36 Arguments for the Existence of God

by Rebecca Goldstein

  The Argument from the Intelligibility of the Universe (Spinoza’s God)

  The Argument from the Abundance of Arguments

  1. The Cosmological Argument

  Everything that exists must have a cause.

  The universe must have a cause (from 1).

  Nothing can be the cause of itself.

  The universe cannot be the cause of itself (from 3).

  Something outside the universe must have caused the universe (from 2 and 4).

  God is the only thing that is outside of the universe.

  God caused the universe (from 5 and 6).

  God exists.

  FLAW I CAN BE CRUDELY PUT: Who caused God? The Cosmological Argument is a prime example of the Fallacy of Passing the Buck: invoking God to solve some problem, but then leaving unanswered that very same problem about God himself. The proponent of The Cosmological Argument must admit a contradiction to either his first premise—and say that, though God exists, he doesn’t have a cause—or else a contradiction to his third premise—and say that God is self-caused. Either way, the theist is saying that his premises have at least one exception, but is not explaining why God must be the unique exception, otherwise than asserting his unique mystery (the Fallacy of Using One Mystery to Explain Another). Once you admit of exceptions, you can ask why the universe itself, which is also unique, can’t be the exception. The universe itself can either exist without a cause, or else can be self-caused. Since the buck has to stop somewhere, why not with the universe?

  FLAW 2: The notion of “cause” is by no means clear, but our best definition is a relation that holds between events that are connected by physical laws. Knocking the vase off the table caused it to crash to the floor; smoking three packs a day caused his lung cancer. To apply this concept to the universe itself is to misuse the concept of cause, extending it into a realm in which we have no idea how to use it. This line of reasoning, based on the unjustified demands we make on the concept of cause, was developed by David Hume.

  COMMENT: The Cosmological Argument, like The Argument from the Big Bang and The Argument from the Intelligibility of the Universe, is an expression of our cosmic befuddlement at the question, why is there something rather than nothing? The late philosopher Sidney Mor-genbesser had a classic response to this question: “And if there were nothing? You’d still be complaining!”

  2. The Ontological Argument

  Nothing greater than God can be conceived (this is stipulated as part of the definition of “God”).

  It is greater to exist than not to exist.

  If we conceive of God as not existing, then we can conceive of something greater than God (from 2).

  To conceive of God as not existing is not to conceive of God (from 1 and 3).

  It is inconceivable that God not exist (from 4).

  God exists.

  This argument, first articulated by Saint Anselm (1033–1109), the Archbishop of Canterbury, is unlike any other, proceeding purely on the conceptual level. Everyone agrees that the mere existence of a concept does not entail that there are examples of that concept; after all, we can know what a unicorn is and at the same time say, “Unicorns don’t exist.” The claim of The Ontological Argument is that the concept of God is the one exception to this generalization. The very concept of God, when defined correctly, entails that there is something that satisfies that concept. Although most people suspect that there is something wrong with this argument, it’s not so easy to figure out what it is.

  FLAW: It was Immanuel Kant who pinpointed the fallacy in The Ontological Argument—it is to treat “existence” as a property, like “being fat” or “having ten fingers.” The Ontological Argument relies on a bit of wordplay, assuming that “existence” is just another property, but logically it is completely different. If you really could treat “existence” as just part of the definition of the concept of God, then you could just as easily build it into the definition of any other concept. We could, with the wave of our verbal magic wand, define a trunicorn as “a horse that (a) has a single horn on its head, and (b) exists.” So, if you think about a trunicorn, you’re thinking about something that must, by definition, exist; therefore, trunicorns exist. This is clearly absurd: we could use this line of reasoning to prove that any figment of our imagination exists.

  COMMENT: Once again, Sidney Morgenbesser offered a pertinent remark, in the form of The Ontological Argument for God’s Non-Existence: Existence is such a lousy thing, how could God go and do it?

  3. The Argument from Design

  A. The Classical Teleological Argument

  Whenever there are things that cohere only because of a purpose or function (for example, all the complicated parts of a watch that allow it to keep time), we know that they had a designer who designed them with the function in mind; they are too improbable to have arisen by random physical processes. (A hurricane blowing through a hardware store could not assemble a watch.)

  Organs of living things, such as the eye and the heart, cohere only because they have a function (for example, the eye has a cornea, lens, retina, iris, eyelids, and so on, which are found in the same organ only because together they make it possible for the animal to see).

  These organs must have a designer who designed them with their function in mind: just as a watch implies a watchmaker, an eye implies an eye-maker (from 1 and 2).

  These things have not had a human designer.

  Therefore, these things must have had a non-human designer (from 3 and 4).

  God is the non-human designer (from 5).

  God exists.

  FLAW: Darwin showed how the process of replication could give rise to the illusion of design without the foresight of an actual designer. Replicators make copies of themselves, which make copies of themselves, and so on, giving rise to an exponential number of descendants. In any finite environment, the replicators must compete for the energy and materials necessary for replication. Since no copying process is perfect, errors will eventually crop up, and any error that causes a replicator to reproduce more efficiently than its competitors will result in the predominance of that line of replicators in the population. After many generations, the dominant replicators will appear to have been designed for effective replication, whereas all they have done is accumulate the copying errors, which in the past did lead to effective replication. The fallacy in the argument, then, is Premise 1 (and, as a consequence, Premise 3, which depends on it): parts of a complex object serving a complex function do not, in fact, require a designer.

  In the twenty-first century, creationists have tried to revive the Teleo-logical Argument in three forms:

  B. The Argument from Irreducible Complexity

  Evolution has no foresight, and every incremental step must be an improvement over the preceding one, allowing the organism to survive and reproduce better than its competitors.

  In many complex organs, the removal or modification of any part would destroy the functional whole. Examples are the lens and retina of the eye, the molecular components of blood clotting, and the molecular motor powering the cell’s flagellum. Call these organs “irreducibly complex.”

  These organs could not have been useful to the organisms that possessed them in any simpler forms (from 2).

  The theory of natural selection cannot explain these irreducibly complex systems (from 1 and 3).

  Natural selection is the only way out of the conclusions of The Classical Teleological Argument.

  God exists (from 4 and 5 and The Classical Teleological Argument).

  This argument has been around since the time of Charles Darwin, and his replies to it still hold.

  FLAW 1: For many organs, Premise 2 is false. An eye without a lens can still see, just not as well as an eye with a lens.

  FLAW 2: For many other organs, removal of a part, or other alterations, may render it useless for its current function, but the organ could have been useful to the organism for some other function. Insect wings, before they were larg
e enough to be effective for flight, were used as heat-exchange panels. This is also true for most of the molecular mechanisms, such as the flagellum motor, invoked in The New Argument from Irreducible Complexity.

  FLAW 3 (the Fallacy of Arguing from Ignorance): There may be biological systems for which we don’t yet know how they may have been useful in simpler versions. But there are obviously many things we don’t yet understand in molecular biology, and, given the huge success that biologists have achieved in explaining so many examples of incremental evolution in other biological systems, it is more reasonable to infer that these gaps will eventually be filled by the day-to-day progress of biology than to invoke a supernatural designer just to explain these temporary puzzles.

  COMMENT: This last flaw can be seen as one particular instance of the more general, fallacious Argument from Ignorance:

  There are things that we cannot explain yet.

  Those things must be attributed to God.

  FLAW: Premise 1 is obviously true. If there weren’t things that we could not explain yet, then science would be complete, laboratories and observatories would unplug their computers and convert to condominiums, and all departments of science would be converted to departments of the history of science. Science is only in business because there are things we have not explained yet. So we cannot infer from the existence of genuine, ongoing science that there must be a God. In other words, Premise 2 does not follow from Premise 1.

  C. The Argument from the Paucity of Benign Mutations

  Evolution is powered by random mutations and natural selection.

  Organisms are complex, improbable systems, and by the laws of probability any change is astronomically more likely to be for the worse than for the better.

  The majority of mutations would be deadly for the organism (from 2).

  The amount of time it would take for all the benign mutations needed for the assembly of an organ to appear by chance is preposterously long (from 3).

  In order for evolution to work, something outside of evolution had to bias the process of mutation, increasing the number of benign ones (from 4).

  Something outside of the mechanism of biological change—the Prime Mutator—must bias the process of mutations for evolution to work (from 5).

  The only entity that is both powerful enough and purposeful enough to be the Prime Mutator is God.

  God exists.

  FLAW: Evolution does not require infinitesimally improbable mutations, such as a fully formed eye appearing out of the blue in a single generation, because (a) mutations can have small effects (tissue that is slightly more transparent, or cells that are slightly more sensitive to light), and mutations contributing to these effects can accumulate over time; (b) for any sexually reproducing organism, the necessary mutations do not have to have occurred one after another in a single line of descendants, but could have appeared independently in thousands of separate organisms, each mutating at random, and the necessary combinations could come together as the organisms have mated and exchanged genes; (c) life on Earth has had a vast amount of time to accumulate the necessary mutations (almost four billion years).

  D. The Argument from the Original Replicator

  Evolution is the process by which an organism evolves from simpler ancestors.

  Evolution by itself cannot explain how the original ancestor—the first living thing—came into existence (from 1).

  The theory of natural selection can deal with this problem only by saying that the first living thing evolved out of non-living matter (from 2).

  That original non-living matter (call it the Original Replicator) must be capable of (a) self-replication, (b) generating a functioning mechanism out of surrounding matter to protect itself against falling apart, and (c) surviving slight mutations to itself that will then result in slightly different replicators.

  The Original Replicator is complex (from 4).

  The Original Replicator is too complex to have arisen from purely physical processes (from 5 and The Classical Teleological Argument). For example, DNA, which currently carries the replicated design of organisms, cannot be the Original Replicator, because DNA molecules require a complex system of proteins to remain stable and to replicate, and could not have arisen from natural processes before complex life existed.

  Natural selection cannot explain the complexity of the Original Replicator (from 3 and 6).

  The Original Replicator must have been created rather than have evolved (from 7 and The Classical Teleological Argument).

  Anything that was created requires a Creator.

  God exists.

  FLAW 1: Premise 6 states that a replicator, because of its complexity, cannot have arisen from natural processes, i.e., by way of natural selection. But the mathematician John von Neumann proved in the 1950s that it is theoretically possible for a simple physical system to make exact copies of itself from surrounding materials. Since then, biologists and chemists have identified a number of naturally occurring molecules and crystals that can replicate in ways that could lead to natural selection (in particular, that allow random variations to be preserved in the copies). Once a molecule replicates, the process of natural selection can kick in, and the replicator can accumulate matter and become more complex, eventually leading to precursors of the replication system used by living organisms today.

  FLAW 2: Even without von Neumann’s work (which not everyone accepts as conclusive), to conclude the existence of God from our not yet knowing how to explain the Original Replicator is to rely on The Argument from Ignorance.

  4. The Argument from the Big Bang

  The Big Bang, according to the best scientific opinion of our day, was the beginning of the physical universe, including not only matter and energy, but space and time and the laws of physics.

  The universe came to be ex nihilo (from 1).

  Something outside the universe, including outside its physical laws, must have brought the universe into existence (from 2).

  Only God could exist outside the universe.

  God must have caused the universe to exist (from 3 and 4).

  God exists.

  The Big Bang is based on the observed expansion of the universe, with galaxies rushing away from one another. The implication is that, if we run the film of the universe backward from the present, the universe must continuously contract, all the way back to a single point. The theory of the Big Bang is that the universe exploded into existence about fourteen billion years ago.

  FLAW 1: Cosmologists themselves do not all agree that the Big Bang is a “singularity”—the sudden appearance of space, time, and physical laws from inexplicable nothingness. The Big Bang may represent the lawful emergence of a new universe from a previously existing one. In that case, it would be superfluous to invoke God to explain the emergence of something from nothing.

  FLAW 2: The Argument from the Big Bang has all the flaws of The Cosmological Argument—it passes the buck from the mystery of the origin of the universe to the mystery of the origin of God, and it extends the notion of “cause” outside the domain of events covered by natural laws (also known as “the universe”), where it no longer makes sense.

  5. The Argument from the Fine-Tuning of Physical Constants

  There are a vast number of physically possible universes.

  A universe that would be hospitable to the appearance of life must conform to some very strict conditions. Everything from the mass ratios of atomic particles and the number of dimensions of space to the cosmological parameters that rule the expansion of the universe must be just right for stable galaxies, solar systems, planets, and complex life to evolve.

  The percentage of possible universes that would support life is infinitesimally small (from 2).

  Our universe is one of those infinitesimally improbable universes.

  Our universe has been fine-tuned to support life (from 3 and 4).

  There is a Fine-Tuner (from 5).

  Only God could have the power and the purpos
e to be the Fine-Tuner.

  God exists.

  Philosophers and physicists often speak of “the Anthropic Principle,” which comes in several versions, labeled “weak,” “strong,” and “very strong.” They all argue that any explanation of the universe must account for the fact that we humans (or any complex organism that could observe its condition) exist in it. The Argument from the Fine-Tuning of Physical Constants corresponds to the Very Strong Anthropic Principle. Its upshot is that the upshot of the universe is … us. The universe must have been designed with us in mind.

  FLAW 1: The first premise may be false. Many physicists and cosmolo-gists, following Einstein, hope for a unified “theory of everything,” which would deduce from as-yet unknown physical laws that the physical constants of our universe had to be what they are. In that case, ours would be the only possible universe. (See also The Argument from the Intelligibility of the Universe, #35 below.)