Endnote added 8/14
In classical theological philosophical terms, my response was related to the "argument from cause," sometimes called the cosmological argument. This argument observes that the universe exists and something must have caused it to exist, and this "Unmoved Mover," as Aristotle put it, is God.
Aristotle's reasoning was picked up by Aquinas and by Moses Maimonides, the greatest Jewish philosopher of the medieval period. Maimonides offered several arguments for God's existence, all of them some variation of a cosmological argument.
Another argument in favor of God's existence is called the ontological argument. This argument attempts to prove God's reality basically by arguing that the term, "God," is nonsensical unless it has an existing referent rather than an imaginary one.
Probably the most famous proponent of the ontological argument is Anselm of Canterbury, 1033-1109. Ontological arguments
proceed from premises which are supposed to derive from some source other than observation of the world — e.g., from reason alone. In other words, ontological arguments are arguments from nothing but analytic, a priori and necessary premises to the conclusion that God exists. In his Proslogion, St. Anselm claims to derive the existence of God from the concept of a being than which no greater can be conceived. St. Anselm reasoned that, if such a being fails to exist, then a greater being — namely, a being than which no greater can be conceived, and which exists — can be conceived. But this would be absurd: nothing can be greater than a being than which no greater can be conceived. So a being than which no greater can be conceived — i.e., God — exists.(Anselm's contemprary, Guanilo, argued in reply that Anselm's argument was absurd. As Anselm had cited the Psalm 14, "The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God," Guanilo snarkily titled his essay, "Reply on Behalf of the Fool," but though it was clever, it did not actually address Anselm's argument since Guanilo apparently misunderstood what Anselm was getting at.) Closer to our own time, Charles Hartshorne presented the ontological argument this way:
1) God can be analytically conceived without contradiction. 2) Therefore God is not impossible. 3) By definition God cannot be contingent. 4) Therefore God is either necessary or impossible. 5) God is not impossible (from 2) therefore, God is necessary.Now, in this argument, "necessary" does not mean "required." A necessary entity's's existence does not depend on something else. "Contingent" means that the entity's existence depends on the prior existence of something else. In the ontological argument, God's existence is not dependent on any other thing. As Anselm pointed out, if there is an entity, however powerful, whose existence is contingent on something else, we would definitionally say that entity is not God. It would fail to be that "than which no greater can be conceived." Non-contingency is one of the key points in the very idea of God. Over the centuries, many philosophers have tried to knock down the ontological argument, but, as atheist Bertrand Russell observed, it is much easier to say that ontological arguments are not valid than it is to explain why. We reason that a non-contingent entity is possible. But we observe that contingent entities actually exist.
The contingency of the things we encounter in everyday life is empirically self evident.
In my undergraduate days, one of my philosophy professors observed that the cosmological argument and the ontological argument together made an extremely powerful case for the existence of God.
William Lane Craig recently put the cosmological argument this way, which I am paraphrasing. Suppose you are walking through the woods and come upon a perfectly spherical, transparent ball a couple of feet in diameter. You would not decide the ball was a necessary entity - that it existed without dependence on any other entity. You would immediately think it is a contingent entity, that its existence and location did indeed depend upon something else. "Who made it? How did it get here?" are entirely reasonable questions because it would be impossible to declare, with any sort of intelligence, that the ball simply popped into being in and of its own. No one would or could claim that the ball created itself.
And, says Craig, if you expand the ball so that it is the size of the universe, the problem does not change.
So why are we so willing to assume that the universe itself simply "big banged" itself into existence when we deny that anything else does so? And if the universe simply appeared, just popped into being, why do other such appearances not happen routinely? Why, for example, don't spherical balls (or whatever) just pop up in my front yard or yours from time to time?
But they don't. In fact, the entire universe itself consists only of contingent events that bring forth only contingent entities. But somehow, we are nonetheless willing to say that the universe is necessary, that it exists independently of other another entity.
I believe that it is neither intellectually coherent nor congruent with empirical science to think that the universe, which consists solely of contingent entities and contingent events, is even so somehow itself necessary rather than contingent. No, the universe itself and entire must be seen as empirically contingent; its existence depends on another entity. Since it is possible for God to exist as a necessary being, as explained above, the existence of the contingent universe means that God is also required.
Therefore, God exists.
However, I must side with Maimonides that arriving at this conclusion shows only that a creator exists, which we call God, but it tells us nothing about the nature of that God. For that more is required. Another post, perhaps.
Endote: Reading the comments makes me conclude that I should clarify what exactly is meant by "proof" of God's existence. In the parlance of philosophical inquiry, "proof" is not mathematical certainty, such as "proving" a theorem of geometry. It is a series of statements, establishing propositions that are true or agreeable within rationality (that is, postulates or conjectures that a reasonable person would assent could be true even if not inarguably so) that lead to a logical conclusion that establishes a proposition which has the force of rational argument behind it.
In this way, philosophical proof is akin to the standard of legal proof in civil lawsuits, where the defendant may be found liable based not on "beyond reasonable doubt" (as criminal trials require), but on "preponderance of evidence," meaning that it is more reasonable than not to find in favor of the plaintiff.
When I formally studied the history of the church I was surprised to learn that it took hundreds of years for Europe to become evangelized. We tend to think that because the Roman empire was Christian (well, nominally) when it fell that its successor duchys and kingdoms also were Christian. Well, 'tweren't so. They remained, north of Italy, mostly nature-god pagan except for large areas of France. As late as 1000, a third of Europe (perhaps as much as half) was still pagan.
It is in that light that much of medieval Christian scholarship should be viewed. Anselm not only propagated the classical ontological argument, but also the "satisfaction" theory of atonement, which holds that human sin (begun by Adam and Eve) constitutes a debt to God that the human race, on its own, cannot repay; the debt is wiped clean by God through his human embodiment in Jesus.
But Anselm's argument, though examined by the Christian literati of the day, was not mainly intended for them. After all, they already believed in God. It was intended to help persuade the still-pagans not so much that Christianity was true, per se, but that it was reasonable. That is, that it was internally coherent and made sense, even if one didn't accept it. (The same task had confronted the church fathers in the face of Roman persecution, who fled Hebraic theology of Christian faith, which they were little versed on anyway, to embrace Platonism as a way to persuade that Roman authorities that Christian teaching actually could make sense within the existing Greek-Roman world view and cosmology - so please stop killing us. Unfortunately, they didn't but the Greek philosophical overlay upon Christian theology still plagues us.)
It's really in that light that Anselm's ontological argument is best understood - as another brick in the wall of reasonableness of believing God exists rather than an attempt to "prove" he does as we moderns understand "proof."
A podcast of William Lane Craig's presentation, followed by two attempted rebuttals, is here, recorded at a formal philosophy conference.
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8 comments:
Bravo! Great post.
Don, these arguments always struck me odd. On the ontological argument, you're asserting the existence of a "being than which no greater can be conceived." As a sometimes mathematician, this seems a little hard to grasp, except as an axiomatic assertion, which would mean that Anselm's construction is vacuously tautological, ie, it assumes that there exists such a being, and then constructs its proof on the basis that such a being must exist. But mathematically, we're used to the notion that there are unbounded sequences. That is, every number n has another number that is greater (n+1).
So, consider: you have some collection of entities, in which God is one. We label each entity with some natural number in 1... It follows necessarily that God has some label, say i. Then we look at i+1. i+1 is greater than i; i+1 is an entity; thus the existence of i+1 contradicts the definition of God.
Similarly with the cosmological argument, which seems like a redress of the argument from first cause. Again, mathematically we deal all the time with sets that don't have a "first" element, eg, the integers: ...-3, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, 3, .... It would seem that given I can exhibit an entity or structure that has no first element, it's questionable to say that the Universe must have a first cause or first element.
None of this is meant to argue against the existence of a Deity, by the way, just these arguments.
As a former Christian, now at best agnostic, I am, perhaps oddly, more interested than I used to be in these sort of philosophic arguments. At first blush, the ontological argument reminds me of "it's turtles, all the way down". So at some point you get to the most awesome turtle which can be conceived, and decide that must be God -- the non-contingent turtle.
What I get from those 5 statements is only that if God exists, then God must be a non-contingent entity. Perhaps I'm missing something, but can't we argue the same for the initial quantum singularity? (I admit my knowledge of that area of cosmology is as close to zero for the difference to be trivial, but I once had a very smart woman explain some of it to me in a way that I somewhat grokked.) Anyways, suppose we just assign a term: TTTCTBB, the thing that caused the big bang. Then substitute TTTCTBB for God in the ontological argument. Perhaps there is some particular meaning or nuance in this argument, where "contradiction" is a term of philosophical art which prevents the substitution from being valid.
But plowing ahead, the argument also allows for more than one God to exist. Just as with your point about the perfect spheres, if it can happen, why doesn't it happen more often? Perhaps it does, but then there's constant war in heaven (or someplace outside our continuum). There's some ramifications there, eh?
Also, regarding the "popping into existence", perhaps it happens only under certain conditions, which don't exist in a universe as old (or young -- on a cosmologic timescale, is our universe old or young?) as ours. Or perhaps another big bang happened, except so far away that the energy from it hasn't reached anything we are able to observe.
Seneca, I think you are making the same misunderstanding of Anselm's argument that Guanilo did. He argued that imagining God exists does not require that God exists. His example was that he could easily imagine a "perfect island" but just because he could imagine it does not mean it must exist.
Anselm didn't really bother to reply very directly to Guanilo, perhaps because he saw right away that G. had misrepresented A's argument.
Anselm was not arguing that just because something can be thought of, however perfect in conception, that it must therefore exist. He was arguing that nothing merely imaginary could be superior to its actually existing cognate.
To wit: if a sailor imagined a perfect island and then, some time later, found an island that corresponded to his conception, he could not rationally declare that his imaginary island was superior to the actual island.
Similarly, an idea of God cannot be greater than an actually existing God that corresponds to the idea. So Anselm was was saying that the necessity of unsurpassability of being works only for God and nothing else, because God is, definitionally, that which greater than nothing can be conceived. And existence in fact is always greater than in mere conception.
Now, in the case of your numerical sequences, the equations may work just fine, but they have no actual correspondence to real entities. Mathematics is purely abstract (which is why Carl Sagan wrote that space aliens' math would have to be exactly like ours, though with different symbols, of course).
So "-3, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, 3," etc. is fine math but the sequence does not exist outside the realm of the mind. Hence it does not rise to Amselm's standard.
Jed, the only problem with surmising that the singularity self-caused the big bang is that cosmologists are not saying that. They admit that they cannot scientifically even investigate, much less describe, the first moments of the creation of the universe ("moments" being a very, very short amount of time, though).
So if we wish to a priori reject that there was an external cause to bring forth the universe from nothing (which is what "singularity" really means), then it won't do to simply shrug one's shoulders at just how the universe did begin.
Does this argument does allow for more than one god to exist? I'm not so sure. It does not allow for the doubling of necessity and requirement for more than one god. Following Occam's razor, if one god fills the bill, we need not postulate more than one.
Nonetheless, presumably the creator god could have created lesser deities. But of course they would fail Anselm's test of "that than which nothing is greater" and therefore, however powerful, would not be God. Hence, for example, angels, seraphim, etc.
As for the "perhapses" - we're back to Guanilo's error that just because we can imagine alternate universes, other big bangs, etc., that we have somehow knocked out the props from the argument.
Um, don't think so, Don. You're still making the definitional assertion that God is that which no greater can be conceived. But that assertion implies an order, "greater than". In any set, there is either a set of greatest elements, or the set is infinite.
If, on the one hand, you define that the set has a greatest element, that's fine. But you can't then use that definition to prove the existence of the greatest element, except in the tautologous sense of "I've defined there to be a greatest element, therefore there is a greatest element." That's a strict tautology, it resolves to p→p.
If, on the other hand, you say the set is infinite, you can say — we say, by convention — there's an "element" ∞ such that for any definite element x, x < ∞. But that doesn't mean you've exhibited a definite entity ∞, because any definite entity has a greater definite entity.
The point is that as an existence proof, it still comes down to either being false, or tautologous, depending on the assumptions. There's no new information content there, it's completely determined by the axioms.
Now I'm not claiming this as a disproof of the existence of Deity; I'm just criticizing the argument.
There's a second, similar, attack there as well. Again, the definition is a "being than which no greater can be conceived." The sentence implies that God is a being which can be conceived. But since people are limited, what we can conceive, it seems, must also be limited. It would appear then the definition requires God to be more more than what can be conceived by humans. This seems implausibly restrictive: could something within what humans can conceive also be something that could say fiat lux, and summon a Universe into existence?
Now, again, I'm not trying to convert you to atheism; I think atheism is also logically flawed. I'm just saying that as a maths guy/logician, I don't find the argument convincing.
Time for me to put my Philosophy undergrad degree to work!
Showing that "a creator" exists (purely in the sense of "something exists that created all this, and that's all we can infer") seems no different, logically, than saying "everything just exists".
If an inferred creator can be assumed to be "always there"/uncreated, why not the universe as such?
That nobody could claim that a ball in the woods created itself does not expand very well, I think, to the entire universe - or at least not usefully.
If nobody could claim (notionally, since I think people can and do claim that) the universe simply-always-existed, I don't see why anybody could claim that its Creator is exempt from either always-existing or having-been-created-by-some-Creator.
And if we're going to allow a Creator (especially of the most limited "Creator-because-the-logic-demands-one" type), why not just skip the middleman and decide the universe as a whole can just as easily have-always-been?
I just don't see any logical reason why not - our intuition might say that "well, all of this is contingent and requires a creator", but experience and science have shown that our intuitions about cosmology are dubious at best.
The assumption that the universe qua universe is contingent is intuitive... but I see no reason to accept it, and it certainly can't be deduced.
Everything in it might be contingent on it existing, but that doesn't prove that the existence must be contingent. I'd be more tempted to argue that its existence is simply a necessary condition of our even being able to ask (or of anything to exist in it), and that demanding a creator outside of it is simply handwaving to remove an apparent need for a creator that's only due to flawed assumptions (and perhaps a Wittgenstein-esque confusion caused by the language?).
I'm a lot more sympathetic - as a lifelong atheist - to Christianity or Judaism and the God of the Bible than I am to logic like that; I'm a lot more likely, like Chesterton, to have a leap of Faith than do more than laugh at attempts at proof that are as weak as the Ontological or Cosmological proofs.
(Too much investigation into self-ordering systems has been done for the whole "but all this order and non-chaos must mean there's a Creator!" argument to work for me.
It would have been much more plausible a hundred years ago, I'm sure.)
Let me begin with the fact that I am neither a philosopher nor a mathematician, so some of the vocabulary used goes over my head, and some of the arguments not allowed seem a little ridiculous to a post-modern English major like me. Just remember that I'm not like you when I posit something you may find ridiculous or stupid.
My biggest problem with the idea that because we cannot know right now how the universe was created and therefore the answer is God is that all it does is pass the buck.
I'll bring up the old argument bringing up the question that if the universe cannot have existed without being created, then what created God? I know this is annoying to IDers, but similarly, the argument that everything must have been created because the universe isn't eternal is just as annoying to the rest of us. The same arguments that an unchanging and eternal God created the universe can hold for a changing yet eternal universe.
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