GOD’S EXISTENCE
What about God? Philosophy of Religion in the Western Tradition
Upon completing this chapter, students should be able to meet the following Learning Outcomes:
5.1 Articulate the views of Anselm and Gaunilo regarding the ontological argument.
5.2 Compare and contrast Freud, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, and Kierkegaard on the rationality of religious belief.
5.3 Explain and evaluate the problem of evil.
Your parents may have told you to never discuss religion or politics—nothing leads to a bigger debate or perhaps the loss of a friendship faster. Unfortunately, in a philosophy class, we discuss both. Existence, life, and death are complex matters. Religions have existed since the beginning of human history and, in many cases, pre- date any written word. Many older religions have morphed into or been absorbed into existing ones. Some even have secret, unknown histories that are only revealed by heretics.
In this chapter, we will focus on Western conceptions of God and discuss the God of the Jews, Christians, and Muslims (who, ironically, is the same being—which has been interpreted in different ways by various Holy books and religions). The discussion will mainly focus on proofs of God’s existence, the rationality of religious belief, and the problem of evil (both logical and evidential).
POWERFUL ANALYSIS: DOES THE PRACTICE MATTER OR THE BELIEF IN GOD?
Does it matter what religion you follow? Do good people go to heaven and the wicked go to hell regardless of their faith?
Powerful Thinkers: St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430) and St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274)
Is belief in God something you can explain or rather something you simply feel?
That dichotomy, in admittedly broad strokes, embodies one of the major controversies in the very concept of belief. As the ideas of Greek philosophy made their way into later religions including those of Christians and Muslims, two great thinkers disagreed on this point, on the roles of faith and reason, of emotion and logic; on the limits of what is knowable.
St. Augustine of Hippo and St. Thomas Aquinas each managed in his own way to adapt the Greeks to new religious trends. In the early days of Christianity, St. Augustine continued the tradition of Plato. In the early Middle Ages, St. Thomas rediscovered Aristotle and made his thought central to any discussion of God.
Like Plato, Augustine believed that there was something that was real, true, eternal. That for Plato this belief was compatible with a belief in gods who were decidedly banned by the new Christian religion was easily explained away: what matters is the feeling that being near the light is better than remaining in the dark. Even if we do not reach absolute certainty of the truth, we must have faith that it is there. Faith, Augustine believed, was central to achieving wis- dom. Reason is the servant of faith. Like Plato and the later Platonists such as Plotinus, Augustine believed in two realms of reality: the intelligible realm where God and truth dwell, and the sensible world to which all humans have access as they live. We may never be able to explain or understand God, but we must have faith even to approach any explanation.
Centuries after Augustine, the Augustinian view of religion dominated the conversation; Aristotle, Plato’s brilliant pupil and a great believer in the supremacy of reason, was actually banned in budding centers of learning including the University of Paris. Until Aquinas arrived on the scene, that is. Aquinas was uncomfortable with the notion that truth lies elsewhere, beyond human experience. We have to start with what we can know, and this includes not only holy scriptures—denying these would have been an unforgivable blasphemy that could get one burned at the stake—but also what our senses tell us about human experience. Reason, as Aristotle claimed, must rule. Reason then supports faith. This interpretation of Aristotle led not only to Aquinas’ own monumental Summa Theologica but also to centuries of Thomistic influence in theology and ethics. It is human nature to know things, and we must follow our nature in this quest methodically, using the reason God gave us. To discover nature and nature’s laws using our reason is to approach discovering God, since it is God that made nature.
Aquinas’ influence was not continuous, and his writings in fact were banned along with those of Aristotle only a few years after his death. Still, along with the Spanish philosopher Averroes in the Muslim faith, Aquinas remained a powerful force in discussions of religious belief. Then in the early 16th Century there was a revolt against the religious system engendered by the Thomistic values that ruled Christianity in the West.
Martin Luther (1483–1546) rejected the Thomistic practices of the Catholic Church and led the way to the Protestant Reforma- tion, a movement that divides Christianity to this day. We need not rely on reason to have faith, Luther thought, and we certainly do not need the authority of church-sanctioned Aristotelian arguments to approach the truth of God. “Compared to the study of theology,” Luther pointedly wrote, “Aristotle is as darkness is to light.”
Like the prisoners in Plato’s Republic who must learn to aban- don the darkness of the cave and approach the light of the sun ourselves. All humanity must person- ally feel the proximity to the light of god. People must have faith before they can have knowledge.
And so it continued. The Catholic Church itself was rescued from what could have been a huge loss of cultural relevance by what is variously known as the Counterreformation or the Catholic Reformation, a move within the Catholic Church that once again emphasized
Augustinian values that belief is something to feel, not always to explain. The powerful Spanish thinkers St. Teresa of Avila and St. Ignatius Loyola (both canonized in 1622), and St. John of the Cross (canonized in 1724) exemplified this Augustinian approach to belief that continues to this day.
Then again, the Thomistic influence remains strong. St Thomas Aquinas was made a Doctor of the Church in 1879, making his teachings the official doctrine of the Catholic Church.
The Existence and Nature of God
The God of the Jews, Christians, and Muslims is purported to have three main qual- ities or attributes. These qualities and attributes have not been assigned or gleamed by philosophers, but rather, by theologians (religious scholars), who study ancient Holy books and documents. The qualities that God (also known as the three omni God) have are omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence. That is to say, God is all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good.
St. Teresa of Ávila
This extraordinary woman made religious belief a personal, sensual matter. Teresa Sánchez de Cepeda y Ahumada, canonized as St. Teresa of Jesus and popularly known as St. Teresa of Ávila was both a revolutionary theologian and a pioneer of women’s rights. The great Castilian poet and mystic, while remaining cloistered among her Carmelite sisters in Ávila most of her life, managed to outwit the Span- ish Inquisition, refined what would become the language of Cervantes in the Golden Age of Spanish literature, and hold her own as a philosopher and theologian.
“Let nothing disturb you
Let nothing frighten you
Everything passes
But God never does
Patience brings everything
With God you lack nothing God is enough”
—St. Teresa of Ávila, 1515–1582
St. Teresa of Ávila was a key figure in the Catholic Counter-Reformation that began with the Council of Trent (1545–1563) as the Catholic Church found itself besieged by the newly minted protestant faiths. Sixteenth-century Protestants such as Luther and Calvin brought on what was in effect a return to Augustinian—which is to say, Platonic—approaches to faith. Popular and populist, this revivalist Christian spirit contributed to the spread of Protestantism in Europe and presented the Catho- lic Church in its Thomistic apex with a formidable challenge. Reason, of the brand that St. Thomas Aquinas preached as he perverted Aristotle into Natural Law, now was seen as part of the problem. Teresa’s importance to the Catholic Church lay precisely in not resting on a foundation of reason—and in this she anticipated Kierkegaard and the twentieth-century existentialist Christians including Gabriel Marcel. She made faith an intensely personal affair.
Teresa’s mysticism took the theological conversation away from reason and into a very personal realm of quiet prayer and meditation that led to spiritual ecstasy. Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s marble statue The Ecstasy of St. Teresa in the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome illustrates a famous episode from Teresa’s Autobiography (Libro de la Vida), where an angel came to her:
“I saw a golden spear in his hand, with what looked like fire at the tip. He thrust the spear into my heart, my breast, and he left me on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great it made me moan. And yet the pain also was so over- whelmingly sweet that I did not want it to end.”
The sheer sensuality of Teresa’s ecstasy as she describes it was not without controversy. But her desire to make the intangible tangible, to make religious belief physical and personal, even sexual, itself calls for piety. Teresa, along with her fellow Spanish mystic and poet St. John of the Cross (1542–1591), embraced the danger- ous sensuality of the religious experience, and she proved that it may well be the essence of Christianity to court that danger. Later readers, in or outside the Catholic faith, found recognition and inspiration in the depth of St. Teresa’s vivid description of the practice of quiet, private prayer and meditation. Apart from any considerations of the metaphysics of religion, Teresa got the psychology of religion right.
Particularly in her masterpieces, The Interior Castle and The Road to Perfection, as well as in her spiritual Autobiography, Teresa’s work was a call to freedom, a challenge for men and women alike and as equals to reach the greatness of human possibili- ties. She was canonized in 1622 by Pope Gregory XV, and she was declared a Doc- tor of the Church by Pope Paul VI in 1970. St. Teresa today is celebrated as the patron saint of Spanish writers.
St. Anselm
Various philosophers and theologians have attempted to provide either inductive or deductive logical proofs for God’s existence. From the outset, we may note that none of the proofs seem to work—if they did, they would most like be carved into every church, temple, or mosque across the world. Nevertheless, they are worth considering. St. Anselm (1033–1109) attempts to produce a deductive proof for God’s existence. He argues that a perfect being necessary exists. His argument is deductive in nature. It is based upon the meaning of certain terms and does not rely upon empirical evidence.
His argument is sometimes called the ontological argument because it is based upon the nature of being. He says that if we imagine two objects, both identi- cal, but one exists and the other does not, then the one that exist is more perfect. Since God is already a perfect being, he cannot be more perfect, therefore he must exist. Gaunilo, a French monk of Anselm’s time, provided a counterargument to Anselm. He argues that existence does not make something more perfect. He employs a reductio ad absurdum (reduce to an absurd conclusion) argument. A reductio argument employs the same structure but changes one word, thereby making the conclusion absurd. In logic, if the argument works in one case, it should work in all cases, all things being equal.
In this case, Gaunilo claims that if perfection entails existence, the by the same token, a perfect island must exist, because, after all it is perfect. Gaunilo does not doubt God’s existence, nor does he believe in the perfect island. His point is that, in his view, Anselm’s arguments do not work.
Again, in Gaunilo’s view, if Anselm is correct in his assertion regarding God’s necessary existence, then the same would be true for a perfect island. Does believing in the perfect island make it real? This is absurd—hence this is a reductio ad absur- dum (reduce to an absurd conclusion) argument. According to Gaunilo, it is an absur- dity to conclude that God necessary exists simply because we can imagine or conceive of him. Anselm agrees that it is absurd to conclude that the perfect island exists just because you think of it, and yet, he claims that in the case of God it is a different mat- ter all together. He maintains that God’s existence is guaranteed by his perfection.
In the end, this twelfth-century debate was left unresolved with both men claiming victory. Ultimately, Anselm became Saint Anselm and Gaunilo was lucky to not be excommunicated for his heretical objection to the argument.
St. Thomas Aquinas
In the Summa Theologica, which was written between 1265 and 1274, St. Thomas Aquinas’ explained the sacred doctrines of Christianity in the clearest way possible. In the work, Aquinas provides five proofs (or ways) for God’s Existence.
The first four ways fail for various reasons, but the fifth way has some promise and has found its way into our contemporary thought. The five proofs for Gods existence are Motion, Efficient Cause, Possibility and Necessity, Degrees of Perfection, and Design.
From each of these arguments, he attempts to draw conclusions from things that we see in everyday life (empirical evidence) regarding the nature of reality. He starts with motion: if something is in motion, then it must have been set into motion by something else and there is not an infinite chain of movers; so, the first unmoved mover who sets the world in motion is God. This argument is a version of Aristotle’s “unmoved mover” argument. Aristotle took existence and creation very seriously and thought it was logically impossible for the universe to be eternal. His answer was to maintain there was a first thing or force that he termed the unmoved mover that set the universe into motion and created, well creation. The problem with the argu- ment is that one premise states that all things are set into motion by something else, but the conclusion says there is one thing that is not set into motion by itself—it is either one or the other but not both, so the argument commits a logical contradic- tion. All of the other arguments (Efficient Cause, Possibility and Necessity, Degrees of Perfection) have similar logical flaws.
The only argument that does not suffer from serious logical flaws is the Design argument, although it does not prove a number of things.
ST. THOMAS AQUINAS AND DESIGN
St. Thomas Aquinas and the Argument from Design
1) Among objects that have goals or a purpose, some have minds and others do not.
2) An object that has a goal, but does not have a mind, must have been designed by a being that had a mind.
3) So there exists a being with a mind who designed all of the mindless objects that act for ends.
4) Hence this Being is God and he does exist.
In the argument, Aquinas claims all objects have a goal or purpose. A pen, for example, has a purpose but does not have a mind. The fact that it has a purpose means it was created by a being with a mind which assigned that purpose. In his view, if an object has a goal or purpose but no mind, then something with a mind must have designed it. Therefore, there is one, single being that has a mind that designed all the mindless objects that have goals or a purpose—of course that Being is God.
From the outset, you may see an issue, pens are mindless objects, but they were not created by God. Furthermore, any human creation or artifact was not created by a single individual or person. By analogy, we could argue that natural creatures and
objects may not have a single creator (or a creator at all). Why should we assume there is a single being that created all natural creatures and objects?
William Paley and a Watch on the Beach
William Paley (1743–1805) asked us to imagine that we are walking on a beach and find a watch. He says we may question, how did it get there? One answer is that it was created randomly—perhaps by the action of the waves and the sand on the beach. Paley, however, thinks this is an absurd idea. He thinks that given the complexity of the watch, it would be reasonable to conclude that the watch had a creator or designer— even if we had never seen a watch in our lives. Of those two hypothesis which seems to be the most likely? Paley thinks, just as you most probably do, that it makes more sense to talk about the watch having a designer. Paley’s version of the design argument is an argument from analogy. He wants to draw an analogy between the watch and nature. He wants us to look at the complexity of the watch and compare it to the complexity of nature and natural organisms. He thinks that if we consider how complex natural creatures and the universe as a whole is, we will conclude that they must have a designer as they are much more complicated than a simple watch.
David Hume (1711–1776) argues that this is a poor or weak analogy. It is one thing to talk about watches, it is another to talk about living organisms, and still another to talk about the universe. He claims that the argument does not make it rational to conclude that the universe has a designer. Hume thinks Paley is compar- ing apples to oranges or better human artifact (watches) to natural creatures and the universe. Watches are manmade, living creatures are not. Watchs are inanimate things, organisms are alive. A Gucci and Rolex watch will not procreate and create a Golex. So in Hume’s view, Paley is drawing a bad comparison and making a weak inference. Ultimately, it seems Hume may be mistaken, it is not the living or innate nature that is at issue, it is the complexity. And no matter how complex my watch might be, our little pinky finger has more complexity in it. The question is, was it the result of a random or natural process or the result of design?
POWERFUL IDEAS: PROBLEMS WITH THE DESIGN ARGUMENT
1) It does not prove there is an interactive designer. (God could be an architect who creates the universe and moves on to other realms—this view is known as Deism.)
2) It does not prove there is only one designer. (There could be many god or goddesses.)
3) It does not clearly show who the designer is. (It does not prove one religion over another.)
A Scientific Alternative: Evolution
A few years ago, scientists from Harvard University published an article in the journal, Nature, providing the result of a genetic analysis of humans and many other primates. The genetic analysis suggests a messy split between the two lineages that lead to humans and the other great apes lineages. According to the scientist, the evo- lutionary split between humans and our nearest evolutionary cousins, chimpanzees, may have occurred more recently than we thought, according to a new comparison of the respective genetic sequences. Previous estimates put the split at as much as 7 million years ago. This would mean that Toumaï, a fossil dating from at least 6.5 million years ago in Chad and assigned to the species Sahelanthropus tchadensis, which had been thought to be the earliest known member of the line that gave rise to modern humans is in fact an ancestor to both species.
Researchers led by David Reich of Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, now calculate that the split may have occurred no more than 6.3 mil- lion years ago, and possibly as recently as 5.4 million. That would make Toumaï older than the time of the split. The researchers make their claim after comparing the genetic codes of humans, chimpanzees, gorillas, and other primates in unprece- dented detail—more than 20 million DNA “letters” in all. By checking the differ- ences between different species’ DNA sequences, they were able to estimate the time since they first diverged. The research involved the study of fossils, mathematical algorithms (to calculate the amount of change in the human and ape DNA as well as the time required to produce those changes), and finally genetic analysis. Ultimately, the research helps to confirm the ideas first put forth by Charles Darwin in 1859 in his book, The Origin of Species and supports the view that humans evolved from earlier forms of life on the planet.
“When we read about Creation in Genesis, we run the risk of imagining God was a magician, with a magic wand able to do everything. But that is not so, He created human beings and let them develop according to the internal laws that he gave to each one so they would reach their fulfillment. Evolution in nature is not opposed to the notion of Creation, because evolution presupposes the creation of beings that evolve”
—Pope Francis, October 27, 2014 at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences
There is, however, one great irony in this notion, Charles Darwin, the cre- ator of evolutionary theory was a theist and Christian when he wrote his book to explain his theory. He went so far as to place this quote in the beginning of his book “But with regard to the material world, we can at least go so far as this-we can perceive that events are brought about not by insulated interposition of Divine power, exerted in each particular case, but by the establishment of general laws”—William Whewell, Bridgewater Treatise (1833), as found in Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859).
The quote on the previous page is by William Whenwell (1794–1866), a Brit- ish philosopher, scientist, and theologian. He argues that events in this world are not caused by God acting in each particular case, but rather by the establishment of laws of nature. In other words, when objects fall, we do not think God makes each of them fall in every instance, but we believe that gravity (a law of nature) dictates their fall (and for theist is a law of nature created by God).
Darwin, in the same way, feels he has stumbled upon laws of biology that dic- tate how events will unfold. We do not worry that dogs will give birth to cats or vice versa, as we now understand that genetics and other laws of biology require dogs to give birth to puppies and cats to give birth to kittens. God does not need to employ his will or divine powers to make such things happen, rather, on this view, God estab- lished laws of nature that include laws of biology and genetics, which govern these events.
Finally, there is good news for Catholics. In 2014, Pope Francis declared that evolution does not conflict with Catholicism. As Pope Francis states at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 2014 “When we read about Creation in Genesis, we run the risk of imagining God was a magician, with a magic wand able to do everything. But that is not so, He created human beings and let them develop according to the inter- nal laws that he gave to each one so they would reach their fulfillment . . . . Evolution in nature is not opposed to the notion of Creation, because evolution presupposes the creation of beings that evolve.”
Although persons on both side of the debate feel they are in the right, creation by a God and evolution are not mutually exclusive. It could be the case that there is no God and that humanity is the result of natural law and processes or it could be the case that God employs those natural laws and processes to create humanity.
POWERFUL IDEAS: HYPOTHESES THAT EXPLAIN LIFE ON EARTH
Of the four likely hypotheses for the creation of the universe and humanity, only two seem possible:
Hypothesis 1: Random (false) Hypothesis 2: Designer (false) Hypothesis 3: Evolution and No Designer (possible) Hypothesis 4: Evolution and Designer (possible)
Evolution does not rule out the possibility of “intelligent design” for the universe. The notions of evolution and a creator deity are not mutually exclusive.
POWERFUL ANALYSIS: GOD’S EXISTENCE
Can science resolve the issue of God’s existence?
Hopes, Bets, and Beliefs
There are numerous other statements and arguments for and against God’s exis- tence. The arguments against will be discussed later in the section on the “The Prob- lem of Evil.” Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) claims that we should all hope that God exist. In that way, justice will be served to those who have lived a wicked and unjust life and yet prospered in this world. In Kant’s view, if you are a moral agent (which I do hope you believe in ethics), then you must assume the God’s existence in order to be rational. Having said this, plenty of philosophers and people are atheist and still hold to ethical truth and values.
“The heart has reasons that reason does not know”
—Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) thought belief in God served our rational self-inter- est. He proposed a prudential argument for God’s Existence. He felt that it was in our self-interest to believe in God, as the benefits of such a belief far outweighed any loss.
POWERFUL IDEAS: PASCAL’S WAGER
Your Belief
You believe in God You don’t believe in God
Possible outcomes:
God Exists
Infinite bliss (heaven) Infinite damnation (hell)
God Does Not Exist
+/− some small amount +/− some small amount
1) If you believe in God, and he exist, then you are going to heaven and are going to reap infinite rewards.
2) If you don’t believe in God, and he does exist, then you are going to hell and suffer infinite pain.
3) If you believe in God, and he does not exist, you have wasted some small measure of energy.
4) If you don’t believe in God, and he does not exist, then you have saved some small measure of energy.
There are, of course, a few flaws with Pascal’s prudential argument. To begin, if this were the only reason you believed in God, I doubt you would get passed the pearly gates of Heaven. Second, it is an over simplification of the options. There are thousands of religions and gods? Which one ought you to choose? Even if you were to choose, Christianity, Judaism, or Islam, each of those faiths have specific prac- tices and the orthodox teaching hold all other believers are destine for hell. In other words, Pascal’s wager is much more of a long shot than he appears to understand or maintain.
William James (1842–1910) thinks that the existence of God cannot be proved or refuted by science. He feels that is something we can make ourselves believe. He thinks belief in God is “open” for most of us to believe in even though there is not sufficient evidence for it. In fact, he goes so far as to say we can “Will ourselves to believe” in God. James says we may believe any “open” hypothesis. James defines a hypothesis as a proposed belief. Such a hypothesis may be live or dead, forced or avoidable, momentous or trivial.
A “live” hypothesis is something we are open to. If we have already made up our minds on an issue, then such a hypothesis is “dead” and we cannot make our- selves believe it. Another two conditions for James are that a hypothesis must be forced and also momentous. In other words, we must be having some sort of existen- tial crisis or serious problem in our life, which forces us to consider the issue. Also the belief must be momentous and very important. We cannot will ourselves to belief trivial or mundane things. When a hypothesis is live, forced, and momentous, then it is a genuine option for us to choose to believe in it. At which point we would attempt to obtain the belief. As far as religion goes, that would mean engaging in the prac- tices of those that do believe, such as going to temple, reciting mantras, or reciting prayers. James feels that over time a person can eventually believe just as any other believer.
POWERFUL ANALYSIS: COMPELLING ARGUMENT?
Is there any argument that you feel is compelling for the existence of God?
