Arguments for the Existence of God

     If believe is understood in the sense of validating a line of the Apostle’s Creed as we would that water is wet, ducks quack, and 2+2=4, then belief based on a leap of faith is dishonest. We must at least bracket it as unproved. It seems wrong to affirm a premise (as opposed to acting on a hypothesis) just because it pleases us—even if it satisfies deep existential longings and completes our souls. Grad school professors red-inked that out of me. Truth, if we can find it, requires authority independent of our needs and desires. Of course, if we’re looking for reasons to believe in God in a true-false sense, there are philosophical “proofs," but Bishop James Pike’s theology best seller, A Time for Christian Candor (1964), summarily dismissed them: “We certainly do not claim that the existence of God can be proved” (17). I agree, but his dismissal is brusque, so I'll walk through a few odd proofs. 

     First, let’s dismiss a few that aren't proofs at all, such as Pascal’s Wager, which is a profit-loss calculation establishing that, given that only one available religion rewards belief with eternal bliss, then a spiritual capitalist will invest in belief even if its likelihood of being true is slim-to-none. Gambling advice based on agnostic hedonism is no proof. Similarly hollow is C. S. Lewis’ argument from desire: the suggestion that a hunger wouldn’t exist absent something to satisfy it—a circular argument that assumes benign design to prove a designer. 

     Argument from so-called miracles, is also hollow. It argues from ignorance, like self-appointed experts who leap from “science cannot explain” to space aliens. Geometric crop circles, for example, prove relativity-defying invisible space tourists—evidently really bored pranksters. Even if an event not predicted by science (say, a sudden remission of my cancer) happens right after I pray to God X, this doesn’t prove that God X exists. There are other possible causes, including an error in diagnosis or the intervention of Gods Y and Z, who may be generously ecumenical. I can be forgiven for thanking God-X, but this is a clear case of the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy. Robins precede the spring but don't cause it. Answered prayer proves nothing.

     Some pious proofs exploit a fallacious maneuver I discussed in a January 1998 article in College English, "Quixote’s Visor: A Rhetorical Turn." It's named after Don Quixote’s attempt to refurbish family armor “for ages forgotten in a corner, eaten with rust and covered with mould.” The helmet lacks a visor, a feature mentioned in the literature that Quixote wants to reenact, so he spends a week making a pasteboard visor and tests it with a sword blow. Of course, it shatters. He then imbeds strips of iron inside a second pasteboard visor and decides not to test the new one. Of course, a sword blow would shatter this visor too. Though marginally stronger, it is equally false as protection, but Quixote wants a visor, so he accepts false as true. 

     This maneuver is commonplace in politics and criminal courts. Each side tests the other, picking its tiniest nits, and then poses its own alternative untested. It’s the tactic of creationists who nitpick scientific research supporting evolution and, finding nits, display them as proof that their theory, supported by no science whatsoever (in effect, one huge nit), is true. It’s about finding a mote in your brother’s argument while ignoring the board in yours.

     A classic example of this rhetorical turn is George Berkeley’s A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, a philosophical argument that so impressed and disappointed me in my undergraduate years that it sprang to mind when I read about Quixote’s folly. Following John Locke but (at the onset) more rigorously empirical, Berkeley demonstrates that all we ever "see" are a fluctuating fields of color and brightness imprinted on two-dimensional retinas. All the things that we imagine we know about the world are nothing but what Berkeley calls ideas. Our 3-D world is a mental construct, not reality. From what William James called "blooming, buzzing confusion," we construct persistent objects and locations only implicit in sense-data. 

     A truism of much later philosophy, it was a revelation to me in 1961 that we never really see (or hear or touch) the “real” world. We are, in this sense, prisoners in Platonic cave constructing imaginary objects out of shadows. So far, this is testable: confirmed by optical illusions and the inability of those blind from birth to see clearly when vision is suddenly acquired. Of course, world-modeling from pixels is based on instinctive capacities, a survival skill in all sighted mammals. But the fact remains that the world we experience is only an instinctive tool, not a window into real being. So far, this would seem to be a basis for agnosticism, even solipsism.

     Bishop Berkeley makes an unwarranted turn from skepticism to faith. First, he supposes that, because everything we know consists of ideas in our minds, everything that exists must be ideas (like a blind man arguing from experience that nobody can see). This is warranted by the the Cartesian premise, axiomatic in Berkeley’s day, that everything is either spirit or matter and that the two can't interact. But perceived objects are stable, not like those in dreams. Therefore, some spirit-matrix must sustain the objects in the world (visual ideas) or Berkeley’s writing table would cease to exist when he looked away. If everything is an idea in a mind, some great mind must be thinking about the table in Berkeley’s absence, and that can only be the mind of God. So God exists. Everything is a God-thought, created second-by-second. 

     This rests on the untested assumption that we cannot, even indirectly, perceive “matter," including the world that most theologians have assumed to exist. The conclusion that a thinking God exists and that we continuously read his mind is presented triumphantly—like Quixote’s reinforced second visor—as a solution to the non-problem that our impressions of the world are impressions. Berkeley's solution is never tested. He never speculates how we read God's mind. Because he complains early in the Principles that the “doctrine” of matter has led to “impieties” (§ 21), it's obvious that, for the good bishop, God isn't questionable. It's as if Quixote smashed an unreinforced pasteboard visor as a demonstration for selling wire-reinforced ones. 

     In a 1948 BBC debate with Bertrand Russell, F. C. Copelston, a priest, summarizes a fashionable proof that goes back to Plato and Aquinas, the proof from contingent being. All things are contingent on other things for their existence (such as humans on parents and air) and those things are also contingent on other things—all of them capable of not existing. The world, in this argument is an”aggregate of individual objects” (p. 102). If we trace back the chain of objects capable of not existing, we must devolve ultimately to a state where no object exists, so there is no ground for any contingent existence whatsoever. Since contingent objects do exist, there must be non-contingent existence behind it all, a creator God. Coppleston assumes that any non-contingent being must be the theistic God, Yahweh smuggled in with the baggage of western culture. Such an assumption shatters like Quixote's second visor if tested—something that Father Copleston quixotically has no interest in doing.

     Russell attacks the argument on other grounds, but I see it as based on a flawed premise of analytical realism, the reification of so-called “individual objects,” as if things had real identities independent of our analytical construction of them. Here Berkeley is right. We construct things. If I look at a two-volume work and see thingness, what things do I see? One work? Two books? 39 chapters? 586 pages? 186,000 words? 1,116,000  letters? Three things if a page is torn out? A fraction of a library? How many molecules? The particular thingness(es) of the book-stuff depends on my purpose and mindset. The various “objects” that are the two-volume work do not exist independently of my constructive act of seeing them. There is simply presence here, potential continuous being.

     Suppose that a wave is rushing toward the beach—and let’s make it a big one with a surfer riding it. Everybody on the beach, of course, sees the wave as an object, a big thing of water rushing toward the beach. Seeing it that way is a survival trick common to all human beings, probably all vertebrates. But the crest that we see consists of constantly shifting colocations of water molecules, each molecule moving only a short distance, joining and then leaving the wave. The wave is an orderly series of laterals—a collective gesture—not an object at all. When it reaches the shore, it disappears, but the water that was it continues to exist. The wave’s brief existence as wave is indeed contingent on wind, tide, depth of water, and such, but these concepts are as edgeless as the wave. They too are gestures. The surfer is also a gesture, if less ephemeral. While the molecules in the wave—always moving, never in the same configuration—are replaced moment by moment, in contrast, it takes about seven years for all the surfer’s atoms to exchange, but he too differs moment by moment like a wave, moving and breathing. Even the surfboard will eventually lose thingness. It too is a wave, though an extremely slow-moving one.

     So does this merely repeat that things are contingent in their existence? Yes, but with a difference. Copleston and Russell imagine physical things as objectively separate or “individual” for periods of time—with virtual black lines around their edges—rather than as permeable, evolving gestures of an edgeless whole. Both men construct chains of distinct, fixed objects like rows of dominos. But the physical world is an incalculably complex and ever-moving sea from which we construct—even if unanimously as a culture or species because it is useful and convenient—waves as things. Waves in the sea of matter-energy, impacting our minds, generate our perception of separate things, and these are indeed contingent on that sea, but (here is the kicker), there's no compelling reason to suppose that matter/energy is not eternal. 

     This is a conclusion based on observation. Astronomers today trace matter-energy back to Big Bang almost fourteen billion years ago, and suppose that it will presumably continue to churn—slowing through entropy—for innumerable billions of years to come. The Big Bang destroyed all information like a black hole, so it blocks questions of "prior" causation without answering them. Even after entropy prevails, evidence is that the “dead” universe will continue to exist—that matter cannot be destroyed except by being converted into energy, which goes on existing even as it spreads into space. So all objects or things—material ones at least—may indeed be contingent on eternal being, a non-contingent ground, but that ground may well be a soup of matter-energy that becomes more mysterious the more we study it. If this advances any theological view, it is pantheism, which I doubt that the Jesuit Father Copleston had in mind.

     Even if a reader choses to smite my visor, it remains one non-theistic explanation of the existence of ‘contingent” things and shows Copleston’s argument to be Quixotic, prematurely shutting down alternatives. A common problem with supposed proofs of divine existence is that all they prove, if anything, is a blind force (may it be with you) remote from any creeds or practices. Nobody worships the Big Bang. Kierkegaard, who valued passionate commitment to absurd religion, regarded rational proofs of God as destructive of faith—a position in contrast to rationalists who honor the God of Truth by withholding belief without proof. After decades of valuing Alfred Tennyson’s position, “There lives more faith in honest doubt, / Believe me, than in half the creeds." I begin to understand Kierkegaard’s surrender to subjective moments of transcendence.

Copleston, F. C., and Bertrand Russell. “The Existence of God—A Debate,” in Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion: Readings. Edited by James Kellenberger. Pearson/Prentice Hall, pp. 101-108.