Arguments for and Against the Existence of God

Introduction: God's Existence in Western Philosophy

The great monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have profoundly influenced Western philosophy. In all of these religions, the existence of God is a central claim. For nearly a millennium — from roughly 500 AD to about 1500 AD — Western philosophy served as the handmaiden of Christian theology (Jordan, 567). During this period, the question of God's existence was of paramount importance. Proofs were needed to convince non-believers and to retain the faithful. In the more secular world that has emerged since the Renaissance, these arguments for the existence of God have been severely challenged.

This essay discusses the arguments for and against the existence of God, with particular attention to the views of Bertrand Russell. It also covers the major classical arguments on these issues before arriving at the author's own conclusions.

The Russell–Copleston Debate and Russell's Key Methods

In 1948, Bertrand Russell and Frederick C. Copleston debated the existence of God, with Copleston arguing for the affirmative. He presented three classic arguments: his main argument was a version of the argument from contingency, he relied heavily on an argument from morality, and he touched on an argument from religious experience.

Russell did not argue that there was no God, nor that the issue could never in principle be settled. His primary rebuttal was "thesis not proved." He viewed propositions essential to the argument from contingency as meaningless. He answered the argument from morality by pointing to the personal and cultural relativity of moral values and by explaining feelings of obligation as behavioral conditioning. Finally, he argued that religious experiences could be explained in natural terms without any need for the transcendental.

Bertrand Russell was one of the outstanding philosophers of the twentieth century. Although he was not primarily a philosopher of religion, he wrote extensively on religion and was highly influential in that area. His Why I Am Not a Christian remains in print and on bookstore shelves today, more than eighty years after its title essay was first published. Russell was one of the clearest, most able, and best-known spokespersons for the modern agnostic position. Father Copleston was a member of the Society of Jesus, a professor of metaphysics at the Gregorian University in Rome, and a professor of philosophy at Oxford. At the time of the debate, some regarded him as the leading Catholic philosopher in the Anglo-Saxon world. His History of Western Philosophy remains one of the best histories of philosophy written in English.

Russell's main weapons were arguments to meaninglessness and reduction to naturalistic explanation. An argument to meaninglessness holds that some apparent proposition is not really a proposition — that a sentence which seems grammatically acceptable and sensible, and which appears to state something that can be true or false, is not actually stating anything meaningful, and is therefore neither true nor false. This can be a very powerful rebuttal: if an apparent proposition is really meaningless, there is no point in discussing its truth or falsity.

A "reduction to naturalistic explanation" holds that some state of affairs allegedly explainable only by something supernatural can also be explained in terms of natural phenomena. In the modern scientific world, this kind of argument is also very powerful, since the general maxim of science is that if something can be explained naturally, it need not be explained any other way. If one can show that a reported experience of God can be explained in terms of natural phenomena, one has effectively rebutted the report.

The transcript of the debate has been reproduced in numerous philosophy textbooks. Debates on the existence of God continue to be held — for example, in February 1998, William Craig and Anthony Flew held one at the University of Wisconsin in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the Copleston–Russell exchange.