Rebecca Goldstein - 36 Arguments for the Existence of God

The Jews introduced the world to the idea of the one God, with his universal moral code.

The survival of the Jews, living for millennia without a country of their own, and facing a multitude of enemies that sought to destroy not only their religion but all remnants of the race, is a historical unlikelihood.

The Jews have survived against vast odds (from 2).

There is no natural explanation for so unlikely an event as the survival of the Jews (from 3).

The best explanation is that they have some transcendent purpose to play in human destiny (from 1 and 4).

Only God could have assigned a transcendent destiny to the Jews.

God exists.

FLAW: The fact that Jews, after the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans, had no country of their own, made it more likely, rather than less likely, that they would survive as a people. If they had been concentrated in one country, they would surely have been conquered by one of history’s great empires, as happened to other vanished tribes. But a people dispersed across a vast diaspora is more resilient, which is why other stateless peoples, like the Parsis and Roma (Gypsies), have also survived for millennia, often against harrowing odds. Moreover, the Jews encouraged cultural traits-such as literacy, urban living, specialization in middleman occupations, and an extensive legal code to govern their internal affairs-that gave them further resilience against the vicissitudes of historical change. The survival of the Jews, therefore, is not a miraculous improbability.

COMMENT: The persecution of the Jews need not be seen as part of a cosmic moral drama. The unique role that Judaism played in disseminating monotheism, mostly through the organs of its two far more popular monotheistic offshoots, Christianity and Islam, has bequeathed to its adherents an unusual amount of attention, mostly negative, from adherents of those other monotheistic religions.

There is an upward moral curve to human history (tyrannies fall; the evil side loses in major wars; democracy, freedom, and civil rights spread).

Natural selection’s favoring of those who are fittest to compete for resources and mates has bequeathed humankind selfish and aggressive traits.

Left to their own devices, a selfish and aggressive species could not have ascended up a moral curve over the course of history (from 2).

Only God has the power and the concern for us to curve history upward.

God exists.

FLAW: Though our species has inherited traits of selfishness and aggression, we have inherited capacities for empathy, reasoning, and learning from experience as well. We have also developed language, and with it a means to pass on the lessons we have learned from history. And so humankind has slowly reasoned its way toward a broader and more sophisticated understanding of morality, and more effective institutions for keeping peace. We make moral progress as we do scientific progress, through reasoning, experimentation, and the rejection of failed alternatives.

Genius is the highest level of creative capacity, the level that, by definition, defies explanation.

Genius does not happen by way of natural psychological processes (from 1).

The cause of genius must lie outside of natural psychological processes (from 2).

The insights of genius have helped in the cumulative progress of humankind-scientific, technological, philosophical, moral, artistic, societal, political, spiritual.

The cause of genius must both lie outside of natural psychological processes and be such as to care about the progress of humankind (from 3 and 4).

Only God could work outside of natural psychological processes and create geniuses to light the path of humankind.

God exists.

FLAW 1: The psychological traits that go into human accomplishment, such as intelligence and perseverance, are heritable. By the laws of probability, rare individuals will inherit a concentrated dose of those genes. Given a nurturing cultural context, these individuals will, some of the time, exercise their powers to accomplish great feats. Those are the individuals we call geniuses. We may not know enough about genetics, neuroscience, and cognition to explain exactly what makes for a Mozart or an Einstein, but exploiting this gap to argue for supernatural provenance is an example of the Fallacy of Arguing from Ignorance.

FLAW 2: Human genius is not consistently applied to human betterment. Consider weapons of mass destruction, computer viruses, Hitler’s brilliantly effective rhetoric, or those criminal geniuses (for example, electronic thieves) who are so cunning that they elude detection.

We are finite, and everything with which we come into physical contact is finite.

We have a knowledge of the infinite, demonstrably so in mathematics.

We could not have derived this knowledge of the infinite from the finite, from anything that we are and come in contact with (from 1).

Only something itself infinite could have implanted knowledge of the infinite in us (from 2 and 3).

God would want us to have a knowledge of the infinite, both for the cognitive pleasure it affords us and because it allows us to come to know him, who is himself infinite.

God is the only entity that both is infinite and could have an intention of implanting the knowledge of the infinite within us (from 4 and 5).

God exists.

FLAW: There are certain computational procedures governed by what logicians call recursive rules. A recursive rule is one that refers to itself, and hence it can be applied to its own output ad infinitum. For example, we can define a natural number recursively: 1 is a natural number, and if you add 1 to a natural number, the result is a natural number. We can apply this rule an indefinite number of times and thereby generate an infinite series of natural numbers. Recursive rules allow a finite system (a set of rules, a computer, a brain) to reason about an infinity of objects, refuting Premise 3.

COMMENT: In 1931 the young logician Kurt Gödel published a paper proving The Incompleteness Theorem (actually there are two). Basically, what Gödel demonstrated is that recursive rules cannot capture all of mathematics. For any mathematical system rich enough to express arithmetic, we can produce a true proposition that is expressible in that system but not provable within it. So even though the flaw discussed above is sufficient to invalidate Premise 3, it should not be understood as suggesting that all of our mathematical knowledge is reducible to recursive rules.

Mathematical truths are necessarily true (there is no possible world in which 2 plus 2 does not equal 4).

The truths that describe our physical world are empirical, requiring observational evidence.

Truths that require empirical evidence are not necessary truths. (We require empirical evidence because there are possible worlds in which these are not truths, and we have to test that ours is not such a world.)

The truths of our physical world are not necessary truths (from 2 and 3).

The truths of our physical world cannot explain mathematical truths (from 1 and 3).

Mathematical truths exist on a different plane of existence from physical truths (from 5).

Only something which itself exists on a different plane of existence from the physical can explain mathematical truths (from 6).

Only God can explain the necessary truths of mathematics (from 7).

God exists.