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The Existence of God

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The existence and attributes of God are evident from the creation itself, even though sinful human beings suppress and distort their natural knowledge of God.

The existence of God is foundational to the study of theology. The Bible does not seek to prove God’s existence, but rather takes it for granted. Scripture expresses a strong doctrine of natural revelation: the existence and attributes of God are evident from the creation itself, even though sinful human beings suppress and distort their natural knowledge of God. The dominant question in the Old and New Testaments is not whether God is, but rather who God is. Philosophers both Christian and non-Christian have offered a wide range of arguments for God’s existence, and the discipline of natural theology (what can be known or proven about God from nature alone) is flourishing today. Some philosophers, however, have proposed that belief in God is rationally justified even without theistic arguments or evidences. Meanwhile, professing atheists have offered arguments against God’s existence; the most popular is the argument from evil, which contends that the existence and extent of evil in the world gives us good reason not to believe in God. In response, Christian thinkers have developed various theodicies, which seek to explain why God is morally justified in permitting the evils we observe.

If theology is the study of God and his works, then the existence of God is as foundational to theology as the existence of rocks is to geology. Two basic questions have been raised regarding belief in God’s existence: (1) Is it true ? (2) Is it rationally justified (and if so, on what grounds)? The second is distinct from the first because a belief can be true without being rationally justified (e.g., someone might irrationally believe that he’ll die on a Thursday, a belief that turns out by chance to be true). Philosophers have grappled with both questions for millennia. In this essay, we will consider what the Bible says in answer to these questions, before sampling the answers of some influential Christian thinkers.

Scripture and the Existence of God

The Bible opens not with a proof of God’s existence, but with a pronouncement of God’s works: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” This foundational assertion of Scripture assumes that the reader not only knows already that God exists, but also has a basic grasp of who this God is. Throughout the Old Testament, belief in a creator God is treated as normal and natural for all human beings, even though the pagan nations have fallen into confusions about the true identity of this God. Psalm 19 vividly expresses a doctrine of natural revelation: the entire created universe ‘declares’ and ‘proclaims’ the glorious works of God. Proverbs tells us that “the fear of the Lord” is the starting point for knowledge and wisdom (Prov. 1:7; 9:10; cf. Psa. 111:10). Denying God’s existence is therefore intellectually and morally perverse (Psa. 14:1; 53:1). Indeed, the dominant concern throughout the Old Testament is not whether God is, but who God is. Is Yahweh the one true God or not (Deut. 4:35; 1Kgs. 18:21, 37, 39; Jer. 10:10)? The worldview that provides the foil for Hebrew monotheism is pagan polytheism rather than secular atheism.

This stance on the existence of God continues into the New Testament, which builds on the foundation of the uncompromising monotheism of the Old. In his epistle to the Romans, the apostle Paul insists that God’s “eternal power and divine nature” are clearly perceived from the created order itself. Objectively speaking, there can be no rational basis for doubt about the existence of a transcendent personal creator, and thus there can be no excuse for unbelief (Rom. 1:20). Endued with a natural knowledge of our creator we owe God our honor and thanks, and our failure to do so serves as the primary basis for the manifestation of God’s wrath and judgment. The apostle’s robust doctrine of natural revelation has raised the question of whether anyone can truly be an atheist. The answer will depend, first, on how “atheist” is defined, and second, on what precisely Paul means when he speaks of people “knowing” God. If the idea is that all men retain some genuine knowledge of God, despite their sinful suppression of natural revelation, it’s hard to maintain that anyone could completely lack any cognitive awareness of God’s existence. But if “atheist” is defined as someone who denies the existence of God or professes not to believe in God, Romans 1 not only allows for the existence of atheists – it effectively predicts it. Atheism might then be understood as a form of culpable self-deception.

Paul’s convictions about natural revelation are put to work in his preaching to Gentile audiences in Lystra and Athens (Acts 14:15–17; 17:22–31). Paul assumes not only that his hearers know certain things about God from the created order but also that they have sinfully suppressed and distorted these revealed truths, turning instead to idolatrous worship of the creation (cf. Rom. 1:22–25). Even so, his appeals to general revelation are never offered in isolation from special revelation: the Old Testament Scriptures, the person of Jesus Christ, and the testimony of Christ’s apostles.

Elsewhere in the New Testament, the question of the existence of God is almost never explicitly raised, but rather serves as a foundational presupposition, an unquestionable background assumption. One exception would be the writer to the Hebrews, who remarks that “whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him” (11:6). In general, the New Testament is concerned less with philosophical questions about the existence of God than with practical questions about how sinners can have a saving relationship with the God whose existence is obvious. As in the Old Testament, the pressing question is never whether God is, but who God is. Is Jesus Christ the revelation of God in human flesh or not? That’s the crux of the issue.

Arguments for the Existence of God

Consider again the two questions mentioned at the outset. (1) Is belief in God true ? (2) Is it rationally justified ? One appealing way to answer both questions affirmatively is to offer a theistic argument that seeks to infer God’s existence from other things we know, observe, or take for granted. A cogent theistic argument, one assumes, would not only demonstrate the truth of God’s existence but also provide rational justification for believing it. There is a vast literature on theistic arguments, so only a sampling of highlights can be given here.

The first generation of Christian apologists felt little need to argue for God’s existence for the same reason one finds no such arguments in the New Testament: the main challenges to Christian theism came not from atheism, but from non-Christian theism (Judaism) and pagan polytheism. Not until the medieval period do we find formal arguments for the existence of God offered, and even then the arguments do not function primarily as refutations of atheism but as philosophical meditations on the nature of God and the relationship between faith and reason.

One of the most famous and controversial is the ontological argument of St. Anselm (1033–1109) according to which God’s existence can be deduced merely from the definition of God, such that atheism leads inevitably to self-contradiction. One distinctive of the argument is that it relies on pure reason alone with no dependence on empirical premises. Various versions of the ontological argument have been developed and defended, and opinion is sharply divided even among Christian philosophers over whether there are, or even could be, any sound versions.

Cosmological arguments seek to demonstrate that that the existence of the universe, or some phenomenon within the universe, demands a causal explanation originating in a necessary first cause beyond the universe. St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) famously offered “Five Ways” of demonstrating God’s existence, each of which can be understood as kind of cosmological argument. For example, one of the Five Ways argues that any motion (change) has to be explained by some mover (cause). If that mover itself exhibits motion, there must be a prior mover to explain it, and because there cannot be an infinite regress of moved movers, there must be an original unmoved mover : an eternal, immutable, and self-existent first cause. Other notable defenders of cosmological arguments include G. W. Leibniz (1646–1716) and Samuel Clarke (1675–1729), and more recently Richard Swinburne and William Lane Craig.

Teleological arguments , which along with cosmological arguments can be traced back to the ancient Greeks, contend that God is the best explanation for apparent design or order in the universe. Simply put, design requires a designer, and thus the appearance of design in the natural world is evidence of a supernatural designer. William Paley (1743–1805) is best known for his argument from analogy which compares functional arrangements in natural organisms to those in human artifacts such as pocket watches. While design arguments suffered a setback with the rise of the Darwinian theory of evolution, which purports to explain the apparent design of organisms in terms of undirected adaptive processes, the so-called Intelligent Design Movement has reinvigorated teleological arguments with insights from contemporary cosmology and molecular biology while exposing serious shortcomings in naturalistic Darwinian explanations.

In the twentieth century, the moral argument gained considerable popularity, not least due to its deployment by C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) in his bestseller Mere Christianity . The argument typically aims to show that only a theistic worldview can account for objective moral laws and values. As with the other theistic arguments there are many different versions of the moral argument, trading on various aspects of our moral intuitions and assumptions. Since such arguments are typically premised on moral realism —the view that there are objective moral truths that cannot be reduced to mere human preferences or conventions—extra work is often required to defend such arguments in a culture where moral sensibilities have been eroded by subjectivism, relativism, and nihilism.

Cornelius Van Til (1895–1987) gained some notoriety for his forceful criticisms of the “traditional method” of Christian apologetics which capitulated to “autonomous human reason.” Van Til held that any respectable theistic argument ought to disclose the undeniability of the triune God revealed in Scripture, not merely a First Cause or Intelligent Designer. He therefore advocated an alternative approach, centered on a transcendental argument for the existence of God, whereby the Christian seeks to show that human reason, far from being autonomous and self-sufficient, presupposes the God of Christianity, the “All-Conditioner” who created, sustains, and directs all things according to the counsel of his will. As Van Til put it, we should argue “from the impossibility of the contrary”: if we deny the God of the Bible, we jettison the very grounds for assuming that our minds have the capacity for rational thought and for reliable knowledge of the world.

Since the renaissance of Christian philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century, there has been renewed interest and enthusiasm for the project of developing and defending theistic arguments. New and improved versions of the classical arguments have been offered, while developments in contemporary analytic philosophy have opened up new avenues for natural theology. In his 1986 lecture, “Two Dozen (or so) Theistic Arguments,” Alvin Plantinga sketched out an entire A to Z of arguments for God, most of which had never been previously explored. Plantinga’s suggestions have since been expanded into a book-length treatment by other philosophers. The discipline of Christian natural theology is thriving as never before.

Basic Belief in the Existence of God

Still, are any of these arguments actually needed? Does confidence about God’s existence have to be funded by philosophical proofs? Since the Enlightenment, it has often been held that belief in God is rationally justified only if it can be supported by philosophical proofs or scientific evidences. While Romans 1:18–21 has sometimes been taken as a mandate for theistic arguments, Paul’s language in that passage suggests that our knowledge of God from natural revelation is far more immediate, intuitive, and universally accessible.

In the opening chapters of his Institutes of the Christian Religion , John Calvin (1509–1564) considers what can be known of God apart from special revelation and asserts that a natural knowledge has been universally implanted in mankind by the Creator: “There is within the human mind, and indeed by natural instinct, an awareness of divinity” ( Institutes , I.3.1). Calvin speaks of a sensus divinitatis , “a sense of deity,” possessed by every single person in virtue of being created in God’s image. This internal awareness of the Creator “can never be effaced,” even though sinful men “struggle furiously” to escape it. Our implanted natural knowledge of God can be likened in some respects to our natural knowledge of the moral law through the God-given faculty of conscience (Rom. 2:14-15). We know instinctively that it’s wrong to lie and steal; no philosophical argument is needed to prove such things. Similarly, we know instinctively that there is a God who made us and to whom we owe honor and thanks.

In the 1980s, a number of Protestant philosophers led by Alvin Plantinga, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and William Alston developed a sophisticated defense of Calvin’s notion of the sensus divinitatis . Dubbed the “Reformed epistemologists,” they argued that theistic beliefs can be (and normally should be) properly basic : rationally justified even without empirical evidences or philosophical proofs. On this view, believing that God exists is comparable to believing that the world of our experience really exists; it’s entirely rational, even if we can’t philosophically demonstrate it. Indeed, it would be quite dysfunctional to believe otherwise.

Arguments Against the Existence of God

Even granting that there is a universal natural knowledge of God, there are unquestionably people who deny God’s existence and offer arguments in their defense. Some have attempted to exposed contradictions within the concept of God (e.g., between omniscience and divine freedom) thereby likening God to a “square circle” whose existence is logically impossible. At most such arguments only rule out certain conceptions of God, conceptions that are often at odds with the biblical view of God in any case.

A less ambitious approach is to place the burden of proof on the theist: in the absence of good arguments for God’s existence, one ought to adopt the “default” position of atheism (or at least agnosticism). This stance is hard to maintain given the many impressive theistic arguments championed by Christian philosophers today, not to mention the Reformed epistemologists’ argument that belief in God is properly basic.

The most popular atheistic argument is undoubtedly the argument from evil. The strong version of the argument maintains that the existence of evil is logically incompatible with the existence of an all-good, all-powerful God. The more modest version contends that particularly horrifying and seemingly gratuitous instances of evil, such as the Holocaust, provide strong evidence against God’s existence. The problem of evil has invited various theodicies : attempts to explain how God can be morally justified in permitting the evils we encounter in the world. While such explanations can be useful, they aren’t strictly necessary for rebutting the argument from evil. It is enough to point out that given the complexities of the world and the considerable limitations of human knowledge, we are in no position to conclude that God couldn’t have morally justifying reasons for allowing the evils we observe. Indeed, if we already have grounds for believing in God, we can reasonably conclude that God must have such reasons, whether or not we can discern them.

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Moral Arguments for the Existence of God

Moral arguments for God’s existence form a diverse family of arguments that reason from some feature of morality or the moral life to the existence of God, usually understood as a morally good creator of the universe. Moral arguments are both important and interesting. They are interesting because evaluating their soundness requires attention to practically every important philosophical issue dealt with in metaethics. They are important because of their prominence in popular apologetic arguments for religious belief. Evidence for this can be found in the amazing popularity of C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity (1952), which is almost certainly the best-selling book of apologetics in the twentieth century, and which begins with a moral argument for God’s existence. Many ordinary people regard religion as in some way providing a basis or foundation for morality. This fact might seem to favor religious arguments for morality rather than moral arguments for religious belief, but if someone believes that morality is in some way “objective” or “real,” and that this moral reality requires explanation, moral arguments for God’s reality naturally suggest themselves. The apparent connection between morality and religion appears to many people to support the claim that moral truths require a religious foundation, or can best be explained by God’s existence, or some qualities or actions of God.

After some general comments about theistic arguments and a brief history of moral arguments, this essay will discuss several different forms of the moral argument. A major distinction is that between moral arguments that are theoretical in nature and practical or pragmatic arguments. The former are best thought of as arguments that begin with alleged moral facts and argue that God is necessary to explain those facts, or at least that God provides a better explanation of them than secular accounts can offer. The latter typically begin with claims about some good or end that morality requires and argue that this end is not attainable unless God exists. Whether this distinction is hard and fast will be one of the questions to be discussed, as some argue that practical arguments by themselves cannot be the basis of rational belief. To meet such concerns practical arguments may have to include a theoretical dimension as well.

1. The Goals of Theistic Arguments

2. history of moral arguments for god’s existence, 3. theoretical moral arguments for god’s existence and divine command theories of moral obligation, 4. arguments from moral knowledge or awareness, 5. arguments from human dignity or worth, 6. practical moral arguments for belief in god, 7. conclusion, other internet resources, related entries.

Before attempting to explain and assess moral arguments for the existence of God, it would be helpful to have some perspective on the goals of arguments for God’s existence. (We shall generically term arguments for God’s existence “theistic arguments.”) Of course views about this are diverse, but most contemporary proponents of such arguments do not see theistic arguments as attempted “proofs,” in the sense that they are supposed to provide valid arguments with premises that no reasonable person could deny. Such a standard of achievement would clearly be setting the bar for success very high, and proponents of theistic arguments rightly note that philosophical arguments for interesting conclusions in any field outside of formal logic hardly ever reach such a standard.

More reasonable questions to ask about theistic arguments would seem to be the following: Are there valid arguments for the conclusion that God exists that have premises that are known or reasonably believed by some people? Are the premises of such arguments more reasonable than their denials, at least for some reasonable people? Arguments that meet these standards could have value in making belief in God reasonable for some people, or even giving some people knowledge of God’s existence, even if it turns out that some of the premises of the arguments can be reasonably denied by other people, and thus that the arguments fail as proofs.

A major issue that cannot be settled here concerns the question of where the burden of proof lies with respect to theistic arguments. Many secular philosophers follow Antony Flew (1976) in holding that there is a “presumption of atheism.” On this view, believing in God is like believing in the Loch Ness Monster or leprechauns, something that reasonable people do not do without sufficient evidence. If such evidence is lacking, the proper stance is atheism rather than agnosticism.

This “presumption of atheism” has been challenged in a number of ways. Alvin Plantinga (2000) has argued that reasonable belief in God does not have to be based on propositional evidence, but can be “properly basic.” On this view, reasonable belief in God can be the outcome of a basic faculty (called the sensus divinitatis by theologian John Calvin) and thus needs no support from arguments at all. In response some would argue that even if theistic belief is not grounded in propositional evidence, it still might require non-propositional evidence (such as experience), so it is not clear that Plantinga’s view by itself removes the burden of proof challenge.

A second way to challenge the presumption of atheism is to question an implicit assumption made by those who defend such a presumption, which is that belief in God is epistemologically more risky than unbelief. The assumption might be defended in the following way: One might think that theists and atheists share a belief in many entities: atoms, middle-sized physical objects, animals, and stars, for example. Someone, however, who believes in leprechauns or sea monsters in addition to these commonly accepted objects thereby incurs a burden of proof. Such a person believes in “one additional thing” and thus seems to incur additional epistemological risk. One might think that belief in God is relevantly like belief in a leprechaun or sea monster, and thus that the theist also bears an additional burden of proof. Without good evidence in favor of belief in God the safe option is to refrain from belief.

However, the theist may hold that this account does not accurately represent the situation. Instead, the theist may argue that the debate between atheism and theism is not simply an argument about whether “one more thing” exists in the world. In fact, God is not to be understood as an entity in the world at all; any such entity would by definition not be God. The debate is rather a debate about the character of the universe. The theist believes that every object in the natural world exists because God creates and conserves that object; every finite thing has the character of being dependent on God. The atheist denies this and affirms that the basic entities in the natural world have the character of existing “on their own.”

If this is the right way to think about the debate, then it is not obvious that atheism is safer than theism. The debate is not about the existence of one object, but the character of the universe as a whole. Both parties are making claims about the character of everything in the natural world, and both claims seem risky. This point is especially important in dealing with moral arguments for theism, since one of the questions raised by such arguments is the adequacy of a naturalistic worldview in explaining morality. Such accounts need to explain without watering the categories of morality down or otherwise domesticating them and thereby depriving them of their most interesting features. Evidentialists may properly ask about the evidence for theism, but it also seems proper to ask about the evidence for atheism if the atheist is committed to a rival metaphysic such as naturalism.

Something that resembles a moral argument for God’s existence, or at least an argument from value, can be found in the fourth of Thomas Aquinas’s “Five Ways” (Aquinas 1265–1274, I, 1, 3). Aquinas there begins with the claim that among beings who possess such qualities as “good, true, and noble” there are gradations. Presumably he means that some things that are good are better than other good things; perhaps some noble people are nobler than others who are noble. In effect Aquinas is claiming that when we “grade” things in this way we are, at least implicitly, comparing them to some absolute standard. Aquinas believes this standard cannot be merely “ideal” or “hypothetical,” and thus this gradation is only possible if there is some being which has this quality to a “maximum” extent: “so that there is something which is truest, something best, something noblest and, consequently, something which is uttermost being; for those things that are greatest in truth are greatest in being, as it is written in Metaph. Ii.” Aquinas goes on to affirm that this being which provides the standard is also the cause or explanation of the existence of these qualities, and such a cause must be God. Obviously, this argument draws deeply on Platonic and Aristotelian assumptions that are no longer widely held by philosophers. For the argument to be plausible today, such assumptions would have to be defended, or else the argument reformulated in a way that frees it from its original metaphysical home.

Probably the most influential versions of the moral argument for belief in God can be traced to Kant (1788 [1956]), who famously argued that the theoretical arguments for God’s existence were unsuccessful, but presented a rational argument for belief in God as a “postulate of practical reason.” Kant held that a rational, moral being must necessarily will “the highest good,” which consists of a world in which people are both morally good and happy, and in which moral virtue is the condition for happiness. The latter condition implies that this end must be sought solely by moral action. However, Kant held that a person cannot rationally will such an end without believing that moral actions can successfully achieve such an end, and this requires a belief that the causal structure of nature is conducive to the achievement of this end by moral means. This is equivalent to belief in God, a moral being who is ultimately responsible for the character of the natural world. Kant’s arguments will be discussed later in this article.

Kant-inspired arguments were prominent in the nineteenth century, and continued to be important right up to the middle of the twentieth century. Such arguments can be found, for example, in W. R. Sorley (1918), Hastings Rashdall (1920), and A. E. Taylor (1945/1930). Although Henry Sidgwick was not himself a proponent of a moral argument for God’s existence, some have argued that his thought presents the materials for such an argument (see Walls and Baggett 2011). In the nineteenth century John Henry Newman (1870) also made good use of a moral argument in his case for belief in God, developing what could be called an argument from conscience.

Besides those luminaries from the history of the moral argument, several other figures made contributions of various sorts to the discussion, including Arthur Balfour (1915), Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison (1920), Clement Webb (2012), W. G. de Burgh (1938), W. R. Matthews (1921), Austin Farrer (2012), and H. P. Owen (1965). A chronicle of much of this history was published by Walls and Baggett (2019). Recovering such history is a helpful antidote to the ahistorical character of much contemporary analytic philosophy.

In recent philosophy there has been a revival of divine command metaethical theories, which has in turn led to new versions of the moral argument found in such thinkers as Robert Adams (1987), John Hare (1996), and C. Stephen Evans (2010). Work on divine command theory, both in favor and against, has experienced a recent resurgence of interest. This work has encompassed both motivations for and formulations of divine command theory, as well as extensive discussion of both old and new objections to it.

However, it is important to see that there are versions of the moral argument for God’s existence that are completely independent of such a divine command theory, and this possibility can be seen in arguments developed by Angus Ritchie (2012) and Mark Linville (2009). Perhaps the most extensive and developed account of a moral argument for God’s existence in recent philosophy is found in David Baggett and Jerry L. Walls (2016). This book examines a comprehensive cumulative form of moral argument and extensively explores underlying issues. It goes without saying that these renewed arguments have engendered new criticisms as well. Theoretical moral arguments for God’s existence can be understood as variations on the following template:

There are objective moral facts.
God provides the best explanation of the existence of objective moral facts.
Therefore, (probably) God exists.

As we shall see, there are a variety of features of morality that can be appealed to in the first steps of the arguments, as well as a variety of ways in which God might be thought to provide an explanation of those features in the second steps. The use of the somewhat vague phrase “objective moral facts” is intended to allow for this variety in Premise 1. The similarly vague notion of God providing the best explanation of such facts allows for the variety of ways moral features may depend on God—divine commands one salient option among them. Both types of premises are obviously open to challenge. For example, the first premise of such an argument can be challenged by popular metaethical views that see morality as “subjective,” or “expressive,” rather than something that consists of objective facts. Moral skeptics and “error theorists” also challenge the first premise. The second premise can be challenged on the basis of rival explanations of the features of morality, explanations that do not require God. Arguments about the second premise then may require comparison between theistic explanations of morality and these rival views, with an attentive eye on the relevant evidence in need of explanation.

It is easy to see then that the proponent of a moral argument has a complex task: She must defend the reality and objectivity of the feature of morality appealed to, but also defend the claim that this feature can be best explained by God. The second part of the task may require not only demonstrating the strengths of a theistic explanation, but pointing out weaknesses in rival secular explanations as well. Both parts of the task are essential, but it is worth noting that the two components cannot be accomplished simultaneously. The theist must defend the reality of morality against subjectivists, constructivists, and “moral nihilists.” Assuming that this task has been carried out, the theist must then try to show that morality thus understood requires or at least is most plausibly understood by a theistic explanation.

It is interesting to observe, however, that with respect to both parts of the task, the theist may enlist non-theists as allies. The theist may well make common cause with ethical naturalists as well as ethical non-naturalists in defending moral realism against “projective” theories such as expressivism. However, the theist may also enlist the support of error theorists such as J. L. Mackie (1977), and moral nihilists such as Friedrich Nietzsche (1887) in arguing that God is necessary for objective morality. Nietzsche, for example, explicitly holds that God does not exist, but also claims that God’s non-existence undermines the reality of traditional western morality. The fact that theists can enlist such unlikely allies does not mean the moral argument for God’s existence is sound, but it does suggest that the argument is not obviously question-begging, since both premises are sometimes accepted by (different) non-believers.

One easily understandable version of a theistic moral argument relies on an analogy between human laws promulgated by nation-states and moral laws. Sovereign states enact laws that make certain acts forbidden or required. If I am a U. S. citizen, and I earn more than a small amount of money I am obligated to file an income tax return each year. I am also forbidden, because of the laws that hold in the United States, to discriminate in hiring on the basis of sex, age, or race. Many people believe that there are moral laws that bind individuals in the same way that political laws do. I am obligated by a moral principle not to lie to others, and I am similarly obligated to keep promises that I have made. (Both legal and moral laws may be understood as holding prima facie , so that in some situations a person must violate one law in order to obey a more important one.)

We know how human laws come into existence. They are enacted by legislatures (or absolute monarchs in some countries) who have the authority to pass such laws. How then should the existence of moral laws be explained? It seems plausible to many to hold that they must be similarly grounded in some appropriate authority, and the or best candidate to fulfill this role is God. Some philosophers have dismissed an argument of this type as “crude,” presumably because its force is so obvious that no special philosophical training is necessary to understand it and see its appeal. The fact that one can understand the argument without much in the way of philosophical skill is not necessarily a defect, however. If one supposes that there is a God, and that God wants humans to know him and relate to him, one would expect God to make his reality known to humans in very obvious ways (See Evans 2010). After all, critics of theistic belief, such as J. L. Schellenberg (1993), have argued that the fact that God’s reality is not obvious to those who would like to believe in God is a grave problem. If an awareness of moral obligations is in fact an awareness of God’s commands or divine laws, then the ordinary person who is aware of moral obligations does have a kind of awareness of God. Of course such a person might be aware of God’s laws without realizing that they are God’s laws; she might be aware of God’s commands without being aware of them under that description. The religious apologist might view such a person as already having a kind of de re awareness of God, because a moral obligation is simply an expression of God’s will (or God’s command or motivation, preference or desire).

How can such an awareness be converted into full-fledged belief in God? One way of doing this would be to help the person gain the skills needed to recognize moral laws as what they are, as divine commands or divine laws. If moral laws are experienced, then moral experience could be viewed as a kind of religious experience or at least a proto-religious experience. Perhaps someone who has experience of God in this way does not need a moral argument (or any kind of argument) to have a reasonable belief in God. This may be one instance of the kind of case that Alvin Plantinga (2000) and the “Reformed epistemologists” have in mind when they claim that belief in God can be “properly basic.” It is worth noting then that there could be such a thing as knowledge of God that is rooted in moral experience without that knowledge being the result of a moral argument .

Even if that is the case, however, a moral argument could still play a valuable role. Such an argument might be one way of helping an individual understand that moral obligations are in fact divine commands or laws. Even if it were true that some ordinary people might know that God exists without argument, an argument could be helpful in defending the claim that this is the case. A person might conceivably need an argument for the second-level claim that the person knows God without argument.

In any case a divine command metaethical theory provides the material for such an argument. The revival of divine command theories (DCT) of moral obligation is due mainly to the work of Philip Quinn (1979/1978) and Robert Adams (1999). Adams’ version of a DCT has been particularly influential and is well-suited for the defense of the claim that moral knowledge can provide knowledge of God. Adams’ version of a DCT is an account of moral obligations and it must be distinguished from more general “voluntarist” views of ethics that try to treat other moral properties (such as the good) as dependent on God’s will. As explained below, by limiting the theory to obligations, Adams avoids the standard “ Euthyphro ” objection, which claims that divine command views reduce ethics to arbitrariness.

Adams’ account of moral obligations as divine commands rests on a more general social theory of obligations. There are of course many types of obligations: legal obligations, financial obligations, obligations of etiquette, and obligations that hold in virtue of belonging to some club or association, to name just a few. Clearly these obligations are distinct from moral obligations, since in some cases moral obligations can conflict with these other kinds. What is distinctive about obligations in general? They are not reducible simply to normative claims about what a person has a good reason to do.

J. S. Mill (1874, 164–165) argued that we can explain normative principles without making any reference to God. He contends that the “feeling of obligation” stems from “something that the internal conscience bears witness to in its own nature,” and thus the moral law, unlike human laws, “does not originate in the will of a legislator or legislature external to the mind.” Doubtless Mill had in mind here such normative logical principles as “it is wrong to believe both p and not-p at the same time.” Mill argues that such normative principles hold without any requirement for an “authority” to be their ground, and he thinks this is plausible for the case of moral principles as well. Mill’s view is plausible at least for some normative principles, though some theists have argued that metaphysical naturalists have difficulty in explaining any kind of normativity (see Devine 1989, 88–89). However, even if Mill is correct about normativity in general, it does not follow that his view is correct for moral obligations, which have a special character. An obligation has a special kind of force; we should care about complying with it, and violations of obligations appropriately incur blame (Adams 1999, 235). If I make a logical mistake, I may feel silly or stupid or embarrassed, but I have no reason to feel guilty, unless the mistake reflects some carelessness on my part that itself constitutes a violation of a moral obligation. Adams argues that “facts of obligation are constituted by broadly social requirements.” (ibid, 233) For example, the social role of parenting is partly constituted by the obligations one assumes by becoming a parent, and the social role of citizen is partly constituted by the obligations to obey the laws of the country in which one is a citizen.

All obligations are then constituted by social requirements, according to Adams. However, not all obligations constituted by social requirements are moral obligations. What social relation could be the basis of moral obligations? Adams argues that not just any human social relation will possess the requisite authority: “A morally valid obligation obviously will not be constituted by just any demand sponsored by a system of social relationships that one in fact values. Some such demands have no moral force, and some social systems are downright evil.” (ibid, 242) If a good and loving God exists and has created all humans, then the social relation humans have to God has the right features to explain moral obligations. For if moral obligations stem from God’s requirements, they will be objective, but they will also be motivating, since a relation to God would clearly be a great good that humans would have reason to value. Since a proper relation to God is arguably more important than any other social relation, we can also understand why moral obligations trump other kinds of obligations. On this view we can also explain why moral obligations have a transcendent character, which is important because “a genuinely moral conception of obligation must have resources for moral criticism of social systems and their demands.” (ibid, 242–243)

Notice that the DCT Adams defends in his later work is ontological rather than semantic: it is a claim that moral obligations are in fact identical with divine commands, not a claim that “moral obligations” has the same meaning as “divine commands.” On his account, applying the work of direct reference theorists like Hilary Putnam and Saul Kripke to the arena of ethics, the meaning of “moral obligation” is fixed by the role this concept plays in our language. That role includes such facts as these: Moral obligations must be motivating and objective. They also must provide a basis for critical evaluation of other types of obligations, and they must be such that someone who violates a moral obligation is appropriately subject to blame. Adams argues that it is divine commands that best satisfy these desiderata. God’s existence thus provides the best explanation of moral obligations. If moral obligations are identical with divine commands (or perhaps if they are grounded in or caused to exist by divine commands) an argument for God’s existence from such obligations can easily be constructed:

There are objective moral obligations.
If there are objective moral obligations, there is a God who explains these obligations.
There is a God.

This argument is stated in a deductive form, but it can easily be reworded as a probabilistic “argument to the best explanation,” as follows:

God provides the best explanation of the existence of moral obligations.
Probably, God exists.

Obviously, those who do not find a DCT convincing will not think this argument from moral obligation has force. However, Adams anticipates and gives a forceful answer to one common criticism of a DCT. It is often argued that a DCT must fail because of a dilemma parallel to one derived from Plato’s Euthyphro . The dilemma for a DCT can be derived from the following question: Assuming that God commands what is right, does he command what is right because it is right (assuming that “right” here means “morally required” and not just “morally permissible.”)? If the proponent of a DCT answers affirmatively, then it appears the quality of rightness must hold antecedently to and thus independently of God’s commands. If, however, the proponent denies that God commands what is right because it is right, then God’s commands appear arbitrary. Adams’ version of a DCT evades this dilemma by invoking the good/right distinction and holding that God is essentially good and that his commands are necessarily aimed at the good. This allows Adams to claim that God’s commands make actions obligatory (or forbidden), while denying that the commands are arbitrary in any problematic sense.

Although Adams’ version of a DCT successfully meets this “ Euthyphro ” objection, there are other powerful criticisms that have been mounted against this metaethical theory in the literature. These objections can be found in the writings of Wes Morriston (2009, 2016), Erik Wielenberg (2005, especially part 3, 2014, and chapter 2, 2020), Oppy (2014, especially ch. 3), and Nicholas Wolterstorff (2007), among others. Besides arbitrariness, objections raised against DCT include autonomy objections, a variety of epistemic objections, a psychopathy objection, supervenience objections, prior obligations objection, and other Euthyphro objections, which include grounding, vacuity, and counterpossible objections.

Wielenberg explicitly defends as an alternative to divine command metaethics a view he calls “godless normative realism.” This is essentially the view that moral truths are basic or fundamental in character, not derived from natural facts or any more fundamental metaphysical facts. It thus seems similar to the view often called “ethical non-naturalism.” This view certainly provides a significant alternative to divine command metaethics. However, it is worth noting that some of the criticisms that metaphysical naturalists have against theistic metaethics may apply to Wielenberg’s view as well. Specifically, philosophers such as J. L. Mackie (1977) find non-natural ethical qualities of any kind “queer” since they are so unlike the realities discovered by science. The “brute moral facts” posited by Wielenberg as necessary truths seem vulnerable to this same criticism. In fact, the criticism may be sharper against Wielenberg’s view than against theistic views, since ethical truths may appear less odd in a universe that is ultimately grounded in a person. Responses to the objections of Wielenberg, Morriston, and others have also been given (see Evans 2013, Baggett and Walls, 2011, 2016, Flannagan, 2017, 2021a, 2021, Pruss, 2009, Davis and Franks, 2015). Clearly the version of a moral argument for God’s existence that rests on divine command theory will only be judged powerful by those who find a DCT plausible, and that will certainly be a minority of philosophers. (Although it is worth noting that no single metaethical theory seems to enjoy widespread support among philosophers, so a DCT is not alone in being a minority view.) Nevertheless, those who do find a DCT powerful will also see moral obligations as providing strong evidence for God’s reality.

A variety of arguments have been developed that God is necessary to explain human awareness of moral truth (or moral knowledge, if one believes that this moral awareness amounts to knowledge). Richard Swinburne (2004, 218), for example, argues that there is no “great probability that moral awareness will occur in a Godless universe.” On Swinburne’s view, moral truths are either necessary truths or contingent truths that are grounded in necessary truths. For example, it is obviously contingent that “It is wrong to drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima,” since it is contingent that there exists a city such as Hiroshima. But one might hold that this proposition is true (assuming it is) because of some other truth such as “It is wrong intentionally to kill innocent humans” which does hold universally and is necessarily true. Swinburne does not think that an argument to God’s existence from moral facts as such is powerful, increasing the likelihood of theism only a little. However, the fact that we humans are aware of moral facts is itself surprising and calls for an explanation.

It may be true that creatures who belong to groups that behave altruistically will have some survival advantage over groups that lack such a trait. However, moral beliefs are not required in order to produce such behavior, since it is clear that “there are many species of animals that are naturally inclined to help others of their species, and yet do not have moral beliefs.” (Swinburne 2004, 217) If God exists, he has “significant reason to bring about conscious beings with moral awareness,” since his intended purpose for humans includes making it possible for them freely to choose good over evil, since this will make it possible for them to develop a relation to God. Swinburne does not think that this argument provides very strong evidence for God’s existence by itself, but rather that it provides some inductive support for belief in God. It is one of several phenomena which seem more probable in a theistic universe than in a godless universe. As we consider more and more such phenomena, it will be increasingly improbable that “they will all occur.” (ibid, 218) All of these inductive arguments together may then provide substantial support for theistic belief, even if no one of them by itself would be sufficient for rational belief by demonstrating that theism is likely true.

Swinburne’s version of the argument is quite brief and undeveloped, but some claims that could be used to support a more developed version of the argument (one that will be described below) can be found in a well-known and much cited article by Sharon Street (2006). Street’s argument, as the title implies, is in no way intended to support a moral argument for theism. To the contrary, her purpose is to defend anti-realist metaethical theories against realist theories that view moral truth as “stance-independent” of human attitudes and emotions. Street presents the moral realist with a dilemma posed by the question as to how our human evaluative beliefs are related to human evolution. It is clear, she believes, that evolution has strongly shaped our evaluative attitudes. The question concerns how those attitudes are related to the objective evaluative truths accepted by the realist. If the realist holds that there is no relation between such truths and our evaluative attitudes, then this implies that “most of our evaluative judgments are off track due to the distorting influence of Darwinian processes.” The other alternative for the realist is to claim that there is a relationship, and thus that is not an accident or miracle that our evaluative beliefs track the objective truths. However, this view, Street claims, is scientifically implausible. Street argues therefore that an evolutionary story about how we came to make the moral judgments we make undermines confidence in the objective truth of those judgments. Street’s argument is of course controversial and thinkers such as Erik Wielenberg (2014) have argued against evolutionary debunking arguments. Still, many regard such arguments as problematic for those who want to defend moral realism, particularly when developed as a “global” argument (Kahane, 2010).

Street’s argument has also been challenged by such critics as Russ Shafer-Landau (2012). However, her argument, and similar arguments, have been acknowledged by some moral realists, such as David Enoch (2011) and Erik Wielenberg (2014) to pose a significant problem for their view. Enoch, for example, even though he offers a response to Street’s argument, evidently has some worries about the strength of his reply. Wielenberg, to avoid the criticism that in a non-theistic universe it would be extremely lucky if evolution selected for belief in objectively true moral values, proposes that the natural laws that produce this result may be metaphysically necessary, and thus there is no element of luck. However, many philosophers will see this view of natural laws as paying a heavy price to avoid theism. It might appear that Street is arguing straightforwardly that evolutionary theory makes it improbable that humans would have objective moral knowledge. However, it is not evolution by itself that predicts the improbability of objective moral knowledge, but the conjunction of evolution and metaphysical naturalism. A good deal of the force of Street’s argument stems from the assumption that naturalism is true, and therefore that the evolutionary process is one that is unguided. Since it is not evolution by itself that poses a challenge to moral realism but the conjunction of evolution and metaphysical naturalism, then rejecting naturalism provides one way for the moral realist to solve the problem. It does appear that in a naturalistic universe we would expect a process of Darwinian evolution to select for a propensity for moral judgments that track survival and not objective moral truths. Mark Linville (2009, 391–446) has developed a detailed argument for the claim that it is difficult for metaphysical naturalists to develop a plausible evolutionary story as to how our moral judgments could have epistemological warrant. However, if we suppose that the evolutionary process has been guided by God, who has as one of his goals the creation of morally significant human creatures capable of enjoying a relation with God, then it would not seem at all accidental or even unlikely that God would ensure that humans have value beliefs that are largely correct.

Some philosophers believe that the randomness of Darwinian natural selection rules out the possibility of any kind of divine guidance being exercised through such a process. Some thinkers, including both some atheists and some proponents of what is called “creation science,” believe that evolution and God are rivals, mutually exclusive hypotheses about the origins of the natural world. What can be explained scientifically needs no religious explanation. However, this is far from obviously true; in fact, if theism is true it is clearly false. From a theistic perspective to think that God and science provide competing explanations fails to grasp the relationship between God and the natural world by conceiving of God as one more cause within that natural world. If God exists at all, God is not an entity within the natural world, but the creator of that natural world, with all of its causal processes. If God exists, God is the reason why there is a natural world and the reason for the existence of the causal processes of the natural world. In principle, therefore, a natural explanation can never preclude a theistic explanation. Any argument that natural explanations preclude or are in tension with theistic explanations will in fact be theological in character, since they will be grounded in assumptions about the kind of world God would create.

But what about the randomness that is a crucial part of the Darwinian story? The atheist might claim that because evolutionary theory posits that the process by which plants and animals have evolved is one that involves random genetic mutations, it cannot be guided, and thus God cannot have used evolutionary means to achieve his ends. However, this argument fails. It depends on an equivocation in what is meant by “random.” When scientists claim that genetic mutations are random, they do not mean that they are uncaused, or even that they are unpredictable from the point of view of biochemistry, but only that the mutations do not happen in response to the adaptational needs of the organism. It is entirely possible for a natural process to include randomness in that sense, even if the whole natural order is itself created and sustained by God. The sense of “randomness” required for evolutionary theory does not imply that the evolutionary process must be unguided. A God who is responsible for the laws of nature and the initial conditions that shape the evolutionary process could certainly ensure that the process achieved certain ends.

Like the other moral arguments for God’s existence, the argument from moral knowledge can easily be stated in a propositional form, and I believe Swinburne is right to hold that the argument is best construed as a probabilistic argument that appeals to God as providing a better explanation of moral knowledge than is possible in a naturalistic universe.

Humans possess objective moral knowledge.
Probably, if God does not exist, humans would not possess objective moral knowledge.

There is a kind of argument from moral knowledge also implicit in Angus Ritchie’s book From Morality to Metaphysics: The Theistic Implications of our Ethical Commitments (2012). Ritchie presses a kind of dilemma on non-theistic accounts of morality. Subjectivist theories such as expressivism can certainly make sense of the fact that we make the ethical judgments we do, but they empty morality of its objective authority. Objectivist theories that take morality seriously, however, have difficulty explaining our capacity to make true moral judgments, unless the process by which humans came to hold these capacities is one that is controlled by a being such as God.

The moral argument from knowledge will not be convincing to anyone who is committed to any form of expressivism or other non-objective metaethical theory, and clearly many philosophers find such views attractive. And there will surely be many philosophers who will judge that if moral objectivism implies theism or requires theism to be plausible, this is a reductio of objectivist views. Furthermore, non-theistic moral philosophers, whether naturalists or non-naturalists, have stories to tell about how moral knowledge might be possible. Nevertheless, there are real questions about the plausibility of these stories, and thus, some of those convinced that moral realism is true may judge that moral knowledge provides some support for theistic belief.

Many philosophers find Immanuel Kant’s moral philosophy still offers a fruitful approach to ethics. Of the various forms of the “categorical imperative” that Kant offers, the formula that regards human beings as “ends in themselves” is especially attractive: “Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end” (Kant 1785 [1964], 96). Many contemporary moral philosophers influenced by Kant, such as Christine Korsgaard (1996), see Kant as offering a “constructivist” metaethical position. Constructivism is supposed to offer a “third way” between moral realism and subjectivist views of morality. Like subjectivists, constructivists want to see morality as a human creation. However, like moral realists constructivists want to see moral questions as having objective answers. Constructivism is an attempt to develop an objective morality that is free of the metaphysical commitments of moral realism.

It is, however, controversial whether Kant himself was a constructivist in this sense. One reason to question whether this is the right way to read Kant follows from the fact that Kant himself did not see morality as free from metaphysical commitments. For example, Kant thought that it would be impossible for someone who believed that mechanistic determinism was the literal truth about himself to believe that he was a moral agent, since morality requires an autonomy that is incompatible with determinism. To see myself as a creature who has the kind of value Kant calls “dignity” I must not see myself merely as a machine-like product of the physical environment. Hence Kant thought that it was crucial for morality that his Critical Philosophy had shown that the deterministic perspective on humans is simply part of the “phenomenal world” that is the object of scientific knowledge, not the “noumenal reality” that it would be if some kind of scientific realism were the true metaphysical view. When we do science we see ourselves as determined, but science tells us only how the world appears, not how it really is. Recognizing this fact suggests that when Kant posits that humans have this intrinsic value he calls dignity, he is not “constructing” the value humans have, but recognizing the value beings of a certain kind must have. Humans can only have this kind of value if they are a particular kind of creature. Whether Kant himself was a moral realist or not, there are certainly elements in his philosophy that push in a realist direction.

If the claim that human persons have a kind of intrinsic dignity or worth is a true objective principle and if it provides a key foundational principle of morality, it is well worth asking what kinds of metaphysical implications the claim might have. This is the question that Mark Linville (2009, 417–446) pursues in the second moral argument he develops. Linville begins by noting that one could hardly hold that “human persons have intrinsic dignity” could be true if human persons do not exist. Clearly, some metaphysical positions do include a denial of the existence of human persons, such as forms of Absolute Monism which hold that only one Absolute Reality exists. However, it also seems to be the case that some forms of Scientific Naturalism are committed to the denial of “ persons as substantive selves that essentially possess a first-person point of view” (See Dennett 2006, 107). Daniel Dennett, for example, holds that persons will not be part of the ultimately true scientific account of things. Dennett holds that to think of humans as persons is simply to adopt a certain “stance” toward them that he calls the “intentional stance,” but it is clear that the kind of picture of humans we get when we think of them in this way does not correspond with their intrinsic metaphysical properties. It is not clear how systems towards which we adopt an “intentional stance” could be truly autonomous and thus have the kind of value Kant believes human persons have.

The argument from human dignity could be put into propositional form as follows:

Human persons have a special kind of intrinsic value that we call dignity.
The only (or best) explanation of the fact that humans possess dignity is that they are created by a supremely good God in God’s own image.
Probably there is a supremely good God.

A naturalist may want to challenge premise (2) by finding some other strategy to explain human dignity. Michael Martin (2002), for example, has tried to suggest that moral judgments can be analyzed as the feelings of approval or disapproval of a perfectly impartial and informed observer. Linville (2009) objects that it is not clear how the feelings of such an observer could constitute the intrinsic worth of a person, since one would think that intrinsic properties would be non-relational and mind-independent. In any case, Linville notes that a “Euthyphro” problem lurks for such an ideal observer theory, since one would think that such an observer would judge a person to be intrinsically valuable because the person has intrinsic value.

Another strategy that is pursued by constructivists such as Korsgaard is to link the value ascribed to humans to the capacity for rational reflection. The idea is that insofar as I am committed to rational reflection, I must value myself as having this capacity, and consistently value others who have it as well. A similar strategy is found in Wielenberg’s form of ethical non-naturalism, since Wielenberg argues that it is necessarily true that any being with certain reflective capacities will have moral rights (Wielenberg, 2014, chapter 4). It is far from clear that human rationality provides an adequate ground for moral rights, however. Many people believe that young infants and people suffering from dementia still have this intrinsic dignity, but in both cases there is no capacity for rational reflection.

Some support for this criticism of the attempt to see reason as the basis of the value of humans can be found in Nicholas Wolterstorff’s recent work on justice (2007, especially Ch. 8). Wolterstorff in this work defends the claim that there are natural human rights, and that violating such rights is one way of acting unjustly towards a person. Why do humans have such rights? Wolterstorff says these rights are grounded in the basic worth or dignity that humans possess. When I seek to torture or kill an innocent human I am failing to respect this worth. If one asks why we should think humans possess such worth, Wolterstorff argues that the belief that humans have this quality was not only historically produced by Jewish and Christian conceptions of the human person, but even now cannot be defended apart from such a conception. In particular, he argues that attempts to argue that our worth stems from some excellence we possess such as reason will not explain the worth of infants or those with severe brain injuries or dementia.

Does a theistic worldview fare better in explaining the special value of human dignity? In a theistic universe God is himself seen as the supreme good. Indeed, theistic Platonists usually identify God with the Good. If God is himself a person, then this seems to be a commitment to the idea that personhood itself is something that must be intrinsically good. If human persons are made in God’s image, as both Judaism and Christianity affirm, then it would seem to follow that humans do have a kind of intrinsic value, just by way of being the kind of creatures they are.

This argument will of course be found unconvincing to many. Some will deny premise (1), either because they reject moral realism as a metaethical stance, or because they reject the normative claim that humans have any kind of special value or dignity. (Maybe they will even think that such a claim is a form of “speciesism.”). Others will find premise (2) suspect. They may be inclined to agree that human persons have a special dignity, but hold that the source of that dignity can be found in such human qualities as rationality. With respect to the status of infants and those suffering from dementia, the critic might bite the bullet and just accept the fact that human dignity does not extend to them, or else argue that the fact that infants and those suffering mental breakdown are part of a species whose members typically possess rationality merits them a special respect, even if they lack this quality as individuals. Others will find premise (2) doubtful because they find the theistic explanation of dignity unclear. Another alternative is to seek a Constructivist account of dignity, perhaps regarding the special status of humans as something we humans decide to extend to each other. Perhaps the strongest non-theistic alternative would be some form of ethical non-naturalism, in which one simply affirms that the claim that persons have a special dignity is an a priori truth requiring no explanation. In effect this is a decision for a non-theistic form of Platonism.

The proponent of the argument may well agree that claims about the special status of humans are true a priori , and thus also opt for some form of Platonism. However, the proponent of the argument will point out that some necessary truths can be explained by other necessary truths. The theist believes that these truths about the special status of humans tell us something about the kind of universe humans find themselves in. To say that humans are created by God is to say that personhood is not an ephemeral or accidental feature of the universe, because at bottom reality itself is personal (Mavrodes 1986).

As already noted, the most famous and perhaps most influential version of a moral argument for belief in God is found in Immanuel Kant (1788). Kant himself insisted that his argument was not a theoretical argument, but an argument grounded in practical reason. The conclusion of the argument is not “God exists” or “God probably exists” but “I (as a rational, moral agent) ought to believe that God exists.” We shall, however, see that there are some reasons to doubt that practical arguments can be neatly separated from theoretical arguments.

Kant’s version of the argument can be stated in different ways, but perhaps the following captures one plausible interpretation of the argument. Morality is grounded in pure practical reason, and the moral agent must act on the basis of maxims that can be rationally endorsed as universal principles. Moral actions are thus not determined by results or consequences but by the maxims on which they are based. However, all actions, including moral actions, necessarily aim at ends. Kant argues that the end that moral actions aim at is the “highest good,” which is a world in which both moral virtue and happiness are maximized, with happiness contingent on virtue. For Kant “ought implies can,” and so if I have an obligation to seek the highest good, then I must believe that it is possible to achieve such an end. However, I must seek the highest good only by acting in accordance with morality; no shortcuts to happiness are permissible. This seems to require that I believe that acting in accordance with morality will be causally efficacious in achieving the highest good. However, it is reasonable to believe that moral actions will be causally efficacious in this way only if the laws of causality are set up in such a way that these laws are conducive to the efficacy of moral action. Certainly both parts of the highest good seem difficult to achieve. We humans have weaknesses in our character that appear difficult if not impossible to overcome by our own efforts. Furthermore, as creatures we have subjective needs that must be satisfied if we are happy, but we have little empirical reason to think that these needs will be satisfied by moral actions even if we succeeded in becoming virtuous. If a person believes that the natural world is simply a non-moral machine with no moral purposiveness then that person would have no reason to believe that moral action could succeed because there is no a priori reason to think moral action will achieve the highest good and little empirical reason to believe this either. Kant thus concludes that a moral agent must “postulate” the existence of God as a rational presupposition of the moral life.

One problem with this argument is that many will deny that morality requires us to seek the highest good in Kant’s sense. Even if the Kantian highest good seems reasonable as an ideal, some will object that we have no obligation to achieve such a state, but merely to work towards realizing the closest approximation to such a state that is possible (See Adams 1987, 152). Without divine assistance, perhaps perfect virtue is unachievable, but in that case we cannot be obliged to realize such a state if there is no God. Perhaps we cannot hope that happiness will be properly proportioned to virtue in the actual world if God does not exist, but then our obligation can only be to realize as much happiness as can be attained through moral means. Kant would doubtless reject this criticism, since on his view the ends of morality are given directly to pure practical reason a priori , and we are not at liberty to adjust those ends on the basis of empirical beliefs. However, few contemporary philosophers would share Kant’s confident view of reason here, and thus to many the criticism has force. Even Kant admits at one point that full-fledged belief in God is not rationally necessary, since one could conceivably seek the highest good if one merely believes that God’s existence is possible (Kant, 1781–1787, 651).

Another way of interpreting Kant’s argument puts more stress on the connection between an individual’s desire for happiness and the obligation to do what is morally right. Morality requires me to sacrifice my personal happiness if that is necessary to do what is right. Yet it is a psychological fact that humans necessarily desire their own happiness. In such a state it looks as if human moral agents will be torn by what Henry Sidgwick called the “dualism of the practical reason” (1884, 401). Reason both requires humans to seek their own happiness and to sacrifice it. Sidgwick himself noted that only if there is a God can we hope that this dualism will be resolved, so that those who seek to act morally will in the long run also be acting so as to advance their own happiness and well-being. (Interestingly, Sidgwick himself does not endorse this argument, but he clearly sees this problem as part of the appeal of theism.) A contemporary argument similar to this one has been developed by C. Stephen Layman (2002).

The critic of this form of the Kantian argument may reply that Kantian morality sees duty as something that must be done regardless of the consequences, and thus a truly moral person cannot make his or her commitment to morality contingent on the achievement of happiness. From a Kantian point of view, this reply seems right; Kant unequivocally affirms that moral actions must be done for the sake of duty and not from any desire for personal reward. Nevertheless, especially for any philosopher willing to endorse any form of eudaimonism, seeing myself as inevitably sacrificing what I cannot help but desire for the sake of duty does seem problematic. As John Hare affirms, “If we are to endorse wholeheartedly the long-term shape of our lives, we have to see this shape as consistent with our happiness” (1996, 88).

The critic may reply to this by simply accepting the lamentable fact that there is something tragic or even absurd about the human condition. The world may not be the world we wish it was, but that does not give us any reason to believe it is different from what it is. If there is a tension between the demands of morality and self-interest, then this may simply be a brute fact that must be faced.

This reply raises an issue for all forms of practical or pragmatic arguments for belief. Many philosophers insist that rational belief must be grounded solely in theoretical evidence. The fact that it would be better for me to believe p does not in itself give me any reason to believe p. This criticism is aimed not merely at Kant, but at other practical moral arguments. For example, Robert Adams argues that if humans believe there is no moral order to the universe, then they will become demoralized in their pursuit of morality, which is morally undesirable (1987, 151). The atheist might concede that atheism is (somewhat) demoralizing, but deny that this provides any reason to believe there is a moral order to the universe. Similarly, Linda Zagzebski (1987) argues that morality will not be a rational enterprise unless good actions increase the amount of good in the world. However, given that moral actions often involve the sacrifice of happiness, there is no reason to believe moral action will increase the good unless there is a power transcendent of human activity working on the side of the good. Here the atheist may claim that moral action does increase the good because such actions always increase good character. However, even if that reply fails the atheist may again simply admit that there may be something tragic or absurd about the human condition, and the fact that we may wish things were different is not a reason to believe that they are. So the problem must be faced: Are practical arguments merely rationalized wish-fulfillment?

The theist might respond to this kind of worry in several ways. The first thing to be said is that the fact that a naturalistic view of the universe implies that the universe must be tragic or absurd, if correct, would itself be an important and interesting conclusion. However, apart from this, it makes a great deal of difference how one construes what we might call the background epistemic situation. If one believes that our theoretical evidence favors atheism, then it seems plausible to hold that one ought to maintain a naturalistic view, even if it is practically undesirable that the world have such a character. In that case a practical argument for religious belief could be judged a form of wish-fulfillment. However, this does not seem to be the way those who support such a practical argument see the situation. Kant affirms that the limits of reason established in The Critique of Pure Reason would silence all objections to morality and religion “in Socratic fashion, namely, by the clearest proof of the ignorance of the objectors.” (1781, 1787, 30. See also 530–531) In fact, the situation actually favors theism, since Kant holds that theoretical reason sees value in the concept of God as a regulative ideal, even though God’s existence cannot be theoretically affirmed as knowledge. If we appeal to God’s will to explain what happens in the natural order, we undermine both science and religion, since in that case we would no longer seek empirical evidence for causality and we would make God into a finite object in the natural world (1781, 1787, 562–563). However, as a regulative ideal, the concept of God is one that theoretical reason finds useful: “The assumption of a supreme intelligence, as the one and only cause of the universe, though in the idea alone, can therefore always benefit reason and can never injure it” (1781, 1787, 560). There is a sense in which theoretical reason itself inclines towards affirmation of God, because it must assume that reality is rationally knowable: “If one wishes to achieve systematic knowledge of the world, he ought to regard it as if it were created by a supreme reason.” (Kant 1786, 298) Although theoretical reason cannot affirm the existence of God, it finds it useful to think of the natural world as having the kinds of characteristics it would have if God did exist. Thus, if rational grounds for belief in God come from practical reason, theoretical reason will raise no objections.

For Kant the argument from practical reason for belief in God is not a form of wish-fulfillment because its ground is not an arbitrary desire or wish but “a real need associated with reason” (Kant, 1786, 296). Human beings are not purely theoretical spectators of the universe, but agents. It is not always rational or even possible to refrain from action, and yet action presupposes beliefs about the way things are (For a good interpretation and defense of this view of Kant on the relation between action and belief, see Wood 1970, 17–25). Thus, in some cases suspension of judgment is not possible. The critic may object that a person may act as if p were true without believing p. However, it is not clear that this advice to distinguish action on the basis of p and belief that p can always be followed. For one thing, it seems empirically the case that one way of acquiring belief that p is simply to begin to act as if p were true. Hence, to begin to act as if p were true is at least to embark upon a course of action that makes belief in p more likely. Second, there may well be a sense of “belief” in which “acting as if p were true” is sufficient to constitute belief. This is obviously the case on pragmatist accounts of belief. But even those who reject a general pragmatic account of belief may well find something like this appealing with respect to religious belief. Many religious believers hold that the best way to measure a person’s religious faith is in terms of the person’s actions. Thus, a person who is willing to act on the basis of a religious conception, especially if those actions are risky or costly, is truly a religious believer, even if that person is filled with doubt and anxiety. Such a person might well be construed as more truly a believer than a person who smugly “assents” to religious doctrines but is unwilling to act on them.

Perhaps the right way to think of practical moral arguments is not to see them as justifying belief without evidence, but as shifting the amount of evidence seen as necessary. This is the lesson some would draw from the phenomenon of “pragmatic encroachment” that has been much discussed in recent epistemology. Here is an example of pragmatic encroachment:

You: I am about to replace the ceiling fan in the kitchen. Spouse: Did you turn off the main electrical power to the house? You: Yes. Spouse: If you forgot you could electrocute yourself. You: I better go back and check. (See McBrayer 2014, Rizzieri 2013).

A plausible interpretation of this scenario is that ordinarily claims such as the one I made, based on memory, are justified, and count as knowledge. However, in this situation, the stakes are raised because my life is at risk, and my knowledge is lost because the pragmatic situation has “encroached” on the normal truth-oriented conditions for knowledge. Pragmatic encroachment is controversial and the idea of such encroachment is rejected by some epistemologists. However, defenders hold that it is reasonable to consider the pragmatic stakes in considering evidence for a belief that underlies significant action (see Fantl and McGrath 2007). If this is correct, then it seems reasonable to consider the pragmatic situation in determining how much evidence is sufficient to justify religious beliefs. In theory the adjustment could go in either direction, depending on what costs are associated with a mistake and on which side those costs lie.

In any case it is not clear that practical moral arguments can always be clearly distinguished from theoretical moral arguments. The reason this is so is that in many cases the practical situation described seems itself to be or involve a kind of evidence for the truth of the belief being justified. Take, for example, Kant’s classic argument. One thing Kant’s argument does is call to our attention that it would be enormously odd to believe that human beings are moral creatures subject to an objective moral law, but also to believe that the universe that humans inhabit is indifferent to morality. In other words, the existence of human persons understood as moral beings can itself be understood as a piece of evidence about the character of the universe humans find themselves in. Peter Byrne (2013, 1998) has criticized practical arguments on the grounds that they presuppose something like the following proposition: “The world is likely to be organized so as to meet our deepest human needs.” Byrne objects that this premise is likely to be false if there is no God and thus arguments that assume it appear circular. However, it is not clear that only those who already believe in God will find this premise attractive. The reason for this is that humans are themselves part of the natural universe, and it seems a desirable feature of a metaphysical view that it explain (rather than explain away) features of human existence that seem real and important.

It seems likely therefore that any appeal to a practical argument will include some theoretical component as well, even if that component is not always made explicit. Nevertheless, this does not mean that practical arguments do not have some important and distinctive features. For Kant it was important that religious beliefs stem from practical reason. For if religious belief were grounded solely in theoretical reason, then such belief would have to conform to “extrinsic and arbitrary legislation.” (Kant 1790, 131) Kant thinks such a religion would be one grounded in “fear and submission,” and thus it is good that religious belief is motivated mainly by a free moral act by which the “final end of our being” is presented to us. (1790, 159) For any practical argument makes religious belief existential; the issue is not merely what I believe to be true about the universe but how I shall live my life in that universe.

It seems clear that no version of the moral argument constitutes a “proof” of God’s existence. Each version contains premises that many reasonable thinkers reject. However, this does not mean the arguments have no force. One might think of each version of the argument as attempting to spell out the “cost” of rejecting the conclusion. Some philosophers will certainly be willing to pay the cost, and indeed have independent reasons for doing so. However, it would certainly be interesting and important if one became convinced that atheism required one to reject moral realism altogether, or to embrace an implausible account of how moral knowledge is acquired. For those who think that some version or versions of the arguments have force, the cumulative case for theistic belief may be raised by such arguments.

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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

Byrne, Peter, “Moral Arguments for the Existence of God”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2013 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2013/entries/moral-arguments-god/ >. [This was the previous entry on moral arguments for the existence of God in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — see the version history .]
Divine Command Theory , entry by Michael Austin, in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Trent Dougherty and Mark Linville for reading a draft of this essay and making many useful suggestions. Matthew Wilson also deserves thanks for tracking many bibliographical references and page numbers.

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Arguments why God (very probably) exists

Professor of Public Policy, University of Maryland

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Robert H. Nelson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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Note from Editor of The Conversation US: This is a revised version of the original piece. We have done so to make explicit the author’s expertise with regard to the subject of this article. We have also incorporated important context that was missing in the original version.

The question of whether a god exists is heating up in the 21st century. According to a Pew survey , the percent of Americans having no religious affiliation reached 23 percent in 2014. Among such “nones,” 33 percent said that they do not believe in God – an 11 percent increase since only 2007.

Such trends have ironically been taking place even as, I would argue, the probability for the existence of a supernatural god have been rising. In my 2015 book, “God? Very Probably: Five Rational Ways to Think about the Question of a God,” I look at physics, the philosophy of human consciousness, evolutionary biology, mathematics, the history of religion and theology to explore whether such a god exists. I should say that I am trained originally as an economist, but have been working at the intersection of economics, environmentalism and theology since the 1990s.

Laws of math

In 1960 the Princeton physicist – and subsequent Nobel Prize winner – Eugene Wigner raised a fundamental question : Why did the natural world always – so far as we know – obey laws of mathematics?

As argued by scholars such as Philip Davis and Reuben Hersh , mathematics exists independent of physical reality. It is the job of mathematicians to discover the realities of this separate world of mathematical laws and concepts. Physicists then put the mathematics to use according to the rules of prediction and confirmed observation of the scientific method.

But modern mathematics generally is formulated before any natural observations are made, and many mathematical laws today have no known existing physical analogues.

Einstein’s 1915 general theory of relativity, for example, was based on theoretical mathematics developed 50 years earlier by the great German mathematician Bernhard Riemann that did not have any known practical applications at the time of its intellectual creation.

In some cases the physicist also discovers the mathematics. Isaac Newton was considered among the greatest mathematicians as well as physicists of the 17th century. Other physicists sought his help in finding a mathematics that would predict the workings of the solar system . He found it in the mathematical law of gravity, based in part on his discovery of calculus.

At the time, however, many people initially resisted Newton’s conclusions because they seemed to be “occult.” How could two distant objects in the solar system be drawn toward one another, acting according to a precise mathematical law? Indeed, Newton made strenuous efforts over his lifetime to find a natural explanation, but in the end he could say only that it is the will of God .

Despite the many other enormous advances of modern physics, little has changed in this regard. As Wigner wrote , “the enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and there is no rational explanation for it.”

In other words, as I argue in my book, it takes the existence of some kind of a god to make the mathematical underpinnings of the universe comprehensible.

Math and other worlds

In 2004 the great British physicist Roger Penrose put forward a vision of a universe composed of three independently existing worlds – mathematics, the material world and human consciousness. As Penrose acknowledged, it was a complete puzzle to him how the three interacted with one another outside the ability of any scientific or other conventionally rational model.

How can physical atoms and molecules, for example, create something that exists in a separate domain that has no physical existence: human consciousness?

It is a mystery that lies beyond science.

This mystery is the same one that existed in the Greek worldview of Plato, who believed that abstract ideas (above all mathematical) first existed outside any physical reality. The material world that we experience as part of our human existence is an imperfect reflection of these prior formal ideals. As the scholar of ancient Greek philosophy, Ian Mueller , writes in “Mathematics And The Divine,” the realm of such ideals is that of God.

Indeed, in 2014 the MIT physicist Max Tegmark argues in “Our Mathematical Universe” that mathematics is the fundamental world reality that drives the universe. As I would say, mathematics is operating in a god-like fashion.

The mystery of human consciousness

The workings of human consciousness are similarly miraculous. Like the laws of mathematics, consciousness has no physical presence in the world; the images and thoughts in our consciousness have no measurable dimensions.

Yet, our nonphysical thoughts somehow mysteriously guide the actions of our physical human bodies. This is no more scientifically explicable than the mysterious ability of nonphysical mathematical constructions to determine the workings of a separate physical world.

Until recently, the scientifically unfathomable quality of human consciousness inhibited the very scholarly discussion of the subject. Since the 1970s, however, it has become a leading area of inquiry among philosophers .

Recognizing that he could not reconcile his own scientific materialism with the existence of a nonphysical world of human consciousness, a leading atheist, Daniel Dennett , in 1991 took the radical step of denying that consciousness even exists .

Finding this altogether implausible, as most people do, another leading philosopher, Thomas Nagel , wrote in 2012 that, given the scientifically inexplicable – the “intractable” – character of human consciousness, “we will have to leave [scientific] materialism behind” as a complete basis for understanding the world of human existence.

As an atheist, Nagel does not offer religious belief as an alternative, but I would argue that the supernatural character of the workings of human consciousness adds grounds for raising the probability of the existence of a supernatural god.

Evolution and faith

Evolution is a contentious subject in American public life. According to Pew, 98 percent of scientists connected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science “believe humans evolved over time” while only a minority of Americans “fully accept evolution through natural selection.”

As I say in my book, I should emphasize that I am not questioning the reality of natural biological evolution. What is interesting to me, however, are the fierce arguments that have taken place between professional evolutionary biologists. A number of developments in evolutionary theory have challenged traditional Darwinist – and later neo-Darwinist – views that emphasize random genetic mutations and gradual evolutionary selection by the process of survival of the fittest.

From the 1970s onwards, the Harvard evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould created controversy by positing a different view, “punctuated equilibrium,” to the slow and gradual evolution of species as theorized by Darwin.

In 2011, the University of Chicago evolutionary biologist James Shapiro argued that, remarkably enough, many micro-evolutionary processes worked as though guided by a purposeful “sentience” of the evolving plant and animal organisms themselves. “The capacity of living organisms to alter their own heredity is undeniable,” he wrote . “Our current ideas about evolution have to incorporate this basic fact of life.”

A number of scientists, such as Francis Collins , director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, “see no conflict between believing in God and accepting the contemporary theory of evolution,” as the American Association for the Advancement of Science points out.

For my part, the most recent developments in evolutionary biology have increased the probability of a god.

Miraculous ideas at the same time?

For the past 10,000 years at a minimum, the most important changes in human existence have been driven by cultural developments occurring in the realm of human ideas.

In the Axial Age (commonly dated from 800 to 200 B.C.), world-transforming ideas such as Buddhism, Confucianism, the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, and the Hebrew Old Testament almost miraculously appeared at about the same time in India, China, ancient Greece and among the Jews in the Middle East, groups having little interaction with one another.

The development of the scientific method in the 17th century in Europe and its modern further advances have had at least as great a set of world-transforming consequences . There have been many historical theories , but none capable, I would argue, of explaining as fundamentally transformational a set of events as the rise of the modern world. It was a revolution in human thought, operating outside any explanations grounded in scientific materialism, that drove the process.

That all these astonishing things happened within the conscious workings of human minds, functioning outside physical reality, offers further rational evidence, in my view, for the conclusion that human beings may well be made “in the image of [a] God.”

Different forms of worship

In his commencement address to Kenyon College in 2005, the American novelist and essayist David Foster Wallace said that: “Everybody worships . The only choice we get is what to worship.”

Even though Karl Marx, for example, condemned the illusion of religion, his followers, ironically, worshiped Marxism . The American philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre thus wrote that for much of the 20th century, Marxism was the “historical successor of Christianity,” claiming to show the faithful the one correct path to a new heaven on Earth.

In several of my books , I have explored how Marxism and other such “economic religions” were characteristic of much of the modern age. So Christianity, I would argue, did not disappear as much as it reappeared in many such disguised forms of “secular religion.”

That the Christian essence, as arose out of Judaism, showed such great staying power amidst the extraordinary political, economic, intellectual and other radical changes of the modern age is another reason I offer for thinking that the existence of a god is very probable .

Mathematics
Solar system
Christianity
Charles Darwin
Isaac Newton
Theory of relativity
Human consciousness

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The Five Proofs of God’s Existence Essay

Introduction, understanding the concept of the unmoved mover, understanding the argument of the first cause, understanding the argument of contingency, understanding the argument of degree, the teleological argument, comparing scientific examination to the arguments of aquinas, works cited.

The concept of God has eluded, fascinated and enthralled humanity since time immemorial yet despite the amount of attention, speculation and religious doctrine used to conceptualize the concept of an all powerful being there has been no definitive proof that actually shows that God is real. Based on this one must wonder whether it is rational to believe and place absolute faith in an entity that for all intents and purposes has not been proven beyond the shadow of a doubt to actually exist.

Many people rationalize the existence of God by stating that nearly every single culture both in existence has believed, in one form or another, of the presence of an ultimate being or beings who have created the world as we know of it and preside over the faith of humanity. Various creation myths focusing on the origin of the world have also used divine entities as the creators of the world itself.

Not only that ancient myths connected to the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and Vikings all state the existence of Gods that control the very essence of life and death itself creating humanity in the process. Historical scripture in the form of the Koran, Torah and Bible, all of which are thousands of years old, all point to the existence of an all powerful entity that created the world, performed miracles beyond imagination and is the source of salvation for humanity (Haldane 381).

Yet despite all this evidence to prove otherwise many groups still believe that the existence of God is doubtful. Various psychological studies attempting to explain the reasoning behind the belief in God state that it is very likely that humanity itself created the concept of God/divine entities in order to create explanations for natural phenomena.

In Greek mythology thunder and lightning were connected to the anger of Zeus who was hurling lightning bolts at the ground, tidal waves and tsunamis were connected to the wrath of Poseidon while earthquakes and volcanic eruptions were associated with the Titans being sealed deep underground by the Gods who were trying to escape their prison (Usher 292). In fact human history is littered with natural occurrences being explained away as being the result of divine intervention rather than a simple scientific cause.

Religious belief, it is argued, is nothing more than an evolution of the notions humanity had in the past which evolved into the present day belief system. Is it any wonder then why people question whether it is rational to believe in God when there is no evidence of his existence and multiple lines of reasoning stating that God is nothing more than the result of the fanciful notions of the human imagination.

Confronting this line of reasoning is the Quinque viae, also known as the five proofs behind the existence of God which were summarized by St. Thomas Aquinas, a 13th century Roman Catholic philosopher and theologian whose book, the Summa Theologica, is one of the most influential philosophical works in Western Literature despite it never actually being finished.

Higgins in his examination of the work of Aquinas states that “the arguments of Aquinas center around the five proofs of God’s existence namely: the argument of the unmoved mover, the argument of the first cause, the argument of contingency, the argument from degree and finally the teleological argument” (Higgins 603).

Combined these five arguments supposedly prove that there is a God with many contemporary philosophers and scholars largely agreeing with his work (Higgins 603). As such this paper will seek to examine whether it is rational to believe in the concept of God based on the philosophical arguments of St. Thomas Aquinas

Under this particular concept it is perceived that everything in the world is divided under two specific categories that which is in motion and that which could potentially be put into motion.

For example a person is an entity that is constantly in motion while a rock is an object that is not in motion but has the potential to be put into motion by a person should that individual choose to pick up the rock and throw it (Higgins 605). Higgins elaborates on this idea by stating “everything which is not in motion has the potential to be put into motion by an outside force which is already in motion” (Higgins 605).

The concept of motion is not isolated to movement rather it extends to the concept of actuality and potentiality. Actuality refers to something which has already been put into motion whereas potentiality refers to something which has yet to be put into motion (Higgins 605). For example once a person is conceived that is considered a potentiality being put into actuality by an outside force namely the parents of that individual.

Using this line of reasoning it can be stated that everything that can be seen in the world today was the result of a potentiality being turned into an actuality by an outside mover. Since it is only objects in motion that can put stationary objects into motion themselves this means that if one were to trace the path of objects that have been put into motion a continuous line could be seen showing all movers of objects that came after them.

Logical reasoning dictates that such a line cannot continue on to infinity since there must a primary mover to set a chain of events into motion (Haldane 381). As such this is where the concept of God comes into play as the initial unmoved mover who began the first movement which started all other forms of movement.

In confirmation to this Masibay states “the argument of the unmoved mover is actually inherently similar to that of Isaac Newton’s law of inertia which states objects at rest tend to remain at rest unless acted upon by an outside force” (Masibay 6). In this particular analogy God was the outside force necessary to precipitate the motion of all other objects in the Universe.

Everything in the world today is the result of cause and effect wherein a particular action creates a specific type of result (Higgins 606). There is nothing in the world today which exists prior to itself and as such nothing is the cause of itself this means that there must be a preceding action to have brought it into existence.

Logically speaking though, similar to the argument of the first mover there must have been a cause to start off the first effect (Powlowski 17). A cause that was not influenced by any prior action before it, it is in this instance that the concept of God is introduced as being the first cause in the long line of cause and effect.

In this particular argument everything in nature is assumed to exist and to not exist with the necessity of something currently existing to bring about that which does not exist (Higgins 607). For example the person that is reading this paper right now was initially nothing until brought into existence by his/her parents. Under the argument of contingency it is assumed that every being in existence is a contingent being namely an entity that came into being from nothingness as a result of beings which are already in existence.

Therefore it can be assumed that there is need for a being currently in existence to bring about a contingent being that is in nothingness. Powloski clarifies this idea by stating “since everything in nature shifts between existing and not existing it can be assumed that at one time in the past nothing existed however such an argument is highly improbable since right now we are currently existing if there was a period where nothing existed there would not have been an existence to bring us into being” (Powlowski 17).

As such this brings up the topic of a sort of necessary existence already in place that brings about the existence of all other things that does not require the existence of anything that comes before it. Such an existence is thus described as God being the creator of all things.

Everything in the world today has certain gradations namely some things are described as hotter, colder, better or worse. As such it assumed by Aquinas that the maximum of any genus, namely the hottest of the hot and coldest of the cold is the cause and origin of that particular genus (Higgins 608).

Based on this argument if everything has an origin which is at the maximum or height of that specific type of genus then the highest genus or the absolute maximum measure for all things namely utter and complete perfection is God. This does make sense since if everything has certain gradations with some things being better than others. It goes without saying that following this line of thought to its absolute zenith will result in something that has no equal and is absolutely perfect.

The teleological argument states that all natural bodies in the world work toward some predetermined goal, even animals such a birds seem to explicitly know where to go when its winter its water, what is ok to eat and where they can fish (Higgins 609).

This argument assumes that all natural things in the world lack knowledge and as such it does not make sense that they would know such things such as which particular direction would be the best to fly towards. An example of an arrow released by an archer would be the best way to explain this. An arrow lacks any form of brain yet hits its goal due to the actions of the archer guiding it before hand. As such the teleological argument presents the idea that there is something that directs nature towards a particular design.

First and foremost I would like to state that it would have been far easier to simply focus on scientific evidence to disprove God rather than try to prove his existence through philosophical and theological means. Haldane in his work states “the inherent problem with using science as a means to disprove the existence of God is that while it is able to show evidence that God does not exist it is unable to disprove that God does exist” (Haldane 390).

In other words “science can neither prove nor disprove with absolute certainty the existence of God” (Haldane 390). Science does confirm that the world does follow certain immutable laws however this only serves to prove the teleological argument of Aquinas in that God acts as the grand designer for all things. Science has yet to prove how such laws came into being and as such cannot state with absolute certainty that they were not the result of a grand design created by God.

Another factor to consider is that science also cannot explain the how the concept of instinct comes about in animals. While it apparent that some form of learning process does occur through certain animal species the fact remains that some of the feats seen by some animals (migratory birds, spawning salmon etc) seem to go beyond what normal teaching methods in the animal kingdom can provide.

Finally while it is generally believed in most scientific communities that the Big Bang was the start of the universe few can sectors can explain how the needed energy utilized during the event came into existence since it is generally perceived that the universe was initially nothingness. As such if one were to examine the five proofs of God as stated by Aquinas one cannot help but rationalize that in the absence of contending scientific fact to prove otherwise proves there most certainly is a God.

After elaborating on the five proofs of God’s existence and combining them in an examination of current scientific reasoning it can be said that it is rational to believe in the concept of God based on the philosophical arguments of St. Thomas Aquinas.

Earlier on it was mentioned that it would be irrational to believe in something that did not exist at all yet if God does exist as shown through the five proofs of Aquinas it would not be irrational at all to worship him. As such despite the lack of solid scientific data to prove it does seem somewhat rational to worship the concept of God so long as it is done with the knowledge of the five proofs of his existence in mind.

Haldane, John. “Common Sense, Metaphysics, and the Existence of God.” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Journal of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 77.3 (2003): 381-398.EBSCO. Web.

Higgins, James. “St. Thomas’ Pedagogy – Ignored, Discovered, Applied.” Heythrop Journal 50.4 (2009): 603-619. EBSCO. Web.

Masibay, Kim Y. “Thrills and Spills.” Science World 58.14 (2002): 6. EBSCO. Web.

Pawłowski, Miłosz. “Traversing the Infinite and Proving the Existence of God.” Forum Philosophicum: International Journal for Philosophy 12.1 (2007): 17-31. EBSCO. Web.

Usher, M. D. “Theomachy, Creation, and the Poetics of Quotation in Longinus Chapter 9.” Classical Philology 102.3 (2007): 292-303 EBSCO. Web.

Chicago (A-D)
Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2020, January 20). The Five Proofs of God’s Existence. https://ivypanda.com/essays/god-2/

"The Five Proofs of God’s Existence." IvyPanda , 20 Jan. 2020, ivypanda.com/essays/god-2/.

IvyPanda . (2020) 'The Five Proofs of God’s Existence'. 20 January.

IvyPanda . 2020. "The Five Proofs of God’s Existence." January 20, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/god-2/.

1. IvyPanda . "The Five Proofs of God’s Existence." January 20, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/god-2/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "The Five Proofs of God’s Existence." January 20, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/god-2/.

A Teleological Understanding of the World
Hotel Ballion in Mayfair: Team Issues and Potentiality
How harness all the potentiality among the people to ensure there is equality
First-mover, Later Mover Theories
Knowledge Existence for Skepticism
Aquinas and Spinoza’s Philosophical Framework
Aquinas and Faith: Theological Theories
Teleological Argument: St. Thomas Aquinas and Kant
Thomas Aquinas and the Proof of Gods Existence
The God's Existence: Cosmological Proof
The Sovereignty Goodness of God
God and Holy Scriptures
What is the Real Relationship between Jesus and God? The Bottom-Line Between God the Son and God the Father
The History of Bible Making
Pagans of the Second Century AD

To arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves.

36 ARGUMENTS FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD

...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. It had been impossible to get grants, and the prestigious journals would return his manuscripts without sending them out for peer review. The undergraduates crowded his courses, but that counted, if anything, as a strike against him in his department. The graduate students stayed away in droves. The sexy psychological research was all in neural network modeling and cognitive neuroscience. The mind is a neural computer and the folks with the algorithms ruled.

But now things had happened — fundamental and fundamentalist things — and religion as a phenomenon is on everybody's mind. And among all the changes that religion's new towering profile has wrought in the world, which are mostly alarming if not downright terrifying, is the transformation in the life of one Cass Seltzer.

First had come the book, which he had entitled The Varieties of Religious Illusion, a nod to both William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience and to Sigmund Freud's The Future of An Illusion. The book had brought Cass an indecent amount of attention. Time Magazine, in a cover story on the so-called new atheists, had ended by dubbing him "the atheist with a soul." When the magazine came out, Cass's literary agent, Sy Auerbach, called to congratulate him. "Now that you're famous, even I might have to take you seriously. ...

Introduction

By John Brockman

"What is this stuff, you ask one another," says the narrator in Rebecca Newberger Goldstein's new novel 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, "and how can it still be kicking around, given how much we already know?"

We have very short memories.

It was in April 2006 that President George W. Bush, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, and Senator John McCain all announced their support of teaching Intelligent Design in public schools. This assault on science and on the separation of church and state was a mobilizing moment for the Edge community which responded to this initiative with book of essays by 16 eminent scientists entitled Intelligent Thought, excerpts from which appeared on Edge.

At the time, three and a half years ago, no one was using the phrase "the new atheists". In fact, in early 2006 only Sam Harris's book The End of Faith (2004), and Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking the Spell(February, 2006) had been published. It was in response to the highly organized and well-financed campaign by the religious right that led champions of rational thinking such as Jerry Coyne , Richard Dawkins , Daniel C. Dennett, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, A.C. Grayling , and P.Z. Myers to mount an unrelenting campaign against the purveyors of superstition, supernaturalism, ignorance ... and their apologists (the self-proclaimed "moderates", or to use more apt terms, the "accommodationists", or the "faitheists").

The term "the new atheists" came into play in early 2007, followed by "I am an atheist, but". This is hardly the lingo of the far right. In fact, you don't have to leave the pages of Edge to read variations on this meme from some very distinguished and respected scientists. But what some appear to be saying is "I am an atheist but... other people, not as smart as I am, require religion (a) to get through the day, (b) to create sustainable societies, (c) to have moral values, etc. Others, intellectually lazy, afraid, or unable to invent their own personal narratives, simply wear their parents' old ideas like a hand-me-down suit, defaulting to the maudlin sentimentality that is the soundtrack to the American mind.

Now, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, known to Edge readers as a philosopher who has interesting things to say about Gödel and Spinoza, among others, enters into this conversation, taking on these and wider themes, and pushing the envelope by crossing over into the realm of fiction.

Goldstein isn't the first novelist to appear on Edge, nor the first to discuss religion. In October 1989, the novelist Ken Kesey came to New York spoke to The Reality Club. "As I've often told Ginsberg," he began, "you can't blame the President for the state of the country, it's always the poets' fault. You can't expect politicians to come up with a vision, they don't have it in them. Poets have to come up with the vision and they have to turn it on so it sparks and catches hold."

It's in this spirit that Edge presents a brief excerpt from the first chapter, and the nonfiction appendix from 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (21,250 words).

REBECCA NEWBERGER GOLDSTEIN is a philosopher, a novelist, and Edge contributor. She is the author of the nonfiction works Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity, and Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel. Her other novels include The Mind-Body Problem and Properties of Light: A Novel of Love, Betrayal, and Quantum Physics, and 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein's Edge Bio page

Chapter I: The Argument from the Improbable Self

Something shifted, something so immense you could call it the world.

Call it the world.

The world shifted, catching lots of smart people off guard, churning up issues that you had thought had settled forever beneath the earth's crust. The more sophisticated you are, the more annotated your mental life, the more taken aback you're likely to feel, seeing what the world's lurch has brought to light, thrusting up beliefs and desires you had assumed belonged to an earlier stage of human development.

What is this stuff, you ask one another, and how can it still be kicking around, given how much we already know? It looks like the kind of relics that archeologists dig up and dust off, speculating about the beliefs that once had animated them, to the best that they can be reconstructed, gone as they are now, those thrashings of proto-rationality and mythico-magical hypothesizing, and mostly forgotten.

Now it's all gone unforgotten, and minds that have better things to think about have to divert precious neuronal resources to figuring out how to knock some sense back into the species. It's a tiresome proposition, having to take up the work of the Enlightenment all over again, but it's happened on your watch. You ought to have sent up a balloon now and then to get a read on the prevailing cognitive conditions, the Thinks watching out for the Think-Nots. 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.

None of this is particularly good for the world, but it has been good for Cass Seltzer. 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. He's thinking his life has gotten better because the world has gone bonkers. He's thinking zealots proliferate and Seltzer prospers.

It's 4 a.m., and Cass Seltzer is standing on Weeks Bridge, the graceful arc that spans the Charles River near Harvard University, staring down at the river below, which is in the rigor mortis of late February in New England. The whole vista is deserted beyond vacancy, deserted in the way of being inhospitable to human life. There's not a car passing on Memorial Drive, and the elegant river dorms are darkened to silent hulks, the most hyper-kinetic of undergraduates sedated to purring girls and boys.

It's not like Cass Seltzer to be out in the middle of an icy night, lost in thought while losing sensation in his extremities. Excitement had gotten the better of him. He had lain in his empty bed for hours, mind racing, until he gave up and crawled out from under the luxe comforter that his girlfriend Lucinda Mandelbaum had brought with her when she moved in with him at the end of June. This comforter has pockets for the hands and feet and a softness that's the result of impregnation with aloe vera. As a man, Cass had been skeptical, but he's become a begrudging believer in Lucinda's comforter, and in her Tempur-Pedic pillow, too, suffused with the fragrance of her coconut shampoo, making it all the more remarkable that he'd forsake his bed for this no-man's stretch of frigid night.

Rummaging in the front closet for some extra protection, he had pulled out, with a smile he couldn't have interpreted for himself, a long-forgotten item, the tricolor scarf that his ex-wife, Pascale, had learned to knit for him during the four months when she was recovering from aphasia, four months that had produced, among other shockers, an excessively long French flag of a scarf, which he wound seven and a half times around his neck before heading out into the dark to deal with the rush in his head.

Lucinda's away tonight, away for the entire bleak week to come. Cass is missing Lucinda in his bones, missing her in the marrow that's presently crystallizing into ice. She's in warmer climes, at a conference in Santa Barbara on "Non-Nash Equilibria in Zero-Sum Games." Among these equilibria is one that's called the "Mandelbaum Equilibrium," and it's Cass's ambition to have the Mandelbaum Equilibrium mastered by the time he picks her up from the airport Friday night.

Technically, Lucinda's a psychologist, like Cass, only not like Cass at all. Her work is so mathematical that almost no one would suspect it has anything to do with mental life. Cass, on the other hand, is about as far away on the continuum as you can get and still be in the same field. He's so far away that he is knee-deep in the swampy humanities. Until recently, Cass had felt almost apologetic explaining that his interest is in the whole wide range of religious experience — a bloated category on anyone's account, but especially on Cass's, who sees religious frames of mind lurking everywhere, masking themselves in the most secular of settings, in politics and scholarship and art and even in personal relationships.

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. It had been impossible to get grants, and the prestigious journals would return his manuscripts without sending them out for peer review. The undergraduates crowded his courses, but that counted, if anything, as a strike against him in his department. The graduate students stayed away in droves. The sexy psychological research was all in neural network modeling and cognitive neuroscience. The mind is a neural computer and the folks with the algorithms ruled.

Next had come the girl, although that designation hardly does justice to the situation, not when the situation stands for the likes of Lucinda Mandelbaum, known in her world as "the Goddess of Game Theory." Lucinda is, pure and simple, a wondrous creature, with adoration her due and Cass's avocation.

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. 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 of Veritas. But he's an academic, his sense of success and failure ultimately determined by the academy's utilities (to use the language of Lucinda's science), and Harvard counts as the maximum utility. Cass has the letter on him right now, zippered into an inside pocket of his parka, insulating him against the elements.

The night is so cold that everything seems to have been stripped bare of superfluous existence, reduced to the purity of abstraction. 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. He takes them off and, of course, can't see a thing, can barely see past the nimbus phantom of his own breath.

But then he stares harder and it seems that he can see better, that the world has slid into sharper focus. It's only now, with his glasses off, that he catches sight of the spectacle that the extreme cold has created in the river below, frozen solid except where it quickens through the three graceful arches of the bridge's substructure, creating an effect that could reasonably be called sublime, and in the Kantian sense: not cozily beautiful, but touched by a metaphysical chill. The quickened water has sculpted three immense and perfect arches into the thick ice, soaring fifty or sixty feet to their apices, sublime almost as if by design. 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.

Standing dead center on Weeks Bridge, in the dead of winter in the dead of night, staring down at the three enormous arches sublimely carved into the Charles, suggesting a cathedral shaped into the ice, Cass is contemplating the strange thing that his life has become.

To him. His life has become strange to him. He feels like he's wearing somebody else's coat, grabbed in a hurry from the bed in the spare bedroom after a boozy party. He's walking around in someone else's bespoke cashmere while that guy's got Cass's hooded parka, and only Cass seems to have noticed the switch.

What has happened is that Cass Seltzer has become an intellectual celebrity. He's become famous for his abstract ideas. And not just any old abstract ideas, but atheist abstract ideas, which makes him, according to some of the latest polls, a spokesperson for the most distrusted minority in America, the one that most Americans are least willing to allow their children to marry.

This is a fact. Studies have found that a large proportion of Americans rate atheists below Muslims, recent immigrants, gays, and Communists, as "sharing their vision of American society." 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.

"As if," as Cass often finds himself saying into microphones, "the only reason to live morally is out of fear of getting caught and being spanked by the heavenly father."

Cass Seltzer has become the unlikely poster boy for this misunderstood group. His is a good face for counteracting the fallacy of equating godlessness with vice. Handsome, but not in a way to make the squeamish consider indeterminate sexual orientation, Cass's fundamental niceness is written all over him. He's got a strong jaw, a high ovoid forehead from which his floppy auburn hair is only just slightly receding, and the sweetest, most earnest smile this side of Oral Roberts University. 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?

Cass is still trying to assimilate the fact that his book has become an international sensation, translated into twenty-seven languages, including Latvian. He understands that it's not just a matter of what he's written — as much as he'd like to believe it is — but also a matter of the rare intersection of the preoccupations of his lifetime with the turmoil of the age. 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.

For the most part, fame is agreeable to Cass. For one thing, people treat him more nicely. It's a revelation to learn what a nice bunch of upright mammals we're capable of being. Everybody happily, gratefully, applies the Golden Rule when it comes to interacting with the famous. Thou must treat the famous as thou wouldst wish to be treated thyself. Easy! If only everybody could be famous, we would all be effortlessly altruistic.

The atheist with a soul. Cass always smiles at the absurdity of the phrase. But which is the more absurd element, he wonders. The truth is — and what's the good of a man contemplating an inhumanly frozen world at 4 a.m. if no truth-telling ensues? — that Cass is somewhat at a loss to account for what he has done. How to explain those 36 Arguments for the Existence of God (see Appendix), all of them formally constructed in the preferred analytic style, premises parading with military precision and every shirking presupposition and sketchy implication forced out into the open and subjected to rigorous inspection?

Cass had started out with all the standard arguments for God's existence, the ones discussed in philosophy classes and textbooks: The Cosmological Argument (#1), The Ontological Argument (#2), The Classical Argument from Design (#3A), the arguments from Miracles, Morality, and Mysticism (#'s 11, 16, and 22, respectively), Pascal's Wager (#31) , and William James's Argument from Pragmatism (#32). He had also analyzed the new batch of arguments recently whipped up by the Intelligent Design crowd, to wit, The Argument from Irreducible Complexity (#3B), The Argument from the Paucity of Benign Mutations (# 3C), The Argument from The Original Replicator (#3D), The Argument from The Big Bang (#4), The Argument from the Fine-Tuning of the Physical Constants (#5), and The Argument from the Hard Problem of Consciousness (#12). But then he had gone beyond these, too, attempting to polish up into genuine arguments those religious intuitions and emotions that are often powerfully evocative but too sub-syllogistic to be regarded as actual arguments. He had tried to capture under the net of analytic reason those fleeting shadows cast by unseen winged things darting through the thick foliage of the religious sensibility.

So Cass had formulated The Argument from Cosmic Coincidences (#7), appealing to such facts as these: that the diameter of the moon, as seen from the earth, is the same as the diameter of the sun, as seen from the earth, which is why we can have those spectacular eclipses when the corona of the sun is revealed in all its glory. He had formulated The Argument from Sublimity (#34), trying to capture the line of reasoning lurking behind, for example, the recent testament of one evangelical scientist who had felt his doubts falling away from him when he was hiking in the mountains and came upon a frozen waterfall — in fact a trinity of a frozen waterfall, with three parts to it. "At that moment, I felt my resistance leave me. And it was a great sense of relief. The next morning, in the dewy grass in the shadow of the Cascades, I fell on my knees and accepted this truth — that God is God, that Christ is his son and that I am giving my life to that belief."

For the right observer, Cass supposed, the triptych cathedral etched out in the ice below might yield a similar epiphany.

Cass had named the twenty-eighth in his list "The Argument from Prodigious Genius", though privately he thinks of it as "The Argument from Azarya." The astonishment of beholding genius, especially when it shows up in child prodigies, is so profound that it can feel almost like violence, as if a behavioral firestorm has devastated the laws of psychology, leaving us with no principles for explaining what we're seeing and hearing. "It's as if these children come into the world knowing" are words that Cass had heard twenty years ago, inspired by a child who could see the numbers and thought that they were angels.

And then there's The Argument from the Improbable Self (#13), another one that engages Cass in a personal way. He had struggled to squeeze precision into the sense of paradox he knows too well, the flailing attempt to calm the inside-outside vertigo to which he's given, trying to construct something semi-coherent beneath that vertiginous step outside himself that would result from his staring too long at the improbable fact of his being identical with . . . himself.

If somebody hasn't experienced this particular kind of metaphysical seizure for himself, then it's hard to find the words to give a sense of what it's like. Cass had experienced it as a boy, lying in bed and thinking his way into the sense of the strangeness of being just this.

Cass had had the lower bunk bed. Both he and Jesse, his younger brother, had wanted the higher bunk, but, as usual, Jesse had wanted what he wanted so much more than Cass had wanted it, with a fury of need that was exhausting just to watch, that Cass had let it go. Lying there awake on his lower bunk, Cass would think about being himself rather than being Jesse.

There was Jesse, and here was Cass. But if someone were looking at the two of them, Jesse there, Cass here, how could that observer tell that he, Cass, was Cass here and not Jesse there? If it got switched on them, everything the same about them, the body and memories and sense of self and everything else, only now he was Jesse here and there was Cass there, how would anybody know? How would he know, how would Jesse? Maybe a switch had already happened, maybe it happened again and again, and how could anybody tell?

The longer he tried to get a fix on the fact of being Cass here, the more the whole idea of it just got away from him. If he tried long enough to grasp it, then he could get the fact of being Cass here to blank out of existence and then come dribbling weakly back in, like a fluorescent fixture flickering on and off toward death. 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. Who was that Other that he was who was regarding his being Cass Seltzer as if he didn't have to be Cass Seltzer? The sense of giddiness induced by these exercises could be a bit too overwhelming for a kid in a lower bunk bed.

It could be a bit overwhelming still.

"Here I am," Cass is saying, standing on Weeks Bridge and talking aloud into the sublimely indifferent night.

Cass knows he needs to tamp down his tendencies toward the transcendental. It isn't becoming in America's favorite atheist, who is, at this moment, Cass Seltzer, who is, somehow or other, just this here.

"Here I am."

How can it be that, of all things, one is this thing, so that one can say, astonishingly — in the right frame of mind, it is astonishing, with the metaphysical chill blowing in from afar — "here I am."

When you didn't force yourself to think in formal reconstructions, when you didn't catch these moments of ravishments under the lens of premises and conclusions, when you didn't impale them and label them , like so many splayed butterflies, bleeding the transcendental glow right out of them, then . . . what?

It's even hard at a time like this to resist the shameful narcissistic appeal of reasonings like The Argument from Personal Coincidences (#8) and The Argument from Answered Prayers (#9) and The Argument from A Wonderful Life (#10). 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.

At moments like this could Cass altogether withstand the sense that — how hard to put it into words — the sense that the universe is personal, that there is something personal that grounds existence and order and value and purpose and meaning — and that the grandeur of that personal universe has somehow infiltrated and is expanding his own small person, bringing his littleness more in line with its grandeur, that the personal universe has been personally kind to him, gracious and forgiving, to Cass Seltzer, gratuitously, exorbitantly, divinely kind, and this despite Cass's having, with callowness and shallowness aforethought, thrown spitballs at the whole idea of cosmic intentionality?

No, no, that doesn't capture it either. Those words are far too narrowed by Cass's own particular life, when what it is he could feel, has felt, might even be feeling now, has nothing to do with the contents of Cass's existence, but rather with existence itself, Itself, this, This, THIS . . . what?

This expansion out into the world which is a kind of love, he supposes, a love for the whole of existence, that could so easily well up in Cass Seltzer at this moment, standing here in the pure abstractions of this night and contemplating the strange thisness of his life when viewed sub specie aeternitatus, that is to say from the vantage point of eternity which comes so highly recommended to us by Spinoza.

Here it is then: the sense that existence is just such a tremendous thing, one comes into it, astonishingly, here one is, formed by biology and history, genes and culture, in the midst of the contingency of the world, here one is, one doesn't know how, one doesn't know why, and suddenly one doesn't know where one is either or who or what one is either, and all that one knows is that one is a part of it, a considered and conscious part of it, generated and sustained in existence in ways one can hardly comprehend, all the time conscious of it, though, of existence, the fullness of it, the reaching expanse and pulsing intricacy of it, and one wants to live in a way that at least begins to do justice to it, one wants to expand one's reach of it as far as expansion is possible and even beyond that, to live one's life in a way commensurate with the privilege of being a part of and conscious of the whole reeling glorious infinite sweep, a sweep that includes, so improbably, a psychologist of religion named Cass Seltzer, who, moved by powers beyond himself, did something more improbable than all the improbabilities constituting his improbable existence could have entailed, did something that won him someone else's life, a better life, a more brilliant life, a life beyond all the ones he had wished for in the pounding obscurity of all his yearnings, because all of this, this, this, THIS couldn't belong to him, to the man who stands on Weeks Bridge, wrapped round in a scarf his once-beloved ex-wife Pascale had knit for him for some necessary reason that he would never know, perhaps to offer him some protection against the desolation she knew would soon be his, and was, but is no longer, suspended here above sublimity, his cheeks aflame with either euphoria or frostbite, a letter in his zippered pocket with the imprimatur of Veritas and a Lucinda Mandelbaum with whom to share it all.

Appendix: 36 ARGUMENTS FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD

1. The Cosmological Argument

1. Everything that exists must have a cause. 2. The universe must have a cause (from 1). 3. Nothing can be the cause of itself. 4. The universe cannot be the cause of itself (from 3). 5. Something outside the universe must have caused the universe (from 2 & 4). 6. God is the only thing that is outside of the universe. 7. God caused the universe (from 5 & 6). 8. God exists.

FLAW 1: can be crudely put: Who caused God? The Cosmological Argument is a prime example of the Fallacy of Passing the Buck: invoking God to solve some problem, but then leaving unanswered that very same problem when applied to God himself. The proponent of the Cosmological Argument must admit a contradiction to either his first premise — and say that though God exists, he doesn't have a cause — or else a contradiction to his third premise — and say that God is self-caused. Either way, the theist is saying that his premises have at least one exception, but is not explaining whyGod must be the unique exception, otherwise than asserting his unique mystery (the Fallacy of Using One Mystery To Pseudo-Explain Another). Once you admit of exceptions, you can ask why the universe itself, which is also unique, can't be the exception. The universe itself can either exist without a cause, or else can be self-caused . Since the buck has to stop somewhere, why not with the universe?

FLAW 2: The notion of "cause" is by no means clear, but our best definition is a relation that holds between events that are connected by physical laws. Knocking the vase off the table caused it to crash to the floor; smoking three packs a day caused his lung cancer. To apply this concept to the universe itself is to misuse the concept of cause, extending it into a realm in which we have no idea how to use it. This line of skeptical reasoning, based on the incoherent demands we make of the concept of cause, was developed by David Hume.

COMMENT: The Cosmological Argument, like the Argument from the Big Bang, and The Argument from the Intelligibility of the Universe, are expressions of our cosmic befuddlement at the question: why is there something rather than nothing? The late philosopher Sydney Morgenbesser had a classic response to this question: "And if there were nothing? You'd still be complaining!"

2. The Ontological Argument

1. Nothing greater than God can be conceived (this is stipulated as part of the definition of "God"). 2. It is greater to exist than not to exist. 3 . If we conceive of God as not existing, then we can conceive of something greater than God (from 2). 4. To conceive of God as not existing is not to conceive of God (from 1 and 3). 5. It is inconceivable that God not exist (from 4). 6. God exists.

This argument, first articulated by Saint Anselm (1033-1109), the Archbishop of Canterbury, is unlike any other, proceeding purely on the conceptual level. 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." The claim of the Ontological Argument is that the concept of God is the one exception to this rule. The very concept of God, when defined correctly, entails that there is something that satisfies that concept. Although most people suspect that there is something wrong with this argument, it's not so easy to figure out what it is.

FLAW: It was Immanuel Kant who pinpointed the fallacy in the Ontological Argument: it is to treat "existence" as a property, like "being fat" or "having ten fingers." The Ontological Argument relies on a bit of wordplay, assuming that "existence" is just another property, but logically it is completely different. If you really could treat "existence" as just part of the definition of the concept of God, then you could just as easily build it into the definition of any other concept. We could, with the wave of our verbal magic wand, define a trunicorn as "a horse that (a) has a single horn on its head, and (b) exists." So if you think about a trunicorn, you're thinking about something that must, by definition, exist; therefore trunicorns exist. This is clearly absurd: we could use this line of reasoning to prove that any figment of our imagination exists.

COMMENT: Once again, Sydney Morgenbesser had a pertinent remark, this one offered as an Ontological Argument for God's Non-Existence: Existence is such a lousy thing, how could God go and do it?

3. The Argument from Design

A. The Classical Teleological Argument 1. Whenever there are things that cohere only because of a purpose or function (for example, all the complicated parts of a watch that allow it to keep time), we know that they had a designer who designed them with the function in mind; they are too improbable to have arisen by random physical processes. (A hurricane blowing through a hardware store could not assemble a watch.) 2. Organs of living things, such as the eye and the heart, cohere only because they have a function (for example, the eye has a cornea, lens, retina, iris, eyelids, and so on, which are found in the same organ only because together they make it possible for the animal to see.) 3. These organs must have a designer who designed them with their function in mind: just as a watch implies a watchmaker, an eye implies an eyemaker (from 1 & 2). 4. These things have not had a human designer. 5. Therefore, these things must have had a non-human designer (from 3 & 4). 6. God is the non-human designer (from 5). 7. God exists.

FLAW: Darwin showed how the process of replication could give rise to the illusion of design without the foresight of an actual designer. Replicators make copies of themselves, which make copies of themselves, and so on, giving rise to an exponential number of descendants. In any finite environment the replicators must compete for the energy and materials necessary for replication. Since no copying process is perfect, errors will eventually crop up, and any error that causes a replicator to reproduce more efficiently than its competitors will result in that line of replicators predominating in the population. After many generations, the dominant replicators will appear to have been designed for effective replication, whereas all they have done is accumulate the copying errors which in the past did lead to effective replication. The fallacy in the argument, then is Premise 1 (and as a consequence, Premise 3, which depends on it): parts of a complex object serving a complex function do not, in fact, require a designer.

In the twenty-first century, creationists have tried to revive the Teleological Argument in three forms:

B. The Argument from Irreducible Complexity 1. 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. 2. In many complex organs, the removal or modification of any part would destroy the functional whole. Examples are, the lens and retina of the eye, the molecular components of blood clotting, and the molecular motor powering the cell's flagellum. Call these organs "irreducibly complex." 3. These organs could not have been useful to the organisms that possessed them in any simpler forms (from 2). 4. The Theory of Natural Selection cannot explain these irreducibly complex systems (from 1 & 3). 5. Natural selection is the only way out of the conclusions of the Classical Teleological Argument. 6. God exists (from 4 & 5 and the Classical Teleological Argument).

This argument has been around since the time of Charles Darwin, and his replies to it still hold.

FLAW 1: For many organs, Premise 2 is false. An eye without a lens can still see, just not as well as an eye with a lens.

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. Insect wings, before they were large enough to be effective for flight, were used as heat-exchange panels. This is also true for most of the molecular mechanisms, such as the flagellum motor, invoked in the modern version of the Argument from Irreducible Complexity.

FLAW 3: (The Fallacy of Arguing from Ignorance): There may be biological systems for which we don't yet know how they may have been useful in simpler versions. But there are obviously many things we don't yet understand in molecular biology, and given the huge success that biologists have achieved in explaining so many examples of incremental evolution in other biological systems, it is more reasonable to infer that these gaps will eventually be filled by the day-to-day progress of biology than to invoke a supernatural designer just to explain these temporary puzzles.

COMMENT: This last flaw can be seen as one particular instance of the more general and fallacious

Argument from Ignorance:

1.There are things that we cannot explain yet. 2. Those things must be caused by God.

FLAW: Premise 1 is obviously true. If there weren't things that we could not explain yet, then science would be complete, laboratories and observatories would unplug their computers and convert to condominiums, and all departments of science would be converted to departments in the History of Science. Science is only in business because there are things we have not explained yet. So we cannot infer from the existence of genuine, ongoing science that there must be a God.

C. The Argument from the Paucity of Benign Mutations 1. Evolution is powered by random mutations and natural selection. 2. Organisms are complex, improbable systems, and by the laws of probability any change is astronomically more likely to be for the worse than for the better. 3. The majority of mutations would be deadly for the organism (from 2). 4. The amount of time it would take for all the benign mutations needed for the assembly of an organ to appear by chance is preposterously long (from 3). 5. 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). 6. Something outside of the mechanism of biological change — the Prime Mutator — must bias the process of mutations for evolution to work (from 5). 7. The only entity that is both powerful enough and purposeful enough to be the Prime Mutator is God. 8 .God exists.

FLAW : Evolution does not require infinitesimally improbable mutations, such as a fully formed eye appearing out of the blue in a single generation, because (a) mutations can have small effects (tissue that is slightly more transparent, or cells that are slightly more sensitive to light), and mutations contributing to these effects can accumulate over time; (b) for any sexually reproducing organism, the necessary mutations do not have to have occurred one after the other in a single line of descendants, but could have appeared independently in thousands of separate organisms, each mutating at random, and the necessary combinations could come together as the organisms mate and exchange genes; (c) life on earth has had a vast amount of time to accumulate the necessary mutations (almost four billion years).

D. The New Argument from The Original Replicator 1. Evolution is the process by which an organism evolves from simpler ancestors. 2. Evolution by itself cannot explain how the original ancestor — the first living thing — came into existence (from 1). 3. The theory of natural selection can deal with this problem only by saying the first living thing evolved out of non-living matter (from 2). 4. That non-living matter (call it the Original Replicator) must be capable of (i) self-replication (ii) generating a functioning mechanism out of surrounding matter to protect itself against falling apart, and (iii) surviving slight mutations to itself that will then result in slightly different replicators. 5. The Original Replicator is complex (from 4). 6. The Original Replicator is too complex to have arisen from purely physical processes (from 5 & the Classical Teleological Argument). For example, DNA, which currently carries the replicated design of organisms, cannot be the Original Replicator, because DNA molecules requires a complex system of proteins to remain stable and to replicate, and could not have arisen from natural processes before complex life existed. 7. Natural selection cannot explain the complexity of the Original Replicator (from 3 & 6). 8. The Original Replicator must have been created rather than have evolved (from 7 and the Classical Teleological Argument). 9. Anything that was created requires a Creator. 10. God exists.

FLAW 1: Premise 6 states that a replicator, because of its complexity, cannot have arisen from natural processes, i.e. by way of natural selection. But the mathematician John von Neumann showed in the 1950s that it is theoretically possible for a simple physical system to make exact copies of itself from surrounding materials. Since then, biologists and chemists have identified a number of naturally occurring molecules and crystals that can replicate in ways that could lead to natural selection (in particular, that allow random variations to be preserved in the copies). Once a molecule replicates, the process of natural selection can kick in, and the replicator can accumulate matter and become more complex, eventually leading to precursors of the replication system used by living organisms today.

FLAW 2: Even without von Neumann's work (which not everyone accepts as conclusive), to conclude the existence of God from our not yet knowing how to explain the Original Replicator is to rely on The Argument from Ignorance.

4. The Argument from The Big Bang

1. The Big Bang, according to the best scientific opinion of our day, was the beginning of the physical universe, including not only matter and energy, but space and time and the laws of physics. 2. The universe came to be ex nihilo (from 1). 3. Something outside the universe, including outside its physical laws, must have brought the universe into existence (from 2). 4. Only God could exist outside the universe. 5. God must have been caused the universe to exist (from 3 & 4). 6. God exists.

The Big Bang is based on the observed expansion of the universe, with galaxies rushing away from each other. The implication is that if we run the film of the universe backward from the present, the universe must continuously contract, all the way back to a single point. The theory of the Big Bang is that the universe exploded into existence about 14 billion years ago.

FLAW 1: Cosmologists themselves do not all agree that the Big Bang is a "singularity" — the sudden appearance of space, time, and physical laws from inexplicable nothingness. The Big Bang may represent the lawful emergence of a new universe from a previously existing one. In that case, it would be superfluous to invoke God to explain the emergence of something from nothing.

FLAW 2: The Argument From the Big Bang has all the flaws of The Cosmological Argument — it passes the buck from the mystery of the origin of the universe to the mystery of the origin of God, and it extends the notion of "cause" outside the domain of events covered by natural laws (also known as the universe) where it no longer makes sense.

5. The Arguments from the Fine-Tuning of Physical Constants

1. There are a vast number of physically possible universes. 2. 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. 3. The percentage of possible universes that would support life is infinitesimally small (from 2). 4. Our universe is one of those infinitesimally improbable universes. 5. Our universe has been fine-tuned to support life (from 3 & 4). 6. There is a Fine-Tuner (from 5). 7. Only God could have the power and the purpose to be the Fine-Tuner. 8. God exists.

Philosophers and physicists often speak of "The Anthropic Principle," which comes in several versions, labeled "weak," "strong" and "very strong." 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. The Argument from Fine-Tuning corresponds to the Very Strong Anthropic Principle. Its upshot is that the upshot of the universe is . . . us. The universe must have been designed with us in mind.

FLAW 1: The first premise may be false. Many physicists and cosmologists, following Einstein, hope for a unified "theory of everything," which would deduce from as-yet-unknown physical laws that the physical constants of our universe had to be what they are. In that case, ours would be the only possible universe. (See also The Argument from the Intelligibility of the Universe,# 35, below).

FLAW 2: Even were we to accept the first premise, the transition from 4 to 5 is invalid. Perhaps we are living in a multiverse (a term coined by William James), a vast plurality (perhaps infinite) of parallel universes with different physical constants, all of them composing one reality. 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. 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. Again, we find ourselves, not surprisingly, in one of those time-slices in which the universe does have physical constants that support stable matter and complex life. These hypotheses, which are receiving much attention from contemporary cosmologists, are sufficient to invalidate the leap from 4 to 5.

6. The Argument from the Beauty of Physical Laws

1. Scientists use aesthetic principles (simplicity, symmetry, elegance) to discover the laws of nature. 2. Scientist s could only use aesthetic principles successfully if the laws of nature were intrinsically and objectively beautiful. 3. The laws of nature are intrinsically and objectively beautiful (from 1 & 2). 4. Only a mind-like being with an appreciation of beauty could have designed the laws of nature. 5 . God is the only being with the power and purpose to design beautiful laws of nature. 6. God exists.

FLAW 1: Do we decide an explanation is good because it's beautiful, or do we find an explanation beautiful because it provides a good explanation? When we say that the laws of nature are beautiful, what we are really saying is that the laws of nature are the laws of nature, and thus unify into elegant explanation a vast host of seemingly unrelated and random phenomena. We would find the laws of nature of any lawful universe beautiful. So what this argument boils down to is the observation that we live in a lawful universe. And of course any universe that could support the likes of us would have to be lawful. So this argument is another version of the The Anthropic Principle — we live in the kind of universe which is the only kind of universe in which observers like us could live — and thus is subject to the flaws of Argument #5.

FLAW 2: If the laws of the universe are intrinsically beautiful, then positing a God who loves beauty, and who is mysteriously capable of creating an elegant universe (and presumably a messy one as well, though his aesthetic tastes led him not to), makes the universe complex and incomprehensible all over again. This negates the intuition behind Premise 3, that the universe is intrinsically elegant and intelligible. (See The Argument from the Intelligibility of the Universe, #35 below.)

7. The Argument from Cosmic Coincidences

1. The universe contains many uncanny coincidences, such as that the diameter of the moon, as seen from the earth is the same as the diameter of the sun, as seen from the earth, which is why we can have spectacular eclipses when the corona of the sun is revealed. 2. Coincidences are, by definition, overwhelmingly improbable. 3. The overwhelmingly improbable defies all statistical explanation. 4. These coincidences are such as to enhance our awed appreciation for the beauty of the natural world. 5. These coincidences must have been designed in order to enhance our awed appreciation of the beauty of the natural world (from 3 & 4). 6. Only a being with the power to effect such uncanny coincidences and the purpose of enhancing our awed appreciation of the beauty of the natural world could have arranged these uncanny cosmic coincidences. 7. Only God could be the being with such power and such purpose. 8. God exists.

FLAW 1: Premise 3 does not follow from Premise 2. The occurrence of the highly improbable can be statistically explained in two ways. One is when we have a very large sample. A one-in-a-million event is not improbable at all if there are a million opportunities for it to occur. The other is that there is a huge number of occurrences that could be counted as coincidences, if we don't specify them beforehand but just notice them after the fact. (There could have been a constellation that forms a square around the moon; there could have been a comet that appeared on January 1, 2000; there could have been a constellation in the shape of a Star of David, etc. etc. etc.) When you consider how many coincidences are possible, the fact that we observe any one coincidence (which we notice after the fact) is not improbably but likely. And let's not forget the statistically improbable coincidences that cause havoc and suffering, rather than awe and wonder, in humans: the perfect storm, the perfect tsunami, the perfect plague, etc.

FLAW 2: The derivation of Premise 5 from Premises 3 and 4 is invalid: an example of the Projection Fallacy, in which we project the workings of our mind onto the world, and assume that our own subjective reaction is the result of some cosmic plan to cause that reaction. The human brain sees patterns in all kinds of random configurations: cloud formations, constellations, tea leaves, inkblots. That is why we are so good at finding supposed coincidences. 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.

COMMENT: Prominent among the uncanny coincidences that figure into this argument are those having to do with numbers. 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). We are therefore likely to attribute magical powers to them. And, given the infinity of numbers and the countless possible ways to apply them to the world, "uncanny coincidences" are bound to occur (see FLAW 1). In Hebrew, the letters are also numbers, which has given rise to the mystical art of "gematria," often used to elucidate, speculate, and prophesy about the unknowable.

8. The Argument from Personal Coincidences

1. 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). 2. Uncanny coincidences cannot be explained by the laws of probability (which is why we call them uncanny). 3. These uncanny coincidences, inexplicable by the laws of probability, reveal a significance to our lives. 4. Only a being who deems our lives significant and who has the power to effect these coincidences could arrange for them to happen. 5. Only God both deems our lives significant and has the power to effect these coincidences. 6. God exists.

FLAW 1: The second premise suffers from the major flaw of the Argument from Cosmic Coincidences: a large number of experiences, together with the large number of patterns that we would call "coincidences" after the fact, make uncanny coincidences probable, not improbable.

FLAW 2: Psychologists have shown that people are subject to an illusion called Confirmation Bias. When they have a hypothesis (such as that daydreams predict the future), they vividly notice all the instances that confirm it (the times when they think of a friend and he calls), and forget all the instances that don't (the times when they think of a friend and he doesn't call). Likewise, who among us remembers all the times when we miss a plane and it doesn't crash? The vast number of non-events we live through don't make an impression on us; the few coincidences do.

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. For all of us, there can be nothing more significant than the lives we are living. As David Hume pointed out, the self has an inclination to "spread itself on the world," projecting onto objective reality the psychological assumptions and attitudes that are too constant to be noticed, that play in the background like a noise you don't realize you are hearing until it stops. This form of the Projection Fallacy is especially powerful when it comes to the emotionally fraught questions about our own significance.

9. The Argument from Answered Prayers

1. Sometimes people pray to God for good fortune, and against enormous odds, their calls are answered. (For example, a parent prays for the life of her dying child, and the child recovers.) 2. The odds of the beneficial event happening are enormously slim (from 1). 3. The odds that the prayer would have been followed by recovery out of sheer chance are extremely small (from 2). 4. The prayer could only have been followed by the recovery if God listened to it and made it come true. 5. God exists.

This argument is similar to The Argument from Miracles below, except instead of the official miracles claimed by established religion, it refers to intimate and personal miracles.

FLAW 1: Premise 3 is indeed true. However, to use it to infer that a miracle has taken place (and an answered prayer is certainly a miracle) is to subvert it. There is nothing that is less probable than a miracle, since it constitutes a violation of a law of nature (see The Argument from Miracles, #11, below). 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.

FLAW 2: The coincidence of a person praying for the unlikely to happen and its then happening is, of course, improbable. But the flaws in The Argument from Cosmic Coincidences and The Argument from Personal Coincidences apply here: Given a large enough sample of prayers (the number of times people call out to God to help them and those they love is tragically large), the improbable is bound to happen occasionally. And, given the existence of Confirmation Bias, we will notice these coincidences, yet fail to notice and count up the vastly larger number of unanswered prayers.

FLAW 3: There is an inconsistency in the moral reasoning behind this argument. It asks us to believe in a compassionate God who would be moved to pity by the desperate pleas of some among us — but not by the equally desperate pleas of others among us. 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. When the life is our own, or that of someone we love, we are especially liable to the Projection Fallacy, and spread our personal sense of significance onto the world at Large.

FLAW 4: Reliable cases of answered prayers always involve medical conditions that we know can spontaneously resolve themselves through the healing powers and immune system of the body, such as recovery from cancer, or a coma, or lameness. Prayers that a person can grow back a limb, or that a child can be resurrected from the dead, always go unanswered. This affirms that supposedly answered prayers are actually just the rarer cases of natural recovery.

10. The Argument from A Wonderful Life

1. Sometimes people who are lost in life find their way. 2. These people could not have known the right way on their own. 3. These people were shown the right way by something or someone other than themselves (from 2). 4. There was no person showing them the way. 5. God alone is a being who is not a person and who cares about each of us enough to show us the way. 6. Only God could have helped these lost souls (from 4 & 5). 7. God exists.

FLAW 1: Premise 2 ignores the psychological complexity of people. People have inner resources on which they draw, often without knowing how they are doing it or even that they are doing it. Psychologists have shown that events in our conscious lives—from linguistic intuitions of which sentences sound grammatical to moral intuitions of what would be the right thing to do in a moral dilemma—are the end-products of complicated mental manipulations of which we are unaware. So, too, decisions and resolutions can bubble into awareness without our being conscious of the processes that led to them. These epiphanies seem to announce themselves to us, as if they came from an external guide: another example of the Projection Fallacy.

FLAW 2: The same as FLAW 3 in The Argument from Answered Prayers, #9 above.

11. The Argument from Miracles

1. Miracles are events that violate the laws of nature. 2. Miracles can be explained only by a force that has the power of suspending the laws of nature for the purpose of making its presence known or changing the course of human history (from 1). 3. Only God has the power and the purpose to carry out miracles (from 2). 4. We have a multitude of written and oral reports of miracles. (Indeed, every major religion is founded on a list of miracles.) 5. Human testimony would be useless if it were not, in the majority of cases, veridical. 6. The best explanation for why there are so many reports testifying to the same thing is that the reports are true (from 5). 7. The best explanation for the multitudinous reports of miracles is that miracles have indeed occurred (from 6). 8. God exists (from 3 & 7).

FLAW 1: It is certainly true, as Premise 4 asserts, that we have a multitude of reports of miracles, with each religion insisting on those that establish it alone as the true religion. But the reports are not testifying to the same events; each miracle list justifies one religion at the expense of the others. See FLAW 2 in the Argument from Holy Books, #23 below.

FLAW 2: The fatal flaw in The Argument from Miracles was masterfully exposed by David Hume in An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Chapter 10, "On Miracles." Human testimony may often be accurate, but it is very far from infallible. People are sometimes mistaken; people are sometimes dishonest; people are sometimes gullible — indeed, more than sometimes. Since in order to believe that a miracle has occurred we must believe a law of nature has been violated (something for which we otherwise have the maximum of empirical evidence), and we can only believe it on the basis of the truthfulness of human testimony (which we already know is often inaccurate), then even if we knew nothing else about the event, and had no particular reason to distrust the reports of witness, we would have to conclude that it is more likely that the miracle has not occurred, and that there is an error in the testimony, than that the miracle has occurred. (Hume strengthens his argument, already strong, by observing that religion creates situations in which there are particular reasons to distrust the reports of witnesses. "But if the spirit of religion join itself to the love of wonder, there is an end of common sense.")

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.

12. The Argument from The Hard Problem of Consciousness

1. The Hard Problem of Consciousness consists in our difficulty in explaining why it subjectively feels like something to be a functioning brain. (This is to be distinguished from the so-called Easy Problem of Consciousness, which is not actually easy at all, and is only called so in relation to the intractable Hard Problem. See FLAW 3 below.) 2. Consciousness (in the Hard-Problem sense) is not a complex phenomenon built out of simpler ones; it can consist of irreducible "raw feels" like seeing red or tasting salt. 3. Science explains complex phenomena by reducing them to simpler ones, and reducing them to still simpler ones, until the simplest ones are explained by the basic laws of physics. 4. The basic laws of physics laws describe the properties of the elementary constituents of matter and energy, like quarks and quanta, which are not conscious. 5. Science cannot derive consciousness by reducing it to basic physical laws about the elementary constituents of matter and energy (from 2, 3, and 4). 6. Science will never solve the Hard Problem of Consciousness (from 3 and 5). 7. The explanation for consciousness must lie beyond physical laws (from 6). 8. Consciousness, lying outside physical laws, must itself be immaterial (from 7). 9. God is immaterial 10. Consciousness and God both partake in the same immaterial kind of being (from 8 and 9). 11. God has not only the means to impart consciousness to us, but also the motive, namely, to allow us to enjoy a good life, and to make it possible for our choices to cause or prevent suffering in others, thereby allowing for morality and meaning. 12. Consciousness can only be explained by positing that God inserted a spark of the divine into us (from 7, 10, & 11). 13. God exists.

FLAW 1: Premise 3 is dubious. Science often shows that properties can be emergent: they arise from complex interactions of simpler elements, even if they cannot be found in any of the elements themselves. (Water is wet, but that does not mean that every H¬2 0 molecule it is made of is also wet.) 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.

FLAW 2: Alternatively, the theory of panpsychism posits that consciousness in a low-grade form, what is often called "proto-consciousness," is inherent in matter. 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. 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.

FLAW 3: It has become clear that every measurable manifestation of consciousness, like our ability to describe what we feel, or let our feelings guide our behavior (the "Easy Problem" of consciousness) has been, or will be, explained in terms of neural activity (that is, every thought, feeling, and intention has a neural correlate). Only the existence of consciousness itself (the "Hard Problem") remains mysterious. But perhaps the hardness of the hard problem says more about what we find hard — the limitations of the brains of Homo sapiens when it tries to think scientifically — than about the hardness of the problem itself. 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.

FLAW 4: Premise 12 is entirely unclear. How does invoking the spark of the divine explain the existence of consciousness? It is the Fallacy of Using One Mystery To Pseudo-Explain Another.

COMMENT: Premise 11 is also dubious, because our capacity to suffer is far in excess of what it would take to make moral choices possible. This will be discussed in connection with The Argument from Suffering, #25 below.

13. The Argument from The Improbable Self

1. I exist in all my particularity and contingency: not as a generic example of personhood, not as any old member of Homo sapiens, but as that unique conscious entity that I know as me. 2. I can step outside myself and view my own contingent particularity with astonishment. 3. This astonishment reveals that there must be something that accounts for why, of all the particular things that I could have been, I am just this, namely, me (from 1 & 2). 4. Nothing within the world can account for why I am just this, since the laws of the world are generic: they can explain why certain kinds of things come to be, even (let's assume) why human beings with conscious brains come to be. But nothing in the world can explain why one of those human beings should be me. 5. Only something outside the world, who cares about me, can therefore account for why I am just this (from 4). 6. God is the only thing outside the world who cares about each and every one of us. 7. God exists.

FLAW: Premise 5 is a blatant example of the Fallacy of Using One Mystery To Pseudo-Explain Another. Granted that the problem boggles the mind, but waving one's hands in the direction of God is no solution. It gives us no sense of how God can account for why I am this thing and not another.

COMMENT: In one way, this argument is reminiscent of the Anthropic Principle. There are a vast number of people who could have been born. One's own parents alone could have given birth to a vast number of alternatives to oneself—same egg, different sperm; different egg, same sperm; different egg, different sperm. Granted, one gropes for a reason for why it was, against these terrific odds, that oneself came to be born. But there may be no reason; it just happened. By the time you ask this question, you already are existing in a world in which you were born. Another analogy: the odds that the phone company would have given you your exact number are minuscule. But it had to give you some number, so asking after the fact why it should be that number is silly. Likewise, the child your parents conceived had to be someone. Now that you're born, it's no mystery why it should be you; you're the one asking the question.

14. The Argument from Survival after Death

1. 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. 2. A person's consciousness can survive after the death of his or her body (from 1) 3. Survival after death entails the existence of an immaterial soul. 4. The immaterial soul exists (from 2 & 3). 5. If an immaterial soul exists, then God must exist (from Premise 12 in The Argument from the Hard Problem of Consciousness, #12, above). 6. God exists.

FLAW : Premise 5 is vulnerable to the same criticisms that were leveled against Premise 12 in the Argument from the Hard Problem of Consciousness. Existence after death no more implies God's existence than our existence before death does.

COMMENT: Many, of course, would dispute Premise 1. The universal experiences of people near death, such as auras and out-of-body experiences, could be hallucinations resulting from oxygen deprivation in the brain. In addition, miraculous resurrections after total brain death, and accurate reports of conversations and events that took place while the brain was not functioning, have never been scientifically documented, and are informal, secondhand examples of testimony of miracles. They are thus vulnerable to the same flaws pointed out in The Argument from Miracles. But the argument is fatally flawed even if Premise 1 is granted.

15. The Argument from the Inconceivability of Personal Annihilation

1. 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. 2. My annihilation is inconceivable (from 1). 3. What cannot be conceived, cannot be. 4. I cannot be annihilated (from 2 & 3). 5. I survive after my death (from 4) The argument now proceeds on as in the argument from Survival After Death, only substituting in 'I' for 'a person,' until we get to: 6. God exists.

FLAW 1: Premise 2 confuses psychological inconceivability with logical inconceivability. The sense in which I can't conceive of my own annihilation is like the sense in which I can't conceive of those whom I love may betray me—a failure of the imagination, not an impossible state of affairs. Thus Premise 2 ought to read "My annihilation is inconceivable to me.", which is a fact about what my brain can conceive, not a fact about what exists.

FLAW 2: Same as Flaw 3 from The Argument from the Survival of Death.

COMMENT: Though logically unsound, this is among the most powerful psychological impulses to believe in a soul, and an afterlife, and God. It genuinely is difficult—not to speak of disheartening— to conceive of oneself not existing!

16. The Argument from Moral Truth

1. There exist objective moral truths. (Slavery and torture and genocide are not just distasteful to us, but are actually wrong.) 2. These objective moral truths are not grounded in the way the world is but rather in the way that the world ought to be. (Consider: should white-supremacists succeed, taking over the world and eliminating all who don't meet their criteria for being existence-worthy, their ideology still would be morally wrong. It would be true, under this hideous counterfactual, that the world ought not to be the way they have made it.) 3. The world itself — the way that it is, the laws of science that explain why it is that way — cannot account for the way that the world ought to be. 4. The only way to account for morality is that God established morality (from 2 and 3). 5. God exists.

FLAW 1: The major flaw of this argument is revealed in a powerful argument that Plato made famous in the Euthyphro. Reference to God does not help in the least to ground the objective truth of morality. The question is: why did God choose the moral rules he did? Did he have a reason justifying his choice that, say, giving alms to the poor is good, while genocide is wrong? Either he had a good reason or he didn't. If he did, then his reasons, whatever they are, can provide the grounding for moral truths for us, and God himself is redundant. And if he didn't have a good reason, then his choices are arbitrary—he could just as easily have gone the other way, making charity bad and genocide good—and we would have no reason to take his choices seriously. According to theEuthyphro argument, then, the Argument from Moral Truth is another example of The Fallacy of Passing the Buck. The hard work of moral philosophy consists in grounding morality in some version of the Golden Rule: that I cannot be committed to my own interests mattering in a way that yours do not just because I am me and you are not.

FLAW 2: Premise 4 is belied by the history of religion, which shows that the God from which people draw their morality (for example, the God of the Bible and the Koran) did not establish what we now recognize to be morality at all. The God of the Old Testament commanded people to keep slaves, slay their enemies, execute blasphemers and homosexuals, and commit many other heinous acts. Of course, our interpretation of which aspects of Biblical morality to take seriously has grown more sophisticated over time, and we read the Bible selectively and often metaphorically. But that is just the point: we must be consulting some standards of morality that do not come from God in order to judge which aspects of God's word to take literally and which aspects to ignore.

COMMENT : Some would question the first premise, and regard its assertion as a flaw of this argument. Slavery and torture and genocide are wrong by our lights, they would argue, and conflict with certain values we hold dear, such as freedom and happiness. But those are just subjective values, and it is obscure to say that statements that are consistent with those values are objectively true in the same way that mathematical or scientific statements can be true. But the argument is fatally flawed even if Premise 1 is granted.

17. The Argument from Altruism

1. People often act altruistically — namely, against their interests. They help others, at a cost to themselves, out of empathy, fairness, decency, and integrity. 2. Natural selection can never favor true altruism, because genes for selfishness will always out-compete genes for altruism (recall that altruism, by definition, exacts a cost to the actor). 3. Only a force acting outside of natural selection and intending for us to be moral could account for our ability to act altruistically (from 2). 4. God is the only force outside of natural selection that could intend us to be moral. 5. God must have implanted the moral instinct within us (from 3 & 4). 6. God exists.

FLAW 1: Theories of the evolution of altruism by natural selection have been around for decades and are now widely supported by many kinds of evidence. A gene for being kind to one's kin, even if it hurts the person doing the favor, can be favored by evolution, because that gene would be helping a copy of itself that is shared by the kin. And a gene for conferring a large benefit to a non-relative at a cost to oneself can evolve if the favor-doer is the beneficiary of a return favor at a later time. Both parties are better off, in the long run, from the exchange of favors.

Some defenders of religion do not consider these theories to be legitimate explanations of altruism, because a tendency to favor one's kin, or to trade favors, are ultimately just forms of selfishness for one's genes, rather than true altruism. But this is a confusion of the original phenomenon: we are trying to explain why people are sometimes altruistic, not why genes are altruistic. (We have no reason to believe that genes are ever altruistic in the first place!) Also, in a species with language, namely humans, committed altruists develop a reputation for being altruistic, and thereby win more friends, allies, and trading partners. This can give rise to selection for true, committed, altruism, not just the tit-for-tat exchange of favors.

FLAW 2: We have evolved higer mental faculties, such as self-reflection and logic, that allow us to reason about the world, to persuade other people to form alliances with us, to learn from our mistakes, and to achieve other feats of reason. Those same faculties, when they are honed through debate, reason, and knowledge, can allow us to step outside ourselves, learn about other people's point of view, and act in a way that we can justify as maximizing everyone's well-being. We are capable of moral reasoning because we are capable of reasoning in general.

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. People behave altruistically to gain a reward or avoid a punishment in the life to come. This argument is self-contradictory. It aims to explain how people act without regard to their self-interest, but then assumes that there could be no motive for acting altruistically other than self-interest.

18. The Argument from Free Will

1. Having free will means having the freedom to choose our actions, rather than their being determined by some prior cause. 2. If we don't have free will, then we are not agents, for then we are not really acting, but rather we're being acted upon. (That's why we don't punish people for involuntary actions—such 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.) 3. To be a moral agent means to be held morally responsible for what one does. 4. If we can't be held morally responsible for anything we do then the very idea of morality is meaningless. 5. Morality is not meaningless. 6. We have free will (from 2- 5). 7. We, as moral agents, are not subject to the laws of nature, in particular, the neural events in a genetically and environmentally determined brain (from 1 and 6). 8. Only a being who is apart from the laws of nature and partakes of the moral sphere could explain our being moral agents (from 7). 9. Only God is a being who is apart from the laws of nature and partakes of the moral sphere. 10. Only God can explain our moral agency (from 8 & 9). 11. God exists.

FLAW 1: This argument, in order to lead to God, must ignore the paradoxical Fork of Free Will. Either my actions are predictable (from my genes, my upbringing, my brain state, my current situation, and so on), or they are not. If they are predictable, then there is no reason to deny that they are caused, and we would not have free will. So they must be unpredictable, in other words, random. But if our behavior is random, then in what sense can it be attributable to us at all? If it really is a random event when I give the infirm man my seat in the subway, then in what sense is itme to whom this good deed should be attributed? If the action isn't caused by my psychological states, which are themselves caused by other states, then in one way is it really my action? And what good would it do to insist on moral responsibility, if our choices are random, and cannot be predicted from prior events (such as growing up in a society that holds people responsible)? This leads us back to the conclusion that we, as moral agents must be parts of the natural world-- the very negation of 7.

FLAW 2: Premise 10 is an example of the Fallacy of Using One Mystery to Pseudo-Explain Another. It expresses, rather than dispels, the confusion we feel when faced with the Fork of Free Will. The paradox has not been clarified in the least by introducing God into the analysis.

COMMENT: Free will is yet another quandary that takes us to the edge of our human capacity for understanding. The concept is baffling, because our moral agency seems to demand both that our actions be determined, and also that they not be determined.

19. The Argument from Personal Purpose

1. If there is no purpose to a person's life, then that person's life is pointless. 2. Human life cannot be pointless. 3. Each human life has a purpose (from 1 & 2). 4. The purpose of each individual person's life must derive from the overall purpose of existence. 5. There is an overall purpose of existence (from 3 and 4) 6. Only a being who understood the overall purpose of existence could create each person according to the purpose that person is meant to fulfill. 7. Only God could understand the overall purpose of creation. 8. There can be a point to human existence only if God exists (from 6 & 7). 9. God exists.

FLAW 1: The first premise rests on a confusion between the purpose of an action and the purpose of a life. It is human activities that have purposes—or don't. We study for the purpose of educating and supporting ourselves. We eat right and exercise for the purpose of being healthy. We warn children not to accept rides with strangers for the purpose of keeping them safe. We donate to charity for the purpose of helping the poor (just as we would want someone to help us if we were poor.) The notion of a person's entire life serving a purpose, above and beyond the purpose of all the person's choices, is obscure. Might it mean the purpose for which the person was born? That implies that some goal-seeking agent decided to bring our lives into being to serve some purpose. Then who is that goal-seeking agent? Parents often purposively have children, but we wouldn't want to see a parent's wishes as the purpose of the child's life. If the goal-seeking agent is God, the argument becomes circular: we make sense of the notion of "the purpose of a life" by stipulating that the purpose is whatever God had in mind when he created us, but then argue for the existence of God because he is the only one who could have designed us with a purpose in mind.

FLAW 2: Premise 2 states that human life cannot be pointless. But of course it could be pointless in the sense meant by this argument: lacking a purpose in the grand scheme of things. It could very well be the there is no grand scheme of things because there is no Grand Schemer. By assuming that there is a grand scheme of things, it assumes that there is a schemer whose scheme it is, which circularly assumes the conclusion.

COMMENT: It's important not to confuse the notion of "pointless" in Premise 2 with notions like "not worth living" or "expendable." It is probably confusions of this sort that give Premise 2 its appeal. But we can very well maintain that each human life is precious—is worth living, is not expendable—without maintaining that each human life has a purpose in the overall scheme of things.

20. The Argument from the Intolerability of Insignificance

1. In a million years nothing that happens now will matter. 2. By the same token, anything that happens at any point in time will not matter from the point of view of some other time a million years distant from it into the future. 3. No point in time can confer mattering on any other point, for each suffers from the same problem of not mattering itself (from 2). 4. It is intolerable (or inconceivable, or unacceptable) that in a million years nothing that happens now will matter. 5. What happens now will matter in a million years (from 4). 6. It is only from the point of view of eternity that what happens now will matter even in a million years (from 3). 7. Only God can inhabit the point of view of eternity. 8. God exists.

FLAW: Premise 4 is illicit: it is of the form "This argument must be correct, because it is intolerable that this argument is not correct." The argument is either circular, or an example of the Fallacy of Wishful Thinking. Maybe we won't matter in a million years, and there's just nothing we can do about it. If that is the case, we shouldn't declare that it is intolerable—we just have to live with it. Another way of putting it is: we should take ourselves seriously (being mindful of what we do, and the world we leave our children and grandchildren), but we shouldn't take ourselves that seriously, and arrogantly demand that we must matter in a million years.

21. The Argument from the Consensus of Humanity

1. Every culture in every epoch has had theistic beliefs. 2. When peoples, widely separated by both space and time, hold similar beliefs, the best explanation is that those beliefs are true. 3. The best explanation for why every culture has had theistic beliefs is that those beliefs are true. 4. God exists.

FLAW: 2 is false. Widely separated people could very well come up with the same false beliefs. Human nature is universal, and thus prone to universal illusions and shortcomings of perception, memory, reasoning, and objectivity. Also , many of the needs and terrors and dependencies of the human condition (such as the knowledge of our own mortality, and the attendant desire not to die) are universal. Our beliefs don't arise only from well-evaluated reasoning, but from wishful thinking, self-deception, self-aggrandizement, gullibility, false memories, visual illusions, and other mental glitches. 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. The fallacy of arguing that if an idea is universally held then it must be true was labeled by the ancient logicians consensus gentium.

22. The Argument from the Consensus of Mystics

1. Mystics go into a special state in which they seem to see aspects of reality that elude everyday experience. 2. We cannot evaluate the truth of their experiences from the viewpoint of everyday experience (from 1) 3. There is a unanimity among mystics as to what they experience. 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. 5. There is no reason to think that mystics are all deluded in the same way. 6. The best explanation for the unanimity of mystical experience is that what mystics perceive is true (from 4 & 5). 7. Mystical experiences unanimously testify to the transcendent presence of God. 8. God exists.

FLAW 1 : Premise 5 is disputable. There is indeed reason to think mystics might be deluded in similar ways. The universal human nature that refuted the Argument from the Consensus of Humanity entails that the human brain can be stimulated in unusual ways that give rise to universal (but not objectively correct) experiences. The fact that we can stimulate the temporal lobes of non-mystics and induce mystical experiences in them is evidence that mystics might indeed all be deluded in similar ways. Certain drugs can also induce feelings of transcendence, such as an enlargement of perception beyond the bounds of effability, a melting of the boundaries of the self, a joyful expansion out into an existence that seems to be all One, with all that Oneness pronouncing Yes upon us. Such experiences, which, as William James points out, are most easily attained by getting drunk, are of the same kind as the mystical: "The drunken consciousness is one bit of the mystic consciousness." Of course, we do not exalt the stupor and delusions of drunkenness because weknow what caused them. The fact that the same effects can overcome a person when we know what caused them (and hence don't call the experience "mystical") — is reason to suspect that the causes of mystical experiences also lie within internal excitations of the brain having nothing to do with perception.

FLAW 2: The struggle to put the ineffable contents of abnormal experiences into language inclines the struggler toward pre-existing religious language, which is the only language that most of us have been exposed to which overlaps with the unusual sensations of an altered state of consciousness. This observation casts doubt on Premise 7.See also The Argument from Sublimity, #34 below.

23. The Argument from Holy Books

1. There are holy books that reveal the word of God. 2. The word of God is necessarily true. 3. The word of God reveals the existence of God. 4. God exists.

FLAW 1: This is a circular argument if ever there was one. The first three premises cannot be maintained unless one independently knows the very conclusion to be proved, namely that God exists.

FLAW 2: A glance at the world's religions shows that there are numerous books and scrolls and doctrines and revelations that all claim to reveal the word of God. But they are mutually incompatible. Should I believe that Jesus is my personal savior? Or should I believe that God made a covenant with the Jews requiring every Jew to keep the commandments of the Torah? Should I believe that Mohammad was Allah's last prophet and that Ali, the prophet's cousin and husband of his daughter Fatima, ought to have been the first caliph, or that Mohammad was Allah's last prophet and that Ali was the fourth and last caliph? Should I believe that the resurrected prophet Moroni dictated the Book of Mormon to Joseph Smith? Or that Ahura Mazda, the benevolent Creator, is at cosmic war with the malevolent Angra Mainyu? And on and on it goes. Only the most arrogant provincialism could allow someone to believe that the holy documents that happen to be held sacred by the clan he was born into are true, while all the documents held sacred by the clans he wasn't born into are false.

24. The Argument from Perfect Justice

1. This world provides numerous instances of imperfect justice — bad things happening to good people and good things happening to bad people. 2. It violates our sense of justice that imperfect justice may prevail. 3. There must be a transcendent realm in which perfect justice prevails (from 1 and 2). 4. A transcendent realm in which perfect justice prevails entails the Perfect Judge. 5. The Perfect Judge is God. 6. God exists.

FLAW: This is a good example of the Fallacy of Wishful Thinking. Our wishes for how the world should be need not be true; just because we want there to be some realm in which perfect justice applies does not mean that there is such a realm. In other words, there is no way to pass from Premise 2 to Premise 3 without the Fallacy of Wishful Thinking.

25. The Argument from Suffering

1. There is much suffering in this world. 3. Some suffering (or at least its possibility) is a demanded by human moral agency: if people could not choose evil acts that cause suffering, moral choice would not exist. 4.Whatever suffering cannot be explained as the result of human moral agency must also have some purpose (from 2 & 3). 5. There are virtues — forbearance, courage, compassion, and so on — that can only develop in the presence of suffering. We may call them "the virtues of suffering." 6. Some suffering has the purpose of our developing the virtues of suffering (from 5). 7. Even taking 3 and 6 into account, the amount of suffering in the world is still enormous — far more than what is required for us to benefit from suffering. 8. Moreover, there are those who suffer who can never develop the virtues of suffering--children, animals, those who perish in their agony. 9. There is more suffering than we can explain by reference to the purposes that we can discern (from 7 & 8). 10 There are purposes for suffering that we cannot discern (from 2 and 9). 11. Only a being who has a sense of purpose beyond ours could provide the purpose of all suffering (from 10). 12. Only God could have a sense of purpose beyond ours. 13. God exists.

FLAW: This argument is a sorrowful one, since it highlights the most intolerable feature of our world, the excess of suffering. The suffering in this world is excessive in both its intensity and its prevalence, often undergone by those who can never gain anything from it. This is a powerful argument against the existence of a compassionate and powerful deity. It is only the Fallacy of Wishful Thinking, embodied in Premise 2, that could make us presume that what is psychologically intolerable cannot be the case.

26. The Argument from the Survival of The Jews

1. The Jews introduced the world to the idea of the one God, with his universal moral code 2. The survival of the Jews, living for milliennia without a country of their own, and facing a multitude of enemies that sought to destroy not only their religion but all remnants of the race, is a historical unlikelihood. 3. The Jews have survived against vast odds (from 2). 4. There is no natural explanation for so unlikely an event as the survival of the Jews (from 3). 5. The best explanation is that they have some transcendent purpose to play in human destiny (from 1 and 4). 6. Only God could have assigned a transcendent destiny to the Jews. 7. God exists.

FLAW 1: The fact that the Jews, after the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans, had no country of their own made it more likely, rather than less likely, that they would survive as a people. If they had been concentrated in one country, they would surely have been conquered by one of history's great empires, as happened to other vanished tribes. But a people dispersed across a vast diaspora is more resilient, which is why other stateless peoples, like the Parsis and Roma, have also survived for millennia, often against harrowing odds. Moreover, the Jews encouraged cultural traits — such as literacy, urban living, specialization in middleman occupations, and an extensive legal code to govern their internal affairs --that gave them further resilience against the vicissitudes of historical change. The survival of the Jews, therefore, is not a miraculous improbability.

COMMENT: The persecution of the Jews need not be seen as a part of a cosmic moral drama. The unique role that Judaism played in disseminating monotheism, mostly through the organs of its two far more popular monotheistic offshoots, Christianity and Islam, has bequeathed to its adherents an unusual amount of attention, mostly negative, from adherents of those other monotheistic religions.

27. The Argument from The Upward Curve of History

1. There is an upward moral curve to human history (tyrannies fall; the evil side loses in major wars; democracy, freedom, and civil rights spread). 2. Natural selection's favoring of those who are fittest to compete for resources and mates has bequeathed humankind selfish and aggressive traits. 3. Left to their own devices, a selfish and aggressive species could not have ascended up a moral curve over the course of history (from 2). 4.Only God has the power and the concern for us to curve history upward. 5. God exists.

FLAW: Though our species has inherited traits of selfishness and aggression, we have also inherited capacities for empathy, reasoning, and learning from experience. We have also inherited language, and with it a means to pass on the lessons we have learned from history. And so humankind has slowly reasoned its way toward a broader and more sophisticated understanding of morality, and more effective institutions for keeping peace. We make moral progress as we do scientific progress, through reasoning, experimentation, and the rejection of failed alternatives.

28. The Argument from Prodigious Genius

1. Genius is the highest level of creative capacity, the level which, by definition, defies explanation. 2. Genius does not happen by way of natural psychological processes (from 1). 3. The cause of genius must lie outside of natural psychological processes (from 2). 4. The insights of genius have helped in the cumulative progress of humankind — scientific, technological, philosophical, moral, artistic, societal, political, spiritual. 5. The cause of genius must both lie outside of natural psychological processes and be such as to care about the progress of humankind (from 3 and 4). 6. Only God could work outside of natural psychological processes and create geniuses to light the path of humankind. 7. God exists.

FLAW 1: The psychological traits that go into human accomplishment, such as intelligence and perseverance, are heritable. By the laws of probability, rare individuals will inherit a concentrated dose of those genes. Given a nurturing cultural context, these individuals will, some of the time, exercise their powers to accomplish great feats. Those are the individuals we call geniuses. We may not know enough about genetics, neuroscience, and cognition to explain exactly what makes for a Mozart or an Einstein, but exploiting this gap to argue for supernatural provenance is an example of The Fallacy of Arguing from Ignorance.

FLAW 2: Human genius is not consistently applied to human betterment. Consider weapons of mass destruction, computer viruses, Hitler's brilliantly effective rhetoric, or those criminal geniuses (for example electronic thieves) who are so cunning that they elude detection.

29. The Argument from Human Knowledge of Infinity

1. We are finite, and everything with which we come into physical contact is finite. 2. We have a knowledge of the infinite, demonstrably so in mathematics. 3. We could not have derived this knowledge of the infinite from the finite, from anything which we are and come in contact with (from 1). 4. Only something itself infinite could have implanted knowledge of the infinite in us ( from 2 and 3). 5. 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. 6. God is the only entity both that is infinite and that could have an intention of implanting the knowledge of the infinite within us (from 4 & 5). 7. God exists.

FLAW: There are certain computational procedures governed by what logicians call recursive rules. A recursive rule is one that refers to itself, and hence it can be applied to its own output ad infinitum. 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. We can apply this rule an indefinite number of times and thereby generate an infinite series of natural numbers. Recursive rules allow a finite system (a set of rules, a computer, a brain) to reason about an infinity of objects, refuting Premise 3.

COMMENT: I n 1931 the young logician Kurt Gödel published a paper proving a result called the Incompleteness Theorem (actually there are two). Basically, what Gödel demonstrated is that recursive rules cannot capture all of arithmetic. 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.

30. The Argument from Mathematical Reality

1. Mathematical truths are necessarily true. (There is no possible world in which, say, 2 plus 2 does not equal 4, or in which the square root of 2 can be expressed as the ratio of two whole numbers.) 2. The truths that describe our physical world, no matter how fundamental, are empirical, requiring observational evidence. (So, for example, we await some empirical means to test string theory, in order to find out whether we live in a world of eleven dimensions.) 3. Truths that require empirical evidence are not necessary truths. (We require empirical evidence because there are possible worlds in which these are not truths, and so we have to test that ours is not such a world.) 4. The truths of our physical world are not necessary truths (from 2 and 3). 5. The truths of our physical world cannot explain mathematical truths (from 1 and 4). 6. Mathematical truths exist on a different plane of existence from physical truths (from 5). 7. Only something which itself exists on a different plane of existence from the physical can explain mathematical truths (from 6). 8. Only God can explain mathematical truths (from 7). 9. God exists.

Mathematics is derived through pure reason — what the philosophers call a priori reason — which means that it cannot be refuted by any empirical observations. The fundamental question in philosophy of mathematics is: how can mathematics be true but not empirical? 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? The Argument from Mathematical Reality assumes, in its third premise, the position of mathematical realism, which isn't a fallacy in itself; many mathematicians believe it, some of them arguing that it follows from Gödel's incompleteness theorems (see the COMMENT in The Argument from Human Knowledge of Infinity, #30 above). This argument, however, goes further and tries to deduce God's existence from the trans-empirical existence of mathematical reality.

FLAW 1: The inference of 5, from 1 and 4, does not take into account the formalist response to the non-empirical nature of mathematics.

FLAW 2: Even if one, Platonistically, accepts the derivation of 5 and then 6, there is something fishy about proceeding onward to 7, with its presumption that something outside of mathematical reality must explain the existence of mathematical reality. Lurking within 7 is the hidden premise: mathematical truths must be explained by reference to non-mathematical truths. But why? If God can be self-explanatory, as this argument presumes, why then can't mathematical reality be self-explanatory — especially since the truths of mathematics are, as this argument asserts, necessarily true?

FLAW 3: Mathematical reality — if indeed it exists — is, admittedly, mysterious. But invoking God does not dispel this puzzlement; it is an instance of "The Fallacy of Using One Mystery to Pseudo-Explain Another." The mystery of God's existence is often used, by those who assert it, as an explanatory sink hole.

31.The Argument from Decision Theory (Pascal's Wager)

1. Either God exists or God doesn't exist. 2. A person can either believe that God exists or believe that God doesn't exist(from 1). 3. If God exists and you believe, you receive eternal salvation. 4. If God exists and you don't believe, you receive eternal damnation. 5. If God doesn't exist and you believe, you've been duped, have wasted time in religious observance, and have missed out on decadent enjoyments. 6. If God doesn't exist, and you don't believe, then you have avoided a false belief. 7. You have much more to gain by believing in God than not believing in him, and much more to lose by not believing in God than believing in him (from, 3, 4, 5, & 6) 8. It is more rational to believe that God exists than to believe that he doesn't exist (from 7).

This unusual argument does not justify the conclusion that "God exists." Rather it argues that it is rational to believe that God exists, given that we don't know whether he exists.

FLAW 1: The "believe" option in Pascal's wager can be interpreted in two ways.

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 act as if God exists. According to this interpretation, God, if He exists, can peer into a person's soul and discern the person's actual convictions. If so, the kind of "belief" that Pascal's wager advises — a purely pragmatic strategy, chosen because the expected benefits exceed the expected costs — would not be enough. Indeed, it's not even clear that this option is coherent: if one chooses to believe something because of the consequences of holding that belief, rather than being intuitively convinced of it, is it really a belief, or just an empty vow?

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.

The problem is that Pascal's wager offers no guidance as to which prayers, which services, whichcreed, to live by. Say I chose to believe in the Zoroastrian cosmic war between Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu to avoid the wrath of the former, while the real fact of the matter is that God gave the Torah to the Jews, and I am thereby inviting the wrath of Yahweh (or vice-versa). Given all the things I could "believe" in, I am in constant danger of incurring the negative consequences of disbelief even though I choose the "belief" option. The fact that Blaise Pascal stated his wager as two stark choices, putting the outcomes in blatantly Christian terms — eternal salvation and eternal damnation — reveals more about his own upbringing than they do about the logic of belief. The wager simply codifies his particular "live options," to use William James's term, for the only choices that seem possible to a given believer.

FLAW 2: Pascal's wager assumes a petty, egotistical, and vindictive God who punishes anyone who does not believe in him. But the great monotheistic religions all declare that "mercy" is one of God's essential traits. A merciful God would surely have some understanding of why a person may not believe in him (if the evidence for God were obvious, the fancy reasoning of Pascal's wager would not be necessary), and so would extend compassion to a nonbeliever. (Bertrand Russell, when asked what he would have to say to God if, despite his philosophical atheism, he were to die and face his Creator, responded, "Oh, Lord, why did you not provide more evidence?') The nonbeliever therefore should have nothing to worry about — falsifying the negative payoff in the lower-left-hand cell of the matrix.

FLAW 3: The calculations of expected value in Pascal's wager omit a crucial part of the mathematics: the probabilities of each of the two columns, which have to be multiplied with the payoff in each cell to determine the expected value of each cell. If the probability of God's existence (ascertained by other means) is infinitesimal, then even if the cost of not believing in him is high, the overall expectation may not make it worthwhile to choose the "believe" row (after all, we take many other risks in life with severe possible costs but low probabilities, such as boarding an airplane). One can see how this invalidates Pascal's Wager by considering similar wagers. Say I told you that a fire-breathing dragon has moved into the next apartment and that unless you set out a bowl of marshmallows for him every night he will force his way into your apartment and roast you to a crisp. According to Pascal's wager, you should leave out the marshmallows. 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.

32. The Argument from Pragmatism

(William James's Leap of Faith)

1. 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). Call this the pragmatic evidence for the belief. 2. Certain beliefs effect a change for the better in the believer's life — the necessary condition being that they are believed. 3. The belief in God is a belief that effects a change for the better in a person's life. 4. 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). 5. One ought to make 'the leap of faith' (the term is James's) and believe in God, and only then evaluate the evidence (from 1 and 4).

This argument can be read out of William James's classic essay "The Will to Believe." The first premise , as presented here, is a little less radical than James's pragmatic definition of truth in general, according to which a proposition is true if believing that it is true has a cumulative beneficial effect on the believer's life. The pragmatic definition of truth has severe problems, including possible incoherence: in evaluating the effects of the belief on the believer, we have to know the truth about what those effects are, which forces us to fall back on the old-fashioned notion of truth. To make the best case for The Argument from Pragmatism, therefore, the first premise is here understood as claiming only that the pragmatic consequences of belief are a relevant source of evidence in ascertaining the truth, not that they can actually be equated with the truth.

FLAW 1: What exactly does effecting "a change for the better on the believer's life" mean? For an antebellum Southerner, there was more to be gained in believing that slavery is morally permissible than in believing it heinous. It often doesn't pay to be an iconoclast or 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 the pragmatist 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, 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.

FLAW 4: The pragmatic argument for God 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 again 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.

33. The Argument from the Unreasonableness of Reason

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 & 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).

34. The Argument from Sublimity

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 that they seem to lift us right out of ourselves. 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, 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. 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 a manifestation of the Christian trinity. One does not detract anything from the sublimity of aesthetic experiences by seeing them for what they are, namely sublime aesthetic experiences. Music, too, produces such experiences, though there we know exactly who the creators were.

35. The Argument from the Intelligibility of the World

(Spinoza's God)

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 premise should not be interpreted as entailing 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 & 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 & 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 Pseudo-Explain Another: one ends up with the universe, and nothing but the universe: a 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 is described by the laws of nature 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 unproved, 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 can be challenged. 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.

36. The Argument from The Abundance of Arguments

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 variations) 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. Then the probability that all 35 are flase is (1-0.2)^35 = .0004, an extremely low probability. 6. It is extremely probable that God exists (from 5).

FLAW 1: Premise 3 is vulnerable to t he 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 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. Religions, too, do not justify themselves with a single logical argument, but rather set themselves up to minister to all of these needs and provide a space in people's lives where large questions that escape answers all come together and co-mingle, a co-mingling that, in itself, can give the illusion that they are being answered.

[Excerpted from 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, New York: Pantheon Books. Forthcoming, January, 2010. Copyright © 2010 by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. All rights reserved. Published with permission.]

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Does God Exist?

Does God exist? This is one of the most important questions a person can consider. Your belief in the existence of God has enormous implications on your views of life, humanity, morality, and destiny. In this article, Dr. Craig offers three reasons why life would be meaningless without God and then presents five strong arguments for the existence of God, demonstrating the reasonableness of believing that God exists.

Does God exist? Here are five good reasons to think that God exists:

God makes sense of the origin of the universe.
God makes sense of the fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life.
God makes sense of objective moral values in the world.
God makes sense of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
God can be immediately known and experienced.

Does God exist? C. S. Lewis once remarked that God is not the sort of thing one can be moderately interested in.

After all, if God does not exist, there's no reason to be interested in God at all.

On the other hand, if God does exist, then this is of paramount interest, and our ultimate concern ought to be how to be properly related to this being upon whom we depend moment by moment for our very existence.

So people who shrug their shoulders and say, "Does God exist? What difference does it make?" merely show that they haven't yet thought very deeply about this problem. Even atheist philosophers like Sartre and Camus—who have thought very seriously about this problem—admit that the existence of God makes a tremendous difference for man.

Let me mention just three reasons why it makes a big difference whether God exists.

Three reasons why His existence makes a difference

Reason 1: life is ultimately meaningless without god.

If God does not exist, life is ultimately meaningless. If your life is doomed to end in death, then ultimately it does not matter how you live. In the end it makes no ultimate difference whether you existed or not.

Sure, your life might have a relative significance in that you influenced others or affected the course of history. But ultimately mankind is doomed to perish in the heat death of the universe. Ultimately it makes no difference who you are or what you do. Your life is inconsequential.

Thus, the contributions of the scientist to the advance of human knowledge, the research of the doctor to alleviate pain and suffering, the efforts of the diplomat to secure peace in the world, the sacrifices of good people everywhere to better the lot of the human race—ultimately all these come to nothing.

Thus, if atheism is true, life is ultimately meaningless.

Reason 2: Without God We Live Without Hope

If God does not exist, then we must ultimately live without hope. If there is no God, then there is ultimately no hope for deliverance from the shortcomings of our finite existence.

For example, there is no hope for deliverance from evil. Although many people ask how God could create a world involving so much evil, by far most of the suffering in the world is due to man's own inhumanity to man. The horror of two world wars during the last century effectively destroyed the 19th century's naive optimism about human progress.

If God does not exist, then we are locked without hope in a world filled with gratuitous and unredeemed suffering, and there is no hope for deliverance from evil.

Or again, if there is no God, there is no hope of deliverance from aging, disease, and death. Although it may be hard for you as university students to contemplate, the sober fact is that unless you die young, someday you—you yourself—will be an old man or an old woman, fighting a losing battle with aging, struggling against the inevitable advance of deterioration, disease, perhaps senility. And finally and inevitably you will die. There is no afterlife beyond the grave. Atheism is thus a philosophy without hope.

Reason 3: If God Exists, You Can Know His Love Personally

On the other hand, if God does exist, then not only is there meaning and hope, but there is also the possibility of coming to know God and His love personally.

Think of it!

That the infinite God should love you and want to be your personal friend! This would be the highest status a human being could enjoy!

Clearly, if God exists, it makes not only a tremendous difference for mankind in general, but it could make a life-changing difference for you as well.

Now admittedly none of this shows that God exists. But it does show that it makes a tremendous difference whether God exists. Therefore, even if the evidence for and against the existence of God were absolutely equal, the rational thing to do, I think, is to believe in Him. That is to say, it seems to me positively irrational when the evidence is equal to prefer death, futility, and despair over hope, meaningfulness and happiness.

But, in fact, I don't think the evidence is absolutely equal. I think there are good reasons to believe in God. And today I want to share briefly five of those reasons. Whole books have been written on each of these, so all I have time to do is to present a brief sketch of each argument and then during the discussion time we can go more deeply into any of them that you'd like to talk about.

Does God exist? As travelers along life's way, it's our goal to make sense of things, to try to understand the way the world is. The hypothesis that God exists makes sense out of a wide range of the facts of experience.

God makes sense of the origin of the universe

Have you ever asked yourself where the universe came from? Why everything exists instead of just nothing? Typically atheists have said the universe is just eternal, and that's all.

But surely this is unreasonable. Just think about it a minute. If the universe never had a beginning, that means that the number of past events in the history of the universe is infinite. But mathematicians recognize that the existence of an actually infinite number of things leads to self-contradictions.

For example, what is infinity minus infinity? Well, mathematically, you get self-contradictory answers. This shows that infinity is just an idea in your mind, not something that exists in reality. David Hilbert, perhaps the greatest mathematician of the twentieth century, states, the infinite is nowhere to be found in reality. It neither exists in nature nor provides a legitimate basis for rational thought. The role that remains for the infinite to play is solely that of an idea. [1]

But that entails that since past events are not just ideas, but are real, the number of past events must be finite. Therefore, the series of past events can't go back forever; rather the universe must have begun to exist.

This conclusion has been confirmed by remarkable discoveries in astronomy and astrophysics.

In one of the most startling developments of modern science, we now have pretty strong evidence that the universe is not eternal in the past but had an absolute beginning about 13 billion years ago in a cataclysmic event known as the Big Bang. What makes the Big Bang so startling is that it represents the origin of the universe from literally nothing. For all matter and energy, even physical space and time themselves, came into being at the Big Bang.

As the physicist P. C. W. Davies explains, "the coming into being of the universe, as discussed in modern science . . . is not just a matter of imposing some sort of organization . . . upon a previous incoherent state, but literally the coming-into-being of all physical things from nothing." [2]

Of course, alternative theories have been crafted over the years to try to avoid this absolute beginning, but none of these theories has commended itself to the scientific community as more plausible than the Big Bang theory.

In fact, in 2003 Arvind Borde, Alan Guth, and Alexander Vilenkin were able to prove that any universe which is, on average, in a state of cosmic expansion cannot be eternal in the past but must have an absolute beginning. Vilenkin pulls no punches:

It is said that an argument is what convinces reasonable men and a proof is what it takes to convince even an unreasonable man. With the proof now in place, cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past-eternal universe. There is no escape, they have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning. [3]

That problem was nicely captured by Anthony Kenny of Oxford University. He writes, "A proponent of the Big Bang theory, at least if he is an atheist, must believe that the universe came from nothing and by nothing." [4]

But surely that doesn't make sense!

Out of nothing, nothing comes. So why does the universe exist instead of just nothing? Where did it come from? There must have been a cause which brought the universe into being.

We can summarize our argument thus far as follows:

Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
The universe began to exist.
Therefore, the universe has a cause.

Given the truth of the two premises, the conclusion necessarily follows.

From the very nature of the case, this cause must be an uncaused, changeless, timeless, and immaterial being which created the universe. It must be uncaused because we've seen that there cannot be an infinite regress of causes. It must be timeless and therefore changeless—at least without the universe—because it created time. Because it also created space, it must transcend space as well and therefore be immaterial, not physical.

Moreover, I would argue, it must also be personal. For how else could a timeless cause give rise to a temporal effect like the universe? If the cause were a mechanically operating set of necessary and sufficient conditions, then the cause could never exist without the effect.

For example, the cause of water's freezing is the temperature's being below 0˚ Centigrade. If the temperature were below 0˚ from eternity past, then any water that was around would be frozen from eternity. It would be impossible for the water to begin to freeze just a finite time ago. So if the cause is permanently present, then the effect should be permanently present as well. The only way for the cause to be timeless and the effect to begin in time is for the cause to be a personal agent who freely chooses to create an effect in time without any prior determining conditions.

For example, a man sitting from eternity could freely will to stand up. Thus, we are brought, not merely to a transcendent cause of the universe, but to its personal Creator.

Isn't it incredible that the big bang theory thus confirms what the Christian theist has always believed: that in the beginning God created the universe?

Now I put it to you: which makes more sense: that the Christian theist is right or that the universe popped into being uncaused out of nothing? I, at least, have no trouble assessing these alternatives!

During the last 40 years or so, scientists have discovered that the existence of intelligent life depends upon a complex and delicate balance of initial conditions given in the Big Bang itself. Scientists once believed that whatever the initial conditions of the universe, eventually intelligent life might evolve. But we now know that our existence is balanced on a knife's edge. The existence of intelligent life depends upon a conspiracy of initial conditions which must be fine-tuned to a degree that is literally incomprehensible and incalculable.

This fine-tuning is of two sorts.

First , when the laws of nature are expressed as mathematical equations, you find appearing in them certain constants, like the gravitational constant. These constants are not determined by the laws of nature. The laws of nature are consistent with a wide range of values for these constants.

Second , in addition to these constants there are certain arbitrary quantities which are just put in as initial conditions on which the laws of nature operate, for example, the amount of entropy or the balance between matter and anti-matter in the universe. Now all of these constants and quantities fall into an extraordinarily narrow range of life-permitting values. Were these constants or quantities to be altered by a hair's breadth, the life-permitting balance would be destroyed and life would not exist.

For example, the physicist P. C. W. Davies has calculated that a change in the strength of gravity or of the atomic weak force by only one part in 10100 would have prevented a life-permitting universe. The cosmological constant which drives the inflation of the universe and is responsible for the recently discovered acceleration of the universe's expansion is inexplicably fine-tuned to around one part in 10120.

Roger Penrose of Oxford University has calculated that the odds of the Big Bang's low entropy condition existing by chance are on the order of one out of 10 10 (123). Penrose comments, "I cannot even recall seeing anything else in physics whose accuracy is known to approach, even remotely, a figure like one part in 1010 (123)." [5] And it's not just each constant or quantity which must be exquisitely finely-tuned; their ratios to one another must be also finely-tuned. So improbability is multiplied by improbability by improbability until our minds are reeling in incomprehensible numbers.

Now there are three possibilities for explaining the presence of this remarkable fine-tuning of the universe: physical necessity, chance, or design.

The first alternative holds that there is some unknown Theory of Everything (T.O.E.) which would explain the way the universe is. It had to be that way, and there was really no chance or little chance of the universe's not being life-permitting.

By contrast, the second alternative states that the fine-tuning is due entirely to chance. It's just an accident that the universe is life-permitting, and we're the lucky beneficiaries. The third alternative rejects both of these accounts in favor of an intelligent Mind behind the cosmos, who designed the universe to permit life.

Which of these alternatives is the most plausible?

The first alternative seems extraordinarily implausible. There is just no physical reason why these constants and quantities should have the values they do. As P. C. W. Davies states,

Even if the laws of physics were unique, it doesn't follow that the physical universe itself is unique. . . . the laws of physics must be augmented by cosmic initial conditions. . . . There is nothing in present ideas about 'laws of initial conditions' remotely to suggest that their consistency with the laws of physics would imply uniqueness. Far from it. . . . . . . it seems, then, that the physical universe does not have to be the way it is: it could have been otherwise. [6]

For example, the most promising candidate for a T.O.E. to date, super-string theory or M-Theory, fails to predict uniquely our universe.

In fact, string theory allows a "cosmic landscape" of around 10500 different universes governed by the present laws of nature, so that it does nothing to render the observed values of the constants and quantities physically necessary.

So what about the second alternative, that the fine-tuning of the universe is due to chance?

The problem with this alternative is that the odds against the universe's being life-permitting are so incomprehensibly great that they cannot be reasonably faced. Even though there will be a huge number of life-permitting universes lying within the cosmic landscape, nevertheless the number of life-permitting worlds will be unfathomably tiny compared to the entire landscape, so that the existence of a life-permitting universe is fantastically improbable.

Students or laymen who blithely assert, "It could have happened by chance!" simply have no conception of the fantastic precision of the fine-tuning requisite for life. They would never embrace such a hypothesis in any other area of their lives—for example, in order to explain how there came to be overnight a car in one's driveway.

Some people have tried to escape this problem by claiming that we really shouldn't be surprised at the finely-tuned conditions of the universe, for if the universe were not fine-tuned, then we wouldn't be here to be surprised about it!

Given that we are here, we should expect the universe to be fine-tuned. But such reasoning is logically fallacious. We can show this by means of a parallel illustration.

Imagine you're traveling abroad and are arrested on trumped-up drug charges and dragged in front of a firing squad of 100 trained marksmen, all with rifles aimed at your heart, to be executed. You hear the command given: "Ready! Aim! Fire!" and you hear the deafening roar of the guns. And then you observe that you are still alive, that all of the 100 trained marksmen missed!

Now what would you conclude?

"Well, I guess I really shouldn't be surprised that they all missed. After all, if they hadn't all missed, then I wouldn't be here to be surprised about it! Given that I am here, I should expect them all to miss."

Of course not!

You would immediately suspect that they all missed on purpose, that the whole thing was a set-up, engineered for some reason by someone. While you wouldn't be surprised that you don't observe that you are dead, you'd be very surprised, indeed, that you do observe that you are alive. In the same way, given the incredible improbability of the fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life, it is reasonable to conclude that this is not due to chance, but to design.

In order to rescue the alternative of chance, its proponents have therefore been forced to adopt the hypothesis that there exists an infinite number of randomly ordered universes composing a sort of World Ensemble or multiverse of which our universe is but a part. Somewhere in this infinite World Ensemble finely-tuned universes will appear by chance alone, and we happen to be one such world.

There are, however, at least two major failings of the World Ensemble hypothesis:

First, there's no evidence that such a World Ensemble exists. No one knows if there are other worlds. Moreover, recall that Borde, Guth, and Vilenkin proved that any universe in a state of continuous cosmic expansion cannot be infinite in the past. Their theorem applies to the multiverse, too. Therefore, since the past is finite, only a finite number of other worlds can have been generated by now, so that there's no guarantee that a finely-tuned world will have appeared in the ensemble.

Second, if our universe is just a random member of an infinite World Ensemble, then it is overwhelmingly more probable that we should be observing a much different universe than what we in fact observe.

Roger Penrose has calculated that it is inconceivably more probable that our solar system should suddenly form by the random collision of particles than that a finely-tuned universe should exist. (Penrose calls it "utter chicken feed" by comparison. [7]) So if our universe were just a random member of a World Ensemble, it is inconceivably more probable that we should be observing a universe no larger than our solar system.

Or again, if our universe were just a random member of a World Ensemble, then we ought to be observing highly extraordinary events, like horses' popping into and out of existence by random collisions, or perpetual motion machines, since such things are vastly more probable than all of nature's constants and quantities' falling by chance into the virtually infinitesimal life-permitting range.

Observable universes like those are much more plenteous in the World Ensemble than worlds like ours and, therefore, ought to be observed by us. Since we do not have such observations, that fact strongly disconfirms the multiverse hypothesis. On atheism, at least, it is therefore highly probable that there is no World Ensemble.

So once again, the view that Christian theists have always held, that there is an intelligent designer of the universe, seems to make much more sense than the atheistic view that the universe just happens to be by chance fine-tuned to an incomprehensible precision for the existence of intelligent life.

We can summarize this second argument as follows:

The fine-tuning of the universe is due to either physical necessity, chance, or design.
It is not due to physical necessity or chance.
Therefore, it is due to design.

Does God exist? If God does not exist, then objective moral values do not exist. To say that there are objective moral values is to say that something is right or wrong independently of whether anybody believes it to be so.

It is to say, for example, that Nazi anti-Semitism was morally wrong, even though the Nazis who carried out the Holocaust thought that it was good; and it would still be wrong even if the Nazis had won World War II and succeeded in exterminating or brainwashing everybody who disagreed with them. And the claim is that in the absence of God, moral values are not objective in this sense.

Many theists and atheists alike concur on this point.

For example, the late J. L. Mackie of Oxford University, one of the most influential atheists of our time, admitted: "If . . . there are . . . objective values, they make the existence of a God more probable than it would have been without them. Thus, we have a defensible argument from morality to the existence of a God." [8] But in order to avoid God's existence, Mackie therefore denied that objective moral values exist. He wrote, "It is easy to explain this moral sense as a natural product of biological and social evolution . . . ." [9]

Michael Ruse, a philosopher of science, agrees. He explains,

Morality is a biological adaptation no less than are hands and feet and teeth. Considered as a rationally justifiable set of claims about an objective something, ethics is illusory. I appreciate that when somebody says "love thy neighbor as thyself," they think they are referring above and beyond themselves. Nevertheless, such reference is truly without foundation. Morality is just an aid to survival and reproduction . . . And any deeper meaning is illusory. [10]

Friedrich Nietzsche, the great 19th century atheist who proclaimed the death of God, understood that the death of God meant the destruction of all meaning and value in life.

I think that Friedrich Nietzsche was right.

But we must be very careful here. The question here is not: "must we believe in God in order to live moral lives?" I'm not claiming that we must. Nor is the question: "Can we recognize objective moral values without believing in God?"

I think that we can.

Rather the question is: "If God does not exist, do objective moral values exist?" Like Mackie and Ruse, I don't see any reason to think that in the absence of God, human morality is objective. After all, if there is no God, then what's so special about human beings? They're just accidental by-products of nature which have evolved relatively recently on an infinitesimal speck of dust lost somewhere in a hostile and mindless universe and which are doomed to perish individually and collectively in a relatively short time.

On the atheistic view, some action, say, rape, may not be socially advantageous and so in the course of evolution has become taboo; but that does absolutely nothing to prove that rape is really wrong. On the atheistic view, apart from the social consequences, there's nothing really wrong with your raping someone.

Thus, without God there is no absolute right and wrong which imposes itself on our conscience.

But the problem is that objective values do exist, and deep down we all know it. There's no more reason to deny the objective reality of moral values than the objective reality of the physical world.

The reasoning of Ruse at best proves only that our subjective perception of objective moral values has evolved. But if moral values are gradually discovered, not invented, then our gradual and fallible apprehension of the moral realm no more undermines the objective reality of that realm than our gradual, fallible perception of the physical world undermines the objectivity of that realm.

Most of us think that we do apprehend objective values. As Ruse himself confesses, "The man who says that it is morally acceptable to rape little children is just as mistaken as the man who says, 2+2=5." [11]

Actions like rape, torture, and child abuse aren't just socially unacceptable behavior—they're moral abominations. Some things are really wrong. Similarly love, equality, and self-sacrifice are really good. But if objective values cannot exist without God, and objective values do exist, then it follows logically and inescapably that God exists.

We can summarize this argument as follows:

If God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist.
Objective moral values do exist.
Therefore, God exists.

God makes sense of the historical facts concerning the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

The historical person Jesus of Nazareth was a remarkable individual.

New Testament critics have reached something of a consensus that the historical Jesus came on the scene with an unprecedented sense of divine authority, the authority to stand and speak in God's place.

That's why the Jewish leadership instigated his crucifixion for the charge of blasphemy. He claimed that in himself the Kingdom of God had come, and as visible demonstrations of this fact he carried out a ministry of miracles and exorcisms. But the supreme confirmation of his claim was his resurrection from the dead.

If Jesus did rise from the dead, then it would seem that we have a divine miracle on our hands and, thus, evidence for the existence of God.

Now most people would probably think that the resurrection of Jesus is something you just accept on faith or not. But there are actually three established facts, recognized by the majority of New Testament historians today, which I believe are best explained by the resurrection of Jesus: His empty tomb, his post-mortem appearances and the origin of the disciples' belief in his resurrection. Let's look briefly at each one of these.

Fact #1: Jesus' tomb was found empty by a group of his women followers on Sunday morning. According to Jacob Kremer, an Austrian scholar who has specialized in the study of the resurrection, "by far most scholars hold firmly to the reliability of the biblical statements about the empty tomb." [12] According to D. H. Van Daalen, it is extremely difficult to object to the empty tomb on historical grounds; those who deny it do so on the basis of theological or philosophical assumptions.

Fact #2: On separate occasions different individuals and groups saw appearances of Jesus alive after his death. According to Gerd L¸demann, a prominent German New Testament critic, "It may be taken as historically certain that Peter and the disciples had experiences after Jesus' death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ." [13] These appearances were witnessed not only by believers, but also by unbelievers, skeptics, and even enemies.

Fact #3: The original disciples suddenly came to believe in the resurrection of Jesus despite having every predisposition to the contrary. Think of the situation the disciples faced following Jesus' crucifixion:

1. Their leader was dead, and Jewish Messianic expectations included no idea of a Messiah who, instead of triumphing over Israel's enemies, would be shamefully executed by them as a criminal.

2. Jewish beliefs about the afterlife precluded anyone's rising from the dead to glory and immortality before the general resurrection of the dead at the end of the world.

Nevertheless, the original disciples suddenly came to believe so strongly that God had raised Jesus from the dead that they were willing to die for the truth of that belief. Luke Johnson, a New Testament scholar at Emory University, states, "Some sort of powerful, transformative experience is required to generate the sort of movement earliest Christianity was." [14] N. T. Wright, an eminent British scholar, concludes, "That is why, as an historian, I cannot explain the rise of early Christianity unless Jesus rose again, leaving an empty tomb behind him." [15]

Attempts to explain away these three great facts—like the disciples stole the body or Jesus wasn't really dead—have been universally rejected by contemporary scholarship.

The simple fact is that there just is no plausible, naturalistic explanation of these facts.

Therefore, it seems to me, the Christian is amply justified in believing that Jesus rose from the dead and was who he claimed to be. But that entails that God exists.

There are three established facts concerning the fate of Jesus of Nazareth: the discovery of his empty tomb, his post-mortem appearances, and the origin of his disciples' belief in his resurrection.
The hypothesis "God raised Jesus from the dead" is the best explanation of these facts.
The hypothesis "God raised Jesus from the dead" entails that the God revealed by Jesus of Nazareth exists.
Therefore, the God revealed by Jesus of Nazareth exists.

This isn't really an argument for God's existence; rather it's the claim that you can know God exists wholly apart from arguments simply by immediately experiencing him. This was the way people in the Bible knew God, as professor John Hick explains:

God was known to them as a dynamic will interacting with their own wills, a sheer given reality, as inescapably to be reckoned with as destructive storm and life-giving sunshine . . . They did not think of God as an inferred entity but as an experienced reality. To them God was not . . . an idea adopted by the mind, but an experiential reality which gave significance to their lives. [16]

Philosophers call beliefs like this "properly basic beliefs." They aren't based on some other beliefs; rather they are part of the foundation of a person's system of beliefs.

Other properly basic beliefs would be the belief in the reality of the past, the existence of the external world, and the presence of other minds like your own.

When you think about it, none of these beliefs can be proved. How could you prove that the world was not created five minutes ago with built-in appearances of age like food in our stomachs from the breakfasts we never really ate and memory traces in our brains of events we never really experienced?

How could you prove that you are not a brain in a vat of chemicals being stimulated with electrodes by some mad scientist to believe that you are here listening to this lecture? How could you prove that other people are not really androids who exhibit all the external behavior of persons with minds, when in reality they are soulless, robot-like entities?

Although these sorts of beliefs are basic for us, that doesn't mean that they're arbitrary. Rather they are grounded in the sense that they're formed in the context of certain experiences. In the experiential context of seeing and feeling and hearing things, I naturally form the belief that there are certain physical objects which I am sensing.

Thus, my basic beliefs are not arbitrary, but appropriately grounded in experience. There may be no way to prove such beliefs, and yet it is perfectly rational to hold them. You'd have to be crazy to think that the world was created five minutes ago or to believe that you are a brain in a vat! Such beliefs are thus not merely basic, but properly basic.

In the same way, belief in God is for those who seek Him a properly basic belief grounded in our experience of God.

We can summarize this consideration as follows:

Beliefs which are appropriately grounded may be rationally accepted as basic beliefs not grounded on argument.
Belief that the biblical God exists is appropriately grounded.
Therefore, belief that the biblical God exists may be rationally accepted as a basic belief not grounded on argument.

Now if this is right, then there's a danger that arguments for the existence of God could actually distract one's attention from God Himself. If you're sincerely seeking God, God will make His existence evident to you. The Bible says, "draw near to God and he will draw near to you" (James 4.8). We mustn't so concentrate on the proofs that we fail to hear the inner voice of God speaking to our heart. For those who listen, God becomes an immediate reality in their lives.

Five good reasons to think that God exists

We've seen five good reasons to think that God exists:

These are only a part of the evidence for God's existence. Alvin Plantinga, one of the world's leading philosophers, has laid out two dozen or so arguments for God's existence. [17] Together these constitute a powerful cumulative case for the existence of God.

Therefore, I think that Christian theism is a plausible worldview which commends itself to the thoughtful consideration of every rational human being.

David Hilbert, "On the Infinite," in Philosophy of Mathematics , ed. with an Introduction by Paul Benacerraf and Hillary Putnam (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1964), pp. 139, 141.

ABC Science Online, "The Big Questions: In the Beginning," Interview of Paul Davies by Philp Adams, http://aca.mq.edu.au/pdavies.html.

Alex Vilenkin, Many Words in One: The Search for Other Universes (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), p. 176.

Anthony Kenny, The Five Ways: St. Thomas Aquinas' Proofs of God's Existence (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p. 66.

Roger Penrose, "Time-Asymmetry and Quantum Gravity," in Quantum Gravity 2, ed. C. J. Isham, R. Penrose, and D. W. Sciama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), p. 249.

Paul Davies, The Mind of God (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), p. 169.

See Roger Penrose, The Road to Reality (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), pp. 762-5.

J. L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982),pp. 115-16.

Ibid., pp. 117-18.

Michael Ruse, "Evolutionary Theory and Christian Ethics," in The Darwinian Paradigm (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 262-269.

Michael Ruse, Darwinism Defended (London: Addison-Wesley, 1982), p. 275.

Jacob Kremer, Die Osterevangelien--Geschichten um Geschichte (Stuttgart: Katholisches Bibelwerk, 1977), pp. 49-50.

Gerd L¸demann, What Really Happened to Jesus? , trans. John Bowden (Louisville, Kent.: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995), p. 8.

Luke Timothy Johnson, The Real Jesus (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1996), p. 136.

N. T. Wright, "The New Unimproved Jesus," Christianity Today (September 13, 1993), p. 26.

John Hick, "Introduction," in The Existence of God , ed. with an Introduction by John Hick, Problems of Philosophy Series (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1964), pp. 13-14.

Alvin Plantinga, "Two Dozen (or so) Theistic Arguments," Lecture presented at the 33 rd Annual Philosophy Conference, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois, October 23-25, 1986.

Is God Real? Philosophy Takes on the Ultimate Question

Whether you’re convinced by them or not, arguments for the existence of God have been around in one form or another for millennia. They challenge and frustrate, confirm, and satisfy. They will likely always be with us, as human beings have always yearned to know. Here are some of these arguments’ greatest hits.

In the 1996 French film Ridicule , a cleric dazzles the court of Louis XVI with a virtuoso proof of God’s existence. “It’s nothing,” he says with mock humility in response to delighted applause. “I can prove the reverse if it pleases your Majesty.” It did not.

Sure, logic is versatile enough to prove or disprove any claim: “If I don’t exist, then I don’t think. But I do think. So, I must exist.” Voila! But logic can’t do everything. The following argument, for example, is logically correct but unsound: “If it’s not the case that the Moon is made of green cheese, then the Moon is made of blue cheese. But the Moon is not made of blue cheese. (Duh.) So, the Moon is made of green cheese.” I don’t think so!

A logically correct argument is one whose structure guarantees the inference. A sound argument is logically correct and has true premises.

Of course, you and I know the content of the green cheese argument is no good, which is why it’s unsound. Moreover, it’s rather unlikely anyone would be convinced, exclusively on the merits of logical correctness, that the Moon is made of green cheese. Nevertheless, whenever we reason, we use some sort of logical framework.

While the type of reasoning represented by the examples above are what the academic tradition means by “logic,” the term also includes experiential, or inductive reasoning. For example, you can reason by analogy from the experiences of biting into various Granny Smith apples over the years that the next Granny Smith apple you eat will be about as tart as the others.

(Credit: 422737, via Pixabay )

Whether “good” or “bad,” arguments are how we arrive at, or clarify, our beliefs. It’s worth remembering, then, that if we are genuinely interested in justified beliefs, rather than ones that just “feel” right or that we’ve always had, then we should be interested in arguing well . Indeed, when confronted by someone who does not share a belief, we’re thrust into a process of justification.

If for no other reason, then, solid argumentation skills, combined with at least a modicum of intellectual humility, are quite useful. After all, we want more than the merely dazzling argumentation skills exhibited by the cleric in Ridicule or the rhetorical flourishes of a spellbinding orator. We walk away from such people feeling rather let down. No, we want arguments that persuade and transform us in some profound way.

Watch Science vs. God on MagellanTV.

Thinking doesn’t get much more profound than when considering the existence or absence of God. Perhaps no other type of argument can have a greater impact on our lives. Belief in divinity, like non-belief, affects every facet of how we experience the world. Consider a universe devoid of a creator and sustainer. Such a universe is utterly indifferent to the human condition ( Yay! Nobody’s the boss of me! ). On the other hand, a universe purposefully brought into existence with us humans in mind ( Yay! I’m important!) would seem to have our humanity squarely in view.

Which universe do we want to be true? Each comes with benefits and drawbacks. Consider, for example, 20 th century French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre ’s view that atheism means there is no human essence. In other words, since there’s no God, your existence as a “human being” is not predicated upon a divinity in whose image you are made. So, you are radically free and you, and you alone, are entirely responsible for what you do. As the saying goes, with great freedom comes great responsibility. That’s a heavy load to carry, so it’s a bummer not to have God to help out.

A theist, on the other hand, must grapple with the problem of evil. There are multiple examples of arguments involving unnecessary suffering, likely originating with the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus , that run something like this: If an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent God exists, then evil does not exist. But evil does exist. So, there is no omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent God.

God arguments, at least in the Middle Eastern and Western traditions (specifically the Abrahamic religions – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) fall into several types. Creation stories from around the world tend to share certain features we find leveraged in these types of argumentation, so in some important ways, we might think of them as applicable wherever one is on Earth.

Cosmological (Causal) Arguments

Indeed, here we are on our home planet in a single galaxy among billions in an infinitely large universe. Given that we seek explanations for pretty much everything, it’s not surprising that we want one for the fact that we’re here, and that we didn’t create our own existence. More specifically, that reason is some sort of cause. Consider this: you ask yourself, “What made me?” You answer, “My parents. But what made them? Their parents, etc., etc.” In other words, we seek the causes of existing states of affairs in terms of some prior state. This can’t go on, ad infinitum , right? On this line of reasoning, not only do we think there has to be a first cause, but also that this first cause must have always existed. Let’s dig a little deeper into this idea.

Like many philosophical terms, “cosmological” comes from the Greek. Kosmos means ‘world order,’ and, in this context, logos means ‘account’ or ‘reason.’ A cosmological argument is about the origins of the universe, or cosmos.

Without a first (uncaused) cause, the reasoning goes, every subsequent cause disappears. If so, nothing would exist. Since it’s impossible for something to come from nothing, there must be something that brings everything about but is not itself brought into being. This we call “God.”

This type of argument goes back as far as Plato and has been espoused by many renowned thinkers in the Western and Middle Eastern traditions. Cosmological arguments derive their force from our ordinary ways of thinking about what exists. More specifically, we aren’t comfortable with the idea of uncaused or unexplained events, let alone an infinite regress of them. In other words, we tend to find the idea of an unending series of causes and effects to be rationally unsatisfying.

“Not so fast, Speedy McArguer!” you might object. “Why should I infer a divine cause from the fact that the universe exists?” Why not say just that the universe is a brute fact – it just is – so there is no explanation or cause required. If so, we don’t need the sort of omni-divinity found in the Abrahamic traditions to explain its existence. We’re just here; there’s no greater mystery to be solved .

Teleological (Design) Arguments

If the cosmological argument doesn’t butter your toast, you may find the design argument more compelling. The reasoning runs like this: We observe machine-like order in the universe. Since machines are made by intelligent designers, it follows that the universe is made by an infinitely more intelligent designer. And we call this designer God.

Another version of the argument concludes that God is the best explanation for our complex universe. The fact that our world, for example, appears to be perfectly calibrated for things to exist means there must be some divine intelligence at work.

(Credit: anncapictures, via Pixabay )

Eighteenth-century thinker William Paley offers a classic formulation of the design argument. Suppose you’re out on a walk on the heath when you come across a watch. Given that it appears to have been made for some purpose (a telos ), you infer a watchmaker. Similarly, the universe itself looks to have been made for some purpose: “Every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the words of nature,” Paley writes. The difference between the watch and the universe is one of scale. So, the universe’s designer must be vastly more intelligent than watchmakers.

“Teleological” is another Greek term. Telos means ‘end,’ either in terms of a function or an ultimate goal. A teleological argument is about the universe’s purpose.

“Hang on, Captain Comparison!” you might exclaim. “There aren’t sufficient similarities between human-made objects and natural objects.” If that’s your response, you’re on to an objection made famous by the Scottish philosopher, David Hume . Instead of thinking of the universe as a machine , we should think of the universe as a living thing whose internal systems sustain the whole over the course of that life. Unlike a watch, no intelligent designer is required for the regulation and consistent functioning of natural systems. Indeed, if human intelligence is any indication, mucking about with natural systems often leads to dysfunction and breakdown, not order and sustainability.

Ontological (Existence) Arguments

One of the trickier God arguments to grasp proceeds by way of logical analysis. It’s “trickier” because it’s the most abstract of the bunch, and abstractions tend to be more difficult to think about than the stuff we can perceive through sensation.

The general line of reasoning goes like this: We understand “God” as the greatest possible being. Now suppose this concept is mind-dependent. In that case, God is no more real than unicorns, elves, or fairies. So, since any mind- independent entity is more real than a merely mental entity, it follows that we can conceive of a being greater than the greatest possible being. But that’s impossible! In other words, we can't both maintain the concept of God as the greatest possible being, and hold that this concept exists only in the mind. So, God exists in reality.

“Ontological” comes from the Greek (again!). Ontos means ‘being.’ An ontological argument is about the nature of God's existence.

Think about it this way: Since what exists only in the mind is not as real as that which is mind-independent, if God exists only in the understanding, then there has to be something greater than God – anything that is not a mental entity would be, by definition, more real than God. But this is impossible, since it is contradictory to conceive of a being greater than the greatest possible being.

“Whoa, Merlin the Magician!” you exclaim. “Why should we assume that mental entities are less real than extra-mental entities? Why, in other words, should we assume there is a hierarchy of existence, such that real existence is superior to mind-dependent existence?”

Speaking of concepts, we could object that saying something exists does not expand or add to our concept of that thing. Consider, for example, someone who has died. That individual no longer exists independently of our conception of them. But this situation does not change the content of the concept. When I contemplate my long-dead father, all the attributes that go along with “Dad” are no less real than they were when he was alive. Hence, to assert existence as a predicate (“Dad exists”) does not alter the concept itself.

So Now What?

Some are predisposed to disbelief, and so find God arguments unconvincing, while others conclude the arguments themselves are flawed. One reason to think the arguments fail is that those who mount them do not seek the truth, but instead seek to establish what they already believe. Whether one is a believer or not, it is worthwhile to approach the arguments – including the counterarguments! – with a charitable mind.

So, for example, if you find the ontological argument persuasive, you must be willing not only to analyze the logical structure of the argument and the concepts it contains, but also to come to grips with the argument’s implications, which include the problem of evil. Similarly, if you are prone to disbelieve any God argument trotted out, out of fairness, you should accept the premises and see how the argument proceeds.

Of course, a good argument resists the sort of criticism that would demolish it. It’s not enough to dismiss a compelling argument out of hand, or to distort it, which makes it easier to reject than would be the case were one to sympathetically engage with it. But an open mind and a fair analysis can lead to surprising points of agreement – even if logic can’t always bridge the chasm between believers and non-believers.

Mia Wood is a professor of philosophy at Pierce College in Woodland Hills, California, and an adjunct instructor at Bentley University and the University of Rhode Island. She is also a freelance writer interested in the intersection of philosophy and everything else. She lives in Little Compton, Rhode Island.

Title Image: Michelangelo, "The Creation of Adam" (detail), via Wikimedia

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According to Science, God Does Not Exist

Belief Systems
Key Figures in Atheism
M.A., Princeton University
B.A., University of Pennsylvania

In the debate over whether God exists, we have theists on the one side, atheists on the other, and, in the middle, science. Atheists claim there is scientific proof that God is not real. Theists, on the other hand, insist that science, in fact, has been unable to prove that God does not exist. According to atheists, however, this position depends upon a mistaken understanding of the nature of science and how science operates. Therefore, it is possible to say that, scientifically, God does not exist—just as science discounts the existence of a myriad of other alleged beings.

What Science Can and Cannot Prove

To understand why "God does not exist" is a legitimate scientific statement, it's important to understand what the statement means in the context of science. When scientist say, "God does not exist," they mean something similar to when they say "aether does not exist," "psychic powers do not exist," or "life does on the moon does not exist."

All such statements are shorthand for a more elaborate and technical explanation, which is that this alleged entity (or God) has no place in any scientific equations, plays no role in any scientific explanations, cannot be used to predict any events, does not describe anything or force that has yet been detected, and there are no models of the universe in which its presence is either required, productive, or useful.

What should be most obvious about the more technically accurate statement is that it isn't absolute. It does not deny for all time any possible existence of the entity or force in question; instead, it's a provisional statement denying the existence of any relevance or reality to the entity or force based on what we currently know. Religious theists may be quick to seize upon this and insist that it demonstrates that science cannot "prove" that God does not exist, but that requires far too strict of a standard for what it means to "prove" something scientifically .

Scientific Proof Against God

In "God: The Failed Hypothesis—How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist," Victor J. Stenger offers this scientific argument against the existence of God:

Hypothesize a God who plays an important role in the universe.
Assume that God has specific attributes that should provide objective evidence for his existence.
Look for such evidence with an open mind.
If such evidence is found, conclude that God may exist.
If such objective evidence is not found, conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that a God with these properties does not exist.

This is basically how science would disprove the existence of any alleged entity. If God existed, there should be concrete evidence of His existence—not faith, but tangible, measurable, consistent evidence that can be predicted and tested using the scientific method. If we fail to find that evidence, then God cannot exist as defined.

Certainty and Doubt in Science

Of course, nothing in science is proven or disproven beyond a shadow of any possible doubt. In science, everything is provisional. Being provisional is not a weakness or a sign that a conclusion is weak. Being provisional is a smart, pragmatic tactic because we can never be sure what we'll come across when we round the next corner. This lack of absolute certainty is a window through which many religious theists try to slip their god, but that's not a valid move.

In theory, it may be possible that someday we will come across new information that will lead us to further explore the God hypothesis. If the evidence described in the above argument were found, for example, that would justify a rational belief in the existence of the sort of god under consideration. It wouldn’t prove the existence of such a god beyond all doubt, though, because belief would still have to be provisional.

It may also be possible that the same could be true of an infinite number of other hypothetical beings and supernatural forces. Zeus or Odin, Christian or Hindu—every possibility of a God or gods is up for exploration.

What Does it Mean to "Exist"?

Finally, for such a proposition as "God exists" to have meaning to science, we need to define what "existence" in this case means. When it comes to God or a series of gods, their existence is dependent on evidence that they have had or continue to have an impact on the universe. In order to prove impact on the universe, there must be measurable and testable events that could best or only be explained by whatever this "God" is we are hypothesizing. Believers must be able to present a model of the universe in which some god is "either required, productive, or useful."

This is obviously not the case. Many believers work hard trying to find a way to introduce their god into scientific explanations, but none have succeeded. No believer has been able to demonstrate, or even strongly suggest, that there are any events in the universe that require a supernatural being to explain.

Instead, these constantly failing attempts end up reinforcing the impression that there is no "there" there—nothing for "gods" to do, no role for them to play, and no reason to give them a second thought.

So far, everyone who has tried to scientifically prove that God exists has failed. While it's technically true that this doesn't mean that no one ever will succeed, it is also true that in every other situation where such failures are so consistent, we don't acknowledge rational or even serious reasons to bother believing.

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Essay on God’s Importance In Life

Students are often asked to write an essay on God’s Importance In Life in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on God’s Importance In Life

Understanding god’s role.

Many people believe in a higher power known as God. They see God as a guide who helps them choose right from wrong. When life gets tough, thinking of God can give comfort and hope.

Learning Through Stories

Religious books are full of stories about God’s love and power. These tales teach kids about bravery, kindness, and honesty. They often look to these stories for lessons on how to live well.

Prayer and Strength

Praying to God is like talking to a friend. It can make you feel strong and calm. When you’re scared or sad, praying might bring peace and a sense of not being alone.

Belonging to a Community

Believing in God can connect you with others. Many gather in places like churches or temples to worship together. This can create a feeling of family and support among the people.

250 Words Essay on God’s Importance In Life

Many people believe in a higher power known as God. They see God as a guiding force in their lives. For those who believe, God is very important because He gives them hope and purpose. When they are scared or unsure, thinking of God can bring comfort and courage.

Learning Right from Wrong

God is often seen as a teacher of what is good and what is bad. Different religions have their own rules that God has given them. These rules help people decide how to act and treat others. With God’s teachings, they learn to be kind, honest, and fair.

Finding Strength in Tough Times

Life can be hard sometimes. When people face problems, they may pray to God for help. They believe God listens and gives them strength to get through tough times. This belief can make them feel less alone and more able to handle life’s challenges.

Bringing People Together

Belief in God can bring people together. In churches, temples, mosques, and other places of worship, people gather to pray and celebrate their faith. This creates a sense of community and belonging, which is very important in life.

Hope for the Future

Thinking about God can give people hope for the future. They believe that God has a plan for them and that everything will work out for the best. This hope can keep them going when things are difficult and can inspire them to work towards a better future.

500 Words Essay on God’s Importance In Life

Many people believe in a higher power known as God. They see God as a source of strength, guidance, and love. In this essay, we will explore why God plays a significant role in the lives of believers.

Comfort in Tough Times

Life can be hard. Sometimes, we face problems that seem too big for us to handle alone. This is where God comes in. For those who believe, God is like a friend who is always there to listen and help. When something bad happens, like losing a loved one or feeling very sad, believers find comfort in praying to God. They feel that God understands their pain and helps them through it.

Guidance for Right Choices

Every day, we make choices. Some are easy, and some are hard. Believers turn to God for help in making the right decisions. They may read holy books, like the Bible or the Quran, to learn what God teaches about living a good life. By following these teachings, they feel they can choose the path that will make them and the people around them happy.

Feeling Loved and Valued

Everyone wants to feel loved. Believers find this love in God. They think of God as a parent who loves them no matter what. This love gives them confidence. It makes them feel important and valued. When they know God loves them, they also learn to love themselves and others.

Thinking about the future can be scary. There are so many unknowns. But believers find hope in their faith in God. They trust that God has a plan for them and that everything will work out for the best. This hope helps them stay positive, even when things look uncertain.

Learning to Forgive

We all make mistakes, and sometimes we hurt others. God teaches about forgiveness. Believers try to follow this teaching by forgiving those who have wronged them. They also ask God to forgive their own mistakes. This helps them live without anger and bitterness.

Building a Community

Believing in God often brings people together. They gather to worship, celebrate, and help each other. This creates a community where people care for one another. In this community, they share their love for God and find friends who support them in their beliefs.

In conclusion, God holds an important place in the lives of those who believe. God offers comfort, guidance, love, hope, and a sense of community. These things help believers lead a fulfilling life. Whether it’s finding strength in tough times, making the right choices, feeling valued, looking forward to the future, learning to forgive, or being part of a community, God’s role is central to many people’s lives. While not everyone believes in God, for those who do, God’s importance in life is clear and deeply felt.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

Essay on Goals For The Future
Essay on Goals Are Good For You
Essay on Goals And Aspirations

Apart from these, you can look at all the essays by clicking here .

Happy studying!

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The biological perspective also can be called Biopsychological Perspective, is a large scientific perspective that undertake that human behaviour and thought processes have a biological fundamental points. Investigations with biological perspective into biochemistry of behaviour link with genetics and heritability, neurotransmitters and hormones, and the psychophysics of sensation and perception. Parts of biological perspective may include; Physiological psychology, neuroscience, pyschoneuroimunology and psychopharmacology. The biological perspective relies on scientific methods because of this, its scope of information is limited to variable that can be manipulated.

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Hillary Clinton Comforted Kelly Clarkson After The Singer Broke Down In Tears While Recalling Being Hospitalized Twice During Her "Hard" Pregnancies

“I mean, literally, I asked God — this is a real thing — to just take me and my son in the hospital the second time because I was like, it’s the worst thing.”

BuzzFeed Staff

Content warning: This post briefly discusses abortion and rape.

Kelly clarkson is getting candid about her complicated pregnancies ..

Kelly wearing a leather outfit and sitting on a talk show set

In case you didn’t know, Kelly is mom to 9-year-old daughter River and 8-year-old son Remy, whom she shares with her ex-husband, Brandon Blackstock .

Kelly Clarkson in a ruffled dress holds a child's hand, flanked by another child and a man, at an event

Kelly and Brandon were married for seven years, between 2013 and 2020 . Their divorce was finalized in 2022.

On Monday’s episode of her talk show, Kelly was joined by Hillary Clinton , and the pair discussed the Arizona Supreme Court’s recent decision to reinstate a near-total abortion ban from 1864 — a ruling that Hillary described as “horrifying in every way.”

Closeup of Hillary Clinton and Kelly Clarkson

The law — which is 160 years old — makes aiding or assisting with an abortion punishable by two to five years in prison, except in instances when the mother’s life is at risk. Notably, the law does not make exceptions for cases of rape or incest.

“I feared it would happen, but I hoped it wouldn’t happen,” Hillary said during her interview with Kelly. “The danger to women’s lives, as well as to our right to make our own decisions about our bodies and ourselves, is so profound…there’s a kind of cruelty to it.”

Hillary Clinton wearing a jacket and scarf, seated on the talk show

As the two talked more about women’s reproductive rights, Kelly became overwhelmed with emotion as she recalled her own difficult pregnancy experiences, saying: “I have been pregnant twice, hospitalized both times.”

Kelly Clarkson on the red carpet in an off-shoulder gown, smiling, and carrying a clutch

Remembering the tough hospitalizations, Kelly said: “I mean, literally, I asked God — this is a real thing — to just take me and my son in the hospital the second time because I was like, it's the worst thing.”

At this point, she was visibly crying and took a moment to pause. “I didn’t know I’d get emotional, sorry,” Kelly said.

Hillary offered some words of support, telling Kelly that she’s “speaking for literally millions of women in our country and around the world.”

“To make some women go through that — whew,” Kelly said of pregnancy once she’d regained her composure, reiterating that it “was [her] decision” to have her children. “And I'm so glad I did. I love my babies. But to make someone…you don't realize how hard it is.”

Closeup of Kelly Clarkson with her hands in the air

“The fact that you would take that away from someone,” she continued about a woman's right to choose, referring to the 1864 law. “That it can literally kill them. The fact if they're raped…by their family member…and they have to — like that, it's just like insane to me.”

This wasn't the first time Kelly openly discussed her difficult pregnancies. In 2015, she told CBS Mornings that her nausea and sickness became so severe that she had to “get IVs and fluids.”

Kelly Clarkson in a off-shoulder gown and child in a velvet suit on the red carpet

Similarly, while expecting in 2013, she told Ellen DeGeneres that she was finding pregnancy “ horrible .”

Kelly standing on the red carpet smiling with her hands on her hips

“I vomit a good dozen times a day. It's, like, bad. I vomited before coming out here,” the singer said on The Ellen DeGeneres Show during her first pregnancy. “I'm not even kidding. It's so bad. It's so bad.”

You can watch clips from Kelly and Hillary’s entire conversation on The Kelly Clarkson Show here .

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Guest Essay

What Sentencing Could Look Like if Trump Is Found Guilty

A black-and-white photo of Donald Trump, standing behind a metal barricade.

By Norman L. Eisen

Mr. Eisen is the author of “Trying Trump: A Guide to His First Election Interference Criminal Trial.”

For all the attention to and debate over the unfolding trial of Donald Trump in Manhattan, there has been surprisingly little of it paid to a key element: its possible outcome and, specifically, the prospect that a former and potentially future president could be sentenced to prison time.

The case — brought by Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, against Mr. Trump — represents the first time in our nation’s history that a former president is a defendant in a criminal trial. As such, it has generated lots of debate about the case’s legal strength and integrity, as well as its potential impact on Mr. Trump’s efforts to win back the White House.

A review of thousands of cases in New York that charged the same felony suggests something striking: If Mr. Trump is found guilty, incarceration is an actual possibility. It’s not certain, of course, but it is plausible.

Jury selection has begun, and it’s not too soon to talk about what the possibility of a sentence, including a prison sentence, would look like for Mr. Trump, for the election and for the country — including what would happen if he is re-elected.

The case focuses on alleged interference in the 2016 election, which consisted of a hush-money payment Michael Cohen, the former president’s fixer at the time, made in 2016 to a porn star, Stormy Daniels, who said she had an affair with Mr. Trump. Mr. Bragg is arguing that the cover-up cheated voters of the chance to fully assess Mr. Trump’s candidacy.

This may be the first criminal trial of a former president in American history, but if convicted, Mr. Trump’s fate is likely to be determined by the same core factors that guide the sentencing of every criminal defendant in New York State Court.

Comparable cases. The first factor is the base line against which judges measure all sentences: how other defendants have been treated for similar offenses. My research encompassed almost 10,000 cases of felony falsifying business records that have been prosecuted across the state of New York since 2015. Over a similar period, the Manhattan D.A. has charged over 400 of these cases . In roughly the first year of Mr. Bragg’s tenure, his team alone filed 166 felony counts for falsifying business records against 34 people or companies.

Contrary to claims that there will be no sentence of incarceration for falsifying business records, when a felony conviction involves serious misconduct, defendants can be sentenced to some prison time. My analysis of the most recent data indicates that approximately one in 10 cases in which the most serious charge at arraignment is falsifying business records in the first degree and in which the court ultimately imposes a sentence, results in a term of imprisonment.

To be clear, these cases generally differ from Mr. Trump’s case in one important respect: They typically involve additional charges besides just falsifying records. That clearly complicates what we might expect if Mr. Trump is convicted.

Nevertheless, there are many previous cases involving falsifying business records along with other charges where the conduct was less serious than is alleged against Mr. Trump and prison time was imposed. For instance, Richard Luthmann was accused of attempting to deceive voters — in his case, impersonating New York political figures on social media in an attempt to influence campaigns. He pleaded guilty to three counts of falsifying business records in the first degree (as well as to other charges). He received a sentence of incarceration on the felony falsification counts (although the sentence was not solely attributable to the plea).

A defendant in another case was accused of stealing in excess of $50,000 from her employer and, like in this case, falsifying one or more invoices as part of the scheme. She was indicted on a single grand larceny charge and ultimately pleaded guilty to one felony count of business record falsification for a false invoice of just under $10,000. She received 364 days in prison.

To be sure, for a typical first-time offender charged only with run-of-the-mill business record falsification, a prison sentence would be unlikely. On the other hand, Mr. Trump is being prosecuted for 34 counts of conduct that might have changed the course of American history.

Seriousness of the crime. Mr. Bragg alleges that Mr. Trump concealed critical information from voters (paying hush money to suppress an extramarital relationship) that could have harmed his campaign, particularly if it came to light after the revelation of another scandal — the “Access Hollywood” tape . If proved, that could be seen not just as unfortunate personal judgment but also, as Justice Juan Merchan has described it, an attempt “to unlawfully influence the 2016 presidential election.”

History and character. To date, Mr. Trump has been unrepentant about the events alleged in this case. There is every reason to believe that will not change even if he is convicted, and lack of remorse is a negative at sentencing. Justice Merchan’s evaluation of Mr. Trump’s history and character may also be informed by the other judgments against him, including Justice Arthur Engoron’s ruling that Mr. Trump engaged in repeated and persistent business fraud, a jury finding that he sexually abused and defamed E. Jean Carroll and a related defamation verdict by a second jury.

Justice Merchan may also weigh the fact that Mr. Trump has been repeatedly held in contempt , warned , fined and gagged by state and federal judges. That includes for statements he made that exposed witnesses, individuals in the judicial system and their families to danger. More recently, Mr. Trump made personal attacks on Justice Merchan’s daughter, resulting in an extension of the gag order in the case. He now stands accused of violating it again by commenting on witnesses.

What this all suggests is that a term of imprisonment for Mr. Trump, while far from certain for a former president, is not off the table. If he receives a sentence of incarceration, perhaps the likeliest term is six months, although he could face up to four years, particularly if Mr. Trump chooses to testify, as he said he intends to do , and the judge believes he lied on the stand . Probation is also available, as are more flexible approaches like a sentence of spending every weekend in jail for a year.

We will probably know what the judge will do within 30 to 60 days of the end of the trial, which could run into mid-June. If there is a conviction, that would mean a late summer or early fall sentencing.

Justice Merchan would have to wrestle in the middle of an election year with the potential impact of sentencing a former president and current candidate.

If Mr. Trump is sentenced to a period of incarceration, the reaction of the American public will probably be as polarized as our divided electorate itself. Yet as some polls suggest — with the caveat that we should always be cautious of polls early in the race posing hypothetical questions — many key swing state voters said they would not vote for a felon.

If Mr. Trump is convicted and then loses the presidential election, he will probably be granted bail, pending an appeal, which will take about a year. That means if any appeals are unsuccessful, he will most likely have to serve any sentence starting sometime next year. He will be sequestered with his Secret Service protection; if it is less than a year, probably in Rikers Island. His protective detail will probably be his main company, since Mr. Trump will surely be isolated from other inmates for his safety.

If Mr. Trump wins the presidential election, he can’t pardon himself because it is a state case. He will be likely to order the Justice Department to challenge his sentence, and department opinions have concluded that a sitting president could not be imprisoned, since that would prevent the president from fulfilling the constitutional duties of the office. The courts have never had to address the question, but they could well agree with the Justice Department.

So if Mr. Trump is convicted and sentenced to a period of incarceration, its ultimate significance is probably this: When the American people go to the polls in November, they will be voting on whether Mr. Trump should be held accountable for his original election interference.

What questions do you have about Trump’s Manhattan criminal trial so far?

Please submit them below. Our trial experts will respond to a selection of readers in a future piece.

Norman L. Eisen investigated the 2016 voter deception allegations as counsel for the first impeachment and trial of Donald Trump and is the author of “Trying Trump: A Guide to His First Election Interference Criminal Trial.”

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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Oh Dear God, Tennessee Just Passed a Bill Banning Chemtrails, Which Are Not Real

One witness at a legislative hearing said she believed the White House was engaged in climate experiments but could not provide definitive proof.

Being our semi-regular weekly survey of what's goin' down in the several states, where, as we know, the real work of governmentin' gets done and where lights flicker in the opposite loft and in this room, the heat pipes just cough.

We begin in Tennessee, which really is coming up hard on the rail in the race to be the wingnuttiest of wingnut states. From the BBC:

The bill forbids "intentional injection, release, or dispersion" of chemicals into the air. It doesn't explicitly mention chemtrails, which conspiracy theorists believe are poisons spread by planes. Instead it broadly prohibits "affecting temperature, weather, or the intensity of the sunlight."

Oh, dear Lord.

Several witnesses who testified before the Tennessee legislature cited debunked conspiracy theories or speculated about secret government geoengineering programmes, according to Scott Banbury, conservation director of the state's branch of the Sierra Club, an environmental organisation. Their claims were troubling, he said.

"As a serious environmental organisation, if what was in the bill was actually going on we would be calling for a stop to it," he said. "It's not happening."

In recent decades speculation about chemtrails has risen as the number of airline flights—and thus the number of contrails—has surged. In the debate over the Tennessee bill, lawmakers and witnesses cited a range of both reliable and debunked facts about geoengineering and weather modification, and at least one witness said she believed the White House was engaged in climate experiments but could not provide definitive proof.

I linked to the Beeb's account of this foolishness because it's written with some fairly deft British drollery concerning the eccentricity over here in the colonies.

Although several lawmakers mentioned chemtrails while the bill was being discussed, during Monday's session Mr. Fritts focused on cloud seeding. "Everything that goes up must come down, and those chemicals that we knowingly and willingly inject into the atmosphere simply to control the weather or the climate are affecting our health," he said. In a joking response, John Ray Clemmons, a Democrat from Nashville, introduced an amendment that would protect fictional beasts. "This amendment would make sure that we are protecting yetis, or Sasquatch or Bigfoot, from whatever this conspiracy is that we're passing in this legislation," he said during debate.

Let's move on to Florida, where failed presidential candidate Governor Ronald DeSantis apparently is going to order all kindergarten classes to remove all the red crayons from their boxes. From the Orlando Sentinel (with thanks to Diane Ravitch for the catch):

State lawmakers overwhelmingly approved the measure (SB 1264) during the 2024 legislative session that ended last month. Under the bill, lessons on the history of communism will be added to required instruction in public schools starting in the 2026-27 school year. The lessons would have to be "age appropriate and developmentally appropriate" and incorporate various topics related to communism, its history in the United States, including tactics used by communists. "Atrocities committed in foreign countries under the guidance of communism" also would be required as part of the lessons.

Florida schoolchildren must be protected from fictionalized gay penguins, but it is important that they learn about the engineered starvation in the Ukraine in the 1920s and '30s. "Mommy, I made a General Walker out of clay!" And, just for the record, those of us in Catholic school in the early 1960s got plenty of information about the evils of Godless Communism, and too many of us went home as baby McCarthys. Which I guess is the whole point here. And speaking of flashbacks to those halcyon days...

DeSantis signed the bill on the 63rd anniversary of the Bay of Pigs invasion and was joined at the bill-signing event by people who fought in the invasion in an attempt to overthrow the Fidel Castro regime. Rafael Montalvo, president of Brigade 2506 Veterans Association, was among the people who addressed the event at the Hialeah Gardens Museum. The museum features a building funded through the Florida Department of State to honor "the noble efforts of the 2506 Assault Brigade during the Bay of Pigs invasion." "The most important fight against communism is the one that's done in the schoolrooms," Montalvo said. "That's where the battle is happening right now. And this is going to be a tool [giving] us the victory in that area."

Reelect Senator Goldwater!

Let's escape Florida as quickly as we can, even if it means landing in Ohio, where high-level ratfcking is the order of the day. From The Columbus Dispatch :

Secretary of State Frank LaRose warned Ohio Democrats e arlier this month that Biden is at risk of not making the Nov. 5 ballot. State law requires officials to certify the ballot 90 days before an election − which is Aug. 7 this year − but the president won't officially be nominated until the Democratic National Convention on Aug. 19. In a letter to LaRose's office, obtained by the USA Today Network Ohio Bureau, attorney Don McTigue said the Democratic Party would provisionally certify Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris ahead of the Aug. 7 deadline. McTigue noted that Biden already secured enough delegates for the Democratic nomination after facing no significant primary challenge.

But Attorney General Dave Yost's office says provisional approval won't work, nor can LaRose unilaterally change election deadlines. "Instead, the law mandates the Democratic Party to actually certify its president and vice-president candidates on or before August 7, 2024," Julie M. Pfeiffer, an attorney on Yost's staff, told LaRose's legal counsel. "No alternative process is permitted."

First of all, who in hell was asleep at this switch? Somebody either at the DNC or at the Ohio Democratic Party should be sent to activist hell for missing this. It's not like you couldn't anticipate that the Ohio Republicans would jump all over this... and they have the law on their side. At best, I see a very messy lawsuit coming out of this. At worst, the Democrats should consider themselves lucky that "Biden" is an easy name to write in.

Let's seek refuge from the news in Alabama... whoops, really out of luck here. State-sponsored grave robbing may have to be added to the lengthy bill of particulars regarding the state's medieval corrections system. From CNN:

After inmate Jim Kennedy Jr. died last year at the Limestone Correctional Facility in Harvest, Alabama, his sister-in-law got an unusual call from the funeral home preparing the body for burial. "Did y'all realize he came back without his organs?" Sara Kennedy recalled being told. "Liver, heart. All of your major organs. They were gone." "He had nothing," said Kennedy's brother, Marvin. Another inmate suffered a similar fate. Arthur Stapler was 85 when he died five months after Kennedy Jr. at the Brookwood Baptist Medical Center in Birmingham. He had been housed at Hamilton Aged and Infirmed Center, which is also run by the Alabama Department of Corrections. "It's like a horror movie that I can't wake up from," said Stapler's son, Billy, who learned about the missing organs after hiring a private pathologist to perform an autopsy on the body.

As CNN pointed out, this grotesquery is of a piece with the rest of the Alabama penal system.

With more than 26,000 inmates, Alabama's severely overcrowded and understaffed prisons are the target of a US Justice Department lawsuit that alleges the state not only fails to prevent violence and sexual abuse behind bars but does not protect inmates from excessive force by prison staff or provide safe conditions. Alabama's men's prisons are also the country's deadliest, with a homicide rate in 2019 more than seven times higher than the national average, according to a report by the non-profit Equal Justice Initiative.

I don't even want to think about what this situation might be like if Alabama governor Kay Ivey weren't so staunchly pro-life .

And we conclude, as is our custom, in the great state of Oklahoma, whence Blog Official Prairie Dog Whisperer Friedman of the Plains brings us the tale of the turkeys and people who track them. From Tulsa Public Radio:

Colter Chitwood, a wildlife ecologist at Oklahoma State University, says the decline has researchers flummoxed. Turkeys have been one of the country's conservation success stories after being hunted to near-extinction in the early 1900s. "Fast-forward to the late 1900s, and we had turkeys coming out of our ears in most places," he said. "And then all of a sudden we see this decline, and even some scientists are scratching their heads, going, 'Wait a minute, what?'" His lab has funding from the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation to address some big turkey questions.

"What's our current situation with turkeys in Oklahoma?" he said. "And how might our research give us ideas on how to stall the perceived decline in turkey numbers?" To answer those, Chitwood and his team catch turkey hens and put little backpacks on them to track their survival. "Those backpacks, most of them are GPS equipped, which means we see where they go," he said. "How much time they spend in different places, what types of barriers they might be exposed to, how they select to use the landscape."

"Big turkey questions," eh?

So many punch lines, so little time.

This is your democracy, America. Cherish it.

Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America , and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.

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A woman brought her seemingly dead uncle to a bank in Brazil for a loan.

Brazilian woman arrested after taking corpse to sign bank loan: ‘She knew he was dead’

Shock in Brazil after woman is arrested and charged with violating a corpse and attempted theft through fraud

When Érika de Souza Vieira wheeled her lethargic-looking uncle into a Brazilian bank, clerks quickly sensed something was amiss.

“I don’t think he’s well. He doesn’t look well at all,” remarked one distrustful employee as Vieira tried to get her elderly relative to sign off on a 17,000 reais ($3,250) loan.

Paulo Roberto Braga was indeed indisposed. In fact, the 68-year-old appears to have been dead.

Shortly after entering the lender in Rio late on Tuesday with her late uncle, Vieira was arrested and charged with violating a corpse and attempted theft through fraud, according to the Rio newspaper O Dia .

“She knew he was dead … he had been dead for at least two hours,” the investigating officer, Fábio Luiz Souza, told the breakfast news program Bom Dia Rio on Wednesday.

“I have never come across a story like this in 22 years [as a cop],” added Souza, who said visible signs of livor mortis left no doubt as to Braga’s state.

Footage of Vieira’s surreal and macabre alleged attempt to cash in on her relative’s corpse has gone viral on social media, with Brazilians voicing stupefaction at the scene.

At one point in the images – which bank workers began filming after smelling a rat – one suspicious employee comments on Braga’s pallid complexion. “That’s just what he’s like,” Vieira replies, before trying to place a pen in his limp hand once again.

Brazilian journalists shared their viewers’ bewilderment.

“It is just unbelievable. It seems like a wind-up, but this is serious,” the news presenter Leilane Neubarth exclaimed as she told viewers about the scandal on the network GloboNews. “She has gone into the bank with a cadaver – and has tried to get money with a human being who is dead.”

Another journalist, Camila Bomfim, was similarly stunned. “This is the last straw … This goes beyond all limits because there can be no doubt … about the difference between a living person and a dead person,” Bomfim said.

Ana Carla de Souza Correa, a lawyer representing Vieira, insisted it was not. “The facts did not occur as has been narrated. Paulo was alive when he arrived at the bank,” Correa told reporters, claiming there were witnesses who could prove that. “All of this will be cleared up,” the lawyer added . “We believe in Érika’s innocence.”

The police chief Souza said he was also investigating if Vieira was in fact the deceased man’s niece. “Anyone who sees that [footage] can see the person was dead,” he said.

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