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Fallacies for God's Existence · Acedra
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Fallacies for God's Existence
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0:26
When believers argue that God exists, I want to know the mistakes they make. I want to discern their errors in logic as well as in fact. It's not that I don't want God to exist - it's that I don't want to fool myself that God does exist, if in fact God does not exist.
0:47
I'd not like to be an atheist. I'd like to be a theist - I want God to exist - life can have meaning. Death not be final. But it is precisely because I want God to exist that I am so scared of self-delusion - fooling myself is my biggest fear - I want to believe - and "wanting to believe" can be hazardous and contagious. That's why I focus on "fallacies" - arguments that believers use to "prove" or demonstrate or support the existence of God - but arguments that do not work.
1:25
What are fallacies in arguing for God? I'm Robert Lawrence Kuhn and Closer To Truth is my journey to find out.
1:44
Some say that the way to God is through faith not reason. Maybe so. But, I have no choice - my way requires reason. Which is why it is important for me to find fallacies. It's easy to see why fallacies arise and are so resilient. "Wanting to believe" twists emotions and distorts reason.
2:08
I'm not immune. So, here's what I'll do. First, I must appreciate how not to argue for God, only then can I consider how to argue for God. I focus on scientists and philosophers, those trained to consider evidence and think logically. I focus further on those who believe in God - not now to ask them why they believe - but rather to find out what they think are fallacies in trying to defend God.
2:41
I begin with a believer who is one of the world's most distinguished medical scientists. I go to Bethesda, Maryland, to the National Institutes of Health, to meet its director, Francis Collins.
2:55
Francis, as a believer and as a rigorous scientist, you come across, as I've come across, many arguments reporting to prove why God exists. I would think that as a believer, you get pretty frustrated with some of them because they would actually turn off most people. What are some of these fallacies that you've heard that people have thrown around trying to prove what you know to be true, but really do it in a way in which casts aspersions on that conclusion?
3:26
I think most of them fall into the general category of trying to insert God into some aspect of human experience that isn't necessarily a good fit - a God of the gaps approach. Obviously, a major argument that many still adhere to is the evidence for design that we see around us in living things. And this carried a lot of weight before Darwin came along... But, in fact, is not an argument, which in the context of understanding the correctness of evolution is a good way to
3:56
convince anybody of God as this specific creator of this or that phenomenon. A version of that is the argument of: you have to believe in God because of the beauty of this particular landscape or this flower. I see, as a believer, that those are in fact beautiful things and I see God's hand in that in a general way, but I don't see God's hand in having made it possible for that flower to have that particular beautiful pink pigment in its petals.
4:21
That is something molecular biology can do for you. Other arguments: certainly the miraculous. Many people do, I think, come to the idea that faith can only be proven by pointing to specific miraculous events that are part of their faith tradition, and many of those - are very difficult to document as having been something other than a misunderstanding of a natural event. And that won't convince anybody who's already a skeptic, and yet, it's often put on the table in those discussions.
4:49
Particularly, a prominent recent version of this is the argument about intelligent design, or ID, which says that God had to step in and fix evolution because some of the molecular machines we find inside ourselves is too complicated for evolution to have come up with on its own. Interesting discussions - not a useful way to try to make a case for the existence of God because the closer you look the more you realize that those are not all that irreducible in their
5:15
complexity after all, and it's a modern version of this same fallacy that we've undertaken and many times passed of trying to put God into a box, trying to say: well, God must be there because science hasn't explained it yet. That's the God of the gaps. That's the God of the gaps. There's a gap in your explanation and that's where you insert God. Right, and then you sort of... And when that's explained you find a new gap. Right, or else you find a lot people are no longer listening
5:39
to you because you made this strong argument that that's where God was and you were wrong, and so, why should they pay attention. They all went home... Yeah.
5:50
Thank you, Francis... This is why believers should purge their apologetics of fallacious arguments for the existence of God.
5:59
"God of the Gaps" is one of the major fallacies affecting perceptions of God - and I pursue its biological expression with a leading biologist who was formerly a Dominican priest. I go to the University of California at Irvine, to meet Francisco Ayala. Francisco, one of the things that I think is detrimental to believers and even theologians is when they try to use science to prove or even to strongly demonstrate the existence of their God.
6:33
Yes, because usually what these people of faith or preachers do is to put God in the gaps of knowledge - is what is sometimes called the "Gods of the gaps". Unfortunately, the history tells us - that gaps very often get filled as time goes by. One of the current movements which has been pursued very strongly, is this idea of intelligent design - that organisms are so complex and have so many parts, that they can only occur if all the parts are together at the same time.
7:10
Actually, organisms are not intelligent design - they are very incompetently designed and that blaming God for that amounts to blasphemy. That the number of the defects that organisms have - it's not just that they are not perfect - is that they are dysfunctional - we have too many teeth for the size of our jaw. We understand why that happened in evolution. As our brain was growing the jaw had to become smaller... So, imagine an engineer who had designed a human jaw -
7:38
that engineer would be fired. And blaming God for that or for designing the birth canal of humans, which is not large, enough for the mother to give easily birth, and so, millions of children have died in the history of mankind. And it's not only dysfunctional designs, it's also cruelties. I mean, who would have designed parasites? It's only existence is by destroying other organisms. Biology can explain it - that's a result of natural processes.
8:10
That's why many theologians who are so very happy with Darwin - some of them react very negatively as they reacted negatively to physicists to discoveries of Galileo. But the discoveries of Galileo or Newton explained where there are earthquakes and whether the storms have lightening - they no longer have to be attributed to God punishing the world. In the same way that Darwin made possible to explain this dysfunctionalities and cruelties as the result of
8:38
natural processes without having to attribute them to the direct creation by God. So, really, an enlightened view of science even by the most fervent believer or theologian would see in science, really an affirmation of their belief if they looked at it properly. Yeah, and affirmation in the sense that knowledge is something good by almost any measure, and therefore science and scientific knowledge can be seen as an expression of the goodness of God in the world.
9:07
And to see the complexity of how God works is really making them understand a different kind of God than maybe their very simplistic God was originally in their minds. That's right. Primitive expressions of religion were considerably simple because the understanding of the world outside was so limited. But now, in biology, if we have such a view of the complexity of life, the beauty of life, the richness of life. Now, science gives us scientific knowledge that not says anything
9:39
about beauty, about richness - but for the religious believer that's one way to see the presence of God in the world.
9:48
Francisco turns the 'God of the Gaps' fallacy upside down, using its own consequences to refute its own assumptions. He rejects trying to 'insert God' where there are not yet natural explanations. And he warns believers that if they try to make the case that God designed everything; they are constructing a creator who is a sub-optimal designer - and responsible for numerous evils in the natural world.
10:19
I agree that seeking God in uncharted areas of scientific ignorance risks being caught in the quicksand of scientific discovery. But, if there is a God who actually is the Creator, I do not agree that God being a "non-tinkerer" absolves God from responsibility for evil.
10:43
I wonder if there are fallacies in arguing for God that creep into philosophical arguments. I go Oxford, England, to ask the philosopher of religion known for his arguments supporting the existence of God - Richard Swinburne.
10:59
Well, let's start with the ontological argument. This was invented by St. Anslem in the 11th Century. You can express it in the form of two premises. Premise one says God is by definition an all-perfect being. And then premise two, a being which exists is more perfect than one that doesn't. One would think, well, surely if something exists, it's got more reality. It's more worth having then something that doesn't. So, that seems immediately appealing.
11:25
But if you grant those two premises, then it would seem to follow that God must exist because He didn't exist, He wouldn't be all perfect. So, here is a quick argument. What's wrong with it? Well, I think both the premises are ones you are not justified in putting forward. It looks as if, well, God is an all-perfect being. It's just a matter of definition, but the issue is does that presuppose the existence of God as it were. Is it saying well there is this object God and what constitutes
11:56
this object is being all-perfect, or does it mean just if there is a God, then He is all-perfect? Well, if you're not to beg the question; it must mean the second. But if it means the second, then the argument just concludes if there is a God, then He exists and that's not particularly worth having. The second premise is also opened to question because you can't really compare things unless you suppose them already to exist. And then you can say one is better or bigger or worst than another one.
12:26
But, you can't compare things, which you acknowledge one of them exists and one of them don't because if a thing doesn't exist, it's not there to be compared with and therefore that can't be asserted either. So, neither of the premises can be asserted and therefore the conclusion doesn't follow. So, okay, what about the argument from morality? Yes. A lot of people these days are apt to say, well, if there wasn't a God, things wouldn't be right or wrong and so on.
12:52
So, we've got to assume and since they obviously is right and wrong, there must be a God. Yes. That seems to me clearly false. I don't think we would have any understanding of goodness and so on, if we didn't recognize well it's bad to torture children and it's a good thing to feed the hungry quite apart from any suppositions that there is a God or not, we would seem to have no concept of what morality means. We wouldn't be able to grasp it.
13:20
Quite clearly, atheists and theists share a lot of moral views and they can discuss and argue about particular moral issues, is it right to go to war in these circumstances or not in these circumstances. But, that presupposes they've got a common armory of concept about which they can use to put forward their propositions and affirm or deny them but that couldn't be the case if the very use of a moral term presupposed the existence of God.
13:51
And so, I don't think you can argue from morality to God. So, the discontinuity between the existence of morality and its lack of capacity to infer or prove an existence of God is caused by the fact that morality has an independent necessary existence? Yes indeed. Whenever anything is wrong or good, there is a reason why it's good. Things can't just be good. They have to be good for some reason. Why is it bad for example for me to kill you? Well, because killing ends life and I can't bring
14:26
you to life again. Okay, so, there are necessary truths and morality, sure. And they exist independent of God. Yes. And so, by something existing independent of God that means that whatever that is, you cannot use that to infer the existence of God? Indeed not. If something is a necessary truth, it's a necessary truth whether or not there's a God and therefore it doesn't give any evidence one way or the other.
14:55
Richard's rejection of the ontological and moral arguments means he distinguishes arguments for God that he believes do work from those that he believes do not work. This encourages me to consider more seriously the workable arguments. But, this doesn't convince me, of course. My point here is not to debate the merits of various arguments for God. But, rather to seek categories of fallacies among those arguments. For the ontological argument, the fallacy is faulty premises
15:27
that hide logical traps and lead to unwarranted conclusions. For the moral argument, the fallacy is relying on things that can exist anyway, even if there were no God.
15:43
So, expanding my search, what are other kinds of fallacies? I meet a philosopher of religion, who argues against a personal God - John Schellenberg. I would like to focus on a couple of oversights that I see in recent argumentation for theism. One has to do with the distinction between the scientific and personal explanation. Some people have been arguing that there is this important distinction science can explain a lot. But, when it comes to why there is world at all for example, or
16:15
why there are the highest level laws of nature and so on, we need to go to a non-scientific explanation specifically a personal explanation. I mean, we explain various things in our own lives by reference, not just to the kinds of things that biology and chemistry and physics are about, but also our own intentions and our beliefs and hopes and so on. So, we might similarly apply this at the metaphysical level. We might say that God's intentions or God's beliefs and
16:39
will and so on explain the universe. This claim says that in terms of causation there are two fundamental types of causation in the universe. Scientific and personal. My point about state or an oversight is precisely this that the contrast should be between scientific and non-scientific modes of explanation, not between scientific and personal. Personal explanation is perhaps just one instance, one token of a certain type, which we should call non-scientific explanation.
17:11
So, people move perhaps too swiftly to thinking that if science can't explain something about the world, well then it must be somebody's intentions that we an appeal to, to explain that bit about the world. It might be that there is just a whole host of different non-scientific forms of explanation, some of which, many of which, we haven't even conceived of yet, because we are still at a very early stage of inquiring. So, personal would be one kind of non-scientific but your point
17:34
is that it doesn't exhaust the set. Right, and it's often treated as though it does. And that's how we sort of stay at a certain early stage, instead of moving further. And that gets you quickly to theism because, because theism is the personal God. Especially if you already believe in theism. You think that there is a personal God. And you say, well, if it's not science, well, it must be this personal God that explains this. It's very natural to go there.
17:55
But, as inquirers, we need to think more rigorously and to do that we have to contrast scientific explanation with non-scientific. So, that's one sort of problem or fallacy or mistake or oversight. Another has to do with the concept of simplicity. Some theistic philosophers recently have been arguing that theistic explanations are preferable to others because they posit this very simple being. God is one thing and the universe is this huge complex mess of things.
18:25
All right, so, we should posit God the simple being, one thing. But here, there is a failure to notice that simplicity operates on at least a couple of levels. In one respect, you might say we don't want any more entities than we need, but in another respect, at another level we are going to say we don't want any more types of reality that we need to explain things, okay. So, at the level of types the atheist has a rejoinder. The atheist can say, look, now you've got two types of reality.
18:52
You've got physical reality, which I am exploring through science and you've also got this other non-physical immaterial entity. Sure, it's simple. But, it introduces a completely new dimension of reality whereas on my perspective, this materialist perspective of mine, there is only one type of thing and that makes my view simple in a way that yours is not. So, the materialist can defend that move by referring to simplicity just as well as the theists can.
19:17
It's just that there is a different level of simplicity that she is going to emphasize, namely the number of types being viewed. In this case, just one. So, there is a simplicity-based rationale for the materialists to resist the theists simplicity based appeal to God.
19:36
John shows how a "simplicity" argument for God can cut both ways - against God, because God would be an extra kind of reality, as well as for God, because God is supposed to be a maximally simple being. This is the fallacy of "belief bias" - where a predisposition to a certain belief will constrain evidence or coerce thinking to confirm that belief. John's rejection of "personal explanations" as the only alternative to scientific explanations exemplifies an "either-or" fallacy.
20:13
Premise: either "X" is true or God exists. Conclusion: if X is not true, therefore, God exists. "Either-or" is a fallacy because it masks innumerable other possibilities - the options are not just "X" and God.
20:32
Also known as the "false dilemma" or "black and white fallacy," the "either-or fallacy" is a theological favorite. So, I explore it with the publisher of Skeptic Magazine, Philosopher of Science, Michael Shermer. The either/or fallacy, that here's a problem in nature, evolution can't explain it, therefore, intelligent design explains it or creationism explains it. Well, it's possible that evolution is wrong. The theory could be flawed in some deep way and, therefore, Theory A is wrong.
21:06
But, Theory A being wrong doesn't make Theory B right. Theory B has to stand on its own regardless of Theory A. And so, intelligent design theorists and creationists have to have positive evidence in support of their theory, not just negative evidence against the theory of evolution. So, the fallacy comes from the original formulation of the question, of saying it's one way or the other and this is the way the world is. And so, once you form the question that way, you're in the fallacy...
21:31
That's right. Already. ..from the beginning. Also related to these is this sort of argument from personal incredulity. I think this is a deep one that we all have. I personally can't think of how this could have come about in some natural way; therefore, there must be some other explanation. Maybe you are just not smart enough, or maybe you have just not thought of it, haven't done your homework enough. So, additional fallacies I find with these kinds of arguments,
21:55
what I call Hume's maxim, or what's more likely, the miracle or the description of the miracle being a very human, biased process. Hume said, when I hear a story about, a dead person coming back to life, I think, well, what's more likely, that a dead person actually came back to life or the person who thinks he saw that happen was biased in his thinking or misperceived. We have a vast experience with humans being deceitful or self-deceitful and misperceiving the world, and we have no
22:22
experience of dead people coming back to life. So, that's more likely. Another one is the "known" and the "unknown". That is, before we say, "look, we know enough about this particular subject to conclusively know that it was a miraculous thing or there's a supernatural explanation", there's so much we don't know about the world. I think it's better to be modest and say let's just leave that open in the level of sort of we don't know yet, rather than
22:49
conclude that there is no natural explanation. Well, the theologians may look at it in exactly the opposite way. They would say that the natural feeling about the world is that there is a God and there is a supernatural and this has been human experience for thousands of years, and then in the last 500 years, arguably, science has come along to take a more limited view, an accurate view but a more limited view, of reality. So, the burden's upon you to say what we have always assumed to
23:19
be the case is not the case. Actually, I think this is a reasonable argument to make, but that there is a very interesting psychological explanation. That humans by nature tend to see design in things, and we were designed by evolution to do that because there is design. It's functional adaptation, which is how evolution works. So, I am willing to concede the point that there is design in nature. And evolution was the bottom-up designer, not a top-down designer from God.
23:48
Either way, I think we evolved to find design in nature. It's there. It is there. So, the natural inclination is to say and conclude that there is design and because we have a big brain and we tend to design things ourselves, we think there must be a higher designer than us. The counter-intuitive thing is the actual explanation, that evolution did it. They're only compatible if you think, well, that's the way God did it. He did it through natural selection and through the forces
24:14
of evolutionary process and so on. Which is perfectly fine. If you're a theist, you should look at that and think, wow, look what God was able to do. Science is helping me understand all the better God's handiwork.
24:31
If there is a God, fallacies to support the existence of God would be an insult to God. If there is no God, fallacies would perpetuate a myth that God exists.
24:45
If you believe in God, or want to believe in God, then you have a higher obligation to beware of fallacies. Watch out for these: God of the Gaps: If there's something we don't understand, then insert God to explain it.
25:02
False premises: If assumptions about God hide logical traps, then good logic will yield false conclusions. Necessary truths that prove God exists: Anything that is necessary will be true whether or not God exists. Belief bias: If you have a prior belief, then you will likely select evidence that conforms to that belief.
25:29
'Either-or' arguments: Like Darwinian evolution or creationism. Ultimate explanations are scientific or personal.
25:39
Personal incredulity: Just because you are awestruck doesn't mean that God is the answer. Fallacies in arguing for God are enemies of God, if there is a God. Watch out for fallacies to keep... closer to truth.
26:08
For complete interviews and for further information, please visit www.closertotruth.com
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