A "meta-argument" against all future arguments for God's existence ?
February 26, 2022 at 5:58 pm
(This post was last modified: February 26, 2022 at 5:59 pm by R00tKiT.)
Cleanthes (Hume's Dialogues): The order and arrangement of nature, the curious adjustment of final causes, the plain use and intention of every part and organ; all these bespeak in the clearest language an intelligent cause or author.
And the clearest language of God's revelation doesn't demand further elaborations and contrived arguments. The very fact that arguments are revised, polished, and sometimes reformulated extensively, seems to be a disservice to theism. In what follows I will try to formalize this intuition
Let A be a new successful (valid and sound) argument for the God of classical theism, based on an uncontroversial set of premises, and discovered by someone (a philosopher, for example) at the date T. Here is now an argument (by reductio ad absurdum) against the very possibility of A.
1. Argument A wasn't known to (almost) anyone before the date T.
2. (From 1.) No one was rationally justified in believing in God before T.
3. (Restatement of 2.) God didn't make his existence known to anyone before T.
4*. God is willing, and was always willing, to make his existence known to everyone.
5. If God is willing, and was always willing, to make his existence known to everyone, then God was willing to make his existence known to anyone who lived before the date T.
6. (From the conjunction of 3. and 5.) God is both willing and unwilling to make his existence to everyone before T. Absurd conclusion. (3. and non-3. are simultaneously true, non-3. being: God made his existence known to at least one person. And 5. entails non-3.)
Therefore, there is no date t at which belief in the God of classical theism suddenly becomes rationally justified. The newness of any purportedly successful argument for God's existence is decisive evidence against it. The only possible argument for theism is the teleological argument in its earliest formulations. Behe's formulation, for example, rests on very recent findings in biology, therefore it's unsound if my argument above is sound. Similarly the CA rests on very recent results/theories in cosmology like the Big Bang, unsound for the same reason.
*In defense of premise 4: God not willing to make his existence known to everyone seems to contradict omnibenevolence (one of the tenets of classical theism) because many believers freely and actively seek a relationship with God. If premise 4 is not true, then the quest for a valid argument in favor of God's existence no longer has any value, and the logical negation of premise 4 can be used to argue for God's non-existence (as in divine hiddenness arguments);
If my argument above is true, then the theist's sole task would be to make the cost of rejecting the TA as heavy and unbearable as possible for the atheist, which seems doable by making analogies with some propositions that nobody usually disputes, like the existence of an external world,, or of other minds, etc.
And the clearest language of God's revelation doesn't demand further elaborations and contrived arguments. The very fact that arguments are revised, polished, and sometimes reformulated extensively, seems to be a disservice to theism. In what follows I will try to formalize this intuition
Let A be a new successful (valid and sound) argument for the God of classical theism, based on an uncontroversial set of premises, and discovered by someone (a philosopher, for example) at the date T. Here is now an argument (by reductio ad absurdum) against the very possibility of A.
1. Argument A wasn't known to (almost) anyone before the date T.
2. (From 1.) No one was rationally justified in believing in God before T.
3. (Restatement of 2.) God didn't make his existence known to anyone before T.
4*. God is willing, and was always willing, to make his existence known to everyone.
5. If God is willing, and was always willing, to make his existence known to everyone, then God was willing to make his existence known to anyone who lived before the date T.
6. (From the conjunction of 3. and 5.) God is both willing and unwilling to make his existence to everyone before T. Absurd conclusion. (3. and non-3. are simultaneously true, non-3. being: God made his existence known to at least one person. And 5. entails non-3.)
Therefore, there is no date t at which belief in the God of classical theism suddenly becomes rationally justified. The newness of any purportedly successful argument for God's existence is decisive evidence against it. The only possible argument for theism is the teleological argument in its earliest formulations. Behe's formulation, for example, rests on very recent findings in biology, therefore it's unsound if my argument above is sound. Similarly the CA rests on very recent results/theories in cosmology like the Big Bang, unsound for the same reason.
*In defense of premise 4: God not willing to make his existence known to everyone seems to contradict omnibenevolence (one of the tenets of classical theism) because many believers freely and actively seek a relationship with God. If premise 4 is not true, then the quest for a valid argument in favor of God's existence no longer has any value, and the logical negation of premise 4 can be used to argue for God's non-existence (as in divine hiddenness arguments);
If my argument above is true, then the theist's sole task would be to make the cost of rejecting the TA as heavy and unbearable as possible for the atheist, which seems doable by making analogies with some propositions that nobody usually disputes, like the existence of an external world,, or of other minds, etc.
