Does God Exist?

1. Does God Exist?

2. Nature of God The four qualities of God (for our purposes): • Omnipotent (all powerful) • Omniscient (all knowing) • Omnibenevolent (perfectly good) • Creator of the universe

3. Nature of God This is only one concept of God, but it seems to be the notion of God advocated by the Judeo-Christian family of religions.

4. Nature of God This constrains what counts as a good argument for God’s existence. • Cosmological Argument • Pascal’s Wager

5. Cosmological Argument Cosmological Argument • Every event must have a cause. • The causal chain cannot be infinite. • Therefore, there must have been a first cause. • Therefore, God exists.

6. Cosmological Argument Does the existence of a first cause mean the first cause must be God (in our sense)? • Why not a very very powerful but not omnipotent creator? • Why not a mostly but not perfectly good creator? • Why not a coalition of creators? • Why does the first cause have to be conscious at all? Even granting all the premises, this argument does not establish that God (in our sense) exists.

7. Pascal’s Wager Pascal pointed out that there are four exhaustive possibilities regarding God’s existence and your belief: • God exists and you believe that God exists • God exists and you do not believe that God exists. • God does not exist and you believe that God exists. • God does not exist and you do not believe that God exists.

8. Pascal’s Wager

9. Pascal’s Wager

10. Pascal’s Wager

11. Pascal’s Wager

12. Pascal’s Wager

13. Pascal’s Wager

14. Pascal’s Wager

15. Pascal’s Wager Two (of many) problems with this argument: First, the existence of Hell seems incompatible with the idea of a perfectly benevolent, all-powerful deity. • Not so bad. We can revise the argument slightly to say, if you don’t believe you just don’t get into heaven. • You still lose out infinitely by not gaining an infinitely good reward, so the wager will still work.

16. Pascal’s Wager The second more serious problem is that the argument does not only work for Godas we have defined the term.

17. Zeus’ Wager

18. Zeus’ Wager Both Zeus and the Judeo-Christian God are jealous, so if you believe in the wrong one you go to hell. You can run the same argument for a potential infinity of jealous deities.

19. Paley vs. Dawkins: The Teleological Argument

20. Why They Failed The two arguments we looked at last time failed because they did not establish that a being with the following properties exists: • Omniscience • Omnipotence • Omnibenevolence Even if they show that we should believe in something, they don’t tell us what.

21. Preliminaries “Telos” is translated from Greek as purpose, end, or goal.

22. Preliminaries Teleological arguments for the existence of God purport to show that God must exist because the universe (or some feature of it) could only have been brought about by the hand of a conscious being.

23. Preliminaries Usually their structure is to point to one or more structures in the universe that seem to be designed and argue that design implies a designer.

24. Preliminaries Paley’s famous argument epitomizes two argument forms we haven’t yet discussed: • Argument by analogy • Inference to the best explanation

25. Non-Deductive Arguments Deductive arguments go wrong when: • One or more of the premises are false (or poorly supported) • The premises do not entail the conclusion • The argument commits some fallacy or other (e.g. circular reasoning)

26. Argument by Analogy An argument by analogy is a non-deductive argument of the following form: • X has feature A. • X is relevantly similar to Y. • Therefore, Y has feature A.

27. Argument by Analogy Ways for an argument by analogy to fail: • The two compared phenomena are not that similar • They are similar in some ways, but different relevant to the feature under consideration • The similarity between the two kinds of things is superficial, and not supported by looking at a wider sample size • There are unintended consequences to the analogy.

28. Inference to the Best Explanation Inference to the best explanation is another kind of non-deductive argument of the following form: • X is an observed phenomena. • If Y were the case, then it would best explain why X is the case. • Y is the case.

29. Inference to the Best Explanation You are walking on the beach and see two sets of shoeprints next to one another, one set of adult size, and one significantly smaller. You conclude that the footprints are those of a parent and a child because this best explains the data you have.

30. Inference to the Best Explanation

31. Inference to the Best Explanation • Power • Elegance • Simplicity • Consistent with proven explanations of other similar observations • Fits into an explanatorily useful theory • Etc.

32. The Watch We walk through the woods and come across a watch. What conclusions should we draw about this thing?

33. The Watch The object has certain features: • The parts are all arranged in a manner that produces a certain motion. • If the parts were of slightly different physical form, the motion would not occur. • If there were missing or different parts, the motion would not occur. • If the parts were arranged differently the motion would not occur

34. The Watch Paley claims that the best explanation of these features is that the object has a purpose, and that it was designed by some intelligent entity to fulfill that purpose.

35. The Argument from Analogy Living organisms share all of these qualities: • The parts are all arranged in a manner that produces a certain motion. • If the parts were of slightly different physical form, the motion would not occur. • If there were missing or different parts, the motion would not occur. • If the parts were arranged differently the motion would not occur

36. The Argument from Analogy Paley’s Argument • Watches have complex features the best explanation of which is that the watch was created by an intelligent designer for some purpose. • Living organisms are similar to watches in these respects. • Therefore, the best explanation of the complexities that we find in living organisms is that living organisms were created by an intelligent designer for some purpose.

37. Disanalogy #1 We know how a watch is constructed, but we do not know how a human is constructed. • Do we know this about the watch (you and me?) • Would it matter? What if we happened across some advanced alien technology? Some lost art of ancient people?

38. Disanalogy #2 We know the purpose of the watch but we do not know the purpose of living things. • We don’t need to know particularpurpose of an artifact to know that it was designed for some purpose or other. • The same goes for individual parts of the watch

39. Disanalogy #3 Watches do not duplicate themselves, organisms do. • Paley argues that if the watch were able to do this it would simply be more evidence of design, and cause for greater respect for the designed. • Would make it likely that the first watch we observed was not the original, but this should not affect our conclusion that there was some original watch, that was designed by an intelligent designer.

40. Summing Up “There cannot be design without a designer; contrivance, without a contriver; order, without choice; arrangement, without anything capable of arranging; subserviency and relation to a purpose, without that which could intend a purpose; means suitable to an end, and executing their office in accomplishing that end, without the end ever having been contemplated, or the means accommodated to it.” (11)

41. Summing Up “There cannot be design without a designer; contrivance, without a contriver; order, without choice; arrangement, without anything capable of arranging; subserviency and relation to a purpose, without that which could intend a purpose; means suitable to an end, and executing their office in accomplishing that end, without the end ever having been contemplated, or the means accommodated to it.” (11)

42. For Next Time Read the interchange between Anselm and Guanilo, (22-32 in the reader)

43. A Problem? Does the teleological argument suffer from the same flaw as the cosmological argument did? • Suppose we grant that there must be a designer. • Why must that designer be God?

44. A Problem This is definitely an issue that needs to be addressed, but there are things that can be said: • Only an omnipotent Creator would have the power to bring into existence the vastness of the universe. • Only an omniscient Creator could have set things up to work in such perfect harmony creating galaxies, solar systems, stars, planets, etc.

45. Dawkins on the Design Argument

48. Complexity and Explanation Any kind of complexity is statistically unlikely and demands explanation. The best kinds of explanations of complex phenomena explaining the complexity in terms of simpler phenomena.

49. Complexity and Explanation Design explanations of complex phenomena should be a theoretic last resort, at least in the absence of direct evidence of design (e.g. you watch someone make a watch)

50. The Prometheus Problem In general, explaining complexity by reference to equally or more complex phenomena just causes us to demand an explanation of the greater complexity.