Theism vs. Atheism: Faith, Reason, and the Existence of God

Faith and Understanding as Foundations for Theism

When humans consider the existence of God, they tend to look outward for evidence and inward for understanding. Humans must process both types of information through a filter based on an unwarranted confidence in human reasoning — or, failing that, they must fall back on faith. The nature of faith may perhaps be characterized by an absence of definitive criteria other than the absolutes sometimes associated with it. Consider the parameter suggested by the phrase: "Oh, ye of little faith" (Matthew 8:26). A believer can be described as having faith along a continuum: great faith, little faith, no faith. However, if-then clauses are not attached to faith. It is generally not regarded as acceptable to claim that one will have faith if something else — whatever that concept of "else" may be — is first satisfied.

To qualify faith in this way transforms belief into bargaining: a person may promise to believe — to have sufficient faith, going forward, to believe in God — if only prayers are answered. By contrast, belief grounded in human understanding is fraught with if-then qualifications. Accordingly, theism — the belief in the existence of God — can be defended from both a position of faith and a position of understanding.

Anselm and Gaunilo: Conceptualization vs. Evidence

St. Anselm argued that "it is one thing for an object to be in the understanding, and another to understand that the object exists" (St. Anselm, n.d.). Rather than conflate conceptualization — captured by "the word signifying it is conceived" — with the phenomenon in which "the thing itself is understood," St. Anselm determined that a lexicon may provide a definition but does not necessarily evoke understanding. True understanding, according to his argument, is dependent upon the reality of the thing — the true existence of what is conceptualized. St. Anselm uses the word conceived, which may be taken to suggest a coming into being rather than a mere perception of what might be.

St. Anselm's assertions are derived from his faith, while Gaunilo argues from a position of evidence, insisting that "the hypothetical excellence of this island exists as a real and indubitable fact, and in no wise as any unreal object, or one whose existence is uncertain, in my understanding" (Gaunilo, n.d.). The overarching difficulty between the two thinkers is that they argue from different philosophical positions — not unlike the sort of argument one would hear between scientists approaching a problem from an empirical, positivist perspective and those approaching it from a naturalistic, phenomenological perspective. While both may explore and analyze the same problem, the fundamental tenets of their investigations differ widely, such that different sets of data are produced and separate conclusions may be drawn. One scientist is driven to prove; the other to surmise.

Paley's Watchmaker and the Limits of Human Knowledge

William Paley (1802) argues that people try to make too much out of the evidence that is right in front of them, dissecting it according to what they know and understand. In his analogy of the watch and the watchmaker, Paley (1802) illustrates a way of orienting to physical matter that fosters pro forma acceptance — which may be all that humans can accomplish when it comes to examining evidence that God exists. Paley asserted that "the consciousness of knowing little need not beget a distrust of that which he does know" (1802, p. 86). Having reasoned that people can only know a little about the watchmaker, Paley expressed the belief that it is acceptable not to understand why there were irregularities in the watch — why "the watch sometimes went wrong, or that it seldom went exactly right" (Paley, 1802, p. 85).

Yet Aikin and Talisse (2011) would impute malice to the watchmaker, or claim the watchmaker exposed indifference toward the malfunctioning of an item he specifically designed and constructed. Accepting malice or indifference as attributes native to God establishes a conundrum — unless the Aikin and Talisse (2011) proposition is accepted as the only feasible reason for a malfunctioning world: that a broken world is but an artifact of the existence of evil, and that it is unrelated to the existence or non-existence of God.

Aikin and Talisse (2011) assert that humans should seek to reconcile the nature of God and man, and of nature in creation. And when they fail at this objective — as Aikin and Talisse (2011) argue they must — then the existence of God is deemed irrational. Rather, the argument presented by Aikin and Talisse (2011) is a manifestation of the limits of human understanding. Perhaps the nature of God and the natural world are no more reconcilable than, say, a watchmaker prone to weekends lost to drunkenness fits with the perfect timepiece he builds during the week. Or, taking the opposite position, the imperfect timepiece is less than what the talented watchmaker is capable of constructing, and perhaps he has built other timepieces that are superior. Yet the person who purchases the imperfect timepiece is not likely to be aware of the more perfect watches, and so he surmises that the watchmaker is not as skilled as he professes or as others in the community claim.

But is the measure of the watchmaker's skill not pegged to the perception of the owner of the watch? The man who owns a watch that works well will argue that the watchmaker is indeed a skilled artisan and a conscientious man. The man whose watch does not keep time will tell anyone who will listen that the watchmaker is unskilled, that he takes good money for bad work, and that he does not care whether the watches he makes serve his customers well. Both customers are bound to experience their watch ownership through their own filters — and they are quick to make attributions based on the quality of the watch they have purchased.

References

Aikin, S. F., & Talisse, R. B. (2011). Reasonable atheism: A moral case for respectful disbelief. Prometheus Books.

King James Bible. Matthew 8:26.

Paley, W. (1802). The watch and the watchmaker, Chapter II.7. In Natural theology, or evidences of the existence and attributes of the deity collected from the appearances of nature (pp. 84–86).

Grube, G. M. A., & Cooper, J. M. (2002). Plato: Five dialogues. Hackett.

St. Anselm. (n.d.). St. Anselm and Gaunilo: The ontological argument, Chapter 11.9.

St. Anselm. (n.d.). Proslogium.

St. Anselm. (n.d.). In behalf of the fool.

St. Anselm. (n.d.). Apologetic.