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The posts of the previous couple weeks begin to add up to an argument for the existence of something like God – a value or goodness that is an inextricable part of the basic structure of reality. It strikes me that a significant part of this line of reasoning also underlies most of the widely known philosophical proofs for the existence of God. These proofs (at least on their own) do not take us to any of the particular Abrahamic views of God, as revealed in Qur’an or Torah or the person of Jesus Christ, but they are often taken as a first step to getting there.
Probably the most widespread argument for the existence of God today is the cosmological argument. (I discount the “Reformed epistemology” argument, which is not actually an argument that God exists but only that those who already believe in him should continue to do so.) According to the cosmological argument, we need explanations for everything, and then explanations for those explanations, which ultimately must come back to a First Explanation. In the more simplistic and less satisfying versions of this argument, the First Explanation is simply a first cause, a temporal beginning that sets the universe in motion. Such a first cause has little to do with the claims I’ve been making about value. But as I’ve noted a couple of times, the First Cause is hardly a proof of anything Godlike. After that first act of creation, the First Cause can just go home and ignore us and be ignored.
But things look rather different through if we view explanation more broadly, as Aristotle did. For among Aristotle’s four aitia, the so-called “four causes” that are really four explanations, is the “final” explanation: one explains a thing through its purpose, its telos, what it is for. And on the more sophisticated cosmological argument, not merely causes but purposes must go back to something: there must be a First Purpose of sorts, the telos of every other telos, an end to end all ends. The First Purpose, as opposed to the First Cause, is exactly an explanation of value; questions of “why should I do X?” will ultimately lead back to it. And if such an ultimate purpose exists, it takes the kind of guiding role in our lives that God would be expected to take.
C.S. Lewis’s moral argument for God’s existence claims that there is a basic universal human set of moral rules, and that this could not exist without a creator having put it there. I don’t think this argument works; differences in historically observed moral codes are far greater than Lewis takes them to be, and Lewis too readily conflates explanation at the level of value with the kind of causal explanation that evolution at least theoretically could provide. However, it seems to me that in his own confused way, Lewis is trying to get at something like the argument of the earlier weeks: to posit God as the explanation for real value. In that sense, it seems to me that Lewis’s argument, like the First Cause argument, turns out to be a confused version of the more sophisticated First Purpose argument.
Even Anselm’s ontological argument can be viewed in a somewhat similar light. Unlike the First Purpose and moral arguments, it is not exactly an attempt to explain the existence of value. But it does something parallel. It starts with an idea of value and goodness of a certain kind, observed by the mind, in the concept of a perfect being. This concept doesn’t make sense – so the argument goes – unless it exists in reality. The evaluative concept of a highest perfection, here, cannot be understood unless it turns out to really exist.
Whether the argument from design also follows a similar line of reasoning is more debatable. In a sense it works by conflating cause and purpose – by examining the purposes apparent in living beings and assuming those must be caused by an intelligent designer. But then it doesn’t really matter, because that is the one argument that – notwithstanding the arguments of intelligent design proponents – has been decisively refuted by empirical evidence. With the idea of evolution to explain the complexity of life on earth, we do not need an idea of God; of course there are gaps in evolutionary theory, as there are in any scientific theory, but they are much smaller than the gaps in any theory of divine design. Before Darwin, the design argument was by far the most compelling argument for God’s existence; now it is the least, and not because the others have gotten any stronger.
I tie together the proofs of God in this way because I want to get at the heart of the God question in philosophy – and I think that question ultimately comes down to the problem of bad and the problem of good. It is not that I necessarily buy any of the arguments discussed here, even the more sophisticated ones. The problem of suffering is too intractable – it’s at least as big a problem for those who believe in God as the problem of value is for those who don’t. But perhaps there is some sort of dialectical synthesis to be found in between?
It seems to me that where this “first explanation” argument clearly fails (and why it’s not made as often as the more traditional causal cosmological argument) is that the premise it relies on isn’t as universally compelling as the one used in the traditional cosmological argument. The traditional cosmological argument is compelling (up until the therefore no bacon part) because almost everyone agrees that we expect things to have causes. The cosmological argument just follows this unbroken causal chain (tree?) back to its beginning (root?) and posits that it has to begin somewhere.
But there’s no generally agreed upon necessity of purpose, telos. It’s been brought to my attention recently that there is a more general sense of purpose/value that can exist independently of intentional agents — namely function. The heart of an earthworm clearly had a purpose even without any conscious beings around to observe it. It came into existence because it’s good for something.
But people don’t find it odd or alarming to say that some things are just byproducts of something else and aren’t for anything. Certainly not to the same extent as we find it odd to say something has no cause. Why are stones found at the bottom of rivers or washed up on the beach smooth and round? They just are, as a byproduct of erosion — they’re not round because it serves some function. Why do stars and planets exist? They’re just what happens when matter coalesces in a certain way due to gravity.
So the chain of purpose isn’t continuous the way the chain of causality is. It’s not a chain at all — it’s more a network of only locally connected islands.
On the other hand, this suggests a possibly productive path to look for ultimate value — is there some type of value that *does* have this transitive property, and not just because Aristotle says so? Because if you found that, at first glance you’d actually have a semi-compelling argument already in place for an ultimate ground of (that type of) value.
These are good distinctions to make. Traditional theists of an Aristotelian bent often do tend to say everything has a purpose, and fold the design argument back into it; and that underlies their argument for pre-1960s sexual morality (sex is for the production of children). And I sure don’t buy any of that.
Where I think something like the cosmological argument gains traction is that purposes and ends are a fundamental part of human experience as we live it. Now many of those purposes can be explained causally through evolution or other means, especially when we are observing the purposes of other people (or animals). But looking inside ourselves at our own purposes, causal explanation isn’t enough. One can certainly say “I aim to be a billionaire now because I grew up poor” or “I deny my children medical treatment because I was raised Christian Scientist,” or even “I try and have sex with as many women as possible because it’s in my genes.” But these are not good reasons. Good reasons for action require invoking some sort of purpose or end; and it’s those purposes and ends that in turn require a kind of explanation which is not merely causal. (The line of reasoning here is parallel to my previous post, but from another angle.)
Now does the chain of reasoning back through our purposes need to lead us to God, or something Godlike? That’s trickier. As Ben noted on last week’s post, it could just have to do with fundamental features of humans that don’t tie back to a universal God. Or so it would appear. This is definitely something I need to think through further.
Leo Strauss sometimes said that the philosophical problem was “quid sit Deus?” I agree that Lewis’ way of putting the argument is too loose–and too empirical (relying on an impressionistic cross-cultural anthropology)–and I am not sure that the apprehension of Good proves that this is a “law” that was “put there” by Anyone; but I am pretty much in agreement with him that our intuitions of value do bespeak a real meaning to existence, which is usually what people mean by God. But you are right that the question of suffering is the immovable object which is met by this irresistible force. If there is a way through, it is via dialectic. But this dialectic must be a matter of experience, not just argument–because that’s what the “force” and the “object” in question are.
Thanks, skholiast; well said. I might dispute, though, that ultimate meaning is “usually what people mean by God.” There is far more dispute over that term, I think. Last week Ethan Mills argued that the problem with the conception of God as ultimate meaning or value was that it was very far from popular understandings of God. I disagreed with him, but not on the grounds that the popular understanding is primarily about ultimate meaning; most people, asked Strauss’s question, would probably reply with something like “the creator,” “the father of Jesus” or something similarly more concrete, particular and narrative. Rather, I think that the idea of God as meaning is the important part of the popular conceptions – the point where the truth in those conceptions is likely to lie.
As for the dialectic of experience: that’s a tough one. It does ring true for me – so many things I’ve heard intellectually only really reveal themselves when applied in practice (and by “practice” here I mean the practice of living, not specifically meditation or prayer or the like). But it also raises so many problems for our ability to ever understand anything, since (as Nussbaum once said) “we have never lived enough.”
It was interesting to see how you view your argument as different from Lewis’s argument from morality. Up until now, I would’ve thought your ideas had more in common with his. Might you say that the distinction is that you’re looking for the ultimate justification for value rather than a causal explanation for it?
How is your idea different from the ontological argument? I’ve never been able to tell if I just don’t fully understand the ontological argument or if it’s just such a bad argument that I can’t even see how it could ever convince anyone. It is, as I read somewhere, the kind of argument only a philosopher would think of. This doesn’t mean it’s wrong, but there’s something fishy going on, whether that fishiness is identified by Kant’s critique or something else.
Lastly, here’s something interesting (Gary Gutting on Steven Pinker): http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/26/pinker-on-reason-and-morality/#
At the end, Gutting makes the rather Humean suggestion that morality is ultimately based on feeling rather than reason. Expanding this to value in general, do you think value is based on reason in some sense (because justification is a rational affair) or is it somehow based more directly on a metaphysical ground of value without intermediaries of human feeling or reason? Is reason how we identify inherent value rather than, as Kant might say, the source of value itself? (Although Kant’s overall views on value are probably a lot more complicated).
My own chip-in, because I read that Gutting article and had similar thoughts:
I think Gutting is “correct”, but he’s talking (in that sentence) about practical morality: why and how people behave the way they do, the ‘what’ rather than the ‘ought’. This ducks the bigger philosophical questions (as Amod discussed in the “why evolution doesn’t explain value” post), but by the same token, it meshes well with my understanding of the behavioral and neurobiological research into the drivers of moral behavior.
I really hope Pinker expands on his argument beyond what’s in the quote in the article. “Logic cannot tell the difference between ‘me’ and ‘you'”? I think I can hear steam coming out of Thill’s ears over the existence of that claim. One can certainly make the claim that the difference between self and other is not all that morally relevant – Kant, Śāntideva, Parfit, Singer are more or less committed to some version of it – but it’s a little strange to put that in terms of “logic cannot tell the difference.”
But getting to your point about the article, that is interesting food for thought. If we believe value to be a real entity, there is the question of where it comes from, why it exists. I suppose that’s one reason people would go to the First Explanation: then value has the same root as everything else. I’m not sure that’s satisfactory, though.
Re the ontological argument, I do agree it seems very fishy, but the fishiness can be hard to pin down when the argument is understood well. I don’t think it’s a particularly bad argument; it just rest on premises that are rarely shared today – especially the connection between what something is and that it is, which I believe Kant questioned. I suppose the difference between Anselm’s argument and the one I’ve been outlining is that Anselm goes much further – he’s trying to prove the existence of a perfect being, not just of value as such (which his argument seems in some respect to presuppose).
Re Lewis: yes, exactly.
The universe and all the things around us is a big argument thats points to an intelligent creator being God. Everything has a beginning and the universe has to be set into motion. The universe also has a specific design to it that it can’t just happen at random. Someone, being God, had to create that. Romans 1:19-20 says “because what may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse.” Not only are divine attributes clearly seen in humanity, but they can be seen in the material universe as well.
Thank you, Jenna. What you’re referring to are the First Cause argument (“Everything has a beginning…”) and the design argument. I’ve argued against the design argument in a previous post. As for the First Cause argument, the biggest problem is that it doesn’t necessarily demonstrate a God that matters to us in any way, let alone the God of the Bible: just a being that starts things up, and might even cease to exist after doing so.