Rebecca Goldstein - 36 Arguments for the Existence of God

This argument can be read out of William James’s classic essay “The Will to Believe.” The first premise, as presented here, is a little less radical than James’s pragmatic definition of truth according to which a proposition is true if believing that it is true has a cumulative beneficial effect on the believer’s life. The pragmatic definition of truth has severe problems, including possible incoherence: in evaluating the effects of the belief on the believer, we have to know the truth about what those effects are, which forces us to fall back on the old-fashioned notion of truth. To make the best case for The Argument from Pragmatism, therefore, the first premise is to be interpreted as claiming only that the pragmatic consequences of belief are a relevant source of evidence in ascertaining the truth, not that they can actually be equated with the truth.

FLAW 1: What exactly does effecting “a change for the better in the believer’s life” mean? For an antebellum Southerner, there was more to be gained in believing that slavery was morally permissible than in believing it heinous. It often doesn’t pay to be an iconoclast or a revolutionary thinker, no matter how much truer your ideas are than the ideas opposing you. It didn’t improve Galileo’s life to believe that the earth moved around the sun rather than that the sun and the heavens revolve around the earth. (Of course, you could say that it’s always intrinsically better to believe something true rather than something false, but then you’re just using the language of pragmatism to mask a non-pragmatic notion of truth.

FLAW 2: The Argument from Pragmatism implies an extreme relativism regarding the truth, because the effects of belief differ for different believers. A profligate, impulsive drunkard may have to believe in a primitive retributive God who will send him to hell if he doesn’t stay out of barroom fights, whereas a contemplative mensch may be better off with an abstract deistic presence who completes his deepest existential world-view. But either there is a vengeful God who sends sinners to hell or there isn’t. If one allows pragmatic consequences to determine truth, then truth becomes relative to the believer, which is incoherent.

FLAW 3: Why should we only consider the pragmatic effects on the believer’s life? What about the effects on everyone else? The history of religious intolerance, such as inquisitions, fatwas, and suicide bombers, suggests that the effects on one person’s life of another person’s believing in God can be pretty grim.

FLAW 4: The Argument from Pragmatism suffers from the first flaw of The Argument from Decision Theory (#31, above)-namely, the assumption that the belief in God is like a faucet that one can turn on and off as the need arises. If I make the leap of faith in order to evaluate the pragmatic consequences of belief then, if those consequences are not so good, can I leap back to disbelief? Isn’t a leap of faith a one-way maneuver? “The will to believe” is an oxymoron: beliefs are forced on a person (ideally, by logic and evidence); they are not chosen for their consequences.

Our belief in reason cannot be justified by reason, since that would be circular.

Our belief in reason must be accepted on faith (from 1).

Every time we exercise reason, we are exercising faith (from 2).

Faith provides good rational grounds for beliefs (since it is, in the final analysis, necessary even for the belief in reason-from 3).

We are justified in using faith for any belief that is so important to our lives that not believing it would render us incoherent (from 4).

We cannot avoid faith in God if we are to live coherent moral and purposeful lives.

We are justified in believing that God exists (from 5 and 6).

God exists.

Reason is a faculty of thinking, the very faculty of giving grounds for our beliefs. To justify reason would be to try to give grounds for the belief: “We ought to accept the conclusions of sound arguments.” Let’s say we produce a sound argument for the conclusion that “we ought to accept the conclusions of sound arguments.” How could we legitimately accept the conclusion of that sound argument without independently knowing the conclusion? Any attempt to justify the very propositions that we must use in order to justify propositions is going to land us in circularity.

FLAW 1: This argument tries to generalize the inability of reason to justify itself to an abdication of reason when it comes to justifying God’s existence. But the inability of reason to justify reason is a unique case in epistemology, not an illustration of a flaw of reason that can be generalized to some other kind of belief-and certainly not a belief in the existence of some entity with specific properties such as creating the world or defining morality.

Indeed, one could argue that the attempt to justify reason with reason is not circular, but, rather, unnecessary. One already is, and always will be, committed to reason by the very process one is already engaged in- namely, reasoning. Reason is non-negotiable; all sides concede it. It needs no justification, because it is justification. A belief in God is not like that at all.

FLAW 2: If one really took the unreasonability of reason as a license to believe things on faith, then which things should one believe in? If it is a license to believe in a single God who gave his son for our sins, why isn’t it just as much a license to believe in Zeus and all the other Greek gods, or the three major gods of Hinduism, or the Angel Moroni? For that matter, why not Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy? If one says that there are good reasons to accept some entities on faith, while rejecting others, then one is saying that it is ultimately reason, not faith, that must be invoked to justify a belief.

FLAW 3: Premise 6, which claims that a belief in God is necessary in order to have a purpose in one’s life, or to be moral, has already been challenged in the discussions of The Argument from Moral Truth (#16, above) and The Argument from Personal Purpose (#19, above).

There are experiences that are windows into the wholeness of existence-its grandeur, beauty, symmetry, harmony, unity, even its goodness.

We glimpse a benign transcendence in these moments.

Only God could provide us with a glimpse of benign transcendence.

God exists.

FLAW: An experience of sublimity is an aesthetic experience. Aesthetic experience can indeed be intense and blissful, absorbing our attention so completely, while exciting our pleasure, as to seem to lift us right out of our surroundings. Aesthetic experiences vary in their strength, and when they are overwhelming, we grope for terms like “transcendence” to describe the overwhelmingness. Yet, for all that, aesthetic experiences are still responses of the brain, as we see from the fact that ingesting recreational drugs can bring on even more intense experiences of transcendence. And the particular triggers for natural aesthetic experiences are readily explicable from the evolutionary pressures that have shaped the perceptual systems of human beings. An eye for sweeping vistas, dramatic skies, bodies of water, large animals, flowering and fruiting plants, and strong geometric patterns with repetition and symmetry was necessary to orient attention to aspects of the environment that were matters of life and death to the species as it evolved in its natural environment. The identification of a blissfully aesthetic experience with a glimpse into benign transcendence is an example of the Projection Fallacy, dramatic demonstrations of our spreading ourselves onto the world. This is most obvious when the experience gets fleshed out into the religious terms that come most naturally to the particular believer, such as a frozen waterfall being seen by a Christian as evidence for the Christian Trinity.