Cognitive science of religion is the study of religious
thought and behavior from the perspective of cognitive science, and
often engages with evolutionary science, which it assumes is its
foundation. The field employs methods and theories from a wide range of
disciplines, including cognitive psychology, evolutionary psychology, cognitive anthropology, artificial intelligence, developmental psychology, and archaeology.
Scholars in this field seek to explain how human minds acquire,
generate, and transmit religious thoughts, practices, and schemas by
means of ordinary cognitive capacities.
History
Although
religion has been the subject of serious scientific study since at
least the late nineteenth century, the study of religion as a cognitive
phenomenon is relatively recent. While it often relies upon earlier
research within anthropology of religion and sociology of religion,
cognitive science of religion considers the results of that work within
the context of evolutionary and cognitive theories. As such, cognitive
science of religion was only made possible by the cognitive revolution of the 1950s and the development, starting in the 1970s, of sociobiology and other approaches explaining human behaviour in evolutionary terms, especially evolutionary psychology.
While Dan Sperber foreshadowed cognitive science of religion in his 1975 book Rethinking Symbolism, the earliest research to fall within the scope of the discipline was published during the 1980s. Among this work, Stewart E. Guthrie's "A cognitive theory of religion"
was significant for examining the significance of anthropomorphism
within religion, work that ultimately led to the development of the
concept of the hyperactive agency detection device – a key concept within cognitive science of religion.
The real beginning of cognitive science of religion can be dated
to the 1990s. During that decade a large number of highly influential
books and articles were published which helped to lay the foundations of
cognitive science of religion. These included Rethinking Religion: Connecting Cognition and Culture and Bringing Ritual to Mind: Psychological Foundations of Cultural Forms by E. Thomas Lawson and Robert McCauley, Naturalness of Religious Ideas by Pascal Boyer, Inside the Cult and Arguments and Icons by Harvey Whitehouse, and Guthrie's book-length development of his earlier theories in Faces in the Clouds.
In the 1990s, these and other researchers, who had been working
independently in a variety of different disciplines, discovered each
other's work and found valuable parallels between their approaches, with
the result that something of a self-aware research tradition began to
coalesce. By 2000, the field was well-enough defined for Justin L. Barrett to coin the term 'cognitive science of religion' in his article "Exploring the natural foundations of religion".
Since 2000, cognitive science of religion has grown,
similarly to other approaches that apply evolutionary thinking to
sociological phenomena. Each year more researchers become involved in
the field,
with theoretical and empirical developments proceeding at a very rapid
pace. The field remains somewhat loosely defined, bringing together as
it does researchers who come from a variety of different traditions.
Much of the cohesion in the field comes not from shared detailed
theoretical commitments but from a general willingness to view religion
in cognitive and evolutionary terms as well as from the willingness to
engage with the work of the others developing this field. A vital role
in bringing together researchers is played by the International Association for the Cognitive Science of Religion, formed in 2006.
Theoretical basis
Despite a lack of agreement concerning the theoretical basis for work
in cognitive science of religion, it is possible to outline some
tendencies. Most significant of these is reliance upon the theories
developed within evolutionary psychology.
That particular approach to evolutionary explanations of human
behaviour is particularly suitable to the cognitive byproduct
explanation of religion that is most popular among cognitive scientists
of religion.
This is because of the focus on byproduct and ancestral trait
explanations within evolutionary psychology. A particularly significant
concept associated with this approach is modularity of mind,
used as it is to underpin accounts of the mental mechanisms seen to be
responsible for religious beliefs. Important examples of work that falls
under this rubric are provided by research carried out by Pascal Boyer and Justin L. Barrett.
These theoretical commitments are not shared by all cognitive
scientists of religion, however. Ongoing debates regarding the
comparative advantages of different evolutionary explanations for human
behaviour find a reflection within cognitive science of religion with dual inheritance theory recently gaining adherents among researchers in the field, including Armin Geertz and Ara Norenzayan.
The perceived advantage of this theoretical framework is its ability to
deal with more complex interactions between cognitive and cultural
phenomena, but it comes at the cost of experimental design having to
take into consideration a richer range of possibilities.
Main concepts
Cognitive byproduct
The
view that religious beliefs and practices should be understood as
nonfunctional but as produced by human cognitive mechanisms that are
functional outside of the context of religion. Examples of this are the
hyperactive agent detection device and the minimally counterintuitive concepts or the process of initiation explaining buddhism and taoism. The cognitive byproduct explanation of religion is an application of the concept of spandrel (biology) and of the concept of exaptation explored by Stephen Jay Gould among others.
Minimally counterintuitive concepts
Concepts
that mostly fit human preconceptions but break with them in one or two
striking ways. These concepts are both easy to remember (thanks to the
counterintuitive elements) and easy to use (thanks to largely agreeing
with what people expect). Examples include talking trees and
noncorporeal agents. Pascal Boyer argues that many religious entities fit into this category. Upal
labelled the fact that minimally counterintuitive ideas are better
remembered than intuitive and maximally counterintuitive ideas as the minimal counterintuitiveness effect or the MCI-effect.
Hyperactive agency detection device
Cognitive scientistJustin L. Barrett
postulates that this mental mechanism, whose function is to identify
the activity of agents, may contribute to belief in the presence of the
supernatural. Given the relative costs of failing to spot an agent, the
mechanism is said to be hyperactive, producing a large number of false positive errors. Stewart E. Guthrie and others have claimed these errors can explain the appearance of supernatural concepts.
Pro-social adaptation
According
to the prosocial adaptation account of religion, religious beliefs and
practices should be understood as having the function of eliciting
adaptive prosocial behaviour and avoiding the free rider problem. Within the cognitive science of religion this approach is primarily pursued by Richard Sosis. David Sloan Wilson
is another major proponent of this approach and interprets religion as a
group-level adaptation, but his work is generally seen as falling
outside the cognitive science of religion.
Costly signaling
Practices that, due to their inherent cost, can be relied upon to provide an honest signal regarding the intentions of the agent. Richard Sosis
has suggested that religious practices can be explained as costly
signals of the willingness to cooperate. A similar line of argument has
been pursued by Lyle Steadman and Craig Palmer. Alternatively, D. Jason Slone has argued that religiosity may be a costly signal used as a mating strategy in so far as religiosity serves as a proxy for "family values."
Dual inheritance
In
the context of cognitive science of religion, dual inheritance theory
can be understood as attempting to combine the cognitive byproduct and
prosocial adaptation accounts using the theoretical approach developed
by Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson,
among others. The basic view is that while belief in supernatural
entities is a cognitive byproduct, cultural traditions have recruited
such beliefs to motivate prosocial behaviour. A sophisticated statement
of this approach can be found in Scott Atran and Joseph Henrich (2010).
The evolutionary psychology of religion is the study of religious belief using evolutionary psychology principles. It is one approach to the psychology of religion. As with all other organs and organ functions, the brain's functional structure is argued to have a genetic basis, and is therefore subject to the effects of natural selection and evolution.
Evolutionary psychologists seek to understand cognitive processes,
religion in this case, by understanding the survival and reproductive
functions they might serve.
Mechanisms of evolution
Scientists generally agree with the idea that a propensity to engage
in religious behavior evolved early in human history. However, there is
disagreement on the exact mechanisms that drove the evolution of the
religious mind. There are two schools of thought. One is that religion
itself evolved due to natural selection and is an adaptation,
in which case religion conferred some sort of evolutionary advantage.
The other is that religious beliefs and behaviors, such as the concept
of a protogod,
may have emerged as by-products of other adaptive traits without initially being selected for because of their own benefits.
Religious behavior often involves significant costs—including economic costs, celibacy, dangerous rituals,
or the expending of time that could be used otherwise. This would
suggest that natural selection should act against religious behavior
unless it or something else causes religious behavior to have
significant advantages.
Religion as an adaptation
Richard Sosis and Candace Alcorta have reviewed several of the prominent theories for the adaptive value of religion.
Many are "social solidarity theories", which view religion as having
evolved to enhance cooperation and cohesion within groups. Group
membership in turn provides benefits which can enhance an individual's
chances for survival and reproduction. These benefits range from
coordination advantages to the facilitation of costly behavior rules.
Sosis also researched 200 utopian communes in the 19th-century United States, both religious and secular (mostly socialist).
39 percent of the religious communes were still functioning 20 years
after their founding while only 6 percent of the secular communes were.
The number of costly sacrifices that a religious commune demanded from
its members had a linear effect on its longevity, while in secular
communes demands for costly sacrifices did not correlate with longevity
and the majority of the secular communes failed within 8 years. Sosis
cites anthropologist Roy Rappaport in arguing that rituals and laws are more effective when sacralized. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt cites Sosis's research in his 2012 book The Righteous Mind as the best evidence that religion is an adaptive solution to the free-rider problem by enabling cooperation without kinship. Evolutionary medicine researcher Randolph M. Nesse and theoretical biologist Mary Jane West-Eberhard have argued instead that because humans with altruistic tendencies are preferred as social partners they receive fitness advantages by social selection,
with Nesse arguing further that social selection enabled humans as a
species to become extraordinarily cooperative and capable of creating culture.
Edward O. Wilson's theory of "eusociality" strongly suggests
group cohesion as the impetus for the development of religion. Wilson
posits that the individuals of a small percentage of species (including
homo sapiens, ants, termites, bees and a few other species) replicated
their genes by adhering to one of a number of competing groups. He
further postulates that, in homo sapiens, thanks to their enormous
forebrains, there evolved a complex interplay between group evolution
and individual evolution within a group.
These social solidarity theories may help to explain the painful or dangerous nature of many religious rituals. Costly-signaling theory
suggests that such rituals might serve as public and hard-to-fake
signals that an individual's commitment to the group is sincere. Since
there would be a considerable benefit in trying to cheat the
system—taking advantage of group-living benefits without taking on any
possible costs—the ritual would not be something simple that can be
taken lightly.
Warfare is a good example of a cost of group living, and Richard Sosis,
Howard C. Kress, and James S. Boster carried out a cross-cultural
survey which demonstrated that men in societies which engage in war do
submit to the costliest rituals.
Studies that show more direct positive associations between
religious practice and health and longevity are more controversial.
Harold G. Koenig and Harvey J. Cohen summarized and assessed the results
of 100 evidence-based studies that systematically examined the
relationship between religion and human well-being, finding that 79%
showed a positive influence. Such studies rate in mass media, as seen in a 2009 NPR
program which covered University of Miami professor Gail Ironson's
findings that belief in God and a strong sense of spirituality
correlated with a lower viral load and improved immune-cell levels in
HIV patients. Richard P. Sloan of Columbia University, in contrast, told the New York Times that "there is no really good compelling evidence that there is a relationship between religious involvement and health."
Debate continues over the validity of these findings, which do not
necessarily prove a direct cause-and-effect relationship between
religion and health. Mark Stibich claims there is a clear correlation
but that the reason for it remains unclear. A criticism of such placebo
effects, as well as the advantage of religion giving a sense of
meaning, is that it seems likely that less complex mechanisms than
religious behavior could achieve such goals.
Religion as a by-product
Stephen Jay Gould cites religion as an example of an exaptation or spandrel,
but he does not himself select a definite trait which he thinks natural
selection has actually acted on. He does, however, bring up Freud's
suggestion that our large brains, which evolved for other reasons, led
to consciousness. The beginning of consciousness forced humans to deal
with the concept of personal mortality. Religion may have been one
solution to this problem.
Other researchers have proposed specific psychological processes
which natural selection may have fostered alongside religion. Such
mechanisms may include the ability to infer the presence of organisms
that might do harm (agent detection), the ability to come up with causal narratives for natural events (etiology), and the ability to recognize that other people have minds of their own with their own beliefs, desires and intentions (theory of mind).
These three adaptations (among others) allow human beings to imagine
purposeful agents behind many observations that could not readily be
explained otherwise, e.g. thunder, lightning, movement of planets,
complexity of life.
Pascal Boyer suggests in his book Religion Explained (2001) that there is no simple explanation for religious consciousness. He builds on the ideas of cognitive anthropologists Dan Sperber and Scott Atran, who argued that religious cognition represents a by-product of various evolutionary adaptations, including folk psychology.
He argues that one such factor is that it has, in most cases, been
advantageous for humans to remember "minimally counter-intuitive"
concepts which are somewhat different from the daily routine and
somewhat violate innate expectations about how the world is constructed.
A god that is in many aspects like humans but much more powerful is
such a concept, while the often much more abstract god discussed at
length by theologians is often too counter-intuitive. Experiments support that religious people think about their god in anthropomorphic terms even if this contradicts the more complex theological doctrines of their religion.
Pierre Lienard and Pascal Boyer suggest that humans evolved a
"hazard-precaution system" which allowed them to detect potential
threats in the environment and to attempt to respond appropriately.
Several features of ritual behaviors, often a major feature of
religion, are held to trigger this system. These include the occasion
for the ritual (often the prevention or elimination of danger or evil),
the harm believed to result from nonperformance of the ritual, and the
detailed prescriptions for proper performance of the ritual. Lienard and
Boyer discuss the possibility that a sensitive hazard-precaution system
itself may have provided fitness benefits, and that religion then
"associates individual, unmanageable anxieties with coordinated action
with others and thereby makes them more tolerable or meaningful".
Justin L. Barrett in Why Would Anyone Believe in God?
(2004) suggests that belief in God is natural because it depends on
mental tools possessed by all human beings. He suggests that the
structure and development of human minds make belief in the existence of
a supreme god (with properties such as being superknowing,
superpowerful and immortal) highly attractive. He also compares belief
in God to belief in other minds, and devotes a chapter to looking at the
evolutionary psychology of atheism.
He suggests that one of the fundamental mental modules in the brain is
the Hyperactive Agency Detection Device (HADD), another potential system
for identifying danger. This HADD may confer a survival benefit even if
it is over-sensitive: it is better to avoid an imaginary predator than
be killed by a real one. This would tend to encourage belief in ghosts
and in spirits.
Though hominids probably began using their emerging cognitive abilities to meet basic needs like nutrition and mates, Terror Management Theory
argues that this happened before they had reached the point where
significant self- (and thus end-of-self-) awareness arose. Awareness of death
became a highly disruptive byproduct of prior adaptive functions. The
resulting anxiety threatened to undermine these very functions and thus
needed amelioration. Any social formation or practice that was to be
widely accepted by the masses needed to provide a means of managing such
terror. The main strategy to do so was to "become an individual of
value in a world of meaning … acquiring self-esteem [via] the creation
and maintenance of culture", as this would counter the sense of insignificance represented by death and provide: 1) symbolic immortality
through the legacy of a culture that lives on beyond the physical self
("earthly significance") 2) literal immortality, the promise of an afterlife or continued existence featured in religions ("cosmic significance").
Religion as a meme
Richard Dawkins suggests in The Selfish Gene (1976) that cultural memes function like genes in that they are subject to natural selection. In The God Delusion (2006) Dawkins further argues that because religious truths cannot be questioned,
their very nature encourages religions to spread like "mind viruses".
In such a conception, it is necessary that the individuals who are
unable to question their beliefs are more biologically fit than
individuals who are capable of questioning their beliefs. Thus, it could
be concluded that sacred scriptures or oral traditions
created a behavioral pattern that elevated biological fitness for
believing individuals. Individuals who were capable of challenging such
beliefs, even if the beliefs were enormously improbable, became rarer
and rarer in the population.
This model holds that religion is a byproduct of the cognitive
modules in the human brain that arose in the evolutionary past to deal
with problems of survival and reproduction. Initial concepts of
supernatural agents may arise in the tendency of humans to "overdetect"
the presence of other humans or predators (for example: momentarily
mistaking a vine for a snake). For instance, a man might report that he
felt something sneaking up on him, but it vanished when he looked
around.
Stories of these experiences are especially likely to be retold,
passed on and embellished due to their descriptions of standard
ontological categories (person, artifact, animal, plant, natural object)
with counterintuitive properties (humans that are invisible, houses
that remember what happened in them, etc.). These stories become even
more salient when they are accompanied by activation of non-violated
expectations for the ontological category (houses that "remember"
activates our intuitive psychology of mind; i.e. we automatically
attribute thought processes to them).
One of the attributes of our intuitive psychology of mind is that
humans are interested in the affairs of other humans. This may result
in the tendency for concepts of supernatural agents to inevitably
cross-connect with human intuitive moral feelings (evolutionary behavioral
guidelines). In addition, the presence of dead bodies creates an
uncomfortable cognitive state in which dreams and other mental modules
(person identification and behavior prediction) continue to run
decoupled from reality, producing incompatible intuitions that the dead
are somehow still around. When this is coupled with the human
predisposition to see misfortune as a social event (as someone's responsibility
rather than the outcome of mechanical processes) it may activate the
intuitive "willingness to make exchanges" module of the human theory of
minds, compelling the bereaved to try to interact and bargain with
supernatural agents (ritual).
In a large enough group, some individuals will seem better
skilled at these rituals than others and will become specialists. As
societies grow and encounter other societies, competition will ensue and
a "survival of the fittest" effect may cause the practitioners to
modify their concepts to provide a more abstract, more widely acceptable
version. Eventually the specialist practitioners form a cohesive group
or guild with its attendant political goals (religion).
A common misconception is that theism is ancient while atheism is modern, but mankind has been making arguments for and against the existence of deities—including, with the rise of monotheism, God—since the dawn of human history. Bronze Age texts such as the Vedas present various arguments against the deities, such as the problem of evil and the Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit, as well as arguments for the deities, such as argument from morality and Pascal's wager. From the ancient Greeks to the medievalJapanese people to the Native Americans, the arguments for and against deities are as old as the idea of a deity itself. Some atheists and theists
see the antiquity of their beliefs as a worthy tradition to carry on,
while others believe arguing about the existence of a God is a
never-ending cycle that produces little fulfillment.
Positions
Europeans polled who "believe in a god", according to Eurobarometer in 2005
North Americans polled about religious identity 2010-2012
Positions on the existence of God can be divided along numerous axes, producing a variety of orthogonal classifications. Theism and atheism are positions of belief (or lack of it), while gnosticism and agnosticism are positions of knowledge (or the lack of it). Ignosticism concerns belief about God's conceptual coherence. Apatheism concerns belief about the practical importance of whether God exists.
Strong theist. 100% probability that God exists. In the words of C.G. Jung: "I do not believe, I know."
De factotheist.
Very high probability but short of 100%. "I don't know for certain, but
I strongly believe in God and live my life on the assumption that he is
there."
Leaning towards theism. Higher than 50% but not very high. "I am very uncertain, but I am inclined to believe in God."
Completely impartial. Exactly 50%. "God's existence and nonexistence are exactly equiprobable."
Leaning towards atheism. Lower than 50% but not very low. "I do not know whether God exists but I'm inclined to be skeptical."
De facto atheist. Very low probability, but short of zero. "I
don't know for certain but I think God is very improbable, and I live
my life on the assumption that he is not there."
Strong atheist. "I know there is no God, with the same conviction as Jung knows there is one."
Theism
The Catholic Church, following the teachings of Paul the Apostle, Thomas Aquinas, and the First Vatican Council, affirms that God's existence "can be known with certainty from the created world by the natural light of human reason".
Traditional religious definition of God
In classical theism,
God is characterized as the metaphysically ultimate being (the first,
timeless, absolutely simple and sovereign being, who is devoid of any anthropomorphic qualities), in distinction to other conceptions such as theistic personalism, open theism, and process theism. Classical theists do not believe that God can be completely defined. They believe it would contradict the transcendent nature of God for mere humans to define him. Robert Barron explains by analogy that it seems impossible for a two-dimensional object to conceive of three-dimensional humans.
In modern Western societies, the concepts of God typically entail a monotheistic, supreme, ultimate, and personal being, as found in the Christian, Islamic and Jewish traditions. In monotheistic religions outside the Abrahamic traditions,
the existence of God is discussed in similar terms. In these
traditions, God is also identified as the author (either directly or by
inspiration) of certain texts, or that certain texts describe specific
historical events caused by the God in question or communications from
God (whether in direct speech or via dreams or omens). Some traditions
also believe that God is the entity which is currently answering prayers
for intervention or information or opinions.
Ibn Rushd, a 12th-century Islamic scholar
Many Islamic scholars have used philosophical and rational arguments to prove the existence of God. For example, Ibn Rushd,
a 12th-century Islamic scholar, philosopher, and physician, states
there are only two arguments worthy of adherence, both of which are
found in what he calls the "Precious Book" (The Qur'an). Rushd cites
“providence” and “invention” in using the Qur'an's parables to claim the
existence of God. Rushd argues that the Earth's weather patterns are
conditioned to support human life; thus, if the planet is so
finely-tuned to maintain life, then it suggests a fine tuner - God. The
Sun and the Moon are not just random objects floating in the Milky Way,
rather they serve us day and night, and the way nature works and how
life is formed, humankind benefits from it. Rushd essentially comes to a
conclusion that there has to be a higher being who has made everything
perfectly to serve the needs of human beings.
Moses ben Maimon, widely known as Maimonides,
was a Jewish scholar who tried to logically prove the existence of God.
Maimonides offered proofs for the existence of God, but he did not
begin with defining God first, like many others do. Rather, he used the
description of the earth and the universe to prove the existence of God.
He talked about the Heavenly bodies and how they are committed to
eternal motion. Maimonides argued that because every physical object is
finite, it can only contain a finite amount of power. If everything in
the universe, which includes all the planets and the stars, is finite,
then there has to be an infinite power to push forth the motion of
everything in the universe. Narrowing down to an infinite being, the
only thing that can explain the motion is an infinite being (meaning
God) which is neither a body nor a force in the body. Maimonides
believed that this argument gives us a ground to believe that God is,
not an idea of what God is. He believed that God cannot be understood or
be compared.
Non-personal definitions of God
In pantheism,
God and the universe are considered to be the same thing. In this
view, the natural sciences are essentially studying the nature of God.
This definition of God creates the philosophical problem that a universe
with God and one without God are the same, other than the words used to
describe it.
Deism and panentheism
assert that there is a God distinct from, or which extends beyond
(either in time or in space or in some other way) the universe. These
positions deny that God intervenes in the operation of the universe,
including communicating with humans personally. The notion that God
never intervenes or communicates with the universe, or may have evolved
into the universe (as in pandeism), makes it difficult, if not by definition impossible, to distinguish between a universe with God and one without.
The Ethics of Baruch Spinoza gave two demonstrations of the existence of God. The God of Spinoza is uncaused by any external force and has no free will, it is not personal and not anthropomorphic.
Debate about how theism should be argued
In
Christian faith, theologians and philosophers make a distinction
between: (a) preambles of faith and (b) articles of faith. The preambles
include alleged truths contained in revelation which are nevertheless
demonstrable by reason, e.g., the immortality of the soul, the existence
of God. The articles of faith, on the other hand, contain truths that
cannot be proven or reached by reason alone and presuppose the truths of
the preambles, e.g., the Holy Trinity, is not demonstrable and
presupposes the existence of God.
The argument that the existence of God can be known to all, even
prior to exposure to any divine revelation, predates Christianity. Paul the Apostle
made this argument when he said that pagans were without excuse because
"since the creation of the world God's invisible nature, namely, his
eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that
have been made". In this, Paul alludes to the proofs for a creator, later enunciated by Thomas Aquinas and others, but that had also been explored by the Greek philosophers.
Another apologetical school of thought, including Dutch and American Reformed thinkers (such as Abraham Kuyper, Benjamin Warfield, Herman Dooyeweerd), emerged in the late 1920s. This school was instituted by Cornelius Van Til, and came to be popularly called presuppositional apologetics
(though Van Til himself felt "transcendental" would be a more accurate
title). The main distinction between this approach and the more
classical evidentialist approach is that the presuppositionalist denies
any common ground between the believer and the non-believer, except that
which the non-believer denies, namely, the assumption of the truth of
the theistic worldview. In other words, presuppositionalists do not
believe that the existence of God can be proven by appeal to raw,
uninterpreted, or "brute" facts, which have the same (theoretical)
meaning to people with fundamentally different worldviews, because they
deny that such a condition is even possible. They claim that the only
possible proof for the existence of God is that the very same belief is
the necessary condition to the intelligibility of all other human
experience and action. They attempt to prove the existence of God by
means of appeal to the transcendental
necessity of the belief—indirectly (by appeal to the unavowed
presuppositions of the non-believer's worldview) rather than directly
(by appeal to some form of common factuality). In practice this school
utilizes what have come to be known as transcendental arguments.
In these arguments they claim to demonstrate that all human experience
and action (even the condition of unbelief, itself) is a proof for the
existence of God, because God's existence is the necessary condition of
their intelligibility.
Alvin Plantinga presents an argument for the existence of God using modal logic. Others have said that the logical and philosophical arguments for and against the existence of God miss the point. The word God
has a meaning in human culture and history that does not correspond to
the beings whose existence is supported by such arguments, assuming they
are valid. The real question is not whether a "most perfect being" or
an "uncaused first cause" exist. The real question is whether Jehovah, Zeus, Ra,
Krishna, or any gods of any religion exist, and if so, which gods? On
the other hand, many theists equate all monotheistic or henotheistic
"most perfect Beings", no matter what name is assigned to them/him, as
the one monotheistic God (one example would be understanding the Muslim Allah, Christian YHWH, and Chinese Shangdi
as different names for the same Being). Most of these arguments do not
resolve the issue of which of these figures is more likely to exist.
These arguments fail to make the distinction between immanent gods and a
Transcendent God.
Some Christians note that the Christian faith teaches "salvation is by faith",
and that faith is reliance upon the faithfulness of God. The most
extreme example of this position is called fideism, which holds that
faith is simply the will to believe, and argues that if God's existence
were rationally demonstrable, faith in its existence would become
superfluous. Søren Kierkegaard
argued that objective knowledge, such as 1+1=2, is unimportant to
existence. If God could rationally be proven, his existence would be
unimportant to humans. It is because God cannot rationally be proven that his existence is important to us. In The Justification of Knowledge, the Calvinist theologian Robert L. Reymond
argues that believers should not attempt to prove the existence of God.
Since he believes all such proofs are fundamentally unsound, believers
should not place their confidence in them, much less resort to them in
discussions with non-believers; rather, they should accept the content
of revelation by faith. Reymond's position is similar to that of his
mentor Gordon Clark,
which holds that all worldviews are based on certain unprovable first
premises (or, axioms), and therefore are ultimately unprovable. The
Christian theist therefore must simply choose to start with Christianity
rather than anything else, by a "leap of faith". This position is also sometimes called presuppositional apologetics, but should not be confused with the Van Tillian variety.
Atheism
The atheistic conclusion is that the arguments and evidence both
indicate there is insufficient reason to believe that any gods exist,
and that personal subjective religious experiences say something about
the human experience rather than the nature of reality itself;
therefore, one has no reason to believe that a god exists.
Positive atheism
Positive atheism (also called "strong atheism" and "hard atheism") is a form of atheism that asserts that no deities exist. The strong atheist explicitly asserts the non-existence of gods.
Negative atheism
Negative
atheism (also called "weak atheism" and "soft atheism") is any type of
atheism other than positive, wherein a person does not believe in the
existence of any deities, but does not explicitly assert there to be
none.
Agnosticism
Agnosticism is the view that the truth value
of certain claims—especially claims about the existence of any deity,
but also other religious and metaphysical claims—is unknown or
unknowable. Agnosticism does not define one's belief or disbelief in gods; agnostics may still identify themselves as theists or atheists.
Strong agnosticism
Strong agnosticism is the belief that it is impossible for humans to know whether or not any deities exist.
Weak agnosticism
Weak agnosticism is the belief that the existence or nonexistence of deities is unknown but not necessarily unknowable.
Agnostic theism
Agnostic theism is the philosophical
view that encompasses both theism and agnosticism. An agnostic theist
believes in the existence of a god or God, but regards the basis of this
proposition as unknown or inherently unknowable. Agnostic theists may also insist on ignorance regarding the properties of the gods they believe in.
Agnostic atheism
Agnostic atheism is a philosophical position that encompasses both
atheism and agnosticism. Agnostic atheists are atheistic because they do
not hold a belief in the existence of any deity and agnostic because they claim that the existence of a deity is either unknowable in principle or currently unknown in fact.
If a man have failed to find any
good reason for believing that there is a God, it is perfectly natural
and rational that he should not believe that there is a God; and if so,
he is an atheist, although he assume no superhuman knowledge, but merely
the ordinary human power of judging of evidence. If he go farther, and,
after an investigation into the nature and reach of human knowledge,
ending in the conclusion that the existence of God is incapable of
proof, cease to believe in it on the ground that he cannot know it to be
true, he is an agnostic and also an atheist, an agnostic-atheist—an
atheist because an agnostic."
Apatheism
An apatheist is someone who is not interested in accepting or denying
any claims that gods exist or do not exist. An apatheist lives as if
there are no gods and explains natural phenomena
without reference to any deities. The existence of gods is not
rejected, but may be designated unnecessary or useless; gods neither
provide purpose to life, nor influence everyday life, according to this view.
Ignosticism
The ignostic (or igtheist) usually concludes that the question of
God's existence or nonexistence is usually not worth discussing because
concepts like "God" are usually not sufficiently or clearly defined.
Ignosticism or igtheism is the theological position that every other
theological position (including agnosticism
and atheism) assumes too much about the concept of God and many other
theological concepts. It can be defined as encompassing two related
views about the existence of God. The view that a coherent definition of
God must be presented before the question of the existence of God can
be meaningfully discussed. Furthermore, if that definition is unfalsifiable, the ignostic takes the theological noncognitivist position that the question of the existence of God (per that definition) is meaningless.
In this case, the concept of God is not considered meaningless; the
term "God" is considered meaningless. The second view is synonymous with
theological noncognitivism, and skips the step of first asking "What is
meant by 'God'?" before proclaiming the original question "Does God
exist?" as meaningless.
Some philosophers have seen ignosticism as a variation of agnosticism or atheism, while others have considered it to be distinct. An ignostic maintains that he cannot even say whether he is a theist or an atheist until a sufficient definition of theism is put forth.
One problem posed by the question of the existence of God is that traditional beliefs usually ascribe to God various supernatural powers. Supernatural beings may be able to conceal and reveal themselves for their own purposes, as for example in the tale of Baucis and Philemon.
In addition, according to concepts of God, God is not part of the
natural order, but the ultimate creator of nature and of the scientific
laws. Thus in Aristotelian philosophy,
God is viewed as part of the explanatory structure needed to support
scientific conclusions and any powers God possesses are—strictly
speaking—of the natural order that is derived from God's place as
originator of nature.
In Karl Popper's philosophy of science,
belief in a supernatural God is outside the natural domain of
scientific investigation because all scientific hypotheses must be
falsifiable in the natural world. The non-overlapping magisteria view proposed by Stephen Jay Gould also holds that the existence (or otherwise) of God is irrelevant to and beyond the domain of science.
Scientists follow the scientific method, within which theories must be verifiable by physical experiment.
The majority of prominent conceptions of God explicitly or effectively
posit a being whose existence is not testable either by proof or
disproof. Therefore, the question of God's existence may lie outside the purview of modern science by definition. The Catholic Church maintains that knowledge of the existence of God is the "natural light of human reason". Fideists maintain that belief in God's existence may not be amenable to demonstration or refutation, but rests on faith alone.
Logical positivists such as Rudolf Carnap and A. J. Ayer
viewed any talk of gods as literal nonsense. For the logical
positivists and adherents of similar schools of thought, statements
about religious or other transcendent experiences can not have a truth value,
and are deemed to be without meaning, because such statements do not
have any clear verification criteria. As the Christian biologist Scott C. Todd
put it "Even if all the data pointed to an intelligent designer, such a
hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic." This argument limits the domain of science to the empirically observable and limits the domain of God to the unprovable.
Nature of relevant proofs and arguments
John Polkinghorne suggests that the nearest analogy to the existence of God in physics is the ideas of quantum mechanics which are seemingly paradoxical but make sense of a great deal of disparate data.
Alvin Plantinga compares the question of the existence of God to the question of the existence of other minds, claiming both are notoriously impossible to "prove" against a determined skeptic.
One approach, suggested by writers such as Stephen D. Unwin, is to treat (particular versions of) theism and naturalism as though they were two hypotheses in the Bayesian
sense, to list certain data (or alleged data), about the world, and to
suggest that the likelihoods of these data are significantly higher
under one hypothesis than the other.
Most of the arguments for, or against, the existence of God can be seen
as pointing to particular aspects of the universe in this way. In
almost all cases it is not seriously suggested by proponents of the
arguments that they are irrefutable, merely that they make one worldview
seem significantly more likely than the other. However, since an
assessment of the weight of evidence depends on the prior probability that is assigned to each worldview, arguments that a theist finds convincing may seem thin to an atheist and vice versa.
Philosophers, such as Wittgenstein, take a view that is considered anti-realist and oppose philosophical arguments related to God's existence. For instance, Charles Taylor
contends that the real is whatever will not go away. If we cannot
reduce talk about God to anything else, or replace it, or prove it
false, then perhaps God is as real as anything else.
In George Berkeley's A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge
of 1710, he argued that a "naked thought" cannot exist, and that a
perception is a thought; therefore only minds can be proven to exist,
since all else is merely an idea conveyed by a perception. From this
Berkeley argued that the universe is based upon observation and is
non-objective. However, he noted that the universe includes "ideas" not
perceptible to humankind, and that there must, therefore, exist an
omniscient superobserver, which perceives such things. Berkeley
considered this proof of the existence of the Christian god.
C.S. Lewis, in Mere Christianity and elsewhere, raised the argument from desire.
He posed that all natural desires have a natural object. One thirsts,
and there exists water to quench this thirst; One hungers, and there
exists food to satisfy this hunger. He then argued that the human desire
for perfect justice, perfect peace, perfect happiness, and other
intangibles strongly implies the existence of such things, though they
seem unobtainable on earth. He further posed that the unquenchable
desires of this life strongly imply that we are intended for a different
life, necessarily governed by a God who can provide the desired
intangibles.
Outside of Western thought
Existence in absolute truth is central to Vedanta
epistemology. Traditional sense perception based approaches were put
into question as possibly misleading due to preconceived or superimposed
ideas. But though all object-cognition can be doubted, the existence of
the doubter remains a fact even in nastika traditions of mayavada schools following Adi Shankara. The five eternal principles to be discussed under ontology, beginning with God or Isvara, the Ultimate Reality cannot be established by the means of logic alone, and often require superior proof.
In VaisnavismVishnu, or his intimate ontological form of Krishna, is equated to the personal absolute God of the Western traditions. Aspects of Krishna as svayam bhagavan in original Absolute Truth, sat chit ananda, are understood originating from three essential attributes of Krishna's form, i.e., "eternal existence" or sat, related to the brahman aspect; "knowledge" or chit, to the paramatman; and "bliss" or ananda in Sanskrit, to bhagavan.
Arguments for the existence of God
Empirical arguments
Argument from beauty
One form of the argument from beauty is that the elegance of the laws of physics, which have been empirically discovered, or the elegant laws of mathematics, which are abstract but which have empirically proven to be useful, is evidence of a creator deity who has arranged these things to be beautiful and not ugly.
Argument from consciousness
The argument from consciousness
claims that human consciousness cannot be explained by the physical
mechanisms of the human body and brain, therefore, asserting that there
must be non-physical aspects to human consciousness. This is held as
indirect evidence of God, given that notions about souls and the afterlife in Christianity and Islam would be consistent with such a claim.
The notion of the soul was created before modern understanding of neural networks and the physiology of the brain. Decades of experimentation lead cognitive science to consider thought and emotion as physical processes although the experience of consciousness still remains poorly understood. The hard problem of consciousness
remains as to whether different people subjectively experience the
world in the same way — for example, that the color blue looks the same
inside the minds of different people, though this is a philosophical
problem with both physical and non-physical explanations.
Argument from design
The teleological argument, or the argument from design, asserts that certain features of the universe and of living things must be the product of an intelligentcause. Its proponents are mainly Christians.
Rational warrant
Philosopher Stephen Toulmin is notable for his work in the history of ideas that features the (rational) warrant: a statement that connects the premises to a conclusion.
Joseph Hinman applied Toulmin's approach in his argument for the existence of God, particularly in his book The Trace of God: A Rational Warrant for Belief.
Instead of attempting to prove the existence of God, Hinman argues you
can "demonstrate the rationally-warranted nature of belief".
Hinman uses a wide range of studies, including ones by Robert
Wuthnow, Andrew Greeley, Mathes and Kathleen Nobel to establish that
mystical experiences are life-transformative in a way that is
significant, positive and lasting.
He draws on additional work to add several additional major points to
his argument. First, the people who have these experiences not only do
not exhibit traditional signs of mental illness but, often, are in
better mental and physical health than the general population due to the
experience. Second, the experiences work. In other words, they provide a framework for navigating life that is useful and effective. All of the evidence of the positive effects of the experience upon people's lives he, adapting a term from Derrida, terms "the trace of God": the footprints left behind that point to the impact.
Finally, he discusses how both religious experience and belief in God is, and has always been, normative among humans:
people do not need to prove the existence of God. If there is no need
to prove, Hinman argues, and the Trace of God (for instance, the impact
of mystical experiences on them), belief in God is rationally warranted.
Inductive arguments
Some have put forward arguments for the existence of God based on inductive reasoning.
For example, one class of philosophers asserts that the proofs for the
existence of God present a fairly large probability though not absolute
certainty. A number of obscure points, they say, always remain; an act
of faith is required to dismiss these difficulties. This view is
maintained, among others, by the Scottish statesman Arthur Balfour in his book The Foundations of Belief (1895). The opinions set forth in this work were adopted in France by Ferdinand Brunetière, the editor of the Revue des deux Mondes.
Many orthodox Protestants express themselves in the same manner, as,
for instance, Dr. E. Dennert, President of the Kepler Society, in his
work Ist Gott tot?
Logical arguments
Aquinas' Five Ways
In article 3, question 2, first part of his Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas developed his five arguments for God's existence. These arguments are grounded in an Aristotelian ontology and make use of the infinite regression argument.
Aquinas did not intend to fully prove the existence of God as he is
orthodoxly conceived (with all of his traditional attributes), but
proposed his Five Ways as a first stage, which he built upon later in
his work. Aquinas' Five Ways argued from the unmoved mover, first cause, necessary being, argument from degree, and the argument from final cause.
The unmoved mover argument asserts that, from our experience of
motion in the universe (motion being the transition from potentiality to
actuality) we can see that there must have been an initial mover.
Aquinas argued that whatever is in motion must be put in motion by
another thing, so there must be an unmoved mover.
Aquinas' argument from first cause started with the premise that it
is impossible for a being to cause itself (because it would have to
exist before it caused itself) and that it is impossible for there to be
an infinite chain of causes, which would result in infinite regress.
Therefore, there must be a first cause, itself uncaused.
The argument from necessary being asserts that all beings are contingent,
meaning that it is possible for them not to exist. Aquinas argued that
if everything can possibly not exist, there must have been a time when
nothing existed; as things exist now, there must exist a being with
necessary existence, regarded as God.
Aquinas argued from degree, considering the occurrence of degrees of
goodness. He believed that things which are called good, must be called
good in relation to a standard of good—a maximum. There must be a
maximum goodness that which causes all goodness.
The argument from final cause asserts the view that non-intelligent
objects are ordered towards a purpose. Aquinas argued that these objects
cannot be ordered unless they are done so by an intelligent being,
which means that there must be an intelligent being to move objects to
their ends: God.
Cosmological argument
One type of cosmological, or "first cause" argument, typically called the Kalam cosmological argument,
asserts that since everything that begins to exist has a cause, and the
universe began to exist, the universe must have had a cause which was
itself not caused. This ultimate first cause is identified with God.
Christian apologist William Lane Craig gives a version of this argument in the following form:
Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
The Universe began to exist.
Therefore, the Universe had a cause.
Ontological argument
The ontological argument has been formulated by philosophers including St. Anselm and René Descartes. The argument proposes that God's existence is self-evident. The logic, depending on the formulation, reads roughly as follows:
Whatever is contained in a clear and distinct idea of a thing must be
predicated of that thing; but a clear and distinct idea of an absolutely
perfect Being contains the idea of actual existence; therefore since we
have the idea of an absolutely perfect Being such a Being must really
exist.
Thomas Aquinas criticized the argument for proposing a definition of
God which, if God is transcendent, should be impossible for humans.
Immanuel Kant criticized the proof from a logical standpoint: he stated
that the term "God" really signifies two different terms: both idea of
God, and God. Kant concluded that the proof is equivocation, based on
the ambiguity of the word God.
Kant also challenged the argument's assumption that existence is a
predicate (of perfection) because it does not add anything to the
essence of a being. If existence is not a predicate, then it is not necessarily true that the greatest possible being exists.
A common rebuttal to Kant's critique is that, although "existence" does
add something to both the concept and the reality of God, the concept
would be vastly different if its referent is an unreal Being.
Another response to Kant is attributed to Alvin Plantinga, who says
that even if one were to grant that existence is not a real predicate, necessary existence, which is the correct formulation of an understanding of God, is a real predicate.
Subjective arguments
Arguments from historical events or personages
The
sincere seeker's argument, espoused by Muslim Sufis of the Tasawwuf
tradition, posits that every individual who follows a formulaic path
towards guidance, arrives at the same destination of conviction in the
existence of God and specifically in the monotheistic tenets and laws of
Islam. This could only be true if the formula and supplication were
being answered by the same Divine entity being addressed, as claimed in
Islamic revelations. This was formally organized by Imam Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali in such notable works as "Deliverance from Error" and "The Alchemy of Happiness," in Arabic "Kimiya-yi sa'adat".
The path includes following the golden rule of no harm to others and
treating others with compassion, silence or minimal speech, seclusion,
daily fasting or minimalist diet of water and basic nourishment, honest
wages, and daily supplication towards "the Creator of the Universe" for
guidance.
Christianity and Judaism assert that God intervened in key specific moments in history, especially at the Exodus and the giving of the Ten Commandments
in front of all the tribes of Israel, positing an argument from
empirical evidence stemming from sheer number of witnesses, thus
demonstrating his existence.
Islam asserts that the revelation of its holy book, the Qur'an, and its unique literary attributes, vindicate its divine authorship, and thus the existence of God.
Arguments
from testimony rely on the testimony or experience of witnesses,
possibly embodying the propositions of a specific revealed religion.
Swinburne argues that it is a principle of rationality that one should
accept testimony unless there are strong reasons for not doing so.
The witness argument gives credibility to personal witnesses, contemporary and throughout the ages. A variation of this is the argument from miracles (also referred to as "the priest stories") which relies on testimony of supernatural events to establish the existence of God.
The majority argument argues that the theism of people throughout most of recorded history and in many different places provides prima facie demonstration of God's existence.
Arguments grounded in personal experiences
The sincere seeker's argument, espoused by Muslim Sufis of the
Tasawwuf tradition, posits that every individual who follows a formulaic
path towards guidance, arrives at the same destination of conviction in
the existence of God and specifically in the monotheistic tenets and
laws of Islam. This apparent natural law for guidance and belief could
only be consistent if the formula and supplication were being answered
by the same Divine entity being addressed, as claimed in Islamic
revelations. This was formally organized by Imam Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali in such notable works as "Deliverance from Error" and "The Alchemy of Happiness," in Arabic "Kimiya-yi sa'ādat".
The path includes following the golden rule of no harm to others and
treating others with compassion, silence or minimal speech, seclusion,
daily fasting or minimalist diet of water and basic nourishment, honest
wages, and daily supplication towards "the Creator of the Universe" for
guidance.
The Argument from a proper basis argues that belief in God is "properly basic"; that it is similar to statements like "I see a chair" or "I feel pain".
Such beliefs are non-falsifiable and, thus, neither provable nor
disprovable; they concern perceptual beliefs or indisputable mental
states.
In Germany, the School of Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi taught that human reason is able to perceive the suprasensible. Jacobi distinguished three faculties: sense, reason,
and understanding. Just as sense has immediate perception of the
material so has reason immediate perception of the immaterial, while the
understanding brings these perceptions to a person's consciousness and
unites them to one another.
God's existence, then, cannot be proven (Jacobi, like Immanuel Kant,
rejected the absolute value of the principle of causality), it must be
felt by the mind.
The same theory was advocated in Germany by Friedrich Schleiermacher,
who assumed an inner religious sense by means of which people feel
religious truths. According to Schleiermacher, religion consists solely
in this inner perception, and dogmatic doctrines are inessential.
Brahma Kumaris religion was established in 1936, when God was said to enter the body of diamond merchant Lekhraj Kripalani (1876–1969) in Hyderabad, Sindh and started to speak through him.
Hindu arguments
The school of Vedanta argues that one of the proofs of the existence of God is the law of karma. In a commentary to Brahma Sutras (III, 2, 38, and 41), Adi Sankara
argues that the original karmic actions themselves cannot bring about
the proper results at some future time; neither can super sensuous,
non-intelligent qualities like adrsta
by themselves mediate the appropriate, justly deserved pleasure and
pain. The fruits, according to him must be administered through the
action of a conscious agent, namely, a supreme being (Ishvara). The Nyaya school make similar arguments.
Other arguments
The evolutionary argument against naturalism,
which argues that naturalistic evolution is incapable of providing
humans with the cognitive apparatus necessary for their knowledge to
have positive epistemic status.
An argument from belief in God being properly basic as presented by Alvin Plantinga.
Argument from Personal Identity.
Argument from the "divine attributes of scientific law".
Arguments against the existence of God
The arguments below aim to show that a god or set of gods does not exist—by showing a creator is unnecessary or contradictory, at odds with known scientific or historical facts, or that there is insufficient proof that a god does exist.
Empirical arguments
The following empirical arguments rely on observations or experimentation to yield their conclusions.
Arguments from inadequate revelations
The argument from inconsistent revelations contests the existence of the deity called God as described in scriptures—such as the Hindu Vedas, the Jewish Tanakh, the Christian Bible, the Muslim Qur'an, the Book of Mormon or the Baha'i Aqdas—by
identifying apparent contradictions between different scriptures,
within a single scripture, or between scripture and known facts.
Relatedly, the argument from parsimony (using Occam's razor) contends that since natural (non-supernatural) theories adequately explain the development of religion and belief in gods,
the actual existence of such supernatural agents is superfluous and may
be dismissed unless otherwise proven to be required to explain the
phenomenon.
The argument from "historical induction" concludes that since most theistic religions throughout history (e.g. ancient Egyptian religion, ancient Greek religion)
and their gods ultimately come to be regarded as untrue or incorrect,
all theistic religions, including contemporary ones, are therefore most
likely untrue/incorrect by induction. H. L. Mencken wrote a short piece about the topic entitled "Memorial Service" in 1922. It is implied as part of Stephen F. Roberts' popular quotation:
I
contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than
you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible
gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.
The argument from nonbelief
contests the existence of an omnipotent god who wants humans to believe
in it by arguing that such a god would do a better job of gathering
believers.
Arguments from the poor design of the universe
The problem of evil contests the existence of a god who is both omnipotent and omnibenevolent by arguing that such a god should not permit the existence of evil or suffering. The theist responses are called theodicies. Similarly, the argument from poor design
contends that an all-powerful, benevolent creator god would not have
created lifeforms, including humans, which seem to exhibit poor design.
Richard Carrier
has argued that the universe itself seems to be very ill-designed for
life, because the vast majority of the space in the universe is utterly
hostile to it. This is arguably unexpected on the hypothesis that the
universe was designed by a god, especially a personal god. Carrier contends that such a god could have easily created a geocentric universeex nihilo in the recent past,
in which most of the volume of the universe is inhabitable by humans
and other lifeforms— precisely the kind of universe that most humans
believed in until the rise of modern science. While a personal god might have created the kind of universe we observe, Carrier contends that this is not the kind of universe we would most likely
expect to see if such a god existed. He finally argues that, unlike
theism, our observations about the nature of the universe are strongly
expected on the hypothesis of atheism, since the universe would have to
be vast, very old, and almost completely devoid of life if life were to
have arisen by sheer chance.
Logical arguments
The following arguments deduce, mostly through self-contradiction, the non-existence of a God as "the Creator".
Stephen Hawking and co-author Leonard Mlodinow state in their book The Grand Design
that it is reasonable to ask who or what created the universe, but if
the answer is God, then the question has merely been deflected to that
of who created God. Both authors claim that it is possible to answer
these questions purely within the realm of science, and without invoking
any divine beings. Christian scholars, like Leonhard Euler and Bernard d'Espagnat, disagree with that kind of skeptical argument.
No scientific evidence of God's existence has been found. Therefore,
the scientific consensus is that whether God exists is unknown.
A counter-argument against God as the Creator takes the assumption
of the Cosmological argument ("the chicken or the egg"), that things
cannot exist without creators, and applies it to God, setting up an
infinite regress.
Dawkins' Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit analogizes the above. Some theists argue that evolution
and abiogenesis are akin to a hurricane assembling a Boeing 747 — that
the universe (or life) is too complex, cannot be made by non-living
matter alone and would have to be designed by someone, who theists call
God. Dawkin's counter-argument is that such a God would himself be
complex — the "Ultimate" Boeing 747 — and therefore require a designer.
Theological noncognitivism
is the argument that religious language – specifically, words such as
"God" – are not cognitively meaningful and that irreducible definitions
of God are circular.
The analogy of Russell's teapot argues that the burden of proof for the existence of God lies with the theist rather than the atheist; it can be considered an extension of Occam's Razor.
Arguments from incompatible divine properties
Some arguments focus on the existence of specific conceptions of God as being omniscient, omnipotent, and morally perfect.
The omnipotence paradox suggests that the concept of an omnipotent
entity is logically contradictory by considering questions such as "Can
God create a rock so big that He cannot move it?" or "If God is all
powerful, could God create a being more powerful than Himself?"
Similarly, the omniscience paradox argues that God cannot be
omniscient because he would not know how to create something unknown to
himself.
Another argument points to the contradiction of omniscience and
omnipotence arguing that God is bound to follow whatever God foreknows
himself doing.
Argument from free will
contends that omniscience and the free will of humanity are
incompatible and that any conception of God that incorporates both
properties is therefore inherently contradictory: if God is omniscient,
then God already knows humanity's future, contradicting the claim of
free will.
The anthropic argument states that if God is omniscient, omnipotent,
and morally perfect, he would have created other morally perfect beings
instead of imperfect ones, such as humans.
The Transcendental Argument for the Non-existence of God contests
the existence of an intelligent Creator God by demonstrating that such a
being would make logic and morality contingent, which is incompatible
with the presuppositionalist assertion that they are necessary, and
contradicts the efficacy of science.
The "no reason" argument tries to show that an omnipotent and
omniscient being would not have any reason to act in any way,
specifically by creating the universe, because it would have no needs,
wants, or desires since these very concepts are subjectively human.
Since the universe exists, there is a contradiction, and therefore, an
omnipotent god cannot exist. This argument is expounded upon by Scott Adams in the book God's Debris, which puts forward a form of Pandeism as its fundamental theological model. A similar argument is put forward in Ludwig von Mises's
"Human Action". He referred to it as the "praxeological argument" and
claimed that a perfect being would have long ago satisfied all its wants
and desires and would no longer be able to take action in the present
without proving that it had been unable to achieve its wants
faster—showing it imperfect.
The atheist-existential argument for the non-existence of a perfect sentient being states that if existence precedes essence, it follows from the meaning of the term sentient that a sentient being cannot be complete or perfect. It is touched upon by Jean-Paul Sartre in Being and Nothingness. Sartre's phrasing is that God would be a pour-soi [a being-for-itself; a consciousness] who is also an en-soi [a being-in-itself; a thing]: which is a contradiction in terms. The argument is echoed thus in Salman Rushdie's novel Grimus: "That which is complete is also dead."
Subjective arguments
Similar to the subjective
arguments for the existence of God, subjective arguments against the
supernatural mainly rely on the testimony or experience of witnesses, or
the propositions of a revealed religion in general.
The witness argument gives credibility to personal witnesses,
contemporary and from the past, who disbelieve or strongly doubt the
existence of God.
The conflicted religions argument notes that many religions give
differing accounts as to what God is and what God wants; since all the
contradictory accounts cannot be correct, many if not all religions must
be incorrect.
The disappointment argument claims that if, when asked for, there is
no visible help from God, there is no reason to believe that there is a
God.
Hindu arguments
Atheistic Hindu doctrines cite various arguments for rejecting a creator God or Ishvara. The Sāṁkhyapravacana Sūtra of the Samkhya
school states that there is no philosophical place for a creator God in
this system. It is also argued in this text that the existence of
Ishvara (God) cannot be proved and hence cannot be admitted to exist.
Classical Samkhya argues against the existence of God on metaphysical
grounds. For instance, it argues that an unchanging God cannot be the
source of an ever-changing world. It says God is a necessary
metaphysical assumption demanded by circumstances. The Sutras of Samkhya endeavor to prove that the idea of God is inconceivable and self-contradictory, and some commentaries speak plainly on this subject. The Sankhya- tattva-kaumudi,
commenting on Karika 57, argues that a perfect God can have no need to
create a world, and if God's motive is kindness, Samkhya questions
whether it is reasonable to call into existence beings who while
non-existent had no suffering. Samkhya postulates that a benevolent
deity ought to create only happy creatures, not an imperfect world like
the real world.
Charvaka, originally known as Lokāyata, a heterodox Hindu philosophy states that there is "no God, no samsara (rebirth), no karma, no duty, no fruits of merit, no sin." Proponents of the school of Mimamsa, which is based on rituals and orthopraxy,
decided that the evidence allegedly proving the existence of God is
insufficient. They argue that there is no need to postulate a maker for
the world, just as there is no need for an author to compose the Vedas
or a god to validate the rituals. Mimamsa argues that the gods named in the Vedas have no existence apart from the mantras that speak their names. In that regard, the power of the mantras is what is seen as the power of gods.
Psychological aspects
Several authors have offered psychological or sociological explanations for belief in the existence of God.
Psychologists observe that the majority of humans often ask
existential questions such as "why we are here" and whether life has
purpose. Some psychologists have posited that religious beliefs may recruit cognitive mechanisms in order to satisfy these questions. William James emphasized the inner religious struggle between melancholy and happiness, and pointed to trance as a cognitive mechanism. Sigmund Freud
stressed fear and pain, the need for a powerful parental figure, the
obsessional nature of ritual, and the hypnotic state a community can
induce as contributing factors to the psychology of religion.
Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained (2002), based in part on his anthropological field work, treats belief in God as the result of the brain's tendency towards agency detection.
Boyer suggests that, because of evolutionary pressures, humans err on
the side of attributing agency where there isn't any. In Boyer's view,
belief in supernatural entities spreads and becomes culturally fixed
because of their memorability. The concept of "minimally
counterintuitive" beings that differ from the ordinary in a small number
of ways (such as being invisible, able to fly, or having access to
strategic and otherwise secret information) leave a lasting impression
that spreads through word-of-mouth.
Scott Atran's In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (2002) makes a similar argument and adds examination of the socially coordinating aspects of shared belief. In Minds and Gods: The Cognitive Foundations of Religion, Todd Tremlin
follows Boyer in arguing that universal human cognitive process
naturally produces the concept of the supernatural. Tremlin contends
that an agency detection device (ADD) and a theory of mind
module (ToMM) lead humans to suspect an agent behind every event.
Natural events for which there is no obvious agent may be attributed to
God (c.f. Act of God).
A common misconception is that theism is ancient while atheism is modern, but mankind has been making arguments for and against the existence of deities—including, with the rise of monotheism, God—since the dawn of human history. Bronze Age texts such as the Vedas present various arguments against the deities, such as the problem of evil and the Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit, as well as arguments for the deities, such as argument from morality and Pascal's wager. From the ancient Greeks to the medievalJapanese people to the Native Americans, the arguments for and against deities are as old as the idea of a deity itself. Some atheists and theists
see the antiquity of their beliefs as a worthy tradition to carry on,
while others believe arguing about the existence of a God is a
never-ending cycle that produces little fulfillment.
Positions
Europeans polled who "believe in a god", according to Eurobarometer in 2005
North Americans polled about religious identity 2010-2012
Positions on the existence of God can be divided along numerous axes, producing a variety of orthogonal classifications. Theism and atheism are positions of belief (or lack of it), while gnosticism and agnosticism are positions of knowledge (or the lack of it). Ignosticism concerns belief about God's conceptual coherence. Apatheism concerns belief about the practical importance of whether God exists.
Strong theist. 100% probability that God exists. In the words of C.G. Jung: "I do not believe, I know."
De factotheist.
Very high probability but short of 100%. "I don't know for certain, but
I strongly believe in God and live my life on the assumption that he is
there."
Leaning towards theism. Higher than 50% but not very high. "I am very uncertain, but I am inclined to believe in God."
Completely impartial. Exactly 50%. "God's existence and nonexistence are exactly equiprobable."
Leaning towards atheism. Lower than 50% but not very low. "I do not know whether God exists but I'm inclined to be skeptical."
De facto atheist. Very low probability, but short of zero. "I
don't know for certain but I think God is very improbable, and I live
my life on the assumption that he is not there."
Strong atheist. "I know there is no God, with the same conviction as Jung knows there is one."
Theism
The Catholic Church, following the teachings of Paul the Apostle, Thomas Aquinas, and the First Vatican Council, affirms that God's existence "can be known with certainty from the created world by the natural light of human reason".
Traditional religious definition of God
In classical theism,
God is characterized as the metaphysically ultimate being (the first,
timeless, absolutely simple and sovereign being, who is devoid of any anthropomorphic qualities), in distinction to other conceptions such as theistic personalism, open theism, and process theism. Classical theists do not believe that God can be completely defined. They believe it would contradict the transcendent nature of God for mere humans to define him. Robert Barron explains by analogy that it seems impossible for a two-dimensional object to conceive of three-dimensional humans.In modern Western societies, the concepts of God typically entail a monotheistic, supreme, ultimate, and personal being, as found in the Christian, Islamic and Jewish traditions. In monotheistic religions outside the Abrahamic traditions,
the existence of God is discussed in similar terms. In these
traditions, God is also identified as the author (either directly or by
inspiration) of certain texts, or that certain texts describe specific
historical events caused by the God in question or communications from
God (whether in direct speech or via dreams or omens). Some traditions
also believe that God is the entity which is currently answering prayers
for intervention or information or opinions.
Ibn Rushd, a 12th-century Islamic scholar
Many Islamic scholars have used philosophical and rational arguments to prove the existence of God. For example, Ibn Rushd,
a 12th-century Islamic scholar, philosopher, and physician, states
there are only two arguments worthy of adherence, both of which are
found in what he calls the "Precious Book" (The Qur'an). Rushd cites
“providence” and “invention” in using the Qur'an's parables to claim the
existence of God. Rushd argues that the Earth's weather patterns are
conditioned to support human life; thus, if the planet is so
finely-tuned to maintain life, then it suggests a fine tuner - God. The
Sun and the Moon are not just random objects floating in the Milky Way,
rather they serve us day and night, and the way nature works and how
life is formed, humankind benefits from it. Rushd essentially comes to a
conclusion that there has to be a higher being who has made everything
perfectly to serve the needs of human beings.
Moses ben Maimon, widely known as Maimonides,
was a Jewish scholar who tried to logically prove the existence of God.
Maimonides offered proofs for the existence of God, but he did not
begin with defining God first, like many others do. Rather, he used the
description of the earth and the universe to prove the existence of God.
He talked about the Heavenly bodies and how they are committed to
eternal motion. Maimonides argued that because every physical object is
finite, it can only contain a finite amount of power. If everything in
the universe, which includes all the planets and the stars, is finite,
then there has to be an infinite power to push forth the motion of
everything in the universe. Narrowing down to an infinite being, the
only thing that can explain the motion is an infinite being (meaning
God) which is neither a body nor a force in the body. Maimonides
believed that this argument gives us a ground to believe that God is,
not an idea of what God is. He believed that God cannot be understood or
be compared.
Non-personal definitions of God
In pantheism,
God and the universe are considered to be the same thing. In this
view, the natural sciences are essentially studying the nature of God.
This definition of God creates the philosophical problem that a universe
with God and one without God are the same, other than the words used to
describe it.
Deism and panentheism
assert that there is a God distinct from, or which extends beyond
(either in time or in space or in some other way) the universe. These
positions deny that God intervenes in the operation of the universe,
including communicating with humans personally. The notion that God
never intervenes or communicates with the universe, or may have evolved
into the universe (as in pandeism), makes it difficult, if not by definition impossible, to distinguish between a universe with God and one without.
The Ethics of Baruch Spinoza gave two demonstrations of the existence of God. The God of Spinoza is uncaused by any external force and has no free will, it is not personal and not anthropomorphic.
Debate about how theism should be argued
In
Christian faith, theologians and philosophers make a distinction
between: (a) preambles of faith and (b) articles of faith. The preambles
include alleged truths contained in revelation which are nevertheless
demonstrable by reason, e.g., the immortality of the soul, the existence
of God. The articles of faith, on the other hand, contain truths that
cannot be proven or reached by reason alone and presuppose the truths of
the preambles, e.g., the Holy Trinity, is not demonstrable and
presupposes the existence of God.
The argument that the existence of God can be known to all, even
prior to exposure to any divine revelation, predates Christianity. Paul the Apostle
made this argument when he said that pagans were without excuse because
"since the creation of the world God's invisible nature, namely, his
eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that
have been made". In this, Paul alludes to the proofs for a creator, later enunciated by Thomas Aquinas and others, but that had also been explored by the Greek philosophers.
Another apologetical school of thought, including Dutch and American Reformed thinkers (such as Abraham Kuyper, Benjamin Warfield, Herman Dooyeweerd), emerged in the late 1920s. This school was instituted by Cornelius Van Til, and came to be popularly called presuppositional apologetics
(though Van Til himself felt "transcendental" would be a more accurate
title). The main distinction between this approach and the more
classical evidentialist approach is that the presuppositionalist denies
any common ground between the believer and the non-believer, except that
which the non-believer denies, namely, the assumption of the truth of
the theistic worldview. In other words, presuppositionalists do not
believe that the existence of God can be proven by appeal to raw,
uninterpreted, or "brute" facts, which have the same (theoretical)
meaning to people with fundamentally different worldviews, because they
deny that such a condition is even possible. They claim that the only
possible proof for the existence of God is that the very same belief is
the necessary condition to the intelligibility of all other human
experience and action. They attempt to prove the existence of God by
means of appeal to the transcendental
necessity of the belief—indirectly (by appeal to the unavowed
presuppositions of the non-believer's worldview) rather than directly
(by appeal to some form of common factuality). In practice this school
utilizes what have come to be known as transcendental arguments.
In these arguments they claim to demonstrate that all human experience
and action (even the condition of unbelief, itself) is a proof for the
existence of God, because God's existence is the necessary condition of
their intelligibility.
Alvin Plantinga presents an argument for the existence of God using modal logic. Others have said that the logical and philosophical arguments for and against the existence of God miss the point. The word God
has a meaning in human culture and history that does not correspond to
the beings whose existence is supported by such arguments, assuming they
are valid. The real question is not whether a "most perfect being" or
an "uncaused first cause" exist. The real question is whether Jehovah, Zeus, Ra,
Krishna, or any gods of any religion exist, and if so, which gods? On
the other hand, many theists equate all monotheistic or henotheistic
"most perfect Beings", no matter what name is assigned to them/him, as
the one monotheistic God (one example would be understanding the Muslim Allah, Christian YHWH, and Chinese Shangdi
as different names for the same Being). Most of these arguments do not
resolve the issue of which of these figures is more likely to exist.
These arguments fail to make the distinction between immanent gods and a
Transcendent God.
Some Christians note that the Christian faith teaches "salvation is by faith",
and that faith is reliance upon the faithfulness of God. The most
extreme example of this position is called fideism, which holds that
faith is simply the will to believe, and argues that if God's existence
were rationally demonstrable, faith in its existence would become
superfluous. Søren Kierkegaard
argued that objective knowledge, such as 1+1=2, is unimportant to
existence. If God could rationally be proven, his existence would be
unimportant to humans. It is because God cannot rationally be proven that his existence is important to us. In The Justification of Knowledge, the Calvinist theologian Robert L. Reymond
argues that believers should not attempt to prove the existence of God.
Since he believes all such proofs are fundamentally unsound, believers
should not place their confidence in them, much less resort to them in
discussions with non-believers; rather, they should accept the content
of revelation by faith. Reymond's position is similar to that of his
mentor Gordon Clark,
which holds that all worldviews are based on certain unprovable first
premises (or, axioms), and therefore are ultimately unprovable. The
Christian theist therefore must simply choose to start with Christianity
rather than anything else, by a "leap of faith". This position is also sometimes called presuppositional apologetics, but should not be confused with the Van Tillian variety.
Atheism
The atheistic conclusion is that the arguments and evidence both
indicate there is insufficient reason to believe that any gods exist,
and that personal subjective religious experiences say something about
the human experience rather than the nature of reality itself;
therefore, one has no reason to believe that a god exists.
Positive atheism
Positive atheism (also called "strong atheism" and "hard atheism") is a form of atheism that asserts that no deities exist. The strong atheist explicitly asserts the non-existence of gods.
Negative atheism
Negative
atheism (also called "weak atheism" and "soft atheism") is any type of
atheism other than positive, wherein a person does not believe in the
existence of any deities, but does not explicitly assert there to be
none.
Agnosticism
Agnosticism is the view that the truth value
of certain claims—especially claims about the existence of any deity,
but also other religious and metaphysical claims—is unknown or
unknowable. Agnosticism does not define one's belief or disbelief in gods; agnostics may still identify themselves as theists or atheists.
Strong agnosticism
Strong agnosticism is the belief that it is impossible for humans to know whether or not any deities exist.
Weak agnosticism
Weak agnosticism is the belief that the existence or nonexistence of deities is unknown but not necessarily unknowable.
Agnostic theism
Agnostic theism is the philosophical
view that encompasses both theism and agnosticism. An agnostic theist
believes in the existence of a god or God, but regards the basis of this
proposition as unknown or inherently unknowable. Agnostic theists may also insist on ignorance regarding the properties of the gods they believe in.
Agnostic atheism
Agnostic atheism is a philosophical position that encompasses both
atheism and agnosticism. Agnostic atheists are atheistic because they do
not hold a belief in the existence of any deity and agnostic because they claim that the existence of a deity is either unknowable in principle or currently unknown in fact.
If a man have failed to find any
good reason for believing that there is a God, it is perfectly natural
and rational that he should not believe that there is a God; and if so,
he is an atheist, although he assume no superhuman knowledge, but merely
the ordinary human power of judging of evidence. If he go farther, and,
after an investigation into the nature and reach of human knowledge,
ending in the conclusion that the existence of God is incapable of
proof, cease to believe in it on the ground that he cannot know it to be
true, he is an agnostic and also an atheist, an agnostic-atheist—an
atheist because an agnostic."
Apatheism
An apatheist is someone who is not interested in accepting or denying
any claims that gods exist or do not exist. An apatheist lives as if
there are no gods and explains natural phenomena
without reference to any deities. The existence of gods is not
rejected, but may be designated unnecessary or useless; gods neither
provide purpose to life, nor influence everyday life, according to this view.
Ignosticism
The ignostic (or igtheist) usually concludes that the question of
God's existence or nonexistence is usually not worth discussing because
concepts like "God" are usually not sufficiently or clearly defined.
Ignosticism or igtheism is the theological position that every other
theological position (including agnosticism
and atheism) assumes too much about the concept of God and many other
theological concepts. It can be defined as encompassing two related
views about the existence of God. The view that a coherent definition of
God must be presented before the question of the existence of God can
be meaningfully discussed. Furthermore, if that definition is unfalsifiable, the ignostic takes the theological noncognitivist position that the question of the existence of God (per that definition) is meaningless.
In this case, the concept of God is not considered meaningless; the
term "God" is considered meaningless. The second view is synonymous with
theological noncognitivism, and skips the step of first asking "What is
meant by 'God'?" before proclaiming the original question "Does God
exist?" as meaningless.
Some philosophers have seen ignosticism as a variation of agnosticism or atheism, while others have considered it to be distinct. An ignostic maintains that he cannot even say whether he is a theist or an atheist until a sufficient definition of theism is put forth.
One problem posed by the question of the existence of God is that traditional beliefs usually ascribe to God various supernatural powers. Supernatural beings may be able to conceal and reveal themselves for their own purposes, as for example in the tale of Baucis and Philemon.
In addition, according to concepts of God, God is not part of the
natural order, but the ultimate creator of nature and of the scientific
laws. Thus in Aristotelian philosophy,
God is viewed as part of the explanatory structure needed to support
scientific conclusions and any powers God possesses are—strictly
speaking—of the natural order that is derived from God's place as
originator of nature.
In Karl Popper's philosophy of science,
belief in a supernatural God is outside the natural domain of
scientific investigation because all scientific hypotheses must be
falsifiable in the natural world. The non-overlapping magisteria view proposed by Stephen Jay Gould also holds that the existence (or otherwise) of God is irrelevant to and beyond the domain of science.
Scientists follow the scientific method, within which theories must be verifiable by physical experiment.
The majority of prominent conceptions of God explicitly or effectively
posit a being whose existence is not testable either by proof or
disproof. Therefore, the question of God's existence may lie outside the purview of modern science by definition. The Catholic Church maintains that knowledge of the existence of God is the "natural light of human reason". Fideists maintain that belief in God's existence may not be amenable to demonstration or refutation, but rests on faith alone.
Logical positivists such as Rudolf Carnap and A. J. Ayer
viewed any talk of gods as literal nonsense. For the logical
positivists and adherents of similar schools of thought, statements
about religious or other transcendent experiences can not have a truth value,
and are deemed to be without meaning, because such statements do not
have any clear verification criteria. As the Christian biologist Scott C. Todd
put it "Even if all the data pointed to an intelligent designer, such a
hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic." This argument limits the domain of science to the empirically observable and limits the domain of God to the unprovable.
Nature of relevant proofs and arguments
John Polkinghorne suggests that the nearest analogy to the existence of God in physics is the ideas of quantum mechanics which are seemingly paradoxical but make sense of a great deal of disparate data.
Alvin Plantinga compares the question of the existence of God to the question of the existence of other minds, claiming both are notoriously impossible to "prove" against a determined skeptic.
One approach, suggested by writers such as Stephen D. Unwin, is to treat (particular versions of) theism and naturalism as though they were two hypotheses in the Bayesian
sense, to list certain data (or alleged data), about the world, and to
suggest that the likelihoods of these data are significantly higher
under one hypothesis than the other.
Most of the arguments for, or against, the existence of God can be seen
as pointing to particular aspects of the universe in this way. In
almost all cases it is not seriously suggested by proponents of the
arguments that they are irrefutable, merely that they make one worldview
seem significantly more likely than the other. However, since an
assessment of the weight of evidence depends on the prior probability that is assigned to each worldview, arguments that a theist finds convincing may seem thin to an atheist and vice versa.
Philosophers, such as Wittgenstein, take a view that is considered anti-realist and oppose philosophical arguments related to God's existence. For instance, Charles Taylor
contends that the real is whatever will not go away. If we cannot
reduce talk about God to anything else, or replace it, or prove it
false, then perhaps God is as real as anything else.
In George Berkeley's A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge
of 1710, he argued that a "naked thought" cannot exist, and that a
perception is a thought; therefore only minds can be proven to exist,
since all else is merely an idea conveyed by a perception. From this
Berkeley argued that the universe is based upon observation and is
non-objective. However, he noted that the universe includes "ideas" not
perceptible to humankind, and that there must, therefore, exist an
omniscient superobserver, which perceives such things. Berkeley
considered this proof of the existence of the Christian god.
C.S. Lewis, in Mere Christianity and elsewhere, raised the argument from desire.
He posed that all natural desires have a natural object. One thirsts,
and there exists water to quench this thirst; One hungers, and there
exists food to satisfy this hunger. He then argued that the human desire
for perfect justice, perfect peace, perfect happiness, and other
intangibles strongly implies the existence of such things, though they
seem unobtainable on earth. He further posed that the unquenchable
desires of this life strongly imply that we are intended for a different
life, necessarily governed by a God who can provide the desired
intangibles.
Outside of Western thought
Existence in absolute truth is central to Vedanta
epistemology. Traditional sense perception based approaches were put
into question as possibly misleading due to preconceived or superimposed
ideas. But though all object-cognition can be doubted, the existence of
the doubter remains a fact even in nastika traditions of mayavada schools following Adi Shankara. The five eternal principles to be discussed under ontology, beginning with God or Isvara, the Ultimate Reality cannot be established by the means of logic alone, and often require superior proof.
In VaisnavismVishnu, or his intimate ontological form of Krishna, is equated to the personal absolute God of the Western traditions. Aspects of Krishna as svayam bhagavan in original Absolute Truth, sat chit ananda, are understood originating from three essential attributes of Krishna's form, i.e., "eternal existence" or sat, related to the brahman aspect; "knowledge" or chit, to the paramatman; and "bliss" or ananda in Sanskrit, to bhagavan.
Arguments for the existence of God
Empirical arguments
Argument from beauty
One form of the argument from beauty is that the elegance of the laws of physics, which have been empirically discovered, or the elegant laws of mathematics, which are abstract but which have empirically proven to be useful, is evidence of a creator deity who has arranged these things to be beautiful and not ugly.
Argument from consciousness
The argument from consciousness
claims that human consciousness cannot be explained by the physical
mechanisms of the human body and brain, therefore, asserting that there
must be non-physical aspects to human consciousness. This is held as
indirect evidence of God, given that notions about souls and the afterlife in Christianity and Islam would be consistent with such a claim.
The notion of the soul was created before modern understanding of neural networks and the physiology of the brain. Decades of experimentation lead cognitive science to consider thought and emotion as physical processes although the experience of consciousness still remains poorly understood. The hard problem of consciousness
remains as to whether different people subjectively experience the
world in the same way — for example, that the color blue looks the same
inside the minds of different people, though this is a philosophical
problem with both physical and non-physical explanations.
Argument from design
The teleological argument, or the argument from design, asserts that certain features of the universe and of living things must be the product of an intelligentcause. Its proponents are mainly Christians.
Rational warrant
Philosopher Stephen Toulmin is notable for his work in the history of ideas that features the (rational) warrant: a statement that connects the premises to a conclusion.
Joseph Hinman applied Toulmin's approach in his argument for the existence of God, particularly in his book The Trace of God: A Rational Warrant for Belief.
Instead of attempting to prove the existence of God, Hinman argues you
can "demonstrate the rationally-warranted nature of belief".
Hinman uses a wide range of studies, including ones by Robert
Wuthnow, Andrew Greeley, Mathes and Kathleen Nobel to establish that
mystical experiences are life-transformative in a way that is
significant, positive and lasting.
He draws on additional work to add several additional major points to
his argument. First, the people who have these experiences not only do
not exhibit traditional signs of mental illness but, often, are in
better mental and physical health than the general population due to the
experience. Second, the experiences work. In other words, they provide a framework for navigating life that is useful and effective. All of the evidence of the positive effects of the experience upon people's lives he, adapting a term from Derrida, terms "the trace of God": the footprints left behind that point to the impact.
Finally, he discusses how both religious experience and belief in God is, and has always been, normative among humans:
people do not need to prove the existence of God. If there is no need
to prove, Hinman argues, and the Trace of God (for instance, the impact
of mystical experiences on them), belief in God is rationally warranted.
Inductive arguments
Some have put forward arguments for the existence of God based on inductive reasoning.
For example, one class of philosophers asserts that the proofs for the
existence of God present a fairly large probability though not absolute
certainty. A number of obscure points, they say, always remain; an act
of faith is required to dismiss these difficulties. This view is
maintained, among others, by the Scottish statesman Arthur Balfour in his book The Foundations of Belief (1895). The opinions set forth in this work were adopted in France by Ferdinand Brunetière, the editor of the Revue des deux Mondes.
Many orthodox Protestants express themselves in the same manner, as,
for instance, Dr. E. Dennert, President of the Kepler Society, in his
work Ist Gott tot?
Logical arguments
Aquinas' Five Ways
In article 3, question 2, first part of his Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas developed his five arguments for God's existence. These arguments are grounded in an Aristotelian ontology and make use of the infinite regression argument.
Aquinas did not intend to fully prove the existence of God as he is
orthodoxly conceived (with all of his traditional attributes), but
proposed his Five Ways as a first stage, which he built upon later in
his work. Aquinas' Five Ways argued from the unmoved mover, first cause, necessary being, argument from degree, and the argument from final cause.
The unmoved mover argument asserts that, from our experience of
motion in the universe (motion being the transition from potentiality to
actuality) we can see that there must have been an initial mover.
Aquinas argued that whatever is in motion must be put in motion by
another thing, so there must be an unmoved mover.
Aquinas' argument from first cause started with the premise that it
is impossible for a being to cause itself (because it would have to
exist before it caused itself) and that it is impossible for there to be
an infinite chain of causes, which would result in infinite regress.
Therefore, there must be a first cause, itself uncaused.
The argument from necessary being asserts that all beings are contingent,
meaning that it is possible for them not to exist. Aquinas argued that
if everything can possibly not exist, there must have been a time when
nothing existed; as things exist now, there must exist a being with
necessary existence, regarded as God.
Aquinas argued from degree, considering the occurrence of degrees of
goodness. He believed that things which are called good, must be called
good in relation to a standard of good—a maximum. There must be a
maximum goodness that which causes all goodness.
The argument from final cause asserts the view that non-intelligent
objects are ordered towards a purpose. Aquinas argued that these objects
cannot be ordered unless they are done so by an intelligent being,
which means that there must be an intelligent being to move objects to
their ends: God.
Cosmological argument
One type of cosmological, or "first cause" argument, typically called the Kalam cosmological argument,
asserts that since everything that begins to exist has a cause, and the
universe began to exist, the universe must have had a cause which was
itself not caused. This ultimate first cause is identified with God.
Christian apologist William Lane Craig gives a version of this argument in the following form:
Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
The Universe began to exist.
Therefore, the Universe had a cause.
Ontological argument
The ontological argument has been formulated by philosophers including St. Anselm and René Descartes. The argument proposes that God's existence is self-evident. The logic, depending on the formulation, reads roughly as follows:
Whatever is contained in a clear and distinct idea of a thing must be
predicated of that thing; but a clear and distinct idea of an absolutely
perfect Being contains the idea of actual existence; therefore since we
have the idea of an absolutely perfect Being such a Being must really
exist.
Thomas Aquinas criticized the argument for proposing a definition of
God which, if God is transcendent, should be impossible for humans.
Immanuel Kant criticized the proof from a logical standpoint: he stated
that the term "God" really signifies two different terms: both idea of
God, and God. Kant concluded that the proof is equivocation, based on
the ambiguity of the word God.
Kant also challenged the argument's assumption that existence is a
predicate (of perfection) because it does not add anything to the
essence of a being. If existence is not a predicate, then it is not necessarily true that the greatest possible being exists.
A common rebuttal to Kant's critique is that, although "existence" does
add something to both the concept and the reality of God, the concept
would be vastly different if its referent is an unreal Being.
Another response to Kant is attributed to Alvin Plantinga, who says
that even if one were to grant that existence is not a real predicate, necessary existence, which is the correct formulation of an understanding of God, is a real predicate.
Subjective arguments
Arguments from historical events or personages
The
sincere seeker's argument, espoused by Muslim Sufis of the Tasawwuf
tradition, posits that every individual who follows a formulaic path
towards guidance, arrives at the same destination of conviction in the
existence of God and specifically in the monotheistic tenets and laws of
Islam. This could only be true if the formula and supplication were
being answered by the same Divine entity being addressed, as claimed in
Islamic revelations. This was formally organized by Imam Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali in such notable works as "Deliverance from Error" and "The Alchemy of Happiness," in Arabic "Kimiya-yi sa'adat".
The path includes following the golden rule of no harm to others and
treating others with compassion, silence or minimal speech, seclusion,
daily fasting or minimalist diet of water and basic nourishment, honest
wages, and daily supplication towards "the Creator of the Universe" for
guidance.
Christianity and Judaism assert that God intervened in key specific moments in history, especially at the Exodus and the giving of the Ten Commandments
in front of all the tribes of Israel, positing an argument from
empirical evidence stemming from sheer number of witnesses, thus
demonstrating his existence.
Islam asserts that the revelation of its holy book, the Qur'an, and its unique literary attributes, vindicate its divine authorship, and thus the existence of God.
Arguments
from testimony rely on the testimony or experience of witnesses,
possibly embodying the propositions of a specific revealed religion.
Swinburne argues that it is a principle of rationality that one should
accept testimony unless there are strong reasons for not doing so.
The witness argument gives credibility to personal witnesses, contemporary and throughout the ages. A variation of this is the argument from miracles (also referred to as "the priest stories") which relies on testimony of supernatural events to establish the existence of God.
The majority argument argues that the theism of people throughout most of recorded history and in many different places provides prima facie demonstration of God's existence.
Arguments grounded in personal experiences
The sincere seeker's argument, espoused by Muslim Sufis of the
Tasawwuf tradition, posits that every individual who follows a formulaic
path towards guidance, arrives at the same destination of conviction in
the existence of God and specifically in the monotheistic tenets and
laws of Islam. This apparent natural law for guidance and belief could
only be consistent if the formula and supplication were being answered
by the same Divine entity being addressed, as claimed in Islamic
revelations. This was formally organized by Imam Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali in such notable works as "Deliverance from Error" and "The Alchemy of Happiness," in Arabic "Kimiya-yi sa'ādat".
The path includes following the golden rule of no harm to others and
treating others with compassion, silence or minimal speech, seclusion,
daily fasting or minimalist diet of water and basic nourishment, honest
wages, and daily supplication towards "the Creator of the Universe" for
guidance.
The Argument from a proper basis argues that belief in God is "properly basic"; that it is similar to statements like "I see a chair" or "I feel pain".
Such beliefs are non-falsifiable and, thus, neither provable nor
disprovable; they concern perceptual beliefs or indisputable mental
states.
In Germany, the School of Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi taught that human reason is able to perceive the suprasensible. Jacobi distinguished three faculties: sense, reason,
and understanding. Just as sense has immediate perception of the
material so has reason immediate perception of the immaterial, while the
understanding brings these perceptions to a person's consciousness and
unites them to one another.
God's existence, then, cannot be proven (Jacobi, like Immanuel Kant,
rejected the absolute value of the principle of causality), it must be
felt by the mind.
The same theory was advocated in Germany by Friedrich Schleiermacher,
who assumed an inner religious sense by means of which people feel
religious truths. According to Schleiermacher, religion consists solely
in this inner perception, and dogmatic doctrines are inessential.
Brahma Kumaris religion was established in 1936, when God was said to enter the body of diamond merchant Lekhraj Kripalani (1876–1969) in Hyderabad, Sindh and started to speak through him.
Hindu arguments
The school of Vedanta argues that one of the proofs of the existence of God is the law of karma. In a commentary to Brahma Sutras (III, 2, 38, and 41), Adi Sankara
argues that the original karmic actions themselves cannot bring about
the proper results at some future time; neither can super sensuous,
non-intelligent qualities like adrsta
by themselves mediate the appropriate, justly deserved pleasure and
pain. The fruits, according to him must be administered through the
action of a conscious agent, namely, a supreme being (Ishvara). The Nyaya school make similar arguments.
Other arguments
The evolutionary argument against naturalism,
which argues that naturalistic evolution is incapable of providing
humans with the cognitive apparatus necessary for their knowledge to
have positive epistemic status.
An argument from belief in God being properly basic as presented by Alvin Plantinga.
Argument from Personal Identity.
Argument from the "divine attributes of scientific law".
Arguments against the existence of God
The arguments below aim to show that a god or set of gods does not exist—by showing a creator is unnecessary or contradictory, at odds with known scientific or historical facts, or that there is insufficient proof that a god does exist.
Empirical arguments
The following empirical arguments rely on observations or experimentation to yield their conclusions.
Arguments from inadequate revelations
The argument from inconsistent revelations contests the existence of the deity called God as described in scriptures—such as the Hindu Vedas, the Jewish Tanakh, the Christian Bible, the Muslim Qur'an, the Book of Mormon or the Baha'i Aqdas—by
identifying apparent contradictions between different scriptures,
within a single scripture, or between scripture and known facts.
Relatedly, the argument from parsimony (using Occam's razor) contends that since natural (non-supernatural) theories adequately explain the development of religion and belief in gods,
the actual existence of such supernatural agents is superfluous and may
be dismissed unless otherwise proven to be required to explain the
phenomenon.
The argument from "historical induction" concludes that since most theistic religions throughout history (e.g. ancient Egyptian religion, ancient Greek religion)
and their gods ultimately come to be regarded as untrue or incorrect,
all theistic religions, including contemporary ones, are therefore most
likely untrue/incorrect by induction. H. L. Mencken wrote a short piece about the topic entitled "Memorial Service" in 1922. It is implied as part of Stephen F. Roberts' popular quotation:
I
contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than
you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible
gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.
The argument from nonbelief
contests the existence of an omnipotent god who wants humans to believe
in it by arguing that such a god would do a better job of gathering
believers.
Arguments from the poor design of the universe
The problem of evil contests the existence of a god who is both omnipotent and omnibenevolent by arguing that such a god should not permit the existence of evil or suffering. The theist responses are called theodicies. Similarly, the argument from poor design
contends that an all-powerful, benevolent creator god would not have
created lifeforms, including humans, which seem to exhibit poor design.
Richard Carrier
has argued that the universe itself seems to be very ill-designed for
life, because the vast majority of the space in the universe is utterly
hostile to it. This is arguably unexpected on the hypothesis that the
universe was designed by a god, especially a personal god. Carrier contends that such a god could have easily created a geocentric universeex nihilo in the recent past,
in which most of the volume of the universe is inhabitable by humans
and other lifeforms— precisely the kind of universe that most humans
believed in until the rise of modern science. While a personal god might have created the kind of universe we observe, Carrier contends that this is not the kind of universe we would most likely
expect to see if such a god existed. He finally argues that, unlike
theism, our observations about the nature of the universe are strongly
expected on the hypothesis of atheism, since the universe would have to
be vast, very old, and almost completely devoid of life if life were to
have arisen by sheer chance.
Logical arguments
The following arguments deduce, mostly through self-contradiction, the non-existence of a God as "the Creator".
Stephen Hawking and co-author Leonard Mlodinow state in their book The Grand Design
that it is reasonable to ask who or what created the universe, but if
the answer is God, then the question has merely been deflected to that
of who created God. Both authors claim that it is possible to answer
these questions purely within the realm of science, and without invoking
any divine beings. Christian scholars, like Leonhard Euler and Bernard d'Espagnat, disagree with that kind of skeptical argument.
No scientific evidence of God's existence has been found. Therefore,
the scientific consensus is that whether God exists is unknown.
A counter-argument against God as the Creator takes the assumption
of the Cosmological argument ("the chicken or the egg"), that things
cannot exist without creators, and applies it to God, setting up an
infinite regress.
Dawkins' Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit analogizes the above. Some theists argue that evolution
and abiogenesis are akin to a hurricane assembling a Boeing 747 — that
the universe (or life) is too complex, cannot be made by non-living
matter alone and would have to be designed by someone, who theists call
God. Dawkin's counter-argument is that such a God would himself be
complex — the "Ultimate" Boeing 747 — and therefore require a designer.
Theological noncognitivism
is the argument that religious language – specifically, words such as
"God" – are not cognitively meaningful and that irreducible definitions
of God are circular.
The analogy of Russell's teapot argues that the burden of proof for the existence of God lies with the theist rather than the atheist; it can be considered an extension of Occam's Razor.
Arguments from incompatible divine properties
Some arguments focus on the existence of specific conceptions of God as being omniscient, omnipotent, and morally perfect.
The omnipotence paradox suggests that the concept of an omnipotent
entity is logically contradictory by considering questions such as "Can
God create a rock so big that He cannot move it?" or "If God is all
powerful, could God create a being more powerful than Himself?"
Similarly, the omniscience paradox argues that God cannot be
omniscient because he would not know how to create something unknown to
himself.
Another argument points to the contradiction of omniscience and
omnipotence arguing that God is bound to follow whatever God foreknows
himself doing.
Argument from free will
contends that omniscience and the free will of humanity are
incompatible and that any conception of God that incorporates both
properties is therefore inherently contradictory: if God is omniscient,
then God already knows humanity's future, contradicting the claim of
free will.
The anthropic argument states that if God is omniscient, omnipotent,
and morally perfect, he would have created other morally perfect beings
instead of imperfect ones, such as humans.
The Transcendental Argument for the Non-existence of God contests
the existence of an intelligent Creator God by demonstrating that such a
being would make logic and morality contingent, which is incompatible
with the presuppositionalist assertion that they are necessary, and
contradicts the efficacy of science.
The "no reason" argument tries to show that an omnipotent and
omniscient being would not have any reason to act in any way,
specifically by creating the universe, because it would have no needs,
wants, or desires since these very concepts are subjectively human.
Since the universe exists, there is a contradiction, and therefore, an
omnipotent god cannot exist. This argument is expounded upon by Scott Adams in the book God's Debris, which puts forward a form of Pandeism as its fundamental theological model. A similar argument is put forward in Ludwig von Mises's
"Human Action". He referred to it as the "praxeological argument" and
claimed that a perfect being would have long ago satisfied all its wants
and desires and would no longer be able to take action in the present
without proving that it had been unable to achieve its wants
faster—showing it imperfect.
The atheist-existential argument for the non-existence of a perfect sentient being states that if existence precedes essence, it follows from the meaning of the term sentient that a sentient being cannot be complete or perfect. It is touched upon by Jean-Paul Sartre in Being and Nothingness. Sartre's phrasing is that God would be a pour-soi [a being-for-itself; a consciousness] who is also an en-soi [a being-in-itself; a thing]: which is a contradiction in terms. The argument is echoed thus in Salman Rushdie's novel Grimus: "That which is complete is also dead."
Subjective arguments
Similar to the subjective
arguments for the existence of God, subjective arguments against the
supernatural mainly rely on the testimony or experience of witnesses, or
the propositions of a revealed religion in general.
The witness argument gives credibility to personal witnesses,
contemporary and from the past, who disbelieve or strongly doubt the
existence of God.
The conflicted religions argument notes that many religions give
differing accounts as to what God is and what God wants; since all the
contradictory accounts cannot be correct, many if not all religions must
be incorrect.
The disappointment argument claims that if, when asked for, there is
no visible help from God, there is no reason to believe that there is a
God.
Hindu arguments
Atheistic Hindu doctrines cite various arguments for rejecting a creator God or Ishvara. The Sāṁkhyapravacana Sūtra of the Samkhya
school states that there is no philosophical place for a creator God in
this system. It is also argued in this text that the existence of
Ishvara (God) cannot be proved and hence cannot be admitted to exist.
Classical Samkhya argues against the existence of God on metaphysical
grounds. For instance, it argues that an unchanging God cannot be the
source of an ever-changing world. It says God is a necessary
metaphysical assumption demanded by circumstances. The Sutras of Samkhya endeavor to prove that the idea of God is inconceivable and self-contradictory, and some commentaries speak plainly on this subject. The Sankhya- tattva-kaumudi,
commenting on Karika 57, argues that a perfect God can have no need to
create a world, and if God's motive is kindness, Samkhya questions
whether it is reasonable to call into existence beings who while
non-existent had no suffering. Samkhya postulates that a benevolent
deity ought to create only happy creatures, not an imperfect world like
the real world.
Charvaka, originally known as Lokāyata, a heterodox Hindu philosophy states that there is "no God, no samsara (rebirth), no karma, no duty, no fruits of merit, no sin." Proponents of the school of Mimamsa, which is based on rituals and orthopraxy,
decided that the evidence allegedly proving the existence of God is
insufficient. They argue that there is no need to postulate a maker for
the world, just as there is no need for an author to compose the Vedas
or a god to validate the rituals. Mimamsa argues that the gods named in the Vedas have no existence apart from the mantras that speak their names. In that regard, the power of the mantras is what is seen as the power of gods.
Psychological aspects
Several authors have offered psychological or sociological explanations for belief in the existence of God.
Psychologists observe that the majority of humans often ask
existential questions such as "why we are here" and whether life has
purpose. Some psychologists have posited that religious beliefs may recruit cognitive mechanisms in order to satisfy these questions. William James emphasized the inner religious struggle between melancholy and happiness, and pointed to trance as a cognitive mechanism. Sigmund Freud
stressed fear and pain, the need for a powerful parental figure, the
obsessional nature of ritual, and the hypnotic state a community can
induce as contributing factors to the psychology of religion.
Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained (2002), based in part on his anthropological field work, treats belief in God as the result of the brain's tendency towards agency detection.
Boyer suggests that, because of evolutionary pressures, humans err on
the side of attributing agency where there isn't any. In Boyer's view,
belief in supernatural entities spreads and becomes culturally fixed
because of their memorability. The concept of "minimally
counterintuitive" beings that differ from the ordinary in a small number
of ways (such as being invisible, able to fly, or having access to
strategic and otherwise secret information) leave a lasting impression
that spreads through word-of-mouth.
Scott Atran's In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (2002) makes a similar argument and adds examination of the socially coordinating aspects of shared belief. In Minds and Gods: The Cognitive Foundations of Religion, Todd Tremlin
follows Boyer in arguing that universal human cognitive process
naturally produces the concept of the supernatural. Tremlin contends
that an agency detection device (ADD) and a theory of mind
module (ToMM) lead humans to suspect an agent behind every event.
Natural events for which there is no obvious agent may be attributed to
God (c.f. Act of God).
