NOTE: Today we feature a guest post from Steven Dillon, one of our regular commenters. When Strange Notions launched in May 2013, Steven didn't believe in the monotheistic conception God. Although he still rejects God as Trinity, he has since come to believe in a single, simple, perfect, immutable God. Today he shares one reason that swayed him closer to monotheism.

 
I’ve spent a lot of time arguing against theistic conclusions here, but I feel it’s time to change gears. There are a lot of good arguments out there not only for theistic sorts of beliefs (such as in an after-life), but also for God’s existence, and I’d like to start defending some of these, especially for the latter.

Now, more often than not, philosophical arguments bottleneck our rich background beliefs and experiences in such a way that our evaluations of and discussions about these arguments are just summaries of more expanded positions we hold. This prevents dialogues and debates from really changing people’s minds a lot of times because there tend to be a lot of relevant points and assumptions that go unaddressed and unexamined.

So rather than defend an entire argument for God in one post, I’d like to defend an important proposition that can play the role of ‘premise’ in various arguments for God’s existence, namely, “If anything whatsoever exists, then it has an explanation of its existence, either in the necessity of its own nature or in an external cause.” Let’s abbreviate it to “If anything exists, it has an explanation of its existence” and call it ‘PSR’ for ‘Principle of Sufficient Reason’.

PSR strikes a lot of people as pretty obvious. But, is there any evidence for it? Not only do I think there is, but I think it’s extremely difficult to deny that there is: the very existence of something counts as evidence of its explicability!

Probability theory tells us that something (call it ‘E’) counts as evidence for one hypothesis (‘H1’) over another hypothesis (‘H2’), if and only if E is more likely given that H1 is true than that H2 is.

But, something is more likely to exist given that it has an explanation of its existence (H1) than that it does not (H2), because having an explanation of its existence entails that it exists, whereas lacking such an explanation does not.¹ In other words, H1 predicts that E exists better than H2 does because it entails E.

Note that we can talk about ‘things’ lacking an explanation of their existence without having to say they exist: unicorns have no explanation of their existence because they have no existence to explain.

Now, if it’s true of anything whatsoever that it is more likely to exist given H1 than H2, then it is true of anything whatsoever that if it exists, there is evidence that it has an explanation of its existence, for the two are just different ways of saying the same thing.

You might wonder how strong this evidence is: does it prove PSR, or just barely support it? As Dr. Pruss explains:

“According to the Expectation Principle [i.e. the leading philosophical interpretation of ‘likelihood’], if an event or state of affairs is more to be expected under one hypothesis, h1, than another, h2, it counts as evidence in favor of h1 over h2 – that is, in favor of the hypothesis under which it has the highest expectation. The strength of the evidence is proportional to the relative degree to which it is more to be expected under h1 than h2.”²

So the strength with which something’s existence is evidence for its explicability is just a function of how much more its existence is to be expected given that it explicable than that it is not.

Now, we know that something’s existence has the highest possible expectation given H1 because it is properly entailed or necessitated by it. As such, unless a thing’s existence is extremely expected given its inexplicability, it will count as significantly strong evidence for its explicability.

But, why should the failure of anything to have an explanation of its existence lead us to expect that it exists? The mere lack of an explanation of thing’s existence provides no reason whatsoever to think it exists because it does not in and of itself explain why there is such a lack of explanation: it could just be because there is no existence to explain.

Thus, the existence of anything whatsoever is far more to be expected given its explicability than not, and as such, we have significantly strong evidence for PSR.

Note that even if I have overestimated the strength of this evidence, it is still evidence
 
 
(Image credit: Mother Fitness)

Although the argument fell into relatively obscurity after it was promoted in the Middle Ages, it received new life through William Lane Craig’s 1979 book The Kalam Cosmological Argument. Craig has become the argument’s leading proponent, and thanks to his famous debates with atheists that end up on YouTube, the kalam argument has become well-known and is vigorously dissected by critics.

Understanding the Argument

 
One reason I think that the kalam is so hotly debated is that it is deceptively simple. This is the entire argument:

Premise 1 (P1): Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
Premise 2 (P2): The universe began to exist.
Conclusion(C): Therefore, the universe has a cause.

You can find hundreds of websites or videos dedicated to the kalam argument, but hardly any that describe, much less refute, other arguments for God such as those from St. Thomas Aquinas (even fewer can be found that actually understand what Aquinas is arguing). Part of this may be due to critics' impatience toward the need to tease a syllogism out of the Summa Theologica. He may instead opt for the nice and neat kalam argument, which seems an easy target for a few swings.

I can’t comprehensively defend the kalam argument in a blog post, but I’d like to put forward a new piece of evidence for the kalam argument I have not seen argued in previous literature—specifically, a piece of evidence for the first premise (P1).

Craig provides two main reasons to think that “whatever begins to exist has a cause.” The first is intuition, or the conclusion we come to upon thoughtful reflection about the idea that something can’t come into existence from nothing. The second is induction, or the conclusion we draw from universal observation that things which begin to exist always have causes. Critics counter that our intuitions can be mistaken (such as the intuition that the sun revolves around the earth) and therefore we have no reason to think something can't come from nothing. Furthermore, some aspects of quantum physics may undermine the inductive data we have for P1. While I don’t think these objections are sound, I think there is another reason we should accept P1. The reason is that the intuitions behind P1 are also behind the “evidence” atheists admit would change their minds about God’s existence.

New Support for the Kalam Argument

 
When atheists say theists have failed to show God exists, they must have a standard of what would show God exists in order to know that theists haven’t succeeded in that task. Almost all of these standards share the same evidential pattern: the requirement that something come from nothing without a natural cause. Here are some examples:

• An amputated limb is healed with prayer.
• A message announcing that God exists appears in the sky in every known language.
• A towering giant says he is God and through an act of will rearranges the solar system.

Each of these have been proposed in the Strange Notions comment boxes. Of course, if it turned out that the limb appeared as a result of a random quantum fluctuation of particles, or that the planets were moved by massive spaceships using gravity devices, then these would not count as proofs for God, because these events would be natural, not supernatural. Rather, it seems that an event can only be considered an act of God (and not an act of technologically advanced aliens) if it involves something coming from nothing without a natural cause.

We wouldn’t think to worship a scientist who said, “I shall bring 5,000 loaves of bread into existence merely by thinking,” and then “thinks” to build a machine that reassembles the molecules in the surrounding environment in order to form the bread. However, we might worship a rabbi who said, “I shall bring 5,000 loaves of bread into existence by thinking,” and then thinks and so makes bread appear (along with some fish for protein so that everyone has a balanced diet).

The requirement that evidence for God involve something coming from nothing without a natural cause also applies to “knowledge” coming from nothing without a cause. Many atheists say that if the Bible predicted man would walk on the moon in the twentieth century, then they would believe God exists. Well, if it turned out that time-travelers went back and manipulated the manuscripts, that would nullify this alleged evidence for God. However, if the authors of the Bible said they knew it because “God revealed it to them,” then a divine explanation may not be far off.

The Bottom Line

 
Why should atheists believe P1 of the kalam argument, or why should they believe that “whatever begins to exist has a cause for its existence?” They should believe P1 because they already believe that something cannot come from nothing without a supernatural cause. They already believe that limbs appearing out of thin air, accurate prophecies that just appear in the mind of a prophet, and demonstrations of power of nature that only involve the will can be the result only of God (at least if they are open to the idea that evidence can show God exists).

This shows that when our intuition suggests something can’t come from nothing without a natural cause, it's reliable because atheists use this intuition in order to devise evidence that would convince them God exists. If an arm or an accurate prophecy, coming into existence from nothing without a natural cause, is proof of God, then why isn’t an entire universe coming into nothing without a natural cause proof of God?

Granted, proving that the universe began to exist from nothing without a natural cause is a much larger task (though if the universe came to be from nothing, then by definition there could be no natural cause because then it would have come from a natural thing that exists, notnothing).

My only goal in this post is to show that if P2 could be established and since atheists already implicitly accept P1, then they should accept the conclusion of the argument and seek out the transcendent cause of the universe.
 
 
(This post was inspired by one of my previous articles at Strange Notions. To learn more about the arguments for and against the existence of God, stay tuned for my new book Answering Atheism: How to Make the Case for the God with Logic and Charity to be published by Catholic Answers Press this fall.)
 
 
Originally appeared at Catholic Answers. Used with author's permission.
(Image Credit: Redshift)

Many atheists say that all arguments for the existence of God are just fallacious “God-of-the-gaps” reasoning. They claim that any evidence offered for the existence of God, such as the beginning, contingency, and fine-tuning of the universe, are nothing more than appeals to ignorance. These arguments are supposedly on par with primitive explanations of natural events (such as lightning) that erroneously included God as a direct cause. Modern arguments for theism are likewise lampooned as primitive “God did it” explanations that will be usurped by modern science.

The problem with the "God-of-the-gaps" objection is that it can have unintended consequences for atheism. Specifically, it makes atheism impossible to falsify, in the same way that most religious beliefs cannot be falsified. Rather than rely on science, "God-of-the-gaps" pushes atheism far away from being a scientific belief.

Why is that the case?

A claim is falsifiable if evidence can be presented that can disprove it (Karl Popper argued that this was a necessary condition for a claim to be scientific). For example, evolutionary theory could be falsified by the discovery of modern animals that were fossilized in ancient rock layers, or what J.B.S. Haldane called “a Precambrian rabbit.” Likewise, the discovery of manuscript P52 of the Gospel of John, which is dated to the early second century, falsified the theory that the Gospel of John was not written until the year 150 A.D. or even later.

So, can atheism be falsified? An atheist might say, “Of course atheism can be falsified—just prove that God exists!”

But how exactly is the theist supposed to do this? Usually atheists demand some kind of over-the-top display of power to confirm God's existence. The late N.R. Hanson gave one such piece of evidence that would convince him:
 

Suppose...that on next Tuesday morning, just after breakfast, all of us in this one world are knocked to our knees by a percussive and ear-shattering thunderclap...the heavens open—the clouds pull apart—revealing an unbelievably immense and Zeus-like figure, towering above us like a hundred Everests. He frowns darkly as lightning plays across the features of his Michaelangeloid face. He then points down—at me!—and exclaims, for every man, woman and child to hear "I have had quite enough of your too-clever logic-chopping and word-watching in matters of theology. Be assured, N.R. Hanson, that I do most certainly exist. (N.R. Hanson. What I Do Not Believe and Other Essays. Springer, 1971)

 
If God did this, then surely we would know he existed, right? Well, why wouldn’t this kind of evidence also be subject to the “God-of-the-gaps” objection? Just because we don’t know how a giant man can appear in the sky doesn’t mean there is no natural explanation for him. Maybe aliens or time-travelers are at work, deceiving us?

Even “low-key” evidence is vulnerable to the “God-of-the-gaps” objection. Some atheists say that if Christian preachers could heal amputated limbs, that would convince them God existed. But once again, aren’t we just taking a gap in our knowledge (“I don’t know how these limbs are being healed”) and filling it with, “Therefore, God did it?”

Atheists have two options. First, they could admit that no amount of evidence could satisfy the “God-of-the gaps-objection” and show God exists. This would leave atheism behind the safe veil of protection that cloaks other unfalsifiable beliefs, such as the belief the entire world is a computer simulation.

If atheists say that atheism does not claim "There is no God," only that some people lack a belief in God, then atheism can't be true at all. A belief can only be true (in a non-trivial sense) when it makes a claim about the world and not just about someone's state of mind. Saying "I lack a belief in God" no more informs us about reality than saying "I lack a belief in aliens" informs us about the facts related to extraterrestrial life.

If these options proved unsatisfactory, atheists could instead put forward strict standards of what kind of evidence would falsify atheism and prove God exists. Although, if those standards included extremely improbable events or something coming from nothing (such as perfect prophecy or healing an amputee) then the traditional arguments for God come back into play, since they include similar phenomena about the universe (such as cosmic fine-tuning and the origin of the universe in the finite past) in order to show God exists.

Rather than argue from what we don’t know (or “God-of-the-gaps”), good arguments for theism take what we do know and show how it logically leads to the transcendent creator of the universe.
 
 
Originally posted at Catholic.com. Used with author's permission.(Image credit: Reasons.org)