Arguments for God's Existence

So in my philosophy class, my teacher has given me the choice of writing an in-class essay or turning in a lengthier and higher-quality paper for the upcoming test. I had a lot to say, so I went the lengthier route. I'll post the prompt for the paper below, but basically this essay outlines the Cosmological argument (mainly the Five Ways), Paley's Watchmaker Teleological argument, and Anselm's ontological argument, and then I discuss which I find to be the most plausible by stating or analyzing the criticisms of each. To be fair, I favor Aquinas' argument, and I don't really counter much of the criticisms of Paley's and Anselm's arguments, but also to be fair I was working under a page limit, and she required me to explain each argument first ^^'

Prompt: Discuss one of Aquinas’ first three ways (Argument from Motion, Argument from Causation, or Argument from Contingency). How is the argument intended to prove God’s existence? Discuss Paley’s argument for God’s existence. How is the argument intended to prove God’s existence? What is Anselm’s argument for God’s existence? How is it intended to prove that God exists? Which of these three arguments do you find the most convincing, and why? Note that in order to defend your choice, you must explain the argument you are defending as well as discuss what you believe to be the weaknesses of the other two arguments. What is the counter-argument we have read against the argument you have chosen as the strongest? Do you think that the counter-argument weakens the argument or not? Explain and defend your answer. Do you think that the argument you have chosen as the strongest is challenged by the presence of evil in the world? Why or why not? Explain and defend your answer.

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An Applause of the Cosmological Argument and Denial of the Infinite Series

In an attempt to determine God’s existence, A transcendent, all-good being of omnipotence and omniscience, Thomas Aquinas has taken the world around us as evidence, creating an a posteriori logical argument showing that without a God being, the universe could not exist; a cosmological argument. Aquinas’s Five Ways each take an aspect of nature, among them motion, causation, and contingency, and show that they each inherently prove the existence of God. The second of Aquinas’ Ways is the Argument from Causation. In this argument, Aquinas begins by stating that everything has an efficient cause, a premise that is generally accepted as true. He continues to claim that something cannot be the cause of itself, the truth of which is clear when one considers that something must exist in order to cause, but cannot cause without existing. Therefore, something that does not exist cannot cause itself to exist, and therefore nothing can be the efficient cause of itself. Next, Aquinas shows that an infinite regress is impossible, because without a first cause, there would be no cause for any of the other causes in the infinite chain, so the whole series vanishes. Finally, since there clearly is some cause and effect in reality around us, there must be a first cause that has always been in existence. The alternatives are that the initial cause has caused itself, or that an infinite series of causes exists, both of which Aquinas has demonstrated to be impossible. Aquinas claims that the First Cause is God, a being outside the bounds of natural law that could indeed cause itself, something the universe is not capable of doing. Aquinas’s argument from Causation, if the premises are accepted as true, proves a First Cause, but leaves the issue at that, making no connection between the traits of God and the First Cause, relying on the other Ways to show these characteristics.

Paley also attempts to demonstrate God’s existence using the world as proof in his Watchmaker analogy. In it, Paley compares the world to a watch, and claims that if we were to find a watch on the ground, we would not even consider the possibility that it did not have a maker. Paley claims it is similarly unthinkable that the world would not have a maker. To strengthen the analogy, Paley determines what characteristics of the watch convince us it was designed, and illustrates those characteristics in the world. Paley says that the watch has complexity, purpose, specially designed parts that are fitted to their function, and precision. Paley says that we are indeed complex, we have a function to live, we certainly have specially designed parts such as eyes and lungs and brains, and they work precisely with each other, especially on the chemical and cellular levels as we know today. Certainly, then, if those traits make us believe a watch has a designer, then we should believe those traits indicate that we have a designer. Paley then addresses numerous counterarguments to his teleological argument, such as the lack of seeing either a watchmaker or a universe-maker, or the ability of natural order or nature of metals to craft a universe (since they clearly can’t make watches), and even the lack of perfection in our world or the watch. Some of these responses are convincing and some are not, but if his analogy is accepted as correct, Paley in the end shows merely that the universe had a designer. Much like Aquinas’ argument, the designer is assumed to be God, using for support the incredible complexity of the universe as evidence that the designer had to be extraordinarily smart, perhaps even omniscient, and surely the power of creation indicates omnipotence. But Paley, like Aquinas, leaves the vital logical connection missing.

Anselm diverges from the a posteriori arguments of Paley and Aquinas with his a priori ontological argument. He does not derive God’s existence from the existence of the universe, but through pure logic. Somewhat more difficult to understand, Anselm begins by defining God differently, but the definition is quite fitting: “a being than which no greater can be conceived” (Pojman 97). Taking this definition, Anselm shows that God can be conceived of, offering as proof that you cannot deny the existence of something that cannot be conceived, because when you deny it’s existence, you must conceive of it in order to deny it. Accepting that God can be conceived, Anselm next states that God exists in the understanding. In other words, God not only can be conceived, but God has been conceived. Finally, God cannot exist in the understanding alone, and therefore must exist in reality. This final step utilizes the most complicated logic, and is where most philosophers, such as Kant, attack Anselm’s argument. Anselm claims this premise is true by a reductio ad absurdum counterargument, stating that if God did exist in the understanding alone, then one could conceive of a God that existed in reality and the understanding, and this conceived God would be greater than God, or greater than “the being than which no greater can be conceived.” In other words, supposing God did exist in the understanding alone, a greater being could be conceived, creating a contradiction and a clearly impossible situation. Therefore, God could not possibly exist in the understanding alone, and must exist in reality as well. To his credit, Anselm does succeed in doing what Paley and Aquinas do not quite accomplish, and if his premises and logic are accepted, this ontological argument actually proves the existence of God, rather than suggest a great being that could be God or merely something supernatural.

The strength of these arguments can be determined by their logical validity and the truth of their premises. Of these arguments, I find Anselm’s ontological argument to be the most valid in logic, and Aquinas’ the most truthful in premises. When taken as a whole, I find the errors in premises in Anselm’s argument to be graver than the logical gap in Aquinas’ argument, and thus the cosmological argument to be the most convincing argument for God’s existence, and Paley’s teleological argument the least convincing.

For a large part, the weakness of Paley’s argument comes from the weak analogy. To compare the Earth to a watch is an unfair comparison, let alone the entire universe to a watch. Perhaps the most significant difference between the two is that a watch has a clear function. Men have designed it to tell time. However, the function of the universe is not so clear. Perhaps Paley refers to the purpose of humans to live, and that we are well fit to this purpose. Paley declares that watches were obviously designed because they function to serve their purpose of telling time, and states that it is implausible to say that watches were not designed but rather were naturally formed. However, objects whose purpose is to live, such as humans, have two distinct differences in this point. First, watches do not strive to tell time; they are made to tell time. Living organisms actively strive to live. Second, the laws of nature which determine what succeeds and is thus more commonly in existence do not favor things that tell time; they favor things that are durable. If things that told time lasted longer as part of their nature, perhaps watches would indeed be formed naturally. Cells and other living things are most certainly durable, in that they can reproduce and thus survive long periods of time. Over long periods of time, natural laws can realistically form functional human beings, while it is unrealistic to claim that natural law will over time form watches. In this way, an explanation can be given to a person’s existence without a designer, that they occurred as a product of nature because they were durable, while the properties of a watch don’t lend themselves to this explanation. This is the main failure of the analogy.

However, presuming the analogy were sound, David Hume in his “Critique of the Teleological Argument” points out that the analogy itself does not prove God’s existence. In fact, the more similar and appropriate the analogy becomes, the more God appears as a simple universe-creator, rather than the omniscient, omnibenevolent, omnipotent, and transcendent being. After all, watch makers die. If the analogy were perfectly applicable, would it not imply that God is mortal too? If God dies, he is not transcendent. Watchmakers are certainly not omnipotent, so where does Paley justify calling the universe-maker omnipotent? In Paley’s favor, the argument shows that the creator has created everything and thus is capable of creating everything in existence, which could be seen as a form of omnipotence, but this explanation does not satisfy the criticism entirely. We are still left wondering if God can still create anything in existence, for example. Maybe he has aged and is unable to make delicate universes anymore. Further, it is possible that multiple people have collaborated on a watch, one craftsman forging the metal and another assembling it, and similarly the universe may have several makers. Or perhaps it is not intelligent design, but our designer is merely copying another being’s work, much as one watchmaker might copy another watch pattern. Most importantly, Hume points out that the analogy commits the logical fallacy of composition in assuming that because some parts of the universe have complexity, the whole universe has complexity. The teleological argument’s logic here fails, and even if we accept the inept analogy as applicable, the argument’s logic is invalid, ultimately failing to prove it’s point of God’s existence both due to invalid logic and the unsound premise that the universe is at all similar to a watch.

Anselm’s logic, on the other hand, is impeccable. If one accepts the premises he lays forth, one cannot but know with certainty that God, by nature, must exist in reality. This of all three arguments is the only one to really demonstrate God as we accept him, due to the factual a priori nature of the argument. The argument truly is valid in logic. Gaunilo attempts to counter this argument by applying it to items such as an “island than which no greater can be conceived” that we know does not exist, but Anselm responds by showing that such an island is impossible because the greatness of the island has no substantial definition and thus cannot be conceived, while the greatness of God can be defined by statements such as “there is no thing that He does not know” or “no thing that He can not do”. Gaunilo’s critique of the logic does not hold against this clarification.

However, this does not mean Anselm’s argument is without fault. Anselm plays a trick with wording that slightly but very significantly alters how one perceives his argument, and the wording Anselm employs hides very well a gap in truth. Kant states this by saying that existence is not a predicate, or that you cannot say that something has the trait of existing, because to have a trait, you assume that something already exists. It implies that it exists, and that it additionally has the characteristic of existence. To present this in a different light, but around the same idea, I will examine Anselm’s argument premise by premise to test for validity. The first premise he sets forth is that God can be conceived. This appears to be true at first, especially considering his counter-argument that you cannot deny the existence of God without conceiving of God first. However, later Anselm makes a distinction between conceiving God as existing in the understanding and conceiving of God as existing in reality, and this difference reflects back on this original premise. To illustrate this difference, we proceed through the next two premises: God exists in the understanding, and that God cannot exist in the understanding alone. The first of these is perfectly acceptable, and merely states that we have conceived of a being than which no greater can be conceived in the understanding. Anselm says that it cannot exist only in the understanding, because we could then conceive of a being that is greater than this being. However, Anselm has now played a trick with words. When he says that God exists in the understanding, he means that we have the concept of God in our minds. God himself does not exist, only the idea of God. We have fixed in our minds the idea of a being that would exist in the understanding as well as in reality. In other words, assuredly if the being God exists, he would exist both in mind and reality. While this may seem obvious, this is what Anselm has really proven. Anselm argues, however, that we have stipulated that God exists in the understanding already, and therefore must exist in reality too. This of course is untrue, because what we meant by the premise “God exists in the understanding” is that “the concept of God can be thought of.” Whether a being possessing the qualities we conceived of exists or not has yet to be proven. Establishing this final premise to be true is not completed in Anselm’s ontological argument, so his entire argument, as logical and beautiful as it is, is unsound.

Alternatively, accepting Anselm’s meaning of God’s existence in the understanding leads to another error in the counter-proof showing that God cannot exist in the understanding alone. We assume that we conceive of God that exists in the understanding alone. Anselm offers as a counter that we cannot conceive of God like this because we could conceive of a being that exists in reality as well that is surely greater. But here one must object to the original premise that God can be conceived. To conceive of something means to have an idea of it in one’s mind. To conceive in reality something, we could simply imagine it yet again in our heads, and say “This is real, in this imagination.” Therefore, one could conceive of God in reality by conceiving of God and saying “in my imagination, this is real.” This does not mandate in any way the real existence of God. That is simply what conceiving of something means. What Anselm does in this counterargument is construe “conceiving of God in reality” as “A God in Reality.” Surely if we have conceived of God in our minds, we cannot disprove that God by use of a God that we have conceived in reality. That is to say, we would need to prove a God that exists in reality in order to use him to disprove a God that exists in the understanding only. Conceiving God in reality, as Anselm would like to use it, would require such proof, and it is quite arguable, then, that Anselm’s first premise, that God can be conceived, is also false in this light. Conceiving of God in the understanding is acceptable, but conceiving of God in reality as a real being would require much more proof or evidence. At this point Anselm’s argument is logically valid but the premise has again been shown to be untrue, or at least unproven. God can be conceived in the understanding alone by conceiving of a God that would exist in reality, assuming that God existed.

St. Thomas Aquinas’ argument does have the weakness of not proving the existence of God specifically, as well as objectionable premises. However, I feel that Aquinas’ Five Ways has the best defenses against these criticisms, and thus is the strongest argument for God’s existence. The first critique raised with Aquinas’ argument is that it does not prove that the First Mover or First Cause is God. This is, of course, true. Aquinas believes that the best explanation for a being outside the universe that can move but not be moved itself is God, but beyond a best explanation he offers little proof. Fortunately the arguments themselves provide a little more persuasion for the case, but still are not entirely convincing. The First Way, argument from motion, provides support for God’s omnipotence, however. In theory, something cannot cause a greater change in another object than what it has potential for itself. In other words, anything possible in the universe, assuming God created it, God has the potential to do, because he has caused it. This does set the limit of omnipotence to be anything possible within the universe, and it is impossible to say what else beyond the universe is possible and whether or not the First Cause can do such things. Following the same line of thought, though, God created time and therefore is beyond time, giving him the property of transcendence. Similarly, all that can be known God must have known beforehand in order for it to come into being, giving him the property of omniscience. Of course, God defies natural law in that he can be a cause without having a cause, and if he does not follow one rule there is no reason to apply another to him, so this argument is not entirely solid. It does suggest a great deal, though, and makes far more effort towards the end goal than Paley’s, which weakens as the analogy becomes stronger.

The most persuasive objection to Aquinas deals with his constant claim that an infinite regress is impossible. Paul Edwards claims in his “Critique of the Cosmological Argument” that infinite regresses are in fact possible, but the implications and idea of an infinite regress are hard to conceptualize, and therefore we come erroneously to the conclusion that they are impossible. There have been many analogies and examples discussed in an attempt to understand the nature of an infinite series, among them an infinite series of trains pushing each other and an infinite link of chains. Put simply, the idea of an infinite regress claims that each cause has another cause as it’s own cause, and that cause is not uncaused, but has another cause itself. In this way, no link in the series is uncaused, as it is explained by another cause. Each individual link can be explained with a definite answer, and therefore the chain as a whole is explained and quite feasible, Edwards claims with his comparison to a group of Eskimos visiting New York. If each Eskimo is explained individually, there is no need to explain the group as a whole. However, an infinite series is difficult to conceptualize for a reason. The implications are immense, and I find that Aquinas is correct in this premise, that an infinite series is impossible for the following two reasons. As William Lane Craig mentions in his “Defense of the Kalam Argument”, an “actually infinite number of things” creates many “absurdities” that can be modeled with theoretic analogies, such as the Hilbert’s Hotel that he uses (Pojman 58). Second, an infinite series implies an infinite time for the series to elapse, and modern science supports not an infinite universe, but one with a definite origin. From these two reasons, an infinite regress is implausible in theory and reality both.

To demonstrate the implausibility of an infinite series, we can employ a reductio ad absurdum argument and suppose the universe has existed forever before the present. Logically then, an infinite time period has elapsed. Five minutes from now, however, the age of the universe will still be infinite, though clearly the universe will be older; infinity plus five minutes, if you will. Mathematically, the passing of time in an infinite universe would be impossible to differentiate, since the age of the universe is always the same. Arguably, there are lesser and greater infinities, and such can be proven mathematically. So let us take another approach. Let us say we wish to go back an infinite number of years, a time span equal to the age of the universe. We would arrive at such a point, and find again that the universe is still an infinite number of years old. Further, we could travel back an infinite number of minutes rather than years, and arrive at the same point in time, with the universe at the same age, when clearly minutes and years are vastly different. Further, we can consider that there is no value greater than infinity. Yet the age of the universe is constantly increasing, and we have already decided that an infinite series implies an infinitely old universe. Finally and most concretely, if any were to attempt to reach infinity by adding one second, minute, hour, year, or century or indeed any discrete unit of time, on to itself over and over, such as counting up by ones, tens, or millions, they would never, ever reach infinity. Employing this truth, we could never trace back to the origin of an infinite universe by counting time. While this is quite obvious and the whole point of the infinite regress counter-argument, the implication often overlooked is that the universe could never have reached the present starting from any given point, if time passes in any measurable rate. If we were to travel back in time an infinite number of years, we would reach a time that was once the present. We can then conclude that time progressing at a constant pace has counted from one year to an infinite number of years to reach our current present, even though we clearly know that it is impossible to count from one to infinity. In theory it could have, but in practice, the universe could never have reached an infinite age by passing time normally, because over it’s course, it would be passing time at the concrete rate of sixty seconds every minute. This is what Craig means when he denies the possibility of ‘actually infinite number of things’ (Pojman 58).

Logically, these scenarios are impossible to work with, but the nebulous nature of infinity still compels philosophers to argue that perhaps an infinite series is possible after all. Instead let us turn to what the scientific community holds true about the origins of the universe. Specifically, the current scientific model for the universe shows that, since the universe is now expanding, it must have been expanding since a common point of origin that they refer to as the Big Bang. Science postulates that in this unique creative event, the fabric of time and space was formed and the universe began to expand, dating about 15 billion years ago. According to this model, the universe is not an infinitely old entity, but only 15 billion years old. The oscillating theory of the universe states that the universe may contract into a single point yet again, and a new big bang will occur, creating a new universe, and thus paving the way for an infinite series with a pulsing, or oscillating universe. However, scientists have today disregarded this possibility on two accounts. First, the current mathematics according to Craig’s paper, outline the universe as a low-density universe that cannot cease its expansion. The ‘big crunch’ theory does not apply to universes that cannot exert enough gravitational force on itself to begin contracting. Instead we are left with a ‘big freeze’ where the universe keeps expanding and distances grow greater and greater between objects in space. However, assuming the universe did contract upon itself, the second objection becomes relevant. Scientists have identified the big bang as a unique event that creates the time-space continuum. Our current knowledge of physics gives us no reason to believe that all matter contracting on itself would do anything more than create a single lump of mass. There is no cause for an explosive event at all, much less one that creates a universe. The oscillating theory states that when all mass contracts, it causes a new big bang, but physics do not support this conclusion.

Stephen Hawking suggested that in the moments immediately after the big bang, within the fraction of a nanosecond during which the time-space continuum was being melded, time and space had little meaning, and in this manner the past could be conceived of as “finite, but boundless” (Pojman, 66). Any number of causes and effects could have taken place in that brief time window; even an infinite number. However, this merely skirts around the issue that the big bang was a beginning. Even if the universe is ageless, the big bang represents a point of origin before which there was nothing, and no series of infinite regress after the big bang could explain the effect of the big bang, which still requires a cause. If logic does not persuade one that an actually infinite span of time, or series of causes, is impossible, science presents a persuasive argument based on the physical world that the universe cannot be its own cause. Aquinas has shown logically what science would later determine: the universe cannot explain itself using its own laws of physics, and therefore an outside cause that is not subject to the laws of the universe is required to explain our existence. Some have argued that this God is equally impossible, then, because He would require a cause, but Aquinas would remind them that his conclusion is that the First Cause is outside our universe, and does not need a cause, for it is not subject to the laws of our universe, that everything must have a cause.

Admittedly, the Five Ways cannot prove all the traits of God, but they do establish several facts: There is a First Cause, and such a being is transcendent, omnipotent and omniscient to the degree that our universe understands, and the fourth of the Five Ways also establishes, tentatively, that God is omnibenevolent. While not quite as exact as Anselm’s argument in showing that this being is God, Aquinas’ arguments certainly suggest something on comparable scale. More importantly, though, Aquinas’ premises are quite true, with strong counters to each critique of them. This truthfulness allows Aquinas to at least prove the existence of a great being, God or not, and this establishes more than either of the other two arguments establish, since they are built on either false premises or weak analogies. For this, the fact that Aquinas has demonstrated something significant, even if it was not quite the conclusion he intended, I find Aquinas’ argument to be the most persuasive and sound.

Often the issue of evil is brought forth to challenge the existence of God, and to Aquinas’ credit he addresses this issue preemptively in his Five Ways. The first three of Aquinas’ ways do not actually describe an all-good being, and that is one of the portions of his argument that is lacking in proving God’s existence. However, he offers an explanation for evil that appears at first questionable, but upon examination is fairly sound, even if it is unelaborated. Aquinas claims that God allows evil to exist because out of it He draws greater good. This is really a belief directly from the Bible, that God turns all evil to his own ends. One has to question, though; this response seems to imply that God believes the end justifies the mean. He is using evil as a tool to accomplish good, but is He justified in doing so? Fortunately for Aquinas’ argument, this is in fact a misinterpretation of what Aquinas has said. Aquinas states that it is not contradictory for God to allow evil to exist, because “out of it [He produces] good,” (Pojman 55). This is different from saying that God commits evil acts for a good end. Indeed, an omnibenevolent being will not commit evil acts. However, circumstances being what they are, Aquinas says that God’s goodness is so complete that He produces good from evil that exists anyways. This seems to imply, of course, that God cannot simply abolish evil, which may well be the crux of the paradox. Aquinas leaves his argument at this, though, stating that evil exists because God makes good from it and simply accepting evil as necessary.

While this may be a weakness to Aquinas’ argument, one can patch over the gap with John Hick’s explanation for evil, which very much coincides with Aquinas’ response. Aquinas shows that God makes the best use of a bad situation, implying that evil is necessary, and Hick shows just why evil is necessary. To keep the defense brief, Hick shows that moral evil is a result of humans existing as free agents, over which even an omnipotent being has no control, because to control something and have it remain free is a paradox that extends beyond even omnipotence. Nonmoral evil and suffering exist as a necessity of a persistent world, and thus also a product of free will, and also to assist in the soul-making process, as Hick calls it. There are of course counter arguments to this view as well, with some worthy points to make, but they stray from the subject of Aquinas’ argument. I do not find Aquinas’ argument to be significantly threatened by the existence of evil, primarily because his argument is designed to prove God’s existence, while an argument regarding evil is designed not to counter Aquinas’ argument, but rather to disprove God’s existence. Such an argument would have to be stronger than Aquinas’ argument, after counter arguments such as Hick’s are taken into account. Finally, Aquinas does address the issue of evil briefly with an explanation that is lacking, but when examined closely and properly augmented, Aquinas’ response to the issue of evil appears to be fairly sound.

Work(s) Cited:

Pojman, Louis P., and Lewis Vaughn. Philosophy : The Quest for Truth. Seventh ed. New York: Oxford UP, Incorporated, 2008.