For the third day of Christmas, a new topic, again focused on confusions about some aspect of Christianity. (Though not specifically Christianity, in this case.) We live in a strangely bifurcated age, with pockets where rationality is celebrated and other pockets where it is ignored or derided. Unfortunately, religious belief is often found in the second set of pockets, and this arises among believers and unbelievers alike. Case in point: the idea raised by some atheists that the question, “Who made God?”, poses a problem for theism.
Now, if a Christian or some other theist (e.g. a Jew or a Muslim) argued as follows:
Everything that exists has a cause.
The universe exists.
Therefore, the universe has a cause – God.
the objection would make sense. Against this sort of argument, it would be appropriate to ask about God’s cause, as the first premise doesn’t just invite it; it demands it.
The problem is that no religious believer in history has ever made this argument.* What theists have argued is that anything that begins to exist has a cause, or anything that is contingent has a cause, or anything that appears to be designed and can’t be explained by necessity or chance has a (designing) cause, and so on. There is always some qualification: things of a certain sort are such that they are not self-explanatory, and ultimately depend for their existence on something which is not of the same sort and therefore not in need of the same sort of explanation. (A being that is reasonably construed as God.) The arguments may or may not succeed, but if they fail it’s not because the property in need of explanation is also possessed by God.
But leave this aside. Maybe that’s one reason why some non-theists have asked the question. But why can’t the question be asked anyway? Isn’t it reasonable to ask, who made God? Maybe what we call “God” is really God-1, who is made by God-2, who is made by …God-N. Could it be gods (rather than turtles) all the way down? And if not, isn’t that a reason to just rule out any gods at all?
This argument may be relevant to certain conceptions of God. If one is talking about Zeus or Odin, for example – finite gods whose existence isn’t in any way self-explanatory – then sure. But this is not the conception of God held by traditional Christians (or traditional Jews or Muslims). God is supposed to be a necessary being, independent in principle of all other beings, self-explanatory and the source of all existence. To ask about the maker of such a being is a bit like asking what’s north of the earth’s north pole. If we understand what it is for something to be the north pole, we understand that it makes no sense to ask what’s north of it. Likewise, to ask what accounts for the existence of the source of all existence is likewise a nonsensical question.
Note: this is not by itself an argument that God exists, just as the north pole argument doesn’t prove that there is a north pole. Had there been no earth, its north pole obviously wouldn’t have existed, either. Similarly, we’re not saying that there is an uncreated, self-explanatory God that is the source of all existence. Rather, the claim is that if God exists, it makes no sense to ask who or what caused God to exist. Some things can be caused to exist, but if there’s a God, he’s not one of them.
* Okay, that’s too strong a claim. There was probably a drunk philosopher, a depressed theologian, and a couple of couple of college sophomores on spring break who each came employed it. But the number of times theists have been accused of making this sort of argument, as opposed to the number of times they’ve actually made it, is probably two or three orders of magnitude in favor of the first option.
Sunday, April 17, 2022 at 4:06PM
Christmas Thoughts
My busyness is the reason I stopped posting, and while I'm still officially retired from blogging, I have a little time for a flurry of posts. Some chess posts are coming up, and - of course - a critically important post having to do with a bowl game, the occasion of Christmas merits a post on the holiday itself.
First, then, Merry Christmas! Many of you know that I am a Christian, and I'm aware that my readership is diverse in its religious beliefs, including plenty who profess no religious belief at all. It is those of you in or near the latter group that I'd like to say a few words to, as I was in your shoes when I was a late teen/young adult. To describe myself as an atheist back then would be an overstatement, but I was agnostic about the existence of God, did not attend any sort of religious services, and wasn't raised by Christian parents. I had some Christian friends, and some non-Christian ones as well. I'm not an especially emotional person either, nor prone to so-called woo-woo or to mysticism.
If anything, my bent is towards rationalism. Some of you who think that religious belief is unjustified nonsense may be inclined to dismiss such a claim out of hand, thinking that rationalism and religious belief go as well together as oil and water (or worse, the properties of being married and of being a bachelor), but it's true. A significant number of contemporary philosophers, many of whom are among the discipline's leading practitioners, and plenty of contemporary scientists, too, are Christians and members of other faiths, and not merely nominal members, either. (See here for an extremely partial list of Christian philosophers, and here for a list of scientists who are Christians.) Of course it's possible that we're all mistaken, but then that is true of all philosophers and all scientists, both at the level of particular theories and general worldviews.
At any rate, what persuaded me was a combination of philosophical argumentation, argumentation about Jesus as the fulfillment of messianic prophecy (both from the Old Testament and from extrabiblical Jewish sources), and arguments for the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus. While not every element of every argument I considered back then, 30+ years ago, still seems completely correct, the arguments from especially the first and third categories still seem cogent to me. Moreover, there are a host of other arguments, mostly against naturalism (especially in ethics and the philosophy of mind) and scientism (it appears to be self-defeating), that have to my mind solidified the plausibility of a Christian worldview.
But I want to say something else to my fellow rationalists - a tribe that is very well-represented in the chess world. I would ask that when you do consider the Christian faith, whether for yourself or in conversation with Christian believers, that you try to distinguish the apologetics enterprise from the faith itself. I often read works by authors who are probably "nones", and often these works have no religious angle, either pro (obviously) or con. But somewhere along the line - say, in a brief paean to science - there might be a throwaway remark referring to Christianity as a "theory" that used to explain things like lightning or other scientific phenomena.
It is difficult to describe just how silly this is. Mind you, in saying this I'm not saying it's silly because God exists, Jesus rose from the dead, etc. Rather, it's silly because that's not why any Christian holds his or her faith, it's silly because that's not the sort of thing that Christianity aims to explain, and it's silly because it completely misconstrues what Christianity is about.
The heart of Christian faith - at least until very recent, "woke", and revisionist interpretations made their appearance - is that Jesus died for our sins, and that through faith (trust, confidence) in him and repentance we are reconciled to God. (A fuller, more robust statement of faith can be found in the Nicene Creed, which is recited by all the major historic branches of the church. More contemporary, evangelical churches seldom recite it duing services, but would in many, probably most cases agree with what it affirms.) Christians put their faith in Jesus, not in the (useful) abstraction we call "Christianity", especially not construed as a quasi-scientific theory. Please note: saying this is not meant to insulate the Christian faith from intellectual examination. Rather, it's to distinguish between what it is to be a Christian (or better, being a Christian) with reflection on the intellectual underpinnings of the Christian faith.
Neither is there any reason to think that this is what Christianity purports to be about. It emerges within a Jewish milieu (and the same responses could be made in the Jewish context as well) where the existence of a good, loving, creator of the universe is already believed. In that context, there's no thought that God is used to explain natural phenomena, except in the sense of divine providence. (If something awful happened to Israel, it was often taken as an indication of divine disfavor for what the nation had done wrong. Whatever one thinks about such thinking, it shouldn't be confused with this: "Hey, there's lightning! Wow, that's such an awesome thing, there's gotta be a god who is making this happen!")
What is true is that Christians believe that nothing occurs without God's permitting it, and without granting the causal power necessary to make it happen. Indeed, all things that exist do so because God sustains them in existence. Philosophically and theologically astute Christians (and Jews and Muslims, too) don't hold to a god of the gaps. God's power underlies everything that happens; Christians (and Jews and Muslims) aren't scurrying to smaller and smaller corners of the scientific landscape looking for tiny, unsolved mysteries that scientific theorizing hasn't yet worked out. We believe that God is responsible for the existence of all things, at every moment of their existence, and grants them the causal powers they have.
Again, though, it's not because we're pretending to engage in scientific or quasi-scientific theorizing. There are some believers who take the philosophical path and become Christians. That's more or less the way I got there. But that's not the norm, and it's not what Christianity is all about. Rather, these ideas emerged from reflection on the nature of God and the Christian faith. But it's not what the faith is all about, any more than being a parent is some sort of hypothesis based on documents from the hospital and the court. Being a Christian is not to check off a set of boxes on a worldview questionnaire; it's the result of repentance and faith, as described above, and is to issue in an increased ability to love God with all one's heart, mind, soul, and strength and to love one's neighbor as oneself.
For those of you who are curious about the Christian faith - maybe you were raised in it, or have Christian friends and co-workers - I hope you'll pursue it. If you have intellectual doubts, research them. There are plenty of intelligent Christians who have written on such matters. (Drop me a line and I'll try to offer a reply or at least send you to sources that seem helpful to me.) But bear in mind that the faith is not about apologetics - not because a blind and irrational faith is the ideal. Rather, the faith is not about apologetics because what it is about is what Jesus did for us approximately 2000 years ago.
Merry Christmas, everyone.