PHILOSOPHY 203 (W)

It is not obvious that there is a God. It is not obvious that there isn't. Strong rationality therefore requires that we suspend judgment on the matter — that we remain agnostic — unless and until a compelling case can be made either for or against the existence of God.

 We shall take up the arguments in earnest over the next several sessions. The task for today is to set the stage by asking two preliminary questions.

• When we ask whether God exists, what exactly are we asking? What does it mean to say that God exists?
• What would it take to show that this claim is well supported by evidence and argument? What is a good argument, and how can we know one when we see one?

The first stage in any inquiry is clarification of the question. Since our question is whether God exists, our first task is therefore to make this question as clear as possible. Now as sentences go, the sentence "God exists" is pretty simple. We have only two words to consider. Let's make sure we're not confused about how they are to be understood.

I'm going to assume that we know what it means to ask whether something or other exists, and hence that no definition of this notion will be necessary. (This is a good thing: the concept of existence is so basic that it's hard to see how it could possibly be defined.) Some children believe that Santa Claus exists; most adults don't. We know perfectly well what this dispute is about. It is about whether there is such a thing as Santa Claus, and to the extent that we understand the Santa Claus story, we know perfectly well what it means to assert or deny the existence of its protagonist. Unfortunately, it is possible to get seriously confused about existence. We'll explore some of the more interesting sources of confusion next time. But for now I want to head off one or two of the most common potential pitfalls.

When we ask whether Santa Claus exists, we are not asking about the existence of an idea or a concept. Disillusioned adults who deny the existence of Santa Claus do not deny that most of us have an idea of Santa Claus. Of course we have the idea: But the idea does not live at the North Pole; the idea does not deliver toys to children on Christmas Eve. But Santa Claus, if he exists, does precisely these things. Therefore Santa Claus (if he exists) is not an idea or a concept. He's a person or an elf – a living thing of flesh and blood. The dispute over the existence of Santa Claus cannot be settled by pointing out that Santa Claus surely exists "in the mind".

This, by the way, is a terribly misleading way of speaking and I strongly encourage you never to use it. The mind is not literally a place populated by creatures like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. If it means anything at all to say that SC exists in the mind, it means only that some people believe that SC exists. And if that's what you mean, you might as well put it that way. So I do not want to hear anyone saying as we discuss the existence of God and other questions that God is an idea, or that God exists in the mind. You would never confuse your mother with the idea of your mother. The idea exists "in your mind", if you insist on speaking in this way. The idea is invisible and intangible. Your mother is not. So don't make this mistake in the case of God. When we talk about God we are talking about an immensely powerful and immensely real spiritual being whose existence is utterly controversial. That thing, if it exists, is certainly not an idea in your mind or in my mind or in "the" mind (whatever that is).

Similarly, it can only confuse matters to say that Santa Claus or God exists for you, but not for me. This locution used to be popular among anthropologists and other social scientists, but it can only confuse you. If it means anything at all to say that tree spirits exist for the Azande but not for us, it just means that the Azande believe in tree spirits but we don't; and if that's what you mean then you might as well say so. Sometimes a commendable concern not to insult other people by disagreeing with them leads us to say things like, "God exists for me, but he may not exist for you". But this is not really a way of resolving the dispute. It means simply that I believe in God and you don't.

Some notions are clearly "relative". If we point to a rock and ask whether it's too heavy to lift , the answer might be: Well, it's too heavy for me, but not too heavy for you. Nothing is too heavy to lift simpliciter; being too heavy to lift is a relative matter. Existence, by contrast, is not relative in this way. If Santa Claus exists, he exists. Period. Nothing is added by saying that he exists for me or for you or for anyone else.

The same goes for the notion of truth. Another (somewhat longwinded) way to put our question is to ask whether it is true that God exists. But it is not an answer to this question to say that the claim that God exists is true for me but not for you. If it means anything at all to say that a claim is "true for me", it means that I believe it; and if that's what you mean then you might as well say so. So I don't want to hear anyone saying in the course of our discussion that certain theological claims may be true for one person and false for another, as if that were a way of resolving the debate. This is just another way of saying that there is a disagreement. It is not a way of saying that both sides are right.

So much for existence. What do we mean by the word "God"?

The first thing to stress is that this is not (at first) a deep theological question. It is an ordinary lexicographic question about what we mean by a word.

The second thing to stress is that there may very well be more than one correct answer. Nearly every ordinary word has more than one meaning. This is not a defect of our language, but it can be confusing. And this means that before we begin to discuss any potentially controversial question we have to make sure that we have all fastened on the same meanings for each of our potentially ambiguous terms.

Usually the best way to disambiguate one's terms is to make an explicit stipulation. If I ask whether you have any bats in your attic, my question is ambiguous, and I can resolve the ambiguity by saying explicitly:

From now on, when I say "bat" I mean a small flying rodent of the genus Myotis, and not the long stick used in baseball.

In the present case, this means that every discussion of the existence of God should begin with some remark of the following form:

For present purposes, when I use the word "God" I mean ...

Or better, we should give a paraphrase of the entire sentence we are concerned to discuss:

For present purposes, the sentence "God exists" is to mean that ....

Now when we offer these stipulations, we are constrained to choose from among the many meanings the term already possesses. If I say:

For present purposes, the sentence "God exists" is to mean that the universe exists.

then it will be easy enough to produce a convincing argument for the conclusion "God exists". But I will not have answered any interesting theological question. I will have answered a trivial astronomical question framed in highly misleading terms. This points to an important moral. There is no point in offering a definition that really just changes the subject. That may permit a verbal victory if your opponent is not paying attention. But it's not a way of making real philosophical progress.

The arguments we are going to consider operate with a range of definitions, some of which are more plausible than others as accounts of the ordinary meaning of the word "God". Here is just a short sample:

To say that God exists is to say that there exists

• a being than which no greater being is conceivable.
• an absolutely perfect being: a being that possesses absolutely every virtue in the maximal degree.
• a first cause: a being that is not itself caused to exist, but which causes other things to exist.
• a prime mover: a being which is not itself moved, but which causes other things to move
• an intelligent creator: a being that intentionally brings the natural universe into being.
• a being that possesses every attribute attributed to God in the Bible (or some other text).
• a being that possesses most of the most important attributes attributed to God in the Bible, though perhaps not all of them.
• an invisible, vastly powerful intelligence which cares about us and which deserves our love and reverence.
• a being that punishes those who do not believe in him for eternity, and likewise rewards those who do believe in him with infinite felicity.

There may be others. But to repeat: our purpose is not to settle which if any of these is the "correct" definition. Obviously it would be a major philosophical advance if we could establish that God exists in any one of these senses by compelling evidence and argument. No one who is serious about his religious commitment would regard his full conception of God as exhausted by any of these accounts. But any version of theism must incorporate something along these lines if it is to deserve the name. Our question is: can compelling evidence and argument support any version of theism?

It remains to say something about what it is for a claim to be "supported by compelling evidence and argument". A complete answer to this question would resolve one of the deepest questions in philosophy, and we shall not attempt that here. I'll be content to make some distinctions that will serve us when we set out to evaluate the various arguments for God's existence.

An argument is a sequence of sentences.

The last sentence is called the conclusion., usually signaled by a "therefore". An argument will typically (although not invariably) have one or more premises: claims that are asserted without argument from which the conclusion is supposed to "follow".

It is absolutely impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion false. There is no conceivable circumstance in which all horses eat grass and Fred is a horse, but Fred does not eat grass.

Now validity is important. But it isn't everything. After all, valid arguments for God's existence are pretty easy to come by.

These are all valid arguments. In each case, if the premises are all true then the conclusion must be true. (It's important that you understand this. Why is (2) valid?) But arguments of this sort are unlikely to persuade anyone of God's existence. So not every valid argument is a compelling argument for its conclusion. And the crucial question is: What more is required?

Now this account introduces a certain relativity into our discussion. What is convincing for me might not be convincing for you. I may be willing to grant certain premises which you find implausible. But this relativity is neither surprising nor objectionable. And indeed in many cases it will turn out not to matter. In evaluating an argument for the existence of God or for any other potentially controversial conclusion, we imagine an audience of reasonable people who do not already accept the conclusion. Then we ask ourselves three questions:

If the answer is 'yes' in each case then we're done. If not, we start asking questions. Can the argument be fixed by adding supplementary premises? Can these premises be made plausible by subsidiary compelling argument? Some arguments are obviously totally hopeless from the start. But the arguments we're going to consider are not like that. In most cases we will discover that the initial formulation is flawed in some way. But that's not a knockdown refutation. It's just an invitation to reconsider the argument and to ask whether it can be repaired. Some of the most interesting work in philosophy consists in trying to turn an obscure but intuitively gripping line of thought into a genuinely cogent argument. One reason for considering the arguments for God's existence in detail — apart from the intrinsic interest of the question — is to give you a sense of what this sort of work is like.