Historically, three intellectual proofs of God’s existence
loom large. They are the argument from design, the cosmological proof and
the ontological proof.
The argument from design says, in effect, that God is
in details. When we examine the wonderful efficiency and appropriateness of
things, it seems impossible that they got to be that other than through
the work of a divine intellect. As the English clergyman William Paley famously
pictured it, if one were to come across a pocket watch in the woods, one would
conclude, on examining its intricate structure, that it had been designed
by an intelligence for a purpose. The design argument is deistic, meaning that
it addresses God as a creator and not as an intervenor who works miracles
in the universe he has created. It has been treated with respect by
philosophers and others who are repelled by the notion of a personal God who
answers prayers by influencing the outcome of battles and football games, but
believe that the marvelous architecture of nature requires a supernatural
explanation.
The anthropic principle is the design argument in scientific
costume. Its appeal is demonstrated in Sir Fred Hoyle’s evaluation of his own
research into the “resonance states” of carbon atoms. Carbon is the fourth most
abundant cosmic element, after hydrogen, helium, and oxygen. It is also the
basis of terrestrial life. (That’s why the study of carbon compounds is known as
organic chemistry.) Carbon atoms are made inside stars. To make one takes
three helium nuclei. The trick is to get two helium nuclei to stick together
until they are struck by a third. It turns out that this feat depends critically
on the internal resonances of carbon and oxygen nuclei. Were the carbon
resonance level only 4 percent lower, carbon atoms wouldn’t form in the first
place. Were the oxygen resonance level only half a percent higher, virtually
all the carbon would be “scoured out,” meaning that it would have combined with
helium to form oxygen. No carbon, no us, so our existence depends in some sense
on the fine-tuning of these two nuclear resonances. Hoyle says that his
atheism—and atheism is, let’s face it, a faith like any other—was shaken by this
discovery. “If you wanted to produce carbon and oxygen in roughly equal
quantities by stellar nucleosynthesis, these are just the two levels you have
to fix, if your fixing would have to be just about where these levels are
actually found to be,” Hoyle told a Caltech gathering in 1981. “Is that another
put-up, artificial job?. . I am inclined to think so. A common sense
interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with
physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind
forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts
seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.”
But despite its having been entertained by thinkers from Paley to Hoyle, the design argument
suffers from at least two serious defects.
First, it was always woefully anthropocentric. Design implies
purpose, and God’s purpose in designing the universe was assumed to be either
to make us, or to make things nice for us, or both. The French science writer
Bernard de Fontenelle lampooned this position in his 1686 book A Plurality of
Worlds. “We are all naturally like that madman at Athens, who fancied that
all the ships were his that came into the Port of Pyraeus,” he wrote. “Nor is
our folly less extravagant. We believe all things in nature designed for our
use, and do but ask a philosopher, to what purpose there is that prodigious
company of fixed stars, when a far less number would perform the service they do
us. He answers coldly, they were made to please our sight.” The larger the
universe looms, the sillier it becomes to maintain that it was all put together
for us. To posit a human-centered purpose to the heavens smacks of a lamentable
humorlessness about the human condition, as Bertrand Russell was quick to point
out. “The believers in Cosmic Purpose make much of our supposed intelligence but
their writings make one doubt it,” Russell wrote. “If I were granted
omnipotence, and millions of years to experiment in, I should not think
Man much boast of as the final result of all my efforts.”
More
damaging was the historical fact that believers in the design argument
habitually drew their evidence from the biological world, citing as evidence of
God’s handiwork the marvellous adaptations of rattlesnakes and bower birds. This
proved to have been an unfortunate choice of fields, once Darwin demonstrated
that biological systems evolve by chance and not design. (Darwin
himself, though respectful of religion and loath to enter into theological
disputation, nevertheless admitted, “I can see no evidence of beneficent design,
or indeed design of any kind, in the details.”)
Driven from the biological arena, the design argument has since sought refuge in physics and cosmology.
Some thinkers expect that it will fare better there. I doubt it. A unified
theory that showed the constants of nature to have resulted from phase
transitions or other chance events would erode the design argument. So would the
admittedly more speculative hypothesis that there are many universes with many
different sets of laws, in only some of which life may be expected to arise.
Darwinism does not dispel the mystery of life. Rather, it equates the mystery of
life with the mystery of existence, of being. But the fact that something seems
mysterious does not mean that God did it.
Flawed
though it may be, the argument from design is more robust than the cosmological
and ontological proofs.
The cosmological proof goes back to Aristotle, who held that the existence of
motion requires an ultimate source of dynamics, an “unmoved mover”—that is,
God. It claims that any hierarchy of existence requires some overarching state
of existence, that of an extant God. Descartes, similarly, interpreted his
moment-to-moment existence as depending on the existence of a being beyond
himself. The cosmological proof has enjoyed a long reign, due in part to the
sentiments of thinkers who regard the origin of the universe as a problem
inaccessible to science. But it has also encountered serious objections. Why,
for instance, must we think of existence as a slippery slope, such that divine
intervention is constantly required to prevent things from sliding down into
the despond of nonexistence? And is causation really so deep a precept of
nature as to render God requisite? Another problem, much discussed in
theological circles, turns on the question of whether God had
free will when he created the universe. If so, he was free to make the universe
in a random, haphazard way. But if the universe is random, what need have we to
postulate the existence of God? And if it is not—if; say, God could have made
the universe only the most reasonable way, or in a way that promoted human
existence—then God cannot be all-powerful. As the philosopher Keith Ward puts
it, “The old dilemma—either God’s acts are necessary and therefore not free
(could not be otherwise), or they are free and therefore arbitrary (nothing
determines what they shall be)—has been sufficient to impale the vast majority
of Christian philosophers down the ages.”
The ontological proof (ontology is the study of
the nature of being) dates from the eleventh century, when Saint Anselm, the
archbishop of Canterbury, made the following argument: We conceive of God as
“something than which nothing more perfect can be conceived.” From the fact that
we have this concept, it follows logically that such a being must exist. Why?
Because if he did not, we would be able to conceive of something still more
perfect—namely, a perfect being that does exist—and it is an absurdity to
conceive of something more perfect than the most perfect conceivable being.
Just as it is better to have ten real dollars than ten imaginary dollars, it is
more perfect to be perfect and exist than to be perfect but nonexistent.
So the concept of a most perfect being requires that such a being exist. The
ontological proof is rather more subtle and persuasive than it looks at first
blush, but so logically slippery that it aroused indignation even in the Middle
Ages. (Gaunilo of Marmoutier inveighed against it while Anselm was still
alive.) Its most telling refutation came from Immanuel Kant.
In The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant effectively
demolished the cosmological and the ontological proofs. The ontological
argument, Kant pointed out, conflates two quite distinct realms of thought—that
of pure reason (e.g., mathematics), in which premises internally dictate
conclusions, and that of things, in which we reach judgments based on
experience. As Kant writes, “Having formed an a priori conception of a
thing, the content of which was made to embrace existence, we believed ourselves
safe in concluding that, because existence belongs necessarily to the object of
the conception (that is, under the condition of my positing this thing as
given), the existence of the thing is also posited necessarily, and that it is
therefore absolutely necessary—merely because its existence has been cogitated
in the conception.” In other words, having postulated that things exist, the
purveyors of the ontological proof argue that existence is an attribute
of things. But this is circular reasoning. And it is false, further, to think of
“existence” as a property of things on a par with, say, their inertia or
electrical charge. I might reasonably announce that I have ten dollars in my
pocket, but not that I have in my pocket five existing and five nonexisting
dollars. And, as Kant noted, the cosmological proof recapitulates the same
error. It pastes the tag of “existing” on things, then asserts that the
existence of any being requires existence of an ultimate being. Since Kant, the
ontological cosmological proofs have continued to sail the philosophical seas
but they are ghost ships, and we cannot expect their tatterred sails to carry us
very far. There remains one further argument, in which the
participatory anthropic principle is employed to establish God’s existence by
way of the riddle of quantum observership. The Copenhagen interpretation of
quantum mechanics treats as real only observed phenomena, raising the riddle of
how the early verse could have evolved in the absence of observers. The may be
“solved” by invoking God as the supreme observer by scrutinizing all particles
converts their quantum potentials in actual states. The same thesis has long
been used by believers to resolve one of the oldest (and most tiresome)
ontological questions—the one about whether trees exist when nobody observes
them, or make a sound when they fall and there’s nobody around to hear it. This
position is summarized in a hoary bit of doggerel:
There once was a man who said,
“God
Must think it exceedingly odd
If be finds that this tree
Continues to be
When there is no one about in the quad.”
“Dear sir, your astonishment’s odd
I am always about in the quad
And that’s why the tree
Will continue to be
Since observed by,
Yours faithfully, God.”
copyright: Timothy Ferris, The Whole Shebang