On many episodes we've mentioned in passing, or given some author's criticism of, the classic arguments for the existence of God:
-The ontological argument, whereby some quality of the idea of God itself is supposed to necessitate that such a being exists. The most famous versions are by Descartes and St. Anselm.
-The cosmological argument, which deduces from the fact that everything has a cause (or everything is contingent, or everything moves... there are several variations of this) that there must be a first cause, i.e. God. This argument dates at least back to Aristotle but was given its most famous formulations by Thomas Aquinas.
-The teleological argument, or argument from design, which says that since nature looks designed (i.e. uniformity, complicated structures that achieve impressive results), there must be a designer, i.e. God. This was given its most famous formulation in William Paley's metaphor about finding a watch on the beach: of course, we'd assume that had a designer.
We'd planned an episode on these arguments from the very beginning of the podcast, but merely reading the source materials linked above would take us about 10 minutes. Well, we found (recommended in both theist and atheist sources) a book that does a pretty exhaustive job analyzing these major arguments: J.L. Mackie'sThe Miracle of Theism: Arguments For and Against the Existence of God
Mackie (who worked at Oxford and died before this book was published) provides substantial chunks of Descartes, Hume, Aquinas, Leibniz, Kierkegaard, Pascal, James, and others, and systematically goes through all the possible points of weakness and the responses available to defend the arguments.
A key point of value in the book is bringing it up to the modern era: his chief opponent is Richard Swinburne (also at Oxford, and still publishing into the 2000's), who takes a very rationalist approach to religion, seeing his existence as a scientifically respectable theory that explains the world better than the alternatives. Mackie, too, has written in philosophy of science, and his critiques, e.g. of miracles show a lot of subtlety in that respect.
We read chapters 1-3, 5-6, 8, and 11. Buy the book
Note that we even had an actual theist in on this discussion: Robert from Cape Town, aka Kid Charlemagne.
-Mark Linsenmayer
Luke says
August 15, 2011 at 3:56 amA much better book with more recent coverage of the arguments is Oppy, ‘Arguing About Gods.’
Seth Paskin says
August 15, 2011 at 9:09 amThanks for the suggestion Luke. After reading the book and recording the podcast, I’d be very surprised if Oppy is “much better”. Mackie is pretty damn good.
Krokben says
September 5, 2011 at 8:31 pmBesides Mackie and Oppy, a demanding but rigoruos book that should be of interest is Jordan Howard Sobel’s “Logic and Theism”. It is the kind of book over which I imagine Plantinga has lost a lot of sleep.
Matthew Clarke says
September 7, 2011 at 5:15 amYou might also like to read Alvin Plantinga’s “God and other minds”, if for no other reason than he is one of the most well-respected of (living) Christian analytic philosophers. The book is split into three sections:
* The inadequacy of those traditional proofs for God’s existence
* The inadequacy of several common proofs for the non-existence of God
* An argument that the question of God’s existence is “in the same epistemological boat” as the question of whether other people have minds.
–Matt.
Mark Linsenmayer says
September 7, 2011 at 9:46 amThanks, yep, we bring up Plantinga on the ‘cast, and I did have the book in my possession, though I didn’t get to read much of it. I’ll try to get a good blog post or two on him to introduce him more fully, as he’s pretty interesting.
Alan says
September 7, 2011 at 2:40 pmI think I have developed a novel proof of gods’ existence which also addresses the problem of evil.
Most of the influential atheist thinkers will agree that there is a small but finite probability of a particular theology being true. I had not considered trying to calculate the probability until I came across the Drake Equation. When applying the same technique to a various faiths the steps are:
1. Write down the claims.
2. Assign probabilities to each claim.
3. Multiple the probabilities all together.
Much like the Drake equation, one ends up estimating the probabilities. Since the claims are highly improbably it is useful to compare them to the probability of winning the lottery. For example the Southern Baptist has a lottery quotient ~214 which means it is about as probable as winning 214 lottery jackpots in a row.
I applied this technique to a number of religions and got essentially the same result. The Unitarian Universalism are a notable exception. Near as I can tell they believe that morning people need something to do on Sunday. Since I suspect that morning people don’t really exist and are just getting up early to annoy me, the UU probability is 50-50 at best.
The final step in the proof is analogous term in the Drake Equation for the total number of stars in the universe. Consider all the possible theologies. Besides all the anthropomorphic, anamorphic pastamorphic incarnations, the possible configuration space consists of several continuous variables. Good-Evil, All knowing-Dumb as a brick, All powerful-Ineffectual, etc. These continuous variables mean that the configuration space contains an infinite number of points. Multiplying an small finite number (average probability) by an infinite number (total configuration space) gives infinity. So not only does this prove the existence of a god, it proves the existence of an infinite number of gods.
I think the problem of evil provides one line of evidence supporting my theory. Given an infinite number of gods in an infinite universe, the next question is “what is the background density of gods?” Because good and evil have measurable consequences we can use it as a marker. The Good-Evil continuum is a free variable so one would expect fluctuations around a mean. If we assume a relative high background density of gods, we would expect the fluctuations to average out to mildly crappy. This is essentially what we see. Consider an entertainment industry analogy. There are really great shows and really crappy shows, but mostly we are stuck with reality TV.
Alan
Josh says
May 10, 2017 at 9:38 amAlan – Have you applied this same equation to non-theistic conceptions of ultimate reality? What odds did you come up with? And how does one settle on accurate probabilities especially in dealing with past events and singularities (like the origins of the universe and emergence of life from non-life for example)?
K W says
September 15, 2011 at 5:42 pmAlan,
I’m going to take the cheap and easy way of trying to debunk your argument and give a reductio ad absurdum (I call it a cheap way of debunking an argument because it doesn’t show where and how the argument went wrong – just that it must have).
I take it that if someone will agree that there is a small but finite probability of a particular god existing, they will also accept that there is some probability that I am the son of such a god (it might be way, way smaller than even the initial small chance, but still a finite possibility).
If you then take basically the same (infinite) configuration space you mentioned but at each point it says there is such a god and I (K.W) am their son (which will still have the same number of points).
So (taking your sums) I can show that I am the son of a god, if not many gods.
(I wish I were…)