1. Rebuttal:
Argument from Reason, or, Transcendental Argument for the Existence of God (TAG)
Argument from Reason, or, Transcendental Argument for the Existence of God (TAG)
Summary:
A. Objective Reason (logic, morality, universal laws) exists.
B. Reason could not be relied upon if it were not universal.
C. An omnipotent, intelligent force must have determined universal Reason.
D. Therefore, God exists.
B. Reason could not be relied upon if it were not universal.
C. An omnipotent, intelligent force must have determined universal Reason.
D. Therefore, God exists.
Paul Davies, PhD, English physicist & professor, 1946-
“In my own mind I have no doubts at all that the arguments for a necessary world are far shakier than the arguments for a necessary being, so my personal inclination is to opt for the latter. Yet I also believe that there remain severe difficulties relating this timeless, necessary being to the changing, contingent world of experience, for the reasons I have discussed. I don’t believe that these difficulties can be separated from the various unresolved puzzles that exist anyway concerning the nature of time, the freedom of the will, and the notion of personal identity. Nor is it obvious to me that this postulated being who underpins the rationality of the world bears much relation to the personal God of religion, still less to the God of the bible or the Koran.”
— Paul Davies, The Mind of God, Touchstone, 1992 p191
“In my own mind I have no doubts at all that the arguments for a necessary world are far shakier than the arguments for a necessary being, so my personal inclination is to opt for the latter. Yet I also believe that there remain severe difficulties relating this timeless, necessary being to the changing, contingent world of experience, for the reasons I have discussed. I don’t believe that these difficulties can be separated from the various unresolved puzzles that exist anyway concerning the nature of time, the freedom of the will, and the notion of personal identity. Nor is it obvious to me that this postulated being who underpins the rationality of the world bears much relation to the personal God of religion, still less to the God of the bible or the Koran.”
— Paul Davies, The Mind of God, Touchstone, 1992 p191
2. Rebuttal:
Argument From Consciousness
Argument From Consciousness
Summary:
A. The universe is intelligible, and we are capable of grasping it.
B. Our ability to understand the universe either comes from a greater intelligence, or random chance.
C. It is not from chance.
D. Therefore, God.
B. Our ability to understand the universe either comes from a greater intelligence, or random chance.
C. It is not from chance.
D. Therefore, God.
Robin Le Poidevin, British professor of metaphysics, 1962-
“There is one striking observation we can make without even using any of our senses – striking, that is, when we stop to think about it namely, that the world contains intelligence...
“At one stage in the history of thought, this readily made observation was considered enough to establish that nature had been created by Divine Providence. For how could the random behaviour of atoms give rise to something so complex and purposeful? Faced with a choice between intelligence as the inevitable result of benevolent intervention by God, the attractions of the latter would have seemed irresistible. And, despite the astonishing progress of science, it has not lost all its power today. But, as Dawkins points out, the ‘random or designed?’ dichotomy is a false one. There is now available an entirely naturalistic explanation of intelligence (‘naturalistic’ in that it does not appeal to supernatural forces), namely that it is simply one more evolutionary strategy. Intelligence does not simply appear, miraculously, at some particular point in history: it gradually emerges by a series of small steps, a gradual increase in complexity in living systems and their capacity to adapt and survive. A creature lacking intelligence will survive only as long as the capacities with which biological evolution has endowed it fit for its environment. If that environment should change drastically, it has no other resources to fall back on. Intelligence permits a greater degree of flexibility, and this is nowhere more convincingly illustrated than in the case of human beings. The modern human is relatively poorly adapted, biologically speaking, to its environment. But psychological and social evolution has compensated for this by partly insulating the biological being from the ravages of nature: technology and social cooperation provide us with a host of things it would be difficult to obtain by our own unaided efforts: food, clothing, housing, transport.
“Natural selection, then, appears to make theism redundant as an explanation of intelligence. But atheists can do more than show that God is not required. They can go on the offensive. The argument from intelligence to God backfire, says Dawkins, because its premise that undesigned intelligence is vastly improbable makes God exceedingly improbable. The kind of complexity that intelligence requires only avoids the lowest probability rating if it is either designed by a being who is itself intelligent, or instead the result of gradual changes due to mutation and natural selection over millennia. But God himself is not (according to theism) the result of intelligent design, nor is he the result of natural selection, for he is the creator. We have to conclude that God is highly improbable. And this has consequences for our previous discussion over the assumption of atheism. If the onus is on those who hold a hypothesis that has a low degree of initial improbability to provide convincing evidence for it, and theism is an initially improbably hypothesis, then there must at the outset be a presumption of atheism.”
— Robin Le Poidevin, Agnosticism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2020 p57-58
“There is one striking observation we can make without even using any of our senses – striking, that is, when we stop to think about it namely, that the world contains intelligence...
“At one stage in the history of thought, this readily made observation was considered enough to establish that nature had been created by Divine Providence. For how could the random behaviour of atoms give rise to something so complex and purposeful? Faced with a choice between intelligence as the inevitable result of benevolent intervention by God, the attractions of the latter would have seemed irresistible. And, despite the astonishing progress of science, it has not lost all its power today. But, as Dawkins points out, the ‘random or designed?’ dichotomy is a false one. There is now available an entirely naturalistic explanation of intelligence (‘naturalistic’ in that it does not appeal to supernatural forces), namely that it is simply one more evolutionary strategy. Intelligence does not simply appear, miraculously, at some particular point in history: it gradually emerges by a series of small steps, a gradual increase in complexity in living systems and their capacity to adapt and survive. A creature lacking intelligence will survive only as long as the capacities with which biological evolution has endowed it fit for its environment. If that environment should change drastically, it has no other resources to fall back on. Intelligence permits a greater degree of flexibility, and this is nowhere more convincingly illustrated than in the case of human beings. The modern human is relatively poorly adapted, biologically speaking, to its environment. But psychological and social evolution has compensated for this by partly insulating the biological being from the ravages of nature: technology and social cooperation provide us with a host of things it would be difficult to obtain by our own unaided efforts: food, clothing, housing, transport.
“Natural selection, then, appears to make theism redundant as an explanation of intelligence. But atheists can do more than show that God is not required. They can go on the offensive. The argument from intelligence to God backfire, says Dawkins, because its premise that undesigned intelligence is vastly improbable makes God exceedingly improbable. The kind of complexity that intelligence requires only avoids the lowest probability rating if it is either designed by a being who is itself intelligent, or instead the result of gradual changes due to mutation and natural selection over millennia. But God himself is not (according to theism) the result of intelligent design, nor is he the result of natural selection, for he is the creator. We have to conclude that God is highly improbable. And this has consequences for our previous discussion over the assumption of atheism. If the onus is on those who hold a hypothesis that has a low degree of initial improbability to provide convincing evidence for it, and theism is an initially improbably hypothesis, then there must at the outset be a presumption of atheism.”
— Robin Le Poidevin, Agnosticism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2020 p57-58