Current Arguments for God | Episode 1006 | Closer To Truth

Does God exist? For 60 years I've struggled to know. Can I know? Can anyone ever know? There are three ways to know whether there is a God. Experience a personal relationship with God. Revelation, messages from God. Arguments for and against God. Believers tell me that personal experience is the best way, and that revelations of their religion are sure. Well, I'll have to settle for the third way. I like arguments about God. I like to push and to be pushed. Explore the possible existence of a supreme creator. What are current arguments for God? I'm Robert Lawrence Kuhn, and Closer to Truth is my long journey to find out. I find a book, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, a Work of Fiction. Arguments for God, a Work of Fiction? The author is philosopher and novelist Rebecca Neuberger Goldstein. What sly game is she playing here? Rebecca, I'm not embarrassed to tell you that I have really spent my life wondering about whether God exists. And because I've never had a religious experience and don't particularly want one, I really looked at arguments. And your book, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, sought about to refute every one. Didn't you think one of them had some merit? My favorite is probably number 35, which is the argument from the intelligibility of the universe. It has basically one premise, which is the principle of sufficient reason. For every fact, there is a reason why it is a fact. That explanation goes all the way down. There's no brute contingency in the universe. And if you have just that one premise, you're going to say that, well, the existence of the universe must itself have an explanation. Why these laws of nature rather than other laws of nature? And why is there something rather than nothing? It's not necessarily true that we can access this explanation if Exponosa claims we can't. The explanation is infinite, and we are finite. And so there's an absolute incompleteness theorem built into Exponosa's worldview. But that the explanation exists is different from that we can get at the explanation. And if there is an explanation for the universe itself, next step, it can't lie outside of the universe. The universe has to explain itself. Because what the universe basically is is all explanations. It is all intelligibilities. It had to be. It is the thing that explains itself and its own existence. The thing that causes itself. Call it God. That's God. And that's what Exponosa means by saying God is nature. God is the final theory of everything that explains why it must be the final theory of everything and which necessitates its own existence. That notion of God I find very convincing. So to me, it's the best argument, but it's not how most people think of God, which is why Exponosa was condemned as an atheist. But if that argument is valid, it undercuts all the other 35 arguments. Not only do you not end up with the view of God of most religions or most religious people, it's inimical. So if I asked you of the other 35, which was the worst argument, you might say all 35 put together. I think they're pretty bad. I mean, there are some that are really bad. For example, the argument from the holy books. You know, we have holy books. They were written by God. Therefore, God exists. I mean, you know, a more viciously circular argument you couldn't dream up. Some of the arguments to me are very poignant. The argument from the intolerability of insignificance. How could we be so insignificant in a million years? Nobody will know that we existed. We must have a place in this universe. There must have been a designer who confers significance on us. The argument from suffering. You know, if there isn't a God, then all the suffering is for naught. These are arguments from wishful thinking. It's the fallacy of wishful thinking. Wishful thinking, I blush. Yes, Rebecca, that's me. But if I am to believe in God, I am compelled to justify God in a world of science. I visit the distinguished pioneer of the relationship between science and religion, Ian Barber. Ian, how would you begin to reflect on the success of the science-religion dialogue in giving new understanding about God? Well, I don't look to that dialogue for proofs for the existence of God. I think one's understanding of God comes primarily from religious experience, from personal life and reflection on it. Science explains pretty well what happens as the Big Bang expands from a hot fireball, but the question of where that fireball came from and even before that, why there's a world at all, why it has the laws it has, one can push it to a stage further back if you think, well, maybe there were a lot of universes and we happen to be in one in which life is possible, but the particular constants of nature do seem to be fine-tuned for life, so that I think it's at the boundaries of science, maybe, that one raises religious questions and not finding proofs, but finding plausibility. And certainly the sense of awe and wonder that the scientist has has a kind of religious dimension, though it doesn't necessarily lead you to a personal God. It is impressive that mathematics fits into with nature so beautifully, and some people suggest this is something in common between the human mind and whatever mind was behind the universe. Some atheistic philosophers would say that if there is a God, why would God hide himself if it is so good for human beings to believe in that God? Well, I don't find that a very convincing argument. I think any belief that was based on a knockdown evidence would deny the human freedom of decision. If God respects human freedom, God isn't gonna hit us over the head. It's gotta be a voluntary love of God that we are finite beings and God is beyond our understanding and we can get glimpses of God, but I think if one expected God to be something like an object that one can observe, or if one expect that somewhere within the atom there will be written, authored by God or something, that's not the kind of universe we live in. What kind of universe do we live in? To me, that is the point. If I am to know God, the universe is where I must find God. That's why I continue my quest with a scientist who is a believer, a quantum physicist who became an Anglican priest, John Polkinghorne. John, what do you think right now are the best arguments for the existence of God? Well, there are two kinds of arguments. One is called natural theology, which is looking at the world. We see a world that is marvelously ordered in its basic fundamental structure. We see a world also whose, the details of whose laws of nature are finely tuned to permit the possibility of carbon-based life. Now these things are things that science discovers but doesn't explain. They seem to me to be too significant to be simply happy accidents and I would like to make them intelligible and belief in a creator whose mind is behind the order of the world and purpose behind its fruitfulness does make them intelligible. Now, to learn more about God, we have to depend upon acts of divine self-disclosure, which theology calls revelation. So we have to ask, have we reason to think that God enacted in particular people or particular circumstances to make the divine nature known? More clearly, we see it and that's the role in faith traditions of the great founder figures of the faith and the accumulated experience of the faith. On the first argument in natural theology, many philosophers would reject all of that and they'd say in today's world that natural theology doesn't work and one of the reasons it doesn't work is there are other explanations. The popular one today is the multiple universes. Well, I don't think it's a season doing that. Even if there were an infinite array of those universes, it doesn't follow any desirable property like being able to produce carbon-based life would be present even in an infinite array. The multiverse argument serves one explanatory purpose. It explains or it explains away the particular fine-tuned character of our universe, but even in the existence of a creator, does much more explanatory work than that. Not only explains the order of the world and its fruitfulness, it also explains, in my view, the origin of our ethical knowledge as intimations of God's good and perfect will. It explains our aesthetic experiences of sharing the creator's joy in creation. Of course, it also explains human account of encounter with spiritual reality. So, there's a sort of cumulative case of theism which I don't think is reflected on the multiverse side of things. I like natural theology, though many smirk it cannot work. I distrust religious faith, though many say it's the only way. John makes a cumulative case argument for God. I pursue this with a theistic philosopher of high scientific literacy, Robin Collins. Robin, what are you accumulating in your case? A cumulative case argument is the kind of argument you find in a courtroom when they say that the defendant is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. It's when multiple pieces of evidence, such as the fingerprints, DNA samples, witnesses, all point to the guilt of the defendant. You have the same thing going on in the universe. You have the fine-tuning of the universe for life, pointing, so I would claim, in the direction of theism. You have the fact that the universe is intelligible. We can understand its underlying mathematical structure, which many have found to be almost miraculous, pointing in the direction of theism. You find that the underlying structure of the physical universe exhibits great beauty and elegance. You find that the underlying structure of the universe is discoverable. We can actually do a step-by-step process as things are arranged just right for us to discover. That points to theism. And perhaps even the existence of consciousness in the universe, the mystery of consciousness, makes more sense under theism than non-theism. So you have all these lines of evidence pointing to the same conclusion, theism. That, to me, makes a particularly powerful argument, what's called a cumulative case argument. One pragmatic argument I like the best is what I call the value-of-truth argument. I am a truth seeker. I believe things because I think they're true. To me, if atheism were true, then my whole basis of seeking the truth would be undermined. Because if atheism is true, I don't see the value of truth with a capital T. If we're just here by chance, that's end of the story. We die. On the other hand, if I'm right, I can give a value to that truth. It connects me with reality. Believing in illusion would disconnect me. Believing in the truth connects me with the reality. That reality is ultimately personal for a theist. And hence, I should pursue the truth. So theism grounds my own pursuit of truth, whereas atheism would not. I find atheism motivationally self-defeating for me, both because it undermines the basis I would have for valuing seeking of the truth, and the basis I have for trusting my own reasoning capacities to be able to find the truth. You do tempt me, Robin. But can subtle arguments lead to God? Can clever words reveal a conscious cause? I resist temptation. I fret that faith, even hope, induces intellectual slumber. Many smart people do not believe in God. To them, no argument for God works. I go to London to immerse myself in the atheistic insights of philosopher Anthony Grayling. Anthony, I'd like to know whether God exists like everyone else, and I like arguments. So I listen to these arguments, and there are a welter of them. Each one adds a little bit so that ultimately, when you have all of these arguments together, you have the likelihood of God being more highly probable than not, and then if you have a little bit of this personal experience, you can go all the way. It's so interesting, isn't it, that if that were the argument, that there is a kind of cumulative overall effect, an increasing weight of support for the pieces, that what the history of the last three or four centuries has shown us, at least in the Western world, is exactly the opposite, that the weight of evidence cumulatively has been increasingly against the idea that there are religious truths or entities of any kind. And this is because the argument from evil, the inconsistency of there being a divine, omnipotent, and benevolent creator, given childhood cancers and tsunamis that kill hundreds of thousands of people. Add that, that's the moral case, to the accumulating evidence in science, to the greater explanation of natural phenomena, and to the loosening of the grip on individuals in their experience of faith. And there you have the cumulative weight going against religion and not for it. So, basically, you can build up a parallel case against the existence of God. Let's just take one example, the cosmological argument, which basically says if you have anything happening, it has to have a cause, and you go back, and either you have an infinite regress, you have a cause of a cause of a cause, or you have a stopping point. How do you deal with that? Well, because there are lots of different ways of approaching it. One recognizes that there is a logical fallacy, and the argument is known as the fallacy of composition. You know, the fact that every individual member of the species whales is a whale doesn't follow that the species is a whale. So, the fact that everything in the universe has a cause doesn't mean that the universe has a cause. Is that a persuasive counterattack on that argument? Well, if you go the further step, which is necessary, which is to say that the cause of the universe, if there is such a thing, won't be on the same ontological and explanatory level as the cause of individual events within the universe. I think probably the strongest way to approach it, however, is to point to the fact that wanting there to be a first term, finding it intolerable that there should be a sequence that doesn't have a first term, is a very characteristic fact about our pattern-seeking and narrative-seeking minds, which are always long for closure. And it may very well be that the idea that it's very hard to imagine what kind of first term there was if there was one, or even if there was one, you know, is something that has to be left open. As much as I want God to exist, far more I want what's true. That's why I listen to Anthony. Suppose there is a God. I still might learn more from articulate atheists than from doctrinaire theists. But believers counsel me that to know God, I must worship God. Should I worship? Should I worry? I drive from London to Birmingham to meet a young philosopher of religion whose views are, well, iconoclastic. Eugene Nagasawa. So theists often claim that if God is a perfect being, then it's necessarily worship-worthy. So worship-worthiness is one of the essential attributes of God. Why do we have to worship God? Some people claim that we have to worship God because God is the greatest possible being. God knows everything, and God has all powers, and God is infinitely benevolent as well. That's why we have to worship God. But I don't know if that's really true, because we can imagine someone smarter than us. But is it obligatory to worship this person? It's not very clear. Some people claim that we have to worship God because God created us, and we should be grateful to God. But then again, I don't know why everyone has to worship God. There are a lot of people who are suffering, and I don't know why they have to worship God. We are fortunate people. We might be obliged to worship God, but there are a lot of people who are in misfortune, and I don't know why they have to worship God. But worship is often compared with love. And if you worship someone, you love someone. But you cannot force someone to love you, and that's the problem. So if it's obligatory for us to worship God, then it somehow undermines the concept of worship itself. We cannot be forced to worship God. It has to be voluntary. Must it be done with other people? Must it be done in religious organizations? You know, I have to tell you that religious organizations are not something that I have great fondness for. But I still am very serious about my interest in God and maybe in my own way do worship, but certainly not in the way the world thinks of worship. Yes, I agree with you. And that's why I'm inclined to eliminate worship worthiness from God's essential attributes. I think it's really up to us whether we want to worship God or not. You're a philosopher of religion and have the great privilege of a lot of what you do has to do with God in terms of analyzing God's characteristics or whether God exists, teaching about it in university. So let me ask you very privately, nobody else will know, do you worship? Yeah, if you say that, yeah, I feel that I'm a very fortunate person to explore these big questions about the universe and the existence of God. So I should really worship and be thankful to God. Do you? Yes. I too am a very fortunate person. Should I give God a chance? Worship God, see what happens. I'm uncomfortable. Atheists employ defeaters of God. Can theists defeat these defeaters? I meet the man who justified belief in God so that believers can have intellectual confidence as well as emotional conviction, Alvin Plantinga. Al, atheists point to various defeaters for theism. What are some of them and how do you react? So, a defeater for a belief that you've got is some other belief that you acquire such that given that you've got that second belief, you can't anymore rationally hold the first belief. So there might be things like that with respect to belief in God as well. And among the ones that have been suggested would be, first of all, the argument from evil. There is all this evil in the world. I mean, all the suffering and pain, much of it caused by human beings doing what is clearly morally wrong in some clear sense. So isn't that a defeater for belief in God? It's not obviously a defeater because God might have a reason for permitting evil in the world. Lots of these reasons have to do with free will. But one thing to think about here is that if God did have a reason for permitting all this evil, it's not at all likely that we would know what that reason is. The distance between us and him, between our cognitive epistemic situation and his situation is just too great for that. Another defeater has to do with postmodernism, which involves the idea that there really isn't any such thing as truth. Sometimes it's said that truth is what your peers will let you get away with saying. But of course, a serious believer in God doesn't think that at all. He doesn't think for a moment that whether or not there is such a person as God depends on what my peers will let me say. I mean, that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Now, related to this is the fact that there are diverse religions in the world, which in many cases are very contradictory, and this too is used as a defeater. Again, it can give a serious believer in God pause. The vast majority of the world's population believes in God or something like God. So it's not that there is a defeater of that sort, perhaps for belief in God, for theism, but there is for particular ways of being a theist. For example, being a Christian, maybe two billion of the world's people profess at least to be Christians, but then there are enormous numbers who are not. So you might say, well, does that give me a defeater for belief in God? But if you think it all over again, if you think of all the reasons they put forward for what they believe as opposed to what you believe, and if you still find yourself convinced, I can't see that you've gone wrong or that you are now in a condition such that because you continue to hold this belief, if you must be irrational, the right thing to do is to continue to believe that way. Current arguments for God, I group into three categories. One, science-based arguments. What's known as natural theology today focus on physics and cosmology, but not since Darwin on biological species and mechanisms. Two, personal-based arguments, stressing religious experiences and worship. Three, philosophy-based arguments, such as the intelligibility and beauty of the cosmos, nature of truth, structure of knowledge. On the other hand, I must consider defeaters of God, problem of evil, God's hiddenness, cultural relativism, contradictory religions, to name a few. Because no specific argument for God is conclusive, wrapping all arguments for God into one big cumulative case is appealing. And yet, even if the weight of evidence would tilt toward God, I'd still wonder why, to answer this greatest of questions, we'd need a courtroom-style argument to get closer to truth. For complete interviews and for further information, please visit closertotruth.com.