'I am still an atheist, thank God' film director Luis Bunuel

Without Johann Sebastian Bach, God would be a third-rate character. E.M.Cioran

'Reverend Fosdick, I no longer believe in God.' 'Tell me about the God you don't believe in.' 'Oh, I don't believe in that God either.'

Alone in the desolate vastness / I ask of the ageless earth; / Who is the ruler of the universe? Doodle by Mao Tse Tung

My roommate and I believe the same thing.. The only difference is that he's a Christian and I'm not. We both know there's no person, or thing, or being called God. But we agree that the concept God is real and very important. My roommate chooses to live by this concept. I don't. (Young philosophy major to his chaplain).
Clark, 1996

It is futile to look for God through a telescope. You find God in yourself, in your soul, in your convictions, in your faith. The evidences of a Creator are so overwhelming to me. I just can't envision this universe coming into being without something like a divine will, a Creator. Frank Borman (Apollo 8) said he didn't see God in space either. But he saw God's evidence there.
Werner von Braun, who birthed the US space and rocket program

Died. Andre Frossard, 80, intellectual editorial writer for the French daily Le Figaro. Frossard was an atheist and leftist in his youth, but as he recalled in his 1968 best seller God Exists and I Met Him, he became a sudden Catholic convert in 1935.
Time, Feb.13,1995

The world is like a well-constructed crossword puzzle: you can suggest any number of words, but only one will fit all the facts.
Einstein

God is a little more than everything.
E E Cummings

For those who believe in God, no explanation is necessary. For those who do not, no explanation is possible.
Opening lines in the film 'The Song of Bernadette'

(Note: I wrote the following rough notes before speaking to a predominantly youthful audience about why I believe in God. There are probably many gaps here, and please note that I am an amateur philosopher, psychologist, and Christian - a la its original meaning: an amateur does something for pleasure, not professionally. Theistic and atheistic arguments are becoming increasing complex and sophisticated. Have fun filling in the gaps!)

Rowland Croucher

There are two main problems in our thinking about God -

Does God exist?
What is God like?
It's not possible to talk about one without the other.

DEFINITIONS
F.W.Boreham recounts this ancient story: 'Simonides, the sweet singer of Ceos, one day mentioned the name of God in the hearing of Hiero, the tyrant of Syracuse. "God!" blustered the king, "what do you mean by God? Tell me that!" Taken by surprise, Simonides begged for a day in which to frame his definition. At the expiration of the twenty-four hours, the philosopher was as far as ever from a satisfactory solution of his problem, and implored two more days in which to draft the formula. At the end of that time he craved four more, and when, a full week now having run its course, he still felt himself to be out of his depth, he threw himself upon Hiero's mercy. "Your majesty," he pleaded, "I have undertaken the impossible, for, the more I think about God, the less am I able to define Him!"' (1958:59)
A Greek philosopher once said, wistfully, 'It is difficult to find out about God, and when you have found out, it is impossible to tell anyone else about him.'
'God is that than which no greater can be thought' (Anselm). But you can be a Deist and say that; deism denies the immanence of God. (Pantheism denies God's transcendence; henotheism denies God's universality; polytheism denies God's unique Oneness). So for our purposes: God is the supreme ruler of the universe, a unique creative personal being, infinitely perfect, unchanging, eternal, unlimited in knowledge, goodness and power, who made and rules over all things, is the source of values and truth, and the ultimate goal of human happiness.
There are four common ways to answer the question 'Does God exist?' :
Atheism (from the Greek atheos, 'without God') - 'God does not exist'
Skepticism - 'It is not possible to know whether or not God exists'
Agnosticism - 'I do not know whether God exists or not'. (T.H.Huxley, who coined the term believed that the question as to whether a higher power existed was unsolved and insoluble. Most agnostics today believe the evidence for or against the existence of God is inconclusive. The Alt.Atheism FAQ distinguishes between 'strict agnosticism' vs. 'empirical agnosticism'.)
Theism - 'I believe there is a God'
And there are four general answers to the question 'How do theists come to believe in God?
Fideism - Belief in God comes from supernatural revelation or faith not by reason
Mysticism - God's existence is affirmed through inner experience
Faith seeking understanding (a priori thinking, Anselm etc.)
Reason seeking truth (a posteriori thinking, Augustine etc.).
ATHEISTS
An atheist is someone with no invisible means of support (Bishop Fulton Sheen). There are atheists and atheists. The Alt.Atheism FAQ distinguishes between strong atheists ('gods do not exist') and weak atheists (an absence of belief in the existence of gods). Weak atheism is close to skepticism. Marx was what I would call a 'utopian atheist': with the coming of communism and its elimination of social injustice, religion and belief in God would vanish.
The early Christians were a-theistic, denying the reality of pagan gods. Nietzsche - and some Christian theologians - believed God was/is dead. (A book published in the 1960s had the title The Gospel of Christian Atheism). Some so-called Christians are 'practical atheists': their 'belief' in God makes no real difference to their lives, except for a socio-religious habit which occupies an hour on Sundays. And some who have 'lost' their faith have really lost their reassuring childhood illusions.
Many high-profile people are atheists. Australia's previous governor-general, Bill Hayden, describes himself as an atheist (he refused to swear on the Bible when sworn in to the vice-regal office in February 1989). In some states in the U.S. atheists can't work in the public service. An incumbent president could, in theory, be banned from public office if he refused to swear a religious oath.
WHY ARE SOME PEOPLE ATHEISTS?
Why did Nietzsche, Bertrand Russell, J.P.Sartre and Sigmund Freud give up their belief in God? Most atheists do not come to their conclusion/s happily: they would prefer to believe in a god who dispenses eternal life and meaning and purpose. The following represents some of the reasons they give me: there are many more.
EVIL IN GENERAL. Why is Australia's teenage suicide rate, per capita, the highest in the world? This problem is as old as the Book of Job. CSLewis' famous summary goes like this: If God were good God would want all creatures to be happy; if God were all-powerful, God could do anything; but the creatures are not happy, so God lacks either goodness or power or both (The Problem of Pain). Oxford's J.L.Mackie, 'perhaps the ablest of today's atheistic philosophers, offers nonsupernatural explanations: the existence of evil is no "knockdown disproof of an omnipotent and wholly good God," he says, but it does make God improbable.' (Time, 1980, p.63). Aquinas declared that God made human beings rational and being rational includes having freedom of mind and will. Plantinga and others reaffirm the age-old response to this one: human free-will: If the corrupt mayor of Boston takes bribes in this world, he might do so to some degree in any world. Even God cannot create a world in which mayors can choose to take bribes and that also contains no evil.
Countries go to war in God's name, and the war is sanctioned by the dominant faith, and we have an Auschwitz (or the Gulag). When C. S. Lewis was an atheist, he said he couldn't believe in a God who allowed a universe to comprise so many unhappy creatures... He never considered the problem: 'If the universe is so bad, or even half so bad, how on earth did human beings ever come to attribute it to the activity of a wise and good Creator?' (The Problem of Pain, chapter 1). (Email me for a summary of this book).
EVIL IN PARTICULAR. For some, God let them down in a personal or family crisis. Others were 'turned off' by hypocritical theists. Thomas Merton wrote somewhere: 'Do not be too quick to condemn the one who no longer believes in God: for it is perhaps your own coldness and avarice and mediocrity and materialism and selfishness that chilled that one's faith.' A significant number of prominent atheists throughout history had problems relating to their fathers.
'IT DIDN'T WORK'. The Alt.Atheism FAQ cites a study by the Freedom From Religion Foundation which 'found that 90% of the atheists who responded became atheists because religion did not work for them. They had found that religious beliefs were fundamentally incompatible with what they observed around them'. Later in that document: 'Many atheists have spent time in prayer trying to reach God.'
God's HIDDENNESS. Many sincere people say that if God became accessible to one or more of five senses, they would believe. Surely, if God did this in the past, as the Biblical narratives affirm, he should not be so selective or arbitrary about his epiphanies. How can he blame those who've never seen/heard/felt him in some tangible way?
HELL. In Usenet atheism/Christian discussion groups there's a lot of talk about heaven and hell. Heaven seems like a celestial bribe to many atheists, and the complaints about hell run like this: how can a so-called good God condone a cosmic rubbish-dump where creatures supposedly made in his image and loved by him are tortured eternally? Does the punishment fit the crime? Would an earthly parent who wasn't a psychopath punish any of their children forever? (Email me for something on this topic). Most atheists are quizzical-to-astonished faced with these sentiments from Francis Xavier: 'My God, I love thee - not because/ I hope for heaven thereby/ Nor yet because who love thee not/ Are lost eternally!/ Not with the hope of gaining aught,/ Not seeking a reward,/ But as Thyself hast loved me,/ O ever-loving Lord!'
PERSONALITY TYPE: some people are naturally sceptical. 'It is by no means obvious that "life" is the sort of thing that has a "meaning"', they feel (a.a. FAQ).
REASON. Most atheists I meet, personally or on the Internet, say their belief-system is the result of a thoroughly thought-through intellectual quest. Perhaps they agree with Spinoza, that God is merely a refuge from our ignorance. Or God/s simply 'fill in the gaps' in scientific knowledge - and that's not enough reason to believe.
WHY DO OTHERS BELIEVE IN GOD'S EXISTENCE?
Probably most theists have not seriously questioned their belief in the existence of God: in the interests of an easy life they've simply adopted the belief-systems of their parents, pastors, or peers. But others believe in the existence of God, for one or more of the following reasons:
[1] GOD-IN-ANOTHER. Specifically, some theists say they believe because someone close to them was so God-filled there was no other explanation for their holiness. Or they witness someone's outstanding Christian heroism or altruism.
[2] A SEARCH FOR MEANING. Back in the 1960's Peggy Lee sang: 'Is that all there is? Is that all there is?/ If that's all there is my friend,/ then let's keep dancing;/ Let's bring out the booze and have a ball,/ If that's all there is.' Many have made a religious commitment because it answers some of their cosmic questions about life and death.
[3] EXPERIENCE. Alister Hardy did a rigorous study (at Oxford) of 3000 religious experiences and reported some striking commonalities among them. And because these experiences are universal, says one argument, something/ Someone must cause them. For Christians (like the Baptist who cleaned our house windows yesterday): 'You asked me how I know he lives? He lives within my heart!' Evangelical Christians - not just the pietists - have always put a significant store on 'The Spirit's witness within'. Perhaps there is a kind of 'knowing' which is deeper than anything the intellect can supply. Why can't certainty be 'felt' rather than 'known'? Wisdom - beyond the cleverness of our reason. Maybe the universe is a cosmic poem rather than ... J.G. Whittier's well-known hymn 'Immortal love, for ever full, forever flowing free' puts it this way: 'God is his own best evidence; his witness is within'.
More specifically, most humans have 'PEAK EXPERIENCES' (Abraham Maslow). Ordinary life is filled with what Peter Berger called 'signals of transcendence.' (p.52) - love, play, trust, music, joy, sunsets, justice, humour, worship, 'aha!' experiences. These are windows into another world.
[4] EMOTION. Pascal wrote during a time of prevailing unbelief in God, and had a profound mystical experience on November 23, 1654. He offered two key insights (in Pensees, or in English, Thoughts). Pascal said Aquinas' arguments from Nature back to God through reason was flawed. Some are so sceptical that no amount of reasoning will convince them. We know about God and we know God through the emotions. 'The heart has reasons, which reason doesn't know.' (c.f. the thesis of the current bestseller by Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence, Bloomsbury, 1995. Goleman argues persuasively that our emotions play a far greater role in thought, decision-making and 'success' than IQ-type intelligence).
[5] CHANCE ('Pascal's Wager'). Because many/most won't find God through human reason, Pascal suggested we put a 'wager' or bet on God's existence: gradually scepticism or indifference will be replaced by faith and serenity. In this sometimes hostile universe we need a friend, we need help. Our lasting happiness is only in God. Our ultimate good is to know God. So Pascal argues from our need for God to the existence of God. But you may not be able to make that jump: so if you wager that God does exist, and God does, you gain all; if not. you lose nothing. And eventually you will know that you have wagered on a certainty, an infinity, for which you have risked nothing.
[6] FEAR: Brendan Behan, the Irish poet, once confessed, 'I'm a daylight atheist'. As David Watson wrote (1984:30) an atheist has far greater and more daring faith than the Christian. C. S. Lewis once saw this epitaph on a tombstone: Here lies an atheist all dressed up but with nowhere to go. Lewis added his own comment, 'I bet he wishes that were so.' When I was working fulltime as a campus evangelist, I did a survey to find out why people became Christians. The motive for most: fear.
[7] DESPERATION. God is 'who you need'. 'I have been driven many times to my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nobody else to go to' said a physician. A young agnostic came to a rabbi and said: 'Rabbi, I don't believe in anything; and it's killing me!' The son of the famous contemporary atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair, William, chronicled (in My Life Without God) that he was 'converted' because there has to be a God to sort out all the evil. 'There has to be a God because there certainly is a devil. I have met him, talked to him, and touched him. He is the personification of evil. He is Tom Evans, my mother, and others like them I have known' (pp. 232-233). Part of this includes the need for forgiveness: for some people the guilt of their sins is overwhelming, and they throw themselves on the mercy of God-if-he-exists to help them. According to the Bible evil has infected every human being (eg. Romans 3:10,12): this doesn't mean that humans are totally evil, but rather that having been created in God's image we chose to rebel against God, and sin mars every aspect of our individual and corporate life.
[8] THE JEWS. My writing mentor John Updike has some marvellous paragraphs about God. Here's one from his memoirs: 'The Jewish God, as best He can be glimpsed in the United States. seems meatier, more unbuttoned than His Christian offspring. He does not excite the churchgoer's anxious either/or, that "Does He?" or "Doesn't He" in regard to His existence, that angst-generating crux of faith. The Jewish attitude seems in comparison humorous and submissive: it's His choice, to exist or not. The Old Testament God seems brashly free, compared with the locked-in God of Aquinas or Anselm. What theologian was it who, asked for a proof of God's existence, answered, "The Jews"? As long as Jews exist, even as Marxists or Freudians, a chosen people exists, and in its existence indicates that of a Chooser. All anger, a psychotherapist recently told me, is anger at God. "God" is a word, however problematical, we do not have to look up in the dictionary. We seem to have its acquaintance from birth.' (Self Consciousness, p.216).
We now move to arguments, or better, 'evidences' under the rubric of REASON:
[9] ONTOLOGICAL arguments (as Kant called them) go back to Anselm (11th century)and have been worked over ever since (eg. by Descartes: remember his cogito ergo sum?). If I have an idea of a perfect being, and existence is an attribute of this perfection, such a being must exist. God is that than which nothing greater can be conceived, and therefore must exist - indeed God can not even be thought of as not existing (ie. God exists necessarily). In Anselm's lifetime Gaunilo countered by arguing that the conception of a lost island, wealthier and better than any inhabited island does not necessarily exist in reality because you think about it. Similarly Kant said we can't enhance theoretical insight by mere ideas any more than a merchant can enhance his financial position by adding a few noughts to his cash account. Since the 1960s this argument has been refined - in ways I don't fully understand (eg. by James F. Ross, Philosophical Theology, Hackett, rev. ed. 1981, and Alvin Plantinga, The Nature of Necessity, Oxford).
[10] ANTHROPOLOGICAL arguments. Stoic and some Christian thinkers, suggest that because belief in God is so widespread among humans, this points to the existence of divinity. If there are laws, there must be a Law-giver. Then there are human 'values' - including 'religious' values' - where did they come from? And what about universal 'religious experience'? Or again, to paraphrase Kant (1724-1804), we can't be perfectly 'holy' in this life (ie. no one keeps the 'moral law' perfectly), and so we need the help of an 'Infinite mind', the source of all morality.
[11] This idea was extended by Cardinal Newman to CONSCIENCE: if we feel ashamed (or serene) about our efforts to do good, such an emotion must come from somewhere - probably Somewhere supernatural and divine. Our inability to pursue a more noble morality can't be explained in terms of conditioning or self-interest. C. S. Lewis argues (in Mere Christianity) that the 'moral law' is not merely an instinct or social convention: what lies beyond our human behaviour is more like a mind than anything we know.
[12] Even non-believers, writes Hans Kung (Does God Exist?), know that an unjust world raises immediate and ultimate issues of MORALITY: our century hasn't a good record of replacing God with non-divine absolutes. Further, some feel, because there is so much injustice in the world, there must be a good God to right all these wrongs sometime, somewhere.
[13] 'MENTAL' proofs. This century's most-read theistic apologist is C. S. Lewis. Mind, he wrote (in eg. Miracles) doesn't just come from Nature: our imperfect rationality assumes an eternal, self-existent Reason as its source. We cannot see light, though by light we can see things. Statements about God are extrapolations from the knowledge of other things which the divine illumination enables us to know. (C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves, ch.6).
Alvin Plantinga, probably the world's leading non-Catholic Christian philosopher, asks 'How can we know that other creatures think, feel and reason? How can we know something existed in the past? Only by analogy - which is how we come to know God (God and Other Minds, Cornell). If other minds exist, that's a short step to believing God exists.
Arguments from HARMONY/DESIGN.
Here we move from essence (ontological arguments) to existence; from 'what' (ideas, concepts) to 'that' (facts and things), from a priori to a posteriori arguments.
[14] NATURE. Imagine you're walking along a pristine Queensland beach, and you happen upon a puddle of seawater the exact shape of Australia. You might not give it much thought, but ten paces on there's another; then another - and ten more. There's probably only one explanation, and further on you find a kid with an Australia-shaped bucket.
Biologist Lecomte du Nuoy (Human Destiny) has calculated that according to the laws of probability, the emergence of living organisms from inorganic molecules would have been less than one in a hundred billion. His conclusion: life could only begin through an act of purposive intelligence. Fred Hoyle, renowned ex-atheist, wrote (in The Times, December 15, 1981): 'the idea that life was put together by a random shuffling of constituent molecules can be shown to be as ridiculous and improbable as the proposition that a tornado blowing through a junkyard may assemble a Boeing 747.' Hugh Montefiore (The Probability of God) lists eleven 'remarkable events' that have occurred in the development of the cosmos. His conclusion: 'I would hold that on the evidence atheism is wildly improbable. In my judgment, the convergence of all the factors make it far, far more probable that God does exist than that he does not' (pp. 173-4).
All philosophy, wrote Coleridge, begins and ends in wonder; the first wonder is the child of ignorance, the second, the parent of adoration. Some find God looking through a microscope, others, a telescope. For Plato it was mathematical astronomy; for Paley human anatomy. For one writer, the amazing fact that hands have thumbs. Nature's marvels have the imprint of a Creator - snowflakes, atoms, the eye of a housefly, the camouflage of a moth. The natural universe is governed by laws and order. Certainly the effects can be earthquakes, tornadoes, and so on, but there we are talking about effects, not causes.
It's inconceivable that we live in a cold, rational universe, where humans are merely one outgrowth among many of chemistry, physics and biology. Then we have the notion of God offered by people like Paul Davies - God as ultimate mathematician, without a heart... He concludes his The Mind of God (1992:232) with this: 'I cannot believe that our existence in this universe is a mere quirk of fate, and accident of history, an incidental blip in the great cosmic drama. Our involvement is too intimate. The physical species Homo may count for nothing, but the existence of mind in some organism on some planet in the universe is surely a fact of fundamental significance. Through conscious beings the universe has generated self-awareness. That can be no trivial detail, no minor by-product of mindless, purposeless forces. We are truly meant to be here. Versus Fritjof Copra's view (The Tao of Physics) that the essential nature of our universe is not material but spiritual: 'modern physics leads us to a view of the world which is very similar to the views held by mystics in all ages and traditions.' Hints of the numinous long derided as superstitious or wish-fulfilment or cowardly escapism.
[15] TELEOLOGICAL arguments. William Paley's famous analogy (1802): if you've got a watch, there must have been a watchmaker. Or Heinrich Heine's: 'In Frankfurt I met a watch that did not believe in the existence of watchmakers.' But David Hume (1711-76) and others were not impressed - nature is so wasteful and savage that it might have been the work of 'some infant deity who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance.' The biggest contemporary challenge is of course Darwinian evolutionary theory. In Chance or Design? (Philosophical Library, 1979) James E. Horigan asks how evolutionary theory can possibly explain the emergence of the large brain in a relatively short time-period. Some theists like to use the ludicrous 'Monkeys and the Typewriters' analogy at this point: if a significant number of monkeys were left long enough pounding computer keyboards, they would eventually produce the whole works of Shakespeare. (One author suggested this argument as an 'out' for a newspaper editor on a charge of libel : - )
[16] COSMOLOGICAL proofs. Why is the universe here at all? Bertrand Russell, in a BBC TV debate remarked that 'the universe is just there, and that's all': 'All the labours of all the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system' (Time, 1980:63). Aquinas (1225-74) reasoned that every effect must have a cause, going back to the primordial First Cause or Prime Mover or Necessary Being. Mortimer Adler (How to Think About God) suggests that the universe 'needs an efficient cause of its continuing existence' (p.149): there's a power needed to keep the cosmos going, together with its laws and processes: so a Superior Being is affirmed 'beyond reasonable doubt'. (In fact, Adler did such a good job of arguing a theistic position that after writing this book he asked to be baptised). In The Existence of God (Oxford) Richard Swinburne concludes: "The experience of so many in their moments of religious vision corroborates what nature and history show to be quite likely - that there is a God who made and sustains humans and the universe." Basil Mitchell, philosopher of religion at Oxford, advocates a "man-stranded rope of reason" like that employed by historians or scientists to develop the best explanation of evidence. Among his strands: individuals' experience of a mysterious "other" outside nature, the simple faith of believers and "cosmic awe" in encountering unusually saintly persons.' (Time, ibid). William Lane Craig's kalam argument: everything which begins has a cause, the universe had a beginning, therefore the universe had a cause. It's a refinement of the old Ex nihilo nihil - nothing can come out of nothing.
I feel that these arguments have a fair degree of probability, but serve to articulate belief in God rather than demonstrate God's existence de novo.
All in all whoever/whatever made the universe is pretty intelligent!
We now look at some THEOLOGICAL arguments.
REVELATION. Augustine was the first major post-apostolic Christian thinker to develop the idea that we know of God through grace, and must believe in order to understand: 'No one can become fit to discover God unless he shall have first believed what he is later to come to know' (De Libero Arbitrio 11.2.6)
[17] NATURAL REVELATION - favoured by the pre-Vatican II Catholic church. It was based on reason independently of all revelation, and fashioned by Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. In his Letters to Malcolm, C. S. Lewis writes: 'We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade, the presence of God. The world is crowded with him. He walks everywhere incognito.'
Would I discern God from nature if I had not been taught about God by parents? Probably not, to be frank. Certainly I experience awe and delight when observing various phenomena in the physical world, but I'm not sure I would posit a personal God behind it all.
[18] BIBLICAL REVELATION - favoured by Protestants. The Catholic Church since the Middle Ages has majored on reason as a pillar of faith; for the Protestants it was the other way around. Many who were brought up in the Christian faith and/or go to church regularly, simply believe the Bible. The Bible never sets out to prove God's existence: In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth (Genesis 1:1) is how it starts; simple as that. Whoever would come to God must believe he exists and rewards those who search for him (Hebrews 11:6). In a world of futility (Ecclesiastes 1:2) where fools say in their hearts, 'There is no God' (Psalm 14:1),
where humans worship all sorts of idols and unknown gods (Acts 17:23), and with their limited wisdom search for God in vain (1 Corinthians 1:21), the living God is 'who he is' (Exodus 3:14): humans can't fathom his depths (Job 11:7). The natural order witnesses to the existence of an infinite personal God (Psalm 19:1, Romans 1:19f). Ultimately there is no escape from God (Psalm 139:7f). God has revealed himself to humankind in many ways but ultimately in his Son (Hebrews 1:1,2), when the Word/Logos became flesh (John 1:1,14). Happy are those who have not 'seen' yet believe (John 20:29).
[19] MIRACLES. 'Signs and Wonders' have significant evidential value for people in the Pentecostal/Charismatic but no one has yet claimed the 10,000 pounds reward offered by the British Sceptics' Society for proving one.
[20] JESUS. Jesus is God-in-human-flesh. He who was 'rich beyond all splendour' became poor; the omniscient, infinite, omnipresent God became finite. He who was all-powerful became weak. (On this point there's an interesting debate from time to time on the .atheism newsgroups that runs like this: 'So God do anything? Can God make a rock so big that he cannot lift it?' Seems you're trapped: if God can make the rock, he is not all-powerful because he can't lift it, but if he cannot make the rock he is not all-powerful because he cannot make it. Or you can answer logically: if God is all-powerful, he cannot by definition make anything more powerful than himself, including a rock that he cannot lift. It's like asking God to make a married bachelor, or a square circle, or a brother who is an only child. Such entities are nonsense. But I have another clue: God can choose to make a rock which he can't lift because he can choose to be weak.)
If God is like Jesus, nothing is too good to be true.
[21] FAITH. Christianity's basic notion is that you believe in order to understand.
And here we must take an excursion into the idea of 'Living With Ambiguity' . God is mystery. We can never encompass him in thoughts or words. When we talk about God we are trying to describe the divine from the point of view of the human, the eternal from the standpoint of the temporal, the infinite in finite terms, the absolute from the severely limited perspective of the relative.
Rudolf Otto describes the sacred as 'mysterium tremendum et fascinans', the awe-inspiring mystery which fascinates us. We are tempted to hide from the fearful majesty of God, but also to gaze in wonder at his loveliness.
We encounter mystery in the descriptions of the ways of God in the Bible, in the sacraments, liturgies and rites of the church, in nature, and in the events of history. Mystery pervades the whole of reality. Indeed true knowledge and freedom are not possible without an experience of mystery.
In the languages of literature, art, music, we touch the hem of God's garment and feel a little tingle of power, but God will always remain incomprehensible.
Mystery also surrounds the human creatures who are both made in the image of a mysterious God and who have, by their sinning, marred that image. Pascal says this doctrine of the fall offends us, but yet, without this mystery, the most incomprehensible of all, we are incomprehensible to ourselves.
So Christianity, says Kierkegaard, is 'precisely the paradoxical'. (Paradox - from the Greek para and doxa, 'against opinion'). The idea of mystery invites us to think more deeply, not to abandon thinking; to reject the superficial, and the simplistic.
Prejudice is, in essence, idolatry: the worship of my - or my group's - ideas, even ideas of God. If I know all the answers I would be God, and 'playing God' is the essence of idolatry. One of my greatest dangers is to relax my vigilance against the possibility of prejudice in my own life, or to suffer from the delusion that I can ever be really free from it. We human beings are more rationalising than rational. Thomas Merton wrote somewhere 'No one is so wrong as the one who knows all the answers'. Alfred North Whitehead says 'Religions commit suicide when they find their inspiration in their dogmas.' 'If you understand everything, you must be misinformed', runs a Japanese proverb. People who are always right are always wrong. The dilemma is summed up by W B Yeats: 'While the best lack conviction, the worst are full of certainty and passionate intensity.'
The key lies in distinguishing between faithless doubt and creative doubt. Faithless doubt, as Kahlil Gibran put it, 'is a pain too lonely to realise that faith is his twin brother'. Or it is a cop-out to save us being committed to anything. Its accomplice, 'neutrality' is also evil: the apathy of 'good' persons results in the triumph of evil. The worst evils in the world are not committed by evil people, but by good people who do not know they are not doing good. The authentic Christian is willing to listen, as well as to save.
Creative doubt, on the other hand, is 'believing with all your heart that your belief is true, so that it will work for you; but then facing the possibility that it is really false, so that you can accept the consequences of the belief.' (John Reseck).
So faith is not about certainty (certainty makes faith invalid and unnecessary). Its core is the mystery - and the reality - of the Eternal coming into time: 'Our God contracted to a span, incomprehensibly made man' (Wesley). The essence of Christianity is not dogmatic systems of belief, but being apprehended by Christ. True faith holds on to Christ, and for all else is uncommitted. It is about a relationship with Christ (and all meaningful relationships involve risk). The true God does not give us an immutable belief-system, but himself. He became one of us to 'make his light shine in our hearts, to bring us the knowledge of God's glory shining in the face of Christ' (2 Corinthians 4:6). Alleluia! (Croucher 1991:355ff)
But there's faith and faith (and faith). First, knowledge and faith are inseparable: faith does not begin where reason ends, but they both begin together, for we must have faith in our reasoning powers before we accept the results of our reasoning. That is, there are some things we have to assume before we can know anything. This is why we 'faith is our guide, for we do not see God' (2 Corinthians 5:7 NEB).
Faith, says Norman Pittenger (1967:22) is not assent to a set of propositions, however true, but commitment to love. grounded in the universe and expressed in Jesus Christ'. Faith, according to Reinhold Niebuhr is the final triumph over incongruity, the final assertion of the meaningfulness of existence. George Macdonald has written somewhere: 'Instead of asking yourself whether you believe or not, ask yourself whether you have this day done one thing because God said, "Do it!", or once abstained because God said, "Do not do it." It is simply absurd to say you believe, or even want to believe in God if you do not do anything God tells you.'
[22] GRACE. 'Belief in God,' wrote Paul Johnson, author and former editor of the New Statesman, 'is intuitive; and as such is the consequence of grace. The road to grace is through prayer. If, therefore, anyone asks me: "Does it make sense to pray to a God in which I do not believe?" I answer: "Yes it does."' (1980:51).
Francis Thompson makes the point eloquently:
Not where the wheeling systems darken,
And our benumbed conceiving soars
The drift of pinions, would we hearken,
Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors.
The angels keep their ancient places;
Turn but a stone, and start a wing!
'Tis ye, 'tis your estranged faces.
That miss the many-splendored thing.
Should we take all the arguments together?. Richard Swinburne, Nolloth Professor of Philosophy of the Christian Religion at Oxford (1992) suggests the best approach is to look at the sum of the arguments: to those on Aquinas' list he adds arguments from morality, providence, history, miracles and religious experience. Two of the weakest, he feels, are the cosmological and teleological arguments, but he is impressed by the occurrence of naturally inexplicable occurrences in history. All in all 'theism has a remarkable ability to make sense' of an otherwise puzzling world: religious experience, together with nature and history, make it 'quite likely' that there is a God who created and sustains the universe (pp. 287-291).
SOME LOOSE ENDS.
SCIENCE. Stephen Maxwell, founder of the Atheist Club in Sydney, was reported in the Australian Press as saying he is 'pretty sure' there is no God. 'But science always leaves room for an element of doubt. You can't know for sure.' Bertrand Russell was sure: 'What science cannot tell us, we cannot know .' 'All utterances about the nature of God are nonsensical' (A.J.Ayer).
But science and religion are answering two different sets of questions. 'Scientism' is the heresy which says only what is scientifically tested is 'true'. Is the wrongness of a murder testable? Or the validity of the death penalty for stealing from the government in Stalini st USSR? Or the Nazi elimination of six million Jews?
Take this (from Cornell President Frank Rhodes, a geologist): 'The qualities that scientists measure may have as little relation to the world itself as a telephone number has to its subscriber'. Or this, from Einstein: 'The mystery of the world's comprehensibility [inspires in me] a profound faith. Science is blind without religion.' Professor Torrance, in God and Rationality (Oxford 1971) complained that theology has been 'harassed' by the 'imperialism of mechanistic concepts, emanating from a dogmatic scientism and a dogmatic empiricism, end-products of the Newtonian era of science.' (quoted in Johnson, pp. 49-50).
So I don't have a problem with science; it's the basic assumption of some scientists that we live in a closed universe.
'Logical positivism was a philosophical position which asserted that only what can be verified by the five senses or is true by definition (eg., mathematics or tautologies) can be said to have meaning. This was called the Verifiability Criterion of Meaning. Of course, since God is neither an empirical entity nor something that is true by definition, the term 'God' is meaningless, according to the positivists.' (Beckweth)
'If God made everything who made God?' There are several levels at which this question betrays fundamental misunderstandings. No theist I know of says 'everything which exists must be made by someone'. Indeed the whole point of theism is that there must be at least one Entity which is not made. The Judaeo-Christian God 'is because he is' (Exodus 3:14).
CONCLUSIONS
So can we prove the existence of God? That depends what you mean by 'prove' . In the sense that the argument is so irresistible that no one could hold the opposite - no. (But, then, try to think of just one universally irresistible argument.)
Jostein Gaarder in Sophie's World puts it well in a short discussion of Kant and 'postulates': '[Kant] called faith in the immortal soul, in God's existence, and in our free will "practical postulates". To "postulate" something is to assume something that cannot be proved. By a "practical postulate" Kant meant something that had to be assumed for the sake of "praxis", or practice; that is to say, for man's [sic] morality. "It is a moral necessity to assume the existence of God," he said.' (1994:275).
Can I prove to you that my wife loves me? If you mean am I convinced on all the evidence of 36 years of happy marriage that I am loved by her - yes, she does. Could all the evidence fall short of absolute certainty? Sure. If you're asking that my judgment be in the order of affirming, for example, 'All squares have four sides', no. But after all these years, and all our accumulated words and actions, there is a high probability that she loves me. How did that happen? We had some information about each other and then affection, and soon our wills said 'Let's make a commitment to one another.' Following commitment, knowledge of and love for each other grew. I believe it's the same with God.
Rationalism vs. Suprarationalism. Arguments from nature and reason can only take us so far. Though a genius in science and mathematics, Blaise Pascal believed that 'the heart has its reasons, which reason cannot know'. The early church fathers relied too much on Greek metaphysics and produced a natural theology which attempted to prove logically the existence of God. Reason helps - but we must then move beyond reason.
Don't believe or disbelieve something because the 'brightest' people invite you to. Clever people today include atheists and theists (and, as we said, both may believe or disbelieve in God for all sorts of reasons, often having nothing to do with their intelligence). The a.a.FAQ puts it well: 'For every scientist or philosopher who believes in a god, there is one who does not. Besides. the truth of a belief is not determined by how many people believe in it.'
Further, if you are vulnerable, clever people are likely to persuade you to believe/disbelieve against your better judgment. There's a story about two learned men who lived in the ancient city of Afkar. They hated and belittled each other's learning. One of them denied the existence of gods and the other was a believer. One day the two met in the marketplace, and amidst their followers, they began to dispute about the existence or non-existence of the gods. After hours of contention they parted. That evening the unbeliever went to the temple and prostrated himself before the altar and prayed the gods to forgive his wayward past. At the same time the other learned man, he who upheld the existence of the gods, burned his sacred books. For he had become an unbeliever!
But some people can 'see' God more easily than others. Has a friend ever asked you to find a face in a mass of grey blotches and you just can't? But once you 'see' it, you've got it! I was watching a grey shrike thrush through a gauze wire window today. It was only three feet away: I could see it clearly but it couldn't see me.
Some concluding wisdom from the a.a.FAQ with which I agree:
Search for what is true, even if it makes you uncomfortable
All beliefs should be open to question.
But after all that, you don't see in order to believe; you believe in order to understand - credo ut intelligam, as Anselm put it. Be open to the possibility of God. Don't wait until all your questions are answered - or even most of them. You choose to follow Jesus, and as he said, those who obey will know (John 7:17).
OK LET'S WRAP IT ALL UP. THERE ARE 22 DIFFERENT REASONS.
Pick the best argument and start from there. On my home page you'll find a summary of the significant book Philosophers Who Believe (ed. Kelly James Clark 1993; cf. also Barrett & Fisher's Scientists Who Believe). These outstanding people had their own unique reasons for believing in God: each journey is unique. Am I saying there a lots of ways to God? Yes, we all come through Christ, but we start where we are - in our own unique place.
And one final word. If God is God, and we are his subjects, then we'd better sort things out with him. Soon. A legend describes an evil spiritual academy's passing-out parade. The devil questioned three of his demons. To the first: 'When you get out into the world, what will you tell people?' 'I shall tell them there is no God.' 'No use,' said Satan, 'Creation tells people there is a God. They won't believe you. To the next: 'And what will you tell them?' 'I shall say there is not going to be a judgment.' 'That's not much use,' the devil responded, 'Conscience tells them about judgment. Not many will believe you.' Turning to the third evil spirit, he asked, 'What about you?' 'I shall tell people there is a God and a judgment to come, but I shall add that there is no hurry.' 'Excellent,' said Satan. 'Many will believe that!'
A FOOTNOTE
In most of history in all of the world, and particularly in the Middle Ages ('when even the cats and dogs were religious'), God was everywhere, in everything, nothing happened apart from God, you couldn't sneeze without reference to God ('Gesundheit!'). Someone would stub their toe and wonder what God was trying to tell them. Angels and demons battled on the stage of daily events. Planets and stars had divine attributes; the universe revolved around the earth. Back then, society was drunk on the supernatural. But in a sense throughout history God dies and comes back to life again. Both atheism and theism are recurring phenomena. The most significant philosophical revolution to hit humankind was the Enlightenment. And so Voltaire wrote in 1764: 'Theological religion is the enemy of mankind.' The rapid progress of the natural sciences in the second half of the nineteenth century produce an attack of deicide. 'God? Wasn't he chased out of heaven by Marx, banished to the unconscious by Freud and announced by Nietzsche to be deceased? Did not Darwin drive him out of the empirical world?' asks Time Magazine (Modernizing the Case for God, April 7, `1980, p.61). Time's answer: 'Well, not entirely. In a quiet revolution in thought and argument that hardly anyone 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.' (Time notes that 300 professional philosophers belonged to the Society for Christian Philosophy.) Theologians have done their bit too, from the German 'higher critics' through the demythologizers and Honest to God/God is dead secularizers in the 1960s, to today's Jesus Seminar theorists, who are trying to tell us Jesus may not have done or said most of what is attributed to him in the four Gospels.
BIBLIOGRAPHY/NOTES
Mortimer Adler, How to Think About God: A Guide for the 20th Century Pagan, Macmillan, 1980.
Alt.Atheism FAQ, (a.a. FAQ), http://freethought.tamu.edu/news/atheism/ ,
an irenic document theists should read, although it's weak in terms of examining the classical Christian theistic arguments. This document recommends two books presenting a philosophical justification for atheism - Martin's Atheism: A Philosophical Justification, and Smith's Atheism: The Case Against God n.p., n.d..
Eric C. Barrett & David Fisher, Scientists Who Believe: 21 tell their own stories, Scripture Press, 1986.
Francis Beckweth, 'Philosophy and Belief in God: The Resurgence of Theism in Philosophical Circles', http://www.iclnet.org.pu.text/beckwith/fjb-02.txt. Readable essay by the Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Whittier College, CA.
Peter Berger, A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscover of the Supernatural, Doubleday, 1970, p.52.
F.W.Boreham, The Tide Comes In, Epworth, 1958.
E.M.Cioran. Article by Benjamin Ivry, 'Thinker who brings rubies from the Orient', The European Weekend, September21-23, 1990, p.4. Romanian-born French philosopher is one of the most widely-read philosophers in the 80's and 90's. He's been called 'the greatest aphorist since Nietzsche'. Another: 'It is not excluded that life has meaning. I like a story he tells to regale dinner guests about when as a lad, he and his mates would sneak drinks from bottles of sacramental wine while delivering them to church, refilling them by urinating into the bottles before giving them to the village priest!
David K. Clark, 'Apologetic Responses to Postmodernism', in Apologetic Responses to Post-Modernism: A Symposium convened by the Evangelical Theological Society of Philadelphia, November 1995, http://www.public.usit.nse/96/april/p960408.html.
Rowland Croucher, 'Living With Ambiguity' in High Mountains Deep Valleys: Meditations and Prayers for the Down Times, Albatross/Anzea, 1991:355ff.
Kelly James Clark, Philosophers Who Believe, IVP, 1993.
Paul Davies, The Mind of God: Science and the Search for Ultimate Meaning, Penguin, 1992.
Jostein Gaarder, Sophie's World, Phoenix, 1994.
Andrew Greeley, Death and Beyond. 'It is possible to be an agnostic for a generation, I think (particularly if your father was a Protestant minister). But the lesson of history is that agnosticism is not a durable compromise. One either has the faith or the fun: one is either a believing puritan or an unbelieving pagan. Agnosticism as a compromise between faith and unbelief may be tenable philosophically but it is untenable humanly. Most agnostics choose to live as though life has a purpose and become respectable, responsible members of the upper middle class. I do not know whether I should believe an agnostic's principles of unbelief or his practice of belief' (p.50).
Paul Johnson, 'A Vindication of Belief', Sydney: The Bulletin, December 25, 1979, pp. 42 ff.
Hans Kung, Does God Exist? Doubleday, 1980.
C.S.Lewis, Mere Christianity, Macmillan, 1960
Thomas V. Morris, The Logic of God Incarnate, Cornell University Press, 1986. Professor of Philosophy at Notre Dame University. Argues persuasively that the Christian belief that God became human in the person of Jesus of Nazareth is perfectly logical.
William Murray, My Life Without God, Thomas Nelson, 1982.
Norman Pittenger, God in Process, SCM, 1967.
Alvin Plantinga, holds an endowed chair in the University of Notre Dame's philosophy department. Argues that belief in God is rational apart from any evidence, although he holds that a version of the ontological argument is plausible.
James F. Ross, Philosophical Theology, Hackett, rev. ed. 1981
The 'laughter of faith in no-God' is heard in Sartre's story 'The Wall': a man is threatened with death if he doesn't tell the enemy where his friend is hiding. He refuses and sends the enemy on a wild goose chase to a place where his friend isn't. However it happens to be the very place where his friend is hiding. The fugitive is captured and executed and the man given his freedom. Sartre ends the story by saying that the man laughed till he cried.
Richard Swinburne, The Existence of God, Oxford, 1992. James F. Ross, Philosophical Theology, Hackett, rev. ed. 1981
Time, 'Modernizing the Case for God', (no author), April 7, 1980, pp61 ff.
John Updike, Self-Consciousness: Memoirs, Penguin, 1989, pp. 216-7. See also Roger's Version, Penguin, 1987, pp. 218-219.
David Watson, Fear No Evil, H&S, 1984.
KANT'S BIG QUESTIONS
WHAT CAN WE KNOW?
WHY IS THERE ANYTHING AT ALL? (WHY NOT NOTHING?)
WHERE DO HUMANS COME FROM AND WHERE DO THEY GO?
WHY IS THE WORLD AS IT IS?
WHAT IS THE ULTIMATE REASON AND MEANING OF ALL REALITY?
WHAT OUGHT WE TO DO?
WHY DO WHAT WE DO?
WHY AND TO WHOM ARE WE FINALLY ESPONSIBLE?
WHAT DESERVES FORTHRIGHT CONTEMPT AND WHAT LOVE?
WHAT IS THE POINT OF LOYALTY AND FRIENDSHIP?
WHAT IS THE POINT OF SUFFERING AND SIN?
WHAT REALLY MATTERS FOR HUMANS?
WHAT MAY WE HOPE?
WHY ARE WE HERE?
WHAT IS IT ALL ABOUT?
WHAT IS THERE LEFT FOR US: DEATH, MAKING EVERYTHING POINTLESS AT THE END?
WHAT WILL GIVE US COURAGE FOR LIFE AND COURAGE FOR DEATH?
(From Hans Kung, On Being A Christian, Collins/Fount, pp. 75-76)