Arguments for God

An esteemed correspondent sent me a link to “Arguments for God Tier-List“, a post at Bentham’s Newsletter on Substack. The author, who goes by Bentham’s Bulldog, begins his post with this explanation:

Tier lists rank arguments for God on a scale from F to S, where F is the worst, S is the best, and the rest follow a traditional letter grade—A better than B, B better than C, and so on.

He notes that his “views on which arguments for God are good diverges sharply from the standard views.” That’s for sure. His favorite argument, the anthropic argument, to which he assigns a grade of S (followed by three heart emojis), isn’t an argument for God. I am hard-pressed to say what it is an argument for, if anything.

Here’s Bulldog’s summary of the anthropic argument:

1. You exist.
2. You’re likelier to exist if there are more total people that exist. Suppose that a coin gets flipped which creates one person if heads and ten people if tails. You should, after being created by the coinflip, think tails is ten times likelier than heads.
3. If 10 people existing makes your existence ten times likelier and 100 people existing makes your existence 100 times likelier, infinity people existing makes your existence infinitely likelier.
4. Thus, you should think there are infinite people. This doesn’t stop at the smallest infinity—you should think the number of people that exist is the most that there could be.
5. That’s a really huge number. Theism can nicely explain why that number of people exists, but atheism has no comparable explanation. In fact, because it’s good to create, theism actively predicts that number of people existing, while atheism does not.

Where is God? He is nowhere to be found in that gibberish, nor in Bulldog’s two long attempts to explain the anthropic argument (here and here), except in name. His existence is merely assumed, there is no attempt to prove it.

This brings me to what I consider to be the most compelling argument for God’s existence. It is the cosmological argument discussed by Bulldog here:

1. Everything that exists and is possibly caused is actually caused.
2. There cannot be an infinite chain of possibly caused things without some deeper cause of the chain.
3. Therefore, there exists at least one uncausable cause.
4. If there exists at least one uncausable cause, then God exists.
5. Therefore, God exists.

That’s a good argument for God’s existence, though I have a shorter version:

1. In the material universe, cause precedes effect.
2. Accordingly, the material universe cannot be self-made. It must have a “starting point,” but the “starting point” cannot be in or of the material universe.
3. The existence of the universe therefore implies a separate, uncaused cause [which can be called many things, God among them].