| Pathfinder |
07-05-2002 08:37 PM |
Quote:
Topics: God, Arguments for the Existence of
Text: The arguments for the existence of God constitute one of the finest attempts of the human mind to break out of the world and go beyond the sensible or phenomenal realm of experience.
Certainly the question of God's existence is the most important question of human philosophy. It affects the whole tenor of human life, whether man is regarded as the supreme being in the universe or whether it is believed that man has a superior being that he must love and obey, or perhaps defy.
There are three ways one can argue for the existence of God. First, the a priori approach argues from a conception of God as a being so perfect that his nonexistence is inconceivable. Second, the a posteriori approach gives evidence from the world, from the observable, empirical universe, insisting that God is necessary to explain certain features of the cosmos. Third, the existential approach asserts direct experience of God by way of personal revelation. This approach is not really an argument in the usual sense, because one does not usually argue for something that can be directly experienced.
The A Priori Approach. This approach is the heart of the famous ontological argument, devised by Anselm of Canterbury though adumbrated earlier in the system of Augustine. This argument begins with a special definition of God as infinite, perfect, and necessary.
Anselm said that God cannot be conceived in any way other than "a being than which nothing greater can be conceived." Even the fool knows what he means by "God" when he asserts, "There is no God" (Ps. 14:1). But if the most perfect being existed only in thought and not in reality, then it would not really be the most perfect being, for the one that existed in reality would be more perfect. Therefore, concludes Anselm, "no one who understands what God is, can conceive that God does not exist." In short, it would be self-contradictory to say, "I can think of a perfect being that doesn't exist," because existence would have to be a part of perfection. One would be saying, "I can conceive of something greater than that which nothing greater can be conceived", which is absurd.
The ontological argument has had a long and stormy history. It has appealed to some of the finest minds in Western history, usually mathematicians like Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. However, it fails to persuade most people, who seem to harbor the same suspicion as Kant that "the unconditioned necessity of a judgment does not form the absolute necessity of a thing." That is, perfection may not be a true predicate and thus a proposition can be logically necessary without being true in fact.
The A Posteriori Approach. Popular mentality seems to appreciate the a posteriori approach better. The ontological argument can be made without ever appealing to sensation, but the cosmological and teleological arguments require a careful look at the world. The former focuses on the cause, while the latter stresses the design of the universe.
The Cosmological Argument. This has more than one form. The earliest occurs in Plato (Laws, Book X) and Aristotle (Metaphysics, Book VIII) and stresses the need to explain the cause of motion. Assuming that rest is natural and motion is unnatural, these thinkers arrived at God as the necessary Prime Mover of all things. Thomas Aquinas used motion as his first proof in the Summa Theologica (Q.2, Art.3). Everything that moves has to be moved by another thing. But this chain of movers cannot go on to infinity, a key assumption, because there would then be no first mover and thus no other mover. We must arrive, therefore, at a first mover, Aquinas concludes, "and this everyone understands to be God."
This argument from motion is not nearly as cogent for our scientific generation because we take motion to be natural and rest to be unnatural, as the principle of inertia states. Many philosophers insist that the notion of an infinite series of movers is not at all impossible or contradictory.
The most interesting, and persuasive, form of the cosmological argument is Aquinas's "third way," the argument from contingency. Its strength derives from the way it employs both permanence and change. Epicurus stated the metaphysical problem centuries ago: "Something obviously exists now, and something never sprang from nothing." Being, therefore, must have been without beginning. An Eternal Something must be admitted by all, theist, atheist, and agonostic.
But the physical universe could not be this Eternal Something because it is obviously contingent, mutable, subject to decay. How could a decomposing entity explain itself to all eternity? If every present contingent thing/event depends on a previous contingent thing/event and so on ad infinitum, then this does not provide an adequate explanation of anything.
Hence, for there to be anything at all contingent in the universe, there must be at least one thing that is not contingent, something that is necessary throughout all change and self-established. In this case "necessary" does not apply to a proposition but to a thing, and it means infinite, eternal, everlasting, self-caused, self-existent.
It is not enough to say that infinite time will solve the problem of contingent being. No matter how much time you have, dependent being is still dependent on something. Everything contingent within the span of infinity will, at some particular moment, not exist. But if there was a moment when nothing existed, then nothing would exist now.
The choice is simple: one chooses either a self-existent God or a self-existent universe, and the universe is not behaving as if it is self-existent. In fact, according to the second law of thermodynamics, the universe is running down like a clock or, better, cooling off like a giant stove. Energy is constantly being diffused or dissipated, that is, progressively distributed throughout the universe. If this process goes on for a few billion more years, and scientists have never observed a restoration of dissipated energy, then the result will be a state of thermal equilibrium, a "heat death," a random degradation of energy throughout the entire cosmos and hence the stagnation of all physical activity.
Naturalists from Lucretius to Sagan have felt that we need not postulate God as long as nature can be considered a self-explanatory entity for all eternity. But it is difficult to hold this doctrine if the second law is true and entropy is irreversible. If the cosmos is running down or cooling off, then it could not have been running and cooling forever. It must have had a beginning.
A popular retort to the cosmological argument is to ask, "If God made the universe, then who made God?" If one insists that the world had a cause, must one not also insist that God had a cause? No, because if God is a necessary being, this is established if one accepts the proof, then it is unnecessary to inquire into his origins. It would be like asking, "Who made the unmakable being?" or "Who caused the uncausable being?"
More serious is the objection that the proof is based on an uncritical acceptance of the "principle of sufficient reason," the notion that every event/effect has a cause. If this principle is denied, even if it is denied in metaphysics, the cosmological argument is defanged. Hume argued that causation is a psychological, not a metaphysical, principle, one whose origins lay in the human propensity to assume necessary connections between events when all we really see is contiguity and succession. Kant seconded Hume by arguing that causation is a category built into our minds as one of the many ways in which we order our experience. Sartre felt that the universe was "gratuitous." Bertrand Russell claimed that the question of origins was tangled in meaningless verbiage and that we must be content to declare that the universe is "just there and that's all."
One does not prove the principle of causality easily. It is one of those foundational assumptions that is made in building a world view. It can be pointed out, however, that if we jettison the idea of sufficient reason, we will destroy not only metaphysics but science as well. When one attacks causality, one attacks much of knowledge per se, for without this principle the rational connection in most of our learning falls to pieces. Surely it is not irrational to inquire into the cause of the entire universe.
The Teleological or Design Argument. This is one of the oldest and most popular and intelligible of the theistic proofs. It suggests that there is a definite analogy between the order and regularity of the cosmos and a product of human ingenuity. Voltaire put it in rather simplistic terms: "If a watch proves the existence of a watchmaker but the universe does not prove the existence of a great Architect, then I consent to be called a fool."
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