The sixth argument I offer for God’s existence in my “Does God Exist?” podcast series is the teleological argument, or argument from design. Teleological arguments affirm that there is evidence of design in the universe, and this design is best explained by theism.
I just posted my first episode in the mini-series, which is a 1-N-Done episode summarizing a form of the teleological argument based on the fine-tuning of the initial conditions and physical constants of our universe. You can listen to it wherever you get podcasts, or from https://thinkingtobelieve.buzzsprout.com.
You can also read a paper I have written on the topic, available at the link below:
Fine-Tuned for Life: A Teleological Argument for God’s Existence
The paper is 29 pages long, so if that’s more than you have time to read, I’ve also written a couple of shorter versions of the paper that will be easier to digest.
Fine-Tuned for Life: A Teleological Argument for God’s Existence – A Short Case (7 pages)
Fine-Tuned for Life: A Teleological Argument for God’s Existence – A Very Short Case (4 pages)
Also, check out Dr. William Lane Craig’s video on the teleological argument:
Thinking to Believe 
February 19, 2024 at 9:31 pm
Yes, the universe is designed. As with the Kalam, that does not tell us that the designer or designers is/are God. If Ockam’s razor (OR) recommends our not multiplying causes beyond what is necessary to explain an effect, it should also recommend our not proposing a cause greater than that necessary for an effect.
As with the KCA, a supplemental argument is needed which utilizes ontology and the causal principle which shows that contingent being is grounded in God. But if one has such an argument, one will readily see that arguments such as this (fine-tuning) are superfluous.
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March 22, 2024 at 11:55 pm
I might also add that this argument relies on the impossibility of traversing an infinite. As I noted in my objections to the Kalam Cosmological Argument, a defender of this kind of argument must address the strong objections to the alleged impossibility of traversing an actual infinite—one of which being the conflation of a potential infinite with an actual one.
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March 26, 2024 at 12:29 pm
Scalia, this seems to be your response to all the arguments for God’s existence. It seems to boil down to “if it aint a home run, it aint a hit.” I just don’t understand that type of thinking. A single argument that gets you everything including the kitchen sink just doesn’t exist (not even the ontological argument). The fact that it takes two or three steps of argumentation to get to the Christian God does not seem problematic to me. The goal is to amass multiple lines of evidence that all converge on the same target.
As for your second comment, this is not a criticism of the teleological argument proper, but the extended line of reasoning used to identify the designer. Personally, I am not as sanguine about the arguments for an infinite past. I think the metaphysical impossibility of a past infinite is about as physically solid as it comes. Obviously people can disagree, but in philosophy, people disagree about everything, including the existence of other minds…so no surprises there.
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March 26, 2024 at 1:38 pm
Except that arguments aren’t evidence. They can inspire you where to look for evidence, but arguments alone can’t get you to God.
But nobody says there ever was any “absolute nothingness.” There’s no evidence that such a thing has ever been or could be.
Furthermore, the evidence indicates that time began with this instantiation of our universe right before the Big Bang, which would mean there wasn’t any “eternal before.”
Furthermore, all evidence indicates that minds are emergent properties of material brains, and that thought and action are defined as changes in a mind over time, any entity “before” the Big Bang would be both mindless and impotent.
Metaphysical concepts tend to break down in the extremes of our universe. For instance, it’s metaphysically intuitive that something is either “A” or “not A,” not both at once…yet quantum mechanics shows that nonintuitive state is fundamental to the universe.
My point is that one can’t rule out a past infinite because what may seem logically incoherent within the confines of our universe may be anything but in reality.
None of this negates the possible existence of gods, but none of it is evidence for gods either. What we have is a number of unanswered mysteries…but you can’t answer a mystery with an even greater mystery. All we can say is we don’t know. But since EVERY explanation we have ever found the answer to has ALWAYS turned out to have a natural cause, I wouldn’t put my money on a supernatural claim.
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March 26, 2024 at 4:11 pm
Jason, you write:
Well, it’s not my response to all the arguments for God’s existence. As I’ve said multiple times, I’m a classical theist. I most definitely believe in “home run” arguments for the existence of God. I’m just pointing out that the arguments you’re presenting don’t get us there. They all rely on supplemental arguments which make unwarranted assumptions about contingency and necessity. The very best these arguments accomplish is a beginning of the universe. They do not establish the existence of God.
By your own admission, you have not studied the Five Ways, so you’re not in a rational position to make that claim. It is the claim of classical theists that any of the Five Ways (motion, contingency, necessity, perfection and teleology) will get you to God if the supporting arguments undergirding said summations are understood.
That’s all well and good, but the target of this convergence always seems to be the beginning of the universe or that the universe was designed. Conceding design doesn’t mean that God designed it. And if it always takes these supplemental arguments to get one to God, then why not go to them instead? That’s a question that’s only been touched on by your answers. I rather think that these lines of argument you’re pursuing are best offered after God’s existence has been established by better arguments.
As far as infinity arguments go, all I’m saying is that substantive objections should be understood before waiving it as a show-stopper. One cannot rationally assess its strength and dismiss its objections prior to even knowing what those objections are.
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March 29, 2024 at 8:42 am
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April 3, 2024 at 12:42 pm
Derek, you went in a number of different directions. There’s too much to speak to, so I’ll be selective.
Of course arguments are evidence. It is rational evidence. What could be more obvious?
You are mistaken to claim that no one claims there was absolute nothingness. Some people do. Indeed, that’s’ the implication of Big Bang cosmology. Physical reality begins with the singularity. If you are a materialist, then there is nothing that exists prior to that. Physical reality just begins to exist out of nothing. Some opt for naturalism over materialism to get out of this, proposing that the laws of nature are eternal, but this has its own set of problems.
It doesn’t follow that if time began with the Big Bang that there was no “eternal before” the Big Bang – unless you are defining eternal as “everlasting time” or discounting the possibility of metaphysical time. Regarding the first, eternity can be conceived of as either everlasting time or timelessness. God could have been timeless without creation. Regarding the second, it’s possible that God’s eternality is of the everlasting kind, in which case He existed in metaphysical time. The Big Bang was not the origin of time itself, but only the origin of physical time (physical time is simply the ability to measure the passage of metaphysical time by change in physical objects).
Quantum mechanics does not show that something is both A and not A at the same time. At best, it shows that something has the potentiality to be either A or not A, but that potential is not actualized until it is observed/measured.
We can say we know because we can rationally reflect on what is possible and what is not, and what is the best explanation for physical effects we see in our universe. If we were considering the question of whether square circles exist or not, we can answer that question rationally and we can say we know such cannot exist. And when it comes to explaining a whole host of issues in our universe and our experience, the best explanation is God.
You said, “But since EVERY explanation we have ever found the answer to has ALWAYS turned out to have a natural cause, I wouldn’t put my money on a supernatural claim.” This claim is ridiculous. It assumes that every explanation needs to be a naturalistic explanation. There are all sorts of things that can’t be explained in a naturalistic way because they do not and cannot have a naturalistic cause (origin of the universe, consciousness, morality, mathematics, etc.) – not because we haven’t found the naturalistic cause yet. And to assume that there is a naturalistic cause that just hasn’t been found yet is to presuppose the very thing in question: the truth of naturalism.
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April 3, 2024 at 6:11 pm
Scalia, you said the arguments I’ve presented don’t “establish the existence of God,” but only “a beginning of the universe.” I’m not sure how you arrived at this conclusion. Out of the six arguments I presented, only one even deals with the beginning of the universe (Kalam), but even there, the beginning of the universe is a premise in the argument rather the conclusion of the argument. The conclusion of the Kalam is that the universe has a cause, and logical reflection on the required nature of such a cause reveals that it is eternal, immaterial, spaceless, personal, and powerful. If that’s not God, then who is it? You might say, “But that’s not all the attributes of God.” First, none of the 5 Ways gives you all of God’s attributes either (I’ll say more about that momentarily). Second, who cares! It gives you many of the core attributes of God, and makes it very easy to identify this cause as the God of theism. One does not need a comprehensive description of God to identify that the being in question is God. Third, the other arguments give you some of the other divine attributes:
–The moral argument gives you a maximally good, personal being as the ground of morality.
–The argument from the impossibility of nothingness gives you an eternal being.
–The contingency argument gives you a necessary being who is the ground and source of all other being.
–The teleological argument gives you a personal, intelligent mind.
–The ontological argument (which will be the topic of my next episode) gives you an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, omnibenevolent, all wise, necessary being.
Combining these arguments together, we discover an immaterial, personal mind who is eternal, spaceless, omnibenevolent, omnipotent, intelligent, omniscient, omnipresent, necessary, all-wise, and the metaphysical grounding of morality. Would anyone walk away from this thinking that we haven’t just described the God of theism? I don’t see how.
Could one argue that this list does not exhaust all of God’s attributes? Sure, but they would be mistaken to think rational arguments must demonstrate every one of God’s attributes before rational arguments can demonstrate the existence of God. There are some things about God we can only learn by revelation, but that doesn’t mean the rational arguments haven’t demonstrated that the God revealed in Scripture does not exist. We are fully capable of identifying who this being is from the attributes we discover via these rational arguments and logical reflection on the conclusion to those arguments.
It’s not that I have not studied the 5 Ways at all, but rather than they have not been the focus of my study because what I had read about them in the past, I did not find as easy to understand or as cogent as modern arguments. Admittedly, I know very little of the 5 Ways in comparison to the other arguments. Recently, however, I’ve been studying them again because I’m going to do an episode on them for my podcast. From what I understand of the 5 Ways, I fail to see how any of them are a home run to the God of Christianity (or even theism). You are surely more versed in the 5 Ways than me, so feel free to correct me here, but the 1st Way gives you a First Mover who is the cause of all change but He Himself is not changed by anything. Is that a complete description of theism? Is that a home run for theism? The 2nd Way gives you a First Cause that explains all intermediate, efficient causes. Does that single property spell out the God of theism? The 3rd Way gives you a necessary being. Great, but is that a full description of theism? The 4th way gives you a perfect being, including moral perfection. That gets you more attributes than the first 3 ways, but still not a home run. The 5th Way gets you an intelligent mind who is directing the natural world to its final ends. That doesn’t even get you omnipotence or omniscience, so how is it a home run? Even Aquinas’ existential proof only gets you to a being who is existence Himself. How is that a home run for theism? I’m not saying the conclusions to these arguments don’t point to the God of theism, but like the arguments I offered, each argument only offers a partial picture. None of them are home runs on their own. They only score when taken together as a whole. Even then, it seems to me that there are attributes of God that “my” arguments give you that the 5 Ways do not. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t see the 5 Ways yielding attributes such as spacelessness, omniscience, omnipresence, all-wise, and God’s being the metaphysical ground of morality.
I don’t entirely agree with your assessment that it’s not the conclusion of the arguments I offered that reveal God, but rather what you call the “supplemental arguments” to those arguments. I can see how you might think this regarding the Kalam and impossibility of nothingness (ION) arguments, but not the others. The Kalam only tells you the universe was caused and the ION argument only tells you that something must be eternal. Those conclusions, by themselves, don’t clearly point to God. That’s where the supplemental “arguments” come in, but I think it’s more appropriate to understand what I’m doing as offering a deeper, logical analysis of the conclusions rather than separate arguments. But it would be a mistake to think the supplemental analyses/arguments is the real meat and potatoes for the simple reason that the supplemental analyses/arguments follow from the conclusions to the primary arguments themselves. Apart from the arguments, the logical analyses would have no place.
As for the possibility of the infinite, why do you assume I am unaware of arguments for the infinite or objections to the arguments for the impossibility of the infinite? I simply find the arguments against the existence of the infinite to be so compelling and the objections to those arguments so weak, that I’m extremely confident that nothing in the physical world can be infinite. There are some things in philosophy that are difficult to determine which side has the better arguments, but I don’t think this is one of them. That said, I’m not omniscient so maybe there are better arguments and objections for the infinite than I have come across thus far. I can remain open while at the same time feeling confident that I’m right on this matter.
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April 3, 2024 at 9:38 pm
Jason, you write:
To argue that the universe was fine-tuned for life means that the universe was created for the purpose of creating life. This is a variation of arguments for the beginning of the universe. The Kalam focuses on the impossibility of creating an actual infinite by successive addition; thus, the universe was caused—without any direct reference to life in the universe. And the fine-tuning argument focuses on the creation of life to show that the universe was designed. One highlights an intelligible pattern in physics and uses the principle of causality to show that the universe was created, whereas the other highlights an intelligible pattern in the way the universe was designed so that life could exist. Indeed, the primary definition of designed is: ”to create, fashion, execute, or construct according to plan.” Nonetheless, I’m happy to concede that fine-tuning isn’t technically about the beginning of the universe, but that’s beside the point. The point is that “designed for life” doesn’t mean that the designer is God.
You then move on to argue that your arguments do indeed provide the “core attributes” of God, but you still haven’t engaged my objections to that claim. You state in your fine-tuning paper:
But you still haven’t argued why a necessary being has to have all the attributes of God. You’re presupposing it throughout your apologetic. As I stated previously:
And as I also wrote:
Moreover, your moral argument does not establish an omnibenevolent being. First, you cannot assert that such a being exists when you cannot even define the term. This is no mixing of ontology with epistemology. We don’t even have a definition to evaluate. Second, you haven’t established that objective moral values exist. You’ve only established that if objective moral values exist, then God is the best explanation for them. Your roundabout argument that since God is the greatest conceivable being, He must be infinitely good by nature is a non sequitur. God’s ontological goodness doesn’t follow from our conceptions. And the fact that we may prove the existence of an immaterial being that is more powerful than anything in the universe does not mean that said being isn’t a mixture of good and bad (whatever those terms mean). We need an argument why God’s infinite goodness is a metaphysical necessity and why it is metaphysically impossible for God to be evil. Absent that, you have missing links in your argument.
I would advise you to suspend analyzing the Five Ways until you have a better understanding of them. Believe me, I’ve heard respected philosophers flub classical theism very badly. As I have encouraged you several times, please invest the time to read Feser’s Aquinas. It is accessible reading, and it isn’t a tome. Moreover, it’s very inexpensive, and it’s offered in hard copy and electronic format.
Now, the first thing many critics flub is they fail to realize that the Five Ways are summations of extremely detailed arguments Aquinas makes elsewhere in the Summa Theologiae, the Summa Contra Gentiles, On Being and Essence, Physics and other works. He literally wrote hundreds of pages of tightly woven arguments which undergird the Five Ways. If you understood the metaphysical presuppositions carried into the Five Ways, you would understand why their conclusions entail all the attributes of God, even if you ultimately disagree with the metaphysics supporting that claim.
So, to briefly explain, the first three ways directly rely on the per se or essentially ordered causal principle that derivative causes answer to an ultimate efficient cause. Since derivative causes lack causal efficiency, they serve as instrumental causes in their borrowing or channeling the efficient cause to the ultimate effect. Since change is the actualization of a potency, every link’s potency to be actualized as to the effect concurrently relies on a preceding cause and necessarily ends in a cause which is pure actuality, without any potency to actualize.
Aristotle rightly reasoned that our observations were accurate and that there was both permanence and flux in reality. What accounts for change is a principle of being called potency and what accounts for permanence is a principle of being called act. All beings that change have the capacity or potential to change, and anything that changes is actual (a raised potency). Consequently, every contingent being is a composite of act (actuality) and potency (potentiality). There are also other types of composition that serve as corresponding principles to act and potency such as form and matter, substance and accident, supposit and nature, genus and species, and essence and existence. Since nothing can compose itself (on pain of contradiction), every composite is assembled by another. It thus follows that no composite can account for its own existence. It is by definition grounded in something other than what it is. And since the assemblage of contingent/composite beings remains contingent, it must be grounded in being that is not composite. So, the hallmark of contingency is composition, and the ground for contingency is simple being devoid of potency (the capacity to change). Pure Actuality is another term for Being Simpliciter which is existence without qualification (restriction). Pure Actuality entails numerical oneness, personality, immutability, absolute goodness, absolute knowledge and absolute power. Please realize that there’s lots of supporting argumentation for that conclusion, but the first three ways definitely get you to God.
As to the Fourth Way, the hierarchy of existence exhibits varying degrees of perfection (actualization of potencies toward a goal). Since every being, high or low, participates in the perfections of its kind, and since the higher one ascends in the strata of being, the greater being one has, the degrees of being (perfections) are grounded in unparticipated being—being simpliciter. This too indirectly imports the causal principle grounding composites in Pure Actuality. Thus, it too gets you to God.
The Fifth Way focuses on final causality (the “last” of the four causes–formal, material, efficient and final), with the last (final causality) being actually the first in order. Beings have a telos of possible effects in accordance with their natures. But this telos, which is in every material thing, can only be accounted for in an intelligent agent acting here and now (due to the causal principle’s unfolding every final cause). And whatever orders things to their ends does so by holding them in existence (causes their essences to be conjoined with the act of existence) which is grounded in Pure Existence.
So, given the Aristotelian/Thomistic metaphysics which undergird classical theism, each of the Five Ways lead directly to one, indivisibile, eternal, almighty, omniscient, omnipotent being. And as Aquinas said, “and this being we call God.”
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April 4, 2024 at 7:42 am
I forgot to mention the following about the fine-tuning argument. Recall my quoting you above:
Here you acknowledge that fine-tuning doesn’t get us to God. Your argument doesn’t preclude the possibility that a finite, immaterial being fined-tuned the universe. You are again relying on a supplemental argument to finish the proof.
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April 9, 2024 at 1:26 pm
Scalia,
You’ve said a lot, just as I did…so I can’t complain there. That said, it will take me a bit to get through this and respond. For the time being, however, let me just say a word about the Five Ways. Virtually all of my recent examination of the Five Ways involved reading Feser’s articles and a resource he highly recommended for the study of the Five Ways: The Thomistic Institute. I think that what you’ve said about the Five Ways in your comment matches with my own understanding. However, knowing how important these arguments are to you, and wanting to be extra sure that I am representing them accurately, I will read Feser’s book prior to recording my episode.
Jason
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April 10, 2024 at 8:57 pm
Thanks, Jason. The Thomistic Institute is okay for absolute beginners, but they go through very little of the underlying metaphysics that make the arguments work. It’s good that you’ll read Feser’s Aquinas before you offer a podcast commentary on it. You’ll thank me for it down the road. Had you commented before adequately appraising yourself, you’d be embarrassed when you got around to studying it. I don’t intend for that to sound smug. I’m just speaking from experience.
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April 14, 2024 at 11:01 pm
I would also recommend Feser’s Five Proofs of the Existence of God. Superb.
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April 18, 2024 at 7:43 am
“Of course arguments are evidence. It is rational evidence. What could be more obvious?”
Arguments are useful tools of persuasion, sure, but evidence is what’s necessary to support your arguments with credibility, grounding them in reality. So to convince effectively, you not only have to construct a logical argument, but ALSO provide credible evidence to support it. It’s the evidence that’s missing from all your arguments, which means those arguments will only be compelling to those who already believe.
Let me give you an example of why arguments aren’t evidence, using Anselm’s ontological argument:
1. By definition, God (the Christian God, let’s admit) is a being which none greater can be imagined.
2. A being that necessarily exists in reality is greater than a being that does not necessarily exist.
3. Therefore, God necessarily exists.
Well, for starters, I CAN imagine a god who created God—an uber-god, if you will, who is so much greater than God that he has created an infinite number of universes, each with its own God who is unaware of any of the other universes or even the uber-god. Therefore, God is not the being which none greater can be imagined (the uber-god is! But then it’s easy to imagine an uber-uber-god who created the uber-god, and round and round we go). Therefore, God doesn’t necessarily exist.
But that’s not the only problem. The only reason God is considered the “being which none greater can be imagined” is because that is how Anselm (and others) chose to define him. And the claim that a being that necessarily exists in reality is greater than a being that does not necessarily exist is nothing more than an assertion—it’s a claim that needs to be supported by evidence.
The argument is a tautology. By stripping the argument of its obfuscating clutter, the tautology is made clear: “God is defined as necessarily existing, therefore God necessarily exists.” Or the even simpler: “God exists because God exists.”
If those problems aren’t clear enough, it’s easy to reword the ontological argument to “prove” God DOESN’T exist:
1. God is defined as the greatest being imaginable.
2. The greatest things imaginable exist solely in the imagination.
3. Therefore, God exists solely in the imagination.
See? Arguments are not evidence.
“You are mistaken to claim that no one claims there was absolute nothingness. Some people do. Indeed, that’s’ the implication of Big Bang cosmology. Physical reality begins with the singularity. If you are a materialist, then there is nothing that exists prior to that.”
I don’t know where you’re getting your information from, but the Big Bang is defined as “the rapid expansion of matter from a state of extremely high density and temperature.” That “state of extremely high density and temperature” is not “nothing,” much less “absolute nothingness.” We don’t know why that hot, dense state existed, but cosmologists are NOT claiming that absolute nothingness ever existed. There’s simply no evidence that absolute nothingness ever existed or even could exist. Actually, it’s pretty much only BIBLICAL THEISTS who believe in absolute nothingess, since they believe God created the universe out of absolute nothingess.
“eternity can be conceived of as either everlasting time or timelessness. God could have been timeless without creation.”
As I noted, ALL evidence we have indicates that minds are an emergent property of material brains that can only function within the context of material spacetime. The very act of thinking can be defined as a change in material brains over time. Without time, you don’t have thinking, and thus the universe couldn’t have been created by a thinking being.
Now that is an argument, BTW, and one grounded in observable reality. Do you think that’s also evidence God doesn’t exist? Because if you consider your other arguments as being evidence, then you have to accept this argument as being evidence as well.
“Regarding the second, it’s possible that God’s eternality is of the everlasting kind, in which case He existed in metaphysical time. The Big Bang was not the origin of time itself, but only the origin of physical time (physical time is simply the ability to measure the passage of metaphysical time by change in physical objects).”
Metaphysical time? Are you also going to make a claim for “metaphysical thinking” to get around the thinking without time problem? 😉 Too often I see the word “metaphysical” tacked on to something as a way to handwave a problem away. If you’re going to postulate “metaphysical time,” you’re going to need to provide some credible evidence that such a thing exists. Again, arguments are not evidence.
Big Bang cosmology doesn’t require a workaround because it doesn’t require an explanation to account for thinking in the absence of time. We have predictions from highly successful theories in physics that imply the existence of multiple universes…but even that is not enough to justify BELIEF in the existence of multiple universes.
“Quantum mechanics does not show that something is both A and not A at the same time. At best, it shows that something has the potentiality to be either A or not A, but that potential is not actualized until it is observed/measured.”
You’re right, I should have worded that better. My apologies. But my point remains: It is “metaphysically intuitive” that something is either “A” or “not A,” not that it is indeterminate until observed in some manner. Yet the evidence indicates that’s reality. So we cannot use a “metaphysically intuitive” claim as an argument against an argument that appears nonintuitive.
“If we were considering the question of whether square circles exist or not, we can answer that question rationally and we can say we know such cannot exist. And when it comes to explaining a whole host of issues in our universe and our experience, the best explanation is God.”
That’s because squares and circles have precise and contradictory definitions. But that’s not what you’re doing with these arguments; what you’re doing is trying to solve mysteries by appealing to an even greater mystery. It’s like noting that the plants in your garden keep dying, while those in your neighbors’ yards thrive. You can’t figure out what the answer is, since your neighbors don’t seem to be doing anything different to their gardens than you are, so you come up with a greater mystery: evil, invisible elves who hate you are sending magical rays to kill your plants. That answers your question…but there’s no way to verify your claim. And there’s no way to prove your claim false, either, so it’s unfalsifiable. And because you think you have the answer, you’re not likely to look into the real answer, which doesn’t require you to invent invisible elves or magic rays—like perhaps the previous owner of your house contaminated the soil in the garden.
That’s the problem with starting with a preconception and then searching for arguments to support it: you look for ways to force reality to fit into that preconception, rather than trying to DISPROVE your own preconception. That’s the opposite to how science works, and it’s why science advances human knowledge so dramatically while religion just makes itself more and more unfalsifiable.
“You said, “But since EVERY explanation we have ever found the answer to has ALWAYS turned out to have a natural cause, I wouldn’t put my money on a supernatural claim.” This claim is ridiculous. It assumes that every explanation needs to be a naturalistic explanation.”
No, not at all! It means that the null hypothesis MUST be a naturalistic explanation, because EVERY explanation discovered so far has had a naturalistic explanation. That puts the burden of proof on the person claiming a SUPERNATURAL explanation. You can’t simply claim the supernatural exists without demonstrating it to—and no, arguments aren’t evidence. If I declared that I have magical powers that allow me to fly and turn invisible, you would be foolish to believe that UNLESS AND UNTIL I demonstrated I actually have those powers. Because thousands of years of experience have indicated humans can’t magically fly or turn invisible.
“There are all sorts of things that can’t be explained in a naturalistic way because they do not and cannot have a naturalistic cause (origin of the universe, consciousness, morality, mathematics, etc.)”
Actually, we DO have quite plausible naturalistic explanations for morality (social species ALL evolve some form of morality in order to survive as and take advantage of being a social species) and mathematics (which is DESCRIPTIVE, not PRESCRIPTIVE). Regardless, not having the answer to something is NOT justification for believing something else. The wise course of action is to simply acknowledge “I don’t know” and keep exploring. But trying to answer mysteries with even greater mysteries? That’s a guaranteed path to misinformation…as the fact that there are literally THOUSANDS of contradictory religions out there should make clear.
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May 3, 2024 at 6:40 pm
Scalia. I read the first four chapters of Feser’s Aquinas, which covers the 5 Ways and the metaphysical presuppositions behind them. It was a good read and it’s laid out well, but I can’t say it really changed my understanding of the arguments that I gleaned from the other resources. It did help to bring some things into better focus, however, and as such, it was worth my while. I just published my first episode on the First Way.
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May 3, 2024 at 8:52 pm
Jason, I commend you for reading part of Feser’s book. Respectfully, I do not see how your reading it failed to really change your understanding of the arguments, given your description of them above, including your failure to see how they lead to God. If what you read from other sources explained their metaphysical foundation, you would have seen precisely why they lead directly to God, even if you ultimately conclude that said arguments fail to ineluctably do so.
I just listened to your podcast and will comment further under that post.
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May 5, 2024 at 8:14 am
As predicted, Dumbo launched into a debate about forgiveness. I tell you, you can read the guy like a book!
Unlike Dingbat, I back up my claims with evidence. I proved he’s a liar via the links I provided, so he wants to distract by debating something else. He knows good and well that won’t happen. He’s a liar, and he knows he’s a liar, else he’d be content for the record to speak for itself. He knows the record shows otherwise. So, as liars do, he goes into deflection mode.
I guess that’s the only explanation for his continued replies even after he’s said more than once he wouldn’t reply!
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May 9, 2024 at 9:57 am
Nicely done, Scalia, you responded on the wrong thread. That’s okay, I forgive you. 😉
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May 9, 2024 at 2:11 pm
Yep, wrong thread. Unlike you, I admit my errors.
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