33. The Argument from the Unreasonableness of Reason
Our belief in reason cannot be justified by reason, since that would be circular.
Our belief in reason must be accepted on faith (from 1).
Every time we exercise reason, we are exercising faith (from 2).
Faith provides good rational grounds for beliefs (since it is, in the final analysis, necessary even for the belief in reason-from 3).
We are justified in using faith for any belief that is so important to our lives that not believing it would render us incoherent (from 4).
We cannot avoid faith in God if we are to live coherent moral and purposeful lives.
We are justified in believing that God exists (from 5 and 6).
God exists.
Reason is a faculty of thinking, the very faculty of giving grounds for our beliefs. To justify reason would be to try to give grounds for the belief: “We ought to accept the conclusions of sound arguments.” Let’s say we produce a sound argument for the conclusion that “we ought to accept the conclusions of sound arguments.” How could we legitimately accept the conclusion of that sound argument without independently knowing the conclusion? Any attempt to justify the very propositions that we must use in order to justify propositions is going to land us in circularity.
FLAW 1: This argument tries to generalize the inability of reason to justify itself to an abdication of reason when it comes to justifying God’s existence. But the inability of reason to justify reason is a unique case in epistemology, not an illustration of a flaw of reason that can be generalized to some other kind of belief-and certainly not a belief in the existence of some entity with specific properties such as creating the world or defining morality.
Indeed, one could argue that the attempt to justify reason with reason is not circular, but, rather, unnecessary. One already is, and always will be, committed to reason by the very process one is already engaged in- namely, reasoning. Reason is non-negotiable; all sides concede it. It needs no justification, because it is justification. A belief in God is not like that at all.
FLAW 2: If one really took the unreasonability of reason as a license to believe things on faith, then which things should one believe in? If it is a license to believe in a single God who gave his son for our sins, why isn’t it just as much a license to believe in Zeus and all the other Greek gods, or the three major gods of Hinduism, or the Angel Moroni? For that matter, why not Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy? If one says that there are good reasons to accept some entities on faith, while rejecting others, then one is saying that it is ultimately reason, not faith, that must be invoked to justify a belief.
FLAW 3: Premise 6, which claims that a belief in God is necessary in order to have a purpose in one’s life, or to be moral, has already been challenged in the discussions of The Argument from Moral Truth (#16, above) and The Argument from Personal Purpose (#19, above).
34. The Argument from Sublimity
There are experiences that are windows into the wholeness of existence-its grandeur, beauty, symmetry, harmony, unity, even its goodness.
We glimpse a benign transcendence in these moments.
Only God could provide us with a glimpse of benign transcendence.
God exists.
FLAW: An experience of sublimity is an aesthetic experience. Aesthetic experience can indeed be intense and blissful, absorbing our attention so completely, while exciting our pleasure, as to seem to lift us right out of our surroundings. Aesthetic experiences vary in their strength, and when they are overwhelming, we grope for terms like “transcendence” to describe the overwhelmingness. Yet, for all that, aesthetic experiences are still responses of the brain, as we see from the fact that ingesting recreational drugs can bring on even more intense experiences of transcendence. And the particular triggers for natural aesthetic experiences are readily explicable from the evolutionary pressures that have shaped the perceptual systems of human beings. An eye for sweeping vistas, dramatic skies, bodies of water, large animals, flowering and fruiting plants, and strong geometric patterns with repetition and symmetry was necessary to orient attention to aspects of the environment that were matters of life and death to the species as it evolved in its natural environment. The identification of a blissfully aesthetic experience with a glimpse into benign transcendence is an example of the Projection Fallacy, dramatic demonstrations of our spreading ourselves onto the world. This is most obvious when the experience gets fleshed out into the religious terms that come most naturally to the particular believer, such as a frozen waterfall being seen by a Christian as evidence for the Christian Trinity.
35. The Argument from the Intelligibility of the Universe (Spinoza’s God)
All facts must have explanations.
The fact that there is a universe at all-and that it is this universe, with just these laws of nature-has an explanation (from 1).
There must, in principle, be a Theory of Everything that explains why just this universe, with these laws of nature, exists. (From 2. Note that this should not be interpreted as requiring that we have the capacity to come up with a Theory of Everything; it may elude the cognitive abilities we have.)
If the Theory of Everything explains everything, it explains why it is the Theory of Everything.
The only way that the Theory of Everything could explain why it is the Theory of Everything is if it is itself necessarily true (i.e., true in all possible worlds).
The Theory of Everything is necessarily true (from 4 and 5).
The universe, understood in terms of the Theory of Everything, exists necessarily and explains itself (from 6).
That which exists necessarily and explains itself is God (a definition of “God”).
The universe is God (from 7 and 8).
God exists.
Whenever Einstein was asked whether he believed in God, he responded that he believed in “Spinoza’s God.” This argument presents Spinoza’s God. It is one of the most elegant and subtle arguments for God’s existence, demonstrating where one ends up if one rigorously eschews the Fallacy of Invoking One Mystery to Explain Another: one ends up with the universe and nothing but the universe, which itself provides all the answers to all the questions one can pose about it. A major problem with the argument, however, in addition to the flaws discussed below, is that it is not at all clear that it is God whose existence is being proved. Spinoza’s conclusion is that the universe that itself provides all the answers about itself simply is God. Perhaps the conclusion should, rather, be that the universe is different from what it appears to be-no matter how arbitrary and chaotic it may appear, it is in fact perfectly lawful and necessary, and therefore worthy of our awe. But is its awe-inspiring lawfulness reason enough to regard it as God? Spinoza’s God is sharply at variance with all other divine conceptions.
The argument has only one substantive premise, its first one, which, though unprovable, is not unreasonable; it is, in fact, the claim that the universe itself is thoroughly reasonable. Though this first premise can’t be proved, it is the guiding faith of many physicists (including Einstein). It is the claim that everything must have an explanation; even the laws of nature, in terms of which processes are explained, must have an explanation. In other words, there has to be an explanation for why it is these laws of nature rather than some other, which is another way of asking for why it is this world rather than some other.