The Irrelevance of All Philosophical Proofs of God
Proving or disproving the existence of an abstract God misses the point of religion
Western philosophers have pondered whether God’s existence can be proven, from as far back as the satirical poems of Xenophanes. That these philosophers approached religion with a battery of constructive or destructive arguments is as unsurprising as that a hammer would treat everything like a nail.
But almost by design these proofs and rational criticisms miss the point of religion.
Western philosophy and the Axial Age
The ancient Greeks laid down some of the foundations of modern science and mathematics: Aristotle practically invented logic and biology, Democritus arrived at atomism by armchair reasoning, and Euclid revolutionized geometry with the axiomatic method. In the first century BCE, the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius captured the free-thinking spirit of humanism that informed both ancient Greek philosophy and the European Renaissance.
The foundations of Western philosophy, therefore, promote scientific skepticism. The ambition was to obtain objective knowledge at any cost, even if that knowledge should prove subversive. This is why Western knowledge-seeking was called “philosophy,” the obsessive, potentially-exclusive love of wisdom. For example, Socrates was executed in part because his elitist interrogations were radical and damaging to Athenian democratic culture.
But religion long predated that philosophical project. Before the patriarchy and imperialism of the world’s organized religions, there were childlike animism and shamanic magic, folklore and ancestral spirit veneration stretching back tens of thousands of years into the late Stone Age. It’s safe to suggest that most worshippers who’ve ever lived didn’t approach religion by drastically overthinking the matter, entertaining idle or self-destructive doubts and compensating with disingenuous apologetics.
Arguably, a crucial moment in the recorded history of religion was the Axial Age, which landed like a bombshell in the mid first millennium BCE. According to Robert Bellah’s use of Merlin Donald’s theory of cognitive change, that period was impacted by the inventions of the Greek alphabet and writing, which invited meta-level questioning, an analytical, theorizing mode of thought that overtook the earlier, analogical and narrative one. Instead of just taking their practices for granted by personifying and socializing with natural forces, people in Greece, India, China, the Levant, and Persia became more self-aware as they came to define themselves as distinct from an increasingly objectified world.
For example, this was the birth of that freedom of thought in ancient Greece which started with the Presocratics, and their radical questioning produced knowledge that was at once progressive and destabilizing. To have the cognitive power not just to reflect on our thoughts, but to build on previous efforts with the written word was to introduce a layer of culture that further liberated us from our animal instincts.
That freedom evidently has its benefits and its downside, which is to say that we’re dealing here with something like what Timothy Morton calls a “hyperobject.” Modern cognition — the way of knowing that accelerated with the Axial Age — is like an empire or climate change: we grapple only with the tip of the iceberg in either case because the whole of the thing is too vast and complex to be comprehended.
The benefits of meta-questioning included revolutions in spirituality, from the Jewish prophets to the Upanishads, and the seeds of scientific objectivity that would flower over a millennium later with the Industrial Revolution and the more recent, spectacular advances in high technology.
The main drawback of such meta-investigations is that they open us up to doubts that suggest our lives are absurd. We learn there’s such a thing as too much freedom, as the liberty to discover that mass culture is a fraud, nature is an amoral nightmare, and the spiritual and intellectual elites are condemned to hide out in caves or countercultures, nursing their anxieties.
The theist’s hybrid deity
The Western practice of attempting to prove God’s existence stems from the philosophy of religion that infiltrated Hindu, Christian, and Islamic theologies. That philosophy began when thinkers ridiculed the dogmas of folk religion but realized, as the political philosopher Leo Strauss said, that they had better help rehabilitate the societies their cogitations threatened to subvert; otherwise, they’d risk undermining their lifestyle of intellectual elitism. The spirits and monsters of archaic folklore were replaced, therefore, with the God of the philosophers, with an abstract, metaphysical Absolute that could satisfy reason, if not an authentic spiritual impulse.
To “prove” that God exists is to recreate God in the philosopher’s image. God becomes for Aristotle an intellectual that’s incapable of caring about anything apart from its thoughts. God turned into the Prime Mover or First Cause because natural causality had finally been discovered in all its disenchanted glory. And the deists of early modern Europe emphasized God’s role as an “architect” or an “intelligent designer” since God had to live up to the emerging standards of science and capitalistic industry.
The God whose existence can be rationally proven by forlorn primates, though, is no God at all since reason is just our primary tool for exploiting environmental conditions by objecting them. For instance, if God is the First Mover, he would be subject to the laws of motion, which would be absurd since God is supposed to transcend the limits of the natural order that he created. The naturalized God of the philosophers conflicts at every turn with the friendlier, more intuitive God of folk religion because the former was meant to serve as a smokescreen to distract from the latter’s annihilation at Reason’s hands.
If you look at the definition of “theism,” you find reference to a curious hybrid of the pre- and post-philosophical deities. The theistic God is the “creator and ruler of the universe” that intervenes in nature with divine revelation, the latter point distinguishing theism from deism.
Notice that this definition doesn’t emphasize the personhood or character of this deity. Indeed, since an act of creation can be understood causally without any trace of intention on the part of the cause, and even the act of ruling can be considered a case of physical control, without the need of personal involvement (such as the choice of laws or governing with a moral purpose), the theistic God as defined is very much an impersonal abstraction, befitting the philosopher’s resuscitation of religion.
The God of folk religion, as defined by the literalistic, exoteric interpretation of the creeds and dramas of religious scriptures has to be read into that definition of philosophical “theism.”
You have to presuppose that this “God,” “Creator,” or “Ruler” is a particular person such as Yahweh, the Father of Jesus, or Allah. You have to presume that this deity controls the universe because God is wise and benevolent, merciful and just. You must read between the lines to find the reassurances that God is especially concerned with our corner of Creation and that he promised to care for us in the afterlife, to save or reward those who worship him and follow his commandments, and to punish sinners and nonbelievers.
All of that theological rigmarole is left out of the philosophy of religion, but few of us care about the crypto-atheistic abstraction of a mere First Cause or Absolute Ground of Being. If God is more like the Way from Daoism or the Force from Star Wars than like a divine person who speaks to us and intervenes in our affairs to fulfill his gracious plan, concern with God becomes a pragmatic attempt to develop techniques for living well. Western religions in that case would be as therapeutic as Eastern ones.
Rational abstractions as lame stand-ins for a divine caretaker
Christianity especially recalls primitive forms of worship, by identifying God with a particular human person. By maintaining that God incarnated in Jesus, just as tribal religions had associated their deities with concrete totems, altars, talismans, and the like, Christians set themselves up for the most excruciating internal conflicts between their folk intuitions and agendas, on the one hand, and the challenge of philosophical rigour, on the other.
These conflicts were evident in the Scholastic tradition of pressing philosophical doubts about scripture as far as possible without provoking the ire of the intolerant Church. Anselm and Aquinas wrestled with the pure philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, from a dogmatic Christian standpoint; more precisely, those theologians meant to tame classical philosophy to excuse their religious dogmas.
This, of course, was Catholicism’s modus operandi since this is what Catholics did ever since their New Testament scapegoated Jews and Hellenized Judaism to make some Jewish scriptures suitable for adoption by the Roman Empire. If they couldn’t wipe out heresies by force, Catholics co-opted the opposing ideas and practices; hence, the word “catholic” means a breadth of appeal that adheres to the lowest common denominator.
This gulf between the comforting religion we want and the pale imitation supplied by philosophical proofs and analyses widens into an appalling abyss with the American Fundamentalists, Creationists, and Evangelical Trumpers. Here we see reason employed most cynically and feebly, the humanistic spirit of science and philosophy having been trampled to make room for some barbaric, anachronistic prejudices. With Scholasticism or at least the philosophy of religion proper, reason tamed faith, but now we have the anti-intellectual reversal in which faith tames reason.
But the point is that these dynamics show us what’s lacking with all so-called theistic arguments: the attempt to prove God’s existence, presupposing a mathematical standard of proof, turns God into a mathematical abstraction. Likewise, comparing God to causes, substrates, or essences turns God into a metaphysical abstraction. All such abstractions are irrelevant to what the masses have always wanted out of religion, which is a way to live without debilitating fears and doubts.
Accepting “proofs” of God from the philosophy of religion or some debased theology is like taking an arsonist’s advice on how to quench fires. With the aid of memory tools such as the alphabet and literacy, freethinkers killed the gods we’ve cared about throughout our recorded history. Reason disenchanted nature in toto; we stripped the world of meaning and inherent value to prepare for our extraction of the world’s material resources. The spirits vanished or became ossified in the civic religions and philosophy-laden theologies we offered as lame substitutes for folklore and a psychedelic broadening of perspective.
That enhanced, spiritual perspective would amount to the innocence of Adam and Eve before their ironic maturation in the Garden of Eden. Or this appreciation of sacredness would be like the child’s naïve optimism and faith in her parents and the importance of her life. Authentic spirituality would be based on the long-lost intuition that everything that happens in the universe is saturated with moral significance.
Philosophical skepticism and scientific objectification made all of that dubious at best, if not psychologically impossible in our late-modern period. To take seriously mere arguments about God is like fighting over how nature is portrayed in a computer simulation, while industries are busy terraforming the wilderness.