Rebecca Goldstein - 36 Arguments for the Existence of God

There is empirical evidence that people survive after death: patients who flat-line during medical emergencies report an experience of floating over their bodies and seeing glimpses of a passage to another world, and can accurately report what happened around their bodies while they were dead to the world.

A person’s consciousness can survive after the death of his or her body (from 1).

Survival after death entails the existence of an immaterial soul.

The immaterial soul exists (from 2 and 3).

If an immaterial soul exists, then God must exist (from Premise 12 in The Argument from the Hard Problem of Consciousness).

God exists.

FLAW: Premise 5 is vulnerable to the same criticisms that were leveled against Premise 12 in The Argument from the Hard Problem of Consciousness. Existence after death no more implies God’s existence than our existence before death does.

COMMENT: Many, of course, would dispute Premise 1. The experiences of people near death, such as auras and out-of-body experiences, could be hallucinations resulting from oxygen deprivation in the brain. In addition, miraculous resurrections after total brain death, and accurate reports of conversations and events that took place while the brain was not functioning, have never been scientifically documented, and are informal, secondhand examples of testimony of miracles. They are thus vulnerable to the same flaws pointed out in The Argument from Miracles. But the argument is fatally flawed even if Premise 1 is granted.

I cannot conceive of my own annihilation: as soon as I start to think about what it would be like not to exist, I am thinking, which implies that I would exist (as in Descartes’s Cogito ergo sum) , which implies that I would not be thinking about what it is like not to exist.

My annihilation is inconceivable (from 1).

What cannot be conceived, cannot be.

I cannot be annihilated (from 2 and 3).

I survive after my death (from 4).

The argument now proceeds as in The Argument from Survival After Death, only substituting “I” for “people,” until we get to:

God exists.

FLAW 1: Premise 2 confuses psychological inconceivability with logical inconceivability. The sense in which I can’t conceive of my own annihilation is like the sense in which I can’t conceive that those whom I love may betray me-a failure of the imagination, not an impossible state of affairs. Thus Premise 2 ought to read “My annihilation is inconceivable to me,” which is a fact about what my brain can conceive, not a fact about what exists.

FLAW 2: Same as Flaw 3 from The Argument from the Survival of Death.

COMMENT: Though logically unsound, this is among the most powerful psychological impulses to believe in a soul, and an afterlife, and God. It genuinely is difficult-not to speak of disheartening-to conceive of oneself not existing!

There exist objective moral truths. (Slavery and torture and genocide are not just distasteful to us, but are actually wrong.)

These objective moral truths are not grounded in the way the world is but, rather, in the way the world ought to be . (Consider: should white supremacists succeed, taking over the world and eliminating all who don’t meet their criteria for being existence-worthy, their ideology still would be morally wrong. It would be true, in this hideous counterfactual, that the world ought not to be the way that they have made it.)

The world itself-the way it is, the laws of science that explain why it is that way-cannot account for the way the world ought to be.

The only way to account for morality is that God established morality (from 2 and 3).

God exists.

FLAW 1: The major flaw of this argument is revealed in a powerful argument that Plato made famous in the Euthyphro . Reference to God does not help in the least to ground the objective truth of morality. The question is, why did God choose the moral rules he did? Did he have a reason justifying his choice that, say, giving alms to the poor is good, whereas genocide is wrong? Either he had a good reason or he didn’t. If he did, then his reasons, whatever they are, can provide the grounding for moral truths for us , and God himself is redundant. And if he didn’t have a good reason, then his choices are arbitrary-he could just as easily have gone the other way, making charity bad and genocide good-and we would have no reason to take his choices seriously. According to the Euthyphro argument, then, The Argument from Moral Truth is another example of the Fallacy of Passing the Buck. The hard work of moral philosophy consists in grounding morality in some version of the Golden Rule: that I cannot be committed to my own interests’ mattering in a way that yours do not just because I am me and you are not.

FLAW 2: Premise 4 is belied by the history of religion, which shows that the God from which people draw their morality (for example, the God of the Bible and the Koran) did not establish what we now recognize to be morality at all. The God of the Old Testament commanded people to keep slaves, slay their enemies, execute blasphemers and homosexuals, and commit many other heinous acts. Of course, our interpretation of which aspects of biblical morality to take seriously has grown more sophisticated over time, and we read the Bible selectively and often metaphorically. But that is just the point: we must be consulting some standards of morality that do not come from God in order to judge which aspects of God’s word to take literally and which aspects to ignore.

COMMENT: Some would question the first premise, and regard its assertion as a flaw of this argument. Slavery and torture and genocide are wrong by our lights, they would argue, and conflict with certain values we hold dear, such as freedom and happiness. But those are just subjective values, and it is obscure to say that statements that are consistent with those values are objectively true in the same way that mathematical or scientific statements can be true. But the argument is fatally flawed even if Premise 1 is granted.

People often act altruistically-namely, against their interests. They help others, at a cost to themselves, out of empathy, fairness, decency, and integrity.

Natural selection can never favor true altruism, because genes for selfishness will always out-compete genes for altruism (recall that altruism, by definition, exacts a cost to the actor).

Only a force acting outside of natural selection and intending for us to be moral could account for our ability to act altruistically (from 2).

God is the only force outside of natural selection that could intend us to be moral.

God must have implanted the moral instinct within us (from 3 and 4).

God exists.

FLAW 1: Theories of the evolution of altruism by natural selection have been around for decades and are now widely supported by many kinds of evidence. A gene for being kind to one’s kin, even if it hurts the person doing the favor, can be favored by evolution, because that gene would be helping a copy of itself that is shared by the kin. And a gene for conferring a large benefit to a non-relative at a cost to oneself can evolve if the favor-doer is the beneficiary of a return favor at a later time. Both parties are better off, in the long run, from the exchange of favors.

Some defenders of religion do not consider these theories to be legitimate explanations of altruism, because a tendency to favor one’s kin, or to trade favors, is ultimately just a form of selfishness for one’s genes, rather than true altruism. But this is a confusion of the original phenomenon. We are trying to explain why people are sometimes altruistic, not why genes are altruistic. (We have no reason to believe that genes are ever altruistic in the first place!) Also, in a species with language- namely, humans-committed altruists develop a reputation for being altruistic, and thereby win more friends, allies, and trading partners. This can give rise to selection for true, committed, altruism, not just the tit-for-tat exchange of favors.