On Arguing God’s Existence

A Philosophical Happy Hour on the Unseriousness of Modern Objectors

It has become fashionable for analytic philosophers in recent years[1] to attack arguments for the existence of God.  These attacks, though their permutations are quite numerous, ordinarily attempt to show that the conception of God somehow entails a contradiction.  These might include some form of the problem of evil: namely, that if there is an infinitely good God, how can there be evil—or at least, “gratuitous” evils?  Another popular claim is that God’s omnipotence would contradict our freedom.  Others still might say that arguments for God fail because they presume a premise which is unproven or indemonstrable, against which some alternative can or might be proposed.

But are these objections serious?

To clarify the question, by “serious” I mean: consistently seeking an understanding of the truth in a way befitting our capacities as human beings.

Thus, to answer the question: no, I do not think so.  Why not?

Serious Inquiry

What makes an inquiry serious?  For a difficult and important question—one where belief in the answer not only has significant consequences for our behavior but which lacks an easy resolution—seriousness begins in humility.  To undertake an inquiry with humility requires a recognition of what one does not know and that it might influence the arguments at stake.

For instance, take the average person of today and ask him or her to read St. Thomas Aquinas’ five ways arguing for the existence of God.  Even most skeptics will doubtless admit that, absent prior extensive experience in philosophy and terminological clarifications, the arguments are not likely to be understood very well.  But just what does one have to know in order rightly to interpret Aquinas’ arguments?  Is it merely a matter of reading all of Aquinas’ works (no small feat)?  Of all of Aristotle’s works?  Augustine’s?  Albertus Magnus’?  Do we need the disputations of Scotus, the clarifications of Cajetan, the Iberian schools?  What of 20th century Thomism?

The point here is not that one need to read all of these thinkers to take seriously Aquinas’ arguments—but it is to say that the seriousness of the argument is manifestly indicated by the wide range of thinkers who have engaged with Aquinas’ thought.  These engagements, further—if examined closely in themselves—reveal that interpretation of Aquinas himself seldom proves straightforward.  Time, language, circumstance, and myriad other factors alter one’s interpretive disposition.  Absent careful and thoughtful consideration of these factors, we invariably import meanings into the argument that the argument does not itself contain and thereby turn it into a strawman.

No serious inquiry does this. 

Unserious Arguments

That modern objectors to the existence of God commonly (which is not to say universally) lack the requisite humility and therefore seriousness to undertake a serious inquiry can be seen through some common characteristics of these arguments.  Allow me to draw attention to five of these.

First, it does seem almost universally the case that modern analytic philosophers, to attempt handling such arguments, always translate them not only into anachronistic language (i.e., using modern terms with modern meanings for ancient or scholastic concepts) but further translate these into the artificial languages of symbolic logic.  While symbolic logic proves very useful for grasping the form and validity of arguments, it actively detracts from grasping the soundness and the significance of the terms.

Second, it is common for these arguments to rely upon presuppositions concerning time, matter, and causality, often deflecting responsibility for answering these questions onto idioscopic science or simply ignoring the necessity of their explicit investigation.  These presuppositions, being erroneous, lead naturally to erroneous conclusions.  This becomes doubly-problematic when these erroneous presuppositions are used to interpret arguments from antiquity—torturing their meaning by a Procrustean framework.

Third, many of the arguments against the necessity of a first cause affect their conclusions by subtly shifting claims’ intended significance—a kind of equivocation—to focus on parts rather than wholes.  For instance, in objecting to the first way, Schmid and Linford (2023: Existential Inertia and Classical Theistic Proofs, 22) read “everything” (or “whatever”; in Latin, omne) in Aquinas’ first way to signify “each and every single thing”, when it is said that everything moved is moved by another and that, since this cannot go on to infinity, there must be some first mover.  But had Aquinas intended “each and every single thing”, he would not have used the word omne, but, rather, quodcumque, quilibet, or the like, as he does seemingly everywhere.  Put otherwise, omne is not here used distributively but collectively.[2]

This leads to the fourth point of unseriousness: the objectors seem, by and large, not to themselves ask with intent to answer the questions put forward by defenders of God’s existence, but, rather, only to find possible refutations of them.  Subsequently, their intent seems not to be conviction but rather persuasion, whether or not conviction is a part of that persuasion.  Thus, one will often find a kind of moral outrage—“how dare your God commit such atrocities!”—without any consideration that it could be our understanding which is wrong, and not God.

Fifth and finally, though hard to notice or accurately summarize them, certain noetic presuppositions stand behind and shape the objections.  Because the objectors themselves do not state explicitly their presuppositions (and perhaps are not even consciously aware of them), they make themselves known primarily by a kind of absence.  Nominalism,[3] for example, or an effete empiricism[4] being quite common.  By such presuppositions, and by maintaining them as necessary conditions for any debate, a skeptical objector establishes the impossibility of any argument for God’s existence.

Conversation and Disputation

In describing why thinkers may adopt an absurd conclusion (and specifically in this case, those who deny the principle of non-contradiction), Aquinas writes the following:[5]

Some of these thinkers lapse into this position on account of doubt: for, since certain sophistical rationales occur to them, from which the aforesaid positions seem to follow, and they do not know how to solve these, they concede the conclusions.  Hence their ignorance is easily cured.  For one must not strive to meet or attack the rationales which they posit, but rather make appeal to their minds, so as to resolve the doubts through which their minds have fallen into such opinions.  And thus, from this, they will withdraw from those positions.

Others, however, pursue the aforesaid positions not because some doubt induces them to these opinions, but only for the sake of expression, that is, from a certain impudence, wishing to sustain these impossible arguments on account of their own sakes—because the contraries of these positions cannot be demonstrated.  And the treatment for these thinkers is argumentation or rejection of that which is expressed in speech and in words, that is, from the fact that the expressions of speech signify something.  For the signification of speech depends upon the signification of words.  And thus it is necessary to have recourse to the principle that words signify something.

Thomas Aquinas 1270/71: Super Sententiam Metaphysicae, lib.4, lec.10, n.663-664. Translation my own.

Now… I do not mean to suggest that the objectors here being identified are as sophistical and egotistical as those who would deny the principle of non-contradiction.  Nonetheless, it bears asking: what is it that truly they are expressing in speech and words?  Do they maintain their objections from a certain impudence?  Are they befuddled by sophistical rationalizations?

Join us this Wednesday to think and discuss (not to debate) how one seriously inquires into the existence of God. [Note: this Happy Hour will be recorded, but this recording will be kept strictly within the Lyceum Institute.]

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[1] I suppose this is true in much of the history of analytic philosophy, but the internet has renewed the trend’s interest and vigor.

[2] Oppy 2023: “Validity and Soundness in the First Way” in Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia, 79.1-2: 148-49 makes precisely the same mistake.  To be fair to Schmid and Linford, they are responding more directly to an interpretation of Aquinas—that by McNabb and DeVito—than to Aquinas himself.  But this in itself is a problem.  Reliance upon interpretations of translations (in this case, by those of Fr. Lawrence Shapcote OP and Anton Pegis), rather than directly addressing the proper signification of the Latin as used by Aquinas, will always be like fighting a shadow with a flashlight.

[3] We can identify both a positive and a negative form of nominalism: positively, as the belief that only individuals exist; negatively, as the denial that mind-independent relations exist or, what is functionally the same, that they can be known by us.

[4] That is, the belief that for a statement to be meaningful there has to be a concrete empirical object which fully instantiates that statement’s meaning.

[5] 1270/71: Super Sententiam Metaphysicae, lib.4, lec.10, n.663-664: “Quidam enim [aliqui incidunt in praedicas positiones] ex dubitatione.  Cum enim eis occurrunt aliquae sophisticae rationes, ex quibus videantur sequi praedictae positiones, et eas nesciunt solvere, concedunt conclusionem.  Unde eorum ignorantia est facile curabilis.  Non enim obviandum est eis vel occurrendum ad rationes quas ponunt, sed ad mentem, ut scilicet solvatur dubitatio de mentibus, per quam in huiusmodi opinions inciderunt.  Et tunc ab istis positionibus recedunt.

“Alii vero praedictas positiones prosequuntur non protper aliquam dubitatoinem eos ad hiuismodi inducentm, sed solum causa orationis, idest ex quaedam protervia, volentes huiusmodi rationes impossibiles sustinere propter seipsa, quia contraria earum demonstrari non possunt.  Et horum medela est argumentatio vel arguitio quae est in voce orationis et in nominibus, idest per hoc quod ipsa vox orationis aliquid significat.  Significatio autem orationis a significatione nomun dependet.  Et sic oportet ad hoc principium redire, quod nomina aliquid significant”.