Rebecca Goldstein - 36 Arguments for the Existence of God

People experience uncanny coincidences in their lives (for example, an old friend calling out of the blue just when you’re thinking of him, or a dream about some event that turns out to have just happened, or missing a flight that then crashes).

Uncanny coincidences cannot be explained by the laws of probability (which is why we call them uncanny).

These uncanny coincidences, inexplicable by the laws of probability, reveal a significance to our lives.

Only a being who deems our lives significant and who has the power to effect these coincidences could arrange for them to happen.

Only God both deems our lives significant and has the power to effect these coincidences.

God exists.

FLAW 1: The second premise suffers from the major flaw of The Argument from Cosmic Coincidences: a large number of experiences, together with the large number of patterns that we would call “coincidences” after the fact, make uncanny coincidences probable, not improbable.

FLAW 2: Psychologists have shown that people are subject to an illusion called Confirmation Bias. When they have a hypothesis (such as that day- dreams predict the future), they vividly notice all the instances that confirm it (the times when they think of a friend and he calls), and forget all the instances that don’t (the times when they think of a friend and he doesn’t call). Likewise, who among us remembers all the times when we miss a plane and it doesn’t crash? The vast number of non-events we live through don’t make an impression on us; the few coincidences do.

FLAW 3: There is an additional strong psychological bias at work here. Every one of us treats his or her own life with utmost seriousness. For all of us, there can be nothing more significant than the lives we are living. As David Hume pointed out, the self has an inclination to “spread itself on the world,” projecting onto objective reality the psychological assumptions and attitudes that are too constant to be noticed, that play in the background like a noise you don’t realize you are hearing until it stops. This form of the Projection Fallacy is especially powerful when it comes to the emotionally fraught questions about our own significance.

Sometimes people pray to God for good fortune, and, against enormous odds, their calls are answered. (For example, a parent prays for the life of her dying child, and the child recovers.)

The odds that the beneficial event will happen are enormously slim (from 1).

The odds that the prayer would have been followed by recovery out of sheer chance are extremely small (from 2).

The prayer could only have been followed by the recovery if God listened to it and made it come true.

God exists.

This argument is similar to The Argument from Miracles, #11 below, except that, instead of the official miracles claimed by established religion, it refers to intimate and personal miracles.

FLAW 1: Premise 3 is indeed true. However, to use it to infer that a miracle has taken place (and an answered prayer is certainly a miracle) is to subvert it. There is nothing that is less probable than a miracle, since it constitutes a violation of a law of nature (see The Argument from Miracles). Therefore, it is more reasonable to conclude that the conjunction of the prayer and the recovery is a coincidence than that it is a miracle.

FLAW 2. The coincidence of a person’s praying for the unlikely to happen and its then happening is, of course, improbable. But the flaws in The Argument from Cosmic Coincidences and The Argument from Personal Coincidences apply here: Given a large enough sample of prayers (the number of times people call out to God to help them and those they love is tragically large), the improbable is bound to happen occasionally. And, given the existence of Confirmation Bias, we will notice these coincidences, yet fail to notice and count up the vastly larger number of unanswered prayers.

FLAW 3: There is an inconsistency in the moral reasoning behind this argument. It asks us to believe in a compassionate God who would be moved to pity by the desperate pleas of some among us-but not by the equally desperate pleas of others among us. Together with The Argument from a Wonderful Life, The Argument from Perfect Justice, and The Argument from Suffering, it appears to be supported by a few cherry-picked examples, but in fact is refuted by the much larger number of counterexamples it ignores: the prayers that go unanswered, the people who do not live wonderful lives. When the life is our own, or that of someone we love, we are especially liable to the Projection Fallacy, and spread our personal sense of significance onto the world at large.

FLAW 4: Reliable cases of answered prayers always involve medical conditions that we know can spontaneously resolve themselves through the healing powers and immune system of the body, such as recovery from cancer, or a coma, or lameness. Prayers that a person can grow back a limb, or that a child can be resurrected from the dead, always go unanswered. This affirms that supposedly answered prayers are actually just the rarer cases of natural recovery.

Sometimes people who are lost in life find their way.

These people could not have known the right way on their own.

These people were shown the right way by something or someone other than themselves (from 2).

There was no person showing them the way.

God alone is a being who is not a person and who cares about each of us enough to show us the way.

Only God could have helped these lost souls (from 4 and 5).

God exists.

FLAW 1. Premise 2 ignores the psychological complexity of people. People have inner resources on which they draw, often without knowing how they are doing it or even that they are doing it. Psychologists have shown that events in our conscious lives-from linguistic intuitions of which sentences sound grammatical, to moral intuitions of what would be the right thing to do in a moral dilemma-are the end products of complicated mental manipulations of which we are unaware. So, too, decisions and resolutions can bubble into awareness without our being conscious of the processes that led to them. These epiphanies seem to announce themselves to us, as if they came from an external guide: another example of the Projection Fallacy.

FLAW 2: The same as Flaw 3 in The Argument from Answered Prayers #9 above.

Miracles are events that violate the laws of nature.

Miracles can be explained only by a force that has the power of suspending the laws of nature for the purpose of making its presence known or changing the course of human history (from 1).

Only God has the power and the purpose to carry out miracles (from 2).

We have a multitude of written and oral reports of miracles. (Indeed, every major religion is founded on a list of miracles.)

Human testimony would be useless if it were not, in the majority of cases, veridical.

The best explanation for why there are so many reports testifying to the same thing is that the reports are true (from 5).

The best explanation for the multitudinous reports of miracles is that miracles have indeed occurred (from 6).

God exists (from 3 and 7).

FLAW 1: It is certainly true, as Premise 4 asserts, that we have a multitude of reports of miracles, with each religion insisting on those that establish it alone as the true religion. But the reports are not testifying to the same events; each miracle list justifies one religion at the expense of the others. See Flaw 2 in The Argument from Holy Books, #23, below.