36 Arguments for the Existence of God

by Rebecca Goldstein

  “I don’t know about any of you, but I find this rationalization, as ingenious as it is, morally offensive. The suffering sacrifice of some so that others are afforded the opportunity to achieve moral transcendence doesn’t strike me as descriptive of a moral universe. At the very least, shouldn’t all God’s creatures be given an opportunity for transcendence? The believer who’s satisfied with this ingenious answer isn’t paying close enough attention to the facts of suffering. His moral calculus of costs and benefits doesn’t add up.

  “And it’s at this point that the believer, if he feels this objection at all, will take refuge in the inscrutable will of God. Or perhaps he’ll argue that the very resistance of these facts of suffering to any explanation that we can come up with points to the existence of God, since there must be a way in which this suffering is redeemed, and since it’s not in this world, then it has to be in the next. But, of course, to believe that there must be some way in which this suffering is ultimately redeemed is already to assume a level of transcendent explanation, which is the same thing as assuming God, which makes an argument of this kind circular.

  “So at some point the believer, no matter how ingenious his attempts to reconcile the existence of God to the nature of the world, will have to fall back, when it comes to some of the most heartrending of cases, on the inscrutable ways of God. But to speak of the inscrutable ways of God is to acknowledge that the moral complexion of our world doesn’t favor the existence of a benevolent deity, which is the very point that I’m making.

  “How am I doing for time?”

  “You have a minute left,” Lenny says, without looking at his watch. Cass has the feeling Lenny is keeping time or not, as the spirit moves him.

  “Okay, then, I’ll wrap it up. It’s often said that, just as theism can’t be proved, so, too, atheism can’t be proved. Just because no argument manages to establish God’s existence doesn’t show he doesn’t exist. Both beliefs depend on faith alone. But to this I respond that there is so much about our world—in particular, its moral complexion—that makes it appear to be unruled by a beneficent being, there is so much that we either have to callously ignore or else lay at the feet of God’s inscrutability, that in the absence of any argument for God’s existence so compelling as to overcome these facts of suffering—and I haven’t heard one tonight—the reasonable conclusion is that God does not exist.”

  Cass stops speaking, and there’s some rustling and whispering and thumping out in the pews as people rearrange their bodies and prepare for the next round.

  Fidley goes to his lectern, while Cass remains standing at his, and Cass finds he no longer feels intimidated. He thinks he’s acquitted himself well so far, and he wistfully wishes that Lucinda were here to see it. But there are Roz and Mona, both looking optimistic—in fact, Roz looks radiant—and now that he’s no longer nervous, he feels grateful to Sy Auerbach for traveling all the way from New York, and to the Agnostic Chaplaincy and to Harvard University, to whom he feels doubly grateful, and he realizes that he’s once again on the verge of ascending on the flapping wings of his grateful soul, and so he takes a good hard look at his adversary to bring him back down to this moment and to what still lies ahead. Fidley has struck a formidable pose, his shoulders looking wider than ever, and he’s been hastily scribbling while Cass has been doing nothing but counting his blessings like a fool. He concentrates now and thinks he knows what Azarya would say about Fidley’s enlisting of Humean skepticism, and thinking that he knows how Azarya would respond calms him down again.

  Lenny Shore comes over to Cass’s lectern and speaks into his mike.

  “Before we go on to the next phase of this debate, I just want to say to Professor Fidley: You know, you’re right! And I would like to say to Professor Seltzer: You know, you’re right!”

  The audience laughs, and Lenny laughs with them, right into the mike.

  “So—now on to the questions. Professor Fidley, you have the first question.” Lenny returns to his seat.

  “Thank you very much. I’m more grateful than ever to have the opportunity to question Cass Seltzer after having listened to him. Only now do I fully understand why he is referred to as ‘the atheist with a soul.’”

  Felix takes a little longer this time to smile and then waits for a few snickers to join him. Is Lenny keeping time? Roz has murder in her eyes.

  “That was an impressively soulful homily on the virtues of atheism. Cass Seltzer makes it sound as if anyone who cares sufficiently for his fellow man is duty-bound to be an atheist. A believer such as Mother Teresa, who devoted her life to serving the most suffering of God’s creatures, apparently isn’t paying enough attention to the facts of suffering, at least not as much as academicians like Bertrand Russell and Cass Seltzer are paying attention, ministering to God’s unfortunates by being professors and writing best-selling books.”

  This is the second time that Fidley has gotten in a dig about best sellers. Perhaps the sales for Welfare Warfare Wherefore had been disappointing.

  “The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, who forfeited his life in the struggle to alleviate the misery of his people, apparently didn’t pay close enough attention to how people suffer, or he would never have been a man of God. Despite lives of self-sacrifice—to which, I think even Cass Seltzer will agree, the religious are far more prone then the irreligious— such people as these are cold of heart compared with the atheists, who care too much for their fellow man to be able to believe in God.

  “My first question to Professor Seltzer is whether he really does mean to suggest that Mother Teresa was a callous woman.”

  Fidley spaces out those last six words so that they make their full impact, and there’s a faint rushing noise that Cass is pretty sure is coming from the audience and not from inside his own head, as if of the collective intake of breath.

  “I’m sorry if I gave the impression that I think believers are callous and uncaring. That certainly isn’t something that I believe.”

  Cass swallows. This head-on attack is unnerving. He’s unnerved. He takes a sip of water.

  “You and I are here today, Professor Fidley, to debate the resolution ‘God exists.’ We’re evaluating arguments for and against that resolution. As those of you who have read my book know, that’s not how I think religious beliefs are generally formed. When it comes to religion, arguments usually come after belief, not before. Far more potent than arguments are certain emotional attitudes that permeate one’s whole sense of being in the world, emotional attitudes that orient a person in the world rather than say something true or false. Theistic propositions like ‘God exists,’ or ‘God is good,’ or ‘God loves me,’ are metaphorical expressions for these permeating attitudes and emotions—metaphors that can seriously confuse us. For me to debate the truth or falsity of the proposition ‘God exists’ with you tonight therefore has nothing much to do with the psychology of religion as I understand it, with what it feels like to hold a spiritual attitude toward the world and to live accordingly. So, when I criticize theodical arguments as being cavalier toward suffering, I’m not criticizing religious people as being cavalier toward suffering, since the whole point of my book is that the psychology of religious conviction has little to do with arguments.

  “But here tonight we are debating arguments, arguments for a proposition, not an emotion, and I maintain that the argument against the existence of God, based on the great amount of suffering that the believer must lay at the inscrutability of God, is stronger than any arguments for the existence. And any theist who thinks he’s helped clear up the mystery by appealing to such things as the potential for achieving greatness of soul that suffering presents to some sufferers, but by no means all sufferers, is, yes, cavalier toward suffering, at least while he is consciously making that argument. In some sense, perhaps, the very fact that compassionate people, people who devote themselves to alleviating suffering, can get themselves to believe that the degree of suffering we witness can be explained, is itself
a measure of how powerful the psychological mechanisms are.”

  Cass had felt discomfited by Fidley’s question, not only the hostile way in which it had been asked, but by the substance of it as well. He doesn’t want to be forced into criticizing religious people. He suspects that Fidley has figured this out about him and is going to exploit it.

  Now it’s his turn to ask a question, and he looks at Fidley as he speaks, but Fidley doesn’t look at him.

  “Professor Fidley, you’ve argued that the belief in God is as necessary to our living coherently as is our belief in logic and our belief in the lawfulness of nature. As you pointed out so eloquently, there can be no thought at all without believing in the fundamentals of thinking, in the rules of logic and the rules of scientific induction. Likewise, you want to argue, our living coherently requires our sense that we matter, and that this mattering in turn requires a Transcendental Underwriter, something beyond ourselves that ensures that we do actually matter. How is it possible to live coherently, you ask, leading lives that are worthy of us, without faith in a transcendent purpose? But there’s something about this line of reasoning that strikes me as viciously circular. If we already know that we’re worthy of having a transcendent purpose coming to us, why would we need the transcendent purpose? The transcendent purpose would be redundant. And if we don’t know that we’re worthy unless we acquire that transcendent purpose, then who says we have a transcendent purpose coming to us in the first place? This demand for a transcendent purpose seems either unneeded or unearned, or am I wrong?”

  All the talk about Hume, Cass had seen, had been just so much silt-stirring. Fidley’s three-pronged argument is an elaborate variation of The Argument from Personal Purpose. Fidley’s argument is only as sound as Cass’s #19.

  Fidley smiles again, that same thin gash cutting into his left cheek, and he keeps his face turned toward the audience.

  “It’s hard for me to accept anything Cass Seltzer has to say about my argument, since his entire discussion has begged the question in a way I think must be obvious to everyone here, including Cass Seltzer himself. He’s coming at my argument from a moral high ground that he can’t legitimately claim. There is simply no way for an atheist such as himself to be able to claim any sort of objective morality.

  “Cass Seltzer spoke of the tragedy of a child being exterminated by the absolute evil that was Nazism. But how, coming from his worldview, can he possibly maintain that there’s anything like absolute evil? It’s on the basis of the evil in this world that he argues that our world yields empirical evidence against God’s existence. But the absolute distinction between good and evil can be maintained only on the basis of God. According to the Nazi system, it was perfectly okay to send that child to his death. And without God, who’s to say the Nazis were wrong?

  “Now, Cass Seltzer, of course, is not a Nazi. He has another system from which he judges the Nazis’ actions wrong, the suffering inflicted on that child evil. But if it’s just some people’s systems going up against other people’s systems, with no higher authority to adjudicate between them, then it all dissolves into moral chaos and ethical relativism, and Cass Seltzer isn’t entitled to talk about the moral complexion of the world at all.

  “I can talk about it, but only because I know that there’s a God who establishes the objective difference between right actions and wrong actions, between immoral systems like Nazism and moral systems like Judeo-Christian ethics. But how can Cass Seltzer claim such objective moral distinctions?”

  Fidley stops speaking, and he still isn’t looking at Cass, and Cass isn’t quite sure if this is the second question that Fidley is lobbing at him or just a rhetorical flourish.

  “Is that your second question to me?”

  “Yes, it is.” Still the man won’t look at Cass, and it’s beginning to irk him.

  “I’d be glad to answer that question, Professor Fidley, but first I do want to point out that you didn’t answer my question, and that disappoints me. Instead, you’ve switched the topic and are arguing that my own argument makes no sense because it’s a moral argument and without God there can be no moral truths. I’m more than happy to address that point.

  “Morality is often claimed by the theists to come much easier to them than to the atheists. It’s a natural thing to think. The claims of morality seem so mysterious—involving, as they do, not just claims about what is the case but about what ought to be the case—that it’s natural to feel that you have to ground them in a mysterious foundation. Morality is mysterious, God is mysterious, let’s reduce one mystery to the other and assume that the mystery of God takes care of the mystery of morality. Morality has to be more than just one people’s system of values clashing with another people’s system of values, Professor Fidley says, and I agree. But then he also says that the only way that it can be more is if there is a higher authority adjudicating between them.

  “But grounding morality in God doesn’t work at all. After all, you have to ask the question whether God has any reason for his moral adjudication. Does God have some reason for endorsing a system that enshrines a moral principle like ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,’ while he rejects the principles of Nazism that sent that child and so many like him to their deaths? Professor Fidley asked me how we humans can adjudicate between moral systems if we don’t have recourse to God’s adjudication. Now I’m asking the same question about how God adjudicates. Either God has a reason for his moral decisions or he doesn’t.

  “Let’s say he does. Well, then, there are reasons independent of his will, and whatever those reasons are provides the justification for what makes those moral decisions the right ones. God’s reasons for wanting us to do unto others as we would have them do unto us are the very reasons that we should do unto others as we would have them do unto us. The reasons are what make such actions moral, and God himself is redundant.

  “The alternative is that God has no reason at all because there are no moral reasons independent of God. But if he really has no moral reason pushing him one way or the other—because otherwise that would be the moral reason and we could leave God out of it—God could just as well have reversed himself. He might want each of us to do unto others the very thing we lie in bed worrying that someone might, God forbid, do unto us. He might order a loving father to take his son and prepare him for sacrifice, binding the terrified boy as one binds an animal to be slaughtered, and, because there is no morality independent of God, the father will obey without demurral. Ah, you say, but the Lord stayed the father’s hand, as we knew that he would, since he would never demand something as morally heinous as child sacrifice. But that’s to bring in a morality independent of God. If there really isn’t any morality independent of God, then we would all be in the position of Abraham, prepared to commit the filicide he came close to committing in Genesis 22. We would all be prepared to commit the genocide that God commands in Numbers 31, when he is outraged that not every last woman and male child of the Midianites had been killed. Without any moral reasons independent of God, God’s adjudication becomes the whim of an entirely arbitrary authority, and it doesn’t clear up the mystery of morality in the least. Without an independent concept of morality, how can we even say that God is good and that therefore his adjudication is relevant to our moral decisions?

  “This argument goes back to Plato, and it shows that appeals to God don’t help with the problem of grounding morality. Either God has his reasons and those are the reasons and reference to God is unnecessary, or God has no reasons and then morality consists of the arbitrary diktats of a God who we can’t even say is good.

  “How, then, do we ground morality? Professor Fidley has done part of the work for us by identifying the fundamental adherence that each of us has to our own lives’ mattering. He’s right in claiming that we can’t live coherent lives without feeling that we matter, but that is quite a different thing from our actually mattering in some cosmic sense. We can’t get that automatically, jus
t from our wanting to matter or feeling that we do matter. The upward move that Professor Fidley tried to make in the third prong of his argument doesn’t work.

  “But I do think we can move horizontally outward, and that’s the direction to go to legitimate morality. I can’t look at other creatures who are committed to their existence and flourishing in the same way as I’m committed to my existence and flourishing without feeling a certain degree of identification, empathy, sympathy, compassion. The intuition that we ought to do unto others as we would have them do unto us flows naturally from this outward move. I don’t see any way to get it by some upward move. I presume, however, that you do, Professor Fidley. And I’d like for you to explain how, especially how you get around Plato’s argument, which is my question to you.”

  “Indeed I do, Cass Seltzer. Not only do I think that what you call the ‘upward move’ can ground morality, I don’t believe that anything else can, certainly not your floundering gesture in what you call the outward direction.”

  Well, this is at least some improvement, as far as Cass is concerned. Fidley may be snarling, but at least he’s addressing him directly, and he’s actually turned toward him, the two hard pebbles locking onto Cass’s gaze.

  “As far as I can make out, this sideways movement that’s supposed to give you the Golden Rule just comes down to this: seeing the meaning-lessness of your life moves you to compassion for the meaninglessness of other lives.”

  He says this with a smile—his most convincing one yet—and he ends it with a brief bark of a laugh. It’s a good line, and Cass laughs, too.

  “And from this you want to derive morality, Cass Seltzer? That is, to say the least, a pretty tepid system of morality you’re offering us, which, even if you could get it to make internal sense, doesn’t have much force. I don’t see it getting anyone to overcome their immoral impulses.