A Level Philosophy

To what extent is the cosmological argument a sufficient explanation for the existence of God? [40]

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The cosmological argument has its roots in the writings of Plato and Aristotle, but is most associated with Aquinas’ first, second and third ways to demonstrate God’s existence and today with William Lane Craig’s Kalam argument.  While cosmological arguments see God as the “sufficient reason” for the universe, overall, they do not provide a sufficient explanation for the existence of God.

Firstly, Leibniz’ version of the cosmological argument saw God as the “sufficient reason” for the universe. God is needed, he reasoned, to explain why there is anything at all. In “The Existence of God” Richard Swinburne writes how this is the most basic and persuasive argument for God’s existence.  Leibniz’ reasoning built on Aquinas’ third way, which started with the premises that everything in the universe is contingent and that something cannot come from nothing, concluding that there must be a necessary being – a being which exists because of itself and cannot not exist – to explain the existence of everything else. Yet Kant rejected this line of argument in the introduction to his “Critique of Pure Reason”, pointing out that as everything that we experience exists contingently, necessary existence is not something we can posit or discuss.  For Kant, to exist is to exist contingently and to be capable of non-existence… the idea of necessary existence is contradictory and impossible. While there are those who reject Kant’s argument and indeed his whole worldview, such as Willard Quine and Charles Hartshorne, it remains the dominant position in philosophy. While Kant may not have shown that necessary existence is impossible, his observation that it falls outside the scope of our experience strongly supports that conclusion.  This shows that God is not needed to be the necessary explanation for the universe we experience.

Secondly, as David Hume observed through his character Philo in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, despite being presented as deductive proofs for God’s existence cosmological arguments fail because there is no way to show that their premises are true. For example, Aquinas starts his first way with the premises that everything in the universe is moved and that things can’t move themselves, concluding that there must therefore be a Prime Mover and that this is what everybody calls God. As Hume pointed out, there is no way to know if everything in the universe is moved or that no thing can move itself because our experience of the universe is too limited to support such sweeping claims.  It is possible that while things in the universe are moved and must be moved by other things, the universe itself could be unmoving and/or self-moving.  As Bertrand Russell later asked, why should not the universe itself be considered a “brute fact”?  Although Big Bang theory seems to have falsified the idea that the Universe could be considered a “brute fact,” in other ways science supports Hume’s scepticism, finding that sub-atomic particles like Quarks do not follow standard laws of causation and logic and forcing William Lane Craig to use more limited premises in his Kalam argument than Aquinas did in his Cosmological Argument.  Craig reasons that since “everything that begins to exist must have a cause” and “the universe began to exist” it follows that “the universe must have a cause”.  Although it strategically stops short of concluding that the cause of the universe is “what everybody calls God” – leaving this for people to infer – Craig’s argument seems persuasive in the context of a layman’s understanding of the standard model of Physics. Yet, Stephen Hawking criticised his argument for assuming that causation must or even could apply where there is no time or space at and before the Big Bang. This shows that the cosmological argument fails to demonstrate God’s existence

On the other hand, other versions of the cosmological argument have been presented as inductive or even abductive arguments, suggesting that God is the most probable explanation for many observations of movement, causation, contingency and other forms of order in the universe.  This approach acknowledges that science could provide natural explanations for these phenomena, but dismisses these as less probable than the simple, elegant explanation provided in God. Yet, while the prime mover, uncaused cause or necessary being supported by Aquinas’ ways seems   to be a simpler explanation than the complex natural accounts presented by science, as Hume pointed out, the prime mover, if such there is, would be very far from being “what everybody calls God.”  In terms of prime movers, uncaused causes or necessary beings, there could be several for all we know and it/they would hardly need to be personal, immanent or good.  Also, the God of the Bible is nothing if not a complex character, being possessed of many characteristics outside the scope of those possessed by the prime mover, so that Richard Dawkins was right to reject the claim that “God” could ever be a simpler explanation in “The God Delusion”.  While Aquinas did attempt to show how the prime mover, uncaused cause and necessary being demonstrated by the cosmological argument was really the God of Christianity, these explanations were outside the scope of the cosmological arguments and unconvincing.  For example, Aquinas claimed that because God is the prime mover, uncaused cause and necessary being He must be timeless-eternal and outside the universe.  It follows that divine attributes like power, knowledge or goodness must be understood as analogies when describing God. Yet Aquinas’ classical theism is unconvincing because although it attempts to provide a philosophical justification for believing that “God” exists – not least through the cosmological argument – this justification is flawed and comes at the price of undermining both the Bible and Christian Doctrine as sources of knowledge about God.  This shows that inductive or abductive versions of the cosmological argument are no more useful as explanations for God’s existence than deductive versions.

Further, all versions of the cosmological argument are part of Natural Theology, the attempt to explain that and how God exists using reason. Natural Theology has long been controversial within Christianity, because it assumes that human beings can discover God and potentially salvation for themselves without God’s grace, which idea was dismissed by St Paul (e.g. Ephesians 2:8) and later made a heresy because of St Augustine’s theological arguments.  It follows that for most Christians Natural Theology cannot provide sufficient knowledge of God’s existence or concerning God’s nature for human beings to attain salvation apart from God’s grace.  Instead, Christians must rely on Revealed Theology, such as through Scripture, Jesus and/or personal religious experience, to demonstrate God’s existence, nature and will.  In one way, this makes sense of the cosmological arguments’ failure to show that God is the necessary or even the most probable explanation of the universe and of the disjunct between the attributes of the prime mover and the God of the Bible.  It could be that the cosmological argument, and wider Natural Theology, provides only an indication that God exists, showing that faith is rational and that atheists are as St Paul put it “without excuse”, while maintaining the necessity of revelation and grace for salvation. Yet it seems terribly convenient that Christian doctrine should so cover for the failure of Natural Theology and the cosmological argument. St Paul and St Augustine would both have been aware of versions of the cosmological argument in the work of Plato and Aristotle and that these arguments are not sufficient explanations for the God of Christianity.  Could their theological arguments have been pragmatic rather than principled in their attempt to sideline reason in favour of revelation?

In conclusion, the cosmological argument does not provide a sufficient explanation for the existence of God. None of the versions of the argument succeed in demonstrating God’s existence. Deductive versions rely on uncertain premises and don’t contain the full conclusion of the Christian God’s existence. Inductive and abductive versions fail to establish that “God” is a simpler explanation of the universe than natural explanations provided by science.  Also, theological attempts to explain why Natural Theology should fail are unconvincing.

Aquinas successfully demonstrates that religious language should be understood in terms of analogy. Discuss. [40]

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As the Summa Theologica makes clear, St Thomas Aquinas’ approach to religious language emerged from his concept of God.  As a Classical Theist, Aquinas saw God as timeless eternal, meaning that words applied to God cannot be understood univocally, to mean the same as they would when applied to created things. While the Bible, the Creeds and Christian doctrines use language univocally in ways that make God seem like a person, subject to limitation and change, for Aquinas God is timelessly other and should not be so anthropomorphised and limited by language.  He saw some merits in the apophatic approach to language, which speaks of God by negation if at all seeing direct religious language as equivocal, but wanted to preserve the possibility of affirming some things about God in a meaningful way, recognising that an equivocal approach to language undermines philosophy and doctrine in a way that must eventually be fatal to organised religion.  The result was Aquinas’ argument that words applied to God should be understood as analogies which is successful in avoiding both the pitfalls of univocalism and giving in to equivocalism, although it depends heavily on his concept of God and so may not be useful to all Christians.

Firstly, Aquinas claimed that claims such as “God is good” should not be taken to imply that God is morally good, such as would imply choice and the existence of independent values but should instead be understood as analogies of proportion. When we say that something is good, we mean that it largely fulfils its nature.  Human nature is to be free and moral, but if God is the origin of our freedom and of moral values it makes little sense to anthropomorphise him by assuming his nature is like ours.  Nothing in this world is perfect; because of time and space nothing can fulfil 100% of its nature.  For example, a person has the potential to be a baby and an adult.  However good they are, they can only fulfil part of their potential at one time, such as by being a good adult.  Nevertheless, God is outside the time and space that holds us back from actualising our full potential and being perfect. When we say that God is good, we mean that God fulfils 100% of his timeless divine nature, being changelessly perfect; what it is for God to fulfil God’s nature is not what it means for us to fulfil our more limited nature.  John Hick used the example of a man and his dog, both of which might be said to be faithful. What it is for a man to be faithful and for a dog to be faithful are not quite the same, but by saying they are faithful we mean that both do a large proportion of what we expect of a faithful member of their species. It follows that our goodness is not the same as God’s goodness… the word good is not used univocally when applied to God… but there is a connection between our goodness and God’s goodness which means that words applied to God are not equivocal either.   In this way, Aquinas’ analogy of proportion is successful in avoiding both the pitfalls of univocalism and giving into equivocalism.

Secondly, Aquinas claimed that attributes like goodness exist primarily in God as the creator and only secondarily in created things, so that what we say about God and created things is connected while still having different meanings and preserving the otherness of God. To explain his analogy of attribution, Aquinas used the example of a bull and its urine… the health of the bull is primary and the health of the urine it produces is secondary… the health of the bull and its urine consist in different things, but the health of the one is the source of the health of the other, so there is a connection.  Simon Oliver uses the example of me and my breakfast yoghurt… both might be said to be healthy, but the healthiness of the yoghurt is secondary and depends on my healthiness, which is primary.  My health might consist in having clear skin, energy and a habit of going jogging… but the health of the yoghurt does not consist in any of these things.  In the same way, the goodness, power or wisdom of God is primary, and the goodness, power or wisdom of created things is secondary.  What it is for God to be good, powerful or wise might be radically different from what it means for a person to be these things, and not only by degree, avoiding limiting God through a univocal use of language.  Yet, there is a clear connection between the goodness, power and wisdom of God and of created creatures, which avoids an equivocal approach to religious language also. 

On the other hand, as Anthony Kenny pointed out the analogical meaning of God’s attributes preserved by Aquinas is extremely limited, making this approach to religious language unsuccessful when it comes to sustaining religion in a practical way.  Kenny suggested that the idea of timeless attributes such as goodness, power or wisdom seems “radically incoherent”, which is a fair criticism, as is the related point that many believers do not understand language analogically, even those who lead or have led the Church.  While Ian Ramsey was right to point out how people often use “qualifiers” like “timelessly” to signify that their use of words to describe God should not be taken as “ordinary language” but as religious language which is “logically odd”, in practice many people do not use such qualifiers or seem to understand that there should be any difficulty in using language univocally at all. Further, as Nelson Pike observed, the God of the Bible is “unavoidably tensed”.  It makes little sense to see God as timeless when that would make the creation, the fall and the resurrection simultaneous in God’s timeless vision. This is why Protestant philosophers look for other ways of understanding religious language, seeing Aquinas analogical approach as bound up in a concept of God which is fundamentally unchristian. John MacQuarrie lamented the adoption of the Greek concept of God into the Christian tradition, seeing this as the cause of multiple avoidable philosophical problems that have beset the faith through the best part of two millennia.  In this context, Richard Swinburne and Nicholas Wolterstorff approach religious language in a more straightforward univocal way.  Further, some Classical Theists support a more univocal approach to religious language than Aquinas.  For examples, St Anselm and John Duns Scotus reasoned that God as creator must have created the concepts through which we understand and speak of Him, meaning that we can speak confidently about God using a far wider range of words and meanings than Aquinas would allow.  All of this suggests that the success of Aquinas’ analogical approach to religious language is limited to those who share his concept of God and does not extend even to all of those.

In conclusion, Aquinas’ analogical approach to understanding religious language is coherent and persuasive if one shares his concept of God, although it is possibly too limited to support religious practice.  Nevertheless, many Christians do not accept either Aquinas’ concept of God or his analogical approach to understanding religious language because they choose to focus on revealed rather than on natural theology as the primary source of their knowledge of God.

Kantian Ethics is too abstract to be used in practical moral decision making. Discuss [40]

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Immanuel Kant proposed his system of ethics in “The Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals” (1785) and subsequently refined his thinking in “The Critique of Practical Reason” (1788) and “The Metaphysics of Morals” (1791).  For Kant, reason demands that we follow the Categorical Imperative whenever we are faced by a moral situation, involving human wellbeing.  He explained what the Categorical Imperative using six different forms of words in the Groundwork, variations of three principles; universalisation, ends and means and kingdom of ends. He was clear that these principles are not laws, to be followed unquestioningly, but rather descriptions of how a rational person (good will) will choose to act, freely, in a moral situation.  Further, that the different formulations were not intended to be applied separately, as they all describe the single moral demand of reason.  While Kantian Ethics does begin with an abstract principle, the Categorical Imperative, it is intensely practical and is in fact the best guide to moral decision making in the real world. 

Firstly, the Categorical Imperative does not seek to be a rule to follow unquestioningly.  Despite the common charge that Kantian Ethics is “harsh and inflexible” as Allen Wood put it, in reality Kant demands that we act autonomously, applying the demands of reason to each specific moral challenge.  In this way, Kantian Ethics – although it expresses the abstract demands of reason – is also intensely practical.  It recognises the complexity of moral situations and supports individuals to make their own decisions, rather than attempting to simplify things to a set of secondary precepts or rules as Roman Catholic Natural Law or Rule Utilitarianism do.  Natural Law produces sweeping rules that often seem to clash, and offers little practical help in resolving these dilemmas, resulting in a diversity of interpretations ranging from Grisez to Hoose.  On the other hand, Kantian Ethics is more practical in explicitly prioritising negative duties over positive duties, helping people to navigate a way through the clashing duties that dominate practical moral decision making.  Rule Utilitarianism ranges between harsh inflexible versions that try to reduce the complexity of moral decision making to a few absolute edicts and impractical versions that generate huge numbers of highly specific rules which still struggle to support practical decision making. On the other hand, Kantian Ethics is more practical, avoiding rules altogether and simply supporting people to be fully human, making decisions rationally and freely on the basis of the specific situation.  Kantian Ethics also recognises the existence of moral absolutes and handles these much better than Situation Ethics, which (at least in Fletcher’s formulation) implies that even dropping a nuclear bomb, murder or rape might be justified in some situations in a way that most people feel deeply uncomfortable about.  It also avoids the problem of prediction, which blights situation ethics and act utilitarianism, and does not demand that people predict and weigh up consequences with insufficient information to do this accurately. Of course, the support Kantian Ethics offers to individuals facing dilemmas can’t make their decisions easy.  Being reminded by conscience – which Kant defined as “practical reason holding the human being’s duty [i.e. the Categorical Imperative] before him” – that my action in helping my dying grandmother to die quickly rather than suffering on for days enacts the same maxim as a murderer is deeply uncomfortable.  Yet this reminder is an important one.  It is impractical to pretend – as Fletcher’s Situation Ethics seems to do – that the situation justifies one in taking a life, when this denies inevitable feelings of guilt and possible implications for how we relate to human life after we have crossed the line of taking it.  Kantian Ethics cannot make practical decisions easy, but it clarifies those decisions in a way that is practical and helpful if not pleasant to experience.  It follows that – despite being abstract – Kantian Ethics is the best approach to real-life moral decision making.

Secondly, Kantian Ethics is practical because it is rooted in human experience. Kant argued that when faced with another human being, reason demands that we treat them as we would wish to be treated.  While reason is abstract, the feeling of empathy and agape-love that it supports is not and is part of human experience every day.  In the “Critique of Practical Reason” he called the formulation of the Categorical Imperative “always treat humanity, whether in the person of yourself or another, always as an end and never as a means to an end” the “Practical Imperative” because it is what we instinctively do in any case.  Kant presupposed that we all have a conscience, which he defined as “practical reason holding the human being’s duty before him for his acquittal or condemnation in every case that comes under the law.” As he pointed out, human beings are “pathologically loving”; it is human nature to treat others as we would wish to be treated and so not to use people as a means to an end.  Of course, Bernard Williams accused Kantian Ethics of being “atomistic” and encouraging people to focus on their own moral characters, ignoring the demand to help others in a positive way if it would mean breaking a negative duty.  For example, Kantian Ethics encourages people not to pull the lever in the Trolley Problem, which feels selfish.  Yet the fat-man version of the same problem shows that Kant was right and that what we might feel comfortable with in theory we shrink from doing in practice.  For another example, as Onora O’Neill has shown, Kantian Ethics prioritises our duty to those we have promised to protect (i.e. the duty not to lie or break a promise) over our duty to help famine-stricken countries overseas (i.e. the duty to save life).  Nevertheless, Kantian Ethics does this because a decision to break a negative duty, whether killing a person as a means to an end in the trolley problem or breaking a promise to the electorate, doesn’t just affect that person or that situation, but sets an example which erodes the principles of the sanctity of human life or trust in government, making it more difficult for all other people to hear and follow the demand of reason and the Categorical Imperative in the future.  Kant’s principle of the Kingdom of Ends shows that it is irrational to act inconsistently, because we each set an example to everybody else, so any inconsistency prevents society developing towards the summum bonum. He appeals to reason which shows the consequences of prioritising consequences to be much worse consequentially, then the consequences of making a few tough decisions in order to uphold a principle.  Even Utilitarians John Stuart Mill and Henry Sidgwick and Peter Singer recognise this, suggesting that rules such as “do not murder” should be enforced more or less strictly for the sake of “the greatest happiness for the greatest number”.  Mill even campaigned to keep the death penalty for murder, against his fellow Utilitarian Bentham’s followers, partly because he believed in the importance of vindicating the law protecting the sanctity of human life as well as in the deterrent example that death represents.  It follows that, while Kantian Ethics does not make individual moral decision-making easy, it is practical and consistent with what most people recognise to be the most effective way to behave and run a society. 

Of course, the existence of people who are apparently without conscience and claim not to feel a duty to treat others as ends does seem to undermine Kant’s case, suggesting that the Categorical Imperative does not appeal directly to everybody through reason.  For example, mass murderers like Ian Brady and Myra Hindley or Levi Bellfield seem to be without a conscience and describing them as “pathologically loving” seems ridiculous.  Nevertheless, in “Religion within the boundaries of reason alone” (1794) Kant explained that the reason why some people appear to be without a conscience and why they don’t recognise the demand of the Categorical Imperative is because of Radical Evil.  Once a person has acted irrationally, out of deference to authority, fear or habit once, it becomes easier and easier to do the same again to the point whereby we feel powerless to change and become a “good will”. Like St Augustine, Kant saw the Human condition as one whereby we don’t do what we actively want to do and feel unable to change. For Kant, this is because rationally we appreciate that in order to deserve the heavenly reward (that Kant postulated to make sense of his moral system) we would have to have a good will, which in practice none of us have because we have all fallen short of acting on one at some point, not least in childhood.  Without any reasonable hope of reward, it becomes irrational to follow the demands of reason.  It is not rational to do what will make us miserable forever and can never result in any happiness.  In effect, we are trapped between the demands of reason with respect of moral action and following the categorical imperative and the demands of reason with respect of not doing what will only make us miserable.  Kant’s solution to this and way of making it possible to change and be good despite feeling trapped was controversial.  Again, Kant depended on St Augustine’s theology.  That is, to trust in the order and fairness of the universe, to believe in the possibility of moral regeneration, to assert our freedom to do what is right.  Jesus’ example is important; He showed that it is possible to have a “good will” making it rational to trust and believe.  While Goethe accused Kant of “smearing his philosopher’s cloak with the shameful stain of original sin” and recent writers have speculated that Kant was losing his reason by the time he developed this part of his theory. In fact, Kant makes rational sense of Augustinian teachings about the human condition and why it is difficult to do what we know we ought. While it is true that Kantian Ethics is extremely demanding and sets an impossibly high standard, it is the fact that it is demanding and not its abstract nature which is the reason why many people are reluctant to use it in moral decision making.  This shows that despite being abstract, Kantian Ethics is also practical, because it is rooted in real human experience.

In conclusion, Kantian Ethics is practical and can be used in moral decision making, despite being rooted in abstract concepts such as reason and duty.  This is because Kantian Ethics is more practical than Natural Law, Situation Ethics and Utilitarianism, being focused on helping people to make decisions autonomously, rather than forcing people to follow absolute rules that take no account of complexity or forcing people to predict and weigh up consequences with insufficient information to do so accurately.  Also, because Kantian Ethics is rooted in the practical experience of being human and provides a rational explanation of why people feel unable to do what they know they should do.  Kantian Ethics may be harsh and demanding, but so is the world and so are the dilemmas we face.  Rather than letting us hide behind rules or forcing us to play God, Kantian Ethics supports us to recognise and have the strength to follow our consciences and the demands of reason, which Kant called the Categorical Imperative.  Act fairly and consistently, honour and don’t use people, set an example and act as though you were being watched… these are moral guidelines we all recognise from childhood and practical experience. They are not too abstract to be practical and should always determine how we make moral decisions.

Critically evaluate Kant’s criticisms of the Ontological Argument. [40] 

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The ontological argument is the name that Kant himself assigned to arguments which attempt to demonstrate God’s existence from reason alone.  Starting with an a priori definition of God, such as that God is “that than which nothing greater can be conceived of” (St Anselm, Proslogion II) or that God is “supremely perfect” (Descartes, Meditation V), ontological arguments show that existence – or necessary existence – is part of that definition and thus that God’s existence is de dicto necessary, as the fact that a man is unmarried is de dicto necessary if he is a bachelor.  Having coined the term “ontological argument”, Kant went on to criticise these arguments in the opening to his Critique of Pure Reason (1781), arguing that the arguments fail because 1) all existential statements must be synthetic, 2) existence is not a perfection and 3) existence is not a predicate.  He concludes that the ontological argument is “so much labour and effort lost” because it cannot do what it sets out to do and prove God’s existence from reason alone.  Nevertheless, despite being enormously influential, Kant’s criticisms fail to establish the impossibility of an ontological argument for God’s existence because they depend on Kant’s worldview which he asserts dogmatically and fails to argue for. 

Kant’s claim that the ontological argument fails because all existential statements must be synthetic is nothing more than an assertion of his own critical worldview, developed in the years after Hume “awoke me from my dogmatic slumbers and gave a completely different direction to my enquiries…” in 1770.  Kant claims that “If, then, I try to conceive a being, as the highest reality (without any defect), the question still remains, whether it exists or not. For though in my concept there may be wanting nothing of the possible real content of a thing in general, something is wanting in its relation to my whole state of thinking, namely, that the knowledge of that object should be possible a posteriori also…” He points out that there is nothing self-contradictory about saying “God does not exist”, because existence cannot be part of the concept of God, but must always be established empirically, synthetically, so that existence is always contingent and includes the possibility of non-existence. Yet, what privileges a posteriori knowledge over a priori knowledge, beyond Kant’s assertion?  As GW Hegel noticed straightaway and as WV Quine late pointed out in his “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (1951) Kant simply asserts that meaningful claims must be either synthetic or analytic and that all existential claims must be synthetic.  Who says that the empirical senses are the arbiters of existence or that nothing can be said to exist that is incapable of being experienced through the senses?  How could it be reasonable to suggest that the senses of a hairless ape inhabiting temperate regions of an insignificant planet orbiting a small star on an outer spiral of the milky way provide the only window on reality?  As Plato and Descartes would have agreed, the “reality” we experience through our senses is ever-changing, imperfect and seen through the filter of senses and concepts in the mind.  Concepts and ideas are permanent and our window on them through reason less misty, so it is more reasonable to see these as ultimate reality.  Further, for followers of Wittgenstein, even if Kant’s worldview is accepted, as Norman Malcolm pointed out, Kant’s worldview and thus “language game” is just one out of many.  To those who hold a different worldview – such as a Platonic worldview in which ultimate reality is metaphysical and the means of accessing it reason – the claim that all existential statements must be synthetic is untrue and unconvincing.  It follows that Kant’s criticism fails to destroy the possibility of an ontological proof for God’s existence.  

Kant’s claim that the ontological argument also fails because existence is not a perfection fails because, as Charles Hartshorne pointed out, while ordinary contingent existence is not a perfection, necessary existence might well be.  Kant’s example of 100 thalers being the same in concept whether it exists or not, and not 101 thalers or 150 by existing, seems to make his point convincingly… and yet neither Anselm nor Descartes conceives of God’s existence being like the existence of other, contingent things.  A chocolate cake, a unicorn, a man or an island might be said to exist or not to exist, but only God can necessarily exist, so while existence might not alter the concept of cake, unicorn, man or island, necessary existence is of the essence of God as the supremely perfect being.  Charles Hartshorne suggested that Anselm’s ontological argument in Prosologion 3 might well evade Kant’s criticism that existence is not a perfection for this reason, nevertheless, Kant would reject this criticism of his point, rejecting the whole concept of necessary existence.  As he had already said, all existential statements must be synthetic, so necessary existence is, in Kant’s worldview, impossible.  JN Findlay noted this, suggesting that “it was indeed an ill day for Anselm when he hit upon his famous proof. For on that day he not only laid bare something that is of the essence of an adequate religious object, but also something that entails its necessary non-existence.” (Findlay, 1948) And that Anselm’s ontological argument in Proslogion III, by demonstrating how God’s contingent existence is impossible, shows that God’s existence is impossible because nothing can necessarily exist.  Yet, as I have already argued, Findlay and Kant are doing nothing more than asserting their own worldview, which excludes necessary existence not because it is inconceivable but because it is not compatible with their stated position which privileges things which can be experienced through the empirical senses. Further, as Hartshorne also pointed out, if it makes sense to talk about God’s necessary non-existence then it makes just as much sense to talk about God’s necessary existence. And, as Norman Malcolm pointed out, what is possible and impossible depends more on our language game than on what it might or might not refer to objectively.  It seems that in arguing that existence is not a perfection Kant got no further than Gaunilo had in refuting the ontological argument; again he just asserted that it was incompatible with his own limited worldview.  

Finally, Kant wrongly argued that existence is not a predicate.  By this Kant meant that existence cannot be accidentally predicated of God, because – as Anselm had pointed out – God’s existence is not something that might or might not be true of God.  Also, existence is wrongly used as an accidental predicate in relation to other things, because it adds nothing to the concept of the object (is not a perfection).  Rather, existence is the basis on which anything else can meaningfully be predicated.  As Russell pointed out, if I say “the present King of France is bald” I imply that there is a present King of France, which makes my predication of baldness meaningful.  If there is no present King of France, predicating anything of him is meaningless.  Similarly, if I say that God exists, I imply that there is a God who exists, smuggling my conclusion into my premises and in this way begging the question.  It follows that existence is not an accidental predicate and could not be used as one of God even if it were.  Further, existence cannot be essentially predicated of anything because… all existential statements must be synthetic. Here again, Kant reverts to asserting his worldview.  While He is right to point out that existence is not an accidental predicate because it is not a perfection, this is beside the point when it comes to the Ontological Argument, as Anselm pointed out in his Responsio to Gaunilo.  In this context, the question concerns whether existence is of the essence and nature of God, whether God necessarily exists.  As Hartshorne reasoned, necessary existence might well be predicated essentially of God, even if contingent existence cannot be used as an accidental predicate of anything.  For Hartshorne there are three alternatives for us to consider: 

i.God is impossible 

ii.God is possible, but may or may not exist 

iii.God exists necessarily. 

because God cannot be just a possibility, since he is by definition preeminent, so God’s existence is necessary.  Hartshorne’s modal ontological argument has been refined in different ways, including by Plantinga and Craig, but in essence – for those who share his worldview at least – it proves God’s necessary existence.  It seems that Kant’s criticism that existence is not a predicate fails to undermine the ontological argument either, at least beyond those who share his worldview.   

In conclusion, Kant’s criticisms of the Ontological Argument are persuasive if and only if you share his limited and dogmatic worldview.  Of course, many Philosophers did and do share this worldview – including Lotze, Schopenhauer, Russell and Findlay – and they will not accept the existence of other worldviews because it is part of their worldview to see their own perspective as the only truthful perspective on reality.  Nevertheless, for anybody who holds a different worldview – such as for St Anselm, Descartes, Hartshorne or Malcolm – Kant’s criticisms are ineffective and there is still the possibility of proving God’s existence a priori, from reason alone.  If ultimate reality is metaphysical and accessed through reason not empirical experience, and if existence is not defined in terms of being contingent existence, then the concept of God can de dicto necessarily contain His necessary existence despite His being incapable of empirical observation.  

Is there really a moral difference between killing somebody and letting somebody die? [40]

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The answer to this question seems obvious. Legally, there is a significant difference between killing someone and letting them die. Killing somebody by active means, depending on the circumstances, might be treated as murder, manslaughter or causing death by dangerous driving for example, all of which are subject to serious punishments. On the other hand, letting somebody die might attract no penalty at all, because this is what we all have to do at some point when medical options are unavailable or not in a person’s best interests. In the case of Airedale NHS Trust v. Bland, the House of Lords judgement “thou shall not kill, but thou needst not strive officiously to keep alive.” When it is in a patient’s best interests it can be the right thing to do to do nothing and let them die. Even where a doctor is negligent and allows somebody to die who might have been saved the penalty is much, much less than if they actively killed somebody – and usually covered by insurance. Nevertheless, despite the obvious answer, the question concerns the moral and not the legal difference between killing and letting die. The answer to this is more contentious. On the one hand traditional Christian Ethics and Kantian Ethics would agree with the law, that there is the world of difference between killing and letting die, but on the other hand, Utilitarianism and Situation Ethics as consequentialist approaches to decision-making would reject that distinction, arguing that the effects of both are the same so as actions they are morally equivalent. Nevertheless, the claim that killing and letting die are morally equivalent is not persuasive. Consider other examples whereby the same effects are achieved by different means. Is there a moral difference between actively lying to a friend or not telling them something that you might have? Is there a moral difference between making somebody homeless and failing to help a homeless person by housing them? Most people would see acts of omission (failing to do good) as less morally serious than acts of commission (i.e. actively doing wrong), so there is a moral difference between killing and letting die.

Firstly, the fact that there is a difference between killing and letting die is supported by the Bible, which distinguishes between things we do intentionally and accidentally and things done actively and passively. In the Old Testament the penalty for murder (intentional, active killing of a person) was death [Genesis 9:6], but nobody suggested that fellow citizens should be executed for failing to feed famine victims. The moral instruction to leave crops for the poor to glean existed of course [Leviticus 23:22], but there was no specific and individual penalty for ignoring it. While Prophets warned that the people would be punished collectively for ignoring the rights of the poor and vulnerable [e.g. Amos 2], suggesting that ignoring these rights is immoral and against the will of God, there can be no doubt that there is a moral difference between active, intentional killing (murder) and letting die, whether intentionally or otherwise. On the other hand, in the New Testament Jesus equated the intention with the action in his moral teaching. In Matthew 5 He taught that anger was morally equivalent to murder, a lustful look morally equivalent with adultery. By this logic, allowing somebody to die with malign intent would be the equivalent of murder, and yet this principle has rarely, if ever, been adopted by Christian ethics. Perhaps the key to this issue is what the word “morally” means. Because it is often impossible to know what motivated an action it is not possible to put a lot of weight on intentions in law or in formal Christian ethics. A person might even be unsure about their own motivations, so it is extremely difficult to assess these objectively. Nevertheless, Christians believe that God knows the inmost secrets of our hearts, being aware of motivations that we might not even be aware of ourselves [Psalm 139]. In this case, intentions might make all the difference to the moral status of an action in God’s eyes, while in the eyes of formal Christian ethics they cannot. Having said that, a Roman Catholic might argue that the Church has been given the authority to “bind and loose” Matthew 18:18, and this would suggest that the moral judgement of the Church – which cannot give much weight to intentions – still applies in heaven. This suggests that there is a moral difference between killing and letting die, whatever the situation or motivations, although that does not mean that letting die is always morally permissable.

Secondly, most versions of Natural Law (used alongside the Bible and Church teaching as the basis for Roman Catholic Ethics) teach that actions are more significant than intentions, which suggests that there is a moral difference between killing and letting die. For example, because of Natural Law Catholic ethics would see it as far worse to use artificial contraception or abortion than to remain celibate and so childless. Contraception and abortion actively prohibit a basic human good – life – while celibacy might be necessary in order to achieve another human good, as in the case of Priests. Morally, there is a real difference between doing something – often for an evil intention – and committing not to do it for a good intention. In Summa 2i, 20, 1 Aquinas explains that an action may be good when carried out with a good intention, but morally evil when carried out with an evil intention. He uses the example of giving alms – good when done out of agape-love and evil when done for vainglory. This implies that saving a life might be good when in the best interests of a patient, but morally evil when done for other reasons, in which case allowing to die might be morally preferable. The same reasoning might suggest that killing would be morally wrong when done with a malign intention and potentially right when done with a loving intention, yet Aquinas stops short of this conclusion. He reasons that while it is a duty to follow synderesis, even if it leads us to make such a faulty decision, this does not excuse us if we carry out actions which contradict conscientia, as killing a person always would because it actively prohibits the basic human good of life. It follows that the wrongness of killing is not dependent on motivations, and yet the situation does make some difference. Aquinas acknowledged the difference between not acting in cases where you can and should act and not acting when you can’t do anything or shouldn’t because of an order etc. He wrote “the cause of what follows from want of action is not always the agent as not acting; but only then when the agent can and ought to act.” [Summa 2i, 6, 3] This suggests that letting a relative die when you can’t help or have been ordered, such as by a court, not to would be morally very different from letting a patient die as a doctor when you could and are allowed to help. Further, in Summa 2i, 76, 3 Aquinas notes that ignorance might reduce the sinfulness of an action, because it makes some actions involuntary, when “voluntariness is essential to sin.” In this way, there would be a moral difference between a person whose synderesis led them to kill an elderly relative out of compassion and a person who intentionally killed an elderly relative in order to benefit from a will. Nevertheless, this interpretation would be strongly rejected by the Roman Catholic Church today, which teaches that any active euthanasia is the moral equivalent of murder, evil. In 2020 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has reaffirmed Roman Catholic teaching that euthanasia is an “intrinsically evil act”. The letter Samaritanus Bonus: On the care of persons in the critical and terminal phases of life described assisted dying and euthanasia as “homicide”, and said that the sacraments must be withheld from those who are planning to end their lives. This underlines the moral difference that the Church perceives between killing somebody – regardless of motivations – and letting die.

Thirdly, Kantian Ethics agrees that there is a moral difference between killing and letting die. For Kant, the maxim behind our actions is the action considered independently of any context and, if it cannot be universalised, it is absolutely and always wrong. In this way killing a hated enemy, killing an elderly relative to benefit from their will, killing a relative who is begging for an easeful death and suicide are all morally equivalent. Because the maxim cannot be universalised, killing is absolutely wrong. Despite this, Kant also taught that intentions are even more significant in determining the moral status of an action than the action in itself. Famously, he began the “Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals” (1785) by stating that “Nothing in the world—or out of it!—can possibly be conceived that could be called ‘good’ without qualification except a GOOD WILL.” If an action is undertaken out of fear or habit or for any other reason than freely, for duty’s sake, then this renders the action morally wrong, which pollutes the will and prevents it being worthy of the eternal reward which we must postulate as existing for good wills, so that they can do as they feel that they should and so that the universe is fair. Further, Kant taught that a negative duty i.e. not to kill, lie or steal always trumps a positive duty e.g. to feed the hungry. This suggests that there is a moral difference between killing and letting die; while in some circumstances both are immoral, killing (achieving the end by active means) is always worse. Nevertheless, Peter Singer would reject this conclusion, arguing that there is little moral difference between killing and letting die. In “Practical Ethics” he argued that there is no moral difference between aborting a near-term foetus because it has a disability and killing a newborn infant. In fact, he argued that it is morally preferable, even a moral duty, to kill a newborn who is suffering and who has no hope of a quality life so that money spent on neonatal care could be spent more productively elsewhere. In “Unsanctifying Human Life” Singer and Kuhse argue the same with regard to Euthanasia, suggesting that it is morally preferable to kill an elderly relative with dementia than to allow them to die – slowly and expensively – while others suffer for lack of healthcare resources. Further, in “The Life you can Save” Singer argued that neglecting an opportunity to help somebody and killing them are morally equivalent. He used the example of a child drowning in a pond, pointing out that we would feel a moral imperative to ruin expensive shoes in order to save them… and that we should equally feel a moral imperative to save a child on the other side of the world by sending the £200 our shoes cost to a charity. Through all these cases, Singer makes a fair point in pointing out that we are wrong to place so much weight on the moral difference between killing and letting die. It is helpful to consider that letting die might well cause more suffering and that killing should not be the taboo that it is to most people, when in practical terms it may be preferable. Singer is also right to point out how most people wrongly prefer people who are close to us and choose to ignore those who are further from us, whether in space or time, meaning that we tend to be thoughtless and ignore the moral imperative to use our money wisely and avoid decisions which – however unintentionally – harm others now or in the future. Nevertheless, however right Singer is to make a theoretical point as regards the equivalence of killing and letting die, in practice it is not reasonable to treat the two as moral equivalents, because the law deals in rules and generalities, not intentions and specific situations. Further, as Onora O’Neill has argued, we can’t agree that failing to help somebody in need – such as by giving money for famine relief – is morally the same as killing them. While both are morally bad, killing is worse because it is active and intentionally evil.

Despite this, most consequentialists will agree with Singer, arguing that there is no moral difference between killing and letting die, because the consequences, which justify an action or condemn it, could be the same either way. Take for example a case of assisted dying; the patient is dying, so the only factor that decides the morality of killing them or letting them die is the amount of pleasure or pain that results from the action, so far as the patient and other interested parties are concerned. As Bentham pointed out “all other things being equal, poetry is as good as pushpin” or, in other words, what you do to produce the results is immaterial; all that matters, morally, is the results. This means that there is no essential moral difference between killing and letting die such as would make one better than the other in all situations. It may be that letting someone die produces more suffering than killing them would, as in a case of a patient dying of motor-neurone disease who has asked to “die with dignity” and whose relatives and friends are all supportive. In other cases however, killing would undoubtedly cause more suffering than allowing to die, such as when the law allows passive euthanasia but not active. In such a case, killing might get a doctor struck off and even imprisoned, even when their intentions were altruistic and good. The case of Dr Cox and Lilian Boyes shows how this could be the case. While the situation makes all the difference in terms of the moral status of the action, Utilitarians such as Jeremy Bentham would reject the idea that intentions make any moral difference; as he argues “nature has placed mankind under two sovereign masters; the pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain” so we should “always act so as to produce the greatest happiness for the greatest number…” what we intend is not at issue, only what we achieve in respect of pleasure and pain in society. This highlights one of the problems with consequentialism – what Peter Singer has identified as the biggest problem that Utilitarianism faces – the Problem of Prediction. That is, consequentialism depends on our ability to calculate the pleasure and/or pain resulting from possible actions so that we can choose the one which is morally preferable in maximising pleasure and minimising pain, in advance of doing anything. In practice, our calculations are often flawed meaning that while we intend to minimise suffering, in the end we fail to do this. Because intentions don’t count and the only thing that justifies an action, morally, is the consequences the agent takes a risk every time they act, trusting that what they intend will happen and so ensure that they have done what is right. In a case of euthanasia, for example, the situation is further complicated by the difficulty of assessing someone else’s pain, whether in the person dying or in their relatives and friends. How can we measure grief or accurately determine whether it is outweighed by the suffering a person dying, say of cancer, experiences in their final hours? Bentham’s felicific calculus, while well meant, is of little practical use when it comes to making such assessments and only serves to highlight another significant criticism of consequentialist ethics, that they are subjective. Of course, rule utilitarianism, such as that proposed by Peter Singer in recent years, gets round both the problem of prediction and the subjectivity problem by developing rules on the basis of the utilitarian maxim, which are then applied in most or all cases regardless of the details. Yet, as RM Hare pointed out, rule utilitarianism means that there is little difference between a Utilitarian and say a Kantian approach. Also, in answer to this question, it would probably mean that there is a moral difference between killing and letting die because rules tend to be framed around actions, not omissions and because it is hard to imagine a rule prohibiting letting people die being practical in many cases!

In conclusion, there is a moral difference between killing and letting die because this is the case in law, in the Bible, in Natural Law and Kantian Ethics. As has been discussed, it is also true in Rule Utilitarianism, which is really the only practical version of Utilitarianism.

Critically compare Aquinas’ and Wittgenstein’s approaches to defining meaning in religious language [40]

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On first sight, Aquinas and Wittgenstein offer diametrically opposed approaches to defining meaning in religious language. Aquinas argued for a cognitivist understanding of religious language, with claims such as “god is good” being meaningful because they refer to the goodness of God which is analogical to goodness in created things, both in the sense of proportion and attribution. Wittgenstein seemed to argue for a non-cognitivist approach to religious language, with claims such as “God is good” being meaningful only if they cohere with the rules of the language game being played within the form of life or context within which the statement is made. On this level, it is Wittgenstein who offers the more persuasive approach to defining meaning in religious language today. Nevertheless, as Herbert McCabe has pointed out, there is a common cause between Aquinas and Wittgenstein, and a greater degree of similarity between their approaches than is usually understood.

In the first place, Wittgenstein’s approach to religious language is more persuasive than that of Aquinas because he starts from where we are and provides an account of religious language which supports the meaningfulness of claims made by and within different religions which seem to be mutually exclusive. His approach does not depend on us having a belief in God, let alone the very particular concept of God which Aquinas assumes. For Aquinas, God is eternal in the sense of being outside time and space, meaning that all God’s attributes are simple and single and that the apparent difference between God’s goodness, power and knowledge is due to how we understand God from our limited, contingent perspective and not the result of any real division in God’s nature. When we say that “God is good” what we say is meaningful because the goodness of created things is analogical to the goodness of God. This is because “God is good” is consistent with the nature of God; being eternal God necessarily fulfils his nature and cannot fall short of it by any proportion, so contains no evil (privatio boni). Further, “God is good” is meaningful because the goodness of all created things depends on God, so the attribution of goodness in created things depends on the attribute of goodness in God, which is primary. Aquinas’ approach is more persuasive than straightforward univocal predication – such as when St Anselm, for all he accepts that God does not have a body, seems to assume that the meaning of terms like goodness mean pretty much the same when applied to God and to created things – because his approach affirms the “otherness” of God, which is consistent both with the Bible (Job 55) and with Natural Theology. Yet, Aquinas’ approach is rooted in a worldview which sees God’s existence as the creator and necessary sustainer as undeniable. For Aquinas, the fact that claims such as “God is good” mean any more than “God is fully God” or just “God is” depends on the being of God being understood to be primary, so that the being of other things can be understood to be secondary and take their attributes by attribution from His. Just as the meaningfulness of me saying “my yoghurt is healthy” depends on the primary existence of healthy people with whose lifestyles this yoghurt is conceivably consistent, so the meaningfulness of me saying “God is good” depends on the primary existence of God with whom my secondary concept of goodness – drawn from the partial goodness of contingent things – can have an analogical relationship. Aquinas himself admits that “because we do not know the essence of God, the proposition is not self-evident to us” Summa Theologica 1,2,1 and so rejects any attempt to prove God’s existence a priori, from reason alone, so his approach to religious language depends on the success of his Five Ways in demonstrating God’s existence a posteriori, from effects or observations. Yet Aquinas’ five ways have been widely criticized; his premises have been shown to be untrue so that they cannot support their conclusions – of a Prime Mover, Uncaused Causer, Necessary Being, Supreme Perfection and Intelligent Designer – let alone to their secondary conclusions, that “this is what everybody calls God.” While Aquinas’ failure to demonstrate the existence of God does not mean that God does not exist, or is not just as Aquinas reasoned He must be, Wittgenstein is surely right when he suggests that the meaning of words depends on how they are used and not on what they refer to; the meaning of words changes over time and differs by context. Given this and the impossibility of establishing the existence of let alone verifying the nature of a Godly point of reference for religious claims, the meaningfulness of a religious claim must depend on the context within which it is made. It follows that for those who inhabit Aquinas’ language game and believe in his God, his approach to religious language will be persuasive, but today it is Wittgenstein’s approach which offers the more persuasive account of the meaningfulness of religious language as a whole.

Secondly, Wittgenstein’s approach to religious language is more persuasive than Aquinas’ because it allows us to say many more things about God meaningfully. Aquinas’ analogical approach supports us in saying a very limited range of things about God, and suggests that the meaning communicated when we affirm that “God is good” or “God is omnipotent” or “God has supreme knowledge” is much, much less than most believers assume it to be. While Ian Ramsey was right to suggest that religious people use qualifiers such as “timeless” or “divine” to signify that their claims are religious, rely on models and so are “logically odd,” this practice is not so widespread as Ramsey suggests. Most believers – even within Aquinas’ Roman Catholic form of life – assume that God’s goodness is much more like our goodness than Aquinas’ doctrine of analogy would allow, so in practice they are speaking of God univocally, which cannot be meaningful given God’s timeless, wholly simple nature. By contrast, Wittgenstein’s approach to religious language supports believers and churches in making whatever claims cohere with the rules of the language game… that they contribute to setting up. Neither the game nor its rules are fixed and static, which suggests that religions can evolve and change over time and accommodate diversity within their ranks as well. This account of religious language is persuasive because it is more consistent with how religion is in the world today than Aquinas fixed, analogical approach. Within Roman Catholicism the claim “God is mother” is highly controversial and would be rejected by most mainstream believers, but that does not stop it being meaningful within some communities. Similarly, the claim that all Catholics have a duty to give the poor a “preferential option” is the life-force of base-communities in South America, while other communities to the north pay lip-service to the idea, if that. Wittgenstein’s approach to religious language is persuasive because it accounts for this diversity and the dynamics of religious meaning much better than Aquinas’ narrow, cerebral approach.

Nevertheless, as Herbert McCabe pointed out, there was common cause between Aquinas and Wittgenstein, which is often ignored. There is no evidence that Wittgenstein read Aquinas directly, but he had several prominent Catholic students, including Elizabeth Anscombe and Peter Geach, who arranged a Catholic funeral and burial for their teacher despite his never joining the Church. While the two lived 700 years apart and in very different contexts, there is in both Aquinas an in Wittgenstein a need to understand the very nature of language. There is also a concern to define the limits of language and not to say either what is untrue or not meaningful. Famously, Wittgenstein concluded his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) by writing “what we cannot speak about, we must pass over in silence” suggesting that he had great sympathy for the apophatic approach to language. Ranjit Chatterjee in Wittgenstein and Judaism: A Triumph of Concealment (2005) argues that Wittgenstein must have read Maimonides’ “The Guide for the Perplexed,” not least because he used a number of phrases and metaphors also used by Maimonides. Wittgenstein clearly believed that there is an ultimate, metaphysical reality, but rejected the idea that we can speak about it meaningfully. He wrote “There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical.” Tractatus 6:522 and “How the world is, is completely indifferent for what is higher. God does not reveal himself in the world.” Tractatus 6:4321 meaning that for Wittgenstein it is not possible to speak (meaningfully) about God, but that does not stop us from feeling God. He wrote “The feeling of the world as a limited whole is the mystical feeling.” 6:45 In this way, Aquinas was more positive about our ability to speak meaningfully about ultimate reality than Wittgenstein. Aquinas maintained that “we know God from creatures as their principle, and also by way of excellence and remotion. In this way therefore He can be named by us from creatures, yet not so that the name which signifies Him expresses the divine essence in itself.” Summa Theologica 1, 13, 1 And yet, Aquinas felt much sympathy for Maimonides position, which held that “The corporeal element in man is a large screen and partition that prevents him from perfectly perceiving abstract ideals… However great the exertion of our mind may be to comprehend the Divine Being or any of the ideals, we find a screen and partition between God and us.” Guide to the Perplexed Part 3, Book 9 and thus for what became Wittgenstein’s position. He wrote “Univocal predication is impossible between God and creatures.” Summa Theologica 1, 13, 5 and, while he maintained that the creative relationship between God and creatures supported his analogical approach to language, he was always cautious of taking claims about God too literally and forgetting the essential difference between what it means for us to be good and for God to be good. Yet, for Aquinas, the meaningfulness of religious claims depends ultimately on the belief that God is the cause of creatures, which means that God is not as remote as it otherwise might seem (Summa 1,13,2) As I have previously argued, Aquinas’ attempt to demonstrate God’s existence fails. Further, Aquinas’ religious experience towards the end of his life shows that he realized that himself in the end. It follows that Aquinas basis for believing that God is the cause of creatures is faith and not reason, so the meaningfulness of claims depends on faith and has no firm epistemological foundation. Other than that God is the cause of creatures, the meaningfulness of religious claims for Aquinas depends on how they cohere with points of doctrine and what else is known to be true. As Aaron B James pointed out in a 2009 article for Catalyst Magazine, Aquinas was a Theologian at least as much as he was a Philosopher. Similarly, for Wittgenstein, the meaning of religious claims depends on coherence, although that does not mean there is not an ultimate truth at stake. As he said, “let nature speak & acknowledge only one thing higher…” Culture and Value p3. He also said “If one thinks of God as the creator, must the conservation of the universe not be a miracle as great as creation – yes, aren’t the two one and the same? Public and Private Occasions p215 which suggests that Wittgenstein’s concept of God and Aquinas’ were similar. This is supported by William H Brenner in “Theology as Straw: An Essay on Wittgenstein and Aquinas” (New Blackfriars Vol. 93, No. 1046 (JULY 2012), pp. 412-425) In these ways, Aquinas and Wittgenstein are more similar than many would recognize, and yet this is partly because Aquinas’ attempt to root his approach to religious language in epistemological foundations failed, so in the end it is Wittgenstein’s approach to religious language which remains the more persuasive.

In conclusion, Wittgenstein’s approach to defining meaning in religious language is more persuasive than that of Aquinas, but it is worth looking beyond the superficial contrasts between their approaches to the essential similarities between their worldviews. While Aquinas and Wittgenstein were separated by 700 years, most of a continent, by religion and by culture, they both based their life on the existence of an metaphysical truth which we can only experience and can never know, at least within the limits of this life.

Critically compare Plato’s Form of the Good with Aristotle’s Prime Mover. [40]

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While Plato and Aristotle had contrasting approaches to philosophy in many ways, there are some similarities between their worldviews. One of these is that both Plato and Aristotle argued that a metaphysical entity provides the ultimate explanation for our physical reality. In Plato’s case this is the Form of the Good (FOG), which is the form of the forms – which themselves give definition and identity to the things we experience – and perhaps the only true form. For Aristotle this is the Prime Mover, which is the origin of movement and efficient causation as well as the necessary being which sustains our universe of contingencies. Through the centuries theists have seen in both the FOG and PM possible rational support for the existence of God, but in the end the Prime Mover is a more persuasive concept than the Form of the Good and is more useful to theists in this relation.

Aristotle’s arguments for the Prime Mover are rooted in observations, so accessible to anybody.  In the Metaphysics Book IV Aristotle defines metaphysics as “a science which investigates being as being and the attributes which belong to this in virtue of its own nature.” For any of the “special sciences” – Physics, Chemistry etc. – to proceed in discovering the causes of specific classes of existing things, we must first identify the causes of existence itself by engaging in metaphysics. As with the special sciences, metaphysics starts with observations and from these uses reason to identify the causes of what is observed. In the case of any thing that is observed, Aristotle reasons that its existence is caused by four types of cause:

  • material causes (i.e. physical ingredients such as the bronze of a statue)
  • formal causes (i.e. the concept according to which the material causes are arranged, such as the idea of the statue in the mind of the sculptor)
  • efficient causes (i.e. the agents which bring the material causes together according to the formal cause)
  • a final cause (i.e. the end or telos for which the thing exists, ultimately flourishing).

Nevertheless, as Aristotle states towards the end of Book IV of the Metaphysics, identifying the causes of existing things raises the question of what caused the causes. For examples, what is the formal cause of formal causes, which explains their existence? What is the uncaused efficient cause which started the series of agents that leads to what we observe? Aristotle hypothesises the existence of a “Prime Mover” which exists necessarily, outside time and space, and which sustains contingent existence, being the unmoved mover and uncaused causer of all things. Clearly, this reasoning has been adopted and adapted by many other philosophers since Aristotle’s time and has become the many versions of the Cosmological Argument for God’s existence. William Lane Craig is just one example of a contemporary philosopher who would support Aristotle in reasoning that this contingent universe must have a cause outside itself. Craig would also agree with Aristotle in limiting speculation about the nature of this cause, because its existence is necessarily beyond our conceptual framework. While the classical cosmological argument for God’s existence, such as was presented by Aquinas, has been roundly rejected by David Hume, Immanuel Kant and later Bertrand Russell, Craig points out that modern science and Big Bang Theory demolishes some of those criticisms, while others of them can be overcome by stopping short of claiming that the necessary being sustaining the universe is “what everybody calls God”… which Aristotle recognized 2400 years ago. As we now know, the universe is not what Russell called “a brute fact” which makes Aristotle’s concept of the Prime Mover persuasive.

In addition, Aristotle’s Prime Mover is more persuasive than Plato’s Form of the Good because Plato’s “argument” for the forms – and thus for the Form of the Good – is unclear and inconsistent. Plato is unclear about precisely which forms exist metaphysically.  As Julia Annas observes, “Plato never offers an argument for Forms that would establish them as entities suitable for a theory”[1] In Book X of the Republic, Plato implies that there are separate forms for tables, beds etc.  Socrates says to Glaucon: “Whenever a number of individuals have a common name we assume them to also have a corresponding idea or form.  Do you understand me? [I do]  Let us take any common instance; there are beds and tables in the world – plenty of them – are there not? [Yes] But there are only two ideas or forms of them – one of the idea of the bed, the other of a table.”[2] Yet, in Book VI of the Republic, through his Allegory of the Sun, Plato implies that only one form ultimately exists – the Form of the Good – and that our impression that a diversity of things exist is a belief rather than actual knowledge, a result of our ideas being clouded by sense-experiences and so not being clear or distinct.  Here, as Julia Annas explains, “Plato contrasted Forms, which are objects of knowledge, with particular instances of Forms (things that ‘partake in’ Forms), which are objects of belief…” [3] The lack of any explicit argument for the forms and the inconsistency of Plato’s position make Plato’s theory of the forms unconvincing. In addition, where Aristotle’s Prime Mover is supported by observable evidence and persuasive argument, it is not possible to support Plato’s theory of the forms, however it is presented, through either evidence or persuasive argument.  Nothing we can observe supports the existence of “forms” whether separately of beds and tables or indeed of the good.  Plato’s position – and that of modern Platonists who accept his theory of the forms – depends on reason alone.  Plato – through the character of Socrates – argues that the existence of the forms is known a priori, before and even without experience, because their necessary existence is contained within our understanding of all other things.  Yet what is the difference between this sort of rational argument for ultimate reality in the world of the forms… and speculation?  Even if the need to verify the forms is discounted, what could possibly falsify or count against Plato’s argument for the forms, especially if all experience is discounted?  It follows that Plato’s concept of the Form of the Good is less persuasive than the concept of Aristotle’s Prime Mover.

Further, Aristotle’s Prime Mover is more useful in supporting the existence of God than the Form of the Good. The concept of the Form of the Good might seem to have more in common with the Christian concept of God than the concept of the Prime Mover. While both the concept of the Form of the Good and the concept of the Prime Mover are of beings which exist metaphysically, eternally and immutably, only the concept of the Form of the Good is conceivably “the creator” or identified with truth and moral goodness. The goodness of the Form of the Good is the same as the goodness we experience in things and more conceivably the moral goodness Christians associate with God, while the goodness of the Prime Mover only relates to the Prime Mover necessarily fulfilling its nature and sustaining good things in existence. Yet, identifying God with the Form of the Good encourages univocal predication – assuming that attributes affirmed of God mean the same as when they are affirmed of other things – which leads to problems. If God’s power, knowledge and goodness are the same as our power, knowledge and goodness then God is limited by the laws of logic and possibility and therefore not supreme. Further, univocal predication quickly leads to confusion and the anthropomorphisation of God, pulling God away from what the rational demonstrations of God’s existence support so that faith becomes fideism and divorced from the Philosophy of Religion.Yet, as Aquinas showed in the Summa Theologica (1264), the concept of the Prime Mover is consistent with the Christian concept of God. Isaiah 55 confirms “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the LORD. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” Because of this, Aquinas’ doctrine of analogy is successful in showing that all of the classical attributes affirmed of God [when identified with the concept of the Prime Mover] convey some (if very limited) positive meaning. It follows that Aristotle’s Prime Mover is more useful in supporting the existence of God than the Form of the Good, because identifying God with the Prime Mover forces believers to confront the otherness of God and thus to avoid limiting or anthropomorphising God in a way that is as dangerous as it is enticing.

Clearly neo-platonists such as GE Moore, Iris Murdoch etc. would disagree with this argument, suggesting that the existence of a universal concept of goodness known through rational intuition is a persuasive argument for the existence of the Form of the Good.  They might draw on Kant’s so-called “moral argument” which suggests that the existence of the Moral Law, which presents itself synthetic a priori, makes it a duty to postulate the existence of a “God”… although “within the boundaries of reason alone”, as Plato would surely have agreed! CS Lewis’ moral argument also supports this view, suggesting that it is the rational concept of fairness, which so often causes atheists to reject God, which provides the best evidence for His existence. The concept of fairness cannot have its origins in experience after all, and yet even 2 year old children appeal to it. Nevertheless, intuitionism is not widely accepted today. Firstly, despite the big claims of Kant, Moore, Murdoch and Lewis, not everybody shares the same concept of goodness. While it is probably fair to say that the occasional sociopath does not disprove the existence of near-universal moral laws, these are better explained through psychology (Freud) and/or evolution (Trivers, Dawkins) than through a metaphysical Form of the Good today. This is partly because the Form of the Good relies on the wider Platonic world-view, where ultimate reality is metaphysical and reason a better guide to it than the evidence of the senses, when this is not widely shared in the modern – let alone the postmodern – world. It follows that Plato’s Form of the Good is not a persuasive or useful concept today.

In conclusion, the Prime Mover is a more persuasive and useful concept than the Form of the Good.  The Prime Mover is supported by more persuasive arguments than Plato’s Form of the Good, arguments which are consistent with modern science. The Prime Mover also presupposes a worldview which was widely accepted through the 19th and early 20th Centuries, while the Form of the Good depends on a worldview which has been out of favor since the Renaissance. The concept of the Prime Mover is also consistent with the Christian concept of God and, as Aquinas showed, identifying God with the Prime Mover helps Christians avoid some of the problems inherent in the univocal predication which identifying God with the Form of the Good encourages.  

Critically compare the logical and evidential aspects of the problem of evil as challenges to belief. [40]

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The problem of evil presents such a severe challenge to Christian belief that Hans Kung referred to it as “the rock of atheism.”  On one level, the problem of evil can be presented as a logical puzzle.  As John Hick noted “As a challenge to theism, the problem of evil has traditionally been posed in the form of a dilemma; if God is perfectly loving, He must wish to abolish evil; and if He is all-powerful, He must be able to abolish evil. But evil exists; therefore God cannot be both omnipotent and perfectly loving.”  As such, the logical problem of evil demands Theodicies or logical defences of God against charges of creating or allowing evil. On another level, the problem of evil can be presented as conclusive evidence that God cannot exist – at least in any form that would be worthy of worship – rendering any attempt at Theodicy… and religious faith… nigh-on impossible.  For example, Dostoevsky’s character Ivan Karamazov presented an evidential challenge to the simple faith of his brother Alyosha, rendering him speechless and certainly not rushing to God’s defence.  In the end, the evidential aspect of the problem of evil is a greater challenge to belief than the logical aspect. 

So challenging is the evidential aspect of the problem of evil to faith that it was presented as an argument for atheism by William Rowe in “The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism” (1979) Rowe focuses on a particular kind of evil that is found in our world in abundance: “intense human and animal suffering” which is, Rowe argues, intrinsically evil…meaning that it is bad in and of itself, even though it sometimes is part of, or leads to, some good state of affairs (p.335)  He uses this kind of evil as the basis for a DEDUCTIVE disproof of God, which is clearly VALID.

P1: There exist instances of intense suffering which an omnipotent, omniscient being could have prevented without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse.

P2: An omnipotent, omniscient, wholly good being would prevent the occurrence of any intense suffering it could, unless it could not do so without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse.

C: There does not exist an omnipotent, omniscient, wholly good being.

If there are rational grounds for accepting its premises, to that extent there are rational grounds for accepting the conclusion, atheism.  Rowe gives two powerful examples to support his first, factual premise; the fawn and Sue.  While Stephen Wykstra tries to reject this premise, arguing that “if we think carefully about the sort of being theism proposes for our belief, it is entirely expectable – given what we know of our cognitive limits – that the goods by virtue of which this Being allows known suffering should very often be beyond our ken” (1984: 91) playing the “mystery card” in this way will only ever persuade those with deep and unfalsifiable faith to the point of being what RM Hare called a BLIK.  The author of the Biblical book of Job tried what became known as Wykstra’s CORNEA argument centuries before Christ and it hardly reduced the force of the evidential challenge to belief.  Attempted defences of Wykstra from Alston, Hick and Swinburne do no more than restate the claim that human beings are in no position to judge why an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God would allow the fawn and Sue to suffer.  They do not make this claim any more persuasive in the face of the agonies that Rowe describes.  Rowe sees his second, theological premise, as self-evidently true.  While advocates of OPENNESS THEOLOGY disagree, suggesting that God’s existence as everlasting-in-time rather than eternal outside time places logical constraints on God’s power and knowledge so that God may not prevent instances of intense suffering that come about as a result of human free-will.  They argue that “the theistic worldview is not only compatible with, but requires or demands, the possibility that there is gratuitous evil” [Nick Trakakis IEP article on Evidential Problem of Evil] because it hinges on the existence of genuine free will.  Nevertheless, this fails to answer the question posed by JL Mackie in relation to his presentation of the logical problem of evil; why could not an omnipotent God create free beings who always choose what is right?  In practice, advocates of Openness Theology are advocates for a limited, anthropomorphic God for whom there is no credible evidence at all.  It follows that Rowe’s first and second premises are true, making his deductive disproof of an omnipotent, omniscient and wholly good being is sound, making his evidential argument the biggest possible challenge to belief.   

This conclusion is further supported by Gregory S Paul in “Theodicy’s Problem” (2007).  Where Rowe begins with very specific examples of dysteleological suffering, Paul widens the scope of the evidential argument by citing  “THE HOLOCAUST OF CHILDREN” as proof that there cannot exist any omnipotent, omnibenevolent God.  Like Rowe, Paul fine-tunes his argument to evade classical theodicies, but he also improves on Rowe’s argument because it is much harder to suggest that God could have an unknown purpose for designing the whole world to create maximum suffering than it is to suggest that he has an unknown purpose for allowing specific instances of animal or child suffering. As Paul writes, “The full extent of the anguish and death suffered by immature humans is scientifically and statistically documented… Probably hundreds of billions of human conceptions and at least fifty billion children have died, the great majority from nonhuman causes, before reaching the age of mature consent. Adults who have heard the word of Christ number in the lower billions. If immature deceased humans are allowed into heaven, then the latter is inhabited predominantly by automatons. Because the Holocaust of the Children bars an enormous portion of humans from making a decision about their eternal fate while maximizing the suffering of children, the classic Christian “free will” and “best of all possible worlds” hypotheses are falsified.”  He goes on, “The situation could not have been much worse than it actually is. If prenatal and juvenile mortality and disability were significantly higher than they actually are, then the population would not be able to grow, and would be at high risk of crashing, leading to human extinction. The level of natural evil has been about as severe as is practically possible.” p.132 Continuing… “If a creator exists, then it has chosen to fashion a habitat that has maximized the level of suffering and death among young humans that are due to factors beyond the control of humans over most of their history.”  It is very difficult to respond to Paul’s challenge as a believer.  Just as Darwin, Mill and Dawkins found, when faced with the “pitiless indifference” of nature laid bare, it becomes impossible – even ridiculous – to maintain a faith position.  This shows that the evidential aspect of the problem of evil presents the greatest possible challenge to belief.   

Of course, the logical problem of evil is still a significant challenge to belief.  JL Mackie (in his essay “Evil and Omnipotence” (1955)) pointed out that Christians usually believe that

P1.  God exists and is omnipotent

P2.  God exists and is omnibenevolent

P3.  Evil exists

Mackie went further than Hume, who had called this an “inconsistent triad” of beliefs, stating that holding these three propositions as co-beliefs is “positively irrational”.  In this way, the logical problem of evil seems to force Christians to choose between God’s omnipotence and His omnibenevolence, or else deny the existence of evil. Yet it has been the attempt to show that faith is (possibly) rational that presents a greater challenge to belief than the logical problem itself.  If only theologians had been content to admit that faith is irrational, or to choose which of Mackie’s propositions to drop!  The effect of doing so on belief would have been far less dramatic than the logical gymnastics of St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas have been.  Firstly, both thinkers demanded that Christians believe that evil is “privatio boni” making God less responsible for its effects. Aquinas used the analogy of silent pauses which add sweetness to the chant!  Yet, as Rowe and Paul have shown, it is difficult to categorise evil as a simple lack of good when the whole of nature seems designed to inflict maximum suffering.  Can the suffering out of which evolution is fashioned really be explained in terms of silent pauses making the totality of nature better?   This Theodicy only serves to highlight how out of touch Christian theology is and this to challenge peoples’ belief.  Secondly, St Augustine claimed that human beings deserve the effects of both moral and natural evil because as a species they misused their free will.  Again, this fails to account for the suffering of animals, which is hardly to be dismissed as an illusion.  It also fails to account for the suffering of innocent children, documented in such detail by Rowe and Paul, without appealing to “Original Sin”, a concept as incredible and abhorrent as it has become necessary to mainstream Christian doctrine.  These examples show how it is the logical gymnastics resorted to by Christian theologians in their blind attempt to defend their position against the logical aspect of the problem of evil that has twisted and distorted the position they sought to defend and presented an enormous challenge to belief, not the logical problem in itself.  As Marilyn McCord Adams noted, to a large extent philosophical reflection on the problem of evil makes the suffering worse.  She wrote ”There is a time to drop philosophical reflection, to forget about questions of meaning… in order to act to get the suffering to stop…”  

In conclusion, the evidential aspect of the problem of evil presents the biggest possible challenge to belief, closely followed by Christian responses to the logical aspect of the problem.  The logical aspect of the problem in itself is not so much of a challenge; believing that God has the all three attributes of omnipotence, omniscience and omnibenevolence and as defined by Mackie is not really demanded by the Bible or by Religious Experience or by the rational arguments for God’s existence, Cosmological, Teleological, Moral or Aesthetic.   

“It is more likely that the universe was the result of chance than that it was designed.” Discuss [40]

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The teleological argument is the oldest and probably the most persuasive argument for the existence of God.  Starting with observations of order and/or purpose in the universe, it reasons that these qualities cannot arise naturally and must have been caused by an intelligent designer… God.  Aquinas’ version of the argument, his Fifth Way, drew on Aristotle’s worldview and likened natural object fulfilling their telos to arrows hitting a target; just as an arrow doesn’t strike true without an archer to let it loose, so natural objects can’t fulfil their telos by chance and their doing so makes the existence of an intelligent designer “which everybody calls God” necessary.  Of course Darwin’s discovery of evolution through natural selection provides a compelling natural explanation for the existence of what appears to be order and purpose without the need to hypothesise an intelligent designer-God, but Paley’s development of the argument in Natural Theology shows that even this did not undermine the attempt to use design to argue for God.  This is because many people misunderstood Darwin’s theory, assuming that the end-point of human consciousness was fixed and that evolution operates through chance, both of which made design seem more probable than natural processes as an explanation.  The fact that these misunderstandings persist is demonstrated by Tennant’s use of them in his teleological arguments in 1930 and more recently by the glut of modern fine-tuning and intelligent design arguments, mostly presented at the behest of the Discovery Institute and via fellows of its Center for Science and Culture.  It follows that despite the persistence of design arguments for God, it is far more likely that the universe results from chance – or at least from the “designs” of natural processes – than that it was designed by an intelligent-designer-God.

In modern times it was David Hume who first identified the flaw in the design argument through his character Philo in “Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion” (1779).  In Part VIII Philo draws on the thinking of Epicurus to ask why the appearance of order and purpose in nature could not be the result of chance in an infinite universe.  He points out…“the universe goes on for many ages in a continuous series of states of chaos and disorder. But couldn’t it happen that it eventually settles down, not so as to lose its motion and active force (for we are assuming that that is inherent in it), but so as to preserve a uniformity of appearance through all the hubbub of its moving parts?” This suggests that if the universe is truly infinite, meaning that all possibilities have been realised, then the possibility of part of the universe being ordered and purposeful would have been realised as a result of chance and not design.  Of course the Big Bang Theory seems to falsify Hume’s assumption that the Universe is infinite in the sense that all possibilities have been realised.  The Standard Model of Physics posits a hard beginning to time and space only 13.7 billion years ago, meaning that only some possibilities have been realised, although others will continue to be realised until the universe collapses.  Given this, it seems less likely that we inhabit a patch of order and purpose that has been generated by chance.  Nevertheless, this underestimates the scale of the universe, which is truly infinite… despite having a hard beginning, an edge and shape and continuing to expand.  It also applies a dated Newtonian worldview to a Universe that we now know resists such a characterisation.  Nobel Prize winning Physicist Steven Weinberg has cast doubt on the Cosmological Principle on which the Standard Model depends and which assumes that the part of the universe we see is a fair sample, whose laws and characteristics reflect laws and characteristics everywhere.  This supports Hume’s point that the design argument relies on the Fallacy of Composition and that conclusions about this part of the universe cannot automatically be extrapolated to the whole universe.  Hume’s character Philo asked “can it be proper to argue from parts to the whole? Doesn’t the great disproportion ·between part and whole· bar all comparison and inference? From observing the growth of a hair, can we learn anything about how men come into being? Would the way a leaf blows—even if we knew this perfectly—teach us anything about how a tree grows?”  And it seems that our 21st century appreciation of the scale and character of the universe only makes his questions more apposite.  So, Hume’s suggestion that the order and purpose we see in our part of the universe is not typical and the result of chance in an infinite universe rather than design has survived the advent of modern Cosmology.  Thus it follows that despite the persistence of design arguments for God, it is far more likely that the universe results from chance than that it was designed.

In Part II of “Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion” Hume’s character Philo went on to ask how we can hope to pronounce about the characteristics of the whole universe from our own, still very limited, experience.  He pointed out how “A very small part of this great system of the universe, during a very short time, is very imperfectly revealed to us” asking “Do we then pronounce confidently about the origin of the whole?” Philo also asks whether the appearance of order and purpose might not be a property of how we see things, rather than how they really are, not least because of the many examples of disorder and chaos in nature, later documented by Darwin and JS Mill as reasons why they cannot agree that nature suggests an intelligent designer-God.  These observations of Hume’s are again supported by modern scientific developments.  Psychology has documented how the human mind is predisposed to see patterns (order) and faces (purpose) even where they do not exist; the phenomenon is called pareidolia and so common is it that the famous Rorschach inkblot tests rely on it.  Further, psychology has documented how we are subject to Confirmation Bias, being more likely to see, notice and remember experiences which confirm our existing beliefs than those which challenge them.  Given these tendencies, Hume’s suggestion that our impression of order and purpose existing everywhere and confirming our existing belief in a supernatural deity seems very plausible.  Of course, accepting Hume’s point has wider consequences than undermining the design argument for God’s existence.  If we accept that the process of spotting patterns and extrapolating from them “universal natural laws” leads to flawed conclusions, then the whole scientific method is in jeopardy.  The fact that this same method has yielded technological advances and results such as the laptop on which I am typing this essay does suggest that Hume’s point is unreasonably sceptical and that his character Cleanthes was onto something when he called Philo’s reasoning “the most perverse and obstinate metaphysics.”  Yet there is an important difference between science and religion when it comes to the use of inductive reasoning; whereas scientific laws are always falsifiable and produce useful results, God is not a falsifiable hypothesis and the results of believing in him are mixed at best in terms of their usefulness.  As Richard Dawkins has pointed out, religion “teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world…” so that “faith is a cop-out.”  It follows that fear of the effects of Hume’s point on science is not a good reason to reject Hume’s point, so it is more likely that the universe results from chance than that it was designed.

Of course, recent arguments from Intelligent Design argue that it is more likely that the universe was designed than that it occurred by chance.  For example, William Dembski argues that any natural structure whose existence passes the (somewhat arbitrary) “Universal Probability Bound” of 1 in 10150  is more likely to have been designed than to have occurred naturally “by chance”.  He uses examples of structures such as amino-acids and DNA which exhibit Specified Complexity, being both finely tuned and extremely complex, whose existence he suggests strains the credibility of naturalistic explanations.  Michael Behe agrees, suggesting that there are irreducibly complex biochemical structures which resist standard evolutionary explanations and are suggestive of an intelligent designer.  Nevertheless, statisticians and biochemists have united in their criticism of Behe and Dembski, arguing that they have made basic errors in their science.  In particular, Behe ignores the possibility that structures can evolve out of as well as into existence, making “irreducibly complex” structures explainable through standard evolutionary theory.  Further, it is wrong to suggest that evolution itself operates entirely randomly; in fact it has a “design” of its own although not an intelligent one, in seeking to replicate genes.  Given this the result; a universe saturated with dysteleological suffering, makes sense.    As Dawkins wrote “The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation… The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.” [River Out of Eden]  This suggests that despite the persistence of design arguments for God, it is far more likely that the universe results from the pitiless “design” of evolution than that it was designed by any intelligent-designer God.

On a wider scale, recent fine-tuning arguments argue that the precise conditions necessary for the Big Bang to produce a life-sustaining planet like ours are so improbable that they are more likely to have been designed than to have occurred by chance. For example, Alister McGrath focuses on the fine-tuning of carbon, writing “[The entire biological] evolutionary process depends upon the unusual chemistry of carbon, which allows it to bond to itself, as well as other elements, creating highly complex molecules that are stable over prevailing terrestrial temperatures, and are capable of conveying genetic information (especially DNA). […] Whereas it might be argued that nature creates its own fine-tuning, this can only be done if the primordial constituents of the universe are such that an evolutionary process can be initiated. The unique chemistry of carbon is the ultimate foundation of the capacity of nature to tune itself” [A fine-tuned universe] In 1989 John Gribbin and Martin Rees wrote a detailed defence of the fine-tuning argument in their book Cosmic Coincidences. They argued: “The conditions in our Universe really do seem to be uniquely suitable for life forms like ourselves, and perhaps even for any form of organic complexity. But the question remains – is the Universe tailor-made for man?”  yet Richard Dawkins has rejected this line of argument, pointing out that the improbabilities attached to naturalistic explanations assume that a life-sustaining planet like ours was always bound to happen.  If we embrace the possibility that it was far more likely that no such planet would ever exist, we will really begin to appreciate that “We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?” [Unweaving the Rainbow] So, wouldn’t design be more probable than this degree of “luck”?  For Dawkins, absolutely not!  To hypothesise the existence of a supernatural, intelligent designer God, let alone one with the many attributes of the Christian God, only multiplies the improbabilities. Who would have designed and fine-tuned this God after all?  Suggesting a whole new category of “necessary existence” without supporting evidence to solve this question makes God far more improbable than any alternative and. as Ockham’s razor suggests, the simplest solution of science is the best, even when that solution is not very simple!

In conclusion, despite the persistence of design arguments for God, it is far more likely that the universe results from chance – or at least from the “designs” of natural processes – than that it was designed by an intelligent-designer-God. The continuing popularity of design arguments for God despite their obvious flaws stems from our reluctance to accept let alone confront the precarity of the human condition.

Conversion Experiences do not provide a basis for belief in God. Discuss. (40)

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William James discusses conversion experiences in his “Varieties of Religious Experience” Lectures IX and X.  Many people might assume that a conversion experience must take somebody from one faith or no faith to a new faith, such as happened to St Paul on the road to Damascus according to Acts Chapter 9 and Chapter 22.   Yet, James defines conversion in broader terms, writing… “To be converted, to be regenerated, to receive grace, to experience religion, to gain an assurance, are so many phrases which denote the process, gradual or sudden, by which a self – hitherto divided, and consciously wrong inferior and unhappy – becomes unified and consciously right superior and happy, in consequence of its firmer hold upon religious realities…” p.186 In this way, a conversion experience is one in which a person gains a new and unified purpose in faith and so includes the famous conversion of St Augustine, described in his Confessions, in which he “converted” from having a purely academic interest in Christianity to having an all-consuming faith after hearing a voice commanding “tole, lege.”  James argues that conversion experiences, like mystical experiences, have four common features, including

  1. “The loss of all the worry, the sense that all is ultimately well with one, the peace, the harmony, the willingness to be…
  2. the sense of perceiving truths not known before….
  3. the objective change which the world often appears to undergo. “An appearance of newness beautifies every object,”
  4. the ecstasy of happiness produced.” James p245-249

As James rightly argues, while not all claimed-conversion experiences are credible, there are some which share all four of these common features, which are amongst the most credible and research-worthy religious experiences, and which serve to demonstrate the inadequacy of narrow medical materialism and provide a pointer to the existence of God. Conversion experiences provide a sound basis for belief in God for those who have them… in practice they cannot not believe after having had one… but someone else’s conversion experience is not a sufficient basis for someone else to believe in God. 

Firstly, James considers the medical explanation of conversion experiences offered by his contemporary Professor Starbuck and rightly rejects it as a complete explanation for this type of experience, while acknowledging that some claimed conversions might be accounted for in this way.  Starbuck attempted to explain away conversion experiences as a natural psychological phenomenon of later adolescence, being accompanied by “a sense of incompleteness and imperfection; brooding, depression, morbid introspection, and sense of sin; anxiety about the hereafter; distress over doubts, and the like.” p.195 and resulting in:  “a happy relief and objectivity, as the confidence in self gets greater through the adjustment of the faculties to the wider outlook” p.195  James rightly accepts that many adolescents do have such experiences, but notes that these might be ”imitative” and that there are sporadic adult examples of conversion which might be the “originals” and which are worthy of further study.  An example of such an “original” might be the conversion of St Augustine.  While Augustine was certainly filled with a sense of incompleteness and what he called “soul sickness” prior to the conversion, and while his conversion did lead to a sort of resolution of these feelings, St Augustine was 30 and so no adolescent at the time of his conversion. Further, the fruits of Augustine’s conversion demonstrate that it was not an adolescent phase or a flash-in-the-pan… it changed Christianity and so changed the world!  St Augustine was never affected by any doubt or backsliding, as one might expect if the experience had been the result of an adolescent psychological crisis. In this way, James was correct to reject Starbuck’s adolescent crisis explanation as a full explanation for conversion experiences and correct to consider some “original” examples of conversion experience – such as that of St Augustine – as worthy of further study and as a pointer to the existence of God if not any kind of proof.  It follows that conversion experiences point towards the existence of God but fall short of being a good basis for believing in God for those who have not had one.

Secondly, James considers the medical explanation of conversion experiences offered by his contemporary Professor Leuba and rightly rejects it as a complete explanation for this type of experience, while acknowledging that some claimed conversions might be accounted for in this way.  For Leuba, conversion experiences emerge out of a deep sense of moral imperfection and sin.  James acknowledges that some experiences do follow this pattern, and this is fair.  Perhaps St Paul’s conversion is the most obvious example to support James’ point.  Might St Paul have been brooding subconsciously on his own role in persecuting Christians, even holding the coats during the stoning of St Stephen?  Could this sense of moral imperfection – bearing in mind Paul’s Pharisaic training and beliefs – have prompted him to have a moral crisis to facilitate regeneration, doing a 180 degree turn in terms of his behaviour to cope with past guilt?  In this way we might compare St Paul with the gangsters who become saints on death row; facing judgement they can only cope by being habitually reborn and utterly changing as a person.  Yet again James argues that Leuba is seeking to explain away all conversion experiences based on a few.  He wrote “in spite of the importance of this type of regeneration, with little or no intellectual readjustment, this writer [Leuba] surely makes it too exclusive” p. 200 This is convincing because no two conversion experiences and no two individuals are alike. As James wrote, “there are distinct elements in conversion, and their relations to individual lives deserve to be discriminated” p.200   Further, even if Leuba was right and the conversion did result from a moral crisis, there is no way to know that the conversion is not God’s answer to the crisis.  God could be working through the brain’s capacities to effect change within the subject, just as God might work through the sun at Fatima or through the waters of the Red Sea when it parted.  How else, after all, could God act on his creation than through his creation?  Nevertheless, James was right to argue that it would be wrong for a third party to believe in God on the strength of somebody else’s claimed conversion experience – however credible it might seem – because (as Hume pointed out in his essay “On Miracles”) it is always possible that that person has been lying, is deluded or ill.  While Dean Inge and William Alston would disagree, claiming that we should believe people unless we have a good reason not to, as Carl Sagan pointed out “exceptional claims demand exceptional evidence” and the fact that the testimony relates to something we cannot verify and can explain in ways that we can, however unlikely, means that we cannot see such testimony as sufficient basis for belief in God.  However, James was also right to point out that a conversion experience is sufficient basis for belief for the person who has been converted.   A characteristic of the conversion experience is that the world seems to change objectively, so that it becomes impossible for the subject not to believe what they have experienced.  As James wrote: “A small man’s salvation will always be a great salvation and the greatest of all facts for him” p.235 and “the sense of renovation, safety, cleanness, rightness, can be so marvellous and jubilant as well to warrant one’s belief in a radically new substantial nature…” p224 It follows that a conversion experience is a good basis for belief in God for those people who have had one.

Further, “original” examples of conversion experience conform to the marks of genuine religious experience proposed by scholars including Otto, Stace and Tillich. For Otto, as he explains in “The idea of the Holy” every genuine experience is characterised by “mysterium tremendum et fascinans.” He described how the experience should include a sense of “piercing acuteness… accompanied by the most uncompromising judgment of self-depreciation, a judgment passed, not upon his character because of individual ‘profane’ actions but upon his very existence as creature before that which is supreme above all creatures.”  As James noted, this sense of utter inadequacy, awe and dread is a hallmark of the first stage of a conversion experience, as a person confronts their soul-sickness and inadequacy in the face of God. For Stace, a genuine experience must be of a non-sensuous unity in all things, similar to what Tillich referred to as “the ground of our being”.  A genuine experience is not a sensory experience of something external that we can sense through eyes or ears in any literal way, but something inward.  In this way, conversion experiences have more claim on being genuine experiences than corporate experiences – which are often of something seen, heard or felt – or of many mystical experiences, which might take the form of visions or voices.  St Augustine’s conversion was not the voice saying “tole, lege”… that might well have been the child in the garden… it was only prompted by the voice, the experience was  profoundly inward and non-sensuous.  In this way, conversion experiences have a good claim to being credible religious experiences by the definitions of scholars other than James.  Also, in their ineffable and non-sensuous nature, conversion experiences are not sectarian and are not undermined by the classic criticism of Hume that they exist in all religious traditions and therefore somehow cancel each other out.  On the contrary, conversion experiences point to the unity that underpins all religious traditions, a God whose nature and attributes are consistent with the other arguments for God’s existence and not, as is the case for other forms of religious experience, a God whose nature and attributes seem at odds with reason. 

In conclusion, as James rightly argued, conversion experiences provide sufficient basis for belief in God for those who have had one.  Indeed, it is impossible for the recipient of a genuine conversion experience not to believe.  However, conversion experiences do not provide sufficient basis in themselves for people in general, who have not had a conversion experience themselves, to believe in God.  It is always possible that individual experiences are, as Starbuck and Leuba suggested, the psychological result of an adolescent or a moral crisis.  It is always possible, as Hume suggested, that the subject is lying, deluded or ill.  Nevertheless, it is equally possible that God works through the brain, responding to adolescent or moral crises in a way whose power and goodness is demonstrated by its effects in the life of the subject and in the lives of those they touch.  Rather than basing belief on a single piece of evidence such as conversion experience, it makes more sense to base it on a cumulative case as Richard Swinburne outlines in his “The Existence of God” (2004)  Once the “prior probability” of God’s existence has been established then it becomes reasonable both to believe what we ourselves experience (Principle of Credulity) and to believe what others tell us (Principle of Testimony) so that we can amass a bank of examples of credible religious experiences, including “original” conversion experiences like those of St Augustine and St Paul, which may tip the balance in favour of believing in God, making God’s existence more probable than His non-existence.  While skeptics like Flew and Dawkins will surely disagree, arguing that “ten leaky buckets are no better than one”, in practice it is just as reasonable to believe in God on the strength of a strong abductive case as it is to convict somebody in a court of law on the strength of a strong abductive case.