Introduction

I’ve written previously on the problem of free will. My own views about free will are somewhat complicated and have evolved over time, but I continue to see strong grounds for skepticism about the metaphysical or even logical possibility of full-fledged, buck-stopping, ultimate moral responsibility-conferring Free Will — free will of such a kind that one in possession of it could be a proper target of praise and blame, punishment and reward, independently of pragmatic considerations. My reasons are more or less those articulated by my old advisor and friend Galen Strawson in Freedom and Belief (1986), who’s said it all better than I ever could. But as I’ve said (also like Strawson, even if many aren’t aware), the impossibility of Free Will, so conceived, does not entail that there are no important varieties of freedom that an agent might possess, or might wish to possess.

What I wish to do here is attempt to sketch the most robust conception of agential freedom that still seems coherent, by specifying what I take to be the necessary conditions for such freedom. This will, therefore, be an exercise in purely speculative metaphysics. In considering the freedom of maximally free agents (MFAs), I will be totally unconcerned with the question of whether the variety of freedom that emerges — call it maximal freedom — is actually possessed by human beings.

1. MFAs Would Be Free From Causal Determination

Maximally free agents would not be subject to causal determinism. The most robust conceivable variety of freedom will be incompatibilist in nature (and thus, libertarian): that is, incompatible with causal determinism — the view on which given the past and the laws of nature, there is at any given moment only one possible future.

But there is a serious limitation on any variety of freedom on which the ultimate explanation of an act is never the agent, but rather a long chain of efficient causes extending back in time to the initial conditions of the universe, or to God, or simply back infinitely far. At least initially, we might also suppose that maximal freedom requires genuine alternative possibilities, though I will complicate this assumption below.

2. MFAs Would Be Irreducible

Maximally free agents would have to actually exist. This one should go without saying, but these days it seems that it cannot, given the things that many philosophers of mind, neuroscientists, and cognitive scientists are presently disposed to say. Maximally free agents would exist as conscious selves. They would not be “reducible” to unconscious electrochemical or neurophysical events in time; they would not be “illusions” or “constructs”; and they could not be somehow “deluded” in their perception of being subjects of experience. Otherwise, such agents would not be — could not be — the true authors of their acts (since, in some sense, they would not exist at all).

Irreducible agents would not be mere fleeting loci of conscious experience. They would persist through time — and a great deal of time at that — at least from roughly the moment of gaining conscious awareness until the time of bodily death. For there is, manifestly, more freedom in existing for several decades than in existing for only a few fleeting moments.

3. MFAs Would Be Non-Physical

Maximally free agents would be simple, non-physical substances. Although merely physical beings could be subjects of experience (given that the physical might itself be experiential, as panpsychists hold, or at least have the power to produce consciousness, as emergentists would have it), such beings could not be maximally free because their persistence through time would depend on something other than themselves, given the mutability and transience of the physical. Moreover, if one is just a physical body, then one is subject to the laws of physical causality, so that one’s decisions are effects of a broader causal order, rather than of oneself.

4. MFAs Would Have Intrinsic Natures

Maximally free agents would have a nature. Such agents — such immaterial selves — would not be tabulae rasae. A tabula rasa, having no intrinsic nature, is by definition a mere puppet whose strings are pulled by myriad external causes. A maximally free agent would be a puppet of nothing, and of no one.

5. MFAs Would Be Agent Causes

Maximally free agents would possess the power to act without being caused to do so by any external influences. It would have to be true of such agents, in other words, that they were the ultimate source — the ultimate explanation — of at least some of their acts. For this requirement to be met, the third would have to be as well, for only if an agent S is an immaterial substance could the explanation for some act of S conclude with reference to S. We could always wonder why a physical agent P came to be the way P was at the moment when the action occurred.

By contrast, it’s possible, at least in principle, for the action of an immaterial agent to be explained solely in terms of the agent’s nature. So, for example, supposing for the sake of argument that I am an immaterial mind, the answer to the question, “Why am I typing this sentence?” could, in principle, be ultimately explained simply in terms of my own nature. This would not entail that no external cause influenced my decision — only that no external cause, or set of causes, necessitated my decision. We should suppose that there were sufficient reasons for me to do any number of things at present and that the difference between this world and the possible ones in which I am doing something else is me; my own agency — and nothing else.

A Worry

A worry here is that it seems that by my own proposed account, there will be possible worlds in which all of my reasons are held fixed, and yet I act differently. That would seem to entail that my acts in the actual world are not really caused by me after all, but rather are merely random happenings (given that the same causal influences and reasons could result in a multiplicity of acts in a given circumstance).

The solution to this problem, I think, is to say that there is only a single possible future for me in a given case in the actual world because my nature (not any external reason) necessitates only one act in a given case (namely, the act which I in fact take).

Thus, it turns out that — by my lights, in any case — the most robust incompatibilist account of freedom turns out to have a broadly compatibilist twist, in the end (perhaps revealing the limitations of position labeling) — but of a highly unusual sort, in which it is our own fixed nature as agents that is the ultimate, necessitating explanation of our acts. Maximal freedom, then, ultimately consists not in the availability of alternative possibilities, but in the agent being the ultimate source of the act.

Conclusion

It is at least metaphysically possible that some acts, and some events in the course of history, are only properly explained by reference to agents. If this metaphysical possibility is ever actualized in our world, then this of course has important implications for ethics and for the social sciences. Even if there are no maximally free agents in the actual world, the concept of maximal freedom might nevertheless be important insofar as it is a variety of freedom worth wishing that we had — or perhaps hoping, and even acting as if, we do in fact possess.

Reference

Strawson, Galen. 1986. Freedom and Belief. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

I was, for a time (due in no small part to reading Henry Sidgwick, whom I still regard as one of the greatest ethicists), a proponent of Hedonism, according to which (a) pleasure is intrinsically good, (b) pain is intrinsically bad, and (c) claims (a) and (b) exhaust the facts about intrinsic value.

I had my reasons. For one thing, as a monist theory of value, Hedonism is elegantly simple, and all else being equal, I think that simplicity is a good-making feature of a theory (“Do not multiply entities beyond necessity”, as Occam’s famous principle has it).

Additionally, monists are able to avoid the difficult questions, which plague value pluralists, concerning, for example, how to weight the various goods relative to one another (and, in turn, how to explain the basis on which the weighting is done at all).

Furthermore, I’ve always found (and still find) something imminently plausible about the idea that one is directly acquainted, phenomenologically, with the goodness of pleasure and the badness of pain – but not with any other sources of value (admittedly, I’ve always been more skeptical about the goodness of pleasure; I really want to know how some instance of pleasure came about before deciding that it’s good – though I used to be skeptical of this desire).1

But over time, I grew disenchanted with Hedonism, for a number of reasons – most of them unoriginal and not worth mentioning here. But the one which moved me the most is, I think, worth mentioning because it doesn’t seem to receive much attention, and that’s the fact that Hedonism is an alienating theory of value.

I’ll try to explain what I mean. Hedonism implies that nothing we do is valuable in itself, but only instrumentally, insofar as what we do is conducive to the promotion of pleasure. This means that when we pursue ends that seem to be good-in-themselves – knowledge, wisdom, virtue, athletic excellence, musical proficiency, friendship, etc. – this seeming goodness is merely illusory; if we could derive more pleasure from downing “pleasure pills” than pursuing such things, that would be the only sensible thing to do, according to Hedonism.

At this point, of course, the hedonist will rush to point out that the goods I have named really are good; far from holding otherwise, Hedonism merely explains why knowledge, friendship, and the like are good (namely, by virtue of producing pleasure!).

But that, by my lights, is simply to miss the point: what’s valuable in knowledge is knowing; what’s valuable in a friendship is the relationship; what’s valuable in running a marathon is the completion of a difficult feat. At least, that’s how it appears to me – and if Hedonism is true, then how it appears to me is wrong; indeed I am totally deluded about the actual nature of value. In that sense, I’m alienated from my actions insofar as they are aimed at things I conceive as intrinsically valuable but in fact are not.

On the other hand, were I to break free of my delusions and begin pursuing the one intrinsic good, pleasure, I would thereby be alienated from most of my actions in another sense, given that very few of them are, in the ordinary course of things, aimed narrowly at attaining or promoting pleasure. Thus, to live consistently with Hedonism, I would have to either consciously act as though it were false (perhaps deceiving myself into thinking that it is in fact false) or else radically alter my own psychology so as to bring it into alignment with the idea that pleasure is the only intrinsic good.

Were I to break free of both forms of alienation identified above and consciously pursue pleasure alone, then, ironically, I would surely find very little of it (the well-known Paradox of Hedonism; studying formal logic can be highly rewarding if one conceives of knowledge itself as valuable; not so much if one is only after pleasure).

I find it hard to believe that the best theory of value would leave one either in a state of profound alienation or else unable to act effectively on the theory.

A new academic year is now underway, which means I am, once again, attempting to convey to my students — most of whom will have no prior exposure to philosophy — what the discipline consists in. I have nothing especially groundbreaking to say about this matter, but what follows is a brief summary of my spiel.

What is philosophy? That is itself a contentious philosophical question, and just about every philosopher would probably answer it slightly differently. Providing anything approaching a complete answer would require a book-length treatment — but it is possible to say a few things to help make sense of how one might go about distinguishing philosophy from the innumerable other fields of human inquiry.

We might begin by saying that philosophy is concerned with the most fundamental questions, and that each of these questions is associated with a particular subfield of the discipline: what is there? (metaphysics); how do we know? (epistemology); what should we do? (ethics); what is beautiful? (aesthetics); and what are the principles of correct reasoning? (logic). These questions are interrelated in various and intricate ways, and each is associated with further questions inviting more fine-grained distinctions. But this way of setting things out gets at something deep and true: namely, that philosophy is, in essence, the discipline that concerns itself with the deepest questions that a person can ask.

One of the goals of philosophy is simply to clarify and refine our concepts — and to determine what, precisely, are the right questions to ask about the world in which we find ourselves. Often, when our concepts and questions are sorted out, we find that at least part of what began as a philosophical question can be outsourced to one or another of the empirical sciences — which themselves, historically, developed out of philosophy (the modern disciplinary distinction between philosophy and science is comparatively recent). A common feature of questions that can be outsourced in this way is that they are empirical by nature, and thus can be settled through observation, broadly construed.

However, some philosophical questions seem destined to remain perennially within the purview of philosophy alone. Examples include questions concerning value and normativity (i.e., “oughtness”), as well as questions about the fundamental nature (or essence) of things: “What is a person?” “What is time?”, and so on. In setting out to answer such questions, the only tools we have are reason (our capacity to use logic, respond to evidence, and make sense of things in the broadest sense), reflection, and conversation.

The point about conversation being one of the philosopher’s tools is crucial: philosophy is a cooperative enterprise; the end goal is always to communicate with other minds. This means making arguments and articulating reasons that are persuasive to others, not simply to ourselves.

Thus, philosophizing is not simply a matter of thinking deep thoughts (contrary to the stereotype of the out-of-touch, head-in-the-clouds philosopher): it is about developing those thoughts in a way that facilitates clear communication and advances an ancient, collective endeavor to better understand reality.

In this way, philosophy is indispensable, inescapable — and eminently practical (contrary to a common trope), insofar as one must have an accurate model of reality if one hopes to live well.

“All human beings by nature desire to know.”
—Aristotle, Metaphysics I.1

Introduction

It’s widely thought that morality is somehow bound up with God. One way of cashing out this intuition is in terms of the normative theory known as Divine Command Theory (DCT), according to which God is the ground of moral normativity. My aim is simply to show that DCT is a respectable view that is not, despite a view perpetuated in too many Philosophy 101 courses, refuted outright by the much-discussed Euthyphro Dilemma.

Divine Command Theory and the Euthyphro Dilemma

Divine Command Theory, as I understand it, holds that moral obligations are grounded in divine commands, while moral goodness is grounded in God’s nature. The general idea is intuitively compelling to many people — including some non-theists — precisely because it seems to explain how moral obligations could have genuine authority, given that they are one and the same as commands issued by a perfect being at the foundation of reality.

DCT has long been thought to face a decisive objection that traces back at least to Plato’s early dialogue, the Euthyphro. In the Euthyphro, the title character has brought charges against his own father for killing a slave. Socrates presses Euthyphro to explain what could justify such an extraordinary act. Euthyphro replies that morality — specifically justice and piety — demand it. Since uncovering the nature of morality is among Socrates’ deepest philosophical concerns, the discussion quickly turns to the question of what morality itself consists in.

Euthyphro initially proposes that what is pious is simply what the gods love. Socrates immediately identifies a problem: the gods, as conceived by the ancient Athenians, frequently disagree. Some love what others hate. If so, the same action could be both pious and impious, which is absurd. In response, Euthyphro revises his account. What is just, he now suggests, is that which is universally loved by the gods. In effect, Euthyphro moves towards a general view that can easily be recast in monotheistic terms.

Socrates presses once more. Do the gods love what is just because it is just, or is it just because they love it? If the former, then justice is independent of the gods’ attitudes toward it. If the latter, then justice seems to depend on a divine preference that could, in principle, have been otherwise, rendering the truths of morality arbitrary.

Recast in explicitly monotheistic terms, the Euthyphro Dilemma can be stated as follows:

1. Either: (a) God has reasons for what he commands, or (b) he does not.

2. If (a), then God’s reasons (not God’s commands, per DCT) determine what is morally required.

3. If (b), then God’s commands (and thus the moral facts) are arbitrary.

Therefore,

4. Either morality is independent of God’s will (i.e., DCT is false), or the facts of morality are arbitrary.

The arbitrariness horn of the dilemma is particularly troubling. If God’s commands are unconstrained by reasons, then any act could be rendered morally obligatory by divine decree. That’s deeply implausible. It seems impossible that acts such as slavery or the deliberate harming of innocents for fun could be made morally permissible simply because God commands them.

Some thinkers have been willing to accept this implication. William of Ockham, for example, was prepared to allow that if God were to command lying or even hatred of God himself, those acts would thereby become obligatory. Most contemporary defenders of Theological Voluntarism, however, are unwilling to accept this consequence. For this reason, many (including my own past self) have taken the Euthyphro Dilemma to decisively refute Divine Command Theory.

A Classical Theistic Response

The force of the dilemma depends on a crucial assumption — namely, that if God has reasons for commanding what he does, then those reasons must be external to God. Classical theists can reject that assumption.

On classical theism, God necessarily exists with a perfectly good nature, and his commands will flow from that nature. On this view, God’s reasons are internal to — or flow from — God’s own nature. They are constitutive of who God is and thus are not properly construed as external constraints. God cannot command cruelty for its own sake because such commands would be incompatible with his very nature (and divine omnipotence does not include the power to act contrary to oneself).

This response preserves DCT while avoiding the arbitrariness concern.

Conclusion

The Euthyphro Dilemma has long been regarded as a decisive objection to DCT. But as we’ve seen here, that verdict depends on a particular — and questionable — conception of the relationship between God’s will and God’s nature. If we adopt a classical view of God, DCT remains a viable account of morality.

In this conversation I speak with Matthew Adelstein — better known online as — about the case for God’s existence and some of the strongest challenges to theism. We discuss the A Priori Fine-Tuning Argument, the Argument From Psychophysical Harmony, Matthew’s novel Anthropic Argument, the Problem of Evil and animal suffering, the Archon/Omission Theodicy, universalism and the afterlife, and Pascal’s Wager. We close with Matthew’s views on organized religion and why, despite being a theist, he remains skeptical that any one religious tradition has the whole truth.

Note: This essay serves as a companion to Fifteen Arguments for the Existence of God. Readers unfamiliar with that essay may wish to begin there before reading the present piece.

Introduction

In Fifteen Arguments for the Existence of God, I defended fifteen arguments that I believe amount to serious evidence for theism. In the extended treatment of each argument, I considered objections directed at that particular line of reasoning.

Here I consider what I take to the strongest objections aimed at the cumulative case taken as a whole — and, I hope, show that these objections, whether considered in isolation or cumulatively, do not obviously undercut the case for theism.

Objection 1: The Problem of Evil Overwhelms the Evidence For Theism

The world contains a horrendous amount of suffering and other forms of evil, much of which seems gratuitous. Beginning hundreds of millions of years before we existed, countless nonhuman animals endured array of horrors. And our own history has been marked by these natural evils in addition to the litany of uniquely human-caused horrors (so-called “moral evils”).

I’ve argued elsewhere that evil plausibly constitutes serious evidence against theism. I think the evidential argument from evil is the strongest argument for atheism.1 It is a serious mistake (to which far too many theists are prone) to minimize the amount of evil in the world or to downplay its moral significance.

But in considering whether theism is true, we must focus on whether the evidential pull of considerations relating to evil is really so strong as to outweigh the evidence for theism.

Objection 2: The Concept of God Is Incoherent

Can there really exist a being who has all the attributes classically ascribed to God? Some writers have insisted that no being could possess all of these attributes.2 If they are right, then theism does not count as a genuine explanatory hypothesis at all.

I don’t believe this objection succeeds. The alleged contradictions among the divine attributes are highly contested, and contemporary philosophy of religion contains an extensive literature devoted to showing that theism can be formulated coherently.

It is certainly not obvious that the concept of a perfect mind is incoherent — and many of history’s greatest minds3 have believed it to be coherent. And unless that much stronger conclusion can actually be established, theism remains a legitimate explanatory hypothesis.

Objection 3: God Is Too Mysterious to Explain Anything

Even if the concept of God is coherent, one might still worry that the God concept is simply too opaque to explain much. Most of the fifteen arguments allege that various features of reality are “more expected” if reality is grounded in a perfect mind than if it is impersonal. But how much can we really know about the psychology of a perfect being? If God’s motives are inscrutable, then God cannot explain much of anything.

There’s nothing essentially mysterious about any of God’s attributes — or at least not about those of his attributes that are invoked to explain things: we know what each of God’s good-making features is — and these attributes properly generate real expectations. A perfectly good being is more likely to create a world containing love than one consisting solely of pointless suffering, and a rational mind is more likely to produce an intelligible universe than an unintelligible one.

Moreover, the objection may put one on the hook for a far more severe variety of skepticism — certainly at least about value — than most would wish to embrace. If we really know so little about perfect goodness that we cannot even say whether it favors (for example) love over indifference, then what can we really say that we know about value at all?

Objection 4: I’ve Counted the Same Evidence Multiple Times

Many of the considerations discussed throughout this series are closely related, so some might insist that they are not genuinely independent lines of evidence — that they simply reflect different aspects of one underlying phenomenon.

I think this would be mistaken. A fine-tuned universe could lack beauty, and a universe with conscious creatures could be devoid of rational agents who experience love. The features of reality that figure in my arguments overlap in some ways, but they aren’t reducible one to another.

Objection 5: There Are Unconsidered Alternatives

Even if every argument I have offered succeeds, why conclude that theism is true rather than some broader non-naturalistic alternative — or even some carefully constructed naturalistic hypothesis designed to accommodate the relevant data? Maybe reality is ultimately grounded in some impersonal absolute, rather than God. Or maybe idealism or some highly specific and non-standard naturalistic hypothesis explains all of the same evidence equally well.

I think that theism provides the most unified explanation. A perfect mind naturally predicts a great deal of what we find in the world. While some alternative views explain particular features of reality, theism explains the broadest range of evidence with the greatest degree of unity.

Moreover, many competing hypotheses achieve their explanatory success only by being tailored to fit the particular phenomenon under consideration. They therefore possess a more ad hoc character than theism, which provides a simple explanatory framework capable of accounting for a remarkably diverse range of evidence.

Conclusion

I think the above objections do not obviously undercut the cumulative case for theism outlined in Fifteen Arguments for the Existence of God. Of the five objections considered, it is the problem of evil that weighs on me most heavily. It remains, in my view, the strongest argument for atheism.

Even so, when I revisit the cumulative case as a whole, my mind returns to the consideration that inspired the series of essays to which the present essay serves as a bookend: the breadth of phenomena that theism renders intelligible. The quantity and kinds of evil on display in the world are prima facie unexpected on theism, but atheism renders virtually everything else about reality surprising.

This concludes my reflections on Fifteen Arguments for the Existence of God. It does not, however, conclude my reflections on the evidence for theism: I will soon begin working on a new essay that will introduce a new series of articles — Fifteen More Arguments For the Existence of God.

References

Draper, Paul. (1989). “Pain and Pleasure: An Evidential Problem for Theists.” Noûs, 23(3), 331–350.

Mackie, J. L. (1982). The Miracle of Theism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Rowe, William L. (1979). “The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism.” American Philosophical Quarterly, 16(4), 335–341.

In March 2025, I published an essay sketching fifteen arguments for the existence of God. Over the past sixteen months, I’ve expanded each of those sketches into an essay. With that project now complete, I’ve returned to the original essay and updated it, with links to the full essays throughout.

Introduction

Like many philosophy majors, I became convinced early in my undergraduate career that all of the arguments for the existence of God were, at best, amusingly preposterous and, at worst, embarrassing failures — the very epitome of the sort of transparently motivated reasoning and wishful thinking that a burgeoning Serious Thinker ought to avoid at almost any cost. I regarded this as unfortunate, since I was never entirely at peace with naturalism (which, at the time, seemed to me like the only intellectually respectable worldview for someone living in the early 21st century) and its myriad entailments — or with atheism in general.

This attitude began to give way, ever so slowly, once I began teaching philosophy courses myself during graduate school (starting in the summer of 2016). In particular, when I taught my first philosophy of religion course in the spring of 2017, I realized that the best versions of the traditional arguments for God’s existence were in fact at least not terrible, by the normal standards of assessment (and I had also learned by then that just about all philosophical arguments were vulnerable to serious objections). By the time I found myself teaching the same course again three years later, I was — to my own surprise — starting to think that some of the traditional arguments for God’s existence, along with some non-traditional ones, might actually be sound (i.e., have true premises in addition to formal validity or cogency).

In the years since that time, arguments for God’s existence have dominated much of my thinking (to the bemusement, befuddlement, and even consternation of more than a few onlookers in my life); I’ve read countless articles and books on these arguments, listened to endless hours of debates and interviews with leading experts on them, and thought about them relentlessly and painstakingly on long runs, long walks, long drives, during meals, while standing in lines, while washing dishes…

Since returning to writing when I re-launched this Substack in February 2025, I’ve explored each of these arguments in detail. This essay offers brief, updated summaries of the fifteen arguments and links to the corresponding essays (which I will, as time permits, continue lightly updating and revising over the years).

None of the arguments is intended to function as a knock-down proof. Each is subject to doubt and can, by my lights, be rejected by a rational and informed person. Such is the nature of philosophical inquiry. Apart from the ontological argument, each proceeds by identifying some feature of reality that is, plausibly, more expected (or, if you like, more intelligible) on theism than on atheism.

Below are brief summaries of the fifteen arguments to which I’ve probably given the most thought — arguments that have, over time, led me to assign a far higher probability to God’s existence than my New Atheist-influenced undergraduate self could have imagined. I’ve retained the original ordering, which (as I recall) ran roughly from the arguments that had most influenced my thinking to those that had influenced it least. I hope that you find this updated version of the essay valuable.

Before setting out the arguments, some terminological and conceptual clarification is in order. I understand God as a perfect mind; God is, by conception, the ultimate being, and the ultimate being is a maximally great conscious subject. Theism is the view that God, so defined, exists. Atheism is the view that neither God nor gods (i.e., finite deities such as Zeus) exist. Naturalism is the view that reality consists exclusively of natural kinds and properties, where “natural kinds and properties” are those that figure in our best scientific theories. Materialism is a variety of naturalism according to which matter is the only fundamental substance. For further terminological clarification, see here.

1. The Contingency Argument

It seems that the universe — material reality, however big that is (and regardless of whether it’s limited to the observable universe which began expanding from a tiny singularity some ~14 billion years ago) — is contingent. That is, it seems that the universe might not have existed at all, or that it might have existed in many (possibly infinitely many) different ways (e.g., it could have had different laws and initial conditions; it could have consisted of one more or one fewer electron, etc.).

Contingent things are such that they admit of explanation. Ordinarily, we explain contingent things in terms of other contingent things (e.g., one contingent event is explained in terms of some earlier contingent event; one contingent being is explained in terms of some other contingent being).

If we add up all the contingent things, they together form a set — namely, the set of all contingent things — which itself cries out for explanation, given that we can reasonably wonder why that set of contingent things exists rather than some other possible set.

The only thing that could explain the set of all contingent things would, by definition, have to be necessary: something such that it could not have been otherwise.

Conceptual analysis reveals God to be the best candidate for a necessary being. How so? If you think about the concept of a being that couldn’t be otherwise, you’ll quickly see that there’s strong reason to suppose that it’s the concept of an immaterial being, given that material beings (in all of our experience) are subject to change, destruction, and division. Because the necessary being would have to be beyond the universe (i.e., not itself a member of the set of all contingent things), it would of course have to be beyond the limits of space and time. And since arguably any kind of arbitrary limit on the being’s power would be incompatible with its necessity (since arbitrary limits are, by their nature, limits which could have been otherwise), there’s good reason to suppose that the being would have to be maximally perfect — and a maximally perfect, necessarily existent immaterial being just is what we mean by “God”.

A Statement of the Argument From Contingency

1. The universe is the totality of contingent reality.

2. The totality of contingent reality is itself contingent.

3. The totality of contingent reality requires explanation in terms of something necessary.

4. The best candidate for that something is a perfect mind.

Therefore,

5. The existence of contingent reality is evidence that a perfect mind — God — exists.

The full essay: The Contingency Argument

2. The Ontological Argument

The concept of God, as suggested above, just is the concept of a maximally perfect being — “that-than-which-none-greater-can-be-conceived”, as St. Anselm put it. Plausibly, existence in concrete reality (as opposed to existence as a mere idea) is itself a perfection, or a “great-making-property”. If so, then insofar as God has every possible perfection, then God must really exist — for if God were to exist as a mere idea, then a greater being would be possible (namely, one that really existed!); however, by definition, no being could be greater than God. So, that-than-which-none-greater-can-be-conceived must actually exist. That is, God must really exist.

It’s an argument which has fascinated philosophers for a millennium, and it’s famously much easier to mock and deride the argument as a “word game” (or some such) than it is to actually demonstrate where the argument goes wrong. Perhaps this is because the argument does, in fact, just work.

A Statement of the Ontological Argument

1. God is, by conception, a perfect being.

2. A perfect being is metaphysically possible.

3. If a perfect being is metaphysically possible, then this being exists necessarily in all metaphysically possible worlds.

Therefore,

4. God exists.

The full essay: In Behalf of the Ontological Argument

3. The Argument From Consciousness

In all of reality, consciousness — what-it’s-likeness; first-person awareness; the subjective perspective — is the surest thing: it’s the one thing which certainly must exist. You know this immediately because it’s like something to be you; there’s a particular experiential character to be processing in your mind these words (or pixel-representations of words, more precisely) on your screen. Indeed, the reality of your consciousness is far more manifest than the screen, given that the screen might in principle be an illusion — whereas your experience of it must be real just in case you’re having it. And yet, if you think about it, it’s really an extraordinary thing that consciousness exists at all. Why is it like something to be you?

On theism, the foundation of reality is a perfect conscious mind; it’s unsurprising that such a mind would generate additional minds (given that minds have value, and given that an unlimited mind seems like just the right sort of entity to produce more minds) — whereas it is at least somewhat surprising that other ontological foundations (e.g., non-conscious particles) could, or would, generate any minds at all. Indeed, it’s not at all clear how, or that, conscious experience could arise from non-experiential stuff.

It’s open to the materialist (i.e., to the person who affirms that there is only matter) to deny that matter is non-experiential; to adopt some form of panpsychism. But this would, in a certain respect, arguably in itself be a kind of concession to the Argument From Consciousness (insofar as it represents a repudiation of what has come to be regarded as standard materialism), precisely due to standard materialism’s inability to account for the most apparent fact of existence). Matter’s being conscious seems to fit better with theism than with atheism (given that consciousness has value, you might expect a perfect mind to create conscious matter, whereas conscious matter is kind of surprising on atheism).

A Statement of the Argument From Consciousness

1. Consciousness exists.

2. On theism, consciousness is expected.

3. On atheism, consciousness is unexpected.

Therefore,

4. The existence of consciousness is evidence that God exists.

The full essay: The Argument From Consciousness

4. The Argument From Psychophysical Harmony

(This argument was developed by the contemporary philosophers Brian Cutter and Dustin Crummett.)

Our consciousness is causally efficacious, and it harmonizes with what our bodies do in ways that make sense. Our negative affective states arise as a result of harm, and our positive affective states arise as a result of things that are good for us— and decisions to move our bodies in various ways result in our bodies moving in the ways we intend. To be more concrete: when you stub your toe, you feel pain (as well you should).

We can easily imagine a world in which such psychophysical harmony didn’t obtain; in which our physical states did not relate to our phenomenal (i.e., experiential) states in a manner that made any sense.

Evolution doesn’t account for psychophysical harmony one bit: evolution operates on behavior, selecting for those behaviors which are broadly adaptive; it doesn’t “care” one bit about an organism’s phenomenal states: an organism that avoids predators and obtains lots of food and mates will pass on its genes even if its experiential states are in radical disharmony with its physical states.

You might be thinking that psychophysical harmony correlates with adaptive behavior and so gets selected for indirectly in that way. However, the fact that this correlation exists just is the very phenomenon in need of explanation.

While a cold, indifferent universe would have no reason to generate psychophysical harmony, God would. Psychophysical harmony is valuable: it’s a prerequisite for being responsible for our actions, planning our lives, coordinating our behavior, and forming meaningful relationships — all things about which a perfect being would have reason to care.

A Statement of the Argument From Psychophysical Harmony

1. There is psychophysical harmony.

2. On theism, psychophysical harmony is expected.

3. On atheism, psychophysical harmony is unexpected.

Therefore,

4. Psychophysical harmony is evidence that God exists.

The full essay: The Argument From Psychophysical Harmony

5. The Argument From Immaterial Minds

There are serious reasons to think that minds are immaterial. Mental states don’t belong to the same metaphysical category as physical things, and it seems (to most of us) very clearly conceivable that there could exist a physically identical world devoid of conscious experience. That suggests consciousness is not identical to physical processes. Finally, our knowledge of a priori truths (like those of math and logic) involves awareness of abstract, non-physical entities; it’s unclear how we’d be capable of such awareness if we were ourselves wholly material beings.

Immaterial minds fit naturally within a theistic framework, according to which the ultimate foundation of reality is itself an immaterial mind (and one that would have reason to create more minds).

By contrast, if reality is fundamentally material, it’s unclear why immaterial minds should exist at all. Even if standard materialism is not tacked onto atheism, the atheist must regard consciousness as a brute fact (and no: there is not obviously a symmetry between the atheist and the theist here because theists generally think that God is self-explaining by virtue of God’s necessity).

A Statement of the Argument From Immaterial Minds

1. Plausibly, minds are immaterial.

2. On theism, immaterial minds are expected.

3. On atheism, immaterial minds are unexpected.

Therefore,

4. If minds are immaterial, this is evidence that God exists.

The full essay: The Argument From Immaterial Minds

6. The Argument From Rational Agency

Rational agency is the capacity to deliberate and exercise meaningful control over at least some of one’s actions. Whatever one’s views about libertarian free will or ultimate moral responsibility, it is very difficult to deny rational agency, so defined.

On theism, the existence of rational agents is predicted. If the ultimate foundation of reality is itself a rational mind, then the emergence of derivative agents capable of reasoning and intentional action is what we’d expect.

By contrast, if reality is fundamentally impersonal, then it is unclear why it should produce beings whose behavior is genuinely guided by reasons.

A Statement of the Argument From Rational Agency

1. Rational agency exists.

2. On theism, rational agency is expected.

3. On atheism, rational agency is unexpected.

Therefore,

4. Rational agency is evidence that God exists.

The full essay: The Argument From Rational Agency

7. The Argument From Moral Knowledge and Agency

There are some objective moral facts: that is, facts concerning what we should do and what we should value which don’t depend upon what anyone happens to believe. This much is obvious to anyone who isn’t in the grip of some nihilistic ideology. That there are agents who have moral knowledge, though, is surprising: even given life and the natural evolutionary process which takes over once life exists, the existence of creatures able or disposed to think about morality was, antecedently, highly unlikely.

Even given the existence of rational creatures capable of thinking about morality, there is no inevitability that these creatures will gain moral knowledge. We might, for example, have had radically different moral intuitions, so that our moral beliefs did not align at all with the moral facts. We might also have been indifferent to the moral facts, recognizing them yet feeling utterly unmotivated by them.

An indifferent reality should not be expected to produce agents who can engage in moral deliberation, act on moral reasons, and perform acts subject to moral evaluation — but insofar as the existence of such agents is good, God would have reason to bring them into being. In this way, moral agency and moral knowledge constitute evidence for theism.

A Statement of the Argument From Moral Knowledge and Agency

1. We possess some moral knowledge and are moral agents.

2. On theism, morally aware agents are expected.

3. On atheism, morally aware agents are unexpected.

Therefore,

4. Moral knowledge and moral agency are evidence that God exists.

The full essay: The Argument From Moral Knowledge and Agency

8. The Argument From the Reliability of Our Perceptual and Cognitive Faculties

We have broadly reliable cognitive and perceptual faculties: we perceive the world more or less as it is, and we’re able to reason our way to all sorts of true beliefs. I take this to be a Moorean Fact (i.e., a proposition more obvious than any premise in an argument for its negation).

And yet, things didn’t have to be this way. Certainly evolution doesn’t “care” whether we have accurate perceptions or true beliefs: the forces of selection operate only on behavior and its causal antecedents.

God would have reasons for placing us in a world which we could understand and perceive accurately.

A Statement of the Argument From the Reliability of Our Perceptual and Cognitive Faculties

1. Our perceptual and cognitive faculties are broadly reliable.

2. On theism, such reliability is expected.

3. On atheism, such reliability is unexpected.

Therefore,

4. The reliability of our perceptual and cognitive faculties is evidence that God exists.

The full essay: The Argument From the Reliability of Our Perceptual and Cognitive Faculties

9. The Fine-Tuning Argument

Findings in contemporary physics and cosmology suggest that the universe is, in various ways, fine-tuned for the emergence of life. Had, for example, the value of the cosmological constant or the strength of the force of gravity been only slightly different, then life never would have emerged. Indeed, theoretical physicists tell us that, of the innumerable possible ways our universe might have been, the conditions for any conceivable form of life (and not only carbon-based life) would have been possible in only a vanishingly small portion of them. We need an explanation of why ours is a life-permitting universe, given that this outcome was antecedently highly improbable (and given that, by ordinary epistemic standards, antecedently highly improbable events need to be explained).

There really are only two principal answers worth considering here. One is The Multiverse Hypothesis, according to which there are indeterminately many (perhaps infinitely many) universes. Thus, so goes the thought, we shouldn’t be surprised that we exist in a life-permitting universe, given that some such universes will exist within the multiverse — and of course observers like ourselves will exist only within those universes in which it’s possible for us to exist.

The major problem with that response is that not just any multiverse will explain fine-tuning, given that, of the logically possible multiverses, most will contain no life-permitting universes. Only a multiverse which is itself fine-tuned for generating life-permitting universes will explain the fine-tuning of our universe. But then the multiverse’s fine-tuning would require explanation.

Theism offers an explanation of fine-tuning insofar as the existence of God predicts the existence of at least some universe (and perhaps many universes) containing life, given that life is a prerequisite for the emergence of embodied conscious subjects, who add enormously to the value of a universe (such that God would have reasons for creating arenas in which they could exist).

A Statement of the Argument From Fine-Tuning

1. The universe is fine-tuned for the emergence of life.

2. On theism, fine-tuning is expected.

3. On atheism, fine-tuning is unexpected.

Therefore,

4. Fine-tuning is evidence that God exists.

The full essay: Contemplating the Fine-Tuning Argument

10. The Argument From the Intelligibility of Nature and the Effectiveness of Mathematics

Nature — the natural world — is intelligible, in the sense that we can investigate and make sense of it; science works! Nature operates according to regularities which permit us to understand it and make generalizations about it which hold across time and space.

Moreover, nature admits of characterization in terms of laws which can be described mathematically; this is what Eugene Wigner referred to as “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics”.

The intelligibility of nature is evidence for theism insofar as God would desire an intelligible order that can be characterized formally by way of mathematics.

A Statement of the Argument From the Intelligibility of Nature

1. Nature is intelligible and mathematically describable.

2. On theism, this is expected.

3. On atheism, this is unexpected.

Therefore,

4. The intelligibility of nature is evidence for the existence of God.

The full essay: The Argument From the Intelligibility of Nature and the Effectiveness of Mathematics

11. The Argument From Widespread Belief in a Transcendent Reality

That some proposition P is widely believed, particularly by relevant experts and great minds, is defeasible reason to believe P (given that such facts are often well-explained by P’s being true and difficult to explain if P is false). It has been widely believed that God exists — and even more widely believed that some ultimate being exists (given that even in some religious traditions in which God is not explicitly posited, some kind of God-like ultimate something often is posited). It seems safe to say that most people who have ever lived have believed in God, or else something very God-like.

It’s unclear whether there are any relevant experts with respect to the matter of God’s existence. Plausibly, philosophers and history’s greatest minds are the relevant experts — and, at least before the 20th century, most of them were theists. Even in contemporary philosophy, those philosophers who know the most about the arguments for God’s existence — philosophers of religion — are theists (and it does not seem that this can be accounted for solely by a selection effect (i.e., by the fact that philosophy of religion selects for philosophers who were theists before they carefully considered the arguments)).

The perseverance of theistic belief is some evidence for theism insofar as we should expect belief in God to persevere through history (despite persecution, social pressure, etc.) if God exists.

A Statement of the Argument From Widespread Belief in a Transcendent Reality

1. We exhibit widespread and enduring orientation toward transcendent reality.

2. On theism, this is expected.

3. On atheism, this is unexpected.

Therefore,

4. Widespread and enduring orientation toward transcendent reality is evidence that God exists.

The full essay: The Argument From Widespread and Enduring Belief In a Transcendent Reality

12. The Argument From Miracle Reports

There seem to be some well-evidenced miracle reports: that is, reports of events which defy naturalistic explanation. These range from reports of inexplicable healings, to Marian apparitions, to levitating monks and nuns. If one actually looks into these reports with an open mind, one will find that many are very hard to dismiss. On theism, we should expect miracles — and, thus, compelling miracle reports: God would have reasons (e.g., an interest in making his presence known) for sometimes contravening the laws of nature. But well-evidenced miracle reports are, at the very least, somewhat awkward aspects of reality for the committed naturalist. Perhaps they are less awkward for non-theistic supernaturalists; however, if one has to adopt non-theistic supernaturalism in order to account for miracle reports, that is itself a kind of dialectical victory for the theist.

A Statement of the Argument From Miracle Reports

1. There are at least some well-evidenced miracle reports.

2. On theism, such reports are expected.

3. On atheism, such reports are unexpected.

Therefore,

4. Well-evidenced miracle reports are evidence that God exists.

The full essay: The Argument From Miracle Reports

13. The Argument From Near-Death Experiences

Near-death-experiences (NDEs), in the sense relevant here, are experiences of people who have come extremely close to bodily death (e.g., to the point of their heart ceasing to beat for some time) but, upon returning to consciousness, report having had various sorts of out-of-body experiences, meetings with deceased relatives, feelings of profound peace, and so forth.

These experiences often seem to align in striking ways with various religious and spiritual expectations about what is likely to come upon bodily death — and which are unexpected on atheism. While I don’t put much stock in NDEs, I think that they are some part of a broad evidence base which results in theism comparing favorably to rival hypotheses about fundamental reality.

A Statement of the Argument From Near-Death Experiences

1. Arguably, there are some veridical NDEs.

2. On theism, this is expected, given that theism predicts an afterlife.

3. On atheism, this is unexpected, given that atheism doesn’t predict an afterlife.

Therefore,

4. NDEs constitute at least some evidence for the existence of God.

The full essay: The Argument From Near-Death Experiences

14. The Argument From Beauty

We encounter beauty in nature and human creation, and we experience it as something genuinely valuable rather than merely instrumentally useful. On theism, the existence and abundance of beauty is expected. A perfect mind would have reason to bring about a world rich in intrinsic goods, and beauty is plausibly one of those goods. By contrast,, if reality is fundamentally indifferent to value, it is much less clear why it should produce a world so deeply saturated with beauty.

A Statement of the Argument From Beauty

1. There is a great deal of beauty in the world.

2. On theism, beauty is expected.

3. On atheism, beauty is unexpected.

Therefore,

4. Beauty is evidence for theism.

The full essay: The Argument From Beauty

15. The Argument From Love

Love, understood roughly as willing the good of another together with the fitting affections that sustain interpersonal attachment, is among the greatest intrinsic goods. Human life would be profoundly impoverished without it.

On theism, love is expected. A perfectly good being would have reason to create creatures capable of loving relationships, and many theists maintain that love belongs to God’s very nature.

While evolutionary processes may explain some (maybe even all) of the behaviors associated with love, they do not, by themselves, explain why those behaviors should be accompanied by the rich conscious experience of love itself. A world in which organisms behaved just as we do but experienced no love at all is entirely conceivable.

A Statement of the Argument From Love

1. Love exists.

2. On theism, love is expected.

3. On atheism, love is unexpected.

Therefore,

4. Love is evidence for theism.

The full essay: The Argument From Love

Conclusion

I haven’t claimed that any one of these arguments is decisive. I also haven’t tried to quantify exactly how much each should increase one’s confidence that theism is true (and I am somewhat skeptical about the impulse to quantify confidence levels as has become popular in recent years). Rational belief should reflect one’s total body of evidence.

I also acknowledge that the considerations discussed here may increase the probability of theism while lending some support to other metaphysical theories — for example, to the theory that reality is ultimately impersonal yet nevertheless oriented toward the good (axiarchism). It’s a familiar fact in the philosophy of science, which generalizes to theory evaluation across the board, that evidence for one theory can also count as evidence for another.

I think our deepest convictions should come from the convergence of many independent lines of evidence. My movement toward theism has, as I’ve said, been gradual and hesitating; no individual consideration convinced me. Over the course of many years, I simply found that the above arguments came to seem increasingly difficult to dismiss. Together they eventually shifted my assessment of where the balance of evidence lies.

The arguments that have most influenced my own thinking are the contingency argument, the ontological argument, the fine-tuning argument, and the argument from consciousness (readers, of course, will likely rank them differently). At the opposite end of the spectrum, I currently regard the arguments from miracle reports and near-death experiences as among the weakest in the series. I continue to think they possess some evidential force, but my confidence in them is considerably lower than my confidence in the leading arguments. Two of the arguments are, to my knowledge, original to me: the Argument From Rational Agency (originally called the “Argument From Free Agency”) and the Argument From Love. For that reason, I am especially partial to those.

Whether you ultimately find them persuasive, I hope the arguments presented here encourage careful reflection upon one of the oldest and most important of all questions: What sort of reality should we expect to inhabit if God exists — and what sort of reality do we actually find?

Introduction

Every year, tens of billions of land animals are raised and slaughtered for human consumption. Most spend their lives in intensive confinement systems that subject them to severe and prolonged suffering.

Even if veganism is the moral ideal, we must contend with the reality that it’s one to which few live up, decades of animal advocacy notwithstanding. Abolitionists regard strict veganism as the only morally meaningful pattern of consumption. Reducetarians encourage any reduction in animal-product consumption, however modest (Kateman 2017).

Between strict veganism and reducetarianism lies a distinct category defined by substantial approximation of the vegan ideal. I call it nearveganism and make a case for it here.

1. The Basic Argument for Veganism

For present purposes, I simply assume that, under ordinary conditions, veganism is the morally ideal pattern of individual consumption. The Basic Argument For Veganism, as I understand it, can be stated as follows:

1. It’s wrong to inflict extreme suffering and death on sentient beings merely for the sake of comparatively trivial goods.

2. Factory farming inflicts extreme suffering and death on sentient beings merely for the sake of human gustatory pleasure and convenience (i.e., for the sake of comparatively trivial goods).

Therefore,

3. Factory farming is morally wrong.

4. We ordinarily have strong moral reason not to knowingly make ourselves complicit in a wrongful practice when we can reasonably avoid it.

5. Knowingly purchasing factory-farmed animal products ordinarily makes us complicit in factory farming.

Therefore,

6. We ordinarily have strong moral reason not knowingly to purchase factory-farmed animal products.

2. Views About Ethical Consumption

Much contemporary vegan advocacy has been absolutist in character. A prominent representative of abolitionist advocacy is Gary Francione, who argues that because animal exploitation is fundamentally unjust, advocates should present veganism as the only morally acceptable pattern of consumption. Incremental reforms and partial reductions, he argues, serve only to legitimize institutions which ought instead to be abolished altogether (Francione 2008).

Brian Kateman has introduced a different strategy: reducetarianism. Reducetarians encourage simply consuming fewer animal products without insisting that they become vegetarian or vegan. Reducetarians hold that every meaningful reduction in animal product consumption is morally worthwhile insofar as it contributes to reducing the demand that sustains animal suffering (Kateman 2017).

3. The Case For Nearveganism

If the moral considerations supporting veganism are compelling, then someone whose ordinary pattern of consumption overwhelmingly reflects those considerations has achieved something morally important. Conversely, someone whose ordinary pattern of consumption remains largely unchanged and insensitive to the moral nightmare that is factory farming has not approximated the ideal in any meaningful sense merely because of a handful of marginal, minuscule improvements.

Nearveganism, as I conceptualize it, holds that individuals living in ordinary conditions in developed countries ought to organize their pattern of consumption around the moral considerations supporting veganism.

It’s distinct from strict veganism insofar as it doesn’t hold that the occasional departure from the ideal negates the moral significance of an otherwise vegan consumption pattern. (An occasional slice of birthday cake containing dairy or a rare social exception does not, by itself, erase that achievement.)

It’s distinct from reducetarianism in requiring considerably more than the most marginal reductions in the consumption of animal products. It requires that concern for animals become the governing principle of one’s ordinary dietary choices rather than simply one consideration among many. It’s just that, unlike veganism, it classifies substantial approximation to the vegan ideal as a distinct form of moral achievement.

4. Objections

I think there are a couple of objections that deserve to be considered upfront.

Objection 1: Nearveganism Is Just Reducetarianism

The Objection: If both reducetarianism and nearveganism enjoin people to consume fewer animal products without insisting upon perfect veganism, then introducing a new category is unnecessary.

Reply: Moral categories shape moral norms. So long as ethical consumption is understood as binary — where one is either an admirable vegan or a moral failure — the dominant distinction remains that between vegans and non-vegans. And that distinction is too coarse-grained to track the moral differences at issue: in a world in which animal product consumption is nearly ubiquitous, substantial orientation against it that exceeds mere reduction needs to be labeled and recognized.

Objection 2: Nearveganism Weakens the Moral Message

The Objection: If consuming animal products is genuinely wrong, then we should encourage nothing short of complete abstention.

Moral movements do often succeed precisely because they refuse to compromise with injustice. If abolitionists had urged merely reducing slavery rather than abolishing it, then their movements would rightly be regarded as moral failures.

But there are reasons to think that there are many unique obstacles facing the animal protection movement that, in turn, necessitate unique tactics. For one thing, animals cannot advocate for themselves. For another, human beings like the taste of meat and are selfish and hedonistic enough that they’re unlikely to abstain when the effects of their consumption are obscured from them.

Conclusion

Factory farming is among the greatest preventable sources of suffering in the modern world. If that judgment is correct, then reducing the demand that sustains factory farming should rank among our most important practical moral priorities. On one side of discussions of ethical consumption lies strict veganism, understood as the only morally meaningful pattern of consumption. On the other end lies reducetarianism, which regards virtually any reduction in the consumption of animal products as morally significant.

But someone whose ordinary pattern of consumption is organized around concern for animals has achieved something morally important, even if that person occasionally falls short of perfect compliance; we need a consumption category to identify this sort of person. Therein lies the conceptual case for nearveganism.

The more important case for nearveganism is normative: it ought to be promoted — not to the exclusion of, but in addition to, abolitionism and reducetarianism — because it could, I believe, lead over time to a meaningful reduction in the consumption of animal products and, ultimately, movement away from conceiving of animals objects for consumption.

References

Francione, Gary L. 2008. Animals as Persons: Essays on the Abolition of Animal Exploitation. Columbia University Press.

Kateman, Brian, ed. 2017. The Reducetarian Solution: How the Surprisingly Simple Act of Reducing the Amount of Meat in Your Diet Can Transform Your Health and the Planet. TarcherPerigee.

In this conversation, I sit down with my former graduate school colleague at the University of Texas at Austin, Brian Cutter, now Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, whose work has made him one of the leading contemporary defenders of consciousness-based arguments for the existence of God. We discuss the case for mind-body dualism, consciousness as evidence for theism, the Argument from Psychophysical Harmony, Bayesian natural theology, and the cumulative case for theism.

Links:

Brian Cutter (University of Notre Dame): https://philosophy.nd.edu/people/faculty/brian-cutter/

Brian Cutter on PhilPeople: https://philpeople.org/profiles/brian-cutter

Psychophysical Harmony paper: https://philarchive.org/rec/CUTPHA?__cf_chl_f_tk=DL80IZz4wJzivOwD9TRdFgKS7GKfckFhh_A1q62nW0Q-1783211678-1.0.1.1-u45.U80Wcym00TpRmm66q8nBw_Sg_mkWSLGznCne4OQ

Introduction

Love is one of the most profound features of reality, and it’s one of the central constituents of a flourishing life. Without it, life would be profoundly impoverished and stripped of much of its value and meaning.

Here, I argue that the existence of love is far more expected on theism than on atheism and, therefore, constitutes serious evidence for theism.

1. Love Is Good and Needs Explanation

I understand love as a settled disposition to will another person’s good for that person’s own sake, ordinarily accompanied by fitting emotions. I take it that love is intrinsically good, by which I mean that it’s valuable in itself; it’s one of those goods which feature in a good life — and arguably is the highest among them.

Love also enriches life’s other goods. For example, beauty is more fully appreciated when shared, and knowledge is more valuable when passed on to others.

Even suffering and other evils are frequently rendered more bearable by the presence of those who genuinely care for us — and the absence of such people can compound profound suffering beyond measure.

Generally speaking, we should be curious about features of reality that are extremely valuable and might easily have been otherwise. A satisfactory account of reality should render such features intelligible. And love has both of those features: it is perhaps the single most valuable feature of reality, and there are far more possible worlds devoid of creatures who experience love than not.

We can readily imagine beings behaviorally indistinguishable from ourselves who nonetheless do not experience love. Such beings would perform every behavior necessary for reproductive success. They need not be conceived as philosophical zombies, entirely devoid of first-person experience. They might experience a variety of mental states, but their nervous systems would merely generate those behaviors without any accompanying love-involving states and dispositions.

So, love is not inevitable even given the existence of creatures broadly like ourselves. A satisfactory account of reality needs to render intelligible the reality of love, given its extraordinary value and the fact that reality could, seemingly, have been all kinds of ways that didn’t involve love at all.

2. Love Is Expected On Theism But Not On Atheism

If love is among the highest intrinsic goods, then its existence is unsurprising on theism. On theism, the ground of all things is a necessarily existent, perfectly mind. If such a being exists, then we have good reason to expect a world containing great goods.

Because love is inherently relational, it cannot exist in isolation — it requires persons capable of recognizing one another as beings worthy of concern, for their own sake. A world containing genuine love is, therefore, one populated by persons capable of displaying love-involving virtues.

So, given theism, it’s unsurprising that we find ourselves in a world of relational beings capable of love.

On atheism, there is no reason to expect the emergence of love. If reality is fundamentally cold and indifferent — if there is no perfect mind at the bottom of things — then that it should give rise to love is extremely surprising, given all the possible loveless worlds.

If atheism is paired with naturalism, then there is the additional difficulty of somehow accounting for love in natural terms — in the terms of the natural sciences. But surely no third-person description could capture the experience of, say, a mother looking upon her newborn child.

3 The Argument From Love

We can now state the Argument From Love in standard form as follows:

1. Love exists.

2. If theism is true, the existence of love is unsurprising.

3. If atheism is true, the existence of love is surprising.

Therefore,

4. The existence of love is evidence for the existence of God.

4. Objections

A couple of objections naturally suggest themselves.

Objection 1: Paleolithic humans, or pre-humans, who cared for their offspring and formed stable pair bonds likely enjoyed greater reproductive success than those that did not. Love is, therefore nothing more than a psychological mechanism favored by natural selection; love evolved.

Reply: While evolutionary theory may explain why parents protect children, it does not obviously explain why parental care should be accompanied by the rich phenomenology of love. Moreover, this objection addresses the evolutionary origins of love rather than the phenomenon itself. Evolutionary theory explains many of the behaviors associated with love, but it doesn’t thereby explain why those behaviors should be accompanied by the experience of love.

Objection 2: Love is nothing more than a pattern of neural activity involving hormones and neurotransmitters, so that once these mechanisms are understood, there will be nothing left to explain.

Reply: Identifying the neural correlates of love will not explain why those processes should give rise to conscious experience rather than unconscious information processing, nor why love possesses its distinctive normative character (i.e., why it presents itself as an appropriate response to another person’s worth). The biological sciences can only tell us how love physically manifests in biological organisms.

Conclusion

Love is so familiar that we seldom pause to consider how extraordinary it is. Theism renders love highly intelligible: if reality is ultimately grounded in a perfect mind, then a world containing creatures capable of experiencing love is just what we should expect to find. Love is, therefore, not merely one of life’s greatest blessings, but a clue to the nature of ultimate reality, itself.

“L'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle.”
— Dante, Paradiso XXXIII.145

In this conversation I talk to Amos Wollen, a philosophy and theology graduate student at Oxford University and author of the excellent philosophy Substack Going Awol. We discuss the cumulative case for theism, the problem of evil, animal suffering, and the challenge of moving from bare theism to a particular religion. Along the way, we explore psychophysical harmony, miracle claims, Pascal's Wager, and how one might rationally assess the world's religions.

Amos's Primary Substack: https://wollenblog.substack.com/
Amos's Secret Baháʼí Substack: https://independentinvestigation.substack.com/

Note: This essay is a revised version of a piece originally written in 2021. The central argument traces back to my doctoral work on suffering.

Introduction

The judgment that suffering is intrinsically bad is, to many of us, so self-evident that it scarcely seems to require defense. It’s difficult to imagine a more natural human response than the desire to escape suffering when it occurs and to prevent it where possible.

Here I argue that our experience of suffering provides powerful evidence that suffering is intrinsically bad and that skepticism concerning this conclusion comes at a substantial epistemic cost.

The Appearance of Badness

Consider an ordinary case of suffering — perhaps someone is grieving the death of a loved one or feeling intense physical agony. Such states present themselves as conditions to be escaped. Built into the experience is a sense that something has gone wrong.

Suffering is not reducible to phenomenology. The suffering of some torture victim differs from the pain experienced by a marathon runner even where the sensory qualities overlap significantly. Context and the subject’s evaluative attitudes are all relevant to whether a given experience constitutes suffering. Nevertheless, suffering characteristically presents itself as something negative from the first-person perspective. This motivates the first premise of my argument:

(P1) For many subjects, suffering is experienced as intrinsically bad.

Granted, that claim is hardly novel; it echoes Derek Parfit, who regarded suffering as paradigmatically bad for those who experience it (Parfit 1984).

3. Appearances Are Evidence

Some truths can be known through direct, first-person experience; indeed, some truths can only be known in this way. No amount of third-person observation can reveal what a headache feels like to the person who has it. As Thomas Nagel has observed, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism, and this subjective character cannot be captured from the outside (Nagel 1974).

Experience is, therefore, itself a source of evidence. My belief that I am currently in pain is justified primarily because I experience pain. I may occasionally misdescribe my experiences or misunderstand their causes, but experience provides me with direct access to aspects of reality that would otherwise remain unavailable.

The second premise concerns epistemic justification, invoking Michael Huemer’s phenomenal conservatism, according to which

(P2) If it seems to a subject that p, then the subject possesses prima facie justification for believing that p (Huemer 2001; 2007).

(P2) is straightforward: appearances constitute defeasible justification. If it visually appears as if there is a tree before me, then I have some justification for believing there is a tree before me.

Obviously, appearances can mislead. We experience hallucinations and have false memories. That notwithstanding, if appearances never provided justification, then radical skepticism would follow.

4. Why This Appearance Is Different

One might object that many false beliefs enjoy prima facie justification. This is true, but bear in mind that not all appearances are on equal footing. My belief that there is a tree outside my window depends upon numerous background assumptions; by contrast, the apparent badness of suffering is grounded directly in experience itself. If there are any evaluative judgments that enjoy substantial epistemic justification, then surely those grounded directly in the experience of suffering rank high among them.

Indeed, it’s difficult to identify a more plausible candidate. Many moral beliefs depend upon controversial theories and commitments, but the judgment that suffering is bad arises directly from one of the most fundamental features of conscious life; therefore, we are on firm ground in affirming that

(P3) The appearance of badness in suffering constitutes one of our most epistemically justified evaluative appearances.

5. The Argument From the Phenomenology of Suffering

We are now in a position to formulate the Argument From the Phenomenology of Suffering:

(P1) Suffering presents itself as intrinsically bad.

(P2) If it strongly seems to us that p, then we possess prima facie justification for believing that p.

(P3) The appearance of badness in suffering is one of our most epistemically justified evaluative appearances.

Therefore,

(C1) We have strong prima facie justification for believing that suffering is intrinsically bad insofar as we experience it as bad.

6. Objections

There are a few lines of objection available to skeptics.

Objection 1: Suffering may merely seem intrinsically bad. After all, appearances can be deceiving.

Reply: Of course appearances can be deceiving. Phenomenal conservatism doesn’t hold that appearances are infallible. What we must ask, then, is whether we possess sufficient reason to distrust the appearance in question. Insofar as suffering seems intrinsically bad, and no compelling defeater is produced, then we should believe that seeming is veridical.

Objection 2: Suffering seems bad because natural selection favored organisms disposed to avoid harmful stimuli: creatures who experienced harm as suffering are more likely to survive and reproduce. So, our judgment that suffering is bad might be explicable by our evolutionary history rather than by the objective truth of the belief itself.

Reply: Evolutionary explanations can be given for many of our beliefs — including beliefs about the external world and the existence of other minds. That evolution helps explain why we believe some proposition does not, in itself, give us strong reason to think that proposition is false. To establish that conclusion, one would need an additional premise linking the causal origins of a belief to its truth or falsity — but such premises are often difficult to defend; as numerous critics of evolutionary debunking arguments have pointed out (myself included), an explanation of a belief’s origins is not a defeater for the belief itself.

Objection 3: Suffering is not intrinsically bad at all. It may be evaluatively neutral — or sometimes even positively valuable. Nietzsche held that suffering is indispensable to human greatness, and various religious traditions have regarded suffering positively insofar as it enables participation in redemption and spiritual growth.

Reply: I’m willing to grant all of this. What follows? Certainly not that suffering is intrinsically good! At most, it follows that suffering can be instrumentally valuable or can participate in states of affairs that are good overall. Consider some painful surgery. The surgery may be instrumentally good because it prevents a greater harm, but the fact that the surgery is good instrumentally does not entail that the suffering itself is good. The same point applies more generally.

Conclusion

Nietzscheans and defenders of redemptive suffering will likely be unconvinced of my argument here, but their skepticism comes at a cost: the more willing they are to distrust the appearance of the awfulness of suffering, the more difficulty they’ll have resisting far more encompassing varieties of skepticism. If we are entitled to trust experience elsewhere, then I think we must surely be entitled to trust it here, as well. And if we are entitled to trust it here, then one of the most common judgments human beings make — that suffering is intrinsically bad — may turn out to be among our most epistemically secure judgments. If so, then at least one objective evaluative truth exists.

“One person’s suffering is in itself bad, and this is a reason to want it to be relieved.”

—Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons

References

Huemer, Michael. 2001. Skepticism and the Veil of Perception. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Huemer, Michael. 2007. “Compassionate Phenomenal Conservatism.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 74 (1): 30–55.

Nagel, Thomas. 1974. “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” The Philosophical Review 83 (4): 435–450.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1967. On the Genealogy of Morals. Translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage Books. Originally published 1887.

Parfit, Derek. 1984. Reasons and Persons. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Introduction

We live in a beautiful world; beauty exists at every level of experience. Because we’re surrounded by beauty, we can easily miss it — and neglect to realize that it’s a remarkable feature of reality which cries out for explanation, given all the conceivable ways in which reality might have been devoid of crusty. Here, I argue that that beauty is more expected on theism than on atheism — and, therefore, that it is evidence for theism.

1. The Abundance of Beauty

The abundance of beauty is easy to overlook precisely because it surrounds us.

Consider, first, the natural world. The rings of Saturn were beautiful long before there were human beings to admire them. Vast nebulae and galaxies remained unseen throughout almost all of cosmic history. Countless waterfalls and coral reefs existed for millions of years before any conscious creature was capable of appreciating them.

Beauty is not confined to the natural world: there is also intellectual beauty. Mathematicians routinely speak of elegant proofs and beautiful equations, while physicists often describe theories as beautiful or inelegant. Reality exhibits a striking degree of order, symmetry, and harmony that naturally invites aesthetic appreciation.

We also create beauty ourselves through artistic expression and the simple unfolding of our own lives.

2. Beauty Is Expected on Theism But Not On Atheism

Theism offers a straightforward explanation of beauty. If God exists, then reality is ultimately grounded in a perfect mind, and such a mind would be disposed to create beauty, given its goodness (beauty is exactly the sort of thing that a perfect mind would love).

On atheism, the universe is fundamentally indifferent. We can imagine beauty still ing in an indifferent world, but there would be no reason to expect it to arise in such a reality.

4. The Argument

The Argument From Beauty can be stated in standard form as follows:

1. There is a great deal of beauty in the world.

2. If theism is true, then the existence of beauty is unsurprising.

3. If atheism is true, then the existence of beauty is surprising.

Therefore,

4. The beauty of the world is evidence for the existence of God.

5. Objections

A few obvious objections suggest themselves.

Obejction 1: Beauty is subjective; it’s in the eye of the beholder — and, if so, then the argument loses its force since on subjectivism about beauty, beauty is not a feature of mind-independent reality at all.

Reply: Subjectivism about beauty doesn’t fit the ordinary experience very well. When we describe a landscape or a work of art as beautiful, we usually mean that we experience ourselves as responding to something worthy of admiration. We don’t just mean, “I happen to like this”.

There is much aesthetic disagreement — but then again we disagree about almost everything — morality, politics, religion, history. That doesn’t mean that there is no fact of the matter concerning any of these subjects..

Objection 2: Our appreciation of beauty is a mere evolutionary adaptation: we find certain landscapes attractive because the promoted survival in the ancestral environment, we find healthy faces appealing because they signal reproductive fitness, and so on.

Reply: This objection does have bite, I think, if aesthetic subjectivism is true: if our judgments about beauty just are the facts about beauty, then given that we’ve evolved we shouldn’t be surprised that we find the world beautiful. But, as noted above, there are good reasons to reject aesthetic subjectivism; if so, then we should be extremely surprised that an evolutionary process with no concern for truth has just happened to produce creatures with the ability to recognize actual beauty.

5.3 The world contains beauty, but it also contains ugliness in the form, for example, of decay and deformation. If beauty supports theism, should not ugliness count against it?

To some extent, yes; prima facie, ugliness is not unexpected one theism, just as evil is prima facie unexpected. But if the existence of the world’s evils can be reconciled with the existence of God, then ugliness can be so reconciled — and neither evil nor ugliness change the fact that there are many features of reality which point to God.

Conclusion

If theism is true, then we should expect a world teeming with beauty; if atheism is true, then beauty is considerably more surprising. For that reason, the beauty of the world provides at least some evidence for theism. The existence of abundant beauty does not prove God’s existence, but it does fit naturally, and best, within a theistic picture of the world — one in which beauty is not an accidental byproduct of blind processes but a reflection of the nature of a maximally perfect mind.

“The power of the good has taken refuge in the nature of the beautiful.”
~Plato, Philebus 64e–65a

Note: This essay is a lightly edited version of an essay that I originally wrote in 2021 as part of my doctoral work. It also serves as the first installment in a short series examining the nature and moral significance of suffering.

Introduction

In this post, I briefly consider the nature of suffering. What is it, exactly, to suffer? My view is that

(S) suffering is unsanctioned harm.

So, in other words (by my understanding of “unsanctioned harm”), to suffer is to be harmed against one’s will. I leave open the question of what, precisely, constitutes harm, understanding it in the broadest possible sense: namely, as referring to whatever one believes can make someone objectively worse off.1 I insist that it includes (even if it is not limited to) pain; however, pain could not be equivalent to suffering, given that it can be rationally willed — not as an end in itself, but as the necessary means by which certain valuable ends are attained (or so I suggest).

Pain and Suffering

In ordinary, everyday discourse, the terms “pain” and “suffering” are now often used interchangeably. However, I think there is value in disentangling and distinguishing them. I propose understanding “suffering” as a broader concept than “pain”, designating certain states that are not aptly described as instances of pain — including, perhaps, even some non-experiential states. We should, I propose, understand “pain” to rigidly designate only “unpleasant sensation”. This view has been given well-known expression by Saul Kripke, in the context of his broader discussion of issues relating to philosophy of mind:

Pain...is not picked out by one of its accidental properties; rather it is picked out by its immediate phenomenological quality...If any phenomenon is picked out in exactly the same way that we pick out pain, then that phenomenon is pain. (1980, pp. 152-53)

There is one view on which the intrinsically aversive nature of pain entails straightforwardly that it is always bad for2 the subject who experiences it. This is the view that seems to have been endorsed by the classical utilitarians3 and, more recently, by Thomas Nagel (1970).

I think that there is reason to reject this view, or at least to modify it. Pain is intrinsic to some activities (e.g., running marathons, lifting weights, and doing difficult intellectual labor) in which many of us engage voluntarily, for purposes of enjoyment, broadly construed. By my lights, it is odd to say that such voluntarily undertaken activities involve suffering. Do I really suffer when I run a marathon? I think I do not.

One might think that the right thing to say here is simply that it is in spite of their painfulness that we value some pain-involving activities. Or, perhaps it might seem that we should say simply that the pain involved in a painful but, on balance, valuable experience is valuable only insofar as it results in the production of some greater good (e.g., elation, a profound sense of accomplishment, etc.).

This could be true of some such experiences, but I do not think it is true of them all. To subtract the pain from one’s experience of, say, running a marathon would, in my judgment, be to strip this experience of much of its value; to diminish it. Contending with, and overcoming, the pain inherent in running a marathon is a significant part of what makes completing one so gratifying; there would be little point in running a painless marathon.

Similarly, subtracting all of the pain-inducing (or pain-involving) mental states — the frustration, confusion, loneliness, and so on — characteristic of writing a philosophical treatise, or solving some difficult equation would, to some extent, be to diminish the value of these achievements (or at least so it seems to me).

Some of the value — the all-things-considered enjoyment, even — of activities such as these derives in no small part from the struggle, the overcoming, that they involve. This is why we can come to enjoy the pain inherent in performing difficult cognitive and physical labor, even when this pain would be immiserating if we did not will, or sanction, it. Indeed, imposed upon us against our will by some other agent, such pain would be intolerable and, in fact, would constitute torture. Sanctioning these experiences in full, including their painful aspects, seems, therefore, to have a causal influence on their phenomenological character, such that they can be made tolerable, and even enjoyable, rather than purely agonizing.

The existence of possible states of experience such that to strip them of their pain would be to decrease their value suggests that pain is not itself necessarily bad for the subject of experience. We can be in pain and no worse off for it, so that neither we, nor anyone else, has any reason to diminish or eliminate it.

However, when pain is unsanctioned by the subject of experience, it is a different matter entirely. Then it is unpleasant (e.g., in the case of stubbing a toe or sitting on a thumbtack), at best, and immiserating (e.g., in the case of severe bodily damage or an acute feeling of despair), at worst — and therefore is, I suggest, properly understood as suffering.4

Beyond Pain: Non-Experiential Suffering

The category of suffering is not obviously isomorphic with that of unsanctioned pain, because there are intrinsically unpleasant states that clearly count as instances of suffering but are not naturally thought of as instances of pain — for example: the misery associated with such states of mind as depression, loss, remorse, grief, loneliness, despair, existential dread, profound fear, and so on. And while it is true that at times these states might involve pain — the pangs of grief, as we all know, can stab sharply and surely as daggers — they often do not. Yet, even in such cases, these psychological states can be far more immiserating, and make someone far worse off, than can pain as classically conceived. Certain states of bodily discomfort such as nausea, persistent dizziness, extreme hunger, and thirst, too — though miserable — are not (to my ear) described naturally as painful.

Moreover, there may be some non-experiential forms of suffering. If, for example, one holds that well-being consists partially in the development of certain capacities, in the cultivation of one’s talents, in achieving particular aims, or in having rational or true beliefs about the world, then one might think that suffering is possible in the absence of any psychological discomfort. One might, for instance, insist that there is a sense (if not a very familiar one) in which the couch potato who lives his life glued to the television set suffers, despite feeling little in the way of pain or unhappiness.5

Conclusion

I have suggested that suffering is helpfully understood as a broader category than pain. At the very least, suffering is unsanctioned pain: that is, pain that one has not endorsed as a necessary harm in the pursuit of some rationally desired end. But if there are non-experiential harms — that is, harms that are not harmful merely in virtue of their connection to any negative affective state — then one would, by my proposed taxonomy, suffer when one was in such an unsanctioned state. My view that

(S) suffering is unsanctioned harm

is ecumenical in that it does not rest upon any tendentious view of either suffering or harm. Whatever one’s understanding of suffering, one should agree that it is a harm; whatever one’s understanding of harm, one should agree that it often amounts to a form of suffering when unsanctioned by the one who is harmed. In the next post, I will attempt to establish that there are sound reasons for supposing that we ought, epistemically, to believe that

(S) suffering is intrinsically bad.

References

Aristotle. 1999. Nicomachean Ethics. 2nd ed. Translated by Terence Irwin. Indianapolis: Hackett.

Bentham, Jeremy. 1789. An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. London: T. Payne and Son.

Kant, Immanuel. 2012. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. 2nd ed. Translated and edited by Mary Gregor and Jens Timmermann. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kripke, Saul. 1980. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Mill, John Stuart. 1863. Utilitarianism. London: Parker, Son, and Bourn.

Nagel, Thomas. 1970. “Death.” Noûs 4 (1): 73–80.

Nagel, Thomas. 1986. The View from Nowhere. New York: Oxford University Press.

Sidgwick, Henry. 1907. The Methods of Ethics. 7th ed. London: Macmillan.

In this interview, I speak with Christian B. Miller, A.C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University and a prominent philosopher working at the intersection of virtue ethics, moral psychology, and character. Dr. Miller is the author of numerous academic articles and several books, including Moral Character: An Empirical Theory, The Character Gap: How Good Are We?, Honesty: The Philosophy and Psychology of a Neglected Virtue, and his newest book, The Honesty Crisis: Preserving Our Most Treasured Virtue in an Increasingly Dishonest World. Our conversation focuses on Dr. Miller’s new book, but we also explore his “mixed character” view and spend considerable time discussing higher education in the age of artificial intelligence. I hope you enjoy the discussion!

Introduction

Near-death experiences (NDEs) are experiences reported by individuals who have come close to death or who have undergone periods of severe physiological distress. NDEs often involve a sense of separation from the body, encounters with deceased loved ones, feelings of peace, and “life reviews” (i.e., recapitulations and assessments of one’s life, as a whole). Some NDEs also include seemingly accurate observations made under circumstances in which ordinary perception would be impossible. NDEs have been documented across cultures, and in recent decades they’ve become the subject of scientific investigation (Moody 1975; Greyson 2003).

Recently, NDEs have attracted renewed attention as a potential source of evidence for theism and survival after death. (For example, in their respective books on religious belief, Charles Murray and Ross Douthat, for example, argue that NDEs are evidence against a purely naturalistic understanding of reality [Murray 2025; Douthat 2025].)

In this essay, I argue that if any NDE reports involve veridical experiences of continued consciousness beyond bodily death, then they constitute evidence for theism — and that, insofar as it’s not obvious that all NDEs are non-veridical, the existence of the phenomenon is evidence for theism.

1. Near-Death Experiences

NDEs are reported most commonly in contexts involving severe physiological distress. While individual reports vary, researchers have identified a remarkably consistent cluster of recurring features (Greyson 2003). The formal study of NDEs can be traced to Raymond Moody’s Life After Life (1975), which collected numerous reports exhibiting these common features. Since then, other researchers have attempted to move beyond anecdotal reports toward more systematic investigation. Bruce Greyson developed the Greyson Near-Death Experience Scale in 1983, and Pim van Lommel and colleagues conducted a landmark prospective study of 344 cardiac arrest survivors across ten Dutch hospitals, published in The Lancet in 2001. The latter found that 62 patients (18%) reported NDEs, of whom 41 (12%) described a core experience (van Lommel et al. 2001). More recently, Sam Parnia’s AWARE project has attempted to investigate reports of consciousness during cardiac arrest under controlled conditions (Parnia et al. 2014).

The details of NDE reports vary across cultures, but many core features are similar. Christians tend to interpret an experience through Christian categories, Hindus through Hindu categories, and so on — yet reports of leaving the body, undergoing life reviews, and the rest appear across a wide range of religious and cultural contexts.

An especially significant subcategory of NDEs involves reports of seemingly accurate observations acquired under conditions in which ordinary sensory access appears unlikely or impossible. Such experiences, if veridical, would offer reason for thinking that the mind and body are metaphysically distinct (which, as previously argued, is more probable on theism).

2. Naturalistic Explanations

A number naturalistic explanatory frameworks have been proposed to account for NDEs.

One of the most common appeals to oxygen deprivation. Reduced oxygen levels can produce myriad perceptual distortions and feelings of dissociation.

Another framework focuses on neurochemical changes associated with extreme physiological stress. Temporal lobe disturbances, endorphin release, and other neurophysical events have all been cited as potential explanations (Blackmore 1993; Nelson 2011).

Psychological explanations have also been proposed. We naturally seek meaning in extraordinary experiences, and memories formed under traumatic conditions are subsequently reconstructed into coherent narratives.

Cultural and religious expectations may further shape the content of reported experiences and prime people to have certain sorts of experiences (though it’s not the case that people simply have experiences that are expected on their own cultural or religious framework.)1

No single naturalistic model has emerged as a generally accepted explanation of NDEs.

3. The Argument

If even a small subset of NDE reports involve genuine continued consciousness beyond bodily death, then those reports would amount to strong evidence for theism over atheism.

Moreover, the existence of a large and persistent body of NDE reports is itself somewhat more expected on theism than on atheism and, therefore, has evidential significance independently of the status of any particular case.

3.1 Veridical NDEs Are Unsurprising On Theism But Surprising On Atheism

On theism, there’s reason to think that human persons are not merely temporary biological phenomena whose existence ends entirely at death — given that, on theism, we are ultimately the creations of a perfect mind. Given the value of persons, and the evils which afflict us in this life, theism generates a strong expectation of continued existence beyond bodily death. More importantly, if there is an afterlife, then one might expect at least occasional reports from individuals who have approached its threshold. One might expect reports of leaving the body, encountering deceased persons, perceiving another realm, and returning with a transformed understanding of death. Thus, NDEs are not especially surprising on theism.

By contrast, atheism generates no expectation of NDEs. Individual atheists may believe in an afterlife, but atheism itself provides no particular reason to expect one — and insofar as atheism is paired with physicalism (as is often the case in contemporary times), it offers positive reason to think that an afterlife is both physically and metaphysically impossible.

3.2 The Existence of Many NDEs Is Itself Some Evidence for Theism

Even if many individual reports are mistaken or distorted in transmission, the mere existence of such a large and persistent body of testimony remains a noteworthy feature of reality. Sometimes, as the saying goes, where there’s smoke, there’s fire — and theism suggests a straightforward explanation of NDEs, whereas atheism necessarily has to deal with them in a more piecemeal manner (as Section 2 suggests).

3.3 A Statement of the Argument From Near-Death Experiences

We can now state the Argument From NDEs in standard form as follows:

1. There are NDEs across time and place.

2. NDEs are fairly unsurprising and easily accounted for on theism.

3. NDEs are surprising and difficult to account for on atheism.

Therefore,

4. NDEs are evidence for theism.

4. Objections

A few objections to the Argument From NDEs deserve consideration.

4.1 NDEs Support Survival, Not Theism

Someone might object that, even if some NDEs provide evidence for continued consciousness after death, they do not provide evidence for the existence of God; that, at most, NDEs suggest some form of postmortem survival.

I grant that even veridical NDEs do not straightforwardly establish the truth of theism. There could be NDEs — and an afterlife — but no God. Nevertheless, survival after death is much more likely on theism than on atheism, so that evidence for an afterlife is indeed evidence for theism.

4.2 Theism Does Not Predict an Afterlife

Second, one might object that theism, as such, offers no real expectation of an afterlife and, thus, renders NDEs no less mysterious than does atheism.

Theism does not logically entail that human beings survive death, and no part of the argument I’ve presented here assumes otherwise. God could create finite creatures who are annihilated at bodily death.

However, given both (a) the value of persons and (b) the evils which befall us in this plane of existence, God would have strong reason to make continued existence beyond death a feature of reality.

4.3 The Evidence Remains Weak

Finally, it might be objected that even if NDEs count as evidence for theism, the evidence is simply too weak to move the needle. The reports are often anecdotal and difficult to verify, and even granting everything argued thus far, one might think that NDEs are functionally irrelevant to the case for theism.

As I’ve indicated, I don’t think that the Argument From NDEs is among the strongest arguments for theism. If it were the only line of evidence for theism, I wouldn’t become a theist because of it. But if, as seems possible, some NDE reports are plausibly veridical, then that strengthens the case for theism (even if only marginally).

Conclusion

NDEs do not establish the existence of an afterlife or the existence of God, and many reported NDEs are undoubtedly susceptible to naturalistic explanation. Reasonable skepticism is, therefore, appropriate. Still, it would be premature simply to dismiss the phenomenon altogether, for if even a small number of NDEs are substantially what they appear to be, they are serious evidence for theism — and even if no particular case can be regarded as decisive, the existence of a large and persistent body of reports pointing in the same direction itself cries out for explanation.

“To refuse to welcome any evidence for a phenomenon because we are unprepared for its consequences is no attitude of scientific mind.”

—William James

References

Blackmore, Susan. 1993. Dying to Live: Near-Death Experiences. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books.

Douthat, Ross. 2025. Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

Greyson, Bruce. 1983. “The Near-Death Experience Scale: Construction, Reliability, and Validity.” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 171(6): 369–375.

Greyson, Bruce. 2003. “Near-Death Experiences in a Psychiatric Outpatient Clinic Population.” Psychiatric Services 54(12): 1649–1651.

Moody, Raymond A. 1975. Life After Life. Covington, GA: Mockingbird Books.

Murray, Charles. 2025. Taking Religion Seriously. New York: Encounter Books.

Nelson, Kevin. 2011. The Spiritual Doorway in the Brain: A Neurologist’s Search for the God Experience. New York: Dutton.

Parnia, Sam, et al. 2014. “AWARE—AWAreness During REsuscitation: A Prospective Study.” Resuscitation 85(12): 1799–1805.

van Lommel, Pim, Ruud van Wees, Vincent Meyers, and Ingrid Elfferich. 2001. “Near-Death Experience in Survivors of Cardiac Arrest: A Prospective Study in the Netherlands.” The Lancet 358(9298): 2039–2045.

Introduction

One of the best-known challenges to moral realism in contemporary philosophy comes from a family of arguments known as evolutionary debunking arguments (EDAs). According to EDAs, many of our moral beliefs are best explained by their evolutionary utility, which is not necessarily connected in any way to their truth. The idea is that our moral beliefs emerge from adaptive sentiments and impulses alone, which makes it exceedingly unlikely that they also track some objective normative reality.

Here, I argue that no EDA gives us reason to reject moral realism. Evolutionary processes may explain some of our moral dispositions, but they can’t plausibly give us reason to doubt all of our moral beliefs or the existence of stance-independent moral facts to which we have access.

1. What Are EDAs?

EDAs are a species of genetic argument. Such arguments aim to undermine confidence in a belief by appealing to its causal origins. The basic idea is that natural selection favors traits which promote survival and reproduction; it does not directly favor truth. To the extent that true beliefs are adaptive, evolution might give rise to creatures capable of recognizing these truths but there’s no guarantee that adaptive beliefs will be true.

The most influential EDA in the moral philosophy literature is due to Sharon Street (2006). According to her much-discussed Darwinian Dilemma, either (a) there is some relation between evolutionary forces and objective moral truth, or (b) there is not (Street 2006). If (a), then it seems extraordinarily unlikely that evolutionary processes would have produced creatures whose moral beliefs reliably track objective moral reality. If (b), then the realist must explain why natural selection would systematically favor true moral beliefs over merely adaptive ones.

So, the thought goes, as good Darwinians we shouldn’t expect our moral judgments to track an objective moral reality — and, insofar as we can explain those judgments in terms of non-moral factors, we shouldn’t believe in an objective moral reality at all.

2. What Evolution Can Explain

Moral realists like myself should concede some ground to the evolutionary debunkers. Many aspects of human moral psychology are amenable to evolutionary explanation (e.g., we tend to care deeply about our offspring and to exhibit stronger concern for close relatives than for strangers). Moral realists need not deny this. Evolution has almost certainly influenced our psychology in some profound ways.

But while some moral dispositions admit of plausible evolutionary explanation, some of our most deeply held moral convictions are far more difficult to explain in these terms. Call them Morally Expansive Beliefs (MEBs).

Take the belief that the suffering of a stranger matters morally. Concern for one’s close kin and cooperative partners is intelligible from an evolutionary perspective, but concern for a genetically unrelated stranger on the other side of the world is stranger and maladaptive. Still, many of us regard the suffering of distant strangers as morally significant and believe that we sometimes ought to make sacrifices on their behalf.

The same point applies to concern for future generations. Many of us believe we have obligations towards individuals who do not yet exist and who will never be in a position to reciprocate our sacrifices; that, too, is a MEB. While such beliefs may sometimes have indirect adaptive consequences (e.g., it’s clearly adaptive to care about one’s own descendants), they don’t seem to arise straightforwardly from the sorts of pressures that natural selection would be expected to favor. Certainly Paleolithic humans who were motivated to make sacrifices costly to themselves and to their descendants on behalf of unknown future strangers would have been at a marked disadvantage in the evolutionary arms race.

And the point applies yet again to the belief that we have serious obligations toward nonhuman animals. We evolved as omnivorous primates, and throughout most of human history the exploitation of animals often provided real advantages for us. Nevertheless, some of us have come to believe that the suffering of nonhumans matters morally and that we possess obligations not to inflict unnecessary suffering upon them; in some cases, these convictions lead individuals to make substantial personal sacrifices.

3. Rational Reflection

If the evolutionary debunkers are right, then why do we frequently arrive at moral conclusions that criticize and transcend the very tendencies evolution seems to have produced?

A plausible explanation is that human beings are creatures capable of reflection. We possess the ability to critically evaluate our attitudes and preferences. We can consider the justification for various social practices rather than mindlessly accept them. We can ask whether our intuitions are justified, whether our loyalties are defensible, whether our treatment of others is morally acceptable.

Many episodes of moral progress involve precisely this process. Opposition to slavery and other forms exclusionary practices and institutions often arose by way of explicit criticism of inherited social norms and evolved tendencies. Advocates of such reforms frequently appealed to principles of impartiality which transcend the boundaries of tribe and kinship.

5. Evolutionary Debunking and the Assumption of Unguided Evolution

There’s a further difficulty for many EDAs that is less frequently discussed in the ethics literature, in part because it concerns an assumption that many contemporary moral realists themselves share — namely, that the evolutionary process itself is unguided and non-teleological. Evolutionary theory tells us that human beings — specifically, human organisms — arose through evolutionary processes. It doesn’t tell us whether those processes are ultimately guided or unguided, nor does it tell us whether the development of human cognitive faculties occurred within a broader teleological or providential framework.

The skeptical force of many EDAs depends upon the assumptions (a) that evolution is wholly unguided and (b) that evolutionary forces constitute the complete explanation of our cognitive faculties. If those assumptions are correct, then questions naturally arise concerning why such faculties should be expected to track truth rather than merely promote survival.

If evolution is guided, then such questions need not arise. If, say, evolution occurs within a broader providential framework, overseen by a perfect being, then there is no obvious reason to regard evolved cognitive faculties as unreliable. One would expect rational creatures fashioned (however indirectly) by God to possess faculties generally capable of recognizing truth, including moral truth.

Conclusion

Two considerations, then, tell against the ambitious evolutionary debunking arguments canvassed in this essay. First, our morally expansive beliefs resist evolutionary explanation and are better understood as products of rational reflection on our evolved dispositions rather than mere expressions of them. Second, the skeptical force of EDAs depends upon the assumption that evolution is unguided, which evolutionary biology itself doesn’t establish.

I suspect that evolutionary debunkers have things exactly backwards. If objective moral truths exist, and if we possess moral knowledge, then these facts require explanation; the existence of moral knowledge, in fact, is reason to doubt that evolution is a wholly unguided process, an the reliability of our moral faculties is evidence that reality is more hospitable to moral knowledge than evolutionary debunkers generally suppose.

“The moral sense perhaps affords the best and highest distinction between man and the lower animals.”
—Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man

References

Street, Sharon. 2006. “A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value.” Philosophical Studies 127: 109–166.

Introduction

Throughout history, there have been reports of events which seem very difficult to explain in purely naturalistic terms and which are, therefore, traditionally classified as miracles. It is not obvious that all such reports admit of wholly naturalistic explanation. On theism, miracles are somewhat expected: it’s plausible that God would see reason to occasionally intervene in the world. By contrast, on atheism miracles are unexpected — and on a specifically naturalistic version of atheism, genuinely miraculous phenomena are metaphysically impossible. On this basis, in this essay I argue that credible miracle reports, if there are any (and it is not obvious that there are not) constitute some evidence for the existence of God.1

1. What Is a Miracle?

Partially due to the influence of the great Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume, miracles are often characterized as “violations” or “contraventions” of the laws of nature.

This definition isn’t ideal. For one thing, the metaphysical status of laws of nature is itself highly contested. Also, there is disagreement about whether laws are genuine governing features of reality or merely descriptions of natural regularities. Given these disagreements, it’s unclear what it would mean for a law of nature to be “violated” — and the language of “violations” itself can suggest an overly crude picture in which God periodically “breaks” the universe he created, as though divine action must somehow compete with the ordinary operations of nature.

A better definition is that miracles are extraordinary events apparently involving purposive supernatural agency. On this definition, miracles are events which seem unusual, oriented towards some end, and resistant to straightforward naturalistic explanation.

2. The Epistemics of Testimony

Most of our beliefs — about matters ranging from historical events to scientific findings — are held primarily on the basis of testimony. It would be practically impossible to function without extensive reliance upon the reports of others.

Obviously, testimony is fallible: people lie and exaggerate, hallucinate, and misremember; however, it doesn’t follow that testimonial evidence is worthless: rational inquiry simply requires that we weigh testimony in the light of all relevant considerations, including considerations which bear on the quality of a given instance of testimony.

3. Credible Miracle Reports Support Theism Over Atheism

It seems that God might have reasons to occasionally act in the world. In some cases, a miracle might look like communication — a way of pointing to some religious truth. Other times, a miracle might seem to authenticate a prophet or a movement, giving outsiders reason to take a claim seriously that would otherwise sound like bluster. God could also do quieter miraculous work — for example, easing someone’s pain or nudging someone towards moral change. And some miracles may serve no larger purpose at all beyond compassion; sometimes, God might be simply responding to people in need. And if God occasionally acts in the world, then we should we should expect some people to report experiences they interpret as miraculous. In this way, the existence of credible miracle reports is somewhat expected on theism.

On atheism, by contrast, there is no expectation of miracles. If reality is, at bottom, indifferent, then there’s no reason to expect much of anything. But more specifically, on atheistic naturalism, the entirety of this vast body of miracle testimony must ultimately be reducible to wholly naturalistic causes. Perhaps this can always be done, but it’s worth appreciating the scale of what must be explained away: across cultures and historical periods, people have repeatedly reported experiences and events they interpret as involving supernatural agency.

5. The Argument From Miracle Reports

We can state the Argument From Miracle Reports in standard form as follows:

1. Plausibly, there are credible miracle reports.

2. On theism, the existence of such reports is not terribly surprising.

3. On atheistic naturalism, such reports are surprising and must be explained entirely in terms of natural causes.

4. Thus, the existence of credible miracle reports is more expected on theism than on atheistic naturalism.

Therefore,

5. If there are some credible reports, that is some evidence for the existence of God.

6. Objections

The most straightforward objections to the argument I’ve presented here cast doubt on miracle reports — though one might also question how clear the link between miracles, even if established, and God.

6.1 A Rational Person Should Dismiss Miracle Reports

Hume insisted that a rational person should never believe testimony concerning a miracle because it will always be more probable that the testimony is mistaken than that a miracle occurred (1748/2000). This idea has been highly influential in certain circles.

If one is already an atheistic naturalist, then of course one will dismiss miracle reports a priori. But if theism is a live possibility, matters are very different: a perfect being could, in principle, produce events which would otherwise be extraordinarily unlikely. Hume’s argument, therefore, begs the question against miracles.

6.2 Conflicting Religious Miracle Claims

A perennial objection that miracle reports occur within many different religious traditions, often supporting apparently incompatible theological claims.

But I have argued only that the widespread existence of apparently credible miracle reports is more naturally expected if theism (not a specific religion) is true than if atheistic naturalism is true. If miracle reports occur across multiple religious traditions, that fact may itself be more naturally expected on theism than on naturalism; we might expect God to interact with people across cultures and historical periods.

6.3 Human Credulity and Religious Interpretation

We are psychologically disposed toward superstition, pattern-recognition, agency-detection, and religious interpretation. Cognitive scientists and evolutionary psychologists have argued that many religious beliefs may arise from ordinary features of human cognition rather than from genuine encounters with the supernatural.

It’s true that we frequently perceive patterns where none exist, infer agency where there is none, and remember extraordinary events selectively. Such tendencies surely account for many miracle reports; however, the existence of a psychological explanation for a belief does not by itself show that the belief is false.

6.4 Why Are Miracles Not More Obvious?

If God exists and wishes to reveal Himself, then miracles should simply be more obvious to everyone — there shouldn’t be a lot of miracle skeptics, in other words.

One response: there aren’t all that many miracle skeptics! There are far more miracle believers than miracle skeptics.

More substantively, though, this objection assumes that if God performs miracles, they must occur in a manner which compels assent from virtually all rational observers. It is not at all obvious that this expectation is warranted: a world saturated with undeniable miracles might undermine the stable regularities that make scientific inquiry possible or otherwise make the world overall worse.

6.5 Do Miracles Really Support Theism?

Do miracles, even if established, really point towards God’s existence? Or do they only establish the existence of beings capable of contravening the natural order (in certain moments)?

I do think there’s a genuine worry here. Few reported miracles, if any, point straightforwardly to a perfect being. So, it should simply be conceded that miracles, if established, would raise the probability of both theism along with other forms of supernaturalism. Perhaps the theist could argue, though, that other supernaturalist worldviews are more likely given theism — so that even if many miracles are caused by angels, say, this still lends credence to theism insofar as angels are more expected given God’s existence.

Conclusion

If there are credible miracle reports, their existence is more expected on theism than on atheistic naturalism. On theism, there is reason to expect miracles (and, thus, credible miracle reports); on naturalism, every apparent miracle must ultimately have a natural explanation. Miracle reports, therefore, constitute evidence for theism (provided, of course, that some of them are credible).

I have not tried to establish that any particular miracle report is credible here. That would be a separate — largely empirical — question. But if there are even a few well-evidenced cases which resist plausible naturalistic explanation, then they amount to evidence for the existence of God.

References

Earman, John. 2000. Hume’s Abject Failure: The Argument Against Miracles. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hume, David. 2000 [1748]. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Edited by Tom L. Beauchamp. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Note: This is a revised version of an essay originally published in 2021.

Introduction

The claim that “morality is subjective” might be interpreted, not as an endorsement of some kind of moral relativism (as considered previously), but instead as an endorsement of some kind of moral anti-realism: the view on which there simply are not moral truths at all (stance-independent or otherwise). Broadly speaking, there are two varieties of moral anti-realism: (i) one on which moral judgments are not truth-apt in virtue of not expressing propositions, and (ii) one on which moral judgments do express propositions, but only ones that are false. Call the first variety non-cognitivism and the second metaethical nihilism. If one of these two positions is true, then we might think that morality is entirely subjective in the sense that there is no subject matter of morality about which we could possibly be right or wrong. However, both anti-realist positions are profoundly mistaken.

Against Non-Cognitivism

Non-cognitivists believe that when we make moral judgments, what we are really doing is just expressing attitudes of various sorts - so that when I say “murder is wrong”, for example, what I am expressing is merely my personal dislike of murder. Attitudes cannot be true or false: if I say that I enjoy the taste of chocolate or love watching Roger Federer play tennis, it would not make any sense for someone to say “false”, by way of response. The great 18th-century Scottish philosopher David Hume is often identified as an early and important defender of non-cognitivism, and the view was, for various reasons, widely endorsed in analytic philosophy throughout much of the 20th-century (Ayer 1936; Stevenson 1944).

Two perennial problems for non-cognitivism are that (i) it seems to offer a poor account of what we take ourselves to be doing when we engage in moral discourse, and (ii) it cannot make sense of the logic of moral judgments. Regarding (i): most of us take ourselves to be doing more than merely expressing attitudes when we render moral judgments. When I say “murder is wrong”, I do not take myself to be merely expressing my personal disapproval of murder. Rather, I take myself to be expressing my belief that there is a universal reason not to commit murder. Regarding (ii): it seems possible to hold logically inconsistent moral beliefs. For example, if I believe that it is wrong to tell lies, then it seems I am logically committed to believing that it is wrong to tell lies in a given case. But attitudes do not admit of logical appraisal in this sort of way: I can dislike tomatoes but like ketchup without being logically inconsistent.

Against Error Theory

Error theorists, on the other hand, believe that, although truth-apt, no moral judgments are true. A form of error theory seemingly common in today’s world involves (a) believing that there could be moral truths only if God existed to issue commandments, and (b) believing that God does not, in fact, exist. On such a view, “murder is wrong” is a truth-apt proposition just as it seems to many of us, but the condition needed to ground its truth simply is not in place. The important 20th-century philosopher J.L. Mackie held that the only alternative to a kind of divine command ethic is some sort of moral Platonism (i.e., a view of morality along the lines of the one held by the ancient Greek philosopher, Plato), according to which moral values are objective and non-natural entities that possess strange properties (e.g., the property of being able to inspire motivation to act in various ways). The strangeness of these properties, Mackie believed, is itself reason to disbelieve in their existence (Mackie 1977).

One line to take against the error theorists is, of course, simply to argue that we have reason to believe that the entities – God, or non-natural values – needed to ground moral truths really do exist. Another is to argue that what Mackie perceives as the ontological strangeness of objective moral values does not count as any reason at all for thinking they do not exist: reality, we might insist, turns out to be quite strange (just read the things that quantum physicists say!); our question should not be whether some possibility is strange, but rather whether it is integral to our best account of the way things are. The anti-realist might at this point be tempted to say that presupposing a need for moral explanations is to beg the question in favor of moral realism. But, of course, the tu quoque writes itself: it can be alleged that in presupposing that there is no need for moral explanations, the anti-realist has begged the question. To break the tie, the moral realist can appeal to our deep psychological commitment to the idea that there really are moral truths. That, it might be thought, provides some evidence of an actual moral domain. Finally, one might challenge Mackie’s assumption that moral values would have to be ontologically strange. Many contemporary moral realists (e.g., W.D. Ross, Derek Parfit, Tim Scanlon, Kristine Korsgaard, Philippa Foot, Peter Railton, and many others) have attempted to defend varieties of moral realism that might be thought less ontologically strange than those that Mackie had in mind.

Conclusion

In conclusion, my view is that, while anti-realists offer challenges that need to be taken seriously, it is far from obvious that any of these challenges are so strong that they should lead us to abandon the ordinary, commonsense commitment to the existence of a real moral domain.

References

Ayer, A. J. 1936. Language, Truth and Logic. London: Victor Gollancz.

Mackie, J. L. 1977. Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Stevenson, Charles L. 1944. Ethics and Language. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Introduction

Belief in some transcendent reality — that is, a portion of reality that exists beyond the material order — has, seemingly, been a near-universal throughout our human history. Crude inference from the popularity of beliefs to their truth are plainly fallacious, but it’s also mistaken to conclude that widespread, enduring belief should simply be ignored. Convergence in belief is prima facie evidence. Often, the obvious explanation for a belief’s being widespread is simply that it’s true — that people are tracking reality.

Widespread, persistent convergence of belief is especially noteworthy when it obtains among many of history’s most brilliant minds, especially when the convergence of belief concerns some matter about which those minds were well-suited to think carefully.

God would have reasons to want us to believe in him (and, of course, would have the means to bring that about). So, on theism, we shouldn’t be surprised that belief in God is common. By contrast, on atheism, it’s prima facie surprising that people tend to believe in a being who isn’t there; it’s even more surprising still that this belief plays such a significant role in their lives.

In the light of these considerations, I argue in this essay that widespread belief in some transcendent reality, including among some of history’s greatest minds, amounts to prima facie evidence for theism.

1. Widespread, Persistent Belief as Defeasible Evidence

Durable belief that P among people is prima facie evidence in favor of P. If nearly everyone reports the existence of (for example) an external world or the passage of time, we should regard this convergence as epistemically significant, absent strong defeaters (i.e., we should regard the convergence as evidence that the beliefs in question are true).

We should regard it as especially significant when the convergence has obtained even in the face of serious criticism, scrutiny, and sometimes social sanction and persecution.

2. The Near-Universality of Belief in a Transcendent Reality

As far back as symbolic culture is detectable, humans seem to have exhibited forms of thought oriented towards transcendence (Mithen 1996; Bellah 2011). Once great civilizations emerged, religious and metaphysical systems became nearly ubiquitous (Smart 1996). These systems emerged under radically different conditions, but all gravitated toward conceptions of ultimate reality transcending ordinary material existence.

Perhaps these disparate traditions were converging on the same underlying reality. After all, we frequently succeed in referring to things we understand only partially or imperfectly. Before modern chemistry, people referred to gold, despite believing false theories about its nature. As Kripke argued, successful reference does not require exhaustive or fully accurate descriptive understanding (Kripke 1980).

3. Great Theistic Minds

Theism, and theism-adjacent metaphysical theories, have been subscribed to by many, and arguably most, of history’s greatest minds (among them: Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Avicenna, Anselm, Maimonides, Averroes, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Ockham, Copernicus, Bacon, Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, Pascal, Boyle, Locke, Newton, Leibniz, Berkeley, Euler, Reid, Kant, Faraday, Maxwell, Planck, Lemaître, and Gödel).

That highly intelligent people believe some proposition P is evidence that P should be taken seriously; certainly, it should be regarded as evidence that P is not obviously false, or insane (as the belief in God is sometimes treated by those who should know much better).

And there is reason to suspect that many of the great thinkers of history were especially well-situated to consider deep metaphysical questions, since sustained abstract reflection was a skill they had honed. Powerful minds today are often drawn away from metaphysical reflection and towards more practical and worldly matters. They also inhabit a world of distraction and are educated in institutions that place little value on metaphysical reflection — and in which natural theology is by and large a forgotten intellectual tradition (it’s possible to obtain multiple Ph.D.s from the most elite institutions of higher learning without once encountering the Cosmological Argument From Contingency or anything more than a surface-level reading of the Five Ways).

4. The Persistence of Theism

Over the last several centuries, there’s been tremendous change in the world. Still, belief in a transcendent reality (under various guises) has persisted and even thrived. There have been repeated predictions of the imminent disappearance of religion and belief in God, but they’ve proven false. Belief in God, and God-adjacent hypotheses, has persisted in extremely hostile conditions. Totalitarian governments and aggressively secular movements have attempted to marginalize and eradicate transcendent belief altogether, but their efforts have failed.

Theism persists even within contemporary academic philosophy, one of the most secularized disciplines in the academy. Those philosophers who know the most about the arguments for theism (namely, those specializing in philosophy of religion) are disproportionately theists (Bourget and Chalmers 2020). (And, no: it’s not at all obvious that this is due entirely to selection effects; personally, I suspect that it is not).

5. Theism Predicts the Persistence of Theistic Belief

There are at least two major reasons to think that theism predicts transcendent belief.

First, if theism is true, then there is a transcendent reality; the most straightforward explanation of a belief that something exists is simply that it exists and is perceived!

Second, as a perfect being, God would have reasons for wanting creatures to perceive his existence: given God’s existence, knowledge of God is plausibly an intrinsic good (i.e., it’s plausibly good-in-itself to know that a perfect being exists), and it’s plausibly in the nature of perfection to desire relations with other valuable beings (since, e.g., part of being perfect is being loving).

6. Atheistic Accounts of the Belief In Transcendence

Atheism doesn’t predict much of anything by itself, but atheistic naturalism does. Various attempts have been made at explaining human belief in the transcendent in broadly naturalistic terms. I think it’s far from clear that any succeed.

6.1 Naturalistic Accounts

Evolutionary psychologists and anthropologists have argued that the belief in transcendence arises from adaptive psychological mechanisms (Boyer 2001; Atran 2002; Barrett 2004). We might be disposed to detect intentional agency even where none exists because false positives are less costly (in evolutionary terms) than false negatives, and religious systems may historically have enhanced social cohesion and cooperative behavior. Marx characterized religion as a response to alienation and material oppression (Marx 1844/1978). Like many of Marx’s thoughts, history hasn’t been kind to this one. Freud — who, like Marx, was more often influential than right — interpreted religious belief as a form of wish-fulfillment (Freud 1927/1961). Other explanatory frameworks have regarded transcendent belief as a product of social power structures and existential anxieties (Boyer 2001; Atran 2002).

6.2 The Limitations of Naturalistic Accounts

Explaining the causal origins of a belief does not, in itself, undercut it. The faculties which permit us to do mathematics and perceive the external world have evolutionary origins, too; this doesn’t mean we should abandon our mathematical and external world beliefs.

Naturalistic explanations are arguably better suited to explaining folk religion than belief in the transcendent, in general (or classical theism, in particular). They don’t straightforwardly explain why brilliant minds across radically different traditions and environments have reasoned their way to the view that reality has a transcendent ground.

7. The Argument From Widespread Belief

We can set out the Argument From Widespread Belief In Transcendence into standard form as follows:

1. There has been widespread, enduring belief in the transcendent, including among history’s greatest minds.

2. On theism, this is expected, since if God exists there is in fact a transcendent realm.

3. On atheism, it’s prima facie surprising that there is such belief; on atheistic naturalism, there just is no such realm, by definition.

Therefore,

4. Widespread, enduring belief in the transcendent is evidence that God exists.

8. Objections

There are a few objections to this argument that we should consider, beyond the naturalistic accounts of transcendent belief already discussed.

8.1 Religious Diversity

If we genuinely apprehend ultimate reality, and that’s why we overwhelmingly believe in the transcendent, then why do religions differ so dramatically? Shouldn’t we expect more convergence if God is the cause of the belief in question?

There is disagreement about all sorts of things, though. It doesn’t follow from the fact that there’s disagreement about X that there’s no truth about X (e.g., physicists disagree about how to interpret quantum mechanics, but it doesn’t follow that there is no fact of the matter).

The Argument From Widespread Belief does not assume convergence upon a single detailed theological system — and theism does not straightforwardly predict a lot of metaphysical convergence; if God exists, he’s pretty clearly okay with humans being confused about him. Maybe that’s a little unexpected a priori, but if childhood cancer can be reconciled with God, then so can metaphysical and religious disagreement.

8.2 Widespread False Beliefs

Widespread false beliefs are also common — false medical theories and social prejudices are widespread and persistent, for example. Why shouldn’t we think that belief in transcendence is just one more stubborn falsehood to which our ape minds are prone?

As I noted earlier, though, it doesn’t follow from the fact that some widespread beliefs have been false that a belief’s being widespread carries zero epistemic significance. On commonsense epistemology, a belief’s being widespread and persistent is defeasible reason to think the belief is true; we shouldn’t defer to what most people think — but we should take note of it and consider that it might be true. And we should take particular note of what the best minds believe, at least concerning those matters about which they’re most apt to be right.

8.3 Secularization

In a number of technologically advanced, educated societies, institutional religious belief has declined substantially. This might be taken as evidence that transcendent belief is ultimately a kind of developmental residue that recedes in the wake of Progress.

But even in secularized societies, such as those of northern Europe, surveys show substantial levels of belief in non-natural entities and phenomena (Pew Research Center 2018). Apparently, when people stop participating in organized religion, they don’t tend to become atheistic naturalists; that worldview, though common in (some quarters of) the contemporary intelligentsia, remains very rare in the broader world, among average people.

Conclusion

There is good reason to suppose that most of humanity — and many of its greatest minds — have affirmed theism or something adjacent to it. The persistence of transcendent belief is some evidence that God exists. There are no obvious defeaters for it, and the belief has survived sustained criticism and considerable cultural pressure. Now, I don’t take this to be especially powerful evidence for theism — but it does seem to amount to some evidence, insofar as theism makes sense of the widespread, persistent nature of transcendent belief better than its atheistic rivals.

References

Atran, Scott. 2002. In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Barrett, Justin. 2004. Why Would Anyone Believe in God? Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.

Bellah, Robert N. 2011. Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Bourget, David, and David Chalmers. 2020. “The PhilPapers Survey 2020.” PhilPapers.

Boyer, Pascal. 2001. Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. New York: Basic Books.

Freud, Sigmund. 1961 [1927]. The Future of an Illusion. Translated by James Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton.

Kripke, Saul. 1980. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Marx, Karl. 1978 [1844]. “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction.” In The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed., edited by Robert C. Tucker, 53–65. New York: W. W. Norton.

Mithen, Steven. 1996. The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion and Science. London: Thames & Hudson.

Pew Research Center. 2018. Being Christian in Western Europe. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center.

Smart, Ninian. 1996. Dimensions of the Sacred: An Anatomy of the World’s Beliefs. Berkeley: University of California Press.