Justification of the Moral Argument’s Second Premise
1
ON THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
On Whether God’s Existence Can Be Evident to Every Sincere Seeker
This is an argument I read on the ReasonableFaith.org forum, and I’m wondering how you would respond. In my opinion, it’s not a very strong argument. But here it is:
1. If God exists, then His existence would be evident to anyone who sincerely seeks God.
2. God’s existence is not evident to everyone who sincerely seeks God.
3. Therefore, God doesn’t exist.
I take it that most Christians accept (1)—I know William Lane Craig does. Hence, to deny the conclusion, Christians must reject (2), but (2) is evidently obvious to anyone who sincerely gave Christianity a chance and yet is not convinced of God’s existence. To me, the truth of (2) is far more plausible than its denial: if (2) were false, then it would have to be true that every person who claims to have sincerely sought God, but couldn’t find Him, must be lying, either to others or themselves.
Do Christians really believe this?
As expected, most who resist the argument claim that premise (2) is false, which I find extraordinary. To hold that (2) is false, one would have to believe that every non-Christian is lying, either about God’s existence being evident or about being sincere. Compare premise (2) with the following:
1. Allah’s existence is not evident to everyone who sincerely seeks Allah.
2. Brahman’s existence is not evident to everyone who sincerely seeks Brahman.
3. Bigfoot’s existence is not evident to everyone who sincerely seeks Bigfoot.
4. Santa’s existence is not evident to everyone who sincerely seeks Santa.
And so on.
Most of us would not doubt these statements, since we generally take people at their word about what they believe. Why, then, shouldn’t we generally take the word of non-Christians who claim they sincerely sought to find God? Without an adequate answer to this question, those who reject premise (2) are just guilty of special pleading.
Sorry if it’s a little bit long. Look forward to hearing from you.
Sincerely,
Tapji
Canada
Dr. Craig’s Response
I believe that God’s existence—that is to say, the existence of the God described in the Bible—is or will become evident in this lifetime to anyone who sincerely seeks Him. Now, by “evident” I don’t mean obvious or certain. I mean that the sincere seeker will come to saving faith in God; his search will be successful; he will not only come to believe that God exists but will come to know God.
Why do I believe such a thing? Well, primarily because that is what Jesus taught, and I have good reasons for believing that Jesus is the revelation of God to mankind and, therefore, to be believed in what He taught. You can find my reasons for so thinking in Reasonable Faith. As for Jesus’ teaching, consider this saying from His Sermon on the Mount:
Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and you shall find; knock, and it shall be opened to you. For every one that asks receives; and he that seeks finds; and to him that knocks it shall be opened. (Matt. 7:7–8)
By “seeking,” Jesus obviously didn’t mean a merely intellectual inquiry but a genuine search of the soul, a spiritual quest in humility and with a contrite heart. This teaching comports well with the universal salvific will of God (1 Tim. 2:3–4; 2 Peter 3:9).
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Note this important distinction between “seeking” as mere intellectual inquiry vs. seeking as a genuine search of the soul. Our apologetics endeavors should seek to be mindful of this distinction in order to avoid the distraction of merely entertaining people’s intellectual curiosities.
Of course, God’s providence in each person’s life plays itself out over time. God’s existence may not be evident to someone at certain stages of his life but may become evident when and through what means God chooses. If a person is truly seeking God, he will persist in his search and will eventually find God.
So I would replace premise (1) with
1´. IF GOD EXISTS, THEN HIS EXISTENCE WILL BECOME EVIDENT TO ANYONE WHO SINCERELY SEEKS GOD.
So to those who say, “I’ve sincerely sought God and haven’t found Him,” I say, “Don’t give up! Keep searching, and you will find God.”
If we have, as I think we do, good reasons to believe that Jesus was who He claimed to be, then we have good reasons to believe that what He taught is true. So what defeater is offered by the detractor of this doctrine?
It’s the claim that
2. GOD’S EXISTENCE IS NOT EVIDENT TO EVERYONE WHO SINCERELY SEEKS GOD.
But (2), even if true, is not incompatible with (1´). From (1´) it follows only that God’s existence will become evident to a sincere seeker after God. Of course, (2) is easily adjusted to the claim that
2´. GOD’S EXISTENCE NEVER BECOMES EVIDENT TO SOME PEOPLE WHO SINCERELY SEEK GOD.
But why should we think that (2´) is true? How do we know that? It’s obviously inadequate to say that (2´) “is evidently obvious to anyone who sincerely gave Christianity a chance and yet is not convinced of God’s existence.” For perhaps his lack of persistence is an indication that his search was not as earnest as he imagines (he gave Christianity “a chance”?) or perhaps that person will yet find God.
To establish (2´) it seems we’d have to appeal to cases in which a person was a sincere seeker but at the end of his life failed to come to faith in God. The problem with such an argument, however, is that we’re just not in a position to look into the human heart and judge a person’s sincerity in this regard. This would require a kind of psychological insight that is not available to us. Only God is capable of doing the spiritual cardiogram necessary for answering this question.
Your “Edit” tries to support (2´) by saying that “we generally take people at their word about what they believe. Why, then, shouldn’t we generally take the word of non-Christians who claim they sincerely sought to find God?” I’ve already answered that question: if a person persists in unbelief until his death, then the evidence for Jesus’ identity and the truth of His claims gives us reason to think that that person was not as sincere as he imagined himself to be.
Notice that in so saying, we do not presume to have the sort of psychological insight that the atheist claims to have. Notice as well that this answer is not to say that “every non-Christian [who persists until death in unbelief] is lying, either about God’s existence being evident or about being sincere.” Rather such a person may be self-deceived. He imagines himself to be sincere and earnest in seeking God, when in truth he may not be.
There is a large amount of literature on the incredible human capacity for rationalization and self-deception that is relevant here. We all see the remarkable blind spots in others; but of course we do not see our own. Pride, the desire to be right, and the wish for self-autonomy all conspire to subvert our vaunted sincerity. It is not at all implausible that those who persist in unbelief until their deaths have not truly sought God.1
As for the four examples of other things whose existence is not evident to every sincere seeker, the last two are just silly, and there is every reason to think that the existence of Bigfoot and Santa Claus should not be self-evident. By contrast, the first two examples, especially the first, deserve to be taken very seriously. A Muslim might well claim that Allah will make his existence evident to anyone who sincerely seeks him. I don’t find that claim at all implausible, given that Allah exists. The problem is, we have good reasons to think that the God described in the Qur’an does not exist. We have good reasons to think that the God revealed by Jesus of Nazareth does exist. So in contrast with the four examples, we have good reason to believe that (1´) is true and no comparably good reasons to think that the claims offered on behalf of Allah, Brahman, Bigfoot, or Santa Claus are true.
Now, I realize that my saying these things makes atheists see red! But that is no argument, and they need to ask themselves honestly whether their anger and indignance at Jesus’ wonderful promise that everyone who sincerely seeks God will find Him may not be an indication of just where their hearts really are in regard to God.
What Does It Mean to Define “God”?
I recently posted a YouTube video respectfully asking atheists to comment with what their strongest argument in favor of atheism was. Then, atheists could vote on the comment they felt was their strongest argument. After 1,000 views, the current #1 argument is:
“God” is not meaningfully defined, ergo, by simple tautology, it is 100 percent certain that “God” does not refer to anything that exists (or that does not).
I don’t even understand what this means. I have never heard this argument before. Please help!
Michael
United States
Dr. Craig’s Response
Wow, wow, wow, wow! Positivism lives! I just shake my head in disbelief when I see how pervasive this old-line positivistic philosophy still is in popular culture despite its demise among philosophers fifty years ago. Those who roundly proclaim that we live in a postmodernist culture need to reflect long and hard on data like this.
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Interested readers may also wish to see Dr. Craig’s comments on whether we live in a postmodern society in Part Six of this book.
The reason you haven’t heard of this objection, Michael, is probably because no philosopher presses it anymore. During the positivist era back in the 1920s and ’30s, it was widely thought among philosophers that “metaphysical” notions like God were meaningless. Why? Because no empirical content could be given to such notions. To be meaningful an informative sentence had to be empirically verifiable. Since it was thought that sentences like “God exists” could not be verified through the five senses, they were dismissed as meaningless. The so-called verification principle of meaning, however, was soon found to be unduly restrictive, rendering even some sentences of science meaningless, and in the end self-defeating. With the abandonment of the verification principle of meaning, the vital nerve of positivism was severed, and so it sank into the grave it so richly deserved. A new era then dawned in Anglo-American philosophy, ushering in a renaissance of metaphysics, ethics, and philosophy of religion, which the positivists had suppressed.
It would be very interesting to learn what undergirds the YouTube atheists’ conviction that “God” is a meaningless word. Is it verificationism? If so, then the foundations of their conviction have, unbeknownst to them, already collapsed long ago.
It’s easy to give content to the word “God.” This word can be taken either as a common noun, so that one could speak of “a god,” or it can be used as a proper name like “George” or “Suzanne.” Richard Swinburne, a prominent Christian philosopher, treats “God” as a proper name of the person referred to by the following description:
a person without a body (i.e., a spirit) who necessarily is eternal, perfectly free, omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good, and the creator of all things.
This description expresses the traditional concept of God in Western philosophy and theology. Now, the YouTube atheist might protest, “But how do you know God has those properties?” The question is misplaced. “God” has been stipulated to be the person, if any, referred to by that description. The real question is whether there is anything answering to that description, that is to say, does such a person exist? The whole burden of Swinburne’s natural theology is to present arguments that there is such a person. You can reject his arguments, but there’s no disputing the meaningfulness of his claim.
The best definition of God as a descriptive term is, I think, St. Anselm’s: the greatest conceivable being. As Anselm observed, if you could think of anything greater than God, then that would be God! The very idea of God is of a being than which there cannot be a greater.
This question has relevance to my recent debate with Sam Harris on whether the foundations of morality are natural or supernatural. Following the debate my friend John wrote:
Bill, in your debate with Sam Harris you claimed God was the grounding of objective morality. That word “God” is problematic though. Until that word is defined, or until you tell us how we know what this “God” wants us to do, or what it is, what you end up saying is that there is an objective grounding to morality, and that’s it. But then Sam Harris agreed with you on that score.
If you’ll look at the text of my opening statement in the debate, which I’ve posted on our Reasonable Faith Facebook page,2 you’ll see that I did define what I mean by “God.” I stated: “On the theistic view objective moral values are grounded in God. As St. Anselm saw, God is by definition the greatest conceivable being and, therefore, the highest Good. Indeed, He is not merely perfectly good; He is the locus and paradigm of moral value.”
Since moral goodness is a great-making property, the greatest conceivable being must be morally perfect (as well as have the other superlative properties listed by Swinburne). Indeed, the greatest conceivable being will be the paradigm of moral value. Of course, it remains to be asked whether such a being actually exists. But the contentions I laid out for defense in our debate were conditional: If such a being exists, then … That’s why I think my first contention is almost obviously true. Of course, if such a greatest conceivable being exists, objective moral values and duties exist! How could they not?
The real question was whether Harris could provide an ontological foundation for objective moral values and duties in the absence of such a being. I presented what I take to be a decisive argument against his solution to what he calls “the Value Problem” as well as powerful objections to his attempt to derive objective moral duties from science and his desire to affirm objective moral duties in the absence of any sort of free will.
Finally, let me say again what I said previously: I do not need to provide an account of “how we know what this ‘God’ wants us to do,” since that is a question, not of moral ontology, but of moral epistemology.3 My concern is with the reality of objective moral values and duties; I’m open to any epistemological theories anyone wants to suggest for how we come to know the values and duties that there are.
What Does It Mean for God to Have Necessary Existence?
Dr. Craig,
I really want to learn more about theism but I have hit an intellectual roadblock with God’s necessary existence. I understand what it means for an entity to necessarily exist in a logical sense. Yet when you attribute metaphysical necessity to God (de re necessity) my brain gets muddled.
As I understand it, to say that God necessarily exists in the metaphysical (de re) sense, you mean to state that in every world in which God exists, God must exist. Other scholars of a theistic persuasion reinterpret the same point as proclaiming that God’s existence is part of His essence. But what in the world does that mean? How should I contrast it to logically necessary existence? Moreover, assuming that existence is a property, isn’t it the case that you, me, and everyone else has existence as part of his or her essence? After all, it seems plausible that there is no possible world wherein I reside and do not exist. Hence, the property of existence is part of my essence.
Finally, do you believe it is logically possible that God does not exist? Please explain your answer.
Mikhal
Dr. Craig’s Response
Understanding God’s necessity is fundamental to our grasping who God is, so your question is a vital one, Mikhal. I think some of your confusion may be due simply to terminological muddles, so let’s try to clear them up.
When philosophers speak of metaphysical necessity/possibility, they are thinking in terms of a modality that lies somewhere in between the strict logical modality that characterizes the laws of logic and the broader physical modality that characterizes what is permitted by nature’s laws and boundary conditions. Metaphysical possibility has to do with what is actualizable or realizable, what can actually be. So, for example, I would say that it is metaphysically possible that I might have had an alligator body, even though such a thing is not physically possible. But it is metaphysically impossible that I could have actually been an alligator rather than a human being. Metaphysical necessity has to do with what must be the case, even though its denial does not involve a contradiction. For example, I think it is metaphysically necessary that everything that begins to exist has a cause, even though there is no logical inconsistency in saying that a certain thing came into being without a cause. If this metaphysical modality strikes you as rather vague, you’re right! What we take to be metaphysically necessary/possible depends on our intuitions about such matters.
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Even though this can feel a little “heady,” the distinctions that Dr. Craig articulates are important for clearly thinking about a whole range of issues in philosophy, theology, and apologetics. Try to cultivate your intuitions about what things are metaphysically necessary/possible. You can do this by taking stock of what you already know to be real, for example.
Now, de re (from the Latin, meaning pertaining to a thing) modality has to do with a thing’s essential properties. When it is said that a property belongs to a thing’s essence or is essential to it, that means that the thing could not have lacked that property and still remained itself. If something loses one of its essential properties, then that thing ceases to exist. A cow, for example, has the essential property of being an animal. If it were slaughtered and ground up into hamburger, then it would cease to be a cow. Properties that a thing has which are not essential to it are called contingent properties.
So metaphysical necessity and de re necessity aren’t the same thing. When we say that God is metaphysically necessary, we mean that it is impossible that He fail to exist. This is a much more far-reaching claim than the claim that “in every world in which God exists, God must exist.” When you think about it, anything that exists must have the property of existing in every world in which it exists! So you’re right that you, I, and everyone else has existence as part of his or her essence in that sense. Rather, the claim here is that God exists in every possible world. What God has that we don’t, then, is the property of necessary existence. And He has that property de re, as part of His essence. God cannot lack the property of necessary existence and be God. Of course, if something has the property of necessary existence, it can’t lose that property, since if it did, there would be a possible world in which it lacked necessary existence and so it was never necessarily existing in the first place!4
So is it logically possible that God not exist? Not in the sense of metaphysical possibility! There is no strict logical contradiction in the statement “God does not exist,” just as there is not a strict logical contradiction in saying “Jones is a married bachelor,” but both are unactualizable states of affairs. Thus, it is metaphysically necessary that God exists.
We have here the germ of the ontological argument for God’s existence. For if it is possible that God exists, there is a possible world in which God has necessary existence. But then He exists in every world, including this one. Thus, the atheist is thrust into the awkward position of having to say that God’s existence is impossible. It is not enough to say that in fact God does not exist; the atheist must hold that it is impossible that God exists—a much more radical claim!
Is a Maximally Great Being Possible?
Dear Dr. Craig,
My first question concerns the soundness of the argument in general. The second, however, concerns its theological implications.
Firstly, then, the soundness of the argument. I’m thinking particularly about the version of the OA you propose in To Everyone an Answer (InterVarsity, 2004) together with what you write about the argument in Philosophical Foundations (InterVarsity, 2003) (though my rendering of the argument below isn’t an exact quote),
(OA1) It’s possible that an all-surpassingly great being exists (i.e., a being greater than which nothing can be conceived). In other words, an all-surpassingly great being exists in some possible world.
(OA2) If an all-surpassingly great being exists in some possible world, then it exists in every possible world.
(OA3) If an all-surpassingly great being exists in every possible world, then it exists in the actual world (since the actual world is clearly a possible world).
(OA4) If an all-surpassingly great being exists in the actual world, then an all-surpassingly great being actually exists.
The problem I have with this argument is that we seem able to take the general form of the key premise (i.e., it’s possible that X exists) and then plug in various different definitions of X in order to arrive at absurd answers.
Obviously, defining X as something like an all-surpassingly great island doesn’t work, since, as you and others rightly point out, islands are, amongst other things, inherently material (and are, therefore, contingent on the existence of space and time); moreover, it’s far from clear as to what properties make an island great (for some it might involve plenty of palm trees; for others, it might involve no palm trees at all). So defining X in such a way doesn’t seem to work.
But what if we define X as a being that necessarily exists but isn’t, say, necessarily all-knowing? The argument you give against this idea (if I understand you correctly) is that God must be such that nothing can exist independently of His power, meaning there must be a possible world where God alone exists. You then argue that the existence of God is therefore logically incompatible with the existence of X, meaning X is an incoherent concept.
But I have two problems with this argument. Firstly, for God to be able to actualize a world where X doesn’t exist seems to be asking God to do the logically impossible (since X exists necessarily). So why should we think God must be capable of doing such a thing? Secondly, even if we grant that the existence of God is incompatible with the existence of X, why should it follow that GOD exists as opposed to X? That is, if the proponent of the OA in its original form can argue that, since God’s existence entails there being possible worlds where God alone exists, the concept of X is incoherent, why can’t the skeptic argue that, since X’s existence entails there being NO possible worlds where God alone exists, the concept of God is incoherent? This looks like a “Mexican stand-off” to me.
I’ve considered appealing to factors like simplicity or likeliness at this point; but this seems misguided. Simplicity can be important in deciding on the most likely explanation for a given body of facts. But I’m not sure this is relevant here, since the OA isn’t an inference to the most likely explanation. Rather, the OA starts from the premise that God’s existence is either possible or it isn’t, and then tells us what logically follows as a result. If God’s existence is possible, then it’s necessary, meaning God exists; if it isn’t, God obviously doesn’t exist.
The OA is, therefore, different from something like the teleological argument, where we might want to argue that God is a simpler and more elegant explanation for the universe’s apparent fine-tuning than the extravagant ontologies posited by many-worlds-hypotheses. The OA is a question of metaphysical fact. From what we have said about X, it, therefore, seems to follow that either God exists or X exists (together with any number of other necessarily-existent beings; for if a modified OA works for X, why can’t it work for any other similarly-defined X? It might, I guess, be argued that to simply tack ‘necessarily-existing’ onto a being is somewhat gratuitous. But I don’t see why this would be any more gratuitous than tacking ‘all-surpassingly great’ onto a being, or why gratuity would even be important here. In any case, couldn’t X be a necessarily-existing number or a necessarily-existing set or something like that? Granted, the existence of such entities is problematic for the same reasons Platonism as a whole is problematic. But the existence of such entities doesn’t seem logically impossible; nor do the entities in question seem conceptually gratuitous or incoherent.
I, therefore, have concerns about the soundness of the OA.
But I also have concerns about its theological implications. For, in light of the OA, doesn’t it follow that God’s actions are a necessary consequence of His nature, since, given any set of conditions, an all-surpassingly great being will necessarily react in the “greatest” possible way? Creating the universe, for instance, gives God opportunity to lavish His love and grace on other creatures, meaning only a lesser being would choose not to create the universe. It, therefore, follows that God’s creating the universe is necessary—which logic can be extended to God’s answering of prayers, and, worse still, Christ’s dying on the cross. In fact, on this view, the only thing that makes our world contingent is man’s free will; and, while this may be so, it seems wrong to me, since it leaves so little scope for the action of God’s grace and freedom and sovereignty. The OA, therefore, appears to eliminate God’s free will in the same way physicalism eliminates man’s free will.
As always, I’d be extremely grateful if you could spare the time to address these issues. (Though I don’t have a philosophical background, so I’d be grateful if you could assume a low level of technical knowledge as your starting point—especially when it comes to the nature of necessity!).
Thanks,
James
Dr. Craig’s Response
Let’s deal with the soundness objection to the ontological argument for the existence of God first, James. What you’re really objecting to is not the soundness of the argument. An argument is sound if it is logically valid and has true premises. Since this argument is logically valid, your objecting to the argument’s soundness would require you to think that (OA1) is false. But the parodies of the argument you mention don’t show that it’s impossible that there be a maximally great being, or, as you put it, an all-surpassingly great being. Rather the point of such parodies is that there is no good reason to think that (OA1) is true. For any reason for thinking that premise to be true would also be a reason for accepting an obviously false premise in one of the parodies of the argument. So the argument, even if sound, is not a good argument because there’s no non-circular reason to think that (OA1) is true.
Now, as you note, some of the parodies, like arguments for an unsurpassingly great island or a necessarily existent lion, are not well thought-out. We have good grounds for thinking that such concoctions are impossible, in contrast to the apparently coherent idea of a maximally great being. More difficult to assess is the notion of what I called a quasi-maximally great being: a being which is just like a maximally great being except that it lacks, for example, complete omniscience (like the God of so-called Open Theism, who lacks knowledge of future free acts of men).
My argument against such a parody is that any reason for thinking a quasi-maximally great being is possible also warrants belief in the possibility of a maximally great being, but if we think that a maximally great being is possible, then we must say that a quasi-maximally great being is impossible after all, since it’s impossible for the two to coexist in the same world.
Now, you object, why should we think that God must be capable of refraining from creating a quasi-maximally great being, since His refraining from creating it would be logically impossible?
I think your question highlights the inadequacy of a definition of omnipotence simply in terms of what is logically possible for someone to do. To borrow a famous example, on this definition a person who is essentially capable of only scratching his ear could count as omnipotent since other actions are logically impossible for him to do! That is surely an inadequate concept of omnipotence! Similarly, if there exists another being outside God’s creative power, then this is plausibly not consistent with God’s being omnipotent. I’d say the same with respect to numbers and other allegedly necessarily existing abstract objects: given God’s necessary existence, they are broadly logically impossible.5
INSIGHT
Note what Dr. Craig highlights here. It is a helpful example of adequate vs. inadequate conceptualization of God’s attributes.
IS A MAXIMALLY GREAT BEING POSSIBLE?
Your second objection to the ontological argument for the existence of God is the more difficult of the two: even if we grant that the existence of God is incompatible with the existence of a quasi-maximally great being, why should it follow that God’s existence is possible as opposed to the existence of a quasi-maximally great being? My answer here is that there’s an asymmetry between our intuitions about the possibility of such beings. Any intuition for thinking a quasi-maximally great being to be possible also warrants belief in the possibility of a maximally great being; indeed, the way we came to form the idea of the former was by diminution of the idea of the latter. But our intuition of the possibility of a maximally great being, once we understand its implications, tends to undermine our intuition of the possibility of a quasi-maximally great being. We begin to suspect that despite appearances, it’s not really possible after all.
Notice that all this is said solely on the basis of appeal to modal intuitions alone (i.e., our intuitions about what is possible or necessary). But one of the significant new wrinkles in discussions of the ontological argument is support for (OA1) which goes beyond mere modal intuitions. Here, considerations of simplicity may indeed have a role to play. By appealing to such factors, one is not altering the form of the ontological argument for the existence of God but marshaling reasons in addition to modal intuitions for the truth of (OA1).
Now, concerning your theological misgiving: I don’t see that this has anything to do with God’s being metaphysically necessary. Even if God exists contingently, so long as He is essentially morally perfect you can run your argument that He is morally obligated to do the best and, therefore, must create the best possible world. So this is a problem that faces any theist who thinks that God is morally perfect.
The misgiving is to be met, I think, by questioning the assumption that there is a best of all possible worlds. Worlds may just get better and better without limit. For any world God chooses to create there will always be a better one that He could have created. God must at most create a good world, not the best world (since there is no such thing). Moreover, there’s no reason to think that God must create anything at all. In a possible world in which God creates nothing, there is only He Himself, the paradigm and locus of goodness—the summum bonum. That’s a pretty good world, to say the least!
Naturalistic Appeal to Ignorance
Dr. Craig,
To say that I appreciate your work would be an understatement. I’ll spare you a paragraph or two elaborating on that subject but I do want to take the opportunity to express my sincere gratitude both to you and all the people who work behind the scenes in order to make your work available to people such as myself. May God truly bless your work and allow it to have an impact for Christ all over the world. For my part, I’m getting ready to teach a class using On Guard in a town called Hovd in western Mongolia. A place, I’m sure, you never would have imagined your books working their way to Mongolia.
At any rate, due to the miracles of modern technology also working their way to our corner of the world, I just finished watching your debate with Christopher Hitchens and the City of Ideas debate and I think that it is fairly clear that these popular type “new atheists” are unable to, or unwilling to, interact in any kind of detail with your arguments. However, the kind of umbrella argument they do give to superficially cover your points seems to run along the lines of the following:
We are only beginning to understand the universe and all that is contained in it. Our current knowledge is very limited right now; we are only beginning to discover the questions, let alone the answers. However, this is the job of science and someday, as science progresses, all of these unanswered questions will in fact be answered. In other words, yes, there are mysteries in the universe which may give the appearance of a transcendent being, but, as experience has shown us already with other things that were thought to be of divine origin, these mysteries will eventually be solved and there will be no place for any kind of a “God hypothesis.” In short, God is not necessary and science will eventually explain everything in a naturalistic way given enough time.
I don’t doubt that you did respond to this line of thinking which they throw out there, seemingly, to avoid having to interact with your premises in any kind of detail but I don’t remember hearing a definitive response on your part—maybe I missed it. Would you mind responding to the above “argument” now?
Thank you once again,
Craig
Mongolia
Dr. Craig’s Response
Craig, your letter made my day! I was just reading the brand-new edition of Operation World and was struck by the following sentence:
Patrick Johnstone, when queried in 1979 about the most difficult places for gospel breakthrough, named Mongolia and Albania. Today, there are at least 40,000 Mongolian believers. Albania is open and churches are growing. (p. 4)
I praise God and thank you for your pioneering work! Folks, if you don’t know where western Mongolia is, take a look at a globe or world map. It may not be the end of the world, but you can see it from there!
As for your question, I, too, hear the naturalistic appeal to ignorance all the time. I think the fallacy of this reasoning is that it assumes that I’m appealing to a sort of “God of the gaps” to plug up the gaps in our scientific knowledge of the world. But I’m not. In fact, I’m not even offering scientific evidence for God. Rather here is how I put it:
1. Scientific evidence can support a premise in an argument leading to a conclusion having theological significance.
Reflect for a moment on that statement. The scientific evidence I offer is for premises which are religiously neutral statements that can be found in any science textbook. Take, for example, the kalam cosmological argument. My claim is that we have good scientific evidence in support of the premise
2. The universe began to exist.
There’s nothing about this statement that would make it incapable of being supported by the scientific evidence. Whether the universe began to exist is precisely one of those questions which science seeks to answer. Are we to think that science is incapable of returning an affirmative answer to this question? Why? That would be to impose some sort of philosophical constraint on what answers science is capable of giving to this question.
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This is indeed worth pondering. For it offers insight not only into how to think about the role of scientific evidence in arguments for God’s existence but how science and theology can converge or integrate in relevant ways in order to grasp an understanding of the world. This is not the only way they can converge, but it is a significant way.
Similarly, the second premise of the teleological argument from fine-tuning is a religiously neutral statement to which scientific evidence can in principle give an answer:
3. The fine-tuning is not due to physical necessity or chance.
Richard Dawkins, following Sir Martin Rees, rejects the hypothesis of physical necessity as a scientifically plausible explanation of the fine-tuning, and Roger Penrose similarly rejects chance as a reasonable explanation. Neither of these non-theists appeals to theological grounds for rejecting these options; their reasons are strictly scientific. So are we to say that they cannot be correct, that science cannot return a negative verdict on these hypotheses? Why? These are strictly scientific statements that must be open to support by the empirical evidence.
Now, of course, the naturalist may claim that the scientific evidence doesn’t in fact support either of these two premises. But then you’ve got him right where you want him: namely, a discussion of how good the evidence for these two statements is! That’s just what we want to discuss.
Now, it should go without saying that scientific evidence is by the very nature of the case always provisional and open to revision. But that’s no special liability of the scientific statements that constitute these two premises. The question will always be, what does our best evidence indicate is true? For example, is the evidence of contemporary cosmology more probable given the beginning of the universe or more probable given that the universe is beginningless?
Notice, too, that it would be hypocritical to demand evidence for these two premises, which is in excess of that which is assumed to constitute adequate support for the acceptance of other scientific hypotheses. If one is rational to accept the neo-Darwinian theory of biological evolution by random mutation and natural selection, for example, then why is it not equally rational to accept that the universe began to exist?
Note, finally, that some of the theistic arguments are philosophical, for example, the moral argument and the ontological argument, or have premises that are supportable not just scientifically but philosophically, and are, therefore, immune to the objection based on scientific ignorance.
On Assessing the Argument from Contingency
Dr. Craig,
I want to say that I am in favor of the Kalam cosmological argument. But, I was wondering what is your opinion of the cosmological argument from contingent being?
William
Dr. Craig’s Response
I’ve briefly defended the cosmological argument from contingent being in my and J. P. Moreland’s Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview (InterVarsity, 2003) and expand my treatment in the third edition of Reasonable Faith (Crossway, 2008).
There are three premises in the argument:
1. Everything that exists has an explanation of its existence (either in the necessity of its own nature or in an external cause).
2. If the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation is God.
3. The universe exists.
Now, what follows logically from these three premises?
From 1 and 3 it logically follows that:
4. The universe has an explanation of its existence.
And from 2 and 4 the conclusion logically follows:
5. Therefore, the explanation of the universe’s existence is God.
Now, this is a logically airtight argument. So if the atheist wants to deny the conclusion, he has to say that one of the three premises is false.
But which one will he reject? Premise 3 is undeniable for any sincere seeker after truth. So the atheist is going to have to deny either 1 or 2 if he wants to remain an atheist and be rational. So the whole question comes down to this: are premises 1 and 2 true, or are they false? Well, let’s look at them.
According to premise 1 there are two kinds of things: (a) things that exist necessarily and (b) things that exist contingently. Things that exist necessarily exist by a necessity of their own nature. Many mathematicians think that numbers, sets, and other mathematical entities exist in this way. They’re not caused to exist by something else; they just exist by the necessity of their own nature. By contrast, contingent things are caused to exist by something else. They exist because something else has produced them. Familiar physical objects like people, planets, and galaxies belong in this category.
So what reason might be offered for thinking that premise 1 is true? Well, when you reflect on it, premise 1 has a sort of self-evidence about it. Imagine that you’re hiking through the woods one day and you come across a translucent ball lying on the forest floor. You would naturally wonder how it came to be there. If one of your hiking partners said to you, “It just exists inexplicably. Don’t worry about it!” you’d either think that he was crazy or figure that he just wanted you to keep moving. No one would take seriously the suggestion that the ball existed there with literally no explanation.
Now, suppose you increase the size of the ball in this story so that it’s the size of a car. That wouldn’t do anything to satisfy or remove the demand for an explanation. Suppose it were the size of a house. Same problem. Suppose it were the size of a continent or a planet. Same problem. Suppose it were the size of the entire universe. Same problem. Merely increasing the size of the ball does nothing to affect the need of an explanation.
Premise 1 is the premise that the atheist typically rejects. Sometimes atheists will respond to premise 1 by saying that it is true of everything in the universe but not of the universe itself. But this response commits what has been aptly called “the taxicab fallacy.” For as the nineteenth-century atheist philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer quipped, premise 1 can’t be dismissed like a hack once you’ve arrived at your desired destination!
It would be arbitrary for the atheist to claim that the universe is the exception to the rule. The illustration of the ball in the woods showed that merely increasing the size of the object to be explained, even until it becomes the universe itself, does nothing to remove the need for some explanation of its existence.
Notice, too, how unscientific this atheist response is. For modern cosmology is devoted to the search for an explanation of the universe’s existence. The atheist attitude would cripple science.
Some atheists have tried to justify making the universe an exception to premise 1 by saying that it’s impossible for the universe to have an explanation of its existence. For the explanation of the universe would have to be some prior state of affairs in which the universe did not yet exist. But that would be nothingness, and nothingness cannot be the explanation of anything. So the universe must just exist inexplicably.
This line of reasoning is obviously fallacious. For it assumes that the universe is all there is, so that if there were no universe there would be nothing. In other words, the objection assumes that atheism is true! The atheist is thus begging the question, arguing in a circle. I agree that the explanation of the universe must be a prior state of affairs in which the universe did not exist. But I contend that that state of affairs is God and His will, not nothingness.
So it seems to me that premise 1 is more plausibly true than false, which is all we need for a good argument.
What, then, about premise 2? Is it more plausibly true than false?
What’s really awkward for the atheist at this point is that premise 2 is logically equivalent to the typical atheist response to the contingency argument. Two statements are logically equivalent if it is impossible for one to be true and the other one false. They stand or fall together. So what does the atheist almost always say in response to the argument from contingency? The atheist typically asserts the following:
A. If atheism is true, the universe has no explanation of its existence.
This is precisely what the atheist says in response to premise 1. The universe just exists inexplicably. But this is logically equivalent to saying:
B. If the universe has an explanation of its existence, then atheism is not true.
So you can’t affirm (A) and deny (B).
But (B) is virtually synonymous with premise 2! So by saying in response to premise 1 that, given atheism, the universe has no explanation, the atheist is implicitly admitting premise 2, that if the universe does have an explanation, then God exists.
Besides that, premise 2 is very plausible in its own right. For think of what the universe is: all of space-time reality, including all matter and energy. It follows that if the universe has a cause of its existence, that cause must be a non-physical, immaterial being beyond space and time. Now, there are only two sorts of things that could fit that description: either an abstract object like a number or else an unembodied mind. But abstract objects can’t cause anything. That’s part of what it means to be abstract. The number 7, for example, can’t cause any effects. So the cause of the existence of the universe must be a transcendent Mind, which is what believers understand God to be.
The argument thus proves the existence of a necessary, uncaused, timeless, spaceless, immaterial, personal Creator of the universe. This is truly mind-blowing!
The atheist has one alternative open to him at this point. He can retrace his steps, withdraw his objection to premise 1, and say instead that, yes, the universe does have an explanation of its existence. But that explanation is: the universe exists by a necessity of its own nature. For the atheist, the universe could serve as a sort of God-substitute which exists necessarily.
Now, this would be a very radical step for the atheist to take, and I can’t think of any contemporary atheist who has in fact adopted this line. A few years ago at a Philosophy of Time conference at City College in Santa Barbara, it seemed to me that Professor Adolf Grünbaum, a vociferous atheistic philosopher of science from the University of Pittsburgh, was flirting with this idea. But when I raised the question from the floor whether he thought the universe existed necessarily, he was quite indignant at the suggestion. “Of course not!” he snapped and went on to say that the universe just exists without any explanation.
The reason atheists are not eager to embrace this alternative is clear. As we look about the universe, none of the things that make it up, whether stars, planets, galaxies, dust, radiation, or what have you, seems to exist necessarily. They could all fail to exist; indeed, at some point in the past, when the universe was very dense, none of them did exist.
But, you might say, what about the matter out of which these things are made? Maybe the matter exists necessarily, and all these things are just different contingent configurations of matter. The problem with this suggestion is that, according to the standard model of subatomic physics, matter itself is composed of tiny particles called “quarks.” The universe is just the collection of all these quarks arranged in different ways. But now the question arises: couldn’t a different collection of quarks have existed instead of this one? Does each and every one of these quarks exist necessarily?
Notice what the atheist cannot say at this point. He cannot say that the quarks are just configurations of matter which could have been different, even though the matter of which the quarks are composed exists necessarily. He can’t say this because quarks aren’t composed of anything! They just are the basic units of matter. So if a quark doesn’t exist, the matter doesn’t exist.
Now, it seems obvious that a different collection of quarks could have existed instead of the collection that does exist. But if that were the case, then a different universe would have existed. To see the point, think about your desk. Could your desk have been made of ice? Notice that I’m not asking if you could have had an ice desk in the place of your wooden desk that had the same size and structure. Rather I’m asking if your very desk, the one made of wood, if that desk could have been made of ice. The answer is obviously, no. The ice desk would be a different desk, not the same desk.
Similarly, a universe made up of different quarks, even if identically arranged as in this universe, would be a different universe. It follows, then, that the universe does not exist by a necessity of its own nature.
So atheists have not been so bold as to deny premise 2 and say that the universe exists necessarily. Premise 2 also seems to be plausibly true.
But given the truth of the three premises the conclusion is logically inescapable: God is the explanation of the existence of the universe. Moreover, the argument implies that God is an uncaused, unembodied Mind who transcends the physical universe and even space and time themselves and who exists necessarily. What a great argument!
Justification of the Moral Argument’s Second Premise
Dear Dr. Craig,
I have recently been working through your book On Guard, and have a question concerning the Moral Argument (which I have also heard you use in several of your debates). I have seen it most commonly set up as:
1. If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist.
2. Objective moral values and duties do exist.
3. Therefore, God exists.
Essentially, I find that although the moral argument has a role in our discussions with atheist and other worldviews, it does not seem to be actual evidence for God’s existence, but rather an implication of His existence. An atheist can say that morality (although subjective) has developed from biological and sociological influences evolving into what we now consider to be “right and wrong.”
Although discussing how we come to know morality says nothing about the ontology of morality, it would seem that the only way a theist can show that an objective moral stand exists is by proving (or providing a greater probability through evidence) that God exists. This is due to the fact that the conversation almost always moves from the ontology of morality to the epistemology of morality. It would seem the only way to clear the air is to determine which worldview is true. My concern may be founded on my own ignorance, but the moral argument would seem to be a one-way street in that by showing God to exist, objective morality exists. However, following this line of thought in its reverse proves increasingly difficult without pointing to God, since either side can offer an explanation of how we come to an understanding of morality—which again, says nothing about the subjective or objective nature of morality.
I do find that the moral argument helps to count the cost of either ideology or as you said in your book, “what is at stake.” But I do not find that the “cost” should be a reason to accept something as true, since our like or dislike of a truth has no effect on that truth. I guess my point is using objective values to show that God exists and then using God to show that objective values exist would seem to be circular reasoning to me. Can we use the moral argument, as given above, as actual evidence for God’s existence and if so, how do we “prove” or give evidence for objective morality apart from pointing to God?
Corey
United States
Dr. Craig’s Response
Corey, your question asks, in effect, whether the moral argument, as I have framed it, is not question-begging, since the only justification for believing premise (2) to be true is believing that God exists, which is the argument’s conclusion, so that one is reasoning in a circle.
I reply that the argument is not question-begging, since the warrant I offer for belief in objective moral values and duties is not God but moral experience.6 That such an appeal is not question-begging should be evident from the fact that the majority of non-theists, including atheists, believe in the truth of premise (2) precisely on this basis.
Louise Antony, herself a non-theist, put it so well in our debate a few years ago at U Mass, Amherst7: Any argument for moral skepticism will be based upon premises which are less obvious than the existence of objective moral values themselves. That seems to me quite right. Therefore, moral skepticism is unjustifiable.
INSIGHT
This is an insightful admission from Antony. It is not only valuable when considering objections against the moral argument for God’s existence, but it is also useful for weighing a skepticism, in general, which tends to proffer assumptions that are “less obvious” than the existence of x. Bottom line: moral skepticism fails to attend to our direct acquaintance with reality even though this is how our moral experience encounters objective moral values and duties.
The humanist philosopher Peter Cave gives the following example:
Whatever skeptical arguments may be brought against our belief that killing the innocent is morally wrong, we are more certain that the killing is morally wrong than that the argument is sound…. Torturing an innocent child for the sheer fun of it is morally wrong.8
In moral experience we encounter objective moral values and duties, and so, in the absence of some sort of defeater of that belief, we are perfectly rational to hold to it. Moral realism is the default position, and the moral skeptic needs to provide some powerful defeater to overcome it.
One can make the same point another way by comparing, as William Sorley does9, our apprehension of the moral realm with our apprehension of the physical realm. Just as we can’t get outside our moral perceptions to try to justify them, so we cannot get outside our sensory perceptions to try to justify them. Just as, in the absence of some defeater, we trust our sense perceptions that there is a realm of objectively existing physical objects around us, so we trust our moral perceptions that there is an objectively existing realm of moral values and duties. For any argument for skepticism about our moral perceptions we could run a parallel argument for skepticism about our sensory perceptions. But you’d have to be crazy to doubt the veridicality of your sense perceptions of a realm of objectively existing physical objects. Similarly, until we are given a defeater, we ought to trust our moral perception of a realm of objectively existing values and duties.
Now, as I say, this is not a theistic justification of belief in objective moral values and duties; this is the way almost every moral realist justifies his belief in the objectivity of values and duties. There is no circularity here.
In any case, I’d encourage you to simply ask your conversation partner whether he believes in some objective moral values and duties. Ask what he thinks of examples of moral atrocities. Even if the unbeliever has no justification for believing in premise (2), so long as he does believe in premise (2), the argument goes through. Since almost everyone does believe that (2) is true, the debate really comes down to (1). The unbeliever will have to explain how objective moral values and duties can exist in a world without God as an absolute standard and law-giver.
You must resist resolutely the tendency to conflate moral ontology with moral epistemology. If the unbeliever tries to steer the conversation toward epistemology, you must bring the conversation back on track. It is just irrelevant that, as you put it, “either side can offer an explanation of how we come to an understanding of morality.” You could agree with everything the unbeliever says about that: we come to an understanding of morality through biological evolution, societal conditioning, parental influences, etc. All of that is irrelevant to the question of whether objective moral values and duties exist, as you, yourself, observe. Of course, the unbeliever might present the socio-biological account as a putative defeater of (2), in which case you’ve got to deal with it.10
Finally, when I talk about the cost of denying the premises of a theistic argument, I’m talking about the intellectual cost. A determined skeptic can always deny the conclusion of one’s argument simply by denying one of the premises. (This calls to mind an observation by Alvin Plantinga that one can reduce someone from knowledge to ignorance by offering him a valid argument based on premises he knows to be true for a conclusion he simply will not accept!) You want to make the intellectual price tag of atheism as high as you can, in hopes that the unbeliever will come to see that the price is simply too high, that to maintain his atheism in the face of the argument would compromise his intellectual integrity. That is the method of good argumentation.
1. Readers might be interested in such books as Gregg A. Ten Elshof, I Told Me So: Self-Deception and the Christian Life (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009); James S. Spiegel, The Making of an Atheist: How Immorality Leads to Unbelief (Chicago: Moody, 2010); James R. Peters, The Logic of the Heart: Augustine, Pascal, and the Rationality of Faith (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2009); Patrick Downey, Desperately Wicked: Philosophy, Christianity and the Human Heart (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 2009).
2. For those interested, here is the text of Dr. Craig’s opening remarks: http://bit.ly/HarrisOpening.
3. For more on this matter, see the question above, “The Importance of Distinguishing Between Moral Epistemology and Moral Ontology” (pages 92–95).
4. It is important to note that when medieval theologians spoke of existence as uniquely part of God’s essence, they were using the word “essence” in a different way. For them a thing’s essence defined what it is. In their view only God has existence essentially, since every other being is contingent and so is not defined as something existing.
5. For a brilliant yet technical discussion of an adequate definition of omnipotence, see Thomas Flint and Alfred Freddoso, “Maximal Power,” in The Existence and Nature of God, Alfred Freddoso, ed. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983, 81–113.
6. William Lane Craig, On Guard: Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision (Colorado Springs: David C. Cook, 2010), 141–43.
7. You can access this debate for free by visiting ReasonableFaith.org (http://bit.ly/CraigAntony).
8. Peter Cave, Humanism (Oxford: OneWorld, 2009), 146. Thanks to Peter S. Williams for this reference.
9. See Craig, On Guard, 128.
10. Dr. Craig does deal with two versions of this objection in On Guard, pp. 142–44. We invite you to reflect on what he says there.