36 Arguments for the Existence of God (52 page)

1. There is empirical evidence that people survive after death: patients who flat-line during medical emergencies report an experience of floating over their bodies and seeing glimpses of a passage to another
   world, and can accurately report what happened around their bodies while they were dead to the world.
   

2. A person’s consciousness can survive after the death of his or her body (from 1).
   

3. Survival after death entails the existence of an immaterial soul.
   

4. The immaterial soul exists (from 2 and 3).
   

5. If an immaterial soul exists, then God must exist (from Premise 12 in The Argument from the Hard Problem of Consciousness).
   

6. God exists.
   

FLAW
: Premise 5 is vulnerable to the same criticisms that were leveled against Premise 12 in The Argument from the Hard Problem of Consciousness. Existence after death no more implies God’s existence than our existence before death does.

COMMENT
: Many, of course, would dispute Premise 1. The experiences of people near death, such as auras and out-of-body experiences, could be hallucinations resulting from oxygen deprivation in the brain. In addition, miraculous resurrections after total brain death, and accurate reports of conversations and events that took place while the brain was not functioning, have never been scientifically documented, and are informal, secondhand examples of testimony of miracles. They are thus vulnerable to the same flaws pointed out in The Argument from Miracles. But the argument is fatally flawed even if Premise 1 is granted.

1. I cannot conceive of my own annihilation: as soon as I start to think about what it would be like not to exist, I am thinking, which implies that I would exist (as in Descartes’s
   Cogito ergo sum)
   , which implies that I would not be thinking about what it is like not to exist.
   

2. My annihilation is inconceivable (from 1).
   

3. What cannot be conceived, cannot be.
   

4. I cannot be annihilated (from 2 and 3).
   

5. I survive after my death (from 4).
   

   The argument now proceeds as in The Argument from Survival After Death, only substituting “I” for “people,” until we get to:
   

6. God exists.
   

FLAW
1: Premise 2 confuses
psychological
inconceivability with
logical
inconceivability. The sense in which I can’t conceive of my own annihilation is like the sense in which I can’t conceive that those whom I love may betray me—a failure of the imagination, not an impossible state of affairs. Thus Premise 2 ought to read “My annihilation is inconceivable
to me,”
which is a fact about what my brain can conceive, not a fact about what exists.

FLAW
2: Same as Flaw 3 from The Argument from the Survival of Death.

COMMENT
: Though logically unsound, this is among the most powerful
psychological
impulses to believe in a soul, and an afterlife, and God. It genuinely is difficult—not to speak of disheartening—to conceive of oneself not existing!

1. There exist objective moral truths. (Slavery and torture and genocide are not just distasteful to us, but are actually wrong.)
   

2. These objective moral truths are not grounded in the way the world
   is
   but, rather, in the way the world
   ought to be
   . (Consider: should white supremacists succeed, taking over the world and eliminating all who don’t meet their criteria for being existence-worthy, their ideology still would be morally wrong. It would be true, in this hideous counterfactual, that the world ought not to be the way that they have made it.)
   

3. The world itself—the way it is, the laws of science that explain why it is that way—cannot account for the way the world ought to be.
   

4. The only way to account for morality is that God established morality (from 2 and 3).
   

5. God exists.
   

FLAW
1: The major flaw of this argument is revealed in a powerful argument that Plato made famous in the
Euthyphro
. Reference to God does not help in the least to ground the objective truth of morality. The question is, why did God choose the moral rules he did? Did he have a reason justifying his choice that, say, giving alms to the poor is good, whereas genocide is wrong? Either he had a good reason or he didn’t. If he did, then
his
reasons, whatever they are, can provide the grounding for moral truths for
us
, and God himself is redundant. And if he didn’t have a good reason, then his choices are arbitrary—he could just as easily have gone the other way, making charity bad and genocide good—and we would have no reason to take his choices seriously. According to the
Euthyphro
argument, then, The Argument from Moral Truth is another example of the Fallacy of Passing the Buck. The hard work of moral philosophy consists in grounding morality in some version of the Golden Rule: that I cannot be committed to my own interests’ mattering in a way that yours do not just because I am me and you are not.

FLAW
2: Premise 4 is belied by the history of religion, which shows that the God from which people draw their morality (for example, the God of the Bible and the Koran) did not establish what we now recognize to be morality at all. The God of the Old Testament commanded people to keep slaves, slay their enemies, execute blasphemers and homosexuals, and commit many other heinous acts. Of course, our interpretation of which aspects of biblical morality to take seriously has grown more sophisticated over time, and we read the Bible selectively and often metaphorically. But that is just the point: we must be consulting some standards of morality that do
not
come from God in order to judge which aspects of God’s word to take literally and which aspects to ignore.

COMMENT
: Some would question the first premise, and regard its assertion as a flaw of this argument. Slavery and torture and genocide are wrong by
our
lights, they would argue, and conflict with certain values we hold dear, such as freedom and happiness. But those are just subjective values, and it is obscure to say that statements that are consistent with those values are objectively true in the same way that mathematical or scientific statements can be true. But the argument is fatally flawed even if Premise 1 is granted.

1. People often act altruistically—namely, against their interests. They help others, at a cost to themselves, out of empathy, fairness, decency, and integrity.
   

2. Natural selection can never favor true altruism, because genes for selfishness will always out-compete genes for altruism (recall that altruism, by definition, exacts a cost to the actor).
   

3. Only a force acting outside of natural selection and intending for us to be moral could account for our ability to act altruistically (from 2).
   

4. God is the only force outside of natural selection that could intend us to be moral.
   

5. God must have implanted the moral instinct within us (from 3 and 4).
   

6. God exists.
   

FLAW
1: Theories of the evolution of altruism by natural selection have been around for decades and are now widely supported by many kinds of evidence. A gene for being kind to one’s kin, even if it hurts the person doing the favor, can be favored by evolution, because that gene would be helping a copy of
itself
that is shared by the kin. And a gene for conferring a large benefit to a non-relative at a cost to oneself can evolve if the favor-doer is the beneficiary of a return favor at a later time. Both parties are better off, in the long run, from the exchange of favors.

Some defenders of religion do not consider these theories to be legitimate explanations of altruism, because a tendency to favor one’s kin, or to trade favors, is ultimately just a form of selfishness for one’s genes, rather than true altruism. But this is a confusion of the original phenomenon. We are trying to explain why people are sometimes altruistic, not why genes are altruistic. (We have no reason to believe that genes are ever altruistic in the first place!) Also, in a species with language— namely, humans—committed altruists develop a reputation for being altruistic, and thereby win more friends, allies, and trading partners. This can give rise to selection for true, committed, altruism, not just the tit-for-tat exchange of favors.

FLAW
2: We have evolved higher mental faculties, such as self-reflection and logic, that allow us to reason about the world, to persuade other people to form alliances with us, to learn from our mistakes, and to achieve other feats of reason. Those same faculties, when they are honed through debate, reason, and knowledge, can allow us to step outside ourselves, learn about other people’s points of view, and act in a way that we can justify as maximizing everyone’s well-being. We are capable of moral reasoning because we are capable of reasoning in general.

FLAW
3: In some versions of The Argument from Altruism, God succeeds in getting people to act altruistically because he promises them a divine reward and threatens them with divine retribution. People behave altruistically to gain a reward or avoid a punishment in the life to come. This argument is self-contradictory It aims to explain how people act without regard to their self-interest, but then assumes that there could be no motive for acting altruistically other than self-interest.

1. Having
   free will
   means having the freedom to choose our actions, rather than having them determined by some prior cause.
   

2. If we don’t have free will, then we are not agents, for then we are not
   really
   acting
   , but, rather, we’re being acted
   upon
   . (That’s why we don’t punish people for involuntary actions—such as a teller who hands money to a bank robber at gunpoint, or a driver who injures a pedestrian after a defective tire blows out.)
   

3. To be a moral agent means to be held morally responsible for what one does.
   

4. If we can’t be held morally responsible for anything we do, then the very idea of morality is meaningless.
   

5. Morality is not meaningless.
   

6. We have free will (from 2–5).
   

7. We, as moral agents, are not subject to the laws of nature—in particular, the neural events in a genetically and environmentally determined brain (from 1 and 6).
   

8. Only a being who is apart from the laws of nature and partakes of the moral sphere could explain our being moral agents (from 7).
   

9. Only God is a being who is apart from the laws of nature and partakes of the moral sphere.
   

10. Only God can explain our moral agency (from 8 and 9).
    

11. God exists.
    

FLAW
1: This argument, in order to lead to God, must ignore the paradoxical Fork of Free Will. Either my actions are predictable (from my genes, my upbringing, my brain state, my current situation, and so on), or they are not. If they are predictable, then there is no reason to deny that they are caused, and we would not have free will. So, if we are to be free, our actions must be unpredictable—in other words, random. But if our behavior is random, then in what sense can it be attributable to us at all? If it really is a random event when I give the infirm man my seat in the subway, then in what sense is it
me
to whom this good deed should be attributed? If the action isn’t caused by my psychological states, which are themselves caused by other states, then in what way is it really
my
action? And what good would it do to insist on moral responsibility if our choices are random, and cannot be predicted from prior events (such as growing up in a society that holds people responsible)? This leads us back to the conclusion that we, as moral agents,
must
be parts of the natural world— the very negation of Premise 7.

FLAW
2: Premise 10 is an example of the Fallacy of Using One Mystery to Explain Another. It expresses, rather than dispels, the confusion we feel when faced with the Fork of Free Will. The paradox has not been clarified in the least by introducing God into the analysis.

COMMENT
: Free will is yet another quandary that takes us to the edge of our human capacity for understanding. The concept is baffling, because our moral agency seems to demand both that our actions be determined, and also that they not be determined.

1. If there is no purpose to a person’s life, then that person’s life is pointless.
   

2. Human life cannot be pointless.
   

3. Each human life has a purpose (from 1 and 2).
   

4. The purpose of each individual person’s life must derive from the overall purpose of existence.
   

5. There is an overall purpose of existence (from 3 and 4).
   

6. Only a being who understands the overall purpose of existence could create each person according to the purpose that person is meant to fulfill.
   

7. Only God could understand the overall purpose of creation.
   

8. There can be a point to human existence only if God exists (from 6 and 7).
   

9. God exists.
   

FLAW
1: The first premise rests on a confusion between the purpose of an action and the purpose of a life. It is human activities that have purposes—or don’t. We study for the purpose of educating and supporting ourselves. We eat right and exercise for the purpose of being healthy. We warn children not to accept rides with strangers for the purpose of keeping them safe. We donate to charity for the purpose of helping the poor (just as we would want someone to help us if we were poor). The
notion of a person’s entire
life
serving a purpose, above and beyond the purpose of all the person’s choices, is obscure. Might it mean the purpose for which the person was born? That implies that some goal-seeking agent decided to bring our lives into being to serve some purpose. Then who is that goal-seeking agent? Parents often purposively have children, but we wouldn’t want to see a parent’s wishes as the purpose of the child’s life. If the goal-seeking agent is God, the argument becomes circular: we make sense of the notion of “the purpose of a life” by stipulating that the purpose is whatever God had in mind when he created us, but then argue for the existence of God because he is the only one who could have designed us with a purpose in mind.