Arguments of one sort or another, for the existence of God, of one sort or another, are a commonplace. There are common errors to be found in them that might be worth putting in one place. We might also develop a fairly consistent critical position concerning those arguments. Perhaps we might be able to simply refer “new” arguments for divine actuality to this thread…
So here’s a list.
General logical objections
- Existence is not a property that can simply be added to a concept or individual by inference; as Kant pointed out, saying something exists is not adding to the concept. See Of the Impossibility of an Ontological Proof
- Existence as Quantification. More recently this point was clarified in showing how existence is captured by the quantifier, not by a first-level predicate of objects — “Fs exist” is ∃x(Fx), not Fa ∧ Ea. In standard first order logic existence cannot be expressed as a predicate of individuals, and so no valid formal argument can have “x exists” as its conclusion.
- In those logics that allow predication of existence, such as free logic, any argument that claims to show that something exists has the assumption of existence hidden in its premises. The things that exist are stipulated in the domain, so that expressions of the form ∀x(A→E!x) cannot be derived in Free Logic.
- Always ask: Where, exactly, does the argument acquire its existential commitment?
Problems with the nature of proof
- The burden of proof: in the absence of evidence, there’s no reason to assert God exists, but also no argument needed to assert he doesn’t. Mere agnosticism will not do, though, since anyone claiming God’s existence is even possible owes an account of a coherent, consistent concept of God. In the absence of such a coherent account, atheism seems the reasonable conclusion.
- The arguments are post hoc, not evangelical — they rarely actually convince anyone, failing if their job is persuading nonbelievers. If these were successful, there would be far more theist philosophers. Belief precedes and outlives the arguments, so while believers may treat the arguments as confirmation, nonbelievers see them as faulty, and either way, the arguments are post hoc to the belief. At best, arguments might provide a way for theists to understand the nature of their God but won’t convince all who give them due consideration.
- Equivocation. Starting with some minimalist notion of God and then switching to something more substantial, e.g. from “God just is the immaterial cause of material existence” to “God is eternal and anyone who doesn’t believe in Him is a corrupt infidel”.
- Such arguments also run into the problem of divine simplicity contradicting the multiplicity of attributes (will, intellect, etc.) ascribed to God; if one begins with a contradiction, anything is provable. For example, what shows that the source of all movement is the source of what is good, and moreover, how does it remain simple? This leads to questions of the coherence of the very notion of God.
Ontological arguments
- Ontological arguments structurally beg the question. The presumption that “the greatest thing” is real gets smuggled into a premise, typically in the move from “conceivable” to “real”. The argument becomes “God exists therefore God exists.”
- Gaunilo’s parody of the perfect island still carries weight against certain ontological arguments. If the logic works for God, it works for any absurd concept, undermining the argument’s validity.
- Modal/necessity arguments face the dilemma that S5’s ◊□p→□p buys its conclusion at the cost of the possible/necessary distinction itself. They risk modal collapse. The theologians’ response that “logic doesn’t apply to God” is just special pleading.
- The Missing Explanation reply stops things a step earlier, asking why we might accept the premise ◊□p at all. The inference from possible necessary existence to necessary existence may be valid, but the possibility of such an existent remains an unaccounted-for premise; why should we accept that there might be an necessary individual at all? Nothing in modal logic suggests that some individual is in every possible world.
- The classic version was presented by St Anselm of Canterbury, who concluded that “God must exist in reality”. The error in the argument is that the sentence “God must exist in reality”, rather than refer to something that exists outside language, in fact refers to language itself. Donald Davidson promoted the Principle of Charity, whereby we must assume that the speaker’s beliefs are consistent and that they are logically responding to their environment. A speaker’s immediate environment is the language being used by the community of which they are a part. The sentence “God must exist in reality” is true, not because God must exist in reality, but because each word within the sentence satisfies in the syntactic rather than semantic sense the sentence, and each sentence satisfies also in the syntactic rather than semantic sense the linguistic environment within which the speaker lives.
- Another error in the ontological argument that “God must exist in reality” Is that the sentence refers to itself rather than something outside the sentence. The sentence “God must exist in reality” does exist in reality as physical text on the computer screen. So, in this sense, the “God” within the sentence “God must exist in reality” does exist in reality.
Cosmological arguments
- Cosmological arguments are viciously simple and merely name a feeling of perplexity. Reduced to its bones they consist in “Here is a series - That series has some prime item on which it is based - And this we call God”. This is unconvincing - why must we call it God? Aquinas’s final move, “this we all call God,” names the mystery that things exist; it doesn’t show that God exists.
- Special pleading as to the terminus of the causal chain. Typically found in the insistence on the “Principle” that everything has a cause, only to reject this very principle in the case of God.
- Quantifier-shift fallacy (∀x∃y Cyx ≠ ∃y∀x Cyx); commonly seen as “everything that exists has a cause, hence there exists something that causes everything”.
- Many versions rely on a shaky theory of causation. Arguments that use causation often smuggle in simplistic Aristotelian mechanics or inconsistent applications of causal determinism. Causal Determinism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Teleological arguments
- Teleological arguments face the problem that “purpose” is imputed by the observer rather than discovered independently in nature. One can be amazed by the universe’s intricacy without inferring a designer.
Fine-tuning
- Fine-tuning arguments attempt to infer a probability from a single data point. In addition, any universe capable of being observed will necessarily have constants compatible with observers. So finding ourselves in such a universe is not evidence of design, only evidence that we couldn’t exist to notice the alternative. Such arguments don’t get a probability assignment at all without some arbitrary and unmotivated choice of measure.
Moral arguments
- The idea is that there could only be objective moral values if god exists. The obvious reply: there are no objective moral values. And even if there were, why they require a god remains unexplained.
- Euthyphro: Does God command something because it is good, or is it good because God commands it?
- Choosing in moral circumstances does not seem to involve following some revelation. Further, if God’s commands constitute moral obligation, then whatever God genuinely commands becomes obligatory, even if it is immoral - slavery, genocide, misogyny, have all at some stage been claimed to be god’s will. In the end, one has no choice but to decide such issues for oneself, anyway, and god drops out of the calculus.
Others
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Transcendent Arguments. God is not a being amongst other beings, but somehow the transcendent source of and ground for being itself. This removes God from the quantification given in most of the arguments. This position is self-undermining in that saying that God is the source of being is itself making the sort of ontic claim that is being rejected. The by now familiar problem of talking about that about which we claim we cannot talk. (Response to @Wayfarer below)
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Argument from miracles. Suspension of natural law has been the stock in trade, the sure clincher, for the divine. Responses have been downright denial - there’s no hard evidence for miracles, only hearsay - to responses like, “I’ll give you all the miracles you want, but you’ll still be left exactly where you are now. Holding an empty sack.” Hume Texts Online
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Argument from personal religious experiences. The stoics held that a truth must be experienced in the Humean sense (vivid, lively, forceful) and religious experiences are that. But if the phantasia katalēptikē matched some real-world object one might expect some convergence across religious doctrine around the world, yet instead we have cultural divergence; also we have amongst us those who have katalēptikē for alien abduction and Marian apparitions. Parsimony suggests a cultural origins. Logically, what can be believed on account of a private experience can be disbelieved on the same grounds. It is precisely unreasonable to expect others to be swayed by my private experience, and my interpretation of it. This of course does not demonstrate that my private experience, and interpretation, are wrong. It only argues against private experience as a persuasive premise in an argument made to others. (@jay)
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Pascal’s wager. If you believe and you’re wrong, not much of an issue but if you don’t believe and you’re wrong it’s an issue. The string of failures here is long, including one recognised by Pascal, that we don’t believe on demand. Introducing infinite priors into probabilities effectively negates any prior, and so any reason for choosing one religion over another. The argument does not tell us which god, amongst the many who promise damnation or salvation.
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The God of the Gaps. This involves a merely rhetorical strategy: here is a gap; invoke god to explain the gap; when science provides another explanation, move on to the next gap. Such an approach is methodologically problematic — again, an explanation that explains anything explains nothing. In order to function, an explanation must rule some things out. The God of the gaps has no predictive content, no failure conditions; it doesn’t answer the gap, it papers over it.
Problems of divine coherence
- Omnipotence and moral perfection. A perfectly powerful being can do anything, including evil. A perfectly good being can do no evil. So how is God both omnipotent and good?
- Foreknowledge and intervention If God knows the future with certainty, that future is fixed, and God can’t act to change it. So either foreknowledge is incomplete, or God’s power to intervene is illusory.
- Perfect and immutable vs. personal and responsive. A being that is perfect lacks nothing and needs no change; indeed any change would be either toward greater perfection, so it wasn’t perfect before, or away from it, and so he wasn’t perfect. A being that answers prayers, becomes incarnate, gets angry, responds to human action, is not an immutable being.
Of course, that there are problems with these proofs does not show that God does not exist. These arguments are a neat case study of philosophy not done well. There are answers to each and all, of course, and these are a beginning, or a continuation, not an end, to our enquiry.
Please, feel free to add to my list. This post is a Wiki. This is just an outline, a beginning, and no doubt will attract ongoing attention. You can add to and edit the points above, but please keep the discussion to the subsequent posts.
There are issues with the markup, it seems the bullets don’t like headings in their scope. If someone has a solution…
If you have an argument that avoids all these problems, please start your own thread.
