More Reasons Why I Believe in God…

Continued from last entry…

5. The Rich Philosophical Heritage of Theism.
Until the last 200 years or so, all of human history has acknowledged some sort of deity or deities.  In fact, it was so obvious to all of them, it didn’t even need to be proved.  While that fact has been attributed by many modern atheists to "ignorance" of our forebearers, I don’t believe that to be the case at all.  I think it is quite the opposite, in fact:  I believe it is human hubris which allows for the temerity to suggest otherwise.  I do not think it consistent to claim a rich philosophical heritage from our philosophical forebearers in one breath and then in the next condemn as foolishness one of the foundational tenets of their philosophy.  In fact, modern philosophy has returned to theism and it is once again being used in high level philosophy with some aplumb by highly respected philosophers in their own right.  The secular humanist movement, the postmodernist movement and other modern movements are giving up ground to an old idea reforged:  the eternal curiousity, theism.  Even purportedly "secular" philosophers like Aristotle couldn’t escape the thought of some sort of Prime Mover, a First Cause.  (Calling Aristotle secular is ridiculous, there was no such thing in that day, and wasn’t up until the Enlightenment.)  Admittedly, Aristotle’s Prime Mover was a poorly thought out inconsistency, but even he was haunted by the thought that there had to be something else out there.  The first real affront to the concept of the "other" deity/ies was set in motion by Descartes, and was formally exploited by John Locke, and the rest of the empiricists.  Until that point, roughly 200 years ago, that there was something out there besides humans who could sense and create was obvious.  It was only when the definition of proof was made purely sensory (what we can touch, taste, feel, see, hear, etc) that God became passe.  My problem with Locke’s empiricism is well known, I’ll not go into this more right now, but even Locke in his own, bet-hedging kind of way acknowledged that it was possible that there was a God, though in the next breath he stated matter-of-factly that it was never justified to believe in such a God, even if he did exist.

6.  The Ontological Argument
Many are unconvinced in the power of the ontological argument, but it has always held power to my way of thinking.  Even many of my Christian brothers and sisters think this is a sham, so I’ll not spend a lot of time on it, but I think Anselm’s formulation of it is by far the best.  If we have a concept of a being with a maximal level of all the qualities is it is better to have than to lack, there must be some object of that conception, or there would be no human way to perceive it or to acquire the concept.  The argument against the ontological argument is that we have conceptions of things like unicorns without their being actual instantiations of unicorns, but there is no such thing.  I argue this is an equivocation…unicorns do exist in the comics and cartoons–and that the characteristics of God ("The being of whom nothing greater can be conceived") would have no point of reference unless such a being existed.  In other words, God has to exist because the concepts which we attribute to him would not exist in the way we know them unless there was some being in which the qualities existed.  At any rate, I find this convincing.  Since the question was "Why do you believe in God," it is appropriate for me to include it here.

7.  The Existence of Objective Truth
Humans are powerless to create objective truth.  We are experts at creating subjective truth.  If objective truth exists, it must come from a source outside humanity, because humanity would have no concept of objectivity apart from one outside us to ground ourselves as a point of reference.  Yet almost all humans will acknowledge at least SOME objective truth.  (Again, as an aside, there is nothing more fun than going to someone who claims a subjective truth, and then violating an objectively true thing like the wrongness of cheating, and watching them scream….what can the possibly appeal to besides objective truth?)  Given that objective truth must come from a source outside humans to be objective, and people do acknowledge objective truth, there must be a truth giver.  This truth giver is a logical necessity for anyone who will posit the existence of objective truth.  Anyone who claims to be an atheist and asserts there is real objective truth is borrowing capital from theism.

8.  The Existence of Objective Ethics
This is closely related to point 7.  There are cultural mores and folkways that are shockingly consistent in all human cultures…murder, incest, etc.  While counterexamples exist, the fact that so many agree on so much is a testimony to a common ethical grounding point.  Again, any time objective ethics are posited, there must be a giver of the objective ethic, and that means a being outside humanity.   Any use of a quantification word, in addition, posits a real state of affairs to compare something against.  Any use of a word like "good," "better," or "best," automatically implies a standard.  It is impossible logically to formulate a standard of good and bad, right and wrong, without have some absolute on one side or the other to compare it against.  That standard, in the most simple explanation, is the existence of God.

More coming soon….