publications

Ontological and Cosmological arguments

These arguments reflect the scholarly debate. The issues here are more about the deep structure of reality, rather than the reasons why most believers think there is a God. When we examine reality as a whole, to the extent that we can understand it, is a being something like God necessary, or impossible, or somewhere in between?

Philosophers debate three traditional arguments. They are known as the ontological argument, the cosmological argument and the design argument. Of the three the design argument has most influence, because many people think the world seems to have been designed by an intelligent mind. I’ll describe that later. This page describes the other two. They don’t impinge on the way most people think; the question is whether they are essential ingredients of the way people think.

It’s a bit like when you go to the doctor saying you feel unwell. The doctor does a few tests and says you have got a virus. You say ‘I haven’t seen any viruses’. The doctor explains that you wouldn’t see them because they are very small, but if you had as much medical knowledge as doctors have, you would understand that your own description of your illness shows that there is a virus there.

In the same way, suppose you ask me how to get from here to Garston by public transport. I tell you to go to the bombed-out church and catch an 82 bus. Before you asked me you probably didn’t spend time wondering what are the chances that Garston was destroyed in an earthquake last night, or whether you are actually a brain in a vat fantasising about the existence of Garston. Similarly, when I answer I presuppose that I am not a brain in a vat, you are a human being with thoughts and intentions comparable to mine, and what you mean by ‘82’ is what I mean by ’82’. But for all I know I may be a brain in a vat, and for all you know you may be a brain in a vat.

So it turns out that even the simplest of communications make a huge range of presuppositions. When we talk about which bus to catch we don’t even think about them, let alone mention them. Even if we decide to think about them and make a list of them, we won’t spot all of them. In other words, our normal understanding of reality logically depends on presuppositions, some of which we are not aware of at all.

The question is: if we examine the way we normally understand reality, does it logically presuppose the existence of a being something like what we call God?

In the same way the ontological and cosmological arguments claim that we need to presuppose the existence of God. ‘Ontological’ means it’s about being, and ‘cosmological’ means it’s about the universe.

Ontological argument

The ontological argument is usually dated from Anselm who was Archbishop of Canterbury in the eleventh century. The revival of learning in western Europe was just beginning. Nobody doubted that God existed; the question was whether they could use their logical skills to prove it.

Simpler version

Anselm defined God as ‘a being than which no greater being can be conceived’. By ‘greater’ he meant something like more perfect. Referring to a text in a psalm which says ‘The fool has said there is no God’, he replied that even the fool does in fact conceive of a being than which no greater can be conceived. He proceeded to argue that if such a being did not exist, we would be able to conceive of a greater being, namely one such which did exist. The greatest conceivable being must therefore have existence.

At that level it is easily refuted. A monk called Gaunilo wrote A Book on Behalf of the Fool, using the analogy of a perfect island. According to Anselm’s argument, he said, a perfect island would have to exist.

When I was at theological college we had to write an essay on this argument, and I had some sympathy with Gaunilo. I came up with an ontological argument for the non-existence of the devil. Since Anselm defined God as the most perfect conceivable being I defined the devil as the most evil conceivable being, and if as Anselm argued existence is a positive attribute which God must have then for the same reason it must follow that the devil doesn’t have it. Nobody thought my argument was any good, but Anselm did reply to Gaunilo. He said God is a special case. In all other cases, like the island, we are thinking of that which is the most perfect of its kind; in the case of God, the most perfect of all kinds.

Later Descartes defended the argument using the analogy of a triangle. He could imagine a triangle that did not exist, but even this imaginary triangle must have certain properties, like having angles that add up to 180º. Just as having such angles is implied in the very idea of a triangle, so existence is implied in the very idea of God.

Immanuel Kant rejected the argument on the ground that it treats existence as a property. Beings have properties: being heavy, possessing a mind, wearing a green dress and so on. It would make sense to argue that the greatest possible being would possess the properties of greatness, but existence is not a property. You wouldn’t say that God possesses the property of existence unless you were already presupposing that there is a God.

Necessary existence version

Modern defenders of the ontological argument usually focus on Anselm’s second account, which depends on the distinction between necessary and contingent existence. This distinction is relevant to the cosmological argument as well. Something exists contingently when it just happens to exist but might not have. Contingent things can exist at one time but not another. Something which exists necessarily must always exist. Philosophers today debate what might exist necessarily, and some of the other candidates are numbers, the rules of logic, and space and time.

The argument is that if there is something so great that nothing greater can be conceived, it would have to exist necessarily. This is because by definition anything which exists necessarily cannot come into existence and go out of existence. It cannot be caused by something else, so it must depend on itself alone. Therefore either it never exists or it always exists. Some defenders of the argument point out that therefore the existence of God is either necessary or impossible - one or the other – but since we cannot prove it impossible the only other alternative is that God necessarily exists.

Today most people find the ontological argument unconvincing because it seems to claim that pure logic can make something exist. John Hick writes:

‘Logical necessity has no purchase on matters of fact and existence... It cannot be logically necessary that there is a reality corresponding to the concept of an ontologically necessary being – or indeed to any other concept’ (An Interpretation of Religion, Macmillan, 1989, pp. 76-77).

Keith Ward replies that it isn’t using words to bring something into existence: it’s analysing the way we understand reality, and concluding that if the way we understand reality has got any truth in it, we have to presuppose a necessary being. If you accept that, then you would bring other considerations into play to show that this necessary being would have to be something like God (Rational Theology and the Creativity of God, Blackwell, 1982, pp. 29-30).

Conclusion

The ontological argument continues to generate extreme reactions. For some it is too absurd to be worth bothering with. Others say it is a deep insight into the nature of reality and once they have grasped it they cannot deny it.

I doubt whether anyone has ever come to faith in God as a result of the ontological argument. For Anselm, there was no serious doubt about the existence of God: what he was exploring was the power of reason. Centuries later Descartes, writing at the beginning of the Enlightenment, still took for granted the existence of God, but used the ontological argument as part of his case for arguing that reason can produce knowledge independently of the dogmas of church leaders. Two centuries later the presuppositions had been reversed. Kant could take for granted the authority of human reason, but treat the existence of God as subject to reasoned examination of the evidence, just like everything else. It is this way round that the argument gets debated today.

Cosmological argument

A simple version of the cosmological argument was proposed by the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, who argued for a first mover. Everything that moves is moved by something else. The only kind of reality which can produce spontaneous movement is soul. Putting it into today’s language we might say that if you have got a mind with free will, you may decide to do something, but if you haven’t, you are part of a determined sequence of causes and effects. Plato thought there must have been a mind which got things moving in the first place. His pupil Aristotle agreed, arguing that otherwise there would have to be an infinite regress of movers. There must have been some original mover who got the process started off.

This argument was picked up in the thirteenth century by Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas described ‘five ways’ of arguing for the existence of God. His fourth and fifth are roughly the moral argument and the design argument, and I’ll describe these later. Here I describe the first two together and then move on to the third.

The first restates Plato’s argument to an unmoved mover, and the second appeals to causation. Each event is caused by another event, and again unless we are to have an infinite regress there must have been an initial uncaused cause.

If we treat these two arguments together, the question is: is there an infinite regress of causes, or was there a first cause, a first mover? That first cause would have to be uncaused, so somehow self-explanatory, and we are back to the idea of a necessary being.

Today there is a third possible alternative. Some theoretical physicists believe that time doesn’t always go from the past into the future, but somehow curves in on itself and there was no beginning.

Historical v hierarchical series

Of course Aquinas didn’t know about that theory, but he allowed for something similar. In his day there was disagreement about whether the universe had existed from eternity, as Aristotle had taught, or had been created at a point in time, as Christianity taught. He wanted to allow for either possibility, and did it as follows. We can distinguish two kinds of causation. When we came here Rose switched the lights on, and they are still on. That’s a historical sequence: first the cause, then the effect. But if you can hear what I’m saying, the cause is that I’m talking, at the same time. When Rose stops switching, the lights stay on; if I stop talking, you stop hearing. Aquinas described the first cause as the top of a hierarchical sequence, continually making the universe work, not the start of a historical sequence.

400 years later Isaac Newton ruined the argument. Aquinas was presupposing that movement and causation are only possible through the constant action of a force. Newton’s account of momentum showed how this didn’t need to be the case. Since then most defenders of the first cause argument have thought of it as a historical series. This makes the argument a question of how it all began. On the other hand, if it’s true that we misunderstand time, and somehow it curves in on itself so there never was a beginning, the question then becomes ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ This means that Aquinas’ way of putting the question was the right one after all; we are looking for an original cause not at the beginning of time but at the top of the hierarchy.

But perhaps it doesn’t matter. In either case we have two options. Either there is an infinite regress of causes: the Big Bang was caused by xyz, and xyz was caused by pqr, and so on for ever; or there is a starter motor as well as a battery, a beginning to the process, a self-sufficient uncaused cause, an unmoved mover.

Laws of nature as regularities

In case this seems too simple there is also an unsolved puzzle. How do causes cause anyway? Last month I described the debate about whether the laws of nature are God’s way of doing things regularly, or whether they are completely independent of God. If they are completely independent of God, how do they make things happen? It’s easy to overlook the problem because the word ‘law’ means two different things. One of the reasons why I am not going to murder you this evening is that there is a law forbidding me. If I do, the police will arrest me. In that sense, a law is a force. It obliges. In the other sense, a law only describes a regularity.

Are the laws of
nature forces?

 

                   

 

 

 

 

 

One of the laws of nature is that water boils at 100˚. You can test it for yourself. Put a pan with water on the cooker, stick a thermometer in it and turn on the gas. When it gets to 100˚ you will see the bubbles. What you won’t see is a bubble-making machine. You won’t see any force obliging bubbles to enter the pan at the bottom and rise through the water. We know your water will boil when it gets to 100˚, not because we’ve seen a bubble-making machine in your house, but because water always does boil at that temperature. In other words, the law is an observed regularity, not a force.

This applies to all the scientific laws of nature. It may seem strange, because of the way we use language. Not only does the word ‘law’ have this double meaning, but if you have learned any physics you will know that physicists use words like ‘force’, ‘momentum’ and ‘gravity’ as though they were real powers. It helps to think of them as real powers, and most of the time they do.

If the laws of nature are observed regularities, not forces, they describe what happens but they never tell us what makes it happen. If you try to explain how the heat in the gas makes the water boil, even if you use words like ‘force’ in their technical scientific sense, you are still only describing how the flames are followed by the water boiling, not how the flames cause the water to boil. All we know is that this is what always happens.

Once you detach the laws of nature from God, you no longer have a force which makes them work. The first person to spot the problem was David Hume in the middle of the eighteenth century. On the one hand, he said, every event must have a cause. This is essential to our knowledge of the world. Without this principle, we would know nothing. On the other hand, how do we know that every event has a cause? Our only evidence is our repeated observations that certain events occur in combination with certain other events. We never see causation; we only infer it. Even if our inferences are correct, we have no way of telling whether all events have causes. Yet all science is based on the assumption that they do; the alternative is to believe we are surrounded by chaos, and knowledge becomes impossible.

Hume did not solve the dilemma. Most philosophers of science today argue that causation and the laws of nature are only ways of describing what we actually observe. If we think of causation as a force, we don’t know anything about that force; all we know is the results. In other words, we’re up against the limits to science. We just can’t know.

The trouble with that is, if we leave it there, it’s unscientific. The whole point of science is that you don’t shrug your shoulders and say ‘That’s just the way it is. Your water will boil at 100˚ but nobody knows why’; to be scientific is to look for explanations.

Some scientists therefore argue that in order to explain how the laws of nature make things happen there must be real forces making the world work the way it does. If so, what are they? We are talking about reliable, invisible, powerful forces which make things happen regularly the way they do. Personally, I feel absolutely confident that if we could go back to the ancient Babylonians, or Egyptians, or Romans, and ask them whether they believed such forces exist, they would have no hesitation in answering ‘Of course. They are the gods’.

We have two options. One is that science doesn’t explain anything at all. All it does is describe what happens and make predictions good enough to produce modern technology, but it leaves us in a world full of events we don’t understand. Some scientists believe that is the case. It’s called pragmatism. If it works, that’s the best we can do. They are in a minority.

Most scientists are not content with this: they believe science is about describing the way things really are, by means of laws of nature and real forces. However, when we examine what we mean by laws of nature, they describe the regularities but not the forces. The forces are something else. They don’t have to be exactly what Jews, Christians and Moslems believe God is like, but they sound like that kind of thing.

This is how I respond. The reason why modern secular science has been able to dispense with God is that it attributes causal force to the laws of nature instead of God. When we realise that all we know about the laws of nature is that they are observed regularities, not forces, there is a massive hole in the theory. To fill that hole, science needs some kind of force. As soon as we notice that that force has to be invisible, powerful and reliable, it begins to look suspiciously like God. It seems to me that contrary to what a lot of people are saying today, either science works and religion works, or neither work.

Aquinas’ ‘third way’: contingency and necessary being

Aquinas’ third argument appeals to the distinction between contingent and necessary existence. Aquinas argues that if everything was contingent, coming into and out of existence, with each thing caused by some other contingent thing in an infinite regress, over an infinite time every possibility would be realised. This would include the state at which nothing existed. But if there was ever a time when nothing existed, it would have been impossible for anything to come into existence. There must therefore be a being which exists not contingently, but necessarily.

The argument doesn’t quite work. You could have an infinite time without every possible state realised: there might for example be a limited set of states which keep recurring.

Some people defend a weaker version. Does there have to be anything that exists necessarily, or could everything be contingent? The universe has been full of contingent things ever since the Big Bang. If the Big Bang was a contingent event, was it caused by another contingent event, or by something necessary? What matters most to us is once again the laws of nature. We depend on them carrying on as they are. But here comes another problem. Physicists now believe the laws of nature were established in the first fraction of a second after the Big Bang. If the Big Bang was a contingent event caused by another contingent event, then the laws of nature are themselves contingent. Far from being universal and unbreakable, they came into existence at a particular time and place, accidentally, for no particular reason, and therefore we have no way of knowing how long they will last. They seem to have lasted well for four billion years, but for all we know our lives may depend on four billion of them and any one of them could go rusty and grind to a halt tomorrow. If the whole of reality is just an accident, the laws of nature could be reliable, just by luck, but we have no way of knowing. Perhaps one of them will change tomorrow morning. Perhaps you’ll be walking down the street, you’ll trip over the pavement, and that will cause the whole Planet Earth to burst into flames. We assume it won’t, but we assume it won’t because we trust the laws of nature more than the laws of nature themselves can justify. This is another way we attribute godlike qualities to the laws of nature, even though science tells us they do not have those godlike qualities.

How long will the laws of nature last?

The point of the cosmological argument is that it offers a theory of reality which would justify the trust we place in the laws of nature. Experience tells us that we have to live our lives as though the universe is ordered and reliable. Either it isn’t true, and the human mind cannot cope with the truth, or it is true. The question is: can we justify the hypothesis that it is true? Can we produce a rational, defensible theory of the universe which explains how the laws of nature are as reliable as we hope they are?

Any such theory would have to do better than describe the universe as just one contingent event after another, one chance accident after another. The theory would have to assume that all the contingent events we know about, including the laws of nature, have their origin in something which is not chance, not accident, not here today and gone tomorrow: in other words, something that exists necessarily.

Once again we seem to have two options. One is that the universe is just contingent, chance, all the way down. The world we’re in and the laws of nature we’ve got just happen to be there, because of a succession of accidents, and we don’t know how long any of them will last. We assume that when this meeting is over and we walk out through the front door, Liverpool will still be there, but it may not. We have no way of knowing how long life is going to carry on like this.

The other option is that the universe is not entirely contingent. Because we are impressed by the way contingent events are ordered according to laws of nature, we conclude that there must be something behind them which gives them their order, something which is not accidental or temporary. It would be some necessary thing which accounts for all the contingent things.

Once again, it seems that either science works and religion works, or neither. Science doesn’t do what we usually think it does unless there is some kind of absolutely reliable necessary being giving the universe its coherence.

Conclusion

To conclude. The arguments I’ve been describing here are not the usual reasons people do or do not believe in God. They are deeper questions about our whole understanding of reality and whether we can justify it. There is a proper place for asking whether our understanding of reality makes better sense with or without some being like God.

It seems to me that if science can really do what we normally think it does, there is a strong case for arguing that there needs to be a necessary being something like what we mean by God. That’s a long way from proving that the God Christians believe in exists. Firstly, perhaps we are wrong about science. Some non-realists think we are just an apparently ordered bubble in an otherwise chaotic, accident-prone universe. Secondly, even if our ability to make sense of the world depends on presupposing a necessary being which is the ultimate cause of the universe, we are a long way from identifying that cause with the God that Christians, Jews, Muslims and Hindus believe in. What believers then do is produce different reasons for describing the necessary being in greater detail.

For a few centuries church leaders had power to restrict the advance of science. Scientists defended themselves by drawing a line between science and religion, insisting that science was nothing to do with religion. As a result science produced a taboo on God. Modern western science expects to operate without any reference to God. It seems to me that that taboo is now hindering the advance of science. If we could let go of the taboo, it would become possible once again for scientists and theologians to work together to puzzle out the best ways to explain the universe.

None of this proves that there is a God. It’s a hypothesis. And like all scientific hypotheses, if it’s the best one we’ve got we’ll probably believe it until such time as we can improve on it.

If only God would give me  some clear sign! Like making a large deposit in my name at a Swiss bank.

Woody Allen, New Yorker, 1973

God exists; for, although the idea of substance is in me, for the very reason that I am a substance, I would not, nevertheless, have the idea of an infinite substance, since I am a finite being, unless the idea had been put into me by some substance which was truly infinite.

René Descartes, 1596-1650

In  the observable world causes derive their causality from other causes; we never observe, nor ever could, something causing itself, for this would mean it preceded itself…  

So one is forced to suppose some first cause, to which everyone gives the name God.

Thomas Aquinas, c. 1225-1274

Gaunilo

or are they regularities?

David Hume
1711-1776