Every Argument for God (and how to challenge them)

this video is sponsored by Squarespace more about them in just a moment religion has been one of the hot topics of humanity since arguably the dawn of civilization for many people the whole reason they got into philosophy or philosophical debates is to answer this key question does God exist and recently I've seen a number of videos online going through religious arguments one by one to give a sort of semi-comprehensive list however I want to take a slightly different approach in this video I want to explore the different types of religious arguments and the potential ways

that someone can challenge them so that you can use this not only to categorize any arguments you already know but also any novel ones that you'll then come across think of it as a user's guide to arguments about God get ready to learn the relevance of religious experience whether you can prove God using logic and whether God remains useful even if he does not exist now obviously this is a massive topic I'll be skimming over a lot of the fine grain detail in the arguments think of this as more of a pragmatic guide than a

rigorous philosophical typology and I want to begin with some of the best known but also most controversial religious arguments but before any of that I want to thank the very kind sponsor for today's video Squarespace if you're looking to build a website then you know it can be a real hassle first you need to find the domain name and then construct the whole thing and then there's always the underlying fear that you are messing up and creating something that's not only untidy but outright unprofessional but this is where Squarespace is immensely helpful they compress all

of that into a single platform and use ready-made templates to take most of the complication and headache out of website building they also have a feature called design intelligence which uses AI tools to help you make design choices which is really handy if like me you're not necessarily that technologically gifted and don't have the eye of a graphic designer head to squarespace.com unlisted advice and use the code unlisted advice to get 10% off your first purchase of a domain name or a website but anyway back to God one God of the definitions the phrase a

priori is a technical term from philosophy that just means from before or prior to experience labeling something an a priori argument essentially means that that argument does not rely on facts about the outside world to function but is rather argued for on Purely logical metaphysical or definitional grounds that is a bit of a mouthful but there are some very intuitive examples to take a non-religious one if you asked me to justify why 2 + 2 = 4 is true then I would probably do so by saying that it is just part of the definition of

the number two that when it's doubled it makes four if I was being more precise I could point to the axioms of piano arithmetic and say that in that arithmetical system it would be contradictory to say that 2+ 2 is anything other than four and since that is the system we use for our everyday calculations it follows that in almost all normal arithmetical circumstances 2 + 2 equal 4 if you know some of the exceptions then do leave them in a comment as they are quite interesting if we look at my argument my justification here

is a priori I did not try to justify my belief by pointing to sticks on the ground and adding them up or anything like that instead I purely used the definitions of the terms involved and didn't draw from experience at all and just like this there are some religious arguments which claim to prove God's existence from first principles one very famous instance of this is the ontological argument put forward by anel here Anselm argued that God must exist because of the definition of the word God he starts by defining God as the maximally perfect being

possessed of every kind of goodness and greatness that is he is perfectly kind and perfectly loving and perfectly powerful and perfectly wise and so on but then anel says that in order to truly be the perfect being in way God must exist after all say we were comparing two situations one in which the being with all of these other Perfections was imaginary and another where it truly existed in the world which would be better well Anselm thinks it is clearly the one that would exist thus purely by looking at the definition of the word God

anel thinks God must exist since a maximally perfect being would Exist by definition this is a classic example of a purely a priori argument anel has not invoked any sort of observation or fact about the world but rather simply argued from his definitions to the existence of God another example of an a priori argument would be the modal ontological argument to give just one very brief version of this argument this claims that if God exists then he must exist necessarily and if God does not exist then he must be impossible this again is based on

a complex series of claims about the definition of God which I won't get too into here but then we are left with two options either God is impossible or he is necessary most people tend to think that God's existence is possible and thus not impossible and so if the only two options are impossibility or necessity then he must be necessary then since all necessary things must exist God must exist perhaps the most famous a priori Arguments for God's existence was St Thomas aquinas's five ways in his first cause argument he says that since everything that

comes into being has a cause we can eventually trace this chain of dependence back to a being which was the first cause which he calls got as I've said before I personally like to think of this more as a chain of metaphysical priority or grounding but since the causal language is more common we'll just go with that while today we tend to think of this first cause argument as an argument from observations about causation in the world to the idea that there must have been some first cause in aquinus day causation was not thought to

be something that was leared by observation but rather something that was known a priori about the fundamental metaphysical structure of the universe this was because of the underlying aristotelianism in aquinus worldview which is fascinating and I've also done a full video on it likewise aquinus is Fourth Way which attempted to infer from the existence of goodness in the world to a perfect God Drew on theories of the day about how the world was metaphysically structured which were not thought to be discovered by observation but to have been deduced a priori however in a lot of

modern presentations of aquinus is five ways they tend to be presented as if they are arguments from observation or experience but this is largely just because most people don't subscribe to the same a priori metaphysical principles that aquinus did nonetheless in their initial formulation they were apriori if you want to learn more about this the Catholic philosopher Ed faser has a fantastic and very readable introduction to the philosophy of Thomas aquinus the Common Thread which binds these arguments together is that they do not start with some fact about the world we observe but instead appeal

to definitions metaphysical principles or attempts at deductive reasoning to try to prove the existence of God this is another really interesting component to a priori Arguments for God they tend to conclude not just that there is some amount of evidence for God but rather that God definitely exists to that extent they are much more ambitious than almost any other religious argument though I suppose that in theory you could have an a priori argument for God that didn't have a certain conclusion say one based on judgments about probability that weren't come to through experience it's just

that I haven't come across one to analyze an a priori argument for God we first need to know whether it is attempting to argue from definitions or from some metaphysical principle then we can either challenge the specific definition or principle or especially in the case of definitions generally challenge their ability to give us an insight into genuine truths about the external world for instance anel's ontological argument has been criticized by saying that existence is just not the kind of property that can feature in definitions and that as a result it simply is not valid to

infer anything from definitions to existence this is sometimes called the claim that existence is not a predicate alternatively in a famous response anel received by another Monk he argued that by the same token we could say that the perfect Island must exist because an existent Island would always be more perfect than a non-existent one and the same for the perfect sandwich and so on sometimes this argument is put in terms of perfection and sometimes it's put in terms of greatness I've used the version in terms of perfection because it seems to just crop up a

bit more in recent discourse something thinkers like Bertram Russell and David Hume have argued that we simply cannot infer anything a priori about the world since well structured a priori reasoning must be deductive and deductions can only conclude things that are already disguised in their initial premises if you hold this view then any a priori argument for God would be doomed from the start since it would be necessarily assuming God at the outset again to use anel's argument this criticism would say that the perfect being must exist is just another way of saying God must

exist and so the argument is circular but the main thing to remember is that you know you are dealing with an a priori argument for God when the argument attempts to infer the existence of God from definitions or metaphysical principles that can purportedly be known without any reference to the contents of experience it's also worth noting here that you can have a priori premises or logical moves contained within an argument that is a mixture of a priori and aposteriori reasoning but this is just one type of religious argument and the next one is a mirror

image of a priori argumentation that is rather appropriately called aposteriori argumentation or arguments from experience if you want to help me make more videos like this then please consider becoming one of my wonderful patrons to support the channel the link is in the description and I would really appreciate it two experience and religion almost all of the reasoning we do on a daily basis is some kind of aposteriori argument that is an argument from observation or experience when we assume that the shop will be open because it's normally open at this time of day that

is an aposteriori argument as is almost all scientific inquiry and a huge number of theologians throughout history have thought that there is evidence for God all around us in the world or through particular Supernatural Events maybe the most common type of argument in this family would be the field of natural theology this attempts to infer from some set of facts about the natural world to some conclusion about the nature or existence of God a well-known example of this is William paly's design argument py starts with an undeniable fact about the natural world that it contains

immense complexity and says that in every other case that we come across something of similar complexity we infer that that object must have had a designer for instance if we were to stroll along the beach and find a watch on the sand we would not think oh I wonder how the tides and wind made this watch we would instead think I wonder who made this watch this is an aposteriori argument because it relies on the natural world being a certain way and US observing it that way if the natural world was not very complex at

all then paly's argument would just seem ridiculous and the world is not this way by its definition his design argument is also inductive it talks about all of the complex things we've seen in the past and says that what holds for them is likely to hold for complex natural objects like the human eye there are also a theori arguments that are more abductive or inferences to the best explanation this is where a thinker suggests a given phenomenon either can only be explained by the existence of a Divine being or is best explained by that being

there are a very wide variety of these arguments all through philosophical and Theological literature a pretty famous one is the fine-tuning argument this begins with the observation that the fundamental laws of the universe are so carefully calibrated to allow it to exist and support life in small sections of it if the fundamental constants that tune the laws of physics were even slightly different then we would never have existed and indeed nothing would have ever existed Advocates of the fine-tuning argument suggest that the best way to explain this is that these values were set by a

supremely intelligent and Powerful agent which sounds an awful lot like a god here it's not like we've seen a lot of universes being created so the inductive element is pretty understated but nonetheless it is certainly abductive and certainly a posteriori since it argues that God is the best way to explain why the laws of the universe are as they observably are sometimes an aposteriori argument draws from certain facts about us as humans CS Lewis quite often gave arguments in this style the two main examples of this in his writings are his argument from morality and

his argument from desire for the first one Lewis initially observes the large amount of convergence on what we happen to consider right and wrong and then argues that the best way to explain this is that there is an objective moral law that is in turn grounded in a theistic God he makes a similar argument about our purported desire for God he claims that in almost every human we seem to have this longing for something that is beyond ourselves and higher than every individual person or set of people some people would call this a search for

purpose or for objective meaning but the important thing for Lewis is that it is a natural desire for something Transcendent and Eternal seeming then he says just like it would be very strange if we had thirst but there was no way to quench that thirst with water a natural desire for something Divine suggests there is something that could in theory fulfill that desire this is again an aposteriori argument this time with one foot in induction and the other in abduction you can spot an aposteriori argument for God because it will often start from some observable

fact about the external World they'll then usually compare that to some set of anous observations and attempt an induction or they will say that God is the best way to explain the existence of this particular phenomenon or some mixture of both induction and abduction certainly aren't exclusive aposteriori arguments also technically include arguments from personal revelation this is where someone claims to have directly experienced an angel or some other Divine being and believes in God because of this particular event or set of events likewise the scripture of many religions purport to record Supernatural occurrences that would

only really be explicable if there was some kind of God involved if the Prophet Elijah truly did soak his offering in water only for it to burst into flames when he prayed to God then it is quite difficult to explain this without believing in God this is part of what can make scripture so convincing for some people if you think the events recorded are true then belief in God is a Perfectly Natural consequence of this the key to analyzing a posteriori arguments is often again to look at their structure as we said most of the

time they will start with some Claim about the world and then perhaps another one about analogous objects and then posit either that we can infer God inductively or that God is the best explanation for the initial claim for example let's look at P's argument this time in propositional form one many objects in the natural world are incredibly complex two almost all complex things have a designer three thus we can conclude that the complex objects in the natural world have a designer to criticize this argument you could question the first premise but most people do not

in fact a lot of the critique of this argument is aimed at the second premise that almost all complex things have a designer utilizing evolutionary theory we point to all the complex things in the world that can come about through a mixture of probability and natural pressures thus the inductive leap doesn't seem as substantiated and in general this is a very handy structure for your own critiques you can either question one of the premises or suggest that God is not the best way to explain the premises I'm using strength rather than the more technical logical

term validity here because I want to include these inductive and abductive arguments which don't always have a straightforward deductive structure for instance to respond to Lewis's argument about our shared moral intuitions suggesting an objective moral law which in turn suggests the existence of God we could argue that shared moral intuitions are instead best explained by the fact that these are simply useful for constructing successful societies any societies without them just died out and we are left with the ones that have them after all it's not hard to see how a society that's structured around indiscriminate

murder and theft would have trouble surviving for a long time but next I want to turn to a religious argument that's becoming more and more popular in recent years and one that I find totally fascinating so let me introduce you to the pragmatic religious argument three the utility of God for an atheistic philosopher Arthur schopenhauer was in some ways a big fan of religious belief for him it was not that a belief in God was necessarily true but rather that it served important societal functions and incidentally did teach certain philosophical truths that would otherwise go

unknown to most people for schopenhauer the world is not a fun place there is an awful lot of suffering and often times that suffering seems completely pointless he often raises the rather sensible question what is the point of going on but he thinks that for many people religion does provide them with an answer to this question and thus stops them from from falling into despair they are told that while they will suffer and perish in this life they will get Heavenly rewards in the next and for him that fulfills an important societal function of allowing

people to cope with hardship when it inevitably strikes and slightly disguise what he took to be the unbearable pessimistic truth about the universe in other words schopenhauer did not think that God exists but he was worried about what might happen if everyone genuinely did stop believing in God and although shophow was an a IST a lot of religious thinkers also unsurprisingly tend to argue that religious faith is a good thing at a social level and that we have good pragmatic reasons to believe alongside theological ones a good example of this is the Russian writer Theodore

dooi who thought that without a firm belief in God we may begin to just treat one another as means to some selfish material end for him a belief in the soul and the Forgiveness of sins and the spark of divinity in every individual person could if genuinely enacted turned the world into a place of unfettered Brotherly Love he did not think that Christianity in his day was anywhere near this situation but he was worried that they were losing ground in that battle he feared that if we lost sight of the notion that every person was

of infinite spiritual value then we could begin to justify murder violence and rewriting morality to suit our own selfish needs this is partly what he was alluding to through Ivan karamazovs musings that without God everything might be permitted importantly dosi was not merely saying that it is fear of hell that keeps people moral he was rather saying that it was certain beliefs about the metaphysical structure of the world that supported our moral code arguments like these are importantly different from the ones we've looked at so far in the video for one thing they don't argue

that God exists but merely that a belief in his existence is extremely pragmatically useful either for individual fulfillment or for the health of a society this means that their conclusion is technically not God exists but rather believing that God exists is good in some way so their scope is not ontological but instead to do with belief this is conceptually rather interesting because it means that you can technically be an atheist and yet still subscribe to one or more of these religious arguments Vol famously remarked that while he did not believe in God he certainly hoped

that anyone considering stealing from him did I think this form of argument has become increasingly popular with the slow rise of so-call cultural Christianity very broadly people subscribing to this position tend to say that while events like the resurrection did not take place nonetheless there are real benefits to holding on to large suedes of Christian beliefs and Christian ethics the general thought tends to be that even if Christianity is not true as far as moral systems go it is hardly the worst we could do especially if we home in on the loving thy neighbor and

looking out for others in need aspects their worry is often that if we do abandon this system then we may create a vacuum that allows another one to step into its place and there is no guarantee that this replacement system won't be totally disastrous it is very much a chesterton's fence argument the writer and apologist GK chesteron used to argue that we should not knock down fences either literal or metaphorical ones until we know exactly what they are there for and what will happen if we remove them likewise people in this vein argue that we

should not try to dispense with Christian ethics until we are very sure about what will replace it another kind of pragmatic argument goes while religions may or may not be true we can certainly learn a lot from them this again is a very atheist friendly argument and does not even say that believing in God is necessarily beneficial but it does urge us to not throw the baby out with the bathwater so to speak for example while it is never quite clear to me what Jordan Peterson's position on the metaphysics of God is he often does

analyze religious texts in an attempt to draw certain lessons from them I am currently partway through his newest book and he has talked about what we can learn from the book of Exodus about resisting tyranny and what we can learn from the book of Genesis about creation and language Alan Watts arguably did a similar thing with many Buddhist texts he often seemed less interested in what was metaphysically or ontologically the case and more what practical lessons we can learn from a long tradition that has had a great many great minds put a lot of work

into it schopenhauer makes a similar argument when he says religions can be used to teach allegorical truths about the world so for example while he thought that fasting specifically in service to a God had no real Divine element He did think that detaching from material objects and learning to deal with frustrated desires was an invaluable skill and that religions helped to teach this skill through allegory when analyzing arguments like this it's very important to pay careful attention to the particular conclusion that's being drawn the mere idea that we can learn something from religious text is

probably true but also it's a relatively minimal thing to show and the plausibility of the conclusions were ultimately depend on which lessons are being drawn from the text if someone is arguing that belief in God is necessary for living a fulfilling life then the bar is much higher than if they are simply saying that such a belief might be helpful for some people and if someone is arguing that religion in general or a religion in particular is good for society then that is an empirical point that ultimately ought to be demonstrated either way pragmatic arguments

about Gods stretch all the way from William James's point that you can choose to believe in God if you think you'll find it helpful to y's worry that without Christ we will morally Decay so much so that he would rather be with Christ than with the truth to use his words if you do want to challenge arguments like this then the first thing to point out is that demonstrating the utility of a belief in God is not the same thing as demonstrating the existence of a god funnily enough this point is made just as often

by DieHard Believers as it is by atheists then if you want to challenge the premises of the pragmatic argument directly you can do this in a variety of ways depending on what they are you might try to point to successful atheistic Societies or argue that morality can ultimately be held together by merely social contracts you might suggest that the allegorical lessons of religion can be taught in other ways like through great literature which does not claim to be true but can still definitely impart wisdom you might argue that existential philosophy is one way to solve

problems of meaning without God or that belief in God is no guarantee that existential meaning will be found after all even the wisest man in the Bible King Solomon still had repeated crises of meaning again like with the previous sections I do want to point out that each of these points does in turn have counterpoints I can't elucidate every possible Direction each argument about religion could go in this video but lastly I want to turn to perhaps one of my favorite types of religious argument and one that I think goes criminally under noticed because it

has a fascinating philosophical structure four religion and the transcendental the the term transcendental arguments comes from Canan scholarship and it refers to a particular type of argument structure which says why exists and cannot exist without X so X must also exist in theory these arguments could be primarily a priori or primarily a posteriori though they normally involve some aspect of both and personally I think they deserve their own section because they can get a bit fiddly and it's very easy to become confused when we're dealing with them in very broad terms the general idea here

is to point to something we already believe is true and then use that to show that something else must also be the case since the thing that we initially think is true cannot exist without it an example might help illustrate what I mean one transcendental argument that can be traced all the way back to C argues that the external world must exist if we are to believe in the notion of experience the chain of reasoning goes a little something like this if we recognize what we have as experiences then that only makes sense if we

draw the distinction between things that are experiences and things that are not experiences but this stuff that is not experience is basically what we mean when we talk about the external World thus if experience exists then the external world must also exist since it is a precondition for that experience it is this precondition framing that defines the transcendental argument before we get started I want to draw a distinction between what I will call an ontological transcendental argument and a doxastic transcendental argument whereas an monological transcendental arguments purports to prove something's existence a doxastic transcendental argument

merely aims to prove that we are already committed to believing something doxastic here comes from the ancient Greek word doia meaning belief in some ways this is a mirror of the distinction we drew in the last section between arguments that try to show that God exists and those which merely try to show that we ought to believe in him one ontological transcendental argument comes from CS Lewis who argued that if we are to have reason there must be some non-material grounding being which we call God effectively he says that if there were only material things

then there would be no reasons there would only be non-rational causes and he says that no combination of non-rational causes can ever give rise to a reason thus he says that there must be some non-material thing which grounds reason and this thing that grounds reason and logic and ensures that it is veritical or that it tracks truth sounds an awful lot like the intelligent metaphysically grounding being that Christians call God thus Lewis attempts to infer from the existence of Reason which he takes to be self-evident and at the very least most people would not want

to deny to the existence of something that looks quite Godlike I want to clarify here that Lewis's argument is more detailed than this I'm just compressing it down for ease of presentation he justifies his premises in much greater detail than I'm doing here on the other hand there are doxastic transcendental arguments which argue that while atheists may say that they do not believe in God they are in fact committed to a belief in God based either on other things that they do believe or just how they act for example I quite often come across arguments

suggesting that if an atheist accepts that there are ways of being right and wrong then they are implicitly committed to the existence of a god even if they do not know it and this argument would make sense if you thought that God was a necessary precondition of moral standards again there's that necessary precondition component which makes this a transcendental argument in the modern day this argument has been popularized in non-academic discourse by Dr Jordan Peterson who is rather fond of saying that even if people claim to be atheists they certainly do not act like it

because they still behave as if things are right wrong beautiful true or knowable and he thinks that all of that depends on the prior belief in some kind of God personally I find doxastic transcendental arguments rather interesting because they often rely on this distinction between what we say we believe and what beliefs are supposedly manifest in our actions and this in turn raises a fascinating philosophical question just when can we infer from someone's actions to their beliefs even against what they explicitly say if I repeatedly claimed that I was absolutely certain that it was not

going to rain but then I also put on my rain coat and packed my umbrella then most people would assume that whatever I say I clearly do believe it's going to rain otherwise I wouldn't have taken all of those precautions however it is also possible to be mistaken about this perhaps I do not think it's going to rain but I happen to be playing the lead in a local production of singing in the rain and this is my costume it's just a little something for you to chew on when it comes to these sorts of

arguments getting round this problem is one reason why it is rather important for those advocating for doxastic transcendental arguments that they establish that belief in God is a necessary precondition of the behavior or other belief otherwise doubt tends to creep in and also I suppose technically it then doesn't become a transcendental argument but rather a more standard Abdu one ultimately most responses to transcendental arguments of either form challenge the claim that God or a belief in God is truly a necessary precondition to the initial starting point for example if we wanted to respond to Lewis

we might give a pragmatist account of Reason where we suggest that reason does track truth because we have evolved to trap truth given that knowing what is true is very useful when it comes to surviving except in a few interesting exceptional cases we might think that veridical reason does not require an agential or personal God but instead simply a way the universe is regularly organized we might argue that the relationships of logic are best construed as just stipulated formalistic games and then some of these games just happen to be really really useful if successfully argued

any one of these would break the chain of necessity that links the uncontroversial claim that reason exists to God's existence likewise for doxastic transcendental arguments we can challenge the idea that commitment to the initial action or belief does imply a belief in God we might deny that God is necessary for ethics or that a belief in ethics is necessary for ethical Behavior again this involves Breaking the Chain of necessity such that a belief in God can no longer be validly inferred from the premises of the argument Additionally you might argue that a belief could both

be necessary to believe and yet also be false if by some weird Cosmic coincidence we were all hardwired to believe that there was a kraken at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean then that would not mean that there actually was one it would just mean that we could not help but believe there is one transcendental arguments may be the trickiest type of argument in this video to examine because it is sometimes very difficult to tell exactly what is necessary to believe certain things or what is necessary for other things to exist for instance it is

sometimes claimed that God is necessary for knowledge to exist and yet there are plenty of atheistic philosophies of knowledge that seem to function very well and without the theist going through each one and explaining why it is insufficient without God it is very hard to see where the link of necessity comes in I think in popular discourse a leap is sometimes made that because God does ground important Concepts like knowledge or reason or truth within certain religious Frameworks that means that nothing else could ground those things in which case a natural response is to then

suggest alternative philosophical foundations for these Concepts additionally I want to note that sometimes a transcendental looking argument is posited with the conclusion that God must exist when the argument only really challenges the idea that just material things exist I find this conflation of atheism and materialism happens quite a lot when people are discussing the necessary preconditions for certain beliefs or certain things even if a materialistic worldview cannot account for something that doesn't necessarily mean that an atheistic worldview could not account for that thing there are a whole host of atheistic philosophers that aren't materialists and

I think that the close link between materialism and athe ism is more of an artifact of specifically new atheism than anything else the point of this loose taxonomy of religious arguments is certainly not to be complete or exclusive for instance there are plenty of arguments that have some a priori premises and some aposteriori ones but by sorting the arguments you encounter into these categories it should give a helpful idea of how to understand them built upon them and if you like criticize them and the best part is that these same argument structures are not just

found in the philosophy of religion but all across argumentation but if you specifically want to explore some aposteriori arguments for belief in God then click here to look at my discussion of David hume's landmarked text on religious argumentation from the natural world I hope you enjoyed this video and have a wonderful day