As believers, we know the answer to this question. But how rigorous is the answer in philosophy circles? This week, Jamie dives into part 1: Cosmological arguments for God's existence.
Jamie Dew: Hey everybody, I'm Jamie Dew.
Joe Fontenot: And I am Joe Fontenot.
Jamie Dew: Welcome back again to the Towel & Basin podcast.
Joe Fontenot: That's right. In the past, we've been doing this series on natural theology. And we're going to come back to that, but in a different way. Before we do that though, can you give us a recap, Jamie, for all the people out there who are like me, who are like, "Wait, what was that again?" What is natural theology, in a nutshell?
Jamie Dew: By the way, you're not alone in that, man. That's what we all do. Anytime we're not super immersed in something we always have to get those a little refreshers. So we did two podcasts on natural theology. Number one, what is it? And then number two, should we be doing it? And is it legitimate for us to do? And stuff like that. What we said there in this previous podcast is that we need to distinguish between revelation and theology. Revelation is something that God does. He reveals. And theology is something we do in response to what God has revealed. So for example, he's spoken his word and then we formulate doctrinal statements from reading the scriptures. That's the act of doing theology. Since one is a God product, God reveals, it cannot err. But since the other one is a man product, something we do, it can err.
The examples of that is consider end time stuff. Lots of different end time views, somebody's wrong. Consider salvation, lots of different views about salvation, somebody's wrong. Now, theologians can err in their work, but God cannot err in the work. That's the difference. Natural theology is, I think, simply making statements about God from what we know in nature. In short, that is roughly what we've done. There's lots of variations of that throughout history. It's been around, natural theology is as old as most of Christianity. There have been times when it's thrived and been done very well. And then there's some times when it has been set aside or vilified and ridiculed. Today it's sort of back. Then that's largely because of new insights that we have from the sciences and other things like that. So that's what it is.
Joe Fontenot: Okay. That makes a lot of sense. From a practical sense, what are some examples of natural theology? If I wanted to just start Googling this other than natural theology, or if I really wanted to study these, are these broken down into areas? Or can you give me examples?
Jamie Dew: Yeah, they are. While one may be somewhat unfamiliar with the discussions about natural theology, per se, if they've done any work in apologetics, they're actually not unfamiliar with natural theology at all, because much of what we do in apologetics is drawn from natural theology. Now, there's other ways of doing apologetics. This is not to minimize presuppositional apologetics or anything else like that, but much of evangelical and even a lot of Catholic apologetics today draws very heavily on natural theology. This is where, for example, arguments for God's existence are going to come in. There's a lot of different kinds of arguments for God's existence that have been and currently are being employed by apologists.
So for example, and in just a minute I want to get real clear about what I mean by each of these camps. There's what we call cosmological arguments. Cosmological arguments are arguments about God or arguments for the existence of God that we draw from the cosmos itself, hence, cosmological. Then there are teleological arguments. Teleological comes from the Greek word télos, which means purpose. Teleological arguments are going to draw in on things, specific details of nature that seem to have purpose, like an eyeball, for example, has a purpose of seeing. Taste buds have a purpose of tasting. Hemoglobin and other elements of blood have the purpose of clotting and things like that. So when you find particular details of the universe that seem to have purpose to them, there are arguments that are made from those examples to the existence of God. Those are called teleological arguments.
There are other kinds of arguments. There are moral arguments from the very sense of morality that we have. There are arguments from beauty. Beauty, be that in the sound of Beethoven's symphonies. Beauty in the beautiful face of a woman. Beauty in a sunset. Beauty in a rose. Beauty in a fragrance. Beauty wherever you'd find it. There are arguments for God's existence from beauty itself. Arguments from reason, the fact that we are rational and the fact that the universe is rational, there are philosophers that make arguments for God's existence from rationality itself. There are even arguments, these would be interesting, they might be a little difficult and complicated to pursue in a podcast, but there are even arguments for God's existence from the very concept of God itself. So arguments where philosophers will say, "Hey, here's what we mean by the word God." And you draw that out to its logical conclusion, that being has to exist.
All that to say, anytime we do stuff like that, we are in the realm of natural theology. And just one word here about that. By each of those examples that I just gave you, you'll hear people ask, use language, they'll say things like, "Well, tell me about "the" cosmological argument or the teleological argument." What I want to say is we're thinking about it wrong. There's not really just one argument that's the teleological argument or cosmological argument. Rather, what there are, there are families of arguments that all belong in those buckets. In other words, there's certain kinds of arguments, plural, that we would label as cosmological arguments and certain kinds of arguments that we would label as teleological arguments, in the same way that there's no such thing as just the pepperoni pizza. There are, rather, pepperoni pizzas. And what makes it a pepperoni pizza? It's a pizza and it has pepperoni on it and kind of the same thing, right?
We can say these arguments are cosmological arguments, because they're arguments for God's existence to come from this kind of information. There are lots and lots of examples of them. Those are examples of what we mean when we talk about doing natural theology today.
Joe Fontenot: Okay. That makes sense. You've listed about half a dozen different areas. What if we just take one, the first one that you mentioned, cosmology.
Jamie Dew: Cosmological arguments, yeah.
Joe Fontenot: Cosmological, yeah. What does this look like? And what should I know about this?
Jamie Dew: One other quick note, real quick. I'll give you some examples of these. But when you look how these arguments function, how they'll move from a thought to the conclusion, a lot of these families of arguments take the same course of thought. In other words, they follow the same patterns. What differentiates them is the information that you plug in on the front end. Take teleological arguments, there's a certain kind of information or data that you start with. You find in the world examples of design or things that have purpose to them. And we argue from those to the existence of God. Well, in cosmological arguments, you're actually starting with a piece of information that's much more broad than that. You're not looking at a particular aspect of the universe like you would in teleological arguments. Rather, what you're doing is you're just looking at the existence of the universe itself.
So you start in cosmological arguments, these are going to be arguments that try to argue for God's existence, they all start with just the brute fact of the universe itself. Hey, look around us. There is a universe. Then we could argue, per these arguments, from the existence of a universe, to the existence of a God. That roughly, is what cosmological arguments do. They start with the universe or the cosmos. They say, "Hey man, there's got to be an explanation of this and that explanation is best thought of as God."
Now, I mentioned a minute ago that for each of these families of arguments, there are lots and lots of examples of them. This is true of cosmological arguments. Cosmological arguments are actually as old as Western philosophy itself. Plato and Aristotle are actually making, in various places, certain arguments for God's existence that are cosmological arguments at the core. There's a sense in which this family of arguments predates even Christianity itself. It's interesting if you read Plato, prior to Plato, the Greek world believed in the Homeric gods, the pantheon of all the gods, the sun gods, the moon gods and fertility gods and the God of love, and all this stuff. Socrates is condemned to death, basically for condemning the youth of Athens. Now, what's that all about? Socrates challenged this Homeric understanding of the gods on a number of fronts.
Number one, that it was illogical. There's no way that there could be anything like that. And then number two, that even if those gods did exist, they were not the moral foundation of the Greco world, because they were morally corrupt. So against this idea of many gods, Socrates starts challenging that idea with a belief that seems to be going in the direction of monotheism. Plato's much wiser as a diplomat than that. He can bypass those questions and not get himself killed and thrown into prison. But it's very clear in Plato's works that he rejects the Homeric gods in favor of a singular God. It really seems like Plato is pointing in the direction of monotheism. He does that on the basis of some arguments for God's existence, which are like cosmological arguments. These arguments that go back as old as really Western philosophy itself, they run something like this.
Here's the first kind of example that you could get, or a good example of that, that you would get. Maybe not the first kind, but a really good example of that, that you'd get in the Western world. The Kalam argument, which actually is a medieval argument coming from the Arabs, in its brute form says something like this, that anything that begins to exist has to have a cause. Number two, the universe began to exist so therefore, the universe has a cause. Notice here the very general, generic conclusion that it draws. It does not say therefore, the God of Christian theism, God of Abraham and [Inaudible 00:11:40]. He simply says that the universe has to have something outside of itself to bring it into existence. It won't do to simply kick that back and say, "Well, there was another universe." Well, then where would that one come from? Because it had a cause.
There are a number of these early arguments that push back against the possibility of something called an infinite regress. Essentially, what all of those arguments are going to try to argue is that you have to have something or somebody outside of the physical universe to bring it all into existence in the first place or else none of this stuff could have ever been. In its initial forms, those are the kinds of things that Kalam arguments tried to do. Now, today, a very popular expression of that Kalam cosmological argument is William Lane Craig's example of the Kalam cosmological argument. Nobody, I think it's safe to say, nobody has had as big of an impact in making these arguments really ever, not just today, than William Lane Craig. In fact, so much so that if anybody has even the faintest awareness of natural theology and arguments for God's existence, they're probably most familiar with William Lane Craig's version of the argument.
Essentially, it has a number of steps to it. It says, essentially something like this, the universe does exist. I mean, who's going to deny that, right? To deny that there's a universe, you have to deny your very existence. So that's dumb. So premise one's accepted. Premise two, the universe began to exist. Now, that is something that intuitively I think everybody recognizes so strongly that Craig probably doesn't have to make much of an argument here to make sure people see it. Oh, but he does. He marshals a number of philosophical arguments against the possibility of an actual infinite. He also marshals a number of scientific arguments to the conclusion that the universe began to exist. For example, here's where he's going to bring in Big Bang cosmology and things like that. I know that Christian camps are torn and divided over that. And look, I don't raise this today because I have a dog in the fight on where one stands on those things.
I will simply say this, that a lot of folks that think bringing in Big Bang cosmology will work against our faith, quite the opposite. What Craig is trying to demonstrate is that if, in fact, Big Bang cosmology happened, this greatly supports Christian theism. This counts more for us than it does against [inaudible 00:14:16]. This is a problem for the atheist. This is not a problem for the Christian. So premise one, the universe exists. Premise two, the universe began to exist and he employs those scientific and those philosophical arguments to make that point. Premise three, that beginning had a cause and that's rather straightforward and logical. There's not a lot we have to do there to really make that point.
The next and the final point is really where a lot of this comes down to. He argues fourthly that the cause of that universe had to be personal, not physical. We could say it this way, physical causes, there's really only two kinds of causes we can think of, personal causes, where you have agents that do stuff or physical causes, like the wind blows, gravity pulls and such. Here's the thing about physical causes. Physical causes require the existence of physical stuff in the first place for their cause to even be possible. Prior to the beginning of the universe, there was no physical stuff. Therefore, it could not have been physical stuff that actually brought it all into existence. Therefore, by process of elimination, the only other possibility for the cause of the universe is an agent type of causation, a personal cause.
The conclusion of that argument would be there's, therefore, a personal cause to the universe. These are examples of what we would call cosmological arguments specifically Kalam, which is Arabic for dialogue, back and forth. If you were in a classroom with me and I could draw this out, you'd see this back and forth nature of it. But, in short, these are examples of what we would call cosmological arguments today.
Joe Fontenot: Okay. I know as we are going to do more podcasts, we're going to get more into this and look at the other examples that you mentioned already, teleological and so on. Do you feel that cosmological argument is a strong, helpful one?
Jamie Dew: Well, again, you keep using this individual singular language and there's not really just one, right? There's a family. I think that they are helpful. Yes, sure. Here's the thing. When we do apologetics, a word to my fellow apologists out there listening, we tend to focus on rationality. To be rational means we've simply marshaled evidence. Our logic is structured right and things of that nature. And look, I'm not saying don't concentrate on that. You have to concentrate on those things, because if you get all that junk wrong, your arguments don't work period. But understand what we're actually interested in is cogency. Cogency, what is that? It's persuasiveness. A cogent argument is an argument that simply put, is persuasive. [inaudible 00:17:11] here's the catch. So what's persuasive?
Well, what's persuasive is probably different for every single one of us. There is no one size fits all for persuasive. There's not. What persuades me might not persuade you and vice versa. I mean, look, I have four kids. I watched all four of them get born. I did. And I hear people say things like, "Oh, I watched my child be born. I just don't know how you can deny the existence of God. It just confirmed it for me." Look, it was a beautiful, all four of them were beautiful moments. They're bloody moments. They were beautiful moments. I wouldn't take anything for them. I remember so very much about every single one them, so special. But they did nothing for me in terms of my belief in God. I already believed in God. I didn't believe in him more after that moment. So I just don't find that stuff particularly persuasive. But for some people it does.
There are things that persuade me. I'll be honest with you, and we'll get into some of this in the later podcasts on some of these things, it's actually, for me, there's a couple other things that are more persuasive to me as to why I really do think there's a God. It's the more existential things. It's this deep sense of meaning and longing that Lewis talks about a lot. I look forward to maybe doing a podcast on that. That stuff does it for me. That stuff really convinces me that there's not just some thing out there, but there's some body out there. Then second of all, it's things like the resurrection of Jesus. Then it's my own personal conversion. I have no way of accounting for my life, aside from the God of Christianity. I really don't. So stuff like that really does it for me. But it wouldn't persuade a skeptic in the pew that came to hear me speak or something like that. This argument might.
Here's the sad part about what's happened in apologetics. It's gotten political and it's gotten denominational and people have gotten super judgmental and we focus now on methodology and we criticize everybody else's approach to doing apologetics. I want to say to everybody, stop it, please. What we're doing, what we actually have to have our eye on is cogency, persuasive. What persuades you may not persuade me and vice versa. So you're asking me, do these arguments work? Well, clearly throughout history, these arguments have indeed been very persuasive to a lot of people. Yes. For me personally? I tend to think that argument works logically. So in other words, I run through that argument. I go, "Yeah, that sounds about right."
But when I put my head on the pillow at night and take great comfort in my God, it's actually not these kinds of arguments that does it for me. It's just not. So do they compel me in some way towards God? No, not really. But I do think that logically they work and so in a mild way for me, they're confirmatory, if I can say that, if that's even a word. But I don't want to begrudge the fact that there are many brothers and sisters throughout the history of the church that have been deeply encouraged by these arguments. Therefore, I'm a proponent of them, recognizing that they may actually be cogent for somebody else.
Joe Fontenot: Excellent. Well, I look forward to getting into the rest of them.
Jamie Dew: Yeah, man. Fun.
Joe Fontenot: All right. Thanks so much, Jamie.
Recording: Hey everybody, this is Jamie and Joe again. If you like this podcast, would you leave us a rating and review wherever you listen to podcasts? That helps other people find it. And if you have any questions, we'd love to hear about them. Just go to jamiedew.com/questions and send them in that way and we'll take a look at the most frequently asked questions and give them a shot.