Short responses to three arguments for God's existence

It's been a long time since I last posted, dear reader. The theatre has consumed my life for quite some time, and then came finals. However, while reviewing for my final examination in philosophy, I decided to discuss God's existence with some neophytes of philosophy (and by neophytes, I really mean people who haven't so much as dabbled in the wonderful discipline) elsewhere online. Then I thought, why not copy my post here to preserve for eternity? So here you have it. It's written for an audience much different than this one, and it's written in a very pedagogical tone, but...it's something worth preserving nonetheless, I think. You'll also notice that my responses to the arguments are very simplistic. Indeed...but I wouldn't have expected my original intended audience to read a ten-page essay. It's all about the audience, isn't it? If theatre has taught me one thing...

Anyway, enough of the chatter. Here's the post I wrote:

"Philosophy major, you say? I'd love to chime in!

The first poster has more or less alluded to the "cosmological argument," a very old argument for God's existence that can be traced back to Aristotle. The standard version of the argument goes:

1. Every contingent thing must have a cause other than itself.
2. There cannot be an infinite regress of causes, or else the causal chain would have never begun.
3. Therefore, there must be a first cause which is not contingent, and that is what we call God.

Most philosophers (myself included), however, object to this argument. First, why can't there be an infinite regress? There are infinite series of numbers with no beginning; why can't there be an infinite series of causes? Second, even if there is a first cause, who is to say that it even remotely resembles what most people call "God"? Couldn't it be some sort of eternal "spark" similar to what scientists have suggested to exist before the explosion of the Big Bang, something entirely natural?

Probably the second most common argument for God's existence is the argument from design (or "teleological argument"). It runs, more or less, that the world is filled with such complexity and beauty that only an intelligent designer could be responsible for it all. Few philosophers have taken this argument seriously since Darwin's theory of evolution, which provides a natural explanation for the development of life on Earth. Of course, science can't account for everything (yet), but that there are gaps is no more of a reason to posit God's existence as an explanation than it would be to posit Creationism as an explanation for the origins of life on Earth absent a scientific theory like evolution.

Most philosophers who still believe in God do so on practical, rather than theoretical, grounds. In other words, they realize that there is no evidence for God's existence, but they believe it helps us to believe in God, so why not? The most common such argument would be the argument from morality...as one of Dostoyevsky's characters remarks, "If God does not exist, then everything is permitted."

Personally, I do not buy such arguments. There is a perfectly valid evolutionary account of morality, and it doesn't bother me that there is no objective, God-given moral order. We can still act ethically according to our own man-made ethics, and that suffices for me.

As you can probably already tell, I'm an atheist. Why atheist instead of agnostic? Consider this analogy, originally conceived by Bertrand Russell.

Imagine that I asserted the existence of a tiny china teapot orbiting around the Sun between Earth and Mars. The teapot has such properties that it is undetectable by human technology and probably will never be able to be detected by humans. Would I say that "I believe that this teapot does not exist" (the atheist position) or "I suspend judgment on whether the teapot exists" (the strict agnostic position)? I would go for the former. While strictly speaking, we should all be agnostic about such teapots, we can be atheists as well. (Indeed, atheism and agnosticism are not mutually exclusive.) Such am I both an atheist and agnostic about God, in that I believe that God does not exist, but I do not claim to know this."

You'll notice my last bit is a repetition of something I said in my last post. Indeed.

Anyway, I would like to take the time to respond in length to each of the arguments to which I promised to respond in my last post, but that'll have to wait until after finals, at least. Until then, dear reader...