God Exists
…there’s a community which is now still only in its faintest beginnings, but which is going somewhere stunning. It’s being formed by a being of perfect love and beauty and goodness, one who wants to have relationships with you and I, of all people, and has even proven willing to undergo terrible suffering to bring that about. It’s a community in which you’ll again see your departed loved ones, in which people whose lives consisted of nothing but suffering will have their wounds healed and will be able to go on, a community without death, without oppression, without degradation, without hurt (even the little animals won’t get hurt, if you can believe it), one in which we’ll relate to God and to one another without fear or anxiety or shame or pretense–in which, as St. Paul says, for the first time, we’ll see each other face to face. And it is our job, here and now, to help this community be realized. “Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand.”
There probably is a God. Many things are easier to explain if there is than if there isn’t.
Many months ago, I wrote about my crisis of faithlessness. I had been an atheist for many years, and yet as I considered the evidence for the existence of God, I began to think that there might be a God. I wasn’t sure, but I for the first time dared to hope that reality was something other than a terrible tragedy where almost every creature dies after just a few days. I compared the world to Pan’s Labyrinth: there is a reading where everything is wonderful and enchanted and magical, and another where the universe is mostly tragic and cruel. I wasn’t sure which one was accurate.
As I mentioned before, I’ve started to believe in God. It’s wonderful, truly! I feel a bit like, to use an analogy Gavin Ortlund has used, I’ve stepped through the closet and entered Narnia! The God in which I believe is one of incalculable goodness, one who made the world to bring about love and value, one who will wipe away every tear and make every wrong right. I believe—not with certainty, but with decent probability—that I will see my dead loved ones again, that I, and you, and everyone else will have the greatest conceivable experience: an infinitely intense relationship with the greatest conceivable being. I believe that the best things in this life are but a pale shadow of what is to come, that an eternity awaits us all where each second is incalculably better than the best moment of your life.
Lots of theists don’t seem to take time to appreciate just how wonderful the world is if they’re right. If God is real, our world isn’t some cruel tale but the best possible story, written by the greatest possible author—one who loves you more intensely than you could ever fathom, one who knows the number of hairs on your head and is watching over you. Many don’t appreciate how good of news this is because their picture of God condemns most people—including many of their own loved ones—to hell, but if one has a suitable picture of God, one that honors his infinite goodness, this should be the best imaginable news.
It does, at times, feel too good to be true. How could it be that the future awaiting us all is really this grand? Well, I’ve felt this before about things that have happened. I’ve felt, at times, that a particular girl who ended up liking me couldn’t like me, for if she did, the world would just be too great. Our perceptions of how good the world can be often radically understate just how wonderful things are. Rather than relying on general pessimistic feelings, we must look at the evidence.
And when I look at the evidence, I think it overwhelmingly favors theism. It favors theism so much that even though psychologically I feel it hard to believe in something so wonderful, when I consider it logically, it best makes sense of the world. Just as biology only makes sense in light of evolution, the world only makes sense in light of God.
I cannot, of course, run through all the evidence. But there is quite a lot of it. First of all, God is a very intrinsically likely sort of thing to exist, being very simple and lacking arbitrary limits. God is simply a mind without limits, and minds are quite simple. He’s the simplest sort of mind, much simpler than anything invoked in fundamental physics.
God is, for this reason, not some random gerrymandered way for reality to be akin to invoking blue leprechauns with magic powers who strangely bring about some specific state of affairs. He’s the sort of thing that’s very likely to exist, potentially even enjoying necessary existence.
And the world, in a very deep way, does not make sense except in the light of a God.
It does not, absent a God, make sense that there is such extraordinary fine-tuning of the parameters in physics, many of them falling in an extraordinarily narrow range required for life. As Tyron Goldschmidt has noted on FaceBook, if you told people a century ago that the parameters needed for life happened to fall in such a narrow range that you’d be more likely to hit a random atom by throwing a dart across the known universe than get those constants by chance, they’d think that was the sort of strong evidence for God that they were missing. And yet that is what we have observed and verified scientifically! And science combined with the fruits of reason have been able to turn up some fairly dramatic problems for alternative explanations of this fine-tuning. I do not know any way for an atheist to explain fine-tuning that’s not enormously improbable and were I to remain an atheist, I do not know anything convincing I could say about it.
Nor, absent a God, does much about our universe make sense. It does not make sense that there is physical stuff that exists at all—and quite a diverse array of different physical things. It does not make sense that there are laws—things that are, on every account of laws, quite bizarre—especially ones that apply to the things that exist.
It does not make sense, absent a God, that our brains are capable of knowing things about morality, math, and the likelihood of various possible worlds that are not features of the natural world. It makes even less sense that our brains give rise to consciousness at all (somehow, atoms bouncing around gives rise to private, indescribable subjective experiences like love and the color red), and that there is a harmonious pairing between our minds and the physical world, where our internal states match the external goings on of the world and our will is implemented in bodily movements. And there are more mysteries like the fact that the world hangs together as well as it does.
Most puzzling, to my mind, is the fact that, out of all the possible people who might have existed, I happen to be one of them. If anything less than all possible people are created, the odds of that are zero—at least, if we accept the overwhelmingly plausible self-indication assumption. This is, I think, the strongest argument for God (and the existing objections are bunk)!
The more I’ve considered these, the more obvious it’s begun to seem that the world just doesn’t make sense absent God, just like absent evolution, none of biology makes sense. Evolution is, I think, quite a good analogy for God’s existence: the evidence for it is primarily abductive, based on it best explaining the world. There are individual data points favoring it, but the best reason to believe it is that it just makes sense of all of biology as a whole so much better than any alternative and the fact that it has a very high prior probability.
Theism has one big problem, however: explaining evil. The sheer diversity of evil in the world, the number of children who starve and die, poses a real challenge for those of us who believe in God. This is strong evidence but not, I think, insurmountable evidence. One who posits God wanting to place us in an indifferent universe for a short period of time can explain all of the facts about evil. That God would want that is, while not terribly likely, not too unlikely. Evil is the one real challenge for theism but once the theist throws the entire kitchen sink at it and musters the considerable evidence for theism, it is not enough to make theism worth rejecting.
I know most of you are not convinced of this. Most of you, according to the survey I sent out, are atheists. But just take a moment to consider the possibility, perhaps only a 1% probability (though that seems far too conservative for a view with such support from so many smart people!) that there is a God. Consider the possibility that every wrong will be righted, that you will spend eternity experiencing infinite joy with your loved ones. This might only have a 1% chance of being right, but that is enough to make it worth hoping for, worth deriving significant joy from.
If you knew there was a 1% chance that you’d win the lottery, that would be great news. But this is far better news. It’s conservatively a 1% chance that everything is infinitely amazing on the whole! And that’s something worth smiling about.
Some wonderful things are too wonderful to coherently express using anything other than poems and songs and fiction. These are the kinds of things I’m bad at writing about. I can write an argument for any dense philosophical view, but I leave expressing the wonder and beauty of things to the poets and singers. I find these lines from the song The Final Word help convey some of the wonder and magic:
However dark
Your story is
Your sin is not
The end of this
The lowest hell
Could not deter
The love of God
The final wordAnd you will fly
Free as a bird
Rescued by
The final word
Ultimately, though, no one can express the goodness of God the way Lewis does. Lewis, at the end of the Narnia series, describes how everything turned out. I think philosophical arguments have delivered us the best possible news, that Lewis’s closing paragraphs of The Last Battle were not fiction but a forecast of the greatest possible tomorrow that we can look forward to. I’ll finish by quoting that forecast that, I want to emphasize, is what I believe the future has in store for us:
“The dream is ended: this is the morning."
And as He spoke He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.
I'm not sure how you get to God being good and an afterlife existing, from the fact that a God probably created the universe to contain conscious life.
I can think of many reasons why a simple, powerful being might decide to create a universe where conscious life can evolve. I'm not convinced of Nonmechanistic Rationalism, but I could probably think of reasons other than God being all good for why he might want to have people have this ability.
In general, it just seems suspicious that this God is so similar to the religious beliefs people have held for millennia. For this not to be a coincidence, we need a God who gave us some vague intuitions about him, but only enough so that various different religions exist on earth, all somewhat similar to each other, but clearly they can't all be right. And then he didn't really do anything else. He doesn't care whether we find out what kind of God is the real God, or he is content with us never being sure and lots of people being atheists. Wouldn't God either just make us believe in him completely, just not care what we think, or trust that we will figure out the truth eventually? Why only give us some vague inclination to be religious?
You put your finger on a really important point: There are two readings of reality, one tragic and one hopeful. The more one seriously reflects on suffering and evil, the harder it becomes to sustain a neutral middle reading. It's easy to dismiss the hopeful view as dishonest, head-in-the-sand wishful thinking. But the tragic reading of reality is often equally motivated by obtuse, uncurious cynicism. At least the hopeful reading doesn't typically mask itself in a veneer of fearless intellectual sophistication. You might enjoy W Norris Clarke's book 'The One and the Many.' Your points about Pan's Labyrinth reminded me of these passages:
"I am now faced with a radical intellectual choice between two ultimate alternatives on the meaning of my life: Either there exists a positive Infinite Fullness of being and goodness, […] and then my human nature becomes luminously and completely meaningful, intelligible, sense-making, and my life is suffused with hope of fulfillment. Or in fact, there exists no such real Infinite at all. And then my nature conceals in its depth a radical defect of meaningfulness, of coherence, an unfillable void of unintelligibility, a kind of tragic emptiness: a natural desire that defines my nature as a dynamic unity, but is in principle unfulfillable, incurably frustrated, "a useless passion," as Jean-Paul Sartre, the existentialist atheist puts it, oriented by its very nature toward a non-existent void, toward nothing real, kept going only by an ineradicable illusion [...] But what good reason can one have for choosing darkness over light, illusion over meaning, for not choosing the light? Only if the darkness is more intelligible? But this does not make sense! Why not then accept my nature as a meaningful gift, pointing the way to what is, rather than to what is not? […] This unique kind of "argument," based on my own inner experience, can lead me to a profoundly reasonable affirmation that a real Infinite must exist as my final end…" (227-228).