Read 36 Arguments for the Existence of God Online
Authors: Rebecca Goldstein
“Roz!” Cass calls over to her again.
“It looks like Cass wants to talk to you.” Deb is laughing. “I’ll save you a seat in the women’s section. We’ll finally get acquainted.
Mazel tov!
”
“Mazel tov!”
Roz answers, and Cass tells his father to go on to the synagogue without him, and Cass and Roz leave their respective sides and meet in the middle of the road.
“Mazel tov,”
Roz says.
“Mazel tov,”
he answers her.
“Look where we are.”
“Look where we are,” he answers her.
“Have you seen him yet?”
“No, I just drove in. He got in touch with you?”
“He sent me an e-mail. Believe it or not, he was worried about you. He wanted to make sure you acquitted yourself well with Fidley.”
“He sent me an e-mail apologizing that he hadn’t been available.” He laughs. “Only Azarya would send an apology under the circumstances!”
“Only Azarya,” she agrees.
“How did it go for you in New York?”
“It went great. I’ve got myself a book deal.
Immortality Now!
All I have to do is write it.”
“So Auerbach has taken you under his wing.”
“I should say so! He gave me the coat off his back.” She gestures downward. “The one I brought with me was a bit too flamboyant for New Walden.”
“Ah, that explains it,” Cass says, smiling.
“Explains what?”
“I thought you were a young man flouting the rules
of menner seit
and
froyen seit
, especially with that
shtreimel.”
“I’ll accept the ‘young’ part.” She laughs. “Have you noticed?”
“I’ve noticed.”
“We’re almost there. You’re not going to stop us.”
“When have I ever wanted to stop you, even if I could?”
“But will you come with me?”
“It’s too early for me to say.”
“We’re almost there,” she repeats.
He looks at her closely.
“Promise you’ll keep a few laugh lines.”
“But will you come with me?” she asks him a second time.
“Too soon to say,” he repeats.
“I might get lonely living so long without you.”
“You seem to have managed quite well for the past twenty years.”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. I’ve been trying to tell you that it’s our living that teaches us how to live. There’s a lot to learn. That’s why we need all the time we can get.”
“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”
“What’s that from?”
“The Catholic mystic Julian of Norwich.”
“A world-famous atheist quoting a Catholic mystic in the middle of a Hasidic shtetl in twenty-first-century America. By the way, I thought you were magnificent in the debate.”
“I’m glad to hear you say that.”
“Come on. You know it. I think you may even have convinced the Agnostic Chaplain.”
“I thought that maybe you weren’t so pleased with my performance.”
“How’s that?”
“You didn’t say anything to me afterward. You were hanging back like a stranger.”
Roz doesn’t say anything for a few moments, and then she changes the subject.
“Why isn’t Lucinda here?”
“I was waiting for you to ask me that. Lucinda left me.”
“She
left
you? Since last
week
, she left you?”
“She left me the night she came home. I picked her up from the airport, brought her home, and she left me.”
Surprising them both, Cass laughs.
“You’ve got to be leaving something out of the story.”
“I picked her up from the airport, brought her home, showed her the offer from Harvard, and she left me.”
Cass is still smiling, and Roz studies his face for several moments before speaking.
“How are you?” is what she finally says.
“Surprisingly well, to tell you the truth.”
“Are you putting on a brave face for me?”
“I’m not. I was devastated for seventy-two hours, and then I wasn’t. Do you want to hear my latest insights on the varieties of religious illusion?”
“I always want to hear your insights.”
“Romantic infatuation can be a form of religious delusion, too.”
“Sweetie,” she says softly, “anyone who’s watched you with your women has known that for years.”
“Ah.”
“You still believe in love, though, don’t you?”
“As if it were a matter of belief,” he moans, and she moans softly in response, and takes his hand, and then, remembering where they are, lets it drop.
There’s another long silence as they walk past the synagogue and then circle back.
They’ve stopped walking, poised midway between the
menner
entrance and the
froyen
entrance to the Valdener synagogue, and the shadows and the shimmers of the day are rippling over their closely watched faces, and both of them say nothing.
“I made a rational-actor matrix, figuring out whether it’s ever rational to say ‘I love you’ first,” Cass says after a while.
“What’s the conclusion?”
“It turns out not to be rational.”
“That’s depressing.”
“Only for rational actors.”
“I still say your mate-selection module got knocked out of whack twenty years ago.”
“And I say you’re right. I’m thinking of following my brother’s lead and yielding responsibility for my life to the Grand Rabbi. Maybe we Valdeners don’t have the instincts anymore for choosing our own mates. Maybe I should let the Valdener Rebbe pick one out for me.”
“But he did. We promised to invite him to the
hasana.”
He laughs and places his large hand on her
shtreimel
and mashes it down.
“Hey,” she says, “have a little respect! That’s mink on my head.”
“I’d rather you were in a purple towel.”
“That can be arranged.”
They enter their gender-appropriate doors, and as soon as Cass is inside he hears the explosive euphoria of the thousands of rejoicers, singing and stamping, and he’s slammed hard by the sight of that vast room’s life, it sends him reeling and jostles his senses out of alignment, so that he can discern the spicy fragrance of the melody and the shifting colors of the emotions, and what does it feel like for Roz up there looking down, what is she making of the soulful wildness of the Valdeners?
He’ll never find a seat and has no intention of trying, but if he stands here in the aisle he will have a sight line to the clearing in the middle of the room, and he might catch a glimpse of the grand event.
A flushed man comes hurrying down the aisle and says to him, “Excuse me? You’re maybe Cass Seltzer?”
“Yes, I’m Cass Seltzer.”
“I’ve been looking! You don’t remember?”
“I’m sorry.” The man is neither young nor old, and he has a sweet yeasty blandness that makes Cass think of his bubbe’s round babka.
“I’m Berel! I’m Cousin Berel!”
“Berel! Cousin Berel! How are you? How have you been?”
“I’m well,
baruch Ha-Shem!”
Bless His Name.
“Mazel tov, mazel tov!”
“Mazel tov!”
“Come, come. I have a seat in the front saved for you. The special friend.”
Berel leads Cass down the narrow aisle between the crushed tiers to the front row of seats, probably occupied by dignitaries, though Cass doesn’t know one from another, but the beards and
shtreimlach
are impressive, and everybody is on his feet, singing and exulting.
As Cass makes his way to his space, everyone he passes interrupts his singing to shout
“Mazel tov!”
into his face, and to wrap an arm around him or thump him on the back.
Somewhere up there in the women’s gallery, hidden from sight, is Roz in her
shtreimel
, savoring the absurdities to their succulent cores, the wild-ness and pang that will always confound us; even if she gets her way and we live for centuries, still we’ll be confounded, as nobody in all the world knows better than the young man who is now standing quietly in the center of the room and smiling, dressed in a white satin
kaputa
streaked with gold, so that the singing rises to a crashing crescendo and the floor is heaving with the weight of frenzied exaltation, and they come and place the swathed infant in his outstretched arms.
Somewhere in the women’s gallery is Tirza, the daughter of the Grand Rebbe of the Borshtchavers, a girl from Israel who was brought here to marry the Rebbe, a mating between two royal lines that’s brought joy to Hasidim around the world. This baby is their firstborn, destined to be
the future Valdener Rebbe, delivered a week ago during a long and difficult labor, while Cass had been desperately trying to reach Azarya.
It’s one of the traditions of the Valdeners, distinguishing them from other sects: the dance of the Rebbe with his firstborn son on the first Shabbes of his life.
It had begun with the current Rebbe’s great-grandfather Rav Eliezer ben Rav Bezalel, the one known as
‘der shvagte
Rebbe,’ the silent Rebbe. Perhaps Rav Eliezer had wanted to dance so that he wouldn’t be forced to speak. He was the one who composed this melody, sung only on the occasion of welcoming the future Rebbe into their midst.
It’s surprising how well everybody seems to know the
niggun
, since it hasn’t been sung in twenty-six years. It seems to Cass that even he knows it as it’s being softly hummed, a sumptuous melody that’s an abrupt change in tone after the stampeding boisterousness.
The melody is frothy white and streaked with gold and sung exactly as it had been sung when the current Rebbe was placed in his own father’s arms, and when his father had been placed in his father’s arms, and when his father had been placed in his father’s arms, in the little town in Hungary that the Valdeners refuse to forfeit to the flames and to forget-fulness.
The Rebbe raises the child up to the heavens as his father had done before him, so that the Valdeners’ collective heart can soar as they behold their future, and the Valdeners lift as one with his upward motion until they seem to hover several inches from the floor.
What does he think at this moment, what does he feel? Cass is certain he knows the Rebbe better than anyone else, and Cass has no idea. At the heart of Azarya Sheiner is the solitude that he had prophesied for himself when he was sixteen. The decision was made for him in the agony of a terrible moment, when he was far too young to have to decide. But he’s decided since then, and if he struggles still, then he struggles alone and he never lets on.
To the Hasidim, their Rebbe is not a human like others, and Cass knows it is true of this Rebbe. Cass is awed by the grace with which the Rebbe accepts the responsibilities that come from his being loved by his Hasidim as much as they love existence itself, so that they batter him
with the needs of their love every day of his life, from early morning until late at night. Only in the small, lonely hours does the Grand Rebbe let himself return to being Azarya, wandering among the abstractions, pursuing reason wherever it takes him, especially in the questions that his way of life might seem to answer but doesn’t at all. As Cass had once been astonished by a little boy’s genius, so he’s been astonished by the way in which that genius has been laid aside. It grieves him, and it moves him, and for Cass Seltzer, Azarya Sheiner will always stand at the place where our universe touches the extraordinary.
Still, if to be human is to inhabit our contradictions, then who is more human than this young man? If to be human is to be unable to find a way of reconciling the necessary and the impossible, then who is more human than Rav Azarya Sheiner?
And if the prodigious genius of Azarya Sheiner has never found the solution, then perhaps that is proof that no solution exists, that the most gifted among us is feeble in mind against the brutality of incomprehensibility that assaults us from all sides. And so we try, as best we can, to do justice to the tremendousness of our improbable existence. And so we live, as best we can, for ourselves, or who will live for us? And we live, as best we can, for others, otherwise what are we? And the Valdener Rebbe holds his son and dances.
The Cosmological Argument
The Ontological Argument
The Argument from Design
The Classical Teleological Argument
The Argument from Irreducible Complexity
The Argument from the Paucity of Benign Mutations
The Argument from the Original Replicator
The Argument from the Big Bang
The Argument from the Fine-Tuning of Physical Constants
The Argument from the Beauty of Physical Laws
The Argument from Cosmic Coincidences
The Argument from Personal Coincidences
The Argument from Answered Prayers
The Argument from a Wonderful Life
The Argument from Miracles
The Argument from the Hard Problem of Consciousness
The Argument from the Improbable Self
The Argument from Survival After Death
The Argument from the Inconceivability of Personal Annihilation
The Argument from Moral Truth
The Argument from Altruism
The Argument from Free Will
The Argument from Personal Purpose
The Argument from the Intolerability of Insignificance
The Argument from the Consensus of Humanity
The Argument from the Consensus of Mystics
The Argument from Holy Books
The Argument from Perfect Justice
The Argument from Suffering
The Argument from the Survival of the Jews
The Argument from the Upward Curve of History
The Argument from Prodigious Genius
The Argument from Human Knowledge of Infinity
The Argument from Mathematical Reality
The Argument from Decision Theory (Pascal’s Wager)
The Argument from Pragmatism (William James’s Leap of Faith)
The Argument from the Unreasonableness of Reason
The Argument from Sublimity
The Argument from the Intelligibility of the Universe (Spinoza’s God)
The Argument from the Abundance of Arguments
Everything that exists must have a cause.
The universe must have a cause (from 1).
Nothing can be the cause of itself.
The universe cannot be the cause of itself (from 3).
Something outside the universe must have caused the universe (from 2 and 4).
God is the only thing that is outside of the universe.
God caused the universe (from 5 and 6).
God exists.
FLAW I CAN BE CRUDELY PUT:
Who caused God? The Cosmological Argument is a prime example of the Fallacy of Passing the Buck: invoking God to solve some problem, but then leaving unanswered that very same problem about God himself. The proponent of The Cosmological Argument must admit a contradiction to either his first premise—and say that, though God exists, he doesn’t have a cause—or else a contradiction to
his third premise—and say that God is self-caused. Either way, the theist is saying that his premises have at least one exception, but is not explaining why
God
must be the unique exception, otherwise than asserting his unique mystery (the Fallacy of Using One Mystery to Explain Another). Once you admit of exceptions, you can ask why the universe itself, which is also unique, can’t be the exception. The universe itself can either exist without a cause, or else can be self-caused. Since the buck has to stop somewhere, why not with the universe?
FLAW
2: The notion of “cause” is by no means clear, but our best definition is a relation that holds between events that are connected by physical laws. Knocking the vase off the table caused it to crash to the floor; smoking three packs a day caused his lung cancer. To apply this concept to the universe itself is to misuse the concept of cause, extending it into a realm in which we have no idea how to use it. This line of reasoning, based on the unjustified demands we make on the concept of cause, was developed by David Hume.
COMMENT
: The Cosmological Argument, like The Argument from the Big Bang and The Argument from the Intelligibility of the Universe, is an expression of our cosmic befuddlement at the question, why is there something rather than nothing? The late philosopher Sidney Mor-genbesser had a classic response to this question: “And if there were nothing? You’d still be complaining!”
Nothing greater than God can be conceived (this is stipulated as part of the definition of “God”).
It is greater to exist than not to exist.
If we conceive of God as not existing, then we can conceive of something greater than God (from 2).
To conceive of God as not existing is not to conceive of God (from 1 and 3).
It is inconceivable that God not exist (from 4).
God exists.
This argument, first articulated by Saint Anselm (1033–1109), the Archbishop of Canterbury, is unlike any other, proceeding purely on the conceptual level. Everyone agrees that the mere existence of a concept does not entail that there are examples of that concept; after all, we can know what a unicorn is and at the same time say, “Unicorns don’t exist.” The claim of The Ontological Argument is that the concept of God is the one exception to this generalization. The very concept of God, when defined correctly, entails that there is something that satisfies that concept. Although most people suspect that there is something wrong with this argument, it’s not so easy to figure out what it is.
FLAW
: It was Immanuel Kant who pinpointed the fallacy in The Ontological Argument—it is to treat “existence” as a property, like “being fat” or “having ten fingers.” The Ontological Argument relies on a bit of wordplay, assuming that “existence” is just another property, but logically it is completely different. If you really could treat “existence” as just part of the definition of the concept of God, then you could just as easily build it into the definition of any other concept. We could, with the wave of our verbal magic wand, define a
trunicorn
as “a horse that (a) has a single horn on its head, and (b) exists.” So, if you think about a trunicorn, you’re thinking about something that must, by definition, exist; therefore, trunicorns exist. This is clearly absurd: we could use this line of reasoning to prove that any figment of our imagination exists.
COMMENT
: Once again, Sidney Morgenbesser offered a pertinent remark, in the form of The Ontological Argument for God’s Non-Existence: Existence is such a lousy thing, how could God go and do it?
A. The Classical Teleological Argument
Whenever there are things that cohere only because of a purpose or function (for example, all the complicated parts of a watch that allow it to keep time), we know that they had a designer who designed them with the function in mind; they are too improbable to have arisen by random physical processes. (A hurricane blowing through a hardware store could not assemble a watch.)
Organs of living things, such as the eye and the heart, cohere only because they have a function (for example, the eye has a cornea, lens, retina, iris, eyelids, and so on, which are found in the same organ only because together they make it possible for the animal to see).
These organs must have a designer who designed them with their function in mind: just as a watch implies a watchmaker, an eye implies an eye-maker (from 1 and 2).
These things have not had a human designer.
Therefore, these things must have had a non-human designer (from 3 and 4).
God is the non-human designer (from 5).
God exists.
FLAW
: Darwin showed how the process of replication could give rise to the
illusion
of design without the foresight of an actual designer. Replicators make copies of themselves, which make copies of themselves, and so on, giving rise to an exponential number of descendants. In any finite environment, the replicators must compete for the energy and materials necessary for replication. Since no copying process is perfect, errors will eventually crop up, and any error that causes a replicator to reproduce more efficiently than its competitors will result in the predominance of that line of replicators in the population. After many generations, the dominant replicators will
appear
to have been designed for effective replication, whereas all they have done is accumulate the copying errors,
which in the past
did
lead to effective replication. The fallacy in the argument, then, is Premise 1 (and, as a consequence, Premise 3, which depends on it): parts of a complex object serving a complex function do not, in fact, require a designer.
In the twenty-first century, creationists have tried to revive the Teleo-logical Argument in three forms:
B. The Argument from Irreducible Complexity
Evolution has no foresight, and every incremental step must be an improvement over the preceding one, allowing the organism to survive and reproduce better than its competitors.
In many complex organs, the removal or modification of any part would destroy the functional whole. Examples are the lens and retina of the eye, the molecular components of blood clotting, and the molecular motor powering the cell’s flagellum. Call these organs “irreducibly complex.”
These organs could not have been useful to the organisms that possessed them in any simpler forms (from 2).
The theory of natural selection cannot explain these irreducibly complex systems (from 1 and 3).
Natural selection is the only way out of the conclusions of The Classical Teleological Argument.
God exists (from 4 and 5 and The Classical Teleological Argument).
This argument has been around since the time of Charles Darwin, and his replies to it still hold.
FLAW
1: For many organs, Premise 2 is false. An eye without a lens can still see, just not as well as an eye with a lens.
FLAW
2: For many other organs, removal of a part, or other alterations, may render it useless for its current function, but the organ could have been useful to the organism for some other function. Insect wings, before they were large enough to be effective for flight, were used as heat-exchange panels. This is also true for most of the molecular mechanisms,
such as the flagellum motor, invoked in The New Argument from Irreducible Complexity.
FLAW
3 (the Fallacy of Arguing from Ignorance): There may be biological systems for which we don’t yet know how they may have been useful in simpler versions. But there are obviously many things we don’t yet understand in molecular biology, and, given the huge success that biologists have achieved in explaining so many examples of incremental evolution in other biological systems, it is more reasonable to infer that these gaps will eventually be filled by the day-to-day progress of biology than to invoke a supernatural designer just to explain these temporary puzzles.
COMMENT
: This last flaw can be seen as one particular instance of the more general, fallacious Argument from Ignorance:
There are things that we cannot explain yet.
Those things must be attributed to God.
FLAW
: Premise 1 is obviously true. If there weren’t things that we could not explain yet, then science would be complete, laboratories and observatories would unplug their computers and convert to condominiums, and all departments of science would be converted to departments of the history of science. Science is only in business because there are things we have not explained yet. So we cannot infer from the existence of genuine, ongoing science that there must be a God. In other words, Premise 2 does not follow from Premise 1.
C. The Argument from the Paucity of Benign Mutations
Evolution is powered by random mutations and natural selection.
Organisms are complex, improbable systems, and by the laws of probability any change is astronomically more likely to be for the worse than for the better.
The majority of mutations would be deadly for the organism (from 2).
The amount of time it would take for all the benign mutations needed for the assembly of an organ to appear by chance is preposterously long (from 3).
In order for evolution to work, something outside of evolution had to bias the process of mutation, increasing the number of benign ones (from 4).
Something outside of the mechanism of biological change—the Prime Mutator—must bias the process of mutations for evolution to work (from 5).
The only entity that is both powerful enough and purposeful enough to be the Prime Mutator is God.
God exists.
FLAW
: Evolution does not require infinitesimally improbable mutations, such as a fully formed eye appearing out of the blue in a single generation, because (a) mutations can have small effects (tissue that is slightly more transparent, or cells that are slightly more sensitive to light), and mutations contributing to these effects can accumulate over time; (b) for any sexually reproducing organism, the necessary mutations do not have to have occurred one after another in a single line of descendants, but could have appeared independently in thousands of separate organisms, each mutating at random, and the necessary combinations could come together as the organisms have mated and exchanged genes; (c) life on Earth has had a vast amount of time to accumulate the necessary mutations (almost four billion years).