Grading Common Arguments for God’s Existence: Part I

Rating the Ontological and Teleological Arguments

There is nothing worse for an intellectual position than to make bad arguments on its behalf. Sometimes I wonder if a group of atheists has infiltrated the Christian ranks with the sole goal of creating obviously-terrible arguments in favor of Christianity, just to throw everyone off the real intellectual trail. (Of course, atheists might reasonably respond that, by that reasoning, Richard Dawkins must therefore really be a Christian after all, but I’m getting off the point).

And the point is…I don’t accept all arguments for God’s existence as equally valid just because I’m a Christian. In fact, I think many of the things that Christians have said over the years are laughably non-credible as intellectual arguments. Since I don’t imagine God is up in Heaven fretting too much about his own intellectual defense, I’m mostly untroubled by this state of affairs.

All the same, some arguments are better than others. And in the spirit of parsing out the good from the bad, the Apologetic Professor here provides a grade for some of the most common arguments for why you should believe in God. The scale goes something like this:

A = This argument provides absolute, irrefutable certainty that God exists. Believe it or die!

B = This argument, in the main, weighs more heavily in favor of God’s existence than not. Ignore it at your intellectual peril!

C = This argument has some merit for the thoughtful person, but there are at least as good of arguments on the other side. Think about it, but don’t imagine that at the end of the day it will change your mind very much!

D = This argument makes a little sense on the surface, but it is either easily refuted or there are better arguments on the other side of the debate. Ignore it!

F = This argument is so dumb that Christians everywhere ought to hang their heads in shame. Buy the book that contains the argument, make a little effigy out of it, and throw it into the fire!

1. The Argument from Imagination (“ontological” argument)

The Argument: God is the conception of a perfect being. We could not possibly have imagined the concept of a perfect being unless it actually existed. Therefore, God must exist.

Apologetic Professor’s Grade: F

This is the quite possibly the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. While it is useful to ask the question of where God as an idea came from, this argument is based on what is obviously a false premise: That because I can imagine something, it is real. Huh? I can imagine an amorphous ugly alien race with boxy chins called the MichaelBoltonians. So now – they must exist, right? I mean, I can imagine that Billy Ray Cyrus wins both the Nobel Peace Prize and the Best Male Vocalist in the same year – so, that really happened, right?

I know this argument has been espoused by some pretty smart people (St. Anselm, for example) and I’m tempted as a result to say that I simply don’t understand it. Except that even smarter people (St. Thomas Aquinas, for example) have rejected it. I imagine if I explained to St. Anselm why I thought his argument was wrong, it would go something like this:

Me: “Dude, I can imagine that your head is made of butter, but that doesn’t make it so.”

St. Anselm: “What sayest thou? Thou makest my argument for me, knave: For thou couldest not have imaginest the butter itself, lest it existed.”

Me: “Dude, I can imagine combinations from things that do exist, but the resulting combinations themselves do not necessarily exist. Maybe God is just a made-up combination of things, like your buttery head. Nice hat.”

St. Anselm: “A most excellent taste in pontifical chapeaus will not savest your soul, knave. Thou clearly are too ignorant to understandeth philosophy. Shall we instead enjoy a malted ale and discusseth the unusually pale weather?”

Me: “Dude, if your argument is so clever, why did St. Thomas Aquinas think you were an idiot?”

(Much screaming and sounds of wassailing…the non-Christmassy kind of wassailing. Exit stage left).

I confess it would be nice to end this section on that humorous fictional conversation, but it turns out that after I posted this years ago, I talked to a group of friends at our Christian Philosophy club who were enthusiastic supporters of the Argument from Imagination (called the “ontological” argument to the high-brow crowd who apparently enjoys making up long fuzzy words to substitute for short clear ones).

So you can probably imagine (insert ontological joke here) that my friends were pretty upset when I told them that I gave their favorite argument a “D” for a grade. And you can further imagine (don’t insert another ontological joke here; what are you, some kind of two-year old who repeats the same joke over and over?) that they will be especially upset to learn that I lied to them, because actually I gave their pet argument, not a “D”…but an “F.” Quoting from my original argument above, my final assessment of their beloved thesis was: “This is the quite possibly the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”

Only it turns out that the argument I gave an “F” to isn’t really the ontological argument at all; at least not the one that St. Anselm originally propounded. (My shame was so great that I actually refused to drink my fourth latte the day I found out. That day was only a three-latte-er. True story.) So, anyway, on behalf of my awesome Christian Philosophy Group brothers and sisters (who, fortunately for me, all have a very good sense of humor), and in the spirit of fair play, I have fully considered the real version of the argument from imagination and decided to upgrade it substantially...to a “D-” grade. (Hey, that extra 3% might be the difference – for all the little aspiring ontological arguments out there – between graduating from college and working as a poorly-paid-but-respectable-plumber.)

Below, I proudly present: A Dumb Person Crapping on the Ontological Argument a second time.

The Argument: Originally, I said the argument was this:

God is the conception of a perfect being. We could not possibly have imagined the concept of a perfect being unless it actually existed. Therefore, God must exist.

Actually, it turns out to be this:

It’s better to exist in reality than to only exist in the mind. “God” means “something of which nothing greater can be imagined.” If God existed only in our minds, then God would not be the greatest Thing, because the greatest Thing would exist in both the mind and in reality. This is not logically possible; therefore, God must exist.

Apologetic Professor’s Grade: D-

Uh….huh. I’ll say this for the argument: It’s cleverer than I ever imagined (seriously, please, will you stop thinking of ontological-related jokes every time I say “imagined”?) it was. Logically speaking, it’s got some force and it is not as easily defeated as you’d think. I know this only too well, because I spent several delightfully fun hours arguing with my dear friend Scott about “infinitely high mountains” and all sorts of stuff like that (us philosophical types cannot get enough of paradoxes about mountains of infinite height). And I’m not sure I won the argument. (Actually – due to the fact that Scott is much, much smarter than I am – I might have been losing. I might have been losing, that is, until I put on my “wolf man” teeth and started howling. Wolf man teeth and howling have helped me win many an argument. That and the fact that I’m actually a werewolf. This seems to intimidate people. But I digress, and it’s a full moon tonight so I need to finish this before…the changes begin).

But whether I won the argument is immaterial. Even the ontological-supporters, or as the world calls them, people-who-are-wrong, admitted that “the argument is right, but of course it doesn’t persuade anyone.” And why is that? I submit that it’s because the ontological argument is basically the equivalent of proving that 1+1=1. Now I’ve heard mathematicians can do this sort of clever little trick. And my reaction is the same as almost everyone else’s: Wow, that’s a really, really cool trick that shows basically nothing important about the world because…one plus one still actually equals two. It might as well be a monkey at a circus, or a magician performing an illusion. Well, at the end of the day, the logic of the argument from imagination is a really cool trick, but…you still can’t prove God exists by starting from the fact that we can imagine His existence. It is a fundamental fact that my imagination is not the sole creator of the things around me. It’s a fundamental fact that what I think is logical often turns out to match reality about as well as my shirt and pants match when my wife doesn’t help me pick them out (that is, not at all). And all the fancy philosophical footwork in the world won’t change these basic facts. If logic alone really proves that God must exist starting from the assumption that I can imagine a maximally-great Being, then that just shows the limits of human logic.

I imagine (seriously, not again!) that St. Anselm and I would talk about the issue like this:

Me: “Dude, are you really saying that because it appears contradictory to imagine both that a greatest Being exists and yet also believe that this Being exists only in my mind – that because of that apparent logical contradiction, I must accept that God exists?”

St. Anselm: “What sayest thou? On your knees, heretic, and beg Thou’s Creator for forgiveness!”

Me: “Dude, I’m not sure that even in made-up Olde English, you’re allowed to say ‘Thou’s’ Creator. ‘Thou’s’ totally doesn’t sound right.”

St. Anselm: “I said Thou’s and I meant Thou’s! Now, on your knees, atheist heretic!”

Me: “Dude, I’m not an atheist; I just disagree with your argument. Do you realize that from your argument you can also prove that a maximally great island must exist, too?”

St. Anselm: “I knewest it! Thou art the knave Gaunilo of Marmoutier! On your knees, knave!”

Me: “Stop saying that! And I’m not Gaunilo; I don’t even know who that is.”

St. Anselm: “O vile Gaunilo, I am St. Anselm, and twenty years ago you killed my father. Prepare to die!”

Me: “OK, stop saying that, too!”

St. Anselm: “O evil Gaunilo, doesn’t thou knowest that your precious island argument hath been widely discreditedeth by almost everyone? That’s why your name has receded to the dust binneth of history, and my name has ‘Saint’ in front of it. It’s also why my action figures sell better than yours.”

[Sound of the masses rushing out to buy St. Anselm action figures].

2. The Argument from Design (“teleological” argument)

The Argument: This argument was made famous by Paley’s “Watchmaker” analogy. The argument goes something like this – if you knew nothing about watches and you found one in the woods, you would note that it appeared to be designed for some purpose (unlike, say, a rock). It would not seem like the kind of thing that just “happened at random,” because gears and hands and such, all working together in a complicated fashion, imply some kind of clear design. And that would imply to you that there was a designer. Well, the universe appears designed for some purpose, and thus must have a designer. Therefore, God must exist.

Apologetic Professor’s Grade: C+

I like this argument more than this grade suggests, but as an intellectual argument it is not super compelling. It is based on a highly debatable premise that seems sort of subjective: That the universe appears designed. That it is clearly like a watch and not a rock. But what does that mean, exactly? That physical laws exist? Well, I can see no reason to presume that because when I throw a ball up, it tends to come down, that it is “designed” that way by some person.

You may wonder why I give this argument such a high score, given that dubious premise. Four reasons occur to me.

First, because the universe may or may not clearly and demonstrably be “designed” in an intellectually-provable sense, but it does feel designed – at least to me and to most other people I know. And why is that?

Second, because I think a variant of this argument (which has been called the fine-tuned universe argument) has a little more merit than the basic form presented here, and a little credit is leaking over from that slightly more compelling argument.

Third, because some opponents of this viewpoint up and started arguing for a multiverse, and my goodness! I have enough faith to believe in God, but the multiverse? What is this, a bad Marvel movie that entertains for two hours but simultaneously destroys the entire backstory of the MCU? If you’re going to seriously believe in something as crazy as a multiverse, then you kind of lose credibility when you mock my belief in God. Thus, this argument gets some points for making at least someone jump through such a strangely high hoop to get over it. (The multiverse is a kind of instructive parable which is worth its own article – the parable being the lengths people will go, the things they will accept, if only to avoid belief in God. Really, if you’re going to believe in the multiverse, why not just believe in God instead and be done with it?)

And fourth, and most importantly, because St. Thomas Aquinas liked the argument and Richard Dawkins doesn’t – thus, I think on both counts there must be something to it!

Teaser for Next Post

This is the first installment in a series of “grading the arguments for God” posts. Next time, we cover the following questions: Will the Apologetic Professor ever give a grade higher than a C+? Why does this guy believe in God if he thinks all the arguments for God’s existence are so bad? Does the existence of something as awful as Justin Bieber’s music definitively prove that the devil is real? That sort of thing.

[This “classic” Apologetic Professor article originally appeared sometime between 2011 and 2018. It has been adapted for the present Substack, but it largely appears here in its original form.]