My Favorite Theistic Arguments - Part 0 - What Do We Mean?

For a long while I've been wanting to give a treatment to the most basic tenet of Christianity - the existence of God.  Namely, I wanted to do a sketch of the most common (and powerful, in my opinion) argument's for God's existence.

Before we begin with the messy work of providing those arguments, it may be instructive to do a little background work.  First, we'll touch upon what we mean by “God" and then what it means to have "faith in God".  Lastly, I'll provide links to all 6 arguments I wanted to examine.


What do We Mean By God?:

In his book “The Last Superstition”, philosopher Edward Feser helpfully classifies different stages of conceptualizing God.

Stage 1:  This is when you’re thinking of God as yet another member of the species “god”.  So you have Thor, Ra, Apollo, Vishnu, and then you have YHWH.  In each case you’re imagining some being in the universe which has a physical form, experiences emotions, and has some kind of origin in time.

Whenever I find a person who insists on comparing God to... say… Hades, I often wonder if it is out of ignorance or contempt.

Stage 2:  You realize that the “God” spoken of by Christians and Muslims created the universe.  For that reason it cannot be a part of this universe, nor can it be material.  So what you imagine is a sort of spirit that looks in on the universe like a snow globe.

Stage 3: This is the concept arrived at by the likes of Aristotle, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas.  You realize that God cannot be subject to time.  And so imagining God as something which can experience change immediately leads you astray.

Then you realize that God isn’t just one being among others – a member of the genus “being”.  God is Being Itself.  The sheer act of TO BE.  All other things which exist don’t possess their existence innately, but God’s very essence is existence.

This is why I find it frustrating when someone wants to compare God to the ancient pagan deities.  The difference is not one of degree, but in kind.  We're literally not talking about the same sort of thing.

Saint Augustine also wrote of this frustration in the Confessions, where he recorded trying to get the pagans to understand the timelessness of God:

 “Lo, are they not full of their ancient way, who say to us, ‘What was God doing before He made heaven and earth?’”  - Confessions, Book 11, Chapter 10 

“For whence could innumerable ages pass by which You did not make, since You are the Author and Creator of all ages? Or what times should those be which were not made by You?” - Confessions, Book 11, Chapter 13 

What Does it Mean to Have Faith in God?

What, then, does it mean to have “faith in God”?

For many people, the word “faith” means:

“To believe despite the absence of evidence, or in spite of it.”

So (they presume) a believer, without any evidence of the existence of God, simply wills himself to believe.  And the goal is to cling to that unwarranted belief until you die – whereupon you’ll receive a reward for your abandonment of reason.

This is not what classical Theists mean by “faith in God.”  The Catechism of the Catholic Church says:

"Though faith is above reason, there can never be any real discrepancy between faith and reason. Since the same God who reveals mysteries and infuses faith has also bestowed the light of reason on the human mind, God cannot deny himself, nor can truth ever contradict truth.”  [CCC 159] 

And regarding evidence for the existence of God, it says:

“Created in God's image and called to know and love him, the person who seeks God discovers certain ways of coming to know him. These are also called proofs for the existence of God, not in the sense of proofs in the natural sciences, but rather in the sense of converging and convincing arguments, which allow us to attain certainty about the truth.” – [CCC 31]

So believing in God’s existence is actually not conceived as an act of faith.  Rather, it is considered a result of the deliverance of reason, logic, and observation.  It is simply the conclusion the mind should reach when it has thought things through.

“Faith in God”, therefore is analogous to the faith I have in my wife.  When she says, “I’m going to the store”, I don’t check the credit cards to make sure she did indeed go.  When she cooks a meal, I trust she didn’t poison it.

My mind reports to me the existence of my wife.  But it is by faith that I know she is sincere, and good, and trustworthy.  And this is the faith we have in God – to trust in the one we know to exist.


The Path Forward:

So what I've done is lay out some examples of the “converging and convincing arguments” spoken of in the Catechism.  We’ll examine the premises of those arguments, some of their objections, the answers to those objections, and where they lead us.

Part 1:  The Kalam Cosmological Argument.
Part 2:  The Contingency Argument.
Part 3:  The Fine Tuning Argument.
Part 4:  The Argument from Regularity, Intelligibility, and Mathematics.
Part 5:  The Argument from Miracles.
Part 6:  The Moral Argument.