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worm; depositary of truth, yet a sewer of uncertainty and error; pride and refuse of the universe. Who shall resolve this tangle?4
Pascal hopes that by explaining man’s greatness as well as his misery, he might shake people out of their lethargy to think about their condition and to seek a solution.
Pascal’s analysis of the human predicament leads up to his famous Wager argument, by means of which he hopes to tip the scales in favor of theism.5 The founder of probability theory, Pascal argues that when the odds that God exists are even, then the prudent man will gamble that God exists. This is a wager that all men must make—the game is in progress and a bet must be laid. There is no opting out: you have already joined the game. Which then will you choose—that God exists or that he does not? Pascal argues that since the odds are even, reason is not violated in making either choice; so reason cannot determine which bet to make. Therefore, the choice should be made pragmatically in terms of maximizing one’s happiness. If one wagers that God exists and he does, one has gained eternal life and infinite happiness. If he does not exist, one has lost nothing. On the other hand, if one wagers that God does not exist and he does, then one has suffered infinite loss. If he does not in fact exist, then one has gained nothing. Hence, the only prudent choice is to believe that God exists.
Now Pascal does believe that there is a way of getting a look behind the scenes, to speak, to determine rationally how one should bet, namely, the proofs of Scripture of miracle and prophecy, which he discusses in the second half of his work.
But for now, he wants to emphasize that even in the absence of such evidence, one still ought to believe in God. For given the human predicament of being cast into existence and facing either eternal annihilation or eternal wrath, the only reasonable course of action is to believe in God: “for if you win, you win all; if you lose, you lose nothing.”6
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Another apologetic based on the human predicament may be found in the magnificent novels of the great nineteenth-century Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881). (May I add that I think the obsession of contemporary evangelicals with the writings of authors like C. S. Lewis to the neglect of writers like Dostoyevsky is a great shame? Dostoyevsky is a far, far grander writer.) The problem that tortured Dostoyevsky was the problem of evil: how can a good and loving God exist when the world is filled with so much suffering and evil? Dostoyevsky presented this problem in his works so persuasively, so poignantly, that certain passages of his, notably “The Grand Inquisitor” section from his Brothers Karamazov, 4. Ibid., 217, 246.
5. Ibid., 343.
6. Ibid.
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are often reprinted in anthologies as classic statements of the problem of evil. As a result, some people are under the impression that Dostoyevsky was himself an atheist and that the viewpoint of the Grand Inquisitor is his own.
Actually, he sought to carry through a two-pronged defense of theism in the face of the problem of evil. Positively, he argued that innocent suffering may perfect character and bring one into a closer relation with God. Negatively, he tried to show that if the existence of God is denied, then one is landed in complete moral relativism, so that no act, regardless how dreadful or heinous, can be condemned by the atheist. To live consistently with such a view of life is unthinkable and impossible. Hence, atheism is destructive of life and ends logically in suicide.
Dostoyevsky’s magnificent novels Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov powerfully illustrate these themes. In the former a young atheist, convinced of moral relativism, brutally murders an old woman. Though he knows that on his presuppositions he should not feel guilty, nevertheless he is consumed with guilt until he confesses his crime and gives his life to God. The latter novel is the story of four brothers, one of whom murders their father because his atheist brother Ivan had told him that moral absolutes do not exist. Unable to live with the consequences of his own philosophical system, Ivan suffers a mental collapse.
The remaining two brothers, one of whom is unjustly accused of the parricide and the other a young Russian orthodox priest, find in what they suffer the perfection of their character and a nearness to God.
Dostoyevsky recognizes that his response to atheism constitutes no positive proof of Christianity. Indeed, he rejects that there could be such. Men demand of Christ that he furnish them “bread and circuses,” but he refuses to do so. The decision to follow Christ must be made in loneliness and anxiety. Each person must face for himself the anguish of a world without God and in the solitude of his own heart give himself to God in faith.
Søren Kierkegaard
The Danish existentialist of the late nineteenth century, Søren Kierkegaard (1813–
1855), also presents a sort of negative apologetic for the Christian faith. He thinks of life as being lived on three different planes or stages: the aesthetic stage, the ethical stage, and the religious stage. Man in the aesthetic stage lives life only on the sensual level, a life that is self- and pleasure-centered. This need not be a gross hedonism. Man on this level could be very cultivated and even circumspect; but nevertheless his life revolves around himself and those material things—whether sex, art, music, or whatever—that bring him pleasure. The paradox of life on this level is that it leads ultimately to unhappiness. The self-centered, aesthetic man finds no ultimate meaning in life and no true satisfaction. Thus, the aesthetic life leads finally to boredom, a sort of sickness with life.
But this is not the end, for only at this point is a person ready to live on the second plane of existence, the ethical plane. The transition to the ethical stage of
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life is a sort of leap motivated by dissatisfaction to a higher level, where one affirms transpersonal moral values and guides life by those objective standards. No longer is life lived only for self and for pleasure; rather one is constrained to seek the ethical good and to change one’s conduct to bring it into conformity with that good. Thus, man in the ethical stage is the moral man. But life on this level, too, ends in unhappiness. For the more one tries sincerely to bring one’s life into conformity with the objective standards of the good, the more painfully aware one is that one cannot do it. Thus, the ethical life, when earnestly pursued, leads ultimately to guilt and despair.
But there is one more stage along life’s way: the religious stage. Here one finds forgiveness of sins and a personal relationship with God. Only here, in intimate communion with one’s Creator, does man find authentic existence and true fulfillment. Again, Kierkegaard represents the transition to this stage from the ethical as a leap. The decision to believe is a criterionless choice, a leap of faith into the dark. Although man can be given no rational grounds to leap, unless he does so, he will remain in despair and inauthentic existence.
Francis Schaeffer
As I remarked earlier, Francis Schaeffer (1912–1984) is the thinker most responsible for crafting a Christian apologetic based on the so-called modern predicament.
According to Schaeffer, there can be traced in recent Western culture a “line of despair,” which penetrates philosophy, literature, and the arts in succession. He believes the root of the problem lies in Hegelian philosophy, specifically in its denial of absolute truths. Hegel developed the famous triad of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, in which contradictions are seen not as absolute opposites, but as partial truths, which are synthesized in the whole. Ultimately all is One, which is absolute and non-contradictory. In Schaeffer’s view, Hegel’s system undermined the notion of particular absolute truths (such as “That act is morally wrong” or “This painting is aesthetically ugly”) by synthesizing them into the whole. This denial of absolutes has gradually made its way through Western culture. In each case, it results in despair, because without absolutes man’s endeavors degenerate into absurdity. Schaeffer believes that the Theater of the Absurd, abstract modern art, and modern music such as compositions by John Cage are all indications of what happens below the line of despair. Only by reaffirming belief in the absolute God of Christianity can man and his culture avoid inevitable degeneracy, meaninglessness, and despair.
Schaeffer’s efforts against abortion may be seen as a logical extension of this apologetic. Once God is denied, human life becomes worthless, and we see the fruit of such a philosophy in the abortion and infanticide now taking place in Western society. Schaeffer warns that unless Western man returns to the Christian world and life view, nothing will stop the trend from degenerating into population control and human breeding. Only a theistic worldview can save the human race from itself.
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Assessment
The Loss of God and Immortality
Man, writes Loren Eiseley, is the Cosmic Orphan. He is the only creature in the universe who asks, “Why?” Other animals have instincts to guide them, but man has learned to ask questions.
“Who am I?” he asks. “Why am I here? Where am I going?” Since the Enlightenment, when modern man threw off the shackles of religion, he has tried to answer these questions without reference to God. But the answers that have come back were not exhilarating, but dark and terrible. “You are the accidental by-product of nature, a result of matter plus time plus chance. There is no reason for your existence. All you face is death.”
Modern man thought that when he had gotten rid of God, he had freed himself from all that repressed and stifled him. Instead, he discovered that in killing God, he had only succeeded in orphaning himself.
For if there is no God, then man’s life becomes absurd.
If God does not exist, then both man and the universe are inevitably doomed to death. Man, like all biological organisms, must die. With no hope of immortality, man’s life leads only to the grave. His life is but a spark in the infinite blackness, a spark that appears, flickers, and dies forever. Compared to the infinite stretch of time, the span of man’s life is but an infinitesimal moment; and yet this is all the life he will ever know. Therefore, everyone must come face to face with what theologian Paul Tillich has called “the threat of non-being.” For though I know now that I exist, that I am alive, I also know that someday I will no longer exist, that I will no longer be, that I will die. This thought is staggering and threatening: to think that the person I call “myself ” will cease to exist, that I will be no more!
I remember vividly the first time my father told me that someday I would die.
Somehow, as a child, the thought had just never occurred to me. When he told me, I was filled with fear and unbearable sadness. And though he tried repeatedly to reassure me that this was a long way off, that did not seem to matter. Whether sooner or later, the undeniable fact was that I would die and be no more, and the thought overwhelmed me. Eventually, like all of us, I grew to simply accept the fact. We all learn to live with the inevitable. But the child’s insight remains true.
As the French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre observed, several hours or several years make no difference once you have lost eternity.
Whether it comes sooner or later, the prospect of death and the threat of nonbeing is a terrible horror. I met a student once who did not feel this threat. He said he had been raised on the farm and was used to seeing the animals being born and dying. Death was for him simply natural—a part of life, so to speak. I was puzzled by how different our two perspectives on death were and found it difficult to understand why he did not feel the threat of non-being. Years later, I think I found my answer in reading Sartre. Sartre observed that death is not threatening so long as we view it as the death of the other, from a third-person
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standpoint, so to speak. It is only when we internalize it and look at it from the first-person perspective—”my death: I am going to die”—that the threat of non-being becomes real. As Sartre points out, many people never assume this first-person perspective in the midst of life; one can even look at one’s own death from the third-person standpoint, as if it were the death of another or even of an animal, as did my friend. But the true existential significance of my death can only be appreciated from the first-person perspective, as I realize that I am going to die and forever cease to exist.
And the universe, too, faces a death of its own. Scientists tell us that the universe is expanding, and the galaxies are growing farther and farther apart. As it does so, it grows colder and colder, and its energy is used up. Eventually all the stars will burn out, and all matter will collapse into dead stars and black holes.
There will be no light at all; there will be no heat; there will be no life; only the corpses of dead stars and galaxies, ever expanding into the endless darkness and the cold recesses of space—a universe in ruins. This is not science fiction. The entire universe marches irreversibly toward its grave. So not only is the life of each individual person doomed; the entire human race is doomed. The universe is plunging toward inevitable extinction—death is written throughout its structure.
There is no escape. There is no hope.
The Absurdity of Life without God and Immortality
If there is no God, then man and the universe are doomed. Like prisoners condemned to death, we await our unavoidable execution. There is no God, and there is no immortality. And what is the consequence of this? It means that life itself is absurd. It means that the life we have is without ultimate significance, value, or purpose. Let’s look at each of these.
NO ULTIMATE MEANING WITHOUT GOD AND IMMORTALITY
If each individual person passes out of existence when he dies, then what ultimate meaning can be given to his life? Does it really matter whether he ever existed at all? It might be said that his life was important because it influenced others or affected the course of history. But this shows only a relative significance to his life, not an ultimate significance. His life may be important relative to certain other events, but what is the ultimate significance of any of those events? If all the events are meaningless, then what can be the ultimate significance of influencing any of them? Ultimately it makes no difference.
Look at it from another perspective: Scientists say that the universe originated in an explosion called the “Big Bang” about thirteen billion years ago. Suppose the Big Bang had never occurred. Suppose the universe had never existed. What ultimate difference would it make? The universe is doomed to die anyway. In the end it makes no difference whether the universe ever existed or not. Therefore, it is without ultimate significance.
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The same is true of the human race. Mankind is a doomed race in a dying universe. Because the human race will eventually cease to exist, it makes no ultimate difference whether it ever did exist. Mankind is thus no more significant than a swarm of mosquitoes or a barnyard of pigs, for their end is all the same. The same blind cosmic process that coughed them up in the first place will eventually swallow them all again.
And the same is true of each individual person. The contributions of the scientist to the advance of human knowledge, the researches of the doctor to alleviate pain and suffering, the efforts of the diplomat to secure peace in the world, the sacrifices of good people everywhere to better the lot of the human race—all these come to nothing. In the end they don’t make one bit of difference, not one bit. Each person’s life is therefore without ultimate significance. And because our lives are ultimately meaningless, the activities we fill our lives with are also meaningless.
The long hours spent in study at the university, our jobs, our interests, our friendships—all these are, in the final analysis, utterly meaningless.
In his poem “The End of the World” Archibald MacLeish portrays life as an idiotic circus, until one day the show is over:
Quite unexpectedly, as Vasserot
The armless ambidextrian was lighting
A match between his great and second toe,
And Ralph the lion was engaged in biting
The neck of Madame Sossman while the drum
Pointed, and Teeny was about to cough
In waltz-time swinging Jocko by the thumb
Quite unexpectedly the top blew off:
And there, there overhead, there, there hung over
Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,
There in the starless dark, the poise, the hover,
There with vast wings across the cancelled skies,
There in the sudden blackness the black pall
Of nothing, nothing, nothing—nothing at all.7
This is the horror of modern man: because he ends in nothing, he is nothing.
But it’s important to see that it is not just immortality that man needs if life is to be meaningful. Mere duration of existence does not make that existence meaningful. If man and the universe could exist forever, but if there were no God, their existence would still have no ultimate significance. I once read a science-fiction story in which an astronaut was marooned on a barren chunk of rock lost in outer 7. In Major American Poets, ed. Oscar Williams and Edwin Long (New York: New American Library, 1962), 436.
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space. He had with him two vials: one containing poison and the other a potion that would make him live forever. Realizing his predicament, he gulped down the poison. But then to his horror, he discovered he had swallowed the wrong vial—he had drunk the potion for immortality. And that meant that he was cursed to exist forever—a meaningless, unending life. Now if God does not exist, our lives are just like that. They could go on and on and still be utterly without meaning. We could still ask of life, “So what?” So it’s not just immortality man needs if life is to be ultimately significant; he needs God and immortality. And if God does not exist, then he has neither.
Twentieth-century man came to understand this. Read Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett. During this entire play two men carry on trivial conversation while waiting for a third man to arrive, who never does. Our lives are like that, Beckett is saying; we just kill time waiting—for what, we don’t know. In a tragic portrayal of man, Beckett wrote another play in which the curtain opens revealing a stage littered with junk. For thirty long seconds, the audience sits and stares in silence at that junk. Then the curtain closes. That’s all.
French existentialists Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus understood this, too.
Sartre portrayed life in his play No Exit as hell—the final line of the play are the words of resignation, “Well, let’s get on with it.” Hence, Sartre writes elsewhere of the “nausea” of existence. Man, he says, is adrift in a boat without a rudder on an endless sea. Camus, too, saw life as absurd. At the end of his brief novel The Stranger, Camus’s hero discovers in a flash of insight that the universe has no meaning and there is no God to give it one. The French biochemist Jacques Monod seemed to echo those sentiments when he wrote in his work Chance and Necessity, “Man finally knows he is alone in the indifferent immensity of the universe.”
Thus, if there is no God, then life itself becomes meaningless. Man and the universe are without ultimate significance.
NO ULTIMATE VALUE WITHOUT GOD AND IMMORTALITY
If life ends at the grave, then it makes no difference whether one has lived as a Stalin or as a saint. Since one’s destiny is ultimately unrelated to one’s behavior, you may as well just live as you please. As Dostoyevsky put it: “If there is no immortality, then all things are permitted.” On this basis, a writer like Ayn Rand is absolutely correct to praise the virtues of selfishness. Live totally for self; no one holds you accountable! Indeed, it would be foolish to do anything else, for life is too short to jeopardize it by acting out of anything but pure self-interest. Sacrifice for another person would be stupid. Kai Nielsen, an atheist philosopher who attempts to defend the viability of ethics without God, in the end admits, We have not been able to show that reason requires the moral point of view, or that all really rational persons, unhoodwinked by myth or ideology, need not be individual egoists or classical amoralists. Reason doesn’t decide here. The picture I have painted
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for you is not a pleasant one. Reflection on it depresses me. . . . Pure practical reason, even with a good knowledge of the facts, will not take you to morality.8
But the problem becomes even worse. For, regardless of immortality, if there is no God, then any basis for objective standards of right and wrong seems to have evaporated. All we are confronted with is, in Jean-Paul Sartre’s words, the bare, valueless fact of existence. Moral values are either just expressions of personal taste or the by-products of socio-biological evolution and conditioning. In the words of one humanist philosopher, “The moral principles that govern our behavior are rooted in habit and custom, feeling and fashion.”9 In a world without God, who is to say which actions are right and which are wrong? Who is to judge that the values of Adolf Hitler are inferior to those of a saint? The concept of morality loses all meaning in a universe without God. As one contemporary atheistic ethicist points out, “To say that something is wrong because . . . it is forbidden by God, is perfectly understandable to anyone who believes in a law-giving God. But to say that something is wrong . . . even though no God exists to forbid it, is not understandable. . . .” “The concept of moral obligation [is] unintelligible apart from the idea of God. The words remain but their meaning is gone.”10 In a world without a divine lawgiver, there can be no objective right and wrong, only our culturally and personally relative, subjective judgments. This means that it is impossible to condemn war, oppression, or crime as evil. Nor can one praise brotherhood, equality, and love as good. For in a universe without God, good and evil do not exist—there is only the bare valueless fact of existence, and there is no one to say that you are right and I am wrong.
NO ULTIMATE PURPOSE WITHOUT GOD AND IMMORTALITY
If death stands with open arms at the end of life’s trail, then what is the goal of life? To what end has life been lived? Is it all for nothing? Is there no reason for life? And what of the universe? Is it utterly pointless? If its destiny is a cold grave in the recesses of outer space, the answer must be yes—it is pointless. There is no goal, no purpose, for the universe. The litter of a dead universe will just go on expanding and expanding—forever.
And what of man? Is there no purpose at all for the human race? Or will it simply peter out someday, lost in the oblivion of an indifferent universe? The English writer H. G. Wells foresaw such a prospect. In his novel The Time Machine Wells’s time traveler journeys far into the future to discover the destiny of man.
All he finds is a dead earth, save for a few lichens and moss, orbiting a gigantic red sun. The only sounds are the rush of the wind and the gentle ripple of the sea. “Beyond these lifeless sounds,” writes Wells, “the world was silent. Silent? It would be hard to convey the stillness of it. All the sounds of man, the bleating of 8. Kai Nielsen, “Why Should I Be Moral?” American Philosophical Quarterly 21 (1984): 90.
9. Paul Kurtz, Forbidden Fruit (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus, 1988), 73.
10. Richard Taylor, Ethics, Faith, and Reason (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1985), 90, 84.
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sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives—all that was over.”11 And so Wells’s time traveler returned. But to what?—to merely an earlier point on the purposeless rush toward oblivion. When as a non-Christian I first read Wells’s book, I thought, “No, no! It can’t end that way!” But if there is no God, it will end that way, like it or not. This is reality in a universe without God: there is no hope; there is no purpose. It reminds me of T. S. Eliot’s haunting lines:
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.12
What is true of mankind as a whole is true of each of us individually: we are here to no purpose. If there is no God, then our life is not fundamentally different from that of a dog. I know that’s harsh, but it’s true. As the ancient writer of Ecclesiastes put it: “The fate of the sons of men and the fate of beasts is the same. As one dies so dies the other; indeed, they all have the same breath and there is no advantage for man over beast, for all is vanity. All go to the same place. All come from the dust and all return to the dust” (Eccles. 3:19–20 at). In this book, which reads more like a piece of modern existentialist literature than a book of the Bible, the writer shows the futility of pleasure, wealth, education, political fame, and honor in a life doomed to end in death. His verdict? “Vanity of vanities! All is vanity” (1:2
esv). If life ends at the grave, then we have no ultimate purpose for living.
But more than that: even if it did not end in death, without God life would still be without purpose. For man and the universe would then be simple accidents of chance, thrust into existence for no reason. Without God the universe is the result of a cosmic accident, a chance explosion. There is no reason for which it exists. As for man, he is a freak of nature—a blind product of matter plus time plus chance.
Man is just a lump of slime that evolved rationality. There is no more purpose in life for the human race than for a species of insect; for both are the result of the blind interaction of chance and necessity. As one philosopher has put it: “Human life is mounted upon a subhuman pedestal and must shift for itself alone in the heart of a silent and mindless universe.”13
What is true of the universe and of the human race is also true of us as individuals. Insofar as we are individual human beings, we are the result of certain combinations of heredity and environment. We are victims of a kind of genetic and environmental roulette. Biologists like Richard Dawkins regard man as an electro-chemical machine controlled by its mindless genes. If God does not exist, 11. H. G. Wells, The Time Machine (New York: Berkeley, 1957), chap. 11.
12. T. S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men,” in Collected Poems 1909–1962 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1934). Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
13. W. E. Hocking, Types of Philosophy (New York: Scribner’s, 1959), 27.
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then you are just a miscarriage of nature, thrust into a purposeless universe to live a purposeless life.
So if God does not exist, that means that man and the universe exist to no purpose—since the end of everything is death—and that they came to be for no purpose, since they are only blind products of chance. In short, life is utterly without reason.
Do you understand the gravity of the alternatives before us? For if God exists, then there is hope for man. But if God does not exist, then all we are left with is despair. Do you understand why the question of God’s existence is so vital to man?
As Francis Schaeffer aptly put it, “If God is dead, then man is dead, too.”
Unfortunately, the mass of mankind do not realize this fact. They continue on as though nothing has changed. I’m reminded of Nietzsche’s story of the madman who in the early morning hours burst into the marketplace, lantern in hand, crying,
“I seek God! I seek God!” Since many of those standing about did not believe in God, he provoked much laughter. “Did God get lost?” they taunted him. “Or is he hiding? Or maybe he has gone on a voyage or emigrated!” Thus they yelled and laughed. Then, writes Nietzsche, the madman turned in their midst and pierced them with his eyes.
“Whither is God?” he cried, “I shall tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea?
Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Away from all suns?
Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night and more night coming on all the while? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God?
. . . God is dead. . . . And we have killed him. How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves?”14
The crowd stared at the madman in silence and astonishment. At last he dashed his lantern to the ground. “I have come too early,” he said. “This tremendous event is still on its way—it has not yet reached the ears of man.” People did not yet truly comprehend the consequences of what they had done in killing God. But Nietzsche predicted that someday people would realize the implications of their atheism; and this realization would usher in an age of nihilism—the destruction of all meaning and value in life. The end of Christianity, wrote Nietzsche, means the advent of nihilism. This most gruesome of guests is standing already at the door. “Our whole European culture is moving for some time now,” wrote Nietzsche, “with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade, as toward a 14. Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Gay Science,” in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1954), 95.
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catastrophe: restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end, that no longer reflects, that is afraid to reflect.”15
Most people still do not reflect on the consequences of atheism and so, like the crowd in the marketplace, go unknowingly on their way. But when we realize, as did Nietzsche, what atheism implies, then his question presses hard upon us: how shall we, the murderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves?
The Practical Impossibility of Atheism
About the only solution the atheist can offer is that we face the absurdity of life and live bravely. Bertrand Russell, for example, wrote that we must build our lives upon “the firm foundation of unyielding despair.”16 Only by recognizing that the world really is a terrible place can we successfully come to terms with life. Camus said that we should honestly recognize life’s absurdity and then live in love for one another.
The fundamental problem with this solution, however, is that it is impossible to live consistently and happily within such a worldview. If one lives consistently, he will not be happy; if one lives happily, it is only because he is not consistent.
Francis Schaeffer has explained this point well. Modern man, says Schaeffer, resides in a two-story universe. In the lower story is the finite world without God; here life is absurd, as we have seen. In the upper story are meaning, value, and purpose. Now modern man lives in the lower story because he believes there is no God. But he cannot live happily in such an absurd world; therefore, he continually makes leaps of faith into the upper story to affirm meaning, value, and purpose, even though he has no right to, since he does not believe in God. Modern man is totally inconsistent when he makes this leap, because these values cannot exist without God, and man in his lower story does not have God.
Let’s look again, then, at each of the three areas in which we saw that life is absurd without God, in order to show how modern man cannot live consistently and happily with his atheism.
MEANING OF LIFE
First, the area of meaning. We saw that without God, life has no meaning. Yet philosophers continue to live as though life does have meaning. For example, Sartre argued that one may create meaning for his life by freely choosing to follow a certain course of action. Sartre himself chose Marxism.
Now this is utterly inconsistent. It is inconsistent to say that life is objectively absurd and then to say that one may create meaning for his life. If life is really absurd, then man is trapped in the lower story. To try to create meaning in life 15. Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Will to Power,” trans. W. Kaufmann, in Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre , 2nd ed., ed. with an introduction by W. Kaufmann (New York: New American Library, Meridian, 1975), 130–31.
16. Bertrand Russell, “A Free Man’s Worship,” in Why I Am Not a Christian, ed. P. Edwards (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1957), 107.
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represents a leap to the upper story. But Sartre has no basis for this leap. Without God, there can be no objective meaning in life. Sartre’s program is actually an exercise in self-delusion. For the universe does not really acquire meaning just because I happen to give it one. This is easy to see: for suppose I give the universe one meaning, and you give it another. Who is right? The answer, of course, is neither one. For the universe without God remains objectively meaningless, no matter how we regard it. Sartre is really saying, “Let’s pretend the universe has meaning.”
And this is just fooling ourselves.
The point is this: if God does not exist, then life is objectively meaningless; but man cannot live consistently and happily knowing that life is meaningless; so in order to be happy he pretends that life has meaning. But this is, of course, entirely inconsistent—for without God, man and the universe are without any real significance.
VALUE OF LIFE
Turn now to the problem of value. Here is where the most blatant inconsistencies occur. First of all, atheistic humanists are totally inconsistent in affirming the traditional values of love and brotherhood. Camus has been rightly criticized for inconsistently holding both to the absurdity of life and to the ethics of human love and brotherhood. The two are logically incompatible. Bertrand Russell, too, was inconsistent. For though he was an atheist, he was an outspoken social critic, denouncing war and restrictions on sexual freedom. Russell admitted that he could not live as though ethical values were simply a matter of personal taste, and that he therefore found his own views “incredible.” “I do not know the solution,” he confessed.17 The point is that if there is no God, then objective right and wrong cannot exist. As Dostoyevsky said, “All things are permitted.”
But Dostoyevsky also showed in his novels that man cannot live this way. He cannot live as though it is perfectly all right for soldiers to slaughter innocent children. He cannot live as though it is all right for dictatorial regimes to follow a systematic program of physical torture of political prisoners. He cannot live as though it is all right for dictators like Pol Pot or Saddam Hussein to exterminate millions of their own countrymen. Everything in him cries out to say these acts are wrong—really wrong. But if there is no God, he cannot. So he makes a leap of faith and affirms values anyway. And when he does so, he reveals the inadequacy of a world without God.
The horror of a world devoid of value was brought home to me with new intensity several years ago as I viewed a BBC television documentary called “The Gathering.” It concerned the reunion of survivors of the Holocaust in Jerusalem, where they rediscovered lost friendships and shared their experiences. Now I had heard stories of the Holocaust before and had even visited Dachau and Buchen-wald, and I thought I was beyond shocking by further tales of horror. But I found 17. Bertrand Russell, Letter to the Observer, October 6, 1957.
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that I was not. Perhaps I had been made more sensitive by the recent birth of our beautiful baby girl, so that I applied the situations to her as they were related on the television. In any case, one woman prisoner, a nurse, told of how she was made the gynecologist at Auschwitz. She observed that pregnant women were grouped together by the soldiers under the direction of Dr. Mengele and housed in the same barracks. Some time passed, and she noted that she no longer saw any of these women. She made inquiries. “Where are the pregnant women who were housed in that barracks?” “Haven’t you heard?” came the reply. “Dr. Mengele used them for vivisection.”
Another woman told of how Mengele had bound up her breasts so that she could not suckle her infant. The doctor wanted to learn how long an infant could survive without nourishment. Desperately this poor woman tried to keep her baby alive by giving it pieces of bread soaked in coffee, but to no avail. Each day the baby lost weight, a fact that was eagerly monitored by Dr. Mengele. A nurse then came secretly to this woman and told her, “I have arranged a way for you to get out of here, but you cannot take your baby with you. I have brought a morphine injection that you can give to your child to end its life.” When the woman protested, the nurse was insistent: “Look, your baby is going to die anyway. At least save yourself.” And so this mother felt compelled to take the life of her own baby. Dr.
Mengele was furious when he learned of it because he had lost his experimental specimen, and he searched among the dead to find the baby’s discarded corpse so that he could have one last weighing.
My heart was torn by these stories. One rabbi who survived the camp summed it up well when he said that at Auschwitz it was as though there existed a world in which all the Ten Commandments were reversed: “Thou shalt kill, thou shalt lie, thou shalt steal . . .” Mankind had never seen such a hell.
And yet, if God does not exist, then in a sense, our world is Auschwitz: there is no right and wrong; all things are permitted. But no atheist, no agnostic, can live consistently with such a view of life. Nietzsche himself, who proclaimed the necessity of living “beyond good and evil,” broke with his mentor Richard Wagner precisely over the issue of the composer’s anti-Semitism and strident German nationalism. Similarly Sartre, writing in the aftermath of the Second World War, condemned anti-Semitism, declaring that a doctrine that leads to extermination is not merely an opinion or matter of personal taste, of equal value with its opposite.18
In his important essay “Existentialism Is a Humanism,” Sartre struggles vainly to elude the contradiction between his denial of divinely pre-established values and his urgent desire to affirm the value of human persons. Like Russell, he could not live with the implications of his own denial of ethical absolutes.
Neither can Richard Dawkins. For although he solemnly pronounces, “There is at bottom no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pointless indif-18. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Portrait of the Antisemite,” trans. M. Guiggenheim, in Existentialism, 330.
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ference. . . . We are machines for propagating DNA,”19 he is a patent moralist. He declares himself mortified that Enron executive Jeff Skilling regards Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene as his favorite book because of its perceived Social Darwinism.20 He characterizes “Darwinian mistakes” like pity for someone unable to pay us back or sexual attraction to an infertile member of the opposite sex as “blessed, precious mistakes” and calls compassion and generosity “noble emotions.”21 He denounces the doctrine of original sin as “morally obnoxious.”22 He vigorously condemns such actions as the harassment and abuse of homosexuals, religious indoctrination of children, the Incan practice of human sacrifice, and prizing cultural diversity in the case of the Amish over the interests of their children.23 He even goes so far as to offer his own amended Ten Commandments for guiding moral behavior, all the while marvelously oblivious to the contradiction with his ethical subjectivism.24
A second problem for the atheist is that if God does not exist and there is no immortality, then all the evil acts of men go unpunished and all the sacrifices of good men go unrewarded. But who can live with such a view? Richard Wurmbrand, who has been tortured for his faith in communist prisons, says, The cruelty of atheism is hard to believe when man has no faith in the reward of good or the punishment of evil. There is no reason to be human. There is no restraint from the depths of evil which is in man. The communist torturers often said, “There is no God, no Hereafter, no punishment for evil. We can do what we wish.” I have heard one torturer even say, “I thank God, in whom I don’t believe, that I have lived to this hour when I can express all the evil in my heart.” He expressed it in unbelievable brutality and torture inflicted on prisoners.25
The English theologian Cardinal Newman once said that if he believed that all the evils and injustices of life throughout history were not to be made right by God in the afterlife, “Why I think I should go mad.” Rightly so.
And the same applies to acts of self-sacrifice. A number of years ago, a terrible mid-winter air disaster occurred when a plane leaving the Washington, D.C., airport smashed into a bridge spanning the Potomac River, plunging its passengers into the icy waters. As the rescue helicopters came, attention was focused on one man who again and again pushed the dangling rope ladder to other passengers rather 19. Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow (London: Allen Lane, 1998), cited in Lewis Wolpert, Six Impossible Things before Breakfast (London: Faber and Faber, 2006), 215. Unfortunately, Wolpert’s reference is mistaken. The quotation seems to be a pastiche from Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (New York: Basic, 1996), 133, and Richard Dawkins, “The Ultraviolet Garden,” Lecture 4 of 7
Royal Institution Christmas Lectures (1992), http://physicshead.blogspot.com/2007/01/ richard-dawkins-lecture-4-ultraviolet.html. Thanks to my assistant Joe Gorra for tracking down this reference.
20. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 2006), 215.
21. Ibid., 221.
22. Ibid., 251.
23. Ibid., 23, 313–17, 326, 328, 330.
24. Ibid., 264.
25. Richard Wurmbrand, Tortured for Christ (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1967), 34.
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than be pulled to safety himself. Six times he passed the ladder by. When they came again, he was gone. He had freely given his life that others might live. The whole nation turned its eyes to this man in respect and admiration for the selfless and good act he had performed. And yet, if the atheist is right, that man was not noble—he did the stupidest thing possible. He should have gone for the ladder first, pushed others away if necessary in order to survive. But to die for others he did not even know, to give up all the brief existence he would ever have—what for? For the atheist there can be no reason. And yet the atheist, like the rest of us, instinctively reacts with praise for this man’s selfless action. Indeed, one will probably never find an atheist who lives consistently with his system. For a universe without moral accountability and devoid of value is unimaginably terrible.
PURPOSE OF LIFE
Finally, let’s look at the problem of purpose in life. Unable to live in an impersonal universe in which everything is the product of blind chance, atheists sometimes begin to ascribe personality and motives to the physical processes themselves. It is a bizarre way of speaking and represents a leap from the lower to the upper story. For example, the brilliant Russian physicists Zeldovich and Novikov, in contemplating the properties of the universe, ask, why did “Nature” choose to create this sort of universe instead of another? “Nature” has obviously become a sort of God-substitute, filling the role and function of God. Francis Crick halfway through his book The Origin of the Genetic Code begins to spell nature with a capital N and elsewhere speaks of natural selection as being “clever” and as “thinking” of what it will do. Sir Fred Hoyle, the English astronomer, attributes to the universe itself the qualities of God. For Carl Sagan the “Cosmos,” which he always spelled with a capital letter, obviously fills the role of a God-substitute. Though these men profess not to believe in God, they smuggle in a God-substitute through the back door because they cannot bear to live in a universe in which everything is the chance result of impersonal forces.
Moreover, the only way that most people who deny purpose in life live happily is either by making up some purpose—which amounts to self-delusion as we saw with Sartre—or by not carrying their view to its logical conclusions. Take the problem of death, for example. According to Ernst Bloch, the only way modern man lives in the face of death is by subconsciously borrowing the belief in immortality that his forefathers held to, even though he himself has no basis for this belief, since he does not believe in God. Bloch states that the belief that life ends in nothing is hardly, in his words, “sufficient to keep the head high and to work as if there were no end.” By borrowing the remnants of a belief in immortality, writes Bloch, “modern man does not feel the chasm that unceasingly surrounds him and that will certainly engulf him at last. Through these remnants, he saves his sense of self-identity. Through them the impression arises that man is not perishing, but only that one day the world has the whim no longer to appear to him.” Bloch concludes, “This quite shallow courage feasts on a borrowed credit card. It lives
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from earlier hopes and the support that they once had provided.”26 Modern man no longer has any right to that support, since he rejects God. But in order to live purposefully, he makes a leap of faith to affirm a reason for living.
Finding ourselves cast into a mindless universe with no apparent purpose or hope of deliverance from thermodynamic extinction, the temptation to invest one’s own petty plans and projects with objective significance and thereby to find some purpose to one’s life is almost irresistible. Thus, the outspoken atheist and Nobel Prize–winning physicist Steven Weinberg at the close of his much acclaimed popularization of contemporary cosmology The First Three Minutes, writes: However all these problems may be solved, and whichever cosmological model proves correct, there is not much comfort in any of this. It is almost irresistible for humans to believe that we have some special relation to the universe, that human life is not just a more-or-less farcical outcome of a chain of accidents reaching back to the first three minutes, but that somehow we were built in from the beginning. . . . It is very hard to realize that this is all just a tiny part of an overwhelmingly hostile universe. It is even harder to realize that this present universe has evolved from an unspeakably unfamiliar early condition, and faces a future extinction of endless cold or intolerable heat. The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.
But if there is no solace in the fruits of our research, there is at least some consola-tion in the research itself. Men and women are not content to comfort themselves with tales of gods and giants, or to confine their thoughts to the daily affairs of life; they also build telescopes and satellites and accelerators and sit at their desks for endless hours working out the meaning of the data they gather. The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.27
There is something strange about Weinberg’s moving description of the human predicament: tragedy is an evaluative term. Weinberg sees the pursuit of scientific research as raising human life above the level of farce to the level of tragedy. But on naturalism, what is the basis for such an evaluative differentiation? Weinberg evidently sees a life devoted to scientific pursuits as truly meaningful, and therefore it’s too bad that so noble a pursuit should be extinguished. But why on naturalism should the pursuit of science be any different from slouching about doing nothing? Since there is no objective purpose to human life, none of our pursuits has any objective significance, however important and dear they may seem to us subjectively.
Daniel Dennett recently betrayed a similar inconsistency. Speaking at a conference in New Orleans, Dennett opened his talk by showing a short film that encapsulated what he wanted to convey. It showed a group of young African men 26. Ernst Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1959), 2:360–1.
27. Steven Weinberg, The First Three Minutes (London: Andre Deutsch, 1977), 154–55.
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playing with a soccer ball, kicking it into the air and adroitly catching it on their feet in quite amazing ways, while never letting the ball touch the ground. Meanwhile a silent narration played across the screen, describing the unfathomable vastness of the cosmos in space and time and contrasting the tininess and brevity of human existence. We are here for a mere twinkling of the eye and then gone forever. The punch line of the film finally came: “We’d better not blow it.” That was the end.
“What a strange film!” I thought to myself. What does it mean on an atheistic view to “blow it”? If there is no objective purpose for the human race, then how can one miss that purpose? Like tragedy, “blowing it” is an evaluative notion which finds no foothold in an atheistic universe. The boys’ skill and evident joy in playing football is no more meaningful a pursuit on atheism than some other kid’s staying home and drinking himself into a stupor. But even atheists recognize that some of life’s pursuits are more objectively meaningful and worthwhile than others.
While participating in a conference on Intelligent Design two years ago, I had the opportunity to have dinner with the agnostic philosopher of science Michael Ruse one evening at an Atlanta steakhouse. During the course of the meal, Michael asked me, “Bill, are you satisfied with where you are in your career as a philosopher?’’ I was rather surprised by the question and said, “Well, yes, basically, I guess I am—how about you?” He then related to me that when he was just starting out as a philosopher of science, he was faced with the choice of vigorously pursuing his career or just taking it rather easy. He said that he then thought of the anguished words of the character played by Marlin Brando at the close of the film On the Waterfront: “I coulda been a contender!” Michael told me that he decided he didn’t want to reach the end of his life and look back in regret and say, “I coulda been a contender!” I was struck by those words. As a Christian I am commanded by the Lord “to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints” ( Jude 3 esv). But what point is there for an atheist or agnostic to be a “contender”—a contender for what? Since there is no objective purpose in life, the only answer can be, to contend for one’s own made-up purposes—hence, the irresistible tendency to treat career advancement and fame as though they really were objectively important ends, when in fact they are nothing.
The Human Predicament
The dilemma of modern man is thus truly terrible. The atheistic worldview is insufficient to maintain a happy and consistent life. Man cannot live consistently and happily as though life were ultimately without meaning, value, or purpose.
If we try to live consistently within the framework of the atheistic worldview, we shall find ourselves profoundly unhappy. If instead we manage to live happily, it is only by giving the lie to our worldview.
Confronted with this dilemma, modern man flounders pathetically for some means of escape. In a remarkable address to the American Academy for the Advancement of Science in 1991, Dr. L. D. Rue, confronted with the predicament
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of modern man, boldly advocated that we deceive ourselves by means of some
“Noble Lie” into thinking that we and the universe still have value.28 Claiming that “the lesson of the past two centuries is that intellectual and moral relativism is profoundly the case,” Dr. Rue muses that the consequence of such a realization is that one’s quest for personal wholeness (or self-fulfillment) and the quest for social coherence become independent from one another. This is because on the view of relativism the search for self-fulfillment becomes radically privatized: each person chooses his own set of values and meaning. “There is no final, objective reading on the world or the self. There is no universal vocabulary for integrating cosmology and morality.” If we are to avoid “the madhouse option,” where self-fulfillment is pursued regardless of social coherence, and “the totalitarian option,”
where social coherence is imposed at the expense of personal wholeness, then we have no choice but to embrace some Noble Lie that will inspire us to live beyond selfish interests and so achieve social coherence. A Noble Lie “is one that deceives us, tricks us, compels us beyond self-interest, beyond ego, beyond family, nation,
[and] race.” It is a lie, because it tells us that the universe is infused with value (which is a great fiction), because it makes a claim to universal truth (when there is none), and because it tells me not to live for self-interest (which is evidently false). “But without such lies, we cannot live.”
This is the dreadful verdict pronounced over modern man. In order to survive, he must live in self-deception. But even the Noble Lie option is in the end un-workable. For if what I have said thus far is correct, belief in a Noble Lie would not only be necessary to achieve social coherence and personal wholeness for the masses, but it would also be necessary to achieve one’s own personal wholeness.
For one cannot live happily and consistently on an atheistic worldview. In order to be happy, one must believe in objective meaning, value, and purpose. But how can one believe in those Noble Lies while at the same time believing in atheism and relativism? The more convinced you are of the necessity of a Noble Lie, the less you are able to believe in it. Like a placebo, a Noble Lie works only on those who believe it is the truth. Once we have seen through the fiction, then the Lie has lost its power over us. Thus, ironically, the Noble Lie cannot solve the human predicament for anyone who has come to see that predicament.
The Noble Lie option therefore leads at best to a society in which an elitist group of illuminati deceive the masses for their own good by perpetuating the Noble Lie.
But then why should those of us who are enlightened follow the masses in their deception? Why should we sacrifice self-interest for a fiction? If the great lesson of the past two centuries is moral and intellectual relativism, then why (if we could) pretend that we do not know this truth and live a lie instead? If one answers, “for the sake of social coherence,” one may legitimately ask why I should sacrifice my self-interest for the sake of social coherence. The only answer the relativist can give 28. Loyal D. Rue, “The Saving Grace of Noble Lies,” address to the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, February 1991.
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is that social coherence is in my self-interest—but the problem with this answer is that self-interest and the interest of the herd do not always coincide. Besides, if (out of self-interest) I do care about social coherence, the totalitarian option is always open to me: forget the Noble Lie and maintain social coherence (as well as my self-fulfillment) at the expense of the personal wholeness of the masses.
Generations of Soviet leaders who extolled proletarian virtues while they rode in limousines and dined on caviar in their country dachas found this alternative quite workable. Rue would undoubtedly regard such an option as repugnant. But therein lies the rub. Rue’s dilemma is that he obviously values deeply both social coherence and personal wholeness for their own sakes; in other words, they are objective values, which according to his philosophy do not exist. He has already leapt to the upper story. The Noble Lie option thus affirms what it denies and so refutes itself.
The Success of Biblical Christianity
But if atheism fails in this regard, what about biblical Christianity? According to the Christian worldview, God does exist, and man’s life does not end at the grave. In the resurrection body man may enjoy eternal life and fellowship with God. Biblical Christianity therefore provides the two conditions necessary for a meaningful, valuable, and purposeful life for man: God and immortality. Because of this, we can live consistently and happily. Thus, biblical Christianity succeeds precisely where atheism breaks down.
Now I want to make it clear that I have not yet shown biblical Christianity to be true. But what I have done is clearly spell out the alternatives. If God does not exist, then life is futile. If the God of the Bible does exist, then life is meaningful.
Only the second of these two alternatives enables us to live happily and consistently. Therefore, it seems to me that even if the evidence for these two options were absolutely equal, a rational person ought to choose biblical Christianity. It seems to me positively irrational to prefer death, futility, and destruction to life, meaningfulness, and happiness. As Pascal said, we have nothing to lose and infinity to gain.
Practical Application
The foregoing discussion makes clear the role I conceive cultural apologetics to play: it is not one’s whole apologetic but rather an introduction to positive argumentation. It serves to lay out in a dramatic way the alternatives facing the unbeliever in order to create a felt need in him. When he realizes the predicament he is in, he will see why the gospel is so important to him; and many a non-Christian will be impelled by these considerations alone to give his life to Christ.
In sharing this material with an unbeliever, we need to push him to the logical conclusions of his position. If I am right, no atheist or agnostic really lives consistently with his worldview. In some way he affirms meaning, value, or purpose
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without an adequate basis. It is our job to discover those areas and lovingly show him where those beliefs are groundless. We need not attack his values themselves—for they are probably largely correct—but we may agree with him concerning them, and then point out only that he lacks any foundation for those values, whereas the Christian has a foundation. Thus, we need not make him defensive by a frontal attack on his personal values; rather we offer him a foundation for the values he already possesses.
I have found the appeal to moral values to be an especially powerful apologetic to university students. Although students may give lip service to relativism, my experience is that 95 percent can be very quickly convinced that objective moral values do exist after all. All you have to do is produce a few illustrations and let them decide for themselves. Ask what they think of the Hindu practice of suttee (burning widows alive on the funeral pyres of their husbands) or the ancient Chinese custom of crippling women for life by tightly binding their feet from childhood to resemble lotus-blossoms. Point out that without God to provide a transcultural basis for moral values, we’re left with socio-cultural relativism, so that such practices are morally unobjectionable—which scarcely anyone can sincerely accept.
Of course, sometimes you find hard-liners, but usually their position is seen to be so extreme that others are repulsed by it. For example, at a meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature a few years ago, I attended a panel discussion on
“Biblical Authority and Homosexuality,” in which all the panelists endorsed the legitimacy of homosexual activity. One panelist dismissed scriptural prohibitions of such activity on the grounds that they reflect the cultural milieu in which they were written. Since this is the case for all of Scripture’s commands (it wasn’t written in a vacuum), he concluded that “there are no timeless, normative, moral truths in Scripture.” In discussion from the floor, I pointed out that such a view leads to socio-cultural relativism, which makes it impossible to criticize any society’s moral values, including those of a society which persecutes homosexuals. He responded with a fog of theological double-talk and claimed that there’s no place outside Scripture where we can find timeless moral values either. “But that just is what we mean by moral relativism,” I said. “In fact, on your view there’s no content to the notion of the goodness of God. He might as well be dead. And Nietzsche recognized that the death of God leads to nihilism.” At this point another panelist came in with that knock-down refutation: “Well, if you’re going to get pejorative, we might as well not discuss it.”
I sat down, but the point wasn’t lost on the audience. The next man who stood up said, “Wait a minute. I’m rather confused. I’m a pastor and people are always coming to me, asking if something they have done is wrong and if they need forgiveness. For example, isn’t it always wrong to abuse a child?” I couldn’t believe the panelist’s response. She replied: “What counts as abuse differs from society to society, so we can’t really use the word ‘abuse’ without tying it to a historical context.”
“Call it whatever you like,” the pastor insisted, “but child abuse is damaging to
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children. Isn’t it wrong to damage children?” And still she wouldn’t admit it! This sort of hardness of heart ultimately backfires on the moral relativist and exposes in the minds of most people the bankruptcy of such a worldview.
In sharing this material with an unbeliever, it’s important also to ask ourselves exactly what part of our case his objections are meant to refute. Thus, if he says that values are merely social conventions pragmatically adopted to ensure mutual survival, what does this purport to refute? Not that life without God really is without value, for this the objection admits. Therefore, it would be a mistake to react by arguing that values are not social conventions but are grounded in God. Rather the objection is really aimed at the claim that one cannot live as though values do not exist; it holds that one may live by social conventions alone.
Seen in this light, however, the objection is entirely implausible, for we have argued precisely that man cannot live as though morality were merely a matter of social convention. We believe certain acts to be genuinely wrong or right. Therefore, one ought to respond to the unbeliever on this score by saying, “You’re exactly right: if God does not exist, then values are merely social conventions. But the point I’m trying to make is that it’s impossible to live consistently and happily with such a worldview.” Push him on the Holocaust or some issue of popular concern like ethnic cleansing, apartheid, or child abuse. Bring it home to him personally, and if he’s honest and you are not threatening, I think he will admit that he does hold to some absolutes. Thus, it’s very important to analyze exactly what the unbeliever’s objection actually attacks before we answer.
I believe that this mode of apologetics can be very effective in helping to bring people to Christ because it does not concern neutral matters but cuts to the heart of the unbeliever’s own existential situation. I remember once, when I was delivering a series of talks at the University of Birmingham in England, that the audience the first night was very hostile and aggressive. The second night I spoke on the absurdity of life without God. This time the largely same audience was utterly subdued: the lions had turned to lambs, and now their questions were no longer attacking but sincere and searching. The remarkable transformation was due to the fact that the message had penetrated their intellectual facade and struck at the core of their existence. I would encourage you to employ this material in evangelistic dorm meetings and fraternity/sorority meetings, where you can compel people to really think about the desperate human predicament in which we all find ourselves.
Literature Cited or Recommended
Historical Background
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. Translated by C. Garnett. Foreword by M. Komroff. New York: New American Library, Signet Classics, 1957.
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———. Crime and Punishment. Translated by C. Garnett. Introduction by E. Simmons.
New York: Modern Library, 1950.
Kierkegaard, Søren. Either/Or. Translated by D. F. Swenson and L. M. Swenson. Princeton: Princeton University, 1944. Volume 1 describes the first stage of life and Volume 2 the second.
———. Fear and Trembling. Edited and translated with an introduction and notes by H. V.
Hong and E. N. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. This handles the religious stage.
Morris, Thomas V. Making Sense of It All: Pascal and the Meaning of Life. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1992.
Pascal, Blaise. Pensées. Edited by Louis Lafuma. Translated by John Warrington. Everyman’s Library. London: Dent, 1960.
Schaeffer, Francis. Escape from Reason. Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 1968.
———. The God Who Is There. Downer’s Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 1968.
———. How Should We Then Live? Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway Books, 1976.
Assessment
Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot. New York: Grove, 1956.
Bloch, Ernst. Das Prinzip Hoffnung. 2nd ed. 2 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1959.
Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Translated by J. O’Brien. New York: Vintage, 1959.
———. The Stranger. Translated by S. Gilbert. New York: Vintage, 1958.
Crick, Francis. “Why I Study Biology.” Washington University Magazine. Spring 1971, 20–24.
Dawkins, Richard, The God Delusion. New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 2006.
———. River out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life. New York: Basic Books, 1996.
———. “The Ultraviolet Garden,” Lecture 4 of 7 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures (1992), http://physicshead.blogspot.com/2007/01/richard-dawkins-lecture-4-ultraviolet.html.
———. Unweaving the Rainbow. London: Allen Lane, 1998.
Eliot, T. S. “The Hollow Men.” In The Complete Poems and Plays. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1934.
Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th ed. Propaedia, s.v. “The Cosmic Orphan,” by Loren Eiseley.
Hocking, W. E. Types of Philosophy. New York: Scribner’s, 1959.
Hoyle, Fred. From Stonehenge to Modern Cosmology. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1972.
Kaufmann, Walter, ed. “Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre.” In Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre. 2nd ed., edited by W. Kaufmann, 11–51. New York: New American Library, Meridian, 1975.
Kurtz, Paul. Forbidden Fruit. Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus, 1988.
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Monod, Jacques. Chance and Necessity. Translated by A. Wainhouse. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1971.
Moreland, J. P. Scaling the Secular City, chap. 4. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1987.
Moreland, J. P. and Kai Nielsen. Does God Exist? Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1990. Repr. ed.: Prometheus Books, 1993. Part 2 is an excellent debate over ethics without God.
Nielsen, Kai. “Why Should I Be Moral? Revisited.” American Philosophical Quarterly 21
(1984): 81–91.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. “The Gay Science.” In The Portable Nietzsche, edited and translated by W. Kaufmann, 93–102. New York: Viking, 1954.
———. “The Will to Power.” Translated by Walter Kaufmann. In Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre. 2nd ed., edited with an introduction by W. Kaufmann, 130–32.
New York: New American Library, Meridian, 1975.
Novikov, I. D., and Ya B. Zeldovich. “Physical Processes Near Cosmological Singularities.”
Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics 11(1973): 387–410.
Rue, Loyal D. “The Saving Grace of Noble Lies.” Unpublished address to the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, February 1991.
Russell, Bertrand. “A Free Man’s Worship.” In Why I Am Not a Christian, edited by P. Edwards, 104–16. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1957.
———. Letter to the Observer, 6 October 1957.
Sagan, Carl. Cosmos. New York: Random House, 1980.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. Translated with an introduction by H. E. Barnes.
New York: Washington Square, 1966.
———. “Existentialism Is a Humanism.” Translated by P. Mairet. In Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre. 2nd ed., edited with an introduction by W. Kaufmann, 345–69.
New York: New American Library, Meridian, 1975.
———. Nausea. Translated by L. Alexander. London: H. Hamilton, 1962.
———. No Exit. Translated by S. Gilbert. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963.
———. “Portrait of the Antisemite.” Translated by M. Guggenheim. In Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre. 2nd ed., edited with an introduction by W. Kaufmann, 329–45.
New York: New American Library, Meridian, 1975.
———. “The Wall.” Translated by L. Alexander. In Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre. 2nd ed., edited with an introduction by W. Kaufmann, 281–99. New York: New American Library, Meridian, 1975.
Taylor, Richard. Ethics, Faith, and Reason. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1985.
An excellent illustration of the desperate lengths to which an ethicist is driven once a divine moral law giver is denied.
Wells, H. G. The Time Machine. New York: Berkeley, 1957.
Wolpert, Lewis, Six Impossible Things before Breakfast. London: Faber and Faber, 2006.
Wurmbrand, Richard. Tortured for Christ. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1967.
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The Existence of God (1)
We’ve seen that only if God exists can there be hope for a solution to the human predicament. Therefore, the question of the existence of God is vital for us today.
Most people would probably agree that this question does have great existential significance but at the same time deny that it is a question to which rational argumentation is relevant. The conventional wisdom is that it’s impossible to “prove”
the existence of God and that, therefore, if we are going to believe in God, we must “take it by faith” that God exists.
But the last half century has witnessed a remarkable resurgence of interest in natural theology, that branch of theology that seeks to provide warrant for belief in God’s existence apart from the resources of authoritative, propositional revelation. Today, in contrast to just a generation ago, natural theology is a vibrant field of study.
On April 8, 1966, Time magazine carried a dramatic cover with just three words emblazoned in red upon the black background. The words read: “Is God Dead?”
The article described the movement then current among American theologians to proclaim the death of God. But at the same time that theologians were writing God’s obituary, a new generation of philosophers was rediscovering his vitality.
Just a few years after its death-of-God issue, Time ran a similar red-on-black cover story, only this time the question read, “Is God Coming Back to Life?” That’s how it must have seemed to those theological morticians of the 1960s! During the 1970s interest in philosophy of religion continued to grow, and in 1980 Time found itself 93
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running another major story entitled “Modernizing the Case for God,” in which it described the movement among contemporary philosophers to refurbish the traditional arguments for God’s existence. Time marveled: In a quiet revolution in thought and argument that hardly anybody could have foreseen only two decades ago, God is making a comeback. Most intriguingly, this is happening not among theologians or ordinary believers, but in the crisp intellectual circles of academic philosophers, where the consensus had long banished the Almighty from fruitful discourse.1
According to the article, the late Roderick Chisholm believes that the reason that atheism was so influential a generation ago is that the brightest philosophers were atheists; but today, he says, many of the brightest philosophers are theists and are using a tough-minded intellectualism in defense of that belief that was formerly lacking on their side of the debate.
The face of Anglo-American philosophy has been transformed as result. In the fall of 2001 the secularist journal Philo carried an article by a leading atheist philosopher lamenting what he called “the desecularization of academia that evolved in philosophy departments since the late 1960s.” He writes: Naturalists passively watched as realist versions of theism, most influenced by Plantinga’s writings, began to sweep through the philosophical community, until today perhaps one-quarter or one-third of philosophy professors are theists, with most being orthodox Christians. . . . Theists in other fields tend to compartmentalize their theistic beliefs from their scholarly work; they rarely assume and never argue for theism in their scholarly work. If they did, they would be committing academic suicide or, more exactly, their articles would quickly be rejected. . . . But in philosophy, it became, almost overnight, “academically respectable” to argue for theism, making philosophy a favored field of entry for the most intelligent and talented theists entering academia today.2
He concludes, “God is not ‘dead’ in academia; he returned to life in the late 1960s and is now alive and well in his last academic stronghold, philosophy departments.”
This is the testimony of a prominent atheist philosopher to the change that has taken place before his eyes in Anglo-American philosophy. I think he’s probably exaggerating when he estimates that one-quarter to one-third of American philosophers are theists; but what his estimates do reveal is the perceived impact of Christian philosophers upon this field. Today all of the various traditional arguments for God’s existence find prominent, intelligent proponents, who defend these arguments in books published by the finest academic presses, in articles in 1. “Modernizing the Case for God,” Time, April 7, 1980, 65–66.
2. Quentin Smith, “The Metaphilosophy of Naturalism,” Philo 4, no. 2 (2001): 3–4.
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professional journals of philosophy, and in papers presented at meetings of professional philosophical societies.
Now atheists are hitting back. In the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks by Muslim jihadists, secularists have become remarkably aggressive both in the United States and Europe, denouncing religious belief in general with an almost evangelical fervor. Lumping evangelical Christians in with Islamic terrorists, popular writers like Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris have championed atheism in their best-selling books and warned of the dire effects of religious belief upon society. Behind these popular writings stand more substantive critiques of theistic arguments like J. Howard Sobel’s Logic and Theism and Michael Martin’s Companion to Atheism. We are witnesses to a mighty struggle for the mind and soul of America in our day, and Christians cannot be indifferent to it.
Historical Background
Ever since Plato, philosophers and theologians have tried to provide a rational basis for belief in God. In this section, we shall briefly survey some of the traditional theistic arguments as developed by various thinkers.
Ontological Argument
The ontological argument attempts to prove from the very concept of God that God exists: if God is conceivable, then he must actually exist. This argument was formulated by Anselm and defended by Scotus, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and, in modern times, Norman Malcolm, Charles Hartshorne, and Alvin Plantinga, among others. We shall examine the Anselmian argument.
Anselm (1033–1109) wanted to find a single argument that would prove not only that God exists, but also that he has all the superlative attributes Christian doctrine ascribes to him. Having almost given up the project, Anselm landed upon the following reasoning:3 God is the greatest conceivable being. This is true by definition, for if we could conceive of something greater than God, then that would be God. So nothing greater than God can be conceived. It is greater to exist in reality than merely in the mind. Anselm gives the example of a painting. Which is greater: the artist’s idea of the painting or the painting itself as it really exists?
Obviously the latter; for the painting itself exists not only in the artist’s mind, but in reality as well. Similarly, if God existed only in the mind, then something greater than him could be conceived, namely, his existing not only in the mind, but in reality as well. But God is the greatest conceivable being. Hence, he must exist not merely in the mind, but in reality as well. Therefore, God exists.
Another way of putting this, says Anselm, is the following: a being whose non-existence is inconceivable is greater than a being whose non-existence is conceivable. But God is the greatest conceivable being. Therefore, God’s non-3. Anselm, Proslogion 2–3.
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existence must be inconceivable. There is no contradiction involved in this notion.
Therefore, God must exist.
This deceptively simple argument is still hotly debated today.
Cosmological Argument
In contrast to the ontological argument, the cosmological argument assumes that something exists and argues from the existence of that thing to the existence of a First Cause or a Sufficient Reason of the cosmos. This argument has its roots in Plato and Aristotle and was developed by medieval Islamic, Jewish, and Christian thinkers. It has been defended by such great minds as Plato, Aristotle, ibn Sīna, al-Ghāzalī, ibn Rushd, Maimonides, Anselm, Aquinas, Scotus, Descartes, Spinoza, Berkeley, Locke, and Leibniz. The cosmological argument is really a family of different arguments, which can be conveniently grouped under three main types.
AL-GHĀZALĪ
The kalām cosmological argument originated in the attempts of Christian thinkers to rebut Aristotle’s doctrine of the eternity of the universe and was developed by medieval Islamic theologians into an argument for the existence of God.4 Let’s look at the formulation of this argument by al-Ghāzalī (1058–1111). He reasons,
“Every being which begins has a cause for its beginning; now the world is a being which begins; therefore, it possesses a cause for its beginning.”5 In support of the first premise, that every being that begins has a cause for its beginning, Ghāzalī
reasons: anything that begins to exist does so at a certain moment of time. But since, prior to the thing’s existence, all moments are alike, there must be some cause that determines that the thing comes to exist at that moment rather than earlier or later. Thus, anything that comes to exist must have a cause.
The second premise is that the world, or the universe, began to exist. In support of this premise Ghāzalī argues that it is impossible that there should be an infinite regress of events in time, that is to say, that the series of past events should be beginningless.
He gives several reasons for this conclusion. For one thing, the series of past events comes to an end in the present—but the infinite cannot come to an end. It might be pointed out that even though the series of events has one end in the present, it can still be infinite in the other direction because it has no beginning. But Ghāzalī’s point may be that if the regress of past events were infinite, then it would be impossible for the present moment to arrive. For it is impossible to cross the infinite to get to today.
So today could never arrive, which is absurd, for here we are!
Second, if the number of past events were infinite, that would lead to infinites of different sizes. For suppose Jupiter completes an orbit once every twelve years 4. “Kalām” is the Arabic word for speech and came to denote a statement of theological doctrine and ultimately the whole movement of medieval Islamic theology.
5. Al-Ghāzalī, Kitab al-Iqtisad fi’l-I’tiqad, cited in S. de Beaurecueil, “Gazzali et S. Thomas d’Aquin: Essai sur la preuve de l’existence de Dieu proposée dans l’Iqtisad et sa comparaison avec les ‘voies’ Thomiste,”
Bulletin de l’Institut Francais d’Archaeologie Orientale 46 (1947): 203.
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and Saturn once every thirty years and the sphere of the stars once every thirty-six thousand years. If the universe is eternal and these planets have been orbiting from eternity, then each of these bodies has completed an infinite number of orbits, and yet one will have completed twice as many or thousands of times as many orbits as another, which is absurd.
Finally, if we take the orbits completed by just one of these planets, we may ask, is the number of orbits it has completed odd or even? It would have to be one or the other, and yet it is absurd to say the infinite is odd or even. For these reasons, the universe must have had a beginning. It therefore follows that there must be a cause of its beginning, which Ghāzalī identifies with God, the Eternal.
THOMAS AQUINAS
The Thomist cosmological argument is based on the impossibility of an infinite regress of simultaneously operating causes. It seeks a Cause that is First, not in the temporal sense, but in the sense of rank or source. Although Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) did not originate this line of reasoning, he is famous for his clear summary of it in his Five Ways of proving that God exists.6 We’ll look at his first three ways, which are different versions of the argument for a First Cause.
The First Way is his proof for an Unmoved Mover based on motion. We see in the world that things are in motion. But anything that is in motion is being moved by something else. For a thing that has the potential to move cannot actualize its own potential; some other thing must cause it to move. But this other thing is also being moved by something else, and that is also being moved by something else, and so on. Now this series of things being moved by other things cannot go on to infinity. For in such a series, the intermediate causes have no power of their own but are mere instruments of a first cause.
It is important to keep in mind that Aquinas is thinking here of causes that all act simultaneously like the gears of a machine, not successively like falling dominoes. So if you take away the first cause, all you have left are the powerless instrumental causes. It does not matter if you have an infinity of such causes; they still could not cause anything. For example, a watch could not run without a spring even if it had an infinite number of gears; a train could not move without an engine even if it had an infinite number of box cars. Aquinas concludes that there must be a first cause of motion in every causal series. For all self-moving things—including humans, animals, and plants—this would be the individual soul, which is an unmoved mover. But souls themselves come to be and pass away and thus cannot account for the eternal motion of the heavenly spheres. In order to account for this cosmic motion, we must postulate an absolutely Unmoved Mover, the First Cause of all motion, and this is God.
The Second Way attempts to prove the existence of a First Cause of existence based on causation in the world. We observe that causes are ordered in series. Now nothing 6. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae 1 a.2, 3 cf. idem Summa contra gentiles 1.13.
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can be self-caused, because then it would have to bestow existence on itself, which is impossible. Everything that is caused is therefore caused by something else. Aquinas thinks here of the same sort of simultaneous causal series as he did in the First Way, except that here the causes are causes of existence, not motion. The existence of any object depends on a whole array of contemporary causes, of which each in turn depends on other causes, and so forth. But such a causal series cannot go on to infinity for the same reason explained above. Therefore, there must be a First Cause of the existence of everything else, which is simply uncaused; and this everyone calls “God.”
The Third Way is the proof for an Absolutely Necessary Being based on the existence of contingent beings. We see in the world beings whose existence is not necessary but only possible. That is to say, these beings do not have to exist, for we see them come to be and pass away. If they were necessary, they would always exist. But all beings cannot be contingent beings, for if everything were merely contingent, then at some point in time everything would cease to exist. Aquinas here presupposes the past eternity of the world and appears to reason that in infinite time all possibilities would be realized. Hence, if every being, including matter itself, were only a contingent being, then it is possible that nothing would exist. Thus, given infinite past time, this possibility would be realized and nothing would exist. But then nothing would now exist, since out of nothing, nothing comes. Since this is obviously absurd, not all beings must be contingent beings.
Some being or beings must be necessary. In fact, Aquinas believed that there were many necessary beings: the heavenly bodies, angels, even matter itself.
Now he continues, where do these necessary beings get their necessity—from themselves or from another? Thomas here distinguishes between a thing’s essence and existence. A thing’s essence is its nature, that set of properties which it must possess in order to be what it is. For example, the essence of man is “rational animal-ity.” If anything lacked either of these properties, it would not be a man. A thing’s existence, on the other hand, is its being. Now if a being is not necessary in itself, this means that its essence is distinct from its existence. It does not belong to its nature to exist. For example, I could think of the nature of an angel without ever knowing whether or not an angel actually exists. Its essence is distinct from its existence.
Hence, if such a being is to exist, something else must conjoin to its essence an act of existence. Then it would exist. But there cannot be an infinite regress of necessary beings that get their existence from another. (The reasoning is the same as that in the First Way against an infinite regress.) So there must be a First Being, which is absolutely necessary in itself. In this Being, essence and existence are not distinct; in some mysterious way its nature is existence. Hence, according to Aquinas, God is Being itself subsisting ( ipsum esse subsistens). God is pure Being and is the source of being to everything else, whose essences do not involve their existing.
G. W. F. LEIBNIZ
The Leibnizian cosmological argument was developed by the German mathematician and philosopher G. W. F. Leibniz (1646–1716) and is often confused with the
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Thomist cosmological argument. But Leibniz does not argue for the existence of an Uncaused Cause, but for the existence of a Sufficient Reason for the universe.7
The difference will become clear as we proceed.
“The first question which should rightly be asked,” wrote Leibniz, “will be, Why is there something rather than nothing? ” That is, why does anything at all exist? There must be an answer to this question, because “nothing happens without a sufficient reason.”8 Leibniz’s famous Principle of Sufficient Reason holds that there must be a reason or rational explanation for the existence of one state of affairs rather than another. Why does the universe exist? The reason cannot be found in any single thing in the universe, for each is contingent itself and does not have to exist. Nor is the reason to be found in the whole aggregate of such things, for the world is just the collection of these contingent beings and is therefore itself contingent. Nor can the reason be found in the prior causes of things, for these are just past states of the universe and do not explain why there are any such states, any universe, at all. Leibniz asks us to imagine that a series of geometry books has been copied from eternity; such an infinite regress would still not explain why such books exist at all. But the same is true with regard to past states of the world: even should these be infinite; we have yet to discover a sufficient reason for the existence of an eternal universe. Therefore, the reason for the universe’s existence must be found outside the universe, in a being whose sufficient reason is self-contained; it is its own sufficient reason for existing and is the reason the universe exists as well. This Sufficient Reason of all things is God, whose own existence is to be explained only by reference to himself. That is to say, God is a metaphysically necessary being.
This proof is clearly different from the Thomist argument: there is no reference to the distinction between essence and existence or to the argument against an infinite causal regress. Indeed, Leibniz is not seeking a cause at all, but an explanation for the world. Thomas concludes to an Uncaused Cause, but Leibniz to a Self-Explanatory Being. Many philosophers have confused these and come up with the notion of God as a Self-Caused Being, which neither Aquinas nor Leibniz defended.
Thus, there is a variety of cosmological arguments, which need to be kept distinct, for objections to one version may prove inapplicable to another.
Teleological Argument
Perhaps the oldest and most popular of all the arguments for the existence of God is the teleological argument. It is the famous argument from design, and it infers an intelligent designer of the universe, just as we infer an intelligent designer for 7. G. W. F. von Leibniz, “On the Ultimate Origin of Things,” in Leibniz Selections, ed. P. Wiener (New York: Scribner’s, 1951), 527–28; idem, “Monadology,” in Selections, 540; idem, Theodicy, trans. E. M. Huggard (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951), 127.
8. Leibniz, “Nature and Grace,” in Selections, 527.
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any product in which we discern evidence of purposeful adaptation of means to some end ( telos).
PLATO AND ARISTOTLE
The ancient Greek philosophers were impressed with the order that pervades the cosmos, and many of them ascribed that order to the work of an intelligent mind who fashioned the universe. The heavens in constant revolution across the sky were especially awesome to the ancients. Plato’s Academy lavished extensive time and thought on the study of astronomy because, Plato believed, it was the science that would awaken man to his divine destiny. According to Plato, there are two things that “lead men to believe in the gods”: the argument based on the soul, and the argument “from the order of the motion of the stars, and of all things under the dominion of the mind which ordered the universe.”9 What a lovely statement of the divine design evident throughout the universe! Plato employed both of these arguments to refute atheism and concluded that there must be a “best soul” who is the “maker and father of all,” the “King,” who ordered the primordial chaos into the rational cosmos we observe today.10
An even more magnificent statement of divine teleology is to be found in a fragment from a lost work of Aristotle entitled On Philosophy. Aristotle, too, was struck with wonder by the majestic sweep of the glittering host across the night sky of ancient Greece. Philosophy, he said, begins with this sense of wonder about the world:
For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to phi-losophize; they wondered originally at the obvious difficulties, then advanced little by little and stated difficulties about greater matters, e.g. about the phenomena of the moon and those of the sun, and about the stars and about the genesis of the universe.11
Anyone who has personally studied the heavens must lend a sympathetic ear to these men of antiquity who gazed up into the night sky, as yet undimmed by pollution and the glare of city lights, and watched the slow but irresistible turn of the cosmos, replete with its planets, stars, and familiar constellations, across their view and wondered, what is the cause of all this? Aristotle concluded that the cause was divine intelligence. He imagined the impact that the sight of the world would have on a race of men who had lived underground and never beheld the sky:
When thus they would suddenly gain sight of the earth, seas, and the sky; when they should come to know the grandeur of the clouds and the might of the winds; 9. Plato, Laws 12.966e.
10. Plato, Laws 10.893b-899c; idem Timaeus.
11. Aristotle, Metaphysica 1.982610–15.
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when they should behold the sun and should learn its grandeur and beauty as well as its power to cause the day by shedding light over the sky; and again, when the night had darkened the lands and they should behold the whole of the sky spangled and adorned with stars; and when they should see the changing lights of the moon as it waxes and wanes, and the risings and settings of all these celestial bodies, their courses fixed and changeless throughout all eternity—when they should behold all these things, most certainly they would have judged both that there exist gods and that all these marvelous works are the handiwork of the gods.12
In his Metaphysics Aristotle proceeded to argue that there must be a First Unmoved Mover, which is God, a living, intelligent, incorporeal, eternal, and most good being who is the source of order in the cosmos. Hence, from earliest times men, wholly removed from biblical revelation, have concluded on the basis of design in the universe that a divine mind must exist.
THOMAS AQUINAS
We’ve already seen that Thomas Aquinas in his first three Ways argued for the existence of God via the cosmological argument. His Fifth Way, however, represents the teleological argument. He notes that we observe in nature that all things operate toward some end, even when those things lack consciousness. For their operation hardly ever varies and practically always turns out well, which shows that they really do tend toward a goal and do not hit upon it merely by accident.
Thomas is here expressing the conviction of Aristotelian physics that everything has not only a productive cause but also a final cause or goal toward which it is drawn. To use an example of our own, poppy seeds always grow into poppies and acorns into oaks. Now nothing, Aquinas reasons, that lacks consciousness tends toward a goal unless it is under the direction of someone with consciousness and intelligence. For example, the arrow does not tend toward the bull’s eye unless it is aimed by the archer. Therefore, everything in nature must be directed toward its goal by someone with intelligence, and this we call “God.”
WILLIAM PALEY
Undoubtedly, the high point in the development of the teleological argument prior to our time came with William Paley’s brilliant formulation in his Natural Theology of 1804. Paley combed the sciences of his day for evidences of design in nature and produced a staggering catalogue of such evidences, based, for example, on the order evident in bones, muscles, blood vessels, comparative anatomy, and particular organs throughout the animal and plant kingdoms. So conclusive was Paley’s evidence that Leslie Stephen in his History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century wryly remarked that “if there were no hidden flaw in the reasoning, it would be impossible to understand, not only how any should resist, but 12. Aristotle, On Philosophy.
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how anyone should ever have overlooked the demonstration.”13 Although most philosophers—who have undoubtedly never read Paley—believe that his sort of argument was dealt a crushing and fatal blow by David Hume’s critique of the teleological argument, Paley’s argument, which was written nearly thirty years after the publication of Hume’s critique, is in fact not vulnerable to most of Hume’s objections, as Frederick Ferré has pointed out.14 Paley opens with a statement of the famous “watch-maker argument”:
In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there; I might possibly answer, that, for anything I knew to the contrary it had lain there forever: nor would it perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place; I should hardly think of the answer which I had before given, that, for anything I knew, the watch might have always been there. Yet why should not this answer serve for the watch as well as for the stone? Why is it not as admissible in the second case, as in the first?
For this reason, and for no other, viz. that, when we come to inspect the watch, we perceive (what we could not discover in the stone) that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose, e.g. that they are so formed and adjusted as to produce motion, and that motion so regulated as to point out the hour of the day; that if the different parts had been differently shaped from what they are, of a different size from what they are, or placed after any other manner, or in any other order, than that in which they are placed, either no motion at all would have been carried on in the machine, or none which would have answered the use that is now served by it. To reckon up a few of the plainest of these parts, and of their offices, all tending to one result: We see a cylindrical box containing a coiled elastic spring, which, by its endeavor to relax itself, turns round the box. We next observe a flexible chain (artificially wrought for the sake of flexure) communicating the action of the spring from the box to the fusee. We then find a series of wheels, the teeth of which catch in, and apply to each other, conducting the motion from the fusee to the balance, and from the balance to the pointer; and at the same time, by the size and shape of those wheels, so regulating that motion, as to terminate in causing an index, by an equable and measured progression, to pass over a given space in a given time. We take notice that the wheels are made of brass in order to keep them from rust; the springs of steel, no other metal being so elastic; that over the face of the watch there is placed a glass, a material employed in no other part of the work; but in the room of which, if there had been any other than a transparent substance, the hour could not be seen without opening the case. This mechanism being observed (it requires indeed an examination of the instrument, and perhaps some previous knowledge of the subject, to perceive and understand it; but being once, as we have said, observed and understood), the inference, we think, is inevitable; that the watch must have 13. Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, 2 vols., 2nd ed. (London: Smith, Elder, 1881), 1:408.
14. Frederick Ferré, Introduction to Natural Theology: Selections, by William Paley (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), xi-xxxii.
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had a maker; that there must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers, who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use.15
This conclusion, Paley continues, would not be weakened if I had never actually seen a watch being made nor knew how to make one. For we recognize the remains of ancient art as the products of intelligent design without having ever seen such things made, and we know the products of modern manufacture are the result of intelligence even though we may have no inkling how they are produced. Nor would our conclusion be invalidated if the watch sometimes went wrong. The purpose of the mechanism would be evident even if the machine did not function perfectly. Nor would the argument become uncertain if we were to discover some parts in the mechanism that did not seem to have any purpose, for this would not negate the purposeful design in the other parts. Nor would anyone in his right mind think that the existence of the watch was accounted for by the consideration that it was one out of many possible configurations of matter and that some possible configuration had to exist in the place where the watch was found. Nor would it help to say that there exists in things a principle of order, which yielded the watch. For one never knows a watch to be so formed, and the notion of such a principle of order that is not intelligent seems to have little meaning. Nor is it enough to say the watch was produced from another watch before it and that one from yet a prior watch, and so forth to infinity. For the design is still unaccounted for. Each machine in the infinite series evidences the same design, and it is irrelevant whether one has ten, a thousand, or an infinite number of such machines—a designer is still needed.
Now the point of the analogy of the watch is this: just as we infer a watchmaker as the designer of the watch, so ought we to infer an intelligent designer of the universe:
For every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature, of being greater and more, and that in a degree which exceeds all computation. I mean, that the contrivances of nature surpass the contrivances of art, in the complexity, subtilty, and curiosity of the mechanism; and still more, if possible, do they go beyond them in number and variety: yet, in a multitude of cases, are not less evidently contrivances, not less evidently accommodated to their end, or suited to their office, than are the most perfect products of human ingenuity.16
Here Paley begins his cataloging of the contrivances of nature bespeaking divine design. He concludes that an intelligent designer of the universe exists, and he closes with a discussion of some of the attributes of this cosmic architect.
15. Paley, Natural Theology, 3–4.
16. Ibid., 13.
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Moral Argument
The moral argument for the existence of God implies the existence of a Being that is the embodiment of the ultimate Good, which is the source of the objective moral values we experience in the world. The reasoning at the heart of the moral argument goes all the way back to Plato, who argued that things have goodness insofar as they stand in some relation to the Good, which subsists in itself. With the advent of Christian theism, the Good became identified with God himself.
THOMAS AQUINAS
Aquinas’s Fourth Way is a type of moral argument. He observes that we find in the world a gradation of values: some things are more good, more true, more noble, and so forth, than other things. Such comparative terms describe the varying degrees to which things approach a superlative standard: the most good, most true, and so forth. There must therefore exist something that is the best and truest and noblest thing of all. Aquinas believed that whatever possesses a property more fully than anything else is the cause of that property in other things. Hence, there is some being that is the cause of the existence, goodness, and any other perfection of finite beings, and this being we call “God.”
WILLIAM SORLEY
Perhaps the most sophisticated development of the moral argument prior to our day is that of William Sorley (1855–1935), professor of moral philosophy at Cambridge University until 1933, in his Gifford Lectures, Moral Values and the Idea of God (1918). Sorley believed that ethics provides the key to metaphysics, and he argues that God as the ground of the natural and moral orders best provides for a rational, unified view of reality. He begins by arguing that reality is characterized by an objective moral order, which is as real and independent of our recognition of it as the natural order of things is. He admits that in a sense one cannot prove that objective values exist, but insists that in this same sense one cannot prove that the external world exists either! Thus, the moral order and the natural order are on equal footing. On the same ground that we assume the reality of the world of objects, we assume the reality of the moral order of objective value. Now obviously Sorley does not mean we perceive value with our five senses in the way we do physical objects. We discern value in some non-empirical way, and just as we are rational to assume that some objective natural order lies behind our sense perceptions, so we are rational to assume that some objective moral order lies behind our perceptions of value. Our perceptions of both value and physical objects are simply givens of experience.
Our perception of a realm of objective value does not mean for Sorley that everyone has an innate and accurate knowledge of specific moral values. In his The Ethics of Naturalism (1885) he had refuted the historical, evolutionary approach to ethics, and now he turns to refute psychological, sociological explanations of value.
The fundamental error of all these approaches is that they confuse the subjective
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origin of our moral judgments and the objective value to which the judgments refer.
Just because the origin of our moral judgments can be historically or sociologically explained does not mean there are no objective, corresponding values in reality. In fact, Sorley argues that our moral judgments are not infallible and that we do not know the content of the moral ideal that we ever seek to approach.
Where, then, does objective moral value reside? Sorley answers: in persons. The only beings that are bearers of intrinsic moral value are persons; non-personal things have merely instrumental value in relation to persons. Only persons have intrinsic value, because meaningful moral behavior requires purpose and will.
The foregoing analysis of moral value provides the ground for Sorley’s moral argument for God. We have seen that the natural order and the moral order are both part of reality. Therefore, the question is: what worldview can combine these two orders into the most coherent explanatory form? According to Sorley, there are three competing worldviews: theism, pluralism, and monism.
Turning first to theism, Sorley believes that the most serious objection to this worldview is the problem of evil. Basically, the problem here is that the natural order and the moral order seem to be working at cross-purposes with each other: the natural order often fails to realize the good that ought to be realized. Sorley, however, thinks this objection is answerable. The objection, he says, tends to confuse moral purpose with personal happiness; because personal happiness is often not realized, it is assumed that moral purpose has been frustrated. But Sorley points out that the realization of moral purpose cannot be equated with the realization of personal happiness. In other words, just because we are not happy about some situation does not imply that the situation ought not to be. In general, Sorley argues that suffering and evil are possible in a theistic worldview if finite minds are gradually recognizing moral ends that they are free to accept or reject.
Indeed, Sorley argues that the theistic account of the natural and moral orders is the superior worldview. For we have seen that moral values or ideals are an objective part of reality and that they reside in persons. The problem is that no finite person has ever fully realized all moral value. The moral ideal is nowhere fully actualized in the finite world, though it is presently valid, that is, binding and obligatory for the finite world. But how can something be objective and valid if it does not exist? Physical laws, by contrast, are fully realized in the world. So no further explanation of their validity is required. Therefore, if the moral ideal is to be valid for reality, it must be fully realized in an existent that is both personal and eternal, that is, God.
Sorley then proceeds to refute the other two alternatives, pluralism and monism.
Against pluralism, which holds that the moral ideal resides in a plurality of finite beings, Sorley argues that the moral values are eternally valid and so cannot reside in temporally finite persons. Against monism, which holds that the universe is constituted by a single non-personal reality of which minds are mere modes, Sorley
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maintains that it leaves no room for purposeful endeavor or real freedom, because
“is” and “ought to be” are identical and everything simply is as it is.
Hence, concludes Sorley, this reasoning, although not a rigid demonstration, shows that theism offers the most reasonable and unified explanation of reality.
The moral order is the order of an infinite, eternal Mind who is the architect of nature and whose moral purpose man and the universe are slowly fulfilling.
Assessment
As a result of years of study and reflection, I have come to share Leibniz’s conviction that “nearly all the means which have been employed to prove the existence of God are good and might be of service, if we perfect them.”17 My experience of debating these arguments orally and in print with atheist and agnostic philosophers has only served to confirm this conviction in my mind.18 Whole books have been written on each of these arguments, and the reader wishing to go deeper is referred to the bibliography for those resources. In our limited space I shall formulate each argument, sketch a defense of its premises, and consider the most important objections brought against it.
Leibnizian Cosmological Argument
A simple statement of a Leibnizian cosmological argument might run as follows:19
1) Anything 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.
4) Therefore, the universe has an explanation of its existence. (from 1, 3) 5) Therefore, the explanation of the existence of the universe is God. (from 2, 4) Is this a good argument? The conclusion follows validly from the premises, so the only question is whether the three premises are more plausibly true than their denials.
17. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, New Essays on the Understanding, trans. Alfred G. Langley (New York: Macmillan, 1896), 505.
18. See my debates with Antony Flew, Does God Exist? ed. Stan Wallace, with responses by K. Yandell, P. Moser, D. Geivett, M. Martin, D. Yandell, W. Rowe, K. Parsons, and William Wainwright (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003); with Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, God? A Debate between a Christian and an Atheist (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); and with Paul Kurtz, God and Ethics: A Contemporary Debate, ed.
Nathan King and Robert Garcia, with responses by L. Antony, W. Sinnott-Armstrong, J. Hare, D. Hubin, S. Layman, M. Murphy, and R. Swinburne (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), as well as the debates listed at www.reasonablefaith.org.
19. I’m indebted to Stephen T. Davis, “The Cosmological Argument and the Epistemic Status of Belief in God,” Philosophia Christi 1 (1999): 5–15, for the inspiration for this formulation of the argument.
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The Principle of Sufficient Reason
Premise (1) is a modest version of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. It circumvents the typical objections to strong versions of that principle.20 For (1) merely requires any existing thing to have an explanation of its existence. This premise is compatible with there being brute facts about the world.21 What it precludes is that there could exist things which just exist inexplicably. According to (1) there are two kinds of being: necessary beings, which exist of their own nature and so have no external cause of their existence, and contingent beings, whose existence is accounted for by causal factors outside themselves. Numbers, sets, and other mathematical objects would be prime candidates for the first sort of thing, while familiar physical objects like people and planets and stars would be examples of the second kind of thing.
The principle enunciated in (1) seems quite plausible, at least more so than its denial. Richard Taylor gives the illustration of finding a translucent ball on the forest floor while walking in the woods.22 One would find the claim quite bizarre that the ball simply exists inexplicably; and just increasing the size of the ball, even until it becomes co-extensive with the cosmos, would do nothing to eliminate the need for an explanation of its existence.
Crispin Wright and Bob Hale agree that explicability is the default position and that exceptions to the principle therefore require justification. Nonetheless they maintain that an exception is justified in the case of the universe. Why? Because the explanation of any physical state of affairs S must be found in a causally prior state of affairs in which S does not exist.23 For example, the explanation why a certain horse exists is that two other horses were bred with the result that they caused the new horse to be conceived and come into existence. So any explanation of why the universe exists must be found in a causally prior state of affairs in which the universe does not exist. But, Wright and Hale object, since a physically empty world couldn’t cause anything, the demand for an explanation of the universe becomes absurd. So the principle enunciated in (1) doesn’t apply in the case of the universe.
This objection, however, plainly begs the question in favor of atheism. For unless one assumes in advance that the universe is all there is, there’s just no reason to 20. For such objections, see Jordan Howard Sobel, Logic and Theism: Arguments For and Against Beliefs in God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 200–228. But even the strong version is not without its defenders; see Alexander R. Pruss, The Principle of Sufficient Reason: A Reassessment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
21. What about the existence of the fact itself? A fact may be taken to be a true proposition. As abstract objects independent of sentences, propositions exist necessarily, if they exist at all. What is contingent about them is their truth value (whether they are true or false). So the proposition exists by a necessity of its own nature, while its truth value may or may not have an explanation.
22. Richard Taylor, Metaphysics, 4th ed., Foundations of Philosophy (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1991), 100–101.
23. Crispin Wright and Bob Hale, “Nominalism and the Contingency of Abstract Objects,” Journal of Philosophy 89 (1992): 128.
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think that the state of affairs causally prior to the existence of the universe which explains why the universe exists has to be a physical state of affairs. The explanation of why the physical universe exists could be some causally prior, non-physical state of affairs. If one assumes that that’s impossible, then one is just begging the question in favor of atheism. The theist will regard Wright and Hale’s maxim about the nature of explanation as not at all restrictive, since the explanation of why the physical universe exists can and should be provided in terms of a causally prior non-physical state of affairs involving God’s existence and will.
The Explanation of the Universe
Premise (2) might seem at first blush to be a very bold assertion on the part of the theist. But, in fact, (2) is logically equivalent to the typical atheist response to Leibniz that on the atheistic worldview the universe simply exists as a brute contingent thing. Atheists typically assert that, since there is no God, it is false that everything has an explanation of its existence, for the universe, in this case, just exists inexplicably. So in affirming that
A. If atheism is true, then the universe has no explanation of its existence, atheists are also affirming the logically equivalent claim that A´. If the universe has an explanation of its existence, then atheism is not true, that is to say, that God exists. Hence, most atheists are implicitly committed to (2).
Moreover, (2) seems quite plausible in its own right, for the universe, by definition, includes all of physical reality. So the cause of the universe must (at least causally prior to the universe’s existence) transcend space and time and therefore cannot be physical or material. But there are only two kinds of things that could fall under such a description: either an abstract object (like a number) or else a mind (a soul, a self ). But abstract objects don’t stand in causal relations. This is part of what it means to be abstract. The number 7, for example, doesn’t cause anything. So if the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation must be a transcendent, unembodied Mind which created the universe—which is what most people have traditionally meant by the word “God.”
Finally, premise (3) states the obvious, that there is a universe. Since the universe exists, it follows that God exists.
The Contingency of the Universe
One way for the atheist or agnostic to try to escape the force of this argument is to say that while the universe has an explanation of its existence, as premise (1) requires, that explanation lies not in an external ground but in the necessity
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of its own nature. The universe exists necessarily. This is, however, an extremely bold suggestion which atheists have not been eager to embrace. We have, one can safely say, a strong sense of the universe’s contingency. A possible world in which no concrete objects exist certainly seems conceivable. We generally trust our modal intuitions on other familiar matters (for example, our sense that the planet earth exists contingently, not necessarily, even though we have no experience of its non-existence). If we are to do otherwise with respect to the universe’s contingency, then the non-theist needs to provide some reason for his skepticism other than his desire to avoid theism.
Still, it would be desirable to have some stronger argument for the universe’s contingency than our modal intuitions alone. Could the Thomist cosmological argument help us here? The difficulty with appeal to the Thomist argument is that it is very difficult to show that things are, in fact, contingent in the special sense required by the argument. Certainly things are naturally contingent in that their continued existence is dependent upon a myriad of factors including particle masses and fundamental forces, temperature, pressure, entropy level, and so forth, but this natural contingency does not suffice to establish things’ metaphysical contingency in the sense that being must be continually added to their essences lest they be spontaneously annihilated.
Nevertheless, I think we do have good grounds for thinking that the universe does not exist by a necessity of its own nature. It’s easy to conceive of the non-existence of any and all of the objects we observe in the world; indeed, prior to a certain point in the past, when the universe was very dense and very hot, none of them did exist. What about the fundamental particles or the building blocks of matter, like quarks? Well, it’s easy to conceive of a world in which all of the fundamental particles composing some macroscopic object were replaced by other quarks. A universe consisting of a totally different collection of quarks, say, seems quite possible. But if that’s the case, then the universe does not exist by a necessity of its own nature. For a universe composed of a wholly different collection of quarks is not the same universe as ours. To illustrate, ask yourself whether the shoes you’re wearing could have been made of steel? Certainly we can imagine that you could have had a pair of steel shoes in the same shape as the shoes you’re wearing; but that’s not the question. The question is whether the very shoes you’re wearing could have been made of steel. I think the answer is obviously not. They would be a different pair of shoes, not the same pair of shoes you have on. The same is true of the universe. If it were composed of a different collection of quarks, then it would be a different universe, not the same universe. Since quarks are the fundamental building blocks of material objects, one cannot say, as we might say of macroscopic objects, that while they are contingent, the stuff of which they are made is necessary, for there is no further stuff beyond quarks. No atheist will, I think, dare to suggest that some quarks, though looking just like ordinary quarks, have the special occult property of being necessary, so that any universe that exists would have to include them. It’s all or nothing here. But no one thinks that every
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quark exists by a necessity of its own nature. It follows that the universe does not exist by a necessity of its own nature either.
The Principle of Sufficient Reason Once More
There’s one last way that the atheist might try to escape the argument. He might say that while there are no beings that exist necessarily, nevertheless it is necessary that something or other exist. Bede Rundle agrees with the theist that it is impossible that nothing exist.24 But he thinks that the proper conclusion to be drawn from this fact is not that a necessary being exists, but that, necessarily, some contingent being or other exists. (This is akin to saying that while, necessarily, every object has a shape, nonetheless there is no particular shape which everything necessarily has. In the same way, it’s necessary that something or other exists but there isn’t anything that exists necessarily.) In short, premise (1) is, on Rundle’s view, false after all. The universe exists contingently and inexplicably. Some universe must exist, but there is no explanation why this universe exists.
Alexander Pruss has pointed out that Rundle’s view has an extremely implausible consequence.25 It’s plausible that no conjunction of claims about the non-existence of various things entails, say, that a unicorn exists. After all, how could the fact that certain things do not exist entail that some other contingent thing does exist? But on Rundle’s view the conjunction “There are no mountains, there are no people, there are no planets, there are no rocks, . . . [including everything that is not a unicorn]” entails that there is a unicorn! For if it is necessary that contingent beings exist, and none of the other contingent beings listed exist, then the only thing left is a unicorn. Hence, a conjunction about the non-existence of certain things entails that a unicorn exists, which seems absurd.
Moreover, on Rundle’s view there is nothing which would account for why there exist contingent beings in every possible world.26 Since there is no metaphysically necessary being, there is nothing that could cause contingent beings to exist in every possible world and no explanation why every world includes contingent beings.
There is no strict logical inconsistency in the concept of a world devoid of contingent beings. What accounts for the fact that in every possible world contingent beings exist? Given the infinity of broadly logically possible worlds, the odds that in all of them contingent beings just happen inexplicably to exist is infinitesimal.
Hence, the probability of Rundle’s hypothesis is effectively zero.
24. Bede Rundle, Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
25. Alexander Pruss, critical notice of Bede Rundle, Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?
Philosophia Christi 7 (2005): 210.
26. For those unfamilar with talk of possible worlds, see the explanation provided in the next chapter in our discussion of the ontological argument.
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Conclusion
Thus, the premises of this Leibnizian argument all seem to me to be more plausible than their negations. It therefore follows logically that the explanation for why the universe exists is to be found in God. It seems to me, therefore, that this is a good argument for God’s existence.
Moreover, the Leibnizian argument is reinforced by the support which the kalām cosmological argument adds to premises (1) and (2). An essential property of a being that exists by a necessity of its own nature is that it be eternal, that is to say, without beginning or end. If the universe is not eternal, then it could fail to exist and so does not exist by a necessity of its own nature. But it is precisely the aim of the kalām cosmological argument to show that the universe is not eternal but had a beginning. It would follow that the universe must therefore be contingent in its existence. Not only so; the kalām argument shows the universe to be contingent in a very special way: it came into existence out of nothing. The atheist who would answer Leibniz by holding that the existence of the universe is a brute fact, an exception to the Principle of Sufficient Reason, is thus thrust into the very awkward position of maintaining, not merely that the universe exists eternally without explanation, but rather that for no reason at all it magically popped into being out of nothing, a position which might make theism look like a welcome alternative. Thus, the kalām argument not only constitutes an independent argument for a transcendent Creator but also serves as a valuable supplement to the Leibnizian argument.
Kalām Cosmological Argument
The kalām cosmological argument may be formulated as follows: 1) Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
2) The universe began to exist.
3) Therefore, the universe has a cause.
Conceptual analysis of what it means to be a cause of the universe then aims to establish some of the theologically significant properties of this being.
Whatever Begins to Exist Has a Cause
Premise (1) seems obviously true—at the least, more so than its negation. First and foremost, it’s rooted in the metaphysical intuition that something cannot come into being from nothing. To suggest that things could just pop into being uncaused out of nothing is to quit doing serious metaphysics and to resort to magic. Second, if things really could come into being uncaused out of nothing, then it becomes inexplicable why just anything and everything do not come into existence uncaused from nothing. Finally, the first premise is constantly confirmed
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in our experience. Atheists who are scientific naturalists thus have the strongest of motivations to accept it.
When I first wrote The Kalām Cosmological Argument, I figured that few atheists would deny the first premise and assert that the universe sprang into existence uncaused out of nothing, since I believed they would thereby expose themselves as persons interested only in an academic refutation of the argument and not in really discovering the truth about the universe. To my surprise, however, many atheists have taken this route. For example, Quentin Smith, commenting that philosophers are too often adversely affected by Heidegger’s dread of “the nothing,” concludes that “the most reasonable belief is that we came from nothing, by nothing, and for nothing”27—a nice ending to a sort of Gettysburg address of atheism, perhaps.
Similarly, the late J. L. Mackie, in refuting the kalām cosmological argument, turns his main guns on this first step: “There is a priori no good reason why a sheer origination of things, not determined by anything, should be unacceptable, whereas the existence of a god [ sic] with the power to create something out of nothing is acceptable.”28 Indeed, he believes creatio ex nihilo raises problems: (i) If God began to exist at a point in time, then this is as great a puzzle as the beginning of the universe. (ii) Or if God existed for infinite time, then the same arguments would apply to his existence as would apply to the infinite duration of the universe. (iii) If it be said that God is timeless, then this, says Mackie, is a complete mystery.
Now notice that Mackie never refutes the principle that whatever begins to exist has a cause. Rather, he simply demands what good reason there is a priori to accept it. He writes, “As Hume pointed out, we can certainly conceive an uncaused beginning-to-be of an object; if what we can thus conceive is nevertheless in some way impossible, this still requires to be shown.”29 But, as many philosophers have pointed out, Hume’s argument in no way makes it plausible to think that something could really come into being without a cause. Just because I can imagine an object, say a horse, coming into existence from nothing, that in no way proves that a horse really could come into existence that way. The defender of the kalām argument is claiming that it is really impossible for something to come uncaused 27. Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 135. Smith’s most recent criticism of the kalām cosmological argument is also a denial of the first premise, despite Smith’s avowal that he now accepts the conclusion that the universe has a cause for its existence. Quentin Smith, “Kalām Cosmological Arguments for Atheism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Atheism, ed. Michael Martin, Cambridge Companions to Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 182–98. Smith’s current position is that the initial singular point of the universe is not real and that therefore the sequence of instantaneous states of the universe is a beginningless series converging toward zero as a limit. Each state is caused by its predecessor and there is no first state. Any non-zero interval or state, such as the first second of the universe’s existence, “is not caused by any or all of its instantaneous states and is not caused by any external cause” (ibid., 189). Smith takes “the beginning of the universe” to refer to the Planck era, that state which lasts until 10-43 second after the singularity. As a state of non-zero duration, the beginning of the universe therefore has no cause of any sort. The universe therefore comes into being uncaused out of nothing.
28. J. L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982), 94.
29. Ibid., 89.
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from nothing. Does Mackie sincerely believe that things can pop into existence uncaused, out of nothing? Does anyone in his right mind really believe that, say, a raging tiger could suddenly come into existence uncaused, out of nothing, in this room right now? The same applies to the universe: if prior to the existence of the universe, there was absolutely nothing—no God, no space, no time—how could the universe possibly have come to exist?30
In fact, Mackie’s appeal to Hume at this point is counterproductive. For Hume himself clearly believed in the causal principle. In 1754 he wrote to John Stewart,
“But allow me to tell you that I never asserted so absurd a Proposition as that anything might arise without a cause: I only maintain’d, that our Certainty of the Falsehood of that Proposition proceeded neither from Intuition nor Demonstration, but from another source.”31 Even Mackie confesses, “Still this [causal] principle has some plausibility, in that it is constantly confirmed in our experience (and also used, reasonably, in interpreting our experience).”32 So why not accept the truth of the causal principle as plausible and reasonable—at the very least more so than its denial?
Because, Mackie thinks, in this particular case the theism implied by affirming the principle is even more unintelligible than the denial of the principle. It makes more sense to believe that the universe came into being uncaused out of nothing than to believe that God created the universe out of nothing.
But is this really the case? Consider the three problems Mackie raises with creatio ex nihilo. Certainly, the proponent of the kalām argument would not hold (i) that God began to exist or (ii) that God has existed for an infinite number of, say, hours, or any other unit of time. But what is wrong with (iii), that God is, without creation, timeless? I would argue that God exists timelessly without creation and in time subsequent to creation.33 This may be “mysterious” in the sense of “wonderful” or “awe-inspiring,” but it is not, so far as I can see, unintelligible; and Mackie gives us no reason to think that it is. Moreover, there is also an alternative which Mackie failed to consider: (iv) prior to creation God existed in an undifferentiated time in which hours, seconds, days, and so forth simply do not exist. Because this time is undifferentiated, it is not incompatible with the kalām argument that an infinite regress of events cannot exist. It seems to me, therefore, that Mackie is entirely unjustified in rejecting the first step of the argument as not being intuitively obvious, plausible, and reasonable.
Other critics have said that premise (1) is true only for things in the universe, but it is not true of the universe itself. But why think that the universe is an excep-30. Elsewhere Mackie reveals his true sentiments: “I myself find it hard to accept the notion of self-creation from nothing, even given unrestricted chance. And how can this be given, if there really is nothing?”
( J. L. Mackie, Times Literary Supplement, 5 February 1982, 126).
31. David Hume, The Letters of David Hume, 2 vols., ed. J. Y. T. Greig (Oxford: Clarendon, 1932), 1:187.
32. Mackie, Theism, 89.
33. See my Time and Eternity (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 2001).
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tion to the rule? As Arthur Schopenhauer once remarked, the causal principle is not something you can dismiss like a cab once you’ve arrived at your desired destination. Moreover, the objection misconstrues the nature of the causal principle.
Premise (1) does not state a merely physical law like the law of gravity or the laws of thermodynamics, which are valid for things within the universe. Premise (1) is not a physical principle. Rather it is a metaphysical principle: being cannot come from non-being; something cannot come into existence uncaused from nothing.
The principle therefore applies to all of reality, and it is thus metaphysically absurd that the universe should pop into being uncaused out of nothing.
Daniel Dennett, misstating the first premise as “Everything that exists must have a cause,” accordingly asks, “What caused God?”34 This retort merely caricatures the argument. In fact, apart from certain Enlightenment rationalists, who by “cause”
meant merely “sufficient reason,” no orthodox theist of any prominence has ever asserted that everything has a cause or that God is self-caused, a notion rightly rejected by Aquinas as metaphysically impossible. Things that begin to exist must have causes. In fact, Dennett himself recognizes that a being “outside of time . . . is nothing with an initiation or origin in need of explanation. What does need its origin explained is the concrete Universe itself.”35 Dennett rightly sees that a being which exists eternally, since it never comes into being, has no need of a cause, as do things which have an origin. So Dennett actually affirms the first premise, which will lead him, as we’ll see, to the remarkable position that the universe must have caused itself to come into being.
Sometimes it is said that quantum physics furnishes an exception to premise (1), since on the sub-atomic level events are said to be uncaused. In the same way, certain theories of cosmic origins are interpreted as showing that the whole universe could have sprung into being out of the sub-atomic vacuum or even out of nothingness. Thus the universe is said to be the proverbial “free lunch.”
This objection, however, is based on misunderstandings. In the first place, not all scientists agree that sub-atomic events are uncaused. A great many physicists today are quite dissatisfied with this view (the so-called Copenhagen Interpretation) of quantum physics and are exploring deterministic theories like that of David Bohm. Thus, quantum physics is not a proven exception to premise (1).36
Second, even on the traditional, indeterministic interpretation, particles do not come into being out of nothing. They arise as spontaneous fluctuations of the energy contained in the sub-atomic vacuum, which constitutes an indeterministic 34. Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (NewYork: Viking, 2006), 242.
35. Ibid., 244.
36. There are at least ten different interpretations of quantum mechanics, many of which are fully deterministic, and no one knows which, if any of these, is correct. Even so determined a naturalist as the physicist Victor Stenger admits, “Other viable interpretations of quantum mechanics remain with no consensus on which, if any, is the correct one”; hence, we have to remain “open to the possibility that causes may someday be found for such phenomena.” Victor Stenger, Has Silence Found God? (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus, 2003), 188–89, 173.
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cause of their origination. Third, the same point can be made about theories of the origin of the universe out of a primordial vacuum. Popular magazine articles touting such theories as getting “something from nothing” simply do not understand that the vacuum is not nothing but is a sea of fluctuating energy endowed with a rich structure and subject to physical laws. Such models do not therefore involve a true origination ex nihilo.37
Neither do theories such as Alexander Vilenkin’s quantum creation model.
Vilenkin invites us to envision a small, closed, spherical universe filled with a so-called false vacuum and containing some ordinary matter. If the radius of such a universe is small, classical physics predicts that it will collapse to a point; but quantum physics permits it to “tunnel” into a state of inflationary expansion. If we allow the radius to shrink all the way to zero, there still remains some positive probability of the universe’s tunneling to inflation. Now Vilenkin equates the initial state of the universe explanatorily prior to tunneling with nothingness. But this equivalence is patently mistaken. As Vilenkin’s own diagram in his recent book illustrates,38 the quantum tunneling is at every point a function from something to something (Fig. 3.1).
time
tunnel
singularity
time
Fig. 3.1: Vilenkin’s model of quantum creation. Note that the tunneling is at every point from something to something; the origin of the initial point remains unexplained.
37. As Kanitscheider explains, “The violent microstructure of the vacuum has been used in attempts to explain the origin of the universe as a long-lived vacuum fluctuation. But some authors have connected with this legitimate speculations [ sic] far-reaching metaphysical claims, or at most they couched their mathematics in a highly misleading language, when they maintained ‘the creation of the universe out of nothing.’ . . . From the philosophical point of view it is essential to note that the foregoing is far from being a spontaneous generation of everything from naught, but the origin of that embryonic bubble is really a causal process leading from a primordial substratum with a rich physical structure to a materialized substratum of the vacuum. Admittedly this process is not deterministic, it includes that weak kind of causal dependence peculiar to every quantum mechanical process.” Bernulf Kanitscheider, “Does Physical Cosmology Transcend the Limits of Naturalistic Reasoning?” in Studies on Mario Bunge’s “Treatise,” ed. Weingartner and G. J. W.
Doen (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990), 346–74.
38. Alex Vilenkin, Many Worlds in One: The Search for Other Universes (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), 180.
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For quantum tunneling to be truly from nothing, the function would have to have only one term, the posterior term. Another way of seeing the point is to reflect on the fact that to have no radius (as is the case with nothingness) is not to have a radius, whose measure is zero. Thus, there is no basis for the claim that quantum physics proves that things can begin to exist without a cause, much less that the universe could have sprung into being uncaused from literally nothing.
That Vilenkin has not truly grasped how radical is being’s coming from nonbeing is evident from his incredulity at the claim of the Hartle-Hawking model that an infinite universe should similarly arise from nothing. He exclaims, “The most probable thing to pop out of nothing is then an infinite, empty, flat space.
I find this very hard to believe!”39 Vilenkin finds it easier to believe that an itsy-bitsy universe should pop into being out of nothing. He thereby evinces a lack of understanding of the metaphysical chasm that separates being from non-being.
If something can come from nothing, then the size and shape of the object is just irrelevant.
THE UNIVERSE BEGAN TO EXIST
If we agree that whatever begins to exist has a cause, what evidence is there to support the crucial second step in the argument, that the universe began to exist?
We’ll examine both deductive, philosophical arguments and inductive, scientific arguments in support of (2).
Philosophical Arguments:
1) The Impossibility of an Actually Infinite Number of Things This argument can also be formulated in three steps:
1) An actually infinite number of things cannot exist.
2) A beginningless series of events in time entails an actually infinite number of things.
3) Therefore, a beginningless series of events in time cannot exist.
Let’s examine each premise in turn.
(1) An actually infinite number of things cannot exist. In order to understand this first premise, we need to understand what an actual infinite is. There is a difference between a potential infinite and an actual infinite. An actual infinite is a collection of definite and discrete members whose number is greater than any natural number 0, 1, 2, 3 . . . This sort of infinity is used in set theory to designate sets that have an infinite number of members, such as {0, l, 2, 3 . . .}. The symbol for this kind of infinity is the Hebrew letter aleph: ℵ. The number of members in the set of natural numbers is ℵ . By contrast, a potential infinite is a collection that is 0
increasing toward infinity as a limit but never gets there. The symbol for this kind of infinity is the lemniscate: ∞. Such a collection is really indefinite, not infinite.
39. Ibid., 191.
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For example, any finite distance can be subdivided into potentially infinitely many parts. You can just keep on dividing parts in half forever, but you will never arrive at an actual "infinitieth" division or come up with an actually infinite number of parts. Now premise (1) asserts, not that a potentially infinite number of things cannot exist, but that an actually infinite number of things cannot exist.
It is frequently alleged that this sort of argument has been cut off at the knees by the work of the nineteenth-century mathematician Georg Cantor on the actual infinite and by subsequent developments in set theory, which have legitimized the notion of the actual infinite. But this allegation is far too hasty. It not only begs the question against denials of the mathematical legitimacy of the actual infinite on the part of certain mathematicians (so-called Intuitionists), but, more seriously, it begs the question against anti-realist views of mathematical objects. These are distinct questions, run together by such recent critics of the argument as Howard Sobel and Graham Oppy.40 Most anti-realists would not go to the Intuitionistic extreme of denying mathematical legitimacy to the actual infinite—hence, the defiant declaration of the great German mathematician David Hilbert: “No one shall be able to drive us from the paradise that Cantor has created for us.”41 They would simply insist that acceptance of the mathematical legitimacy of certain notions does not imply a commitment to the metaphysical reality of various objects.
In Hilbert’s view, “The infinite is nowhere to be found in reality. It neither exists in nature nor provides a legitimate basis for rational thought. . . . The role that remains for the infinite to play is solely that of an idea.”42 Cantor’s system and set theory may be taken to be simply a universe of discourse, a mathematical system based on certain adopted axioms and conventions. On anti-realist views of mathematical objects such as Balaguer’s Fictionalism or Yablo’s Figuralism or Chihara’s Constructibilism, mathematical discourse is not in any way abridged, but there are, notwithstanding, no mathematical objects, let alone an infinite number of them.43
One may consistently hold that while the actual infinite is a fruitful and consistent concept within the postulated universe of discourse, it cannot be transposed into the real world, for this would involve counter-intuitive absurdities.
40. Sobel, Logic and Theism, 181–89, 198–99; Graham Oppy, Philosophical Perspectives on Infinity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 291–93.
41. David Hilbert, “On the Infinite,” in Philosophy of Mathematics, ed. with an introduction by Paul Benacerraf and Hillary Putnam (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1964), 141.
42. Ibid., 151.
43. Mark Balaguer, Platonism and Anti-Platonism in Mathematics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), part 2; idem, “A Theory of Mathematical Correctness and Mathematical Truth,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 82 (2001): 87–114; Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, s.v. “Platonism in Metaphysics,” by Mark Balaguer (Summer 2004), ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ sum2004/entries/platonism/; Stephen Yablo, “A Paradox of Existence,” in Empty Names, Fiction, and the Puzzles of Non-Existence, ed. Anthony Everett and Thomas Hofweber (Stanford: Center for Study of Language and Information, 2000), 275–312; idem, “Go Figure: A Path through Fictionalism,” in Figurative Language, ed. Peter A. French and Howard K. Wettstein, Midwest Studies in Philosophy 25 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 72–102; Charles S.
Chihara, Constructibility and Mathematical Existence (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990); idem, A Structural Account of Mathematics (Oxford: Clarendon, 2004).
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Ludwig Wittgenstein enunciated perhaps the best strategy for showing the metaphysical impossibility of the actual infinite when he quipped, “I wouldn’t dream of trying to drive anyone from this paradise. I would do something quite different: I would try to show you that it is not a paradise—so that you’ll leave of your own accord. I would say, ‘You’re welcome to this; just look about you.’ ”44
If an actually infinite number of things could exist, this would spawn all sorts of absurdities. We can construct thought experiments illustrating what it would be like if an actually infinite number of things were to exist, in order to evoke a sense of how absurd such a world would be. Let me share one my favorites, Hilbert’s Hotel, the brainchild of David Hilbert.45
As a warm-up, let’s first imagine a hotel with a finite number of rooms. Suppose, furthermore, that all the rooms are occupied. When a new guest arrives asking for a room, the proprietor apologizes, “Sorry, all the rooms are full,” and that’s the end of the story. But now let us imagine a hotel with an infinite number of rooms and suppose once more that all the rooms are occupied. There is not a single vacant room throughout the entire infinite hotel. Now suppose a new guest shows up, asking for a room. “But of course!” says the proprietor, and he immediately shifts the person in room #1 into room #2, the person in room #2 into room #3, the person in room #3 into room #4, and so on, out to infinity. As a result of these room changes, room #1 now becomes vacant and the new guest gratefully checks in. But remember, before he arrived, all the rooms were already occupied!
But the situation becomes even stranger. For suppose an infinity of new guests shows up at the desk, each asking for a room. “Of course, of course!” says the proprietor, and he proceeds to shift the person in room #l into room #2, the person in room #2 into room #4, the person in room #3 into room #6, and so on out to infinity, always putting each former occupant into the room with a number twice his own. Because any natural number multiplied by two always equals an even number, all the guests wind up in even-numbered rooms. As a result, all the odd-numbered rooms become vacant, and the infinity of new guests is easily accommodated. And yet, before they came, all the rooms were already occupied! In fact, the proprietor could repeat this process infinitely many times and so always accommodate new guests, despite the fact that the hotel is completely full! As one student remarked to me, if Hilbert’s Hotel could exist, it would have to have a sign posted outside: No Vacancy—Guests Welcome.
But Hilbert’s Hotel is even stranger than the great German mathematician made it out to be. Just ask yourself the question: what happens if some of the guests start to check out? Suppose the guests in rooms # l, #3, #5 . . . check out. In this case an infinite number of people has left the hotel, and half the rooms are now empty.
44. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics, ed. Cora Diamond (Sussex, England: Harvester, 1976), 103.
45. The story of Hilbert’s Hotel is related in George Gamow, One, Two, Three, Infinity (London: Macmillan, 1946), 17.
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Now suppose the proprietor doesn’t like having a half-empty hotel (it looks bad for business). No matter! By shifting occupants as before, but in reverse order, he transforms his half-vacant hotel into one that is jammed to the gills! You might think that by such maneuvers the proprietor could always keep this strange hotel fully occupied. But you would be wrong. For suppose that the persons in rooms #4,
#5, #6 . . . checked out. At a single stroke the hotel would be virtually emptied, the guest register reduced to but three names, and the infinite converted to finitude.
And yet it would remain true that the same number of guests checked out this time as when the guests in rooms # l, #3, #5 . . . checked out! In both cases we subtracted the identical number of guests from the identical number of guests and yet did not arrive at an identical result. In fact one can subtract equal quantities from equal quantities and get any quantity between zero and infinity as the remainder. Can anyone believe that such a hotel could exist in reality?
Hilbert’s Hotel is absurd. Since nothing hangs on the illustration’s involving a hotel, the argument, if successful, would show in general that it is impossible for an actually infinite number of things to exist. Students sometimes react to such illustrations as Hilbert’s Hotel by saying that we don’t understand the nature of infinity and, hence, these absurdities result. But this attitude is simply mistaken.
Infinite set theory is a highly developed and well-understood branch of mathematics, and these absurdities can be seen to result precisely because we do understand the notion of a collection with an actually infinite number of members. Hilbert’s illustration merely serves to bring out in a practical and vivid way what the mathematics necessarily implies; for if an actually infinite number of things were possible, then such a hotel must be possible. Hence, it logically follows that if such a hotel is impossible, then so is the real existence of an actual infinite.46
What can the argument’s critic say at this point? Mackie, Sobel, and Oppy try, in Oppy’s words, to “outsmart” the proponent of the argument by embracing the conclusion of his reductio ad absurdum argument: Hilbert’s Hotel is possible after all.47 The problem with this strategy is that it could used to legitimize any conclusion, no matter how absurd, so long as one has the chutzpah to embrace it. What we want is some sort of reason to think that such a hotel is really possible. Here Oppy has no more to say than “these allegedly absurd situations are just what one ought to expect if there were . . . physical infinities.” This response only reiterates, in effect, that if an actual infinite were to exist, then the relevant situations would result, which is not in dispute. The situations would, after all, not be effective illustrations if they would not result! Rather the question is whether these situations really are absurd. It is indisputable that if an actually infinite number of things 46. Students frequently ask if God, therefore, cannot be infinite. The question is based on a misunderstanding. When we speak of the infinity of God, we are not using the word in a mathematical sense to refer to an aggregate of an infinite number of finite parts. God’s infinity is, if you will, qualitative, not quantitative.
It means that God is metaphysically necessary, morally perfect, omnipotent, omniscient, eternal, etc.
47. Graham Oppy, Philosophical Perspectives on Infinity, 48; cf. Mackie, Theism, 93; Sobel, Logic and Theism, 186–87.
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were to exist, then we should find ourselves landed in an Alice-in-Wonderland world populated with oddities like Hilbert’s Hotel. Merely reiterating that “If there were physical infinities, these situations are just what we ought to expect”
does nothing to allay one’s suspicions that such a world is metaphysically absurd.
Moreover, Oppy says nothing about what would happen in cases of inverse operations like subtraction with infinite quantities, as when an infinite number of guests check out of the hotel. In trans-finite arithmetic, inverse operations of subtraction and division are prohibited because they lead to contradictions; but in reality, one cannot stop people from checking out of the hotel if they so desire!
Again, it’s worth reiterating that nothing in the argument need be construed as an attempt to undermine the theoretical system bequeathed by Cantor to modern mathematics. Indeed, some of the most eager enthusiasts of the system of transfinite mathematics are only too ready to agree that these theories have no relation to the real world. The case against the real existence of the actual infinite says nothing about the use of the idea of the infinite in conceptual mathematical systems.
2) A beginningless series of events in time entails an actually infinite number of things. This second premise is pretty obvious. If the universe never began to exist, then prior to the present event there have existed an actually infinite number of previous events. Thus, a beginningless series of events in time entails an actually infinite number of things, namely, events.
3) Therefore, a beginningless series of events in time cannot exist. If the above two premises are true, then the conclusion follows logically. The series of past events must be finite and have a beginning. Since the universe is not distinct from the series of events, the universe therefore began to exist.
Philosophical Arguments:
(2) The Impossibility of Forming an Actually Infinite Collection of Things by Adding One Member after Another
It’s important to note that this second argument is distinct from the foregoing argument, for it does not deny that an actually infinite number of things can exist.
It denies that a collection containing an actually infinite number of things can be formed by adding one member after another. So even if the first philosophical argument were deemed to be unsound, the critic of the kalām cosmological argument must still contend with this independent argument for the second premise.
This argument, too, can be formulated in three steps:
1) The series of events in time is a collection formed by adding one member after another.
2) A collection formed by adding one member after another cannot be actually infinite.
3) Therefore, the series of events in time cannot be actually infinite.
Let’s take a look at each premise.
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1) The series of events in time is a collection formed by adding one member after another. This may seem rather obvious. The past did not spring into being whole and entire but was formed sequentially, one event occurring after another. Notice, too, that the direction of this formation is “forward,” in the sense that the collection grows with time. Although we sometimes speak of an “infinite regress” of events, in reality an infinite past would be an “infinite progress” of events with no beginning and its end in the present.
As obvious as this first premise may seem at first blush, it is, in fact, a matter of great controversy. It presupposes a certain view of time which is variously called the tensed or dynamic or, following the convenient nomenclature of J. M. E.
McTaggart, who first distinguished these views of time, the A-Theory of time.
According to the A-Theory, things/events in time are not all equally real: the future does not yet exist and the past no longer exists; only things which are present are real. Temporal becoming is an objective feature of reality: things come into being and go out of being. By contrast, on what McTaggart called the B-Theory of time or the tenseless or static theory of time all events in time are equally real, and temporal becoming is an illusion of human consciousness. Pastness, present-ness, and futurity are at most relative notions: for example, relative to the persons living in the year 2050 the people and events of 2000 are past, but relative to the persons living in 1950 the people and events of 2000 are future. Things and events in time are objectively ordered by the relations earlier than, simultaneous with, and
later than, which are tenseless relations that are unchanging and hold regardless of whether the related events are past, present, or future relative to some observer.
B-Theorists typically unify time with space into a four-dimensional, geometrical entity called spacetime, all of whose points are equally real and none of which is objectively present. On a B-Theory of time, premise (1) is false, for the past, like the future, exists tenselessly and there is no question of the series of events’ being formed sequentially.
The question, then, is which of these two competing theories of time is true?
Unfortunately, an adjudication of this issue here would take us too far afield.
Everyone agrees that the commonsense view is that the difference between past, present, and future is real and objective, and as a result of over a decade of intensive research on this question my studied opinion is that there is no reason to abandon the commonsense view of this matter.48 Therefore, I am convinced that the A-Theory of time is correct and, accordingly, that premise (1) is true. Given that the vast majority of people share this conviction, I think that an argument based upon this premise will provoke little objection on this score.
2) A collection formed by adding one member after another cannot be actually infinite. This is the crucial step. It’s important to realize that this impossibility has nothing to do with the amount of time available: no matter how much time one 48. See my Time and Eternity for a consideration of the arguments for and against these theories of time and my defense of the A-Theory.
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has available, an actual infinite cannot be formed. This may seem obvious in the case of someone’s trying to count to infinity: no matter how many numbers he counts, he can always add one more before arriving at infinity. Now someone might say that while an infinite collection cannot be formed by beginning at a point and adding members, nevertheless, an infinite collection could be formed by never beginning but ending at a point, that is to say, ending at a point after having added one member after another from eternity. But this method seems even more unbelievable than the first method. If one cannot count to infinity, how can one count down from infinity?
Sometimes this problem is described as the impossibility of traversing the infinite. In order for us to have “arrived” at today, temporal existence has, so to speak, traversed an infinite number of prior events. Richard Gale protests, “This argument depends on an anthropomorphic sense of ‘going through’ a set. The universe does not go through a set of events in the sense of planning which to go through first, in order to get through the second, and so on.”49 Of course not; but on an A-Theory of time the universe does endure through successive intervals of time. It arrives at its present event-state only by enduring through a series of prior event-states. So before the present event could occur, the event immediately prior to it would have to occur; and before that event could occur, the event immediately prior to it would have to occur; and so on ad infinitum. So one gets driven back and back into the infinite past, making it impossible for any event to occur. Thus, if the series of past events were beginningless, the present event could not have occurred, which is absurd.
Sometimes critics indict this argument as a slight-of-hand trick like Zeno’s paradoxes of motion. Zeno argued that before Achilles could cross the stadium, he would have to cross halfway; but before he could cross halfway, he would have to cross a quarter of the way; but before he could cross a quarter of the way, he would have to cross an eighth of the way, and so on to infinity. It is evident that Achilles could not arrive at any point! Therefore, Zeno concluded, motion is impossible. Now even though Zeno’s argument is very difficult to refute, nobody really believes that motion is impossible. Even if Achilles must pass through an infinite number of halfway points in order to cross the stadium, somehow he manages to do so. The argument against the impossibility of traversing an infinite past, some critics allege, must commit the same fallacy as Zeno’s paradox.
But such an objection fails to reckon with two crucial disanalogies of an infinite past to Zeno’s paradoxes: whereas in Zeno’s thought experiments the intervals traversed are potential and unequal, in the case of an infinite past the intervals are actual and equal. The claim that Achilles must pass through an infinite number 49. Richard Gale, “The Failure of Classic Theistic Arguments,” in The Cambridge Companion to Atheism, ed. Michael Martin, Cambridge Companions to Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 92–93. Gale’s framing the argument in terms of a “set of events” is maladroit, since we are not talking about a set but about a series of events which elapse one after another. Cf. Russell’s statement cited below (n. 52).
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of halfway points in order to cross the stadium is question-begging, for it already assumes that the whole interval is a composition of an infinite number of points, whereas Zeno’s opponents, like Aristotle, take the line as a whole to be conceptually prior to any divisions which we might make in it. Moreover, Zeno’s intervals, being unequal, sum to a merely finite distance, whereas the intervals in an infinite past sum to an infinite distance. Thus, his thought experiments are crucially disanalogous to the task of traversing an infinite number of equal, actual intervals to arrive at our present location.
Mackie and Sobel object that this sort of argument illicitly presupposes an infinitely distant starting point in the past and then pronounces it impossible to travel from that point to today. But if the past is infinite, they say, then there would be no starting point whatever, not even an infinitely distant one. Nevertheless, from any given point in the past, there is only a finite distance to the present, which is easily “traversed.”50 But in fact no proponent of the kalām argument of whom I am aware has assumed that there was an infinitely distant starting point in the past. The fact that there is no beginning at all, not even an infinitely distant one, seems only to make the problem worse, not better. To say that the infinite past could have been formed by successive addition is like saying that someone has just succeeded in writing down all the negative numbers, ending at 0. And, we may ask, how is the claim that from any given moment in the past there is only a finite distance to the present even relevant to the issue? The defender of the kalām argument could agree to this happily. For the issue is how the whole series can be formed, not a finite portion of it. Do Mackie and Sobel think that because every finite segment of the series can be formed by successive addition the whole infinite series can be so formed? That is as logically fallacious as saying because every part of an elephant is light in weight, the whole elephant is light in weight.
The claim is therefore irrelevant.
We can heighten the absurdity of the sequential formation of an actual infinite by imagining, with al-Ghāzalī, two beginningless series of coordinated events.
He envisions our solar system’s existing from eternity past, the orbital periods of the planets being so coordinated that for every one orbit which Saturn completes Jupiter completes 2.5 times as many. If they have been orbiting from eternity, which planet has completed the most orbits? The correct mathematical answer is that they have completed precisely the same number of orbits. But this seems absurd, for the longer they revolve the greater becomes the disparity between them, so that they progressively approach a limit at which Jupiter has fallen infinitely far behind Saturn. Yet, being now actually infinite, their respective completed orbits are somehow magically identical. Indeed, they will have “attained” infinity from eternity past: the number of completed orbits is always the same. Moreover, Ghāzalī asks, will the number of completed orbits be even or odd? Either answer seems absurd. We might be tempted to deny that the number of completed or-50. Mackie, Theism, 93; Sobel, Logic and Theism, 182.
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bits is either even or odd. But post-Cantorian transfinite arithmetic gives a quite different answer: the number of orbits completed is both even and odd!51 For a cardinal number n is even if there is a unique cardinal number m such that n = 2 m, and n is odd if there is a unique cardinal number m such that n = 2 m + 1. In the envisioned scenario the number of completed orbits is (in both cases!) ℵ , and ℵ
0
0
= 2ℵ = 2ℵ +1. So Jupiter and Saturn have each completed both an even and an 0
0
odd number of orbits, and that number has remained equal and unchanged from all eternity, despite their ongoing revolutions and the growing disparity between them over any finite interval of time. This strikes me as absurd.
It gets even worse. Suppose we meet a man who claims to have been counting down from infinity and who is now finishing: . . . , -3, -2, -1, 0. We could ask, why didn’t he finish counting yesterday or the day before or the year before? By then an infinite time had already elapsed, so that he should already have finished.
Thus, at no point in the infinite past could we ever find the man finishing his countdown, for by that point he should already be done! In fact, no matter how far back into the past we go, we can never find the man counting at all, for at any point we reach he will already have finished. But if at no point in the past do we find him counting, this contradicts the hypothesis that he has been counting from eternity. This shows again that the formation of an actual infinite by never beginning but reaching an end is as impossible as beginning at a point and trying to reach infinity.
Hence, set theory has been purged of all temporal concepts; as Russell says,
“Classes which are infinite are given all at once by the defining properties of their members, so that there is no question of ‘completion’ or of ‘successive synthesis.’”52
The only way an actual infinite could come to exist in the real world would be by being created all at once, simply in an instant. It would be a hopeless undertaking to try to form it by adding one member after another.
3) Therefore, the series of events in time cannot be actually infinite. Given the truth of the premises, the conclusion logically follows. If the universe did not begin to exist a finite time ago, then the present moment would never arrive. But obviously it has arrived. Therefore, we know that the universe is finite in the past and began to exist.
We thus have two separate philosophical arguments to prove that the universe began to exist, one based on the impossibility of an actually infinite number of things and one on the impossibility of forming an actually infinite collection by successive addition. If one wishes to deny the beginning of the universe, he must refute, not one, but both of these arguments.
51. See Wacław Sierpiński, Cardinal and Ordinal Numbers, Polska Akademia Nauk Monografie Matematyczne 34 (Warsaw: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1958), 146.
52. Bertrand Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1929), 170.
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Scientific Arguments:
(3) The Expansion of the Universe
Now some people find philosophical arguments dubious or difficult to follow; they prefer empirical evidence. So I now turn to an examination of two remarkable scientific confirmations of the conclusion already reached by philosophical argument alone. Before I do so, however, I want to note in passing that the sort of philosophical problems with the infinity of the past which we have discussed are now being recognized in scientific papers by leading cosmologists and philosophers of science.53 For example, Ellis, Kirchner, and Stoeger ask, “Can there be an infinite set of really existing universes? We suggest that, on the basis of well-known philosophical arguments, the answer is No.”54 Similarly, noting that an actual infinite is not constructible and therefore not actualizable, they assert,
“This is precisely why a realised past infinity in time is not considered possible from this standpoint—since it involves an infinite set of completed events or moments.”55 These misgivings represent endorsements of both of the kalām arguments which I defended above. Ellis and his colleagues conclude, “The arguments against an infinite past time are strong—it’s simply not constructible in terms of events or instants of time, besides being conceptually indefinite.”56
The physical evidence for the expansion of the universe comes from what is undoubtedly one of the most exciting and rapidly developing fields of science today: astronomy and astrophysics. Prior to the 1920s, scientists had always assumed that the universe was stationary and eternal. Tremors of the impending earthquake that would topple this traditional cosmology were first felt in 1917, when Albert Einstein made a cosmological application of his newly discovered gravitational theory, the General Theory of Relativity (GR). To his chagrin, Einstein found that GR would not permit an eternal, static model of the universe unless he fudged the equations in order to offset the gravitational effect of matter. As a result Einstein’s universe was balanced on a razor’s edge, and the least perturbation—even the transport of matter from one part of the universe to another—would cause the universe either to implode or to expand. By taking this feature of Einstein’s model seriously, the Russian mathematician Alexander Friedman and the Belgian astronomer Georges Lemaître were able to formulate independently in the 1920s solutions to his equations which predicted an expanding universe.
The monumental significance of the Friedman-Lemaître model lay in its histor-ization of the universe. As one commentator has remarked, up to this time the idea of the expansion of the universe “was absolutely beyond comprehension. Throughout 53. Besides the paper by Ellis et al. cited below, see also Rüdiger Vaas, “Time before Time: Classifications of Universes in contemporary cosmology, and how to avoid the antinomy of the beginning and eternity of the world,” http://arXiv.org/abs/physics/0408111 (2004).
54. G. F. R. Ellis, U. Kirchner, and W. R. Stoeger, “Multiverses and Physical Cosmology,” http://arXiv: astro-ph/0305292 v3 (28 August 2003), 14 (my emphasis).
55. Ibid.
56. Ibid.
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all of human history the universe was regarded as fixed and immutable and the idea that it might actually be changing was inconceivable.”57 But if the Friedman-Lemaître model were correct, the universe could no longer be adequately treated as a static entity existing, in effect, timelessly. Rather the universe has a history, and time will not be matter of indifference for our investigation of the cosmos.
In 1929 the American astronomer Edwin Hubble showed that the light from distant galaxies is systematically shifted toward the red end of the spectrum. This red-shift was taken to be a Doppler effect indicating that the light sources were receding in the line of sight. Incredibly, what Hubble had discovered was the expansion of the universe predicted by Friedman and Lemaître on the basis of Einstein’s GR. It was a veritable turning point in the history of science. “Of all the great predictions that science has ever made over the centuries,” exclaims John Wheeler, “was there ever one greater than this, to predict, and predict correctly, and predict against all expectation a phenomenon so fantastic as the expansion of the universe?” 58
The Standard Model
According to the Friedman-Lemaître model, as time proceeds, the distances separating the galaxies become greater. It’s important to appreciate that as a GR-based theory, the model does not describe the expansion of the material content of the universe into a preexisting, empty space, but rather the expansion of space itself. The galaxies are conceived to be at rest with respect to space but to recede progressively from one another as space itself expands or stretches, just as buttons glued to the surface of a balloon will recede from one another as the balloon inflates. As the universe expands, it becomes less and less dense. This has the astonishing implication that as one reverses the expansion and extrapolates back in time, the universe becomes progressively denser until one arrives at a state of infinite density at some point in the finite past. This state represents a singularity at which spacetime curvature, along with temperature, pressure, and density, becomes infinite. It therefore constitutes an edge or boundary to spacetime itself. P. C. W. Davies comments, If we extrapolate this prediction to its extreme, we reach a point when all distances in the universe have shrunk to zero. An initial cosmological singularity therefore forms a past temporal extremity to the universe. We cannot continue physical reasoning, or even the concept of spacetime, through such an extremity. For this reason most cosmologists think of the initial singularity as the beginning of the universe. On this view the big bang represents the creation event; the creation not only of all the matter and energy in the universe, but also of spacetime itself. 59
57. Gregory L. Naber, Spacetime and Singularities: an Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 126–27.
58. John A. Wheeler, “Beyond the Hole,” in Some Strangeness in the Proportion, ed. Harry Woolf (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1980), 354.
59. P. C. W. Davies, “Spacetime Singularities in Cosmology,” in The Study of Time III, ed. J. T. Fraser (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 1978), 78–79.
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The term “Big Bang,” originally a derisive expression coined by Fred Hoyle to characterize the beginning of the universe predicted by the Friedman-Lemaître model, is thus potentially misleading, since the expansion cannot be visualized from the outside (there being no “outside,” just as there is no “before” with respect to the Big Bang).60
The standard Big Bang model, as the Friedman-Lemaître model came to be called, thus describes a universe which is not eternal in the past, but which came into being a finite time ago. Moreover—and this deserves underscoring—the origin it posits is an absolute origin out of nothing. For not only all matter and energy, but space and time themselves come into being at the initial cosmological singularity. As physicists John Barrow and Frank Tipler emphasize, “At this singularity, space and time came into existence; literally nothing existed before the singularity, so, if the Universe originated at such a singularity, we would truly have a creation ex nihilo.”61 Thus, we may graphically represent spacetime as a cone (Fig. 3.2).
Time
Initial
cosmological
Space
singularity
Fig. 3.2: Conical representation of Standard Model spacetime. Space and time begin at the initial cosmological singularity, before which literally nothing exists.
60. As Gott, Gunn, Schramm, and Tinsley write: “The universe began from a state of infinite density about one Hubble time ago. Space and time were created in that event and so was all the matter in the universe. It is not meaningful to ask what happened before the big bang; it is somewhat like asking what is north of the North Pole. Similarly, it is not sensible to ask where the big bang took place. The point-universe was not an object isolated in space; it was the entire universe, and so the only answer can be that the big bang happened everywhere.” J. Richard Gott III, James E. Gunn, David N. Schramm, and Beatrice M. Tinsley, “Will the Universe Expand Forever?” Scientific American, March 1976, 65.
The Hubble time is the time since the singularity if the rate of expansion has been constant. The singularity is a point only in the sense that the distance between any two points in the singularity is zero. Anyone who thinks that there must be a place in the universe where the Big Bang occurred still has not grasped that it is space itself which is expanding; it is the two-dimensional surface of an inflating balloon which is analogous to three-dimensional space. The spherical surface has no center and so no location where the expansion begins. The analogy of the North Pole with the beginning of time should not be pressed, since the North Pole is not an edge to the surface of the globe; the beginning of time is more like the apex of a cone. But the idea is that just as one cannot go further north than the North Pole, so one cannot go earlier than the initial singularity.
61. John Barrow and Frank Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), 442.
De Deo
On such a model the universe originates ex nihilo in the sense that at the initial singularity it is true that there is no earlier spacetime point or it is false that something existed prior to the singularity.
Now such a conclusion is profoundly disturbing for anyone who ponders it.
For the question cannot be suppressed: why did the universe come into being? Sir Arthur Eddington, contemplating the beginning of the universe, opined that the expansion of the universe was so preposterous and incredible that “I feel almost an indignation that anyone should believe in it—except myself.”62 He finally felt forced to conclude, “The beginning seems to present insuperable difficulties unless we agree to look on it as frankly supernatural.”63 The problem of the origin of the universe, in the words of one astrophysical team, thus “involves a certain metaphysical aspect which may be either appealing or revolting.”64
The Steady State Model
Revolted by the stark metaphysical alternatives presented by an absolute beginning of the universe, certain theorists have been understandably eager to subvert the Standard Model and restore an eternal universe. The first such attempt came in 1948 with the first competitor to the Standard Model, namely, the Steady State Model of the universe. According to this theory, the universe is in a state of cosmic expansion, but as the galaxies recede, new matter is drawn into being ex nihilo in the voids created by the galactic recession (Fig. 3.3).
Fig. 3.3: Steady State Model. As the galaxies mutually recede, new matter comes into existence to replace them. The universe thus constantly renews itself and so never began to exist.
62. Arthur Eddington, The Expanding Universe (New York: Macmillan, 1933), 124.
63. Ibid., 178.
64. Hubert Reeves, Jean Audouze, William A. Fowler, and David N. Schramm, “On the Origin of Light Elements,” Astrophysical Journal 179 (1973): 912.
129
If one extrapolates the expansion of the universe back in time, the density of the universe never increases because the matter and energy simply vanish as the galaxies mutually approach!
The Steady State theory never secured a single piece of experimental verification; its appeal was purely metaphysical. Instead, observational astronomy made it increasingly evident that the universe had an evolutionary history. But the decisive refutation of the Steady State Model came with two discoveries which constituted, in addition to the galactic red-shift, the most significant evidence for the Big Bang theory: the primordial nucleosynthesis of the light elements and the microwave background radiation. Although the heavy elements were synthesized in the stars, stellar nucleosynthesis could not manufacture the abundant light elements such as helium and deuterium. These could only have been created in the extreme conditions present in the first moment of the Big Bang. In 1965 a serendipitous discovery revealed the existence of a cosmic background radiation predicted in the 1940s by George Gamow on the basis of the Standard Model. This radiation, now shifted into the microwave region of the spectrum, consists of photons emitted during a very hot and dense phase of the universe. In the minds of most cosmologists, the cosmic background radiation decisively discredited the Steady State Model.
Oscillating Models
The Standard Model was based on the assumption that the universe is largely the same in every direction. In the 1960s and 1970s some cosmologists suggested that by denying that assumption, one might be able to craft an Oscillating Model of the universe and thus avert the absolute beginning predicted by the Standard Model. If the internal gravitational pull of the mass of the universe were able to overcome the force of its expansion, then the expansion could be reversed into a cosmic contraction, a Big Crunch. If the matter of the universe were not evenly distributed, then the collapsing universe might not coalesce at a point, but quantities of matter might pass by one another, so that the universe would appear to bounce back from the contraction into a new expansion phase. If this process could be repeated indefinitely, then an absolute beginning of the universe might be avoided (Fig. 3.4).
Radius of the universe
Time
Fig. 3.4: Oscillating Model. Each expansion phase is preceded and succeeded by a contraction phase, so that the universe in concertina-like fashion exists beginninglessly and endlessly.
Such a theory is extraordinarily speculative, but again there were metaphysical motivations for adopting this model. The prospects of the Oscillating Model were