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Module/Week 7 Presentation: The Existence of God Transcript

Hello, I'm Kevin Smith. Welcome to another presentation in philosophy 201. I’d like to talk to you for just a few minutes about the existence of God. That's an enormous and infinite topic indeed, but I do want to highlight a few of the classical approaches to offering rational arguments for the existence of God. These can roughly fall into two categories: empirical and rational arguments. That is belonging to the empiricists in epistemology or the rationalists in epistemology. That’s why we covered epistemology first because it does have a bearing on how you approach proofs or arguments for God.

Let me say right up front, as we've said before in this course, that in philosophy of religion the use of proofs needs to be qualified. In one sense, can we prove God's existence in the psychological sense of “I can be adequately certain of it to stake my life on it? As a person in terms of commitment and faith?” Absolutely, but in strictly logical deductive or inductive terms it's best to qualify these proofs and call them arguments for the existence of God. Because when we say proof we may be setting ourselves up to expectations in someone else's minds where if we fail to convince them, then somehow God has failed or there's inadequate evidence for God. And so the better approach is: what is the best explanation for reality as far as we can know and observe it?

We can argue that God is the best ultimate explanation in comparison with other worldviews. And so, along those lines, some of the classical arguments for God are the cosmological argument, the teleological argument, the moral argument, and the ontological argument. I'm going to skip the last for now because it's really abstract and focus on the first three that I mentioned.

To begin with the cosmological argument. This is an empirical argument that begins with observation of the cosmos: the grand nature of cosmic existence itself. How did the cosmos originate? When we look at things like the expansion of the universe or the nature of time and its relation to space and matter. Can it tell us something about whether or not there was a beginning to the universe? Because if the universe is eternal some critics would use that as an argument that there's no need for a creator. Now it's actually possible to sustain a cosmological argument for God as the first cause without establishing that the universe has a beginning in time—we’ll see more about that in your readings.

But for the sake of this illustration video, I'm going to refer to a timeline and ask some questions about the nature of infinity and whether it's actually possible for an infinite amount of anything, including time to pass, by definition. So if we look at this rod perhaps as a timeline and we're at some point in time—whatever that point is. Now we're not asking how far it's going to go on yet. For this simple argument, we're simply asking, “Whether if we are at a point in time, that an amount of time has passed, is it possible that an infinite amount of time has passed?” That is that there was no beginning to the cosmos and the time spectrum, but rather, theoretically, it could stretch infinitely in this direction without a beginning.

Well mathematically, logically, one of the problems with that is: if we're at a certain given point in time and space now, and infinite means what we think it means: without limitation. Then is it possible for an infinite amount of time to have passed in order for us to be here? Because that's what would have had to happen, it seems logically, if the universe has no beginning. If it's eternal, then an infinite amount of time would have to pass. Can an infinite number be reached? By definition “No.”

So that's one of the arguments you might say in favor of believing that the timeline, cosmically, does have a beginning point in dimensional space. Whether you want to relate that to the Big Bang, cosmic theory, or something else; that there must be a beginning leads us to ask, “What caused that beginning?” Because by definition it can't be something within the cosmos—physical—if the cosmos has a beginning. It would have to be something above or transcending that timeline, transcending cosmic space, or the physical universe itself. A first cause outside of the cosmos that leads very naturally into an argument for something like God existing: a timeless, non-spatial, eternal being that caused time and space to begin. So that's one of many versions of the cosmological argument that could be played out in more detail, which you’ll read.

Another classical argument for God's existence, which is also empirically based—that is based on observation of nature—is the teleological or roughly design argument. And that's maybe a little conceptually simpler. We simply observe that around us in nature there are many things that have the apparent features of design. Whether at the large level of a tree, or a solar system in the way it works together, or at the microscopic, microbiological level of the cell and its engineering-like operations.

So also with ordinary objects by analogy: if I were a primitive person and I was walking along in the woods and I came across an object I had never seen and it's this object here. I really don't have any idea what it is it first. I might play with it and look at it and so forth and discover that it lights up if I push this button. I don't have to have seen it before or know personally who made it in able to reasonably infer that it seems to be artificed, that is it seems to be put together for design. I may not even understand exactly what the purpose of it is, but it has telos: purpose or design of some sort. It seems like there are many things in biological nature like that, and even at their astrophysical level like that; even if we don't fully understand them they do seem to strongly indicate design. So, what's the argument: where there is design there is an intelligent designer. If the cosmos as a whole has this attribute, property, or characteristic of apparent intelligent design, then it seems that there must be an intelligent designer outside the physical cosmos itself.

Another argument that I’ll mention briefly is the moral argument. That's more of a rationalist argument although it is experiential in a sense, empirical in that sense as well. When we contemplate our own inner moral experience, and notice now that our observation is inside instead of empirically outside nature. Looking at inner nature of human beings each of us tends to have an experience of something we might call conscience. Now, it's irrelevant at this point in the argument whether or not conscience works the same for everyone, whether or not your conscience operates or is quite as sensitive on some matters as mine or not. What matters is that if we all seem to have something like it and it can't be merely explained away as a biological survival mechanism—after all, classic Darwinian evolution is about the survival of the fittest not the survival of the kindest or most sacrificial. And so we often have these senses, inner senses if you will, that have a moral dimension to them: an oughtness. I sense that although I have failed to do some things, that I ought to have done them. And that is a conviction, which I feel bad. Or perhaps I feel good about doing something that seems like a duty even if it's counter instinctual to mere survival or advantageous outcomes.

Why do we have this conscious? Again naturalists will offer a number of potential objections, ultimately I think they fail and you'll read about some of those problems. But, if underneath all of this we can find that, despite our disagreement about particular moral laws—which ones are right or wrong—that whenever we dispute or argue about what is right or wrong, we are giving away the underlying agreement that we have that there's a difference between rightness and wrongness morally. Not merely effectiveness or advantageousness or results, but the rightness. We can disagree vigorously about a particular issue being right or wrong morally, but the fact that we do this, and we can’t get away from doing it, even more we call ourselves relativists. If someone wrongs us, all of a sudden we have a sense of justice that has been violated. Even if we disagree about what is just versus what is unjust, what do we agree on what can we not escape from? The idea of moral rightness being different than wrongness or evil.

So that is the underlying Moral Law, singular. And if there is a moral law does that suggest there is a moral law giver that transcends our diverse experiences and is an actual objective basis for morality itself. Even when we have personal difficulty grasping the fine tuning of that for ourselves and our issues. So those three classical arguments are not necessarily proofs in the mathematical sense for God and seem to be very strong rational arguments for God as the best explanation ultimately for our experience both of the outer world of observation and the inner world of human experience and relationships.