Topics Religion

Question Are there any professional philosophers that find the traditional arguments for God convincing? In my intro class, we basically blitzed all of them (like Aquinas' cosmological one, and the Kalaam one, etc.), and the class consensus was that none of these arguments worked out to guarantee a personal creator god like the one many Christians, Muslims, and Jews believe in or really any deity/supernatural force. But I'm very interested to hear what the pros think about the matter!

Accepted:
October 18, 2012

Comments

As a sociological matter, I'd guess that most, though certainly not all philosophers don't find any of the usual arguments convincing. (There are exceptions, not least among panelists here at askphilosophers.org) That said, a couple of caveats are in order.

The first is that in most intro classes, what one gets are bare-bones versions of the arguments. This is particularly clear for the ontological argument, where the most powerful versions are sufficiently complex that most intro courses avoid them, but in my experience it's true to some extent for all of the arguments . For example: there's a good deal more than can be said on behalf of versions of the cosmological argument than one tends to find in the intro to philosophy presentations.

The second point is that even though arguments are important, it would be a mistake to think that most serious believers are believers because they find some argument or arguments convincing. Their reasons are broader and more diffuse than that. I'd suggest that there's nothing peculiar about religious claims in this respect. Philosophers who believe that there are objective moral values, for instance, can offer relevant argumentative considerations, but I suspect that very few believers in the objectivity of morality hold their view simply on the basis of arguments intended to demonstrate it. They might be able to sum up various relevant considerations in the form of an argument, but that argument would, so I'm betting, not really do justice to all that lies behind their views.

In fact, I suspect that this holds quite widely when it comes to matters of broad philosophical outlook. Arguments are by no means irrelevant, but very few philosophical positions are backed by arguments that command belief, and most are subject to counter-arguments worth taking seriously. Our views on such things tend to be matters of what seems to us to make the most sense of things all told, and argument isn't the only thing that bears on that.

One more thought: you talk about the views that "many Christians, Muslims and Jews" hold. It's worth keeping in mind that just as most of us aren't good at thinking about physics or economics or psychology or... most people aren't very sophisticated about their religious views. In fact, I'd venture to say that the average believer might be quite shocked to discover how some of the theologians in their traditions think about these questions.

I don't think there are many contemporary philosophers who find that traditional completely unrefined, unnuanced versions of the arguments for God's existence 'guarantee the existence of a personal creator God.' But, this should not be too discouraging since there are few historical, non-revised, philosophical arguments that are judged to be so thoroughly convincing that on their own they 'guarantee' their conclusions. Instead, contemporary philosophers usually judge arguments to be plausible or implausible; to provide a lot, some, little, or no evidence for their conclusions.

I certainly hope your professor didn't rip the traditional arguments for God's existence out of their historic context and act as if they represented the pinnacle of contemporary religious thought. Take Aquinas's five arguments for example: unless your teacher took time to explain Aristotle's four types of causes and how Aquinas's arguments presuppose something like Aristotelian physics (the height of the science of his day), I would suggest you 'blitzed' through the arguments far too quickly. These were great arguments in historic context. And with some revisions for the discoveries in the 700+ years since Aquinas (such as those of Newton and Einstein) they might be plausible.

Of course, there are revised versions of each of the arguments that are still offered to this day. Probably the most interesting contemporary argument is The Existence of God written by Oxford Philosopher of Science Richard Swineburne. Other interesting contemporary arguments include Alvin Plantinga's version of the ontological argument (which seems to prove that either God exists or that God must not be a real possibility at all). You can find it in God, Freedom, and Evil. Yale professor John Hare investigates a contemporary version of the moral argument in Why Bother Being Good? Robert Adams (of Yale and Oxford) also touches on the moral argument in Finite and Infinite Goods. Alexander Pruss has a Cambridge Press book defending The Principle of Sufficient Reason undergirding many contemporary versions of the cosmological argument. Jeff Jordan offers a defense of a 'Pascal's Wager' type argument in an Oxford University Press book on Pascal's Wager: Pragmatic Arguments and Belief in God. Of course, those are just a few examples off the top of my head. So, there are versions of the traditional arguments that are still endorsed by a significant minority of philosophers today.