Atheists and Their Errors

Our Nameless Friend is back, continuing with his running commentary on my posts about the existence of God. Normally I wouldn't continue to feature such comments within their own post, but his questions (and errors) are so common among the atheistic folk that I thought it would be useful to the readership to see them addressed.

Our friend's first comment:

From the Christian point of view their God is super special the one and only, unique, one of a kind etc 
From an atheist point of view he's one of the crowd. It would seem that in the case of Dawkins you're critiquing an atheist for speaking from an atheists perspective. 

If we're talking about whether or not the Christian God exists, shouldn't Christians be the ones who get to define just who this God is that they believe in? If an atheist says, "I don't believe in your god," and the Christian says, "What god is that?" and the atheist replies, "You know, the old man in the sky that arbitrarily condemns people to eternal punishment and forces his rules on everyone," then the Christian is quite right in responding, "I don't believe in that god, either. So we agree there." It gets us nowhere to set up straw men.

I argue that the Christian (or at the very least Abrahamaic) concept of God is unique because it is, and I've laid out some of the key features of that concept that make it different from other concepts of other "gods"--that God is the ground of all Being, that God has no physical body, that God can create out of nothing, etc., whereas other "gods" can't. You say that atheists don't see any distinguishing features, that God is just "one in a crowd." My point was precisely to say that that was a mistaken position, and I gave reasons why that is the case. I didn't just claim that God was unique; I showed how. You didn't address that. To simply reply with "Well, that's the atheist point of view" is to duck the question.

Our friend then says:

As to God not being a physical being then Exodus 33 would disagree with you there.Firstly at 20 where God tells Moses 20 “you cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live.” and at 23 "Then I will remove my hand and you will see my back; but my face must not be seen.”
So you can see God's back and be ok but if you saw his face you'd die. Sure sounds like a physical presence to me. 
Ezekiel 1 also describes the physical appearance of God.
So it would seem that the god of the Christian bible is physically observable and has been observed.

Our friend argues that because Exodus 33 and Ezekiel 1 give descriptions of manifestations of God, therefore God must be a physical being. Exodus 33 says God has a hand, back, and face; and Ezekiel 1 says God has, not only these features and appendages, but feet as well!

This is a common tactic of the armchair atheist: cherry-pick a passage of the Bible, read it as literalistically as possible, in a way in which no Christian has ever even considered interpreting it, and submit that as a proof-text.

But to say this means that the "god of the Christian Bible is physically observable and has been observed" is to betray a lack of familiarity with the Christian tradition, with the basics of biblical hermeneutics, and even with the content of the rest of the Bible. 1 John 4:12 says that "no one has ever seen God," and Jesus says in the Gospel of John "God is spirit" (John 4:24). Now, the apostle John and Our Blessed Lord, being Jewish men, would have been steeped in the tradition of the Law and the Prophets and would have known these passages forward and backward. So, if someone holding these Old Testament passages to be inspired can still say "No one has seen God," and Jesus himself tells us "God is Spirit" (which I think we can all agree is the opposite of physical matter) then we can be fairly confident that the proper reading of these passages is not a naively literalistic one, but an obviously sensible one: when God appears in these passages, He does not appear as He is in His essential nature, but in a manifestation capable of being apprehended by finite, physical creatures such as ourselves. God is not physical and not observable as He is in His essence, and, pace our atheist friend, the Bible says so.

Our friend takes another stab, bringing up his old pal Mbombo:

So what's that conclusion that you were drawing earlier about Mbombo? Maybe they are both just really good at hiding, that's possible. Wikipedia does tell us that "Once the creation was complete and peaceful, Mbombo delivered it to mankind and retreated into the heavens, " 
So that might be why he hasn't been observed for a long while - just like your god. 
But the more likely explanation is that he doesn't exist - just like your god. 

If God is hiding, He's doing a very poor job of it. He really should stop revealing Himself through His prophets, Scriptures, Son, and Church--they'll blow his cover! This is the old Bertrand Russell line; when asked what he would say to God if he were to die and find out God existed, the atheist Russell responded, "I would say, 'Not enough evidence, God!'" The list of types of evidence admissible in an atheist court of judgment is very short, essentially reduced to forms of empirical observation, not allowing the eyewitness testimony of billions of believers, nor the cogent arguments of philosophy. The atheist presumes that the physically observable is all there is, so that if something can't be observed, it can't exist; where he gets support for this premise, he can't say. But if God is not physical, and you'll only look for Him by physical means, then of course you'll never find him. It would be like saying the color yellow doesn't exist because it can't be felt by touch, or that a landscape view wasn't really there because you couldn't taste it. Though we could look at the whole of physical reality and ask what its cause is, but that is a more philosophical question--an atheist who rejected this line of thinking would, by that same logic, reject the notion of a painter having made the picture because he couldn't see the painter anywhere in it.

As his parting shot, our friend writes:

As a PS in terms of accuracy a better title for this article might have been "Avoiding Anonymous African-themed Asks" 
Your initial gripe with the likes of Thor seemed to be that he wasn't a creator god therefore not comparable with the upper-case God. Thor photogenic as he may be wasn't the "first cause" and thus not comparable with the big G. 
When it was pointed out that there are other gods which are also creator gods - such as Mbombo - the argument now seems to have segued into the physical for (or otherwise of the god) 
I can't wait to see what the next segue will be. 

I will accept his description of my post as a segue, because segue means "uninterrupted transition" and derives from the Latin sequor, sequi meaning "to follow (in order)" (as in "sequence"), and the contents of my post certainly did follow from what was said. So, if my comments followed, or segued, from yours, they could not have avoided them.

I argued that no little-G god could fit the bill of First Cause/ground of all being as God does, and in answer you gave me an example of a little-G god that was not a First Cause/ground of all being as God is. Well done. The point about physicality was directly related: Mbombo and others like him cannot be the ground of the physical universe if they are themselves part of it, if they merely form pre-existing matter rather than causing all matter to be in the first place. God, on the other hand, is not a physical being, and is wholly distinct from His creation, and thus He can be and is the source of its being. My response was not an avoidance, but an illustration.

I hope this has been instructive to the reader, Anonymous included. I invite Anonymous to go online and find the Summa Theologica, Part One, Question Two, Article Three, read St. Thomas Aquinas' Five Proofs for the existence of God, as a starter. I'd be happy to hear your thoughts.

Answering Anonymous African-themed Asks

Since this blog receives so few comments, those who do comment have the great fortune of having their comment responded to in a post unto itself, their witticisms and polemics placed in the cold spotlight, their words dead in my sights and receiving my full attention. You lucky so-and-sos.

Recently I was honored to receive not one but two comments from the world's most prolific commenter by far: the legendary Anonymous. This mysterious entity, seemingly possessing both omnipresence by commenting on every forum out there and omniscience by always being right, is clearly the most superior being out there. If only he'd run for office, the world would surely be a better place. I can only hope there are no imposters out there abusing his august name. 

Or maybe it's from that hacker group Anonymous. If my blog is shut down minutes after posting this, we'll have our answer.

In a post about a year ago, I wrote about how pagan "gods" are fundamentally and categorically different from the Christian concept of God--super powered beings vs. the ground of Being itself--so that the scientifically-based criticisms of those like Richard Dawkins would be quite cutting toward the pagan deities but wouldn't be able to touch God with a ten-meter cattle prod.

Our friend Anonymous commented on this with the following:

"In the mainstream orthodox Christian tradition, when we speak of 'God'..."
Isn't at all where Richard Dawkins is coming from. 
On the other hand the great god Bumba (try Google) seems to be an immortal creator god. But I'll bet you don't believe in him. 
Atheists just go one god better. 

Dawkins is not "coming from" the Christian tradition in his argument, but he is "moving toward" it, as a knight approaches his adversary on the lists. The trouble is, instead of facing his opponent and approaching him head-on, he's at a 45-degree angle, and is liable to crash into the grandstands and make a bleedin' fool of himself. That was my point, which Anonymous seemed to miss: the concept of "God" that Dawkins attacks is not the concept held by Christians.

As to his invitation to a Google search: Wikipedia tells us: "Mbombo, also called Bumba, is the creator god in the religion and mythology of the Kuba of Central Africa. In the Mbombo creation myth, Mbombo was a giant in form and white in color." Right away, Anonymous once again shows that he has missed a key point. If Bumba is giant in form and white in color (and if he vomits out all of creation, as the myth goes on to say), then Bumba has physical attributes, and has a relation to the rest of existence of the Biggest Thing Among All the Things. He has size and color, and apparently an irritable stomach. If this is the case, then he is physically observable. Yet he has not been observed. Thus, we are quite within our rights not to assent to the proposition that he exists.

God, on the other hand, does not have size or color, or any discernible stomach; He has no physical traits, because he is not a physical, material being, and thus is not observable. Now, if God is not observable, and someone states that we can't observe God, this is not an argument against His existence, any more than saying that you doubt the existence of third basemen because you have never seen one on the football field. (It's not an exact analogy, but you get the point.)

Well, that's probably enough for now. We'll save the other comment for another day.

Good Thing Alanis Morissette Isn't God

I'd like to build upon a point I made in my last post over at Catholic Stand. There, I talked about the significance of the fact that the risen Christ still has his wounds. Among other things, this shows the respect that God has for our free will: He respects our free will by allowing the consequences of our actions to have effect in the world, even as He redeems us from their effect on our souls. Allow me to illustrate that in another way.

The Kevin Smith film Dogma is seemingly intended to shock Catholic sensibilities, from the assertion "Jesus wasn't white, Jesus was black" (neither is true, and more importantly, what would it matter?), to the suggestion that the Blessed Virgin Mary was not ever-virgin (which is put crudely and betrays a low estimate of the human capacity for chaste living), to a depiction of God by a woman (the more offensive part is that God is played by Alanis Morissette). But one of the most offensive things in the film is not one that might jump out at you right away.

At the end of the film, after the villanous fallen angels have caused their havoc and the scene is strewn with their victims, God(dess) shows up and annihilates the offenders. Then, with a sad look on her face as she surveys the scene, God(issette) waves her hand and restores all that was: buildings rebuilt, pavement repaved, people brought back to life, none the worse for wear. God-lanis simply hits the rewind button and puts everything back where it was. A big pink bow on a happy ending.

Except this is not how God works, and thank God for it.

What is at stake in this scene is nothing less than the free will of God's intellectual creatures, the ability for us to choose either good or evil. In this story, the fallen angels made certain choices, and those choices had consequences--tragic, horrific consequences, to be sure. But that is the great power and the great gift that God has given us: the ability to choose to fulfill our good and be united with Him in contented joy, or to choose our own willfulness and be united with ourselves, caught in a loop of selfish misery. This is the choice before us in our freedom. But imagine if our negative choices had no negative consequences.

Suppose you were the sort of person who liked to club other people over the head with blunt instruments, and suppose God consistently acted like the Celestial Mr. Fix-It that Dogma portrays at the end. Imagine that every time you exercised your head-clubbing proclivities, God prevented that head from feeling the club's effects. You could drum on that cranium like Keith Moon playing on "The Ox," and your victim wouldn't be bothered. Or suppose that God caught your arm and prevented you from following through, so that, try as you might, you couldn't bludgeon anyone for anything. You would shrivel into a bitter, inert lump, full of impulses you were physically incapable of enacting. Nothing would have changed your desire to bash in skulls; it would still be there, lurking beneath the surface like a shark trapped beneath ice. 

Or suppose that God did indeed remove your skull-bashing desires: one moment you were all ready to Hulk-smash, the next you're whistling "Zip-a-dee-doo-dah," unaware of the 180 your will had just done. You'd be something between a dog on a leash and a puppet being made to do or say whatever the Master of Puppets directed.

Or suppose that God allowed the head-cracking to take place, then wiped away the event with some spatial-temporal Oxi-Clean and erased it from history. 

If God were to obliterate our wrong-doing and its effects from existence, to hit the metaphysical reset button and call a mulligan, it would not soothe our pain so much as insult it. Such an act would rob our suffering of any meaning. It did happen! It did! That should mean something! There should be consequences! There should be justice for perpetrator and victim. We feel this at the deepest level. And we feel this because God made us according to His own nature, in His image and likeness, and part of that image is God's justice.

Part of justice is to restore what has been lost, when possible. And with God, all things are possible. So, when we lost our friendship with God in the Fall, God restored this friendship. But He did not wave away the offense, or pretend it didn't happen. God took upon Himself the necessary steps to make things right while still acknowledging the seriousness of the offense. As St. Anselm explained in his Cur Deus Homo: in order to pay the infinite debt owed, the one paying it would have to be able to make an act of infinite worth; and in order to pay the debt on humanity's behalf, the one would have to be human. So, for friendship to be restored between God and man, God became man--the infinite Being taking on a human nature, thus able to pay the debt on our behalf. 

That's justice. That's love. That's how God does things. Thank God that He didn't take the Kevin Smith approach.

Thoughts from the Walk for Life

A week ago I attended the Walk for Life in San Francisco, together with my beautiful wife--who also happens to be eight months pregnant, which was quite fitting for the event--and my sister-in-law and five nieces and nephews--well, six, counting the one in utero, since my sister-in-law is also pregnant. Despite what our breathless 24-hour news cycle might suggest to us, it is actually possible to discuss something that happened more than a day ago. Allow me to share a few thoughts and reflections from the event.

50,000 people gathered in the City to stand up for the sanctity of life. Fifty thousand. I've never seen that many people outside of a football stadium. They filled the square in front of the civic center. They stretched down Market Street for miles as they walked, carrying signs, praying together, or simply adding their presence as a visible witness. A sea of humanity pleading that we show a little humanity to the weakest of humanity.

We arrived a little late and missed part of the rally and speakers. One speaker that I did hear was a woman who had started the process to have a chemical abortion but then changed her mind; the doctors and nurses were able to stop the process and save the baby. The woman brought her young one on stage, along with one of the nurses, and implored people to tell others that in cases such as hers it's still not too late, that you can still save your baby's life.

Some of my favorite moments were when I caught people glancing at my wife's baby belly and smiling.

Most of the people we passed on the sidewalks took no notice of the throng filing past them. Some looked on with bemused expressions, taking pictures with their phones, as though we were all on unicycles: "Huh, would you look at that?" Some had come to protest our protest, holding signs of their own and/or shouting slogans.

A group of people with signs saying, "Abort all the babies, kill all the children, save the planet." I'm not sure to what extent these people were just jerk-faces trying to get under our skin or were environmentalists that had taken the idea that human beings are a threat to the planet to the near logical extreme. I say "near" extreme because the very end of that thought process would involve the suicide of the person holding that idea. Of course I'm not advocating this and I don't wish death upon these people; I'm simply pointing out their inconsistencies.

Some passers-by would shout at us, "Read a book!" I'm not sure what that was supposed to refer to, or why it was directed at us, but that exhortation definitely should have been passed on to some of the other people shouting at us.

A common refrain was, "A fetus is not a baby!" To these people I would recommend either Merriam-Webster's English Dictionary or Lewis and Short's Latin Dictionary, both of which will define "fetus" as "unborn baby." The term "fetus" does not denote a separate species like frog or gazelle; it is merely a different stage of development of the human person, more denoting a change in address than anything as substantial as the difference between rights-bearing and non-rights-bearing person. You might as well shout, "A toddler is not a baby!" Well, yes, but he's still human.

One woman I heard conversing with another said, "Is an egg a chicken? Then a fetus is not a baby. It's not a baby until 20 weeks." To this woman I would recommend any biology book. At all. Anywhere. At the very least she can learn the difference between a fertilized and an unfertilized egg, and how a fertilized egg has a much more active future than its counterpart. A fertilized egg is a chicken (assuming it's a chicken egg), albeit a very small chicken. I don't know why on Earth this woman picked 20 weeks as the magic change-into-a-baby point. Because it's halfway through pregnancy? Because it's near viability for the child? But well before that, the child has a beating heart, an active nervous system, and the specifically human genetic structure that will cause the child to develop from an embryo to a fetus to an infant to a toddler to an adolescent to a teen to an adult to a middle-aged adult to an elderly adult. The whole package is there from the beginning. It just needs time to unwrap itself.

One fellow had gotten hold of a megaphone and said: "We don't all hold your religious views. These Catholics, they don't even believe in birth control. They think a sperm is a baby." To this gent I recommend the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which will inform him that the Catholic Church follows science, philosophy, and plain common sense in saying that an individual human life begins at conception, when the sperm and egg combine to form a new entity with a unique genetic code, which, if allowed to, will develop through all the above-named stages of life. The Catholic Church's objection to artificial birth control is not based in a belief that the sperm is a tiny person (though that was a commonly held scientific position at one time).

This notion of "We don't hold your religious views, so don't impose them on us" deserves a column-length response. But briefly: the assumption here is that opposition to abortion is contingent upon the acceptance of certain religious or revealed truths inaccessible to reason or to the non-believer. But this is, of course, false, as Atheists for Life and Pro-Life Humanists can attest. They show that a strong case for the immorality and illegality of abortion can be made without any reference to God or divine revelation.

Events like the Walk for Life are growing each year, both in the number of places in which they take place and the number of people attending. Opinion polls show Americans are increasingly pro-life, in favor of laws far more restrictive of abortion than politicians seem to want to vote for, which is odd in a representative democracy. Many people were wearing shirts saying, "I survived Roe v. Wade. Roe v. Wade won't survive me." God grant that comes true.

Does God Exist? Answering a Few Common Objections

A blessed and Merry Christmas to one and all!

I apologize for my latest period of absence, and for the string of absences which have necessitated apologies. Life keeps happening: in our latest episode, mold was discovered in our apartment, forcing us to find a new place and move, just before Christmas. It was a tad hectic, to say the least. But life is starting to calm down a bit, Deo gratias.

Recently I received an invitation to dialogue from a reader named Gil:

Since you appear to be quite perspicacious, I would like to engage you in dialogue in the hope that a fertile brain such as yours could be rescued from the tyranny of religious dogma (I stole that idea from Thomas Paine); "All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit."

Thanks for the compliment, and I'm happy to oblige. Let's address that quote from ol' Tommy Pain if you don't mind (that was purposely misspelled--it would make a good name for a pro wrestler from the 80s, no? "Here comes Tommy Pain, with his manager Jimmy "Mouth of the South" Hart....") What is enslaving or terrifying or tyrannical about religious dogma? Please do expand upon that so I can address it properly.

Gil has commented on several of my posts, so I'll provide a little context for his comments quoted here. In reference to my post "Is believing in God Like Believing in Zeus or Thor?" in which I said that many of the pagan gods were more like super-powered humans than anything that could properly be called "god" or "God," Gil wrote:

How about Allah or the Hindu and Buddhist Gods? Or the Native American God? Or the Gods of many South American traditions? They are more in the category of your Judeo-Christian God, so if you do not believe in Allah, then you are an atheist in that regard. Or is your God better than their Gods?

Gil wants me to expand my search parameters because he thinks some of these will provide a stronger challenge to my contention that non-Abrahamic concepts of God do not fit the bill. Let's look at these. Allah is simply the Arabic name for God, the same God that Jews and Christians worship. Christian liturgies in Arabic or Aramaic refer to Allah. You might as well say, "Ah, you believe in God, but what about Dios, or Dieux, or Theos, or Deus?" We may believe some different things about Him, but all parties agree that they worship the God who called Abraham to the Promised Land. The "gods of many South American traditions" and the Hindu gods, rather than challenging the categories I set up, fit neatly into them--none of them could be described as omnipotent, immutable, or immortal, and their very multiplicity means none of them fulfill the criterion of unity. Most forms of Buddhism are disinterested in the question of God, and the Buddhist cosmologies that include super-powered beings definitely do not describe anything that could fit the definition of God I laid out.

When Gil starts to imply the "we're only atheists about one more god than you are" argument, or when he uses the "is your God better than their Gods" rhetorical question, he shows again that he has missed the point: to call both the God of Abraham and the gods of these other religions by the same name, "god," is an equivocation, forced on us by limits in our language. They are categorically different. I laid out my definition for what would qualify an entity to be called "God"; what's your definition, Gil?

Here Gil references the statement he's responding to:

Now this is a pretty grandiose statement (even for a theologian), "I've never heard of anyone in the last 3,000 years being healed of a deadly disease thanks to their supplications to Apollo." So presumably, you have roamed the entire earth for "the last 3,000 years" and observed all the billions of intercessory supplications and their results. Er, did you say your name was . . . Yahweh?

Passing over the crack on theologians (honored as I am by being gifted that title by Gil), let me briefly say that I did not claim to have observed every intercession and result for the last 3,000 years; my statement was clearly limited to my own observation. If you know of some datum that would apply to this case, please introduce it into evidence, and we can discuss it.

Here again Gil is kind enough to quote me before responding:

"But to believe in the Triune God as described above is eminently reasonable," you say, Nick. Well tell me how reasonable it is that a Father sent His Son to be killed, but the Son turned out to be God who while He was dying (if a God of this unimaginable potency can die) spoke to His Father as if He was being abandoned and apparently the Father ignored Him, because He did die (although God could have saved Him, or saved Himself) and now the Son is God who also created the Earth 4,000 years before He died. No fair using the water, ice, fog analogy.

It appears Gil is having difficulty seeing the reasonability... reasonableness... reasonabilitude... it appears Gil thinks the relation between the Father and the Son within the Trinity is not reasonable, that it is fraught with contradictions and confusions. Certainly, the Trinity is the greatest mystery of the Christian faith, something we could not arrive at only by rational speculation and which, even when revealed, we cannot understand fully; but at the same time, it is not irrational or inconsistent in itself. Actually, the way that Gil describes the relation between the Father and the Son, and his reference to a "water, ice, fog analogy" with which I am unfamiliar, sounds like the heresy of modalism, and not the traditional Christian understanding of the Trinity.

Modalism says that there is really only one God, but this God appears or acts in different modes (aren't italicized letters so much fun?)--He appears to the Israelites in "Father Mode" and incarnates in "Son Mode" and energizes the Church in "Spirit Mode." Basically, Modalism thinks of God like Peter Sellers or Eddie Murphy playing several roles in the same film. When Jesus addresses the Father in prayer, Modalism would say that we'd need some split-screen camera work to get them in the same scene, since it's really just one person. Gil finds this ridiculous. And I agree. But that's not the Christian concept of God.

The Holy Trinity is one God in three persons, one act of existence shared by three hypostases, in which the three persons are distinct in relation to each other, but they are one in their existence. "The Father is God, the Son is God, the Spirit is God; yet there are not three gods, but one God," to quote the Creed of St. Athanasius. I would encourage Gil to dive into this subject and understand it on its own terms. It's a fascinating field of theology, though difficult. But, to anticipate an objection, just because something is difficult to understand doesn't make it "convoluted" or "nonsense," any more than particle physics or organic chemistry is nonsense by virtue of being difficult.

Gil, I look forward to your responses.

Does God Exist? The Argument from Wonder and Gratitude

Before we get back to logical or rational arguments for the existence of God, let's take a brief detour into an argument that is not so much an argument as an attempt to put a name to an intuition, an innate feeling or experience that we all seem to have and that occurs in us as naturally as a breath or a heartbeat.

There are certain moments in life that leave us speechless and breathless, our mouths gaped open but unable either to take in the profound experience before us nor to find the proper expression to mark the occasion. A pastel sunset over green fields and blue seas. The Hallelujah chorus from Handel's Messiah. The birth of your child. The sight of a sparkling, swirling galaxy, coupled with the knowledge that it's thousands of light-years across and millions of light-years away. Such moments stir up in us a sense of awe and wonder--"I didn't know life could be this good."

And when we're given something good, it's our natural inclination to say, "Thank you."

And when we say "Thank you," to whom are we speaking?

We are grateful when we are given something by someone who has chosen to bestow the gift upon us. Persons give gifts. Persons are thanked. Not forces or aggregates, but persons, who have willed our good and acted to achieve it.

We all know this, intuitively, instinctively, deep down in our bones. But some don't know to what or whom it should be attributed. I suggest it is the only one capable of giving sunsets and symphonies and everything in between. It's God.

Does God Exist? It All Must Start Somewhere

We said last time that we could know that God exists if we were able to identify some effects the cause of which could only be God. We use this sort of reasoning all the time. If I see smoke, I conclude there is fire. If I see a maple leaf, I conclude there is somewhere a maple tree. Only a maple tree can cause a maple leaf.

This is an important point, because it's double-edged: I know that in order for there to be a maple leaf, there needs to be something which can bring about the maple leaf and adequately explain its existence--that is, something to cause the maple leaf; likewise, I know that a maple leaf cannot be the cause of itself, that maple leaves "just happen," any more than people or planets or platypuses do. Each needs a cause sufficient to explain its existence. I know that everything needs a cause, and I know that nothing is the cause of itself.

So, what's the cause of the maple leaf? A maple tree. But what's the cause of the maple tree? Another maple tree, I suppose; and sunlight, and water, and nutrients from the soil, and so forth. But what is the cause of the sunlight and water and nutrients and soil? Well, they're all made from elementary particles, if that's what you're asking. But what is the cause of those particles? If we keep going backward with these questions and addressing them in a scientific way, drilling down into increasingly smaller components of matter, we will eventually hit a question that is not scientific, but philosophical: why do they exist at all?

This is a philosophical question rather than a scientific one because it deals not with empirical observation but with logical necessity--we float along in the boat of our empirical observations until we come upon the hard ground of logical questions, and the boat can't carry us anymore. Logically, there is nothing about the nature of anything we observe in reality that says the existence of that thing is necessary. The maple leaf does not necessarily need to exist, evidenced by the fact that at one time it didn't exist. If its existence were logically necessary, it would always have existed. What we find in reality, then, is a series of beings the existence of which is not necessary, might-not-have-been, always lingering on the brink of nothingness; such beings are called contingent beings.

When we try to explain the existence of one contingent being by the causal power of another contingent being--that is, when we say one thing exists because of another thing's bringing it about--we find that we still must explain the existence of that other contingent being by the existence of yet another contingent being that brought it about, and so on, and so forth... until we realize that trying to explain the existence of the universe by contingent beings traps us on a train going backward infinitely, forever, with no stopping... and, in this case, no beginning. No starting point. No source. No explanation.

What is required, then, to stop this infinite regress, this never-ending recession from one insufficient cause to another, is a being that is not contingent, but is necessary. What is needed is a being that absolutely must exist, by its nature, and therefore always has existed. A being whose essence is to exist. Only such a being would be able to bring anything else into being out of nothing, to start from scratch, to make the first link in the chain. An eternal, necessary being that brings everything else into existence--what does that sound like? Who does that sound like?

This is a much less eloquent and less pithy version of the argument from contingency that St. Thomas Aquinas makes in question 2, article three of the first part of the Summa when he asks the question, "Does God exist?" (You can find it here about 5 paragraphs down, the one that starts with "The third way....") It is one of five ways that St. Thomas proposes to prove the existence of God, and all of them more or less cover this same sort of ground: we see motion, motion is caused by another, so for any motion to start, there must be an mover who is himself unmoved; we see causes, every cause is the effect of another cause, so for any cause-and-effect relation to start, there must be an uncaused cause; and so forth. And each proof ends with, "this we call God."

Notice there is no reference to or reliance on Scripture, or any special revelation, or any article of faith, or anything special or particular to a Christian or a person of faith. You can argue with the arguments if you like, but they present themselves on the bases of empirical observation and logical analysis--that is, on science and reason. These are arguments accessible to any person, no matter what their background.

Notice, too, that these arguments only get you so far. Such arguments will tell you that there is an eternal creator of the universe, and they'll tell you one other important thing about this creator, the rebuttal to a mistake commonly made by those who profess not to believe in God: God is not the biggest being in a universe of other beings more or less like him, different only in degree rather than in kind; no, God is the very ground of being itself. God is the cause of nature, and thus beyond nature. The usual objection to these sorts of arguments is, "If everything needs a cause, what caused God?" But surely you can see within the argument itself that this objection has missed the point. Every contingent, that is, non-necessary thing, needs a cause for its existence. But the point of the exercise is precisely that there must be something that exists that exists necessarily, that is the source of existence for everything else. God is not a thing among other things; rather, God is the root of all things, their source, their foundation. God is not the biggest object in the painting of reality, or even the whole painting itself; God is the artist, painting the picture.

But this won't tell you much else about God, that He's loving or wise or kind or has created you in His image and likeness with the intention that you should live forever with Him in perfect happiness and glory. But this sort of argument does at least have the potential to open up the possibility to the mind of the atheist or agnostic or skeptic that the existence of God as Christians understand Him is not irrational or silly or a fairy-tale, but rather, that it's quite reasonable to assent to the proposition that God exists. There are other arguments, though. On these, more next time.