Why I Believe in God

• The ontological argument (that is, the consideration of God's being and reality), invented by St. Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109). This argument begins by defining God as all-perfect (omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, etc.), and then argues that an all-perfect Being wouldn’t be truly perfect unless It existed. “We believe that thou, God, art a being than which none greater can be imagined. .  .  . But clearly that than which a greater cannot be imagined cannot exist in the mind alone. For if it is actually in the understanding alone, it can be imagined as existing also in reality, and this is greater.” For St. Anselm, to say “There is no God” is as self-contradictory as saying, “Here is a triangle with four sides.”
        Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) objected that “existence” is not a quality, characteristic, or property, such as purple, snobbish, or elastic. If someone says to you, “Describe a hurkle,” you might reply, “A hurkle is blue, with six legs and an aura that makes you itch but an affectionate disposition.” You might add, “And furthermore, a hurkle isn’t always visible.” But if you added, “And furthermore, hurkles exist” — well, we’re not talking in the same categories any more.
        It was in defending St. Anselm’s ontological argument that René Descartes (1596-1650) came up with his famous, “I think, therefore I am.” It seems so simple, so obvious! Unfortunately, it’s also so circular. The statement presupposes the existence of the “I” whose existence it seeks to prove: “[I exist to do the thinking and] I think, therefore I exist.” All that Descartes is allowed to say, by the rules of logic, is “Thinking is going on, therefore there must be a thinker.” Similarly, St. Anselm really can’t be allowed to get away with, “God is perfect, therefore God is.”
• The cosmological argument (that is, the consideration of the Universe in its entirety) has taken a number of forms, the two most important of which are the argument from causation and the argument from contingency.
        St. Thomas Aquinas (ca. 1225-74) adduced a famous “five ways” that he knew God existed: (1) There is no motion without causality, therefore at the very beginning there was a First Mover; (2) there is no causality without a First Cause (i.e., some One needs to have tipped that first domino); (3) for the Big Bang to have happened, some One must have pre-existed to think it up and set it off; (4) the notion of gradation — the sun is hotter than a candle, re is lower on the scale than la, Richard Nixon was more honest than Joe Isuzu — implies that some One must exist who encompasses all the Platonic Ideals; and (5) natural selection implies the existence of a Selecter, just as an arrow must be shot by an archer. (Naturally, St. Thomas never heard of the Big Bang or of evolution, and thus had to phrase his arguments much more obscurely than I’ve summarized them here.)
        In my opinion, the fourth of Aquinas’s arguments is the ontological argument in fancy dress, while arguments three and five are both teleological, which we’ll get to in a moment. That leaves us with causation, and it seems reasonable to put arguments one and two into the same portmanteau.
        Aquinas said that everything has a cause, and every cause is the result of an earlier cause — domino Z was tipped over by domino Y, which was tipped by domino X, and so forth — but since the series cannot be infinite, the First Cause must be God. Opponents through the centuries have said, one way and another, “Why can’t the series be infinite?” Zero minus one is -1; minus one is -2; minus a million is -1,000,002; and so on forever. And furthermore, they add, who says that there’s only one First Cause? Pi is hardly the only irrational number.
        I believe that the theory of the Big Bang is the most plausible explanation of the origin of the Universe we’re going to come up with. (The following is vastly oversimplified, of course.) Approximately 12 to 15 billion years ago, there was nothing — no time, no space, no matter, no energy. Everything that was later to come into existence was crammed into a single point, a point in the mathematical sense. And then suddenly, within the space of approximately one 47 millionth of a second, everything came bursting forth — first time, then space and light, some of which slowed and cooled into matter, which eventually coalesced into stars, which eventually threw off planets. (Forty-seven million seconds, incidentally, is approximately a year and a half.)
        In our Universe, the First Cause must therefore be God — but what about the “time” before Time, before the Universe came into being? Who thought up the Universe? Who invented mathematics, logic, music, time, space, light? Who created the laws of physics? (For if gravity were even slightly weaker, matter would never have cohered into stars; if gravity were even slightly stronger, stars would age and die too quickly for life ever to evolve.) Assuming that God pre-existed the Big Bang, Who created God? Aquinas would say, the buck’s gotta stop somewhere, and God is IT.
        A famous philosopher (some say Bertrand Russell, some say William James) once gave a lecture on cosmology. Afterward, a little old lady said, “This is all very interesting, but it’s totally wrong. Everyone knows the world is flat and rests on the back of a giant turtle.” “What is the turtle standing on?” the philosopher asked. “Another turtle.” “And what is that turtle standing on?” The little old lady fixed him with a beady eye and said, “I know where you’re heading with that, sonny, and it won’t work. It’s turtles all the way down.”
        Joseph Smith agreed. The Mormons teach that their god, “Elohim” (not to be confused with the Elohim of the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic tradition), was once a mortal man, and that a Mormon man who lives a virtuous life and jumps through all the hoops properly may evolve into the god of his own planet. (A virtuous Mormon wife may evolve into the servant / odalisque / consort of her god-husband, if while alive on Earth he deigns to tell her what her secret name is; otherwise, when she dies, she’s gone forever.) Today, “Elohim” is living in luxury with his celestial harem on a planet circling a star called Kolob.
  

  The LDS "Elohim"

  (hide)

  Joseph Smith: “God was once as we are now, an exalted man, and sits enthroned in yonder heavens. I say if you were to see him today, you would see him like a man in form like yourselves. . . . God was once a man like us and dwelt on an earth, the same as Jesus Christ did, and you have got to learn to be gods yourselves the same as all gods before you.” Brigham Young: “The Lord created you and me for the purpose of becoming gods like himself. . . . A plurality of gods exist, indeed this doctrine of plurality of gods is so comprehensive and glorious that it reaches out and embraces every exalted personage.” Ron Carlson and Ed Decker, Fast Facts on False Teachings (Eugene, OR: Harvest House Publishers, 1994), p. 165 ff. Fast Facts goes on to say that these ideas have been promulgated as official doctrine of the LDS Church as recently as 1989, and quotes several official LDS publications in support of this statement.
  Which brings up the question: Who created “Elohim”? Another god who evolved from a mortal man? And who created that god? “Sorry, sonny. It’s ‘Elohims’ all the way down.”
        The contingency argument can be summarized as: All around us we can perceive creatures and things that are contingent — that it, it is possible to imagine a world in which George W. Bush had never been born or the Great Wall of China had never been built. All contingent entities can be traced back to other contingent entities — the human race might never have evolved if Lucy the australopithecus had been killed as a baby; life would not have evolved on Earth if the Moon hadn’t been there. But, just like following the stack of turtles downward, we eventually have to end up with something or some One that is necessary rather than contingent — that is, the reason for whose existence is contained within itself. The bottommost turtle, the One who started the dominoes toppling, the First Chicken who laid the first Egg of potentiality.
        Against the contingency argument, philosophers have contended that saying some necessary One must exist gets us back into Kant’s argument against existence being a quality or characteristic. Moreover, to say that a necessary Being started the chain of contingency and potentiality presupposes the existence that it’s supposed to be proving — “[It exists and] It is necessary, therefore It exists.” The contingency argument, in other words, becomes the ontological argument.
        And so let us return to causation. Is the metaphorical stack of turtles upon which the Universe rests in fact infinite — “turtles [or Elohims] all the way down”? If the existence of an Elohim requires the pre-existence of an earlier Elohim, then the “stack” is as circular as the ontological arguments. For me, Thomas Aquinas wins this round.
• The teleological argument, that is, the consideration of whether there is a meaning or purpose to life. This has also been called the watchmaker argument. It is used today by the proponents of “intelligent design.”
        Go down to the junkyard and get a shoebox full of this and that. Shake the shoebox vigorously for some length of time — perhaps, eight billion years. Suddenly, whammo — you’ll have a cesium watch that keeps perfect time. Ridiculous, eh? To have a watch, you need a watchmaker. To have a human brain, with its roughly 120 billion cells and roughly 130 trillion synapses all working together intricately and perfectly so that you can read these words, you need a Watchmaker.
        William Paley, writing in 1802, said, “There cannot be design without a designer; contrivance, without a contriver; order, without choice; arrangement, without anything capable of arranging; subserviency and relation to a purpose, without that which could intend a purpose; means suitable to an end, and executing their office in accomplishing that end, without the end ever having been contemplated, or the means accommodated to it. Arrangement, disposition of parts, subserviency of means to an end, relation of instruments to a use, imply the presence of intelligence and mind.”
        The Universe is ridiculously complex, and the possibility that you might have evolved into a person capable of reading and understanding these words by random chance seems to be beyond vanishingly small. A mathematician named Edward Kasner asked a young nephew to name the largest number he could think of: A “googol” is 10 to the hundredth power (that is, multiplied by itself 100 times) — a 1 followed by 100 zeroes. The googolplex is a googol to the hundredth power. The chance of humanity evolving in a random Universe makes a googolplex-to-one look like a sure thing.
        Or does it? As I write in my article about “intelligent design,” the evidence for intelligence comes from a design's simplicity. Yes, if you stumbled across a Rube Goldberg contraption in the middle of nowhere, that would be evidence of intelligent design. But how about if you stumbled across a stainless-steel spoon? How about if you stumbled across a piece of broken glass or a plastic drinking straw?

• The moral argument. This is not “moral” in the sense of knowing the difference between right and wrong; this is the legal use of the word “moral,” and means, based on the general observation of people or analogies, rather than on evidence that you can point to or demonstrate. Immanuel Kant, who rejected the ontological, cosmological, and teleological arguments, said, basically: Throughout history there have been hordes of sane, sober, intelligent, admirable, sincere people who have said they had supernatural experiences that convinced them of the existence of God. They can’t all have been crazy, high, deluded, hallucinating, or fraudulent.
  

  Kant's theories

  (hide)

  At a later point during his career, Kant rejected this argument too, as being immaterial — but luckily, this article is not about the evolution of that great genius's thought. I've had a hard enough time oversimplifying turgidity as it is.
  John Cardinal Newman (1801-90), for example, writing about his conversion experience, said that he was more certain of its reality than that he had “hands and feet.”
        In reply, Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) commented, “From a scientific point of view, we can make no distinction between the man who eats little and sees heaven and the man who drinks much and sees snakes.” In other words, perhaps some supernatural experiences are real; but if an experience can’t be proven to be veridical, scientific method is constrained to ignore it. Logical positivists, for example, say that a statement can only be considered meaningful if we have some way testing its truth or falsity in experience. Since we can’t prove the existence of God through verifiable experience, the statement “God exists” must be considered meaningless.
        And in reply to that, D.E. Trueblood said, “The religious opinions of the unreligious are no more valuable than the scientific opinions of the unscientific.”
• The argument from the common consent of humanity, and the related appeal to religious instinct. According to this argument, human beings seem to be hard-wired to seek God, which is to say, to seek a meaning for life. Every single culture in human history, without exception, has believed in an Ultimate Reality that provides a purpose to existence. It is only the conception of the nature of this Ultimate Reality that differs. Some people worship money, fame, or power; some people worship Allah, or Atman, or Elvis; some people worship a man named Jesus (yes, the same Yeshua bar Maryam who told us to worship only God), although they pay lip service to the existence of the “Father.” This argument says: Why on earth would we have evolved seeking God if there is no God? Do we waste hours and days and years arguing about the existence of hurkles?
• The appeal to “religious experience.” Religious experiences are not limited to mystics, saints, and lunatics; nor must they be as dramatic as those of Saul of Tarsus or Teresa of Avila. Countless people have experienced the presence of God; I myself have; you probably have as well, although you may not be willing or able to acknowledge that experience.
        And not only are there thousands or possibly millions of these reports, but they vary only in detail. Virtually all speak of some form of contact with a Being immeasurably greater than the person doing the reporting, and that this Ultimate Reality provided the human with love and reassurance. Virtually all near-death experiences, for example, speak of a period of transition, frequently described as passing through a tunnel, and almost as frequently involving water in some way; of a magnificent radiance at the end of the tunnel, usually described as light or glory; and of a Being or beings at the other side, God, angels, or family members, who welcome the recently dead person to a metaphysical “place” of bliss. Many reports of NDEs end by having this other Being inform the protagonist that it is not “time” (“your hour has not yet come”) and that she or he must return to living.
  
  

  Title of note

  (hide)

  I am constrained to mention here, however, an article that I read about ten years ago in the Skeptical Inquirer, whose author pointed out how remarkably similar the typical structure of an NDE is to the typical birth experience — the dark vaginal tunnel, the amniotic waters, the blinding light once the tunnel has been departed, the being or beings who welcome the neonate to a different and richer reality with enfolding arms. It seems plausible to me that an NDE may be no more than ideation applied to the memory of an experience one had before one was capable of ideation.
        I myself add to the stew all the zillions of reports of supernatural experiences involving beings other than God — angels, ghosts, poltergeists, aliens and UFOs, witchcraft, telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, inspiration, the list goes on and on. Certainly it is possible that millions upon billions of people can be wrong. But suppose that there is a googolplex of reports of supernatural experiences, and all but one of them are demonstrably the result of delusion, madness, or fraud. And suppose that one of them cannot be disproven despite two thousand years of highly intelligent people attempting to disprove it. Suppose that only one of this googolplex of experiences is true. If even one experience of Ultimate Reality out of a googolplex is true, then there is an Ultimate Reality that exists to be experienced. That’s the great blessing of Easter.

What I find interesting about all these arguments is not how an individual argument can be demolished with a little careful thought. It’s the sum of them taken together that interests me. If God does exist, then one or more of these six arguments could be wrong. (I think that Lewis Carroll would have made mincemeat out of St. Anselm’s reasoning.) But if God does NOT exist, then ALL arguments in favor of God’s existence are indisputably wrong. Now, start adding. If God does not exist: