Arguments Pro and Con

Arguments Pro and Con

“Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?”

David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779)

This page sets out the case on both sides. Not the caricatures each side keeps of the other, but the arguments as their best defenders actually make them. The reader can then judge which way the evidence leans, which is the only judgment worth making here.

The question is whether belief in God is reasonable — whether it is a blind leap or a conclusion the world we live in supports. That is a different question from what the word “God” means, which is taken up on the companion page What Do We Mean by “God”? A definition has to be settled before an argument about existence can even begin.

The case against is led by the oldest and hardest objection there is, the one Hume puts above: if God is able to prevent suffering and unwilling, He is not good; if willing and unable, He is not almighty. The world is full of suffering, a great deal of it falling on people who did nothing to deserve it. Alongside that stand the objections that every proof of God has been answered, that nature explains itself without remainder, that God stays hidden when He could simply appear, and that the sheer number of rival religions tells against all of them.

The case for begins where Saint Paul begins, insisting that God’s existence is not hidden knowledge but something “clearly perceived in the things that have been made” (Rom. 1:20). It runs from the existence of a universe that did not have to be here, from its order and its strange openness to being understood, from the reality of moral truth, and from the testimony of conscience and religious experience. Not one proof that compels, but several lines of evidence that converge.

I invite your engagement with me on these questions. You may leave comments below, but please be sure to read our policy on commenting before doing so.

Atheist/Skeptic View

Unbelief is not a refusal to think about the question. For most who hold it, it is the result of having thought about it, and of finding that the answers keep arriving after the fact.

The Problem of Evil

Hume laid out the fork and nobody has straightened it. A God who can prevent suffering and will not is not good. A God who would prevent it and cannot is not almighty. The world is full of suffering. So one of the three claims has to go: the power, the goodness, or the God.

The usual reply is that freedom is worth its price — that love which could not be refused would not be love. Grant it. It explains the torturer. It does not explain the tumor. A child dying of bone cancer is nobody’s free choice, and an earthquake arriving under a sleeping city is not the abuse of anyone’s liberty. Much suffering buys something. A great deal of it buys nothing that anyone has ever been able to name, and it is that remainder which tells.

Every Proof Has Been Answered

The argument from cause says everything must have one, then exempts God from the rule it just laid down. If one thing can exist uncaused, the universe is the obvious candidate, and it has the advantage of being here.

The argument from design was buried by Darwin, who showed how the appearance of design arises without a designer. Its modern replacement, fine-tuning, is answered either by a multiverse or by noticing that observers can only ever find themselves in a universe that permits observers. And the argument from morality mistakes an evolved social instinct for a voice from outside. Cooperation pays. Creatures that felt obligation left more descendants than those that did not.

The Silence, and the Crowd

Set the arguments aside and one fact remains: a God who wanted to be known could be known. He could say so, plainly, to everyone, and end the matter in an afternoon. Instead there is ambiguity, which is what absence looks like.

Every gap once occupied by God has been filled by something else — disease, weather, the origin of species, the origin of the cosmos. The pattern is not encouraging for the remaining gaps. And there are thousands of religions, each held with total conviction, almost all of which must be false. The believer already applies to every religion but his own exactly the skepticism the unbeliever applies to one more.

None of this demands certainty. It asks only that the evidence be as good as the claim is large, and it is not.

Catholic View

No single argument here is meant to compel. What follows is a convergence — several independent lines pointing the same way, none decisive on its own, and together harder to set aside than any one of them. Saint Paul claims this is how it has always been: that God’s “eternal power and deity” are “clearly perceived in the things that have been made” (Rom. 1:20). Not proved by a syllogism. Perceived, in what is already there.

Why There Is Anything at All

The universe did not have to exist. Nothing about it explains why it is here rather than absent; it is the sort of thing that could have failed to be. Whatever is like that needs something outside itself to account for it.

The objection is that this exempts God from the rule it just laid down. It does not, because the rule was never “everything has a cause.” It was that whatever could have failed to exist needs a cause. God is not one more item of that kind — that is the entire content of the word, as the companion page on what we mean by “God” sets out. To ask who made God is to ask who made the thing that by definition was not made.

Could the universe itself be that thing? It could, if it showed the marks of it — not changing, not assembled from parts, not one item among others. It shows none of them. It changes constantly, it is made of parts, and every part of it depends on the rest.

A World That Can Be Understood

Darwin explained the appearance of design in living things, and explained it well. He did not explain, and never claimed to, why there is a universe whose laws hold steady enough for evolution to work in.

That is what fine-tuning presses. The constants governing physics could have taken almost any values, and nearly all of them give a universe with no chemistry, no stars, nothing that lasts long enough to matter. The multiverse answers by multiplying universes until ours is unremarkable — a very large purchase, unobserved and by its own construction unobservable, made to avoid a conclusion. And the reply that we could only find ourselves in a life-permitting universe is true but idle: that I could only notice the firing squad missed if it had missed does not make the missing unremarkable.

Stranger still is that the universe can be understood at all. Mathematics worked out for its own sake, with no eye on the world, keeps turning out to describe the world exactly. That is not what you would expect of brute matter with no mind behind it.

The Weight of Right and Wrong

Evolution can explain why we feel obligation. It cannot explain why some things are wrong. Those are two different claims, and the objection slides from one to the other without noticing.

If the moral sense is only inherited instinct, then torturing a child is not wrong; it is merely something we are built to dislike, as we are built to dislike bitter flavors. Almost nobody believes this, including those who say it. The man who calls morality an evolved instinct still means it — means it about the world, not about his own wiring — when he says cruelty is wrong.

Where the Objection Is Strongest

The problem of evil is the hardest thing said against belief in God, and a believer who pretends otherwise forfeits his credibility. Three things can be said in reply, and the first is a concession.

Freedom is worth its price. Love that could not be refused would not be love, and a world of creatures able to love is worth more than a world of well-behaved machinery. But the objection is right that this covers the torturer and not the tumor. It answers the evil we do. It does not answer the evil that simply happens.

Second, what looks purposeless from inside time may not be. We see a fragment and pronounce on the whole. This is a real answer, and a limited one; offered by itself to someone in grief it is cold comfort, and should not be offered by itself.

The third is not an argument, and it is where Christianity actually differs from every other answer on offer. The claim is not that God explains suffering from a safe distance, but that He entered it — was betrayed, tortured, and executed — and turned it, in the Resurrection, toward redemption. That does not make evil good or grief lighter. It means the sufferer is not addressing someone who has never been where he is.

Why God Does Not Simply Appear

If God appeared unmistakably to everyone tomorrow, belief would stop being a free response and become a conclusion forced. A God who wants love rather than mere assent has reason to decline to overwhelm. Room to refuse is a condition of love, which is why the evidence is sufficient for those willing and resistible by those not.

As for the many religions: that they conflict shows most are wrong somewhere, not that all are wrong everywhere. Physicians disagree, and medicine is not thereby false. What is striking, once you look, is not how much the traditions differ about who is divine but how completely they agree about what ‘divine’ means.

The pattern of gaps closing is real, and worth conceding. But every explanation science supplies is an explanation of how something within the universe works. None of them touches the question of why there is a universe with anything in it to explain.

The Reply in Brief

No line here forces assent, and none is offered as forcing it. The claim is only that a universe which did not have to exist, which runs on constants that did not have to permit us, which yields to mathematics it had no reason to obey, and in which cruelty is actually wrong, is better accounted for by a Creator than by nothing at all.

The problem of evil remains the strongest objection, and it is not dissolved here. It is weighed. Set against it is a world containing creatures who can genuinely love, and a God who did not stay out of the wreckage but was nailed to it.

The full essays take each strand further than a panel allows: the argument from contingency in the form Aquinas actually gave it, the fine-tuning figures and what the multiverse would have to cost, why the moral argument survives every evolutionary account of moral feeling, and the long Christian literature on suffering — Augustine, Aquinas, and the modern replies to Hume.

Summary

The question is not whether any one argument settles the matter. None does, on either side. It is which way the whole body of evidence leans once the strongest case has been made both ways.

The problem of evil is the hardest objection, and it is not dissolved here. Hume’s fork stands: a God able to prevent suffering and unwilling is not good; willing and unable, not almighty. Freedom answers the evil we do to each other. It does not answer the child’s tumor or the earthquake under a sleeping city, and any reply that pretends otherwise is not worth hearing.

What Christianity offers there is not mainly a theory. Some suffering that looks purposeless from inside time may not be, and that is worth saying once and not leaning on. The distinctive Christian claim is that God did not explain suffering from a safe distance but entered it, was executed, and turned it toward redemption. Evil is not thereby made good. The sufferer is simply not addressing someone who has never been where he is.

“Who made God?” misreads the argument. The rule was never that everything has a cause, but that whatever could have failed to exist needs one. God is not an item of that kind. The universe, on the other hand, changes, is made of parts, and has every part depending on the rest — which is exactly the profile of something that needs accounting for.

Darwin explained the appearance of design; he did not explain the stage. He accounted for living things without a designer, and never claimed to account for a universe whose laws hold steady enough for evolution to work in. Fine-tuning presses that question, and the multiverse answers it by buying an unobservable infinity of worlds to make ours unremarkable.

Evolution explains the moral feeling, not the moral fact. Why we feel obligation and why some things are wrong are different questions. If the sense is only inherited instinct, cruelty is not wrong but merely distasteful to us — and almost nobody believes that, including those who say it.

The hiddenness has a reason, and the crowd of religions proves less than it seems. A God who appeared unmistakably would compel assent rather than invite love, and room to refuse is a condition of love. That the traditions conflict shows most are wrong somewhere, not that all are wrong everywhere — physicians disagree, and medicine is not therefore false.

In short: taken one at a time, no argument is decisive. Taken together they point one way. A universe that did not have to exist, running on constants that did not have to permit us, yielding to mathematics it had no reason to obey, containing creatures for whom cruelty is genuinely wrong — that is better accounted for by a Creator than by blind matter. The objections trouble the believer. They do not dissolve the reasons for belief.

For a fuller treatment, download Arguments For God (.docx) or Arguments Against God (.docx)

See also the companion page What Do We Mean by “God”?