Transcription
I think that there are very good arguments to believe that there are some kind of foundational principle of the universe, some necessarily existing being, some first cause, but I think that the Judeo-Christian tradition is an imperfect approximation of who that being is. I I I think it probably gets a lot right and and is a sort of compilation of human theological wisdom over the past few thousand years, but it will get a lot wrong as well.
My name is Alex Okconor. I'm the host of the Within Reason podcast. I think I'm best described as a philosophy YouTuber and former edgy atheist.
The strongest arguments for and against the existence of God. So I think probably the most powerful argument for the existence of God is the so-called first cause argument, which is quite like naive. A lot of people are familiar with the idea that we need a first cause for the universe, but I think people think about it wrong. There is what you might think of as a a horizontal causal argument and a hierarchical causal argument. And a lot of people just aren't familiar with the hierarchical version of the causal argument, which I think is probably best explained with a prop like this lovely glass of water.
You might ask yourself, why is this water here? And the way that people tend to think about cause is in terms of time. you know what what happened before what might be called the efficient cause in the arisetilian sense which is well somebody just poured the water into the glass and then I might ask well why did they pour the water into the glass oh well because you asked them to oh why did you do that well because the glass was empty because I'm thirsty so on and so forth back infinitely there's just no beginning there just as long as every single step is explained by the step before then everything gets explained back in back in time but there's another way that you can think about causation.
I can say why is this water here? Well, because it's being held up by the glass, right? If the glass wasn't there, the water would just, you know, fall out or at least wouldn't like retain its its space, its shape. Even if we were in space, the water is in the glass right now because it's being held up by the glass. In that sense, the shape and position of the water right now is being caused by the shape and position of the glass. Okay. So, why is the glass there? Because it's being held up by my hand. Why is my hand there being held up by my arm? My arm is being held up by my shoulder. My shoulder is being held up by my body. My body is being held up by the chair. The chair is being held up by the ground. The ground is being held up by the foundations of the building. And so on. And if you kept going, you might get to the gravity that's pulling the building down. You might get the the forces of nature which are holding the earth together. But ultimately all of this is happening now in a time slice and hierarchically. This isn't some causation that goes back in time. It sort of goes up and down if you can see what I mean.
So there is a reason why that kind of causation cannot go on infinitely. And that is that in each stage of this causal chain, the causal actor doesn't have any causal power except in so far as it borrows it from something more fundamental. I'll try and put that in simpler terms. The glass holds up the water, but it can't do it of its own accord. It's being held up by my hand to the extent that if I took away my hand, the glass would no longer have the power to hold hold the water here. Right? So the glass's power, the causal power to have to cause the water to be where it is right now. Is literally borrowed from my hand. But likewise, if I removed my arm, my hand would no longer have the power to hold the water where it is. So my hand doesn't have on its own any kind of power to hold up the glass. It borrows it from my arm. and my arm borrows it from my shoulder and my should shoulder borrows it from my body to the extent that if I were to remove any of those parts in the causal chain, everything further up the chain than that would instantly lose its causal power to hold the water up where it is. Right? Instantly. So what that means is that there is no actual causal power except for whatever is at the basis of this giving the whole chain causal power.
So if you think about that horizontal causation, right? Imagine a series of dominoes knocking each other over. This is causation in time. Domino one is knocked over by domino minus one and domino minus 1 is knocked over by domino minus 2 -3 -4 - 5 and so on back to infinity. In this kind of causation when domino minus5 knocks over domino minus 4 and then the dominoes keep falling over. I could take domino minus 5 that caused you know all these other dominoes fall over. I could take that that earlier cause. I could take it. I could throw it in the bin. We don't need it anymore. those dominoes further down the chain would keep on going. Right? It's the kind of causation where you don't require the first causes, the earlier causes to remain in existence in order for the causal chain to continue. So another example of this would be like parents and children. You know, my grandfather caused my father to exist. Then my grandfather died. After my grandfather died, my father caused me to exist. Right? So like you've got cause A, B, and C. A causes B. A then just disappears, gets in the C, and B still has the causal power to to bring about C. You see what I'm saying? You don't need to you don't need that first cause to remain there. But that's that's in this so-called um horizontal causation, right?
In a hierarchical series of causation, you can't get rid of the earlier cause. And when we say earlier or first or fundamental, we don't mean in time. We mean like sort of further down the chain as it were. So if my grandfather causes my father, then my grandfather dies. My father still has the causal power to bring me about. But if my shoulder causes the position of my arm, then if my shoulder disappears, my arm no longer has the power to hold up my hand, the shoulder needs to stay there causing the arm in order for the arm to cause the hand. So all of that causation happens all at once, right? Which means that there is no intrinsic causal power. My father has his own causal power to bring about me, but my my arm only borrows it from my shoulder. It doesn't have it on its own, but my shoulder only borrows it from my body, and my body only borrows it from the chair. Without the chair, none of this would have any causal power. My hand would not be able to be here. And without the floor, none of that would be able to do anything. So, there's no causal power at all in this chair except in so far as it borrows it right now in this instant from the ground below it. So if this just goes back infinitely, well this borrows from this and this borrows from this and this borrows and that goes back on literally infinitely then there is no causal power at all because it's not being borrowed from anywhere. It like everyone is just borrowing from another thing which has no causal power. It only gets its causal power where it's borrowed it from something else which has no causal power. So where did it get it from? It borrowed it from something else which has no causal power. So where did that get it from? that can't go back forever because then there would be literally no causal power in this instant right now.
So unlike the temporal thing where you can go back in time and imagine that that just sort of goes on infinitely and there's no first cause cuz each individual uh causal actor in the chain has its own causal power to knock over the next domino. The hierarchical causation in this time slice right now. This glass being held up right now has some kind of foundational cause which is which is giving life to this entire causal chain without which the whole thing would would fall apart. So it's a it's a sustaining cause. It's causing things to exist and be as they are right now in time. Not like a billion years ago set something in motion, but right now sustaining it in existence in the same way that like the law of gravity sustains, you know, all of the objects in this room in in position. It it's a fundamental cause of why everything is being held up right now. If that just switched off, like the entire thing would fall apart, right? And you need that now. right now like at the basis of this sort of causal chain of floors holding up chairs and chairs holding up buildings and stuff like that. And so you you might say well maybe the the fundamental cause there then is something like the law of gravity. Fine, but you might want to ask sort of what's you know holding the law of gravity in place? What's what's making sure that it won't stop working tomorrow? And this is the sort of great debate with something like this argument. And there are lots of technical terms that you can throw in there. You can talk about contingency and necessity and you can talk about um per se and per accident causal chains. But let's just do away with that for a moment and just just think about it in those terms. What is holding up you know this invisible microphone that I promise our listeners is above my head right now in place. And like the the the depth of explanation you go to will be context dependent. If I say, "What's holding up that microphone?" You know, our audio engineer might say, "Well, it's the mic stand, right?" But the physicist might say, "Oh, it's the it's the the floor pressing up against the mic stand." But the philosopher will say it's whatever is at the foundation of that causal chain giving giving causal power to it all. And that is the strongest version of a first cause argument. I think one that's insensitive to time and one which requires the that first cause to exist right now.
So this alone isn't strong enough to establish the existence of of capital G God, right? Like this just establishes that there is some kind of fundamental sustaining principle of the universe. Now there are lots of debates as to the nature of what that thing could be. But the thing that's really important to note is that there's no singular argument for the existence of God. What you have is a kind of cumulative case. you have different arguments that deal with different aspects of God. So this kind of causal argument is discussed by Thomas Aquinus in his summer theologica. He gives five famous ways of sort of showing the existence of God to be true. And the first three are kinds of causal arguments. You have to then do more to get the attributes of God. you have to get you have to do more to show that this thing is not material that this thing is is certainly more to show that it's like good or loving or anything like that. But so Aquinus has an argument from from change. I mean it's called the argument from motion but motion just means change in some sort of older dialects of philosophy. So he leans quite heavily on Aristotle and it gets a bit complicated but he'll say something like you know for something to change means that something which is potential becomes actual. That's what change is you know like a hot cup of coffee will cool down because when it was hot it had the potential to become cool and that potential was actualized. Potential can only be actualized by something which is already actual. Potential can't be actualized by potential. Like if if the coffee cools down because it's in a fridge, the the potential coldness of the coffee can't be brought into existence by the potential coldness of the fridge. The fridge has to be actually cold in order to bring about the potential coldness in in the coffee, right? It can't just be you've got a potentially cold fridge and a potentially uh cold cup of coffee and the potential coldness brings about the potential. No, you have to have an actual thing actualizing the potential in the coffee. Right? And that's what he thinks change is. But you have this you have another kind of causal argument then you know any instance of change where something potential becomes actual there has to have been something actual to to actualize it. But there will have had to have been something to actualize that thing and to actualize that thing and to actualize that thing. And so Aquinus sort of follows this causal chain and says again at the beginning there must be a as Aristotle might have had it an unactualized actualizer something which is pure act.
Now this gets really kind of technical and weird but Aquinus then tries to draw out why it would be that if something has zero potential in it can't be material for example because if something is material you could potentially divide it you know you could potentially move it you could there are things that are like potential about it. It has potential qualities. And so if the first cause of the universe has to be pure act, no potentiality, pure act, then whatever is the cause of the universe can't be material. So now we've got an immaterial first cause of the universe. And then we carry on in a similar vein using different arguments to show why this thing must be outside of time, outside of space. and you end up with something like a spaceless, timeless, creative first cause of the universe powerful enough to bring the universe into existence. And if you don't want to call that God, that's fine by me, but I think it will suffice for most people.
The strongest argument against the existence of God as traditionally conceived is undoubtedly the problem of evil. I prefer to say the problem of suffering because a lot of the time being an ethical emotivist especially a religious person will say well how can you call anything evil if you've got no standard of goodness. Okay let's not say evil then let's say suffering. If you believe that there is a a loving God who has the power to do all that is possible and who supervises the not just the the goings on of the universe but also supervised its creation and the setting up of its parameters. There are a few questions that jump out a few mysteries. For example, life on Earth is the result of evolution by natural selection. That is the that is the the reason why we have such complexity and such variance of life. Natural selection is survival of the fittest. Survival of the fittest is the same thing as the destruction and death and suffering of the weakest. For billions of years, there's been life on Earth. And for much of that, it's existed in a brutal competition for survival with predation and disease. And 99.9% of all the species, let alone the creatures, but the species who've ever existed been wiped from existence usually in in pretty in a pretty dismal manner. And all of this is built into the very mechanism by which God chose to bring about human life on earth.
Traditional religious communities believe that humans are very special. They think that we are the reason why this all exists as opposed to other animals and other points in history. Which means that all of this has occurred for our sake. It's built in. It's one thing to talk about suffering as a as a sort of abstract object, but it is unfathomable truly the amount of suffering that these animals not just like the human species in its 200,000 year history or I suppose the human species would be would be much longer than that, a few million years. But the animals who came before us and the animals who existed at the same time as us, it's it's genuinely unfathomable the the depths of despair and misery and suffering and torment, meaningless torment for those animals who don't get to inherit eternal life. And we're told that for some reason, God chose this mechanism to to bring us into existence. It just doesn't seem to be what you would expect. Of course, this doesn't disprove the existence of God. It's not it's not like logically contradictory to say that God did this for some reason, but it just seems a little unexpected. And I think for most people, it's very powerful. Of course, this only really does anything to argue against the existence of a good God. Some people will then just say, well, maybe God is God is evil. But this will then just depend on your view of God because there are philosophers who in the course of proving God's existence have established why he must be perfectly good. For example, there are also people who belong to religious traditions who insist upon the goodness of God. So they would at least have to give up that if they were to accept the plausibility of an argument like this. And I think it's powerful.
I think that there are very good arguments to believe that there is some kind of foundational principle of the universe, some necessarily existing being, some first cause. Uh but I think that the Judeo-Christian tradition is an imperfect approximation of who that being is. I I I think it probably gets a lot right and and is a sort of compilation of human theological wisdom over the past few thousand years. Uh but it will get a lot wrong as well. I think that if you have just personally apprehended a truth about the universe, you are just convicted that there's some kind of foundational cause. I don't really know much more than that and I don't want to subscribe to a particular tradition. I say more power to you. I think you're on the right track. In the same way that if somebody is sort of a dogmatic atheist of the new atheist variety, I have a lot of fun posing religious arguments to them and saying like that there might actually be more plausibility to these arguments than you would know from reading the God delusion. But that's not enough to say that you're wrong about your atheism or anything, but I much prefer this kind of person who says either I believe there's some kind of some kind of god of maybe of some sort maybe not even a god, maybe just something like that, but I don't really know what it is. I'm like, yeah, yeah, me too, man. and I've got no idea. Likewise, somebody who says, I just, you know, there's a lot of mysteries, but I just can't buy the fact that this was designed somehow intelligently. I'm like, yeah, I get that, too. That's awesome. And then we can just discuss it, you know. Uh, and so I I quite like that kind of person.
There are also the so-called deists who typically are described as people who believe that God kind of set the universe in motion and then went away. So, does not involve himself. I mean, he could have died, you know, he could have gone gone to sleep and and sort of set it all off and that explains how it got going, but it's not there anymore. I don't think that makes much sense. I think that this is a a product of mechanistic thinking that comes about with the sort of scientific revolution where we think of everything as sort of like a bit of a machine where you twist it up and and let it go. But the argument that I just ran through, the reason I like it so much is because I think it gets rid of this idea of dism. You can't have a god who sets it all in motion and then goes to sleep. He can't knock over the first domino and then go away and the dominoes keep on falling over and he's long dead because he's not just knocked over a domino and then then gone away. He's holding up the microphone above my head right now in this instant. And if he were to disappear, the whole thing would just collapse. I think that there's a more powerful argument for that kind of God. Not to say personal, not to say that he cares about human beings, right? Like because again, you can you can distinguish between those things. There's there's there's like people say, well, I believe that there is a god, but he has no interest in human affairs. That's fair enough. But someone who says, well, I believe in a god, but he's just like not around anymore, like at all. I I think that might be true. There might be no God. But if you think there's a good argument for God's existence, I think the best versions of arguments for God's existence require that he does stick around. And so I think you either kind of have to say there's no God at all or there's a God who's still here right now holding it all in place as we speak. I don't think this God at the beginning but not anymore makes much sense to me.
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