Rebecca Goldstein - 36 Arguments for the Existence of God

“That is my second prong,” Eighteen minutes have elapsed, and he has yet to affirm the resolution that God exists.

“But I haven’t said anything yet about God.” Aha! “I’ve waited for my third prong of attack to introduce Him. I should have convinced you by now that certain faiths are necessary for coherence, and I should have convinced you that among such faiths is that in our own purposefulness, our sense that our lives matter. You know, even someone who ends his life is taking that life seriously, so seriously that he can’t stand to live it. We just can’t inhabit our lives without taking them seriously.”

Cass could be projecting-he’s been known to project before-but he seems to sense a slightly more sympathetic note creeping into Fidley’s delivery as he swerves toward the existential.

“But how can an individual life acquire this seriousness? What can confer it? It requires something outside an individual’s life to make it matter, and that something must itself have agency and purpose. It must have intentionality, which means it must have a mind. And that is exactly what God is. The mind of God is the purposeful agency that confers purposefulness on each of us, even on Cass Seltzer.”

No, Cass had definitely been projecting.

“The faith in a God who loves each one of us, who cares about whether we each reach our full potential as human beings, is the very faith required for us to reach our full potential as human beings. The faith in a God who has made us in His image is the faith that confers worth on each of us. How else can mere human lives acquire transcendent meaning if not through a transcendent agency?

“How am I doing for time?” he finally thinks to ask Lenny, who answers jauntily that he’d used up his time several minutes ago, and earns himself a huge laugh. Lenny is now having the time of his life.

“Okay, then, I’ll make just one more point,” Fidley says, because obviously Lenny is not going to stop him. “And that’s that, if you have any doubt that rejection of faith in God impoverishes life and robs men and women of that sense of meaningfulness that makes their lives coherent, then all you have to do is look around at the hollow hedonism, neurotic narcissism, and dissolute degeneracy of a secular age that can’t even be alerted to the seriousness of life by a wake-up call like 9/11. It’s not just the immorality of our godless age that makes a person want to weep, but also the sad sight of human life untouched by transcendence.”

Cass can see Fidley’s trapezius muscles contracting, and his right hand slashes the air one time each on the downward beat of “hedonism,” “narcissism,” and “degeneracy.”

Fidley walks back to his seat, and Cass remains sitting a bit too long, so that Lenny actually turns to him with a wide smile and a flourish of his hand to indicate the podium, which of course gets another laugh; at this point, Lenny can do no wrong. Cass stands and walks over to his lectern and looks out at the overflow audience, and the awareness of the absurdity of his standing here, before all these people, in order to negate the resolution ‘God exists,’ threatens to transport him clean out of who he is supposed to be and what he is supposed to be doing.

Here I am .

No, if any moment is the wrong moment for him to yield to his version of transcendence, this has to be it. He takes a good long look at the kid with the ponytail, he takes a good long look at Roz, and he brings himself back to the question at hand, which is: is he going to go after Fidley’s argument?

He doesn’t feel he has a grip on it yet. Fidley has appealed to elements of The Argument from Personal Purpose (#19), and The Argument from the Unreasonableness of Reason (#33), and he’s even introduced a snatch of The Argument from Pragmatism (#32) in speaking of beliefs that pay good rates of return; but he’s jumbled them up in such a way that the whole is giving the appearance of being greater than the sum of its parts, and Cass can’t see his way through the jumble yet. And then he’d thrown in Hume, too, for good measure. What would Azarya say about Fidley’s deployment of Hume? Hume is one of Azarya’s heroes. He’d all but memorized Hume’s essay “On Miracles” when he was an adolescent. Azarya would never stand for Humean skepticism’s being misused as a defense of theism.

Back when Cass had been a pre-med and taking exams, sometimes he would look at the questions for the first time and think in a panic that nothing was familiar, that because of some terrible misunderstanding he had studied the wrong text, and that there wasn’t a single question on the page that connected with anything that he knew. But then, like a cloud of silt settling out of turbid water and revealing the riverbed below, his mind cleared and the panic subsided, and each question of the exam emerged as an exemplar of a familiar principle. He’s hoping that will happen very soon.

On the spot, as Cass is making his preliminary remarks thanking Chaplain Shore and the Agnostic Chaplaincy of Harvard for sponsoring the debate, and thanking Professor Fidley for “initiating the discussion by firing such an intellectually serious salvo,” he’s decided to postpone discussing Fidley’s argument, and instead start out by making his own case independently. Why let Fidley define the terms of his opening argument anyway?

“Professor Fidley, in apologizing for the necessity of faith, concedes too soon in admitting that belief in God must rest on faith. If God makes any difference to the world-and what would be the point of believing in any God that didn’t make a difference to the world?-then we should be able to see indications of his existence when we observe the world we find ourselves in. And the fact is that this world does not present itself as being one in which there exists a powerful creator who cares about us. On the face of it, it seems a very different kind of world, which is what has inspired the theological line of argument that’s called theodicy: the attempt to reconcile the existence of God with the facts about our world that seem to suggest his absence.

“We can observe one feature of our world that is particularly relevant: suffering. Children die of disease; individuals are crippled by accidents and wracked with pain; whole peoples get exterminated. Just on the face of it, the obscene amounts of suffering we observe are not compatible with a God who’s both good and in control. Mind you, that’s just on the face of it. Believers look for ways of accommodating God’s existence with the searing facts of suffering, but they have to work hard at it, and the hard theodical work they need to do is what I mean by the world’s offering empirical evidence against God’s existence.

“So what are the ways that believers have offered to reconcile so much suffering with the existence of God? First there are the preconditions for free will. If we are truly to be moral agents rather than robots, then we must have the freedom to choose between good and evil. And, given that freedom, the possibility of evil must be there; and, given that possibility, sometimes it will be realized, and when it is realized, suffering will ensue.

“But the requirements of free will can only account for a small part of the suffering we see. It will, perhaps, allow the believer to write off, as cos-mically accounted for, the child who was overheard to whisper to his mother as they were both being marched to their deaths at the extermination camp at Belzec, ‘But I tried to be so good, Mama!’ Yes, people are given free will, and Belzec was a consequence, and so the theist can write off that child’s pathetic cry as accounted for.

“But there is also abundant suffering that comes about not because of the exercise of others’ free will but because of natural disasters and accidents and the ravages of disease. And believers have to come up with some other way of dealing with these cases, since their occurrence has nothing to do with the exercise of free will. At this point you hear about the potential for achieving a greatness of the soul in overcoming tragedy. You hear that there are virtues-such as forbearance, and courage, and transcendence in the face of suffering, and compassion and love for those who suffer-which can only be exercised because suffering gives us the opportunity. The moral purpose of life, under this view, has to do with soul-making, and the full extent of what our souls can become can only unfold under the adverse conditions that God generously provides us.