Friday, April 02, 2021

The god of the philosophers vs. the Abrahamic God

Let's suppose the Kalam Cosmological Argument (KCA), the argument from contingency, the fine-tuning argument, and the moral argument are all sound.

The KCA tells us why the universe exists. It's because a spaceless, timeless, immaterial being brought it into existence. But the KCA doesn't tell us why anything at all exists. Why does the being that brought the universe into existence exist? Well, that is answered by the argument from contingency. It's because it's impossible for nothing to exist. Everything owes its existence to a necessary being, and it's impossible for that being not to exist.

The argument from fine-tuning tells us that there was an engineer who fixed the constants of nature in such a way as to make life possible. But why? What movtive might the engineer have had? Well, we get an inkling of an answer from the moral argument. The moral argument gives us a morally perfect being. It stands to reason that a morally perfect being would want to actualize certain moral goods, like courage, humility, and self-sacrifice, by creating other sentient beings. In the Christian story, God himself was able to have these moral qualities through the incarnation of Jesus. It also stands to reason that the being would want to create sentient beings capable of appreciating beauty and virtue. In fact, as Jonathan Edwards argued in The End For Which God Created the World, it would make sense that the being would want to create other beings capable of appreciating the morally perfect being himself since the adoration of that which is most worthy of adoration is, itself, a good we should expect a perfectly good being to want to actualize. And that explains why God wants us to worship him.

The fine-tuning argument also tells us that there was an engineer, but it doesn't tell us how that engineer got its design into the universe. That is answered by the KCA. The design got its way into the universe through the creation of the universe. If the universe hadn't been created, it's hard to see how it could've been designed.

The moral argument tells us there is an absolute moral authority. But what kind of being could possibly have that kind of authority? Well, that is answered by the KCA and the argument from contingency. According to these arguments, there is a being that is the ultimate source of everything else that exists. Everything else owes its existence to a necessary being. Reality revolves around that being. It's hard to think of anything else that would suffice as a ground for objective moral truths that apply to all humans across all cultures, no matter where they travel.

Given how these various arguments compliment each other, it's probable that they each refer to the same being. The creator of the universe is the same person as the moral authority, and that's the same person who designed the universe. If these arguments are sound, then there is a necessary personal being who is the absolute foundational ground of all reality, who is spaceless, timeless, immaterial, sentient, intelligent, and morally perfect with absolute sovereignty, autonomy, and moral authority who designed the universe so that it would be habitible by living creatures capable of moral awareness and agency, and brought that universe into being out of nothing, and who rules and governs the universe by imposing moral obligations on its creation, and by investing creatures with moral knowledge so that they can know what is required of them.

That still doesn't prove it's the Abrahamic God, but considering how well it coheres with the Abrahamic God, it ought to make us suspicious. This suspicion should be heightened when we consider the fact that it was not because of these arguments that the Jewish people came up with YHWH. There are many gods in many religions, and there are many origin stories, but hardly any of them have an ultimate, necessary, absolutely sovereign, and morally perfect being who brought the universe into existence out of absolutely nothing. Most creation accounts involve a god who is not without peers who built the cosmos, or some part of it, out of pre-existing material, and they are almost never morally perfect beings. If the Jewish people came up with a God that resembles the God of the philosophers in so many ways, then it's either a huge coincidence, and they made a lucky guess, or else this God revealed himself to them during their history. So although this may not prove with any certainty that the God of the philosophers is the Abrahamic God, it seems likely that that would be the case. At the very least, it should give us reason to look into Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, or any other religion that has a god who coheres as nicely with the conclusion of these arguments.

Here's a couple of other posts I made on this same subject:

"Deism and philosophical arguments for God"

"Natural theology, deism, and theism again"

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