Tolle Lege

This week, I had the privilege of attending a philosophy lecture given by Professor Lawrence Crocker regarding God’s existence. In order to forestall any confusion, I will begin by stating that Professor Crocker does not opt for the traditional approach to the question of God’s existence. His arguments do not purport to prove or disprove God’s existence; his arguments do not even attempt to persuade anyone to believe in God. Instead, Professor Crocker merely wants to prove that it is reasonable for theist and atheist alike to hope for God’s existence.

In Professor Crocker’s model, there are three levels of interaction between desire for a statement’s veracity and evidence of the statement’s veracity:  wish, hope, and belief. At the bottom level is wish, which only needs to be worthy of desiring and need not possess rational grounds—for example, I wish the sky was green. Hope, on the other hand, requires some degree of plausibility. It is rationally justified if evidence does not impugn its plausibility and if there is a sufficient reason for desiring the object of hope. Finally, on level three, belief requires enough evidence for justification, independent of desire. I can, for example, believe that I will fail tomorrow’s midterm without desiring it. Professor Crocker concludes that hoping for God’s existence is rationally justifiable but belief in God’s existence is not. He his variants of Pascal’s Wager and the Cosmological Argument to reach this conclusion.

First, Professor Crocker attempts to justify the desire for God’s existence. Doing so would satisfy the first condition for hope:  rational grounds for desiring the object. Using a modification of Pascal’s Wager, he states that the possibility of eternal life is worthy of hope because perpetual consciousness is intrinsically good.  He continues to state that a plausible necessary condition for eternal life is also worthy of hope and argues that God is the best explanation for eternal life, making God a plausible necessary condition. Thus, God is worthy of hope.

It should be noted however that the God Professor Crocker hopes for deviates from Christian orthodoxy. He specifically hopes for a universalist God, but another person could just as easily hope for something else. Thus, the nature of “the God worth hoping for” remains inchoate and nebulous at best. Professor Crocker states that a God who appeals comprehensively to individual preferences is superior than one who does not appeal to all preferences. For example, he says that an eternal life that lacks the restriction of wearing strange hats is better than one does possess such a requirement if one has a distaste for strange hats, and, hence, the former notion of eternal life merits greater hope. Consequently, the object meriting hope is always dependent on subjective preferences. A man can equally hope for either a God who gives eternal life universally or a God who only does so for people of a certain hair color. If God remains this undefined, He can be adumbrated into anything conceivable so long as it conforms to a person’s preferences, no matter how bizarre. If God actually exists, He may be a very different person than He is in Professor Crocker’s subjective hopes.

Professor Crocker’s conception of eternal life, which I will consider equivalent to Heaven, also differs from Christian thought. He believes that Heaven possesses infinite utility merely because it extends the human consciousness, allowing people to continue pursuing new activities. Nevertheless, in a Christian worldview, Heaven is desirable because it brings man into the eternal presence of His Maker. God is not desirable merely because He provides Heaven. It is God that makes eternal life meaningful, rather than eternal life making God meaningful.  

In Heaven we shall see the face of God

In conjunction with his first proof, Professor Crocker’s Cosmological Argument serves as evidence to bolster the probability of God’s existence. He rightfully observes that the existence of the universe raises profound philosophical questions which Richard Swinburne avers by saying that something that suggests the existence of God is “the fact of there being a universe at all, [and] how very odd it is, how unlikely a priori it is that there should be a physical universe” (Swinbune 118). Professor Crocker enumerates four possible explanations for the universe’s existence:  the universe is eternal, the universe was spawned by chance, the universe necessarily exists according to physical laws, and the universe was created by God. He considers the first two to be non-answers and the third to be erroneous because physical laws are absent in a material and energetic vacuum. In other words, without matter and energy, physical laws have no application. The fourth possibility remains the best explanation. Because Professor Crocker’s first proof establishes that it is desirable for God to exist, it is reasonable to hope that God exists.

According to Crocker, the question of God stops at hope. Belief remains unjustified despite Crocker’s concession that God is the best explanation for the universe. He uses an allusion to Agatha Christie in which there are ten suspects for a crime, and while one suspect is most likely the murderer, the degree of suspicion between this suspect and the others is too minute to warrant an accusation. Analogously, his rationale is that the probability for the proposition “God exists” is only marginally more probable than the proposition “God does not exist.” Thus, one need not commit to belief.

I want to advance a highly condensed outline of the Teleological Argument in hopes that it will provide sufficient evidence to elevate hope into belief. Also, known as the Argument of Design, this argument posits that the perceived order manifest in the physical universe is best accounted for by a transcendental mind, or God. The laws of nature are derived from natural regularities—for example, the law of the conservation of energy, Newton’s laws, and Boyle’s law. These regularities are remarkable not only in the fact that they exist but also because of their mathematical precision and ubiquity (Flew 96). Each one is calibrated to extraordinary precision.  Craig cites Stephen Hawking who “estimated that if the rate of the universe’s expansion one second after the Big Bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, the universe would have re-collapsed into a hot fireball” (9-10). This is merely one of the many constants that govern the universe. This compounded with the reality that the specific confluence of individually finely tuned natural laws permits the emergence of life points to a Creator (Craig 9-10). According to Craig:

There are around 50 such quantities of and constants present in the Big Bang that must be finely-tuned in this way if the universe is to permit life. And it’s not just each quantity that must be exquisitely finely-tuned; their ratios to one another must be also finely tuned. (9-10)

Like Crocker’s version of the Cosmological Argument, the cause for a life-permitting universe can be ascribed to chance, physical law, or design from a Creator. The specified possibility for a life-permitting universe over a life-prohibiting one is so staggeringly infinitesimal and incomprehensible that appealing to chance as the universe’s cause becomes a rationally impoverished conclusion. Likewise, the claim that the universe is life-permitting due to physical law or physical necessity is immensely implausible. Nothing suggests that it is impossible for the universe to have been life-prohibiting (Craig 9-10). In the physicist Paul Davies words, “It could have been otherwise” (169). Only design plausibly accounts for the fact that the universe has the unique combination of physical laws and constants to support life.

The Teleological Argument justifies belief rather than mere hope because attributing the universe’s fine tuning to a Creator is vastly superior in plausibility to the other explanations. The Agatha Christie analogy does not hold because the evidence only points to a Creator. If belief is rationally justifiable, then the belief ought to be held whether or not it merits the optimal hope. If the God of Christianity exists and there is sufficient evidence of His existence, then it follows that we should believe in His existence regardless of whether or not He matches the God that we deem “worth hoping for.”

William Lane Craig and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, God? A Debate Between a Christian and an Atheist (New York:  Oxford University Press, Inc. 2004).

Antony Flew with Roy Abraham Varghese, There is a God (New York:  HarperCollins Publishers, 2007).

Paul Davies, The Mind of God (New York:  Simon & Schuster, 1992).

Richard Swinburne, Great Thinkers On Great Questions, ed. Roy Abraham Varghese (Oxford:  Onewold Publications, 1998).