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What was Immanuel Kant’s childhood like?
What did Immanuel Kant do for a living?
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A human Inuit skull in a stone chambered cairn in Ilulissat in Greenland. These ancient graves are pre christian and are at least 2000

existence of God

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Catholic Education Resource Center - Twenty Arguments For The Existence Of God
The Gospel Coalition - The Existence of God
Catholic Online - The Existence of God
Humanities LibreTexts - Proofs for the Existence of God- Overview
Eternal Word Television Network - The Proofs for the Existence of God in the Light of Modern Natural Science
Ancient Origins - Arguments Why God (Very Probably) Exists

existence of God , in religion , the proposition that there is a supreme supernatural or preternatural being that is the creator or sustainer or ruler of the universe and all things in it, including human beings. In many religions God is also conceived as perfect and unfathomable by humans, as all-powerful and all-knowing (omnipotent and omniscient), and as the source and ultimate ground of morality .

Belief in the existence of God (or gods) is definitional of theism and characteristic of many (though not all) religious traditions. For much of its history , Christianity in particular has been concerned with the question of whether God’s existence can be established rationally (i.e., by reason alone or by reason informed by sense experience) or through religious experience or revelation or instead must be accepted as a matter of faith . The remainder of this article will consider some historically influential arguments that have been advanced to demonstrate the existence of God.

Arguments for the existence of God are usually classified as either a priori or a posteriori —that is, based on the idea of God itself or based on experience. An example of the latter is the cosmological argument , which appeals to the notion of causation to conclude either that there is a first cause or that there is a necessary being from whom all contingent beings derive their existence. Other versions of this approach include the appeal to contingency—to the fact that whatever exists might not have existed and therefore calls for explanation—and the appeal to the principle of sufficient reason , which claims that for anything that exists there must be a sufficient reason why it exists. The arguments by St. Thomas Aquinas known as the Five Ways—the argument from motion, from efficient causation, from contingency , from degrees of perfection, and from final causes or ends in nature—are generally regarded as cosmological. Something must be the first or prime mover, the first efficient cause, the necessary ground of contingent beings, the supreme perfection that imperfect beings approach, and the intelligent guide of natural things toward their ends. This, Aquinas said, is God. The most common criticism of the cosmological argument has been that the phenomenon that God’s existence supposedly accounts for does not in fact need to be explained.

The argument from design also starts from human experience: in this case the perception of order and purpose in the natural world. The argument claims that the universe is strongly analogous , in its order and regularity, to an artifact such as a watch; because the existence of the watch justifies the presumption of a watchmaker, the existence of the universe justifies the presumption of a divine creator of the universe, or God. Despite the powerful criticisms of the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–76)—e.g., that the evidence is compatible with a large number of hypotheses , such as polytheism or a god of limited power, that are as plausible as or more plausible than monotheism —the argument from design continued to be very popular in the 19th century. According to a more recent version of the argument, known as intelligent design , biological organisms display a kind of complexity (“irreducible complexity”) that could not have come about through the gradual adaptation of their parts through natural selection ; therefore, the argument concludes, such organisms must have been created in their present form by an intelligent designer. Other modern variants of the argument attempt to ground theistic belief in patterns of reasoning that are characteristic of the natural sciences, appealing to simplicity and economy of explanation of the order and regularity of the universe.

Perhaps the most sophisticated and challenging argument for the existence of God is the ontological argument , propounded by St. Anselm of Canterbury . According to Anselm, the concept of God as the most perfect being—a being greater than which none can be conceived—entails that God exists, because a being who was otherwise all perfect and who failed to exist would be less great than a being who was all perfect and who did exist. This argument has exercised an abiding fascination for philosophers; some contend that it attempts to “define” God into existence, while others continue to defend it and to develop new versions.

It may be possible (or impossible) to prove the existence of God, but it may be unnecessary to do so in order for belief in God to be reasonable. Perhaps the requirement of a proof is too stringent, and perhaps there are other ways of establishing God’s existence. Chief among these is the appeal to religious experience—a personal, direct acquaintance with God or an experience of God mediated through a religious tradition. Some forms of mysticism appeal to religious tradition to establish the significance and appropriateness of religious experiences. Interpretations of such experiences, however, typically cannot be independently verified.

The Abrahamic religions ( Judaism , Christianity , and Islam ) also appeal to revelation, or to claims that God has spoken through appointed messengers to disclose matters which would otherwise be inaccessible. In Christianity these matters have included the doctrine of creation, the Trinity , and the Incarnation of Jesus Christ . Various attempts have been made to establish the reasonableness of the appeal to revelation through the witness of the church and through signs and miracles , all of which are thought to herald the authentic voice of God. (This is the context in which Hume’s classic critique of the credibility of reported miracles—that no amount or kind of evidence can establish that a miracle has occurred—must be understood.) Yet appeals to revelation by the various religions conflict with each other, and the appeal to revelation itself is open to the charge of circularity.

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).

Believe

Eternal salvation

You've been duped, missed out on some sins

Eternal damnation

You got it right

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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The Nature of God and Arguments for the Existence of God

Cite this chapter.

James F. Harris 2

Part of the book series: Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy of Religion ((HCPR,volume 3))

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Theism is characterized by belief in a God that possesses a unique set of characteristics or attributes. The theistic conception of God that is formed by the combination of these attributes has been troublesome through the centuries and has given rise to many questions and criticisms — by theists and nontheists alike — both of the individual attributes and the collective set of attributes. These problems persisted throughout the twentieth century and intensified in the last few decades. Some of the issues concerning the attributes are old ones revisited in light of our changing knowledge of the natural world as a result of the development of science. Others are logical issues that have been given new “twists” by contemporary scholars, quite independently of contingent matters. The coherence of the attributes that comprise the concept of God is fundamental to theism since the viability of theism must begin with the viability of the concept of God. Sorting through the difficulties surrounding the traditional attributes of the theistic deity is such a fundamental problem that Richard Swinburne devotes approximately two-thirds of what many consider his seminal work, The Coherence of Theism , to an explanation and defense of the coherence of these attributes. Although there are many disagreements among theists that need to be explored, I shall take Swinburne’s view as typical of the traditional theistic concept of God: namely, “that there exists eternally an omnipresent spirit, free, creator of the universe, omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good, and a source of moral obligation.” 1

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Richard Swinburne, The Coherence of Theism , Revised Edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 99.

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I do not treat here the work of Charles Hartshorne, since his view of the divine attributes is so intimately connected with his process philosophy. See his Man’s Vision of God and the Logic of Theism (New York: Harper and Row, 1941) and The Divine Relativity: A Social Conception of God (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1948).

Several of the exchanges have taken place in Philosophical Studies . See Richard LaCroix, “The Impossibility of Defining Omnipotence,” Philosophical Studies , Vol. 32, 1977, pp. 181–90; George Mavrodes, “Defining Omnipotence,” Philosophical Studies , Vol. 32, 1977, pp. 191–202; Richard LaCroix, “Failing to Define Omnipotence,” Philosophical Studies , Vol. 35, 1979, pp. 219–22; Joshua Hoffman, “Mavrodes on Defining Omnipotence,” Philosophical Studies , Vol. 35, 1979, pp. 311–15; and Bruce Reichenbach, “Mavrodes on Omnipotence,” Philosophical Studies , Vol. 37, 1980, pp. 211–14. Also see Anthony Kenny, The God of the Philosophers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), Chapter Vil; Stephen T. Davis, Logic and the Nature of God (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1983), Chapter 5; and Edward R. Wierenga, The Nature of God (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), Chapter 1. For Alvin Plantinga’s notion of omnipotence, see the discussion of his modal version of the ontological argument below.

Edward. R. Wierenga provides a summary and discussion of the different versions of the different qualifications in The Nature of God , p. 14–18.

Wade C. Savage, “The Paradox of the Stone,” Philosophical Review , Vol. 76, 1967.

In addition to the responses discussed here, see Alvin Plantinga, God and Other Minds (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1967), pp. 168–73; Peter Geach, “Omnipotence,” Philosophy , Vol. 48, 1973, reprinted as Chapter 1 of Providence and Evil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); and G. B. Keene, “A Simpler Solution to the Paradox of Omnipotence,” Mind , Vol. 69, 1960. For a critical discussion of different responses to the paradox of the stone, see Stephen T. Davis, Logic and the Nature of God (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1983), Chapter 5.

George Mavrodes, “Some Puzzles Concerning Omnipotence,” Philosophical Review , 72, 1963, pp. 221–23. Reprinted in Philosophy of Religion: Selected Readings , edited by Michael Peterson et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), to which the page numbers here refer, p. 113.

lbid., p. 114.

Richard Swinburne, The Coherence of Theism , p. 158.

Harry Frankfurt, “The Logic of Omnipotence,” The Philosophical Review , Vol. 73, 1964, pp. 26263. Reprinted in Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology , edited by Louis Pojman (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1998), to which the page numbers here refer.

Ibid., p. 282.

Richard Swinburne, The Coherence of Theism , p. 156.

Ibid., p. 161. For a discussion of temporal considerations in the notion of omnipotence as well as a distinction concerning different levels of omnipotence (“first-order” and “second-order” omnipotence), see J. L. Mackie, “Evil and Omnipotence,” Mind , Vol. 64, 1955, pp. 200–12.

There are other considerations involved here as well. For example, powers are sometimes distinguished from attributes that are distinguished from relations. I maintain that powers and attributes can best be analyzed in terms of relations, though I have not argued for this position here.

The terminology is sometimes confusing here since some scholars refer to the paradox of the stone as the paradox of omnipotence. I use the two different designations here to try and maintain the distinction between the two problems.

Originally in J. L. Mackie, “Evil and Omnipotence,” Mind , Vol. 64, 1955. Also in J. L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1982), pp. 160ff.

There has been some discussion of whether this is a genuine paradox or simply a difficult issue that forces a certain response from a theist depending upon whether or not God may have second-order omnipotence without ever exercising it. See Mackie, The Miracle of Theism , p. 160.

Ibid., pp. 161–62. Alvin Plantinga’s free will defense and Mackie’s criticisms are discussed at length in Chapter VI.

Anthony Kenny, The God of the Philosophers , pp. 94–95.

Ibid., p. 96.

Ibid., pp. 97–98. There are other difficulties that cause further qualifications as well. Although God may possess the power to beget a son, he cannot possess the power to beget my son, and although God might possess the power to write a book, he cannot possess the power to write the book that I write.

See Richard Swinburne, “Tensed Facts,” American Philosophical Quarterly , Vol. 27, 1990, pp. 117–30.

Norman Kretzmann, “Omniscience and Immutability,” Journal of Philosophy , Vol. 63, 1966.

For responses to Kretzmann, see Nector-Neri Castaneda, “Omniscience and Indexical Reference,” Journal of Philosophy , Vol. 64, 1967, pp. 203–210, and Swinbume, The Coherence of Theism , 167–72. Castafieda argues that there is a propositional content to indexicals that can be known by other people, but Swinburne denies this.

Nelson Pike, “Divine Omniscience and Voluntary Action,” Philosophical Review , Vol. 74, 1965, pp. 27–46. Reprinted in Philosophy of Religion: Selected Readings , edited by Michael Peterson, William Hasker, Bruce Reichenbach, and David Bassinger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) to which the page numbers here refer, pp.117–18.

See Anthony Kenny, “Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom,” in Aquinas: A Collection of Critical Essays , edited by Anthony Kenny (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1969), pp. 255–270, as well as The God of the Philosophers , Chapter V.

Richard Swinburne, The Coherence of Theism , pp. 179–83.

Ibid., pp. 180–81.

See Harry Frankfurt, “Alternative Possibilities and Moral Responsibility,” Journal of Philosophy , Vol. 66, 1969, pp. 829–39. For a discussion of Frankfurt’s attack on PAP and various responses as well as a defense of PAP, see Laura Waddell Ekstrom, Free Will: A Philosophical Defense (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1999).

See Linda Zagzebski, “Foreknowledge and Human Freedom,” in A Companion to Philosophy of Religion , edited by Philip L. Quinn and Charles Taliaferro (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997), pp. 294–96. Zagzebski accepts Frankfurt’s rejection of PAP but argues that PAP is not the important issue for the problem of divine foreknowledge.

Marilyn Adams, “Is the Existence of God a Hard Fact?” Philosophical Review , Vol. 76, 1967; Joshua Hoffman, “Pike on Possible Worlds, Divine Foreknowledge, and Human Freedom,” Philosophical Review , Vol. 88, 1979; Anthony Kenny, The God of the Philosophers , pp. 51–87; John Martin Fischer, “Freedom and Foreknowledge,” Philosophical Review , Vol. 92, 1983; Joshua Hoffman and Gary Rosenkrantz, “Hard and Soft Facts,” Philosophical Review , Vol. 93, 1984; William P. Alston, “Divine Foreknowledge and Alternative Conceptions of Human Freedom,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion , Vol. 18, no. 1, 1985.

For a thorough discussion of William of Ockham and the contemporary Ockhamists, see Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski, The Dilemma of Freedom and Foreknowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), Chapter 3.

This summary is a synthesis of the treatments found in Zagzebski, ibid ., pp. 68–70, and Marilyn Adams, William Ockham (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987), Chapter 27.

Zagzebski, The Dilemma of Freedom and Foreknowledge , p. 18.

Nelson Pike, “Of God and Freedom: A Rejoinder,” Philosophical Review , Vol. 75, 1966, pp. 36979; John Turk Saunders, “Of God and Freedom,” Philosophical Review , Vol. 75, 1966, pp. 219–225; and Marilyn Adams, “Is the Existence of God a Hard Fact?”

Marilyn Adams, ibid ., pp. 493 and 494.

William L. Rowe, Philosophy of Religion: An Introduction (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1978), p.163. [Though the war between Japan and the United States ended in 1945 and lasted four years, I use Rowe’s original example to be true to his text.]

For example, Alvin Plantinga, “On Ockham’s Way Out,” Faith and Philosophy , Vol. 3, no. 3, July 1986, pp. 235–69.

John Martin Fischer, “Introduction: God and Freedom,” in God , Foreknowledge , and Freedom , edited by John Martin Fischer (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1989), pp. 35–36. Also see Fischer’s “Freedom and Foreknowledge” (Chapter 4) in the same volume, originally published in The Philosophical Review , Vol. 92, no. 1, 1983, pp. 67–79. For a response to Fischer, see Joshua Hoffman and Gary Rosenkrantz, “Hard and Soft Facts,” The Philosophical Review , Vol. 93, no. 3, 1984, pp. 41934, which is reprinted also in God , Foreknowledge , and Freedom , Chapter 7.

Zabzebski, The Dilemma of Freedom and Foreknowledge , pp. 74–76.

William Hasker, God , Time , and Knowledge (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), pp.75–95.

I am here assuming that not all facts about God are soft simply because God is eternal.

See Alvin Plantinga, The Nature of Necessity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), Chapter 9, and Alfred Freddoso’s Introduction in On Divine Foreknowledge: Part IV of the Concordia , Luis de Molina (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988).

Alvin Plantinga, God , Freedom , and Evil (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), pp. 66–73.

For a critical discussion of these criticisms, see Zabzebski, The Dilemma of Freedom and Foreknowledge , pp. 141ff.

William Hasker, God , Time , and Knowledge , pp. 39–52. For a lengthy response to Hasker and a defense of Plantinga, see Edward R. Wierenga, The Nature of God , pp. 150–160. Anthony Kenny also attacks Plantinga’s notion of middle knowledge in The God of the Philosophers , pp. 67ff.

Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann, “Eternity,” Journal of Philosophy , Vol. 78, 1981. Reprinted in The Concept of God , edited by Thomas V. Morris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). p. 247.

Others have rejected this way of resolving the dilemma Kenny calls the timelessness of God “incoherent” while Swinburne denies that timelessness is consistent with other theistic beliefs about God.

Anthony Kenny, The God of the Philosophers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 38-

Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann, “Eternity,” Journal of Philosophy Vol. 78, 1981, pp. 429–58. The pages numbers here refer to the reprint in The Concept of God edited by Thomas V. Morris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 231.

For a critical discussion of the relationship of timelessness to these attributes, see Nelson Pike, God and Timelessness (New York: Schocken Books, 1970), Chapter 3, and Richard Swinburne, The Coherence of Theism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 219ff.

Stump and Kretzmann, ibid ., p. 247.

Zagzebski, The Dilemma of Freedom and Foreknowledge , p. 41ff.

Hasker, God , Time , and Knowledge , p. 164.

Much of the following is drawn from James F. Harris, “An Empirical Understanding of Eternality,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion , Vol. 22, 1987, pp. 165–83.

William James, Principles of Psychology (New York: Henry Holt, 1893), Vol. IV, p. 606.

See Harris, “An Empirical Understanding of Eternality,” for more detailed discussion of the limits of the specious present, pp. 177ff.

Nelson Pike, God and Timelessness , Chapter 7.

Swinburne, The Coherence of Theism , p. 228.

Using this distinction is more helpful, I think, than using “the Cambridge Criterion” introduced by Peter Geach, “What Actually Exists,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplemental Volume, Vol. 42, 1968, pp. 7–16.

It should be noted that several have criticized and rejected this distinction.

For a discussion of the notion that God has eternal intentions, see Swinburne, The Coherence of Theism , pp. 221–22.

Dun Scotus notwithstanding. Although Scotus held that the incarnation was intended by God from all eternity and not as a result of original sin, this certainly has never been and is not now the dominant view.

Richard Swinburne, The Coherence of Theism , pp. 217ff; Nicholas Wolterstorff, “God Everlasting,” God and the Good: Essays in Honor of Henry Stob , edited by C. Orlebeke and L. Smedes (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1975), pp. 181–203. Reprinted in Philosophy of Religion: Selected Readings , edited by Michael Peterson et al., pp. 125–33; Stephen T. Davis, “Temporal Eternity,” from Logic and the Nature of God (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1983). Reprinted in Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology , edited by Louis Pojman (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1998), pp. 235–42. Page references to both Wolterstorff and Davis refer to the reprinted versions.

Wolterstorff, “God Everlasting,” pp. 125–26.

Davis, “Temporal Eternity,” pp. 237ff.

If this is true, one might wonder why Aquinas, Boethius, and others have taken God to be timeless. To this question I have no definite answer, but Swinburne’s suggestion that attributing timelessness to God in Christian theology resulted from neo-Platonism seems very plausible. See Swinbume, The Coherence of Theism ,p. 225.

For a critical discussion of the history of impassibility (which focuses on Augustine and the Stoics) and its relation to the other divine attributes, see Nicholas Wolterstorff, “Suffering Love,” in Philosophy and the Christian Faith , edited by Thomas V. Morris (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), pp. 196–237.

See Richard Creel, “Immutability and Impassibility,” in A Companion to Philosophy of Religion , edited by Philip L. Quinn and Charles Taliaferro (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997), pp. 313ff, for a short discussion of impassibility and the other attributes of God. Also see, Nicholas Wolterstorff, “Suffering Love,” pp. 217ff.

Richard Creel, Divine Impassibility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 2.

Jung Young Lee, God Suffers for Us: A Systematic Inquiry into a Concept of Divine Passibility (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), p. 7. Lee is also quoted by Creel, ibid .

For a detailed discussion of different definitions and a critical survey of the literature, see Richard Creel, Divine Impassibility , pp. 3ff.

Richard Creel, “Immutability and Impassibility,” p. 313.

Nicholas Wolterstorff, “Suffering Love,” p. 211. Charles Taliaferro also develops a theory of passibility in Consciousness and the Mind of God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 315–33. I do not discuss his theory of passibility here, but I do discuss his theory of integrated dualism in some detail below.

Ibid., pp. 214–15 and pp. 224ff.

Nicholas Wolterstorff, “Suffering Love,” in Philosophy and the Christian Faith , edited by Thomas V. Morris, pp. 196–237, and Lament for a Son (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1987).

Wolterstorff, Lament for a Son , pp. 80 and 81.

Richard Creel, Divine Impassibility , Chapters 2 and 7. Also see Kelly James Clark, “Hold Not Thy Peace at My Tears,” in Our Knowledge of God , edited by Kelly James Clark (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1992), pp. 173ff.

Many critics have objected that the claims about the personhood of God which have become so thoroughly ingrained in traditional theism are the confused result of a complete misunderstanding of the nature of persons originating in Cartesian dualism. Such criticism is found in Kai Nielsen, “God, Disembodied Existence and Incoherence,” Sophia , Vol. 26, no. 3, 1987, and Richard Rorty, “Mind as Ineffable,” in Mind in Nature , edited by Richard Q. Elvee (San Francisco: Macmillan, 1973). The most thorough discussion of the matter of dualism and its effect upon the traditional theistic conception of God is found in Charles Taliaferro, Consciousness and the Mind of God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

Richard Swinburne, The Coherence of Theism , Chapter 8.

Ibid., pp. 104ff. and p. 135. Derived from Arthur Danto, “Basic Actions,” American Philosophical Quarterly , Vol. 2, 1965, pp. 141–48.

Swinburne, ibid ., p. 141.

Swinburne argues that such a notion is meaningful. See ibid ., pp. 106ff. This issue is discussed in the context of the issue of immortality in Chapter VII.

Ibid., p. 105.

Ibid., p. 106.

William P. Alston, “God’s Action in the World,” in Evolution and Creation , edited by Ernan McMullin (Notre Dame, hid.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986). Reprinted in William P. Alston, Divine Nature and Human Language: Essays in Philosophical Theology (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), to which the page numbers here refer, p. 198.

Ibid., pp. 199–207. Also see J. L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism , pp. 161ff.

Alston, “God’s Action in the World,” p. 207.

Harry Frankfurt, “Alternative Possibilities and Moral Responsibility,” Journal of Philosophy , Vol. 66, 1969, pp. 829–39.

Whether Frankfurt is right about the effect of this type of case on PAP and whether moral responsibility depends upon PAP have been the subject of some debate in the literature on free will. Peter van Inwagen, for example, agrees with Frankfurt that these cases show that PAP is false in An Essay on Free Will (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), pp. 179–80, while Laura Ekstrom disagrees in Free Will: A Philosophical Study (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1999), Chapter 6.

One fairly recent such example is Gary Legenhausen, “Is God a Person?” Religious Studies , Vol. 22, 1986, pp. 307–23.

Grace Jantzen, God’s World , God’s Body (Philadelphia, Pa.: The Westminster Press, 1984), Chapter 5.

For a critical (but ultimately negative) assessment of the different theological supports for incorporeality, see Jantzen, God’s World , God’s Body ,pp. 105–130. See also David Paulsen, “Must God Be Incorporeal?” Faith and Philosophy , Vol. 6, no. 1, 1989, pp. 76–87. For a rebuttal to Jantzen and Paulsen, see Charles Taliaferro, Consciousness and the Mind of God , pp. 256–71.

For criticism of Jantzen on this score, see Taliaferro, ibid .,pp. 249ff., especially his note on p. 249 for further references.

Charles Taliaferro, Consciousness and the Mind of God .

Ibid., pp. 233–34.

Richard Swinburne, The Coherence of Theism , pp. 101ff.

Patrick Sherry, “Spirits , Saints , and Immortality (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1984), p. 13. For a lengthy response to Sherry’s objection, see Taliaferro, ibid .,pp. 264ff.

Taliaferro, Consciousness and the Mind of God ,p. 266.

This issue is discussed at length in Chapter VII. Using some kind of replica body theory might help integrated dualism answer this question.

Taliaferro, Consciousness and the Mind of God ,pp. 335–36.

Taliaferro’s integrated dualism seems somewhat akin to Alfred North Whitehead’s consequent nature of God — a kinship that can only be noted here.

Alvin Plantinga, God and Other Minds (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1967), pp. 29ff. 704 Ibid . p. 27.

It should be noted that Kant raises a number of different objections to the ontological argument, of which “existence is not a predicate” is just one. For a full discussion of Kant’s different objections, see Plantinga, ibid ., pp. 29ff., and J. L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism , pp. 43ff.

Plantinga, God and Other Minds , pp. 30–31.

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason , translated by Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1963).

Mackie, The Miracle of Theism , p. 46. Mackie follows W. C. Kneale on this point. See W. C. Kneale, “Is Existence a Predicate?” in Readings in Philosophical Analysis , edited by Herbert Feigl and Wilfrid Sellars (New York: Appleton-Century-Croft, 1949).

Mackie, ibid ., pp. 46–47.

Plantinga, God and Other Minds , p. 32.

Some would say, following Quine, that the ontological question of what “really” exists is nonsensical and is replaced by the question of the ontological commitment of a particular language.

Ibid., p. 47.

Graham Oppy, Ontological Arguments and Belief in God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 33ff. This volume contains the most complete annotated bibliography on the ontological argument available, pp. 200ff.

Mackie, The Miracle of Theism , pp. 42–43. This is a modern-day version of Gaunilo’s objection that a perfect island would necessarily have to exist.

Oppy, Ontological Arguments and Belief in God , pp. 48–49.

For further discussion of the issue of whether existence can be a predicate, see the articles by Bertrand Russell and Jerome Shaffer in The Many-Faced Argument , edited by John Hick and Arthur McGill (London: Macmillan, 1968), pp. 219–45.

For example, a version of the ontological argument that is now receiving some attention is the one that was found in the unpublished papers of Kurt Gödel. Gödel’s original version appears in his Collected Works , Volume 3, edited by S. Feferman et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). For critical comments, see C. Anthony Anderson, “Some Emendations of Gödel’s Ontological Argument,” Faith and Philosophy , Vol. 7, 1990, pp. 291–303; Graham Oppy, “Gödelian Ontological Arguments,” Analysis , Vol. 56, 1996, pp. 226–30; and C. Anthony Anderson and Michael Gettings, “Gödel’s Ontological Proof Revisited,” in Lecture Notes in Logic 6: Gödel ‘86 , edited by Petr Hhjek (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1996), pp. 167–72.

Charles Hartshorne, “The Necessarily Existent,” in Man’s Vision of God (New York: Harper and Row, 1941), pp. 229–341. Page numbers refer to reprint in The Ontological Argument , edited by Alvin Plantinga (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1965); The Logic of Perfection (LaSalle, ID.: Open Court, 1962); and Anselm’s Discovery (LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1965). Norman Malcolm, “Anselm’s Ontological Arguments,” Philosophical Review , Vol. 69, no. 1, January 1960. Reprinted in Malcolm’s Knowledge and Certainty (Englewood, Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963), to which the page numbers here refer.

Whether Anslem intended to present two different arguments in Chapter 3 or whether he intended to be exploring the attributes of the being whose existence he had established in Chapter 2 is an intriguing question of historical exegesis. However, the main substantive issue is not whether the modal version of the argument can be attributed to Anseem but whether a sound modal version of the argument can be formulated.

Hartshorne, The Logic of Perfection , p. 58.

Hartshorne, “The Necessarily Existent,” p. 124.

Ibid., p. 135.

See Hartshorne, The Logic of Perfection , pp. 50–51.

John Hick has objected that Anselm intended “necessary” to mean “ontological necessity” rather than “logical necessity.” See his “A Critique of the `Second Argument,”` in John Hick and Arthus C. McGill, The Many-Faced Argument (New York: Macmillan, 1967).

For an introduction to these modal systems, see G. E. Hughes and M. J. Creswell, An Introduction to Modal Logic (London: Methuen and Company, 1968).

Hartshorne, The Logic of Perfection , p. 60.

Ibid., p. 46.

See ibid., p. 63.

Ibid., pp. 63ff.

Hartshorne thinks that admitting potentiality in God for future concrete states actually strengthens the case for regarding God’s existence as necessary. See ibid ., pp. 63–68.

Norman Malcolm, “Anselm’s Ontological Arguments,” p. 146.

As with Hartshorne, there is significant controversy over Malcolm’s interpretation of Anselm. See, for example, Clement Dore, Theism (Dordrecht, Netherlands: D. Reidel, 1984), pp. 144ff.

Ibid ., pp. 149–50.

Richard Gale takes Malcolm to be offering two different versions of Anselm’s “second” proof, but it seems more likely that Malcolm intended his comments to be simply elaborations of a single modal proof. At any rate, the differences are not great. For Gale’s formalizations of Malcolm’s modal proof(s), see his On the Nature and Existence of God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 209ff. Compare Keith E. Yandell, Basic Issues in the Philosophy of Religion (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, Inc., 1971), pp. 101ff.

Norman Malcolm, “Anselm’s Ontological Arguments,” pp. 149 and 150.

For criticisms of Malcolm on this point, see W. Baumer, “Anse1m, Truth, and Necessary Being,” Philosophy , Vol. 37, 1962, pp. 257–58, and Terrence Penelhum, “Some Recent Discussions of the Traditional Proofs — The Ontological Argument,” in Religion and Rationality (New York: Random House, 1971), pp. 365–72. For discussion of other responses, see Oppy, Ontological Arguments and Belief in God , pp. 211–12.

While modality may apply to other attributes of God, I take “modally perfect being” as shorthand for perfection solely in terms of existence.

For a detailed treatment of the relationship between the ontological and cosmological arguments for Hartshorne, see H. G. Hubbeling, “Hartshorne and the Ontological Argument,” in The Philosophy of Charles Hartshorne , edited by Lewis Edwin Hahn (LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1991), pp. 367ff.

Clement Dore, Theism , Chapter 6.

Norman Malcolm, “Anselm’s Ontological Arguments,” p. 159.

Dore, Theism , pp. 70ff.

Paul Henle, “Uses of the Ontological Argument,” Philosophical Review , Vol. 70, 1961, pp. 102ff.

For monotheists, it is crucial then to argue that there is one and only one necessarily existent being, a part of the argument that is frequently neglected. For a generalized version of Henle’s point, see R. Kane, “The Modal Ontological Argument,” Mind , Vol. 93, 1984, pp. 336–50. Kane shows that it is easy to use the modal argument to populate the universe with an infinite number of necessarily existent but slightly less than perfect beings. See Oppy, Ontological Arguments and Belief in God , pp. 171ff., for discussion of this development.

Dore, Theism , p. 74.

Ibid., pp. 74–75.

J. N. Findlay, “Can God’s Existence Be Disproved,” in New Essays in Philosophical Theology , edited by Antony Flew and Alasdair Maclntyre (London: SCM Press, 1955), pp. 47–75. This article is widely reprinted in different anthologies.

Ibid., p. 52.

Ibid., p. 54.

For a detailed and formalized treatment of Findlay’s disproof, see Bowman Clarke, “Modal Disproofs and Proofs for God,” Southern Journal of Philosophy , fall 1971, pp. 247–58. As Clarke notes, Findlay’s objection amounts to a modal extension of the Hume-Kant objection to Anselm’s version of the ontological argument.

See John Hick, “A Critique of the `Second Argument,”` p. 343.

See Alvin Plantinga, God and Other Minds , p. 174. Plantinga is correct that statements of mathematics are a priori for Kant, but they are not logically true in the sense that Malcolm and Hartshorne claim that “God exists” is logically true. While Kant’s distinction between analytic and synthetic statements does not map neatly onto contemporary uses of “necessarily true” and “logically true,” it seems that the modal versions of the ontological argument discussed so far would have us understand “God exists” as analytic a priori in the sense of analytic that depends upon essential predication. For further discussion, see Jerome Shaffer, “Existence, Predication, and the Ontological Argument,” in The Many-Faced Argument , edited by John Hick and Arthur McGill, pp. 244–45.

Alvin Plantinga, The Nature of Necessity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), p. 213. This claim of Plantinga’s is ambiguous. What Hartshorne and Malcolm have shown is that a being necessarily exists (exists in all possible worlds) and that this same being has perfection in at least one possible world. So we should understand Plantinga’s claim to mean that while a necessarily existing being exists in this actual world, this world may not be the one in which it has perfection. The following description of Plantinga’s argument follows pp. 214–217.

Ibid., pp. 213–14.

See ibid ., pp. 220–21.

Michael Tooley, “Plantinga’s Defence of the Ontological Argument,” Mind , Vol. 90, 1981, p. 424.

Ibid., p. 425–26.

Richard Gale, On the Nature and Existence of God , pp. 227–28. L60 Ibid ., p. 229.

J. L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism , pp. 57ff.

For Plantinga’s discussion of world-indexed properties, see The Nature of Necessity ,pp. 62ff.

Edwards’s introduction to this section (pp. 372ff.) is particularly illuminating. The debate is also reprinted in The Existence of God , edited by John Hick (New York: Macmillan, 1964).

J. L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism , p. 60.

Kant, of course, argued just the converse, namely, that the cosmological argument depends upon the ontological argument.

For various forms of the cosmological argument, see William L. Craig, The Cosmological Argument from Plato to Liebniz (London: Macmillan, 1980).

William L. Rowe, The Cosmological Argument (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975), p. 7; Richard Gale, On the Nature and Existence of God , Chapter 7; J. L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism , Chapter 5.

Bertrand Russell and F. C. Copleston, “The Existence of God — A Debate,” a 1948 program of the British Broadcasting Corporation, reprinted in A Modern Introduction to Philosophy , edited by Paul Edwards and Arthur Pap (New York: The Free Press, 1957), p. 473. Edwards’s introduction to this section (pp. 372ff.) is particularly illuminating. The debate is also reprinted in The Existence of God ,edited by John Hick (New York: Macmillan, 1964).

This is essentially the same point made by Ronald W. Hepburn, Christianity and Paradox (London: Watts Publishing, 1958), pp. 167–68.

See William L. Rowe, “Two Criticisms of the Cosmological Argument,” The Monist , Vol. 54, no. 3, 1970. Reprinted in Philosophy of Religion: Selected Readings , Third Edition, edited by William L. Rowe and William J. Wainwright (Fort Worth, Tex.: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1973). Page numbers refer to this reprint.

The most thorough discussion of PSR and examples of how different versions of the cosmological argument rely upon different versions of PSR are found in William L. Rowe, “The Cosmological Argument and the Principle of Sufficient Reason,” Man and World , Vol. 1, no. 2, 1968. Reprinted in William L. Rowe, The Cosmological Argument , pp. 60–114.

Compare J. L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism , p. 82, and Rowe, ibid ., 145.

Bruce Reichenbach explicitly states the form of the PSR that he thinks the cosmological argument requires as one that says that all contingent beings require a sufficient explanation for their existence. See Bruce Reichenbach, The Cosmological Argument: A Reassessment (Springfield, Ill.: Charles C. Thomas, 1972), p. 68.

William L. Rowe, “Two Criticisms of the Cosmological Argument,” pp. 151ff.

Ibid., 152.

See William L. Rowe, The Cosmological Argument ,pp. 100–101.

There are other difficulties as well with Rowe’s defense of the PSR on this score. See Richard Gale, On the Existence and Nature of God , pp. 259ff.

Bruce Reichenbach, The Cosmological Argument: A Reassessment , p. 69, and J. L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism , p. 85. Given Kant’s attack on the ontological argument, it is ironic that Reichenbach likens the PSR to the principle of causality and then gives a very Kantian defense of it.

Richard Swinburne, The Existence of God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), Chapter 7.

Ibid., p. 130.

Swinburne also develops an inductive version of the teleological argument for the existence of God. These probabilistic arguments, along with miracles and religious experience, are parts of Swinburne’s “cumulative case” for the existence of God.

See, for example, J. L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism , pp. 95ff.

There are many scientific descriptions available of the big bang. The description here is a synthesis of the most commonly accepted current theories and draws primarily upon a popular college textbook for astronomy and cosmology, George Abell, David Morrison, and Sidney Wolff, Exploring the Universe, Fifth Edition, (Philadelphia, Pa.: Saunders College Publishing, 1987), Chapter 37, pp. 656–76. For a very lay-accessible account, see also James S. Trefil, The Moment of Creation (New York: Macmillan, 1983), Chapter 1. For descriptions of the big bang employed by philosophers of religion, see Quentin Smith, “The Uncaused Beginning of the Universe,” and “Atheism, Theism, and Big Bang Cosmology,” in Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology, William Lang Craig and Quentin Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), and Kenneth Nelson, “Evolution and the Argument from Design,” Religious Studies, Vol. 14, 1978, pp. 427–28.

There are many explanations of this development for the layperson. A very popular recent source is Brain Greene, The Elegant Universe (New York: Vintage Books, 1999), pp. 82ff. Einstein later was to say that introducing the ad hoc adjustment to relativity theory to ensure a static universe was the biggest mistake of his life.

For a more detailed scientific description of the big bang, see Abell et al., Exploring the Universe, pp. 665ff. The version discussed here is what physicists call the “standard model” of the big bang.

An interesting point here involves the problem of the perspective of any theoretical observer that epistemologists (but probably not physicists) will find interesting. The common conception of the big bang where one imagines a bright flash of light in distant space will not work. Since all of the mass of the universe was contained in the original singularity, there was no “outside” to the big bang. The big bang occupied all of existing space and would have to be imagined more like a sudden bright flash of the entire visual field.

Abell et al., Exploring the Universe p. 247.

Planck time is named after Max Planck, who is credited with a major role in developing quantum theory.

Some physicists think that superstring theory is a candidate for a theory that will unify general relativity and quantum theory by piercing the Planck limit on the supermicroscopic level. However, even superstring theory is not proffered as a way of piercing the Planck limit in regards to the big bang. See Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe .

Stephen Hawking, `Breakdown of Predictability in Gravitational Collapse,“ Physical Review Vol. D14, 1976, p. 2460. Quoted by Quentin Smith in ”Atheism, Theism, and Big Bang Cosmology,“ in Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology p. 198.

Paul Davies, The Edge of Infinity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981), p. 161.

For example, Stephen Hawking thinks that his oscillating view of the universe is preferable to the standard big bang model — in part, at least — because it has no beginning and thus, in contrast to the standard big bang model, does not leave a gap for the beginning of space-time, which allows an appeal to God. See Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York, Bantam Books, 1988).

See William Lane Craig, The Kalâm Cosmological Argument (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), and “The Caused Beginning of the Universe,” in Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology . Craig borrows the name “kalâm” for his version of the cosmological from the movement in Islam comparable to natural theology in the Western, Judeo-Christian tradition.

William Lane Craig, “Scientific Confirmation of the Cosmological Argument,” in Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology edited by Louis P. Pojman, pp. 38ff.

Ibid., p. 38.

Ibid., p. 39.

Paul Draper, “A Critique of the Kalâm Cosmological Argument,” in Louis P. Pojman, Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology edited by Louis P. Pojman, pp. 42–47.

Quentin Smith, “The Uncaused Beginning of the Universe,” in Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology, p. 123. For a full discussion concerning the caused vs. uncaused — the theistic vs. the atheistic — interpretations of the big bang theory, which space here does not permit, see the exchange between Craig and Smith in Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology.

Craig, “Scientific Confirmation of the Cosmological Argument,” p. 39.

For a more detailed treatment of the notion of an uncaused big bang, see Quentin Smith, “The Uncaused Beginning of the Universe,” pp. 125ff.

See above and Richard Swinburne, The Existence of God pp. 130–32.

See Smith, “The Uncaused Beginning of the Universe,” pp. 201–202. Compare Richard Swinburne, The Existence of God pp. 145–51.

Parallel issues involve the cosmological argument as well. See John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1986), especially section 2.9, pp. 103ff.

The coining of the phrase “the anthropic principle” is usually attributed to Brandon Carter in 1974.

Alfred Russel Wallace, Man’s Place in the Universe (New York: McClure, Phillips and Co., 1903).

See Brandon Carter, “The Anthropic Principle and Large Number Coincidences,” in Confrontation of Cosmological Theories with Observation edited by M. S. Longair (Dordecht, Netherlands: D. Reidel Publishers, 1974).

John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Argument (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 16ff. This book provides the most complete account of the anthropic principle available.

For example, it is claimed that if the rate of expansion of the universe had been reduced by one part in a million million, the universe would have collapsed upon itself. For a discussion of this and other such conditions, see John Leslie, “Anthropic Principle, World Ensemble, Design,” American Philosophical Quarterly Vol. 19, no. 2, 1982, pp. 141ff. See also Barrow and Tipler, ibid . pp. 288ff.

Barrow and Tipler, ibid . p. 21.

M. A. Corey, God and the New Cosmology: The Anthropic Design Argument (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 1993), pp. 205–15. Corey gives significant weight to the fact that some scientists, such as Stephen Hawking and Paul Davies, allow for some notion of principle of design to account for the initial conditions of the universe. Compare Corey’s restrained comments about scientists with the exaggerated comments of William Craig, “Theism and Physical Cosmology,” in A Companion to Philosophy of Religion edited by Philip L. Quinn and Charles Taliaferro, p. 422.

Richard Swinbume, The Existence of God p. 138.

For further discussion of the probability of the set of initial conditions of the universe, see John Earman, “The SAP Also Rises: A Critical Examination of the Anthropic Principle,” American Philosophical Quarterly, Vol . 24, no. 4, 1987, pp. 309.

The notion of a world ensemble is now common and was first used by Brandon Carter, “The Anthropic Principle and Large Number Coincidences,” and G. Steigman, “Confrontation of Antimatter Cosmologies with Observational Data,” also in Confrontation of Cosmological Theories with Observational Data edited by M. S. Longair.

There are many discussions of the competing interpretations of quantum mechanics. For a very accessible account, see Paul Davies, Other Worlds (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980), pp. 145ff. Also see M. A. Corey, God and the New Cosmology pp. 175ff. For a discussion of the less accepted many-worlds interpretation of Hugh Everett, according to which observers select the actual world in which they live by their presence from many actual worlds, see The Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics edited by Bryce S. DeWitt and Neill Graham (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973).

Corey recognizes that intelligent observers might be whales or dolphins or “human-like” creatures on other planets. M. A. Corey, God and the New Cosmology p. 7.

John Farman, “The SAP Also Rises: A Critical Examination of the Anthropic Principle,” pp. 308 and 313.

FAP was first formulated by Barrow and Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle p. 23. Their Ultimate Observer (p. 471) is reminiscent of Berkeley’s use of God as the Eternal Perceiver in his idealism. As a corollary to the effect of the observer in quantum physics, PAP was first suggested by John Wheeler, “Genesis and Observership,” in Foundational Problems in the Special Sciences edited by R. E. Butts and J. Hintikka (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Reidel, 1977). For discussions of FAP and PAP. see Earman, ibid . pp. 312ff., and Corey, ibid., pp. 3–4, 167–68, and 185–88. Ignored in much of the discussion is Wheeler’s disclaimer that PAP is “too frail” to withstand criticism and Barrow and Tipler’s disclaimer that FAP and SAP are “quite speculative.”

John Earman, ibid . p. 313.

Martin Gardner, “WAP, SAP, FAP, and PAP,” New York Review of Books Vol. 33, no. 8, 1986, Pp. 22–25.

See Earman, “The SAP Also Rises: A Critical Examination of the Anthropic Principle,” pp. 309 and 313ff., for a discussion of anthropic explanation.

Richard Swinburne, The Existence of God p. 138.

There is also the additional problem raised by Richard Gale of whether one can reasonably use argument to the best explanation to make a prediction about the past based upon evidence from that past’s own future. But there is a goose and gander problem here. If the use of argument to the best explanation is problematic for AP, then it is as well for a theistic explanation of the universe. See Richard Gale, “The Anthropic Principle,” Scientific American Vol. 245, 1981, pp. 157. Also see, M. A. Corey, God and the New Cosmology pp. 209ff.

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Harris, J.F. (2002). The Nature of God and Arguments for the Existence of God. In: Analytic Philosophy of Religion. Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy of Religion, vol 3. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0719-0_3

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Unit 2: Metaphysics

Aquinas’s Five Proofs for the Existence of God

St. Mary's Press

The Summa Theologica is a famous work written by Saint Thomas Aquinas between AD 1265 and 1274. It is divided into three main parts and covers all of the core theological teachings of Aquinas’s time. One of the questions the Summa Theologica is well known for addressing is the question of the existence of God. Aquinas responds to this question by offering the following five proofs:

1. The Argument from Motion: Our senses can perceive motion by seeing that things act on one another. Whatever moves is moved by something else. Consequently, there must be a First Mover that creates this chain reaction of motions. This is God. God sets all things in motion and gives them their potential.

2. The Argument from Efficient Cause: Because nothing can cause itself, everything must have a cause or something that creates an effect on another thing. Without a first cause, there would be no others. Therefore, the First Cause is God.

3. The Argument from Necessary Being: Because objects in the world come into existence and pass out of it, it is possible for those objects to exist or not exist at any particular time. However, nothing can come from nothing. This means something must exist at all times. This is God.

4. The Argument from Gradation: There are different degrees of goodness in different things. Following the “Great Chain of Being,” which states there is a gradual increase in complexity, created objects move from unformed inorganic matter to biologically complex organisms. Therefore, there must be a being of the highest form of good. This perfect being is God.

5. The Argument from Design: All things have an order or arrangement that leads them to a particular goal. Because the order of the universe cannot be the result of chance, design and purpose must be at work. This implies divine intelligence on the part of the designer. This is God.

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Theses and Dissertations

The divine nature of god: a study of what has been said and taught about the divine nature of god by ancient and modern apostles and prophets.

Lester Young Moody , Brigham Young University - Provo

In this thesis prominent teachings of the apostles and prophets were examined on the subject of the divine nature of God. These teachings indicate that among the elements of the divine nature of God is his Holy Spirit, his glory or the light which emanates from his person. God's glory, spirit and light were compared and analyzed to determine their relationship to each other. It was found that they perform the same roles and functions and are often used synonymously. Other aspects of the divine nature were examined, such as life, love, truth and goodness. The terms omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence were studied in light of statements made by the apostles and prophets. They show that God is omnipotent in the sense that he has all the power that it is possible to have, and that he is omniscient in that he knows the past, present and future. Even though God has an organized, glorified and spiritual body of flesh and bone, he is nevertheless omnipresent through the ubiquity of his divine nature and is in and through all things.

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Moody, Lester Young, "The Divine Nature of God: A Study of What has Been Said and Taught About the Divine Nature of God by Ancient and Modern Apostles and Prophets" (1973). Theses and Dissertations . 4954. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/4954

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Descartes’ Ontological Argument

Descartes’ ontological (or a priori ) argument is both one of the most fascinating and poorly understood aspects of his philosophy. Fascination with the argument stems from the effort to prove God’s existence from simple but powerful premises. Existence is derived immediately from the clear and distinct idea of a supremely perfect being. Ironically, the simplicity of the argument has also produced several misreadings, exacerbated in part by Descartes’ tendency to formulate it in different ways.

The main statement of the argument appears in the Fifth Meditation. This comes on the heels of an earlier causal argument for God’s existence in the Third Meditation, raising questions about the order and relation between these two distinct proofs. Descartes repeats the ontological argument in a few other central texts including the Principles of Philosophy . He also defends it in the First, Second, and Fifth Replies against scathing objections by some of the leading intellectuals of his day.

Descartes was not the first philosopher to formulate an ontological argument. An earlier version of the argument had been vigorously defended by St. Anselm in the eleventh century, and then criticized by a monk named Gaunilo (Anselm’s contemporary) and later by St. Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas’ critique was regarded as so devastating that the ontological argument died out for several centuries. It thus came as a surprise to Descartes’ contemporaries that he should attempt to resurrect it. Although he claims not to be familiar with Anselm’s version of the proof, Descartes appears to craft his own argument so as to block traditional objections.

Despite similarities, Descartes’ version of the argument differs from Anselm’s in important ways. The latter’s version is thought to proceed from the meaning of the word “God,” by definition, God is a being a greater than which cannot be conceived. Descartes’ argument, in contrast, is grounded in two central tenets of his philosophy — the theory of innate ideas and the doctrine of clear and distinct perception. He purports to rely not on an arbitrary definition of God but rather on an innate idea whose content is “given.” Descartes’ version is also extremely simple. God’s existence is inferred directly from the fact that necessary existence is contained in the clear and distinct idea of a supremely perfect being. Indeed, on some occasions he suggests that the so-called ontological “argument” is not a formal proof at all but a self-evident axiom grasped intuitively by a mind free of philosophical prejudice.

Descartes often compares the ontological argument to a geometric demonstration, arguing that necessary existence cannot be excluded from idea of God anymore than the fact that its angles equal two right angles, for example, can be excluded from the idea of a triangle. The analogy underscores once again the argument’s supreme simplicity. God’s existence is purported to be as obvious and self-evident as the most basic mathematical truth. It also attempts to show how the “logic” of the demonstration is rooted in our ordinary reasoning practices.

In the same context, Descartes also characterizes the ontological argument as a proof from the “essence” or “nature” of God, arguing that necessary existence cannot be separated from the essence of a supremely perfect being without contradiction. In casting the argument in these terms, he is implicitly relying on a traditional medieval distinction between a thing’s essence and its existence. According to this tradition, one can determine what something is (i.e. its essence), independently of knowing whether it exists. This distinction appears useful to Descartes’ aims, some have thought, because it allows him to specify God’s essence without begging the question of his existence.

1. The Simplicity of the “Argument”

2. the distinction between essence and existence, 3. objections and replies, primary texts, secondary texts, other internet resources, related entries.

One of the hallmarks of Descartes’ version of the ontological argument is its simplicity. Indeed, it reads more like the report of an intuition than a formal proof. Descartes underscores the simplicity of his demonstration by comparing it to the way we ordinarily establish very basic truths in arithmetic and geometry, such as that the number two is even or that the sum of the angles of a triangle is equal to the sum of two right angles. We intuit such truths directly by inspecting our clear and distinct ideas of the number two and of a triangle. So, likewise, we are able to attain knowledge of God’s existence simply by apprehending that necessary existence is included in the clear and distinct idea of a supremely perfect being. As Descartes writes in the Fifth Meditation:

[1] But if the mere fact that I can produce from my thought the idea of something entails that everything which I clearly and distinctly perceive to belong to that thing really does belong to it, is not this a possible basis for another argument to prove the existence of God? Certainly, the idea of God, or a supremely perfect being, is one that I find within me just as surely as the idea of any shape or number. And my understanding that it belongs to his nature that he always exists is no less clear and distinct than is the case when I prove of any shape or number that some property belongs to its nature (AT 7:65; CSM 2:45).

One is easily misled by the analogy between the ontological argument and a geometric demonstration, and by the language of “proof” in this passage and others like it. Descartes does not conceive of the ontological argument on the model of an Euclidean or axiomatic proof, in which theorems are derived from epistemically prior axioms and definitions. On the contrary, he is drawing our attention to another method of establishing truths that informs our ordinary practices and is non-discursive. This method employs intuition or, what is the same for Descartes, clear and distinct perception. It consists in unveiling the contents of our clear and distinct ideas. The basis for this method is the rule for truth, which was previously established in the Fourth Meditation. According to the version of this rule invoked in the Fifth Meditation, whatever I clearly and distinctly perceive to be contained in the idea of something is true of that thing. So if I clearly and distinctly perceive that necessary existence pertains to the idea of a supremely perfect being, then such a being truly exists.

Although Descartes maintains that God’s existence is ultimately known through intuition, he is not averse to presenting formal versions of the ontological argument. He never forgets that he is writing for a seventeenth-century audience, steeped in scholastic logic, that would have expected to be engaged at the level of the Aristotelian syllogism. Descartes satisfies such expectations, presenting not one but at least two separate versions of the ontological argument. These proofs, however, are stunningly brief and betray his true intentions. One version of the argument simply codifies the psychological process by which one intuits God’s existence, in the manner described above:

Version A : Whatever I clearly and distinctly perceive to be contained in the idea of something is true of that thing. I clearly and distinctly perceive that necessary existence is contained in the idea of God. Therefore, God exists.

The rule for truth appears here in the guise of the first premise, but it is more naturally read as a statement of Descartes’ own alternative method of “demonstration” via clear and distinct perception or intuition. In effect, the first “premise” is designed to instruct the meditator on how to apply this method, the same role that the analogy with a geometric demonstration serves in passage [1].

When presenting this version of the argument in the First Replies, Descartes sets aside this first premise and focuses our attention on the second. In so doing, he is indicating the relative unimportance of the proof itself. Having learned how to apply Descartes’ alternative method of reasoning, one need only perceive that necessary existence pertains to the idea of a supremely perfect being. Once one attains this perception, formal arguments are no longer required; God’s existence will be self-evident (Second Replies, Fifth Postulate; AT 7:163–4; CSM 2:115).

Descartes sometimes uses traditional arguments as heuristic devices, not merely to appease a scholastically trained audience but to help induce clear and distinct perceptions. This is evident for example in the version of the ontological argument standardly associated with his name:

Version B : I have an idea of supremely perfect being, i.e. a being having all perfections. Necessary existence is a perfection. Therefore, a supremely perfect being exists.

While this set of sentences has the surface structure of a formal argument, its persuasive force lies at a different level. A meditator who is having trouble perceiving that necessary existence is contained in the idea of a supreme perfect being can attain this perception indirectly by first recognizing that this idea includes every perfection. Indeed, the idea of a supremely perfect being just is the idea of a being having all perfections. To attempt to exclude any or all perfections from the idea of a supremely being, Descartes observes, involves one in a contradiction and is akin to conceiving a mountain without a valley (or, better, an up-slope without a down-slope). Having formed this perception, one need only intuit that necessary existence is itself a perfection. It will then be clear that necessary existence is one of the attributes included in the idea of a supremely perfect being.

While such considerations might suffice to induce the requisite clear and distinct perception in the meditator, Descartes is aiming a deeper point, namely that there is a conceptual link between necessary existence and each of the other divine perfections. It is important to recall that in the Third Meditation, in the midst of the causal argument for the existence of God, the meditator already discovered many of these perfections — omnipotence, omniscience, immutability, eternality, simplicity, etc. Because our mind is finite, we normally think of the divine perfections separately and “hence may not immediately notice the necessity of their being joined together” (First Replies, AT 7:119; CSM 2:85). But if we attend carefully to “whether existence belongs to a supremely perfect being, and what sort of existence it is” we shall discover that we cannot conceive any one of the other attributes while excluding necessary existence from it (ibid.).

To illustrate this point Descartes appeals to divine omnipotence. He thinks that we cannot conceive an omnipotent being except as existing. Descartes’ illustration presupposes the traditional, medieval understanding of “necessary existence.” When speaking of this divine attribute, he sometimes uses the term “existence” simpliciter as shorthand. But in his more careful pronouncements he always insists on the phrase “necessary and eternal existence,” which resonates with tradition. Medieval, scholastic philosophers often spoke of God as the sole “necessary being,” by which they meant a being who depends only on himself for his existence. This is the notion of “aseity” or self-existence ( a se esse ). Since such a being does not depend on anything else for its existence, he has neither a beginning nor an end, but is eternal. Returning to the discussion in the First Replies, one can see how omnipotence is linked conceptually to necessary existence in this traditional sense. An omnipotent or all-powerful being does not depend ontologically on anything (for if it did then it would not be omnipotent). It exists by its own power:

[2] when we attend to immense power of this being, we shall be unable to think of its existence as possible without also recognizing that it can exist by its own power; and we shall infer from this that this being does really exist and has existed from eternity, since it is quite evident by the natural light that what can exist by its own power always exists. So we shall come to understand that necessary existence is contained in the idea of a supremely perfect being …. ( ibid .)

Some readers have thought that Descartes offers yet a third version of the ontological argument in this passage (Wilson, 1978, 174–76), but whether or not that was his intention is unimportant, since his primary aim, as indicated in the last line, is to enable his meditator to intuit that necessary existence is included in the idea of God. Since there is a conceptual link between the divine attributes, a clear and distinct perception of one provides a cognitive route to any of the others.

Although Descartes sometimes uses formal versions of the ontological argument to achieve his aims, he consistently affirms that God’s existence is ultimately known through clear and distinct perception. The formal versions of the argument are merely heuristic devices, to be jettisoned once one has attained the requisite intuition of a supremely perfect being. Descartes stresses this point explicitly in the Fifth Meditation, immediately after presenting the two versions of the argument considered above:

[3] whatever method of proof I use, I am always brought back to the fact that it is only what I clearly and distinctly perceive that completely convinces me. Some of the things I clearly and distinctly perceive are obvious to everyone, while others are discovered only by those who look more closely and investigate more carefully; but once they have been discovered, the latter are judged to be just as certain as the former. In the case of a right-angled triangle, for example, the fact that the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the square on the other two sides is not so readily apparent as the fact that the hypotenuse subtends the largest angle; but once one has seen it, one believes it just as strongly. But as regards God, if I were not overwhelmed by philosophical prejudices, and if the images of things perceived by the senses did not besiege my thought on every side, I would certainly acknowledge him sooner and more easily than anything else. For what is more manifest than the fact that the supreme being exists, or that God, to whose essence alone existence belongs, exists? (AT 7:68–69; CSM 2:47)

Here Descartes develops his earlier analogy between the (so-called) ontological argument and a geometric demonstration. He suggests that there are some meditators for whom God’s existence is immediately manifest; for them God’s existence is akin to an axiom or definition in geometry, such as that the hypotenuse of a right triangle subtends its largest angle. But other meditators, whose minds are confused and mired in sensory images, must work much harder, and might even require a proof to attain the requisite clear and distinct perception. For them, God’s existence is akin to the Pythagorean Theorem. The important point is that both kinds of meditators ultimately attain knowledge of God’s existence by clearly and distinctly perceiving that necessary existence is contained in the idea of supremely perfect being. Once one has achieved this perception, God’s existence will be manifest or, as Descartes says elsewhere, “self-evident” ( per se notam ) (Second Replies, Fifth Postulate; AT 7: 164; CSM 2:115).

Descartes’ contemporaries would have been surprised by this last remark. While reviewing an earlier version of the ontological argument, Aquinas had rejected the claim that God’s existence is self-evident, at least with respect to us. He argued that what is self-evident cannot be denied without contradiction, but God’s existence can be denied. Indeed, the proverbial fool says in his heart “There is no God” (Psalm 53.1).

When confronted with this criticism by a contemporary objector, Descartes tries to find common ground: “St. Thomas asks whether existence is self-evident as far as we are concerned, that is, whether it is obvious to everyone; and he answers, correctly, that it is not” (First Replies, AT 7:115; CSM 2:82). Descartes interprets Aquinas to be claiming that God’s existence is not self-evident to everyone , which is something with which he can agree. Descartes does not hold that God’s existence is immediately self-evident, or self-evident to everyone, but that it can become self-evident to some careful and industrious meditators.

In the Fifth Meditation and elsewhere Descartes says that God’s existence follows from the fact that existence is contained in the “true and immutable essence, nature, or form” of a supremely perfect being, just as it follows from the essence of a triangle that its angles equal two right angles. This way of putting the a priori argument has puzzled commentators and has led to a lively debate about the ontological status of Cartesian essences and the objects which are purported to “have” them. Some commentators have thought that Descartes is committed to a species of Platonic realism. According to this view, some objects that fall short of actual existence nevertheless subsist as abstract, logical entities outside the mind and beyond the physical world (Kenny, 1968; Wilson, 1978). Another commentator places Cartesian essences in God (Schmaltz 1991), while two recent revisionist interpretations (Chappell, 1997; Nolan, 1997) read Descartes as a conceptualist who takes essences to be ideas in human minds.

Descartes’ reference to “essences” raises another important issue more directly related to the ontological argument. In claiming that necessary existence cannot be excluded from the essence of God, Descartes is drawing on the traditional medieval distinction between essence and existence. According to this distinction, one can say what something is (i.e. its essence), prior to knowing whether it exists. So, for example, one can define what a horse is — enumerating all of its essential properties — before knowing whether there are any horses in the world. The only exception to this distinction was thought to be God himself, whose essence just is to exist. It is easy to see how this traditional distinction could be exploited by a defender of the ontological argument. Existence is included in the essence of a supremely perfect being, but not in the essence of any finite thing. Thus it follows solely from the essence of the former that such a being actually exists. At times, Descartes appears to support this interpretation of the ontological argument. In the Fifth Replies, for example, he writes that “the existence of a triangle should not be compared with the existence of God, since the relation between existence and essence is manifestly quite different in the case of God from what it is in the case of the triangle. God is his own existence, but this is not true of the triangle” (AT 7:383; CSM 2:263). But Descartes’ complete view is subtler and more sophisticated than these remarks first suggest. Understanding this view requires a more careful investigation of the distinction between essence and existence as it appears in medieval sources. Although one often speaks of the “traditional” distinction, the exact nature of the relation between essence and existence in finite things was the subject of a fierce debate among medieval philosophers. Seeing where Descartes’ position fits within this debate will provide a deeper understanding of his version of the ontological argument.

The distinction between essence and existence can be traced back as far as Boethius in the fifth century. It was later developed by Islamic thinkers such as Avicenna. But the issue did not become a major philosophical problem until it was taken up by Aquinas in the thirteenth century. The issue arose not as part of an effort to establish God’s existence on a priori grounds (as mentioned above, Aquinas was one of the staunchest critics of the ontological argument), but out of concern to distinguish God from finite spiritual entities such as angels. Like many scholastic philosophers, Aquinas believed that God is perfectly simple and that created beings, in contrast, have a composite character that accounts for their finitude and imperfection. Earthly creatures are composites of matter and form (the doctrine of hylomorphism), but since purely spiritual beings are immaterial, Aquinas located their composite character in the distinction between essence and existence.

Some of the details of Aquinas’ account will emerge from our discussion below. The primary interest of his theory for our purposes, however, is that it led to a lively debate among his successors both as to how to interpret the master and about the true nature of the relation between essence and existence in created things. This debate produced three main positions:

The Theory of Real Distinction
The Intermediate Position
The Theory of Rational Distinction

Proponents of the first view conceived the distinction between essence and existence as obtaining between two separate things. In the eyes of many Thomists, this view was considered to be quite radical, especially as an interpretation of Aquinas’ original position. The latter is sometimes expressed by saying that essence and existence are “principles of being” rather than beings themselves. One problem then with the theory of real distinction, at least as espoused by many of Aquinas’ followers, was that it reified essence and existence, treating them as real beings in addition to the created entity that they compose.

The theory of real distinction was also considered objectionable for philosophical reasons. Following Aquinas, many participants in the debate urged that essence and existence are related to each other as potency and act, so that existence can be said to “actualize” essence. On the theory of real distinction, this view leads to an infinite regress. If an essence becomes actual only in virtue of something else — viz. existence — being superadded to it, then what gives existence its reality, and so on ad infinitum ? (Wippel, 1982, 393f).

In response to these difficulties some scholastic philosophers developed a position at the polar extreme from the theory of real distinction. This was the view that there is merely a rational distinction or a “distinction of reason” between essence and existence in created beings. As the term suggests, this theory held that essence and existence of a creature are identical in reality and distinguished only within our thought by means of reason. Needless to say, proponents of this theory were forced to distinguish purely spiritual entities from God on grounds other than real composition.

Giving up the doctrine of real composition seemed too much for another group of thinkers who were also critical of the theory of real distinction. This led to the development of a number of intermediate positions, including Duns Scotus’ curious notion of a formal distinction and the view that essence and existence are modally distinct such that existence constitutes a mode of a thing’s essence.

Like Francisco Suárez, his most immediate scholastic predecessor, Descartes sides with the proponents of a rational distinction between essence and existence. His position is unique, however, insofar as it springs from a more general theory of “attributes”. Articulating this theory in an important passage in the Principles of Philosophy , Descartes claims that there is merely a distinction of reason between a substance and any one of its attributes or between any two attributes of a single substance (1:62, AT 8A:30; CSM 1:214). For Descartes’ purposes, the most significant instance of a rational distinction is that which obtains between a substance and its essence — or what he sometimes refers to as its “principal attribute” (1:53, AT 8A:25; CSM 1:210). Since thought and extension constitute the essence of mind and body, respectively, a mind is merely rationally distinct from its thinking and a body is merely rationally distinct from its extension (1:63, AT 8A:31; CSM 1:215). But Descartes insists that a rational distinction also obtains between any two attributes of a substance. Since existence qualifies as an attribute in this technical sense, the essence and existence of a substance are also distinct merely by reason (1:56, AT 8A:26; CSM 1:211). Descartes reaffirms this conclusion in a letter intended to elucidate his account of the relation between essence and existence:

[4]… existence, duration, size, number and all universals are not, it seems to me, modes in the strict sense …. They are referred to by a broader term and called attributes … because we do indeed understand the essence of a thing in one way when we consider it in abstraction from whether it exists or not, and in a different way when we consider it as existing; but the thing itself cannot be outside our thought without its existence …. Accordingly I say that shape and other similar modes are strictly speaking modally distinct from the substance whose modes they are; but there is a lesser distinction between the other attributes …. I call it a rational distinction …. (To an unknown correspondent, AT 4:349; CSMK 3:280)

Indications are given here as to how a rational distinction is produced in our thought. Descartes explains that we regard a single thing in different abstract ways. Case in point, we can regard a thing as existing, or we can abstract from its existence and attend to its other aspects. In so doing, we have distinguished the existence of a substance from its essence within our thought. Like scholastic proponents of the theory of rational distinction, however, Descartes is keen to emphasize that this distinction is purely conceptual. Indeed, he goes on to explain that the essence and existence of a substance are “in no way distinct” outside thought (AT 4:350; CSMK 3:280). In reality they are identical.

While borrowing much from scholasticism, Descartes’ account is distinguished by its scope of application. He extends the theory of rational distinction from created substances to God. In general, the essence and the existence of a substance are merely rationally distinct, and hence identical in reality.

This result appears to wreak havoc on Descartes’ ontological argument. One of the most important objections to the argument is that if it were valid, one could proliferate such arguments for all sorts of things, including beings whose existence is merely contingent. By supposing that there is merely a rational distinction between essence and existence abroad in all things, Descartes seems to confirm this objection. In general, a substance is to be identified with its existence, whether it is God or a finite created thing.

The problem with this objection, in this instance, is that it assumes that Descartes locates the difference between God and creatures in the relation each of these things bears to its existence. This is not the case. In a few important passages, Descartes affirms that existence is contained in the clear and distinct idea of every single thing, but he also insists that there are different grades of existence:

[5] Existence is contained in the idea or concept of every single thing, since we cannot conceive of anything except as existing. Possible or contingent existence is contained in the concept of a limited thing, whereas necessary and perfect existence is contained in the concept of a supremely perfect being (Axiom 10, Second Replies; AT 7:166; CSM 2:117).

In light of this passage and others like it, we can refine the theory of rational distinction. What one should say, strictly speaking, is that God is merely rationally distinct from his necessary existence, while every finite created thing is merely rationally distinct from its possible or contingent existence. The distinction between possible or contingent existence on the one hand, and necessary existence on the other, allows Descartes to account for the theological difference between God and his creatures.

Now, when Descartes says that a substance (be it finite or infinite) is merely rationally distinct from its existence, he always means an actually existing substance. So how are we to understand the claim that a finite substance is merely rationally distinct from its possible existence? What is meant by “possible (or contingent) existence”? It is tempting to suppose that this term means non-actual existence. But as we saw already with the case of necessary existence, Descartes does not intend these terms in their logical or modal senses. If “necessary existence” means ontologically independent existence, then “possible existence” means something like dependent existence. After all, Descartes contrasts possible existence not with actual existence but with necessary existence in the traditional sense. This account is also suggested by the term “contingent.” Created things are contingent in the sense that they depend for their existence on God, the sole independent being.

This result explains why Descartes believes that we cannot proliferate ontological arguments for created substances. It is not that the relation between essence and existence is any different in God than it is in finite things. In both cases there is merely a rational distinction. The difference is in the grade of existence that attaches to each. Whereas the concept of an independent being entails that such a being exists, the concept of a finite thing entails only that it has dependent existence.

Looking back at the problematic passage cited above from the Fifth Replies, it becomes clear that Descartes intended something along these lines even there. He says that “the existence of a triangle should not be compared with the existence of God”, reinforcing the point that it is the kind of existence involved that makes God unique. And just before this statement, he writes, “in the case of God necessary existence…applies to him alone and forms a part of his essence as it does of no other thing”. Later he adds: “I do not … deny that possible existence is a perfection in the idea of a triangle, just as necessary existence is perfection in the idea of God” (AT 7:383; CSM 2:263). Descartes’ final position then is that essence and existence are identical in all things. What distinguishes God from creatures is his grade of existence. We can produce an ontological argument for God, and not for finite substances, because the idea of a supremely perfect being uniquely contains necessary — or ontologically independent — existence.

Because of its simplicity, Descartes’ version of the ontological argument is commonly thought to be cruder and more obviously fallacious than the one put forward by Anselm in the eleventh century. But when the complete apparatus of the Cartesian system is brought forth, the argument proves itself to be quite resilient, at least on its own terms. Indeed, Descartes’ version is superior to his predecessor’s insofar as it is grounded in a theory of innate ideas and the doctrine of clear and distinct perception. These two doctrines inoculate Descartes from the charge made against Anselm, for example, that the ontological argument attempts to define God into existence by arbitrarily building existence into the concept of a supremely perfect being. In the Third Meditation, the meditator discovers that her idea of God is not a fiction that she has conveniently invented but something native to the mind. As we shall see below, these two doctrines provide the resources for answering other objections as well.

Given our earlier discussion concerning the non-logical status of the ontological argument, it may seem surprising that Descartes would take objections to it seriously. He should be able to dismiss most objections in one neat trick by insisting on the non-logical nature of the demonstration. This is especially true of the objection that the ontological argument begs the question. If God’s existence is ultimately self-evident and known by a simple intuition of the mind, then there are no questions to be begged. Unfortunately, not all of the objections to the ontological argument can be dismissed so handily, for the simple reason that they do not all depend on the assumption that we are dealing with a formal proof.

Although it is often overlooked, many of the best known criticisms of the ontological argument were put to Descartes by official objectors to the Meditations . He in turn responded to these objections — sometimes in lengthy replies — though many contemporary readers have found his responses opaque and unsatisfying. We can better understand his replies and, in some cases, improve upon them by appealing to discussions from previous sections.

One classical objection to the ontological argument, which was first leveled by Gaunilo against Anselm’s version of the proof, is that it makes an illicit logical leap from the mental world of concepts to the real world of things. The claim is that even if we were to concede that necessary existence is inseparable from the idea of God (in Kant’s terms, even if necessary existence were analytic of the concept “God”), nothing follows from this about what does or does not exist in the actual world. Johannes Caterus, the author of the First Set of Objections to the Meditations , puts the point as follows:

[6] Even if it is granted that a supremely perfect being carries the implication of existence in virtue of its very title, it still does not follow that the existence in question is anything actual in the real world; all that follows is that the concept of existence is inseparably linked to the concept of a supreme being. So you cannot infer that the existence of God is anything actual unless you suppose that the supreme being actually exists; for then it will actually contain all perfections, including the perfection of real existence (AT 7:99; CSM 2:72).

To meet this challenge, Descartes must explain how he “bridges” the inferential gap between thought and reality. The principle of clear and distinct perception is intended to do just that. According to this principle, for which he argues in the Fourth Meditation, whatever one clearly and distinctly perceives or understands is true — true not just of ideas but of things in the real world represented by those ideas. Thus, Descartes’ commitment to the principle of clear and distinct perception allows him to elude another objection that had haunted Anselm’s version of the argument.

The previous objection is related to another difficulty raised by Caterus. In order to illustrate that the inference from the mental to the extra-mental commits a logical error, critics have observed that if such inferences were legitimate then we could proliferate ontological arguments for supremely perfect islands, existing lions, and all sorts of things which either do not exist or whose existence is contingent and thus should not follow a priori from their concept. The trick is simply to build existence into the concept. So, while existence does not follow from the concept of lion as such, it does follow from the concept of an “existing lion.”

Descartes’ actual reply to this objection, which he took very seriously, is highly complex and couched in terms of a theory of “true and immutable natures.” We can simplify matters by focusing on its key elements. One of his first moves is to introduce a point that we discussed earlier ( see passage [5] in section 2), namely that existence is contained in the idea of every thing that we clearly and distinctly perceive: possible (or dependent) existence is contained in our clear and distinct idea of every finite thing and necessary (or independent) existence is uniquely contained in the idea of God (AT 7:117; CSM 2:83). So for Descartes one does not have to build existence into the idea of something if that idea is clear and distinct; existence is already included in every clear and distinct idea. But it does not follow that the thing represented by such an idea actually exists, except in the case of God. We cannot produce ontological arguments for finite things for the simple reason that the clear and distinct ideas of them contain merely dependent existence. Actual existence is demanded only by the idea of God, which uniquely contains independent existence.

A natural rejoinder to this reply would be to ask about the idea of a lion having not possible but wholly necessary existence. If Descartes’ method of reasoning were valid, it would seem to follow from this idea that such a creature exists. This formulation of the objection requires Descartes’ second and deeper point, which is only hinted at in his official reply. This is that the idea of a lion — let alone the idea of a lion having necessary existence — is hopelessly obscure and confused. As Descartes says, the nature of a lion is “not transparently clear to us” (Axiom 10, Second Replies; AT 7:117; CSM 2:84). Since this idea is not clear and distinct, the method of demonstration employed in the ontological argument does not apply to it. Recall that the geometrical method of demonstration is grounded in the principle of clear and distinct perception and consists in drawing out the contents of our clear and distinct ideas. If an idea is not clear and distinct then we cannot draw any conclusions from it about things outside thought.

The key difference then between the idea of God on the one hand and the idea of a necessarily existing lion is that the former can be clearly and distinctly perceived. For Descartes, it is just a brute fact that certain ideas can be clearly and distinctly perceived and others cannot. Some critics have charged him with dogmatism in this regard. Why should Descartes be allowed to legislate the scope of our clear and distinct perceptions? Perhaps we can clearly and distinctly perceive something that he could not.

Descartes cannot be saved entirely from this charge, but two important points can be made in his defense. First, he has principled reasons for thinking that everyone has the same set of innate or clear and distinct ideas. When the meditator first proved God’s existence in the Third Meditation, she also established that God is supremely good and hence no deceiver. One consequence of God’s perfect benevolence is that he implanted the same set of innate ideas in all finite minds. Thus, Descartes feels justified in concluding that the limits of his capacity for clear and distinct perception will be shared by everyone.

Second, when responding to objections to the ontological argument such as the ones considered above, Descartes typically does more than insist dogmatically on a unique set of clear and distinct ideas. He also tries to dispel the confusion which he thinks is at the root of the objection. Since the ontological argument ultimately reduces to an axiom, the source of an objection according to Descartes’ diagnosis is the failure of the objector to perceive this axiom clearly and distinctly. Thus, Descartes devotes the bulk of his efforts to trying to remove those philosophical prejudices which are hindering his objector from intuiting the axiom. These efforts are not always obvious, however. Descartes is good at maintaining the pretense of answering criticisms to a formal proof. But his replies to Caterus’ objections to the ontological argument are best read as an extended effort to dispel prejudice and confusion, so as to enable his reader to intuit God’s existence for himself.

Let us return for a moment to the objection that the ontological argument slides illicitly from the mental to the extramental realm. We have seen how Descartes responds to it, but it is related to another objection that has come to be associated with Leibniz. Leibniz claims that Descartes’ version of the ontological argument is incomplete. It shows merely that if God’s existence is possible or non-contradictory, then God exists. But it fails to demonstrate the antecedent of this conditional (Robert Adams 1998, 135). To reinforce this objection, it is sometimes observed that the divine perfections (omnipotence, omniscience, benevolence, eternality, etc.) might be inconsistent with one another. This objection is related to the previous one in that the point in both cases is that Descartes’ argument restricts us to claims about the concept of God and lacks existential import. In order to redress this issue himself, Leibniz formulates a different version of the ontological argument (see Adams 1998, 141f).

Descartes was dead long before Leibniz articulated this criticism but it was familiar to him from the Second Set of Objectors (Marin Mersenne et al .) (AT 7:127; CSM 2:91). He replies by appealing once again to the principle of clear and distinct perception, which states that if something is contained in the clear and distinct idea of something then it is not only possible but also true of that thing in reality. (Descartes might have said that if something is conceivable then it is possible, and a being having all perfections is conceivable, but he has an even stronger principle at his disposal in the rule for truth.) In effect, Descartes thinks he has already satisfied Mersenne and Leibniz’s extra condition. But Mersenne’s version of the objection goes further, urging that in order to know with certainty that God’s nature is possible, one must have an adequate idea that encompasses all of the divine attributes and the relations between them (ibid.) — something that Descartes denies that we have. Descartes responds to this criticism as follows:

[7] For as far as our concepts are concerned there is no impossibility in the nature of God; on the contrary, all the attributes which we include in the concept of the divine nature are so interconnected that it seems to us to be self-contradictory that any one of them should not belong to God (AT 7:151; CSM 2:107).

It is difficult to see how this statement on its own addresses Mersenne’s criticism, but here again we can gain a better grip on what Descartes has in mind by appealing to our earlier discussion in section 2. We noted there that on Descartes’ view there is merely a rational distinction between a substance and each of its attributes, and between any two attributes of a single substance. He also maintains that God has only attributes and no modes or accidental properties. This implies that there is merely a rational distinction between all of the divine perfections, something that he expressly affirms in his correspondence (see, e.g., AT 4:349; CSMK 3:280). In the Third Meditation he also notes that “the unity, simplicity, or the inseparability of all the divine attributes of God is one of the most important of the perfections which I understand him to have” (AT 7:50; CSM 2:34). So not only is there no inconsistency between the divine perfections, but we understand that one of the most important perfections is simplicity (contra Curley 2005), which is just to say that in God there is no distinction between his attributes: God’s omnipotence just is his omniscience, which just is his benevolence, etc. The very distinction between the divine attributes is confined to our thought or reason. This then is what he means by saying in passage [7] that the divine attributes are “interconnected,” which echoes a remark in the Third Meditation passage concerning “the interconnection and inseparability of the perfections” (ibid.). Descartes’ responses probably would not have satisfied Leibniz and Mersenne, but we can appreciate how they have a fundamental basis in his philosophical system.

Perhaps the most famous objection to the ontological argument is that existence is not a property or predicate. Popularized by Kant, this objection enjoys the status of a slogan known by every undergraduate philosophy major worth her salt. In claiming that existence is included in the idea of a supremely perfect being, along with all the other divine attributes, Descartes’ version of the argument appears to succumb to this objection.

It is not obvious of course that existence is not a predicate. To convince us of this point, Kant observes that there is no intrinsic difference between the concept of a hundred real thalers (coins common in Kant’s time) and the concept of a hundred possible thalers. Whenever we think of anything, we regard it as existing, even if the thing in question does not actually exist. Thus, existence does not add anything to the concept of a thing. What then is existence if not a predicate? Kant’s answer is that existence is “merely the positing of a thing” or “the copula of a judgment,” the point being that when we say “God exists” we are simply affirming that there is an object answering to the concept of God. We are not ascribing any new predicates to God, but merely judging that there is a subject, with all its predicates, in the world (CPR:B626–27).

Kant’s formulation of the objection was later refined by Bertrand Russell in his famous theory of descriptions. He argues that existential statements such as “God exists” are misleading as to their logical form. While serving grammatically as a predicate, the term “exists” in this sentence has a much different logical function, which is revealed only by analysis. Properly analyzed, “God exists” means “there is one (and only one) x such that ‘x is omnipotent, omniscient, etc.’ is true.” Russell thinks this translation shows that, appearances to the contrary, the statement “God exists” is not ascribing existence to a subject, but asserting that a certain description (in single quotes) applies to something in reality. Russell’s view is reflected in the standard modern logical treatment of existence as a quantifier rather than a predicate.

It is widely believed that Descartes did not have a response to this objection, indeed that he blithely assumed that existence is a property without ever considering the matter carefully. But this is not the case. The seventeenth-century empiricist Pierre Gassendi confronted Descartes with this criticism in the Fifth Set of Objections (and deserves credit for being the first to enunciate it): “existence is not a perfection either in God or in anything else; it is that without which no perfections can be present” (AT 7:323; CSM 2:224). As with most of his replies to Gassendi (whom he regarded as a loathsome materialist and quibbler), Descartes responded somewhat curtly. But it is clear from the discussion in section 2 that he had the resources for addressing this objection in a systematic manner.

Before examining how Descartes might defend himself, it is important to note that the question at issue is typically framed in non-Cartesian terms and thus often misses its target. Both Kant and Russell for example are interested in the logical issue of whether existence is a predicate . Descartes, in contrast, was not a logician and disparaged the standard subject-predicate logic inherited from Aristotle. Although, as discussed above, he sometimes presents formal versions of the ontological arguments as heuristic devices, Descartes thought that God’s existence is ultimately known through intuition. This intuitive process is psychological in character. It is not a matter of assigning predicates to subjects but of determining whether the idea of a supremely perfect being can be clearly and distinctly perceived while excluding necessary existence from it through a purely intellectual operation. To be sure, Descartes was interested in the ontological question of whether existence is a “property” of substances. For him, however, the analogues of properties are clear and distinct ideas and ways of regarding them, not predicates.

Having said that, Descartes’ best strategy for answering the ontological version of the objection is to concede it, or at least certain aspects of it. Descartes explicitly affirms Kant’s point that existence does not add anything to the idea of something (provided that the terms “idea” and “concept” are regarded as psychological items). Once again we should recall passage [4] from the Second Replies: “Existence is contained in the idea or concept of every single thing, since we cannot conceive of anything except as existing” (Axiom 10, AT 7:166; CSM 2:117). So, Descartes agrees with Kant that there is no conceptual difference between conceiving of a given substance as actually existing and conceiving it as merely possible. In the first instance one is attending to the existence that is contained in every clear and distinct idea, and in the other instance one is ignoring the thing’s existence without actively excluding it. He would, however, stress another conceptual difference that Kant and other critics do not address, namely that between the two grades of existence — contingent and necessary. The clear and distinct ideas of all finite things contain merely contingent or dependent existence, whereas the clear and distinct idea of God uniquely contains necessary or wholly independent existence (ibid.). As discussed previously, the ontological argument hinges on this distinction.

Another intuition underlying the claim that existence is not a property is that there is more intimate connection between an individual and its existence than the traditional one between a substance and a property, especially if the property in question is conceived as something accidental. If existence were accidental, then a thing could be without its existence, which seems absurd. It seems no less absurd to say that existence is a property among other properties (accidental or essential), for how can a thing even have properties if it does not exist? Descartes shares this intuition. He does not think that existence is a property in the traditional sense or is even distinct from the substance that is said to bear it. Recall the view discussed in section 2 that there is merely a rational distinction between a substance and its existence, or between the essence and existence of a substance. This means that the distinction between a substance and its existence is confined to thought or reason. Human beings, in their efforts to understand things using their finite intellects, draw distinctions in thought that do not obtain in reality. In reality, a substance (whether created or divine) just is its existence.

The purpose of this defense of Descartes is not to render a verdict as whether he has the correct account of existence, but to show that he has a rather sophisticated and systematic treatment of what has been one of the great bugbears in the history of philosophy. He does not make the ad hoc assumption that existence is an attribute in order to serve the needs of the ontological argument. Indeed, on Descartes’ view, existence is not a property in the traditional sense, nor can one conceive of something without regarding it as existing. Descartes’ critics might not be convinced by his account of existence, but then they have the burden of providing a better account. The focus of the debate will then be shifted to the question of who has the correct ontology, rather than whether the ontological argument is sound.

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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.

The Ontological Argument , entry in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, by Kenneth Einar Himma (Seattle Pacific University)
Medieval Sourcebook: Philosophers’ Criticisms of Anselm’s Ontological Argument for the Being of God , by Paul Halsell (Fordham University)
Medieval Sourcebook: Thomas Aquinas: On Being and Essence , by Paul Halsell (Fordham University)
“ On the Logic of the Ontological Argument ”, paper by Paul E. Oppenheimer and Edward N. Zalta.
Philosophy of Religion.Info by Tim Holt.

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The holiness of God refers to the absolute moral purity of God and the absolute moral distance between God and his human creatures.

The core idea of divine holiness is absolute moral purity. God’s holiness is an enduring thematic thread throughout the Scripture often associated with divine theophanies when God “shows up” in the midst of and on behalf of his people. The theme of holiness develops in unexpected ways with the advent of Jesus and the Pentecost experience of the Holy Spirit in the New Testament. Divine holiness closely attaches in mysterious ways to both divine justice and divine mercy and is the clearest explanation of the death of Jesus on the cross.

Holiness: Attractive and Dangerous

The holiness of God refers to the absolute moral purity of God and also the absolute moral distance between God and his human creatures. The prophet Isaiah declared, “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty” (Isa 6:3). It is the only description of God repeated in the three-fold formula—a literary device to bring great emphasis. God is not just a little bit holy. God is REALLY, REALLY, REALLY holy. This served to remind Israel in the original context, and us at present, that God’s holiness is a matter of enormous spiritual significance. It also serves as a warning that we humans are not holy. Holiness is a central marker of the fundamental divide between God and the sinful human creature—most especially in their fallen condition but also in the redeemed state entirely dependent upon God for any holiness that might reside in them.

The core idea behind holiness is absolute moral purity. God is not only perfectly good; he is the very source and standard of goodness. In this regard, goodness has a permanence to it precisely because it is rooted in the eternal and everlasting God. Goodness does not change because God does not change.

God’s absolute moral purity often carries the connotation of danger as well. It was a great fear within Israel to get too close to God lest they be overwhelmed by his holiness. God’s presence was a great comfort to Israel while at the same time being a great threat to their own unholy lives. One did not lightly or superficially come before God. Most often, one would need a mediator to go before God on their behalf lest they suffer the consequences of being in the presence of absolute holiness while themselves not being holy.

Holiness in the Old and New Testaments

Throughout the Old Testament this was symbolically signified in various ways. During the time of the patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph) circumcision was enacted to symbolize the seriousness of being cut off because of sin from the covenant with God. The theophanies of the Mosaic period (burning bush, ten plagues, the exodus, lightning and thunder at Sinai) all carried a fearful and awe-inspiring experience when God “showed up.” In the tent of meeting (Exod 26) and later at the temple (1Kgs 6–8), the place of God’s presence was known as the “holy of holies.” The intensity of God’s presence also entailed that only a proper representative could enter in the holy of holies, and only then with a proper sacrifice that would serve as a substitute on behalf of the sins of the people. The annual rite of The Day of Atonement (Lev 16, 23; Heb 9) was a time when the High Priest in Israel would enter into the Holy of Holies with the blood of a sacrificed lamb without blemish and sprinkle the blood on the altar as the means to symbolize the death of a substitute for Israel. The only proper response in the face of divine holiness connected to all of these diverse ways in which God’s holiness became manifest was prostration and worship.

In the New Testament, divine holiness is mostly clearly attached to the Spirit of the God—referred to as the Holy Spirit some eighty-nine times in the New Testament. The holiness of God, which served as the primary obstacle that separated God from unholy people, was now lodged in the person of the Trinity that was poured out on his unholy people and by which God’s holiness took up residence in human hearts. The Holy Spirit brought holiness where there was none, and he was/is the means by which believers participated in the holiness of God personally.

God’s driving passion from the beginning of Genesis to the end of Revelation is to make the universe a holy dwelling place for himself. The consummation of that motive in the new heavens and new earth (Rev 21–22), hearkens back to the original garden of Eden (Gen 2–3) when God created a place of fruitful goodness. However, the consummation also completes that which was lost in the garden and which was redeemed most fully in Jesus—namely, a people for God’s own possession that would be “at home” in his presence and holiness.

Holiness and its Relationship to Justice and Mercy

There are several closely related ethical themes in Scripture to divine holiness, most notably justice/righteousness and mercy. Divine justice is one outworking of divine holiness, marking out the ethical consequences of actions—dividing righteous actions from evil actions. The just consequences of evil actions are a punishment proportionate to the action. The Old Testament standard of “an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth” may seem distasteful to modern ears, but it simply is an ancient colloquial way of saying the punishment should fit the crime. Actions have consequences. Standards of justice determine how consequences should be fitted ethically to the prior actions. Israel’s case law in the book of Leviticus laid out the just consequences for many actions though clearly not every possible action was considered. Divine justice is the standard by which all human actions will finally be judged. The reminder throughout Scripture that God cannot be bribed (Deut 10:17) nor does he show partiality (2Chron 19:7), was the powerful reminder that God’s judgment will be entirely and perfectly just.

The great and unexpected irony of Scripture is that God shows mercy to the unjust. The promise even in the garden with Adam and Eve that the seed of the woman would crush the head of the serpent (Gen 3), was a promise that God would defeat evil justly while also showing mercy to those who were undeserving (Gen 3:15; Gal 3:16). The covenant established with Abraham (Gen 12–15) was grounded in God’s mercy, the only appropriate response of Abraham and his descendants was trust in God’s mercy. There was no allowance that Abraham nor his descendants could earn God’s favor. Yet, the question remained—how would their sins be dealt with? Would God merely and arbitrarily forget their sins? Would God put aside his justice in order to show his love? Would one half of God’s character (righteousness/justice) be sacrificed for the other half of God’s character (mercy/love)? The answer to all of these questions rested in an adequate understanding of God’s holiness—which did not sacrifice his justice nor undermine his mercy. All of the manifest representations of God’s holiness across the Old Testament foreshadowed the substitutionary atonement of Jesus. The shocking reality was that God himself would take the punishment himself (on the cross) for the sins of his people, and thereby show them mercy in the forgiveness of their sins. This mercy was undeserved, which mercy must always be, but was also entirely just since the entire punishment and penalty was paid (by Jesus). Divine justice was not obliterated by divine mercy, but neither was his mercy impeded by his justice. The great mystery of the cross is the reality that it is the full satisfaction of divine justice and the full display of divine mercy (Rom 3, 4).

God’s holiness is the underpinning to the entire narrative arc of Scripture. His holiness means that all of the created order functions within a fixed moral order wherein good and evil are never simply relative terms contingent upon a culture’s moral taste buds. Human flourishing is always a function of delighting in that which God delights and desiring that which God desires. God’s holiness gives us the clearest frame of reference for human corruption and dysfunction across the whole of Scripture. God’s holiness also marks out the remarkable appearances of God into human history in ways that are mysterious, stupendous and scary. The greatest hope of an Israelite was to see God and their greatest fear was to see God—because absolute holiness is always both attractive and terrifying. The holiness of God runs right through the entirety of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. It is why so few of Jesus’ contemporaries understand him on the pages of the Gospels. When God shows up in history, his presence is inscrutable. The first appropriate reaction is always worship and gratitude and only afterwards may a modicum of understanding emerge. When God sends his holiness into our lives and communities by his (Holy) Spirit, the Good News of Jesus’ death and resurrection on our behalf spreads even to the nations. When God brings a final defeat to evil, there will no longer be a need for a temple with a “holy of holies” for the Holy God will dwell in the midst of his people forever and ever.