A recent comment on my YouTube channel reads:
My problem with theism is whether God exists or not. How do you know your religion is the right one? Are all religions valid? Why is it important to worship God if God exists? Can’t you live a virtuous life without expecting a divine reward? Why would the existence of God imply an afterlife? See? There are too many plot holes in Christian lore for me.
But are these problems, or are they just questions?
Should we think of questions as problems? If so, then it’s difficult to see that theism or Christianity has any more problems than any other worldview. There are countless questions we could ask about a non-religious, naturalist perspective. (Naturalism is just a philosophically developed form of atheism, which denies the existence of God.) For instance, how do qualitative experiences arise from unconscious physical matter? How does directedness (in thought, behaviors of organisms, etc.) emerge in a world presumably devoid of purpose at the foundational level? How does the principle of indifference, the basic philosophical assumption of atheism, ultimately lead to such marvelously complex and well-integrated structures? If things rest on an indifferent foundation, why don’t things just descend into chaos, or vanish entirely? How do particles amount to meaning? Where do moral obligations come from in a world produced by various combinations of atoms and Darwinian forces?
All the above are simply questions. And some of them have (somewhat) decent answers from naturalists. Sort of. Maybe. But I don’t think much ground is gained simply by throwing rhetorical questions around. Both sides can generate such questions ad infinitum.
A problem, on the other hand, is something that creates a tension between commitments. A classic example is the problem of evil: if God is all-good, all-powerful, and all-knowing, then why is there so much suffering in the world? This problem, though framed as a question, is not just seeing how things fit together; it’s seeing things that don’t (or at least appear not to) fit together.
Now let’s examine the above questions.
How do we know that God exists? Aside from what I present in my book (linked above), here are some of my favorite arguments either for God or against the explanatory adequacy of naturalism.
- Pruss’s contingency argument (found in this volume)
- Koon’s first cause argument (found in this volume)
- Pearce’s grounding argument(updated here)
- Aquinas’s existence argument
- Ross’s immaterial intellect argument
- Haldane’s prime thinker argument
- Rasmussen’s arbitrary limits argument
Some of these arguments, to be sure, I find stronger than others, but altogether . . . man. I really do find the case for theism convincing, especially if one thinks the above arguments, and the many others out there, have something halfway decent to say about the problem of suffering.
Why is it important to worship God if God exists? Presumably because God (as classical theists understand God) would be identical to The Good itself, and we are, by nature, made to know what is ultimately true and love what is ultimately good. Worship—part of our right relationship with God—naturally perfects us, since it is good for us (or in other words, it is a matter of justice) to give others what they are due. If God exists, then he is due worship, since it’s not just that God is supremely good, but he gives to us every good thing we have, entirely gratuitously—every ounce of our existence—and we could not truly flourish without this appropriate relationship with God, any more than we could flourish without friendship in general. Notice that this question concerns philosophical anthropology—the nature of the human person—as much as it concerns the philosophy of God.
How do you know your religion is the right one? Again, there are arguments! (For me, Catholicism is cumulatively evidenced through Church history, the lives of the saints, and hard-to-refute miracle accounts like Fatima. It also aligns well with my philosophy of God, philosophical anthropology, and ethical considerations—the Incarnation and the Atonement, the Catholic understanding of justification and sanctification, and Catholic sacramental theology.)
Are these arguments good? Everyone has to assess them for himself. But just because God exists, that doesn’t mean any particular religion is true. Perhaps some religion is true (I think so!), but that is a separate, though importantly related, question. Many people accept belief in the existence of God through certain arguments but remain unconvinced of the truth of any specific religion. Mortimer Adler, one of my favorite thinkers, became a convinced theist some forty years before he became a convinced Catholic in his nineties.
Another point: People disagree about many things aside from religion. How do you know your politics is the right one? Your system of morality? Your epistemology (theory of knowledge)? I don’t think we want to say that just because there is disagreement, even widespread disagreement, there isn’t truth to be found. That’s a little too nihilistic for me!
Can’t you live a virtuous life without expecting a divine reward? Yes. But I would argue that this is a simplistic view of the Christian moral life and afterlife. The beatific vision is about attaining moral perfection as a necessary condition for union with God (The Good), not about receiving an unlimited number of candy bars. Heaven is the realization of our terminal freedom—freedom for excellence, perfected in virtue, in loving union with God—through our fallible freedom of choice in cooperation with God’s grace.
Why would the existence of God imply an afterlife? The afterlife is implied more by studying the nature of the human person and trying to answer whether there is an aspect of us that is 1) immaterial and 2) immortal. This question is more related to modern issues in the philosophy of mind than in the philosophy of God. Nevertheless, on the assumption of theism and in light of the problems of sin and evil, many philosophers believe that the existence of God does imply an afterlife as a matter of justice, since God, being perfectly just, could not leave things as they are on this side of death. Notice that this is a probable consequence of the theistic theory, though it also receives, I think, significant evidence from other sources, like near death experiences.
If nothing else, I hope this article highlights two things. First, these questions are good, but they are also unoriginal. Unoriginality isn’t necessarily bad—we often ask the same questions as those who came before us. However, this should encourage some humility, as many others—often very intelligent people—have grappled with these questions and offered serious answers. So we shouldn’t stop at simply having questions, because questions aren’t problems; they are opportunities for investigation—and, possibly, to discover truth.