How to Think About God
How to Think About God
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In his should-be famous book, Mortimer J Adler talks about how to think about God from a pagan perspective. That is, how to deduce that God exists, and how to figure out what he is like, purely from thinking like a philosopher. In other words, without reliance on revelation.
What Adler attempts to point out is that you can use reason alone to come to know about God. You might not be able to use reason alone to know everything about God, but you can at least get to the conclusion that God’s existence is more probable than not.
The argument that Adler presents in his book is a contemporary version of the Argument from Contingency, famously developed by Aquinas and brought into its more common form by Liebniz. (This was Aquinas’s “3rd Way”, or argument from necessity to possibility, and then became Leibniz’s famous cosmological argument, which I’ve previously outlined here.)
Here’s the way Adler presents his “Truly Cosmological Argument”, and I quote:
- The existence of an effect requiring the concurrent existence and action of an efficient cause implies the existence and action OF that cause. The causal principle, thus stated, is self-evidently true, as has been said before.
- The cosmos as a whole exists. Here we have the existential assertion that is indispensable as a premise in any existential inference. While it does not have the same certitude possessed by my assertion of my own existence, it can certainly be affirmed beyond a reasonable doubt.
- The existence of the cosmos as a whole is radically contingent, which is to say, while not needing an efficient cause of its coming to be (if we assume it is everlasting) it nevertheless does need an efficient cause of its CONTINUING existence, to preserve it in being and prevent it from being replaced by nothingness.
- IF the cosmos needs an efficient cause of its continuing existence to prevent its annihilation, THEN that cause must be a supernatural being, supernatural in its action, and one the existence of which is uncaused; in other words, the supreme being, or God.
The argument is logically valid. Meaning IF the premises are true, the conclusion follows whether one “likes” it or not. The only question is, are the premises true?
Well, let’s talk about it.
The first thing you want to note about this argument, is the kind of “efficient cause” Adler is proposing God to be. This merits a few minutes of conversation, because it is one of the most common mistakes people make when arguing either for or against this specific brand of cosmological argument.
Adler is NOT saying that God, at some finite time ago, BROUGHT the universe into being. That is, he’s not claiming God as a first cause in a temporal sense. (Although that argument can be made, and I think made well, as it is in the Kalam Cosmological Argument, it’s not the argument being made, now.) Adler is claiming something much more radical than that, I would say. What Adler is saying is that God is acting as the ever-present ex-nihilator of the universe. In other words, it is God who actively prevents the universe from going out of being at any particular moment in time.
The premise to support this is premise three, which says the universe is radically “contingent”, meaning nothing about the universe explains itself, or is necessary within itself. The interesting thing about the third premise is Adler concedes (solely for the sake of this argument; he later argues differently) that the universe does not need an efficient cause to COME into being, only an efficient cause to preserve it as such. This is also what Aquinas argued. Because while Aquinas personally believed the universe had an absolute beginning (as did Adler), he did not think that beginning could be demonstrated philosophically, so he stayed away from that as an argument. Rather he maintained, very much like Adler, that the universe demands an explanation for existence here and now, and that that explanation, ultimately, is God.
I will mention that I think both of these philosophers would be made giddy by the discoveries of modern big-bang Cosmology and the general consensus that the universe had an absolutely beginning in one way or another, but again, whether that is true or not has no particular bearing on the arguments presented by Aquinas, Liebniz, OR Adler, because that is so not the argument they’re making. Their arguments either assume the universe is past-eternal, or simply don’t care one way or another. So any debate over the temporal beginning of the universe in this context is merely irrelevant.
So it seems to me the only really potentially contentious premise in the argument is premise #3. Is the universe radically contingent?
The question, says Adler, can be proposed another way, “Is it possible for the cosmos that now exists to cease to exist and be replaced by nothing at all?”
Adler offers a brief explanation of what would be required to show this, “The contingency of the cosmos as a whole (IF it is contingent) must, as we have seen, be radical, not superficial, whereas the contingency of individual things is superficial, not radical. Hence we cannot infer the contingency of the cosmos as a whole from the contingency of its parts, even if all the parts, including electrons and protons, were contingent in their existence, as indicated by their coming into existence and passing away.”
Essentially you can’t make the composition fallacy, is what Adler is saying. Just because it seems things WITHIN the universe come into being and pass away, the counter argument can be made that this “contingency” is merely superficial (not “radical), in the sense the building blocks are maintained (protons and electrons, etc) and only the form is changing. In other words, Adler is not letting us get away with poor reasoning. Good!
Adler continues, and even raises the stakes against his argument, “Should we be unable to affirm the radical contingency of the cosmos, we would then have no grounds for thinking that the cosmos as a whole needs a supernatural cause to maintain it in existence. Complying with Ockham’s Rule governing inferences to the existence of unobservable hypothetical entities, we would not be justified in positing the existence of God to explain the continuing existence of a radically contingent cosmos. ”
Said another way, you don’t need God to explain a universe that explains itself.
So still, the question remains: DOES the universe explain itself? Is it, in fact, radically continent, or merely”superficially” contingent. Well, let’s see.
Adler goes on to explain why we SHOULD view the universe as radically contingent…
“That reason is to be found in the fact that the cosmos which now exists is only one of many possible universes that might have existed in the infinite past, and that might still exist in the infinite future.
… This is not to say that any cosmos other than this one ever did exist in the past, or ever will exist in the future. It is not necessary to go that far in order to say that other universes might have existed in the past and might exist in the future.
… If other universes are possible, then this one also is merely possible, not necessary–not the only cosmos that can ever exist in an infinite extent of time.
… How do we know that the present universe is only a possible universe (one of many possibilities that might exist), not a necessary universe (the only one that can ever exist)?
… We can infer it from the fact that the arrangement and disarray–the order and disorder–of the present cosmos might have been otherwise, might have been different from what it is. There is no compelling reason to think that the natural laws which govern the present cosmos are the only possible natural laws. The cosmos as we know it manifests chance and random happenings, as well as lawful behavior. Even the electrons and protons, which are through to be imperishable once they exists as the building blocks of the present cosmos, might not be the building blocks of a different cosmos.
… The next step in the argument is a crucial one. It consists in saying that whatever might have been otherwise in shape or structure is something that also might not exist at all.
… That which cannot be otherwise also cannot not exist; and conversely, what necessarily exists cannot be otherwise than it is. The truth that is the thin thread on which the cosmological argument hangs runs parallel to the truth just stated. Whatever can be otherwise than it is can also simply not be at all. A cosmos which can be otherwise is one that also can not be; and conversely, a cosmos that is capable of not existing at all is one that can be otherwise than it is now.
… Applying this insight to the fact that the existing cosmos is merely one of a plurality of possible universes, we come to the conclusion that he cosmos, radically contingent in existence, would not exist at all were its existence not caused.”
And so Adler from another angle confirms the famous premise once presented by Leibniz, that everything which exists has an explanation for its existence, either in a necessity of its own being (God) or an external cause. The universe exists. The universe does not explain itself. Therefore, the universe has an external cause. And from there we can unpack what such an external cause would be, which Adler has already hinted at: Supernatural–that is, timeless, spaceless, immaterial, extremely powerful, and possessed of intellect and will.
And thus we’ve arrived at The God of the Philosophers, an entity reached many times by thinkers spanning through various cultures and times and religious backgrounds, from Aristotle to Aquinas, from Leibniz to Longergan, and so on. I find this argument–if we’re talking personally for a moment–quite convincing. It not only has stood the test of time but remains as valid and effervescent as ever.
That said, the argument does nothing to confirm the God of Christianity, say. It only gets us to monotheism, and that’s fine. Because that’s all the argument is supposed to do–and, I would say–has to do. This argument is not supposed to establish the God of Christanity; it is only supposed to show that atheism is false. And once that matter has been settled, we no longer need entertain the prattling nonsense of such polemic dunderheads as Sam Harris or Richward Dawkins, and can then get on to other arguments over what version of monotheism, if any, is correct.
– Pat
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I’m always learning something useful from your blogs Pat. Your article reminds me of a book I read, “I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist” (I may have mentioned it elsewhere). There are just too many reasons to believe this is all one accident. I’ve yet to hear a good reason explaining why God doesn’t exist. Now, people may argue about the specifics of God’s existence—is he a non-participant, the God of Moses, etc? (although I’m a Christian myself), but I can’t understand people claiming this wonderful cosmos is a fluke.
I remember back in my atheist days (oh, the memories!) being challenged by one of my philosopher friends on this. He asked what arguments I had for the non-existence of God. At this point, even though I thought I was quite studied in the existentialists, the most I could come up with was some vague form of the problem of evil. He pressed me on this to point of realizing I may have been misusing the term atheist, or at least was not very clear about it. Ultimately, I was an agnostic; my belief was withheld, but I had no good arguments for thinking God did not exist. I just didn’t *like* the thought of religion.
Obviously, things have changed.
I’ve actually heard about this book but never got to read more or understand its context which you so gladly did here. Again, another one of your thought provoking posts, Pat! It will take a willing person who originally denounces such to listen or to at least read something of this context, but I hope they at least give chance or a bit of consideration on the point being discussed. Thank you for this post, Pat! I definitely learned more on an area I have not fully read about.
Thanks Cheska,
And I think you’re right, but then I think back on my experience. For years I was shut off to hearing arguments for the existence of God, but as I got deeper into my study of philosophy, I began to see them as pretty good arguments–eventually, rather convincing arguments. I was also much more receptive to arguments that were purely philosophical, rather than Bible-based, since I held literally zero stock in scripture as a non-believer.
My hope is these arguments can open folks up to thinking about God in a way they may never have, well, thought of before. I think so many people (and for years, this included me) have a very misconstrued notion of God, so in that sense I think books and arguments like these can reinvigorate a person’s spiritual journey.
I was reading Joseph Campbell’s “The Power of Myth” and the guy just had no clue about religions. He’s fixated on religions as metaphors, dismissing the real-world applications and roots of things such as Judaism and Christianity. It’s good to think and rationalize, but some people overthink as well.