Christianity

This is based on Encyclopaedia Britannica articles. For more detail, please find Encyclopaedia Britanica on the web at www.eb.com. Very many thanks to Anthony Murphy for ediiting various sections.

Introduction

Essence

Denominations

God Exists?

Christian god's character.

Arguments for the existence of God.

The design (or teleological) argument

St. Paul, with many others in the Greco-Roman world, believed that the existence of God is evident from the appearances of nature. The most popular, because the most accessible, of the theistic arguments is that which identifies evidences of design in nature, inferring from them a divine designer. This argument asks: Is not the eye as manifestly designed for seeing, and the ear for hearing, as a pen for writing or a clock for telling the time; and does not such design imply a designer? The fact that the universe as a whole is a coherent and efficiently functioning system likewise, in this view, indicates a divine intelligence behind it. This kind of argument was powerfully criticized by the Scottish philosopher David Hume in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779). Hume granted that the world constitutes a more or less smoothly functioning system; indeed, he points out, it could not exist otherwise. He suggests, however, that this may have come about as a result of the chance permutations of particles falling into a temporary or permanent self-sustaining order, which thus has the appearance of design. A century later the idea of order without design was rendered more plausible by Charles Darwin's discovery that the adaptations of the forms of life are a result of the natural selection of inherited characteristics having positive, and the elimination of those having negative, survival value within a changing environment. In the 20th century the design argument has been reformulated in more comprehensive ways. Taking account not only of the order and functioning of nature but also of the "fit" between human intelligence and the universe, one may understand its workings, as well as human aesthetic, moral, and religious experience. There are also attempts to show that the evolution of the universe, from the "big bang" of some 15,000,000,000 years ago to the present state that includes conscious life, required the conjunction of so many individually improbable factors as to be inexplicable except as the result of a deliberate coordinating control. Surely, it is argued, all this must be the work of God creating the conditions for human existence. These probability arguments have, however, been strongly criticized. A basic consideration relevant to them all is that there is by definition only one universe, and it is difficult to see how its existence, either with or without God, can be assessed as having a specific degree of probability in any objective sense. It is only the fact that humans are part of it that makes it seem so special, requiring a transcendent explanation. The design argument is thus an area in which debate continues.

The cosmological argument

St. Thomas Aquinas gave the first-cause argument and the argument from contingency--both forms of cosmological reasoning--a central place for many centuries in the Christian enterprise of natural theology. The first-cause argument begins with the fact that there is change in the world. A change is always the effect of some cause or causes. Each cause is itself the effect of a further cause or set of causes; this chain moves in a series that either never ends or is completed by a first cause, which must be of a radically different nature in that it is not itself caused. Such a first cause is an important aspect, though not the entirety, of what Christianity means by God. The argument from contingency follows by another route the same basic movement of thought from the nature of the world to its ultimate ground. It starts with the fact that everything in the world is contingent for its existence upon other factors. Its presence is thus not self-explanatory but can only be understood by reference beyond itself to prior or wider circumstances that have brought it about. These other circumstances are likewise contingent; they too point beyond themselves for the ground of their intelligibility. If this explanatory regress is unending, explanation is perpetually postponed and nothing is finally explained. The existence of anything and everything thus remains ultimately unintelligible. But rational beings are committed to the search for intelligibility and cannot rest content until it is found. The universe can only finally be intelligible as the creation of an ontologically necessary being who is eternal and whose existence is not contingent upon anything else. This is also part of what Christianity has meant by God. Criticism of these arguments points to the possibility that there is no first cause because the universe had no beginning, having existed throughout time, and is thus itself the necessary being that has existed eternally and without dependence upon anything else. Proponents of the cosmological argument reply that the existence of such a universe, as a procession of contingent events without beginning, would still be ultimately unintelligible. On the other hand, a personal consciousness and will, constituting a self-existent Creator of the universe, would be intrinsically intelligible; for human beings have experience in themselves of intelligence and free will as creative. Critics respond that insofar as the argument is sound it leaves one with the choice between believing that the universe is ultimately intelligible, because created by a self-existent personal will, or accepting that it is finally unintelligible, simply the ultimate given brute fact. The cosmological argument does not, however, compel one to choose the first alternative; logically, the second remains equally possible.

The ontological argument.

The ontological argument proceeds not from the world to its Creator but from the idea of God to the reality of God. It begins with the concept of God as that than which nothing greater can be conceived. To think of such a being as existing only in thought and not also in reality involves a contradiction. For an X that lacks real existence is not that than which no greater can be conceived. A yet greater being would be X with the further attribute of existence. Thus the unsurpassably perfect being must exist--otherwise it would not be unsurpassably perfect. Therefore God, as unsurpassably perfect, cannot lack the attribute of existence. This argument, however, has been criticized as failing to observe the distinction between logical and ontological, or factual, necessity. Logically necessary existence, it is said, is an incoherent idea, for logical necessity applies to the relations between concepts, not to their instantiation. God's necessity, then, must be an ontologically, or factually, rather than a logically, necessary existence: God exists as the ultimate fact, without beginning or end and without depending upon anything else for existence. But whether this concept of an ontologically necessary being is instantiated cannot be determined a priori. It cannot be validly inferred from the idea of an eternal and independent being that there actually is such a being.

Moral arguments.

Moral theistic argument belongs primarily to the modern world and perhaps reflects the modern lack of confidence in metaphysical constructions. To take seriously the awareness of a categorical imperative to act rightly is to commit oneself to work for an ideal state of affairs in which perfect goodness and happiness coincide. But as this universal apportioning of happiness to virtue is beyond human power, a divine agent capable of bringing it about must be assumed. Further, to accept the absolute demands of ethical obligation is to presuppose that this is a morally structured universe; and that this in turn implies a personal God whose commands are reflected in the human conscience. It cannot be proved that this is such a universe, it is said, but it is inevitably assumed in acknowledging the claims of morality. The basic criticism of all attempts to trace ethical obligation to a transcendent divine source has been that it is possible to account for morality without going beyond the human realm.

Arguments from religious experience and miracles.

Religious experience is used in Christian apologetics in two ways--in the argument from religious experiences to God as their cause and in the claim that it is (in the absence of contrary indications) as reasonable to trust religious as it is to trust nonreligious experience in forming beliefs about the total environment. The argument maintains that special episodes, such as seeing visions of Christ or Mary or hearing a voice speaking with apparently divine authority, as well as the more pervasive experience of "living in God's presence" or of "absolute dependence upon a higher power," constitute evidence of God as their source. The criticism of this reasoning is that although such experiences may be accepted as having occurred, their cause might be purely natural. To establish that the experiences are real, as experiences, is not to establish that they are caused by an infinite, omnipotent, omniscient, divine being. The analogous argument, from miracles to God as their cause, is more complex, involving two sets of problems. The argument may assert that the children of Israel were miraculously rescued from Egypt or Jesus was miraculously raised from the dead and therefore that God must exist as the agent of these miracles. The first problem concerns the reports. Whereas in the case of private religious experiences the skeptic (to whom the argument is addressed) may well be willing to grant that such experiences occurred, in the case of public miracles the skeptic will require adequate evidence for the described event; and this is not forthcoming for the classic miracle stories referring to alleged extraordinary events of many centuries ago. How, though, can it be established that these events were caused by supernatural divine intervention rather than by the operation of natural psychic laws, such as seem to be indicated by the phenomena of telepathy and telekinesis? Once again, any kind of strict proof seems to be lacking. Nevertheless, the concept of deity offers a possible, satisfying answer to the fundamental questions to which these various factors point. They may thus be said to open the door to rational theistic belief--but still leaving the nonbeliever waiting for a positive impetus to go through that door.

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