On Religion

The history of Philosophy has often been coloured (some might say contaminated) by the subject of Religion. Most of the great thinkers in Europe in the centuries past have been Christians, and have directed at least some of their Philosophy accordingly. Can Religion be 'proved' or even argued for, or is it simply a matter of personal faith, devoid of reason? Let us examine the arguments for Religion, Christianity in particular.

The three main arguments for the existance of God are as follows:

i) The Teleological
ii) The Cosmological argument
iii) The Ontological argument

The Teleological argument, also known as the argument from design, states that the universe contains such complexity that it must have a designer, and based on the goodness and order of the world, this creater must be infinitely good and wise. This is known as the watchmaker argument, based on the analogy that if you find a watch in the desert, you can only assume that someone made it, and the watch did not just 'come to be'.

The Teleological argument has come under heavy fire recently, with evolution showing that complexity can exist from nature. David Hume argued that even if the watchmaker did exist, it is a fallacy to assume he is infinitely perfect. He argued that we can only infer the properties of the Cause from what we know of the Effect, and the universe is neither infinitely good nor infinitely perfect. He proceeds to ask how the conception of a perfect God and the teleological argument sits with the existence of evil. Of course, fundamentalists will feel we brought this on ourselves, Garden of Eden etc, but there are some problems with this 'free will' argument. For example, do angels have free will? If they did not, Lucifer would have to be commanded by God to rebel, thus contradicting the view of a perfect God. If they do, then there are obviously angels who have not fallen, and thus free will is not incompatible with sinning, and thus God could have given us free will and still kept us from falling. (Ex-Christian rant over)

The Cosmological argument basically argues that everything natural, or 'worldly' must have a cause, based on the law of Causation (although Hume might beg to differ). Thus if we follow the chain of causation all the way to the very begining, there must be a 'first cause', which was itself not caused by anything. The argument then proceeds to argue that this 'first cause' (or Unmoved Mover according to Aristotle) must be God, since God self-sufficient in that sense.

This argument assumes that the 'first cause' must be infinitely perfect and provident, but it is clear that this does not have to be the case. There could be a supernatural first cause who created the universe and then left it hung out to dry, as it were.

Personally, I am inclined to believe that an infinite chain of causation could exist. Our limited human minds protest at this because we cannot conceive it, but that does not mean that an infinite regress does not exist. It is plausible that the universe expands until a critical mass, then collapses, leading to another big bang, leading to an expanding universe, and so forth ad infinitum, to name but one possibility.

The Ontological argument states that God is perfect, and existence is a quality of perfection, thus God exists. Anselm asked his listeners to imagine a being than which no greater can be conceived. Now, it would be greater if it existed than if it did not exist, thus it exists.

One response to this is the Kantian dogma that existance is not a predicate, to whit, existence is not a property. Thus a theoretical perfect being would not necessarily exist. To say that X exists is to say nothing more than there is an instance of X. By the Ontological reasoning, I could define a Unicorn as 'a horse with a horn on its head which exists', and thus it would exist.

Also, there is a vital case of referential failure here. In Anselm's version, in the statement that 'it would be greater if it existed', there is no 'it' to refer to here. The argument assumes in its premise that the being than which no greater can be conceived already exists!

Myself, I believe that 'rationalising' religion is self-defeating. If God is provable, what place would faith have? As an agnostic with atheist tendencies, I think that the whole endeavor is misplaced from the start.