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.

If a good God made the world why has it gone wrong? And for many years I simply refused to listen to the Christian answers to this question, because I kept on feeling “whatever you say and however clever your arguments are, isn’t it much simpler and easier to say that the world was not made by any intelligent power? Aren’t all your arguments simply a complicated attempt to avoid the obvious?” But then that threw me back into another difficulty.

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I gotten this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction against it? A man feels wet when he falls into water, because man is not a water animal: a fish would not feel wet. Of course I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too — for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my private fancies. Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist — in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless — I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality — namely my idea of justice — was full of sense. Consequently, atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.*

There must be a source for our moral sensibilities, C. S. Lewis is saying, outside of our own personal preferences and likes. If there is no outside criteria for truth, justice, fairness and the like, no criteria outside of me, then I can never rationally exhort others to behave the way I believe they ought to. Fairness, justice, right and wrong: it’s all merely my word against theirs, my preference instead of someone else’s preference.

Of course I may by force impose my moral viewpoint on others, but I have no basis outside myself for doing so; by extension, the same applies to any government or state: although it can impose by force, it can have no moral authority since there is no basis except the personal preferences of the governors.

In order to overcome this difficulty, Antony Flew once suggested that a sort of “market economy” of individual moral preferences holds sway, that this “moral market” acts like an invisible hand to create price or value for various behaviors, much as the economic marketplace establishes values and prices for goods. Although this is an interesting concept, it misses the crux of the issue at hand.

That is because the issue at hand is not how to establish agreement about which behaviors are moral and which aren’t (although that is a vital secondary question); rather the issue is where does our moral authority itself come from. What can serve to place the basis for morality outside of our individual or social biases?

Here, there is an alternative to God. It is an alternative that is not entirely free of relativism, in the sense that it is necessarily species-specific. Nevertheless, it is free of relativism from one individual in a species to the next. That is to say, it does not rely on my exotic personal biases, or on yours.

Human morality, according to this alternative, is built into the nature of the human body and its biological instincts. The sense of fairness and justice is as built into us as are our other senses. And the ability to apply this moral instinct to specific situations is as much a part of being human as is our ability to reason and remember.

Unfortunately, we are not all equal in moral skills, just as we are not all equal in reasoning skills or equally adept at remembering. Or for that matter, at throwing or running or catching. Skills must be developed by practice, and this applies to the skill of applying our moral instincts, sensibilities, empathy, to specific situations.

From an evolutionary point of view, the basis of human morality is very clear: morality is a human instinct, much like language, much like the fear of being alone in dark woods, or the desire to walk upright. Different as these are, they are all human instincts.

Just as the language instinct takes practice to be developed to its full flowering, so too with the moral instinct. It needs practicing. And this is something that a strong fundamentalist upbringing can thwart. Call it the commandments approach to childrearing. Some parents send their children the strong message that there are no moral decisions for them to make: that they must always defer to the moral commandments dictated by the Bible or some other religious authority.

For example, in commandment childrearing, a child might be told that lying is simply wrong always and in all situations: the Bible says so, end of subject. In fact, there are certain situations where lying is the right moral decision. Even murder could be the right choice in extremely rare circumstances. The commandments approach prevents a child from developing adequate moral decision-making skills because of the parental insistence that there are no situational moral decisions for the child to ever make. Instead the child has a rule-book to follow to the letter: the Bible.

As a rule, religious children are taught to look to a book or authority figure for the source of their moral sensibilities rather than to their own bodily instincts. The result is that their own moral instincts and feelings are suppressed, and the skill of making moral decisions by refering to those feelings never gets well-developed. Since the basis of morality actually lies in feelings, substituting unfelt words (the letter of the law — in this case Bible law) for those feelings is a setup for failure.

What happens when a fundamentalist child grows up and discovers that the religious authority they have always relied upon is questionable or contradictory? With few moral feelings to fall back on, the result is often disaster.

Our prisons are filled with such disasters.

Even if the now fundamentalist adult never figures out the questionable nature of Biblical morality, there is still a problem. The Bible simply can’t speak clearly to many of the moral situations modern society presents. The authors of the Bible — whether divine or human — failed to address most of the complexities of modern society. Trying to use the Bible as a rule-book simply breaks down.

Moral decisionmaking, furthermore, is very much about engaging our feelings, emotions and desires before we act, weighing them with our sense of identity with other human beings (this snuck into the Bible as the “golden rule”), and making a skilled decision about what to do. If your moral upbringing was all about “following rules” from holy books and religious authorities, then you never developed the necessary skill to do morality on your own. Little surprise that so many fundamentalist preachers end up making the news as hypocrites.

But back to C. S. Lewis. Remember his words,

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I gotten this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?*

Lewis forgets here that morality only applies to moral agents. We hardly consider a volcano immoral for erupting, nor do we condemn the sky for causing tornadoes. But make nature the result of God’s agency and then the volcano and tornado put God’s morality into question: because God is, after all, a moral agent. The atheist doesn’t face an equivalent difficulty with nature since the atheist doesn’t claim that nature is a person.

The problem for the atheist is not, as Lewis mistakenly asserts, that the universe seems “cruel and unjust”. The universe is not a person. It would be as irrational to expect the universe to behave “morally” as it would be to expect morality from a rock. But the atheist does have something to explain, not about justice as it applies to the universe but about justice as it applies to other human beings. Where does our sense of justice, as it applies to human behavior come from?

Lewis’ answer, that it comes from God, doesn’t work, and I refer you to my essay Atheism and Morals (about Alasdair MacIntyre’s essay “Atheism and Morals”) for a full explanation of why that answer fails. However the short explanation is that it becomes impossible to know whether an act is right because God says so, or whether it’s right because it’s actually good. If God’s say-so is what makes something right, then we have no way to distinguish God from the devil. God becomes, to use Alasdair MacIntyre’s explanation,

. . . a Hobbesian sovereign whose title to legitimate authority rests not on his absolute paternal care, his goodness as a father, but solely on his power, and the devil’s lack of such a title rests solely on his inferiority in respect of power. Satan becomes a Hobbesian rebel who fails to be a Hobbesian sovereign only because he is unsuccessful.*

This won’t do, even for Christians. C. S. Lewis answer, that God is the source of morality, has the effect of insulting God. It makes God’s goodness disappear, replaced by God’s raw power. The source of our sense of justice has to lie outside not just our agency, but outside of God’s agency as well. Otherwise neither our decisions nor God’s decisions can be good or bad — and the same goes for the devil.

For God, the only solution that works is for there to be a moral sense built into God’s nature separate from his agency (his actual actions); and somehow God must reference that innate moral sense before he acts if he is to determine the right thing to do. The same solution applies for us. There must be a moral sense built into our nature separate from our agency, and by which we can judge the rightness or wrongness of our actions.

Now, that moral sense must have gotten into us in one of two ways: either because God put it there, or because we evolved as a social species and the process of evolution put it there. Either answer is viable. But — and this is a significant but — the theist faces an additional problem: what or who put God’s moral nature into God? Is there another God behind God, responsible for God’s moral nature? And what about that God’s moral nature?

The theist, unfortunately, can’t resort to evolution to explain God’s moral nature because, for one thing, God doesn’t exist in competition with other species (or with other Gods, supposedly). Nor is God a member of a social species to which God’s moral nature could apply — until God peopled the universe, his moral nature had no application, no purpose, no reason to be. And yet, as we saw earlier, God must have a sense of morality separate from his agency, by which God (and all subsequent beings) can judge the morality of his actions. How did he get this? Why should it be a moral nature rather than an immoral nature — that is, why is God God rather than the devil?

If God is a moral actor, in other words, then God must have a sense of justice to which he can refer when making decisions. “But how,” we can imagine God wondering (anticipating Lewis) “how did I get this idea of just and unjust?” And God might likewise wonder, “Why do I feel obliged to do the right thing for the creatures I created in my world?”

And this brings us to the 1000-lb gorilla: the problem of evil. Not the evil that might result from human misbehavior, but the evil that results (assuming the universe is the product of God’s agency) from God’s decisions when designing the universe. For example, those before-mentioned volcanoes and tornadoes. If God is a moral agent, with a sense of justice, then he must recognize his own culpability in the death and destruction to sentient beings which the forces of nature unleash. He must also recognize the pain and suffering due entirely to his decision to create a world in which life must eat other life in order to survive. If God does not recognize the wrongness of this, it can only be because he is indeed a Hobbsian sovereign who is morally indistinguishable from the devil. But if God does recognize the wrongness of it, then it follows that he also recognizes his fallibility, his own lack of perfection.

And so must we.

The atheist has the easier path. The atheist needs only to demonstrate that evolution can result in a species with an internal sense of right and wrong by which to judge actions, and do so by showing how it might have evolved and by identifying its development in existing species. Scientists face no major difficulty in any of this. We do in fact see a sense of right and wrong exhibited by other primate species, for example; and game theory shows that altruistic behavior along with “tit for tat” can be viable evolutionary strategies. It is possible to invision how such strategies could have been internalized into a social species’ genetic makeup.

The atheist task, compared to that of the theist, is the easier.

In a later post, when I discuss consciousness as “sensations” distinct from the brain’s other, non-conscious “behaviors”, it will be possible (I hope) to explain how morality fits into the picture. In particular, I will argue that decisions are made in non-conscious parts of the brain, and that moral feelings of shame, regret, ought, moral satisfaction, and so on — like our other brain-created sensations — serve a role related to longer-term memory formation and future decision-making. Untangling why we humans have moral sensations, in other words, is very much tied up with untangling why we have consciousness at all, the nature of that consciousness, and its evolutionary role.

———-

*Quotes are from:

Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis, 1952

Atheism and Morals, Alasdair MacIntyre in The Religious Significance of Atheism, Columbia University Press, 1969, p. 35

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.

It is the kind of philosophical mumbo-jumbo that drives people away from philosophy. Whatever the distinction is supposed to be, it’s probably a poorly chosen one. But let’s see if we can figure it out. Being, one must suppose, refers to abstract Form or Ideas existing in our minds (Plato was enamored of mental talk like this) while becoming must refer, in the Platonic canon, to material things: always changing, growing, decaying and generally being messy (something Plato wanted nothing to do with).

Plato’s attitude toward bodily things strikes me more as the product of mental illness than of a rational thought process. Only a diseased mind, cut off from the rest of the self or warped by infection or chemical imbalance, concludes that mental imaginings alone are real, that the body is nothing. Indeed there is something very unreal about such an attitude, something pathological. Nor is the foolishness of the Platonic attitude difficult to show even relying strictly on reason — which brings us back from parenthesis to Aquinas.

Aquinas understood the distinction Plato was trying to make between being and becoming, and he strenuously objected to it. Plato had to try to wash matter — the material world of bodies — out of the picture as if it didn’t exist. But it does exist, Aquinas said, and Plato’s philosophy can’t account for why.

If I understand him correctly, Aquinas maintained that Plato’s abstract ideas (the abstract idea of a tree, for instance) have in themselves (whether held in our mind or in God’s) absolutely no power to bring real, material trees into existence. The particulars of the world can’t be thought into being by thinking universals, no matter who is doing the thinking. But not being able to explain how matter comes to exists is only part of the problem. In the Platonic system, Aquinas saw, there could never be a satisfactory explanation of why matter exists.

To use more modern terms, Plato thought of us as a soul making incidental use of a physical body. We are decidedly not our bodies: they are just an impediment for the soul or mind that is the real us. Aquinas rejected this. We are, he said, a unity of body and soul, mind and matter. Both are equally essential if we are to be what God intended: spiritual beings who “know” the world.

Anton C. Pegis says in his book, Introduction to St. Thomas Aquinas,

Where the Platonic knower is a pure reason, and the Cartesian knower a pure mind, the Thomistic knower is, as knower, the composite of soul and body. Let us say this in another way. Man as a knower must be partly material in order to be adequately a knower.

Pegis follows this with a telling comment:

Of course, such a notion is bound to sound scandalous to modern ears. For we are the heirs of generations of philosophic speculations according to which man is a thinker and a mind. ²

For Thomas Aquinas a mind cannot “know” the world because the mind works in abstractions and universals, whereas the world is a population of physical particulars. The mind can only know — or think in terms of — these abstractions. We were given bodies, says Aquinas, precisely because we must have bodies in order to get our hands on particulars, to be a “knower” and not just a “thinker.” Pegis observes,

“…what we call the decline of mediaeval philosophy was really a transition from man as a knower to man as a thinker — from man knowing the world of sensible things to man thinking abstract thoughts in separation from existence.”²

Why Know the World?

Let’s summarize so far. Plato said the goal was to be a thinker thinking not about the material world (never real anyway), but about the eternal, nontransmutable ideas and ideal “Forms” — “the emptiness of abstract thought closed on abstractions”² as Pegis believes Aquinas saw it.

Aquinas said a pure thinker can’t know the objects of the physical world: to do that the mind must be combined with a body. If our task was only to think, and not to know, then Plato’s scheme would suffice. Nonetheless it would not explain why we have bodies — or how they come to exist from universals.

Bodies are necessary to know the world. This is Aquinas’ key observation. Since we do have bodies, it follows, said he, that God created us with bodies because He intended for us to know the world.

But why? What is the purpose of knowing the world? Not, Aquinas maintained, for “the good of the body itself, since matter serves us rather than making us its servant.”³ Rather, it is because the soul alone “is unequal by itself to the task of accomplishing the work proper to an intellectual substance.”³

And this is where we part company with Aquinas. We don’t understand why — the real why — of existing as an “intellectual substance” with “work proper” to accomplish.

Why should God create us for such a task? What intellectual work does God need accomplished? Is it not work He could do Himself, and so much more quickly? Or is it because God lacks a body that He cannot do this work of “knowing” the world? — just as Aquinas maintained we humans could not do it if we were only Platonic thinkers.

This is a serious problem. How can God create a world — or even infuse a pre-existing material chaos with “order” — but then need us humans as body/soul beings to “know” this world? Doesn’t God “know” it already? If he doesn’t, how could He create it?

The Platonic story fails because it has to pretend that matter is not material — that it doesn’t really count. But why matter exists Platonism can’t begin to explain.

Aquinas bravely attempted to rectify this nonsense. But he leaves us without a way of explaining why the world must be known. Why does God need us for this task, and how can it be that God should need us for this task?

Now, maybe God doesn’t have to have a reason or purpose for creating the beings he peoples earth with. Perhaps God was just bored. “Let me create a creature with a mind and see if it can figure out the plan behind my world — that should be entertaining for a few thousand years, hopefully.”

But in all honesty, it wouldn’t be very entertaining, even for God.

If we want a solution that works, it’s pretty simple. All we must say is, “Yes, we have minds able to know the world, and we have them precisely for the benefit of our bodies.” This is the line of thought Aquinas summarily rejected, because he wanted the material body to “serve us rather than making us its servant” — thus he identified the body as “it” and the mind as “us”.

After all was said, Aquinas was unable to present us as a true composite. He fell back towards Plato.

Why Do We Have Minds?

We have a benefit Aquinas lacked: we know about evolution. This allows us to see immediately that the body can obtain a great survival advantage by developing a mind capable of knowing the world.

The mind exists for the benefit of the body. It comes into existence out of evolutionary pressure.

This answer, so obvious to scientists, does not appeal to philosophers and theologians. But it explains why we exist as bodies with minds — and this is something Plato and Aquinas cannot do.

Furthermore, evolution makes it clear that the body comes first, and the mind evolves after. We are not thinkers that picked up bodies along the way; we are not minds driving bodies around like they were automobiles; we are not ghosts in machines. We are living bodies that happened to develop minds.

To phrase it philosophically, evolution reveals that we must reject the primacy of the mind for the primacy of the body.

Now many philosophers post a very big objection at this point. They often voice it in terms of “free will” or “determinism” or “mechanism.” If we are bodies that through evolution developed minds, if the mind evolved physically, then that turns us into mere robots. We can’t have free will. We are reduced to a behavioristic and deterministic view of humankind which deprives us of any dignity. (One might think this objection is summed up nicely in the phrase “Beyond Freedom and Dignity” which is the title of a book by behaviorist B. F. Skinner.⁴)

But it is an objection based on their premises, not ours.

It is the Platonic, Thomistic, and Cartesian philosophers who have dunked the body down in the mud and elevated the mind up to the heavens. Today, presented with the idea that we are first and foremost bodies, they object, “You’re dunking us in the mud!” Depriving humans of dignity! they exclaim. Turning us into mechanisms!

No. That was their doing. Every time they pushed the mind higher and closer to God, they deprived the body of a little more dignity, pushed our faces a little deeper into the puddle. They propelled our mind up so high it obtained absolute free will, but correspondingly they denied our body almost everything: it became nothing but clockwork, deterministic, merely stuff for mind to manipulate and explain.

Turns out we were bodies all along.

Now we have to be rescued from this intellectual mud philosophers shoved us into. They denied bodies essence or real life, and now they object that in defining humans as body beings we are relegating ourselves to a lifeless state, without dignity, without value!

They are philosophically stuck on their own flawed premises.

But not just philosophers: most of us are stuck here. If it were just a few lifeless intellectuals, no one would care. But society as a whole is stuck, and it shows worst in our religious thoughts and ideas.

This is the crucial distinction between atheism and theism. Theism has decided that the physical world can’t stand on its own. It can’t because it is just “stuff” that obeys blind laws. Newton’s laws of motion for example; but really, any “laws” that scientists have discovered will do. Scientists discover these laws, but who created them? Since material “stuff” is raw, robotic, devoid on its own of value — because theists pushed value to a spiritual world — there must be something else to give this stuff value and laws to obey.

Then when atheists deny that there is a God or spiritual realm beyond our physical realm theists are shocked. To them atheists are proclaiming that we are nothing but raw, robotic stuff, devoid of value, obeying laws that never had a lawgiver!

If atheists were theists, this would indeed follow. If we remove God, a big hole forms in the universe.

But we are not theists. We are not Cartesians, we are not Platonists, we are not even Thomists. That’s the whole point: we have rejected their basic premises. No big hole forms where God used to be because our universe — based on our premises — never needed God to provide value or save us from mechanism in the first place. There’s no place for a hole.

Which means also there’s no place for God. No need. Value doesn’t come from without but within. Depriving us of value within — a result of theistic premises (so that it can be provided from without by God) — merely devalues us, and then makes us dependent on a questionable entity. And it shifts the purpose of life from earth and life to heaven and afterlife. Why does everything shift away from earth? Because our theistic premises have turned earth and our bodies into robotic, meaningless stuff — pushed all the meaning to heaven. Not here but in heaven will our life be fulfilled. And we must not really be bodies, but heavenly souls.

This is solely the result of theistic premises.

Atheists premises, on the other hand, leave us and our earthlife whole. Our bodies really are us and they really are valuable; they are not robots or mechanisms, and therefore we are not. Our life must be fulfilled here on earth, or never fulfilled at all. Thus moral behavior really matters — not because God will punish us in some imaginary beyond, but because moral behavior is necessary if we are all to obtain fulfillment on this blue planet of ours, which is the only place fulfillment is possible for us.

These premises are laid out elsewhere and perhaps don’t belong in an introduction to Aquinas. But to me it seems important as we approach Aquinas’ five ways⁵ (his “proofs” of God) to have a bit of background: that theistic premises are not the only premises possible, that there is a pleasing alternative to theism, that if there no God it is not a disaster. It might even open a new and better door.

The Nature of Knowledge

One atheist premise is that the nature of information (and the nature of the way human thinking works) makes it a logical fallacy to conclude that matter is a mechanism, or deterministic in any Cartesian sense. Truth is always a comparative, not an absolute. This means that scientific “laws” like Newton’s laws of motion are not laws per se, not bits of absolute truth however much we like to think so.

All scientific endeavour aims at creating useful descriptions of the world — which allow us to get things done successfully or open the door to future successful descriptions. These descriptions are hypotheses and we choose our hypotheses on the basis of how useful they are compared to competing hypotheses. How do we determine which hypothesis is more useful? By testing and replicating the test: in short, by the scientific method. If one hypothesis is consistently more useful, for our purpose at hand, than competing hypotheses, then we adopt it. If its usefulness over competing hypotheses is overwhelming, and if its consistency with related successful hypotheses leads us to feel we can’t imagine a more useful challenger, scientists will call it a “theory.” If it seems to cover a basic and useful relationship of things, it might even be called a “law.”

But we mustn’t forget that all theories and laws are nothing but very successful, well established hypotheses. They are not absolute truths. They can never be, for the method doesn’t allow that kind of a determination. Why? Because hypotheses are always tested for usefulness against other hypotheses. Laws compete against other laws: all scientific ideas are verified in competition with other ideas.

It is important to note that there is no way to verify science directly against the world itself, except by the process of comparative usefulness. This hypothesis worked, it was useful; that hypothesis did not. But just because one works doesn’t mean a third hypothesis might not also work. In such a case scientists create controlled experiments to test both hypotheses and determine which one is more useful more often.

This is how science works. It runs on the premise that truth is a comparative, not an absolute. If there is absolute truth out there, science has no way of confirming it. It can only confirm comparative truths.

Science works, in other words, precisely because it abandoned the old philosophical tradition of trying to divine absolute truth. In thousand of years, on the other hand, philosophy has made little progress. It is as much a mess as ever. Why? Perhaps because it has failed to recognize that truth is relative, and that hypotheses can only be verified by their usefulness compared to competing hypotheses.

Now, atheists hypothesize that there are no absolute truths about the world. There are, of course, millions of absolute truths bumping around in our heads. All thoughts have an absolute kind of quality, but that is the nature of thoughts. The question, however, is whether any of these absolute thoughts match the real world. The atheist premise is that they do not, and they cannot. To put it another way, there is a mismatch between information and the world itself.

In this world as atheists imagine it to be, the scientific method is the only way to knowledge because it is optimized for discovering comparative truths. Optimized, that is, for the specific kind of world atheists postulate: a world with no absolute truths, with a mismatch between thought or information and the physical world itself, and a human mind that evolved over millions of years not to discover absolute truth, but to develop practical, useful hypotheses about the world.

This hypothesis about information may seem remote from atheism, which after all is only the denial of God. But when we study Aquinas and his five ways⁵, we’ll see why this is indeed at the core of atheism. It is not enough to deny God; we must also overthrow the theistic premises that underlie belief in God. An atheism that rejects God without rejecting the underlying premises of theism is doomed to self-contradiction.

Once we understand what thought is we realize that rather than being primarily a “knower” — though that is a part of us — we are primarily “behavers” and “experiencers” in a phenomenal world that is in an absolute sense unknown and unknowable. This is simply because it is not informational in nature, whereas the mind’s modus operandi is by necessity informational. Yet this mismatch makes no practical difference to science. (But it makes a huge difference to philosophy and religion.) The whole genius of our mental processes is that they are ideally suited for developing useful hypothesis in comparison to alternatives and testing them by their usefulness — and the nature of the world itself simply doesn’t matter.

There is no paradox here. the practicality of the human mind, and of its scientific method, is in line with what we should expected from evolutionary pressures, which are inherently biased toward what is useful, what works. Evolution provides a completely consistent and testable explanation of the origin of our minds and the mental currency of information, and why human thinking takes a form optimized to “know” a non-informational world.

For Aquinas, we have bodies because bodies are necessary to serve the mind in its quest to know the absolute truths of God’s world. For atheists, our minds exist because we are bodies, and because developing minds was a practical and useful benefit under evolutionary pressures. For Aquinas and theists, real meaning and value come from heaven; for atheists they come from earth and from us. For theists, our lives are a temporary stop on our way to God’s realm; for atheists life is all there is or need be and afterlife is a cruel deception. For Aquinas life without God is worthless; for atheists the concept of God renders life worthless.

——— FOOTNOTES ———

1. Aquinas picked up this distinction from “The Consolation of Philosophy” by Boethius (480 – 524) See Philosophy in the Middle Ages, edited by Arthur Hyman and James J. Walsh, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1974, p.115: “One of Boethius’ many incisive statements gave rise to another distinction much discussed by later medievals. Commenting on the difference between God and creatures, he states that in beings other than God, ‘being’ (esse) and ‘that which is’ (id quod est) are different. In making this distinction Boethius has in mind that while individual substances are composed of various parts, none of these parts make a substance to be what it is. Its determinate characteristic is provided by a unifying and determining principle–its being (esse). Though, for Boethius, this distinction serves only to describe the relation between a substance and that principle which makes it to be what it is, Aquinas finds in it a supporting text for his own distinction between ‘essence’ and ‘existence’.” Aquinas may also have been indebted to other Aristotelians such as Avicenna (980 – 1037) and Averroes (1126 – 1198). For example, on page 283 of Philosophy in the Middle Ages, we read: “Analyzing substances existing within the world, Avicenna had distinguished between their essence and existence, affirming at the same time that essence is ontologically prior to existence and that existence is something added to essence….Rejecting this Avicennian distinction, Averroes held that individual substances exist primarily and, though the mind can distinguish between essence and existence in them, ontologically speaking, the two are one. Thus, while for Avicenna essences were primary, for Averroes primacy belonged to individual substances.” Finally, someone with a bit of common sense!

2. Introduction to St. Thomas Aquinas, edited by Anton C. Pegis, NY: The Modern Library, 1948, p. xxiv

3. Introduction to St. Thomas Aquinas, edited by Anton C. Pegis, NY: The Modern Library, 1948, p. xxiii

4. Skinner, B. F. Beyond Freedom and Dignity, Bantam Books; 11th Print edition (1972)

5. In his Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas presented five “ways” by which the existence of God could be proven. (It is not to be thought that these proofs originate with Aquinas. Most can be found in Islamic, Jewish, and Christian philosophical traditions well before Aquinas.)

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.

For practical purposes, evolution is the dividing line between theism and atheism.

Evolution points the way to a naturalistic explanation for the design we see in the world around us. If evolution is false, a naturalistic explanation for design becomes extremely difficult to hold, so that for all practical purposes we can say that if evolution is false atheism is probably false. Conversely we can say that if evolution is true, then theism is probably false.

Only probably.

But that’s enough to make evolution into a continental divide.

I say that if evolution is true then theism is probably false because theism has a very difficult time explaining certain congenital flaws in the world’s design, while evolution breezes through. For example, life must eat other life to survive — a fact of existence which poses no problems for evolution, yet stymies theism. So long as theism is the only choice its inherent difficulties must be accepted, but if the scientific view of evolution is valid then theism is not the only choice. And certainly not the best.

This observation is actually strengthened by a declaration made by The Vatican’s Observatory Director, George Coyne. Coyne, who is ordained but is also an astrophysicist, whole-heartedly embraces evolution. But at what cost?

“The intelligent design movement belittles God. It makes God a designer, an engineer,” said Vatican Observatory Director George Coyne, an astrophysicist who is also ordained. “The God of religious faith is a god of love. He did not design me.” –CNN article 2/20/2006

If evolution is true, then God is driven out of the design business. That’s a valid move to make, and reminds me of Process Theology. But surely it leaves us with a God less compelling and less necessary than the one we had before.