The Cosmological Argument The Ontological Argument The Argument from Design The Classical Teleological Argument The Argument from Irreducible Complexity The Argument from the Paucity of Benign Mutations The Argument from the Original Replicator The Argument from the Big Bang The Argument from the Fine-Tuning of Physical Constants The Argument from the Beauty of Physical Laws The Argument from Cosmic Coincidences The Argument from Personal Coincidences The Argument from Answered Prayers The Argument from a Wonderful Life The Argument from Miracles The Argument from the Hard Problem of Consciousness The Argument from the Improbable Self The Argument from Survival After Death The Argument from the Inconceivability of Personal Annihilation The Argument from Moral Truth The Argument from Altruism The Argument from Free Will The Argument from Personal Purpose The Argument from the Intolerability of Insignificance The Argument from the Consensus of Humanity The Argument from the Consensus of Mystics The Argument from Holy Books The Argument from Perfect Justice The Argument from Suffering The Argument from the Survival of the Jews The Argument from the Upward Curve of History The Argument from Prodigious Genius The Argument from Human Knowledge of Infinity The Argument from Mathematical Reality The Argument from Decision Theory (Pascal's Wager) The Argument from Pragmatism (William James's Leap of Faith) The Argument from the Unreasonableness of Reason The Argument from Sublimity The Argument from the Intelligibility of the Universe (Spinoza's God) The Argument from the Abundance of Arguments 1. The Cosmological Argument Everything that exists must have a cause.

The universe must have a cause (from 1).

Nothing can be the cause of itself.

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

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

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

God caused the universe (from 5 and 6).

God exists.

FLAW I 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 about 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 why God must be the unique exception, otherwise than asserting his unique mystery (the Fallacy of Using One Mystery to 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 reasoning, based on the unjustified demands we make on 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, is an expression of our cosmic befuddlement at the question, why is there something rather than nothing? The late philosopher Sidney Mor-genbesser had a classic response to this question: "And if there were nothing? You'd still be complaining!"

2. The Ontological Argument Nothing greater than God can be conceived (this is stipulated as part of the definition of "God").

It is greater to exist than not to exist.

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

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

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

God exists.

This argument, first articulated by Saint Anselm (10331109), 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 generalization. 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, Sidney Morgenbesser offered a pertinent remark, in the form of The 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 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.) 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).

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 eye-maker (from 1 and 2).

These things have not had a human designer.

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

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

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 the predominance of that line of replicators 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 Teleo-logical Argument in three forms: B. The Argument from Irreducible Complexity 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.

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."

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

The theory of natural selection cannot explain these irreducibly complex systems (from 1 and 3).

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

God exists (from 4 and 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 New 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, fallacious Argument from Ignorance: There are things that we cannot explain yet.

Those things must be attributed to 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 of 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. In other words, Premise 2 does not follow from Premise 1.

C. The Argument from the Paucity of Benign Mutations Evolution is powered by random mutations and natural selection.

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.

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

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).

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).

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

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

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 another 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 have mated and exchanged genes; (c) life on Earth has had a vast amount of time to accumulate the necessary mutations (almost four billion years).

D. The Argument from the Original Replicator Evolution is the process by which an organism evolves from simpler ancestors.

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

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

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

The Original Replicator is complex (from 4).

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

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

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

Anything that was created requires a Creator.

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 proved 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 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.

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

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

Only God could exist outside the universe.

God must have caused the universe to exist (from 3 and 4).

God exists.

The Big Bang is based on the observed expansion of the universe, with galaxies rushing away from one another. 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 fourteen 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 Argument from the Fine-Tuning of Physical Constants There are a vast number of physically possible universes.

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.

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

Our universe is one of those infinitesimally improbable universes.

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

There is a Fine-Tuner (from 5).

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

God exists.

Philosophers and physicists often speak of "the Anthropic Principle," which comes in several versions, labeled "weak," "strong," and "very strong." They all 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 the Fine-Tuning of Physical Constants 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 cosmolo-gists, 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 universes 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 another 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 Scientists use aesthetic principles (simplicity, symmetry, elegance) to discover the laws of nature.

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

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

Only a mindful being with an appreciation of beauty could have designed the laws of nature.

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

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 Anthropic Principle-we live in the kind of universe that 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 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.

Coincidences are, by definition, overwhelmingly improbable.

The overwhelmingly improbable defies all statistical explanation.

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

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

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.

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

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 are 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 improbable 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, et cetera.

FLAW 2. The derivation of Premise 5 from 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 backward to say that, in every case in which we see a pattern, someone deliberately put that pattern in the universe for us to see.

ASIDE: 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 Human Knowledge of Infinity, #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 prophecy about the unknowable.

8. The Argument from Personal Coincidences 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).