The Rational Path Leads to God

Everyone has heard the propaganda that theism is irrational.

We’re told belief in God is wishful thinking. A security blanket for people who can’t cope with the harsh realities of life.

But this patronising idea is the opposite of the truth. If we follow logic where it inevitably leads, it will take us to God.

The Scientific Image of the World

In the modern age the success of science is everywhere. This isn’t a theoretical belief we can doubt, it’s a solid and undeniable fact of our daily experience.

The influence of science is so pervasive we’re all conditioned to think scientifically. We see nature in the image science paints for us.

We assume nature only has the properties science describes: mass, dimension, charge etc. We no longer see the world as having inner dimensions; animistic spirits or Aristotelian essences.

Once we assume nature consists only of the properties science describes, it logically follows that there may — or there may not — be something more than nature. This something more we call the super-natural.

But notice how the super-natural is vague. It isn’t a description in its own right, but only in relation to the natural. The super-natural is anything that isn’t made of the stuff science can detect and measure.

We think of the super-natural as things like ghosts, fairies and magical creatures. But we also place God and the soul in that category.

Bracketing nature this way has practical benefits. But a side-effect we don’t notice is we’ve already assumed atheism is true.

The leap from science to all reality

We can all agree that looking at nature through a scientific lens is a powerful method for investigating certain aspects of the world.

But there’s a large gap between seeing nature through a scientific lens, and assuming it gives us a complete description of reality. It’s this assumption that’s never made explicit.

We don’t even notice we’re making it, because this isn’t something we’ve intentionally concluded using logic. It’s our habitual way of understanding the world in the scientific age.

We not only bracket nature as a category of thought, beyond that we bracket it as the allowable category in our explanations of the world. But we then take an unjustified leap. We assume nature describes a free-standing category of reality.

We assume nature can exist independently. That it doesn’t need anything else to bring it into existence, or to continually sustain it in existence.

It’s this assumption that gives us the logical possibility the super-natural may not exist. And once this logical space is available to us, atheism becomes a foregone conclusion.

But the idea nature is — or could be — a free-standing reality, is a strong philosophical claim. A claim most people accept on intuition, or habits of thinking. Not because they have good reasons to think it’s true.

Facing up to the logical consequences of atheism

There’s a difference between saying the words, I don’t believe God exists, and confronting the logical consequences of that being true. To confront the consequences we need to ask: how would the world be different if God doesn’t exist? What would the world look like?

And we intuitively assume we can remove God from our picture of reality and we are left with nature, the world described by science.

We envision an eternal universe, self-sufficient unto itself.

And once we take that leap to assume nature can exist independently, the super-natural becomes superfluous. Parsimony soon dispenses with God, because we no longer need him to explain the world.

God becomes an explanatory irrelevance.

The meaning of the word God

Rather than being the most rational conclusion, this way of thinking is confused on a foundational level. It assumes reality conforms to our habitual way of understanding the world. It also misunderstands the meaning of the word God.

We can’t remove God from our ontology without causing logical incoherence. God isn’t an optional extra. If we take away God, we aren’t left with a free-standing universe of natural things.

Without God, we’re left with nothing whatsoever.

God is necessary for anything at all to exist. To have an accurate understanding of the claim God exists, we should understand it to mean, nature can’t exist on its own.

Theism observes nature and agrees it has common properties like mass, dimension and charge. But it doesn’t ignore the fact it also has the common property of existential dependence. Everything in nature depends on something outside itself for its existence.

This means the idea of nature as a self-sufficient category of reality, a collection of things which exist independently, is logically incoherent.

It’s like pulling a universe out of a hat. It relies on distraction and sleight of hand to make anyone believe it could happen.

God is the Absolute

God with a capital G signifies something far more profound than a super-human being. An omnipotent God isn’t a being who is really, really powerful. Omni doesn’t mean bigger or better. Omni means all.

An omni God is the Absolute.

Absolute means not qualified or diminished in any way, independent. The Absolute isn’t understood in relation to other things. Everything else can only be understood in relation to the Absolute.

God as the Absolute isn’t a mathematical or theoretical concept. It’s the necessary foundation of all existence. This is why you don’t hear God referred to as “a being” who exists alongside various other beings. But instead, God is “Being itself”.

God isn’t one more thing in the collection of things which exist. He isn’t a super-human entity within the universe, or sitting outside the universe. These are both variations of the same misunderstanding.

The Absolute is in a class of its own.

The Absolute isn’t the mere negation of the relative. It transcends both the relative and its negation. God is both transcendent to, and immanent within, the entire creation.

If that sounds too abstract, think of a more familiar and concrete example.

The sun transcends both light and dark, yet is the source of both. The light is the manifestation of the sun’s energy. The darkness is the absence of light.

The sun is the ultimate cause. Both light and dark exist only in relation to the sun.

If we understand what the sun is, we also understand we can’t remove it from our ontology and think light and dark can exist independently. The sun is a necessary precondition not only of the creation of light, but to sustain light in existence from moment to moment.

This is analogous to God as the Absolute.

Absolute isn’t a characteristic God has, like someone may have intelligence or beauty. God as the Absolute is a logical designation of what God is.

When we hear people talk of God as an unnecessary hypothesis, we know they’re confused. God’s creation of the world isn’t concerned with an event prior in time to the big bang.

God is the logical pre-condition for anything at all to exist. Because there must be a foundation which isn’t dependent on other things.

The ground of all existence must be self-sufficient.

The logical price of rejecting God

So what are the consequences of rejecting God as the necessary foundation of reality? What options are available to atheism to explain the existence of the universe?

There are only two. Brute fact and infinite regress.

Infinite regress says there is an infinite causal sequence. Not only does the sequence have no end, it also has no beginning. This isn’t a theoretical infinity. It’s a claim about concrete things in the world.

In this context saying there is no first member of the causal series isn’t an explanation, it’s the endless deferral of giving an explanation.

Which is the same as giving no explanation at all.

The second option is brute fact. A brute fact is something which has no cause or reason to explain it. Let’s be clear about what this means. Brute fact isn’t saying there is a cause but we don’t know what it is. It’s saying there is no cause.

Saying the universe is a brute fact means there is no reason, no explanation for its existence.

Brute fact denies the principle of sufficient reason (PSR). The PSR is a logical principle that says things have reasons why they exist rather than not. The PSR is a fundamental requirement of rationality - there are reasons, or explanations, for why things exist.

The PSR is also common sense. When someone pulls a rabbit out of a hat, we don’t think they’ve proved brute facts exist. We also don’t think they’ve shown that things can appear from nothing.

We know they’re deceiving us.

God is a demand of logic

Notice how incongruous these two explanations are with the confident proclamations atheism is the most rational position. It’s hard to even think of infinite regress or brute fact as actual explanations.

They aren’t ideas we hear and think, what a carefully thought out explanation. They’re more like unwanted leftovers we’re stuck with if we insist on rejecting God.

It’s not a coincidence that rejecting God leaves us with no explanation for why everything exists. This is exactly what theists argue. God isn’t an unnecessary hypothesis or a superfluous one.

God is a demand of logic.

If we understand what the word God signifies, we also see that theism is the option that is faithful to logic. Theism follows logic where it leads. And we also see the alternatives to God are appeals to magic. Like pulling a universe out of a hat.

The remarkable thing is how many people don’t notice the trick.

There’s no shortage of atheists telling us the universe comes from nothing, or that science is capable of explaining the cause of its existence.

The physicist Stephen Hawking tells us the universe was “spontaneously created out of nothing”. Lawrence Krauss wrote an entire book titled, A Universe from Nothing.

This is an astonishing level of confusion from public intellectuals.

The confusion is the result of an over-confidence in the limits of scientific explanation, and a corresponding ignorance of philosophy. These are the same scientists who declare philosophy useless.

A rationally justified atheism must face up to the logical consequences disbelief in God entails. It’s not good enough to mock caricatures of theism, or promote the misunderstanding science can explain why the universe exists. No rational and thoughtful person should take these deceptive ideas seriously.