CHAPTER 2

God

The history of European philosophy is tightly bound with the history of Christian theology, so there’s an emphasis here on Christian views. I’ve tried to present things so that these questions and ideas are as valuable as possible for those of you who are not Christians, but some of the issues don’t translate well to other views. If you’re Jewish or Muslim, most of the issues will apply equally for you; if you’re Hindu or Buddhist, it’ll be hit-and-miss; if you’re agnostic or atheist, well, you’ll probably just be playing along. But that’s valuable too—valuable to better understand what it’s like to have faith, and to enjoy the intricacies and subtleties of religious reasoning. I’m not a Christian, and I have a kind of pure enjoyment of St. Thomas Aquinas’s writing; pure because I don’t have faith in his sources, and have little concern for his topics or answers—and yet nonetheless I enjoy and appreciate the grace and wisdom of his discussion itself.

It might be good to remind you before you start in here that philosophy is about hard-nosed analysis and criticism. Philosophy is not interested in being reassuring, and it is not interested in making you comfortable. It’s interested in discovering the truth, and that means being open to the possibility that the truth is horrible.

Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?

No, seriously: Why is there something rather than nothing?

Things are happening right now, caused by things that just happened just before the things happening now. And those things must have been caused by something before them, and so on. Doesn’t there have to be some kind of first cause, that isn’t itself caused? Or is it possible that there is no beginning?

If there is a first cause, mustn’t it have its own will and ability to choose? If not, wouldn’t it have to have been caused by something else to start everything into motion? But if that’s the case, then we haven’t reached the first cause yet, have we?

The Philosophy

Ok, yes, these are leading questions. You can see where this is going. These questions are the basis for what’s called the cosmological proof of God’s existence.

It’s an argument that’s been given by many different philosophers, including Aristotle and René Descartes (1596–1650), but this is the basic form. Where did all this stuff come from? How did the chain of cause and effect get started? Change and matter need to come from somewhere. And, in particular, it’s unsatisfying to just say that everything’s always been around and been in motion, since, well, how can there be an infinite series of effects without some cause to start everything off? Unless you say that there is some kind of “unmoved mover” to get things going, we just have to throw up our hands. Even the “Big Bang” theory doesn’t resolve the issue. Why did it “bang”? Where did the thing that “banged” come from?

Still, this doesn’t really prove God’s existence, although plenty of philosophers wrongly thought it did. Sure, we can’t explain the universe otherwise, but should we really expect to be able to understand the origin of the universe, or to be so sure that just because human reason says there must be a beginning that it must be so in actuality? Even the answer that “God did it” just puts off the cosmological question: We might ask, then, where God came from? If we assert that God is sui generis—that He made Himself by Himself—that’s really just as uninformative as saying that the universe made itself by itself.

The bottom line here is that, whatever we believe, we should have humility about it. Because whatever we believe, it doesn’t really answer the question, and it sure seems like nothing ever will.

The Divine Watchmaker

Pick up a stone and look at it for a minute. Where did that stone come from? Could it have come from a series of purposeless natural forces? Or must there have been something directing its creation?

Imagine, instead, picking up a watch. Could it have come from a series of purposeless natural forces?

Consider the diversity and intricate interconnection of all the elements of nature—plants and animals, earth and atmosphere. Is it not more like a watch than a stone? Could nature have come from a series of purposeless natural forces?

The Philosophy

Again, these are leading questions. In this case, they are the questions asked by English philosopher William Paley (1743–1805), in his famous “watchmaker analogy.” The analogy is a kind of teleological argument for God’s existence—“teleological” in that it is an argument based on the idea of a purpose (from the Greek telos).

The watch appears designed to work, and this implies a designer. Nature, for it’s part, resembles a watch in its intricacy and precision, and this seems to imply a designer as well. Contemporary versions of this argument call attention to the complexity of, for example, the eye, and ask how intermediary forms could be evolutionarily adaptive—and, if they are not adaptive, why would they have come about unless it’s part of a larger plan? These arguments call into question the idea that natural selection alone could account for the origin of human and animal bodies.

It’s interesting to see what this argument does and does not establish. These arguments for “intelligent design” theories are often used to argue for a Christian conception of creation, but they are just as compatible with any kind of intelligent designer—a flying spaghetti monster, for example. The teleological argument also doesn’t establish that evolutionary biology and other sciences won’t explain the complexity of design, given time. After all, most theists believe that God works mostly through natural processes rather than miracles, so God’s design could quite possibly be realized through scientifically describable natural forces.

But is science able to explain everything? Maybe. Maybe not. We’re a long way from finding out. But whether or not you believe in a Designer, you’re better off not using it as an explanation for anything. To say “God did it” only halts inquiry into nature, where we might be able to figure out how things happened—and that’s at least as interesting if you think that this scientifically discoverable natural history is also an expression of God’s will.

The Problem of Evil

If God exists, is God entirely good, or partially good and partially evil? How can you tell?

If God is entirely good, where does the evil in the world come from? Did God create it? How could evil come from an entirely good being?

If God did not create the evil in the world, why does God allow it to exist?

The Philosophy

This is what’s called “The Problem of Evil,” and it presents some serious problems to a traditional Judeo-Christian notion of God. There are several possible responses that depart from this notion of God:

God doesn’t exist.

God exists, but is partially evil.

God is good, but not omnipotent, and so evil creeps into the world despite God’s goodness and love.

There is a good divine force, but an evil one as well, strong enough to compete with God’s will, and our world is a battleground between them.

There are also several ways that Christian philosophers have responded to the problem of evil in other ways without departing from a traditional Judeo-Christian understanding of God. Most famous is the “free-will defense”: Evil enters the world through human choice, and free will is so important to God that He allows evil for its sake. (We’ll talk more about that argument in Chapter 7: Aspects of the Self.) Another interesting response is to simply deny that evil exists.

St. Augustine (354–430), a North African philosopher, claimed that what we call evil is simply the absence of good, just like darkness is not a real thing, but only the absence of light. He asked what happens to a physical wound or sickness when we are healed. Does it flutter away from your body to a new host? Of course not; it simply disappears, showing that the injury was not a real thing, but only an absence of health. In the same way, evil is not real, it is only the absence of good. We fall into evil and suffering because God made us from nothing, and when we move away from God’s goodness, we tend to return to nothing.

The Value of Suffering

What great trials have you faced in life? Have they changed you for the better or for the worse? If you don’t think you’ve faced any great trials, think about someone who has, and imagine her or his answer.

What are some examples of kinds of suffering that almost always improve the people who undergo them?

What kinds of suffering are unlikely to improve those who undergo them? Is there such a thing as a pure loss—suffering unredeemed or unredeemable by growth and progress?

The Philosophy

Another possible response to the problem of evil—called a theodicy or justification of God—is to claim that God allows evil because suffering is necessary for human development. Without the negative, we cannot appreciate the positive, and some elements of human greatness can only be achieved through suffering, strife, and loss.

Many have put forth versions of this theodicy; among the earliest was St. Irenaeus (d. 202), and among the most famous, the German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716). The basic idea is that even though there is evil and suffering, this is still the best of all possible worlds, either because the evil in the world is outweighed by the good that is made possible through that evil, or because it is not logically possible for God to have created a world without these flaws—for example, to have created beings who are not, through their finite nature, subject to errors in knowledge and moral failings.

Others have argued against this view. For example, the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) argued that you could see immediately that the good in the world does not always outweigh the evil simply by comparing “the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is engaged in eating the other.” Surely the pleasures of the table are not so great! William R. Jones (1933–2012) put forth a fascinating challenge to this theodicy in his 1973 book, Is God a White Racist? Can we assert that “the harder the cross, the brighter the crown”—can we maintain that suffering will be redeemed by God—in the face of a history of racially discriminatory violence and suffering?

What justification can be given for God’s inaction in the face of the enslavement of black people, or in the face of the attempted genocide of the Jews? Is the very idea that such horrors could be justified an insult to those who have suffered and died?

Punishment and Redemption

For a moment at least, adopt the idea that suffering is sometimes a divine punishment for sin. Can this explain the suffering of terminally ill infants and children or of an animal burned alive in a forest fire? What other explanation can you offer?

How should we differentiate deserved from undeserved punishment in the suffering of others?

How should we separate deserved from undeserved punishment in our own suffering?

The Philosophy

The suffering of innocent individuals, like the suffering of peoples and races, provides a difficult challenge to any theodicy. This is one among many philosophical themes explored in The Plague, a Nobel Prize–winning novel by the French-Algerian absurdist philosopher Albert Camus (1913–1960).

In the story, an Algerian town suffers a rare outbreak of bubonic plague, which kills much of the population before the town’s doctors are able to develop a cure. Father Paneloux, a Jesuit priest, gives a sermon early on in the epidemic, in which he calls forth the image of a threshing floor: It is through the violence of the plague, he claims, that God separates the wheat from the chaff.

After watching a child suffer a slow and painful death, Paneloux finds that he can no longer believe that suffering can always be justified as a punishment or a trial. He asks himself instead whether the suffering of an innocent can be made up for by the eternal bliss of heaven. But if this is so, then Jesus’s suffering on the cross becomes meaningless, because it is only a moment of pain outweighed by an eternity of happiness. Jesus’s suffering cannot serve as a means of human redemption if it is not truly a sacrifice. Paneloux finds he can’t brush away the suffering of a child by asserting that all will be made right in the next world. Instead, “he, Father Paneloux, would keep faith with that great symbol of all suffering, the tortured body on the Cross; he would stand fast, his back to the wall, and face honestly the terrible problem of a child’s agony.”

Faith and Evidence

Do you think God exists, and why? What evidence do you have in favor of your position? How did you come by this evidence?

Do you consider this evidence to be conclusive, and your position to be beyond doubt? If so, why do you think others remain unconvinced?

If you don’t consider your position to be beyond doubt, what kind of evidence would move you to reconsider your position?

The Philosophy

Most of us think our views for or against religion are a matter of faith rather than proof, and even those who are utterly convinced usually are convinced based on an inner experience, insight, or intuition rather than evidence available to everybody. Is it acceptable for us just to choose to believe whatever we wish to? After all, outside of religion, we usually consider it wrong to just believe whatever “feels right”!

In his 1896 essay, “The Will to Believe,” American philosopher William James (1842–1910) argued that there are some kinds of things that we are justified in believing in the absence of sufficient evidence. For example, consider whether your neighbor likes you. If you remain skeptical, you’ll be standoffish toward your neighbor. She’ll be less inclined to like you if she doesn’t already and less likely to continue liking you if she already does. On the other hand, if you believe your neighbor likes you, even though you can’t really be certain of it, you will be more friendly and outgoing, and your belief will tend to make it true.

In a slightly different example, if you are considering marrying, but are not sure that your spouse will live up to your hopes, your doubt will poison and end the relationship—only through believing in her goodness are you able to have a life together in which you are able to find out whether she is the wonderful woman you believe her to be.

Religious faith, according to James, works the same way. Belief in the goodness of the world tends to make the world good, and belief in religion opens us up to the kinds of experiences that justify faith, which the doubter may never experience. This doesn’t mean that we all necessarily ought to have religious faith or that faith is correct, but James claims we have a right to choose to believe, even in the absence of sufficient evidence.

The Euthyphro Dilemma

Think of a religious text that you believe expresses the will of God (or imagine for the moment that you believe there is such a thing). Why is God telling you how you should act?

If that text told you to do something you believe to be immoral, would you do it?

The Philosophy

You probably found the second question frustrating. Very likely, you found the premise behind the question impossible. If God is good, how could God tell you to do something immoral? Or, alternately, if God tells you to do it, doesn’t that make it the right thing to do?

This is what’s called “The Euthyphro Dilemma,” named for Plato’s dialogue “The Euthyphro.” In the dialogue, Socrates (469–399 B.C.E.) confronts an earnest man named Euthyphro about his beliefs about piety. Piety, in Euthyphro’s view, is doing what the gods love. But why, asks Socrates, do the gods love some things rather than others? Because those things are holy, answers Euthyphro. This brings up several troubling questions:

If it is pious to do what the gods love, and the gods love what is holy, then why not just say that it’s pious to do what is holy, and leave the gods out of the whole discussion?

Alternately, if it isn’t holiness that makes the pious action pious, then couldn’t the gods love what is unholy—and wouldn’t that, then, be what is pious?

In the context of modern Christianity, the question is whether good and evil are based on God’s will, or whether God’s will is based on good and evil. Either position appears heretical. If good means nothing but “what God says to do” and evil means nothing but “what God says not to do”—this is called divine command theory—then God could say that murder is right, and it would be … and that sure doesn’t seem right. And worse yet, how can we claim that God is good, if “good” just means “whatever God says”? On the other hand, if God is telling us to do what is good because God is good, then good and evil exist independently of God, and God is just offering advice about a moral system that God is Himself subject to!

Natural Law

Think again about a text that you believe contains the will of God—or, again, imagine that you believe there is such a thing. Can someone who doesn’t accept that text be moral? Why or why not?

That text undoubtedly has a history, and a cultural origin. Could a just God judge those who never had a chance to read that text? In a Christian context, how can God judge those who lived before the birth of Jesus?

The Philosophy

In many faiths, this isn’t such a big issue. In Hinduism and Buddhism, for example, you can be a good person without any particular knowledge about this or that deity. You just have to be compassionate, care for others, stand for what’s right, and so on. We can all pretty well figure out that stuff on our own, even though moral and religious texts might be helpful along the way. This has, however, been a big issue in the Christian tradition, where some theologians have claimed that “Revealed Law”—the word of God, contained in the Bible, and sent to guide humanity—is necessary for salvation. It seems a bit unfair to others, though, and the question of the “righteous heathens,” like the good and moral people born before Jesus, has been an issue of debate.

One way of mitigating this seeming divine injustice is the idea of “Natural Law.” The idea is that God’s will can be determined by looking to God’s creation, where we can see implicitly the rules for moral conduct that are stated explicitly in God’s word. Through use of reason alone, we can determine, for example, that we ought to treat others just as we would like others to treat us. Whatever you might think about the idea of Natural Law, it is certainly striking that every culture and religion seems to have its own version of the Golden Rule.

On this view, even our bodies can instruct us in God’s will through Natural Law. For example, philosopher and Doctor of the Church St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), argued in On Kingship that we could tell that God intended us to live in community with one another and under a government because He created us without tough hides or sharp claws. It’s a bit undignified, but effective: We learn to live along with others, to be citizens and subjects, because our other choice is to die cold and alone or fall prey to wild beasts.

Bodily Urges

Based on this idea of Natural Law, why might it be that other bodily attributes sometimes seem to drive us toward less moral behavior? Why would God make us this way?

Do you consider any of your bodily urges immoral? If not, why do you think others might? If so, what do you do to control these urges?

The Philosophy

For creatures said to be created in the image of God, we are awfully messy, hairy, smelly, and desirous things, aren’t we? If this idea of Natural Law is going to hold up, we need to have some explanation for why, if nature is supposed to be a guide to the same moral law contained in Revealed Law, our bodily natures seem to drive us into all kinds of coveting and licentiousness.

Both Augustine and Aquinas were influenced by Aristotle’s understanding of the human as a “rational animal.” In this view, we are animals first and rationality, the soul, in the Christian sense, is added later. (This is why, until the nineteenth century, the Church regarded abortion as morally acceptable—through the first trimester, the fetus was thought to be just an animal, with no soul.) So, we have our animal nature as well as our higher nature, and that means that we retain some biological imperatives and urges proper to animals, as well as those distinctively proper to humans. The pleasure we take in the body is natural and proper to our animal nature, and contributes to its well-being. The pleasures of the table drive us to maintain our bodily health, which we need for our individual survival, and sexual pleasure drives us to procreate, which we need for the continuation of humanity. Our nature, though, should also teach us that reason, which humans alone have, is more important than the body, which we have in common with all animals, and so we should see (as did Aristotle and Plato) that it is right that our desires be kept in check rather than given free rein. But those urges are not sinful in themselves—they are proper to our animal nature. The sin comes through acting like mere animals.

In a particularly awkward passage, Chapter 17 of his City of God, Augustine even discusses erections. He claims that this involuntary and sometimes unwelcome response of the human body “testifies against the disobedience of man” in the Garden of Eden. So there you go.

Today’s “Abrahams”

What if you began hearing a voice that told you to do things? Terrible things. What if it said it was God? Would you follow the voice?

What if it really was God, and you knew that with certainty, somehow? Would you follow its instructions?

What if someone else had this experience? What would it take to convince you to help him to commit the atrocities that he says God has told him to do?

The Philosophy

Of course, we don’t even want to consider such a thing, but the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) said that no Christian can avoid these questions (and we can add, neither can any Jew or Muslim).

In the story of Abraham, God tells Abraham to kill his son Isaac, who is Abraham’s greatest love and pride, and who has done nothing to deserve this fate. No moral justification is given—Isaac is to be a ritual sacrifice to God, murdered by the command of the same God who commanded us not to murder. This shows us, according to Kierkegaard, that faith lies beyond the realm of the ethical. Faith can demand things that cannot be explained or justified.

Should the priest, hearing a parishioner speak of hearing such a divine command, dismiss this as insanity? Can he, while remaining a Christian? Would this not condemn Abraham as well? Shouldn’t the priest, instead, walk with his parishioner, as he would have walked with Abraham and Isaac to Mount Moriah? How can any answer here be acceptable?

It is a question that is all the more pressing today, in the light of religious terrorism—not just Islamist attacks, but abortion clinic shootings, the Atlanta Olympic bombing, and “collateral damage” of innumerable Muslim children in the Middle East. Anyone in the Judeo-Christian tradition cannot ignore the story of Abraham—or that of Samson, a biblical “suicide bomber” who brought about his own death in order to wreak vengeance upon the Philistines (Judges 16:30)—and this requires some difficult thought.