Does God exist? (A series)
We are first of all struck by the awesome difficulty of the question. When we examine this feeling of difficulty, we find that it comes apart into two sections, which we can call the internal or self conscious section and the external or comparative section. The two parts, if we put them into words, say: “I am not good enough to attack this question” and “other, better people have attacked this question, and I should refer people to their analyses rather than doing a new one.”
Is there any legitimacy to these worries? Should we just give up the quest before we even get started? To answer that question, let’s examine the first of the worries. It seems like the more important of the two worries to address, since there could at least be some point in going on if better people have attacked the God question, but there can be no point in going on if my brain is not good enough for the question at all.
Why wouldn’t I be good enough to attack the God question? I suppose one reason would be that I am young. But that’s not a very good reason, since the answer to a philosophical question should be in grasp of anyone with a working brain. On every philosophical issue I have investigated, I have found that all of the arguments end up pointing to the correct answer when they are properly examined. Truth overwhelms. And if I am young, I am at least an unusually clever and ambitious young person, so perhaps these factors offset my youth somewhat.
But none of these rebuttals are really satisfactory. There is still a feeling that I am too young to say anything valuable on the topic. If that feeling is correct, then so much the worse for truth and warrant. It’s only a daylog. I am going to make a grab at this question anyway, and perhaps some of my readers will get some entertainment from watching an arrogant young person try to answer one of the immortal questions. I shall be a sort of intellectual clown in that case.
And if I reach a conclusion that seems completely right to me, can I really be wrong?
Let’s return to the first worry. Is there anything else about my brain that might render me unfit for this question? Perhaps this worry has roots in my ignorance of philosophy of religion. But I have a broad grasp of the essential arguments in the field. I have been arguing on religious discussion forums for a while now, and one would think that that gives me some credibility, although there are perspectives like William Lane Craig’s to consider (who says that such boards are full of “angry teenagers”). I can rattle off the words “cosmological, teleological, ontological” quickly when someone asks me what the main arguments for God are*, and I can explain Kant’s purported refutation of them. I have a working knowledge of Plantinga. I stand in the presence of all that I have learned in the years behind me, and I feel that this has all got to count for something. So I’m going to say that I know enough about philosophy of religion to make a stab at this question. If I don’t, maybe I’ll be a decent intellectual clown.
I have spent a long time dissecting the first part of my worry, and will now return to the second section to see if there’s anything I need to pay attention to there. Shouldn’t I just recommend a book or something, and perhaps write a review of it for far more XP than this daylog is likely to get? Aren’t I just wasting my readers’ time out of an entirely selfish desire for attention? From one perspective, the answer to both questions is clearly “yes.” If we consider my writeup from the perspective of XP attainment or my readers’ intellectual edification, this writeup should not exist. But the real purpose of this writeup is to help me figure out what I think on this topic, and so much the worse for anyone who reads it under the (mistaken) impression that it is meant for them. I am a selfish philosopher.
I have come to several distinct conclusions here, and I should sew them all together before I go on. First, I have concluded that I am not too young or ignorant to answer the question, “does God exist?” And second, I have concluded that this writeup’s purpose is not to get XP or entertain anyone, but solely to figure out what I think on this topic. This second conclusion seems to contradict my earlier conclusion that I will, at least, be an intellectual clown if I fail to be old enough or learned enough to reasonably reach a conclusion on the God question. This is only an apparent contradiction, however, because I will be an unwitting clown in that case.
So my goal from here must be to arrange my (presumably sufficient) knowledge on the topic of God’s existence into a logically ordered whole. Actually, this is getting fairly long. I will do that tomorrow. I suppose this will have to be a series of daylogs.
*Nobody ever does