The arguments for God’s existence are visceral, not rational
On being thrown into existence, with Lecture 3 of "Theological Epistemology"
“I mean, we’re all just going about, living our lives. But, like, what are we doing? Isn’t it weird that we’re here at all? And we act as if it’s just normal.
“So, I guess you could say I’m not an atheist, more of an agnostic.”
I heard these sentiments over the weekend from a friend and former believer. He hadn’t been able to talk about his religious thoughts with anyone for a long time, but presented with an opportunity, that is what spilled out.
In most of my higher education, at religious schools, I heard the arguments for God’s existence dismissed or denigrated. People who use them put too much trust in human reason. They are trying to treat doubt and other matters of the heart with left-brained argument.
But I don’t believe that is so. The arguments are visceral.
My agnostic friend was expressing the radical contingency of human existence. Why are we all playing the complex board-game of life as if there’s nothing surprising about it?
Philosopher Martin Heidegger called this aspect of human existence thrownness (in German, Geworfenheit). It’s like we were just chucked here, and now we have to choose what to do with a life we did not choose.
Heidegger believed in thrownness but, last I checked, didn’t believe in a thrower. But if a hundred-mile-an-hour fast ball whizzed past your face, wouldn’t you ask who threw it? (And if the answer were, “No one. This pitching machine projected it,” I would have more, not fewer questions.)
These visceral sentiments are inchoate versions of the cosmological argument for God’s existence. Thomas Aquinas’ first three ways are all attempts to formalize these intuitions, but especially his third, the argument from contingency. It goes something like this:
In nature and human life, everything we encounter is contingent. It could have been or not have been.
But if everything is contingent, why does anything exist it all? At root, there must be something that explains the existence of contingent things, but isn’t itself contingent.
So there is some being that is not contingent, but necessary. “This all men call ‘God.’”
If Aquinas’ formulation is too “rationalistic” for you, then stick with Heidegger’s thrownness, or my agnostic friend’s expression of wonder at the contingency of life.
Even those who don’t already believe in God are subject to a visceral feeling of contingency. That gut-feeling contains the premises of an argument.
Want to learn more about the theistic arguments?
I’m offering a course on theological epistemology, the intersection of faith and reason, through paid subscription to this Substack. The third lecture, below, is about the arguments for God’s existence, with a focus on their epistemological features - do they appeal to pure reason, to the senses, to faith, to transcendental deduction, etc. Upgrade to a paid subscription to get access to this and other lectures.
Theological Epistemology Course Syllabus
Previous Lectures
Lecture 1, What Is Theological Epistemology? An Introduction
Lecture 2, Bertrand Russell Refutes Cornelius Van Til
Theological Epistemology Lecture 3: Arguments for God, Ancient and Medieval
Contents:
Ancient Arguments for God: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle
Medieval Arguments for God
Anselm’s Ontological (or Logical) Argument
Aquinas’s Rejection of the Ontological Argument, and his Five Empirical Ways
The arguments for God’s existence long predate Christianity. In fact, almost all the main arguments for God’s existence derive from ancient Greek philosophy. The Medieval tradition took up these arguments and introduced others, like Anselm’s ontological argument.
However, not everyone agreed with Anselm that you could prove God by reason alone. In particular, Aquinas argued that the ontological argument has a fatal flaw and that our knowledge of God, for now, had to derive from the senses. This was the basis for Aquinas’s Christian empiricism and the fault-line between different epistemologies of our knowledge of God: Rationalism and empiricism.
1. Ancient Arguments for God: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle
In the first section of the lecture, I discuss the moral arguments for God’s existence from Socrates and Plato and the way they broke from pre-Socratic materialism. Then I discuss Aristotle’s articulations of the cosmological and the teleological arguments and the connection to his empiricist epistemology. This is the background for the whole Christian tradition of arguments for God’s existence.
