Fundamental Reality

Aron Wall

I. Prologue, or Why Even Bother?

Looks like I've got to tell you now what I think about the Cosmological Argument. I believe that Cosmological Arguments can give us a good reason to believe in some type of fundamental entity which causes the universe to exist. In Theism that fundamental entity is taken to be God. However, I think that the Cosmological Argument by itself, apart from other considerations, does not necessarily imply either Theism or Supernaturalism. That is because there are also candidates within Naturalism for what that entity might be. But there are related considerations, having to do with consciousness and ethics, which in my view tip the scales towards Theism, and I will try to also explain what these are.

Before I begin, let me tell you right away that this isn't my preferred approach for doing Apologetics. I generally prefer a more empirical approach based on examining historical records for things like, oh, people being raised from the dead. That's not just because that type of data can potentially get you to Christianity instead of just Theism. It's also because, as a scientist, I've been trained to prefer the data to purely theoretical reasoning. Also, as someone who has studied the history of Philosophy, I'm well aware of just how far astray one can be led by so-called “armchair reasoning”, where you try to figure out how it makes sense for the universe to work, based only on broad aspects of reality.

There's way too many examples of philosophers (I'm looking at you, Kant) who say that things logically follow necessarily from premises, when in fact they don't. They're sneaking in extra assumptions on the side: relying on intuitions and then calling it Reason. It's not irrational to have intuitions—without them reasoning would never get off the ground—but not everyone necessarily shares those intuitions. That's just how it is in Philosophy. Any strictly deductive arguments for the existence of God necessarily rest on premises that not everyone is going to accept.

So I'm not going to even try to make deductive claims for most of what I'm going to say, but instead I'll try to tell you why I find Theism plausible, from an armchair reasoning point of view. There are plenty of places where you'll be able to dissent from me. I will argue that Theism makes better sense out of the world than any rival view, but not that all other views are inconsistent or absurd.

The English idealist F.H. Bradley said that “Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct; but to find these reasons is no less an instinct.” Well, I'm going to indulge that instinct here. I'm well aware that what I say isn't going to convince everyone.

I've been told that the perfect philosophical argument would be one where if the hearer understood the argument but failed to accept the conclusion, they would just die. The struggle to accept the incoherence would just be too much, and their brain would shut down. Well, there aren't any arguments like that, but I think Metaphysics is still worth doing anyway.

In fact, we must do Metaphysics. Even if you decide to focus on empirical evidence such as miracle claims, you still have to decide how much empirical evidence you actually need to accept a conclusion that may seem weird to you. But just how weird is God's existence? Bayes' Theorem says that the assignment of prior probabilities is a necessary step in evaluating any claim.

So that means, when deciding whether something exists or not, we always need to have some set of plausibility heuristics in our mind which say how likely that thing is to be. In cases where we are talking about the fundamental nature of existence, that means we've got to do Metaphysics. Even if there are no strictly deductive arguments (from indisputable premises), there are still going to be plausibility arguments pointing in various directions. It's irrational to put too much faith in plausibility arguments, but it's also irrational to be completely insensible to them. We must assess the plausibility of propositions in order to evaluate them properly.

If at any point you think I am handling things badly and going beyond my evidence, I ask only to be judged by fair standards. It's easy enough to just take a negative point of view, and criticize unwarranted assumptions in other people's arguments. But suppose that someone asked you to stand up and defend your own metaphysical beliefs (say, materialism) with arguments capable of persuading others. Not just something offhand like “This makes sense to me, and I've never seen any good reason to believe otherwise”, but some robust intellectual argument for certain types of existence or nonexistence claims. You'll quickly find that it's a hard thing to do. Yet some particular specific set of metaphysical statements must in fact be true, even if it is hard to see which ones.

So if you disagree, please do not just say, “There's a hole in your reasoning at line 278, therefore you are being illogical and religion is irrational.” Instead tell me what metaphysical view you find more plausible and why.

From this perspective, I find it interesting that it is possible to argue for the existence of God as well as we can. There are no compelling armchair arguments for the existence of quarks, jaguars, and so on, yet these exist and are observationally measurable. Only in the case of the most fundamental being, God, can we make any kind of purely philosophical argument for his existence. And that is precisely because he is so fundamental, that he is part of the background for everything else that we can or do experience.

I hasten to repeat that this type of considerations I'm about to present are not the primary reasons why I believe in God. God has shown himself through explicit divine revelations, recorded in the Bible and elsewhere. So it is not necessary to approach him through purely philosophical means. And there are many important things about God which we cannot hope to learn without revelation. Nevertheless, there are some people who have argued themselves into Theism for reasons similar to those I am going to describe. I also think it gives some helpful background motivations for Christian theology, even though it is not the primary source of it.

But I don't think Cosmological Argument type reasoning should be exclusively thought of as an argument for Theism, as though it had no other applicability except as a religious tool. I think there are several different types of Cosmological considerations, and that anyone trying to think through Metaphysics seriously, will have to do some type of reasoning not completely unlike what I am going to say. Indeed, quite a bit of what I am going to say should be acceptable even to atheists, and I would continue to accept several of the arguments even if I ceased to be religious.

None of what follows is intended to be particularly original, except for the presentation, and perhaps also the modesty with which I wish to assert the following claims as plausibility arguments, rather than any kind of strict deductions. Broadly speaking, the types of arguments being considered have been around for a long time (longer than Christianity has been around), although I'm going to present them in the form I find most plausible even at the cost of a bit of originality.

One might worry that such arguments are a post hoc attempt to justify, through specious reasoning, conclusions which really came from certain religious texts. But historically speaking, this is not at all what happened. The arguments were developed primarily by Greek philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. These arguments tended to support a monotheistic view of the world, which was actually in conflict with the polytheistic view of their surrounding culture. (Other Greek philosophers developed something more akin to Naturalism, which was of course also in conflict with popular Greek religion.) It is therefore quite interesting that the Greek arguments supported something much closer to the Hebrew conception of divinity, which the Hebrews had received by Revelation rather than Reason. Western culture as we know it is really the synthesis of the Greek mind with the Jewish heart, without which there is no theo-logy.

But that combination is also not the origin of Christianity. Rather, it is the cultural milieu in which Christianity started. The compatibility of these two sets of ideas was just starting to be appreciated, when something far stranger than either of them came into the world to save it.

II. Causes and Explanations

With sufficiently robust assumptions about how causation works, it is possible to formulate various Cosmological Arguments (there's more than one) in a strictly deductive way. But in our age there isn't enough of a consensus about how causation works, or even whether it really exists, to create an argument with broad popular appeal. Some people even say that Science has refuted the idea of causality and replaced it with other concepts.

Instead I'm going to go the long way around and focus on the concept of explanations. It seems utterly clear to me that Science is in the business of finding explanations for certain phenomena. If it can't do that, it loses any claim to make sense out of the world. If you want your theory to explain even one single thing about the world, then that requires you to give an account of what circumstances explain that thing. Then we say that the thing happened because of those circumstances. And as you can see, that word “because” has the word cause sitting inside of it. Grammar itself teaches us that Science requires some notion of causation.

For example, we say things like “the planets all rotate around the sun in the same direction because the solar system formed from a rotating disk of gas”, or “the heat capacity of matter is finite because it is made out of atoms”, or “electrons attract protons because they have negative charge”, or “energy is conserved because the laws of nature are invariant under time translation.” It is not obvious that these various senses of “because” all correspond to the exact same concept, but we can take almost any of them as examples for what I am going to say. (Except perhaps for the “because” of pure logical deduction from definitions, i.e. “cold is the absence of heat because that is what the word cold means; 2+2 = 4 because 4 is twice two. But pure logic is not enough to explain everything that happens, since avoidance of strict logical inconsistency is a rather weak constraint.)

Aristotle famously said that there are four different types of causes: material, formal, efficient, and final. As a classification of the types of "because" answers we give to various questions, this seems fairly reasonable. But some people would argue that the physical sciences only use some of these types of explanations. In particular, it is disputed whether final causes, which express purposes—e.g. that the sun exists in order to produce light, or that the animals eat in order to receive nourishment—really exist in reality outside of our own minds. This question will pop up later when we discuss Ethics, not to mention the Fine-Tuning Argument. For the time being, let's consider less controversial notions of causation, without assuming Aristotle’s division to be correct.

In order to side-step some possible misunderstandings about what I mean by an explanation, let me make it clear that I am using the term explanation in a broad sense, so that:

A. Explanations can be Nondeterministic. An explanation does not need to be deterministic, in the sense that the effect invariably follows from the cause. It is enough if the explanation produces a framework, in which it makes sense that the cause might be produced. For example, Quantum Mechanics is a nondeterministic theory, in the sense that if you start with a given initial condition, and you know the laws of physics, there is generally more than one possible final outcome, and you can only predict their probabilities. So long as the probability of what happens is not so low as to indicate that the theory is probably wrong, I'm going to count this type of thing as an explanation of the experimental outcome. That's because it seems that the universe is not deterministic, and if it isn't, then probabilistic explanation is the best that we can do.

For example, if a radioactive atom decays, you can't predict exactly when it will decay, but you can still explain why it can decay with reference to the forces and particles in the nucleus. It's not like the decay occurs in an explanatory void. So I think in a quantum mechanical theory, we need to generalize our notions of "explanation" and/or "causation" to allow for such nondeterministic explanations. Just because you can't predict exactly what happens, doesn't mean there isn't a set of circumstances which causes whatever does happens to happen. It's just that there's more than one possible outcome that set of circumstances could have produced. That's different from something happening without any causes at all.

B. Explanations can be Unknown. Similarly, there obviously exist some phenomena which do have an explanation, but we don't know what it is yet. In that case, I want the term “explanation” to refer to the actual reason why the thing occurs, and not merely to those explanations which are currently known to our limited human minds. Maybe we will never find out the full explanation for something, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. This point is important because Cosmological Reasoning, as I understand it, involves the attempt to push back the concept of explanation back to its ultimate fundamentals, to see what a fundamental explanation would have to look like in principle. For example, a Naturalist doesn't necessarily need to know what the most fundamental theory of physics should look like, to propose that if we did know it fully, it would then explain everything else.

On the other hand:

C. Explanations are not just Regularities. I reject the Humean view that causality is just a name for the constant conjunction of events. In the end, I think this boils down to a renunciation of the possibility of explaining anything. “Rocks have always fallen down before” is simply not an explanation for why the next rock falls down. It doesn't have the right form to be an explanation. It may make it rational to believe that the next rock will fall down, but the reason it does so is that we believe that there are underlying causes (in this case, gravitational attraction to the Earth) which remain roughly the same for each rock. Conversely, there are many types of regularities (e.g. as of 2014, a woman has never been U.S. President) which may be unbroken in our experience, but that doesn't make those recurrences Laws of Nature. Hence, when we seek to explain things, we ought to demand more than just the occurrence of regularities.

This seems to me to be elementary common sense, and I don't think the mathematization of physics (which merely describes these regularities, in increasing generality and detail) should change this conclusion. But even if you accept the Regularity View, you still can't do Science at all unless you try to figure out how to describe these regularities with the most fundamental and deep laws possible. On any reasonable view of causation, we can ask whether this process of explaining things finally terminates; and that will be the topic of the next section.

III: Chains, Parsimony, and Magic

Some optimistic folks hope that Science will eventually explain everything about the world. But this hope seems absurd in light of the fact that explanations always involve presuppositions. The structure of explanation is always that we explain one thing A in terms of some set of other things B, C, D... which exist, or which have happened. (Let's not be too particular about what we mean by “things” here, whether “objects”, “events” or what...) One could then ask what is the explanation of B or C or D, and these things will in turn typically have explanations in terms of other things. This gives us various types of explanatory series, and we can ask whether these terminate in some type of ultimate explanation.

So it seems that the best we could possibly do is to have one thing or principle whose existence is unexplained, and then use that to explain everything else. That one thing would then have no other explanation outside of itself. However, we can still evaluate how plausible it is that it should exist, based on various considerations of parsimony. We can ask:

Is this entity the type of thing where it would make sense for it to just exist on its own? Or is it the sort of thing that would more naturally be explained by reference to something else?

Is this the simplest conception of fundamental reality, or can we get away with a simpler one? (Here I am using simple in the sense of Occam's razor, although if there were really just one unexplained entity, not composed of parts, it would also be simple in the Medieval Scholastic sense of being non-composite.)

You might notice that the people of a scientific bent tend to focus exclusively on the second question, while traditional metaphysics focuses more on the first question. In my view both questions are relevant.

I said that explaining everything in terms of one thing is the best we can do. We might have to settle for less, such as a plurality (hopefully small) of unexplained fundamental principles. However, that would not only be more complicated, it would also raise questions about what is it that joins these (supposedly separate) principles together. We might therefore reasonably hope that the principles in question would at least have some type of internal unity, without being too dogmatic at this stage about what kind of unity we are looking for.

Some people might propose that the chain of explanations extends backwards forever in an infinite chain. Thus nothing has any ultimate explanation, but rather each one is explained by the thing before it, and so on. Alternatively one could have the explanations arranged in a circle, which is similar to the infinite regress for what I am about to say.

The chain of explanations wouldn't necessarily have to be embedded in any kind of temporal sequence, but if it were, one would have to have a universe which is eternal to the past. Now there are physics problems with trying to make a compelling physical model along these lines, with neither a geometrical nor a thermodynamic type of beginning. But here I'm trying to explore more general metaphysical considerations, of the sort that are accessible from the nearest armchair, so I'll try to appeal to intuition instead of esoteric quantum cosmology considerations, for which the evidence of a beginning is mixed.

Personally, I find an infinite regress, with nothing more behind it, rather unsatisfactory. It is not that I think there is any logical inconsistency in a universe which extends backwards in time forever. There isn't. The universe might well work that way. But I feel like such a chain of explanations wouldn't actually explain anything in the chain properly. For example, in the “ekpyrotic” scenario where the universe involves an eternal bouncing back and forth of two membranes, it wouldn't tell us why there are two membranes rather than one or four. It would just boil down to saying that: things just are the way they are because they are the way they are. Of course, if there were some additional extra explanation outside of time which somehow determined that there had to be two membranes, that would be different, and would make me much more satisfied with a time that goes back forever.

Somebody might retort that explaining everything in terms of one unexplained thing is just as bad in that it also has something which “just is the way it is”. But at least in that case it there's only one thing like that, not a whole chain of things. I find in myself an intellectual preference for building explanations on a foundation. Axiomatic reasoning is usually regarded as more intellectually respectable than circular reasoning. If we deduce things from axioms, those axioms can be appreciated and evaluated. Whereas if we deduce things from a chain going back to infinity, I feel that the entire system is unsupported in a vicious way. So I'm fine with time going back to infinity, but only if there is something which transcends time which makes time do that. Of course, Nature does not necessarily have to correspond to my intuitions, but I don't think it's irrational to believe that at least some of our intuitions give us rational guidance about how the universe should work. Without some rational intuitions leading us to seek explanations, Science couldn't even get off the ground.

Furthermore, there are chains of explanation which do not go further and further back into the past, and these chains cannot be accounted for simply by postulating an infinite past. We might also try to explain why the present-day dynamical processes of nature occur in the way that they do. For example, suppose I want to know why a balloon attracts hair. So I say it is because they have opposite electrical charges, which are attracted to each other with an inverse square law. Well, why is that? Well, because each charge has electric field lines coming out of it. Why is that? Because Gauss's equation said it had to happen that way. Why is that? It seems the answer must eventually be: it happens by MAGIC.

Some would say that this is obscurantism and that things happen because of the Laws of Nature. But we have to remember that the phrase “Laws of Nature” is really a stand-in for whatever mysterious aspect of reality causes things to obey these Laws of Nature. When the phrase was first coined, the word “law” was a metaphor which was taken to imply the presence of a Legislator. St. Chesterton suggests that the rational agnostic should instead use a different type of terminology, borrowed from fairy tales:

In fairyland we avoid the word "law"; but in the land of science they are singularly fond of it. Thus they will call some interesting conjecture about how forgotten folks pronounced the alphabet, Grimm's Law. But Grimm's Law is far less intellectual than Grimm's Fairy Tales. The tales are, at any rate, certainly tales; while the law is not a law. A law implies that we know the nature of the generalization and enactment; not merely that we have noticed some of the effects. If there is a law that pick-pockets shall go to prison, it implies that there is an imaginable mental connection between the idea of prison and the idea of picking pockets. And we know what the idea is. We can say why we take liberty from a man who takes liberties. But we cannot say why an egg can turn into a chicken any more than we can say why a bear could turn into a fairy prince. As ideas, the egg and the chicken are further off from each other than the bear and the prince; for no egg in itself suggests a chicken, whereas some princes do suggest bears. Granted, then, that certain transformations do happen, it is essential that we should regard them in the philosophic manner of fairy tales, not in the unphilosophic manner of science and the "Laws of Nature." When we are asked why eggs turn to birds or fruits fall in autumn, we must answer exactly as the fairy godmother would answer if Cinderella asked her why mice turned to horses or her clothes fell from her at twelve o'clock. We must answer that it is magic. It is not a "law," for we do not understand its general formula. It is not a necessity, for though we can count on it happening practically, we have no right to say that it must always happen. It is no argument for unalterable law (as Huxley fancied) that we count on the ordinary course of things. We do not count on it; we bet on it. We risk the remote possibility of a miracle as we do that of a poisoned pancake or a world-destroying comet. We leave it out of account, not because it is a miracle, and therefore an impossibility, but because it is a miracle, and therefore an exception. All the terms used in the science books, "law," "necessity," "order," "tendency," and so on, are really unintellectual, because they assume an inner synthesis, which we do not possess. The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms used in the fairy books, "charm," "spell," "enchantment." They express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery. A tree grows fruit because it is a magic tree. Water runs downhill because it is bewitched. The sun shines because it is bewitched.

I deny altogether that this is fantastic or even mystical. We may have some mysticism later on; but this fairy-tale language about things is simply rational and agnostic. It is the only way I can express in words my clear and definite perception that one thing is quite distinct from another; that there is no logical connection between flying and laying eggs. It is the man who talks about "a law" that he has never seen who is the mystic.

(Orthodoxy, "The Ethics of Elfland").

Let no one think that St. Chesterton said this only because he did not understand the particular explanations given by Modern Science. He didn't, but it doesn't make any difference, since you come to the same place in the end no matter what. No matter how many mediators we put in between the hair and the balloon—even if there is a continuum of mediating entities—at some point we need to postulate some sort of fundamental interaction not explained through intermediaries.

If we ask why these direct interactions occur, we either have to say for no reason at all (in which case it is a puzzle why things happen so consistently, since every single instance of an interaction would be a quite separate unexplained occurrence) or else to say that there is some common force or principle: either God or else some other term more acceptable to atheists. We can call the underlying principle a “Law” if we want to (for lack of better language) but we should be aware that the word doesn't really explain why things had to be this way.

So in what follows, let's suppose that the explanations terminate on one or more unexplained entities, whether laws of physics, divinities or something else. Because of the uncertainty about what these things actually are, I am not going to impose a rigid grammar on them, but will freely alternative between different terms. I don't mean to sneak in any substantive assumptions by calling them “things”, “entities”, “principles”, “rules”, “beings”, or whatever.

Still, they must in some sense exist, or they couldn't do any work explaining anything else. They are not merely logical abstractions, since logical abstractions can't do anything, they can only describe things. Some people would say that it's a category error to say that laws can do anything, that laws merely describe regularities in Nature, but don't cause them to exist. Well, if that happens to be true, then (contra Hume) something else must cause those regularities to keep occurring, otherwise it would just be a mighty coincidence that the regularities keep on happening.

In the following reflections I will try to say more about what this “something” might be. I'm not trying to force a prematurely theological conclusion here. I'm reasonably confident that any rational, complete worldview must have some set of fundamental entities or explanations which play the explanatory role that God does in Theism, but it is a quite separate question whether the thing(s) that fill that role have to be at all like the traditional conception of God. This is a question which we will eventually need to face square-on, but first let's try to figure out some properties that any fundamental entities would have to have, no matter whether they are conceived of along Naturalist or Supernaturalist lines.

IV: Necessity, Eternity, and Power

It is natural to suppose that these fundamental entities are in some sense necessary. I don't mean this term to imply that they can be rigorously proven from pure logic (logical/conceptual necessity) or even that we personally can be sure that they exist. What I mean is that they are necessary considered in themselves, that (regardless of what we think or know) if we could only understand the fundamental nature of reality, we would know that they had to exist. They are metaphysically necessary. (This is quite distinct from the sort of conceptual inevitability described in the Chesterton quote previously.)

The way I have stated things, this may seem almost like a tautology, since we have stipulated that these things are the fundamental entities which explain everything else. Given that they are the nature of things, they cannot not exist given the fundamental rules of existence, which is themselves.

Some people, though, would argue for the exact opposite, and say that the fundamental nature of reality, because it cannot be explained in terms of anything else, is just the ultimate inexplicable “brute fact”. They would conceive of it more along the lines of the most wildly contingent thing there is, since it has no particular reason to exist and yet it does. But this way of looking at things doesn't make intuitive sense to me.

If the fundamental nature of existence just happens to exist, with no internal necessity, why should we suppose that it should be at all simple or rational in its effects? If it is completely inexplicable, then there are no constraints. And if it is contingent—meaning something which might either exist or not exist—then it seems strange that there would be no process controlling whether it or something else (or nothing at all) comes into being. If there are brute facts, then the entire world rests on a fluke, and the ultimate nature of reality is completely arbitrary and irrational.

Furthermore, if anything about the concrete physical world occurs necessarily, because it had to be that way (besides mere truths of logic) then a fortiori the fundamental nature of existence must be like that too.

If the fundamental entities are necessary, then it stands to reason that they are also eternal, since something that exists necessarily cannot come into being, or cease to be, or indeed change in any way. They must just exist timelessly. Besides which, if they explain what happens at all moments of time, it doesn't seem plausible that they should only exist for certain moments of time. For similar reasons, one can argue that the fundamental entities can't be limited to just one region of space. Their influence must be present everywhere.

It also seems that the fundamental entities (taken as a whole, if there is more than one of them) must be powerful, insofar as their existence is capable of explaining the existence of all other things.

Power here means causal efficacy (I obviously don't mean force times distance per time in this context!). Earlier I tried to avoid making too many controversial assumptions about causality, but I also argued that the very concept of explanation or “because” involves a certain notion of causality, so if you like you may take the notion of power in this sense. (One needs some concept of causation to say that anything is powerful.)

In fact, the fundamental principle(s), taken together, must be all-powerful, and that in two different senses: (1) all the other powers that may exist in the world are explained by reference to theirs, and (2) nothing outside of themselves can prevent them from doing things, because there IS nothing outside of them; only themselves and things whose natures are, by stipulation, subject to their dominion.

This does not, however, prevent there from being constraints on what these beings can do, based on them having some type of definite nature, which only does certain things. And, since everything that exists obeys the rules of logic, it is clear they cannot do logically absurd things, such as causing themselves to never have existed. So none of those silly logical puzzles about whether an omnipotent being can make stones too heavy to lift are relevant here.

All of the metaphysical reflections above, I would endorse whether or not I believed in God. Nothing I have yet said is designed to discriminate between Naturalism and Supernaturalism.

V: Some Candidates, and a Math Test

What are the possible candidates for the most fundamental principle of reality, which is to explain everything else? Well, what do we know about the reality which it is supposed to explain? One thing we know from the study of Physics, is that the world can be described (at least most of the time, to a high degree of precision) by a mathematical system of equations.

So the world is made of math! (However, we should bear in mind here Bertrand Russell's observation that the fact that the constituents of the world are ordered in a particular pattern does not actually tell us what is the internal nature of those constituent parts...this will come back to bite us later.) Here I am speaking loosely, in the same rough sense that I said earlier that things happen due to magic.

Well, what should we conclude from the mathematical nature of physics? I can think of two obvious hypotheses. Either (1) the fundamental reality is something a bit like an mathematical equation (yet not a mere abstraction, but something which actually makes the world go around), or (2) the fundamental reality is something a bit like a mathematician, i.e. a mind capable of appreciating mathematical relations. (I don't mean either of these descriptions to be taken too literally here, obviously the fundamental entity cannot be exactly like a set of symbols on the blackboard, or a human mind, but the choice of analogy makes the difference to what effects seem likely to follow.)

If the former hypothesis is true, we would have Naturalism, a worldview which takes the universe as revealed by the Natural Sciences to be the ultimate reality, so that everything else must depend on that. If the latter is true, we would have a Supernatural or Theistic view of reality.

I don't mean to suggest that (1) and (2) are the only possible candidates for the fundamental entity, just the ones I find most plausible. Some naturalists might instead propose that the ultimate thing that explains everything else is A) the entire Universe “taken as a whole”, B) the first moment of time, C) the most elementary constituents of matter (whatever they are), or D) some vague principle or force, not structured like an equation, “out of which” the Laws of Physics emerge for some unknown reason. But I don't think these are quite as plausible as compared to (1).

I only have time to do a drive-by shooting of these proposals: (A) seems problematic as the unexplained source of everything, if we take the term “Universe” literally. For the Universe (as defined by Naturalists) is just the collection of all the things which exist (e.g. my cat). So if we say that the Universe as a whole just exists and has no explanation, that would imply that my cat, being one of the parts of the Universe, just exists and has no explanation. We could try to clarify this hypothesis by saying that actually only certain necessary, eternal, basic features of the Universe that have no explanation. But then it is no longer the world taken as a whole which is fundamental, but only some aspect thereof. We are then obliged to give a more specific account of what we mean by that aspect, and this is tantamount to adopting one of the other hypotheses.

If we say (B)—which obviously only works if there is a first moment of time—it seems problematic that the fundamental nature of reality should pass out of existence, and odder still why it should result in consistent laws of physics at later moments of time. (C) means that there are rather a lot of fundamental realities, and raises difficult questions about what makes them capable of interacting with each other, and how they can be limited to particular places or times. Without more details (D) is too vague to really be criticized, but in any case it is starting to verge on a (rather murky) Supernaturalism.

Now let's do a survey of Supernaturalistic views, in which there's one or more divinities, conceived as capable of having some degree of understanding, power, and purpose, although it or they might not be very much like a human mind. One could accept Pantheism and identify God with the Universe. Or one could embrace Polytheism and believe in multiple gods who are collectively responsible for the Universe as we know it. Finally, one could invest all of the responsibility in a single Deity who is the source of everything else, which is Monotheism.

Pantheism seems to be open to much the same types of objections as (A) above. (Many forms of Pantheism say that the universe of our senses is an illusion and all that really exists is God, but I have difficulties making logical sense of this position, so I won't consider it seriously.) Also it is not entirely clear, if God is identified with the Universe, how this viewpoint can distinguish itself from Naturalism, although some Pantheists might have answers to this question.

Polytheism seems to me susceptible to fatal objections, at least if the gods are regarded as metaphysically fundamental. It seems rather strange that a bunch of fundamental entities should coexist without there being any higher principle which determines why the Pantheon is related to each other in the way that they are. What decides which god gets its way in the case of a disagreement? (Or if they always agree, that would seem to suggest something deeper than any of them which causes them to agree.)

Indeed the actual historical Pagans, despite worshiping multiple gods, very seldom conceived of the vast panoply of gods as being fundamental aspects of reality. Instead they usually invented elaborate theogenies explaining how the gods themselves came into being (by a variety of scandalous sexual or asexual means of reproduction) from pre-existing matter or divinities. Often one has a henotheistic setup: worshipping one chief God who is regarded as the primary Creator, together with many lesser gods valued as mediators to the heavenly court. Or else the different deities are regarded as modes or manifestations of a single one. Thus, even in polytheistic cultures, the philosophers tend towards Naturalism, Pantheism, or Monotheism in their fundamental philosophy. This is a tell-tale sign that a religious belief is philosophically untenable: if even the philosophers raised in a tradition cannot accept it.

Notwithstanding the platypus, it seems rather unlikely that Nature was designed by committee. It has too much internal coherence for that. Atheists are frequently heard saying that Modern Science is in conflict with Religion, and they are quite right, always assuming that by “Religion” they mean Paganism. It is quite untenable in a Scientific Age to believe that there is one divinity responsible for lightning, another one responsible for erotic love, another for birds and so on. The natural world isn't really divided along those lines.

As far as I know there are no polytheists who worship the actual forces of nature as four different gods. The best I can do along these lines is to suggest that Thor = electromagnetism (obviously!), Odin = gravitation (he's the most subtle), Freyja = strong force (she who binds with ties of love), and Loki = weak force (too busy wreaking mischief to bother holding anything together). But I think this new cult is unlikely to take off among any demographic group I can think of!

VI: Comparison of the Finalists

For the reasons just given, I think the main choice is between Naturalism and Monotheism (which I will sometimes call Theism for short).

Before trying to decide between these two views, I think it is well worth emphasizing just how much they have in common. Both of them agree that Nature is not a divine being, but instead a limited reality capable of being studied and explored—these metaphysical views are therefore the most compatible with Science, and it is not surprising that people of a scientific bent tend to adopt one of these two views.

We thus have to decide which conception to adopt of Ultimate Reality. Is it more like a Law, or more like a Mind?

On the one hand, there is something strange about the concept of a “Law of Nature” as a fundamental entity, since as pointed out earlier, normally a law is something which is imposed by a Lawgiver. Really it must be a metaphor for something stranger, more magical as St. Chesterton says. Indeed, in so far as the Laws compel matter to behave in a particular, rationally comprehensible way, one can see that they are already, in certain respects, a bit more like a living mind than say a rock is. Thus Naturalism itself borders on a form of Theism, to the extent that it implies that the Universe is governed by a rational ordering principle (λογος) similar to, but greater than, the rational ordering in the minds of the scientists who study it. There is a risk here of introducing at least Einstein's “God”, if not the God of Religion.

But to be fair, no matter what conception of Ultimate Reality we adopt, it seems likely that we can only understand it with our limited human minds by employing some set of metaphors or analogies. This applies to Theism at least as strongly as to Naturalism (though perhaps Theists are more often conscious of the fact that they are applying metaphors to God, than Naturalists are when they speak of Nature). In that sense, we are all in the same boat. If the Naturalist wishes to insist that they are using “Law of Nature” in a purely metaphorical way, which connotes order and rationality but excludes any hint of personality or mind, then I cannot say that they are employing a fundamentally illegitimate methodology. Nearly all of our conceptions are metaphorical to some degree, even about lesser matters.

And if there are some deep questions about what the metaphysical meaning of the Laws are, at least their physical content can be precisely stated in precise mathematical terms. Whereas anyone who has studied Theology knows that hashing out the meaning of a fundamental mind, and predicting its effects, is a far murkier subject.

For these reasons, I believe it is not possible on the basis of Cosmological Arguments alone to decide between Naturalism and Theism. But the balance of probabilities is shifted by other types of arguments.

We might check to see if there is any credible evidence that some god has revealed himself to the world through explicit revelation, supported by manifestations such as miracles, prophecies, or visions. In fact we should do this, but it is not something that can be done from our armchairs (not without the aid of books or the internet anyway!) so let's leave this aside for the time being.

Another set of considerations is Design Arguments. These concern the question of whether the Universe is organized in a way that suggests the existence of an intelligent agent with particular goals. One particular type of Design Argument was invalidated by Darwin, but there are other versions, such as the Fine-Tuning Argument, which I'll discuss in depth at a later time. On the flip side are the Undesign Arguments that the Universe is not the way a divine being would organize it: the most convincing forms of these involve Arguments from Evil. But I don't want to consider Design Arguments here. Not because they are irrelevant, but because they don't have much to do with purely Cosmological considerations.

Instead let me consider what we can learn from the Philosophy of Mind and the Philosophy of Ethics. There is a sense in which these give a continuation of the Cosmological Argument, namely that if we believe there is some Source responsible for everything else that is, then what attributes we should attribute to the source will depend on what kinds of things really exist and therefore proceed from that source. (I say kinds of things, not arrangements of things into patterns; the latter would be more akin to a Design Argument). We need to decide whether it would be possible in principle for those kinds of things to come from that proposed Source or not.

In the process, I will naturally have to make some rather controversial statements. In other words, the plausibility of Theism depends on your background beliefs. I hope that doesn't shock any of my readers too much!

VII: Does God Need a Brain?

One possible objection to Theism is this: in the case of human or animal minds, we think using our brains. This is a rather complicated chunk of matter, that has—at the very least—a rather large amount to do with determining what our thoughts are. Assuming that there is a divinity which transcends the material world, and everything else, it wouldn't and couldn't have anything like a brain. So how could God possibly think?

The problem is aggravated all the more if we decide that the fundamental reality should be simple in the sense of not being composed of any kind of parts (this is a technical term in theology, not to be confused with "simple" in the sense of easy to understand or unsophisticated). Since if it were composed of separable parts, it would be natural to seek some explanation further back about how these parts got to be stuck together.

Recall, however, that I only proposed that God is like a mind, not that his mind works in the exact same way that ours does. Because we have brains, our knowledge is necessarily limited (because there's a limit to the information capacity and reliability of a finite piece of matter) and also indirect (because we experience things in the outside world by representing them as particular patterns of firing neurons).

If God does not have a brain, then there is no physical mechanism to determine which things he knows and which he doesn't know. So it seems likely he would have to know either nothing or everything. (Aristotle stands up to propose the compromise that God knows only his own act of thinking, but let's ignore him.) Since our original motivation for Theism was that God is like a mathematician who can appreciate the mathematical elegance of the physical world, it seems only the omniscience option will do.

Unlike us, God knows things directly, rather than by the mediation of a perceptual apparatus and neural processing. For if an omniscient being knew things by representation, then he would need an exact identical copy of the entire Universe in his brain. If he is omniscient, the copy would be exactly like the original, which seems absurd on grounds of redundancy: everything in the world would exist twice, once in reality and once exactly the same in God's mind. Better to say that God just knows whatever is true, or rather that God is such that his knowledge and Truth are one and the same thing! (This, incidentally, also provides a general recipe for dispelling almost any supposed logical paradox about omniscience. Just replace all instances of “God knows X” with “X is true”, and then you will have a new paradox which must have a solution, even if you are an atheist. That solution is then also available to the theist.)

Some readers may think that this view of God is a form of Pantheism, because in some sense the world is a part of God's thoughts. But I don't think this is true. The views which I am articulating here are a form of Classical Theism, which has historically been the most important view of God in the philosophy of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. This view might come a little closer to Pantheism than people think, but it differs in some essential details.

If God is the fundamental reality, then he exists quite apart from the world and does not depend on it for his existence. His wisdom and power are eternal, and eternally he knows himself. Because he is omniscient, and does not need representations, what he knows about a tree must be exactly the same as that tree (together with its context), but that is not to say that his pre-existing ability to know is identical to the tree, still less that he himself is made out of wood, like the idols that have no understanding.

A brief digression: In Christian theology, there is one possible exception to my argument here, namely that God's knowledge of himself might well still be representational. We believe that there is also a Divine Son who is the Word and Wisdom of God, that he eternally pre-existed with his Father before all Creation. “Word” (λογος) is a metaphor for an expression of some idea, and this suggests that in some sense the Son is involved in God's act of knowing himself. So, although this is getting into very deep waters here, maybe even God can't fully understand himself without recourse to a representation. Since God is omniscient, this representation is in some sense an exact copy; fully accurate to who he is, yet distinguishable by the fact that it is the copy, not the original.

In fact, we believe that God is so full of life that there are actually two distinct self-expressions springing up out of the Father's being, namely the Son and the Holy Spirit. When an artist paints a self-portrait, the image of himself is an expression of who he is, and in a different way his artistic style—the “spirit” of the work—is also an expression of who he is. Yet there is only one portrait, and there are not three artists but only one. Since as Monotheists we believe that God is also One, we do not regard these as three parts of God but rather use the language of three persons within the unique divine Being. (A person is something which can be in a loving relationship with another person.)

However, most Christian philosophers (e.g. St. Thomas Aquinas) have thought that the doctrine of the Trinity cannot be deduced from armchair reasoning alone! (Though after we learn the fact, we can say something about how it might make sense given God's loving nature.) Especially since it sits rather uncomfortably with the idea of divine unity; our theologians have their work cut out just explaining why the Trinity is consistent with the idea of Monotheism which we hold in common with Jews and Muslims, let alone demonstrating it from sound metaphysical reasoning. Thus these last three paragraphs are NOT part of my main argument; I cite them only to avoid some confusions about how what I've said might fit in with what God has revealed about himself in the Bible.

VIII: The Hard Problem of Consciousness

To my mind, the true implications of Philosophy of Mind, far from being an argument against Theism, are actually an argument for Theism. To see this, we must start, not with God's mind, but our own.

It is indisputable that Consciousness exists. Or rather, it has been disputed, but it ought never to have been. However many fallacies Descartes may have committed later in his arguments, I think therefore I am has always seemed perfectly sound to me. It is in fact more certain than anything else.

What would it mean to say that I am wrong about being self-aware? That would require me to be aware of some perceptions or arguments that make me think I have awareness or thinking—but in fact I am wrong, because I only think I think! This is manifestly absurd and self-contradictory.

In the case of other people, or certain animals, we assume they have conscious self-awareness because of their similarity to us. This is an argument by analogy which (even though it is very reasonable) could potentially be mistaken. But in the case of our own conscious self-awareness, there can be no doubt. This consciousness includes specific qualia or experiences such as blueness or sounds, as well as many other things.

Now this is a very interesting fact, primarily because, as far as I can see, there is no way you could possibly logically deduce it even if you knew all the Laws of Physics, and everything about Neurology which one could possibly learn from external observation alone. It is quite inexplicable, if all you know are the physical Laws of Nature, why some of those physical systems should have the additional property of having subjective experiences. Physicists mostly don't think about this issue since it's not our specialty, but when asked most of us would probably admit that there's a deep mystery here. This mystery is known in Philosophy circles as the “hard problem of consciousness” (a term coined by David Chalmers).

Please don't think I'm saying more than I am. I'm not talking about the question of why our material brains are arranged in the complex pattern that they are, as one might in an Argument from Design. Presumably Darwinian evolution is at least a large part of the answer to that question. I am asking why, once they are arranged into these patterns, they experience self-awareness.

Nor does this argument imply that there has to exist a detachable “soul”, which is separate from our bodies, and survives death. I'm not denying that the brain has a lot to do with our minds, or even that the brain and mind are in one-to-one correspondence (or more likely, many-to-one). I am only saying that we could not possibly deduce this correspondence from the Laws of Physics plus Logic alone. It might even be metaphysically necessary that living brains (and maybe artificial intelligences if we ever make them) have minds. But if so, we've just learned something about Metaphysics!

That Consciousness tells a story against Naturalism can be seen by the great efforts which many Naturalists take to resist the unavoidable conclusion. The first main counterattack is to try to deny the existence of the problem at all, through some type of “eliminative” or “reductionist” materialism. Maybe Consciousness is just another name for certain kinds of information processing which happen to occur in the brain. As in the Sondheim musical: “The woods are just trees, the trees are just wood!”

As much as I respect philosophers like Daniel Dennett for trying to make this idea precise, I just don't think it can work. Self-awareness might well turn out to be related to certain types of causal events in the brain, but we knew that we were self-aware long before we knew anything about neuroscience. So we cannot say that self-awareness is by definition a certain pattern of neurons. If folks like Dennett are right that there's no hard problem to explain, then their position has to be true by logical necessity. And it just isn't, because no matter what you tell me about the physics, I could assert without contradiction that nothing in it is self-aware.

The second main counterattack is to say: “We may not know the answer now, but Science will discover it one day! Once upon a time, some people used to think that biological life was due to some inexplicable élan vital, but now we know that it can be explained entirely through ordinary chemical processes. The same will one day be true of Consciousness.”

It's a little presumptuous to appeal to future scientific discoveries as an argument for any position, since by definition those discoveries haven't happened yet. That is why these people instead make an inductive argument, based on imagined triumphs of Science over Mysticism in the past.

But there is a key dis-analogy between Life and Consciousness: we are directly aware of the latter but not of the former (except insofar as it includes the latter). And the argument that Physics cannot explain Consciousness is not based on the detailed form of the Laws of Physics. So long as they consist of formal mathematical equations which merely describe the spatio-temporal patterns of material entities, it seems that the problem remains insoluble. At the very least, a radical change in how we even do Physics would be necessary. And as for neurological studies, surely brain researchers could go on and on making lists of which neural processes correspond to which conscious sensations, and classifying them into patterns, without ever explaining from the basic Laws of Physics why that particular set of correspondences should hold (or any set).

I said earlier that I am going to confine myself to plausibility arguments, but in this stage of the argument I think strict demonstration is possible: to deny that we are conscious clearly contradicts experience; but to say that our consciousness follows logically from the known Laws of Physics is also manifestly false when consciousness is properly defined. So it appears that our description of the Universe in terms of physical laws is incomplete.

This is why many of the early Enlightenment philosophers and scientists were Dualists. Because they assigned all conscious, sensory, and “secondary” qualities to mind rather than matter, they were free to construct scientific descriptions of matter which made reference only to their “primary” qualities, those capable of mathematical modeling. Having assigned these quantities to the “soul”, they were free to do quantitative physics on the rest. To go one step further and also banish these secondary qualities from the mind, was for them obviously inconsistent. As the philosopher St. Ed Feser says:

...the reductive method in question is like the method of getting rid of all the dirt in the house by sweeping it under a certain rug. While this is a very effective way of getting rid of the dirt everywhere else, it is not a strategy that could possibly be used to get rid of the dirt under the rug itself. On the contrary, it only makes the problem of getting rid of that dirt even worse. And that is exactly why the mind-body problem as it is understood today essentially came into existence with Galileo, Descartes, and Co. and has remained unsolved to the present day. What these early modern thinkers wanted (for certain practical and political ends) was a completely quantitative, mathematical description of the world. Irreducibly qualitative features—secondary qualities, final causes, and the like—since they would not fit this model, were thus essentially defined away as mere projections, “swept under the rug” of the mind as it were. But that only makes the idea of dealing with the mind itself in the same manner even more hopeless. For these early moderns, the mind just is, you might say, the holding tank for everything that doesn’t fit their quantitative method. Naturally, then, that method cannot coherently be applied to the mind itself.

This does not mean that a Cartesian mind-body Dualism is the only or best way of describing our situation—I think it isn't—but at least it recognizes explicitly some of the problems at stake. (There are several other options which recognize the objective reality of the mind, which go by names such as “Property Dualism”, “Hylomorphic Dualism”, “Epiphenomenalism”, “Idealism”, etc.) But any view which says that all mental quantities can in principle be derived from a purely physical description of the brain, is necessarily incoherent and wrong on philosophical grounds. And no amount of progress in empirical Science can ever prove that which is logically impossible.

Note that the logical contradiction lies in a reductionistic form of materialism which claims that all of our mental properties can be derived from external, physically measurable properties. On a non-reductionistic definition of "matter", to mean "that mysterious thing which we are made of, which may have additional properties besides those which can be externally measured", it would not necessarily be a contradiction to say that we are entirely made out of matter. Such a viewpoint would be a type of Property Dualism, which asserts that that we are one type of entity which has both physical and mental properties.

My arguments should stand on their own apart from any suspicions about my motivations. But since this term “soul” has popped up, let me add that for many years, I thought it was possible to reconcile Christian theology with the view that the human mind is identical to the material brain. I thought then, and I still think now, that the reason we will live forever is because of God's promises and his faithfulness, and not because of what we are “made out of”. It was not my interest in Theology, but trying to make sense out of the Philosophy of Mind, which led me to see the contradiction in a purely materialistic conception of human beings: that we are solely what can be physically measured about the brain.

IX: Stories and Atoms

You might say that, at any rate, it is very natural to suppose that an animal whose brain processes sensory stimuli, represents them as patterns, and then reacts to them should be conscious. Granted, it is very natural for you to think this, since you are yourself a conscious being, and what's more you are evolved to attribute mental states to other things in order to help you survive and reproduce.

When we engage with fictional characters displayed in books or anime (leaving aside plays and movies, since in them the actors are real people), we are indulging our tendency to treat sets of letters or pixels which have no inherent meaning, as if they did have meaning, in fact as though they were people. But none of us think that the characters in books have an independent mental existence, since apart from the actions of an external mind in making sense of them, they have no intrinsic meaning or significance.

Well, in some sense we are in the same boat as these fictional characters. We have the advantage that our brains, lives, and actions are specified in considerably more detail, whereas in the case of fiction there are a lot of gaps to be filled in. But from a sufficiently “objective” perspective, we are ourselves just a collection of material objects, a set of 1's and 0's in the cosmic computer with no inherent meaning. Well, evidently this supposedly objective perspective is wrong. Our Universe seems to be more hospitable than that. Sometimes, when there is a collection of matter to which meaning might be ascribed, it is so ascribed. Something is to us as we are to anime characters, interpreting the pattern as significant.

As Muriel Rukeyser writes in her poem "The Speed of Darkness" [erotic themes, not safe for work]:

Say it. Say it.
The universe is made of stories,
not of atoms.

Well, all of this suggests that the fundamental nature of existence has to be more like a mind than like a set of equations, because no set of equations interprets itself. And obviously we are not the most fundamental minds in existence, because human beings are contingent. We are born and we die and we need not have existed. The Universe existed long before we did. Therefore, some other mind-like entity must be. At best we participate in the operations of this mind.

Being the most fundamental entity in existence, there can be no distinction between its subjective thoughts and feelings and the objective “real world”, as we have seen previously. Its thoughts are what is.

This is not the only way to try to incorporate mental qualities into the fundamental description of the world, but it has a certain appeal due to its simplicity. In any case, these considerations turn the tables on claims that Naturalism is simpler because it can describe everything in a mathematically quantitative way, without any appeal to basic mental qualities. You can't get mental qualities out of any model of the world, unless somehow you put them in from the beginning.

To recapitulate: a book is a material object containing a set of letters in a row. The words in a book contain meaning because a human being, who is conscious, reads and understands them. But why does the human brain contain any consciousness or meaning? Because the ultimate nature of reality is like a mind, not like a set of equations, and it "reads" our brains and finds them to be meaningful.

Given that the series has to terminate in any case, why not just stop at our own minds rather than on God? Because we know that we, as complicated, evolved, and contingent constructs, are not the most fundamental entities in existence, and therefore any reasonable worldview should explain everything about ourselves in terms of a more fundamental picture.

Or to put it another way, if there are any types of meaning in the world which cannot be deduced just from the laws of physics, then it follows that the most fundamental reality is more than just those laws of physics, and indeed it must be something capable of supporting this meaning. This increases the probability that the fundamental reality is more analogous to a mind than a set of equations.

By itself, this Argument from Consciousness might well support a pantheistic conclusion, rather than a theistic one. But for the reasons given before, I think the unity and clarity of Monotheism has a decided advantage, not least for making sense of a scientific approach to the world.

X: Theories of Ethics

Let's talk about Ethics now. Most of us have, whether it comes from Instinct, Reason, or Culture, a strong belief that certain acts and behaviors are morally right and therefore obligatory or commendable, while others are morally wrong and therefore forbidden or reprehensible. Until we are exposed to certain philosophical questions, we tend to assume that this is just part of how the world is: that there is right and wrong and that one can persuade other people of it. “It's not fair!” say small children to their parents. There is, admittedly, some disagreement about what morality says (just as there is disagreement about everything else), but there is also a fair amount of common ground.

Once people get exposed to Philosophy (even if only in the form of a shallow cultural relativism common among college Freshmen), it is natural to question whether this sense of ethics is grounded in the actual objective nature of reality. Or is it is purely subjective? In the latter case, one should probably bite the bullet and say that, other than as descriptions of our own psychology, moral facts don't really exist at all (Ethical Nihilism), and it is a mistake to think that there is somehow a fact of the matter about e.g. whether murder or adultery are really wrong.

It seems to me that the belief that e.g. “murder isn't really wrong” is morally abhorrent, and that anyone who really disbelieved in the truth of ethics (though perhaps it is not fully possible) would be leaving behind an important part of their human heritage. Just as a person whose left and right brain hemispheres have been severed is a defective or damaged human specimen, so the person whose heart and mind have been severed by moral relativism fails to be fully humane. At the very least, Ethical Nihilism hardly seems likely to inspire moral excellence. Even the moral duty to believe what is true would in principle be undermined by it. But this, however important it may be practically, is a moral argument in favor of morality, and those who do not accept this vision of humanity may accuse me of arguing in a circle. Instead, let's ask what could ground ethical truths.

There are many views which have been held about Meta-Ethical theory. For simplicity let's consider four main ones: which we might call, with some degree of over-simplification, the Protagorean view, the Kantian view, the Aristotelian view, and the Platonic view. All but the first of these views attempt to ground morality in some sort of objective reality, but in different ways.

The Protagorean view is that Ethics is grounded in nothing more than one's own personal subjective opinion. That opinion may be partly determined by cultural or biological factors, but there is nothing inherently good or bad in accepting or defying ones heritage: whatever you want to do is best. If somebody sincerely believes a different sort of ethical system which permits say revenge and genocide, they aren't really any better or worse than anyone else, just different. We judge them to be bad, but then again they judge us to be bad. Once you decide to pursue a particular goal, you can ask whether your means are well-chosen to suit your ends, but your ends are really up to you. Thus, the wise man who wishes to live in a peaceful city might perpetuate myths which help other people to be virtuous, but he won't believe any of them himself.

The Kantian view is that Reason tells us that certain things are right and wrong; that the reasoning mind can know the truths of Ethics much as we know the truths of Mathematics, by deducing them from self-evident first principles. Kant himself had an argument for something called the Categorical Imperative which was roughly like the Golden Rule, and he claimed that this was equivalent to treating other people as ends rather than means. Nobody much accepts his specific arguments anymore, but newspaper ethics columnists still have a broadly Kantian mindset, perhaps because it takes them more or less where they want to go, given the current tendency among democracies to reformulate all ethical questions in terms of “Human Rights” vested in autonomous (self-governing) individuals.

The Aristotelian view is that Ethics is grounded in human nature. That is, all living creatures have some sort of intrinsic goal, purpose or end (τελος) which is what it means for that plant or animal to flourish, fully developing its nature in the way that is good for it. Evil would be a perversion or corruption of a thing's nature, not something which has an independent existence apart from the telos of a thing. For us as humans, Ethics consists of identifying the requirements of human nature and cultivating habits which help to promote that flourishing. Since we are sexual beings, part of our good is directed towards reproducing ourselves, and since we are “political animals”, another part of our nature consists in promoting benevolence towards others, but the highest and noblest aim (according to Aristotle) is to develop our rational nature, which flourishes when we pursue philosophy. Each person has their own individual telos (what's good for you is not necessarily good for me)—which is however objective, since it is grounded in a more-or-less universal human nature.

(Some people might think that this Aristotelian view that biological organisms have purposes, i.e “final causes” is undermined by Darwinian evolution, but this is contestable. Did Darwin eliminate purposes from the biological world, or did he explain their existence? In any case, we are not here dealing with the Design question of how organisms like us came to exist, but with the quite distinct question of what our ethical significance is, now that we do exist.)

The Platonic view is that there is a transcendental principle called “the Good” or “goodness itself”, which acts as the standard or judge for all other things. Thus, as in the Aristotelian view, goodness is based on the nature of things, but now it is a property of the fundamental nature of existence. All things, to the extent that they exist, participate to a greater or lesser extent in goodness. They are thus good only in a derivative sense, by participating in goodness. The philosopher begins by appreciating the beauty or virtue in visible realities, but ascends from there to appreciating the primary goodness in that which is Beauty or Virtue itself. Thus, in this view, the fundamental nature of reality requires us to be benevolent to others, although the precise set of actions to be performed are doubtless (as in the Aristotelian view) dependent on the precise details of human nature (it is kind to give a beggar bread rather than cyanide because of the nature of human biology, but what kindness is does not depend on that).

Of these four views, Platonism is particularly conducive to arguing for Ethical Monotheism, due to its ascribing all goodness to the fundamental nature of things. On the Aristotelian view, one can still attempt to trace the teloi back to their ultimate goal, much as the Cosmological Argument traces causes back to their ultimate cause. (By rights this ought to be called the Teleological Argument, but unfortunately that term is usually taken to be synonymous with the Argument from Design.) If Ethics can be deduced rationally as in the Kantian system, then one can at least deduce that if the Universe originates from something like a mind, that mind should also be able to appreciate ethical truths. But on the Protagorean view, the Argument from Ethics is dead in the water and can go nowhere.

XI: What's Right is Right

Now how should we decide between these ethical views? To my mind, the fact which is of primary importance is the one we started with, that we all have a deep-seated primary belief in the reality of Ethics. Even people who say there's no such thing as ethical truth suddenly sound quite different when somebody treats them unfairly. And cultural relativists look down on their ancestors who persecuted other cultures, and comment on how much moral progress there's been since then, showing that they actually believe in moral relativism for moral reasons. Some ethical framework seems to be embedded as axioms in the human mind.

It's no good to argue that ethics must be subjective because different cultures disagree about it. People disagree about all sorts of things, many of which are quite real. And there are various ways people can be rationally persuaded to change their ethical views; that's how moral progress happens.

Nor is Darwinian Evolution fatal to the idea that we know ethical truths. No sensible Darwinian says that our knowledge of e.g. Mathematics or Biology is necessarily unreliable just because our capacities were developed through Natural Selection, since that would refute the Theory of Evolution too! We are not here concerned with the origin of our moral ideas, but with their truth. The origin of human ethics (which is lost in the mists of prehistoric time) would be relevant only if it implied that the ideas are invalid. But this would not follow, simply from the fact that our ethical views have an origin. In general, Darwinian evolution gives us true beliefs, not false ones, since for the most part the ability to acquire knowledge about the world is adaptive. In order to prove that our moral beliefs are unreliable, we would have to show that they originated in a way which was completely disconnected from their truth. Any such argument would involve a whole raft of controversial philosophical assumptions, not to mention the speculation common to all Evolutionary Psychology arguments. Morality leaves no fossil record. Although it is certain that our ethical capacities have some historical origin, we are in a far better position to assess what it means to be a human being today, then to speculate about these origins.

But it may be felt that Ethical Nihilism follows automatically, from the fact that right and wrong are not mentioned anywhere in the Laws of Physics. Naturalism, you see, is the attempt to reduce all realities down to those described by the Natural Sciences. Anything which doesn't fit gets cut out or else stretched to fit, as on the bed of Procrustes. In my view, this is not a benign use of Occam's razor. Instead it is a zealous oversimplification which throws out nearly all the realities of experience, in order to save a theory that won't cover them.

We have already seen how very similar reductionistic arguments would rule out Consciousness, but in that case we know the conclusion is false. If this type of reductionistic argument fails so spectacularly in the one case where we can really check it, why should we give it any credence when it is deployed as an argument against morality? (Or the existence of aesthetics, free will, personal identity, or whatever is supposed to be eliminated next.) You could even say that, since I believe in the existence of good and bad because they flavor my experiences, the mystery of Consciousness and the mystery of Ethics are intimately connected to each other. Both are features of reality which I could never have derived from a purely literal intepretation of the physical facts.

Some Naturalists believe it is possible to derive ethical laws from the physical sciences, but this is a rather tall order. It runs into the famous Is-Ought problem, articulated by David Hume, who highlighted the logical difficulty in deriving an ought statement from any number of purely factual, nonmoral statements. (Hume himself believed that morality was just a fact about human sentiments towards certain actions, an example of a subjective view.) Some rather problematic attempts to construct a purely Natural system of Ethics are reviewed here:

Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy article on Moral Naturalism

Of course, part of the problem is that the perfect division between is and ought is an artificial distinction in the first place. In our actual experiences, the two are nearly always joined together. We do not experience the world dispassionately. The vision of a world of pure facts is obtained by abstraction. It is obtained, not so much by eliminating half of our experiences, but eliminating half of each experience, the part of ourselves which cares about what we are seeing. This abstract representation of reality may be very useful for certain scientific purposes, but the map is not the territory. If we are unable to recover certain aspects of our experience from the map, it means that the map is incomplete, not that those experiences are invalid.

The brain is a very complicated organ which tells us a great many things about the world. Some parts of it allow us to deduce scientific facts, while others deliver to us ethical truths. To my mind, it is irrational and capricious to reject all those aspects of our thinking except that very limited set which we use when formulating physical laws (and even there, our sense of beauty plays a role). Rather, the fundamental deliverances of our brain ought to be accepted by default unless we have good reason to reject them. That is undivided looking: thinking with our whole mind.

XII: The Good, and the Not

It is not surprising that the Laws of Physics don't have anything to say about right and wrong, given that the world they describe is an abstraction from our own. Physics describes the world in one aspect, as a pattern of interlocking relationships, but it doesn't tell us what are the actual entities in those relationships, and what their meaning and signficance is.

If there are any moral truths at all, then reality has to combine them with other facts in a unified way. Physical truths and moral truths, considered in isolation, are just abstractions from the actual reality, but real situations contain elements of both. Furthermore, since you can't derive an “Ought” statement from a a purely factual “Is” statement, the moral aspects of reality must be present in the fundamental principles of reality, whatever they are. (Here I am using Hume's Is-Ought dictum in a manner which he would have thoroughly disapproved of!) This type of argument is a form of the Argument from Ethics (also called the Moral Argument) for the existence of God. It is similar to the Cosmological Argument except that it involves tracing back ethical reasons rather than physical causes.

Notice also that the concept of good is more fundamental than the concept of evil. There is an asymmetry here. In every situation where we identify something as evil, there is some good behind it which is perverted or threatened by that evil. For example, if it is wrong to inflict unnecessary pain on a dog, that is because the dog is itself something good and valuable, so that something which harms it is an evil. Existence, sensation, consciousness, will, and knowledge are all themselves inherently good and desirable things. It is only when these things exist that evil can also exist, parasitically.

This lends support to something like the Platonic view of reality, in which all goodness is derivative from a fundamental type of goodness. Although aspects of a Kantian or Aristotelian outlook could be included as well, both men being theists after all. (This “Platonic” view of Ethics should be distinguished from another idea attributed to Plato, that all abstract concepts correspond to their own “Platonic Form”. Here I am only concerned only with the transcendent reality of goodness.)

But now observe that morality is at least a little bit like a mind, insofar as it approves or favors certain things, and disapproves or disfavors other things. So a fundamental morality would have something analogous to will or desire, and in that respect it would be more like a mind than like an equation, as in Theism.

And indeed, if we are Monotheists, then it is not possible to have one Ultimate Fact, and a distinct Ultimate Goodness, as two separate and independent principles not joined together by any common tie. They must be rooted in one and the same Ultimate Being.

Conversely, if we conclude for other reasons (e.g. the Argument from Consciousness) that the Ultimate Being is something like a mind, then this being's desires would be rooted in the fundamental nature of reality, and would therefore be objective in a way that our desires are not. Such a being's desires would therefore potentially be capable of grounding morality, since there would be a notion of ought that transcends our own wishes and desires, and exists necessarily.

Before anyone even tries to throw the Euthyphro dilemma at me, let me observe that this dilemma was introduced into philosophy by Plato, as an (indirect, Socratic) argument for Platonic Monotheism! When Socrates asked whether good actions are pious because the gods love them, or whether the gods love them because they are pious, he was highlighting an absurdity in the idea that morality could be connected to the collective will of multiple, finite beings who (like us) are not the most fundamental entity in the Universe. How the dilemma mutated into its current existence as a standard tool in the arsenal of Atheism, I don't know. But if God IS the fundamental principle of goodness, then he neither commands it arbitrarily, nor is he beholden to any more fundamental ethical principle outside of himself. God is the Good; indeed in a certain sense he is the only Good, all other goods being images or reflections of his splendor.

If this conclusion is correct, this forms a secondary argument against Pantheism, since the world, and we ourselves if we examine our consciences, contain much evil. Freedom from immorality is thus a necessary (but not sufficient) condition to be divine.

Of course, the evils in the world are also a powerful prima facie argument against the idea that the world comes from a being that is essentially good. This is the Argument from Evil. How could a good God produce a creation which has any evil in it at all, let alone the amount which we see? This isn't the place for an extended theodicy, but I think something must be said here lest the Argument from Ethics be drained of all credibility whatsoever.

If we view God as merely an impersonal source, out of which goodness flows, like water from the tap or light from the sun, then perhaps the problem is insoluable. But if God is conceived of as being like a mind, then he is allowed to use long-term planning: in particular he can allow evil so long as it contributes to the greater good. So if there is some good which cannot be had without evil (e.g. if it turns out that suffering is the best way to build character—a thesis I find, with some regret, to be quite plausible) then God might be expected to allow the evil in question.

Secondly, the moral philosophy associated with the Platonic view is not quite so unconducive to the existence of evil as it is supposed. I said above that God is the only Good; all other things are good only as they participate in his goodness. That means that any created thing, not being God, could potentially be turned away from God and become evil. For human beings in particular, the possible temptation to idolatry, seeking our final goodness in created things rather than in the (necessarily invisible) Creator, is built into the very nature of a world containing lesser goods, reflecting God's more perfect yet less accessible goodness. Indeed, the better a created thing is, the more easily it can be turned into an idol.

God could, of course, act to prevent anything from “going bad” in this way, but since the whole point of Creation is to make a Universe which is, to some extent, independent from God, this would plausibly sabotage the artistic integrity of his work. Even in the realm of fiction, few of us are interested in reading stories where nothing bad ever happens.

Finally, note that the existence of evil is part of the very premises of the Argument from Ethics! When you indignantly condemn the evil in the world, are you appealing to real objective ethical truths or merely to your own personal private sensibilities? If the world really contains evil, then it contains moral facts, and the Argument from Ethics says that the fundamental reality must be capable of grounding ethical truths. Then who are you, O man, to think you know more about goodness than Reality itself does?

On the other hand, if you say it is merely your own subjective feeling about the world adapted to the needs of primate communites, then you undercut not only the Argument from Ethics but also the Argument from Evil along with it. In that case, God is merely indulging his own personal preferences in creating a world with butterflies and mosquitos, cancer and laughter. Then who are you, O ape, to judge Reality based on your own standard of right and wrong?

XIII: Surprised by Something

Having described briefly the bearing of both Ethics and Consciousness on the nature of the fundamental reality, let's ask whether the source of these things would really be the same thing as a god, to whom one could have a religious and/or personal relationship. There are various half-way houses for people who see defects in the conventional materialistic narrative, but aren't willing to go “all the way”.

I've had people tell me that they believe there is “Something” out there, but not God. This is about as vague of a worldview as can be conceived, but I assume from context that they are not merely asserting that there exists at least one object (such as a rock or a tree)—no, their “Something” is more transcendental than that, and is intended to fill a quasi-religious niche. Whether through mystical experience, philosophical argument, or just wishful thinking, they feel that there is something numinous or spiritual about existence, but organized religion turns them off and they feel it must be something quite different from conventional religious concepts of God.

My Ph.D. advisor, Ted Jacobson, who considers himself an atheist, nevertheless tells me he thinks there is some type of “cosmic consciousness” in which we participate. I guess the Universe is observing itself through us, or something like that. But I feel that this view is getting dangerously close to Theism.

One of the recurring themes in this exploration is this: even if the existence of God cannot be proven conclusively by pure Reason, there are plenty of things which nonreligious people are motivated to believe in, which turn out on inspection to be dangerously close to Theism. Universal laws, objective ethics, cosmic consciousness: all of them smell in certain respects like a certain Somebody.

And if the Something really is a Somebody, then even when you are most alone, your life is a dialogue rather than a monologue. One day, that seemingly impersonal brightness that hovers over existence, may suddenly manifest as a voice speaking to you, that knows your name.

Of course you cannot force God to reveal himself to you. Any approach must be on his side. In retrospect, it is clear to those chosen by God that nothing they did beforehand caused them to deserve or merit the experience of God. It is gratis, an undeserved gift, which comes in spite of human resistance and even deliberate ignorance.

And yet that does not mean that preparation is unimportant. The freedom of God is not an excuse for human laziness. Even at the level of human experience, you cannot force somebody to fall in love with you, nor force yourself to fall in love with somebody else. But you can be the sort of person to whom it happens more easily—fortune favors the prepared. "Ask, and you will receive. Seek, and you will find. Knock, and the door will be opened to you." It matters if you have a heart which is receptive to truth, and beauty, and ethical goodness. Those who practice certain disciplines are more likely to find God, or rather more likely to be found by him. These disciplines can include:

philosophy not as an intellectual game, but as a genuine search for truth that makes a difference to how you live your life,

an attitude of attentive waiting, not forcing yourself to have spiritual experiences, yet being open to them when they occur, and choosing to remember and ponder them,

diligently choosing to expose yourself to various religious communities and texts, in order to see whether any of them know something you don't, searching for serious truth and holiness rather than conformity to your personal prejudices,

prayer: speaking to God and asking him to reveal himself to you, if he exists, in a way of his own choosing, and also to help you with whatever problems concern you,

and most importantly, genuinely trying as best you can to be an ethical person who is open to serving, loving, and welcoming other people (note: if you feel you have succeeded, then your standards are probably much too low).

From the outside, it may appear that religious believers trick themselves into having religious experiences by a sort of self-hypnosis: that the preparation is what causes us to believe. Presumably that is true for some. Yet many of us on the inside know that the most earnest preparation can lead to seeming dryness and absence, and then at other times God breaks in on us in a completely unexpected, surprising, and perhaps even unwelcome way.

Perhaps Ted will have an unpleasant surprise at some point in the future, as St. Lewis did. The following excerpt is from Lewis' autobiography, Surprised by Joy. We pick him up after he has already been led out of a materialistic form of Atheism into philosophical Idealism (a position similar to Pantheism) which he arrived at partly by means of Owen Barfield's “Argument from Reason” (which I do not myself accept as valid, by the way). St. Lewis describes his conversion to Theism (not to Christianity, that came later) as follows:

I was now teaching philosophy (I suspect very badly) as well as English. And my watered Hegelianism wouldn't serve for tutorial purposes. A tutor must make things clear. Now the Absolute cannot be made clear. Do you mean Nobody-knows-what, or do you mean a superhuman mind and therefore (we may as well admit) a Person? After all, did Hegel and Bradley and all the rest of them ever do more than add mystifications to the simple, workable, theistic idealism of Berkeley? I thought not. And didn't Berkeley's “God” do all the same work as the Absolute, with the added advantage that we had at least some notion of what we meant by Him? I thought He did. So I was driven back into something like Berkeleyism, but Berkeley with a few top dressings of my own. I distinguished this philosophical “God” very sharply (or so I said) from “the God of popular religion.” There was, I thought, no possibility of being in a personal relation with Him. For I thought He projected us as a dramatist projects his characters, and I could no more “meet” Him, than Hamlet could meet Shakespeare. I didn't call him “God” either; I called him “Spirit”. One fights for one's remaining comforts.

Then I read Chesterton's Everlasting Man [online] and for the first time saw the whole Christian outline of history set out in a form that seemed to me to make sense. Somehow I contrived not to be too badly shaken. You will remember that I already thought Chesterton the most sensible man alive “apart from his Christianity”. Now I veritably believe, I thought—I didn't of course say; words would have revealed the nonsense—that Christianity itself was very sensible “apart from its Christianity.” But I hardly remember, for I had not long finished The Everlasting Man when something far more alarming happened to me. Early in 1926 the hardest boiled of all the atheists I ever knew sat in my room on the other side of the fire and remarked that the evidence for the historicity of the Gospels was really surprisingly good. “Rum thing”, he went on, “All that stuff of Frazer's about the Dying God. Rum thing. It almost looks as if it had really happened once.” To understand the shattering impact of it, you would need to know the man (who has certainly never since showed any interest in Christianity). If he, the cynic of cynics, the toughest of the tough, were not—as I would still have put it—“safe,” where could I turn? Was there then no escape?

The odd thing was that, before God closed in on me, I was in fact offered what now appears as a moment of wholly free choice. In a sense. I was going up Headington Hill on the top of a bus. Without words and (I think) almost without images, a fact about myself was somehow presented to me. I became aware that I was holding something at bay, or shutting something out. Or, if you like, that I was wearing some stiff clothing, like corsets, or a suit of armor, as if I were a lobster. I felt myself being, there and then, given a free choice. I could open the door or keep it shut; I could unbuckle the armor or keep it on. Neither choice was presented as a duty; no threat or promise was attached to either, though I knew that to open the door or to take off the corslet meant the incalculable. The choice appeared to be momentous but it was also strangely unemotional. I was moved by no desires or fears. In a sense I was not moved by anything. I chose to open, to unbuckle, to loosen the rein. I say, “I chose,” yet it did not really seem possible to do the opposite. On the other hand, I was aware of no motives. You could argue that I was not really a free agent, but I am more inclined to think that this came nearer to being a perfectly free act than most that I have ever done. Necessity may not be the opposite of freedom, and perhaps a man is the most free when, instead of producing motives, he could only say, “I am what I do”. Then came the repercussion on the imaginative level. I felt as if I were a man of snow at long last beginning to melt. The melting was starting in my back—drip-drip and presently trickle-trickle. I rather disliked the feeling.

The fox had been discharged from the Hegelian Wood and was now running in the open, “with all the woe in the world”, bedraggled and weary, hounds barely a field behind. And nearly everyone was now (one way or another) in the pack: Plato, Dante, MacDonald, Herbert, Barfield, Tolkien, Dyson, Joy itself. Everyone and everything had joined the other side. Even my own pupil Griffiths—now Dom Bede Griffiths—though not himself yet a believer, did his share. Once, when he and Barfield were lunching in my room, I happened to refer to philosophy as “a subject”. “It wasn't a subject to Plato”, said Barfield, “it was a way.” The quiet but fervent agreement of Griffiths, and the quick glance of understanding between these two, revealed to me my own frivolity. Enough had been thought, and said, and felt, and imagined. It was about time that something should be done.

For of course there had long been an ethic (theoretically) attached to my Idealism. I thought the business of us finite and half-unreal souls was to multiply the consciousness of Spirit by seeing the world from different positions while yet remaining qualitatively the same as Spirit; to be tied to a particular time and place and set of circumstances, yet there to will and think as Spirit itself does. This was hard; for the very act whereby Spirit projected souls and a world gave those souls different and competitive interests, so that there was a continual temptation to selfishness. But I thought each of us had it in his power to discount the emotional perspective produced by his own particular selfhood, just as we discount the optical perspective produced by our position in space. To prefer my own happiness to my neighbor's was like thinking that the nearest telegraph post was really the largest. The way to recover, and act upon, this universal and objective distinction was daily and hourly to remember our true nature, to reascend or return to that Spirit which, in so far as we really were at all, we sill were. Yes; but now I felt I had better try to do it. I faced at last (in MacDonald's words) “some thing to be neither more nor less nor other than done”. An attempt at complete virtue must be made.

Really a young Atheist cannot guard his faith too carefully. Dangers lie in wait on every side. You must not do, you must not even try to do, the will of the Father unless you are prepared to “know of the doctrine”. All my acts, desires, and thoughts were to be brought into harmony with universal Spirit. For the first time I examined myself with a seriously practical purpose. And what I found there appalled me; a zoo of lusts, a bedlam of ambitions, a nursery of fears, a harem of fondled hatreds. My name was legion.

Of course I could do nothing—I could not last one hour—without continual conscious recourse to what I called Spirit. But the fine, philosophical distinction between this and what ordinary people call “prayer to God” breaks down as soon as you start doing it in earnest. Idealism can be talked, and even felt; it cannot be lived. It became patently absurd to go on thinking of “Spirit” as either ignorant of, or passive to, my approaches. Even if my own philosophy were true, how could the initiative lie on my side? My own analogy, as I now perceived, suggested the opposite: if Shakespeare and Hamlet could ever meet, it must be Shakespeare's doing. Hamlet could initiate nothing. Perhaps, even now, my Absolute Spirit still differed in some way from the God of religion. The real issue was not there, or not yet, there. The real terror was that if you seriously believed in even such a “God” or “Spirit” as I admitted, a wholly new situation developed. As the dry bones shook and came together in that dreadful valley of Ezekiel's, so now a philosophical theorem, cerebrally entertained, began to stir and heave and throw off its grave-clothes, and stood upright and became a living presence. I was to be allowed to play at philosophy no longer. It might, as I say, still be true that my “Spirit” differed at some point from “the God of popular religion”. My Adversary waived the point. It sank into utter unimportance. He would not argue about it. He only said, “I am the Lord”; “I am that I am”; “I am”.

....You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.

XIV: Conclusion

Putting everything together, I have argued—using plausibility arguments, not strictly deductive proofs—that it is reasonable to believe in a metaphysically ultimate being, and that given the reality of Ethics or Consciousness, it is probable that it is more like a mind than like a set of equations. More specifically, my arguments pointed to just one eternal God, existing necessarily, who is all-powerful, all-knowing, and good, who is the source of all other things, yet is distinct from them, and who appreciates mathematical beauty, conscious life, and ethical behavior.

Of course there are a lot of mysteries left in this view. Even though God is supposed to be the explanation of all other things, we cannot predict, from this information alone, exactly which laws of physics God would select, nor whether he would intervene in the Universe thus created in other ways. Not sharing the divine knowledge about what is best, we have to make additional stipulations about the world he has created, adding to the complexity of any specific Theistic worldview.

But then again, Naturalism by itself cannot tell us either (apart from experiment) which specific laws of nature to expect. All views contain a certain amount of irreducible mystery. The difference is that Naturalism hides or denies the mysteries, and pretends to solve problems that it cannot possibly really solve, while Theism puts them up-front and center and does the best it can to fit them into a consistent picture of the world.

It does not matter so much whether you are convinced that my conclusions have to be right. Maybe there were several places in the argument where I selected one of two paths, but you think it was a toss-up, or that the other way was somewhat more plausible. That's part of the hazards of armchair reasoning. Personally I am primarily concerned with the arguments for Theism as a prelude to Christianity, which is founded on the Resurrection of Christ and the testimony of God's Spirit, not philosophical discourse. But plausibility arguments still have their place. If you are thirsting after goodness and beauty and meaning, and if you learn that there could well be a fountain capable of slaking that thirst, shouldn't this increase your incentive to search for it?

A purely intellectual philosophy can only get you so far. Actual religion involves opening yourself up to the divine being, over a continued period of time, allowing God to get hold of you. Any approach must be by his initiative rather than yours, but your attitude can determine whether or not you are receptive to his advances. Without this, philosophy is sterile. If it advances only to savoir, conceptual knowledge, it might as well have remained atheistic. All of these philosophical arguments are only there to help you make further steps, to connaître or knowledge by acquaintance. Arguing for the existence of the Good is one thing; tasting the reality of the Holy is another.

When that happens, the purely intellectual arguments—and the doubts which are a necessary corollary of any honest attempt to evaluate them—can be kicked aside like a ladder that has served its purpose, and replaced with something far better.

Fundamental Reality Online

Here is an index for the complete series in the Undevided Looking blog.

I. Prologue, or Why Even Bother? – Discussion

II. Causes and Explanations – Discussion

III. Chains, Parsimony, and Magic – Discussion

IV. Necessity, Eternity, and Power – Discussion

V. Some Candidates, and a Math Test – Discussion

VI. Comparison of the Finalists – Discussion

VII. Does God Need a Brain? – Discussion

VIII. The Hard Problem of Consciousness – Discussion

IX. Stories and Atoms – Discussion

X. Theories of Ethics – Discussion

XI. What's Right is Right – Discussion

XII. The Good, and the Not – Discussion

XIII. Surprised by Something – Discussion

XIV. Conclusion – Discussion