Philosopher Rebecca Goldstein's novel 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction features a fictional character who writes an eponymous book with an Appendix that begins this way:
36 ARGUMENTS FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
1. The Cosmological Argument
1. Everything that exists must have a cause.
2. The universe must have a cause (from 1).
3. Nothing can be the cause of itself.
4. The universe cannot be the cause of itself (from 3).
5. Something outside the universe must have caused the universe (from 2 & 4).
6. God is the only thing that is outside of the universe.
7. God caused the universe (from 5 & 6).
8. God exists.
FLAW 1: 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 when applied to 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 whyGod must be the unique exception, otherwise than asserting his unique mystery (the Fallacy of Using One Mystery To Pseudo-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 skeptical reasoning, based on the incoherent demands we make of 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, are expressions of our cosmic befuddlement at the question: why is there something rather than nothing? The late philosopher Sydney Morgenbesser had a classic response to this question: "And if there were nothing? You'd still be complaining!"
2. The Ontological Argument
1. Nothing greater than God can be conceived (this is stipulated as part of the definition of "God").
2. It is greater to exist than not to exist.
3 . If we conceive of God as not existing, then we can conceive of something greater than God (from 2).
4. To conceive of God as not existing is not to conceive of God (from 1 and 3).
5. It is inconceivable that God not exist (from 4).
6. 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 rule. 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, Sydney Morgenbesser had a pertinent remark, this one offered as an Ontological Argument for God's Non-Existence: Existence is such a lousy thing, how could God go and do it?
... (34 more arguments summarized here, including all the famous ones and some truly novel inventions)
Ross Douthat's favorite...
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been recording conversations about my new book, “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious,” and one of the striking things — not unexpected, but still interesting — is how different people react to different arguments for being religious or believing in God.
You’ll get one very smart interlocutor for whom it seems perfectly reasonable to consider religious possibilities in light of the evidence for order and design at the deepest level of the universe, but who just can’t swallow the idea that there might be supernatural realities — visions, encounters, literal miracles — that inherently evade the capacities of modern science to measure and dissect. Then you’ll get another person for whom it’s the reverse, for whom the primary case for religion is experiential, while attempts to discover God in, say, the cosmological constant leave them cold.
My own view is more promiscuous: I think that the most compelling case for being religious — for a default view, before you get to the specifics of creeds and doctrines, that the universe was made for a reason and we’re part of that reason — is found at the convergence of multiple different lines of argument, the analysis of multiple different aspects of the existence in which we find ourselves.
Consider three big examples: the evidence for cosmic design in the fundamental laws and structure of the universe; the unusual place of human consciousness within the larger whole; and the persistence and plausibility of religious and supernatural experience even under supposedly disenchanted conditions... (nyt, continues)
My reply to Ross:
Re: Ross Douthat, Feb.7--
Ross Douthat's convergent arguments for a god based on "Fine Tuning" (aka the "anthropic principle") and human consciousness, while impressive coming from a "precocious undergraduate," do not finally compel assent. As Carl Sagan put it in his book Pale Blue Dot, “There is something stunningly narrow about how the Anthropic Principle is phrased. Yes, only certain laws and constants of nature are consistent with our kind of life. But essentially the same laws and constants are required to make a rock. So why not talk about a Universe designed so rocks could one day come to be, and strong and weak Lithic Principles? If stones could philosophize, I imagine Lithic Principles would be at the intellectual frontiers.”
Undergraduate conversations about the possible existence of a god are fun, sometimes. But insisting that they should make us all religious flirts insensibly, at this moment of political blitzkrieg in Washington, with theocratic intolerance. We don't all need to be religious, any more than we all need to be Republican.
==
Carl Sagan's discussion of the anthropic "fine tuning" argument--
“There is something stunningly narrow about how the Anthropic Principle is phrased. Yes, only certain laws and constants of nature are consistent with our kind of life. But essentially the same laws and constants are required to make a rock. So why not talk about a Universe designed so rocks could one day come to be, and strong and weak Lithic Principles? If stones could philosophize, I imagine Lithic Principles would be at the intellectual frontiers.” ― Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
And see his Varieties of Scientific Experience--"If the very strong version of the anthropic principle is true, that is, that God created the universe so that humans would eventually come about, then we have to ask the question, what happens if humans destroy themselves? That would make the whole exercise sort of pointless.
We would have to conclude either (a) that an omnipotent and omniscient God did not create the universe, that is, that He was an inexpert cosmic engineer, or (b) that human beings will not self-destruct. Either alternative, it seems to me, is a matter of some interest, would be worth knowing."
And,
"...if there were an uncaused first cause, that by no means says anything about omnipotence or omniscience, or compassion, or even monotheism. And Aristotle, in fact, deduced several dozen first causes in his theology.
The second standard Western argument using reason for God is the so-called argument from design, which we have already talked about, both in its biological context and in the recent astrophysical incarnation called the anthropic principle. It is at best an argument from analogy; that is, that some things were made by humans and now here is something more complex that wasn’t made by us, so maybe it was made by an intelligent being smarter than us. Well, maybe, but that is not a compelling argument. I tried to stress earlier the extent to which misunderstandings, failure of the imagination, and especially the lack of awareness of new underlying principles may lead us into error with the argument from design.
The extraordinary insights of Charles Darwin on the biological end of the argument of design provide clear warning that there may be principles that we do not yet divine (if I may use that word) underlying apparent order. There is certainly a lot of order in the universe, but there is also a lot of chaos.The centers of galaxies routinely explode, and if there are inhabited worlds and civilizations there, they are destroyed by the millions, with each explosion of the galactic nucleus or a quasar. That does not sound very much like a god who knows what he, she, or it is doing. It sounds more like an apprentice god in over his head. Maybe they start them out at the centers of galaxies and then after a while, when they get some experience, move them on to more important assignments." --The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God by Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan
Sean Carroll's view of it...
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2015/12/31/sean-carroll-debunks-the-fine-tuning-argument-for-god/
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