Now it is generally admitted that religion and theism are different phenomena and that religion is possible without a personal God. However, theistic religions find it necessary to have a firm belief in a personal God and many thinkers belonging to these religions have offered a number of rational proofs for God’s existence. My purpose in this paper is to examine the claim that no rational proofs can establish the existence of God.

Before taking up this issue, two points must be made clear – the notion of a personal God and the role of reason concerning the existence of God. In the philosophy of religion there are three main notions of God – personalistic, impersonalistic and naturalistic. The rational arguments are mainly concerned with the personalistic notion. According to this notion, whatever may be the actual nature of God, and none claims to know it, God must be at least personal in the sense that one can have a personal relation with the divinity. As Martin Buber says, man’s relation with God is the relation of ‘I’ and ‘Thou’, which is different from the non-personal relation of ‘I’ and ‘It’. God is one, eternal, causa sui, free, omnipotent, omniscient, omni-benevolent, fully just, merciful, and loves the human beings. All of these attributes involve some problems but we are not concerned with them in this paper.

The second point concerns the place and role of reason. Some theists reject the role of reason in religious matters. According to Martin Luther, a man cannot be saved unless he is willing to tear out the eyes of reason, kill it and bury it. In the earliest stages of Christianity, St. Paul gave the warning, See to it that no one makes a prey of you by philosophy…”. Tertullian asked, What has Jerusalem to do with Athens, the church with the Academy?” And Karl Barth says a dogmatic no” to human words and reason. Some Indian theists also depend completely on Shruti for the knowledge of divinity. According to another approach, reason is capable of knowing the existence and attributes of God. According to Clement of Alexandria, reason is a gift of God and God wills that every one should use his reason to know God. Similarly, in the Indian tradition, the followers of Nyaya believe that every object of knowledge including God is capable of rational proofs. However, most of the theistic scholars adopt the middle course, as done by St. Aquinas. They hold the view that certain religious truths can be known only through revelation while some religious truths can be known and demonstrated by natural reason. They think that we can prove the existence of God by rational arguments and we can know His attributes also with the help of reason.

After these preliminary clarifications, we may examine some prominent rational arguments for God’s existence. These are the two versions of the cosmological argument – causal argument and the argument from contingency. The third argument which has inspired and moved laymen, philosophers and scientists, is the argument from design. I will, first, state these arguments in brief and simple terms, as these are well-known to any believer who cares for proofs.

Let us take the causal argument. This argument has been differently formulated by different theologians and philosophers but all the versions rest on some common assumptions. These are the following:

First, the theists believe that on the basis of some aspect or the other of the sensible world God’s existence can be proved. This procedure, claims St. Aquinas, is sanctioned by St. Paul’s remark that God may be known, even without revelation, through His visible creation. The Indian theists – followers of Nyaya and Vedanta hold a similar view.

Second, they believe that the universe could not be the cause of itself. There must be some external cause.

Third, the world cannot come out of nothing since ex nihilo nihil fit (out of nothing, nothing can come).

Fourth, the chain of causes and effects cannot be stretched to infinity. There must be a first uncaused cause of all things.

Some of these assumptions are unproblematic. It may be granted that nothing of a finite nature can be its own cause, for if a thing is its own cause, it must exist prior to itself which is not possible. Nothing can both be and not be at the same time in the same respect. It is also obvious that the world exists, though in what form and in which sense, is a matter of great controversy. And if the world exists, its nature is ambiguous and as such, a theistic interpretation is logically possible. Hence a possible way of proving God’s existence depends on the world. However, ex nihilo nihil fit, the beginning of the world, and the principle of causality are problematic propositions. Let us look at these points with a serious concern.

All theistic religions support the view that the world came into existence at a particular time in the past. This may be explained and understood in two ways. According to the Semitic religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam, God created the world and this is the only world, while according to Indian theists, the present world is only one occurrence in the cycle of creation and dissolution, and the present world like other past and future worlds has a beginning in time. If the world has a beginning in time, then there must be a first cause and this first cause is God. But critics point out that it is not necessary to assume a beginning of the world, the world may be beginningless or everlasting.

Some theists believe in the beginning of the world on the basis of their scriptures. Some like St. Bonaventure try to prove the beginning of the world by advancing a number of argumentum ad absurdum and some employ certain scientific theories to support this view. One of these is the Second Law of Thermodynamics or the Law of Entropy. The energy in the universe is being progressively and uniformly distributed throughout. The heat is flowing from the hotter to the cooler areas. The end of this process will be a state of thermal equilibrium. If the world had no origin, such a state of equilibrium would have been achieved by now. But this is not the case. As Eddington put it, since the world is running down, it must have been wound up”. The second support comes from the Lemaitre- Gamow concept of the evolutionary cosmos. According to this theory, which is also called the Big Bang Theory, all the matter of the universe was originally compressed into something resembling a huge super-dense atom. At a time calculated at ten or fifteen billion years ago the primeval atom exploded throwing matter into the expanses of space. Our universe is still expanding and our galaxies are receding from one another at enormous velocities. If the universe is beginningless, this process should have come to an end.      

Sceptics and atheists can easily reject an appeal to revealed scriptures. Logicians and mathematicians argue that the problems concerning the nature of infinity can be solved. And an appeal to the scientific theories, though plausible, is not conclusive. The Second Law of Thermodynamics does show that the present world has a beginning but the present world may be just one world in the chain of infinite worlds. It can be easily conceived that once the state of equilibrium is reached, it may be disturbed again, and again a new beginning takes place. Similarly, the Big Bang Theory can claim that the huge atom exploded in the past, but after the expansion is complete, the whole universe may collapse and form another huge atom, and this process may continue ad infinitum. The atom and explosion may go on eternally.

But the first cause argument is still not refuted. According to the Indian tradition, the beginning and end of the world form a continuous process and there is no need of an absolute beginning. Similarly, according to Thomas Aquinas, logically it is possible to think that the world had no origin, that the world is everlasting. This was also Aristotle’s view. His unmoved mover is not the first in time. According to Aquinas, even if the world is eternal without a fixed beginning in time, there must be a first cause, first in order of being and reality, and not first in time. As Aquinas says, God is the first cause in the sense in which a foot is the cause of an eternal foot-print. The first cause in this sense is the ultimate cause. If there is no ultimate cause, no contingent cause is possible.

This is seen more perspicuously if we consider what is known as the argument from the contingent nature of things. This argument is applied whether the world has a beginning in time or whether the world is everlasting. Everything in the world is contingent, depending on other things. The world, whether finite or infinite, is a collection of contingent things. Contingency presupposes and depends on a necessary being. The necessary being is the ultimate being on which everything, past present and future, depends. This necessary being is the ultimate cause or ground of everything that is finite and dependent.

Thus the main point of contention is the principle of causality. This very principle also reappears in the argument from design. Though this argument is very old both in Indian and western traditions, it received first systematic formulation in William Paley’s Natural Theology. In this book, he considers particular examples and concludes that where there is a design, there must be a designer. This type of argument was effectively rejected by Hume and Kant. Since Darwin’s Theory of Evolution this argument appears to be useless and ineffective.    

                                                                                                                  (To be continued)

(The author, a renowned scholar of Contemporary Philosophy, has retired as Professor and Head of the Department of Philosophy, University of Allahabad. He has published several books, research papers and articles on various tenets of philosophy)