Tolle Lege

On Wednesday, April 28th Rebecca Goldstein, philosopher and novelist, gave a lecture at Dartmouth on her novel 36 Arguments for the Existence of God. Her book is actually about why these 36 arguments fail, which came as a shock to those in the audience who had expected her to be a theist. I had researched her before and discovered she was an atheist, so I was prepared. What I was not prepared for (but perhaps should have been) was the shallowness of her case against God’s existence.

Most of her lecture was not devoted to the 36 arguments (why 36, and more importantly, why these 36, is left a mystery/left unanswered), but to her theory about fiction and philosophy, which she has attempted to combine in several of her novels. It was only afterwards, when browsing through the appendix of her book in which she gives each of the thirty six arguments and her “refutations” of them that I discovered that she, despite her Princeton PhD, was really no better than Dawkins, Dennett, or Hitchens.

Rebecca Goldstein

The arguments in her appendix can be divided into three broad categories: arguments no thinking theist would put forth in the way she presents them (straw men), arguments no thinking theist would put forth period, and arguments that easily survive her objections. 

Under the first category—straw man arguments—one that stands out in particular is the cosmological argument. The version of the cosmological argument she offers goes as follows:

1. Everything that exists must have a cause

2. The universe must have a cause (from 1)

3. Nothing can be the cause of itself 

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

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

6. God is the only thing outside the universe 

7. God caused the universe

8. God exists

Of course, Goldstein’s objection is the typical, cliché atheist question: then who caused God? The first premise says everything must have a cause, but the conclusion establishes the existence of something that doesn’t have a cause. If there is one exception, why can’t the universe be the exception? Now this objection is bad even in its own right—saying you can’t accept God as an explanation for the universe because you  can’t explain God is like saying we can’t accept your mother as the explanation for dinner because somebody must have cooked your mother. And of course God, definitonally, is that which is above nature (which includes natural laws, like causation). 

Furthermore, the universe can’t be the exception, because that would make the universe a necessary being—which, since it is contingent, it clearly isn’t. This kind of objection—call it the infinite regress objection—is so egregiously bad because it tries to take the central premise of the cosmological argument, which is that, since there can’t be an infinite regress of causes, there must be a first cause, and use it to disprove the argument. It tries to use the impossibility of an infinite regress to disprove God’s existence, when it is that very impossibility on which the cosmological rests. But that is utterly nonsensical. It would be like saying to a relativist, “no, relativism can’t be true, because there are no moral truths.”

But in fact we don’t even need to bother with her objection, because it is only relevant to her version of the cosmological, and her version is manifestly a straw man. All it takes is a slight variation in the first premise and you have solved the problem. Take, for instance, the Kalam cosmological argument, which is the version defended by William Lane Craig:

1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause

2. The universe began to exist

3. Therefore, the universe has a cause

Or a basic summary of Aquinas’ first way:

1. Some things are moved (which means not only physical motion, but changed)

2. Every that is moved is moved by another 

3. Either there is a first mover or nothing is moved by another

4. There is a first mover

I am not trying to assess the soundness of these arguments here. Clearly, they require explanation and defense. My point is that both of the first premises of the above syllogisms are more limited in scope than the first premise she uses, thereby easily avoiding her refutation. The objection she raises- who caused God- is totally irrelevant to any actual cosmological argument that believers use.

Then there is the second category of arguments, ones that no apologist would actually use. She offers one called “the argument from holy books”:

1. There are holy books that reveal the word of God

2. The word of God is necessarily true

3. The word of God reveals the existence of God

4. God exists.

If Goldstein believes Christians actually argue in this way, then her ignorance of classical natural theology is so deep as to be almost tragic. Of course, such a patronizing assumption of Christian stupidity is by no means unexpected from someone who would write the following about atheists: “Now it’s all gone unforgotten, and minds that have better things to think about have to devote precious neuronal resources to figure out how to knock some sense back into the species” (36 Arguments, pg. 1). 

Then there’s the third category of arguments in which she fails to refute even her own version. Argument 16, the argument from moral truth:

1. There exist objective moral truths (slavery and torture and genocide are not just distasteful to us, but are actually wrong)

2. These objective moral truths are not grounded in the way the world is, but rather, in the way it ought to be (consider: should white supremacists succeed, taking over the world and eliminating all who don’t meet their criteria for being existence-worthy, their ideology would still be morally wrong. It would be true, in this hideous counterfactual, that the world ought not to be the way they have made it).

3. The world itself- the way it is, the laws of science that explain why it is that way-cannot account for the way the world ought to be.

4. The only way to account for morality is that God established morality (from 2 and 3)

5. God exists. 

Now while I prefer the brevity and clarity of other versions (for instance, William Lane Craig’s: 1. If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist. 2. Objective moral values and duties do exist. 3. God exists), nevertheless, this version still works. Certainly it is a valid argument, which means the conclusion follows from the premises. So to disprove it, Goldstein would have to disprove one of the premises. This she resolutely refuses to do. Instead she offers two irrelevant objections: 1. Euthyphro’s dilemma (which, since it was made 2,000 years ago by Plato, has been responded to by pretty much every major Christian thinker- see the previous Tolle Lege post entitled “Euthyphro’s Dilemma and The Problem of Theological Volunterism” by Brendan Woods) and 2. The historical wrongdoings of Christians and other religious people. Now it should be clear that neither of these objections even manages to address one of the premises of the argument. She claims that the historical sins of Christianity somehow refute premise four, but four is a philosophical statement about the proper metaphysical grounding for moral truth, not a historical claim about Christian behavior. 

And yet, despite these obvious flaws, her book has been praised in the atheist community as a paragon of atheist rationality. The tragic thing is that they are right: she probably is the one of the more rational champions atheists have today. It is a sad day for atheism, when Kant, Hume and Neitzshe are replaced by Goldstein, Hitchens, and Dennett. It’s a loss not only for atheists, but, in a way, for all of us.