The existence of God can be proved, but not demonstrated. It can be proved by the same method that a man is proved guilty of theft in a court of law, when neither judge nor jury have seen the theft committed, and the thief has not been caught in the act of stealing. Under these circumstances the thief is proved guilty by reasoning from evidence gathered at the scene of the crime, or from other sources. His guilt is not demonstrated beyond all possible doubt because his crime was not seen. There is a remote chance that someone else committed it. But the court is assured of his guilt because there is no flaw in the chain of reasoning that concludes his guilt from the evidence.
In the same way the existence of God cannot be demonstrated beyond all possible doubt because he cannot be seen. He is invisible and intangible. But from the evidence of the universe and of our five senses we can prove the existence of God by the same method that would satisfy a court of law in the case of a crime. We can prove it by a chain of reasoned argument in which there is no flaw. The argument can only be contested by doubting the evidence of our senses and the principles of reason, which is to say, by committing intellectual suicide. For once we doubt our own senses and the laws of reason, intelligent thought and discussion about life become impossible. Since modern philosophers have taken this doubt seriously, philosophy has largely degenerated into a profitless and unfruitful wrangling not about life, but about the processes of thought—about whether anything can be known at all.
It is not presumption to attempt to prove the existence of God by reason. It is, on the contrary, the duty of reason and the chief purpose for which this faculty is given to us. Those who can reason have no excuse for doubting the existence of God, for, in the words of St. Paul, “The invisible things of God since the creation of the world are clearly seen, being perceived through the things that are made, even his everlasting power and divinity; that they may be without excuse” (Romans 1:20).
The evidence upon which the reasoned proof of God’s existence is based is provided by our senses. It is the fact of a universe containing man who perceives and thinks about it. But the existence of this universe does not explain itself; it does not show us how it came into existence, nor yet how it is maintained in being. In other words, we do not see its cause. Does the universe cause itself? Obviously not, for the universe is simply the sum total of things, and none of them causes its own being. They are caused, directly and immediately, by other things that come before them, as we are caused by our parents. By scientific research we may trace these direct causes back some considerable distance. Organic life may be traced back to the original protoplasm that lived in primaeval slime. The inorganic matter of mountains, waters and stars is traced to less diversified and complex centers of stellar energy.
But here, without going back any further, we find the chain of direct causes ceasing to explain itself. The evidence now before us contains elements that simple protoplasm and stellar energy do not explain. It contains the complex and (at least relatively) ordered structure of stellar systems, of crystals, and of a thousand electrical and chemical phenomena. It contains the still more complex and ordered structures of organic life, of eyes, ears, hearts and stomachs, and finally of the human mind, which reflects upon itself and upon the impressions of its senses. Can we admit that stellar energy or simple protoplasm are adequate or sufficient causes for such highly complex and organized things?
Every effect must have a sufficient cause. That is to say, something cannot be caused by nothing, because nothing is not sufficient to cause something. In the same way, figs do not grow on thistles because there is nothing in a thistle sufficient to produce a fig. It doesn’t have it in it to make a fig, just as a moron doesn’t have it in him to become a mathematician. Our problem then is: Do matter and energy, or atoms and electrons, have it in them to produce protoplasm, and through protoplasm to produce man?
Let us admit that they do, and see where this admission takes us. Let us also assume, along with materialists and others who deny the existence of God, that this primal matter-energy is a purely blind and unintelligent substance. (Why do they assume this while confessedly ignorant of what substance is?) Matter-energy must therefore produce its effects, not by intelligence or conscious design, but by untold billions of permutations and combinations that necessarily, if they go on long enough, produce the universe and man. Even monkeys, it is said, typing for long enough on enough typewriters would be bound eventually to write the Bible. This is to say, therefore, that blind and unconscious elements are a sufficient cause for this universe, provided that they are able to combine and re-combine haphazardly for a sufficient length of time. By pure statistical necessity, a human mind will eventually be the result. What, therefore, we term mind, intelligence and personality are in fact peculiar arrangements of atoms produced in course of time by blind necessity. To put it more simply, intelligence is a special form of unintelligence, and consciousness a special form of unconsciousness.
Granting that this position is not already absurd, let us take it a step further. The individual who argues in this way is himself the product of blind necessity; his argument, which is part of himself, is likewise the haphazard result of necessity. Because, then, his argument is part of the universe, he cannot claim for it what he denies to the universe—meaning. He can only claim that the meaning of his argument is a special form of meaninglessness. He is then saying that the presence of a thing (meaning) is a special form of its absence, or indeed that something is a special form of nothing. To deny intelligence to your own sufficient cause is to deny it to yourself. If all sense is in fact a peculiar kind of nonsense, man’s intellectual suicide is complete. He might just as well be reciting “Jabberwocky” as propounding philosophical theories.
Furthermore, his entire argument began with a huge begging of the question. Quite arbitrarily he has termed the principle substance of the universe blind and unconscious. This is a mere guess, for he admits he does not know what substance is. Why, then, does he make this assumption? Because he wishes to deny his own spiritual and rational responsibility, because he finds it morally inconvenient to admit that he is what he seems to be—a free, rational, and conscious person. By showing that he and all his thoughts and deeds are the results of blind necessity, he can renounce responsibility for himself. But not only does his argument begin with a purely arbitrary assumption; it ends in the denial of its own rationality and meaningfulness.
But the argument for the existence of God begins with an assumption that is not arbitrary, an assumption that we make naturally and are compelled to make in order to live any kind of rational life. It begins with the evidence (or assumption, if you insist) of sense, feeling and intuition that man is a conscious, intelligent, responsible, and relatively free person. We have therefore to account for the appearance of this intelligent and self-conscious thing called a person. Personality cannot be explained as a special form of impersonality, any more than the playing of a violin can be explained as the mere scraping of cat’s entrails with horsehair. The emergence of human personality from the universe must have a sufficient cause, which is to say a cause that itself has the property of personality. The cause of personality must be at least personal since the lesser cannot of itself make the greater, the presence of a thing cannot be explained in terms of its absence, and something cannot come out of nothing.
The principle evidence for the existence of God is not just the fact of an objective, organized universe. It is rather the appearance of man in it as a part of it. If the universe is the effect of a cause, consciousness cannot appear in the effect without existing in the cause. The cause must be sufficient to produce the effect, to evolve from substance and protoplasm all the properties of human personality—not only consciousness, intelligence and reason, but also love, goodness, and beauty.
Having considered the principle evidence, the reduction to absurdity of the contrary position, and the general scope of the reasoned argument for God’s existence, we can turn to the details of the proof, following the five different ways of proof proposed by Saint Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologica.
1. The first proof has to do with the origin of motion. The fact that things are in motion is clearly perceived by our senses, as well as the fact that their motion does not originate in themselves. Everything that is moved is moved, at least originally, by something other than itself. We are forced to one of two conclusions: either motion begins with a “first mover,” which, unlike everything else, is absolutely self moved, or that there is no origin of motion, that the series of movers and moved goes back forever to infinity. But if motion is forever derived from something else and never originates in anything, motion must be without origin and without cause. But this would lead to one of two absurd conclusions: (1) that it is then its own cause, which, seeing that it is always derived from something else, is impossible, or (2) that it is a causeless effect, a something emerging from nothing, which is also impossible. We are compelled, then, to accept the idea of a First Mover, absolutely self moved and the cause of all other motion. And we might add to St. Thomas’s argument that since man is the most self-moving of known beings, it is highly probable that the First Mover is a living Being rather than an impersonal force.
2. The second proof is akin to the first, seeking the First Cause instead of the First Mover. We know of nothing that is its own cause, and unless we can arrive at a First Cause we are left with the absurd conclusion that there is simply an infinite series of causes and effects, the whole of which hangs absolutely uncaused in a void, like the Cheshire Cat’s grin in Alice in Wonderland. For we do not only have to find the first, beginning cause of the series. Even if the universe were eternal and had no beginning in time, it would still have to have a cause beyond itself; otherwise it would be like a country where all made their living by taking in each other’s washing. That is to say, if every cause in the series was an effect, the whole would be an effect without a cause. The mere size or duration of such a series, such an uncaused universe, would make no difference to its absurdity. To make it infinitely long or infinitely large is only to make it infinitely absurd. There must therefore be a First Cause that is not an effect of anything but itself; “and this” concludes St. Thomas, “men call God.”
3. There is nothing in the universe that exists in its own right, for of all things that we know it is possible for them both to be and not to be. Obviously a thing that has the possibility of not existing does not exist necessarily—in its own right; if it existed necessarily it could never cease to exist. If, then, things do not have being in their own right, they must derive being from something else. A series of beings, none of which exist in their own right, all of which derive their existence from one another, is by itself impossible—however enormous it may be. If every being in the series derives its existence from something else, the whole series must also derive its existence from something else. For a being that can at some time not exist is not an eternal being,1 and no number of temporal beings will add up to an eternal being just as no number of geometric points will add up to a line, and no amount of shapes will make a color. But if there is no eternal being there was a time when things were not, in which case they could never have come into existence. Therefore there must be an eternal being that exists necessarily, in its own right, which does not have being (and so can possibly not have it) but which is being. And this, too, is what men call God.
4. The fourth proof is based on the different grades of perfection to be found in things. There are, for example, varying degrees of warmth and of consciousness. Things are understood to be more or less warm or more or less conscious to the extent they approach that which is most warm and most conscious. Something that is less warm cannot become more warm by itself. The extra warmth must come from somewhere, and that can only be from what is most warm, i.e., fire, in one form or another. We are saying, in fact, that there cannot be less or more of a given quality or perfection until there is a most, from which the less and the more can be derived. If there is not a most perfect form that the less and the more perfect can be derived, we are saying that the greater can be explained in terms of the less, that more of a given quality is the result of less of it—which is manifest nonsense. Therefore all perfections in all things must be explained with reference to a most perfect Being that does not receive perfection from another, but that possess the fullness of these perfections in its own right. Man is more conscious than the animal; man, however, is not the most conscious because animals do not derive their consciousness from man. Thus the necessary most conscious and most perfect being will be what we call God.
5. The fifth proof comes from the fact of a certain order in unintelligent things—a type of order that is not simply read into them by the human mind. For example, the eye of a bird is ordered toward seeing. The power of sight is for the good of the bird, yet certainly the bird has neither the intelligence nor power to produce its own eye and order it to the perception of light as distinct from sound and smell. The fact that unintelligent things are ordered toward ends—eyes to seeing, ears to hearing, nerves to feeling, lungs to breathing—is not to be explained by chance, because to do so would be to commit the old error of explaining order in terms of disorder. Both the idea and the fact of chance presuppose the existence of order and purpose, and even if we say that the notion of order exists only in the human mind we have still to explain its existence there. But the ordering of eyes to seeing is in no sense an “imagined” order that the mind of man reads into external events as, perhaps, he reads design and beauty into the patterns of frost upon a window. Yet because eyes and a million other natural phenomena clearly do not order themselves to their ends, there must be an intelligence directing them; and this intelligence we call God.
The five proofs of St. Thomas tell us not only that God exists; they tell us also something of what God is like. From the first, which has to do with motion, we learn that God is power. From the second, dealing with God as the First Cause, we see that God is creative power. From the third we learn not just that God has being, but that he is Being itself. The fourth adds to this that God is not mere being; he does not simply exist like a stone, or a man after a heavy dinner. God is the fullness of Being, possessing every perfection of which Being is capable. And finally the fifth tells us that God is the source of all intelligence, order, and design.
Reason, therefore, leads us not only to the fact that God is; it gives us also some knowledge of his nature, though this knowledge is incomplete beside God’s own revelation of himself in the prophets and in Jesus Christ. There are, however, three specially important aspects of the divine nature that reason deduces from our experience of the universe, and though implied in the foregoing argument, it will be well to examine them more closely since nothing detracts more from belief in God than absurdly unworthy ideas of his nature.
1. The first is that God is life. The sufficient cause of a universe containing persons must, as we saw, be at least personal—that is to say, a living, conscious, intelligent and integrated being. God is the most of qualities that we find in more or less degree in the world, and because created things are more or less alive God is that which is most alive. The higher a form of life, the greater its degree of consciousness and integration, and the greater its independence of physical limitations. We are thus led to the thought of God as one who is absolute consciousness, absolute wholeness and unity, and absolute freedom from other than self-imposed limitation. Therefore to say that God is personal is in no sense to limit or belittle him. It is not to imprison God in a form or shape. On the contrary, it is to say that he is the absolute maximum of life and freedom, bursting, as it were, the bonds of form and finitude not because he is vague and misty but because he is utterly and intensely alive.
The idea of a personal God is so often criticized as idolatry, as making God in man’s image. But the alternatives offered by such critics are yet more idolatrous since they conceive God in terms of less living forms than man—as blind and abstract mechanism, force or principle, unlimited only in the inane and vacuous sense of infinite space or aether. The error of idolatry is not that it makes a finite image of the infinitely Vast and Vague, but that it is an attempt to capture the infinitely Alive One in a fixed, dead and petrified form of thought or imagination. Try to capture the wind in a bag and you have only stagnant air. Thus the assertion that God is personal is not to say that God is like man; it is to say that man, in so far as he is personal, is something like God, having in some slight degree the awareness, the selfhood, the unity, the intelligence, and the freedom of absolute and perfect life.
2. The second is that God is being—he who IS, the only one who can truly say, “I am.” It is this truth that leads us to the knowledge of God’s perfection and goodness. A perfect thing is a complete thing, a thing that lacks nothing and is not frustrated or limited by anything else. As the first cause, as necessary being, and as the source of all possible perfections to be found in creatures, God is obviously quite self-sufficient and lacks nothing. If there were anything that he lacked, he could not be its cause, and if some being or quality existed uncaused by God, he would not be the first cause, in which case he would not be God. In general, however, things are limited and frustrated by their opposites—life by death, pleasure by pain, and joy by sorrow. Not only are they limited by their opposites, but they cannot exist without them, as life (as we know it) cannot exist without death since it lives on dead plants and animals.
But because God is being he has no opposite. The opposite of being is nothing, which by definition doesn’t exist. God, then, is called good because he is the triumphant and unopposed fullness of being, possessing every perfection, every positive and excellent quality of which being is capable. Yet we are used to thinking of evil as the opposite of good, and if God is the purely good, must not evil be his opposite? We are mistaken in calling evil the opposite of good. We should think rather of evil as the attempt to oppose good, an attempt that can never succeed since to oppose the good entirely and successfully would be to cease from being. Evil is a parasite upon the good, depending on the good for its existence. For example, an evil handkerchief is one containing a hole—a handkerchief lacking complete being and going in the direction of nonbeing. A purely evil Handkerchief would be one that was all hole. It would not exist at all. Yet whereas the handkerchief can exist without a hole (the good without the evil), the hole cannot exist without the handkerchief (the evil without the good). Evil is thus dependent upon and subordinate to good; it is not its equal and opposite.
All evil is destructive. In whatever form it is a tendency toward nonexistence, for the things we call evil are those that destroy and inhibit life, which makes holes in things otherwise complete and perfect. We praise God as the absolutely good because it is impossible to “make holes in him.” One who exists necessarily, who is being, cannot be made to cease to be even partially. But from one who only has being, being can partially or wholly be taken away.
The fact that God, as being, has no opposite makes him the Supreme Good in the sense of the supremely desirable One, the true, if unacknowledged, object of all human yearning. For the heart of man desires to have life, happiness, love and peace eternally. But this desire is frustrated again and again because these various goods, as we ordinarily experience them, have opposites upon which they depend. As created life is opposed to and dependent on death, created happiness is unknown apart from the contrast of sorrow. A life independent of death, and a happiness independent of sorrow can only be the eternal life and happiness of God himself. Hence the only final satisfaction of human desire must be found in a union of man with God so intimate that man becomes a partaker of the divine nature. This will be possible if it is true that to become one life with God is the purpose for which man exists, if man is ordered to union with God as the eye is ordered to the perception of light.
3. The third important aspect of the divine nature is, then, that God is love. Love is the unreserved giving of one’s whole being to another person. As the noblest and most positive of all human virtues, it is necessarily derived from God, who must possess it, like all other perfections, in the very highest degree. But God does not simply have these perfections just as he does not simply have being. In order to be the sufficient cause of a certain quality, he must not only have it; he must be it, and thus we may say that God is love.
Creation itself is an act of the divine love, because in creating God gives himself to others. A person or a thing can only exist because God has given it a share in his own being. And since he is one and indivisible, God gives his whole being, his whole mind, his whole will, to every single creature that he makes, although each creature receives the gift of God in accordance with its capacity. Man receives the gift more perfectly than a stone, but no creature can receive it with absolute perfection because in so doing it would cease to be a creature and become God. We receive God partially, but he gives himself wholly; the degree to which we can receive him will depend on our likeness to God, who, like the sun, sheds down the entire light of his love upon every place and thing. And as bright objects reflect the sun more perfectly and dark objects less perfectly, so the life and the love of God is received with varying degrees of perfection although it is given to all alike.
The special peculiarity of man is that being a person, an image of God, he can return that love. Under certain circumstances man can give the whole of himself to God as God gives the whole of himself to man. For this reason there can exist between God and man the most intimate of all unions—the union of love, the Spiritual Marriage. Love necessarily desires union with the beloved object, and love turns into the bitterest suffering if that union cannot be had. It would therefore be contrary to every reasonable idea of the divine perfection and justice if man were capable of loving God, but not of union with him.
The good news, the gospel, of the Christian religion is precisely that God has given man the power to receive this union, to become one life with God and to share and enjoy eternally his unopposed goodness, love, peace, and happiness. The realization of this union is what is meant by “going to heaven,” and the imagery of wings and harps and halos, of the celestial city whose temple, light and center is God, of the unending song of praise and adoration, is designed to tell us in symbolic form of the joy and illumination of those who have become one with God and transfigured into his radiance like iron plunged into fire.
Human reason, just because it is human and not divine, cannot be absolutely perfect, and consequently the reasoned proof of God’s existence and the reasoned deduction of what his nature must be cannot have absolute certainty. Two things, however, may safely be claimed. First, it is clear that belief in God is more reasonable than any other theory of ultimate Reality that human reason has to offer.2 To suspend judgment on the bare chance that this reasoning may not be true, is like refusing to go out of the house because of the much stronger chance that you may be hit by an automobile. It is a thousand times easier to prove that you can trust in God than that you can trust yourself to the hazards of a city street. People do the latter every day. That they do not do the former can only be attributed either to inability to reason, or to sheer moral cowardice, or, in some cases, to mere lack of information.
Secondly, it is also clear that a reasoned consideration of God’s existence and nature shows that this central doctrine of Christianity, together with its necessary implications, is not at all the crude, naive, and superstitious notion it is currently supposed to be. The Christian Church does not teach that the ultimate Reality is a cosmic superman with white whiskers who sits upon a golden throne above the stars. Nor, however, does it commit the opposite folly of supposing that God is merely the personification of our highest ideals who exists only in the sense of Uncle Sam. It does not even ask us to believe in God as a “gaseous vertebrate,” or as a rather large, ubiquitous and beneficent superspook.
On the contrary, it carries human reason to the highest, the most sublime, the most subtle idea that it can form; and, having taken it to that splendid height, makes it bow down in wonder and humility—the philosopher with the child—because on the very topmost peak one thing becomes certain beyond all else: that the Reality so far surpasses the idea in glory that all human knowledge is seen as comparative ignorance, and the curious chatter of thought becomes the loving silence of contemplation.
1. A thing that either begins or ends is by definition not eternal. The eternal can neither start not finish, because this would constitute an end to what is by definition endless. A start is an end in the same sense that the “beginning” of a road is one end of the road.
2. The fact that the argument for the existence of God does not of itself answer various related problems, such as the existence of evil and suffering, is nothing against it. It is only when its conclusions are seen to be true that the problem of evil is raised.
Reprinted from The Roodcroft Papers, 1946, with permission of Holy Cross Press, West Park, NY. Copyright © 1946 by Alan W. Watts. Copyright not renewed.