Arguing God's Existence | Episode 106 | Closer To Truth

I've been obsessed with God in the past. Lady, you knew to argue God's existence. I hear so much God talk. I see so much God conflict between religions, within religions, religions versus governments, believers versus non-believers. God-related books are bestsellers, whether addressed to Christians or to atheists. These polemical missiles target their own markets, preach to their own converted. I'd like all sides to listen to the same arguments, pro and con. Does God exist? I'm Robert Lawrence Kuhn, and this is my journey to try to find out. I start with the Reverend Keith Ward, former Regis Professor of Divinity at Oxford, priest in the Church of England, and a leading philosopher-theologian. Keith, people today talk about the evil in the world, the evil of religion, the hiddenness of God, a whole panoply of reasons why there isn't and shouldn't be a God. How do you see that? I think there's partly a misunderstanding of God. It's easy to find views of God which are morally abhorrent. For example, I would think that a God who sends the majority of the world's population to hell forever is morally abhorrent, and I think there shouldn't be such a God, and I think there isn't such a God. So you've got to discriminate between religious views. But if you think, as Christians are supposed to think, and I think Jews and Muslims are supposed to think too, that God is ultimately a God of mercy and a God of forgiveness and a God even of love, positive concern for the well-being of everything God has created, then I don't see how that could be thought of as morally objectionable. At least on the moral point of view, it would be good if there was such a God. But the argument is there isn't. The more we discover about science and the way things work, the more we explain things that used to have to be explained by a God of these gaps, which we don't need anymore. Scientists would say all sorts of things, of course, and there are some scientists who would say what you have just said. And I think there's a real question to ask about, well, by strictly scientific methods, would you expect to discover anything about God? So I'm not impressed by the argument that God is superfluous to science. It's like saying God is superfluous to car mechanics. I mean, God is, yes. But there might be questions which might be relevant. They're not strictly scientific questions. They're questions of value, really. Not about questions of scientifically ascertainable fact. So the fact that God is scientifically superfluous is not, to me, an objection. It's an obvious fact. Keith argues for God as a believer who is a philosopher. I'd like to hear how a believer who is a scientist argues about God. I go to Harvard to meet Owen Gingrich, emeritus professor of astronomy and the history of science. Owen is a leading expert on Copernicus's epic-making book on the revolutions of the heavenly spheres, which he is delighted to show me. This was a popular almanac, which went through repeated editions in the 16th century. It happened to have the first English translation of part of Copernicus's book in it. Owen believes in God. How does he integrate his science with his religion? Owen, how can you advise me to begin to address this question about God and the possible existence? Well, first off, I don't think science can give any proofs for the existence of God or for the non-existence of God. These issues are deep ones. They're metaphysical. They're related to the entire framework in which the universe itself sits. If you think of God as not only creator, but sustainer of the universe, then this framework itself would not exist if it were not for God's ongoing action. So what I hear from this is that if I want to think about God, I'm limiting God by thinking of God only as a creator. I would say that is a very important theological underpinning. But if we take seriously the statement in the first chapter of Genesis that God created mankind, humankind, in his own image and ask what that means, I would say it must have something to do with creativity itself, with self-consciousness, and with conscience. I look at big issues around the time of Galileo where a proof text was used against the Copernican heliocentric system. Psalm 104, the Lord God laid the foundation of the earth that it not be moved forever. I've asked my students, can they think of an interpretation of that verse? And to my astonishment, they were baffled. But Kepler had it right. He said that verse is talking about the stability of the earth as a home for humankind. It is a place that is satisfactory for life to inhabit. It has nothing to do with celestial mechanics. But I would think that in order to understand God, one has to understand God with a human vocabulary, even though that is so foreign to what God may be like. I feel the power of Owen's God as the sustainer of the universe, which is even more fundamental than as its creator. I'd like to talk to someone whose mission in life is to argue for God's existence. William Lane Craig is my man. With doctorates in philosophy and theology, he debates atheists wherever he finds them. Bill, can the existence of God be demonstrated? Well, it all depends on what you mean, obviously, by demonstrated. I don't think there's a mathematically certain proof of God's existence that will compel belief. But I do think that there are good arguments for God's existence. That is to say, I think there are arguments that God exists that have true premises that are more plausible than their opposites and that logically imply the conclusion that there is a God. So I think there are good reasons to believe that God exists. What are some of these reasons and how would you follow the argument? Let me just list them without explaining them. One would be, I think, that God is the best explanation for why anything at all exists rather than nothing. Another one would be that God is the best explanation for the origin of the universe at a point in the finite past. Another would be that God is the best explanation for the fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life. Another would be that God is the best explanation for the existence of objective moral values and duties in the world. I would also argue that God is the best explanation for the historical facts surrounding the person of Jesus of Nazareth, particularly his radical personal claims, his miracles, and his resurrection from the dead. There's the famous teleological argument which would say that the universe exhibits a complexity in its structure that cannot be attributed plausibly to either chance or to physical necessity and that therefore this is best explained by saying it's the product of intelligent design. I would also think that the very concept of God, once it's properly understood, entails that God exists such that it's metaphysically impossible for God not to exist. And then finally I would say that it's possible to have a personal relationship with God and to know God personally and that latter isn't really an argument for God's existence, it's the claim that you can know God exists wholly apart from arguments simply by having a personal and intimate relationship with God the creator. And if you integrate all of these together, how would you describe the level of confidence that someone should have having all of that together? I think it provides a good cumulative case that would be convincing in a court of law, for example, that it makes the existence of God more probable than not. I like Bill's systematic approach to God's existence. Laying out each argument with precision, if not with proof. I'm surrounded by theists. I need to cross over to the other side. How does an atheist argue about God? Walter Sinod Armstrong, professor of philosophy and legal studies at Dartmouth, does not believe in God. Walter, I, like many people, would love to know whether God exists. If I were beginning to think about this question and I came to you as a philosopher or as a mentor, how would you advise me to even begin to think about this subject? Well, I think you should think about it in the same way that you think about similar questions in other areas. If you want to know whether something exists, you engage in a certain type of inquiry. If you want to know whether a certain animal exists, you go and try to take pictures of it. If you want to know whether ghosts exist, you engage in certain types of explorations. You would talk to people who say they experience ghosts and see whether their stories are coherent. Look at the circumstances under which they claim to experience ghosts and ask yourself, are those circumstances under which people's beliefs are reliable or unreliable? Seems to me that you should approach the question of the existence of God in the same way that you approach all these other questions of the existence of other types of creatures or entities. My initial reaction is that's exactly what I would not do. And here's why. Because as I define God, and it's not necessarily in an Abrahamic Western tradition, but in the broadest sense, by the very definition, it is therefore different than everything else I know. It's different than all the abstract mathematics. It's different than the quantum physics. It is a potential cause of everything that exists. And so by that characteristic, I think that I can't use the same kinds of inquiry that I would use for everything else. That's my problem. Well, then what kind of inquiry are you going to use? That's why I'm coming to you. If you don't use your senses and you don't use the testimony of other people, then you can try to use arguments a priori, as they say, prior to experience, like mathematical arguments, and see whether those work because you want to know whether a certain, whether imaginary numbers really exist, or something of that sort. You need some kind of evidence. If you don't have anything of that sort, you ought to at least suspend belief and probably deny that the thing exists if you think that there should be some reason if it did exist, right? That may be the conclusion that we ultimately come to, and I certainly do not want to believe in God based on fallacious arguments. I mean, that's something that scares me because I know I'd like to do it, and I absolutely want to avoid fooling myself. Well, then let me give you some advice. People are not good at finding the fallacies in their own arguments. If you want to know whether your arguments have fallacies in them, you should talk to other people, and you should listen to other people when they point out what they think are the problems in your arguments. Yeah, okay. I sometimes feel that I like all of the arguments on the critical side that is arguments for the non-existence of God, except at the end of the day, I feel that the— I still have a feeling that God exists, even though I sort of agree with all the arguments against it. Is that irrational? Now we're back to ghosts. You've got all these arguments against ghosts. You've got no good reason for ghosts. But I don't believe in ghosts. I do potentially believe in God. If your sister— I don't know if you have a sister— but if your sister came to you and said, I feel that there's a ghost in my attic. I have no reason to believe in this ghost. I have lots of reasons to deny the existence of this ghost, but I feel that there's a ghost in my attic. You wouldn't think that she was holding that belief in a rational way, or that she should hold that belief. No, I wouldn't. Right. You'd feel sorry for her. And that's the way atheists, I think, often view people who believe in God. They have this feeling they've just got no reason. I think Walter feels sorry for me. I don't mind, but I'm still not convinced that arguments about God are like arguments about anything else. I need Alvin Plantinger, one of the most distinguished philosophers of the Christian religion. If anyone understands arguments about God, it's Al. We meet at Notre Dame. Alvin, you have famously rejected the need of argument to deal with the existence of God. Yet, at the same time, you've joined in the fray by throwing up lots of different possible arguments for the existence of God. What are some of them? First of all, I do really think one doesn't need arguments in order to be perfectly rational, reasonable, sensible, justified, up-to-date, okay intellectually in believing in God. But there still could be lots of arguments for the existence of God. Let me just give you an example of a kind of peculiar argument along these lines, say the set of the natural numbers or some very diverse set of elements from the set of real numbers. No human being could think all those things together, have them before their minds at one time. So if such really are collections that have to be collected in that fashion, there would have to be some supermind, something like God in order to collect them. What about epistemological kinds of arguments? So think about what knowledge is. I would say we could use the term warrant to denote whatever it is that when you add it to true belief, the result is knowledge. A belief has warrant for me provided it's produced by cognitive faculties, memory, perception, induction and the like that are functioning properly, not subject to any dysfunction or malfunction, in the sort of environment for which they were designed by God or evolution and according to a design plan that's successfully aimed at truth. But what I'm interested in here just is the notion of proper function. I think proper function is essential to the idea of warrant. And I think proper function can't be explained in naturalistic terms. People have tried to give an explanation in terms of evolution, for example, so that you're functioning properly when you're functioning in a way which was adaptive for your ancestors or something. Well, I don't have the time here to explain why none of this works, but none of it works. The basic idea of proper function is that of something which is designed to work a certain way and then it functions properly when it works that way. And as it seems to me, you can't give an explanation of proper function in naturalistic terms. You can only do it in terms of a creator or designer of human beings. How about some interesting arguments you've used that talks about flavors and colors, the Mozart argument and some of the richness of our world. Do you think those are really demonstrations of God's existence? I think it'd be much too strong to say that they are demonstrations. But the fact that there are people like Mozart that can create beauty of absolutely stunning proportions, this seems to me to fit in much better in a theistic universe and one which God is in control, God who is himself beautiful beyond compare. Who appreciates beauty, who makes us able also to appreciate it, makes us able also to make beautiful things and the like. That fits in vastly better our being like that than say, our being in a naturalistic universe where we just happen to come out this way because evolution crafted us in this fashion. I mean, from that point of view, it's hard to think that either morality or beauty are real, that there really is such a thing as morality or that there really is such a thing as what's genuinely beautiful. But from a theistic perspective, all that makes perfect sense. Though Al assures me it's okay to believe in God without arguments, he does enjoy discussing some of his favorites like proper function, morality and beauty. But I cannot or cannot yet share Al's convictions. And there are competing explanations for existence. Confident or confused, I am always delighted turning to Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate in physics who thinks deeply about fundamental questions. While Steve does not believe in God, a conclusion with which I may not agree, there is no one to whom I would rather listen. Steve, let's discuss the boundaries of science, particularly in that religion would purport to deliver what science cannot. Well, there are certainly things science cannot deliver. Science has nothing to say about what man ought to do. It can tell you what will happen if you do certain things and you may then decide whether that's a good thing or not. But science can't tell you whether that's a good thing. In a sense, religion can't either, which may sound a little surprising because that's what religion to many eyes is supposed to. But religion is partly a body of statements of fact that there is a creator, that there is an afterlife perhaps, that there are certain ways of getting to the good side of the afterlife. It's still your choice whether those are good commands. And so religion doesn't relieve you from the moral choice any more than science does. It's notorious that science does. I don't think religion does either. There's another side to what religion purports to do, and that says that science in its explanatory powers, as remarkable as they are, will ultimately face a wall. There'll be an existence of something beyond which they cannot explain. And only religion then can come in and explain that theory to its ultimate extent, that science ends and religion begins. I think the religious people who say that are right about science and wrong about religion. It is true that science will hit a wall if we're lucky. If we get to a final theory, which is clearly as far as we can go, there will always be a remaining question, why this? And it may be answered that it is only this kind of theory that is mathematically consistent and allows a universe rich enough to have people in it that could ask the question. But you'll still ask, well, why should there be people? There's an irreducible mystery. I grant that. But if you're religious, it doesn't remove the mystery. I mean, a religious person who says that he or she believes in God might be asked, well, what is God like? And if he or she says, I have no idea. God is completely unknown to me. Well, then, you know, what does it mean? It's just a three-letter word. Belief in God has no content, whatever. If, on the other hand, they come forth and say, well, God is the creator. God is all-powerful. God is merciful. God is vengeful. Whatever. God is humorous. Then they're making a statement which raises the question, why that? Why is God that way rather than some other way? If you believe that God is merciful but will punish us all who don't believe in him and the last judgment, then you have to say, well, why is God that way? Now, I'm not saying that that proves that the religious person is wrong. I mean, maybe God is that way. Maybe there is such a God. But the religious person is left with a mystery. Which is no less than the mystery with which science leaves us. Why is that the way it is? The same irreducible mystery. Why is that the way it is? About God's existence, I find one fact beyond dispute. Really smart folks hold radically opposite views. Both sides, God, no God, cite the world as evidence. Believers add personal experience of God which non-believers dismiss as illusion, delusion, or worse. Neither side has a knockdown proof. God's existence or non-existence is not deducible by logic. Instead, believers assert that God is the inference to the best explanation. While non-believers counter that postulating God just multiplies entities and adds complexity without explanatory gain. I'm pleased that the existence of God is not determined by human vote. Majority opinion does not get us closer to truth. For complete interviews and for further information, please visit closertotruth.com