You've undoubtedly come across a person who argued that God can't exist because there is evil and suffering in the world. Do you know how to respond to this objection? Did you know evil and suffering, instead of disproving God, actually supports his existence?
Greg Koukl in the following video answers these questions, take a listen.
Skeptics sometimes ask when they hear that a Christian believes in God, "Do you believe in Santa Claus too?" Is that a far enough criticism or have they made an error in logic?
Watch the following video where Dr. William Lane Craig responds to this objection.
It is likely that you have heard atheists say to Christians, "But who created God?" They ask this usually when the Christian has shown that the universe had a beginning, and so in the atheist's mind it's a little like, "If I can't have an eternal universe, then you can't have an eternal God." But does this question really present a problem for Christianity? In this video, Randall Niles explains the impossibility of infinite regression, showing there must be an uncaused God.
There are arguments that can be given which show that the uncaused cause of the universe must be personal, meaning that it must refer to God and not simply to a singularity. Check out the Kalam Cosmological argument article for more information.
For sure one of the most common arguments used against the existence of God is the fact that there is evil in the world. But in actuality, evil much less than being an argument against God's existence, actually proves His existence. Dr. William Lane Craig and Dr. Greg Koukl in this close to 3 minute video explain how this is the case.
By Ryan Hemelaar
The Kalam Cosmological Argument is a very strong argument for God's existence. However, the leader of the Brisbane Atheists thinks that he has found a way to refute it. To summarise his argument:
1. There is an equal amount of matter and anti-matter in the universe.
2. Negative one plus one equals zero.
3. Therefore, the sum of the total matter of the universe is equal to zero.
4. Therefore the universe does not exist.
5. Therefore the universe never had a beginning.
6. Therefore there was no cause to the universe
As you can probably already see, there are many problems with this argument.
Firstly, there is no evidence to think that there is an equal amount of matter and anti-matter in the universe. Some Big Bang theorists speculate that there should have been equal amounts of matter and anti-matter made at the Big Bang. However, no anti-matter domains have been detected in space within 20 megaparsecs (6.17*10^20 km) of the Earth.
Even one of the leading advocates in the search for antimatter in space, Samuel Ting, laments:
"At the beginning, equal amounts of matter and antimatter were created [in the “big bang”]. Now there seems to be only matter. There have been theoretical speculations about the disappearance of antimatter, but no experimental support." [1]
Secondly, it is a total misunderstanding to think that even if there was an equal amount of matter and anti-matter in the universe that therefore nothing exists. That is as illogical as saying that if I have a certain amount of debts and a certain amount of money, therefore I have zero money. Even if on balance it does equal out as nothing, the debts still exist and the money still exists, they're not nothing. Similarily, even if the matter and anti-matter were on balance, equal, the anti-matter still exists and the matter still exists!
Thirdly, his conclusion that the universe does not exist I think is absurd. As Descartes said, I at least exist. Even when I doubt that I exist, who is there to do the doubting? I doubt, therefore I am. There simply must be something that exists.
So in conclusion, this Atheist's attempt at refuting the Kalam Cosmological Argument falls down at numerous points. Therefore, if one cannot refute the Kalam argument, a rational person is still obligated to believe that God exists.
Notes
[1] Antia, M., Ready to takeoff, antimatter experiment takes some flak, Science, 280:1339, 1998.
Question:
Richard Dawkins, in his book "The God Delusion," references Douglas Gasking's 'Proof' that God does not exist. It goes like this:
How would you respond, Dr. Craig?
Dr. William Lane Craig responds:
I have to confess that I had never come across this argument until I read it in The God Delusion. The reason for its obscurity isn't hard to divine: it's so wrong-headed that even detractors of the ontological argument who understand that argument would agree that this objection is no good. To see why, let's review the ontological argument.
The version below comes from Alvin Plantinga, one of America's premier philosophers. It's formulated in terms of possible worlds semantics. For those who are unfamiliar with the terminology of possible worlds, let me explain that by "a possible world" one doesn't mean a planet or even a universe, but rather a complete description of reality, or a way reality might be. To say that God exists in some possible world is just to say that there is a possible description of reality which includes the statement "God exists" as part of that description.
Now in his version of the argument, Plantinga conceives of God as a being which is "maximally excellent" in every possible world. Plantinga takes maximal excellence to include such properties as omniscience, omnipotence, and moral perfection. A being which has maximal excellence in every possible world would have what Plantinga calls "maximal greatness." So Plantinga argues:
Premises (2)-(5) of this argument are relatively uncontroversial. Most philosophers would agree that if God's existence is even possible, then He must exist. The principal issue to be settled with respect to Plantinga's ontological argument is what warrant exists for thinking the key premiss "It's possible that a maximally great being exists" to be true.
The idea of a maximally great being is intuitively a coherent idea, and so it seems plausible that such a being could exist. In order for the ontological argument to fail, the concept of a maximally great being must be incoherent, like the concept of a married bachelor. But the concept of a maximally great being doesn't seem even remotely incoherent. This provides some prima facie warrant for thinking that it is possible that a maximally great being exists.
In his book Dawkins devotes six full pages, brimming with ridicule and invective, to the ontological argument, without raising any serious objection to this argument. (He notes in passing Immanuel Kant's objection that existence is not a perfection; but since Plantinga's argument doesn't presuppose that it is, we can leave that irrelevance aside.) He then cites the parody of the argument you mention above, which is designed to show that God does not exist because a God "who created everything while not existing" is greater than one who exists and created everything.
Ironically, this parody, far from undermining the ontological argument, actually reinforces it! For a being who creates everything while not existing is a logical incoherence and is therefore impossible: there is no possible world which includes a non-existent being which creates the world. If the atheist is to maintain—as he must—that God's existence is impossible, the concept of God would have to be similarly incoherent. But to all appearances it's not. That supports the plausibility of premiss (1) of Plantinga's argument.
I think you can see that Dawkins doesn't even understand the logic of the ontological argument, which moves from the logical possibility of God's existence to its actuality. A parody of the argument that moves from a logical impossibility to actuality is not parallel to the argument.
Dawkins chortles, "I've forgotten the details, but I once piqued a gathering of theologians and philosophers by adapting the ontological argument to prove that pigs can fly. They felt the need to resort to Modal Logic to prove that I was wrong" (God Delusion, p. 84). This is just embarrassing. The ontological argument is an exercise in modal logic—the logic of the possible and the necessary. I can just imagine Dawkins making a nuisance of himself at this professional conference with his spurious parody, just as he similarly embarrassed himself at the Templeton Foundation conference in Cambridge where he describes his confronting sophisticated philosophers and theologians with his flyweight objection to the teleological argument!
If you're interested in further responses to Dawkins' critique of theistic arguments, have a look at Chad Meister and my new book God Is Great, God Is Good, forthcoming this year with Inter-Varsity Press.
Source: ReasonableFaith.org
By Dr. William Lane Craig
On pages 157-8 (pages 188-9 of the 2008 edition) of his book, Dawkins summarizes what he calls "the central argument of my book." It goes as follows:
- One of the greatest challenges to the human intellect has been to explain how the complex, improbable appearance of design in the universe arises.
- The natural temptation is to attribute the appearance of design to actual design itself.
- The temptation is a false one because the designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer.
- The most ingenious and powerful explanation is Darwinian evolution by natural selection.
- We don't have an equivalent explanation for physics.
- We should not give up the hope of a better explanation arising in physics, something as powerful as Darwinism is for biology.
- Therefore, God almost certainly does not exist.
This argument is jarring because the atheistic conclusion that "Therefore, God almost certainly does not exist" seems to come suddenly out of left field. You don't need to be a philosopher to realize that that conclusion doesn't follow from the six previous statements.
Indeed, if we take these six statements as premises of an argument implying the conclusion "Therefore, God almost certainly does not exist," then the argument is patently invalid. No logical rules of inference would permit you to draw this conclusion from the six premises.
A more charitable interpretation would be to take these six statements, not as premises, but as summary statements of six steps in Dawkins' cumulative argument for his conclusion that God does not exist. But even on this charitable construal, the conclusion "Therefore, God almost certainly does not exist" does not follow from these six steps, even if we concede that each of them is true and justified.
What does follow from the six steps of Dawkins' argument? At most, all that follows is that we should not infer God's existence on the basis of the appearance of design in the universe. But that conclusion is quite compatible with God's existence and even with our justifiably believing in God's existence. Maybe we should believe in God on the basis of the cosmological argument or the ontological argument or the moral argument. Maybe our belief in God isn't based on arguments at all but is grounded in religious experience or in divine revelation. Maybe God wants us to believe in Him simply by faith. The point is that rejecting design arguments for God's existence does nothing to prove that God does not exist or even that belief in God is unjustified. Indeed, many Christian theologians have rejected arguments for the existence of God without thereby committing themselves to atheism.
So Dawkins' argument for atheism is a failure even if we concede, for the sake of argument, all its steps. But, in fact, several of these steps are plausibly false. Take just step (3), for example. Dawkins' claim here is that one is not justified in inferring design as the best explanation of the complex order of the universe because then a new problem arises: who designed the designer?
This rejoinder is flawed on at least two counts. First, in order to recognize an explanation as the best, one needn't have an explanation of the explanation. This is an elementary point concerning inference to the best explanation as practiced in the philosophy of science. If archaeologists digging in the earth were to discover things looking like arrowheads and hatchet heads and pottery shards, they would be justified in inferring that these artifacts are not the chance result of sedimentation and metamorphosis, but products of some unknown group of people, even though they had no explanation of who these people were or where they came from. Similarly, if astronauts were to come upon a pile of machinery on the back side of the moon, they would be justified in inferring that it was the product of intelligent, extra-terrestrial agents, even if they had no idea whatsoever who these extra-terrestrial agents were or how they got there. In order to recognize an explanation as the best, one needn't be able to explain the explanation. In fact, so requiring would lead to an infinite regress of explanations, so that nothing could ever be explained and science would be destroyed. So in the case at hand, in order to recognize that intelligent design is the best explanation of the appearance of design in the universe, one needn't be able to explain the designer.
Secondly, Dawkins thinks that in the case of a divine designer of the universe, the designer is just as complex as the thing to be explained, so that no explanatory advance is made. This objection raises all sorts of questions about the role played by simplicity in assessing competing explanations; for example, how simplicity is to be weighted in comparison with other criteria like explanatory power, explanatory scope, and so forth. But leave those questions aside. Dawkins' fundamental mistake lies in his assumption that a divine designer is an entity comparable in complexity to the universe. As an unembodied mind, God is a remarkably simple entity. As a non-physical entity, a mind is not composed of parts, and its salient properties, like self-consciousness, rationality, and volition, are essential to it. In contrast to the contingent and variegated universe with all its inexplicable quantities and constants, a divine mind is startlingly simple. Certainly such a mind may have complex ideas—it may be thinking, for example, of the infinitesimal calculus—, but the mind itself is a remarkably simple entity. Dawkins has evidently confused a mind's ideas, which may, indeed, be complex, with a mind itself, which is an incredibly simple entity. Therefore, postulating a divine mind behind the universe most definitely does represent an advance in simplicity, for whatever that is worth.
Other steps in Dawkins' argument are also problematic; but I think enough has been said to show that his argument does nothing to undermine a design inference based on the universe's complexity, not to speak of its serving as a justification of atheism.
Source: ReasonableFaith.org
