Arguments for God

St. Anselm succeeded in demonstrating God’s existence from reason alone. Discuss [40]

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Most of the arguments for God’s existence start with observations of the natural world, concluding a posteriori, after the fact, that God’s existence is the most probable explanation of those observations.  As such, most arguments for God’s existence are inductive and so are subject to the problem of induction; even when these arguments are strong, they do not provide proof but only a high degree of probability. Their conclusions are always falsifiable if and when observations are found to be flawed or incomplete (and the premises of the argument thus shown to be untrue), as well as if and when a more probable explanation of these observations is suggested.  Because of the limitations of arguments for God’s existence that start with observations, St Anselm sought to demonstrate God’s existence from reason alone.  In his Monologion (1075-6) he proposed a deductive argument based on the grades of perfection in things, arguing that the existence of God as supreme perfection is contained within claims that other things are more or less perfect.  Nevertheless, Anselm’s argument was criticized by his predecessor as abbot of Bec, Lanfranc.  Lanfranc argued that Anselm had not succeeded in demonstrating God’s existence from reason alone, because the premises in his argument depended on observations, even though they did contain his conclusion.  Because of Lanfranc’s criticism, Anselm determined to try to demonstrate God’s existence from reason alone in the Prosologion (1078).  Anselm developed two novel a priori arguments in this work and he remained confident of his own success, despite criticisms leveled during his lifetime, writing…

“I BELIEVE that I have shown by an argument which is not weak, but sufficiently cogent, that in my former book I proved the real existence of a being than which a greater cannot be conceived; and I believe that this argument cannot be invalidated by the validity of any objection. For so great force does the signification of this reasoning contain in itself, that this being which is the subject of discussion, is of necessity, from the very fact that it is understood or conceived, proved also to exist in reality, and to be whatever we should believe of the divine substance.” Concluding words of Anselm’s “Responsio” to Gaunilo

Nevertheless, history has shown that St Anselm did not succeed in demonstrating God’s existence from reason alone. 

In the Prosologion Book II St Anselm presents a simple version of what Kant later termed an Ontological Argument from God’s existence.  He started by quoting Psalm 14:1 and claiming that atheists are fools because they accept that God is “that than which nothing greater conceived of” and claim that there is nothing by that definition that exists in reality, when existence is a perfection and so my definition a property of “that than which nothing greater can be conceived of”.  For St. Anselm, if God only existed in the mind, it would always be possible to conceive of something greater, namely something that existed in reality, so existence in reality must be a property of God.  This argument was criticised by Gaunilo of Marmoutiers in his wittily titled “On behalf of the fool.” Gaunilo objected to St. Anselm’s claim that Atheists accept his definition of God as “that than which nothing greater can be conceived of.” He argued that people can recognise a word without forming an idea of what it refers to in their minds and that is particularly likely in the case of God, because it is a word which refers to something that is unlike any other thing and which is beyond most peoples’ experience.  Further, Gaunilo argued that it is possible to have in one’s minds all sorts of ideas of things which do not exist in reality.  He then used St Anselm’s own example of a painter and a painting to reason that the idea of something in the mind must always precede understanding that that idea also exists in reality.   St Anselm rejected Gaunilo’s points in his Responsio, arguing that if Atheists do indeed recognise the word God but not have any idea what it refers to then so much more are they fools!  Later, Descartes’ examples of triangles and valleys support St Anselm’s reasoning here – how could somebody claim to recognise the word triangle without understanding its essential predicate of three-sidedness?  St Anselm then reasoned that God is not like the idea of a unicorn or a Gruffalo, because unlike any other imaginary thing, the idea of God is of a being whose supreme nature logically contains existence in reality.  He hit back at Gaunilo, claiming he never intended his example of the painter and painting to be used in the way that Gaunilo used it.  Nevertheless and despite these responses, Gaunilo’s criticisms are effective.  Having ideas “in intellectu” for words to refer to depends on experience, on having ideas about similar things to draw on.  When an artist paints, they form an idea of what they want to paint in their minds that usually draws on experience before they then apply paint to the canvas and come to understand their painting as an object that now exists in reality as well as in the mind.  When an artist paints a triangle, they have experience of three-sided shapes to draw on and if not that, then some experience of shapes full stop.  However, if an Artist tried to paint God, they would have no comparable experience to draw on at all, so the idea of God in the artist’s mind would always be prior to and separate from the idea of God existing in reality.  Atheists have no experience of God and so the word “God” is just a sound, a sign without anything to point towards.  Later, St Thomas Aquinas agreed with Gaunilo.  While he accepted that God’s existence can be said to be self-evident and known through reason alone to somebody who really understands all that can possibly be known about the nature of God, Aquinas noted that in practice most people have little concept of what God is.  In Summa 1,2,1 Aquinas wrote: “Now because we do not know the essence of God, the proposition is not self-evident to us; but needs to be demonstrated by things that are more known to us…— namely, by effects.”  In this way, St Anselm failed to demonstrate that Atheists are fools because God’s existence can be known from reason alone.

Further, a version of St Anselm’s argument in Proslogion II presented by Descartes was later criticised by Immanuel Kant and Bertrand Russell.  Persuasively, Kant pointed out that St Anselm and Descartes are wrong to claim that existence is a perfection.  Taking the example of a job interview, a candidate who exists is not more perfect than a candidate who does not, rather the application of the non-existent candidate is meaningless.  Superficially, it might seem that Kant is nitpicking.  A real chocolate cake, any real chocolate cake, will always be greater, more perfect, more tasty etc. than any imaginary chocolate cake, even an imaginary one with zero calories.  No less authorities than St Anselm and Descartes saw this as a matter of common sense.  Despite this, Kant’s point deserves deeper consideration.  In logic, following Aristotle, there are two kinds of predicates – accidental predicates and essential predicates.  Accidental predicates are properties that an object may or may not have – like cherries or cream in the case of a chocolate cake.  Essential predicates are properties that an object must have or not be that object – like chocolate-flavour in the case of a chocolate cake.  In the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) Kant argues that existence is neither an essential predicate of anything, nor really an accidental predicate.  Focusing for the moment on existence as an accidental predicate, existence cannot be seen as a quality that an object might or might not have in the same way that cherries or cream are qualities that a chocolate cake might or not have.  To explain this point, Bertrand Russell used the example of a claim such as “the present King of France is bald” – it seems like a meaningful claim and capable of being true or false, but in fact because there is no present king of France the claim is meaningless.  St Anselm implies that there is a scale of perfection, the idea of an imaginary God appearing lower down the scale, with Gods having more or less perfect attributes appearing alongside, with the real God at the top of the scale.  In fact real existence is a precondition of appearing on the scale and being capable of comparison.  Russell points out that when St Anselm defines God as “that than which nothing greater can be conceived of” he begs the question and smuggles the existence of God as the object into the premises of his argument, reasoning that existence must de dicto be an accidental predicate of God.  If there is no “that than which nothing greater can be conceived of” then predicating anything of it is meaningless.  St Anselm needs to establish the existence of God before his demonstration of God’s existence will work, so the argument could only ever succeed for a person who had reason to believe already, on other grounds.  For these reasons as well, St Anselm failed to demonstrate God’s existence from reason alone.

Perhaps aware of the shortcomings of his argument in Proslogion Book II, in the Proslogion Book III St Anselm had already presented a different type of Ontological Argument, reasoning that it is greater to exist necessarily than only contingently, so necessary existence is a property of God as “that than which nothing greater can be conceived of.”  Here, St Anselm is arguing that existence is not just an accidental predicate of “that than which nothing greater can be conceived of” but is actually an essential predicate of God, to use Descartes’ later example as three-sidedness is an essential predicate of being a triangle.  In his “On behalf of the fool” Gaunilo criticised this argument as well, trying to reduce it to absurdity by using the analogy of a perfect island.  Nobody but a fool would believe that an island exists simply because somebody says that it is a perfect island, so existence (necessary or otherwise) must be predicated of it.  In this last criticism, at least as applied to the argument presented in Proslogion III, Gaunilo fails to show that Anselm’s argument is flawed.  As St Anselm wrote in the Responsio:

“I promise confidently that if any man shall devise anything existing either in reality or in concept alone (except that than which a greater be conceived) to which he can adapt the sequence of my reasoning, I will discover that thing, and will give him his lost island, not to be lost again.”

St Anselm is right to remind Gaunilo that necessary existence cannot logically be said to be a property of islands, unicorns or gruffalos for that matter.  Such things exist within time and space, contingently.  No contingent existence can necessarily exist.  Only God, who is “that than which nothing greater can be conceived of” has and must by definition have the unique property of necessary existence.  Despite this, however, St Anselm assumes that the idea of necessary existence is possible.  Persuasively, Immanuel Kant argued that because all our possible knowledge is of contingently existing things, any claims about necessary existence are like a “cupola of judgement”.  For Kant, all existential claims must be synthetic, capable of being verified through sense-observations.  We simply cannot claim to know that anything necessarily exists, so St Anselm’s argument is speculative and must fail to demonstrate God’s existence from reason alone.  Further, Kant argues that existence cannot be an essential predicate of anything.  He wrote:

“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…”

Kant is effectively agreeing with Gaunilo, although supporting his argument rather better, in reasoning that existence is “out there” in the world of the senses and so incapable of being demonstrated analytically, through reason alone, and without reference to the senses.  Today, the vast majority of people would side with Kant and Gaunilo in their understanding of what it means to exist, and for this reason St Anselm failed to demonstrate God’s necessary existence from reason alone.

Nevertheless, after WWII Kant’s world-view started to be questioned and along with it his claims that all existential statements have to be synthetic and that existence cannot be an essential predicate of anything.  Perhaps drawing on those like Hegel who drew attention to cracks in the foundations of Kant’s critical philosophy early in the 19th Century, scholars such as Hartshorne and Quine pointed out how dogmatic Kant’s understanding of existence and meaning was.  For Hartshorne, Kant’s criticism of seeing existence as an accidental predicate is fair, but ignores the possibility that necessary existence could be an essential predicate of God and only God.  Hartshorne reasoned that either God’s existence is contingent (which it cannot be, by definition), or God’s existence is necessary and necessary existence is impossible or God’s existence is necessary and possible, in which case God exists.  Rejecting Kant’s limited world-view, Hartshorne argued that God’s necessary existence is not impossible, so God necessarily exists.  Of course, Hartshorne’s argument depends on his ability to reject the claim that necessary existence is an impossible concept.  JN Findlay strongly disagreed with Hartshorne on this point, arguing that by showing that God’s existence can’t be contingent and can only be necessary when necessary existence is impossible,

“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…’ [First published in Mind, April 1948] 

While others have agreed with and built on Hartshorne’s reasoning, including Norman Malcolm and later Alvin Plantinga, those who side with Hartshorne tend to be those who believe in God on other grounds.  Again, attempts to revive the Ontological Argument serve to show that Anselm failed to demonstrate the existence of God from reason alone to anybody who doesn’t already believe in God on other grounds.

In conclusion, St. Anselm’s arguments in the Proslogion fail to demonstrate the existence of God from reason alone.  Gaunilo, Kant and Russell among many other critics have shown how St. Anselm’s reasoning is problematic, firstly by showing how Atheists need not accept the first premise of the argument, that “God is that than which nothing greater can be conceived of” and by undermining the whole attempt to demonstrate existence by analysing the concept of anything, and then by showing that existence is not a perfection or quality that can properly be accidentally predicated of anything and that necessary existence is impossible, because existence cannot be an essential predicate of anything.  That is not to say that St Anselm’s arguments have no value.  While they fail to demonstrate God’s existence from reason alone, for those who already believe in God – or at least for those who already reject Kant’s critical world view with its limitation on possible knowledge and meaningful claims – the arguments remain an important part of articulating their faith and revealing the nature of God.

Aquinas’ first cause argument successfully proves the existence of God. Discuss. (40)

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Aquinas’ first cause argument is the second of his three versions of the Cosmological Argument, which form the first of his three ways to God in the first part of the Summa Theologica.  As a Cosmological Argument, Aquinas’ first cause argument starts from the observation of order, in this case causation, in the universe.  The word “Cosmological” derives from the Greek “Kosmos” which means both “order” and “universe”.  As Anthony Kenny[CV1]  explains, Aquinas relies on Aristotle’s theory of causation, as outlined in the Metaphysics Book IV.  Aristotle argued that all things in the universe have four causes, which can by understood in terms of the material, efficient, formal and final.  Material causes are the physical ingredients of things, efficient causes the agents that cause them to exist as they do, formal causes the definitions of things which make them what they are and the final cause to which things aim is their goal or telos and ultimately flourishing.  Focusing on efficient causation, Aquinas’ second way to God argues that everything in the universe is caused by one or more agents outside itself and nothing causes itself to exist.  If this is so then there is a problem – what was the first efficient cause.  An infinite chain of efficient causes makes no sense, because without a first cause nothing would exist.  Something cannot come out of nothing.  There must be a first efficient cause, but this must itself be uncaused, which makes it unlike any other thing.  The uncaused cause of the universe could then be said to be “neither something nor nothing” and, Aquinas concludes, this is what everybody calls God. As an inductive argument the conclusion of the Cosmological Argument, that God exists, is supported by observed premises which are falsifiable.  Because of this, Aquinas’ first cause argument cannot be said to prove God’s existence.  The problem of induction ensures that the most that the argument can be said to achieve is a very high degree of probability that its conclusions are, in fact, true[CV2] . Leaving the problem of induction and the issue of proof to one side: Aquinas’ first cause argument is still a convincing argument for the existence of God and, as William Lane Craig continues to argue, it is a useful means of defending the rationality of faith[CV3] . 

An immediate criticism of Aquinas’ argument is that it assumes that EVERYTHING in the universe is caused.  Although this claim is supported by Aristotle, it may be fair to suggest – as indeed JL Mackie did in “The Miracle of Theism” (1982[CV4] ) – that there may be things in the universe that are uncaused.  Indeed, Quantum Physics has concluded that there are sub-atomic particles that are in a sense uncaused. It could be that Aquinas’ first premise – that everything in the universe is caused – is untrue and if that is the case then the argument would fail. Nevertheless, it would be going too far to suggest that Physics has proven the existence of uncaused things in the universe.  Quantum particles could well be caused, for all we know, even though they appear not to be.  The most that Mackie’s criticism achieves is to show that Aquinas’ first premise must remain uncertain.  Although it seems likely on the basis of present experience that all things are caused, as Hume observed it is always possible that there are things in the universe that are uncaused and that these could explain the universe without recourse to God[CV5] . In this way, although Aquinas’ first cause argument is not entirely successful as an argument for God’s existence from observation, it is able to survive an obvious line of criticism.

In Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779) Hume went on to suggest that the universe itself could be the uncaused cause of itself.  Russell made a similar point in his debate with Frederick Copleston[CV6] , suggesting that the universe should be seen as a “brute fact”.  This is certainly possible; Aquinas’ might be guilty of committing the fallacy of composition in reasoning that just because things within the universe need causes that the universe as a whole needs a cause.  Russell gave the analogy of mothers – just because all men have mothers doesn’t mean that the human race has a mother.  While Hume and Russell could well be right and the universe might be the cause of itself, this goes well beyond our experience.  It is just as difficult to theorise about the universe being self-causing as it is to theorise that it has an uncaused cause.  Neither conclusion can be drawn with any degree of confidence.  What does seem certain is that Aquinas is correct to reason that the universe must be explained in terms of something that is uncaused, whether that is within the universe, the universe itself – or God.  William Lane Craig[CV7] , in adapting the Cosmological Argument for modern Christian Apologetics, chooses to leave the argument at its first conclusion – that there must exist an uncaused causer.  He leaves it to Theologians to convince people that the uncaused cause is in fact “what everybody calls God” and it seems that his caution is sensible. Neither Aquinas’ first cause argument nor any other version of the Cosmological Argument can conclusively prove the existence of God, but the argument can point to the rationality of faith given the necessity for a cause for the universe which is unlike anything within our normal experience[CV8] .

Immanuel Kant advised such caution when in the Critique of Pure Reason he argued that the Cosmological Argument, like other inductive arguments for God’s existence, goes beyond the boundaries of what we can claim to know.  It is reasonable to observe that all things are caused and that there is a tension implicit in this which demands explanation – but it is not reasonable to draw conclusions about that explanation when they go beyond possible experience.  Perhaps this is where faith comes in; the first cause argument cannot successfully PROVE the existence of God, but it can point towards a mystery which is evident in the observed universe, a mystery which is suggestive of the existence of something supernatural if not of the God of Classical Theism.  As Hume pointed out, the first cause argument cannot claim to lead to the God of Christianity – even to a single God in fact – but limited as it is, the argument provides a useful defence for the believer[CV9] . 

 [CV1]Precise relevant detail and range of scholarly views

 [CV2]Acknowledging & engaging with the precise wording of the title – This also works to show the LIMITATIONS of the argument.

 [CV3]THESIS

 [CV4]Using a range of scholarly views.  This paragraph also serves as the COUNTERCLAIM, as it does cede some of the point that Mackie makes.

 [CV5]Evaluating the “maybe not everything has a cause” criticism, linking to the THESIS, justified, developed…

 [CV6]Range of scholarly views – again a bit of counterargument (balance) here, allowing that Hume and Russell have a point.

 [CV7]Range of scholarly views

 [CV8]Evaluating the fallacy of composition criticism and linking to the THESIS – justified, developed, sustained…

 [CV9]Drawing in Kant’s criticism & another of Hume’s in drawing the final CONCLUSION, which restates the THESIS – successful argument.  Builds step by step and is therefore convincing.

Critically evaluate the view that religious experience is the best basis for belief in God. [40]

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When compared with the classical arguments for God’s existence – Cosmological, Teleological and Ontological – Religious Experience might seem like the best basis for believing in God, because the God revealed through well-known experiences is more obviously what Pascal called “the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob” than the abstract “God of the Philosophers”.  In this way, Religious Experience would better support Religion or Classical Theism than the other arguments, which seem to support deism at best.  Nevertheless, on closer analysis Religious Experience does little more to support belief in the God of Religion, a personal deity, than the other arguments.  Because of this, coupled with the unique difficulties which beset Religious Experience as an argument for God’s existence, Religious Experience is not the best – or even a good – basis for belief in God.

Firstly, as William James argued in his “Varieties of Religious Experience” (1902) genuine religious experiences are ineffable and resist description in what Ramsey called “ordinary language”.  When somebody reports having “seen” the Virgin Mary or having “heard” the voice of God, the experience is not really like other sense-experiences through the eyes or ears.  Further, the object that people experience is not really personal.  As Otto argued, genuine religious experiences are of “the numinous”, “the Absolute” rather than any anthropomorphic being.  Stace concurred, arguing that genuine mystical experiences are of “an ultimate nonsensuous unity in all things, a oneness or a One to which neither the senses nor the reason can penetrate.” Happold agreed, arguing that genuine mysticism is characterized by a sense of love and union with all other beings which overcomes the anxiety we all feel at being separate and alone.  For James, Otto, Stace and Happold Religious Experiences point not towards the existence of “the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob” but to a “higher power” which, as James pointed out, “need not be infinite, it need not be solitary. It might conceivably even be only a larger and more godlike self…” (Varieties of Religious Experience, Postscript) In this way, Religious Experience does not really serve to support belief in the God of Religion or even Classical Theism any more than the classical arguments do and so it is not the best basis for belief in such a God.

Secondly, Religious Experience is a weaker basis for belief in a “higher power” God than the classical arguments are.  This is because:

  1. Religious Experience is difficult to define.  While James, Otto and Stace recognize only solitary experiences, Richard Swinburne and Caroline Franks-Davis allow for corporate experiences as well.  While James, Otto and Stace suggest that all genuine experiences are beyond literal description, Swinburne and Franks-Davis allow for experiences which can be described using everyday language.  Because scholars differ about which experiences are possibly “authentic” and which are not, Religious Experience as a phenomenon is a less convincing basis of observation on which to build an inductive argument for God’s existence.  When compared with the Cosmological Argument, nobody questions Craig’s first premise “everything that begins to exist has a cause” even if they go on to criticize other premises or the conclusion of his argument. It follows that because of the difficulty in defining Religious Experience, is a weaker basis for an inductive argument for God’s existence than the classical arguments are
  2. As Swinburne points out, the argument from Religious Experience depends on assuming the Principles of Credulity and Testimony.  While it is far to say that the other arguments from observation also depend on the Principle of Credulity, Hume’s critique of Miracles in “An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding” Section X (1758) fatally undermines the Principle of Testimony as it applies to reports of religious experiences.  It is always more likely that somebody has made a mistake than that their experience, which goes against the established laws of nature, is genuine.  While it is, as Hick pointed out, bad science to ignore such reports, it is, as James pointed out, impossible to exclude the possibility that the person reporting a religious experience is mistaken because credible physiological and/or psychological explanations exist to account for everything reported.  For examples, as James discusses in his chapter on Conversion Experiences, psychiatry might account for very many of these including those of St Paul (as a response to a moral crisis according to Leuba) and of St Augustine (as a delayed adolescent crisis according to Starbuck).  While St Paul or St Augustine might themselves be convinced that their experience was authentic and be justified in believing in their object, there is no necessity for other people to believe either in the authenticity of their experiences or in what they seem to refer to.  So, because testimony always lacks credibility, an inductive argument based on Religious Experience will be weaker than the classical arguments in establishing a basis for belief in God.
  3. Finally, as Swinburne points out, accepting accounts of Religious Experience as possibly genuine depends on prior probability.  If you are what James called a “medical materialist“, reports of religious experience would be their very nature incredible.  In this way, reports of will only be entertained as the basis for belief in anything by those who are already open to the existence of that thing and the argument from Religious Experience is shown to be circular and so not as persuasive as the other classical arguments.

Clearly, Swinburne would disagree and would argue that Religious Experience is a better basis for believing in God than the other inductive arguments.  In his “The Existence of God” (1979) he set out a cumulative argument for God’s existence which employed Bayes’ Theorem to assess the relative probabilities of God and natural causes as explanations of causation, order and purpose, beauty and morality in the universe.  None of these arguments is conclusive in itself, argued Swinburne.  It takes Religious Experience to tip the balance in favour of God’s existence and provide a basis for believing in God.  Nevertheless, Swinburne’s cumulative argument has been widely criticized, not least by Anthony Flew, who compared it with “ten leaky buckets”.  A lot of bad arguments, each of which fails to justify belief in God in itself, are together not significantly better than one bad argument and so fail to justify religious belief.  Further, Swinburne’s contention that Religious Experience is the strongest argument, the argument which tips the balance of probability in favour of God’s existence, seems odd given that it depends on prior probability and so has no force without the other arguments having already established that God is slightly more probable than the natural alternative.  To what extent can an argument which is circular in itself be the deciding factor?  If the other arguments succeed in justifying an openness to the existence of God without depending on Prior Probability or the Principle of Testimony, then surely they are better bases for belief in God than Religious Experience.  For Swinburne, Religious Experience is a better basis for belief in God than the other arguments from observation even though it depends on Prior Probability and the Principle of Testimony because, as he sees it, Religious Experiences support belief in the personal God of Religion.  However, as has already been established here, this is not necessarily the case.  On close analysis, for those who have had no experience themselves, Religious Experiences can support openness to the existence of a “higher power” at most.  By contrast, the cosmological argument supports belief in a necessarily single, all-powerful creator God and the teleological argument supports belief in an omni-benevolent intelligent designer God, at least when “good” is understood in the purely Aristotelian sense.  In this way, Religious Experience is a worse basis for belief in God than either of the cosmological or teleological arguments, even when it comes to believing in “the God of the Philosophers” with the classical attributes.

In conclusion, Religious Experience is very far from being the best basis for belief in God. On close analysis, reports of such experiences fail to justify anything more than an openness to a “higher power” which would not have to have any of the classical attributes of God.  It is as impossible to exclude naturalistic explanations for Religious Experiences as it is to exclude the possibility that they have been caused by God, so the question of what they point towards must remain open.  Further, as an argument for God’s existence, Religious Experience is beset by problems of definition, credibility of testimony and circularity.  It is certainly not the decisive factor in demonstrating the existence of God that Swinburne claims, but is a bucket that is more leaky than most.

“Although it is reasonable to believe in God on the basis of a religious experience you yourself have had, it is wrong to believe on the basis of other peoples’ reports.” Critically evaluate this statement. [40]

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This statement largely reflects the conclusion William James came to in his “Varieties of Religious Experience” (1902).  James argued that the people who have a religious experience are perfectly justified in believing in the object of that experience, but maintained that reports of other peoples’ religious experiences could not justify belief in anything more than “a higher power.”  On the basis of James’ conclusion and WK Clifford’s famous 1877 essay “The Ethics of Belief” it  would be fair to say that believing in the God of religion on the basis of others’ reported experiences is wrong because

“it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone to believe anything on insufficient evidence.”

As Clifford pointed out, belief is not a private matter because belief affects how we act.  He gave the example of a ship owner sending an un-seaworthy vessel to sea on the basis of a belief that the hull was sound.  If the belief is not supported by sufficient evidence and not properly justified, it is morally wrong of the ship owner to hold that belief.  In the case of the title statement, a person who believed in anything more than “a higher power” on the basis of other peoples’ religious experiences would be morally wrong to do so because this belief affects their actions.  For example, a Christian who believed in the Christian God on the basis of the religious experiences described in the Bible would be morally wrong to do so because that belief would direct them to look down on non-Christian religion and make efforts to convert Muslims, Jews and Hindus on the grounds that St Paul reported a vision of the risen Jesus who directed him (via Ananias) to be baptized.  The reported vision in Acts 22 would be insufficient justification for the belief of the Christian today and the Christian would be wrong to believe in more than the existence of a “higher power” on the strength of such reports.  By this analysis, the title statement is correct.

In William James’ Gifford lectures, given between 1901 and 1902, James explored the topic of Religious Experience in detail, considering conversion experiences and mystical experiences in particular depth, before evaluating the extent to which these experiences could be used as evidence to support belief in God.  In Lecture I James challenged the dominant medical materialism, arguing that it is reductive and fails to do justice the the richness of human experience.  He later built on this theme in Lecture III pointing out the naivety discounting any claimed experience of anything which cannot be sensibly perceived because indeed all sense-experiences are mediated through the mind and its categories, none of which can themselves be perceived through the senses. In Lecture II James went on to limit the scope of his inquiry to address only

“the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine” p.32

His inquiry did not, therefore, address corporate religious experiences despite the fact that most previous work had focused on what Durkheim called

“an effervescent group phenomenon”

This was because corporate experiences are more plausibly explained in terms of mass hysteria.  After exploring the important place of religious experience in religiosity and outlining the common features of conversion experiences and mystical experiences, James concluded that there are religious experiences that are not easily reduced to medical or psychological phenomena.  In these cases, James argued, the people who have a religious experience are perfectly justified in believing in the object of that experience.  In fact, they can do no other.  Nevertheless, this left open the question of whether other people would be justified in believing in God on the strength of what recipients of mystical experiences report.  In Lecture XVIII James began to consider this question, discounting the efforts of Philosophers of Religion in proving God’s existence through reason and then pointing out that religious experiences neither support belief in the classical attributes of God nor evidence standard theological doctrines.  For James, then, belief in God as the object of Religion lay beyond rational proof and beyond what can be justified through religious experience either.  Nevertheless, as James concluded in Lecture XX, Religious Experience can and does justify belief in something other and larger than our conscious selves.  As James wrote in his Postscript,

“the practical needs and experiences of religion seem to me sufficiently met by the belief that… there exists a larger power… both other and larger than our conscious selves. Anything larger will do… It need not be infinite, it need not be solitary. It might conceivably even be only a larger and more godlike self…. … my only aim at present is to keep the testimony of religious experience clearly within its proper bounds.”

It is clear, then that James would have accepted the title statement insofar as “God” refers to the God of any specific religion.  There is no sense that others’ reports of religious experiences justify belief in anything beyond some larger power; certainly not being a Christian or defining God in terms of the classical attributes.  It follows that the title statement is correct insofar as others’ reports of religious experiences could not justify belief in God and so would render such a belief wrong by Clifford’s argument.

James’ argument that the human phenomenon of religious experience only justifies belief in a higher power and not the God of religion  is persuasive.  Firstly because Rudolph Otto in his The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and its Relation to the Rational (1917) argued that all genuine religious experiences are encounters with “the numinous” rather than either of what Pascal famously called “the God of the Philosophers” or “the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob”.  While Otto’s description of the marks or characteristics of genuine religious experiences seems more tightly drawn than James’, his argument supports James’ conclusion that the phenomenon that some people experience for themselves and which others hear or read about points towards a more abstract “higher power” rather than the God of any particular religion.  Secondly because Walter Stace in The Teachings of the Mystics (1960) argued that:

“the central characteristic in which all fully developed mystical experiences agree… is that they involve the apprehension of an ultimate non-sensuous unity in all things, a oneness or a One to which neither the senses nor the reason can penetrate. In other words, it entirely transcends our sensory-intellectual consciousness.” p14-15

Stace’s description of mystical experiences as an encounter with larger reality supports James’ conclusion that religious experiences justify the belief that:

“there exists a larger power… both other and larger than our conscious selves. Anything larger will do… It need not be infinite, it need not be solitary.” Varieties of Religious Experience, Postscript, p.515-6

In this way James, Otto and Stace all support the title statement and agree that other peoples’ religious experiences could not justify belief in the “God” of any particular religion.  It follows that the title statement is correct insofar as others’ reports of religious experiences could not justify belief in the God of Religion and so would render exclusive Religious belief on the basis of reports of others’ experiences wrong by Clifford’s argument.

Clearly, Richard Swinburne would take issue with this conclusion.  In “The Existence of God” (1979) Chapter 13, Swinburne agreed with James that it is reasonable to believe in God on the basis of one’s own experience.  He pointed out that in the absence of any reason to disbelieve it, one should accept what appears to be true and called this the “Principle of Credulity”.  On this basis, Swinburne would disagree with Richard Dawkins who claimed in “The Blind Watchmaker”(1986) that if he saw a marble statue waving at him across a museum, he would sooner check into his local psychiatric hospital than believe his own eyes.   Swinburne also agreed with James’ broader critique of medical materialism, pointing out that accepting his arguments depends on “prior probability” and that those who have already excluded anything supernatural on ideological grounds will remain unconvinced by any evidence for God.  Nevertheless, Swinburne was more open than James to trusting the testimony of others as evidence for the existence of not only a higher power but more specifically the God of Religion.  Swinburne claimed that with the absence of any reason to disbelieve them, one should accept that believers are telling the truth when they testify about religious experiences.  On the basis of this “Principle of Testimony” Swinburne argued that the common occurrence of those Religious Experiences which conform to his broad, five-fold classification makes the existence of a single “God” (with at least the classical attributes of omnipotence and omnibenevolence) more probable than any alternative explanation of the universe.  For Swinburne, believing that God is single is a simpler, more elegant explanation than believing in multiple higher powers.  In this way (by the commonly accepted principle of Ockham’s razor) he reasons that whatever caused and designed the universe and whatever people encounter through religious experiences is more likely to be one God than several.  Further, by calling on the evidence of the Cosmological and Teleological arguments for God alongside Religious Experience, Swinburne reasons that the single God must be both the cause of everything and so be all-powerful and responsible for the order and purpose evident in the universe and so be omnibenevolent.  Swinburne would, therefore, disagree with the title statement and argue that Religious Experiences justify belief in a single all-powerful, all-good “God”, whether you have had one yourself or not.

Nevertheless, Swinburne’s argument is open to a number of criticisms.  Firstly, his cumulative approach was rejected by Anthony Flew, who compared it with “ten leaky buckets”.  A lot of bad arguments, each of which fails to justify belief in God in itself, are together not significantly better than one bad argument and so fail to justify religious belief.  Although JP Moreland attempted to defend Swinburne, pointing out that:

‘clearly if you jam ten leaky buckets together in such a way as the holes in the bottom of each bucket are squashed close to the solid parts of neighbouring buckets, you will get a container that holds water.’

That is pushing the analogy too far.  Flew’s point that Swinburne’s cumulative approach fails to provide sufficient justification for believing in God still stands.  As Carl Sagan and later Christopher Hitchens pointed out, “exceptional claims demand exceptional evidence“.  The existence of the God of religion is certainly an exceptional claim and the evidence provided by Swinburne’s list of inductive arguments in the Existence of God fails to provide sufficient justification for anything beyond being open to a higher power as James, Stace and Otto argued.  Secondly, as David Hume and much later Richard Dawkins have pointed out, when people claim to have experienced something exceptional it is always more likely that they have made a mistake than that they are telling the truth.  While Swinburne criticizes this argument as bad science, it is reasonable for a scientist to explore whether statistical anomalies might be explained as mistakes first, before exploring other possibilities.  In the case of those people reporting religious experiences, there are established and credible physiological or psychological conditions which could explain the experiences without reference to a higher power, let alone a “God”.  This is why James rightly rejects the attempt to use other peoples’ Religious Experiences as proof for God.  Alternative explanations for the experiences can never be excluded, not least because experiences are ineffable, so descriptions of them are imprecise and can’t bear the weight of being used as evidence to justify belief in the God of Religion.  It follows that the title statement is indeed correct insofar as others’ reports of religious experiences could not justify belief in the God of Religion and so would render exclusive Religious belief on the basis of reports of others’ experiences wrong by Clifford’s argument.

In addition, while Swinburne’s reasoning that the “higher power” is more probably single than plural seems sensible, his claim that the higher power must have the attributes of omnipotence and/or omnibenevolence is not.  Firstly, Swinburne accepts that neither the Cosmological nor the Teleological Argument justifies belief in the existence of God in itself.  How then can he rely on the reasoning of the Cosmological argument to support that element of his conclusion which relates to God’s omnipotence or on the reasoning of the Teleological argument to support that element of his conclusion which relates to God’s omnibenevolence?  If an argument can’t justify belief in God’s existence why should it justify belief in God’s omnipotence or omnibenevolence?  Secondly, there is specific evidence against God’s power and goodness.  If God really was all-powerful, why would he need to break the laws of nature periodically to reveal His existence and His will or correct a sequence of events?  Further, if God really was all-good then why would he be so selective and arguably arbitrary in how, when, where and to whom he grants religious experiences?Why would he make eternal salvation dependent on that which only some people have the opportunity to demonstrate, namely having faith that goes beyond the evidence?  Swinburne argues that in the absence of a reason to believe otherwise we accept what we experience and what others report about their own experiences, but surely the fact that these experience point to what is inconsistent and incoherent should count as such a reason to believe otherwise.  It follows that the title statement is indeed correct insofar as others’ reports of religious experiences could not justify belief in the God of Religion and so would render exclusive Religious belief on the basis of reports of others’ experiences wrong by Clifford’s argument.

In conclusion, the title statement “although it is reasonable to believe in God on the basis of a religious experience you yourself have had, it is wrong to believe on the basis of other peoples’ reports” is correct.  In terms of believing an experience you yourself have had, both James and Swinburne suggest that it would be unreasonable to disbelieve the evidence of your own experience.  As William Alston wrote:

“It is clear that if I have directly experienced a personal deity… I have the strongest possible basis for believing that such a being exists; just as I have the strongest possible basis for believing that yaks exist if I really have seen one”

Richard Dawkins skepticism on this point seems at odds with the scientific reliance on personal experience and the fact that the whole of science depends on the cosmological principle, that things are the way they appear to be.  In terms of believing on the strength of others’ reported experiences, the reasoning of James, Otto and Stace that the most other peoples’ experiences can justify is being open to a “higher power” is more persuasive than that of Swinburne, that others’ religious experiences could justify belief in a single, all-powerful, all-good God.  Swinburne’s argument does appeal to common sense.  In normal circumstances it is fair to assume the Principle of Testimony because as Dean Inge pointed out:

“If a dozen honest men tell me that they have climbed the Matterhorn, it is reasonable to believe that the summit of that mountain is accessible, although I am not likely to get there myself.” 

Yet, as Sagan and Hitchens suggest, the exceptional nature of the claims people make about religious experiences mean that a higher standard of evidence is demanded.  By Clifford’s argument, it is wrong to base belief in the God of any specific religion on other peoples’ reports of religious experiences.  It is impossible to exclude a psychological or physiological explanation, people could have made a mistake, be wishful-thinking or outright lying however honest they may appear.  When religious beliefs dictate actions which can harm or even kill other people, it is wrong to hold them on such a basis.

Critically compare the cosmological and teleological arguments for God’s existence. [40]

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St Thomas Aquinas presents five ways of demonstrating God’s existence based on observation in his Summa Theologica (1,2,3).  The first four of these ways are Cosmological arguments, reasoning from observations of movement, efficient causation, contingency and grades of perfection in the universe a posteriori to the conclusion that God as a Prime Mover, uncaused cause, necessary being and supreme perfection must exist.  The fifth way is a teleological argument, reasoning from observation of order and purpose (teleology) in the universe a posteriori to the existence of an intelligent designer “which is what everybody calls God.”  Clearly, Aquinas saw both Cosmological and Teleological Arguments as persuasive arguments for God’s existence, however the Teleological Argument offers better support to the God of Christian worship than the Cosmological Argument does.

David Hume criticised cosmological arguments in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779).  His character Philo pointed out that it is based on limited observations of the universe.  For all we know there might be uncaused things out there… as indeed Quantum Physics and Particle Physics has since shown to be the case.  Further, the argument is based on the fallacy of composition, the assumption that just because the parts of the universe have a cause that the whole universe must have a cause.  As Bertrand Russell later pointed out; just because all men have mothers doesn’t mean that the human race has a mother, it could be that the universe is a “brute fact”.  Hume’s criticisms of the cosmological argument are difficult to overcome.  While it is fair to say that Hume’s claims about the limitations of human observations as the basis for knowledge about natural laws are just as much of a problem for science as they are for religion, his other criticisms hit hard.  In truth, the universe might, for all we know, be uncaused or be its own cause.  It is fair to ask why what is true of the part should also have to be true of the whole.  Although William Lane Craig argues that the cosmological argument – at least in his own Kalam version, which stops short of concluding that the Prime Mover is “what everybody calls God” – is the best support for the reasonableness of faith, his claims about the impossibility of an actual infinite and about the Big Bang theory needing a cause have been shown to be mistaken by critics such as Erik Sotnak and Stephen Hawking.  While the cosmological argument might superficially seem to be supported by Big Bang theory, in reality Cosmology shows that the idea of causation cannot apply outside the space-time matrix of our universe.  While it seems incredible, as Terry Pratchett quipped, science proposes that “in the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.” It is clear, therefore, that the cosmological argument is not persuasive. 

Hume’s character Philo also attacked the teleological argument in the Dialogues, criticising the tendency to make the argument using inappropriate analogies and pointing out apparent imperfections in the design of the universe, which might undermine the idea that the designer would be perfect.  Later, both Charles Darwin and JS Mill pointed out the brutality in nature and reasoning that an Ichneumon wasp could not have been designed by the God of Christianity.

“Nearly all the things which men are hanged or imprisoned for doing to one another are nature’s everyday performances.”  Mill: Three Essays on Religion

Nevertheless, these critics all failed to exclude the possibility that the universe could be designed to contain evil for some morally sufficient reason.  As St. Augustine argued, it could be that natural evil in the world is a just punishment for sin.  Moral evil could be the necessary bi-product of human freedom.  Evil does not necessarily undermine the claim that the universe was designed by God.  Alternatively, as John Hick argued, suffering could be positively created by God to afford the opportunity for “soul-making” with any injustices being accounted for through an afterlife.  Further, there are versions of the teleological argument which do not rely on spurious analogies – such as FR Tennant’s aesthetic argument and anthropic principle.  These are more persuasive than the cosmological argument.  Hume’s criticisms fall short of undermining Tennant’s claim that God is needed to explain beauty and human consciousness in the universe and evolution through natural selection fails to explain these aspects of the universe adequately either.  Modern Intelligent Design arguments – such as those proposed by Michael Behe from irreducible complexity and by William Dembski from specified complexity – show that evolution cannot provide the complete explanation that atheists like Richard Dawkins claim it can.  While Paley’s argument in Natural Theology can be rightly criticised for its use of the famous watchmaker analogy, its appeal to our incredulity at the scientific claim that all this could have arisen by chance is powerful.  To accept that evolution through natural selection can provide a complete explanation of the universe and that there is no intelligence guiding it is difficult to accept.  Take the Japanese puffer-fish… can evolution really account for the extent of the intricacy and beauty of its designs?  It is clear, therefore, that the teleological argument is more persuasive than the cosmological argument.

In addition, even if the cosmological argument was persuasive, it would only serve to demonstrate the existence of a Prime Mover, an uncaused cause, a necessary being outside time and space.  It is not easy to see how this being could be the God of Christian worship.  Aristotle stopped short of claiming that the Prime Mover could be a God in any normal sense, its power being limited to supporting the existence of all contingent things and its goodness being limited to being fully actualised and containing no potential. How could a God who is outside time and space act to create the universe when there could be no time before during or after his action and when there would be no space to differentiate the creation from the creator?  Both human understanding and the language which tries to communicate it struggles to cope with objects outside the space-time matrix which bounds our experience.  It might, of course, be fair to say that human understanding and language cannot expect to be able to comprehend or describe God.  Yet, without the ability to claim that God exists, that God is the all-powerful creator and that God is good with some content, it is difficult to see how Religion could prosper.  St. Thomas Aquinas attempted to show how human language could be used to describe God in positive terms as analogies, but even he admitted that he content of attributes such as goodness must needs be limited and cannot be understood in the same way as human goodness.  The teleological argument, by contrast, does not rely on locating God outside time and space.  As the intelligent designer, it seems likely that God would have defined the purpose of the universe from within the same logical framework which governs its operation today.  In this way, God’s power and goodness have real content, as they relate to how He created the complex order and purposiveness we can observe.  It follows that the teleological argument offers better support for the God of Christian worship than the cosmological argument does.

In conclusion, the teleological argument offers better support for the God of Christian worship than the cosmological argument does.  Clearly, the teleological argument relies on the possibility of defending God’s goodness and power against charges of creating or allowing evil and suffering, but it is still more persuasive than the cosmological argument.  Even Immanuel Kant, who rejected all the classical arguments for God’s existence in his Critique of Pure Reason, saw the age and persistence of the teleological argument as pointers to its status as the most powerful of the arguments for God’s existence.

“Aquinas’ Cosmological Argument proves that God exists.” Critically evaluate this statement.  [40] 

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Cosmological Arguments start with the existence of the universe (Greek = Kosmos) and conclude that God is the most logical explanation of it.  They are some of the oldest arguments for God’s existence and have an intuitive appeal.  As Richard Swinburne observed in “Is There a God?” (1996)

“The human quest for explanation inevitably and rightly seeks for the ultimate explanation of everything observable.”

Cosmological Arguments can be found in the work of Plato (Laws Book X) and Aristotle (Physics Book II, Metaphysics Book IV) and make up the first four of Aquinas’ five ways to God in the Summa Theologica (1.2.3).   While Aquinas’ Cosmological Arguments are all framed as a posteriori arguments – and so could never provide proof – they do provide strong support for the existence of a Prime Mover.  Nevertheless, Aquinas goes too far in his claim that this is what everybody calls God.

Aquinas’ first way draws on the Aristotelian concept of movement. In the Physics, Book V, Aristotle wrote, “all things that are in motion must be moved by something.”  Motion does not necessarily mean movement in the sense that things are is moving through space from location A to location B, but rather that they are moving from a state of potentiality to a state of actuality in multiple different respects. As Aristotle wrote, movement involves the… “actualizing of some potency. It is because things have real potencies that they are able to change.”  Aquinas later wrote, “for motion is nothing else than the reduction of something from potentiality to actuality.”  Whereas Plato’s argument, later refined by Muslim scholars of the 8th Century Kalam School and more recently by William Lane Craig, focuses on a temporal series of causes much like a domino-rally, pointing towards a beginning in time, an uncaused cause, which is what everybody calls God, for Aristotle and for Aquinas, even if the universe is as infinite as it appeared to be, there is still the need for a Prime Mover because everything depends on other things.  As Parmenides, Heraclitus and separately the Buddha observed, everything changes or moves and nothing stays the same, but nothing changes or moves without being moved by something else, even if that is just time itself.  As Aristotle wrote, “potential, precisely because it is potential, cannot make itself actual”.  Aristotle concluded that there must be a Prime Mover outside time and space, but stops short of claiming that this is God.  Aquinas went further, claiming that this Prime Mover is “what everybody calls God”, but in doing this he weakened the argument. It is true that the Prime Mover must be outside time and space and thus wholly simple and unchanging, pure actuality and with zero potentiality.  As Aquinas wrote,

“nothing can be reduced from potentiality to actuality, except by something in a state of actuality… it is impossible that in the same respect and in the same way a thing should be both mover and moved…” 

It is also true that everything ultimately depends on the Prime Mover for its existence.  As Aquinas wrote, “therefore it is necessary to arrive at a first mover, put in motion by no other”  However, it is a step too far to claim that the Prime Mover could be seen as the “creator”, let alone act in the world, speak to human beings or be crucified and rise again. When Aquinas writes “and this everyone understands to be God”  He goes beyond the evidence and possible knowledge.  In his book “The Nature of God” Gerard J. Hughes describes the Prime Mover changing potentiality to actuality in terms of a bowl of milk causing a cat to cross a room.  The bowl of milk does nothing, in the way that the Prime Mover – being timelessly unchanging and impassive – does nothing, because it has no potential and is pure act. It follows that Aquinas’ first framing of the Cosmological Argument provides strong support for the existence of a Prime Mover, but not for the existence of the God that Christians worship, because the Prime Mover would be unable to say “let there be light”, work miracles or judge individuals on the final day… all of these require in God potential and the ability to act in time, which the Prime Mover cannot have.

Aquinas’ second way draws on the Aristotelian concept of efficient causation.  For Aristotle, all things have four causes – material, formal, efficient and final.  Efficient causes are agents which bring things into being, in the way that parents bring their children into being or the earth, sun and rain bring the oak tree out of the acorn.  If everything depends on efficient causes to bring them into being, again there is a chain of causation which requires explanation.  The chain cannot be infinite, because if there was no first efficient cause there would be no subsequent causes and the universe would not exist.  Something cannot come out of or be caused by nothing. Similarly, there cannot be a first efficient cause like other things in the universe, as if there were it would need efficient causes of its own and could not, therefore, be the first.  Aquinas concludes, “it is necessary to admit a first efficient cause, to which everyone gives the name of God.” Again, Aquinas’ second Cosmological Argument provides strong support for the existence of an uncaused efficient cause and again, it is a step too far to claim that this must be the God of Christian worship.  This not least because efficient causes do not need to be sustaining causes in esse (as Frederick Copleston later called them) but could be a cause in fieri (again, to use Copleston’s terminology).   An uncaused cause which began the universe but has no further role in it is not the God of Christian theism; at most it supports deism.  Further, Aquinas admits that

“There is no case known (neither is it, indeed, possible) in which a thing is found to be the efficient cause of itself; for so it would be PRIOR to itself, which is impossible.”

 This implies that as efficient cause the uncaused cause must be PRIOR to the universe, something which would be difficult to reconcile with Big Bang Theory as this suggests that as time itself was created at the Big Bang, it makes no sense to speak of anything being PRIOR to it or indeed, as Stephen Hawking observed, causing it.  In these ways, Aquinas goes beyond the evidence in claiming that the uncaused cause is that to “everyone gives the name of God”.

Aquinas’ third way develops the idea of the contingency of things in the universe, pointing out that everthing has the potential to be or not to be; “We find in nature things that are possible to be and not to be”.  In an infinite universe, all potentials not to be might be expected to have been realized; as something can’t come out of nothing, nothing would then exist and I could not be writing this essay.  It follows, therefore, that EITHER the universe cannot be infinite – in which case there would have to be a first cause in time which would be what everybody calls God – or the universe is infinite and there exists a “necessary being”, a fully actual “neither something nor nothing” which contains its own explanation and has no potential not to exist.  This, Aquinas claims, is what “all men speak of as God.”  Aquinas’ third Cosmological Argument is just as problematic as an argument for the existence of the God of Christian worship as the first and second.  Not only as an a posteriori argument does it stop short of providing proof, it also goes well beyond the observable evidence in concluding that the necessary being is God as Christians would define Him.  Leibniz later recast the third Cosmological Argument as an a priori argument, writing:

“Why is there something rather than nothing? The sufficient reason […] is found in a substance which […] is a necessary being bearing the reason for its existence within itself.” 

For Leibniz, anything that exists has a cause for its existence, either in the necessity of its own nature or in an external cause.  If the universe has an external cause for its existence, this cause must be God.  As the universe exists, it must have a cause for its existence, either in the necessity of its own nature or in an external cause.  Because the universe exists contingently, not necessarily, the universe must have an external cause and this must be God.  Nevertheless, like Aquinas, Leibniz argument fails to prove the existence of the God of Christian worship.  Causing the universe is not enough to be called God; the Christian God does rather more than an abstract singularity or the Higgs Boson does.  Further, it doesn’t make sense to predicate much of what the Christian God does to the necessary cause of the universe supported by Aquinas and by Leibniz in his supposed improvement of Aquinas’ third cosmological argument.  Both the God of Aquinas and the God of Leibniz are timelessly impassive and it is inconceivable how such a being could act even once to create the world, given that this would involve a change in its being incompatible with being timeless and fully actual with no potential.  Further, as Immanuel Kant observed, we have no experience of necessary beings so it makes little sense to speculate about their possible existence.  Also, it is inconsistent to start an argument by claiming that all things are contingent and conclude by hypothesizing something that is not contingent.  Again, while Aquinas’ third Cosmological Argument strongly points towards the existence of a necessary being or beings in the universe, it is far from being conclusive proof of such, even when recast as an a priori argument and cannot in any case justifiably claim that the necessary being is what Christians worship as God.

While it is true that most of the classical criticisms of Aquinas presented by David Hume and Bertrand Russell fail to undermine his Cosmological Arguments, the point (which they all make) about the Cosmological Argument failing to support the God of Christian worship stands.

Firstly, Hume criticized a version of the Cosmological Argument presented by his character Demea in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779) Book IX.  Cleanthes points out that there is no support for the claim that everything in the universe is moves and is moved, caused and is caused or is contingent.  We have a limited view of the universe and no sensible reason to believe that the universe is homogenous or that we see things the way they actually are, a principle known in science as isotropy.  For all we know, argues Cleanthes, there could be unmoved movers, uncaused causes or necessary beings within the universe which could explain its continued existence.  Nevertheless, accepting these criticisms of the Cosmological Argument entails abandoning Natural Science altogether.  Leibniz coined the term “Cosmological Principle” to refer to the principles of homogeneity and isotropy which all scientists must assume in order to reason inductively towards natural laws.  Without the Cosmological Principle, we could not make many scientific knowledge claims; Cosmology and Quantum Science, Medicine and Biochemistry would all be a waste of time.  In practice, laws of nature supported by inductive reasoning enable mobile phones and space shuttles to work, so it doesn’t make sense to doubt the authority of our observations as Hume, through Cleanthes, does.  These criticisms of Hume’s fail to undermine Aquinas’ Cosmological Arguments insofar as they point to a necessary cause for the universe.

Secondly, Cleanthes continues by criticizing the claim that just because the parts of the universe have causes, so must the universe as a whole.  Demea (and Aquinas) rely on the so-called fallacy of composition.   Further, Cleanthes asks why the universe cannot be the explanation of itself, why there must be an external cause for the universe.  Later, Bertrand Russell asked why the universe cannot be a “brute fact”.  Yet neither of these criticisms is conclusive.  As Leibniz points out, it is difficult to see how a universe of contingencies can itself exist necessarily.  Contingencies involve potential which cannot, by definition, exist within a necessary being.  Further, while characteristics of the parts do not necessarily have to be characteristics of the whole and while (as Russell argued) just because all men have mothers it doesn’t mean that the human race has a mother, it can sometimes follow.  Each strand of spaghetti has two ends, something which also applies to the whole packet of spaghetti.  In a sense and because it is made up of material in the way that things in the universe are, the universe is a thing.  Things exist contingently and need to be moved and caused by things other than themselves.  These criticisms of Hume’s fail to undermine Aquinas’ Cosmological Arguments insofar as they point to a necessary cause for the universe as well.

Nevertheless, Cleanthes’ criticism that the cause of the universe could not be said to have the attributes of the Christian God is, for reasons previously explored, is persuasive.  Again it is clear that while Aquinas’ Cosmological Arguments do offer support to the hypothesis that there is an uncaused, necessary cause for the universe, they are far from proving that the God of Christian worship exists. 

In conclusion, Aquinas’ Cosmological fail to prove that God exists, both because as a posteriori arguments they stop short of proving their conclusions and because even if they are reframed into a format which could provide proof, as Leibniz attempted, they demonstrate only the existence of an abstract necessary being far short of having the attributes of the God Christians worship. 

 

Bibliography

  • Class notes on the Cosmological Argument
  • Aristotle, Physics Book V
  • Aquinas, Summa Theologica 1, 2, 3
  • Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion Book IX
  • Vardy & Vardy “God Matters” Chapters 4 & 5

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

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Immanuel Kant criticised what he first termed the Ontological Argument at the beginning of his Critique of Pure Reason (1781). Focussing on the argument as presented by Rene Descartes, which suggested that existence is a perfection and thus a necessary attribute of God, who is a supremely perfect being, in the way that having three sides is a necessary property of a triangle or having valleys is a necessary property of being a hill – Kant concluded that the argument was “so much labour and effort lost”. For Kant, existence is not a perfection and is wrongly used as a predicate. He used the example of a sum of money – the difference between a real and imaginary sum is not that the real sum is worth more, just that the real sum might be in my pocket. Existence is not a predicate and does not describe the properties of an object, it just informs me whether there is such an object in the real world. Bertrand Russell developed this point, using the example of the claim “the present King of France is bald”. Russell pointed out that although the claim seems sensible, as if it is referring to the properties of the King of France’s head and might be either true or false, in actual fact, the claim is meaningless because there is no present King of France for the claim to refer to and thus no way that the claim is either true or false. Existence is not a predicate, it is not just another property that the present King of France does or does not have, it is the ground of meaning on which all sensible claims must be made. Michael Palmer used another example to explain this; that of two candidates applying for a job. If a panel is faced with two CVs listing the “perfections” of the candidate A and candidate B, it would be ridiculous to list “exists” as one of them – existence is neither a perfection nor properly used as a predicate, rather it is what makes the analysis of the CV and the contest between the candidates meaningful. Kant’s criticisms of the Ontological Argument were highly influential and following the publication of the Critique of Pure Reason in 1781, scholarly interest in the Ontological Argument declined steeply. Nevertheless, developments in the second half of the 20th Century showed that Kant’s criticisms are far from conclusive and reawakened scholarly interest in the Ontological Argument for God’s existence.

While Kant’s criticisms were directed at Descartes’ Ontological Argument, they are often applied to the arguments of St Anselm of Canterbury, presented in his Proslogion (1078). Anselm argued that if God is “that than which nothing greater can be conceived of” then God must, a priori, exist because it is greater to exist in reality than just in the mind, so if God existed only as an idea in the mind (as he must, if Anselm’s definition was accepted) then something greater could conceivably exist… something that existed in reality as well as in the mind. If God is, therefore, the greatest conceivable being then God must exist in reality, because existence is a perfection which makes something greater. Clearly, Kant’s arguments that existence is not a perfection and that existence is wrongly used as a predicate seem to undermine Anselm’s argument fatally. As Gaunilo of Marmoutiers had observed in his “On behalf of the fool”, the idea that the perfect island has to exist just by virtue of being the perfect island is absurd; nobody is going to book a ticket to go there on the basis of an argument like that. Nevertheless, that ignores how Anselm developed his argument in the next chapter of the Proslogion, a point that he made in response to Gaunilo’s attack by restating this part of the argument in his Responsio. In Proslogion Chapter 3 Anselm reasons that it is better to exist necessarily than to exist only contingently, therefore necessary existence – not being able to not exist – must be an attribute of that than which nothing greater can be conceived of. This development of the Argument could defeat Kant’s standard criticisms, in that while existence is not a perfection or rightly used as a predicate, that does not necessarily apply to necessary existence, which is a total state of existence either possible or impossible, not a property which might or might not be added to a object that could only ever contingently exist.

Norman Malcolm argued that Anselm’s argument in Proslogion 3 can be presented in terms of modal logic. Either God’s necessary existence is impossible – as in it contains a formal contradiction – or possible. If God’s necessary existence is possible, then it is necessary.   Remember, necessary existence is not existence in the sense that we could encounter through our senses. The world of sense is a world in which things exist contingently and might or might not exist, as St Thomas Aquinas observed in his Third Way to God (Summa Theologica I.II QIII). To exist necessarily is to exist in a different way, a way that is by definition beyond anything that we could experience through our senses. For Kant, because necessary existence is beyond possible experience, then it can only be speculative to even speak of it. Kant called necessary existence a “cupola of judgement” meaning that it strays so far beyond possible knowledge to be a flight of fancy or a castle in the air. Nevertheless, this assumes Kant’s world view and the primacy of sense-experience. For rationalist philosophers like Descartes, Leibniz and later Malcolm, what is real cannot be limited to what can be experienced through the senses. The world of sense is faulty, partial, subjective and limited; empirical knowledge is contingent and ever-changing. For Descartes and Leibniz, rational knowledge should be primary because it is none of these things. A clear and distinct idea, an idea which contains no contradictions, is certain, complete, objective and constant. Just as we know that 1+1=2 without resorting to a posteriori reasoning based on experiences with apples and oranges, we know that God necessarily exists a priori because he is supremely perfect. Alvin Plantinga and William Lane Craig have developed this line of reasoning, using the device of possible worlds. A concept is possible if it could be instantiated in any possible world. A unicorn is a possible concept; although unicorns (at least in the sense of being live horses with single horns!) don’t exist in this world, it is not inconceivable that they might exist in a multiverse. The concept of a horse with a horn is not contradictory, it is possible. On the other hand, a square circle is impossible and could not exist in any possible world because the definition of a square is to have four straight sides, something which directly contradicts the definition of a circle. God’s “maximal greatness” – which must include Omnipotence, Omniscience and Omnibenevolence – is possible not impossible and, because maximal greatness precludes the possibility that God might or might not exist in any one universe, God must necessarily exist in every possible world, including this one. In essence, Plantinga and Craig show that Kant’s criticisms of the Ontological Argument fail because they rely on an impoverished epistemology.

To explain this, for Kant, all existential claims have to be synthetic, they have to refer to something in the world of sense-experience and therefore contain the possibility of being either true or false. If I say “unicorns exist” I am making the claim that there are such things as unicorns in the world – if I saw a unicorn I would know that the claim was true and if no evidence of unicorns has ever been found it is probably fair to say that the claim is false. Making the claim “God exists” does not refer to anything in the world of sense experience and it is not possible, therefore, for the claim to be either true or false… in the terms of the Logical Positivists, it is a meaningless claim. In 1951 American Philosopher WV Quine attacked the basis of Kant’s objections to the Ontological Argument in his essay “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”. Like Karl Popper and AJ Ayer, as a young man, Quine had spent time with the Vienna Circle of Logical Positivists, but by 1950 Quine came to reject their approach, not only to establishing meaning in language but also to bigger questions about epistemology – “what can we know?” and “what does it mean to say that something exists?” Logical Positivists were Positivists, that is to say that they approached philosophy on the basis that scientific, empirical observation is the only source of knowledge and that metaphysics is a waste of time. Positivism formally began with the work of French philosopher Auguste Comte, but looked back to Kant and before that to Hume and Locke. Locke rejected continental rationalism and argued that human beings have no innate ideas, being born as tabula rasa and gaining all their knowledge and understanding from experience. Hume agreed to a large extent, although he acknowledged the limitations of sense-experience as well. Kant said that Hume “awoke me from my dogmatic slumbers and gave a new direction to my philosophical enquiries” and adopted Hume’s fork, the categorisation of possible knowledge into either what is known analytically or what is known from sense-experience, dismissing any other claimed knowledge – including most metaphysical and religious claims – as speculative. Scientific method drew on the work of Locke, Hume and Kant in that it came to focus on sense-experience as the source of all new knowledge and limiting the role of reason to one of analysis and clarification. It is fair to say, therefore, that the Logical Positivists were empiricists. Quine rejected empiricism, and the Logical Positivism of his youth, arguing that in embracing Hume’s fork Kant had awoken from one set of dogmatic slumbers only to fall into another set of dogmatic slumbers. On what basis, Quine asked, did the Logical Positivists claim that sense-experience is the only source of new knowledge? The Logical Positivists failed to provide an adequate explanation of why meaningfulness should depend on either sense-experience or logic and on nothing else. This point was later developed by Alvin Plantinga in his “God and Other Minds” when he pointed out that the Verification Principle is itself unverifiable and therefore self-defeating. Quine also questioned the lack of any adequate explanation for the authority of logic, pointing out that you have to accept logic in order to defend why you should accept logic, which is circular. The same applies to the authority of the empirical senses, Quine argued. On what basis do we say that the sense-experience are the only source of new knowledge without just appealing to sense-experience? This is pure reductionism and again, the justification for Positivism is circular. The answer is that the Logical Positivists adopted Kant’s world-view without much thought, ignoring the fact that Hume (not to mention Descartes) had already outlined the serious problems with relying on the senses in that they are faulty, limited in scope and that data always needs to be interpreted through reason anyway. If Quine is correct and Kant’s epistemology is more dogmatic than critical, then his criticisms of the Ontological Argument start to collapse. On what basis did Kant claim that all existential claims have to be synthetic? For Quine, he had no adequate justification for assuming the authority or primacy of sense-experience, other than by appealing to that same sense experience. Without any proper justification for his epistemology, it seems that Kant’s criticism of the Ontological Argument is on shaky ground indeed.

Further, to say that sense-experience is the only source of new knowledge is to relegate whole fields of study, discussion and indeed human experience to junk status. The fact that the Verification Principle proposed by the Logical Positivists as the gold standard of meaning had to be liberalised through the 1930s and 1940s shows that the claim that discussions about topics such as Ethics, History and Aesthetics (let alone Religion) are meaningless is unworkable and runs against what most people believe and experience. Quine proposed an alternative holistic approach called Ontological Naturalism, which moved away from the attempt to define the meaning of individual statements in terms of their reference and towards assessing their meaning in terms of cohering with and contributing to the whole field of science as an explanatory framework. Popper also rejected Verificationism, proposing another, more generous and inclusive, approach to meaning in scientific terms in the Falsification Principle. Both were influential and contributed to a decline in Logical Positivism to the extent whereby by 1960 it was declared “dead, or as dead as any philosophical movement can be.” The decline of Logical Positivism demonstrates the inadequacy of Kant’s world-view for the modern world. What place has a system which claims that sense-experience is the only source of new knowledge in a world of Quantum science and particle-Physics, in which the very act of observing particles changes their state? Long gone is the idea that the senses offer human beings a transparent window on the external world, even the world of matter and energy. Today, the whole field of theoretical Physics would have to be declared “meaningless” by Schlick, Ayer and Carnap… and yet the insights it yields offer humanity unthought of technological advances… they work. Further, Physics suggests that what appears “real” to our senses is far from being solid and as it appears. On the Planck scale no matter exists… if I hit the table the contact I experience is really the interaction of charges in the fields which make up the vast majority of each atom in the wood and in my hand. The universe, which appeared like a vast machine to Kant and which still appears eternal to the amateur start-gazer has been revealed to be infinite while still having edges, a shape and a colour and while expanding at an increasing rate… into nothing. All of this suggests that reason – mathematics – can yield new knowledge and confidently move past anything we can hope to observe through our senses, to a much greater degree than either the Logical Positivists, or Kant, allowed.

On the other hand, even theoretical Physicists admit the need to test their theories through experiments. Very recently, different theories on black holes were tested when radio-telescopes were linked together to take a photograph of a black hole. The photograph – an observation – was necessary to check analytical calculations and prevent them from being purely speculative. This supports Kant’s claim that all existential claims must be synthetic. Physicists theorise about black holes, but it is not possible to say that or how they exist unless and until we take a photograph or make some other observation to verify (or falsify) the theories. Nevertheless, there are aspects of Physics – as there are aspects of Theology – which resist any possible observation. By definition, it is not possible to observe God’s necessary existence, because by definition it must be outside of the matrix of time and space in which our senses operate. Similarly, it is not possible to observe what caused the Big Bang which created the space-time continuum, or to experience conditions in a multiverse. The extent to which cosmological theories like cosmic inflation and string theory are pseudo-scientific (to use Popper’s phrase) because they are not falsifiable or subject to normal scientific method has been a matter of controversy on the letters’ page of Scientific American since 2017. Nevertheless, this should not stop Physicists (or Theologians) from using reason, the other source of knowledge available to them, to push forward the boundaries of knowledge. While Kant was right to be cautious and to warn against metaphysical speculation – because after all, the greatest obstacle to finding something is being convinced that you already have it – his world-view with its focus on the senses as the arbiter of possible knowledge is too restrictive for the 21st Century in the way that the world-view of the Logical Positivists became too restrictive for the 20th Century. It also sits ill with both developing insights about the way in which our senses work and rely on our brains and pre-existing ideas and with insights about the different reality beyond how things appear to our senses, on the Planck scale. While Popper’s Falsification Principle is more flexible than the Verification Principle, it still limits what can be said scientifically to that which can be falsified in relation to observations, it still assumes a Kantian world-view, and herein lies the problem for particle Physics and Cosmology with Scientific Method as it is conceived today. It seems that Kantian epistemology and the assumed world-view within which science has operated since the 1790s is on the verge of being rejected; to use Thomas Kuhn’s phrase, the Positivist scientific (and philosophical) paradigm is shifting and giving way to a paradigm which is more open to reason providing new knowledge which cannot be checked by observation. Given this, it seems that Kant’s criticisms of the Ontological Argument will lose a great deal of their power. As William Lane Craig has pointed out, the Ontological Argument (as he presents it) is valid. If it is accepted that an argument can also be sound – its propositions can be said to be true – even when they cannot be verified or falsified empirically, then the Ontological Argument is much more persuasive.

Nevertheless, even if Kant was too cautious about using reason as a source of new knowledge, it could be fair to say that the Ontological Argument pushes things too far. St Thomas Aquinas made just this point in his Summa Theologica I.II question 1 (1264) when he wrote “because we do not know the essence of God, the truth of God’s existence is not self-evident to us.” Aquinas dismissed the Ontological Argument because to suggest that any human being can have a “clear and distinct idea” of God to use Descartes phrase from the Meditations, sufficient to analyse that idea and find necessary existence – a unique property of God – within it, is arrogant. God is, to use Augustine’s words “other, completely other”, outside time and space, so even if we have innate ideas – as Descartes and Plato argued – it stretches credulity to rely on those ideas being so complete in relation to God so as to make the Ontological Argument plausible. Clearly, what it means for God to be perfect or great is not what it means for human beings to have a perfection or be called great. Aquinas even rejected the idea that it could just be a matter of scale, with God at the top of the scale and people (and other created things) at the other. If God is timeless then God’s perfection and greatness must also be timeless and cannot include any potential for God to be other than he is, to change or to choose. Aquinas’ saw claims about God’s nature as necessarily analogical. Yes, our greatness depends on God’s greatness, but in the way that the healthiness of a yoghurt depends on the healthiness of somebody who eats it. Healthy people are slim, muscly and bounce around… healthy yoghurts are none of these things! For Aquinas, God’s nature can be described (and known) positively, but only in a very limited sense, not completely enough to support an ontological demonstration of God’s necessary existence from an a priori definition of His nature. Nevertheless, St Anselm and Descartes on one hand and Karl Barth and Iris Murdoch on the other would all reject this argument, with reasons that also serve as criticisms of Kant’s approach to the Ontological Argument.

For Anselm it is true to say that God’s attributes are not the same as human attributes, because God is timelessly perfect, nevertheless it is possible to understand enough about God’s greatness to deduce that necessary existence is a necessary property of it. This is because, according to the a posteriori argument in Anselm’s Monologion, God is the best explanation for our ability to judge things in this world as more or less perfect. God creates us with an innate conception of perfection, the top of a scale which we use to measure things in this world every day. Indeed, Aquinas – although he still denied that this would give people a clear enough concept of God to analyse and find necessary existence within – included a similar argument as his fourth way to God in Summa Theologica I.II question 3, arguing that claims about God’s nature can be understood as analogies of proportion as well as as analogies of attribution (as above). This suggests that Aquinas’ rejection of Anselm’s approach was more about the degree to which we can conceive of the essence of God and a matter of interpretation, rather than about Anselm’s whole methodology in the Monologion, which he later used to support his reasoning in the Proslogion. Descartes “trademark” argument in the Meditations supports Anselm’s belief that God creates us with an innate idea of God’s existence and there have been other, similar arguments in the work of scholars from St Augustine to CS Lewis, arguing from the experience of believers, their desire for and innate awareness of God, a posteriori to the conclusion of His existence. It seems that many believers could accept the idea that we have an understanding of God’s supreme greatness even if we cannot completely conceive of what that might entail. It seems, therefore, that Aquinas’ dismissal of a priori attempts to argue that God’s existence is self-evident is rather hasty. Just as Aquinas’ rejection of the idea that God’s existence is self-evident and exclusive focus on arguments from observation as the only approach to defending God’s existence rationally does not fit with believers’ experience of God as an innate idea, Kant’s rejection of both a priori and a posteriori arguments for God in the Critique of Pure reason does not fit with the imperative to believe in God which he himself expressed in strong terms, most completely in “Religion within the bounds of Reason alone” (1794). While Kant dismisses all the rational arguments for God’s existence, including the Ontological Argument, he argues that God is a necessary postulate, an assumption that it is our rational duty to make, to explain the existence of the moral law which we know as a synthetic a priori. Kant reasons, therefore, that we know the moral law a priori, before experience, although it is supported in all respects by experience as well. The moral law is, furthermore, necessarily explained by God. On what basis can Kant argue that Descartes is wrong to claim that we know God’s existence a priori, something which is supported in all respects by experience as well, but proceed to make a similar claim about the moral law. It is worth asking, is Descartes concept of God actually different from Kant’s concept of God? All that Descartes attempts to demonstrate through his Ontological Argument is that Supreme Perfection necessarily exists… he makes no claim about the Ontological Argument proving anything about the nature of that Supreme Perfection, stopping short of listing attributes like being male, being the father of Jesus etc. Is it fair to claim that the moral law can be known a priori – as Kant does – and reject the idea that the necessary existence of Supreme Perfection cannot be known a priori, when both seem equally borne out by experience.

Further, Karl Barth (and later Iris Murdoch) pointed out that the Ontological Argument, although not conclusive as a proof of God’s existence for the non-believer, it is deeply persuasive for the person with faith. In Barth’s “Faith Seeking Understanding” (1930), far from pre-empting Norman Malcolm’s claim that the Proslogion was an exercise in modal logic (a claim that has been accepted by Hartshorne, Plantinga and Craig), Barth argued that Anselm’s work had been wrongly characterised as a philosophical treatise and argued that it was really a prayer, a deeply spiritual meditation on contingency and necessity and the nature of reality. If Barth is correct then Kant’s criticisms of the argument, at least as they are applied to Anselm rather than their intended target, Descartes, are misplaced. To say that Anselm’s work is “so much labour and effort lost” misses the point that he may not have intended to formulate a deductive proof such as to convince a non-believer at all. Further, while the philosophical intent behind Descartes’ arguments in the Meditations is difficult to deny, it is worth mentioning that this work too was written from the perspective of pre-existing faith. Descartes too had “faith seeking understanding” and was not engaged in a work of Christian apologetics. Kant’s criticisms approach Descartes’ ontological argument for God in isolation and attempt to dismantle it from the perspective of a radically different world-view and epistemological framework. Given the doubt that has been cast on the possibility of attaining objective Truth and a grip on ultimate reality – a doubt that was adopted by Kant from Hume but which was often subsequently ignored – the idea that Kant’s world-view and epistemological framework, which as has been explained rests on as many assumptions as does Descartes, should have the authority to dismiss Descartes’ Ontological Argument is unconvincing. Today, most philosophers have to look to coherence rather than to correspondence to find meaning, and thus have to be open to the possibility that an Ontological argument might be both valid and sound within one form of life and simultaneously valid but not sound in another form of life.

In conclusion, Kant’s criticisms of the Ontological Argument are effective only if his epistemology and world-view are accepted.

“The arguments for the existence of God do nothing to support the God people actually worship” Critically evaluate this statement. [40]

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It is fair to say that the arguments for the existence of God fail to prove the existence of God.  The ontological argument is the only one that sets out to deliver an a priori proof and as Immanuel Kant argued in his “Critique of Pure Reason” (1781) it is “so much labour and effort lost“.  It is equally fair to say that the inductive arguments for God’s existence, both Cosmological and Teleological, fail to demonstrate the existence of God conclusively.  Criticisms leveled at the arguments by David Hume, amongst many others, point out their several flaws and fallacies.  Nevertheless, to say that the arguments do nothing to support the God people worship is a big overstatement. [THESIS]

The ontological argument, for all it seems to rely on bad grammar by treating existence as a perfection and a predicate, remains a powerful thought-exercise for those who already believe.  For one example, Karl Barth – who utterly rejected Natural Theology – appreciated the spiritual depth of Anselm’s argument.  In “Faith Seeking Understanding” (1931), he suggested that Anselm was not trying to prove that God exists, but was rather meditating on how God exists.  For Barth “that than which nothing greater can be conceived of” is a revealed name of God which contains something of God’s nature.  Reflecting on it and seeking deeper and deeper understanding is an essential faith-activity, which supports and enriches peoples’ relationship with the divine.  For another example, the mystic Thomas Merton was inspired by Anselm’s “faith seeking understanding” and exploration of how God necessarily exists as his starting point in opening his mind to insights about God from all religions [Faith Seeking Understanding: Theological Method in Thomas Merton’s inter-religious Dialogue by Ryan Scruggs, Journal of Ecumenical Studies 46:3 2011].  Both Barth and Merton used Anselm’s ontological argument to support their understanding of and enrich their faith in God, in their different ways.  It is wrong to say then that this argument for God’s existence does nothing to support the God that people worship. [REASON]

Cosmological arguments point to God as the Prime Mover, uncaused cause and Necessary sustainer of the universe.  For St. Thomas Aquinas, these arguments show a posteriori how God must be eternal in the sense of being outside time and space, which in turn distances God from creation and limits how He can be understood to know and intervene in what happens.  On one level, this suggests that the statement “the arguments for the existence of God do nothing to support the God people actually worship” is reasonable.  Omnipotence – in the sense of being able to work miracles – omniscience – in the sense of being able to respond to prayer – and benevolence – in the sense of understanding and having a personal relationship with worshipers – are all crucial to the Christian concept of God.  Aquinas’ God, although well-supported by the cosmological argument – is not obviously the God most Christians worship.  Nevertheless, Aquinas’ ways to God  only serve as a preamble to the substance of his argument in the Summa Theologica, which seeks to show why the necessary being supported by observational evidence must be the God Christians worship.  It is true that for Aquinas, the meaning of divine attributes like omnipotence, omniscience and omni-benevolence has to be understood analogically and cannot be understood literally, univocally.  Yet he also maintains that there is real and positive meaning in claims such as “God is good”, which are central to Christian worship.  It is clear that Aquinas’ cosmological arguments establish the necessary existence of the God Christians worship, even if they do not by themselves explain how or why God must be as Christians worship Him. Therefore it is an overstatement to say that the arguments do nothing to support the God people worship.  [REASON]

Teleological arguments suggest a God who is more obviously involved in His creation than either ontological or cosmological arguments.  William Paley used the analogy of watch and watchmaker to describe the close relationship between creation and creator.  Even Aquinas’ fifth way suggests that God is the intelligence that directs inanimate things towards their ends (telos) “as an arrow is given flight by the archer.”  In “Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion” David Hume’s character Philo is right to point out that the observable evidence of creation includes things that seem poorly designed or even cruel and might more properly suggest an imperfect deity, or multiple deities, than the perfect God of Christian worship because in practice, most Christians are resigned to worshipping a God who at least allows evil and suffering, albeit for a morally sufficient reason.  For example, John Hick argued that God created human beings in His own image, with only the potential to grow into His likeness after passing through the “vale of soul-making” that is human life.  In “Evil and the God of Love” (1966) he argued that belief in a God who allows people to suffer for the spiritual benefit that they (or other people) may gain from that experience is compatible with Christian faith and worship.  After all, in the Garden of Gethsemane Jesus called out to “Abba, Father…” asking that “this cup of suffering” be taken away by God’s will.  God did not act to prevent his suffering, even when Jesus called out “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani, which means “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34)  Christians do not worship a God who doesn’t know about or understand suffering and nor do they worship a God who even tried to create a world with no potential for horror… he placed the tree in the garden after all.  It follows that teleological arguments support the God Christians actually worship, “the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob” far more than they support the perfect “God of the philosophers”, to use Blaise Pascal’s distinction.  [REASON]

Pushing this line of reasoning might give more credence to the claim that “the arguments for the existence of God do nothing to support the God people actually worship.”  Certainly, ontological and cosmological arguments – if they are sound and cogent respectively – support the existence of a perfect God.  Anselm defined God as “that than which nothing greater can be conceived of,” Descartes defined God more straightforwardly as “Supreme Perfection” and Plantinga similarly defined God as a “maximally great being.”  Aquinas’ cosmological arguments support a God who is the Prime Mover, uncaused causer and de re necessary being sustaining the universe.  By definition, such a God is 100% actual and has no potential, is outside time and space and cannot change.  Aquinas successfully showed that this God must be all-good.  In the Aristotelian sense defining goodness in terms of fulfilling potential and evil in terms of falling short, a God whose nature is to unchangingly be 100% actual cannot be other than all-good.  Further, Aquinas successfully showed that this God must be all-powerful and all knowing in the sense of being the primary cause of everything that exists, what is responsible for things being as they are and no other way.  Nevertheless, Christians do not worship a God who is perfect in this abstract way.  The Bible casts God as the creator of everything, but a creator who has a defined purpose for each aspect of his creation (Genesis 1:27-31) and who can and does interact with and respond to people both in Eden (Genesis 2-3) and subsequently throughout Biblical History.  In Genesis God appears to Abraham – albeit in a mysterious way – then Jacob wrestles with God, mistaking him for a man.  In the New Testament God speaks to acknowledge Jesus as His son, Jesus calls God Abba (literally Daddy) and claims “the father and I are one” (John 10:30) before dying horribly on the cross.  It is difficult to claim that the God Christians worship is the abstract if all-powerful, all-good God supported by ontological and cosmological arguments.  [DISAGREE]  Nevertheless, the Nicene Creed affirms that the Christian God is the perfect God of the philosophers as well as being the God of Biblical history.  God is the creator both of what is “seen and unseen”, Jesus’ incarnation is part of the original creation, willed from the beginning of time rather than being a response to circumstance.  God speaks but through the prophets, acts but through the agency of the Holy Spirit.  It is fair to say that the Christian God, the God Christians actually worship, is paradoxical and mysterious but it is not fair to say that the God supported by the arguments is not the God people actually worship.  [EVALUATION]

In conclusion,  to say that the arguments do nothing to support the God people worship is a big overstatement. [THESIS] While it is true that the ontological argument and the cosmological argument point towards an abstract, perfect God which demands theological explanation to show as the God of Biblical history, it is unfair to say that the arguments do nothing to support the God people actually worship.  Certainly, as Karl Barth and Thomas Merton pointed out of the ontological argument, they are useful in enriching and sustaining faith by supporting deeper understanding of God’s nature.  Certainly, as Reformed Epistemologists like William Lane Craig have argued, cosmological arguments help believers to “defeat the defeaters” and show that faith – while not based on or dependent on arguments – is not irrational despite that.  In addition, as St Thomas Aquinas reasoned, a proper understanding of religious language shows that the attributes of the God supported by the arguments and the attributes of the God actually worshipped by Christians share meaning, even if that meaning is of a specific and limited type.  Finally, teleological arguments offer essential support for the God people actually worship, showing His creative care and causing people to reflect on the existence of evil and suffering in a way that is essential to Christian worship.  Without appreciating the reality of suffering – and rational reflection on God as designing intelligence encourages this – Christians could not understand the importance of the atonement or stake their lives on the hope for salvation, and in this case there would be little point in worship.  [Significance]

 

 

To what extent does Hume successfully argue that observation does NOT prove the existence of God? [40]

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David Hume criticized all the classical arguments for God’s existence through his book “Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion“, which was published after his death in 1776.  The Dialogues take place between four characters, with the interaction between Demea, a deist, Cleanthes, a theist and Philo, a sceptic, being the focus.  Most scholars see Philo as a vehicle for Hume’s own views and arguments and because of this, A Level textbooks list simplified versions of Philo’s criticisms of the classical Cosmological and Teleological arguments from the Dialogues and credit them to Hume.  It is probably fair to say that if the textbook was the sum total of one’s reading it would be easy to conclude that Hume was unsuccessful in arguing that observation does not prove the existence of God, in every case other than the criticism that the arguments do not support belief in all the attributes of the Christian God, which Christians accept in any case.  Few believers suggest that arguments for God’s existence are sufficient support for Christian faith in themselves. For example, when the textbook suggests that Hume asks “and what caused God” in response to Aquinas’ Cosmological Argument, it would be natural to criticize Hume for missing the more subtle point that Aquinas is making about God’s necessary existence.  Nevertheless, if one reads “Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion” it becomes clear that the criticisms Hume places in the mouth of Philo are subtle and support the conclusion that Hume was indeed successful in arguing that observation does not prove the existence of God.

In Part VIII of the Dialogues, against a very basic form of the Cosmological Argument for a “voluntary agent or first mover” Philo points out that nobody can know whether all things in the universe have a cause, that it is fallacious to make the leap from all things in the universe being caused to proposing that the universe itself has a cause.  He points out that for all we know some things in the universe could exist or happen without a cause… why not some natural process rather than a supernatural, divine agent deciding to create.  He argues in favour of the Epicurean Hypothesis, the idea that the universe could be actually infinite, which was the commonly accepted scientific world-view at the time, rooted in Aristotle.

“But this presupposes, said Demea, that matter can come to move without any voluntary agent or first mover.  And where’s the difficulty in that? replied Philo“

Superficially, Philo’s criticisms appear ill-founded.  William Lane Craig and other Christian apologists argue that an actual infinity of causes is impossible and suggest that Big Bang theory supports them in the need for an absolute beginning for the universe as a whole and so in the need for an uncaused cause.  However in fact, modern Physics supports Philo’s reasoning.  Although it is true that the standard model suggests that time and space had a beginning – the Big Bang – no Cosmologist today sees the Big Bang as the absolute beginning in the sense of needing a divine cause to explain it.  Stephen Hawking responded to a question about whether the universe needed a cause by saying that the question makes no sense to ask.  True, causation applies within time and space, but within the singularity there is no sense in which it could apply.  Cause and effect imply time and space; without either it makes no sense to think in terms of causation.  Further, research confirms the hypothesis that (at least at the Planck scale) things in the universe exist and happen without a cause and it is possible that the natural action of sub-atomic particles could account for the Big Bang.  Whatever the apologists claim, it seems that modern science supports Hume’s criticism of the attempt to prove God from observation and does not support the existence of God as the necessary uncaused cause.

In addition, through parts 8 and 9 of the Dialogues Philo makes the important point that…

“I won’t even allow any one part to justify conclusions about another part”

This is a point that builds on one he made in relation to the teleological argument in Part II

“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?”

While superficially flippant, Philo’s point is actually subtle and far-reaching and extends beyond the point that the arguments from observation depend on the Fallacy of Composition.  Although it what is true of parts is not necessarily true of the whole, it still could be so the most damage that the classic textbook criticism of the Cosmological Argument could do is to point out that the conclusion needs more support, not that the argument has no merit.  In fact, Philo’s criticism of the Cosmological Argument is more damaging than the technical point about relying on the Fallacy of Composition.  He points out that the argument makes the massive assumption that the part of the universe we can observe is a fair sample, that the whole universe behaves as this part behaves, and that the way we see the universe is the way it really is.  The Cosmological Principle was first spelt out by Isaac Newton and Astronomer William Keel states that it…

“amounts to the strongly philosophical statement that the part of the universe which we can see is a fair sample, and that the same physical laws apply throughout. In essence, this in a sense says that the universe is knowable and is playing fair with scientists” [The Road to Galaxy Formation, 2006]

Following the discovery of Quantum Physics, science has had to abandon the Newtonian paradigm to the extent that today, the “Cosmological Principle”, the very principles of homogeneity and isotropy, are being questioned – even though that leads to the unwelcome conclusion that science is extremely limited in what it can claim to know about the universe.  Philosopher Karl Popper criticized the Cosmological Principle on the grounds that it makes

“our lack of knowledge a principle of knowing something”

concluding that

“the “cosmological principles” were, I fear, dogmas that should not have been proposed”

and since then some Physicists have come to similar conclusions, including Steven Weinberg.  Scientists might be as reluctant to accept the force of Philo’s argument as believers, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that there is no way to know that the way we perceive causation is actually what is happening or that the principle of causation that appears to apply here also applies everywhere in the universe, let alone to the universe as a whole.  Certainly, what is true of parts of the universe is not necessarily true of the whole of the universe – but further, it is not possible to say what is true of parts of the universe and let alone what might be true of the whole.  This argument of Philo’s alone shows that attempting to prove God from observation is impossible.

Further, also in Part 9 of the Dialogues, Philo attacks a version of the Cosmological Argument presented by Demea that echoes Jeremiah Clarke’s a priori argument. While not strictly an argument from observation, this version of the cosmological argument deduces God’s necessary existence and attributes from the contingent nature of other existences.  Nevertheless, unless one is an idealist, understanding what it means for other things to exist must depend on observation, so it is worth considering Hume’s refutation of this version of the argument here.  Although in 1996 Joseph K Campbell successfully argued that Philo fails to defeat this version of the Cosmological Argument – leaving open the possibility that God could be the necessary sustaining-cause of the universe – Philo’s point in asking why the cause of the universe would have to be intelligible renders Campbell’s argument in support of proving God from observation only a technical victory.  While it is true that there might be the necessary sustaining-cause of the universe, it is also true (as Philo contends) that it is not meaningful to claim that this sustaining cause has the attributes of the Christian God.  Jeremiah Clarke faced the same difficulties as Aquinas in trying to marry the attributes of a necessary being with those of the object of Christian faith.  Neither thinker manages to do more than imply that Christian faith is misplaced, because there is no way that the being indicated by contingent existence could create or act in the way that the God of Abraham and Isaac creates and acts, let alone provide hope for salvation and/or personal survival beyond death.  Nobody seriously claims that the Higgs Boson is omnipotent, let alone omniscient or omnibenevolent.  Nobody worships quarks.  Even if God might be whatever sustains the universe in being, there is no way to support religion on that basis.  Further, there is now a sensible natural explanation for the universe which obviates the need to call the necessary sustaining cause of the universe “God” and so muddy the waters of Cosmology with Theological assumptions and associations.  On this point also, despite Campbell’s work, Hume’s argument against proving God from observation has been vindicated.

Philo provides numerous other criticisms of the arguments from observation.  For example, through Parts II-V of the Dialogues, Philo criticizes versions of the Teleological Argument presented by Cleanthes, pointing out that the analogies Cleanthes employs are weak, that there is no way to establish that everything in the universe which appears to have order and purpose really has, and that (because like effects prove like causes) the universe suggests a cause or designer who is far from perfect, not necessarily single and either way a long way from being the God of the Christian religion.

“what shadow of an argument, continued Philo, can you produce, from your hypothesis, to prove that God is one being? A great many men join together to build a house or ship, to found and develop a city, to create a commonwealth” … “For all he knows, the world is very faulty and imperfect by certain higher standards… only the first rough attempt of some infant god, who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his poor performance… the work of some dependent, inferior god, whose superiors hold it up for ridicule… produced by some god in his old age and near-senility, and ever since his death the world has continued without further guidance, activated by the first shove he gave to it and the active force that he built into it.” (Part V)

As JCA Gaskin has argued, Philo’s individual criticisms are compelling, highlighting one by one the flaws and leaps in reasoning in two distinct versions of the teleological argument.  They are far more serious than Philo’s flippant tone might suggest, as they demonstrate how far short of proving the existence of the Christian God classical arguments fall and how much believers must depend on revelations and authority. 

In addition, the broader criticism implicit in Philo’s line of argument is conclusive; despite the multi-layered theodicies of St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas, and the less complete but more pastorally satisfying Irenaean theodicy proposed by John Hick, there has as yet been no satisfactory explanation of why a perfect creator would create an imperfect world.  As JL Mackie observed in his essay “Evil and Omnipotence” (1955), St Augustine’s Free Will Defence fails to explain why an omnipotent God could not create free beings who always choose to do what is right.  Further, St Thomas Aquinas’ approach to redefining evil as a lack of good and God’s attributes as meaning that He can do only what is actually possible and compatible with His wholly simple nature fails to do justice to the reality of peoples’ faith.  The problem of evil and suffering remains the most persuasive objection to attempts to argue to the God of Christianity from observation.

In conclusion, Hume’s arguments – as proposed through the character Philo – successfully show that attempts to prove God from observation all fail.  The Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion present a persuasive case against belief in any sort of God which goes well beyond the petty point-scoring that the genre and style of the piece suggests.  Nevertheless, while extremely persuasive, Philo’s line of argument is a skeptical one and there significant implications flow from accepting it.  Philo casts doubt not just on belief in God, but also on the human ability to know that what we observe is really what we observe and on the human ability to deduce natural laws of any kind on the basis of observation.  By this argument, people wouldn’t just have to drop their belief in God but also their belief in science, something which few people are willing to do.  This, perhaps, is the best objection to Philo’s arguments against the attempt to prove God from observation, that they surely and persuasively lead people into a pit of despair.  However, it is not reasonable to conclude from this that the arguments from observation prove God or that Hume’s criticisms, as presented through Philo, are less than successful.

Critically evaluate the Ontological Argument. (40)

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The Ontological Argument was first so-called by Immanuel Kant, who sought to destroy the attempt to establish God’s existence a priori that had been made by Leibniz, Descartes and first by St Anselm.  In basic terms the Ontological Argument suggests that since

  • P1. God is supremely perfect

and

  • P2. Existence in reality is better than existence only in the mind
  • C.   God therefore must exist.

The argument contends that real existence is a necessary part of the concept of God and thus that attempts to deny God’s existence are foolish.  Anselm quoted Psalm 14:1 and concluded that atheists assert a straightforward contradiction, in effect saying “God (who by definition must exist) does not exist”.   While the argument seems like “a charming joke” (as Schopenhauer put it), as even the Bertrand Russell remarked, it is much more difficult to show how it fails.  Nevertheless, the Ontological Argument does fail for the reasons set out by Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason.

Kant aimed his critique at Descartes’ version of the Ontological Argument, although his points do relate to other versions as well.  Descartes developed his argument in several places, but the most well known version is in his Fifth Meditation, where he reflected that the existence of a supremely-perfect being was as undeniable and necessary as three sides are to a triangle or valleys are to hills.  Like Anselm, Descartes suggests that existence is part of the definition of God as supremely perfect (as Anselm put it “that than which nothing greater can be conceived of”).  Kant rejected this absolutely.  For Kant all knowledge claims are either synthetic or analytic.  Synthetic claims refer to experience and so add to our knowledge of the world, but they always contain the possibility of being true or false.  Analytic claims are based on logic, reason. The relationships between concepts – if valid they provide certainty, proof, but they are tautologous and do not add to our stock of knowledge, they just clarify our understanding and so provide insight.  Kant argued that the Ontological Argument analyses the concept of God and claims to find existence within it. Although it is analytic, it makes an existential claim.  Kant argues that this is impossible – all existential claims must be synthetic – and this is highly persuasive.  Analytic statements cannot expand our knowledge of what does or does not exist in the real world. As Gaunilo remarked in response to Anselm in his essay “on behalf of the fool,” it is absurd to try to define something into existence.  If somebody suggested that a perfect island exists just because by definition it has to, nobody would book tickets to go there on holiday!  Kant’s division of knowledge into synthetic and analytic is still widely accepted, as is his argument that all existential claims must be synthetic, despite WV Quine’s criticism of Kant’s understanding of knowledge.  Quine claimed that the division of all knowledge into synthetic and analytic was a “dogma of empiricism” and only true within Kant’s own limited worldview.

Kant went on to show how the Ontological Argument makes the assumption that existence is a perfection.  Both Anselm and Descartes argue that it is better, more perfect, to exist in reality (in re) than just in the mind (in intellectu) but, as Kant points out, there is no difference between the concept of a real $100 and an imaginary $100 – the concept remains the same whether the money is in my pocket or in my head.  Existence does not add a single penny to the concept, it just tells me where (and if) the concept has been actualised. Related to this is Kant’s famous observation that existence is not a predicate and that the Ontological Argument rests on poor grammar.  A predicate is a word that describes an object.  Although superficially it seems that existence adds to our knowledge of an object, in practice it is the basis on which any claims to knowledge about an object make sense.  Take a job interview.  If there are two candidates, equally well qualified, but it later emerges that only one exists it is not a case of saying that the real candidate is better than the fictitious one but it is a case of saying that the contest was a joke.  As Bertrand Russell remarked, if I ask you “has the present King of France got blonde hair and blue eyes” I smuggle the assumption that there IS a present King of France into my question.  Actually, there is no present King of France so my question is meaningless and can’t be answered either correctly or incorrectly.  This is a difficult point to deny and seems to conclusively destroy the Ontological Argument’s claim to proving God’s existence.  Although there is an intuitive human appeal to the idea that a (any?) real chocolate cake, island – or God – is better than one that only exists in the mind, in practice that cannot be sufficient basis for a claim that God exists.

Kant’s criticisms of the Ontological Argument show that it fails in its object of proving God’s existence. Of course that does not mean that God does not exist.  Just because the Ontological – or any – argument for the existence of God is found to be unsound has no effect on the existence or non-existence of God, although it does take away one support for Propositional faith.  Is it fair to say that as a failed argument the Ontological Argument really is a “charming joke” then?  Absolutely not.  Anselm originally titled the Proslogion “Fides quaerens intellectum”; in the process of faith seeking understanding the Ontological Argument succeeds in clarifying our understanding of the nature and limits of human knowledge.  As such, the argument continues to have great significance.  Further, as both Karl Barth and Iris Murdoch suggested, the argument invites believers to reconsider what they mean by existence, particularly when it comes to God.  Do believers really expect God to be real in the way that a perfect island might be real, or do they have a different sort of reality in mind?