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.

Classical Arguments for the Existence of God

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.

The many arguments for the existence of God can be classified into types and sub-types. The general types include the following: the ontological, the cosmological, the teleological, the argument from morality, the argument from the common consent of mankind, the argument from religious experience, the argument from consciousness, the pragmatic argument, and the argument from intuition. Different writers use different names for these arguments.

The ontological argument argues from the very definition of God as a perfect being to his necessarily existing. The argument was first developed by St. Anselm (1033–1109) in his Proslogium and used by René Descartes (1596–1650) in his Meditations. It was rejected by Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) and dealt a near-fatal blow by Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). Kant argued that existence is not a property or quality: any definition — including that of God — specifies properties or qualities belonging to something, and since existence is not a property, it cannot be included in the definition of God (Edwards, 20). The ontological argument is the only one that is entirely a priori; that is, it argues from premises independent of experience. Copleston chose not to use it, and that decision seems to have been wise. To the layperson, the argument appears sophistical and unconvincing (Smart, 500), while to the philosophically informed, it seems to have been decisively defeated by Kant.

The cosmological argument is really a family of arguments. There are three main types, comprising the first three of Aquinas's "Five Ways" of proving the existence of God. The first way argues from the presence of motion in the world to a first mover. The second argues from the presence of efficient causes to a first cause. The third argues from the existence of contingent beings to a necessary being that causes all contingent beings. All of these arguments involve the denial of an infinite regress — a denial that many philosophers simply do not accept. Modern science, for example, seems to accept such infinite regresses. However, the argument from contingency can be put in a form that avoids this defect: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) and Samuel Clarke (1675–1729) devised versions of the argument from contingency that do not require the denial of an infinite regress. In the debate, Copleston uses his version of Leibniz's argument — one of the most highly regarded cosmological arguments.

The teleological argument, also known as the argument from design, argues from the way parts of the world appear to fit and work together to the existence of a designer. The argument was used by Plato (c. 428–c. 347 BC), Aquinas (his "Fifth Way"), and especially by William Paley (1743–1805). It holds that the world is like a watch: just as the existence of a watch implies a watchmaker, the world implies a world-maker. For the layperson, this is perhaps the most popular argument for God's existence (Hick, 1971).

However, the argument's apparent simplicity is deceptive. As Rowe noted, "The fact about the world from which the Teleological Argument begins is vastly more complicated and therefore more difficult to establish by experience than is the fact from which the Cosmological Argument proceeds" (Smart, 505). The cosmological argument begins simply with noting the existence of contingent beings; the teleological argument begins with observing marvelously complex phenomena that seem too intricately fitted together to have arisen by accident or blind natural forces. Yet Darwin's theories of evolution and modern studies in ecology have done much to explain phenomena previously considered mysterious. Some also assert that the argument from design depends on the conclusions of the cosmological argument (Williamson, 196), which means a debater may end up arguing the cosmological case anyway. Furthermore, the argument rests on an analogy, and effective analogical arguments require the audience to accept the closeness and relevance of the comparison. Finally, the argument can even be turned against its proponent by pointing to the existence of evil in the world: if an all-good God designed the world, why would he allow evil? The problem of evil is generally regarded as the most important argument against theism (Mavrodes, 1995).

Of the five historically most important arguments — ontological, cosmological, teleological, moral, and from religious experience — Copleston chose not to use the ontological or teleological arguments for defensible reasons given the debate format. The decision to present three of the five historically most important arguments cannot be faulted. Of the three he did present, the cosmological is decidedly deductive in nature, while the argument from religious experience is inductive (Reese, 1980). The argument from morality is more difficult to classify; its thrust seems to be an appeal to the reasonableness of the proposition that God is the ground of value.

Conclusion

In reviewing the argument from religious experience, it has been noted that neither the theist nor the agnostic can establish the truth of his or her claims. Thus, both settle for arguing that their position is the preferred one. The situation seems to be much the same for the objectivist and the subjectivist in moral matters: neither can really prove the truth of his or her claims, and the question ultimately becomes which position is the more reasonable one to hold.