Cosmological arguments for God’s existence

     St. Thomas Aquinas’ first three ‘ways’ of proving the existence of God all inquire into origins--they ask, crudely, how it all got started or where it all came from.  Change, motion, and the existence of ordinary things all depend on previous change, motion, or the existence of earlier things.  Aquinas argued that this chain of dependence could not stretch indefinitely backward; it could not go to infinity, or the process never could have gotten started at all.  Thus there must be a First Cause and Unmoved Mover, ‘and this everyone understands to be God.’

     These arguments are controversial, and in particular commentators have wanted to know why the chain of dependency couldn't ‘go to infinity.’  Samuel Clarke therefore produced a version of the ‘cosmological’ argument that does not assume ‘the supposed impossibility of infinite succession.’  Here is my own reconstruction of Clarke's argument:

          1.  Nothing is produced out of nothing.

          2.  If there had ever been a time at which nothing at all existed, then nothing would exist now.   [1]

  But   3.  Something exists now.

          4.  There has never been a time at which nothing at all existed.   [2,3]

          5.  The universe (= the material world plus whatever else there may be) has existed ‘from eternity.’ [4]

          6.  Either the universe consists of an ‘endless’ [he means beginningless] series of dependent beings, or there is in it (at least) one being which is
      independent.

          7.  If every part of a collection or series is dependent, the series as a whole is dependent.

          8.  If the universe consists of a beginningless series of dependent beings, then the universe itself is a dependent being.    [7]

  But   9.  The universe itself is not dependent.  [Trivial, given our technical definition of ‘universe’]

   So  10. The universe does not consist of a beginningless series of dependent beings.   [8,9]

   So  11. There is (at least) one being that is independent.  [6,10]

         12. Any being must be (a) produced from nothing or (b) produced by some antecedently existing thing or (c) ‘self-existing’ (produced by nothing at all,
      existing by its very nature).

   So  13. The independent being is self-existing.  [1,9,11,12]

...and this everyone calls God, QED.  (Note that the material world itself cannot be the independent being, as Spinoza once suggested, simply because it isn’t independent, as has already been shown by steps 7 and 8.)

     It is a long way from the conclusion that there is an “independent being” to the identification of that being with (the traditional Judeo-Christian) God, as we noted in the case of Aquinas’ first three “ways.”  But Clarke is sensitive to this and later provides further arguments for the omnipotence, omniscience, goodness etc. of the independent being.

     There are a number of objections that might be made.  For example, does 5 really follow from 4?  (I think it doesn’t, but the argument can be repaired pretty easily.)  But the main problem, I’d say, is 7.  In his article on the Cosmological Argument (reprinted in Feinberg) William Rowe raises the obvious objection that many statements of the form ‘If every part of a collection or series is ---, the series as a whole is ---’ are plainly false, and so 7 in particular requires special defense.  But Rowe rightly points out that 8 can be defended without appeal to 7 in any case: It is a striking fact that there is a material world at all; there might not have been, or so it seems, even though in fact there is.  So we can ask, ‘Why is there something, a material world, rather than nothing at all?’  And here what Rowe calls the ‘Principle of Sufficient Reason’ backs up the demand: if there is an answer to our question, as the PSR says there must be, then something is responsible in some sense for the existence of the material world, which presumably makes the world a dependent being.

     Rowe now asks why we should believe the PSR itself.  A fair question.  But if we do believe it and have no further objection to Clarke's argument, we are committed to the existence of the independent being.  I leave further examination of the argument to you.
 

Teleological arguments

 Teleological arguments infer the existence of God from features of the material world that seems to exhibit purpose, function, or design.  Paley’s argument, a generalization from his example of the watch, goes as follows:

          1.  Artifacts are characterized and identified as such in virtue of the adaptation of their various parts to an end or purpose.

          2.  It is in virtue of this adaptation that we rightly infer them to be the products of conscious, intelligent design.

  But   3.  Nature as a whole, and particularly the living animals within it, exhibit this same adaptation (and to a dramatically higher degree).

   So   4.  Nature too is the product of conscious, intelligent design.

...and this designer everyone calls God, QED.  (Here again, further work would be needed to justify this last bit, but it is a less ambitious step than Aquinas’ or Clarke’s.)

     The argument is not strictly valid.  Though of course we do infer a designer when we see a watch, that conclusion does not very strictly follow; it is still conceivable, however preposterously unlikely, that the watch fell together coincidentally, by a huge cosmic accident, as a result of freakish radiation from the sky.  And the same holds for the inference of 4 from 3.  But that’s OK.  The inference need not be taken as deductive; we can regard it as an instance of inference to the best explanation.  The watch’s adaptation of parts to purposes does not strictly entail that it was manufactured by a designer, but the designer hypothesis is by far the most reasonable explanation of the adaptation.  So too, Paley thinks, the hypothesis of an intelligent creator is far and away the most reasonable explanation of the world’s adaptation.

    Objection 1:  Against premise 3, it’s not true that nature as a whole exhibits adaptation of parts to purposes; only parts of nature do.  (Nature as a whole may have a purpose, but it doesn’t exhibit one; we don’t see it.)  Reply: OK, take out “as a whole.”  Nature is still full of things that do exhibit the adaptation, and they weren’t designed by human beings, or by each other; so it’s still reasonable to infer a pre-existing intelligent designer.

    Objection 2:  Watches and other artifacts have identifiable human-driven purposes or functions.  Living creatures (except perhaps in rare cases) don’t, or don’t obviously, have such. Reply: But living creatures do have other important teleological properties.  Our parts are adapted to “a purpose” in that they are organized in such a way as to keep us alive and functioning.  And that adaptation is no less remarkable, indeed far more so, than is the adaptation of clockworks to the purpose of keeping time; despite the disanalogy, the apparent need for an intelligent designer is not diminished.

    Objection 3 (Wallace Matson):  Step 2, and thereby premise 1, are open to challenge; Matson argues that we infer the existence of the watchmaker, not because of the watch's teleological properties, but because of its marks of manufacture.  Reply: Certainly the marks of manufacture are an excellent reason for inferring the existence of the manufacturer.  But, compatibly with that, so is the adaptation of parts to purposes.

    Objection 4:  Even if 2 is true, part of our justification for inferring the watchmaker is the tacit assumption that no credible alternative comes to mind.  But for the case of nature as a whole, especially the life forms it sustains, the adaptation of means to ends is extremely well explained by the theory of natural selection, as subserved by population genetics.  So one can’t assume here that ‘like effects must have like causes.’

    There are more modern teleological arguments, such as those due to George Gale and George Schlesinger, that focus on the fabulously complex homeostasis that is required for the emergence and maintenance of intelligent life (anywhere in the universe).  Gale argues that unless we posit an intelligent designer, the existence of intelligent life would seem wildly improbable.

    Cosmological arguments, teleological arguments, and a third species called “ontological” arguments are the main sorts of a priori arguments for the existence of God.  (Note that the arguments we have considered are not completely a priori, in that each has at least one empirical (though very general) premise.)  Empirical arguments would include appeals to scripture, to historical events, and to religious experience or alleged spiritual manifestations; such appeals would have to be assessed one by one, according to whatever standards we apply to matters of empirical evidence.
 

Evil

    The Problem of Evil, used by Philo (= Hume) as an argument against the existence of the Judeo-Christian God, is that the following set of statements seems to be inconsistent.

                   1.  God is omnipotent.

                   2.  God is omniscient.

                   3.  God is entirely benevolent.
        Yet
                   4.  Evil and suffering exist (and in greater measure than is conceptually required for the existence of goods).

By definition, if God is entirely benevolent He will prevent any suffering that He is able to prevent.  And by definition, if He is omnipotent, he is able to do anything, hence able to prevent any suffering whatever.  Therefore there is no suffering.  (2 rules out the zany possibility that although God is both willing and able to prevent all suffering, there is some suffering He fails to prevent because He just doesn’t know about it.)

    Cleanthes flirts with denying 4.  But that is untenable.  One may take the long view and deny that human suffering is ultimately evil, so one may put quotation marks around “evil” in 4, but that doesn’t make the suffering itself go away.  So we must deny either 1, 2 or 3.  To my knowledge, no one has ever tried to solve the Problem of Evil by denying 2, so that leaves 1 and 3.

    1 is sometimes denied tacitly, by accident: “God has to make/allow us to suffer because [for example] it builds our characters.”  An omnipotent being doesn’t have to do anything.

    1 is more deliberately denied by one version of the Free Will Defense:  Having given human beings free will, God is now unable to control their free actions; evil and suffering result from the free actions of human beings, and cannot be blamed on God.  (Why did He give us the free will in the first place, since it’s had such catastrophic consequences?  Consider the alternative: What would have been the point of creating a clockwork universe, in which there weren’t beings that had free will?)
    Alternately, the Free Will Defender can say that although God is still omnipotent, He chooses not to interfere with the free actions of human beings.  This would mean that He does allow some suffering that He could have prevented, and so it falsifies 3, but for a perhaps defensible reason.  God Himself is still benevolent, and even though there is suffering that He could have prevented, that suffering is not directly His fault, but is to be blamed on the human beings who caused it.

    The main problem with the Free Will Defense is that much evil, particularly the evil that most galls us in the theistic context, is not the result of human action.  The sufferings that drive people to atheism result from horrible diseases or from natural tragedies of the sort referred to in insurance policies as “acts of God.”  So, to be even minimally adequate, the FWD has to be extended.  Natural evils must be seen as the deliberate acts of a powerful free-willed being, the obvious candidate being Satan.  (Hence Hume’s reference on p. 73 to Manichaeanism.)  The literal existence of one or more free-willed unholy nonhuman beings who cause evil and suffering in the world and whose choices often succeed in going against God's will is not widely accepted by theologians, and is hard to believe.  Moreover, if this extension of the FWD is to succeed, it must be total, and cover natural suffering of any sort however trivial.  We would have to take Satan as a practical jokester who, when he is not doing something much worse, goes around giving people hangnails and hemorrhoids; and we would have to take this very literally.  That idea is pretty fanciful.

    It is, I think, more plausible to deny 3, and deny it outright.  To my knowledge, no actual scripture or religious doctrine has held that God is “entirely benevolent” in the sense maintained by Philo’s argument.  No major religion has promised us a rose garden; in fact, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam presuppose that we are going to suffer and go on suffering.  Get used to it and stop whining.

    But now the problem is:

                5.  God is perfectly good.

Can the prevalence of evil and suffering be reconciled with the claim that the universe is governed by a perfectly good superbeing, to Whom on account of His goodness we owe worship and adoration?

Logically or conceptually, yes.  But there is still hard theological work to be done, to show how or why so much evil and suffering would be visited upon us by a being that is perfectly good.  After all, if you or I (a) saw someone suffering, (b) had the power to relieve that suffering at no cost or trouble to ourselves, but (c) did not relieve it, what would that make us?