Anti Depression Wellness Wheel

Wellness Wheel (my personal examples)

prayer
mindfulness
deep breathing
music
connect with support
positive affirmations
guided imagery
humor
get little things done, make the bed, do the dishes
(sense of accomplishment)
grounding techniques
journaling
sunshine
walk outdoors
exercise
cheer someone up




Wellness Wheel List
There's the Wheel Of Life which has you score yourself in different categories.  And then there's the Wellness Wheel or Self-Help Wheel which contains suggestions for wellness in each category.


Physical

Safe Housing
Regular Medical Care
Eat Healthy
Exercise
Be Sexual
Get Enough Sleep
Take Vacations
Take Time Off
Massages
Bubble baths
Kiss
Ask For Nurture
Take A Walk
Turn Off Cell
Get 'Me' Time


Psychological

Self-Reflection
Therapy
Journal
Self-Awareness
Sensory Engagement
Aromatherapy
Draw
Paint
Go To Symphony Or Ballet
Relax In The Sun
Garden
Read A Self-Help Book
Join A Support Group
Think About Your Positive Qualities
Practice Asking And Receiving Help


Emotional

Affirmations
Self-Love
Self-Compassion
Cry
Social Justice Engagement
Laugh
Say "I Love You"
Watch A Funny Movie
Find A Hobby
Flirt
Buy Yourself A Present
Cuddle With Your Pet
Tell Yourself "You're Gorgeous!"
Practice Forgiveness


Spiritual

Self-Reflection
Go Into Nature
Find Spiritual Community
Self-Cherish
Meditate
Sing
Dance
Play
Be Inspired
Take Yoga
Play With Children
Bathe In The Ocean
Watch Sunsets
Pray
Find Spiritual Mentor
Volunteer For A Cause
Foster Self-Forgiveness



Personal

Learn Who You Are
Figure Out What You Want In Life
Plan Short And Long-Term Goals
Make A Vision Board
Foster Friendships
Go On Dates
Get Coffee With A Friend
Get Out Of Debt
Just Relax
Write A Poem Or A Book
Spend Time With Your Family
Cook Out
Learn To Play Guitar



Professional

Take Time For lunch
Set Boundaries
Do Not Work Overtime
Leave Work At Work
Do Not Work During Your Time Off
Get Regular Supervision
Get Support Of Colleagues
Take Mental Health Days
Learn To Say NO
Plan Your Next Career Move
Take A Class
Take All Vacation And Sick Days

Anti Depression Guided Meditation

Guided Meditation

deep sigh
relax your jaw and shoulders
sit up straight
your spine is a tree trunk
gently lean back against it
your seat rooted to the earth
ground yourself in this moment
easy breaths smell the air
light a pleasant smile
feel it glowing on your face
feel it twinkle in your eyes
feel it playful in your heart
feel it brighten in your breath
and use it to light your day


List Happy Places like...

cottage guest bed
running down dunes dunes
garage rain storm
wood boat with dad
christmas tree in the dark

Anti Depression Affirmations

Affirmations

We wait, starving for moments of high magic to inspire us, but life is a banquet of common enchantment...

Happiness is...

a long hot shower
looking over bridges
waking up to sunshine
hot soup on a cold day
an outing with my camera
waking up and realizing
you don't have to go into work
18 different colors
oven hot pizza
sock skating around the house
letting go of the thing that make you sad
chocolate chip cookies fresh from the oven
new pillows
making paper boats and
floating them in a puddle
falling leaves
the sound of popcorn in the microwave
becoming fit
papering yourself after a depressing day
the fragrance of the first rains
chasing small children
find a face in a gnarly old potato
adding a task you already did to your 'to do'
list just for the pleasure of crossing it off
using a new razor blade and realizing
how blunt your old one must have been
airconditioning on a hot summer night
watching clouds change shape
waking up really early, peeing,
then going back to bed
watching snowfall through a window
walking barefoot on fresh grass
the first sip of a cold Coke
when you're really hot
snuggling under a blanket when it's cold
finding the remote
remembering that you still
have coffee left in your cup
getting your old password
right on the first guess
suddenly realizing your headache is gone
a morning walk
great people, good wine,
and a meal made with love
finding your missing glasses
saying exactly the same thing
at exactly the same time
a selfie with my dog
no dirty dishes in the sink
street-food
sleeping diagonally
having fun with friends who are idiots
not having to set the alarm for the next day
waking up to a fresh new day
the simple things in life





*****************************




Most worries never happen

When in this world of wonders
I find in self pity I wallow
I roll my eyes and laugh aloud
Freed of such folly to follow

A good laugh and a long sleep are the two best cures for anything

Gratitude turns a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend.

a thankful heart finds blessings like the magnet finds iron

We wait, starving for moments of high magic to inspire us, but life is a banquet of common enchantment.

The moment you start acting like life is a blessing it starts feeling like one.

cultivate a grateful heart with each sip, each bite, each breath.

When you cannot sleep count your blessings instead of sheep

talk to yourself like someone you love

Be quick to forgive, especially yourself.

Let go or be dragged

after a storm comes a calm

When you hate something, you chain yourself to it.

Positive thoughts are both the prayer and the answer to your prayer

what consumes your mind controls you life

forgiveness frees us
thankfulness enriches us
kindness betters us all

Breath

inhale blessings, exhale smiles

If you are depressed you are living in the past.
If you are anxious you are living in the future.
If you are at peace you are living in the present.

no longer forward nor behind
i look in hope and fear
but grateful take the good i find
the best of now and here.

worry poisons the now

we are the light in the dark


.........................................



Self Talk
(first name)

Get fired up

Put your game face on

You got this

Laugh it off

You're doing great

it's showtime


100% survival rate!

be quick to forgive

after the storm is the calm

what controls your mind controls your life


Speak only positive things aloud and to yourself as if to a loved oned.  Be quick to forgive especially yourself

The Origins of Life

https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/reading-a-phylogenetic-tree-the-meaning-of-41956

Abiogenesis or biopoiesis, is the natural process of life arising from non-living matter, such as simple organic compounds.


Synopsis


The Origins of Life


Protocells; Encasing Molecules Without Membranes


The Universe moves in a direction in which entropy increases, yet life is distinguished by its great degree of organization. Therefore, a boundary is needed to separate life processes from nonliving matter... The Dresden droplet discoveries by Brangwynn and collaborators... that they are liquid droplets in subcellular structures... the droplets believed to be from Oparin's 1924 protocell theory and “may still be alive and well, safe within our cells" ...a viable path from nonlife to life starts to come into focus.



Protocells; Fostering Complex Organic Compounds.  


The biophysicist Jeremy England made waves in 2013 with a new theory that cast the origin of life as an inevitable outcome of thermodynamics. England said this restructuring effect of atoms due to entropy, which he calls dissipation-driven adaptation, fosters the growth of complex structures, including living things. exercises in non-equilibrium statistical mechanics...  as long as you can harvest energy from your environment, order will spontaneously arise and self-tune.  



Cell Membranes


Competition for membrane molecules would favour stabilized membranes, suggesting a selective advantage for the evolution of crosslinked fatty acids and even the phospholipids of today. The main advantages of encapsulation include the increased solubility of the contained cargo within the capsule and the storage of energy in the form of a electrochemical gradient.



Before DNA There Was Only RNA  


Ribozymes (ribonucleic acid enzymes) are RNA molecules that are capable of catalyzing specific biochemical reactions, similar to the action of protein enzymes. The 1982 discovery of ribozymes demonstrated that RNA can be both genetic material (like DNA) and a biological catalyst (like protein enzymes), and contributed to the RNA world hypothesis, which suggests that RNA may have been important in the evolution of prebiotic self-replicating systems.
  


DNA-RNA-protein world, LIFE!


"Ur-organism" is the term loosely given to the hypothetical "first life" species, from which all other life presumably evolved. It is therefore the ancestor of the LUA.  It is estimated to have lived some 3.9 to 4.1 billion years ago.




LUCA; To Which All Surviving Life Is Related



The last universal common ancestor (LUCA), is the most recent population of organisms from which all organisms now living on Earth have a common descent. LUCA is the most recent common ancestor of all current life on Earth.



RESEARCH

The Dresden droplet discoveries began in 2009, when Brangwynne and collaborators demystified the nature of little dots known as “P granules” in C. elegans germline cells, which undergo division into sperm and egg cells. During this division process, the researchers observed that P granules grow, shrink and move across the cells via diffusion. The discovery that they are liquid droplets, reported in Science, prompted a wave of activity as other subcellular structures were also identified as droplets. It didn’t take long for Brangwynne and Tony Hyman, head of the Dresden biology lab where the initial experiments took place, to make the connection to Oparin’s 1924 protocell theory. In a 2012 essay about Oparin’s life and seminal book, The Origin of Life, Brangwynne and Hyman wrote that the droplets (proto cells) he theorized about “may still be alive and well, safe within our cells, like flies in life’s evolving amber.”...The primordial plotline hinges, of course, on the outcome of future experiments, which will determine how robust and relevant the predicted droplet division mechanism really is. Can chemicals be found with the right two states, A and B, to bear out the theory? If so, then a viable path from nonlife to life starts to come into focus. The luckiest part of the whole process, in Jülicher’s opinion, was not that droplets turned into cells, but that the first droplet — our globule ancestor — formed to begin with. Droplets require a lot of chemical material to spontaneously arise or “nucleate,” and it’s unclear how so many of the right complex macromolecules could have accumulated in the primordial soup to make it happen. But then again, Jülicher said, there was a lot of soup, and it was stewing for eons. “It’s a very rare event. You have to wait a long time for it to happen,” he said. “And once it happens, then the next things happen more easily, and more systematically.”

https://www.quantamagazine.org/dividing-droplets-could-explain-origin-of-life-20170119/

The biophysicist Jeremy England made waves in 2013 with a new theory that cast the origin of life as an inevitable outcome of thermodynamics. His equations suggested that under certain conditions, groups of atoms will naturally restructure themselves so as to burn more and more energy, facilitating the incessant dispersal of energy and the rise of “entropy” or disorder in the universe. England said this restructuring effect, which he calls dissipation-driven adaptation, fosters the growth of complex structures, including living things. The existence of life is no mystery or lucky break, he told Quanta in 2014, but rather follows from general physical principles and “should be as unsurprising as rocks rolling downhill.”... Eugene Shakhnovich, a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard who supervised England’s undergraduate research, sharply emphasized the divide between his former student’s work and questions in biology. “He started his scientific career in my lab and I really know how capable he is,” Shakhnovich said, but “Jeremy’s work represents potentially interesting exercises in non-equilibrium statistical mechanics of simple abstract systems.” Any claims that it has to do with biology or the origins of life, he added, are “pure and shameless speculations.” Even if England is on the right track about the physics, biologists want more particulars — such as a theory of what the primitive “protocells” were that evolved into the first living cells, and how the genetic code arose. England completely agrees that his findings are mute on such topics. “In the short term, I’m not saying this tells me a lot about what’s going in a biological system, nor even claiming that this is necessarily telling us where life as we know it came from,” he said. Both questions are “a fraught mess” based on “fragmentary evidence,” that, he said, “I am inclined to steer clear of for now.” He is rather suggesting that in the tool kit of the first life- or proto-life-forms, “maybe there’s more that you can get for free, and then you can optimize it using the Darwinian mechanism.” Sarpeshkar seemed to see dissipation-driven adaptation as the opening act of life’s origin story. “What Jeremy is showing is that as long as you can harvest energy from your environment, order will spontaneously arise and self-tune,” he said. Living things have gone on to do a lot more than England and Horowitz’s chemical reaction network does, he noted. “But this is about how did life first arise, perhaps — how do you get order from nothing.”

https://www.quantamagazine.org/first-support-for-a-physics-theory-of-life-20170726/

"Primordial soup" hypothesis

...Certain organic compounds that are necessary building blocks for the evolution of life.. Oparin argued that a "primeval soup" of organic molecules could be created in an oxygenless atmosphere through the action of sunlight. These would combine in ever more complex ways until they formed coacervate droplets. These droplets would "grow" by fusion with other droplets, and "reproduce" through fission into daughter droplets, and so have a primitive metabolism in which factors that promote "cell integrity" survive, and those that do not become extinct. Many modern theories of the origin of life still take Oparin's ideas as a starting point...

"'Coacervation"' is a unique type of electrostatically-driven liquid-liquid phase separation, resulting from association of oppositely charged macro-ions. The term "coacervate" is sometimes used to refer to spherical aggregates of colloidal droplets held together by hydrophobic forces...

This theory proposes that metabolism predated information replication, although the discussion as to whether metabolism or molecules capable of Template replication came first in the origins of life remains open...

One of the most important pieces of experimental support for the "soup" theory came in 1952. Stanley L. Miller and Harold C. Urey performed an experiment that demonstrated how organic molecules could have spontaneously formed from inorganic precursors under conditions like those posited by the Oparin-Haldane hypothesis. The now-famous Miller–Urey experiment used a highly reducing mixture of gases – methane, ammonia, and hydrogen, as well as water vapour – to form basic organic monomers such as amino acids. The mixture of gases was cycled through an apparatus that delivered electrical sparks to the mixture. After one week, it was found that about 10% to 15% of the carbon in the system was then in the form of a racemic mixture of organic compounds, including amino acids, which are the building blocks of proteins. This provided direct experimental support for the second point of the "soup" theory...

the first molecules constituting the earliest cells "were synthesized under natural conditions by a slow process of molecular evolution, and these molecules then organized into the first molecular system with properties with biological order".

Chemical synthesis

While features of self organization and self replication are often considered the hallmark of living systems, there are many instances of abiotic molecules exhibiting such characteristics under proper conditions. Stan Palasek suggested based on a theoretical model that self assembly of ribonucleic acid (RNA) molecules can occur spontaneously due to physical factors in hydrothermal vents. Virus self assembly within host cells has implications for the study of the origin of life, as it lends further credence to the hypothesis that life could have started as self assembling organic molecules.

Protocells

A protocell is a self organized, self ordered, spherical collection of lipids proposed as a stepping stone to the origin of life. A central question in evolution is how simple protocells first arose and differed in reproductive contribution to the following generation driving the evolution of life. Although a functional protocell has not yet been achieved in a laboratory setting, there are scientists who think the goal is well within reach.

Self assembled vesicles are essential components of primitive cells. The second law of thermodynamics requires that the Universe move in a direction in which entropy increases, yet life is distinguished by its great degree of organization. Therefore, a boundary is needed to separate life processes from nonliving matter. Researchers Irene A. Chen and Jack W. Szostak amongst others, suggest that simple physicochemical properties of elementary protocells can give rise to essential cellular behaviours, including primitive forms of differential reproduction competition and energy storage. Such cooperative interactions between the membrane and its encapsulated contents could greatly simplify the transition from simple replicating molecules to true cells. Furthermore, competition for membrane molecules would favour stabilized membranes, suggesting a selective advantage for the evolution of crosslinked fatty acids and even the phospholipids of today. Such microencapsulation would allow for metabolism within the membrane, the exchange of small molecules but the prevention of passage of large substances across it. The main advantages of encapsulation include the increased solubility of the contained cargo within the capsule and the storage of energy in the form of a electrochemical gradient.

RNA world

The RNA world hypothesis describes an early Earth with self-replicating and catalytic RNA but no DNA or proteins. It is generally accepted that current life on Earth descends from an RNA world, although RNA-based life may not have been the first life to exist....

The structure of the ribosome has been called the "smoking gun," as it showed that the ribosome is a ribozyme, with a central core of RNA and no amino acid side chains within 18 angstroms of the active site where peptide bond formation is catalyzed...

The ribosome is a complex molecular machine, found within all living cells, that serves as the site of biological protein synthesis (translation). Ribosomes link amino acids together in the order specified by messenger RNA (mRNA) molecules. Ribosomes consist of two major components: the small ribosomal subunit, which reads the RNA, and the large subunit, which joins amino acids to form a polypeptide chain. Each subunit is composed of one or more ribosomal RNA (rRNA) molecules and a variety of ribosomal proteins. The ribosomes and associated molecules are also known as the translational apparatus...

Ribozymes (ribonucleic acid enzymes) are RNA molecules that are capable of catalyzing specific biochemical reactions, similar to the action of protein enzymes. The 1982 discovery of ribozymes demonstrated that RNA can be both genetic material (like DNA) and a biological catalyst (like protein enzymes), and contributed to the RNA world hypothesis, which suggests that RNA may have been important in the evolution of prebiotic self-replicating systems. The most common activities of natural or in vitro-evolved ribozymes are the cleavage or ligation of RNA and DNA and peptide bond formation. Within the ribosome, ribozymes function as part of the large subunit ribosomal RNA to link amino acids during protein synthesis. They also participate in a variety of RNA processing reactions, including RNA splicing, viral replication, and transfer RNA biosynthesis. Examples of ribozymes include the hammerhead ribozyme, the VS ribozyme, Leadzyme and the hairpin ribozyme. Investigators studying the origin of life have produced ribozymes in the laboratory that are capable of catalyzing their own synthesis from activated monomers under very specific conditions, such as an RNA polymerase ribozyme...

Relatively short RNA molecules have been artificially produced in labs, which are capable of replication. Such replicase RNA, which functions as both code and catalyst provides its own template upon which copying can occur. Jack W. Szostak has shown that certain catalytic RNAs can join smaller RNA sequences together, creating the potential for self-replication...

It had been a firmly established belief in biology that catalysis was reserved for proteins. However, the idea of RNA catalysis is motivated in part by the old question regarding the origin of life: Which comes first, enzymes that do the work of the cell or nucleic acids that carry the information required to produce the enzymes? The concept of "ribonucleic acids as catalysts" circumvents this problem. RNA, in essence, can be both the chicken and the egg...

Depending on the specific definition used, life can be considered to have emerged when RNA chains began to express the basic conditions necessary for natural selection to operate as conceived by Darwin: heritability, variation of type, and differential reproductive output...

The RNA world would have eventually been replaced by the DNA-RNA-protein world...

"Ur-organism" is the term loosely given to the hypothetical "first life" species, from which all other life presumably evolved. The term was used first by Charles Darwin, and has been picked up by various subsequent thinkers addressing the same questions of origin of species. Not to be confused with the Last universal ancestor (LUA), the term "ur-organism" refers to the first universal ancestor common to all life existing on earth today. It is therefore the ancestor of the LUA. The ur-organism is not necessarily the first instance of life arising abiogenically on Earth. As with the concept of the " Mitochondrial Eve, "the existence of the ur-organism does not imply the existence of a population bottleneck or a first organism. It is estimated to have lived some 3.9 to 4.1 billion years ago.

The last universal common ancestor (LUCA), is the most recent population of organisms from which all organisms now living on Earth have a common descent. LUCA is the most recent common ancestor of all current life on Earth...

Genetically sequencing of decendants, suggest that the LUCA inhabited an anaerobic hydrothermal vent setting in a geochemically active environment...

At the beginnings of life, ancestry was not as linear as it is today because the genetic code took time to evolve.Before high fidelity replication, organisms could not be easily mapped on a phylogenetic tree. Not to be confused with the Ur-organism, however, the LUCA lived after the genetic code and at least some rudimentary early form of molecular proofreading had already evolved. It was not the very first cell, but rather, the one whose descendants survived beyond the very early stages of microbial evolution...

Monophyly

In cladistics, a monophyletic group is a taxon (group of organisms) which forms a clade, meaning that it consists of an ancestral species and all its descendants.

Woese argued that the bacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes represent separate lines of descent that diverged early on from an ancestral colony of organisms. One possibility is that this occurred before the evolution of cells, when the lack of a typical cell membrane allowed unrestricted lateral gene transfer, and that the common ancestors of the three domains arose by fixation of specific subsets of genes...

Bacteria common noun bacteria, singular bacterium) constitute a large domain of prokaryotic microorganisms. Typically a few micrometres in length, bacteria have a number of shapes, ranging from spheres to rods and spirals... Bacteria grow to a fixed size and then reproduce through binary fission, a form of asexual reproduction.[99] Under optimal conditions, bacteria can grow and divide extremely rapidly, and bacterial populations can double as quickly as every 9.8 minutes... Unlike cells of animals and other eukaryotes, bacterial cells do not contain a nucleus and rarely harbour membrane-bound organelles. Although the term bacteria traditionally included all prokaryotes, the scientific classification changed after the discovery in the 1990s that prokaryotes consist of two very different groups of organisms that evolved from an ancient common ancestor. These evolutionary domains are called Bacteria and Archaea.

The Archaea (ar-KEE-ə or ar-KAY-ə) constitute a domain and kingdom of single-celled microorganisms. These microbes (archaea; singular archaeon) are prokaryotes, meaning that they have no cell nucleus or any other membrane-bound organelles in their cells... Archaea and bacteria have generally similar cell structure, but cell composition and organization set the archaea apart. Like bacteria, archaea lack interior membranes and organelles.[51] Like bacteria, the cell membranes of archaea are usually bounded by a cell wall and they swim using one or more flagella... Archaea reproduce asexually by binary or multiple fission, fragmentation, or budding; meiosis does not occur...

Archaea were initially classified as bacteria, receiving the name archaebacteria (in the Archaebacteria kingdom), but this classification is outdated. Archaeal cells have unique properties separating them from the other two domains of life, Bacteria and Eukaryota...

Archaea, however, were later discovered in less hostile environments, and are now believed to be more closely related to eukaryotes than bacteria, although many details are still unknown.

A eukaryote (yoo-KARR-ee-oht or yoo-KARR-ee-ət) is any organism whose cells have a nucleus and other organelles enclosed within membranes. Eukaryotes belong to the taxon Eucarya or Eukaryota. The defining feature that sets eukaryotic cells apart from prokaryotic cells (Bacteria and Archaea) is that they have membrane-bound organelles, especially the nucleus, which contains the genetic material and is enclosed by the nuclear envelope. The presence of a nucleus gives eukaryotes their name, which comes from the Greek εὖ (eu, "well" or "true") and κάρυον (karyon, "nut" or "kernel"). Eukaryotic cells also contain other membrane-bound organelles such as mitochondria and the Golgi apparatus. In addition, plants and algae contain chloroplasts. Eukaryotic organisms may be unicellular or multicellular. Only eukaryotes form multicellular organisms consisting of many kinds of tissue made up of different cell types. Eukaryotes can reproduce both asexually through mitosis and sexually through meiosis and gamete fusion.

Researching online about the Ur-organism, the designation given to the 'hypothetical first life species from which all other life presumably evolved', discovering this meme. 'You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.'

https://wiki2.org/en/Abiogenesis

https://wiki2.org/en/Coacervate

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_world

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_universal_common_ancestor

https://wiki2.org/en/Ribosome

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribozyme

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monophyly

Existence of God Arguments (and flaws)

Arguments for and against the existance of God(s) are insightful excersizes about the subject and logic however in the many centuries they have been taking place none have been found to be truly irrefutable and continues to be a matter of faith.  The arguments are refuted and counter refuted to where only one point becomes clear,

"Even if all of the kinds of arguments produced to date are pretty clearly unsuccessful—i.e., not such as ought to give non-theists reason to accept the conclusion that God exists—it remains an open question whether there is some other kind of hitherto undiscovered ontological argument which does succeed. (Perhaps it is worth adding here that there is fairly widespread consensus, even amongst theists, that no known ontological arguments for the existence of God are persuasive. Most categories of ontological argument have some actual defenders; but none has a large following.)" - Graham Oppy

The following arguments and flaws listed are an example of this and are themselves not the final word as there are numerous variations and many more not covered. 

At the wiki link on the Existence of God are lists of links to some of the arguments in more detail. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existence_of_God

Arguments for Existence of God

Beauty, Christological, Consciousness Cosmological (kalām contingency), Degree, Desire, Experience, Fine-tuned universe, Love, Miracles, Morality, Necessary existent, Ontological, Pascal's Wager, Proper basis, Reason, Teleological (natural law watchmaker), Transcendental.


Arguments against Existence of God

747 gambit, Atheist's Wager, Evil, Free will, Hell, Inconsistent revelations, Nonbelief, Noncognitivism, Occam's razor, Omnipotence paradox, Poor design, Russell's teapot.


Arguments for Atheism

Atheist's Wager, Evil God Challenge, Fate of the unlearned, Free will, God of the gaps, Hitchens's razor, Incompatible properties, Inconsistent revelation, Nonbelief, Omnipotence paradox, Poor design, Problem of evil, Problem of Hell, Russell's teapot, Theological noncognitivism, Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit. 




Appendix: 36 ARGUMENTS FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD (and their flaws)
(ostensibly from the character Cass's own book)
*Mystical Hasidic Judaism as well as other segments of Judaism believe that there exist 36 righteous people whose role in life is to justify the purpose of humankind in the eyes of God. Jewish tradition holds that their identities are unknown to each other and that, if one of them comes to a realization of their true purpose, they would never admit it.

1. The Cosmological Argument
2. The Ontological Argument
3. The Argument from Design
    A. The Classical Teleological Argument
    B. The Argument from Irreducible Complexity
    C. The Argument from the Paucity of Benign Mutations
    D. The Argument from the Original Replicator
4. The Argument from the Big Bang
5. The Argument from the Fine-Tuning of Physical Constants
6. The Argument from the Beauty of Physical Laws
7. The Argument from Cosmic Coincidences
8. The Argument from Personal Coincidences
9. The Argument from Answered Prayers
10. The Argument from a Wonderful Life
11. The Argument from Miracles
12. The Argument from the Hard Problem of Consciousness
13. The Argument from the Improbable Self
14. The Argument from Survival After Death
15. The Argument from the Inconceivability of Personal Annihilation
16. The Argument from Moral Truth
17. The Argument from Altruism
18. The Argument from Free Will
19. The Argument from Personal Purpose
20. The Argument from the Intolerability of Insignificance
21. The Argument from the Consensus of Humanity
22. The Argument from the Consensus of Mystics
23. The Argument from Holy Books
24. The Argument from Perfect Justice
25. The Argument from Suffering
26. The Argument from the Survival of the Jews
27. The Argument from the Upward Curve of History
28. The Argument from Prodigious Genius
29. The Argument from Human Knowledge of Infinity
30. The Argument from Mathematical Reality
31. The Argument from Decision Theory (Pascal’s Wager)
32. The Argument from Pragmatism (William James’s Leap of Faith)
33. The Argument from the Unreasonableness of Reason
34. The Argument from Sublimity
35. The Argument from the Intelligibility of the Universe (Spinoza’s God)
36. The Argument from the Abundance of Arguments



1. The Cosmological Argument

    1. Everything that exists must have a cause.

    2. The universe must have a cause (from 1).

    3. Nothing can be the cause of itself.

    4. The universe cannot be the cause of itself (from 3).

    5. Something outside the universe must have caused the universe (from 2 & 4).

    6. God is the only thing that is outside of the universe.

    7. God caused the universe (from 5 & 6).

    8. God exists.

FLAW 1: can be crudely put: Who caused God? The Cosmological Argument is a prime example of the Fallacy of Passing the Buck: invoking God to solve some problem, but then leaving unanswered that very same problem when applied to God himself. The proponent of the Cosmological Argument must admit a contradiction to either his first premise — and say that though God exists, he doesn't have a cause — or else a contradiction to his third premise — and say that God is self-caused. Either way, the theist is saying that his premises have at least one exception, but is not explaining whyGod must be the unique exception, otherwise than asserting his unique mystery (the Fallacy of Using One Mystery To Pseudo-Explain Another). Once you admit of exceptions, you can ask why the universe itself, which is also unique, can't be the exception. The universe itself can either exist without a cause, or else can be self-caused . Since the buck has to stop somewhere, why not with the universe?

FLAW 2: The notion of "cause" is by no means clear, but our best definition is a relation that holds between events that are connected by physical laws. Knocking the vase off the table caused it to crash to the floor; smoking three packs a day caused his lung cancer. To apply this concept to the universe itself is to misuse the concept of cause, extending it into a realm in which we have no idea how to use it. This line of skeptical reasoning, based on the incoherent demands we make of the concept of cause, was developed by David Hume.

COMMENT: The Cosmological Argument, like the Argument from the Big Bang, and The Argument from the Intelligibility of the Universe, are expressions of our cosmic befuddlement at the question: why is there something rather than nothing? The late philosopher Sydney Morgenbesser had a classic response to this question: "And if there were nothing? You'd still be complaining!"

2. The Ontological Argument

    1. Nothing greater than God can be conceived (this is stipulated as part of the definition of "God").

    2. It is greater to exist than not to exist.

    3 . If we conceive of God as not existing, then we can conceive of something greater than God (from 2).

    4. To conceive of God as not existing is not to conceive of God (from 1 and 3).

    5. It is inconceivable that God not exist (from 4).

    6. God exists.

This argument, first articulated by Saint Anselm (1033-1109), the Archbishop of Canterbury, is unlike any other, proceeding purely on the conceptual level. Everyone agrees that the mere existence of a concept does not entail that there are examples of that concept; after all, we can know what a unicorn is and at the same time say "unicorns don't exist." The claim of the Ontological Argument is that the concept of God is the one exception to this rule. The very concept of God, when defined correctly, entails that there is something that satisfies that concept. Although most people suspect that there is something wrong with this argument, it's not so easy to figure out what it is.

FLAW: It was Immanuel Kant who pinpointed the fallacy in the Ontological Argument: it is to treat "existence" as a property, like "being fat" or "having ten fingers." The Ontological Argument relies on a bit of wordplay, assuming that "existence" is just another property, but logically it is completely different. If you really could treat "existence" as just part of the definition of the concept of God, then you could just as easily build it into the definition of any other concept. We could, with the wave of our verbal magic wand, define a trunicorn as "a horse that (a) has a single horn on its head, and (b) exists." So if you think about a trunicorn, you're thinking about something that must, by definition, exist; therefore trunicorns exist. This is clearly absurd: we could use this line of reasoning to prove that any figment of our imagination exists.

COMMENT: Once again, Sydney Morgenbesser had a pertinent remark, this one offered as an Ontological Argument for God's Non-Existence: Existence is such a lousy thing, how could God go and do it?

3. The Argument from Design

    A. The Classical Teleological Argument

    1. Whenever there are things that cohere only because of a purpose or function (for example, all the complicated parts of a watch that allow it to keep time), we know that they had a designer who designed them with the function in mind; they are too improbable to have arisen by random physical processes. (A hurricane blowing through a hardware store could not assemble a watch.)

    2. Organs of living things, such as the eye and the heart, cohere only because they have a function (for example, the eye has a cornea, lens, retina, iris, eyelids, and so on, which are found in the same organ only because together they make it possible for the animal to see.)

    3. These organs must have a designer who designed them with their function in mind: just as a watch implies a watchmaker, an eye implies an eyemaker (from 1 & 2).

    4. These things have not had a human designer.

    5. Therefore, these things must have had a non-human designer (from 3 & 4).

    6. God is the non-human designer (from 5).

    7. God exists.

FLAW: Darwin showed how the process of replication could give rise to the illusion of design without the foresight of an actual designer. Replicators make copies of themselves, which make copies of themselves, and so on, giving rise to an exponential number of descendants. In any finite environment the replicators must compete for the energy and materials necessary for replication. Since no copying process is perfect, errors will eventually crop up, and any error that causes a replicator to reproduce more efficiently than its competitors will result in that line of replicators predominating in the population. After many generations, the dominant replicators will appear to have been designed for effective replication, whereas all they have done is accumulate the copying errors which in the past did lead to effective replication. The fallacy in the argument, then is Premise 1 (and as a consequence, Premise 3, which depends on it): parts of a complex object serving a complex function do not, in fact, require a designer.

In the twenty-first century, creationists have tried to revive the Teleological Argument in three forms:

    B. The Argument from Irreducible Complexity

    1. Evolution has no foresight, and every incremental step must be an improvement over the preceding one, allowing the organism to survive and reproduce better than its competitors.

    2. In many complex organs, the removal or modification of any part would destroy the functional whole. Examples are, the lens and retina of the eye, the molecular components of blood clotting, and the molecular motor powering the cell's flagellum. Call these organs "irreducibly complex."

    3. These organs could not have been useful to the organisms that possessed them in any simpler forms (from 2).

    4. The Theory of Natural Selection cannot explain these irreducibly complex systems (from 1 & 3).

    5. Natural selection is the only way out of the conclusions of the Classical Teleological Argument.

    6. God exists (from 4 & 5 and the Classical Teleological Argument).

This argument has been around since the time of Charles Darwin, and his replies to it still hold.

FLAW 1: For many organs, Premise 2 is false. An eye without a lens can still see, just not as well as an eye with a lens.

FLAW 2: For many other organs, removal of a part, or other alterations, may render it useless for its current function, but the organ could have been useful to the organism for some other function. Insect wings, before they were large enough to be effective for flight, were used as heat-exchange panels. This is also true for most of the molecular mechanisms, such as the flagellum motor, invoked in the modern version of the Argument from Irreducible Complexity.

FLAW 3: (The Fallacy of Arguing from Ignorance): There may be biological systems for which we don't yet know how they may have been useful in simpler versions. But there are obviously many things we don't yet understand in molecular biology, and given the huge success that biologists have achieved in explaining so many examples of incremental evolution in other biological systems, it is more reasonable to infer that these gaps will eventually be filled by the day-to-day progress of biology than to invoke a supernatural designer just to explain these temporary puzzles.

COMMENT: This last flaw can be seen as one particular instance of the more general and fallacious

Argument from Ignorance:

    1.There are things that we cannot explain yet.

    2. Those things must be caused by God.

FLAW: Premise 1 is obviously true. If there weren't things that we could not explain yet, then science would be complete, laboratories and observatories would unplug their computers and convert to condominiums, and all departments of science would be converted to departments in the History of Science. Science is only in business because there are things we have not explained yet. So we cannot infer from the existence of genuine, ongoing science that there must be a God.

    C. The Argument from the Paucity of Benign Mutations

    1. Evolution is powered by random mutations and natural selection.

    2. Organisms are complex, improbable systems, and by the laws of probability any change is astronomically more likely to be for the worse than for the better.

    3. The majority of mutations would be deadly for the organism (from 2).

    4. The amount of time it would take for all the benign mutations needed for the assembly of an organ to appear by chance is preposterously long (from 3).

    5. In order for evolution to work, something outside of evolution had to bias the process of mutation, increasing the number of benign ones (from 4).

    6. Something outside of the mechanism of biological change — the Prime Mutator — must bias the process of mutations for evolution to work (from 5).

    7. The only entity that is both powerful enough and purposeful enough to be the Prime Mutator is God.

    8 .God exists.

FLAW: Evolution does not require infinitesimally improbable mutations, such as a fully formed eye appearing out of the blue in a single generation, because (a) mutations can have small effects (tissue that is slightly more transparent, or cells that are slightly more sensitive to light), and mutations contributing to these effects can accumulate over time; (b) for any sexually reproducing organism, the necessary mutations do not have to have occurred one after the other in a single line of descendants, but could have appeared independently in thousands of separate organisms, each mutating at random, and the necessary combinations could come together as the organisms mate and exchange genes; (c) life on earth has had a vast amount of time to accumulate the necessary mutations (almost four billion years).

    D. The New Argument from The Original Replicator

    1. Evolution is the process by which an organism evolves from simpler ancestors.

    2. Evolution by itself cannot explain how the original ancestor — the first living thing — came into existence (from 1).

    3. The theory of natural selection can deal with this problem only by saying the first living thing evolved out of non-living matter (from 2).

    4. That non-living matter (call it the Original Replicator) must be capable of (i) self-replication (ii) generating a functioning mechanism out of surrounding matter to protect itself against falling apart, and (iii) surviving slight mutations to itself that will then result in slightly different replicators.

    5. The Original Replicator is complex (from 4).

    6. The Original Replicator is too complex to have arisen from purely physical processes (from 5 & the Classical Teleological Argument). For example, DNA, which currently carries the replicated design of organisms, cannot be the Original Replicator, because DNA molecules requires a complex system of proteins to remain stable and to replicate, and could not have arisen from natural processes before complex life existed.

    7. Natural selection cannot explain the complexity of the Original Replicator (from 3 & 6).

    8. The Original Replicator must have been created rather than have evolved (from 7 and the Classical Teleological Argument).

    9. Anything that was created requires a Creator.

    10. God exists.

FLAW 1: Premise 6 states that a replicator, because of its complexity, cannot have arisen from natural processes, i.e. by way of natural selection. But the mathematician John von Neumann showed in the 1950s that it is theoretically possible for a simple physical system to make exact copies of itself from surrounding materials. Since then, biologists and chemists have identified a number of naturally occurring molecules and crystals that can replicate in ways that could lead to natural selection (in particular, that allow random variations to be preserved in the copies). Once a molecule replicates, the process of natural selection can kick in, and the replicator can accumulate matter and become more complex, eventually leading to precursors of the replication system used by living organisms today.

FLAW 2: Even without von Neumann's work (which not everyone accepts as conclusive), to conclude the existence of God from our not yet knowing how to explain the Original Replicator is to rely on The Argument from Ignorance.

4. The Argument from The Big Bang

    1. The Big Bang, according to the best scientific opinion of our day, was the beginning of the physical universe, including not only matter and energy, but space and time and the laws of physics.

    2. The universe came to be ex nihilo (from 1).

    3. Something outside the universe, including outside its physical laws, must have brought the universe into existence (from 2).

    4. Only God could exist outside the universe.

    5. God must have been caused the universe to exist (from 3 & 4).

    6. God exists.

The Big Bang is based on the observed expansion of the universe, with galaxies rushing away from each other. The implication is that if we run the film of the universe backward from the present, the universe must continuously contract, all the way back to a single point. The theory of the Big Bang is that the universe exploded into existence about 14 billion years ago.

FLAW 1: Cosmologists themselves do not all agree that the Big Bang is a "singularity" — the sudden appearance of space, time, and physical laws from inexplicable nothingness. The Big Bang may represent the lawful emergence of a new universe from a previously existing one. In that case, it would be superfluous to invoke God to explain the emergence of something from nothing.

FLAW 2: The Argument From the Big Bang has all the flaws of The Cosmological Argument — it passes the buck from the mystery of the origin of the universe to the mystery of the origin of God, and it extends the notion of "cause" outside the domain of events covered by natural laws (also known as the universe) where it no longer makes sense.

5. The Arguments from the Fine-Tuning of Physical Constants

    1. There are a vast number of physically possible universes.

    2. A universe that would be hospitable to the appearance of life must conform to some very strict conditions: Everything from the mass ratios of atomic particles and the number of dimensions of space to the cosmological parameters that rule the expansion of the universe must be just right for stable galaxies, solar systems, planets, and complex life to evolve.

    3. The percentage of possible universes that would support life is infinitesimally small (from 2).

    4. Our universe is one of those infinitesimally improbable universes.

    5. Our universe has been fine-tuned to support life (from 3 & 4).

    6. There is a Fine-Tuner (from 5).

    7. Only God could have the power and the purpose to be the Fine-Tuner.

    8. God exists.

Philosophers and physicists often speak of "The Anthropic Principle," which comes in several versions, labeled "weak," "strong" and "very strong." All three versions argue that any explanation of the universe must account for the fact that we humans ( or any complex organism that could observe its condition) exist in it. The Argument from Fine-Tuning corresponds to the Very Strong Anthropic Principle. Its upshot is that the upshot of the universe is . . . us. The universe must have been designed with us in mind.

FLAW 1: The first premise may be false. Many physicists and cosmologists, following Einstein, hope for a unified "theory of everything," which would deduce from as-yet-unknown physical laws that the physical constants of our universe had to be what they are. In that case, ours would be the only possible universe. (See also The Argument from the Intelligibility of the Universe,# 35, below).

FLAW 2: Even were we to accept the first premise, the transition from 4 to 5 is invalid. Perhaps we are living in a multiverse (a term coined by William James), a vast plurality (perhaps infinite) of parallel universes with different physical constants, all of them composing one reality. We find ourselves, unsurprisingly (since we are here doing the observing), in one of the rare universe that does support the appearance of stable matter and complex life, but nothing had to have been fine-tuned. Or perhaps we are living in an "oscillatory universe," a succession of universes with differing physical constants, each one collapsing into a point and then exploding with a new big bang into a new universe with different physical constants, one succeeding the other over an infinite time span. Again, we find ourselves, not surprisingly, in one of those time-slices in which the universe does have physical constants that support stable matter and complex life. These hypotheses, which are receiving much attention from contemporary cosmologists, are sufficient to invalidate the leap from 4 to 5.

6. The Argument from the Beauty of Physical Laws

    1. Scientists use aesthetic principles (simplicity, symmetry, elegance) to discover the laws of nature.

    2. Scientist s could only use aesthetic principles successfully if the laws of nature were intrinsically and objectively beautiful.

    3. The laws of nature are intrinsically and objectively beautiful (from 1 & 2).

    4. Only a mind-like being with an appreciation of beauty could have designed the laws of nature.

    5 . God is the only being with the power and purpose to design beautiful laws of nature.

    6. God exists.

FLAW 1: Do we decide an explanation is good because it's beautiful, or do we find an explanation beautiful because it provides a good explanation? When we say that the laws of nature are beautiful, what we are really saying is that the laws of nature are the laws of nature, and thus unify into elegant explanation a vast host of seemingly unrelated and random phenomena. We would find the laws of nature of any lawful universe beautiful. So what this argument boils down to is the observation that we live in a lawful universe. And of course any universe that could support the likes of us would have to be lawful. So this argument is another version of the The Anthropic Principle — we live in the kind of universe which is the only kind of universe in which observers like us could live — and thus is subject to the flaws of Argument #5.

FLAW 2: If the laws of the universe are intrinsically beautiful, then positing a God who loves beauty, and who is mysteriously capable of creating an elegant universe (and presumably a messy one as well, though his aesthetic tastes led him not to), makes the universe complex and incomprehensible all over again. This negates the intuition behind Premise 3, that the universe is intrinsically elegant and intelligible. (See The Argument from the Intelligibility of the Universe, #35 below.)

7. The Argument from Cosmic Coincidences

    1. The universe contains many uncanny coincidences, such as that the diameter of the moon, as seen from the earth is the same as the diameter of the sun, as seen from the earth, which is why we can have spectacular eclipses when the corona of the sun is revealed.

    2. Coincidences are, by definition, overwhelmingly improbable.

    3. The overwhelmingly improbable defies all statistical explanation.

    4. These coincidences are such as to enhance our awed appreciation for the beauty of the natural world.

    5. These coincidences must have been designed in order to enhance our awed appreciation of the beauty of the natural world (from 3 & 4).

    6. Only a being with the power to effect such uncanny coincidences and the purpose of enhancing our awed appreciation of the beauty of the natural world could have arranged these uncanny cosmic coincidences.

    7. Only God could be the being with such power and such purpose.

    8. God exists.

FLAW 1: Premise 3 does not follow from Premise 2. The occurrence of the highly improbable can be statistically explained in two ways. One is when we have a very large sample. A one-in-a-million event is not improbable at all if there are a million opportunities for it to occur. The other is that there is a huge number of occurrences that could be counted as coincidences, if we don't specify them beforehand but just notice them after the fact. (There could have been a constellation that forms a square around the moon; there could have been a comet that appeared on January 1, 2000; there could have been a constellation in the shape of a Star of David, etc. etc. etc.) When you consider how many coincidences are possible, the fact that we observe any one coincidence (which we notice after the fact) is not improbably but likely. And let's not forget the statistically improbable coincidences that cause havoc and suffering, rather than awe and wonder, in humans: the perfect storm, the perfect tsunami, the perfect plague, etc.

FLAW 2: The derivation of Premise 5 from Premises 3 and 4 is invalid: an example of the Projection Fallacy, in which we project the workings of our mind onto the world, and assume that our own subjective reaction is the result of some cosmic plan to cause that reaction. The human brain sees patterns in all kinds of random configurations: cloud formations, constellations, tea leaves, inkblots. That is why we are so good at finding supposed coincidences. It is getting things backwards to say that, in every case in which we see a pattern, someone deliberately put that pattern in the universe for us to see.

COMMENT: Prominent among the uncanny coincidences that figure into this argument are those having to do with numbers. Numbers are mysterious to us because they are not material objects like rocks and tables, but at the same time they seem to be real entities, ones that we can't conjure up with any properties we fancy but that have their own necessary properties and relations, and hence must somehow exist outside us (see The Argument from Our Knowledge of The Infinite, #29, and The Argument from Mathematical Reality, #30 below). We are therefore likely to attribute magical powers to them. And, given the infinity of numbers and the countless possible ways to apply them to the world, "uncanny coincidences" are bound to occur (see FLAW 1). In Hebrew, the letters are also numbers, which has given rise to the mystical art of "gematria," often used to elucidate, speculate, and prophesy about the unknowable.

8. The Argument from Personal Coincidences

    1. People experience uncanny coincidences in their lives (for example, an old friend calling out of the blue just when you're thinking of him, or a dream about some event that turns out to have just happened, or missing a flight that then crashes).

    2. Uncanny coincidences cannot be explained by the laws of probability (which is why we call them uncanny).

    3. These uncanny coincidences, inexplicable by the laws of probability, reveal a significance to our lives.

    4. Only a being who deems our lives significant and who has the power to effect these coincidences could arrange for them to happen.

    5. Only God both deems our lives significant and has the power to effect these coincidences.

    6. God exists.

FLAW 1: The second premise suffers from the major flaw of the Argument from Cosmic Coincidences: a large number of experiences, together with the large number of patterns that we would call "coincidences" after the fact, make uncanny coincidences probable, not improbable.

FLAW 2: Psychologists have shown that people are subject to an illusion called Confirmation Bias. When they have a hypothesis (such as that daydreams predict the future), they vividly notice all the instances that confirm it (the times when they think of a friend and he calls), and forget all the instances that don't (the times when they think of a friend and he doesn't call). Likewise, who among us remembers all the times when we miss a plane and it doesn't crash? The vast number of non-events we live through don't make an impression on us; the few coincidences do.

FLAW 3: There is an additional strong psychological bias at work here: Every one of us treats his or her own life with utmost seriousness. For all of us, there can be nothing more significant than the lives we are living. As David Hume pointed out, the self has an inclination to "spread itself on the world," projecting onto objective reality the psychological assumptions and attitudes that are too constant to be noticed, that play in the background like a noise you don't realize you are hearing until it stops. This form of the Projection Fallacy is especially powerful when it comes to the emotionally fraught questions about our own significance.

9. The Argument from Answered Prayers

    1. Sometimes people pray to God for good fortune, and against enormous odds, their calls are answered. (For example, a parent prays for the life of her dying child, and the child recovers.)

    2. The odds of the beneficial event happening are enormously slim (from 1).

    3. The odds that the prayer would have been followed by recovery out of sheer chance are extremely small (from 2).

    4. The prayer could only have been followed by the recovery if God listened to it and made it come true.

    5. God exists.

This argument is similar to The Argument from Miracles below, except instead of the official miracles claimed by established religion, it refers to intimate and personal miracles.

FLAW 1: Premise 3 is indeed true. However, to use it to infer that a miracle has taken place (and an answered prayer is certainly a miracle) is to subvert it. There is nothing that is less probable than a miracle, since it constitutes a violation of a law of nature (see The Argument from Miracles, #11, below). Therefore, it is more reasonable to conclude that the correlation of the prayer and the recovery is a coincidence than that it is a miracle.

FLAW 2: The coincidence of a person praying for the unlikely to happen and its then happening is, of course, improbable. But the flaws in The Argument from Cosmic Coincidences and The Argument from Personal Coincidences apply here: Given a large enough sample of prayers (the number of times people call out to God to help them and those they love is tragically large), the improbable is bound to happen occasionally. And, given the existence of Confirmation Bias, we will notice these coincidences, yet fail to notice and count up the vastly larger number of unanswered prayers.

FLAW 3: There is an inconsistency in the moral reasoning behind this argument. It asks us to believe in a compassionate God who would be moved to pity by the desperate pleas of some among us — but not by the equally desperate pleas of others among us. Together with The Argument from A Wonderful Life, it appears to be supported by a few cherry-picked examples, but in fact is refuted by the much larger number of counterexamples it ignores: the prayers that go unanswered, the people who do not live wonderful lives. When the life is our own, or that of someone we love, we are especially liable to the Projection Fallacy, and spread our personal sense of significance onto the world at Large.

FLAW 4: Reliable cases of answered prayers always involve medical conditions that we know can spontaneously resolve themselves through the healing powers and immune system of the body, such as recovery from cancer, or a coma, or lameness. Prayers that a person can grow back a limb, or that a child can be resurrected from the dead, always go unanswered. This affirms that supposedly answered prayers are actually just the rarer cases of natural recovery.

10. The Argument from A Wonderful Life

    1. Sometimes people who are lost in life find their way.

    2. These people could not have known the right way on their own.

    3. These people were shown the right way by something or someone other than themselves (from 2).

    4. There was no person showing them the way.

    5. God alone is a being who is not a person and who cares about each of us enough to show us the way.

    6. Only God could have helped these lost souls (from 4 & 5).

    7. God exists.

FLAW 1: Premise 2 ignores the psychological complexity of people. People have inner resources on which they draw, often without knowing how they are doing it or even that they are doing it. Psychologists have shown that events in our conscious lives—from linguistic intuitions of which sentences sound grammatical to moral intuitions of what would be the right thing to do in a moral dilemma—are the end-products of complicated mental manipulations of which we are unaware. So, too, decisions and resolutions  can bubble into awareness without our being conscious of the processes that led to them. These epiphanies seem to announce themselves to us, as if they came from an external guide: another example of the Projection Fallacy.

FLAW 2: The same as FLAW 3 in The Argument from Answered Prayers, #9 above.

11. The Argument from Miracles

    1. Miracles are events that violate the laws of nature.

    2. Miracles can be explained only by a force that has the power of suspending the laws of nature for the purpose of making its presence known or changing the course of human history (from 1).

    3. Only God has the power and the purpose to carry out miracles (from 2).

    4. We have a multitude of written and oral reports of miracles. (Indeed, every major religion is founded on a list of miracles.)

    5. Human testimony would be useless if it were not, in the majority of cases, veridical.

    6. The best explanation for why there are so many reports testifying to the same thing is that the reports are true (from 5).

    7. The best explanation for the multitudinous reports of miracles is that miracles have indeed occurred (from 6).

    8. God exists (from 3 & 7).

FLAW 1: It is certainly true, as Premise 4 asserts, that we have a multitude of reports of miracles, with each religion insisting on those that establish it alone as the true religion. But the reports are not testifying to the same events; each miracle list justifies one religion at the expense of the others. See FLAW 2 in the Argument from Holy Books, #23 below.

FLAW 2: The fatal flaw in The Argument from Miracles was masterfully exposed by David Hume in An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Chapter 10, "On Miracles." Human testimony may often be accurate, but it is very far from infallible. People are sometimes mistaken; people are sometimes dishonest; people are sometimes gullible — indeed, more than sometimes. Since in order to believe that a miracle has occurred we must believe a law of nature has been violated (something for which we otherwise have the maximum of empirical evidence), and we can only believe it on the basis of the truthfulness of human testimony (which we already know is often inaccurate), then even if we knew nothing else about the event, and had no particular reason to distrust the reports of witness, we would have to conclude that it is more likely that the miracle has not occurred, and that there is an error in the testimony, than that the miracle has occurred. (Hume strengthens his argument, already strong, by observing that religion creates situations in which there are particular reasons to distrust the reports of witnesses. "But if the spirit of religion join itself to the love of wonder, there is an end of common sense.")

COMMENT: The Argument from Miracles covers more specific arguments, such as The Argument from Prophets, The Arguments from Messiahs, and the Argument from Individuals with Miraculous Powers.

12. The Argument from The Hard Problem of Consciousness

    1. The Hard Problem of Consciousness consists in our difficulty in explaining why it subjectively feels like something to be a functioning brain. (This is to be distinguished from the so-called Easy Problem of Consciousness, which is not actually easy at all, and is only called so in relation to the intractable Hard Problem. See FLAW 3 below.)

    2. Consciousness (in the Hard-Problem sense) is not a complex phenomenon built out of simpler ones; it can consist of irreducible "raw feels" like seeing red or tasting salt.

    3. Science explains complex phenomena by reducing them to simpler ones, and reducing them to still simpler ones, until the simplest ones are explained by the basic laws of physics.

    4. The basic laws of physics laws describe the properties of the elementary constituents of matter and energy, like quarks and quanta, which are not conscious.

    5. Science cannot derive consciousness by reducing it to basic physical laws about the elementary constituents of matter and energy (from 2, 3, and 4).

    6. Science will never solve the Hard Problem of Consciousness (from 3 and 5).

    7. The explanation for consciousness must lie beyond physical laws (from 6).

    8. Consciousness, lying outside physical laws, must itself be immaterial (from 7).

    9. God is immaterial

    10. Consciousness and God both partake in the same immaterial kind of being (from 8 and 9).

    11. God has not only the means to impart consciousness to us, but also the motive, namely, to allow us to enjoy a good life, and to make it possible for our choices to cause or prevent suffering in others, thereby allowing for morality and meaning.

    12. Consciousness can only be explained by positing that God inserted a spark of the divine into us (from 7, 10, & 11).

    13. God exists.

FLAW 1: Premise 3 is dubious. Science often shows that properties can be emergent: they arise from complex interactions of simpler elements, even if they cannot be found in any of the elements themselves. (Water is wet, but that does not mean that every H¬2 0 molecule it is made of is also wet.) Granted, we do not have a theory of neuroscience that explains how consciousness emerges from patterns of neural activity, but to draw theological conclusions from the currently incomplete state of scientific knowledge is to commit the Fallacy of Arguing from Ignorance.

FLAW 2: Alternatively, the theory of panpsychism posits that consciousness in a low-grade form, what is often called "proto-consciousness," is inherent in matter. Our physical theories, with their mathematical methodology, have not yet been able to capture this aspect of matter, but that may just be a limitation on our mathematical physical theories. Some physicists have hypothesized that contemporary malaise about the foundations of quantum mechanics arise because physics is here confronting the intrinsic consciousness of matter, which has not yet been adequately formalized within physical theories.

FLAW 3: It has become clear that every measurable manifestation of consciousness, like our ability to describe what we feel, or let our feelings guide our behavior (the "Easy Problem" of consciousness) has been, or will be, explained in terms of neural activity (that is, every thought, feeling, and intention has a neural correlate). Only the existence of consciousness itself (the "Hard Problem") remains mysterious. But perhaps the hardness of the hard problem says more about what we find hard — the limitations of the brains of Homo sapiens when it tries to think scientifically — than about the hardness of the problem itself. Just as our brains do not allow us to visualize four-dimensional objects perhaps our brains do not allow us to understand how subjective experience arises from complex neural activity.

FLAW 4: Premise 12 is entirely unclear. How does invoking the spark of the divine explain the existence of consciousness? It is the Fallacy of Using One Mystery To Pseudo-Explain Another.

COMMENT: Premise 11 is also dubious, because our capacity to suffer is far in excess of what it would take to make moral choices possible. This will be discussed in connection with The Argument from Suffering, #25 below.

13. The Argument from The Improbable Self

    1. I exist in all my particularity and contingency: not as a generic example of personhood, not as any old member of Homo sapiens, but as that unique conscious entity that I know as me.

    2. I can step outside myself and view my own contingent particularity with astonishment.

    3. This astonishment reveals that there must be something that accounts for why, of all the particular things that I could have been, I am just this, namely, me (from 1 & 2).

    4. Nothing within the world can account for why I am just this, since the laws of the world are generic: they can explain why certain kinds of things come to be, even (let's assume) why human beings with conscious brains come to be. But nothing in the world can explain why one of those human beings should be me.

    5. Only something outside the world, who cares about me, can therefore account for why I am just this (from 4).

    6. God is the only thing outside the world who cares about each and every one of us.

    7. God exists.

FLAW: Premise 5 is a blatant example of the Fallacy of Using One Mystery To Pseudo-Explain Another. Granted that the problem boggles the mind, but waving one's hands in the direction of God is no solution. It gives us no sense of how God can account for why I am this thing and not another.

COMMENT: In one way, this argument is reminiscent of the Anthropic Principle.  There are a vast number of people who could have been born. One's own parents alone could have given birth to a vast number of alternatives to oneself—same egg, different sperm;   different egg, same sperm; different egg, different sperm. Granted, one gropes for a reason for why it was, against these terrific odds, that oneself came to be born. But there may be no reason; it just happened. By the time you ask  this question, you already are existing in a world in which you were born. Another analogy: the odds that the phone company would have given you your exact number  are minuscule. But it had to give you some number, so asking after the fact why it should be that number is silly. Likewise, the child your parents conceived had to be someone. Now that you're born, it's no mystery why it should be you; you're the one asking the question.

14. The Argument from Survival after Death

    1. There is empirical evidence that people survive after death: patients who flat-line during medical emergencies report an experience of floating over their bodies and seeing glimpses of a passage to another world, and can accurately report what happened around their bodies while they were dead to the world.

    2. A person's consciousness can survive after the death of his or her body (from 1)

    3. Survival after death entails the existence of an immaterial soul.

    4. The immaterial soul exists (from 2 & 3).

    5. If an immaterial soul exists, then God must exist (from Premise 12 in The Argument from the Hard Problem of Consciousness, #12, above).

    6. God exists.

FLAW: Premise 5 is vulnerable to the same criticisms that were leveled against Premise 12 in the Argument from the Hard Problem of Consciousness. Existence after death no more implies God's existence than our existence before death does.

COMMENT: Many, of course, would dispute Premise 1. The universal experiences of people near death, such as auras and out-of-body experiences, could be hallucinations resulting from oxygen deprivation in the brain. In addition, miraculous resurrections after total brain death, and accurate reports of conversations and events that took place while the brain was not functioning, have never been scientifically documented, and are informal, secondhand examples of testimony of miracles. They are thus vulnerable to the same flaws pointed out in The Argument from Miracles. But the argument is fatally flawed even if Premise 1 is granted.

15. The Argument from the Inconceivability of Personal Annihilation

    1. I cannot conceive of my own annihilation: as soon as I start to think about what it would be like not to exist, I am thinking, which implies that I would exist (as in Descartes' Cogito ergo sum), which implies that I would not be thinking about what it is like not to exist.

    2. My annihilation is inconceivable (from 1).

    3. What cannot be conceived, cannot be.

    4. I cannot be annihilated (from 2 & 3).

    5. I survive after my death (from 4)

    The argument now proceeds on as in the argument from Survival After Death, only substituting in 'I' for 'a person,' until we get to:
    6. God exists.

    

FLAW 1: Premise 2 confuses psychological inconceivability with logical inconceivability.  The sense in which I can't conceive of my own annihilation is like the sense in which I can't conceive of those whom I love may betray me—a failure of the imagination, not an impossible state of affairs. Thus Premise 2 ought to read "My annihilation is inconceivable  to me.", which is a fact about what my brain can conceive, not a fact about what exists.

FLAW 2: Same as Flaw 3 from The Argument from the Survival of Death.

COMMENT: Though logically unsound, this is among the most powerful psychological impulses to believe in a soul, and an afterlife, and God. It genuinely is difficult—not to speak of disheartening— to conceive of oneself not existing!

16. The Argument from Moral Truth

    1. There exist objective moral truths. (Slavery and torture and genocide are not just distasteful to us, but are actually wrong.)

    2. These objective moral truths are not grounded in the way the world is but rather in the way that the world ought to be. (Consider: should white-supremacists succeed, taking over the world and eliminating all who don't meet their criteria for being existence-worthy, their ideology still would be morally wrong. It would be true, under this hideous counterfactual, that the world ought not to be the way they have made it.)

    3. The world itself — the way that it is, the laws of science that explain why it is that way — cannot account for the way that the world ought to be.

    4. The only way to account for morality is that God established morality (from 2 and 3).

    5. God exists.

FLAW 1: The major flaw of this argument is revealed in a powerful argument that Plato made famous in the  Euthyphro. Reference to God does not help in the least to ground the objective truth of morality. The question is: why did God choose the moral rules he did?  Did he have a reason justifying his choice that, say, giving alms to the poor is good, while  genocide is wrong? Either he had a good reason or he didn't. If he did, then his reasons, whatever they are, can provide the grounding for moral truths for us, and God himself is redundant. And if he didn't have a good reason, then his choices are arbitrary—he could just as easily have gone the other way, making charity bad and genocide good—and we would have no reason to take his choices seriously. According to theEuthyphro argument, then, the Argument from Moral Truth is another example of The Fallacy of Passing the Buck. The hard work of moral philosophy consists in grounding morality in some version of the Golden Rule: that I cannot be committed to my own interests mattering in a way that yours do not just because I am me and you are not.

FLAW 2: Premise 4 is belied by the history of religion, which shows that the God from which people draw their morality (for example, the God of the Bible and the Koran) did not establish what we now recognize to be morality at all. The God of the Old Testament commanded people to keep slaves, slay their enemies, execute blasphemers and homosexuals, and commit many other heinous acts. Of course, our interpretation of which aspects of Biblical morality to take seriously has grown more sophisticated over time, and we read the Bible selectively and often metaphorically. But that is just the point: we must be consulting some standards of morality that do not come from God in order to judge which aspects of God's word to take literally and which aspects to ignore.

COMMENT: Some would question the first premise, and regard its assertion as a flaw of this argument. Slavery and torture and genocide are wrong by our lights, they would argue, and conflict with certain values we hold dear, such as freedom and happiness. But those are just subjective values, and it is obscure to say that statements that are consistent with those values are objectively true in the same way that mathematical or scientific statements can be true. But the argument is fatally flawed even if Premise 1 is granted.

17. The Argument from Altruism

    1. People often act altruistically — namely, against their interests. They help others, at a cost to themselves, out of empathy, fairness, decency, and integrity.

    2. Natural selection can never favor true altruism, because genes for selfishness will always out-compete genes for altruism (recall that altruism, by definition, exacts a cost to the actor).

    3. Only a force acting outside of natural selection and intending for us to be moral could account for our ability to act altruistically (from 2).

    4. God is the only force outside of natural selection that could intend us to be moral.

    5. God must have implanted the moral instinct within us (from 3 & 4).

    6. God exists.

FLAW 1: Theories of the evolution of altruism by natural selection have been around for decades and are now widely supported by many kinds of evidence. A gene for being kind to one's kin, even if it hurts the person doing the favor, can be favored by evolution, because that gene would be helping a copy of itself that is shared by the kin. And a gene for conferring a large benefit to a non-relative at a cost to oneself can evolve if the favor-doer is the beneficiary of a return favor at a later time. Both parties are better off, in the long run, from the exchange of favors.

Some defenders of religion do not consider these theories to be legitimate explanations of altruism, because a tendency to favor one's kin, or to trade favors, are ultimately just forms of selfishness for one's genes, rather than true altruism. But this is a confusion of the original phenomenon: we are trying to explain why people are sometimes altruistic, not why genes are altruistic. (We have no reason to believe that genes are ever altruistic in the first place!) Also, in a species with language, namely humans, committed altruists develop a reputation for being altruistic, and thereby win more friends, allies, and trading partners. This can give rise to selection for true, committed, altruism, not just the tit-for-tat exchange of favors.

FLAW 2: We have evolved higer mental faculties, such as self-reflection and logic, that allow us to reason about the world, to persuade other people to form alliances with us, to learn from our mistakes, and to achieve other feats of reason. Those same faculties, when they are honed through debate, reason, and knowledge, can allow us to step outside ourselves, learn about other people's point of view, and act in a way that we can justify as maximizing everyone's well-being. We are capable of moral reasoning because we are capable of reasoning in general.

FLAW 3: In some versions of the Argument from Altruism, God succeeds in getting people to act altruistically because he promises them a divine reward and threatens them with divine retribution. People behave altruistically to gain a reward or avoid a punishment in the life to come. This argument is self-contradictory. It aims to explain how people act without regard to their self-interest, but then assumes that there could be no motive for acting altruistically other than self-interest.

18. The Argument from Free Will

    1. Having free will means having the freedom to choose our actions, rather than their being determined by some prior cause.

    2. If we don't have free will, then we are not agents, for then we are not really acting, but rather we're being acted upon. (That's why we don't punish people for involuntary actions—such as a teller who hands money to a bank robber at gunpoint,  or a driver who injures a pedestrian after a defective tire blows out.)

    3. To be a moral agent means to be held morally responsible for what one does.

    4. If we can't be held morally responsible for anything we do then the very idea of morality is meaningless.

    5. Morality is not meaningless.

    6. We have free will (from 2- 5).

    7. We, as moral agents, are not subject to the laws of nature, in particular, the neural events in a genetically and environmentally determined brain (from 1 and 6).

    8. Only a being who is apart from the laws of nature and partakes of the moral sphere could explain our being moral agents (from 7).

    9. Only God is a being who is apart from the laws of nature and partakes of the moral sphere.

    10. Only God can explain our moral agency (from 8 & 9).

    11. God exists.

FLAW 1: This argument, in order to lead to God, must ignore the paradoxical Fork of Free Will.  Either my actions are predictable (from my genes, my upbringing, my brain state, my current situation, and so on), or they are not. If they are predictable, then there is no reason to deny that they are caused, and we would not have free will. So they must be unpredictable, in other words, random. But if our behavior is random, then in what sense can it be attributable to us at all?  If it really is a random event when I  give the infirm man my seat in the subway, then in what sense is itme to whom this good deed should be attributed? If the action isn't caused by my psychological states, which are themselves caused by other states, then in one way is it really my action?  And what good would it do to insist on moral responsibility, if our choices are random, and cannot be predicted from prior events (such as growing up in a society that holds people responsible)? This leads us back to the conclusion that we, as moral agents must be parts of the natural world-- the very negation of 7.

FLAW 2: Premise 10 is an example of the Fallacy of Using One Mystery to Pseudo-Explain Another. It expresses, rather than dispels, the confusion we feel when faced with the Fork of Free Will. The paradox has not been clarified in the least by introducing God into the analysis.

COMMENT: Free will is yet another quandary that takes us to the edge of our human capacity for understanding. The concept is baffling, because our moral agency seems to demand both that our actions be determined, and also that they not be determined.

19. The Argument from Personal Purpose

    1. If there is no purpose to a person's life, then that person's life is pointless.

    2. Human life cannot be pointless.

    3. Each human life has a purpose (from 1 & 2).

    4. The purpose of each individual person's life must derive from the overall purpose of existence.

    5. There is an overall purpose of existence (from 3 and 4)

    

    6. Only a being who understood the overall purpose of existence could create each person according to the purpose that person is meant to fulfill.

    7. Only God could understand the overall purpose of creation.

    8. There can be a point to human existence only if God exists (from 6 & 7).

    9. God exists.

FLAW 1: The first premise rests on a confusion between the purpose of an action and the purpose of a life. It is human activities that have purposes—or don't.  We study for the purpose of educating and supporting ourselves.  We eat right and exercise for the purpose of being healthy.  We warn children not to accept  rides with strangers for the purpose of keeping them safe.  We donate to charity for the purpose of helping the poor (just as we would want someone to help us if we were poor.) The notion of a person's entire life serving a purpose, above and beyond the purpose of all the person's choices, is obscure. Might it mean the purpose for which the person was born? That implies that some goal-seeking agent decided to bring our lives into being to serve some purpose. Then who is that goal-seeking agent? Parents often purposively have children, but we wouldn't want to see a parent's wishes as the purpose of the  child's life.   If the goal-seeking agent is God, the argument becomes circular: we make sense of the notion of "the purpose of a life" by stipulating that the purpose is whatever God had in mind when he created us, but then argue for the existence of God because he is the only one who could have designed us with a purpose in mind.

FLAW 2: Premise 2 states that human life cannot be pointless. But of course it could be pointless in the sense meant by this argument: lacking a purpose in the grand scheme of things. It could very well be the there is no grand scheme of things because there is no Grand Schemer. By assuming that there is a grand scheme of things, it assumes that there is a schemer whose scheme it is, which circularly assumes the conclusion.

COMMENT: It's important not to confuse the notion of "pointless" in Premise 2 with notions like "not worth living" or "expendable."  It is probably confusions of this sort that give Premise 2 its appeal.  But we can very well maintain that each human life is precious—is worth living, is not expendable—without maintaining that each human life has a purpose in the overall scheme of things.

20. The Argument from the Intolerability of Insignificance

    1. In a million years nothing that happens now will matter.

    2. By the same token, anything that happens at any point in time will not matter from the point of view of some other time a million years distant from it into the future.

    3. No point in time can confer mattering on any other point, for each suffers from the same problem of not mattering itself (from 2).

    4. It is intolerable (or inconceivable, or unacceptable) that in a million years nothing that happens now will matter.

    5. What happens now will matter in a million years (from 4).

    6. It is only from the point of view of eternity that what happens now will matter even in a million years (from 3).

    7. Only God can inhabit the point of view of eternity.

    8. God exists.

FLAW: Premise 4 is illicit: it is of the form "This argument must be correct, because it is intolerable that this argument is not correct." The argument is either circular, or an example of the Fallacy of Wishful Thinking. Maybe we won't matter in a million years, and there's just nothing we can do about it. If that is the case, we shouldn't declare that it is intolerable—we just have to live with it. Another way of putting it is: we should take ourselves seriously (being mindful of what we do, and the world we leave our children and grandchildren), but we shouldn't take ourselves that seriously, and arrogantly demand that we must matter in a million years.

21. The Argument from the Consensus of Humanity

    1. Every culture in every epoch has had theistic beliefs.

    2. When peoples, widely separated by both space and time, hold similar beliefs, the best explanation is that those beliefs are true.

    3. The best explanation for why every culture has had theistic beliefs is that those beliefs are true.

    4. God exists.

FLAW: 2 is false. Widely separated people could very well come up with the same false beliefs.  Human nature is universal, and thus prone to universal illusions and shortcomings of perception, memory, reasoning, and objectivity. Also , many of the needs and terrors and dependencies of the human condition (such as the knowledge of our own mortality, and the attendant desire not to die) are universal.   Our beliefs don't arise only from well-evaluated reasoning, but from wishful thinking, self-deception, self-aggrandizement, gullibility, false memories, visual illusions, and other mental glitches. Well-grounded beliefs may be the exception rather than the rule when it comes to psychologically fraught beliefs, which tend to bypass rational grounding and spring instead from unexamined emotions.  The fallacy of arguing that if an idea is universally held then it must be true was labeled by the ancient logicians consensus gentium.

22. The Argument from the Consensus of Mystics

    1. Mystics go into a special state in which they seem to see aspects of reality that elude everyday experience.

    2. We cannot evaluate the truth of their experiences from the viewpoint of everyday experience (from 1)

    3. There is a unanimity among mystics as to what they experience.

    4. When there is unanimity among observers as to what they experience, then unless they are all deluded in the same way, the best explanation for their unanimity is that their experiences are true.

    5. There is no reason to think that mystics are all deluded in the same way.

    6. The best explanation for the unanimity of mystical experience is that what mystics perceive is true (from 4 & 5).

    7. Mystical experiences unanimously testify to the transcendent presence of God.

    8. God exists.

FLAW 1: Premise 5 is disputable. There is indeed reason to think mystics might be deluded in similar ways. The universal human nature that refuted the Argument from the Consensus of Humanity entails that the human brain can be stimulated in unusual ways that give rise to universal (but not objectively correct) experiences. The fact that we can stimulate the temporal lobes of non-mystics and induce mystical experiences in them is evidence that mystics might indeed all be deluded in similar ways. Certain drugs can also induce feelings of transcendence, such as an enlargement of perception beyond the bounds of effability, a melting of the boundaries of the self, a joyful expansion out into an existence that seems to be all One, with all that Oneness pronouncing Yes upon us. Such experiences, which, as William James points out, are most easily attained by getting drunk, are of the same kind as the mystical: "The drunken consciousness is one bit of the mystic consciousness." Of course, we do not exalt the stupor and delusions of drunkenness because weknow what caused them. The fact that the  same effects can overcome a person when we know what caused them (and hence don't call the experience "mystical") — is reason to suspect that the causes of mystical experiences also lie within internal excitations of the brain having nothing to do with perception.

FLAW 2: The struggle to put the ineffable contents of abnormal experiences into language inclines the struggler toward pre-existing religious language, which is the only language that most of us have been exposed to which overlaps with the unusual sensations of an altered state of consciousness. This observation casts doubt on Premise 7.See also The Argument from Sublimity, #34 below.

23. The Argument from Holy Books

    1. There are holy books that reveal the word of God.

    2. The word of God is necessarily true.

    3. The word of God reveals the existence of God.

    4. God exists.

FLAW 1: This is a circular argument if ever there was one. The first three premises cannot be maintained unless one independently knows the very conclusion to be proved, namely that God exists.

FLAW 2: A glance at the world's religions shows that there are numerous books and scrolls and doctrines and revelations that all claim to reveal the word of God. But they are mutually incompatible. Should I believe that Jesus is my personal savior? Or should I believe that God made a covenant with the Jews requiring every Jew to keep the commandments of the Torah? Should I believe that Mohammad was Allah's last prophet and that Ali, the prophet's cousin and husband of his daughter Fatima, ought to have been the first caliph, or that Mohammad was Allah's last prophet and that Ali was the fourth and last caliph? Should I believe that the resurrected prophet Moroni dictated the Book of Mormon to Joseph Smith? Or that Ahura Mazda, the benevolent Creator, is at cosmic war with the malevolent Angra Mainyu? And on and on it goes. Only the most arrogant provincialism could allow someone to believe that the holy documents that happen to be held sacred by the clan he was born into are true, while all the documents held sacred by the clans he wasn't born into are false.

24. The Argument from Perfect Justice

    1. This world provides numerous instances of imperfect justice — bad things happening to good people and good things happening to bad people.

    2. It violates our sense of justice that imperfect justice may prevail.

    3. There must be a transcendent realm in which perfect justice prevails (from 1 and 2).

    4. A transcendent realm in which perfect justice prevails entails the Perfect Judge.

    5. The Perfect Judge is God.

    6. God exists.

FLAW: This is a good example of the Fallacy of Wishful Thinking. Our wishes for how the world should be need not be true; just because we want there to be some realm in which perfect justice applies does not mean that there is such a realm. In other words, there is no way to pass from Premise 2 to Premise 3 without the Fallacy of Wishful Thinking.

25. The Argument from Suffering

    1. There is much suffering in this world.

    3. Some suffering (or at least its possibility) is a demanded by human moral agency: if people could not choose evil acts that cause suffering, moral choice would not exist.

    4.Whatever suffering cannot be explained as the result of human moral agency must also have some purpose (from 2 & 3).

    5. There are virtues — forbearance, courage, compassion, and so on — that can only develop in the presence of suffering. We may call them "the virtues of suffering."

    6. Some suffering has the purpose of our developing the virtues of suffering (from 5).

    7. Even taking 3 and 6 into account, the amount of suffering in the world is still enormous — far more than what is required for us to benefit from suffering.

    8. Moreover, there are those who suffer who can never develop the virtues of suffering--children, animals, those who perish in their agony.

    9. There is more suffering than we can explain by reference to the purposes that we can discern (from 7 & 8).

    10 There are purposes for suffering that we cannot discern (from 2 and 9).

    11. Only a being who has a sense of purpose beyond ours could provide the purpose of all suffering (from 10).

    12. Only God could have a sense of purpose beyond ours.

    13. God exists.

FLAW: This argument is  a sorrowful one, since it highlights the most intolerable feature of our world, the excess of suffering. The suffering in this world is excessive in both its intensity and its prevalence, often undergone by those who can never gain anything from it. This is a powerful argument against the existence of a compassionate and powerful deity.   It is only the Fallacy of Wishful Thinking, embodied in Premise 2, that could make us presume that what is psychologically intolerable cannot be the case.

26. The Argument from the Survival of The Jews

    1. The Jews introduced the world to the idea of the one God, with his universal moral code

    2. The survival of the Jews, living for milliennia without a country of their own, and facing a multitude of enemies that sought to destroy not only their religion but all remnants of the race, is a historical unlikelihood.

    3. The Jews have survived against vast odds (from 2).

    4. There is no natural explanation for so unlikely an event as the survival of the Jews (from 3).

    5. The best explanation is that they have some transcendent purpose to play in human destiny (from 1 and 4).

    6. Only God could have assigned a transcendent destiny to the Jews.

    7. God exists.

FLAW 1: The fact that the Jews, after the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans, had no country of their own made it more likely, rather than less likely, that they would survive as a people. If they had been concentrated in one country, they would surely have been conquered by one of history's great empires, as happened to other vanished tribes. But a people dispersed across a vast diaspora is more resilient, which is why other stateless peoples, like the Parsis and Roma, have also survived for millennia, often against harrowing odds. Moreover, the Jews encouraged cultural traits — such as literacy, urban living, specialization in middleman occupations, and an extensive legal code to govern their internal affairs --that gave them further resilience against the vicissitudes of historical change. The survival of the Jews, therefore, is not a miraculous improbability.

COMMENT: The persecution of the Jews need not be seen as a part of a cosmic moral drama. The unique role that Judaism played in disseminating monotheism, mostly through the organs of its two far more popular monotheistic offshoots, Christianity and Islam, has bequeathed to its adherents an unusual amount of attention, mostly negative, from adherents of those other monotheistic religions.

27. The Argument from The Upward Curve of History

    1. There is an upward moral curve to human history (tyrannies fall; the evil side loses in major wars; democracy, freedom, and civil rights spread).

    2. Natural selection's favoring of those who are fittest to compete for resources and mates has bequeathed humankind selfish and aggressive traits.

    3. Left to their own devices, a selfish and aggressive species could not have ascended up a moral curve over the course of history (from 2).

    4.Only God has the power and the concern for us to curve history upward.

    5. God exists.

FLAW: Though our species has inherited traits of selfishness and aggression, we have also inherited capacities for empathy, reasoning, and learning from experience. We have also inherited language, and with it a means to pass on the lessons we have learned from history. And so humankind has slowly reasoned its way toward a broader and more sophisticated understanding of morality, and more effective institutions for keeping peace. We make moral progress as we do scientific progress, through reasoning, experimentation, and the rejection of failed alternatives.

28. The Argument from Prodigious Genius

    1. Genius is the highest level of creative capacity, the level which, by definition, defies explanation.

    2. Genius does not happen by way of natural psychological processes (from 1).

    3. The cause of genius must lie outside of natural psychological processes (from 2).

    4. The insights of genius have helped in the cumulative progress of humankind — scientific, technological, philosophical, moral, artistic, societal, political, spiritual.

    5. The cause of genius must both lie outside of natural psychological processes and be such as to care about the progress of humankind (from 3 and 4).

    6. Only God could work outside of natural psychological processes and create geniuses to light the path of humankind.

    7. God exists.

FLAW 1: The psychological traits that go into human accomplishment, such as intelligence and perseverance, are heritable. By the laws of probability, rare individuals will inherit a concentrated dose of those genes. Given a nurturing cultural context, these individuals will, some of the time, exercise their powers to accomplish great feats. Those are the individuals we call geniuses. We may not know enough about genetics, neuroscience, and cognition to explain exactly what makes for a Mozart or an Einstein, but exploiting this gap to argue for supernatural provenance is an example of The Fallacy of Arguing from Ignorance.

FLAW 2: Human genius is not consistently applied to human betterment. Consider weapons of mass destruction, computer viruses, Hitler's brilliantly effective rhetoric, or those criminal geniuses (for example electronic thieves) who are so cunning that they elude detection.

29. The Argument from Human Knowledge of Infinity

    1. We are finite, and everything with which we come into physical contact is finite.

    2. We have a knowledge of the infinite, demonstrably so in mathematics.

    3. We could not have derived this knowledge of the infinite from the finite, from anything which we are and come in contact with (from 1).

    4. Only something itself infinite could have implanted knowledge of the infinite in us ( from 2 and 3).

    5. God would want us to have a knowledge of the infinite, both for the cognitive pleasure it affords us and because it allows us to come to know him, who is himself infinite.

    6. God is the only entity both that is infinite and that could have an intention of implanting the knowledge of the infinite within us (from 4 & 5).

    7. God exists.

FLAW: There are certain computational procedures governed by what logicians call recursive rules. A recursive rule is one that refers to itself, and hence it can be applied to its own output ad infinitum. For example, we can define a natural number recursively: 1 is a natural number and if you add 1 to a natural number, the result is a natural number. We can apply this rule an indefinite number of times and thereby generate an infinite series of natural numbers. Recursive rules allow a finite system (a set of rules, a computer, a brain) to reason about an infinity of objects, refuting Premise 3.

COMMENT: In 1931 the young logician Kurt Gödel published a paper proving a result called the Incompleteness Theorem (actually there are two). Basically, what Gödel demonstrated is that recursive rules cannot capture all of arithmetic. So though the flaw discussed above is sufficient to invalidate Premise 3 , it should not be understood as suggesting that all of our mathematical knowledge is reducible to recursive rules.

30. The Argument from Mathematical Reality

    1. Mathematical truths are necessarily true. (There is no possible world in which, say, 2 plus 2 does not equal 4, or in which the square root of 2 can be expressed as the ratio of two whole numbers.)

    2. The truths that describe our physical world, no matter how fundamental, are empirical, requiring observational evidence. (So, for example, we await some empirical means to test string theory, in order to find out whether we live in a world of eleven dimensions.)

    3. Truths that require empirical evidence are not necessary truths. (We require empirical evidence because there are possible worlds in which these are not truths, and so we have to test that ours is not such a world.)

    4. The truths of our physical world are not necessary truths (from 2 and 3).

    5. The truths of our physical world cannot explain mathematical truths (from 1 and 4).

    6. Mathematical truths exist on a different plane of existence from physical truths (from 5).

    7. Only something which itself exists on a different plane of existence from the physical can explain mathematical truths (from 6). 8. Only God can explain mathematical truths (from 7).

    9. God exists.

Mathematics is derived through pure reason — what the philosophers call a priori reason — which means that it cannot be refuted by any empirical observations. The fundamental question in philosophy of mathematics is: how can mathematics be true but not empirical? Is it because mathematics describes some trans-empirical reality — as mathematical realists believe — or is it because mathematics has no content at all and is a purely formal game consisting of stipulated rules and their consequences? The Argument from Mathematical Reality assumes, in its third premise, the position of mathematical realism, which isn't a fallacy in itself; many mathematicians believe it, some of them arguing that it follows from Gödel's incompleteness theorems (see the COMMENT in The Argument from Human Knowledge of Infinity, #30 above). This argument, however, goes further and tries to deduce God's existence from the trans-empirical existence of mathematical reality.

FLAW 1: The inference of 5, from 1 and 4, does not take into account the formalist response to the non-empirical nature of mathematics.

FLAW 2: Even if one, Platonistically, accepts the derivation of 5 and then 6, there is something fishy about proceeding onward to 7, with its presumption that something outside of mathematical reality must explain the existence of mathematical reality. Lurking within 7 is the hidden premise: mathematical truths must be explained by reference to non-mathematical truths. But why? If God can be self-explanatory, as this argument presumes, why then can't mathematical reality be self-explanatory — especially since the truths of mathematics are, as this argument asserts, necessarily true?

FLAW 3: Mathematical reality — if indeed it exists — is, admittedly, mysterious. But invoking God does not dispel this puzzlement; it is an instance of "The Fallacy of Using One Mystery to Pseudo-Explain Another." The mystery of God's existence is often used, by those who assert it, as an explanatory sink hole.

31.The Argument from Decision Theory (Pascal's Wager)

    1. Either God exists or God doesn't exist.

    2. A person can either believe that God exists or believe that God doesn't exist(from 1).

    3. If God exists and you believe, you receive eternal salvation.

    4. If God exists and you don't believe, you receive eternal damnation.

    5. If God doesn't exist and you believe, you've been duped, have wasted time in religious observance, and have missed out on decadent enjoyments.

    6. If God doesn't exist, and you don't believe, then you have avoided a false belief.

    7. You have much more to gain by believing in God than not believing in him, and much more to lose by not believing in God than believing in him (from, 3, 4, 5, & 6)

    8. It is more rational to believe that God exists than to believe that he doesn't exist (from 7).

Believe
   
Eternal salvation     You've been duped, missed out on some sins
Don't Believe
   
Eternal damnation     You got it right

This unusual argument does not justify the conclusion that "God exists." Rather it argues that it is rational to believe that God exists, given that we don't know whether he exists.

FLAW 1: The "believe" option in Pascal's wager can be interpreted in two ways.

One is that the wagerer genuinely has to believe, deep down, that God exists; in other words, it is not enough to mouth a creed, or merely act as if God exists. According to this interpretation, God, if He exists, can peer into a person's soul and discern the person's actual convictions. If so, the kind of "belief" that Pascal's wager advises — a purely pragmatic strategy, chosen because the expected benefits exceed the expected costs — would not be enough. Indeed, it's not even clear that this option is coherent: if one chooses to believe something because of the consequences of holding that belief, rather than being intuitively convinced of it, is it really a belief, or just an empty vow?

The other interpretation is that it is enough to act in the way that traditional believers act: say prayers, go to services, recite the appropriate creed, and go through the other motions of religion.

The problem is that Pascal's wager offers no guidance as to which prayers, which services, whichcreed, to live by. Say I chose to believe in the Zoroastrian cosmic war between Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu to avoid the wrath of the former, while the real fact of the matter is that God gave the Torah to the Jews, and I am thereby inviting the wrath of Yahweh (or vice-versa). Given all the things I could "believe" in, I am in constant danger of incurring the negative consequences of disbelief even though I choose the "belief" option. The fact that Blaise Pascal stated his wager as two stark choices, putting the outcomes in blatantly Christian terms — eternal salvation and eternal damnation — reveals more about his own upbringing than they do about the logic of belief. The wager simply codifies his particular "live options," to use William James's term, for the only choices that seem possible to a given believer.

FLAW 2: Pascal's wager assumes a petty, egotistical, and vindictive God who punishes anyone who does not believe in him. But the great monotheistic religions all declare that "mercy" is one of God's essential traits. A merciful God would surely have some understanding of why a person may not believe in him (if the evidence for God were obvious, the fancy reasoning of Pascal's wager would not be necessary), and so would extend compassion to a nonbeliever. (Bertrand Russell, when asked what he would have to say to God if, despite his philosophical atheism, he were to die and face his Creator, responded, "Oh, Lord, why did you not provide more evidence?') The nonbeliever therefore should have nothing to worry about — falsifying the negative payoff in the lower-left-hand cell of the matrix.

FLAW 3: The calculations of expected value in Pascal's wager omit a crucial part of the mathematics: the probabilities of each of the two columns, which have to be multiplied with the payoff in each cell to determine the expected value of each cell. If the probability of God's existence (ascertained by other means) is infinitesimal, then even if the cost of not believing in him is high, the overall expectation may not make it worthwhile to choose the "believe" row (after all, we take many other risks in life with severe possible costs but low probabilities, such as boarding an airplane). One can see how this invalidates Pascal's Wager by considering similar wagers. Say I told you that a fire-breathing dragon has moved into the next apartment and that unless you set out a bowl of marshmallows for him every night he will force his way into your apartment and roast you to a crisp. According to Pascal's wager, you should leave out the marshmallows. Of course you don't, even though you are taking a terrible risk in choosing not to believe in the dragon, because you don't assign a high enough probability to the dragon's existence to justify even the small inconvenience.

32. The Argument from Pragmatism

(William James's Leap of Faith)

    1. The consequences for the believer's life of believing should be considered as part of the evidence for the truth of the belief (just as the effectiveness of a scientific theory in its practical applications is considered evidence for the truth of the theory). Call this the pragmatic evidence for the belief.

    2. Certain beliefs effect a change for the better in the believer's life — the necessary condition being that they are believed.

    3. The belief in God is a belief that effects a change for the better in a person's life.

    4. If one tries to decide whether or not to believe in God based on the evidence available, one will never get the chance to evaluate the pragmatic evidence for the beneficial consequences of believing in God (from 2 and 3).

    5. One ought to make 'the leap of faith' (the term is James's) and believe in God, and only then evaluate the evidence (from 1 and 4).

This argument can be read out of William James's classic essay "The Will to Believe." The first premise , as presented here, is a little less radical than James's pragmatic definition of truth in general, according to which a proposition is true if believing that it is true has a cumulative beneficial effect on the believer's life. The pragmatic definition of truth has severe problems, including possible incoherence: in evaluating the effects of the belief on the believer, we have to know the truth about what those effects are, which forces us to fall back on the old-fashioned notion of truth. To make the best case for The Argument from Pragmatism, therefore, the first premise is here understood as claiming only that the pragmatic consequences of belief are a relevant source of evidence in ascertaining the truth, not that they can actually be equated with the truth.

FLAW 1: What exactly does effecting "a change for the better on the believer's life" mean? For an antebellum Southerner, there was more to be gained in believing that slavery is morally permissible than in believing it heinous. It often doesn't pay to be an iconoclast or revolutionary thinker, no matter how much truer your ideas are than the ideas opposing you. It didn't improve Galileo's life to believe that the earth moved around the sun rather than that the sun and the heavens revolve around the earth. (Of course, you could say that it's always intrinsically better to believe something true rather than something false, but then you're just using the language of the pragmatist to mask a non-pragmatic notion of truth.)

FLAW 2: The Argument from Pragmatism implies an extreme relativism regarding the truth, because the effects of belief differ for different believers. A profligate, impulsive drunkard may have to believe in a primitive retributive God who will send him to Hell if he doesn't stay out of barroom fights, whereas a contemplative mensch may be better off with an abstract deistic presence who completes his deepest existential world view. But either there is a vengeful God who sends sinners to Hell or there isn't. If one allows pragmatic consequences to determine truth, then truth becomes relative to the believer, which is incoherent.

FLAW 3: Why should we only consider the pragmatic effects on the believer's life? What about the effects on everyone else? The history of religious intolerance, including inquisitions, fatwas, and suicide bombers,  suggests that the effects on one person's life of another person's believing in God can be pretty grim.

FLAW 4: The pragmatic argument for God suffers from the first flaw of The Argument from Decision Theory (#31 above) — namely the assumption that the belief in God is like a faucet that one can turn on and off as the need arises. If I make the leap of faith in order to evaluate the pragmatic consequences of belief, then if those consequences are not so good, can I leap back again to disbelief? Isn't a leap of faith a one-way maneuver? "The will to believe" is an oxymoron: beliefs are forced on a person (ideally, by logic and evidence); they are not chosen for their consequences.

33. The Argument from the Unreasonableness of Reason

    1. Our belief in reason cannot be justified by reason, since that would be circular.

    2. Our belief in reason must be accepted on faith (from 1).

    3. Every time we exercise reason we are exercising faith (from 2).

    4. Faith provides good rational grounds for beliefs (since it is, in the final analysis, necessary even for the belief in reason — from 3).

    5. We are justified in using faith for any belief that is so important to our lives that not believing it would render us incoherent (from 4).

    6. We cannot avoid faith in God if we are to live coherent moral and purposeful lives.

    7. We are justified in believing that God exists (from 5 & 6).

    8. God exists.

Reason is a faculty of thinking, the very faculty of giving grounds for our beliefs. To justify reason would be to try to give grounds for the belief: "We ought to accept the conclusions of sound arguments." Let's say we produce a sound argument for the conclusion that "we ought to accept the conclusions of sound arguments." How could we legitimately accept the conclusion of that sound argument without independently knowing the conclusion? Any attempt to justify the very propositions that we must use in order to justify propositions is going to land us in circularity.

FLAW 1: This argument tries to generalize the inability of reason to justify itself to an abdication of reason when it comes to justifying God's existence. But the inability of reason to justify reason is a unique case in epistemology, not an illustration of a flaw of reason that can be generalized to some other kind of belief — and certainly not a belief in the existence of some entity with specific properties such as creating the world or defining morality.

Indeed, one could argue that the attempt to justify reason with reason is not circular, but rather, unnecessary. One already is, and always will be, committed to reason by the very process one is already engaged in, namely reasoning. Reason is non-negotiable; all sides concede it. It needs no justification, because it is justification. A belief in God is not like that at all.

FLAW 2: If one really took the unreasonability of reason as a license to believe things on faith, then which things should one believe in? If it is a license to believe in a single God who gave his son for our sins, why isn't it just as much a license to believe in Zeus and all the other Greek gods, or the three major gods of Hinduism, or the angel Moroni? For that matter, why not Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy? If one says that there are good reasons to accept some entities on faith, while rejecting others, then one is saying that it is ultimately reason, not faith, that must be invoked to justify a belief.

FLAW 3: Premise 6, which claims that a belief in God is necessary in order to have a purpose in one's life, or to be moral, has already been challenged in the discussions of The Argument from Moral Truth (#16 above) and The Argument from Personal Purpose (#19 above).

34. The Argument from Sublimity

    1. There are experiences that are windows into the wholeness of existence — its grandeur, beauty, symmetry, harmony, unity, even its goodness.

    2. We glimpse a benign transcendence in these moments.

    3. Only God could provide us with a glimpse of benign transcendence.

    4. God exists.

FLAW: An experience of sublimity is an aesthetic experience Aesthetic experience can indeed be intense and blissful, absorbing our attention so completely while exciting our pleasure that they seem to lift us right out of ourselves. Aesthetic experiences vary in their strength, and when they are overwhelming, we grope for terms like "transcendence" to describe the overwhelmingness. Yet for all that, aesthetic experiences are still, more than likely, internal excitations of the brain, as we see from the fact that ingesting recreational drugs can bring on even more intense experiences of transcendence. And the particular triggers for natural aesthetic experiences are readily explicable from the evolutionary pressures that have shaped the perceptual systems of human beings. An eye for sweeping vistas, dramatic skies, bodies of water, large animals, flowering and fruiting plants, and strong geometric patterns with repetition and symmetry, was necessary to orient attention to aspects of the environment that were matters of life and death to the species as it evolved in its natural environment. The identification of a blissfully aesthetic experience with a glimpse into benign transcendence is an example of The Projection Fallacy, dramatic demonstrations of our spreading ourselves onto the world. This is most obvious when the experience gets fleshed out into the religious terms that come most naturally to the particular believer, such as a frozen waterfall being seen by a Christian as a manifestation of the Christian trinity. One does not detract anything from the sublimity of aesthetic experiences by seeing them for what they are, namely sublime aesthetic experiences. Music, too, produces such experiences, though there we know exactly who the creators were.

35. The Argument from the Intelligibility of the World

(Spinoza's God)

    1. All facts must have explanations.

    2. The fact that there is a universe at all — and that it is this universe, with just these laws of nature — has an explanation (from 1).

    3.There must, in principle, be a Theory of Everything that explains why just this universe, with these laws of nature, exists (from 2. Note that this premise should not be interpreted as entailing that we have the capacity to come up with a Theory of Everything; it may elude the cognitive abilities we have.)

    4. If The Theory of Everything explains everything, it explains why it is the Theory of Everything.

    5. The only way that the Theory of Everything could explain why it is the Theory of Everything is if it is itself necessarily true (i.e. true in all possible worlds).

    6. The Theory of Everything is necessarily true (from 4 & 5).

    7. The universe, understood in terms of the Theory of Everything, exists necessarily and explains itself (from 6).

    8. That which exists necessarily and explains itself is God (a definition of "God").

    9. The universe is God (from 7 & 8).

    10. God exists.

Whenever Einstein was asked whether he believed in God, he responded that he believed in "Spinoza's God." This argument presents Spinoza's God. It is one of the most elegant and subtle arguments for God's existence, demonstrating where one ends up if one rigorously eschews the Fallacy of Invoking One Mystery to Pseudo-Explain Another: one ends up with the universe, and nothing but the universe: a universe which itself provides all the answers to all the questions one can pose about it. A major problem with the argument, however, in addition to the flaws discussed below, is that it is not at all clear that it is God whose existence is being proved. Spinoza's conclusion is that the universe that is described by the laws of nature simply is God. Perhaps the conclusion should, rather, be that the universe is different from what it appears to be — no matter how arbitrary and chaotic it may appear, it is in fact perfectly lawful and necessary, and therefore worthy of our awe. But is its awe-inspiring lawfulness reason enough to regard it as God? Spinoza's God is sharply at variance with all other divine conceptions.

The argument has only one substantive premise, its first one, which, though unproved, is not unreasonable; it is, in fact, the claim that the universe itself is thoroughly reasonable.  Though this first premise can't be proved, it is the guiding faith of many physicists (including Einstein).  It is the claim that everything must have an explanation; even the laws of nature, in terms of which processes are explained, must have an explanation. In other words, there has to be an explanation for why it is these laws of nature rather than some other, which is another way of asking for why it is this world rather than some other.

FLAW: The first premise can be challenged. Our world could conceivably be one in which randomness and contingency have free reign, no matter what the intuitions of some scientists are.  Maybe some things just are ("stuff happens"), including the fundamental laws of nature. Philosophers sometimes call this just- is-ness "contingency" and, if the fundamental laws of nature are contingent, then even if everything that happens in the world is explainable by those laws, the laws themselves couldn't be explained.   There is a sense in which this argument recalls The Argument from the Improbable Self.  Both demand explanations for just this-ness, whether of just this universe or just this me.

The Argument from the Intelligibility of the Universe fleshes out the consequences of the powerful first premise, but some might regard the argument as a reductio ad absurdum  of that premise.

COMMENT: Spinoza's argument, if sound, invalidates all the other arguments, the ones that try to establish the existence of a more traditional God—that is, a God who stands distinct from the world described by the laws of nature, as well as distinct from the world of human meaning, purpose, and morality. Spinoza's argument claims that any transcendent God, standing outside of that for which he is invoked as explanation, is invalidated by the first powerful premise, that all things are part of the same explanatory fabric. The mere coherence of The Argument from The Intelligibility of The Universe, therefore, is sufficient to reveal the invalidity of the other theistic arguments. This is why Spinoza, although he offered a proof of what he called "God," is often regarded as the most effective of all atheists.

36. The Argument from The Abundance of Arguments

    1. The more arguments there are for a proposition, the more confidence we should have in it, even if every argument is imperfect. (Science itself proceeds by accumulating evidence, each piece by itself being inconclusive.)

    2. There is not just one argument for the existence of God, but many — thirty-five (with variations) in this list alone.

    3. The arguments, though not flawless, are persuasive enough that they have convinced billions of people, and for millennia have been taken seriously by history's greatest minds.

    4. The probability that each one is true must be significantly greater than zero (from 3).

    5. For God not to exist, every one of the arguments for his existence must be false, which is extremely unlikely (from 4 ). Imagine, for the sake of argument, that each argument has an average probability of only .2 of being true. Then the probability that all 35 are flase is (1-0.2)^35 = .0004, an extremely low probability.

    6. It is extremely probable that God exists (from 5).

FLAW 1: Premise 3 is vulnerable to t he same criticisms as the Argument from the Consensus of Humanity. The flaws that accompany each argument may be extremely damaging, even fatal, notwithstanding the fact that they have been taken seriously by many people throughout history. In other words, the average probability of any of the arguments being true may be far less than .2, in which case the probability that all of them are false could be high.

FLAW 2: This argument treats all the other arguments as being on an equal footing, distributing equal probabilities to them all, and rewarding all of them, too, with the commendation of being taken seriously by history's greatest minds. Many of the arguments on this list have been completely demolished by such minds as David Hume and Baruch Spinoza: their probability is zero.

COMMENT: The Argument from the Abundance of Arguments may be the most psychologically important of the thirty-six. Few people rest their belief in God on a single, decisive logical argument. Instead, people are swept away by the sheer number of reasons that make God's existence seem plausible — holding out an explanation as to why the universe went to the bother of existing, and why it is this particular universe, with its sublime improbabilities, including us humans; and, even more particularly, explaining the existence of each one of us who know ourselves as a unique conscious individual, who makes free and moral choices that grant meaning and purpose to our lives; and, even more personally, giving hope that desperate prayers may not go unheard and unanswered, and that the terrors of death can be subdued in immortality. Religions, too, do not justify themselves with a single logical argument, but rather set themselves up to minister to all of these needs and provide a space in people's lives where large questions that escape answers all come together and co-mingle, a co-mingling that, in itself, can give the illusion that they are being answered.

http://www.randomhouse.com/pantheon/authors/goldstein/36%20Arguments.pdf



Introduction by John Brockman (excerpt)

"What is this stuff, you ask one another," says the narrator in Rebecca Newberger Goldstein's new novel 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, "and how can it still be kicking around, given how much we already know?"

We have very short memories.

It was in April 2006 that President George W. Bush, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, and Senator John McCain all announced their support of teaching Intelligent Design in public schools. This assault on science and on the separation of church and state was a mobilizing moment for the Edge community which responded to this initiative with book of essays by 16 eminent scientists entitled Intelligent Thought, excerpts from which appeared on Edge.

https://www.edge.org/conversation/rebecca_newberger_goldstein-36-arguments-for-the-existence-of-god





Some common but less academic arguments and replies


The Bible says that atheism is wrong.

"The Bible also says some guy's donkey talked."

If you believe in God and are wrong, then it's no big deal, but if you don't believe in God and are wrong, you'll be punished eternally, so it's not a good idea to be an atheist.

"What if you're wrong that God prefers unthinking self-righteous toadies to honest people who try and live a good life?"

Deep down you really believe in God.

"Deep down, you really don't believe that."

You're only saying you're an atheist to rebel against authority.

"And if the Beatles grew long hair to rebel against authority, then they really had no hair -- is that what you're saying?"

You probably are an atheist because you had a bad experience as a child.

"You probably worship God because you hate your real father."

There are no atheists in foxholes.

"Probably because we have less excuses to start wars."

If you don't believe in God, you'll go to Hell!

"If you don't stop believing in God right now, I'll punch you in the face."

Why are you mad at God?

"Because he's supposed to be all good but he doesn't even have the common decency to exist."

Atheists are Satanic.

"Just like theists are agnostic?"

Without God there is no morality.

"Are we talking about the God that ordered Moses to kill babies and asked people to set animals on fire because he liked the smell?"

God is perfect, and He couldn't be perfect if He didn't exist, which proves that He exists.

"No, it just proves he isn't perfect."

People who follow Jesus are good, so you should follow Jesus.

"Chemotherapy can cure cancer, so everyone should have chemotherapy."

Jesus was either a liar, a crazy person, or the son of God. He spoke against liars, and his behavior wasn't crazy, so the only remaining possibility is that he was the son of God.

"So you're telling me that if a polite, honest-looking, well-spoken, nicely dressed man walked up to you on the street and introduced himself as the earthly incarnation of God, you'd figure he probably is? Have you considered the possibility that you're the one who is crazy?"

There were eye witnesses that Jesus worked miracles.

"There are eye witnesses that Bigfoot exists, Uri Geller works miracles, and aliens abduct people."

Most people who know about Jesus believe in Him.

"If most people jumped off a bridge..."

I know from personal experience that God exists.

"No he doesn't. He told me so himself."

God wants you to believe in him without rational proof.

"Then he's certainly doing a fine job of not tempting me with evidence."

You say you don't believe that God exists, but the word "God" is meaningless if there is no such thing, so you are admitting that God exists even as you deny his existence.

"That reminds me, I don't believe you owe me $100."

Hitler was an atheist.

"I don't know about Hitler's religion, but I do know that he was heterosexual, so can I assume you're against that, too?"

Einstein believed in God. Do you think you're smarter than Einstein?

"If he believed in God, yes."

The founding fathers intended the United States to be a Christian nation. Atheists aren't welcome.

"Are you sticking with the whole 'slavery' thing, too?"

The universe is so complex that someone must have designed it.

"I don't know -- that sentence was fairly complex but there was obviously not much thought behind it."

Atheists believe in evolution, but if we teach our children evolution in public school they will believe that they are no better than animals and will grow up immoral.

"I've met public school children. Most of them aren't any better than animals."

Evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics.

"No, but God does."

Well, evolution's only a theory.

"So's your old man."

How can you not believe in Jesus Christ when the evidence is overwhelming?

"Well, Jesus's divinity is only a theory."

There's proof that God exists, like the Bible and miracles.

"If your twenty-year-old son still believes in Santa Claus because he read a book about Santa visiting and presents magically appeared on Christmas morning when he was a child, would you praise him for having faith in the face of overwhelming evidence or call him an idiot?"

My parents raised me to believe in God. Are you calling my parents liars?

"Can we talk about the Tooth Fairy for a minute?"

There are so many wonderful things in the world, how can you say there is no God?

"It's really pretty easy: 'There is no god.' See?"

There is so much beauty in the world that only God could have created it.

"My wife's beautiful, and my mother-in-law made her."

If there is no Heaven, then where do you go when you die?

"The same place you were before you were conceived, I assume."

You can't prove God doesn't exist.

"So?"

You don't know everything.

"Do you?"

You can't see air, but you believe in it.

"I can't see ignorance, but I can smell it. Right now, in fact."

You can't see love, but you believe in it.

"And I agree that god, like love, is just a concept."

God made His image appear in this tortilla!

(Eats tortilla)

You call yourself an atheist but you have faith. Everyone has faith in something.

"I have faith that this conversation isn't going anywhere. Bye!"

http://www.iamanatheist.com/arguments.html