Perhaps it’s customary for a person starting a new blog to introduce themselves and put forth their predictions for American Idol’s next winner. However, I’ve just been watching The Four Horsemen, starring Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris and I feel like writing something. And I might as well have a vehicle to do that, namely wordpress. So here I am.
For those of you who don’t know, Four Horsemen is a video of a journalist (Hitchens), an evolutionary biologist (Dawkins) and two philosophers (Dennett and Harris), having a conversation. These four men are linked by their atheism and that is the primary topic of discussion. It’s an interesting watch, no matter what you believe. A theme they frequently return to is arguments in favor of faith. Now if you exclude the “faith” argument or the idea of incomprehendable “mysteries,” which by their nature are really just ways of avoiding the questions rather than coherent and meaningful arguments, it seems to me that every modern argument put forward to rationalize religious belief falls into one of the “Five Ways” of the 13th century theologian Thomas Aquinas.
These five ways are (as put forward in Aquinas’ book Summa Theologica, and as summarized in Derek Johnston’s book A Brief History of Philosophy) -
1 – The Unmoved Mover – everything is in motion, there must be something that set them in motion. God is that unmoved mover.
2 – The First Cause – the nature of cause-and-effect requires a first cause, an uncaused cause if you will. God is that first cause. Very similar to the unmoved mover argument.
3 – Contingency – There is no reason why anything should be, yet everything is any ways. The reason for this is God.
4 – Degrees – We know that there are different degrees of goodness, evilness, perfection, truth, etc. If we take this knowledge to it’s logical conclusion, there must be something that is completely good, true and perfect. That thing is God.
5 – Design – Everything looks designed, therefore there must be a designer. That designer is God.
As I said, in some guise or another, these arguments constantly crop up and are deemed irrefutable by their advocates and deemed completely refuted by their opponents. As Johnston points out in his book, the first four arguments suffer from the same logical misstep that Aquinas criticized his predecessor, St. Anselmo, for committing. Namely, they simultaneously qualify God as a being among other beings, while excluding him from the normal rules that apply to beings. This might be easily explained as one of the mysteries of God, but it begs the question of whether or not terms like “unmoved mover” are actually meaningful. Clearly, they are not if God exists in a state of being to which terms reserved for mundane things do not apply. The next logical step, apparently, is to throw up one’s hands and proclaim “God is Great!” It seems to me, all that this really establishes is not god’s greatness, but the inherently and internally contradictory nature of these kinds of religious arguments.
The fifth argument, the Design argument, was left out of this critique by Johnston, who probably wisely avoided the debate over Creationism versus Evolution for the sake of his book. I, however, am not so sympathetic to the bizarre, typically American phenomena of the Intelligent Design movement. This fifth argument (as well as the first 3) suffer from another logical fallacy. They begin by setting up two contradictory premises, then seek to dissolve this contradiction by invoking God. Formal logic, the scientific method (and in fact, common sense) both tell us that if we set up an argument with two contradictory premises, one or both of those premises must be false. In the case of the Design argument, the two premises are 1) the universe is designed and 2) design implies a designer. Either one or both of these claims must be false. The first premise is false because order in the universe is applied to it by human beings trying to understand the universe and deliberately find patterns and design within it. This is crucial to how to understand and survive in a universe that mostly consists of atoms spinning (or, if you believe string theory, strands of energy vibrating) erratically in empty space. The second premise is weak because it suffers from the “either/or” fallacy by excluding other possibilities. Spontaneous existence and eternal existence are not as absurd as you might think and I am not invoking eastern mysticism by mentioning them. Light is known to travel backwards in time, sub-atomic particles are known to move in and out of existence and these basic substances, of which the universe consists, display all sorts of bizarre, seemingly illogical behavior because we are, again, trying to qualify “non-being” objects with “being” terms.
So please stop rehashing Aquinas’ tired arguments. I’m hungry and am going to go find some food.
(Johnston, Derek, A Brief History of Philosophy, Continuum. London 2006)
