Does God Exist?

Note: I wrote this summary several years ago. I no longer agree with every point mentioned, and it is also very terse and doesn't properly engage in every point and relevant argument. Nevertheless, there are many ideas I still find compelling and many arguments worth engaging.

Here's a basic summary I wrote of my current stance regarding many arguments for God. Very little to nothing is original, but I attempted to set up many of the arguments clearly. Let the discussion begin!!

Since prehistoric times, people have always assumed a Higher Intelligence exists. This assumption has largely rested on two categories of reasoning. The primary reasoning involved was the existence of forces of nature. When presented as an argument, this can appear in two forms. The first would be an argument from teleology; that objects and forces in nature appear to be designed or have a specific purpose, which indicates the existence of a Higher Intelligence who designed them. The second is the existence of natural forces themselves. What exactly is nature? And what is the driving force behind it? These arguments largely represent the basis of more ancient religions, such as animism and ancient polytheism, although it finds refuge to a smaller extent with monotheistic philosophies as well.

The second general category was most prominently promulgated by Hellenic and medieval philosophers. It is an argument from the concept of existence itself. Formally, it is usually presented as the cosmological argument from contingency, although at times it may appear in other formulations as well. The general thrust of this idea is more abstract. Why does anything exist rather than nothing? Is our universe just a brute fact? What would that even mean? They postulated a (somewhat) anthropomorphic concept of the First Cause, namely that It is alive, intelligent, and according to some, intimately involved in human affairs.

A subset of this kind of basis are arguments from metaphysics. The most common one presented today is the argument from objective morality. The human experience contains rather profound metaphysical coming conceptions of reality. Are these all an illusion? Many would say not, hence implying that material existence is far from a brute fact, and is actually rooted in a deeper reality which may actually be the realm of God or the gods.

(Note that I am not including revelation here, as to the best of my knowledge historically this has not been a significant factor for belief in the existence of God itself, rather each of these reports of revelation were predicated on the prior belief in those gods beforehand.)

Using all the resources available to us in the 21st century, are these arguments compelling? Let us analyze each category and see if they are currently relevant.

The first category of arguments from nature has radically changed in the past few centuries. As the scientific enterprise has turned most ancient scientific assumptions on its head, we can no longer approach these questions the way the ancients did. Regarding arguments from design, physical, chemical, biological and cosmological objects and processes are largely explained are considered to be attributable to basic laws of nature interacting in complex ways. Likewise, the makeup of these forces themselves have been discovered to be largely reducible to abstract and indifferent mathematical equations which don't leave much room for anthropomorphizing them and ascribing godly qualities to these forces themselves.

However, generally speaking, there are three major areas in which theists continue to find refuge. These are 1) The Fine-Tuning Argument, 2) The Kalam Cosmological Argument, and 3) The Hard Problem of Consciousness.

The most common objection to these arguments is what came to be known a “God of the Gaps”. This objection is a form of inductive reasoning; namely, that every phenomenon we have observed that we have discovered the cause was revealed to be the product of material causes, so it would follow that we should assume that every phenomenon not yet understood is of a material nature as well. (The category of material cause is fairly self-explanatory why it constitutes a category.) Every discovery made by science, especially monumental theories set out to explain what was previously thought to be completely unexplainable (such as those made by Newton, Einstein and Darwin) strengthens this induction.

However, one my might contend that the Fine-Tuning argument and the Kalam Cosmological argument cannot be included in this category, as they are matters of ultimate origin, thus by definition would have a non-material cause. There is no material process which preceded these arrangements, thus negating the possibility that they have a material cause.

However, this is a fundamental error. The ancients as well thought the material world as we know it extended only as far as our planet, and the cosmos were a comprised of a different ‘substance’. This is a fallacy which was brought about due to the limitations of our power of observation. Being that our planet was tangible to them and the cosmos were not observable in the same sense, they automatically assumed that it was not of the same basic nature. Modern science has confirmed that this is not the case, and the cosmos are governed by the same laws of physics are our planet. We must be very wary of considering ourselves to be the center of the cosmos, as this is a fallacy that is inherent in our psychology. It has no independent basis. Similarly, we must not confine material existence to what is observable by us humans. We may never discover what is beyond our universe, or if any multiverse or other theories are true, because we have no tools to observe it.

This is not to say that any specific theories are true, although they may very well be. However, to posit that the Big Bang and the tuning of the cosmological constants are not within the realm of material causes is a category error. There is absolutely no reason to assume that the fundamental properties of the material universe do not exist there as well, and as such, there can be myriads of possible causes to these events; of which we can only speculate.

Others raise the objection that the God of the Gaps fallacy does not apply to the theory of consciousness, as qualia and subjective experience are not of a material substance. However, I fail to see how we can make such a claim any more than the ancients who mistakenly assumed that the cosmos is of a different substance.

(As an aside, the Hard Problem of Consciousness alone wouldn’t lead us directly to theism in any case, merely away from materialism, but it may be combined with other arguments to imply theism, which will be addressed later.)

There is still yet a way of approaching this not from any particular aspect of nature, but from the totality of it. This is generally presented based on the anthropic principle, which is the statistical improbability of life arising as it has. However, in order to be a proper argument, it must assume the premise that the particular way we exist is significant in some way, which is hard to support on non-theistic grounds, thus causing this argument to be circular reasoning, as it implicitly accepts the conclusion of theism at the outset. (This objection is not valid for the fine-tuning argument, as complexity is inherently more significant than simplicity.)

Another aspect of the totality which may be raised is the ecology of our planet and the universe, being that we find the seamless interaction of different natural factors to be astounding. This however is easily refutable by the meta idea of natural selection; namely, that the systems arrange themselves based their components, and not the other way around. Indeed, the amount of haphazardness we observe that it was not designed to work as a whole.

Let us now turn to the second basis on which theism may stand. What does it mean to exist? Are all the fields we perceive simply there, or are they manifestations of a greater realm of existence? Is being a fundamental aspect of reality, or is it merely accidental? Why does anything exist rather than nothing?

Theism provides the answer to these questions. God necessarily exists in actuality, and the universe is a manifestation of some form of Godly emanation. Question solved, no?

Actually, no. One only need to look as far as the ultimate mysteries which are part and parcel of every theology. Be it the Trinity, Tzimtzum, or merely the difficulty in understanding how the Infinite and the finite interact, every theology admits there are things it can’t explain regarding fundamental ontology. The classical answer is that our intellect is finite, and thus limited, which would explain we can’t understand concepts pertaining to the infinite. This is a fair argument, but than one wonders if this is special pleading. Why can’t the same be said with regard to materialism? Although everything we know is contingent, it still exists for some reason we can’t fathom, as our contingent minds can only understand contingency. With regard to theism nobody can even articulate why God necessarily exists, and with good reason. This is because are minds are contingent. Wouldn’t this mean that claiming that a being necessarily exists and grounds our reality is no more than a guess in the dark of concepts we cannot possibly have any conception of? Why would we even consider any possibility as a live option?

I submit that ultimate questions are not deserving of answers by evolved beings. This is not ignoring the question, rather this is arguing that any claim to proofs with regard to ultimate reality are meaningless and have no epistemic merit. Thus, positing that a necessary being exists has no more explanatory power than just saying that material existence is a brute fact.

Many atheists accept the conclusion of the Cosmological Argument from Contingency, yet object to the conflation of necessary existence with a personal or even conscious or intelligent God. Although there have been several arguments presented throughout history which attempt to prove that a necessary being must be conscious. I believe that all of these arguments are fallacious for two reasons. Firstly, they are committing the Fallacy of Ultimate Questions outlined above. Secondly, they are all making assumptions with regard to the nature of consciousness, and posit that it can exist independent of a material existence. This has yet to be demonstrated to be true to any extent, as the Hard Problem of Consciousness places restrictions on both ends. Nobody can conclusively claim that consciousness is reducible (unless appealing to a similar form of inductive reasoning as explained above) or that dualism is true, and to the contrary, absolute dualism is becoming increasingly difficult to defend in light of modern neuroscience.

We must still address the experiential aspect of metaphysics, such as our moral sense, our conception of meaning, and the value we believe is inherent in the universe. Standing alone, these arguments fail spectacularly. Even assuming that a non-theistic philosophy cannot properly account for these concepts, we have no objective basis with which to claim that these aren’t merely cognitive faculties which arose due to evolutionary conditions. However, coupled with the ontological discussions mentioned above, one might justifiably claim that the senses are manifestations of the ultimate existence, thus shedding a bit of light onto these otherwise unanswerable questions. (I don’t think that this is included in the Fallacy of Ultimate Questions, because we are using empirical and experiential deductions rather than abstract reasoning of concepts we cannot understand.)

However, I would argue that this commits the fallacy of anthropomorphizing existence based on our own experience. It is not these concepts which indicate the nature of the metaphysical, rather our psychology which compels us to project our own experiences onto the fabric of being itself. If we were an entirely different being based on different evolutionary conditions, we would project that psychology onto the universe, and it would be no more correct. So why be presumptuous and assume we experience reality as it is? I choose to have epistemic humility, and simply claim we do not know.

Does God exist? I don’t see any reason to say so. What to you think?