prove to me that god exists
TRANSCRIPT
-
8/9/2019 Prove to Me That God Exists
1/7
Pro ve to Me that God Exists
W ednesday, October 26, 2005
Prove to me that God exists and I'll believe it!
This is slightly revised version of talk given to Rice University Undergraduate Philosophy Society, 11/4/91.
I take the title I have been given for this talk to express the attitude of certain people who do not altogether
rule out the possibility that there is a God but see nothing likely to convince them that there is. That is the
typical attitude of the agnostic. And so it is to the agnostic that I shall address myself.
Not, however, to just any agnostic; for there are some who cannot be fruitfully addressed. Some, for
example, cannot say what, if anything, would convince them that there is a God. I have found that most
such agnostics so limit what might count as evidence or proof as to preclude evidence or proof that there is
a God. That kind of narrow-mindedness is usually impervious to argument. But most of you are probably
not guilty of it, for it is quite rareexcept among academics who pride themselves on their broad-
mindedness.
More often, agnostics have an mistaken idea of what would count as God. Consider the painful fact that welive in a world in which the wicked often prosper and the innocent often suffer. Many agnostics think that
even if there is some entity responsible for the way the world in general is, that entity is unworthy of
worship and obedienceand hence cannot be God. That is one way of posing the so-called "problem of
evil," a problem that theists must and do confront. But it ought at least to occur to such agnostics that if
there is an all-powerful, all-knowing, perfectly good God, he might see fit to arrange the universe quite
differently from how they would in his place and do so in a way that is unclear to them. Until they take that
possibility seriously, their idea of God remains so anthropomorphic that it would be pointless to try to
persuade them with arguments that something called "God" exists.
Admittedly, some agnostics are free of such errors. Their idea of what would count as God is pretty close to
that of the theistic mainstream, and they have a more or less defensible notion of what would count as a
compelling case that there is such a God. It's just that they have yet to find any case compelling. Such open-
minded, clear-headed agnostics are the only sort to whom a theist may usefully propound an argument
that there is a God. Some of you, I hope, count as such agnostics.
Now the question what would succeed in persuading anyone in particular that God exists is a highly
personal one. So, all I can do as a theist in a setting such as this is to try to present an argument that is
cogent in an objective sense: one that really does establish its conclusion (or at least render it probable),
and thus should persuade those who understand it even if, for whatever reason, some people remain
unpersuaded. Such an argument would be a proof that God exists. It might fail to prove toyouthe open-
minded, clear-headed agnosticthat God exists; but if my argument is objectively cogent, then the failure
is as likely to be yours as mine.
Very well then: what criteria must an objectively cogent argument satisfy? It is easy to answer that in
broad terms. The first criterion is that ofvalidity: an argument is valid just in case its conclusion follows
necessarily from its premises if it is a deductive argument, or its conclusion is rendered highly probable by
its premises if it is an inductive argument. The second is that ofsoundness: an argument is sound just in
case it is valid and all its premises are true. The third criterion is that of independent decidability. If an
argument is to be objectively cogent, then the question w hether it is sound must be decidable by some
reliable, publicly accessible method that does not require prior knowledge that the conclusion is true. That
essential since an argument that we can't certify as sound without prior knowledge of the conclusion is not
useful as an argument.
Now we can decide the validity of many sorts of arguments by the reliable, publicly accessible methods of
deductive and inductive logic; and it is in fact quite easy to produce a valid argument for nearly any
meaningful claim. And so my main task is to show how the premises of some valid argument that God exists
can be verified by some reliable, publicly available method that does not require prior knowledge that God
exists. The main difficulties may be raised in two questions: by what method might we look to verify such
premises, and by whose judgment would such premises thereby be verified? I cannot answer those
questions tonight; I can only point you in the right direction by constructing the right sort of argument,
i.e., one that I think satisfies the criteria I have cited and allows for good answers to the questions I have
posed.
Before proceeding further, though, I must dispose of a major red herring: believers as well as unbelievers
Report Abuse Next Blog Create Blog Sign In
http://www.blogger.com/ -
8/9/2019 Prove to Me That God Exists
2/7
often reject what I want to do as impossible, irrelevant, or both. Indeed most people these days are given
to saying that belief in God is a matter of faith rather than of reason. And though I find that most who say so
are unclear about what they mean either by 'faith' or by 'reason', they are clearly negative about those
instances of reasoning that consist in philosophical arguments for the existence of God. That is only to be
expected from unbelievers; but ironically enough, believers will often go further.
Some Christians, for instance, accept as revealed truth the doctrine of total depravity, thus holding that
human reason unaided by revelation is too corrupt to attain any knowledge that it would facilitate one's
salvation to have. From that point of view, arguing as I shall do appears almost as a kind of impiety. And
even many believers who would admit that my aim is not impious are inclined to consider it irrelevant.
How many people, after all, come to believe in God primarily as a result of philosophical arguments? You
may be sure they are few. To most people who pay the matter any notice at all, natural theologyi.e., that
branch of metaphysics which aims to achieve knowledge of God without taking anything from divine
revelation as a premiseseems like a quaint if occasionally irritating sideshow to the real business of
ordering their minds, hearts, and lives.
Well, natural theology is not for everyone. But it is for many of you, else you wouldn't be here. You want to
know just how much there really is in the whole business. I think there is a lot in it. That is what I want to
begin showing you.
As many of you probably know, there are traditional clusters of arguments for the existence of God. Each
cluster comprises many arguments, but the clusters themselves are surprisingly few. In my view,
arguments from each cluster contribute to what the literature terms a cumulative-case argument for
theism, and it is just such an argument that I shall present in briefest outline at the end. In aid of
formulating such an argument, I shall consider only the four clusters most widely discussed byphilosophers: the modal, the cosmological, the teleological, and the moral. I want to frame arguments from
each of these four as briefly as possible, so as to show as briefly as possible why each is valuable but none
are objectively cogent by themselves.
Modal arguments are sometimes classed together under the heading 'the ontological argument'; but for
reasons I cannot discuss here, I shal l leave aside ontological arguments that are properly so-called. Modal
arguments are called such because they employ the logical modalities of possibility and necessity, and may
be generically framed in the following simple argument:
(1) If God possibly exists, then God necessarily exists
(2) God possibly exists
(3) Therefore, God necessarily exists.
The first premise may seem odd, but it has to be true. It means that if anything could be God, then there is a
God that exists eternally, uncausably, and unpreventably. That is because God cannot be a contingent
being: God is not the sort of thing that happens to exist but might not have, or that happens not to exist but
might have. God cannot come to be or cease to be: God cannot be caused to exist, or just pop into
existence, or die. However extraordinary, no such being could be God, but would be only one more item of
our world. The same goes for any alleged God who undergoes change; such a being would not be God, but
another constituent of our world, though perhaps a pretty special one. Whatever would count as God
would have to be eternal, uncausable, and unpreventable, so that it always exists, never really changes,
and could neither come into existence nor pass out of existence. Hence, if it could exist at all, it must exist.
The simple modal argument I have presented is obviously valid. But since Hume, many philosophers have
been inclined to reject its conclusion, and hence its second premise, as false on logical grounds alone. Their
argument goes like this: no existential statement (i.e., no statement to the effect that such-and-such exists)
could be a necessary truth; for a necessary truth is one whose denial entails a contradiction, and no
statement of the form 'x exists' entails a contradiction; hence no statement of the form 'x necessarily exists'
is true; hence it cannot be true that God necessarily exists. And given (1) as well , we may also conclude that
God does not possibly existi.e., that (2) is false.
But that argument is itself invalid. For from the factif it is a factthat no existential statement is such that
its denial entails a contradiction, it does not follow that any statement of the form 'x necessarily exists' is
false. In particular, to say that God necessarily exists is not to imply that 'God does not exist' entails a
contradiction; it is rather to imply that, given the sort of thing God would be, God exists eternally,uncausably, and unpreventably if at all. The word 'necessarily' in this context is not about the modal status
of the statement 'God exists', but is rather a shorthand description of how God exists if God exists at all. So if
(3) is false, that is not because it is saying something that logic alone can teach us is false.
The real problem with the modal argument is that there seems to be no reliable, publicly available method
for verifying premise (2) that does not require prior knowledge that God exists. In general, we find out that
a thing possibly exists (i.e., could exist) in one of two ways. The first is to extrapolate from what one knows
http://www.blogger.com/ -
8/9/2019 Prove to Me That God Exists
3/7
to exist. That, e.g., is what astronomers do when they hold that there could be life on some planet orbiting
some other star; given what we know about the physical universe, that is a reasonable view, even if it turns
out to be false. The second way to find out whether something could exist is simply to find out that the
thing does exist, from which it follows trivially that the thing could exist. Obviously, to verify (2) by finding
out that God exists would render the modal argument useless as an argument. But from what may we
extrapolate in order to make it reasonable to think that God could exist? God is not the sort of thing, like
life on a planet, that might not have existed if indeed it does exist, or that exists by first coming to be. In
view of this, some theists would argue that God, though not physically possible, is logically possible. Thus,
given a complete description of the concept of God, we would find that God is, in a certain sense, like
planets but unlike things that are both black-all-over and not-black-all-over. Like the former and unlike the
latter, the claim that there is a God would not entail a contradiction; hence God could exist (is possible).
But of course, there is no agreement on just what such a description would entail or on whether we could
fully understand it even if we could agree on all that it would entail. Short of knowing that there is a God,
there seems to be no reliable way to find out just what God is; if so, then one cannot know that God's
existence is possible without knowing that God exists. It seems we are at a loss here. By itself, the modal
argument does not get us very farthough it does highlight something about what God is that must always
be kept in mind.
The next two clusters of argumentsthe cosmological and the teleologicalare the best-known, and
involve essentially extrapolatory moves. Their aim is not to establish directly that God could exist but that
God does exist. The cosmological argument may be generically framed as follows:
(1) Whatever exists, and is contingent, has been caused to exist by something other than and not part of
itself
(2) The world exists and is contingent
(3) Therefore, something not of the world has caused the world to exist.
Even if sound, of course, such an argument does not establish that the cause of the world is God. But for the
moment I want to leave that issue aside and assess the argument for what it purports to do, not criticize it
for failing to do what it does not purport to do.
The cosmological argument as I have presented it is clearly valid. But are both its premises true? Consider
(2) first. To say that the world is contingent entails that the world is not the sort of thing that exists
eternally, uncausably, and unpreventably. Obviously, whether that's true or not depends on what theworld is. Suppose, for example, that the world consists only of matter-energy and the changes matter-
energy undergoes, and that matter-energy is neither created nor destroyed. Then one might be inclined to
affirm that the world is necessary not contingent. But even if the world consists only of matter-energy and
the changes it undergoes, and even if the first law of thermodynamics is true, that law does not entail that
the world can neither be created nor destroyed; it only entails that such changes as occur in the world do
not involve the production or destruction, but merely transformations, of matter-energy. And so the sort
of crude physicalism I have hypothesized for argument's sake is no basis for saying that the world is
necessary.
There are, of course, other more philosophical arguments that th e world's existence is necessarythe best
known being Spinoza's. Each of those arguments, if you look at them in their respective contexts, stands or
falls with the philosophies to which they severally belong. Of those philosophies, all I can say here is theirchief attraction has been their explanatory power: if any are true, then everything is explicable in such a
way that nothing could have been otherwise. Such philosophies often attract people, like philosophers and
scientists, who crave maximum intelligibility of the sort we find in, say, geometry or elementary symbolic
logic, where every theorem is strictly deducible from a few axioms using a few obvious rules of inference.
Such philosophies entail determinism: the thesis that whatever is the case is either necessarily so in itself
or is rendered inevitable by the past and the laws of nature. But determinism does not seem true to most of
uswho find it incompatible with, e.g., our sense of moral responsibilityand in any case determinism
finds no more support in contemporary physics than in ordinary experience. Many people, then, are right
to think it a marvelous and puzzling fact that the world exists, and continues to exist, at all. At any rate,
there is no good reason to hold that the world is the sort of thing th at exists uncausably, unpreventably,
and eternally. And so we may safely say that the existence of the world is contingent.
Premise (1) is harder to justify. True, ordinary experience only presents objects that are caused to exist,
and so one might think that we can infer (1) by induction. But the contingent objects that experience
presents are the sorts that come to be through causally efficacious processes which followlaws: the laws of
nature. Whatever the world as a whole is, it cannot be an object of that sort; it is rather that totality which
includes all such objects, whatever else it may include. So if the world has indeed come to be, it cannot
have done so through a causal process that obeys the laws of nature. And some have found in this grounds
for denying that the world's existence is causally explicable at all. Such explanations as we have of the
http://www.blogger.com/ -
8/9/2019 Prove to Me That God Exists
4/7
causes of particular things involve appeal to generalizations that get refined and expressed as scientific
laws; a causal explanation involving no such appeal seems by contrast to hypothesize a unique, essentially
arbitrary event that we can neither observe nor replicate. In face of this, many philosophers think that the
contingency of the world might consist just in its happening to exist, even though it might not have existed;
as Bertrand Russell put it, "the world is just there, and that's all." The world might be eternal and
uncausable, for all we know, but still be preventable in some way; for we may admit that the world is the
sort of thing that might not have existed; but in fact it existsend of story.
Some proponents of the cosmological argument have tried to counter that attitude by premising the so-
called principle of sufficient reason as an a priori truth. In other words, they claim that whatever is the
case, there is sufficient reason why it is the case, and that such a generalization is either self-evident or
otherwise immune to counterexamples. If they are right, then there is reason enough why the world exists,
and thus a complete explanation of the world's existing.
But such a tack is unpromising. First, the principle of sufficient reason as generally formulated does
nothing to rule out that sufficient reason for the world's existence may be found in that of its constituents.
Thus, to the question "Why does the world exist" one might simply answer "Because each of its constituents
do," without any clear violation of the principle. One might, of course, so formulate the principle as to rule
out such a trivial answer. But that would bring us square up against the historical fact that the usefulness of
the principle of sufficient reason varies inversely with the precision with which it is formulated.
Vague formulations which command broad assent do not suffice for the purposes their proponents usually
have in mind; more precise formulations that would suffice if true either are untrue or appear to be true
only if some version of the cosmological argument is independently cogent. Following Aristotle, for
example, Thomas Aquinas argued that there cannot be an "infinite regress" of causes of being, even though
there could in principle be an infinite regress of causes of becoming. Thus for all philosophy can tell us, the
world might always have existed, and so there might have been infinitely long causal chains by which one
contingent individual after another comes to be; but an account of why any such individual can continue in
being at all must terminate somewhere-or-other. That, I think, is undeniably true. But Aquinas also
thought that what is identified at the terminus of any such explanation must be a necessary existent that
causes whatever is caused: namely, God. I believe that; and if Aquinas is right, then some version of the
principle of sufficient reason is also true. But Aquinas' conclusion does not follow just from the fact that
there cannot be an infinite regress of causes of being. If you examine Aquinas' arguments carefully, you
find that some of them get the conclusion to follow by relying on an Aristotelian cosmology that is now
outdated; others get it to follow only by bringing in metaphysical theses that few philosophers, including
theistic ones, have even found intelligible, much less ac ceptable. More work needs to be done, especially
by way of clarifying the logic of causal explanation.
The cosmological argument does call attention to the contingency of the world, as well as to the fact that
the existence of the world so conceived cannot be explained in the sort of way in which the known
constituents of the world can be. But by itself, the cosmological argument as typically framed does not
show that the existence of the world is explicable by the activity of what would count as God. Partly for
that reason, some people prefer the teleological argument.
Generically framed, the teleological argument (or: the argument from design) goes like this:
(1) The world as a whole is well-ordered
(2) Good order obtains only by the design of something intelligent
(3) Therefore, there is an intelligent designer of the world as a whole.
Like the modal and cosmological arguments I have framed, that one is logically valid. And if both its
premises are true, we have both a reason why the world as a whole is explicable and a fairly specific sense
in which the world is explicable. But there are two difficulties with the argument.
First, it does not establish that the designer of the world must also be the creator of the world, and hence is
not by itself an argument for the existence of God. However, in a few minutes I shall overcome that
difficulty by combining the teleological with the cosmological argument in one mega-argument. The
second difficulty is more serious: there seems to be no apposite method for verifying either of its premises.
Consider premise (2). One might argue by analogy that the pervasive and intricate order we find in the
world needs to be accounted for. After all, if our lives are to be well-ordered, we have to think and plan and
take appropriate action; things don't just happen to fall into place for us (unless we are toddlers, in which
case others will usually order our lives for us, in face of the chaos we spread). And so one might think that,
in general, chaos is the natural state of things-unless some intelligent super-agent orders them for a certain
end or purpose. But that doesn't follow. In fact, we have no experience of a chaotic universe being reduced
to order; the natural state of things, by all appearances, is fundamentally orderly. Although instances of
http://www.blogger.com/ -
8/9/2019 Prove to Me That God Exists
5/7
local order may indeed require explanation, it is not at all obvious that the general order of things itself
requires any explanation other than the lawlike interrelations among things that would be exhibited by a
good inventory of the sorts of things there are. There seems to be no reliable, publicly accessible method
for showing that the general order of things calls for explanation in the first place.
The problem with premise (1) is similar. By what reliable, publicly available method could we determine
that the world as a whole is well-ordered in the first place? One might say the answer is obvious: the
method of modern physics; and the world, by all appearances, is well-ordered. Well, the universe studied
by astrophysicists may well be; but if it is, how do we know that that is all there is to the world? For all
science can tell us, there might be other universes, or countless non-physical beings; the questions
whether or how such things might be related to the physical universe we know are dark ones indeed, which
it is not obvious that science or any other human method can answer. Until we know the answers, it seems,we are in no position to verify premise (1).
Despite such difficulties, the teleological argument does focus attention on a very important fact: if there is
a genuine explanation why the world works as it doesand by 'genuine' I mean one that consists in more
than just an account of the world's content and structurethat explanation cannot be in terms of scientific
laws but only in terms of the intentions of some intelligent personal agent. At any rate, I have not
encountered any alternative sort of explanation that would do the job.
In that respect, the appeal of the teleological argument dovetails with that of the moral argument. The
best-known moral argument for the existence of God is Kant's. I have no time to describe and evaluate it;
but fortunately there are others too, and I think the gist of them all can be captured in the following,generic version:
(1) Moral laws tell us how, in general, we really should behave, not merely how we or others want to
regulate our behavior
(2) Such laws can only be thought of as promulgated by a supreme and benevolent legislator
(3) Therefore, there is a supreme and benevolent legislator.
Like the others I have framed, that argument too is logically valid.
Now the mere presence of premise (2) might seem to undermine the argument from the outset; for youmay well ask why anybody should believe (2) unless they already believe in God. But premise (1), I submit,
is true just in case premise (2) is. If morality is not just descriptive, but is also normativeso that it tells us
not just how people do choose to regulate their lives, but how they shouldthen its ultimate source must
be beyond us in a supremely powerful and benevolent will to which our obedience is due. The converse
also holds. Why?
Well, if your personal morality is just a list of rules that you set for yourself, then it does not necessarily tell
you how you should behave, but merely how you want to regulate y our life. Of course one might well reply
that one's personal morality should conform to some larger, collective morality. But even so, if the latter is
ultimately just a way of codifying social prejudices, preferences, and goals, then it onl y serves to clarify
how most people of a given human communitywant its members to behavenot necessarily how they
ought to behave. In other words, the question whether your personal rules are the ones you should be
following, and/or the question whether some socially codified set of rules are the ones people ought to
impose on each other, still remain open. In face of those questions, there are only two possible responses.
You can insist that, in the final analysis, moral norms simply tell us how certain individuals or social
groups want to regulate their lives. In that case, saying that one "ought" to behave in such-and-such ways
reflects nothing more than some person's or group's preference. The force of ought here is merely
psychological: ultimately, the voice of conscience is just the internalized voice of society. This result would
be what is called "moral relativism." Or you can admit that there is some fundamental moral lawperhaps
the so-called "natural law"in light of which we can and must judge whether some norms by which people
want to regulate their lives are ones by which they should regulate their lives. The first response entails
rejecting premise (1), and with it premise (2). The second raises another question: what gives this law its
binding force?
Some philosophers argue that this law binds simply because it describes what general forms of behavior
are really good for us, as opposed to what may only seem good to some people at some times. From that
point of view, it is supposed to be obvious that we ought to do what's really good for us just because that's
what's really good for us. But one difficulty here is that it is not clear who this "us" is supposed to be: people
taken individually? Collectively? The people now alive, or posterity too? But even supposing for argument's
http://www.blogger.com/ -
8/9/2019 Prove to Me That God Exists
6/7
sake that what's really good for the one is ultimately good for the many, and that what's thus good for the
living is always good for the yet-unborn, why should we always do what's good for us? How can we rule out
the possibility that there are some goods incompatible with our individual and/or col lective flourishing
qu a human beingsgoods for the sake of which such happiness might be worth forgoing? Perhaps
humanity is just a doomed evolutionary experiment, whose chief value consists in teaching other races, by
our example, how not to live. Or maybe what's really good for us is not good for the universe as a whole:
the big stage of the universe might be more important than the actors who cross it, so that at some point we
actors would do well to sacrifice our careers for the good of the theater. In that case, our highest duties
would be murder and suicide. The Albigensian heresy of medieval France entailed just that.
In order to set aside such possibilities as morally irrelevant, one must show that there is no good we can
intelligibly pursue that is incompatible with and preferable to what would promote our flourishing as
human beings. From that it would follow that, by doing only what's really good for us (whatever that is), we
do as well as we can; and doing as well as we can is, of course, all and only what we should do. But we
thereby do as well as we can only if the general scheme of things embodies such values as we could (a)
recognize as compatible with what's really good for us, and (b) pursue under that description. And why
think that?
The only reason I can find to think so would be that the general scheme of things is intelligently designed
by some benevolent agent who thereby intends, among other things, what's really good for us. That person
would be God. By designing us and the general scheme of things in a certain way, God would be in effect a
supreme and benevolent legislator. For if God has set things up so that doing what's really good for us is
doing as well as we can, then doing what's really good for us is all and only what we should do. In that case,
our obligations coincide with what would make us truly happy; and an agent responsible for such a state ofaffairs is surely benevolent.
It is of course psychologically possible to treat certain moral precepts as laws without being aware of any
such supreme legislator. People manage it all the timepartly by noticing that cultivating the cardinal
virtues is essential for a modicum of happiness in this life, and in particular by noticing that certain good
reasons for others not to harm them are equally good reasons for them not to harm others. But the
explanation why the relevant precepts are laws, and thus binding on all of us, must posit a supreme
lawgiver.
The only way to avoid this result, it seems to me, is by embracing moral relativism. But then you will have
abandoned the idea that we are ultimately bound by moral obl igations that we do not simply choose toimpose on ourselves. That in turn means abandoning the idea that what we do can be evaluated in any
terms other than its fitness for attaining such ends as we happen to have. Ultimately, you will have rejected
the common belief that moral laws tell us not merely how we or others want to regulate our lives, but how
we should. And by thus rejecting premise (2), you will have rejected premise (1). They stand or fall
together.
The moral argument I have presented would be no good if there were no reliable, publicly available
method for establishing that there is an objectively binding moral law in the first place. I think there is such
a method, but I cannot pursue that issue here. For my present purpose, the key thing about the moral
argument is how it shows that a belief which is very important to most peoplenamely, that certain moral
norms bind us absolutely, whether some of us care to acknowledge that or notis best supported in
theistic terms. In that respect, the moral argument resembles the teleological argument by exhibiting that
the only way to explain certain things (assuming those things are so) is in terms of a supreme, intelligent,
and benevolent agent, namely God.
Where, then, does all this leave us? Let me propound to you an argument that I think combines the virtues
of the four generic ones I have reviewed, while avoiding at least some of their difficulties.
(1) The world is the totality comprising every entity that really changes, and is thus contingent
(2) The existence of the world so defined either is not explicable at all, or is explicable as the creation of a
necessary, intelligent, and benevolent being, which would be God
(3) There is better reason to think that the world's existence is explicable than that it is not
(4) Therefore, there is better reason to think that the existence of the world is explicable as the creation ofGod than not.
In defense of that logically valid argument, I have time to make only a few brief remarks. First, I have
defined the world in the way I have because it is about just such a world that the question "Why does the
world exist?" can intelligibly arise. Since it seems clear that that question does intelligibly arisewhether
or not we have the resources for answering itI must here rest my case for (1). Premise (2) can be verified
in light of my considerations on the four major argument-clusters I have reviewed. It is premise (3), I
http://www.blogger.com/http://www.blogger.com/http://www.blogger.com/http://www.blogger.com/http://www.blogger.com/http://www.blogger.com/http://www.blogger.com/http://www.blogger.com/http://www.blogger.com/http://www.blogger.com/http://www.blogger.com/http://www.blogger.com/http://www.blogger.com/http://www.blogger.com/http://www.blogger.com/http://www.blogger.com/http://www.blogger.com/http://www.blogger.com/http://www.blogger.com/http://www.blogger.com/ -
8/9/2019 Prove to Me That God Exists
7/7
think, that many of you will find most objectionable. In its defense, I will say only this: the only
justification for rejecting it would be to show that the world, as I have defined it, is not the sort of thing
whose existence can be explained by anyone at all, no matter how intelligent or well-informed they may
be. But that, I am certain, would be an instance of the narrow-mindedness that I have said is impervious to
argument. The most important question about my argument is: is there a reliable, publicly available
method for verifying each of the premises? I think there is, but I must now leave that to you to verify for
yourselves.
Michael Liccione 1999. Permission is granted only for private, non-commercial use of this article.
Reproduction or use in any other form without the express written consent of the author is prohibited.
POSTED BY MIKE L AT 3:09 PM 29 COMMENTS
converted by Web2PDFConvert com
http://www.web2pdfconvert.com/?ref=PDFhttp://www.blogger.com/https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=18332206&postID=113036557556054670http://provetomethatgodexists.blogspot.com/2005/10/prove-to-me-that-god-exists-and-ill.htmlmailto:[email protected]