The Cosmological Argument is perhaps the classic argument for the existence of a God. Thomas Aquinas included it in his famous Five Ways, although over the years his argument has been constantly refashioned. It lives on in several distinct versions. I bring this up because of a “customer review” I came across on Amazon.com of a book by John Allen Paulos. The book is Irreligion: a mathematician explains why the arguments for God just don’t add up. The review is by M. Stringer.

Full disclosure: I read the review, I have not read the book.

Stringer, as it turns out, is quite critical of Paulos and his work.

As for Paulos’ book I would hesitate to describe it as even schoolboy philosophizing as it fails to reach any level of academic respectability and is, if anything, even worse than the aforementioned efforts from the `New Atheists’.

His first area of attack is the ‘first cause argument’ which Paulos states can be slightly amended to become the ‘cosmological argument’;

1. Everything has a cause, or perhaps many causes.
2. Nothing is its own cause.
3. Causal chains can’t go on forever.
4. So there has to be a first cause.
5. That first cause is God, who therefore exists.

There are however two major problems with Paulos’ version. Firstly no one in Western philosophical/theological history has even advanced the first cause/cosmological argument in this form. Paulos appears to have just made it up for this book. Secondly his version is not logically valid as the conclusion (5) does not follow from the earlier statements (1-4). All that is presented is a series of unconnected assertions unrelated to each other.

Stringer goes on to present what he considers a sound version of the cosmological argument (one popularized in recent years by the philosopher William Lane Craig). His seems shorter than what I recall as Craig’s version, but since brevity is a virtue, let’s take a look.

A good example a modern first cause argument is the Kalam cosmological argument rediscovered and improved in modern thought by William Lane Craig.

1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist
3. Therefore the universe has a cause

This argument is logically valid. The conclusion (3) follows deductively from 1 and 2.

Now, I’m not interested in contesting Stringer’s characterization of the book he’s reviewing—I for one am in no position to do so. Instead what I prefer to do is comment on this rather succinct version of the cosmological argument.  I am aware of course that Craig is a better source for the modern cosmological argument than an Amazon reviewer plucked out of the hat, but, here goes….

1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist
3. Therefore the universe has a cause

The short problem with this is that it assumes in the 2nd premise what it needs to prove, namely that everything (here referred to as “the universe”) began to exist.

Let’s take a closer look. This is supposed to be an argument for the existence of a Creator—and yet, it never mentions God or Creator. Of course, God is ever-present in the background, lurking, waiting for an opportunity to jump in. Let’s see if an opportunity presents itself.

Under the Microscope

The syllogism begins by asserting that everything that begins to exist has a cause. Why the phrase “begins to exist”?. It’s there so we can exclude God from the requirement to have a cause. Since by definition God is eternal, no beginning no end, premise #1 doesn’t apply to him.

That’s important. For the cosmological argument to work, it has to make the case that (A) “everything has a cause” and (B) “except God.” Obviously, a large part of the debate about whether the argument is successful centers on whether or not the exception made for God is warranted. What is unusual about Stringer’s version is that it doesn’t even mention God. Still, by asserting that physical things like the universe begin to exist and therefore must have a cause, the implication is that their cause must be something that does not begin to exist, i. e. God.

Yet, nothing in the argument requires causes to be non-physical. Nothing seems to prevent an infinite chain of physical causes; nothing, that is, other than the author’s bare assumption that premise #2 is correct. Well, not quite “bare.”  Actually, the idea is that premise #2 has been established by astrophysicists as a fact—after all, aren’t scientists in agreement that our universe began in a big bang which itself exploded from a singularity? Didn’t time itself have it’s beginning with that singular cosmic bang?

A glance at cosmology (the scientific study of the origin of the universe) makes it appear premise #2 is widely accepted as true, since most scientists heartily accept the big bang. And yet, for most cosmologists, I would argue, the term “universe” does not equal “all physical existence”. In fact, most scientists take it for granted that there is some kind of prior physical state which led to the singularity (itself a physical state) which led to the big bang and our current universe. And recently, some cosmologists (e.g. Stephen Hawking) are questioning the singularity anyway. Which means the big bang is not only not the beginning of all physical existence, it may not be the beginning of the universe either.

This is not fatal, of course. There is way too much uncertainty about the science of cosmology to say whether science will or will not end up supporting premise #2. The fact remains that if there is a God who created our physical world, then we ought to find ourselves living inside a world that had a definite origin at some specific point in the past, and prior to that point in the past nothing physical should be detectable. In fact, this fits reasonably well with current science. Sure, scientists talk about strings and multiverses in existence prior to the big bang—but at this point that’s just theorizing without evidence.

The Long and Short of It

So much for the short problem with the Kalem cosmological argument. But there is also a long problem—”long” in the sense that it won’t be as easy to explain, I’m afraid. But I will try.

There is a subtle problem with premise #1, and it involves the meaning of saying something has a cause. If one operates from a worldview based on mind before matter, then this premise is a founding principle. However, if one operates from a natural worldview (which rejects the principle of sufficient reason), then the negative of this premise is your founding principle. From this latter point of view, postulating “causes” is merely a useful way of describing the physical world.

Causes, in short, are a form of mental currency and not something “real” about matter. Technically, you might say, causes are imaginary. This viewpoint follows naturally from neurological constructivism and pragmatic empiricism. These approaches to understanding knowledge and science paint a picture of a relationship between thoughts about physical nature and the actual stuff of physical nature which is loose and indirect. In fact, it is just the sort of insufficient relationship evolutionary scientists should expect from “unguided” biological evolution.

Some of the key elements of this relationship can be summarized as follows. Knowledge is a virtual reality; its relationship to physical reality is like that of a useful map to the terrain the map represents; all of the logical relationships indicated by the map pertain to the map, not to the terrain. That is to say, the map is an analytical construction that has a synthetic relationship to the world it models. The map is only “true” to the extent that we find it a more useful model of the world than any alternative mappings we happen to have thought up. Knowledge, in other words, is something we invent to model the physical world by testing for usefulness. The scientific method codifies this process.

If matter comes first and mind evolves later (the premise of naturalism) then “causes” are just descriptions, and we choose our causal explanations based on their predictive usefulness, nothing else. The same applies for any non-causal explanations we might embrace, as well.

Imagine, now, if we were to restate Stringer’s cosmological argument from this natural perspective. It might look like this:

1. Everything that begins to exist can be usefully described.
2. The universe began to exist
3. Therefore the universe can be usefully described.

So we see that only by embracing a worldview which presumes that causal descriptions identify innate causal truths about the physical universe can the Kalam cosmological argument become an argument for God’s existence. But the notion that there are innate causal truths about or contained within physical existence is a notion that stems from a supernatural worldview (from mind before matter). It is inherently incompatible with a natural worldview, and no one with a natural worldview should accept it. (Some misguided atheists do, of course, but they are . . . well, misguided.)

We will find that if one accepts the premises of the supernatural worldview, it follows that the premises of the Kalam cosmological argument seem obviously true. If instead one hews to the premises of the natural worldview, the Kalam premises seem obviously false. We can be sure that the reverse is the case as well. Premises which seem obvious to advocates of the natural worldview will likely seem far from obvious to supernatural worldview advocates.

Here Comes the Judge

What we need, then, is a way to judge between the two worldviews independent of their inherent premises. I think this can be done. It involves first finding conclusions which differ between the worldviews and then comparing those conclusions to what we pretty much all agree are facts about the world. In short, which worldview best fits the facts, as we know them? This is not a philosophical endeavor so much as an empirical one—there will be no definitive answer that all can agree on. After all, pragmatic empiricism is the only tool we have to arbitrate this debate.

Notice that if I am right about this last point, in itself that supports the natural worldview. For the natural worldview entails that all matters of fact about existence must be brokered through pragmatic empiricism, the scientific method. But the supernatural worldview, it seems to me, entails that a shortcut to direct knowledge is possible, indeed that classical logical arguments can reveal facts about the world. I believe this contention can be shown to be unuseful, and has been shown unuseful again and again, as far as the determination of facts (rather than logical truths) is concerned.

There is another way to say this, which perhaps has more biological clarity. Over the course of the natural history of the earth, the brain has evolved into an organ which creates sensations which we refer to as the mind. This evolution has resulted in a relationship between “minding” and the physical reality that is the subject of that “minding” which is synthetic rather than analytic. Because the relationship is synthetic, pragmatic empiricism has become the best route to factual knowledge. Were the relationship analytic instead, then analytic statements would provide factual content about the world, and thus would have become the best route to factual knowledge. Yet things don’t work that way. That’s not the way the mind evolved.  Instead, only empirical statements provide factual content about the world—and this is just what we would expect if the premises of naturalism are true.

So what then are analytic statements “about”? They are about the organization of the mind itself, or perhaps more accurately, the organization of the brain’s “minding” faculty. In a real sense, of course, the brain’s “minding” faculty is something physical. So logical statements do have factual content in that limited sense. If I make an analytical statement, eg, 2 + 3  = 5 , I am making a factual claim about the organization of the minding faculty in my brain. Fair enough, but the organization of the minding faculty in my brain exists for the purpose of developing useful facts—descriptions, explanations and causes—about the physical world which lies outside my minding faculty. 2 + 3 = 5 tells me nothing factual about the world outside my minding faculty. That is precisely why we call math statements like that analytic rather than synthetic.

But this very state of things, it seems to me, supports the natural worldview and does not support—is not what would be expected in the case of—the supernatural worldview. With the latter, we would expect analytic statements, purely logical arguments, to provide factual knowledge about the world outside the mind. They do not, and that is one reason why I believe the natural worldview is far more useful as a worldview, why it “wins” the debate.

Terminology and Necessity

At this point let me say something about my terminology. Note that “fact” and “factual” in my usage do not equal “true”—when we say something is a fact we mean simply that it’s the most useful knowledge we’ve got (so far) on the matter, utilizing the pragmatic empiricism of the scientific method. Logical/mathematical knowledge can be “true” but it cannot, under this usage, be factual. Empirical knowledge, on the other hand, can be factual but it cannot be “true.” We can only continue to call factual knowledge “true” if first we redefine the term as a comparative meaning “more scientifically useful” than the alternatives it competes against. Again, this is just the method of pragmatic empiricism.

Now let me make a comment or two about another argument mentioned the book review above.

1. Everything has a cause, or perhaps many causes.
2. Nothing is its own cause.
3. Causal chains can’t go on forever.
4. So there has to be a first cause.
5. That first cause is God, who therefore exists.

As the reviewer points out, no one makes the cosmological argument this way because premise #1 forces God to also have a cause, and premise #2 prevents Him from being his own cause, which vitiates the conclusion. Note also that premise #1 and premise #3 are in flat contradiction: if everything has a cause then causal chains must go on forever. #4 follows from #3, but neither can be true if #1 and #2 are true.

So theologians try to make the argument work by asserting that premises #1 & #2 don’t apply to God but do apply to the physical world. But this is simply a case of special pleading based on confusing the physical world with our knowledge of the physical world. (I will explain this presently.)

Specifically, theologians traditionally define God as a “necessary” being and define the physical world as “contingent” instead of “necessary.” As I say, this is mere special pleading. But even if we accept it, the argument fails because if God is not a contingent sort of being then God can’t be a cause for contingent things—causality, in short, is a two-way street. Causes must be the sort of thing that can bring about what they cause. I have written about this in discussions of the cosmological argument elsewhere.

What does it mean to say something is “necessary”? Well, what is intended is that God’s existence be logically required, whereas the existence of physical things be not logically required. But really it is only another way of saying that something does or doesn’t have a cause—and we are back to special pleading. Can the theologian make a factual case for this distinction? Is there some way to show it is not special pleading? I don’t see how. Look at it this way: just because God was never created, why does it follow that God necessarily exists? Isn’t it just as possible that if God was never created God does not exist? Moving God outside the causal chain does not transform God into a necessary being.

I’m going to come back to this point in a minute, but now let’s consider the contingency side of the matter.

Contingency and Knowledge

The idea behind contingency is that if something has a cause or causes, then had those causes not occurred the something would never have come to exist. While this may seem to be true for individual things in the physical universe, importantly it is not true for the collection of all physical things. The existence of the collection of all physical things is logically necessary—therefore shouldn’t the entire collection (the physical universe in toto) fall into the same category of being necessary rather than contingent—and therefore like God, shouldn’t it be exempt from premises #1 & #2? The special pleading which supposedly exempts God must also exempt the universe taken in its entirety. (Note that the collection necessarily exists even if it’s an empty set.)

I think if we analyze this carefully we see that factual (synthetic) knowledge is “contingent” and analytic knowledge is “necessary”. The distinction is really not about the things known but about the manner in which we know them. Contingent things must be known empirically. Necessary things must be known logically.

There is a problem in this for the theist. It effectively denies that God’s existence is a factual matter and makes it a logical matter instead. That at once puts God into a category that prevents him from interacting as cause with the physical world (the “lack of contingency” problem). 2 + 3 = 5 is necessarily true, but that is because like all analytical knowledge it is not a reference to the world outside our “minding”. It is not a reference to anything factual. So the problem with the subtle cosmological argument is that its premises amount to simply asserting that the central claim of supernaturalism—that mind precedes matter—is true. This assumes what is to be proven, the fallacy of begging the question.

And anyway, it is not at all clear to me why individual physical beings which actually exist aren’t therefore “necessary” beings. True, our knowledge of them is synthetic, therefore merely factual, therefore uncertain to some extent. But it is a fallacy to assume that what it true for knowledge is equally true for the physical subject of that knowledge. We may always know through a glass darkly, but that is because knowing is a synthetic process based on pragmatic empiricism. Regardless of the uncertainty of what we know about a physical being, if it exists then it exists, it necessarily exists.

Whatever “contingent” steps led to your coming into existence, if you exist then you absolutely exist—you necessarily exist. What is, is. Things that exist exist regardless of logical argument or anyone’s factual knowledge of the matter. They exist regardless of what we know about them or how they came into existence.

A Different Necessity

But perhaps theists will reply that this is not what is meant by the term “necessary being”. What is meant is “a being who does not have to have a cause” a being who, if it exists, necessarily exists causeless. To this the special pleading objection obviously applies. For as I pointed out previously, advocates of the natural worldview maintain, as a necessary consequence of that worldview, that “causes” are simply knowledge-descriptions created by our brain’s ”mindings”—that it is a mistake to think that “causes” are true things, or that real physical things have innate causes. They only have the causes our minds find it useful to assign to them—causality literally exists in our minds and not outside our minds. Again, it is the mistake of confusing physical things with our mindings about them.

Thus to say something is contingent is simply to say that we can create knowledge about it through our minding process of pragmatic empiricism. That is, it is something that can be factually addressed. That’s all contingency really boils down to: if something is empirically knowable, subject to synthetic statements, it is contingent. If it is not empirically knowable then it is not contingent. Now we see the problem with defining God as non-contingent. It does serve to effectively distinguish God from the physical world, but at the cost of no longer being able to claim that God factually exists. God only theoretically exists, and the logical arguments which are supposed to “prove” that existence can only do so if we start them with premises which make God necessary rather than premises which do not. They amount to saying, “If things are such that God’s existence is entailed, then it follows that God’s existence is entailed.” True enough. But if things are such that God’s existence is not entailed, then God’s existence is not entailed.

Analytical arguments can’t settle factual questions. And ultimately, God’s existence is a factual question. Pragmatic empiricism, scientific method, is the only way to approach it. But any answer obtained this way will lack the certainty of truth. At best it will only be a fact, and therefore not a final answer.

It follows that time only comes into existence once all three conditions are met. The most limiting condition is the 3rd, the existence of a being capable of doing the comparison, and I say this because 1 and 2 are known to come into existence billions of years before 3 comes into existence.

When Stephen Hawking and other cosmologists talk about time coming into existence with the big bang, they pretend that there is a scientist like them, a being capable of doing the comparison which creates time, right back there at the beginning of our universe looking on. That of course is a conceit. Since time is a comparison, it can only exist in a mind. Unless one is a theist (Hawking and most other cosmologists are not), one has to admit that time cannot exist until the evolution of organisms with minds capable of doing the right sort of comparison.

The scientific conceit is that we are right there at the big bang, looking on. If there is change occurring and a standard clock by which to measure it, why then “time” exists because the 3rd necessity — us — is looking on from our objective perch billions of years in the future. But if the 3rd element can be billions of years in the future why can’t the 1st element — the standard clock — also be billions of years in the future? In this case element 2 is all that really needs to be present before we can in our conceit declare the existence of time.

And the implication is this: the big bang is when that 2nd element — change — had its beginning.

That can’t be, and most cosmologists will agree with me on this. Change is an interaction and it cannot start cold from nothing. If the singularity is truly unchanging then it never changes. No big bang ensues, and our universe never gets started. Something must have been going on inside or outside the singularity for a big bang to result, and that mean the big bang cannot be the beginning of change.

To think otherwise is to abandon methodological naturalism. But it is also to do nothing other than declare that the impossible and inconceivable happened: that something unchanging suddenly changed for no possible explanation.

It is the same impossibility that theists assert of God: that unchanging deity suddenly and inexplicably changed and so created our world of change. Both God and an unchanging singularity represent the abandonment of explanation. Both beg the question: how can the unchanging ever lead to anything different, since it must change to do so?

Embracing that impossibility we find both theism and bad science.

Theists counter by maintaining that the something, God, is unlike everything in one very important respect. It differs from everything in that God is a “necessary being” while everything (else) is “contingent”. Contingent here refers to things which interact in a causal chain with other things. A creates B, B creates C, C creates D in this interaction of cause and effect. Thus A, B, C and D are “contingent”. But if A is contingent then something must have created A.

Ah, but if A is God then nothing created A. The causal chain is broken by saying that A is a “necessary” being — which means, simply, uncaused. God’s existence doesn’t require the existence of anything else.

But is this anything other than a word game?

The Two-Way Street

The first problem is that causality is a two-way street. Effects have causes, but those causes have to be the sort of thing which can make those effects happen. Causality, in short, is an interaction. Which means that for God to be capable of interacting with the physical world in a way which enables God to create and move things, God must be contingent or have some contingent component. Declaring God “necessary” makes God incapable of creating contingent things or else renders God an inexplicable being who has both contingent and non-contingent parts which can’t possibly interact.

Theism can’t escape from this dilemma. Either God has no contingent aspect and therefore can’t be the source of the world’s contingency — can’t be the Creator — or else God has both contingent and non-contingent aspects and the problem of the “impossibility” of an infinite series of causes gets shoved into God’s nature. This last leaves a God who begins as an uncaused necessary being but in some unexplainable way transforms into a contingent being capable of engaging in a causal chain.

If something unmoving could be the cause of movement, theists would have a chance. But something which doesn’t move or change can’t move or change other things. Nor can it transform itself into something which moves and changes.

The Logical Necessity of the Series

The only way out for the theist is to claim that with God they are talking about a different kind of causality: logical causality, not contingent or historical causality. For example, the members of a series (e.g.: “the generations of Homo sapiens”) cannot exist unless as a matter of logical necessity the series itself (Homo sapiens) already exists. God must create the series (Homo sapiens) since the series is logically necessary before the individual contingent members of the series (generations of individual Homo sapiens) can exist.

But notice that it makes no difference whether the series contains finite or infinite members: the series as a whole stands in the same logical relationship to its members either way. The series of Homo sapiens could contain contingent Homo sapiens connected in a causal chain for all infinity, and the existence of the “series” would still be logically necessary before it could be assigned any members.

Put another way, if members of a series exist (no matter how many or few) then by logical necessity the series itself must exist.

But this line of argument fails to get us to God. For if everything in the physical universe is part of a contingent series, the series itself which by logical necessity must exist is not “God” but rather “the universe”. The argument only demonstrates that by logical necessity if anything in the universe exists, the universe must necessarily exist.

The Author of the Series

But I imagine theists arguing that I have missed the point here. For their point is that there must be a mental source for this abstract category that constitutes the series itself, and this is so whether the series is “Homo sapiens” or “the universe.” A member of a series cannot be the author of the series itself of which it is a member. (The series is logically precedent to its being populated with members, in other words).

But this crashes for the theist. It crashes because we only have to imagine a series which also includes God. If God is a member of a series then God cannot — by the same reasoning — be the author of the series of which God is a member.

Do such series exist? Absolutely. There is the series of “deities and Gods worshipped by humans.” More to the point, there is the series of “everything that exists.” If God is a member of that series, then God cannot be the author of the series. If God is not a member then God does not exist.

In fact, series are only descriptions of like or related things, and the author of these descriptions and series is not God but us. Logical relationships and “necessities” apply only to our thoughts and not to the actual physical things we think about.

Consider, for example, the series which contains “the generations of Homo sapiens.” If we follow the causal chain of that series backward in time we find H. sapiens imperceptibly changing into H. erectus then H. habilis then Australopithecus. If we look back far enough eventually we find members of the series are no longer discernable even as primates but only as mammals, further back still and they are no longer mammals but vertebrates and so on until eventually we leave even the animal kingdom behind.

Physical reality is not constrained by the logical categories we choose for describing it. And those logical categories owe their existence and logical necessities not to God but to us. They prove our existence, not God’s.

That is exactly where it led, though it would take 5 1/2 years to get there.

Zeno’s “theory”, as she presented it, was that motion was not continuous but rather consisted of discrete segments. The path of an arrow shot across the horizon would actually, according to Zeno, not be smooth (although it might appear so to our eyes) but would in fact jump from segment to segment.

Why didn’t Zeno think motion was smooth and continuous? The answer is mathematics. Zeno realized there could not be an actual infinity of numbers between point a and point b on a numberline: numbers by their nature were inherently finite and countable, and therefore the path of an arrow across the sky had to consist of finite, countable steps.

If we think about it, we realize Zeno’s arrow was an early call for the Cosmological argument, which hinges on the assertion that there cannot be an actual infinity. There can’t be, per the Cosmological argument, an infinite regress of physical causes and there can’t be, per Zeno, an infinite number of steps in the motion of any object.

Just as there are two types of infinity — the macro infinity of going on and on to higher numbers and the micro infinity of more numbers between any two numbers on a number line — so there are two types of physical infinities which one can deny in the world. Zeno denied one, the Cosmological argument denies the other.

In my paper for Miss Blumenstock, I argued that there had to be an infinite number of arrow segments across the sky, otherwise scientists (not to mention camera enthusiasts) would have discovered a shutter speed which either hit between segments of the arrow’s path (resulting in no arrow in the photo) or else caused a blurred image as the arrow suddenly jumped from one segment to the next during the exposure. (I imagined that an example of my proposed effect could be seen by taking high-speed exposures of a movie screen at a theatre.) Yet neither scientists nor photographers had discovered such an anomaiy, which I took as a good enough implication that Zeno was wrong.

Miss Blumenstock liked my paper, but argued that if there were infinite segments then I had actually proved Zeno’s contention about segments correct! But my intuition was the opposite: infinite segments meant no segments at all. It meant that movement was continuous. It meant that there was a mismatch between all attempts to segment & number the path of the arrow, and the actual physical movement of the arrow itself (which was in its physical reality infinite and segmentless).

I came back to Zeno’s theory of motion again and again during my high school career, convinced that Zeno had mistakenly conflated mathematics and the physical world. And not just Zeno. I found it to be a popular error, even in the 20th century.

In short, by the time I graduated from high school I rejected anything that conflated the nature of mathematics with the nature of the physical world. I recognized such conflation as a repeat of Zeno’s error. To be sure, I agreed with Zeno’s rejection of an actual infinity in respect to numbers, but I maintained that the same rejection could not be applied to the physical world, for the simple reason that the physical world had a different sort of essence. We mapped numbers and mathematical formulas onto the world, because it was useful, but the world itself was nevertheless not mathematical.

When I found myself introduced to Aquinas and the Cosmological argument as a freshman in college, I was reminded of Zeno all over again. As I mulled over the argument I drew the conclusion that God could not be a “mind” who created the physical world by “thinking” it into existence — for the simple reason that the world wasn’t that sort of thing. But then if so, what was God’s nature?

And then it happened. I came across a bit of humor in Reader’s Digest about a Sunday School kid who, told that God had created the world, asked “Who created God?” To Readers Digest it was a funny story to entertain their readers, but to me it was a challenge — a threat — that had to be parried.

God is a special case, I explained to myself. You can’t ask who made God because God is infinite and eternal. But the world is finite and temporal, so who made the world is a fair question.

That didn’t work, and unconsciously I knew it. It didn’t work because it relied on the error of conflating mathematics with the world and declaring actual infinity is impossible. But if my analysis of Zeno was correct — and I knew it was — then the physical world stood in the same existential position God did. The physical world could be infinite and could be eternal — in fact if my intuition about Zeno was correct it had to be.

Therefore “Who made God?” was as valid a question as “Who made the world?” If both were valid, God was no final answer; if neither were valid, God was redundant.

Instantly, I was an atheist. I realized immediately that it was the physical world, not God, that was the proper object of worship. Eden, not heaven. Life, not afterlife. Bodies, not bodiless souls.

———-

Footnote (added 10/11/2006):

Actually, Zeno did not present a “theory of motion” but rather a number of paradoxes designed to demonstrate that motion is impossible and an illusion. My 9th grade understanding of Zeno’s arrow was, to put it politely, garbled. Kevin Brown’s book Reflections on Relativity has a fascinating chapter on Zeno’s paradoxes. The arrow paradox, Brown writes

. . .focuses on the instantaneous physical properties of a moving arrow. He notes that if physical objects exist discretely at a sequence of discrete instants of time, and if no motion occurs in an instant, then we must conclude that there is no motion in any given instant. (As Bertrand Russell commented, this is simply “a plain statement of an elementary fact”.) But if there is literally no physical difference between a moving and a non-moving arrow in any given discrete instant, then how does the arrow know from one instant to the next if it is moving? In other words, how is causality transmitted forward in time through a sequence of instants, in each of which motion does not exist?

Instead of arguing that motion consists of discrete segments, Zeno is actually demonstrating that it cannot. He goes further, implying that if time is composed of “instants” then motion is impossible. Brown concludes,

If . . . we insist on adhering to the view of the entire physical world as a purely spatial expanse, existing in and progressing through a sequence of instants, then we again run into the problem of how a quality that exists only over a range of instants can be causally conveyed through any given instant in which it has no form of existence. Before blithely dismissing this concern as non-sensical, it’s worth noting that modern physics has concluded (along with Zeno) that the classical image of space and time was fundamentally wrong, and in fact motion would not be possible in a universe constructed according to the classical model. We now recognize that position and momentum are incompatible variables, in the sense that an exact determination of either one of them leaves the other completely undetermined. According to quantum mechanics, the eigenvalues of spatial position are incompatible with the eigenvalues of momentum so, just as Zeno’s arguments suggest, it really is inconceivable for an object to have a definite position and momentum (motion) simultaneously.

I would recommend the entire chapter on Zeno in Brown’s book to anyone interested in Zeno’s paradox of motion.

In his excellent book, The Existence of God (Cornell University, 1965), Wallace I. Matson distinguishes between “crude” and “subtle” versions of the Cosmological argument for God’s existence. It is the suble version that interests me here. Put very briefly, it is this:

If the world is intelligible, then God exists. But the world is intelligible. Therefore God exists. – Matson, The Existence of God, page 62

What is meant by intelligibility? It means, briefly, that the world is explainable in terms of causal relationships, scientific laws, “sufficient reason” (“There is a Sufficient Reason why everything that is, is so and not otherwise.” — Leibniz). In investigating the world, says the theist, scientists uncover this underlying causality and framework, that is to say, scientists tap into and thereby discover the intelligence with which the world is imbued. That it is so imbued is unquestionable; that the source of the imbuing is God is obvious, even if not strictly provable.

The atheist position is that the theist has made a basic mistake. Like the kid who puts on rose-colored glasses and sees a rosy world and concludes that the world is rose-colored, the theist fails to realize that the human mind necessarily imparts a patina of intelligibility to everything it illuminates. The theist sees causal relationships and a blueprint of scientific laws imbued in the physical world, whereas the atheist avers that these are only artifacts of the human mind, the currency itself of human intelligence shining on the world.

Intelligence, says the atheist, isn’t out there, it’s in here. And it got in here as a product of evolution, nothing more. We evolved to have minds, and our minds are essentially information-colored glasses which impart — unavoidably — a patina of information, properties, and relationships upon everything we think about.

Intelligibility is in us, not outside us, but no matter: it is just as useful either way.

Surprisingly, at the time rejecting God never occurred to me as an option. Instead, I determined that the nature of God had to be quite different than traditionally conceived. God was not a creator-God, not a logos-God, but had to be some other kind of entity. I spent the next couple years trying to figure out what that entity might be.

Eventually I resolved the difficulty: by becoming atheist.

The Cosmological Argument

To give an idea of some of the stumbling blocks I perceive in the idea of God, let me quote Terry Miethe, himself paraphrasing Aquinas’ “Second Way” or second proof of God’s existence. All quotes come from Does God Exist? A Believer and an Atheist Debate by Terry Miethe and Antony Flew, 1991, New York: HarperCollins.

1. There are efficient causes in the world (i.e. producing causes).

2. Nothing can be the efficient cause of itself (for it would have to be prior to itself in order to cause itself.) [Does God Exist?, p. 130]

But already this dooms the concept of God, since it means that God cannot cause Himself, or in other words, one state or moment of God cannot proceed from a previous. To avoid this objection, God must be defined as absolutely unchanging and timeless. But if God is thus constrained, two inevitable conclusions follow: (1) God can’t behave or happen or act — that is, God can’t exist in any normal sense of the meaning of that word when applied to a being, and (2) God can’t be the first cause, since being a causal agent requires action. Something which can’t have changing states, or can’t exist one moment after another (therefore one moment being the cause of the next), can’t cause.

To continue:

3. There cannot be an infinite regress of (essentially related) efficient causes, for unless there is a first cause of the series there would be no causality in the series. [p. 130]

If applied to God (as it seems it would have to be, since God is going to be placed into the series of “efficient causes” of the world) we are left with the conclusion that God, as well, must have a prior cause. And that prior cause, itself, must also have a prior cause. Ad nauseum.

Another way to restate this premise, simply, is thus: Every series must have a beginning, for without a beginning the series could never get started and therefore never come into existence. Since infinite series don’t have beginnings, they can never get started, and therefore can’t exist. But everything can be seen as a series. Even an infinite series can be seen as a series of finite series. Even God can be seen as a series, or placed into one.

Infinite Time & Infinite Space

If infinite series can’t exist because, as the premise asserts, they lack a beginning, then an infinite series of moments cannot exist. Time then, according to this premise, cannot be infinite, and it must follow then that there cannot be an infinite God, speaking temporally. Of course, an infinite series of space, or place, must also be ruled out, if we are to follow this premise, since otherwise we have no place to begin our series with. So infinite God is also rulled out spacially.

Aquinus, of course, wants to apply this premise to the world, yet exempt God from it. It certainly looks like special pleading. For if we claim the world for logical reasons cannot exist forever (and the premise, despite all its fancy words, is nothing other than that), then the same necessity should mean that God cannot exist forever.

Any claim that an infinite series is impossible is as harmful to God as it is to the world, and makes God as dependent as it thus makes the world.

And for any possibility that God can be uncaused (as we will see is claimed next), it is just as possible that the world itself can be uncaused.

If it is claimed that God is different from the world because God is non-physical, motionless and outside of time, then it becomes impossible for God to be a cause of the world. For without time you cannot change or move, and without the ability to move, you cannot act. Indeed, if you exist outside of time, you cannot be, much less create and cause.

4. Therefore, there must be a first uncaused efficient cause of all efficient causality in the world. [p. 130]

As I see it, this means that the series begins uncaused (uncaused God being the first item in the series), but in that case the series never comes into existence in the first place. It never happens. It never gets its first drop of movement, and time never starts for it.

If you simply disagree, and argue that the series can begin uncaused, then we can as easily begin it with the world as with God. Or we could begin it with the cause of God, rather than with God.

First Recap

The three premises are simply wrong. The claim that unless there is a first cause of the series there can be no causality in the series, is one without any basis. Why should it be so? And how is the claim that the first cause of the series must itself be uncaused consistent with the claim in premise 2 that nothing can be the efficient cause of itself? For to say that something is uncaused is no different than saying that it causes itself — or else never comes into a state of existence in the first place.

Finally, the claim that there are efficient causes in the world must also be disputed. As a matter of fact, causes (and causality itself) is nothing but a mental phenomena. Causality exists not out in the world, but here internally as part of the currency of thought. What I mean is not that events don’t follow and flow out of other events, but that defining a “series of efficient causes” is nothing but an arbitrary mental game which, once begun, must result in an infinite regress of causes unless we tire of it, arbitrarily deciding to break the rules and declare “God.”

5. Everyone gives to this the name of God. [p. 130]

But it is a God who can’t get started, can’t behave, and therefore in any ordinary sense of the words, can’t create and can’t exist.

My conclusion is that to say something exists is to say that it has a past, or that there is a past which leads to it, as well as a future which proceeds from it. But to say God is uncaused is to say God has no past. I infer that such a God has no future as well.

Existence, in other words, requires that something happen, then something else happen after that. In fact, what I would say about existence is that it essentially equates with movement and change.

To say that something exists is to say that it happens, which is to say that it changes.

If God is to be a cause, God must move. Everything that moves, however, must have first been moved.

So to describe a chain of causality is only to describe the way existence is. To try to break that chain at God is only a hidden way of saying that God is not part of existence, which is an euphemism for saying that there is no God.

Part Two

How can someone imagine that it is workable for God to be the uncaused cause of everything else?

They imagine it by making a very fundamental mistake, the mistake of thinking that language, a thought, an idea, can create something without itself having to be created. This is the notion behind a “metaphysical” source for physical reality.

This is what Miethe means when he says,

Thomas appeals to a type of causality unknown to Aristotle where existence itself is the effect, a type of causality where the effect is a finite efficient cause. This would be a metaphysical kind of causality rather than a physical one. [p. 131]

Let’s tackle this another way, by bringing in the popular modern term contingency. Miethe says, “Prominent philosophers have reformulated the argument to present what they believe is a true and valid cosmological argument.” [p. 133] Miethe then summarizes Bruce Reichenbach’s version as follows:

(S1) A contingent being exists

a. This contingent being is caused either (1) by itself, or (2) by another.

b. If it were caused by itself, it would have to precede itself in existence, which is impossible. [p. 134]

But I would argue that existing beings almost always precede themselves in existence, since existence must happen over time (involve change). Therefore b is simply erroneous.

(S2) Therefore, this contingent being (2) is caused by another, i.e., depends on something else for its existence.

(S3) That which causes (provides the sufficient reason for) the existence of any contingent being must be either (3) another contingent being, or (4) a noncontingent (necessary) being.

c. If 3, then this contingent cause must itself be caused by another, and so on to infinity.

(S4) Therefore, that which causes (provides the sufficient reason for) the existence of any contingent being must be either (5) an infinite series of contingent beings, or (4) a necessary being

(S5) An infinite series of contingent beings (5) is incapable of yielding a sufficient reason for the existence of any being.

(S6) Therefore, a necessary being (4) exists. [p. 134]

It appears transparent to me is that the necessary “being” or what I would term the “necessity” which the existence of contingent beings compels us to believe in, is what can only be termed the universe or totality of existence, taken as a whole. Everything that exists is contingent on the existence of the totality, both logically and causally; although the totality itself is and must be uncaused, or must be described as self-caused.

Two Pronged Sword

The use of the word being in fact performs a word-trick. It leads us into thinking that at the conclusion we are talking about an agent or person, when in fact all we are really talking about is a “greater existence.” (Alternatively, it is the “infinite series” taken as a totality which fills the role of “necessary” being.)

What cannot fill the role is God. As remarked earlier, God is defined so that God has no way of behaving, and therefore cannot be the source of contingency.

Contingency, in fact, is a two-pronged sword. Just as something has to come from something previous to it, the something which was previous to it has to have the sort of nature which can hand contingency, so to speak, to that which it causes.

To be a causer in the world, or even to be the first causer of the world, God has to be made of the kind of stuff that can cause contingent, physical things to happen. A disembodied idea, or even a metaphysical ideal, can’t do it, for it can’t interact with the world. God must be a contingent sort of thing to be a causal agent for contingent beings.

Insufficient Reasoning

I will comment also on a particularly bizarre claim in the argument presented above.

(S5) An infinite series of contingent beings (5) is incapable of yielding a sufficient reason for the existence of any being. [p. 134]

In the premise immediately prior to this one, the phrase “provides the sufficient reason for” was defined as meaning “causes”. So the premise is really claiming that an infinite series is incapable of causing the existence of any being — or in other words, if the chain is infinite, no causality occurs.

Of course, the real reason for the appearance of the phrase “sufficient reason” is not logical, but emotional. It is designed to make us feel that only God can sufficiently explain why something really exists. But why something exists is different from whether it exists — and it is whether things can exist without God, rather than why they exist, which is the logical subject of this series of premises.

Part Three

Miethe says that Reichenbach’s argument above is “based on the relationship of causality and sufficient reason.” [p. 134] Next he presents another version which he says is “not based on the principle of sufficient reason but on the principle of existential causality.” [p. 134] Here it is:

1. Some limited, changing being(s) exist.

2. The present existence of every limited, changing being is caused by another.

3. There cannot be an infinite regress of causes of being.

4. Therefore, there is a first Cause of the present existence of these beings.

5. This first Cause must be infinite, necessary, eternal, and one.

6. This first uncaused Cause is identical with the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition. [p. 134]

My first impression is that steps 3, 5, and 6 are flawed. But first let’s let Miethe explain his steps.

1. Some limited, changing being(s) exist. [p. 135]

For example, us. There is certainly nothing to disagree with here.

2. The present existence of every limited, changing being is caused by another.

3. There cannot be an infinite regress of causes of being. [p. 135]

Of course, it seems to me that there can ONLY be an infinite regress of causes of being. But Miethe maintains this argument is valid because “an infinite regress of causes” does not refer to a “linear series of historical causes of becoming, but a vertical series of causes of being, for existence itself.” [p. 135] He explains “existential causality refers to the cause of the being of entities and not the cause of their becoming,” and then clarifies (or rather unclarifies) this by saying that he is . . .

talking about a cause for the very being of a thing, not its coming into existence (its becoming) or the changes it may undergo. It is impossible to have an infinite regress (go backward to infinity, has no first or beginning cause) of existent-dependent causes. [p. 130]

I don’t understand the distinction Miethe is attempting to make here. Perhaps because I cannot envision how “the very being of a thing” and its “coming into existence or the changes it may undergo” can be anything but references to the same thing. Is Miethe trying to say something like: I concede that Jennifer’s “coming into existence” was caused by her parents, those, limited, changing beings called Mary and John, but the source of “the very being” of Jennifer–the “existential cause” of her being, as opposed to the historical cause–has to be an uncaused First Cause? Body by Mary and John; but soul by God?

If this is what Miethe means (and I am not sure it is) then it boils down to the unwarranted assertion that only God can be the cause of a thing’s soul or essence. In which case his argument is really as follows:

(1) At least some things (humans) have a soul or essense.

(2) Only God can be the cause of a thing’s soul or essense.

(3) Therefore God must exist.

The problem here is that (2) is just a bald assertion, and if we define soul as “a god-like aspect”, then (1) becomes the bald assertion instead. (And of course it begs the very question at hand by presuming that God exists in its premise.)

Furthermore, Miethe’s argument that premise 3 refers not to a “linear series of historical causes of becoming, but a vertical series of causes of being, for existence itself” in support of the claim that there can not be “an infinite regress of causes of being” is itself inconsistent with the line of argument in premise 2, where it appears clear that a “linear series of historical causes” is meant. Premise 2 states, “The present existence of every limited, changing being is caused by another.” If, instead of referring to historical causation, this is about a “vertical series of causes of being” as it must be if premise 3 is to logically lead us to statement 4, then we are left with no idea in the world what premise 2 means.

Logical vs Historical Causation

Unless, that is, the distinction Miethe is attempting to make between “causes of being” and causes of becoming” is a distinction between logical and historical causation. Miethe writes

When you simply add another dependent being to a chain of such beings, it does not ground the existence of the chain. To say that it does is like saying one could get an avocado by adding an infinite number of pineapples to a basket of pineapples. Adding pineapples to pineapples does not yield an avocado; adding dependent beings to other such beings does not yield a cause or ground for their dependent existence. One contingent being cannot ground another such being. No caused being can be an intermediary in a chain of existential causality. Thus it follows that the very first cause of a caused being must be an uncaused Being.” [135-136]

I can make sense of this only if I assume that in Miethe’s canon “first cause” means “logical cause” while “dependent cause” means “historical cause”. Yet if this is what Miethe is referring to then he has fallen into an obvious fallacy.

Perhaps it can be clarified this way. An oak begins as an acorn, sprouts into a sappling, eventually becoming a fully-grown oak tree dropping acorns of its own which themselves sprout into other oaks. This is what Miethe means by dependent causation. Fine and good. If I interpret Miethe correctly here, he would readily assert that one oak tree causes the next in a series of dependent causation. But what, he seems to be asking, causes the ground of being of oak trees themselves? No matter how many oak trees we add to the basket of dependent causation to explain each individual oak tree’s becoming, the cause of oak trees as a class remains unexplained.

Now surely Miethe is aware of evolutionary theory and how, according to scientists, individual variability and natural selection lead to speciation. Even if one rejects evolution as historical fact, one must admit the theoretical possibility of speciation by evolutionary processes. We must assume therefore that it is not the origin of species — of oaks in this example — that Meithe is denying on logical grounds to dependent causes.

Essence Before Existence

Instead, Miethe must be denying that dependent causes — individual oak trees — can cause the logical class of oak trees to come into existence. Miethe declares, in other words, that evolution can account only for the becoming of oak trees, and not for the ground of their being — and to make any sense of such a distinction we are forced to interpret “ground” as meaning “logical ground”, to wit the initiation of the contingent oak tree, sapling or acorn into the logical class of oaks.

This initiation is a purely mental process, and the relationship of any particular dependent existence or “contingency” to its logical class is a purely mental relationship.

Miethe’s assumption, I take it, is that these logical classes are universal, that they transcend history, and therefore they cannot have a contingent cause. I can find no other way to make sense of his language.

To put this into Sartrian terms, Miethe asserts as a raw premise essence before existence. But that is of course precisely what atheists reject when they assert atheism: to declare that there is no God is to declare that there is no essence before existence, no mind before matter, no logical framework to existence which must serve as a blueprint or logical ground for the physical world. In assuming essence before existence Miethe is simply declaring up front the God he is trying to prove.*

Why then, theists might ask, do we see logical relationships everywhere we look? And why do they appear universal and transcendental? And the atheist answer is simply that logical relationships are the currency of thought itself: the very process of thinking requries and creates them. They come from us, out of our very human brains. Why do causal relationships seem universal and transcendental? Because that’s what makes thought useful. In actual fact, however, every aspect of human thought is species-specific to humans.

The essential problem of the cosmological argument (whether or not modernized) is that one way or another the existence of God is presupposed in the premises, but this is disguised by the use of ambiguous and confusing phrases.

——–

* Of course theists can make the opposite accusation: that in denying essence before existence, atheists are beginning with a premise that excludes God’s existence. But this only focuses us on the real point of contention between theists and atheists: the relationship of thought to the world. It is an even more fundamental divide than the God question.