So many arguments for God's existence; all flawed

Here's a mini-miracle that happened to me yesterday: I'm in a Barnes & Noble store and see a new hardcover book: "36 Arguments for the Existence of God -- a work of fiction."

I'm attracted to buy it. Handing it to the checkout clerk, I hear him say: "Hey, a friend of mind is reading this. He loves it." Cosmic! What are the chances...

Actually, quite good.

I suspect that people who work in book stores tend to read more books than the average person. And it figures that their friends would also. I'm buying a philosophical novel whose central character is a best-selling writer known as "the atheist with a soul," and the bookstore I'm in is located in one of the least religious areas in the country, Portland, Oregon.

So I don't think God impelled me to buy a book that questions God's existence (though it'd be cool if that were true, because I'd be attracted to a divine being with such an ironic sense of humor).

Nor do I think that God was behind another mini-miracle that occurred just before I sat down to write this post. Putting a salad bowl in the dishwasher, I dropped the fork that I was holding in the same hand.

Instead of dropping on the kitchen floor, or into the bottom of the dishwasher, the fork somehow flipped over perfectly and landed handle-side down in the utensil holder, which has narrow slots. Cosmic! What are the chances...

I have no idea. Fairly small, for one fork drop.

But the odds of winning a megabucks lottery are extremely miniscule, and regularly someone does just that: beat the odds. Having a fork randomly bounce handle first into a utensil slot is unusual. However, it isn't an act of God.

Thinking like this is what Rebecca Newberger Goldstein does in a marvelous appendix to her "36 Arguments for the Existence of God," which contains -- no big surprise -- those 36 arguments.

[You can read all of them, courtesy of Goldstein, on the Edge web site. Thanks, Rebecca -- who is married to noted cognitive scientist Steven Pinker. Much appreciated.]

Each argument is stated in a clear step by step fashion. Then the flaws in the argument are discussed. A comment ends the examination of the argument's validity.

The Barnes & Noble clerk said that his friend thought the 52-page appendix was worth the price of the whole 400-page book. I agree. I couldn't resist heading right to the final pages to read some of the arguments.

Many of them have been brought up by visitors to this blog who are still true believers in some faith, rather than godless heathen infidels like others who comment on my blog posts.

Here's a simplified and shortened summary of a few of the Goldstein arguments that come up frequently here on the Church of the Churchless.

(1) The Cosmological Argument. Everything that exists must have a cause. The universe cannot be the cause of itself. Something outside the universe must have caused it. God caused the universe. God exists.

Flaws: Who caused God? If God doesn't have a cause, or is self-caused, then the universe is able to exist without a cause, or be self-caused. Further, applying the concept of "cause" to everything in existence misuses the concept.

(2) The Argument from Personal Coincidences. People experience uncanny coincidences. These can't be explained by the laws of probability. Only a being who has the power to effect these coincidences could arrange for them to happen. God exists.

Flaws: A large number of experiences make "uncanny" coincidences probable, not improbable. And people are prone to an illusion called Confirmation Bias. When they have a hypothesis (daydreams predict the future), they notice the instances that confirm it (when they think of a friend and he calls), forgetting the times this doesn't happen.

(3) The Argument from the Hard Problem of Consciousness. Currently science can't explain why we have a subjective feeling of conscious awareness. Science will never solve this problem, because the explanation must lie beyond physical laws. Thus consciousness is immaterial. God also is immaterial. God inserted a conscious spark of the divine into us. God exists.

Flaws: Drawing theological conclusions from the currently incomplete state of scientific knowledge is to commit the Fallacy of Arguing from Ignorance. It may turn out that consciousness (or "proto-consciousness") is inherent in matter, which would make it materialistic. And the human brain simply may lack the capacity to understand human consciousness.

(4) The Argument from the Consensus of Mystics.  Mystics go into a special state in which they seem to see aspects of reality that elude everyday experience. There is unanimity among mystics as to what they experience. They can't all be deluded in the same way. Their experiences testify to the transcendent experience of God. God exists.

Flaws: Mystics may indeed be deluded in similar ways. Human nature is universal, and thus prone to universal illusions and shortcomings of perception, memory, reasoning, and objectivity. The temporal lobes of non-mystics can be stimulated to induce "mystical" experiences, as can certain drugs. 

There are quite a few more interesting arguments for the existence of God in Goldstein's appendix. But like the four I've shared, they all have serious flaws.

Thus to me one of the best arguments for the non-existence of God is how many arguments there are for God. This is the flip side of Argument #36 in the book: "The Argument from the Abundance of Arguments."

You'd think that the creator of the universe, the most important dude (or dudette) in the cosmos, the ultimate reality behind all other realities, would be just a bit more obvious and not need so many abstract conceptions to argue for his existence.

Comments

[Suzanne Foxton]

God's just a label, a concept. It's all God, all objects, the cosmos, thoughts, feelings, all matter, all concepts are God...if you care to label it all God.

[Willie R.]

I think that most fence-sitters would be content to achieve closure with respect to the debate as to whether there actually exists a completely separate "being" that is the cause of all that exists, and that has no necessary connection to what exists.

In this there obviously can be no closure, since the existence of such a "God" is not apparent. What is apparent is the fact that there is no consensus of opinion to be found, other than the supposition that most humans seem to find the notion of "God" as a completely separate entity to be necessary from the get-go, based upon what is obvious to our senses.

If there does actually happen to exist a completely separate "God" and I personally became aware of this God's existence, would I then feel any different about my own obvious and beyond-question existence?

Only if that God compelled me to.

[Rain]

Well one thing for sure. Whether a god or gods exist, we don't decide it. Whatever a person writes in a book, how many questions they come up with, a bigger presence than us is or it is not. It's not up for a vote.

[Blogger Brian]

Rain, I agree that something -- anything, really -- is not up for a vote. It either is real, or is is not. It either exists, or it does not.

This is true of visitors from outer space, an asteroid that could destroy Earth, a cure for cancer, whether global warming is caused by human activities, and every other actual or potential entity that could be experienced.

Yet I disagree when you say that "whether a god or gods exist, we don't decide it." Actually, we do. Reality isn't given to us. It is decided upon by the human brain/intelligence/psyche -- whatever we want to call it.

Many of these decisions are personal. Only I can decide whether I am feeling sad, or if I like blueberries better than bananas. But when it comes to entities in our shared world of common experience, then we definitely do decide whether something exists, or doesn't; whether something is true, or isn't.

We do this in many ways. Considering arguments for and against the existence of something is one way. This is the way of science, of rationality, of the "enlightenment."

Another way is for a ruler, secular or religious, to decree whether something is real or not. Many of us don't like this authoritarian approach, while others are attracted to a "thus saith.." promulgator of truth.

Regardless, decisions have to be made about what is real and what is not. Otherwise we wouldn't be able to function in the world, if we took illusions to be real, and realities to be illusions. (We'd sure crash our cars quickly, if green lights and red lights weren't recognized for what they are.)

So we can't get away from debating, arguing, examining evidence, having conversations, hearing each other out. This is how we humans largely decide -- individually and collectively -- what is real and true, and what is not.

[Rain]

You can decide whether you believe in god/gods. You can decide what you do about it if you decide one way or the other, but you cannot decide the existence of god/gods. That is or it is not. It impacts our lives, or could, what we decide while we are living and for some more than others.

I have heard it argued that we create our own reality (especially in new age circles) and hence we could make there be a god or not and that would be that for 'our' world. I say then stop meat from rotting. If we can create our own reality, we would have control that I don't see anybody having.

[George]

The central argument for God imo is why something rather than nothing?

Nothing is surely a far simpler state.
The existence of something is a very big deal.

So was something created or has it always just existed? The former is often attributed to god and the latter the universe. However, both explanations (god and the universe) rely on a phenomenon that is eternal and causeless.

A phenomenon that is eternal and causeless is inconsistent with science and our observable natural world, where things appear temporary and causal in nature. Every thing we know of from life forms to the building blocks of life itself appear to be of temporary existence and whose creation was caused by something else.

Whats even stranger of having something rather than nothing, is that the something appears to have a fundamental order the more deeply it is understood. Science itself is the study and discovery of such order from objective observation. It is the rules and patterns of the universe which are science's laws of nature.

So the explanatory phenomenon for 'something', is that it is causeless, eternal and also ordered.

The order appears to brought about according to self-governing principles reflected in the laws and constants of nature, some of which are so finely tuned that if only one of a handful of certain key universal parameters was even slightly out - there would be no universe - i.e. nothing rather than something.

All of this reinforces just how precarious and unlikely the existence of something, rather than nothing, is.

So our explanatary phenomenon is eternal, causeless, ordered and exceptionally unlikely - could be a definition of God.