When believers argue that
God exists, I want to know the mistakes they make. I want to discern their errors
in logic as well as in fact. It's not that I don't want God
to exist - it's that I don't want to fool myself that
God does exist, if in fact God does not exist. I'd not like to be an atheist. I'd like to be a theist -
I want God to exist - life can have meaning. Death not be final. But it is precisely because I
want God to exist that I am so scared of self-delusion -
fooling myself is my biggest fear - I want to believe
- and "wanting to believe" can be hazardous and contagious. That's why I focus on
"fallacies" - arguments that believers use to "prove" or
demonstrate or support the existence of God - but
arguments that do not work. What are fallacies
in arguing for God? I'm Robert Lawrence Kuhn
and Closer To Truth is my journey to find out. Some say that the way to God
is through faith not reason. Maybe so. But, I have no choice -
my way requires reason. Which is why it is important
for me to find fallacies. It's easy to see why fallacies
arise and are so resilient. "Wanting to believe" twists
emotions and distorts reason. I'm not immune. So, here's what I'll do. First, I must appreciate how not
to argue for God, only then can I consider how to argue for God. I focus on scientists and
philosophers, those trained to consider evidence
and think logically. I focus further on those who
believe in God - not now to ask them why they believe - but
rather to find out what they think are fallacies in
trying to defend God. I begin with a believer who
is one of the world's most distinguished
medical scientists. I go to Bethesda, Maryland,
to the National Institutes of Health, to meet its
director, Francis Collins. Francis, as a believer and as
a rigorous scientist, you come across, as I've come across,
many arguments reporting to prove why God exists. I would think that as a
believer, you get pretty frustrated with some of them
because they would actually turn off most people. What are some of these fallacies
that you've heard that people have thrown around trying to
prove what you know to be true, but really do it in a way
in which casts aspersions on that conclusion? I think most of them fall into
the general category of trying to insert God into some aspect
of human experience that isn't necessarily a good fit -
a God of the gaps approach. Obviously, a major argument that
many still adhere to is the evidence for design that we
see around us in living things. And this carried a lot of weight
before Darwin came along... But, in fact, is not an
argument, which in the context of understanding the correctness
of evolution is a good way to convince anybody of God as
this specific creator of this or that phenomenon. A version of that is the
argument of: you have to believe in God because of the beauty
of this particular landscape or this flower. I see, as a believer,
that those are in fact beautiful things and I see God's
hand in that in a general way, but I don't see God's hand
in having made it possible for that flower to have
that particular beautiful pink pigment in its petals. That is something molecular
biology can do for you. Other arguments:
certainly the miraculous. Many people do, I think, come to
the idea that faith can only be proven by pointing to specific
miraculous events that are part of their faith tradition, and
many of those - are very difficult to document as having
been something other than a misunderstanding
of a natural event. And that won't convince anybody
who's already a skeptic, and yet, it's often put on the
table in those discussions. Particularly, a prominent recent
version of this is the argument about intelligent design, or ID,
which says that God had to step in and fix evolution because
some of the molecular machines we find inside ourselves is too
complicated for evolution to have come up with on its own. Interesting discussions - not a
useful way to try to make a case for the existence of God because
the closer you look the more you realize that those are not
all that irreducible in their complexity after all, and it's
a modern version of this same fallacy that we've undertaken
and many times passed of trying to put God into a box, trying
to say: well, God must be there because science
hasn't explained it yet. That's the God of the gaps. That's the God of the gaps. There's a gap in your
explanation and that's where you insert God. Right, and then you sort of... And when that's explained
you find a new gap. Right, or else you find a lot
people are no longer listening to you because you made this
strong argument that that's where God was and
you were wrong, and so, why should they pay attention. They all went home... Yeah. Thank you, Francis... This is why believers should
purge their apologetics of fallacious arguments
for the existence of God. "God of the Gaps" is one of
the major fallacies affecting perceptions of God - and I
pursue its biological expression with a leading biologist who was
formerly a Dominican priest. I go to the University
of California at Irvine, to meet Francisco Ayala. Francisco, one of the things
that I think is detrimental to believers and even theologians
is when they try to use science to prove or even to strongly
demonstrate the existence of their God. Yes, because usually what these
people of faith or preachers do is to put God in the gaps of
knowledge - is what is sometimes called the "Gods of the gaps". Unfortunately, the history tells
us - that gaps very often get filled as time goes by. One of the current movements
which has been pursued very strongly, is this idea of
intelligent design - that organisms are so complex and
have so many parts, that they can only occur if all the parts
are together at the same time. Actually, organisms are not
intelligent design - they are very incompetently designed
and that blaming God for that amounts to blasphemy. That the number of the defects
that organisms have - it's not just that they are not perfect -
is that they are dysfunctional - we have too many teeth
for the size of our jaw. We understand why that
happened in evolution. As our brain was growing the
jaw had to become smaller... So, imagine an engineer who
had designed a human jaw - that engineer would be fired. And blaming God for that or for
designing the birth canal of humans, which is not large,
enough for the mother to give easily birth, and so, millions
of children have died in the history of mankind. And it's not only dysfunctional
designs, it's also cruelties. I mean, who would have
designed parasites? It's only existence is by
destroying other organisms. Biology can explain it - that's
a result of natural processes. That's why many theologians who
are so very happy with Darwin - some of them react very
negatively as they reacted negatively to physicists
to discoveries of Galileo. But the discoveries of Galileo
or Newton explained where there are earthquakes and whether the
storms have lightening - they no longer have to be attributed
to God punishing the world. In the same way that Darwin
made possible to explain this dysfunctionalities and
cruelties as the result of natural processes without
having to attribute them to the direct creation by God. So, really, an enlightened view
of science even by the most fervent believer or theologian
would see in science, really an affirmation of their belief
if they looked at it properly. Yeah, and affirmation in
the sense that knowledge is something good by almost any
measure, and therefore science and scientific knowledge can
be seen as an expression of the goodness of God in the world. And to see the complexity of how
God works is really making them understand a different kind
of God than maybe their very simplistic God was
originally in their minds. That's right. Primitive expressions of
religion were considerably simple because the understanding
of the world outside was so limited. But now, in biology, if we have
such a view of the complexity of life, the beauty of life,
the richness of life. Now, science gives us scientific
knowledge that not says anything about beauty, about richness -
but for the religious believer that's one way to see the
presence of God in the world. Francisco turns the 'God of
the Gaps' fallacy upside down, using its own consequences
to refute its own assumptions. He rejects trying to 'insert
God' where there are not yet natural explanations. And he warns believers that if
they try to make the case that God designed everything; they
are constructing a creator who is a sub-optimal designer -
and responsible for numerous evils in the natural world. I agree that seeking God in
uncharted areas of scientific ignorance risks being
caught in the quicksand of scientific discovery. But, if there is a God
who actually is the Creator, I do not agree that God being
a "non-tinkerer" absolves God from responsibility for evil. I wonder if there are fallacies
in arguing for God that creep into philosophical arguments. I go Oxford, England, to ask the
philosopher of religion known for his arguments supporting
the existence of God - Richard Swinburne. Well, let's start with
the ontological argument. This was invented by St. Anslem
in the 11th Century. You can express it in
the form of two premises. Premise one says God is by
definition an all-perfect being. And then premise two, a being
which exists is more perfect than one that doesn't. One would think, well,
surely if something exists, it's got more reality. It's more worth having
then something that doesn't. So, that seems
immediately appealing. But if you grant those two
premises, then it would seem to follow that God must exist
because He didn't exist, He wouldn't be all perfect. So, here is a quick argument. What's wrong with it? Well, I think both the premises
are ones you are not justified in putting forward. It looks as if, well,
God is an all-perfect being. It's just a matter of
definition, but the issue is does that presuppose the
existence of God as it were. Is it saying well there is this
object God and what constitutes this object is being
all-perfect, or does it mean just if there is a God,
then He is all-perfect? Well, if you're not
to beg the question; it must mean the second. But if it means the second,
then the argument just concludes if there is a God,
then He exists and that's not particularly worth having. The second premise is also
opened to question because you can't really compare things
unless you suppose them already to exist. And then you can say one
is better or bigger or worst than another one. But, you can't compare things,
which you acknowledge one of them exists and one of them
don't because if a thing doesn't exist, it's not there to be
compared with and therefore that can't be asserted either. So, neither of the premises can
be asserted and therefore the conclusion doesn't follow. So, okay, what about the
argument from morality? Yes. A lot of people these days
are apt to say, well, if there wasn't a God, things wouldn't
be right or wrong and so on. So, we've got to assume and
since they obviously is right and wrong, there must be a God. Yes. That seems to me clearly false. I don't think we would have any
understanding of goodness and so on, if we didn't recognize well
it's bad to torture children and it's a good thing to feed the
hungry quite apart from any suppositions that there is a God
or not, we would seem to have no concept of what morality means. We wouldn't be able to grasp it. Quite clearly, atheists and
theists share a lot of moral views and they can discuss and
argue about particular moral issues, is it right to go to war
in these circumstances or not in these circumstances. But, that presupposes they've
got a common armory of concept about which they can use to put
forward their propositions and affirm or deny them but that
couldn't be the case if the very use of a moral term presupposed
the existence of God. And so, I don't think you can
argue from morality to God. So, the discontinuity between
the existence of morality and its lack of capacity to infer
or prove an existence of God is caused by the
fact that morality has an independent necessary existence? Yes, indeed. Whenever anything is wrong
or good, there is a reason why it's good. Things can't just be good. They have to be
good for some reason. Why is it bad for example
for me to kill you? Well, because killing ends
life and I can't bring you to life again. Okay, so, there are necessary
truths and morality, sure. And they exist
independent of God. Yes. And so, by something
existing independent of God that means that whatever that
is, you cannot use that to infer the existence of God? Indeed not. If something is a necessary
truth, it's a necessary truth whether or not there's a God and
therefore it doesn't give any evidence one way or the other. Richard's rejection of the
ontological and moral arguments means he distinguishes
arguments for God that he believes do work from those
that he believes do not work. This encourages me to
consider more seriously the workable arguments. But, this doesn't
convince me, of course. My point here is not to
debate the merits of various arguments for God. But, rather to seek
categories of fallacies among those arguments. For the ontological argument,
the fallacy is faulty premises that hide logical traps and lead
to unwarranted conclusions. For the moral argument, the
fallacy is relying on things that can exist anyway,
even if there were no God. So, expanding my search, what
are other kinds of fallacies? I meet a philosopher of
religion, who argues against a personal God -
John Schellenberg. I would like to focus on a
couple of oversights that I see in recent argumentation
for theism. One has to do with the
distinction between the scientific and
personal explanation. Some people have been arguing
that there is this important distinction science
can explain a lot. But, when it comes to why there
is world at all for example, or why there are the highest
level laws of nature and so on, we need to go to a
non-scientific explanation specifically a
personal explanation. I mean, we explain various
things in our own lives by reference, not just to the kinds
of things that biology and chemistry and physics are about,
but also our own intentions and our beliefs and hopes and so on. So, we might similarly apply
this at the metaphysical level. We might say that God's
intentions or God's beliefs and will and so on
explain the universe. This claim says that in terms
of causation there are two fundamental types of
causation in the universe. Scientific and personal. My point about state or an
oversight is precisely this that the contrast should be between
scientific and non-scientific modes of explanation, not
between scientific and personal. Personal explanation is perhaps
just one instance, one token of a certain type, which we should
call non-scientific explanation. So, people move perhaps too
swiftly to thinking that if science can't explain something
about the world, well then it must be somebody's intentions
that we an appeal to, to explain that bit about the world. It might be that there is just
a whole host of different non-scientific forms of
explanation, some of which, many of which, we haven't even
conceived of yet, because we are still at a very early
stage of inquiring. So, personal would be one kind
of non-scientific but your point is that it doesn't
exhaust the set. Right, and it's often
treated as though it does. And that's how we sort of
stay at a certain early stage, instead of moving further. And that gets you quickly to
theism because, because theism is the personal God. Especially if you already
believe in theism. You think that there
is a personal God. And you say, well, if it's not
science, well, it must be this personal God that explains this. It's very natural to go there. But, as inquirers, we need to
think more rigorously and to do that we have to contrast
scientific explanation with non-scientific. So, that's one sort
of problem or fallacy or mistake or oversight. Another has to do with
the concept of simplicity. Some theistic philosophers
recently have been arguing that theistic explanations
are preferable to others because they posit this
very simple being. God is one thing and the
universe is this huge complex mess of things. All right, so, we should posit
God the simple being, one thing. But here, there is a failure to
notice that simplicity operates on at least a couple of levels. In one respect, you might say
we don't want any more entities than we need, but in another
respect, at another level we are going to say we don't want any
more types of reality that we need to explain things, okay. So, at the level of types
the atheist has a rejoinder. The atheist can say, look, now
you've got two types of reality. You've got physical reality,
which I am exploring through science and you've
also got this other non-physical immaterial entity. Sure, it's simple. But, it introduces a completely
new dimension of reality whereas on my perspective, this
materialist perspective of mine, there is only one type of thing
and that makes my view simple in a way that yours is not. So, the materialist can defend
that move by referring to simplicity just as well
as the theists can. It's just that there is a
different level of simplicity that she is going to emphasize,
namely the number of types being viewed. In this case, just one. So, there is a simplicity-based
rationale for the materialists to resist the theists
simplicity based appeal to God. John shows how a "simplicity"
argument for God can cut both ways - against God, because
God would be an extra kind of reality, as well as for God,
because God is supposed to be a maximally simple being. This is the fallacy of "belief
bias" - where a predisposition to a certain belief will
constrain evidence or coerce thinking to confirm that belief. John's rejection of "personal
explanations" as the only alternative to scientific
explanations exemplifies an "either-or" fallacy. Premise: either "X"
is true or God exists. Conclusion: if X is not true,
therefore, God exists. "Either-or" is a fallacy because
it masks innumerable other possibilities - the options
are not just "X" and God. Also known as the
"false dilemma" or "black and white fallacy,"
the "either-or fallacy" is a theological favorite. So, I explore it with the
publisher of Skeptic Magazine, Philosopher of Science,
Michael Shermer. The either/or fallacy, that
here's a problem in nature, evolution can't explain it,
therefore, intelligent design explains it or
creationism explains it. Well, it's possible
that evolution is wrong. The theory could be flawed in
some deep way and, therefore, Theory A is wrong. But, Theory A being wrong
doesn't make Theory B right. Theory B has to stand on
its own regardless of Theory A. And so, intelligent design
theorists and creationists have to have positive evidence in
support of their theory, not just negative
evidence against the theory of evolution. So, the fallacy comes from
the original formulation of the question, of saying it's one way
or the other and this is the way the world is. And so, once you form
the question that way, you're in the fallacy... That's right. Already. ..from the beginning. Also related to these
is this sort of argument from personal incredulity. I think this is a deep
one that we all have. I personally can't think of how
this could have come about in some natural way;
therefore, there must be some other explanation. Maybe you are just not smart
enough, or maybe you have just not thought of it, haven't done
your homework enough. So, additional fallacies I find
with these kinds of arguments, what I call Hume's maxim,
or what's more likely, the miracle or the description
of the miracle being a very human, biased process. Hume said, when I hear a story
about, a dead person coming back to life, I think, well,
what's more likely, that a dead person actually
came back to life or the person who thinks he saw that
happen was biased in his thinking or misperceived. We have a vast experience
with humans being deceitful or self-deceitful and misperceiving
the world, and we have no experience of dead people
coming back to life. So, that's more likely. Another one is the
"known" and the "unknown". That is, before we say, "look,
we know enough about this particular subject to
conclusively know that it was a miraculous thing or there's
a supernatural explanation", there's so much we don't
know about the world. I think it's better to be modest
and say let's just leave that open in the level of sort of
we don't know yet, rather than conclude that there is
no natural explanation. Well, the theologians
may look at it in exactly the opposite way. They would say that the natural
feeling about the world is that there is a God and there is a
supernatural and this has been human experience for thousands
of years, and then in the last 500 years, arguably,
science has come along to take a more limited view,
an accurate view but a more limited view, of reality. So, the burden's upon you to say
what we have always assumed to be the case is not the case. Actually, I think
this is a reasonable argument to make,
but that there is a very interesting psychological
explanation. That humans by nature tend
to see design in things, and we were designed by evolution to do
that because there is design. It's functional adaptation,
which is how evolution works. So, I am willing to concede
the point that there is design in nature. And evolution was the bottom-up
designer, not a top-down designer from God. Either way, I think we evolved
to find design in nature. It's there. It is there. So, the natural inclination is
to say and conclude that there is design and because we
have a big brain and we tend to design things ourselves,
we think there must be a higher designer than us. The counter-intuitive thing is
the actual explanation, that evolution did it. They're only compatible if
you think, well, that's the way God did it. He did it through natural
selection and through the forces of evolutionary
process and so on. Which is perfectly fine. If you're a theist, you should
look at that and think, wow, look what God was able to do. Science is helping me understand
all the better God's handiwork. If there is a God, fallacies to
support the existence of God would be an insult to God. If there is no God, fallacies
would perpetuate a myth that God exists. If you believe in God, or want
to believe in God, then you have a higher obligation
to beware of fallacies. Watch out for these: God of the Gaps: If there's
something we don't understand, then insert God to explain it. False premises: If assumptions
about God hide logical traps, then good logic will
yield false conclusions. Necessary truths that prove
God exists: Anything that is necessary will be true
whether or not God exists. Belief bias: If you have a prior
belief, then you will likely select evidence that
conforms to that belief. 'Either-or' arguments:
Like Darwinian evolution or creationism. Ultimate explanations
are scientific or personal. Personal incredulity:
Just because you are awestruck doesn't mean that
God is the answer. Fallacies in arguing
for God are enemies of God, if there is a God. Watch out for
fallacies to keep... closer to truth. For complete interviews
and for further information, please visit
www.closertotruth.com
