On the Existence of God (Part 1 of 2)

Many, if not most, of those who want to argue against the existence of God focus their criticism on conceptions of God which few, if any, actually believe in. They engage absurd misreadings of theistic beliefs, thinking that if they can show such particular formulations of divinity to be non-existent, they somehow have demonstrated why God does not exist. At best, what they have done is show why such formulations of divinity are false, not that God does not exist. Such an argument is as foolish as if someone tried to argue that no equines existed because it is impossible for giant invisible purple horses flying around the sun to exist.  We can all agree such horses do not exist, but by doing this, we have not proven there is no such thing as horses.

The point is that most criticisms of God really do not engage what people believe about God. They are straw men, constructs carefully made to be denied. Yes,  there usually are elements of what people believe about God put into the construction, to give the external appearance of a serious argument, but usually those elements are facile at best, for they do not present the basic core belief about divinity, but secondary derived notions about God. Instead of dealing with the best, most general presentations of divinity, they want to rush in and argue against that which no one believe in, so that God can then be easily denied.  To be sure, some might offer several such constructs, several different, and usually bad, presentations about God,put them side by side, and then ask, “Which God is real” as if such a rhetorical flourish proved anything.  They ignore that behind most rival conceptions of God there is a principle which is being affirmed – that of God, which can be discussed before secondary considerations are explored and discussed.

When dealing with the question of the existence of God, the issue is whether or not there is a God; only after establishing why the existence of God is sound can secondary considerations be discussed. The same, of course, is true with science. There are many fundamental concepts, such as evolution, which have rival theories of explanation; many theists who have little to no understanding of science will use all the rival theories similar to the way many atheists and agnostics use rival conceptions of God to suggest that the basic principle, evolution, is not agreed upon and proven. And yet, they would be as wrong as the atheists who follow such fallacious modes of argumentation.

Or, if we want something more concrete, it would be as if someone denied President Obama existed and said that the reason they knew Obama does not exist is that there are many contradictory, rival claims about who and what he is (i.e., some say he was born in the United States, others say in Kenya; some say he is good, some say he is evil; some say he is African American, others say he is white; some say he is smart, others say he is not, et. al). It is a typical fallacy which is easy for someone to fall into when entering a debate. We do not have to prove which aspects of Obama are true to show he exists. Likewise, then, those who demand “which God” or “which presentation of God” is true are going about the discussion wrong. Questions about qualities which we associate with God come after we establish that there is some God.  Or, as Henry of Ghent explained, “For we can know that this proposition by which we say, ‘God exists,’ is true in the soul, although we do not know the nature of that being that is God’s.”[1]

This is why, when asking whether God exists, the traditional reply was to show we can know some sort of first principle, some form of absolute, some form of being which is greater than all others, exists, and when we find out what it is, we can call it God. It could be that God is the universe (or multi-verse, if you will) and God could end up being an impersonal absolute. Those arguing for the existence of God without going into the qualities of God have no problem as establishing some impersonal first cause as God. Only after the fact that there is a first cause, a God, is established, can what is known about that first cause be explored,  often with the caveat of how difficult, if not impossible, it is for us to comprehend it, making it difficult for us to use human reason as a means of discerning what God is like.

And so people of differing faiths, with differing conceptions concerning the nature of God, can come together and say that God exists. They do not presume that by doing this they actually agree to the attributes which they would predicate to God, with the way they perceive God has or has not interacted with humanity in history, or with the way God has or has not actively revealed himself to us. To try to make an author indicating that God exists prove all the qualities they believe about God at the same time or else say they have failed to offer a proper proof would be like someone demanding those who believe in punctuated evolution to prove it when they say evolution is true. When theists offer basic principles about God and use them to show some form of God exists, certainly they would be the first to agree they have not proven all their belief about God, but on the other hand, they would also say it is not their intention, just as a scientist showing the general principle of evolution will not have to prove all the mechanisms they believe are operating in the process of evolution to show evolution is occurring. It is not equivocating to deal with general principles. Atheists who get upset at theists working with the category of divinity and what it represents without going into detail about their belief in God show they have not actually studied theism in general, similar to those who deny evolution because some hypotheses through the years have been proven false fail to understand the general principle of evolution and why such hypotheses do not have to be correct for evolution to be fact.

What is necessary, then, is a basic presentation of divinity, of the category of God. This is what theists who discuss the existence of God generally provide before going into secondary considerations about God. Atheists who have not studied the literature always go for secondary conceptions, often false ones, and so tend to get frustrated when theists remain in the general category which is not so easy to dispute.

It is in this manner that St. Augustine, in a dialogue, recommended the way we know that God exists is because we know that there is something greater than us; when we observe it, if we find nothing greater than it, we can declare it to be God, but if we find something greater beyond it, we are then to look until we find that which is greatest, and then realize we have then found God.  And so he suggested that if we can find something greater than us, something which is eternal and unconditioned, we know that God exists because either it is God, or God is something from which it flows and is even greater than that which we can observe. In this instance, Augustine is not suggesting we theorize about what God; instead, he suggested that we merely observe, and through observation, we can come to know that some form of divinity exists. But he does offer a bit more than this – he says, in the end, God is either the truth itself, or something which is greater than the truth, by being the one who makes the truth:

Now you had conceded that if I proved the existence of something higher than our minds, you would admit it was God, as long as there was nothing higher still. I accepted this concession, and said that it would be enough if I proved that there is something higher than our minds. For if there is something more excellent than the truth, then that is God; if not, the truth itself is God. So in either case you cannot deny God exists, and that was the very question that we had agreed to discuss.[2]

Truth exists, even if we do not know it or comprehend it properly. While we subjectively engage it, while we might possess only a limited understanding of it, the reason we can judge things as true or false in an objective sense is because we know there is an objective dimension to truth which exists. That what is truth is not mere opinion; what we declare is truth is not merely “true for us,” but it is the precondition which allows us to have subjective dimensions and experiences of truth. Truth itself is absolute, unchanging, which is why we use it to say something is true or false – to say someone is wrong is to presuppose the truth. Pure subjective relativism cannot work because if we were to state all things were relative, that statement itself would be an objective non-relative truth establishing the absolute nature of the truth itself. In this light, then, Augustine presented why the truth is great, greater than us, and is therefore to be the basis to show God exists:

Furthermore, if this truth were equal to our minds, it too would be changeable. For our minds see the truth better at some times than at others, which shows that they are indeed changeable. But the truth makes no progress when we see it better and suffers no setback when we see it less. It remains whole and undefiled, giving the joy of its light to those who turn toward it but inflicting blindness on those who turn away. Why, even make judgments about our own minds in accordance with that truth, while we can in no way make judgments about it. [3]

The key to the realization of God, then, is the acceptance that that there is something which is greater than us, greater than all other things, and so there is something absolute or supreme which actually exists. We might or might not know what it is, but we do know it is, because we can find things in the world which might fit in its place and will fit in it unless we find something greater to replace it.  This tradition, this understanding of God, in some form or another, is at the foundation for most discussions of God’s existence.

More to Come

 

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[1] Henry of Ghent, The Questions of God’s Unity and Simplicity. trans. Roland J. Teske, S.J. (Paris: Peeters, 2006), 317.

[2] St. Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will. trans. Thomas Williams (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1993), 58.

[3] St. Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will,  58.The example Augustine used to demonstrate that there is some eternal, unchangeable truth which we can use to prove truth exists is the universal rules which govern mathematics. We do not create them. We merely observe them. They are true whether or not we observe them, and even if in the modern age we understand the constructed nature of how we represent the rules which govern mathematics, so that there are different forms mathematical formulations can be presented, this only shows that our subjective grasping for mathematical rules engage rules which lie behind the constructs we make to represent them. We can translate one mathematical formulation to another because of the general principles which lie behind them, principles which transcend us and so need the various constructs to represent different elements of those principles.

 

 

 

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