William David Beck - Does God Exist?: A History of Answers to the Question

THIS BOOK HAS BEEN A LONG TIME COMING. In my first year of graduate school, 1969, I was a graduate assistant to Norman Geisler, who decreed that after teaching a course five times, one must write the textbook. He seems to always have adhered to that maxim. On the other hand, I myself have been teaching courses on the subject of Gods existence for almost fifty years and am just now getting around to writing it down. Now I did have some good excuses. Within ten years I became entangled in administrative responsibilities at a new institution, soon to become Liberty University, which needed to develop its basic documents and administrative procedures.

I certainly enjoyed all of that work, but along with a full load of teaching, it allowed little time for anything else. Now, with those administrative duties a thing of the past, it is a joy to get around to research and writing again. I am certainly grateful to InterVarsity Press for the opportunity to take on this challenge, and especially David McNutt for his good guidance throughout the writing. And I am grateful to Liberty University, and my dean, Roger Schultz, for research release time that has made this project so much easier.

I can think of no topic that demands greater attention in this global culture than the existence and reality of God. Our world is divided and divisive. I am convinced that this is a result of the fact that our global culture has given up on finding any truth that would unite usany truth at all. Many people even think that to be a virtue. But the relativistic skepticism that is in danger of engulfing us cannot provide a unifying factor. Without truth there is only power. I think we are headed for dark days if we continue on this course. That is certainly my overriding motivation in writing this book.

The obvious difficulty with a project like this is that my decision-making procedure for inclusion is bound to fully please no one. Many, even most, of the philosophers included in this story are obvious and necessary. But beyond that everyone has their favorites and essentials. How could I possibly have included Rob but left out Bob? Especially when Bob was the first one to get this most important point, or who wrote the ultimate refutation. Sometimes I have had to be very restrictive. After all, who has not weighed in on the ontological argument in the last fifty years? Or on how evil does or does not have a bearing on any one of the arguments? Or on fine-tuning? So, all I can say is that I did my best to include what I thought was most important to my purposes at hand. I should add that I often included more in the early stages of each argument just to make the point that little if any of the current discussion is at all new.

Another difficulty arises from presenting this as history: narrating a story that has developed and is still developing. That is, I mention many identifying facts about individuals that are subject to change. Even by the time this is published there will likely be a few changes. I apologize to those so affected, but I have tried my best to get all the facts right.

THERE ARE SO MANY TO THANK. My students in Philosophy of Religion in the spring term of 2019 and of 2020 have all played some part in research and review: Jonathan Smith, Chester Walker, Noah Perrault, Asher Thompson, Kedrick Bradley, Devonte Narde, Corey Walton, Mike Consiglio, and Scout Powell. Thank you! Thanks to my student Israel Healy for doing the contents page. Don Zeyl, Andrew Loke, David Baggett, Gary Habermas, Alexander Pruss, Jeffrey Koperski, James East, and Lad Sessions, as well as my former assistants Max Andrews and Caleb Brown, have read parts of this and given me comments. My colleagues and friends Ed Martin and Eberhard Bertsch read the whole manuscript. Im so grateful to all of them. Whatever mistakes remain are mine.

Most of all, Im grateful to my wife, Jean, who spent endless hours typing in longer quotes, and just putting up with a years obsessionour fiftieth year together, actually. I might wish for fifty more like this, but we will have so many more than that togetherendlessly more.

It seems that human beings have been thinking about God from the very beginning. The first chapters of the Bible certainly have it so. Recent excavations of Gobekli Tepe, located right where those same chapters place the Garden of Eden, show a society centered on worship dated by many archaeologists to around 10,000 One of my favorite quotes is this one from Greenland:

The first missionaries in Greenland supposed that there was not, there, a trace of belief in a Divine Being. But when they came to understand

Eventually these insights and intuitions that our world is unimaginable without a creator take on the status of formal arguments: the characters of this story. This provides them a life of their own. Why this human endeavor begins in sixth-century-BC Greece has long been Suffice it to say, many forces came together and produced the Milesian school of Thales, and the philosophical discussion of these arguments has never ceased since then. That is the story of this book.

Initially this interaction was focused on what Aristotle called the search for the arch, the source and origin, the operating principle, of our universe. It took two hundred years of discussion after Thales to bring this idea to the explicit concept of God. This initial argument about the cause of existence of the universe comes to be called the cosmological argument. It stems from our everyday observations that things around us exist as parts of sequences of causal connections. Nothing we have observed, though of course we have not observed everything, simply exists by itself, but only within fields, networks, chains, trees of other things to which it is connected in cause-effect relationship. From this observation, our reasoning concludes that there must be an ultimate or final something that is itself uncaused.

A second type of argument is lurking behind this same reasoning. The causal connections in the universe do not exist in some random way, but in what appears to us to be lawlike, purposeful, and designed patterns. This organization itself seems to demand an explanation. Given our experience of our own artistic and technological inventions, the most likely explanation would have to be some creative and intelligent source. This argument has come to be known as the teleological argument.

A third type of argument emerges as a special case of this observed orderliness and lawfulness of our universe: the moral argument. One thing that is truly unique about us as human beings is our perception of moral obligation. We experience ourselves as part of a social order that expects us to act justly, lovingly, tolerantly, but also not to act with hatred, violence, or discrimination. And we seem intuitively to expect the same of others, society as a whole, and even ourselves. This demands a much more specialized explanation, since only a personal and intentional intelligence would appear to fit the bill here.

There is a fourth and quite different sort of argument that comes to us from the great medieval theologian and philosopher Anselm of Canterbury: the ontological argument. What is different here is that it is not based on observations of states of affairs in the real world and is thus not a posteriori but a priorithat is, it is based solely on the logic of the words or concepts involved.