The question before us is whether or not we have sufficient evidence to think that a god exists.
I think that evidence exists, or rather that there are things in the world that point us toward God. However I don’t think that any one of those things, analysed in isolation would convince me absolutely that God exists. Before proceeding to examine possible proofs for the existence of this first cause (God), it is important to state that, for most people who believe in God, such formal proofs are not the means by which they conclude that God exists. There appears to be a natural capacity for human beings to perceive God or to infer God, a phenomenon found across a remarkable range of situations and cultures.
Another indication of a natural capacity for belief in God is a tendency that many people have of praying, at least in an inchoate way, in moments of crisis, even when they have had no religious instruction or belief in God has been suppressed in the societies in which they live. Max Hastings, for example, in his history of the battle for Germany in World War II, cites a seventeen year old soldier in the Red Army, Yulia Pozdnyakova, who had never been taught any prayer, inventing some when she found herself being bombed.
Yet another example of an expression of a natural capacity for belief in God is the way in which many people find an acknowledgment of God or at least the use of theistic language to be a natural response to a sense of wonder about the order of the world. Newton, for example, in the ‘
General Scholium’ of his
Principia Mathematica, the founding document of much of modern science, wrote, “This most beautiful System of the Sun, Planets, and Comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being … And thus much concerning God; to discourse of whom from the appearances of things, does certainly belong to Natural Philosophy’ (‘Experimental Philosophy’ [second edition]).” Although rejecting a personal God, Einstein said, “I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings.” This common pattern, articulating a sense of the divine based on a perception of order in nature, also appears in the following homily of St Augustine, preached in the late Roman Empire:
Question the beauty of the earth, question the beauty of the sea … question all these realities. All respond: “See, we are beautiful”. Their beauty is a confession. These beauties are subject to change. Who made them if not the Beautiful One who is not subject to change?
In this homily, St Augustine is expressing a common natural reaction to the order of the world, underpinning a kind of natural inference or sense of God. Such a reaction is not a proof, but it can, nevertheless, be a powerful (perhaps even the decisive) influence on a person’s acceptance of the existence of God. Indeed, reports of such experiences have led some philosophers working on religious epistemology to argue that belief in God can be rational even if this belief is not capable of being justified by an argument. Such philosophers point out that many (perhaps most) of the things that we know, such as what we perceive through our senses, are warranted without formal proofs. These philosophers therefore propose that belief in God is ‘properly basic’, analogous to the warrant that we have for believing in the existence of what we see.
