Thinking about the Existence of God, Part 2

Reflections on the Differences between Ontological and Cosmological Arguments

Cosmological arguments that operate on the basis of scientific knowledge are not convincing. Imagine a person contending, "we are pretty sure that anything which begins to exist has a cause, and science is pretty confident that the universe began to exist, so it is most probable that the universe has a cause, which is God." The claim that whatever evidence science is currently pleased points to God more than not may be accurate, but I think it remains unconvincing for most people (and I am one of them).

Why is this? One reason has to do with the limitations of scientific inquiry, of course: on the one hand, science is always changing and one does not necessarily want to hang one's spiritual hat on its current configuration; on the other hand, one has a hard time imagining God to be a proper object of scientific study. I think another reason, though, has to do with the nature of the claim. People do not want to understand God in terms of probability -- "God is more probable than not, so I should believe." First, belief in God based on such an understanding will always be an error in reasoning: just as a fifty percent chance of God's existence entails that we believe God's existence and non-existence to be equally likely, a ninety-nine percent probability of God's existence justifies us in believing that God's existence is ninety-nine percent probable, and nothing more. Establishing probabilities, in other words, justifies us only in believing the probabilities which have been established.

More fundamentally, though, people want to relate to God in terms of confidence and certainty. (This certainty can be shaken by doubt, but the entire existential structure of doubt and the dark night of the soul is predicated upon the dialectic of certainty and confidence; it is entirely foreign to tabulation of evidence and probability calculus.) One does not want to say, "in view of the evidence, I am eighty-six percent sure that God exists." One simply wants to say, "God exists."

Here ontological arguments, such as the one above, are much more satisfying, offering an analysis that posits God in strictly necessary terms.


Reflections on the Concept of Demonstrating the Existence of God

Can God's existence be demonstrated at all? In other words, to what extent can arguments for the existence of God be satisfying to begin with?

When I was younger, I was of the opinion that God's existence was not subject to demonstration. I quickly grew tired of any purported "proofs" and thought them nothing but word games. This was predicated in large part on a misunderstanding of faith and its relation to reason.

But if the world manifests the rationality of the divine Logos, if God has a determinate and fundamental place in its ontological makeup, and if our apprehension of this order is itself an element of the same order, then nothing is more natural than that a proper application of the understanding to Being should reveal not only the necessity of God's existence but the determination of many aspects of that existence.

Insofar as we desire to know God, furthermore, such analyses is indispensable to us, for the world reveals many things of God that are absent or under-determined in (or, for that matter, duplicated in) Sacred Scripture.

As the Apostle says, "For what can be known about God is evident to them, because God made it evident to them. Ever since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes of eternal power and divinity have been able to be understood and perceived in what he has made."