1. Argument from Evidence
Summary:
We should determine truth claims based upon evidence, because without evidence as the final standard, anything can be argued.
Carl Sagan, PhD, American astronomer, astrophysicist, & astrobiologist, 1934-1996
“But I try not to think with my gut. Really, it’s okay to reserve judgment until the evidence is in.”
— Carl Sagan (quoted by Richard Dawkins), The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p69
“But I try not to think with my gut. Really, it’s okay to reserve judgment until the evidence is in.”
— Carl Sagan (quoted by Richard Dawkins), The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p69
Stephen Hawking, PhD, English theoretical physicist & cosmologist, 1942-2018
“There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority, and science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win because it works.”
― Stephen Hawking, Interview by Diane Sawyer, ABC News, June 7, 2010
“There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority, and science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win because it works.”
― Stephen Hawking, Interview by Diane Sawyer, ABC News, June 7, 2010
Thomas Jefferson, American philosopher, lawyer, & statesman, 1743-1826
“Shake off all the fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.”
— Thomas Jefferson (quoted by Richard Dawkins), The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p64
“To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, god, are immaterial, is to say they are nothings, or that there is no god, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise...without plunging into the fathomless abyss of dreams and phantasms. I am satisfied, and sufficiently occupied with the things which are, without tormenting or troubling myself about those which may indeed be, but of which I have no evidence.”
— Thomas Jefferson (quoted by Richard Dawkins), The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p63
“Shake off all the fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.”
— Thomas Jefferson (quoted by Richard Dawkins), The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p64
“To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, god, are immaterial, is to say they are nothings, or that there is no god, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise...without plunging into the fathomless abyss of dreams and phantasms. I am satisfied, and sufficiently occupied with the things which are, without tormenting or troubling myself about those which may indeed be, but of which I have no evidence.”
— Thomas Jefferson (quoted by Richard Dawkins), The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p63
Thomas Henry Huxley, English biologist & anthropologist, 1825-1895
“Agnosticism, in fact, is not a creed, but a method, the essence of which lies in the rigorous application of a single principle... Positively the principle may be expressed: In matters of the intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard to any other consideration. And negatively: In matters of the intellect, do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable. That I take to be the agnostic faith, which if a man keeps whole and undefiled, he shall not be ashamed to look the universe in the face, whatever the future may have in store for him.”
— Thomas Henry Huxley, “Agnosticism,” 1889 (quoted by Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p72)
“Agnosticism, in fact, is not a creed, but a method, the essence of which lies in the rigorous application of a single principle... Positively the principle may be expressed: In matters of the intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard to any other consideration. And negatively: In matters of the intellect, do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable. That I take to be the agnostic faith, which if a man keeps whole and undefiled, he shall not be ashamed to look the universe in the face, whatever the future may have in store for him.”
— Thomas Henry Huxley, “Agnosticism,” 1889 (quoted by Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p72)
Robin Le Poidevin, British professor of metaphysics, 1962-
“The agnostic principle: always seek reasons for beliefs, and do not make knowledge claims that are not adequately supported by the evidence. [William Kingdom] Clifford’s statement of this principle, that ‘it is wrong, always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence,’ is too strong. Clifford does not allow for degrees of belief: we should proportion the extent to which we are inclined to believe something to the weight of the evidence.”
— Robin Le Poidevin, Agnosticism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2020 p117
“The agnostic principle: always seek reasons for beliefs, and do not make knowledge claims that are not adequately supported by the evidence. [William Kingdom] Clifford’s statement of this principle, that ‘it is wrong, always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence,’ is too strong. Clifford does not allow for degrees of belief: we should proportion the extent to which we are inclined to believe something to the weight of the evidence.”
— Robin Le Poidevin, Agnosticism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2020 p117
Richard Dawkins, PhD, British evolutionary biologist, 1941-
“Contrary to [T.H.] Huxley [who created the term ‘agnostic’], I shall suggest that the existence of God is a scientific hypothesis like any other. Even if hard to test in practice, it belongs in the same TAP or temporary agnosticism box as the controversies over the Permian and the Cretaceous extinctions. God’s existence or non-existence is a scientific fact about the universe, discoverable in principle if not in practice. If he existed and chose to reveal it, God himself could clinch the argument, noisily and unequivocally, in his favour. And even if God’s existence is never proved or disproved with certainty one way or the other, available evidence and reasoning may yield an estimate of probability far from 50 per cent.”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p72-73
“Contrary to [T.H.] Huxley [who created the term ‘agnostic’], I shall suggest that the existence of God is a scientific hypothesis like any other. Even if hard to test in practice, it belongs in the same TAP or temporary agnosticism box as the controversies over the Permian and the Cretaceous extinctions. God’s existence or non-existence is a scientific fact about the universe, discoverable in principle if not in practice. If he existed and chose to reveal it, God himself could clinch the argument, noisily and unequivocally, in his favour. And even if God’s existence is never proved or disproved with certainty one way or the other, available evidence and reasoning may yield an estimate of probability far from 50 per cent.”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p72-73
Bertrand Russell, British philosopher & polymath, 1872-1970
“When two men of science disagree, they do not invoke the secular arm; they wait for further evidence to decide the issue, because, as men of science, they know that neither is infallible. But when two theologians differ, since there are no criteria to which either can appeal, there is nothing for it but mutual hatred and an open or covert appeal to force...
“But if in the West the view prevails that Christianity is essential to virtue and social stability, Christianity will once again acquire the vices which it had in the Middle Ages; and, in becoming more and more like Communism, will become more and more difficult to reconcile with it. It is not along this road that the world can be saved from disaster.”
— Bertrand Russell, “Can Religion Cure Our Troubles?” (1954) Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects, Touchstone Books, 1957, p198-199
“When two men of science disagree, they do not invoke the secular arm; they wait for further evidence to decide the issue, because, as men of science, they know that neither is infallible. But when two theologians differ, since there are no criteria to which either can appeal, there is nothing for it but mutual hatred and an open or covert appeal to force...
“But if in the West the view prevails that Christianity is essential to virtue and social stability, Christianity will once again acquire the vices which it had in the Middle Ages; and, in becoming more and more like Communism, will become more and more difficult to reconcile with it. It is not along this road that the world can be saved from disaster.”
— Bertrand Russell, “Can Religion Cure Our Troubles?” (1954) Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects, Touchstone Books, 1957, p198-199
2. Argument from Nonfalsifiablity /
Argument from Burden of Proof /
Russell’s Teapot
Argument from Burden of Proof /
Russell’s Teapot
Summary:
The proposition that God exists is nonfalsifiable, which means that if it is false, there are no conditions which would show it to be false. Other nonfalsifiable propositions, also presented without evidence, are obviously absurd notions. These include: Russell’s Teapot, invisible pink unicorns, and numerous gods once thought to be real which are no longer worshipped. These analogies are used to create an objective perspective to show that belief in God is just as arbitrary.
Bertrand Russell, British philosopher & polymath, 1872-1970
“Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth of every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.”
— Bertrand Russell, “Is there a God?”, 1952 (quoted by Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p74-75)
“I ought to call myself an agnostic; but, for all practical purposes, I am an atheist. I do not think the existence of the Christian God any more probable than the existence of the Gods of Olympus or Valhalla. To take another illustration: nobody can prove that there is not between the Earth and Mars a china teapot revolving in an elliptical orbit, but nobody thinks this sufficiently likely to be taken into account in practice. I think the Christian God just as unlikely.”
— Bertrand Russell, “Letter to Mr. Major,” Dear Bertrand Russell: A Selection of His Correspondence with the General Public, 1950-1968, Allen & Unwin, 1969
“Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth of every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.”
— Bertrand Russell, “Is there a God?”, 1952 (quoted by Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p74-75)
“I ought to call myself an agnostic; but, for all practical purposes, I am an atheist. I do not think the existence of the Christian God any more probable than the existence of the Gods of Olympus or Valhalla. To take another illustration: nobody can prove that there is not between the Earth and Mars a china teapot revolving in an elliptical orbit, but nobody thinks this sufficiently likely to be taken into account in practice. I think the Christian God just as unlikely.”
— Bertrand Russell, “Letter to Mr. Major,” Dear Bertrand Russell: A Selection of His Correspondence with the General Public, 1950-1968, Allen & Unwin, 1969
Richard Dawkins, PhD, British evolutionary biologist, 1941-
“We would not waste time saying so [that Russell’s Teapot exists] because nobody, so far as I know, worships teapots; but, if pressed, we would not hesitate to declare our strong belief that there is positively no orbiting teapot. Yet strictly we should all be teapot agnostics: we cannot prove, for sure, that there is no celestial teapot. In practice, we move away from teapot agnosticism towards a-teapotism.
“A friend, who was brought up a Jew and still observes the sabbath and other Jewish customs out of loyalty to his heritage, describes himself as a ‘tooth fairy agnostic.’ He regards God as no more probable than the tooth fairy. You can’t disprove either hypothesis, and both are equally improbable. He is an a-theist to exactly the same large extent that he is an a-fairyist. And agnostic about both, to the same small extent.”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p75
“Russell’s teapot, of course, stands for an infinite number of things whose existence is conceivable and cannot be disproved. That great American lawyer Clarence Darrow said, ‘I don’t believe in God as I don’t believe in Mother Goose.’ The journalist Andrew Mueller is of the opinion that pledging yourself to any particular religion ‘is no more or less weird than choosing to believe that the world is rhombus-shaped, and borne through the cosmos in the pincers of two enormous green lobsters called Esmerelda and Keith.’ A philosophical favourite is the invisible, intangible, inaudible unicorn, disproof of which is attempted yearly by the children at Camp Quest. A popular deity on the Internet at present – and as undisprovable as Yahweh or any other – is the Flying Spaghetti Monster, who, many claim, has touched them with his noodly appendage...
“The point of all these way-out examples is that they are undisprovable, yet nobody thinks the hypothesis of their existence is on an even footing with the hypothesis of their nonexistence. Russell’s point is that the burden of proof rests with the believers, not the non-believers. Mine is the related point that the odds in favour of the teapot (spaghetti monster / Esmerelda and Keith / unicorn etc.) are not equal to the odds against.”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p76
“We would not waste time saying so [that Russell’s Teapot exists] because nobody, so far as I know, worships teapots; but, if pressed, we would not hesitate to declare our strong belief that there is positively no orbiting teapot. Yet strictly we should all be teapot agnostics: we cannot prove, for sure, that there is no celestial teapot. In practice, we move away from teapot agnosticism towards a-teapotism.
“A friend, who was brought up a Jew and still observes the sabbath and other Jewish customs out of loyalty to his heritage, describes himself as a ‘tooth fairy agnostic.’ He regards God as no more probable than the tooth fairy. You can’t disprove either hypothesis, and both are equally improbable. He is an a-theist to exactly the same large extent that he is an a-fairyist. And agnostic about both, to the same small extent.”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p75
“Russell’s teapot, of course, stands for an infinite number of things whose existence is conceivable and cannot be disproved. That great American lawyer Clarence Darrow said, ‘I don’t believe in God as I don’t believe in Mother Goose.’ The journalist Andrew Mueller is of the opinion that pledging yourself to any particular religion ‘is no more or less weird than choosing to believe that the world is rhombus-shaped, and borne through the cosmos in the pincers of two enormous green lobsters called Esmerelda and Keith.’ A philosophical favourite is the invisible, intangible, inaudible unicorn, disproof of which is attempted yearly by the children at Camp Quest. A popular deity on the Internet at present – and as undisprovable as Yahweh or any other – is the Flying Spaghetti Monster, who, many claim, has touched them with his noodly appendage...
“The point of all these way-out examples is that they are undisprovable, yet nobody thinks the hypothesis of their existence is on an even footing with the hypothesis of their nonexistence. Russell’s point is that the burden of proof rests with the believers, not the non-believers. Mine is the related point that the odds in favour of the teapot (spaghetti monster / Esmerelda and Keith / unicorn etc.) are not equal to the odds against.”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p76
3. Argument from Probability/Improbability
Summary:
The existence of God is a knowable question; we just need enough data about the universe. For now, the God hypothesis seems improbable based on what we know. Current trends indicate that the more data we uncover about the universe, the lower that probability is likely to become.
Richard Dawkins, PhD, British evolutionary biologist, 1941-
“...What matters is not whether God is disprovable (he isn’t) but whether his existence is probable. That is another matter. Some undisprovable things are sensibly judged far less probable than other undisprovable things. There is no reason to regard God as immune from consideration along the spectrum of probabilities. And there is certainly no reason to suppose that, just because God can be neither proved nor disproved, his probability of existence is 50 per cent...”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p77
“Suppose Bertrand Russell’s parable [Russell’s Teaopot] had concerned not a teapot in outer space but life in outer space – the subject of Sagan’s memorable refusal to think with his gut. Once again we cannot disprove it, and the only strictly rational stance is agnosticism. But the hypothesis is no longer frivolous. We don’t immediately scent extreme improbability. We can have an interesting argument based on incomplete evidence, and we can write down the kind of evidence that would decrease our uncertainty. We’d be outraged if our government invested in expensive telescopes for the sole purpose of searching for orbiting teapots. But we can appreciate the case for spending money on SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, using radio telescopes to scan the skies in the hope of picking up signals from intelligent aliens.
“I praised Carl Sagan for disavowing gut feelings about alien life. But one can (and Sagan did) make a sober assessment of what we would need to know in order to estimate the probability. This might start from nothing more than a listing of our points of ignorance, as in the famous Drake Equation which, in Paul Davies’s phrase, collects probabilities. It states that to estimate the number of independently evolved civilizations in the universe you must multiply seven terms together. The seven include the number of stars, the number of Earth-like planets per star, and the probability of this, that and the other which I need not list because the only point I am making is that they are all unknown, or estimated with enormous margins of error. When so many terms that are either completely or almost completely unknown are multiplied up, the product – the estimated number of alien civilizations – has such colossal error bars that agnosticism seems a very reasonable, if not the only credible stance.
“Some of the terms in the Drake Equation are already less unknown than when he first wrote it down in 1961...
“But today’s estimates of the ubiquity of solar systems are no longer based on the principle of mediocrity; they are informed by direct evidence. The spectroscope, nemesis of [Auguste] Comte’s positivism, strikes again. Our telescopes are scarcely powerful enough to see planets around other stars directly. But the position of a star is perturbed by the gravitational pull of its planets as they whirl around it, and spectroscopes can pick up the Doppler shifts in the star’s spectrum, at least in cases where the perturbing planet is large. Mostly using this method, at the time of writing we now know of 170 extra-solar planets orbiting 147 stars, but the figure will certainly have increased by the time you read this book...
“We have at least quantitatively improved our estimate of one previously shrouded term of the Drake Equation. This permits a significant, if still moderate, easing of our agnosticism about the final value yielded by the equation. We must still be agnostic about life on other worlds – but a little bit less agnostic, because we are just that bit less ignorant. Science can chip away at agnosticism, in a way that [T.H.] Huxley bent over backwards to deny for the special case of God. I am arguing that, notwithstanding the polite abstinence of Huxley, [Stephen Jay] Gould and many others, the God question is not in principle and forever outside the remit of science. As with the nature of the stars, contra Comte, and as with the likelihood of life in orbit around them, science can make at least probabilistic inroads into the territory of agnosticism.”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p94-96
“The fact that orbiting teapots and tooth fairies are undisprovable is not felt, by any reasonable person, to be the kind of fact that settles any interesting argument. None of us feels an obligation to disprove any of the millions of far-fetched things that a fertile or facetious imagination might dream up. I have found it an amusing strategy, when asked whether I am an atheist, to point out that the questioner is also an atheist when considering Zeus, Apollo, Amon Ra, Mithras, Baal, Thor, Wotan, the Golden Calf and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I just go one god further.
“All of us feel entitled to express extreme scepticism to the point of outright disbelief – except that in the case of unicorns, tooth fairies and the gods of Greece, Rome, Egypt and the Vikings, there is (nowadays) no need to bother. In the case of the Abrahamic God, however, there is a need to bother, because a substantial proportion of the people with whom we share the planet do believe strongly in his existence. Russell’s teapot demonstrates that the ubiquity of belief in God, as compared with belief in celestial teapots, does not shift the burden of proof in logic, although it may seem to shift it as a matter of practical politics. That you cannot prove God’s non-existence is accepted and trivial, if only in the sense that we can never absolutely prove the non-existence of anything. What matters is not whether God is disprovable (he isn’t) but whether his existence is probable. That is another matter. Some undisprovable things are sensibly judged far less probable than other undisprovable things. There is no reason to regard God as immune from consideration along the spectrum of probabilities. And there is certainly no reason to suppose that, just because God can be neither proved nor disproved, his probability of existence is 50 per cent...”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p77
“...What matters is not whether God is disprovable (he isn’t) but whether his existence is probable. That is another matter. Some undisprovable things are sensibly judged far less probable than other undisprovable things. There is no reason to regard God as immune from consideration along the spectrum of probabilities. And there is certainly no reason to suppose that, just because God can be neither proved nor disproved, his probability of existence is 50 per cent...”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p77
“Suppose Bertrand Russell’s parable [Russell’s Teaopot] had concerned not a teapot in outer space but life in outer space – the subject of Sagan’s memorable refusal to think with his gut. Once again we cannot disprove it, and the only strictly rational stance is agnosticism. But the hypothesis is no longer frivolous. We don’t immediately scent extreme improbability. We can have an interesting argument based on incomplete evidence, and we can write down the kind of evidence that would decrease our uncertainty. We’d be outraged if our government invested in expensive telescopes for the sole purpose of searching for orbiting teapots. But we can appreciate the case for spending money on SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, using radio telescopes to scan the skies in the hope of picking up signals from intelligent aliens.
“I praised Carl Sagan for disavowing gut feelings about alien life. But one can (and Sagan did) make a sober assessment of what we would need to know in order to estimate the probability. This might start from nothing more than a listing of our points of ignorance, as in the famous Drake Equation which, in Paul Davies’s phrase, collects probabilities. It states that to estimate the number of independently evolved civilizations in the universe you must multiply seven terms together. The seven include the number of stars, the number of Earth-like planets per star, and the probability of this, that and the other which I need not list because the only point I am making is that they are all unknown, or estimated with enormous margins of error. When so many terms that are either completely or almost completely unknown are multiplied up, the product – the estimated number of alien civilizations – has such colossal error bars that agnosticism seems a very reasonable, if not the only credible stance.
“Some of the terms in the Drake Equation are already less unknown than when he first wrote it down in 1961...
“But today’s estimates of the ubiquity of solar systems are no longer based on the principle of mediocrity; they are informed by direct evidence. The spectroscope, nemesis of [Auguste] Comte’s positivism, strikes again. Our telescopes are scarcely powerful enough to see planets around other stars directly. But the position of a star is perturbed by the gravitational pull of its planets as they whirl around it, and spectroscopes can pick up the Doppler shifts in the star’s spectrum, at least in cases where the perturbing planet is large. Mostly using this method, at the time of writing we now know of 170 extra-solar planets orbiting 147 stars, but the figure will certainly have increased by the time you read this book...
“We have at least quantitatively improved our estimate of one previously shrouded term of the Drake Equation. This permits a significant, if still moderate, easing of our agnosticism about the final value yielded by the equation. We must still be agnostic about life on other worlds – but a little bit less agnostic, because we are just that bit less ignorant. Science can chip away at agnosticism, in a way that [T.H.] Huxley bent over backwards to deny for the special case of God. I am arguing that, notwithstanding the polite abstinence of Huxley, [Stephen Jay] Gould and many others, the God question is not in principle and forever outside the remit of science. As with the nature of the stars, contra Comte, and as with the likelihood of life in orbit around them, science can make at least probabilistic inroads into the territory of agnosticism.”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p94-96
“The fact that orbiting teapots and tooth fairies are undisprovable is not felt, by any reasonable person, to be the kind of fact that settles any interesting argument. None of us feels an obligation to disprove any of the millions of far-fetched things that a fertile or facetious imagination might dream up. I have found it an amusing strategy, when asked whether I am an atheist, to point out that the questioner is also an atheist when considering Zeus, Apollo, Amon Ra, Mithras, Baal, Thor, Wotan, the Golden Calf and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I just go one god further.
“All of us feel entitled to express extreme scepticism to the point of outright disbelief – except that in the case of unicorns, tooth fairies and the gods of Greece, Rome, Egypt and the Vikings, there is (nowadays) no need to bother. In the case of the Abrahamic God, however, there is a need to bother, because a substantial proportion of the people with whom we share the planet do believe strongly in his existence. Russell’s teapot demonstrates that the ubiquity of belief in God, as compared with belief in celestial teapots, does not shift the burden of proof in logic, although it may seem to shift it as a matter of practical politics. That you cannot prove God’s non-existence is accepted and trivial, if only in the sense that we can never absolutely prove the non-existence of anything. What matters is not whether God is disprovable (he isn’t) but whether his existence is probable. That is another matter. Some undisprovable things are sensibly judged far less probable than other undisprovable things. There is no reason to regard God as immune from consideration along the spectrum of probabilities. And there is certainly no reason to suppose that, just because God can be neither proved nor disproved, his probability of existence is 50 per cent...”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p77
Sir Alfred Jules "Freddie" Ayer (A.J. Ayer), English philosopher & humanist, 1910-1989
“It is now generally admitted, at any rate by philosophers, that the existence of a being having the attributes which define the god of any non-animistic religion cannot be demonstratively proved. To see that this is so, we have only to ask ourselves what are the premises from which the existence of such a god could be deduced. If the conclusion that a god exists is to be demonstratively certain, then these premises must be certain: for, as the conclusion of a deductive argument is already contained in the premises, any uncertainty there may be about the truth of the premises is necessarily shared by it. But we know that no empirical proposition can ever be anything more than probable. It is only a priori propositions that are logically certain. But we cannot deduce the existence of a god from an a priori proposition. For we know that the reason why a priori propositions are certain is that they are tautologies. And from a set of tautologies nothing but a further tautology can be validly deduced. It follows that there is no possibility of demonstrating the existence of a god.”
— A.J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, Penguin Books, 1936 p151-152
“It is now generally admitted, at any rate by philosophers, that the existence of a being having the attributes which define the god of any non-animistic religion cannot be demonstratively proved. To see that this is so, we have only to ask ourselves what are the premises from which the existence of such a god could be deduced. If the conclusion that a god exists is to be demonstratively certain, then these premises must be certain: for, as the conclusion of a deductive argument is already contained in the premises, any uncertainty there may be about the truth of the premises is necessarily shared by it. But we know that no empirical proposition can ever be anything more than probable. It is only a priori propositions that are logically certain. But we cannot deduce the existence of a god from an a priori proposition. For we know that the reason why a priori propositions are certain is that they are tautologies. And from a set of tautologies nothing but a further tautology can be validly deduced. It follows that there is no possibility of demonstrating the existence of a god.”
— A.J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, Penguin Books, 1936 p151-152
4. Argument from Simplicity /
Occam’s Razor
Occam’s Razor
Summary:
When faced with multiple theories that explain all the given evidence, the theory which explains the evidence with the fewest unknowns or assumptions is probably true. For most or perhaps all questions, the God explanation makes too many assumptions.
Richard Dawkins, PhD, British evolutionary biologist, 1941-
“...A God capable of continuously monitoring and controlling the individual status of every particle in the universe cannot be simple. His existence is going to need a mammoth explanation in its own right. Worse (from the point of view of simplicity), other corners of God’s giant consciousness are simultaneously preoccupied with the doings and emotions and prayers of every single human being – and whatever intelligent aliens there might be on other planets in this and 100 billion other galaxies. He even, according to [Richard] Swinburne, has to decide continuously not to intervene miraculously to save us when we get cancer. That would never do, for, ‘If God answered most prayers for a relative to recover from cancer, then cancer would no longer be a problem for humans to solve.’ And then what would we find to do with our time?”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p178-179
“...A God capable of continuously monitoring and controlling the individual status of every particle in the universe cannot be simple. His existence is going to need a mammoth explanation in its own right. Worse (from the point of view of simplicity), other corners of God’s giant consciousness are simultaneously preoccupied with the doings and emotions and prayers of every single human being – and whatever intelligent aliens there might be on other planets in this and 100 billion other galaxies. He even, according to [Richard] Swinburne, has to decide continuously not to intervene miraculously to save us when we get cancer. That would never do, for, ‘If God answered most prayers for a relative to recover from cancer, then cancer would no longer be a problem for humans to solve.’ And then what would we find to do with our time?”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p178-179
5. Omnipotence Paradoxes
Summary:
The concept of omnipotence is prone to unresolved paradoxes. For instance, can God create a rock that is too heavy to lift? Reductio ad absurdum: a truly omnipotent being is not possible.
Joshua Hoffman & Gary Rosenkrantz, American professors of philosophy
“The intelligibility of the notion of omnipotence has been challenged by the so-called paradox or riddle of the stone. Can an omnipotent agent, Jane, bring it about that there is a stone of some mass, m, which Jane cannot move? If the answer is ‘yes’, then there is a state of affairs that Jane cannot bring about, namely, (S1) that a stone of mass m moves. On the other hand, if the answer is ‘no’, then there is another state of affairs that Jane cannot bring about, namely, (S2) that there is a stone of mass m which Jane cannot move. Thus, it seems that whether or not Jane can make the stone in question, there is some possible state of affairs that an omnipotent agent cannot bring about. And this appears to be paradoxical.”
— Joshua Hoffman & Gary Rosenkrantz, “Omnipotence,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2002
“The intelligibility of the notion of omnipotence has been challenged by the so-called paradox or riddle of the stone. Can an omnipotent agent, Jane, bring it about that there is a stone of some mass, m, which Jane cannot move? If the answer is ‘yes’, then there is a state of affairs that Jane cannot bring about, namely, (S1) that a stone of mass m moves. On the other hand, if the answer is ‘no’, then there is another state of affairs that Jane cannot bring about, namely, (S2) that there is a stone of mass m which Jane cannot move. Thus, it seems that whether or not Jane can make the stone in question, there is some possible state of affairs that an omnipotent agent cannot bring about. And this appears to be paradoxical.”
— Joshua Hoffman & Gary Rosenkrantz, “Omnipotence,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2002
Richard Dawkins, PhD, British evolutionary biologist, 1941-
“Incidentally, it has not escaped the notice of logicians that omniscience and omnipotence are mutually incompatible. If God is omniscient, he must already know how he is going to intervene to change the course of history using his omnipotence. But that means he can’t change his mind about his intervention, which means he is not omnipotent...”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p101
“Incidentally, it has not escaped the notice of logicians that omniscience and omnipotence are mutually incompatible. If God is omniscient, he must already know how he is going to intervene to change the course of history using his omnipotence. But that means he can’t change his mind about his intervention, which means he is not omnipotent...”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p101
Paul Davies, PhD, English physicist & professor, 1946-
“What seems to come through such analyses loud and clear is the fundamental incompatibility of a completely timeless, unchanging, necessary God with the notion of creativity in nature, with a universe that can change and evolve and bring forth the genuinely new, a universe in which there is free will. You can’t really have it both ways. Either God fixes everything, including our own behavior, in which case free will is an illusion – ‘The plan of predestination is certain,’ wrote Aquinas – or things happen over which God either has no control, or has voluntarily relinquished control.”
— Paul Davies, The Mind of God, Touchstone, 1992 p189
“What seems to come through such analyses loud and clear is the fundamental incompatibility of a completely timeless, unchanging, necessary God with the notion of creativity in nature, with a universe that can change and evolve and bring forth the genuinely new, a universe in which there is free will. You can’t really have it both ways. Either God fixes everything, including our own behavior, in which case free will is an illusion – ‘The plan of predestination is certain,’ wrote Aquinas – or things happen over which God either has no control, or has voluntarily relinquished control.”
— Paul Davies, The Mind of God, Touchstone, 1992 p189
6. Other Theistic Paradoxes
Summary:
Some theistic concepts are logically contradictory. This topic does not include paradoxes related to omnipotence.
Kai Nielsen, American Professor of Philosophy, 1926-2021
“But all that to the contrary notwithstanding, one of the things I would argue is there couldn’t be a nonsensory awareness of an infinite eternal God transcendent to the universe. [J.P.] Moreland says that in Christianity God was immanent. That’s one of the paradoxes of Christianity. How could God be both transcendent and immanent? It is self-contradictory to say that x is both transcendent to the world and in the world at the same time. And God remember, is said to be an eternal, timeless reality.
“...If I were shopping around for a theistic religion, I would be much more inclined to be a Moslem or a Jew than a Christian because you wouldn’t in those religions have such paradoxes. There isn’t any immanence of God in Judaism.”
— Kai Nielsen, Does God Exist?, Prometheus Books, 1988 p71
“But all that to the contrary notwithstanding, one of the things I would argue is there couldn’t be a nonsensory awareness of an infinite eternal God transcendent to the universe. [J.P.] Moreland says that in Christianity God was immanent. That’s one of the paradoxes of Christianity. How could God be both transcendent and immanent? It is self-contradictory to say that x is both transcendent to the world and in the world at the same time. And God remember, is said to be an eternal, timeless reality.
“...If I were shopping around for a theistic religion, I would be much more inclined to be a Moslem or a Jew than a Christian because you wouldn’t in those religions have such paradoxes. There isn’t any immanence of God in Judaism.”
— Kai Nielsen, Does God Exist?, Prometheus Books, 1988 p71
Keith Ward, English Anglican priest, philosopher, and theologian, 1938-
“First of all, if God really is self-sufficient, as the axiom of intelligibility seems to require him to be, how can it come about that he creates a world at all? It seems an arbitrary and pointless exercise. On the other hand, if God really is a necessary and immutable being, how can he have a free choice; surely all that he does will have to be done of necessity and without any possibility of alteration? The old dilemma – either God’s acts are necessary and therefore not free (could not be otherwise), or they are free and therefore arbitrary (nothing determines what they shall be) – has been sufficient to impale the vast majority of Christian philosophers down the ages.”
— Keith Ward (quoted by Paul Davies), The Mind of God, Touchstone, 1992 p180
“How can a being which is necessary and immutable have the power to do everything? Being necessary, it cannot do anything other than it does. Being immutable, it cannot do anything new or original... Even if creation can be seen as a timeless Divine act, the real difficulty remains, that, since the being of God is wholly necessary, it will be a necessary act, which could not have been otherwise in any respect. This view is still in tension with a central strand of the Christian tradition: namely, that God need not have created any universe, and that he need not have created precisely this universe. How can a necessary being be free in any way?”
— Keith Ward (quoted by Paul Davies), The Mind of God, Touchstone, 1992 p180-181
“If God is the creator or cause of a contingent world, he must be contingent and temporal; but if God is a necessary being, then whatever he causes must be necessarily and changelessly caused. On this rock both interpretations of theism founded. The demands of intelligibility require the existence of a necessary, immutable, eternal being. Creation seems to demand a contingent, temporal God, who interacts with creation and is, therefore, not self-sufficient. But how can one have both?”
— Keith Ward (quoted by Paul Davies), The Mind of God, Touchstone, 1992 p180
“First of all, if God really is self-sufficient, as the axiom of intelligibility seems to require him to be, how can it come about that he creates a world at all? It seems an arbitrary and pointless exercise. On the other hand, if God really is a necessary and immutable being, how can he have a free choice; surely all that he does will have to be done of necessity and without any possibility of alteration? The old dilemma – either God’s acts are necessary and therefore not free (could not be otherwise), or they are free and therefore arbitrary (nothing determines what they shall be) – has been sufficient to impale the vast majority of Christian philosophers down the ages.”
— Keith Ward (quoted by Paul Davies), The Mind of God, Touchstone, 1992 p180
“How can a being which is necessary and immutable have the power to do everything? Being necessary, it cannot do anything other than it does. Being immutable, it cannot do anything new or original... Even if creation can be seen as a timeless Divine act, the real difficulty remains, that, since the being of God is wholly necessary, it will be a necessary act, which could not have been otherwise in any respect. This view is still in tension with a central strand of the Christian tradition: namely, that God need not have created any universe, and that he need not have created precisely this universe. How can a necessary being be free in any way?”
— Keith Ward (quoted by Paul Davies), The Mind of God, Touchstone, 1992 p180-181
“If God is the creator or cause of a contingent world, he must be contingent and temporal; but if God is a necessary being, then whatever he causes must be necessarily and changelessly caused. On this rock both interpretations of theism founded. The demands of intelligibility require the existence of a necessary, immutable, eternal being. Creation seems to demand a contingent, temporal God, who interacts with creation and is, therefore, not self-sufficient. But how can one have both?”
— Keith Ward (quoted by Paul Davies), The Mind of God, Touchstone, 1992 p180
Schubert Ogden, American Protestant theologian, 1928-2019
“Theologians usually tell us that God creates the world freely, as the contingent or non-necessary world of our experience discloses it to be... At the same time, because of their fixed commitment to the assumptions of classical metaphysics, theologians usually tell us that God’s act of creation is one with his eternal essence, which is in every respect necessary, exclusive of all contingency. Hence, if we take them at their word, giving full weight to both of their assertions, we at once find ourselves in the hopeless contradiction of a wholly necessary creation of a wholly contingent world.”
— Schubert Ogden (quoted by Paul Davies), The Mind of God, Touchstone, 1992 p181
“Theologians usually tell us that God creates the world freely, as the contingent or non-necessary world of our experience discloses it to be... At the same time, because of their fixed commitment to the assumptions of classical metaphysics, theologians usually tell us that God’s act of creation is one with his eternal essence, which is in every respect necessary, exclusive of all contingency. Hence, if we take them at their word, giving full weight to both of their assertions, we at once find ourselves in the hopeless contradiction of a wholly necessary creation of a wholly contingent world.”
— Schubert Ogden (quoted by Paul Davies), The Mind of God, Touchstone, 1992 p181
7. Nielsen’s Argument from Linguistic & Logical Incoherence
Summary:
In a rational argument, one must have premises which are definable and point to a detectible thing, otherwise the premises cannot be backed by empirical evidence or purely logical assertions. Our language reflects our inability to rationally comprehend god. Because we don’t know what we’re talking about when we use the word “god,” we cannot reason about god.
Kai Nielsen, American Professor of Philosophy, 1926-2021
“...I am going to argue that for somebody living in the twentieth century with a good philosophical and a good scientific education, who thinks carefully about the matter, that for such a person it is irrational to believe in God...
“...Take a belief in a Zeus-like, anthropomorphic God. Such a belief is just plainly false and superstitious. Such a being is an odd kind of being, and there is no evidence for His reality. Moreover, anything that could be observed, as an anthropomorphic God could or in any way directly be detected, would not be the God of Christianity or at least of advanced Judaeo-Christianity... But the anthropomorphic God, and anthropomorphic conception of God, is not incoherent; it’s just superstitious to believe in such a god. But at least since the Middle Ages, and even earlier than that, religious people have long since, at least when they are reflecting about the nature of God, ceased believing in an anthropomorphic Zeus-like God, while continuing to believe in the God of developed Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. And it is this belief, a much far more ethereal conception of God, that I maintain is incoherent...
“...What does the word ‘God’ refer to for Christians or for Jews?
“Consider the sentence, ‘God made the heavens and the earth,’ as distinct from ‘Louis made pasta and cake.’ Consider those two sentences. What is ‘God’ in this first sentence supposed to stand for, and how is the referent of that term to be identified? Compare this with ‘Louis.’ I can say ‘Somebody asked, “Who’s Louis?”’ and I’ll say, ‘That chap over there.’ That’s what philosophers would call an ostensive definition, an extra-linguistic definition. I point out the reference of the term ‘Louis’ by pointing to its referent. There is another way to give meaning to the term. I could say, ‘Well, the professor, one of the professors of philosophy at the University of Mississippi,’ or ‘the professor of philosophy at the University of Mississippi,’ or ‘the professor of philosophy at the University of Mississippi who studied Kierkegaard in Denmark,’ or ‘the man sitting on the platform with the dark glasses on.’ ... So when I say, ‘Louis made pasta and cake,’ you can understand what would make that sentence true or false.
“Now back to the religious sentence, ‘God made the heavens and the earth.’ How do we know, as we said when we rejected the anthropomorphic conception, that anything that could be pointed to or literally seen or literally observed or literally experienced or literally noted wouldn’t be God? It would be some kind of temporal something that you could detect; something limited. So God, unlike Louis [Pojman, the moderator of this debate], can’t be identified ostensively, extra-linguistically.
“Well, let us try to identify, try to establish what this God is that we speak of and concerning whom we try to use premises to prove His existence. Let us try to identify God by means of definite descriptions, that is, intra-linguistically. Suppose we say, ‘God is the maker of the heavens and the earth,’ or ‘The being transcendent to the world on whom all things depend and who depends on nothing himself,’ or ‘the being of infinite love to whom all things are owed,’ or ‘the infinite sustainer of the universe,’ or ‘the heavenly father of us all.’
“Now the difficulty with those definite descriptions, unlike the ones I used to identify Louis, is that with them, if you had trouble about knowing what was referred to by the word ‘God,’ you are going to be equally puzzled about ‘A being transcendent to the world.’ How would you identify that? ... How do you know what it would be like to meet such a being? What is it that you’re talking about [in] a being of infinite love? Or ‘the maker of the heavens and the earth,’ rather than ‘The maker of the pasta and the cake?’ How would you know what that refers to?
“What I’m trying to say is (and I don’t say these expressions are meaningless; or that they are linguistic irregularities) that they are what philosophers would call problematic conceptions. Indeed, they are so problematic and so obscure that it turns out that we don’t know what we are talking about when we use them. We have a kind of familiar pictorial sense that we know what we are talking about, but when we think very carefully about what these expressions mean, they are so problematic that we can’t use them to make true or false claims...
“We need to have some account of who or what we are talking about in speaking of God. Some minimal understanding is necessary even for faith to be possible. If you have no understanding of those terms at all, then you can’t take them on faith or take them on trust, because you don’t know what to take on faith or trust. Nor could you use such terms in a premise. For something to be a premise in an argument, its terms must not be so problematic that we do not understand them...
“In the case of God, however, anything that could be observed would not be the God of Christianity. It would be the anthropomorphic Zeus-like god that it would be superstitious to believe in. One of the responses to this is to say, ‘Well, God isn’t directly observable, but He is indirectly observable. You observe Him through His works and so forth and so on, through the design in the world and the like.’ ... But it makes no sense whatsoever to say something is indirectly observable, if it is not at least in theory or in principle directly observable as well...
“But there is no directly observing of God or directly noting His existence or personally encountering God. You can’t encounter a transcendent being. (Think here literally of what you are saying.) ... It just makes no sense to say you can indirectly observe something you have no idea of what it could even mean to directly observe something you have no idea of what it could even mean to directly observe.
“The definite description, ’The infinite individual who made the world,’ is as puzzling as is God. Suppose it is said, ’God’s reality is sui generis. God just has a distinct reality which is different from any other kind of reality. It is not like mathematical reality; it is not like physical reality and so forth.’ But such talk of being sui generis is, I believe, evasive. Suppose I ask you to believe in poy, an utterly nonsensical term, a made-up word of mine. But I can’t tell you what poy is. You can’t in that circumstance, no matter how much you want to, believe in poy or have faith in poy. To do that, you would have to have some understanding of what poy is. Now what I’m trying to argue is when you really think through to what God is supposed to be, you will see that you have no more understanding of God, except as a familiarity in the language, than you have an understanding of poy. There’s no way of conceptually identifying God that isn’t equally problematic.
“...Does God exist? If I am right in claiming that the concept of God in developed Judeo-Christian discourse is incoherent, then there can be no question of proving God’s existence or establishing that He exists. Proof requires premises and conclusions. But if the concept of God is incoherent, it cannot be used in a premise purporting to prove that God exists... If the concept of God in developed Judeo-Christianity is incoherent, as I have argued it is, then arguments of the ontological type, cosmological type, or design type cannot possibly get off the ground...
“...Suppose I say, ‘All married bachelors are irascible. Jones is a married bachelor. Jones is irascible.’ Now that’s a valid form, but it couldn’t be a sound argument. Sound arguments are valid arguments with true premises, but if a premise is incoherent, then there can be no question of its being true. There is no need, if my argument is sound, even to look at the proof. Nothing could prove there is a round square or a married bachelor or that procrastination drinks melancholy. The very idea of such a thing is incoherent.
“...We, in some not very clear way, know our way around when we speak of God anthropomorphically, as we of course learned to use God-talk as children. That gives us the illusion that we understand what we are talking about when we speak of God. We are told that God is our heavenly Father, not a father like our real father, but our heavenly Father. And what’s that? And eventually we move from anthropomorphic conceptions of God, which we do in some way understand, to nonanthropomorphic ones. When we engage in our devotions (if we do such things), the anthropomorphic ones reassert themselves and we feel confident that we understand what we are praying to, worshipping, and the like. But when we reflect, we realize that neither our religious nor our intellectual impulses will sustain the anthropomorphic conceptions. That way makes religion into superstition. So we are driven, when we reflect, to ever less anthropomorphic ones... We do so de-anthropomorphize that we no longer understand what we are saying. Yet an anthropomorphic conception of God of any sort gives us a materially tainted God which is subject to evident empirical disconfirmation in the more obvious anthropomorphic forms, made so pantheist that religion is naturalized, made into what in reality is a secular belief system disguised in colorful language...
“I simply said that it is so problematic, when you get a completely ethereal God who is supposed to be an infinite individual transcendent to the world, that we literally don’t know what we are talking about, though we have the illusion that we do.”
— Kai Nielsen, Does God Exist?, Prometheus Books, 1988 p48-56, 64-65
“...It is as difficult to define ‘chair’ as it is to define ‘knowledge,’ to give necessary and sufficient conditions for all of those things and only those things which are chairs. Nobody has been able to do that. We can identify chairs perfectly well, and...we do know what knowledge is even though we can’t define knowledge. But I’m saying that for an entity as mysterious as God, some people think they understand and believe in its reality and some people don’t. There are real doubts, as is not the case, with chairs or with knowledge. Moreover, it is impossible to identify God. If I can’t define a chair, at least I can point to one. But by contrast, to point out the God you can’t define is impossible.”
— Kai Nielsen, Does God Exist?, Prometheus Books, 1988 p66
More on the philosophical concept around the difficulty defining “chair.” Introduction to Philosophy by Philip A. Pecorino
“...I am going to argue that for somebody living in the twentieth century with a good philosophical and a good scientific education, who thinks carefully about the matter, that for such a person it is irrational to believe in God...
“...Take a belief in a Zeus-like, anthropomorphic God. Such a belief is just plainly false and superstitious. Such a being is an odd kind of being, and there is no evidence for His reality. Moreover, anything that could be observed, as an anthropomorphic God could or in any way directly be detected, would not be the God of Christianity or at least of advanced Judaeo-Christianity... But the anthropomorphic God, and anthropomorphic conception of God, is not incoherent; it’s just superstitious to believe in such a god. But at least since the Middle Ages, and even earlier than that, religious people have long since, at least when they are reflecting about the nature of God, ceased believing in an anthropomorphic Zeus-like God, while continuing to believe in the God of developed Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. And it is this belief, a much far more ethereal conception of God, that I maintain is incoherent...
“...What does the word ‘God’ refer to for Christians or for Jews?
“Consider the sentence, ‘God made the heavens and the earth,’ as distinct from ‘Louis made pasta and cake.’ Consider those two sentences. What is ‘God’ in this first sentence supposed to stand for, and how is the referent of that term to be identified? Compare this with ‘Louis.’ I can say ‘Somebody asked, “Who’s Louis?”’ and I’ll say, ‘That chap over there.’ That’s what philosophers would call an ostensive definition, an extra-linguistic definition. I point out the reference of the term ‘Louis’ by pointing to its referent. There is another way to give meaning to the term. I could say, ‘Well, the professor, one of the professors of philosophy at the University of Mississippi,’ or ‘the professor of philosophy at the University of Mississippi,’ or ‘the professor of philosophy at the University of Mississippi who studied Kierkegaard in Denmark,’ or ‘the man sitting on the platform with the dark glasses on.’ ... So when I say, ‘Louis made pasta and cake,’ you can understand what would make that sentence true or false.
“Now back to the religious sentence, ‘God made the heavens and the earth.’ How do we know, as we said when we rejected the anthropomorphic conception, that anything that could be pointed to or literally seen or literally observed or literally experienced or literally noted wouldn’t be God? It would be some kind of temporal something that you could detect; something limited. So God, unlike Louis [Pojman, the moderator of this debate], can’t be identified ostensively, extra-linguistically.
“Well, let us try to identify, try to establish what this God is that we speak of and concerning whom we try to use premises to prove His existence. Let us try to identify God by means of definite descriptions, that is, intra-linguistically. Suppose we say, ‘God is the maker of the heavens and the earth,’ or ‘The being transcendent to the world on whom all things depend and who depends on nothing himself,’ or ‘the being of infinite love to whom all things are owed,’ or ‘the infinite sustainer of the universe,’ or ‘the heavenly father of us all.’
“Now the difficulty with those definite descriptions, unlike the ones I used to identify Louis, is that with them, if you had trouble about knowing what was referred to by the word ‘God,’ you are going to be equally puzzled about ‘A being transcendent to the world.’ How would you identify that? ... How do you know what it would be like to meet such a being? What is it that you’re talking about [in] a being of infinite love? Or ‘the maker of the heavens and the earth,’ rather than ‘The maker of the pasta and the cake?’ How would you know what that refers to?
“What I’m trying to say is (and I don’t say these expressions are meaningless; or that they are linguistic irregularities) that they are what philosophers would call problematic conceptions. Indeed, they are so problematic and so obscure that it turns out that we don’t know what we are talking about when we use them. We have a kind of familiar pictorial sense that we know what we are talking about, but when we think very carefully about what these expressions mean, they are so problematic that we can’t use them to make true or false claims...
“We need to have some account of who or what we are talking about in speaking of God. Some minimal understanding is necessary even for faith to be possible. If you have no understanding of those terms at all, then you can’t take them on faith or take them on trust, because you don’t know what to take on faith or trust. Nor could you use such terms in a premise. For something to be a premise in an argument, its terms must not be so problematic that we do not understand them...
“In the case of God, however, anything that could be observed would not be the God of Christianity. It would be the anthropomorphic Zeus-like god that it would be superstitious to believe in. One of the responses to this is to say, ‘Well, God isn’t directly observable, but He is indirectly observable. You observe Him through His works and so forth and so on, through the design in the world and the like.’ ... But it makes no sense whatsoever to say something is indirectly observable, if it is not at least in theory or in principle directly observable as well...
“But there is no directly observing of God or directly noting His existence or personally encountering God. You can’t encounter a transcendent being. (Think here literally of what you are saying.) ... It just makes no sense to say you can indirectly observe something you have no idea of what it could even mean to directly observe something you have no idea of what it could even mean to directly observe.
“The definite description, ’The infinite individual who made the world,’ is as puzzling as is God. Suppose it is said, ’God’s reality is sui generis. God just has a distinct reality which is different from any other kind of reality. It is not like mathematical reality; it is not like physical reality and so forth.’ But such talk of being sui generis is, I believe, evasive. Suppose I ask you to believe in poy, an utterly nonsensical term, a made-up word of mine. But I can’t tell you what poy is. You can’t in that circumstance, no matter how much you want to, believe in poy or have faith in poy. To do that, you would have to have some understanding of what poy is. Now what I’m trying to argue is when you really think through to what God is supposed to be, you will see that you have no more understanding of God, except as a familiarity in the language, than you have an understanding of poy. There’s no way of conceptually identifying God that isn’t equally problematic.
“...Does God exist? If I am right in claiming that the concept of God in developed Judeo-Christian discourse is incoherent, then there can be no question of proving God’s existence or establishing that He exists. Proof requires premises and conclusions. But if the concept of God is incoherent, it cannot be used in a premise purporting to prove that God exists... If the concept of God in developed Judeo-Christianity is incoherent, as I have argued it is, then arguments of the ontological type, cosmological type, or design type cannot possibly get off the ground...
“...Suppose I say, ‘All married bachelors are irascible. Jones is a married bachelor. Jones is irascible.’ Now that’s a valid form, but it couldn’t be a sound argument. Sound arguments are valid arguments with true premises, but if a premise is incoherent, then there can be no question of its being true. There is no need, if my argument is sound, even to look at the proof. Nothing could prove there is a round square or a married bachelor or that procrastination drinks melancholy. The very idea of such a thing is incoherent.
“...We, in some not very clear way, know our way around when we speak of God anthropomorphically, as we of course learned to use God-talk as children. That gives us the illusion that we understand what we are talking about when we speak of God. We are told that God is our heavenly Father, not a father like our real father, but our heavenly Father. And what’s that? And eventually we move from anthropomorphic conceptions of God, which we do in some way understand, to nonanthropomorphic ones. When we engage in our devotions (if we do such things), the anthropomorphic ones reassert themselves and we feel confident that we understand what we are praying to, worshipping, and the like. But when we reflect, we realize that neither our religious nor our intellectual impulses will sustain the anthropomorphic conceptions. That way makes religion into superstition. So we are driven, when we reflect, to ever less anthropomorphic ones... We do so de-anthropomorphize that we no longer understand what we are saying. Yet an anthropomorphic conception of God of any sort gives us a materially tainted God which is subject to evident empirical disconfirmation in the more obvious anthropomorphic forms, made so pantheist that religion is naturalized, made into what in reality is a secular belief system disguised in colorful language...
“I simply said that it is so problematic, when you get a completely ethereal God who is supposed to be an infinite individual transcendent to the world, that we literally don’t know what we are talking about, though we have the illusion that we do.”
— Kai Nielsen, Does God Exist?, Prometheus Books, 1988 p48-56, 64-65
“...It is as difficult to define ‘chair’ as it is to define ‘knowledge,’ to give necessary and sufficient conditions for all of those things and only those things which are chairs. Nobody has been able to do that. We can identify chairs perfectly well, and...we do know what knowledge is even though we can’t define knowledge. But I’m saying that for an entity as mysterious as God, some people think they understand and believe in its reality and some people don’t. There are real doubts, as is not the case, with chairs or with knowledge. Moreover, it is impossible to identify God. If I can’t define a chair, at least I can point to one. But by contrast, to point out the God you can’t define is impossible.”
— Kai Nielsen, Does God Exist?, Prometheus Books, 1988 p66
More on the philosophical concept around the difficulty defining “chair.” Introduction to Philosophy by Philip A. Pecorino
Sir Alfred Jules "Freddie" Ayer (A.J. Ayer), English philosopher & humanist, 1910-1989
“...For we are often told that the nature of God is a mystery which transcends the human understanding. But to say that something transcends the human understanding is to say that it is unintelligible. And what is unintelligible cannot significantly be described. Again, we are told that God is not an object of reason but an object of faith. This may be nothing more than an admission that the existence of God must be taken on trust, since it cannot be proved. But it may also be an assertion that God is the object of a purely mystical intuition, and cannot therefore be defined in terms which are intelligible to the reason. And I think there are many theists who would assert this. But if one allows that it is impossible to define God in intelligible terms, then one is allowing that it is impossible for a sentence both to be significant and to be about God. If a mystic admits that the object of his vision is something which cannot be described, then he must also admit that he is bound to talk nonsense when he describes it.”
— A.J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, Penguin Books, 1936 p155-156
“...For we are often told that the nature of God is a mystery which transcends the human understanding. But to say that something transcends the human understanding is to say that it is unintelligible. And what is unintelligible cannot significantly be described. Again, we are told that God is not an object of reason but an object of faith. This may be nothing more than an admission that the existence of God must be taken on trust, since it cannot be proved. But it may also be an assertion that God is the object of a purely mystical intuition, and cannot therefore be defined in terms which are intelligible to the reason. And I think there are many theists who would assert this. But if one allows that it is impossible to define God in intelligible terms, then one is allowing that it is impossible for a sentence both to be significant and to be about God. If a mystic admits that the object of his vision is something which cannot be described, then he must also admit that he is bound to talk nonsense when he describes it.”
— A.J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, Penguin Books, 1936 p155-156
8. Why just one god?
Summary:
If we’re to settle on a Creator, why are we limited to the Western monotheistic God?
Richard Dawkins, PhD, British evolutionary biologist, 1941-
“Life is too short to bother with the distinction between one figment of the imagination and many.”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p56
“It is not clear why the change from polytheism to monotheism should be assumed to be a self-evidently progressive improvement. But it widely is – an assumption that provoked Ibn Warraq (author of Why I Am Not a Muslim) wittily to conjecture that monotheism is in its turn doomed to subtract one more god and become atheism...”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p52
“Life is too short to bother with the distinction between one figment of the imagination and many.”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p56
“It is not clear why the change from polytheism to monotheism should be assumed to be a self-evidently progressive improvement. But it widely is – an assumption that provoked Ibn Warraq (author of Why I Am Not a Muslim) wittily to conjecture that monotheism is in its turn doomed to subtract one more god and become atheism...”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p52
9. Argument from Agnosticism
Summary:
The answer may be unknowable, or perhaps it is knowable but not through the reasoning and methods that mankind is presently using or capable of.
Paul Draper, American professor of philosophy and religious studies
“According to one relatively modest form of agnosticism, neither versatile theism nor its denial, global atheism, is known to be true. Robin Le Poidevin (2010: 76) argues for this position as follows:
“(1) There is no firm basis upon which to judge that theism or atheism is intrinsically more probable than the other.
“(2) There is no firm basis upon which to judge that the total evidence favors theism or atheism over the other.
“It follows from (1) and (2) that“(3) There is no firm basis upon which to judge that theism or atheism is more probable than the other.
“It follows from (3) that“(4) Agnosticism is true: neither theism nor atheism is known to be true.“Le Poidevin takes ‘theism’ in its broadest sense to refer to the proposition that there exists a being that is the ultimate and intentional cause of the universe’s existence and the ultimate source of love and moral knowledge (2010: 52)...”
— Paul Draper, “Atheism and Agnosticism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Mar 22, 2022
“According to one relatively modest form of agnosticism, neither versatile theism nor its denial, global atheism, is known to be true. Robin Le Poidevin (2010: 76) argues for this position as follows:
“(1) There is no firm basis upon which to judge that theism or atheism is intrinsically more probable than the other.
“(2) There is no firm basis upon which to judge that the total evidence favors theism or atheism over the other.
“It follows from (1) and (2) that“(3) There is no firm basis upon which to judge that theism or atheism is more probable than the other.
“It follows from (3) that“(4) Agnosticism is true: neither theism nor atheism is known to be true.“Le Poidevin takes ‘theism’ in its broadest sense to refer to the proposition that there exists a being that is the ultimate and intentional cause of the universe’s existence and the ultimate source of love and moral knowledge (2010: 52)...”
— Paul Draper, “Atheism and Agnosticism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Mar 22, 2022
Robin Le Poidevin, British professor of metaphysics, 1962-
“As far as the onus of proof is concerned, the theist and atheist are in exactly the same position: neither has a greater duty to justify their position than the other. there should be no automatic presumption of atheism, but rather an initial presumption of agnosticism...”
— Robin Le Poidevin, Agnosticism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2020 p117
“What this all-too-brief survey of five pieces of evidence [for God] is intended to show is just how ambiguous that evidence is. Whenever we find a reason for thinking that the evidence in question shifts the probabilities one way, towards theism or towards atheism, there is a further consideration that pulls in the opposite direction. The case for agnosticism, then, is this: there is no firm basis on which we can judge atheism to have a greater intrinsic probability than theism. They begin the race on exactly the same line, neither having a head start. And the evidence that we subsequently examine is sufficiently ambiguous that we cannot at any later point decide that one hypothesis has a greater overall probability than the other.”
— Robin Le Poidevin, Agnosticism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2020 p76
“Thought of it in these terms, does theism have a much lower initial probability than atheism? It isn’t at all clear that it does. Of course, once we start filling in the details, going beyond the basic role that God is supposed to play and describing how exactly he plays those roles, then the specificity of the hypothesis goes up, and the initial probability consequently goes down. And the same is true of atheism. Once we go beyond a denial that there is a being that plays the roles in question, and start to fill in the alternative explanations, then the initial probability goes down.
“It looks, then, as if theism and atheism start on pretty much the same footing. There should be no presumption of atheism, and indeed no presumption of theism either. The initial position should be an agnostic one, which means that theists and atheists share the burden of proof. Agnosticism is not redundant.
“All this is not at all to deny that agnosticism is a considered position must rest on more than the relatively (or, as [Richard] Dawkins calls it, ‘ignominiously’) weak point that we cannot prove that God does or does not exist. The fact that we cannot prove that there are trees in a way that will satisfy the philosophical sceptic does not make it at all irrational to continue to believe in trees, and the fact that we cannot prove that Russell’s teapot does not exist does not make it at all irrational to continue to believe that there is no such teapot. For most of our beliefs, we can give nothing more than reasonable grounds, and sometimes not even that. So the agnostic will have to show either that we can’t even find reasonable grounds that would shift the probabilities one way or the other – towards theism or towards atheism – or that taken together the reasons we give for each side cancel each other out. That would leave us with agnosticism not simply as a starting point, but as a finishing point too.”
— Robin Le Poidevin, Agnosticism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2020 p53
“...If agnosticism just stands for a ‘don’t know’ position, then it is hardly in the middle between theism and atheism. A middle position would be an answer to the same question that theists and atheists are answering. It is the question ‘Does God exist?’ The theist says ‘yes’ and the atheist ‘no.’ But ‘don’t know’ is not an answer to this question. It is certainly a response to it, a response that is acceptable in a way in which ‘the wardrobe’ is not. But it is not an answer. Rather, it is an admission that one doesn’t have an answer... But even here, the agnostics are not to be found in the middle. They will be on the opposite side from those theists and atheists who think that one can establish whether or not God exists. And not all atheists and theists do affirm this. It is possible to be an agnostic atheist, one who does not believe in God, and does not permit the idea to have any practical impact on their life, while acknowledging that they do not have substantial grounds for disbelief. And there most certainly are agnostic theists...
“Suppose, however, that we were to represent attitudes towards God on a sliding scale, ranging from absolute confidence that he exists to absolute confidence that he doesn’t. Most of us will be somewhere between those extremes. And it seems reasonable to label the area around the middle of this scale ‘agnosticism,’ allowing it to shade gradually (with no determinate cut-off points) into theism in one direction and atheism in the other. But the problem with this kind of sliding scale is that it is one-dimensional. It ignores important distinctions that help to bring out some of the subtleties of debate over agnosticism...”
— Robin Le Poidevin, Agnosticism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2020 p8-9
“The first distinction we will need to make is between two strengths of agnosticism. ‘Weak agnosticism’ is the position most people are familiar with, and is nothing more than a confession that one does not know whether God exists. This is the position we can locate roughly in the middle of the sliding scale just mentioned. Weak agnosticism by itself is just a personal matter: it makes no comment on others’ beliefs.
“Strong agnosticism is more interesting. It says that we cannot know whether or not God exists. There is something about the subject matter that makes knowledge impossible in this case. That, of course, has to be based on some criterion by which we can judge what counts as knowledge. The more stringent the criterion, the more secure, but also the less interesting, the resulting agnosticism. The most interesting, and boldest, agnosticism says that we cannot even have justified beliefs in this area.”
— Robin Le Poidevin, Agnosticism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2020 p9-10
“Agnosticism is always agnosticism about something. It may be about God, or it may be about alien life, or the possibility of a Grand Unified Theory of physics, or the wisdom of taking vitamin pills, and so on. And even when it has to do with God, it needn’t specifically be to do with his existence. Those who are prepared to commit to God’s existence may be agnostic about certain or even all of God’s properties. It is an entirely orthodox view in theistic religions that human language is inadequate to capture God. St. Anselm (1033-1109), an Italian philosopher who became Archbishop of Canterbury, famously defined God as ‘that than which no greater can be conceived.’...
“Most agnosticism, then, is local: it is applied to a particular subject matter. An agnostic about aliens need not be agnostic about God. And within any given subject matter, one might be agnostic only about certain aspects... A Christian believer may still be agnostic about how God answers prayers, why he permits evil, how he became incarnate in Christ – or even whether he did...”
— Robin Le Poidevin, Agnosticism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2020 p10-11, 13
“Agnosticism is part of the wider phenomenon of uncertainty, and uncertainty is positive in so far as it promotes creativity, theoretical progress, and social tolerance. Agnosticism thus promotes religious pluralism: peaceful co-existence between different religious faiths, and between religious and humanist groups. What it does not promote or imply is a relativistic view of truth: ‘Islam is true-for-me but false-for-you,’ and so on.”
— Robin Le Poidevin, Agnosticism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2020 p118
“Since the evidence is ambiguous, commitment either to theism or atheism is, at least in part, an emotional response to the world, not a purely rational one. But this does not make either theism or atheism an irrational response. Theists regard the religious attitude as natural, in-built, and one which is valuable and to be encouraged and developed. Atheists, while often recognizing the response as natural, see it as apt to delude us, and as something to be exorcised. The difference is more temperamental than either side typically acknowledges.”
— Robin Le Poidevin, Agnosticism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2020 p117
“As far as the onus of proof is concerned, the theist and atheist are in exactly the same position: neither has a greater duty to justify their position than the other. there should be no automatic presumption of atheism, but rather an initial presumption of agnosticism...”
— Robin Le Poidevin, Agnosticism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2020 p117
“What this all-too-brief survey of five pieces of evidence [for God] is intended to show is just how ambiguous that evidence is. Whenever we find a reason for thinking that the evidence in question shifts the probabilities one way, towards theism or towards atheism, there is a further consideration that pulls in the opposite direction. The case for agnosticism, then, is this: there is no firm basis on which we can judge atheism to have a greater intrinsic probability than theism. They begin the race on exactly the same line, neither having a head start. And the evidence that we subsequently examine is sufficiently ambiguous that we cannot at any later point decide that one hypothesis has a greater overall probability than the other.”
— Robin Le Poidevin, Agnosticism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2020 p76
“Thought of it in these terms, does theism have a much lower initial probability than atheism? It isn’t at all clear that it does. Of course, once we start filling in the details, going beyond the basic role that God is supposed to play and describing how exactly he plays those roles, then the specificity of the hypothesis goes up, and the initial probability consequently goes down. And the same is true of atheism. Once we go beyond a denial that there is a being that plays the roles in question, and start to fill in the alternative explanations, then the initial probability goes down.
“It looks, then, as if theism and atheism start on pretty much the same footing. There should be no presumption of atheism, and indeed no presumption of theism either. The initial position should be an agnostic one, which means that theists and atheists share the burden of proof. Agnosticism is not redundant.
“All this is not at all to deny that agnosticism is a considered position must rest on more than the relatively (or, as [Richard] Dawkins calls it, ‘ignominiously’) weak point that we cannot prove that God does or does not exist. The fact that we cannot prove that there are trees in a way that will satisfy the philosophical sceptic does not make it at all irrational to continue to believe in trees, and the fact that we cannot prove that Russell’s teapot does not exist does not make it at all irrational to continue to believe that there is no such teapot. For most of our beliefs, we can give nothing more than reasonable grounds, and sometimes not even that. So the agnostic will have to show either that we can’t even find reasonable grounds that would shift the probabilities one way or the other – towards theism or towards atheism – or that taken together the reasons we give for each side cancel each other out. That would leave us with agnosticism not simply as a starting point, but as a finishing point too.”
— Robin Le Poidevin, Agnosticism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2020 p53
“...If agnosticism just stands for a ‘don’t know’ position, then it is hardly in the middle between theism and atheism. A middle position would be an answer to the same question that theists and atheists are answering. It is the question ‘Does God exist?’ The theist says ‘yes’ and the atheist ‘no.’ But ‘don’t know’ is not an answer to this question. It is certainly a response to it, a response that is acceptable in a way in which ‘the wardrobe’ is not. But it is not an answer. Rather, it is an admission that one doesn’t have an answer... But even here, the agnostics are not to be found in the middle. They will be on the opposite side from those theists and atheists who think that one can establish whether or not God exists. And not all atheists and theists do affirm this. It is possible to be an agnostic atheist, one who does not believe in God, and does not permit the idea to have any practical impact on their life, while acknowledging that they do not have substantial grounds for disbelief. And there most certainly are agnostic theists...
“Suppose, however, that we were to represent attitudes towards God on a sliding scale, ranging from absolute confidence that he exists to absolute confidence that he doesn’t. Most of us will be somewhere between those extremes. And it seems reasonable to label the area around the middle of this scale ‘agnosticism,’ allowing it to shade gradually (with no determinate cut-off points) into theism in one direction and atheism in the other. But the problem with this kind of sliding scale is that it is one-dimensional. It ignores important distinctions that help to bring out some of the subtleties of debate over agnosticism...”
— Robin Le Poidevin, Agnosticism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2020 p8-9
“The first distinction we will need to make is between two strengths of agnosticism. ‘Weak agnosticism’ is the position most people are familiar with, and is nothing more than a confession that one does not know whether God exists. This is the position we can locate roughly in the middle of the sliding scale just mentioned. Weak agnosticism by itself is just a personal matter: it makes no comment on others’ beliefs.
“Strong agnosticism is more interesting. It says that we cannot know whether or not God exists. There is something about the subject matter that makes knowledge impossible in this case. That, of course, has to be based on some criterion by which we can judge what counts as knowledge. The more stringent the criterion, the more secure, but also the less interesting, the resulting agnosticism. The most interesting, and boldest, agnosticism says that we cannot even have justified beliefs in this area.”
— Robin Le Poidevin, Agnosticism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2020 p9-10
“Agnosticism is always agnosticism about something. It may be about God, or it may be about alien life, or the possibility of a Grand Unified Theory of physics, or the wisdom of taking vitamin pills, and so on. And even when it has to do with God, it needn’t specifically be to do with his existence. Those who are prepared to commit to God’s existence may be agnostic about certain or even all of God’s properties. It is an entirely orthodox view in theistic religions that human language is inadequate to capture God. St. Anselm (1033-1109), an Italian philosopher who became Archbishop of Canterbury, famously defined God as ‘that than which no greater can be conceived.’...
“Most agnosticism, then, is local: it is applied to a particular subject matter. An agnostic about aliens need not be agnostic about God. And within any given subject matter, one might be agnostic only about certain aspects... A Christian believer may still be agnostic about how God answers prayers, why he permits evil, how he became incarnate in Christ – or even whether he did...”
— Robin Le Poidevin, Agnosticism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2020 p10-11, 13
“Agnosticism is part of the wider phenomenon of uncertainty, and uncertainty is positive in so far as it promotes creativity, theoretical progress, and social tolerance. Agnosticism thus promotes religious pluralism: peaceful co-existence between different religious faiths, and between religious and humanist groups. What it does not promote or imply is a relativistic view of truth: ‘Islam is true-for-me but false-for-you,’ and so on.”
— Robin Le Poidevin, Agnosticism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2020 p118
“Since the evidence is ambiguous, commitment either to theism or atheism is, at least in part, an emotional response to the world, not a purely rational one. But this does not make either theism or atheism an irrational response. Theists regard the religious attitude as natural, in-built, and one which is valuable and to be encouraged and developed. Atheists, while often recognizing the response as natural, see it as apt to delude us, and as something to be exorcised. The difference is more temperamental than either side typically acknowledges.”
— Robin Le Poidevin, Agnosticism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2020 p117
Paul Davies, PhD, English physicist & professor, 1946-
“...Might it not be the case that the reason for existence has no explanation in the usual sense? This does not mean that the universe is absurd or meaningless, only that an understanding of its existence and properties lies outside the usual categories of rational human thought. We have seen how application of human reasoning in its most refined and formalized sense – to mathematics – is nevertheless full of paradox and uncertainty. Gödel’s theorem warns us that the axiomatic method of making logical deductions from given assumptions cannot in general provide a system which is both provably complete and consistent. There will always be truth that lies beyond, that cannot be reached from a finite collection of axioms. The search for a closed logical scheme that provides a complete and self-consistent explanation for everything is doomed to failure. Like Chaitin’s cabalistic number, such a thing may exist ‘out there’ abstractly – indeed, its existence could be known to us, and we might get to know bits of it – but we cannot know its whole form on the basis of rational thought.
“It seems to me that, as long as we insist on identifying ‘understanding’ with ‘rational explanation’ of the sort familiar in science, we will inevitably end up with turtle trouble: either an infinite regress, or a mysterious self-explaining superturtle, or an unexplained ring of turtles [of the “turtles all the way down” philosophy]. There will always be mystery at the end of the universe. It may be, however, that there are other forms of understanding which will satisfy the inquiring mind. Can we make sense of the universe without turtle trouble? Is there a route to knowledge – even ‘ultimate knowledge’ – that lies outside the road of rational scientific inquiry and logical reasoning? Many people claim there is. It is called mysticism.”
— Paul Davies, The Mind of God, Touchstone, 1992 p225-226
“...Might it not be the case that the reason for existence has no explanation in the usual sense? This does not mean that the universe is absurd or meaningless, only that an understanding of its existence and properties lies outside the usual categories of rational human thought. We have seen how application of human reasoning in its most refined and formalized sense – to mathematics – is nevertheless full of paradox and uncertainty. Gödel’s theorem warns us that the axiomatic method of making logical deductions from given assumptions cannot in general provide a system which is both provably complete and consistent. There will always be truth that lies beyond, that cannot be reached from a finite collection of axioms. The search for a closed logical scheme that provides a complete and self-consistent explanation for everything is doomed to failure. Like Chaitin’s cabalistic number, such a thing may exist ‘out there’ abstractly – indeed, its existence could be known to us, and we might get to know bits of it – but we cannot know its whole form on the basis of rational thought.
“It seems to me that, as long as we insist on identifying ‘understanding’ with ‘rational explanation’ of the sort familiar in science, we will inevitably end up with turtle trouble: either an infinite regress, or a mysterious self-explaining superturtle, or an unexplained ring of turtles [of the “turtles all the way down” philosophy]. There will always be mystery at the end of the universe. It may be, however, that there are other forms of understanding which will satisfy the inquiring mind. Can we make sense of the universe without turtle trouble? Is there a route to knowledge – even ‘ultimate knowledge’ – that lies outside the road of rational scientific inquiry and logical reasoning? Many people claim there is. It is called mysticism.”
— Paul Davies, The Mind of God, Touchstone, 1992 p225-226