Defense Laboratory / Does God exist?
1. The objection
“Every claim about God is a claim about something no one has ever seen, measured or tested. Every culture has had gods, and they differ so much that they cannot all be right, which suggests people invent them. Science has explained lightning, disease and the origin of species without needing God. The old arguments for God, from a first cause or from design, only show that I do not yet know the answer, and then label my ignorance God. When there is no good evidence, the honest position is to withhold belief.
2. Investigation
Assumptions
- That only claims that can be tested by the methods of natural science count as evidence.
- That the existence of many different religions shows that none of them is true, rather than that people are asking a real question in different ways.
- That a natural explanation of how people come to believe in God settles whether God exists.
- That the arguments for God are meant to work like laboratory results, rather than as arguments about why anything exists at all.
- That when science explains how something happens, there is no further question about why there is anything to be explained.
Evidence and historical claims
- What does each of the classical arguments actually claim: a first cause in time, a cause that keeps things in existence now, an argument from order, an argument from the existence of moral obligation?
- What does Romans 1:19-20 say that people can know about God from creation, and what does it not say?
- How do Thomas Aquinas, in the Summa Theologiae (First Part, question 2), and the later kalam tradition state their arguments, and how do they differ?
- What do David Hume and Immanuel Kant argue against the traditional arguments, and which of their points do defenders accept?
- What do scientists mean when they say the universe had a beginning, and what do cosmologists themselves say remains debated about that?
- How do atheist and agnostic philosophers state their own best case, in their own words, rather than as summarized by believers?
Philosophical and theological claims
- What would count as evidence for or against God, and does that standard apply to other things we reasonably believe, such as the reality of other minds or the reliability of memory?
- Is the question why there is something rather than nothing a scientific question, a philosophical question, or an empty one?
- Is the burden of proof on the believer, the denier, or both, and what does it mean to withhold belief?
Logical structure
- Premise 1: We should believe only what can be established by observation or experiment.
- Premise 2: The existence of God cannot be established by observation or experiment.
- Conclusion: Therefore we should not believe that God exists.
- Test each premise separately. Ask whether Premise 1 can itself be established by observation or experiment, and whether Premise 2 is true of every argument for God or only of some.
3. Christian responses
Response A: Reason can reach God (the classical Catholic position)
The First Vatican Council (1870) taught that God can be known with certainty from created things by the natural light of human reason, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church (paragraphs 31 to 36) describes several ways of coming to this knowledge. Thomas Aquinas set out five arguments in the Summa Theologiae. They do not mainly concern the beginning of the universe. They ask what keeps anything in being at all, what accounts for change, and what accounts for order, and they argue that these questions lead to a source that is not itself caused.
Catholic teaching also holds that reason is not enough for the fullness of faith, which depends on revelation. The claim is narrower: that the existence of a first source of all things is not a blind leap.
Response B: God is known by encounter more than by proof (Orthodox emphasis)
Orthodox theology stresses that God is beyond what words and concepts can grasp, and that knowing God is a matter of worship, prayer and participation in the life of the church, not mainly of argument. Orthodox writers do not usually reject the idea that creation points to its Creator. They are wary of treating God as a conclusion at the end of a syllogism, as if God were one more being whose existence could be proved from outside.
On this view, arguments can clear away objections and show that belief is reasonable, but the knowledge that matters comes through lived relationship.
Response C: Belief in God can be rational without arguments (many Protestants)
The Reformed philosopher Alvin Plantinga and others have argued that belief in God can be properly basic, meaning rational to hold without being deduced from other beliefs, in the way that belief in the past or in other minds is. Calvin spoke of a sense of the divine given to human beings. Other Protestants, following Karl Barth, are suspicious of natural theology altogether, holding that God is known because God speaks, not because humans reason upward.
Protestants therefore differ among themselves: some defend the classical arguments vigorously, some treat them as helpful but secondary, and some reject them.
Response D: The arguments do not succeed, and withholding belief is reasonable (agnostic and atheist philosophers)
Many philosophers who have studied the arguments carefully conclude that they fail. Hume argued that we cannot reason from the observed universe to a cause beyond it, and Kant argued that reason overreaches when it tries to go beyond experience. Modern critics add that if everything needs a cause, so does God, and that a sufficient explanation of the universe might simply be that it exists without further reason.
Careful secular thinkers also note that a god of philosophy (a first cause, a necessary being) is far from the God of Christian worship, and that even a successful argument would leave most of the questions open. They hold that honest inquiry may end in agnosticism, and that this is not a failure of nerve.
4. The strongest counterargument
The strongest reply to Responses A and C is that the history of these arguments shows no agreement even among skilled philosophers who have studied them for centuries. If the arguments were as strong as claimed, one would expect more convergence. Critics also say that a necessary being or first cause need not be personal, good, or the God of Israel and Christ, and that the move from the one to the other requires revelation, which brings the question back to historical and textual evidence.
The strongest reply to Responses B and D comes from the other side. If belief in God rests on encounter alone, it is hard to distinguish from private experience, and defenders of the arguments will ask why a question of such weight should be left without public reasons. Against Response D, defenders reply that many arguments in philosophy never reach consensus, that disagreement by itself does not show that no one is right, and that the demand for a purely scientific proof is itself a philosophical position that cannot meet its own test.
5. Your independent defense
- Write the objection in one sentence in your own words.
- List the hidden premises, using the logic outline above, and mark which premise you think is weakest.
- Choose one classical argument (for example Aquinas’ argument from motion or the kalam argument) and write it as numbered premises and a conclusion. Do not use the word God until the final line.
- Read the strongest published objection to that argument that you can find, written by someone who rejects it. Summarize it in a paragraph that its author would accept as fair.
- Read Romans 1:19-20 and Psalm 19:1-4 in the King James Version. Write two sentences on what each claims and what each leaves unclaimed.
- Decide what you think reason can and cannot show about God. Write 300 to 500 words defending your position, stating what you believe, what you hold as a matter of trust, and what you hold as a matter of argument.
- Write the strongest objection to your own position. Make it as strong as you can, then answer it.
- Write one sentence on what would change your mind.
- Keep this in your own notebook or document. Do not send it anywhere.