The GOD Delusion (12 page)

3

ARGUMENTS
FOR GOD'S EXISTENCE

A
professorship of theology should have no place in our institution.

—
THOMAS JEFFERSON

Arguments
for the existence of God have been codified for centuries by
theologians, and supplemented by others, including purveyors of
misconceived 'common sense'.

The
five 'proofs' asserted by Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century
don't prove anything, and are easily - though I hesitate to say so,
given his eminence - exposed as vacuous. The first three are just
different ways of saying the same thing, and they can be considered
together. All involve an infinite regress - the answer to a question
raises a prior question, and so on
ad infinitum.

1. 
The Unmoved Mover.
Nothing moves without a prior
mover. This leads us to a regress, from which the only escape is God.
Something had to make the first move, and that something we call God.

2. 
The Uncaused Cause.
Nothing is caused by itself.
Every effect has a prior cause, and again we are pushed back into
regress. This has to be terminated by a first cause, which we call God.

3. 
The Cosntological Argument.
There must have been a
time when no physical things existed. But, since physical things exist
now, there must have been something non-physical to bring them into
existence, and that something we call God.

All
three of these arguments rely upon the idea of a regress and invoke God
to terminate it. They make the entirely unwarranted assumption that God
himself is immune to the regress. Even if we allow the dubious luxury
of arbitrarily conjuring up a terminator to an infinite regress and
giving it a name, simply because we need one, there is absolutely no
reason to endow that terminator with any of the properties normally
ascribed to God: omnipotence, omniscience, goodness, creativity of
design, to say nothing of such human attributes as listening to
prayers, forgiving sins and reading innermost thoughts. Incidentally,
it has not escaped the notice of logicians
that omniscience and omnipotence are mutually incompatible. If God is
omniscient, he must already know how he is going to intervene to change
the course of history using his omnipotence. But that means he can't
change his mind about his intervention, which means he is not
omnipotent. Karen Owens has captured this witty little paradox in
equally engaging verse:

Can
omniscient God, who 

Knows the future,
find 

The omnipotence
to 

Change
His future mind?

To
return to the infinite regress and the futility of invoking God to
terminate it, it is more parsimonious to conjure up, say, a 'big bang
singularity', or some other physical concept as yet unknown. Calling it
God is at best unhelpful and at worst perniciously misleading. Edward
Lear's Nonsense Recipe for Crumboblious Cutlets invites us to 'Procure
some strips of beef, and having cut them into the smallest possible
pieces, proceed to cut them still smaller, eight or perhaps nine
times.' Some regresses do reach a natural terminator. Scientists used
to wonder what would happen if you could dissect, say, gold into the
smallest possible pieces. Why shouldn't you cut one of those pieces in
half and produce an even smaller smidgen of gold? The regress in this
case is decisively terminated by the atom. The smallest possible piece
of gold is a nucleus consisting of exactly seventy-nine protons and a
slightly larger number of neutrons, attended by a swarm of seventy-nine
electrons. If you 'cut' gold any further than the level of the single
atom, whatever else you get it is not gold. The atom provides a natural
terminator to the Crumboblious Cutlets type of regress. It is by no
means clear that God provides a natural terminator to the regresses of
Aquinas. That's putting it mildly, as we shall see later. Let's move on
down Aquinas' list.

4.
The
Argument from Degree.
We notice that things in the world
differ. There are degrees of, say, goodness or perfection. But we judge
these degrees only by comparison with a maximum. Humans can be both
good and bad, so the maximum goodness cannot
rest in us. Therefore there must be some other maximum to set the
standard for perfection, and we call that maximum God.

That's
an argument? You might as well say, people vary in smelli-ness but we
can make the comparison only by reference to a perfect maximum of
conceivable smelliness. Therefore there must exist a pre-eminently
peerless stinker, and we call him God. Or substitute any dimension of
comparison you like, and derive an equivalently fatuous conclusion.

5.
The
Teleological Argument,
or
Argument from Design.
Things
in the world, especially living things, look as though they have been
designed. Nothing that we know looks designed unless it is designed.
Therefore there must have been a designer, and we call him God.*
Aquinas himself used the analogy of an arrow moving towards a target,
but a modern heat-seeking anti-aircraft missile would have suited his
purpose better.

The
argument from design is the only one still in regular use today, and it
still sounds to many like the ultimate knockdown argument. The young
Darwin was impressed by it when, as a Cambridge undergraduate, he read
it in William Paley's
Natural Theology.
Unfortunately
for Paley, the mature Darwin blew it out of the water. There has
probably never been a more devastating rout of popular belief by clever
reasoning than Charles Darwin's destruction of the argument from
design. It was so unexpected. Thanks to Darwin, it is no longer true to
say that nothing that we know looks designed unless it is designed.
Evolution by natural selection produces an excellent simulacrum of
design, mounting prodigious heights of complexity and elegance. And
among these eminences of pseudo-design are nervous systems which -
among their more modest accomplishments - manifest goal-seeking
behaviour that, even in a tiny insect, resembles a sophisticated
heat-seeking missile more than a simple arrow on target. I shall return
to the argument from design in Chapter 4.

* I
cannot help being reminded of the immortal syllogism that was smuggled
into a Euclidean proof by a schoolfriend, when we were studying
geometry together: 'Triangle ABC looks isosceles. Therefore . . .'

Arguments
for God's existence fall into two main categories, the
a
priori
and the
a posteriori.
Thomas
Aquinas' five are
a posteriori
arguments, relying
upon inspection of the world. The most famous of the
a priori
arguments, those that rely upon pure armchair ratiocination,
is the
ontological argument,
proposed by St Anselm
of Canterbury in 1078 and restated in different forms by numerous
philosophers ever since. An odd aspect of Anselm's argument is that it
was originally addressed not to humans but to God himself, in the form
of a prayer (you'd think that any entity capable of listening to a
prayer would need no convincing of his own existence).

It
is possible to conceive, Anselm said, of a being than which nothing
greater can be conceived. Even an atheist can conceive of such a
superlative being, though he would deny its existence in the real
world. But, goes the argument, a being that doesn't exist in the real
world is, by that very fact, less than perfect. Therefore we have a
contradiction and, hey presto, God exists!

Let
me translate this infantile argument into the appropriate language,
which is the language of the playground:

'Bet
you I can prove God exists.'

'Bet
you can't.'

'Right
then, imagine the most perfect perfect
perfect
thing
possible.'

'Okay,
now what?'

'Now,
is that perfect perfect
perfect
thing real? Does
it exist?'

'No,
it's only in my mind.'

'But
if it was real it would be even more perfect, because a really really
perfect thing would have to be better than a silly old imaginary thing.
So I've proved that God exists. Nur Nurny Nur Nur. All atheists are
fools.'

I
had my childish wiseacre choose the word 'fools' advisedly. Anselm
himself quoted the first verse of Psalm 14, 'The fool hath said
in his heart, There is no God,' and he had the cheek to use the name
'fool' (Latin
insipiens)
for his hypothetical
atheist:

Hence,
even the fool is convinced that something exists in the understanding,
at least, than which nothing greater can be conceived. For, when he
hears of this, he understands it. And whatever is understood, exists in
the understanding. And assuredly that, than which nothing greater can
be conceived, cannot exist in the understanding alone. For, suppose it
exists in the understanding alone: then it can be conceived to exist in
reality; which is greater.

The
very idea that grand conclusions could follow from such logo-machist
trickery offends me aesthetically, so I must take care to refrain from
bandying words like 'fool'. Bertrand Russell (no fool) interestingly
said, 'It is easier to feel convinced that [the ontological argument]
must be fallacious than it is to find out precisely where the fallacy
lies.' Russell himself, as a young man, was briefly convinced by it:

I
remember the precise moment, one day in 1894, as I was walking along
Trinity Lane, when I saw in a flash (or thought I saw) that the
ontological argument is valid. I had gone out to buy a tin of tobacco;
on my way back, I suddenly threw it up in the air, and exclaimed as I
caught it: 'Great Scott, the ontological argument is sound.'

Why,
I wonder, didn't he say something like: 'Great Scott, the ontological
argument seems to be plausible. But isn't it too good to be true that a
grand truth about the cosmos should follow from a mere word game? I'd
better set to work to resolve what is perhaps a paradox like those of
Zeno.' The Greeks had a hard time seeing through Zeno's 'proof that
Achilles would never catch the tortoise.* But they had the sense not to
conclude that therefore Achilles
really would fail to catch the tortoise. Instead, they called it a
paradox and waited for later generations of mathematicians to explain
it (with, as it turned out, the theory of infinite series converging on
a limiting value). Russell himself, of course, was as well qualified as
anyone to understand why no tobacco tins should be thrown up in
celebration of Achilles' failure to catch the tortoise. Why didn't he
exercise the same caution over St Anselm? I suspect that he was an
exaggeratedly fair-minded atheist, over-eager to be disillusioned if
logic seemed to require it.* Or perhaps the answer lies in something
Russell himself wrote in 1946, long after he had rumbled the
ontological argument:

*
Zeno's paradox is too well known for the details to be promoted out of
a footnote. Achilles can run ten times as fast as the tortoise, so he
gives the animal, say, 100 yards' start. Achilles runs 100 yards, and
the tortoise is now 10 yards ahead. Achilles runs the 10 yards and the
tortoise is now 1 yard ahead. Achilles runs the 1 yard, and the
tortoise is still a tenth of a yard ahead . . . and so on
ad
infinitum,
so Achilles never catches the tortoise.

* We
might be seeing something similar today in the over-publicized
tergiversation of the philosopher Antony Flew, who announced in his old
age that he had been converted to belief in some sort of deity
(triggering a frenzy of eager repetition all around the Internet). On
the other hand, Russell was a great philosopher. Russell won the Nobel
Prize. Maybe Flew's alleged conversion will be rewarded with the
Templeton Prize. A first step in that direction is his ignominious
decision to accept, in 2006, the 'Phillip E. Johnson Award for Liberty
and Truth'. The first holder of the Phillip E. Johnson Award was
Phillip E. Johnson, the lawyer credited with founding the Intelligent
Design 'wedge strategy'. Flew will be the second holder. The awarding
university is BIOLA, the Bible Institute of Los Angeles. One can't help
wondering whether Flew realizes that he is being used. See Victor
Stenger, 'Flew's flawed science',
Free Inquiry
25:
2, 2005, 17-18; www.secularhumanism.org/index.php
?section=library&page=stenger_25_2.

The
real question is: Is there anything we can think of which, by the mere
fact that we can think of it, is shown to exist outside our thought?
Every philosopher would
like
to say yes, because a
philosopher's job is to find out things about the world by thinking
rather than observing. If yes is the right answer, there is a bridge
from pure thought to things. If not, not.

My
own feeling, to the contrary, would have been an automatic, deep
suspicion of any line of reasoning that reached such a significant
conclusion without feeding in a single piece of data from the real
world. Perhaps that indicates no more than that I am a scientist rather
than a philosopher. Philosophers down the centuries have indeed taken
the ontological argument seriously, both for and against. The atheist
philosopher J. L. Mackie gives a particularly clear
discussion in
The Miracle of Theism.
I mean it as
a compliment when I say that you could almost define a philosopher as
someone who won't take common sense for an answer.

The
most definitive refutations of the ontological argument are usually
attributed to the philosophers David Hume (1711-76) and Immanuel Kant
(1724-1804). Kant identified the trick card up Anselm's sleeve as his
slippery assumption that 'existence' is more 'perfect' than
non-existence. The American philosopher Norman Malcolm put it like
this: 'The doctrine that existence is a perfection is remarkably queer.
It makes sense and is true to say that my future house will be a better
one if it is insulated than if it is not insulated; but what could it
mean to say that it will be a better house if it exists than if it does
not?'
⁴⁶
Another philosopher, the Australian
Douglas Gasking, made the point with his ironic 'proof that God does
not
exist (Anselm's contemporary Gaunilo had suggested a somewhat
similar
reductio).