How We Believe_ Science and the Search for God - Michael Shermer [64]
Counterargument. The universe is everything that is, ever was, or ever shall be. Thus, God must be within the universe or is the universe. In either case, God would himself need to be moved, and thus the regress to a prime mover just begs the question of what moved God. If God does not need to be moved, then clearly not everything in the universe needs to be moved. Maybe the initial creation of the universe was its own prime mover.
2.
First Cause Argument. This is Aquinas’s second way. All effects in the universe have causes. The universe itself must have a cause. But this cause-and-effect sequence cannot be regressed forever, so there had to be a first cause, a causal agent who needed no other cause. “Therefore it is necessary to admit a first efficient cause, to which everyone gives the name of God.”
Counterargument. This is essentially the prime mover argument rephrased. And, as in the problem with the prime mover argument, God must be within the universe or is the universe. In either case, God would himself need to be caused, and thus the regress to a first cause just begs the question of what caused God. If God does not need a cause, then clearly not everything in the universe needs a cause. Maybe the universe itself does not need a cause. Perhaps, as cosmologist Alan Guth suggests in his 1997 book The Inflationary Universe, it just sprang into existence out of a quantum vacuum, uncaused.
3.
Possibility and Necessity Argument. Aquinas’s third way argues that in nature it is possible for things to be or not to be. But not everything could be in the realm of the possible, for then there could be nothing. If there were at one time nothing, then the universe could not have come into existence. “Therefore we must admit the existence of some being having of itself its own necessity, and not receiving it from another, but rather causing in others their necessity. This all men speak of as God.”
Counterargument. Why is it not equally plausible that God, like the universe, is possible but not necessary? As Stephen Hawking likes to ask in his books and lectures: “Why does the universe bother to exist at all? Why should there be something rather than nothing?” No one knows. It is entirely possible that the universe, including God, did not need to come into existence. The problem here is that the human mind is incapable of conceiving of nothing (in the universal sense), and therefore this argument falls into what Martin Gardner calls a mysterian mystery—it is not just unknown, it is unknowable with the minds we possess. Evolution provided us with a big enough brain to ask such profound questions, but not big enough to answer them. This is an argument neither for nor against God.
4.
The Perfection/Ontological Argument. Aquinas argued in his fourth way that there are gradations from less to more good, true, and noble. “There is then, something which is truest, something best, something noblest. Therefore there must also be something which is to all beings the cause of their being, goodness, and every other perfection. And this we call God.” This is known as the ontological argument and was first presented by St. Anselm, the eleventh-century archbishop of Canterbury, who in his Proslogion defined God as “something than which nothing greater can be conceived.” Even a “fool” can understand this, says Anselm (referencing Psalm 14:1, “the fool hath said in his heart, There is no God”):
For if it is actually in the understanding alone, it can be thought of as existing also in reality, and this is greater. Therefore, if that than which a greater cannot