Rebecca Goldstein - 36 Arguments for the Existence of God

FLAW 2: We have evolved higher mental faculties, such as self-reflection and logic, that allow us to reason about the world, to persuade other people to form alliances with us, to learn from our mistakes, and to achieve other feats of reason. Those same faculties, when they are honed through debate, reason, and knowledge, can allow us to step outside ourselves, learn about other people’s points of view, and act in a way that we can justify as maximizing everyone’s well-being. We are capable of moral reasoning because we are capable of reasoning in general.

FLAW 3: In some versions of The Argument from Altruism, God succeeds in getting people to act altruistically because he promises them a divine reward and threatens them with divine retribution. People behave altruistically to gain a reward or avoid a punishment in the life to come. This argument is self-contradictory It aims to explain how people act without regard to their self-interest, but then assumes that there could be no motive for acting altruistically other than self-interest.

Having free will means having the freedom to choose our actions, rather than having them determined by some prior cause.

If we don’t have free will, then we are not agents, for then we are not really acting , but, rather, we’re being acted upon . (That’s why we don’t punish people for involuntary actions-such as a teller who hands money to a bank robber at gunpoint, or a driver who injures a pedestrian after a defective tire blows out.)

To be a moral agent means to be held morally responsible for what one does.

If we can’t be held morally responsible for anything we do, then the very idea of morality is meaningless.

Morality is not meaningless.

We have free will (from 2-5).

We, as moral agents, are not subject to the laws of nature-in particular, the neural events in a genetically and environmentally determined brain (from 1 and 6).

Only a being who is apart from the laws of nature and partakes of the moral sphere could explain our being moral agents (from 7).

Only God is a being who is apart from the laws of nature and partakes of the moral sphere.

Only God can explain our moral agency (from 8 and 9).

God exists.

FLAW 1: This argument, in order to lead to God, must ignore the paradoxical Fork of Free Will. Either my actions are predictable (from my genes, my upbringing, my brain state, my current situation, and so on), or they are not. If they are predictable, then there is no reason to deny that they are caused, and we would not have free will. So, if we are to be free, our actions must be unpredictable-in other words, random. But if our behavior is random, then in what sense can it be attributable to us at all? If it really is a random event when I give the infirm man my seat in the subway, then in what sense is it me to whom this good deed should be attributed? If the action isn’t caused by my psychological states, which are themselves caused by other states, then in what way is it really my action? And what good would it do to insist on moral responsibility if our choices are random, and cannot be predicted from prior events (such as growing up in a society that holds people responsible)? This leads us back to the conclusion that we, as moral agents, must be parts of the natural world- the very negation of Premise 7.

FLAW 2: Premise 10 is an example of the Fallacy of Using One Mystery to Explain Another. It expresses, rather than dispels, the confusion we feel when faced with the Fork of Free Will. The paradox has not been clarified in the least by introducing God into the analysis.

COMMENT: Free will is yet another quandary that takes us to the edge of our human capacity for understanding. The concept is baffling, because our moral agency seems to demand both that our actions be determined, and also that they not be determined.

If there is no purpose to a person’s life, then that person’s life is pointless.

Human life cannot be pointless.

Each human life has a purpose (from 1 and 2).

The purpose of each individual person’s life must derive from the overall purpose of existence.

There is an overall purpose of existence (from 3 and 4).

Only a being who understands the overall purpose of existence could create each person according to the purpose that person is meant to fulfill.

Only God could understand the overall purpose of creation.

There can be a point to human existence only if God exists (from 6 and 7).

God exists.

FLAW 1: The first premise rests on a confusion between the purpose of an action and the purpose of a life. It is human activities that have purposes-or don’t. We study for the purpose of educating and supporting ourselves. We eat right and exercise for the purpose of being healthy. We warn children not to accept rides with strangers for the purpose of keeping them safe. We donate to charity for the purpose of helping the poor (just as we would want someone to help us if we were poor). The notion of a person’s entire life serving a purpose, above and beyond the purpose of all the person’s choices, is obscure. Might it mean the purpose for which the person was born? That implies that some goal-seeking agent decided to bring our lives into being to serve some purpose. Then who is that goal-seeking agent? Parents often purposively have children, but we wouldn’t want to see a parent’s wishes as the purpose of the child’s life. If the goal-seeking agent is God, the argument becomes circular: we make sense of the notion of “the purpose of a life” by stipulating that the purpose is whatever God had in mind when he created us, but then argue for the existence of God because he is the only one who could have designed us with a purpose in mind.

FLAW 2: Premise 2 states that human life cannot be pointless. But of course it could be pointless in the sense meant by this argument: lacking a purpose in the grand scheme of things. It could very well be that there is no grand scheme of things because there is no Grand Schemer. By assuming that there is a grand scheme of things, it assumes that there is a schemer whose scheme it is, which circularly assumes the conclusion.

COMMENT: It’s important not to confuse the notion of “pointless” in Premise 2 with notions like “not worth living” or “expendable.” Confusions of this sort probably give Premise 2 its appeal. But we can very well maintain that each human life is precious-is worth living, is not expendable- without maintaining that each human life has a purpose in the overall scheme of things.

In a million years, nothing that happens now will matter.

By the same token, anything that happens at any point in time will not matter from the point of view of a time a million years distant from it in the future.

No point in time can confer mattering on any other point, for each suffers from the same problem of not mattering itself (from 2).

It is intolerable (or inconceivable, or unacceptable) that in a million years nothing that happens now will matter.

What happens now will matter in a million years (from 4).

It is only from the point of view of eternity that what happens now will matter even in a million years (from 3).

Only God can inhabit the point of view of eternity.

God exists.

FLAW: Premise 4 is illicit: it is of the form “This argument must be correct because it is intolerable that this argument is not correct.” The argument is either circular, or an example of the Fallacy of Wishful Thinking. Maybe we won’t matter in a million years, and there’s just nothing we can do about it. If that is the case, we shouldn’t declare that it is intolerable-we just have to live with it. Another way of putting it is: we should take ourselves seriously (being mindful of what we do, and the world we leave our children and grandchildren), but we shouldn’t take ourselves that seriously, arrogantly demanding that we must matter in a million years.