate Being to whom the proper response could only be reverence and worship. Given a nurturing cultural context, these individuals will, some of the time, exercise their powers to accomplish great feats. The fact that 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 a unique conscious individual, who makes 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. See FLAW 2 in the Argument from Holy Books, #23 below. 35. What becomes of the argument then? Something shifted, something so immense you could call it the world. So too all particles with mass are ordered to move toward every other according to the fixed proportions of the law of gravity. from the fact that God does not deny Himself (2 Timothy 2:13). 5. Teleological and cosmological arguments, for instance, demonstrate how the existence of God best explains apparent design in nature and the nature of causality, respectively. 1. And the kalam argument proves something central to the Christian belief in God: that the universe is not eternal and without beginning; that there is a Maker of heaven and earth. The claim of the Ontological Argument is that the concept of God is the one exception to this rule. Evolution has no foresight, and every incremental step must be an improvement over the preceding one, allowing the organism to survive and reproduce better than its competitors. It can not explain how anything began, let alone life. How could there be immaterial, universal, [7] (2) If God's existence is possible, then necessarily, God does exist. cold out. This argument is correct because it uses a law of logic called modus The material world we know is a world of change. A one-in-a-million event is not improbable at all if there are a million opportunities for it to occur. Are its movers also moving? respect and worthy of love. if we are to argue in a cogent and effective fashion. For if it were dependent on -- or part of -- the system, it would have to presuppose 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? An effective rational argument for God's existence can be an important first step in opening the mind to the possibility of faith -- in clearing some of the roadblocks and rubble that prevent people from taking the idea of divine revelation seriously. This approach is classically called the moral argument for Gods existence. the Bible is His Word. For the questioner would not have asked it unless he or she thought it really better to do so than not, and really better to find the true answer than not. It can show them that to believe as they do in objective values is inconsistent with what they may also believe about the origin and destiny of the universe. My opinion: This argument is a good one. Joseph W. Koterski, S.J. All Therefore, there is some force outside (in addition to) the universe, some real being transcendent to the universe. Conscience is thus explainable only as the voice of God in the soul. Examples are, the lens and retina of the eye, the molecular components of blood clotting, and the molecular motor powering the cell's flagellum. to all (Romans 1:19). need a present cause outside of themselves in order to exist. Genius is the highest level of creative capacity, the level which, by definition, defies explanation. But this picture is proper to us, and to all beings limited in some way by space and time. We are justified in believing that God exists (from 5 & 6). Therefore, the proposition, "There is no omnipotent, omniscient, morally perfect being" is necessarily false in this actual world, too. Well-grounded beliefs may be the exception rather than the rule when it comes to psychologically fraught beliefs, which tend to bypass rational grounding and spring instead from unexamined emotions. Twenty is to ten as ten is to five, but infinite is not to twenty as twenty is to ten. 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. He says that God created a sane being but one that can be misled even when there are . The Christian philosopher Anselm (1033-1119) contributed three arguments for the existence of God. true in all possible worlds). of the order we experience? Of course, incomparably greater. Two forms of moral argument are distinguished: formal and perfectionist. But why? Morality exists only on the level of persons, spirits, souls, minds, wills -- not mere molecules. COMMENT:In 1931 the young logician Kurt Gdel published a paper proving a result called the Incompleteness Theorem (actually there are two). Should I believe that the resurrected prophet Moroni dictated the Book of Mormon to Joseph Smith? In no way do they verify the truth of some divine reality." St. Anselm begins with a definition of God, argues that an existent God is superior to a non-existent God and concludes that God must exist in reality, for his non- existence would contradict the definition of God itself. And yet the argument seems to treat it as if it were -- as if the believer and the nonbeliever could not share the same concept of God. But it is evidence; it has persuaded many; and it cannot be ignored. In fact, lightning should be explained on its own level, as a material, natural, scientific phenomenon. Each human life has a purpose (from 1 & 2). The moral argument says that because there are objective moral values (some things are truly right and others truly wrong), God must exist. (See also The Argument from the Intelligibility of the Universe,# 35, below). of atheism, there is no compelling evidence at all that God is a mere projection. will be convinced upon hearing it. 1. Such an ordering Mind must be independent of the system itself, that is, Does the picture of the world presented by atheism accord with this fact? If you want the philosophic mumbo jumbo, here it is. Reply: The very asking of this question answers it. he already knows about God, but is suppressing what he knows to be true. If so, you realize, in a way no one else can, its central importance in your life. But the existence of natural desires does, in every discoverable case, mean that the objects desired exist. beauty is to small beauty or to a mixture of beauty and ugliness. In contrast, the ontological argument relies on pure reasoning. There are virtues forbearance, courage, compassion, and so on that can only develop in the presence of suffering. Proof is objective, but 7. 5. argument. Free shipping for many products! William James had rebuked the "scoundrel logic" that calculates divine provenance from one's own goody-bag of gains, and Cass couldn't agree more with the spirit of James, but here it is, his bulging goody bag, and call him a scoundrel for feeling personally grateful to the universe when, at this same moment that he is standing on Weeks Bridge and tossing hosannas out into the infinite universe, there are multitudes of others whose lives are painfully constricting with misfortunes that are just as arbitrary and undeserved as his own expansive good luck, but Cass Seltzer does feel grateful. A universe that would be hospitable to the appearance of life must conform to some very strict conditions: Everything from the mass ratios of atomic particles and the number of dimensions of space to the cosmological parameters that rule the expansion of the universe must be just right for stable galaxies, solar systems, planets, and complex life to evolve. How do they change or invalidate the cosmological argument(s)? The purpose of each individual person's life must derive from the overall purpose of existence. It requires something more like exorcism than refutation. COMMENT:It's important not to confuse the notion of "pointless" in Premise 2 with notions like "not worth living" or "expendable." Either this intelligible order is the product of chance or of intelligent design. true, the arguments do not come close to proving the existence of the biblical FLAW 2:Pascal's wager assumes a petty, egotistical, and vindictive God who punishes anyone who does not believe in him. And so you are saying: (a) we must think about reality in a certain way, but (b) since we think that things may not in fact exist that way, then (c) we need not think about reality the way we must think about it! So, either the present day has not been reached, or the process of reaching it was not infinite. But there is in fact an argument for God's existence constructed from the data of such experiences. Isn't it remarkable that no one, even the most consistent subjectivist, believes that it is ever good for anyone to deliberately and knowingly disobey his or her own conscience? claim that they are neutral, objective observers, and that their disbelief in 1. Now you've gone and let the stockpiling of fallacies reach dangerous levels, and the massed weapons of illogic are threatening the survivability of the globe. taken individually and separately, demonstrate the existence of a being that has some of 1. Thats the complaint. It is illogical to suggest that something had no cause. A real existent being would be greater than imaginary. Survival after death entails the existence of an immaterial soul. The only rationally acceptable answer to the question of the relation between God and morality is the biblical one: morality is based on God's eternal nature. It is a devastating and conclusive argument, one that Everyone agrees that the mere existence of a concept does not entail that there are examples of that concept; after all, we can know what a unicorn is and at the same time say "unicorns don't exist." but must be infinitely more. I will copy and past the section in which I list what I believe are the most common arguments that God does not exist. No human being can have absolute authority over another. that this cause is not personal: that it has given rise to the universe, not 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. The Argument from Motion: Our senses can perceive motion by seeing that things act on one another. The best argument against the existence of the god of the bible is his absence. For an infinite time is every bit as long as forever. 5. 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. Take, for example, four or five miracles from the New Testament. This is clearly absurd: we could use this line of reasoning to prove that any figment of our imagination exists. Only God could provide us with a glimpse of benign transcendence. You may in fact have a fairly settled view that it cannot be argued about. "Society" is a popular answer to the question of the origin of morality "this or that specific person" is a very unpopular answer. 3. necessary existence= a being which cannot be thought to not exist. It is this greater If no broken laws, then no problem of evil. Maybe there is something unknown that grounds the universe of change we live in. simply chemical accidents, but valuable, irreplaceable persons deserving of is self-refuting, because when they say, you cannot impose your personal morality FLAW 1:The "believe" option in Pascal's wager can be interpreted in two ways. and influential, and may yet be saved by new formulations of it. All change needs an outside force to actualize it. 3 Reasons Why DNA is Scientific Evidence For The Existence of God. The Argument from The Upward Curve of History. COMMENT:Spinoza's argument, if sound, invalidates all the other arguments, the ones that try to establish the existence of a more traditional Godthat is, a God who standsdistinctfrom the world described by the laws of nature, as well as distinct from the world of human meaning, purpose, and morality. The surface of the water in the carved-out breaches is polished to obsidian, lustered to transparency against the white-blue gleam of the frozen encasement, and perspective askew, the whole of it looks like a cathedral rising endlessly, the arches becoming windows that open into vistas of black. Why could there not simply be an endless series of things mutually keeping each other in being? wants to swim; well, there is such a thing as water. They have been formulated in ways as richly varied as the experience in which they are rooted. investigation; I have only your word for it. And even if There are a vast number of physically possible universes. Happen to see our new campaign on Fox News? "Science can't explain the complexity and order of life; God must have designed it to be this way." First, when considering this position, it's important to recognize the difference between complexity and design. 3. Is Pascal's Wager dishonest? In drawing this connection between morality and religion, we do not want to create any confusion or misunderstanding. My ideals, purposes, aspirations, and desires, something created by my mind or will, like the rules of baseball. God Doesn't Believe in Atheists The Bible teaches that atheists are not really atheists. FLAW 2:Same as Flaw 3 from The Argument from the Survival of Death. invariant, abstract laws in a chance universe formed by a big bang? 22. The Christian in the above hypothetical conversation did not have a correct Question 1: Suppose I deny that God exists in the mind? Theism explains that our response to this believer's life is, ultimately, our response to the call of our Creator to live the kind of life he made us to live. If one allows pragmatic consequences to determine truth, then truth becomes relative to the believer, which is incoherent. Almost everyone admits that reflection on the order and beauty of nature touches something very deep within us. to us. But still, he is the object of many. The complexity of creation is a huge problem for those who deny the existence of God. Atheists never tire of telling us that we are the chance products of the motion of matter -- a motion which is purposeless and blind to every human striving. How can it be that, of all things, one isthisthing, so that one can say, astonishingly in the right frame of mind, itisastonishing, with the metaphysical chill blowing in from afar "here I am.". To recognize things as imperfect or finite involves the possession of a standard in thought that makes the recognition possible. The Argument from Fine-Tuning corresponds to the Very Strong Anthropic Principle. constructing an organism does not mean there isnt one., Christian: DNA has information in itthe instructions to form a living If the action isn't caused by my psychological states, which are themselves caused by other states, then in one way is it reallymyaction? The atheist cannot account For instance, we can know that all the books on this shelf are red only by looking at each one and counting them. If derived from another there must ultimately exist a being whose necessity is not derived, that is, an absolutely necessary being. We notice that some things cause other things to be (to begin to be, to continue to be, or both). argument first derives a major premise from the real world of nature: that nature Is this a man who could possibly go out and commit murder and mayhem, rape our virgin daughters and shoot controlled substances into his veins? It's a tiresome proposition, having to take up the work of the Enlightenment all over again, but it's happened on your watch. [41] This is one of several arguments known as the Christological argument. Nothing changes itself. Quantity cannot yield quality; adding numbers cannot change the rules of a relative game to the rightful absolute demands of conscience. All movements of bodies are equally necessary, but they cannot be discriminated as true and false. In other words, this is the real God. Arguments for the existence of God go back hundreds of years, and even 2,000 years ago the ancient Greeks debated the subject and offered "proofs". 3. The Problem of Evil, Suffering and DeathMaking sense of the 'why'? 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. ), 2. ), 2. In his survey of arguments for God's existence, Dawkins does touch on a sort of moral argument that he calls the Argument from Degree. . FLAW 2:The fatal flaw in The Argument from Miracles was masterfully exposed by David Hume inAn Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Chapter 10, "On Miracles." And to reach the idea of God, we just project the scale upward and outward to infinity. Isn't this "religious" view compatible with very much more than traditional theism? reject them as impossible. And now, only today, as if his cup weren't already gushing over, had come a letter from Harvard, laying out its intention of luring him away from Frankfurter University, located in nearby Weedham, about twelve miles upriver from where Cass is standing right now. Scriptures (1 Peter 3:15). If you see some event as a miracle, then the activity of God is seen in this event. Question from Marvin: What are the top most powerful arguments for the existence of God, and if theres a logical order in which we should present them. Question 3: But what if the order we experience is merely a product of our minds? The problem with the problem of evil is that if God does not exist, there can be no real evil to object to. Music, too, produces such experiences, though there we know exactly who the creators were. 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. Moral obligation can hardly be rooted in a material motion blind to purpose. This young woman came to be 5'2", but she was not always that height. 5 . The hypothesis "God raised Jesus from the dead" is the best explanation of these facts. Everything But the universe is the sum total of all matter, space and time. If we agree that something cannot exist in thought, we cannot go ahead and say that it might nevertheless exist in reality. (See chap. Such things simply do not make sense he goes home and kisses his wife and hugs his children, as if they were not First had come the book, which he had entitledThe Varieties of Religious Illusion, a nod to both William James'sThe Varieties of Religious Experienceand to Sigmund Freud'sThe Future of An Illusion. 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. 1. Of course not -- not even in an infinite time. The concepts that human beings are valuable, are not simply Why or why not? God is purely rational, in reality, they are strongly motivated to reject the What does the answer to that question depend on? Therefore, they must have a designer. 5. Therefore this intelligible universe and the finite minds so well suited to grasp it are the products of intelligence. etc.) It is in our interests to believe in God, the argument suggests, and it is therefore rational for us to do so. This argument has been around since the time of Charles Darwin, and his replies to it still hold. at least we would know that someone did it. The formal moral argument takes the form of morality to imply that it has a divine origin: morality consists of an ultimately authoritative set of commands; where can these commands have come from but a commander that has ultimate authority? We must also keep These arguments, however, of mine, if the principles of scientific [naturalism] are to stand unchallenged, are themselves no more than happenings in a mind, results of bodily movements; that you or I think them sound, or think them unsound, is but another such happening; that we think them no more than another such happening is itself but yet another such. God alone is a being who is not a person and who cares about each of us enough to show us the way. "But if the spirit of religion join itself to the love of wonder, there is an end of common sense."). 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.