The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever

certainty.” Thus understood, “Belief in God… is a matter not only of human reason but of the whole concrete, living man” (pp. 573–574).

I have summarized Kung’s argument as far as possible in his own words, because a paraphrase would not only detract from its eloquence but also risk distorting a view that contains so many complexities and contrasts. My criticisms must, and can, be briefer.

Kung’s final step seems to claim that the very act of believing in God is self-verifying; but he gives no reason at all for this claim. The act may carry with it a conviction of certainty: the relief of ceasing to doubt is pleasantly reassuring. But this is purely subjective: to rely on this would be merely another form of the assumption that there is a kind of experience which guarantees the objective validity of its content or intentional object which Kung himself has rightly dismissed (p. 533). Alternatively, the suggestion may be that in postulating a god one is postulating that which grounds both itself and everything else. But to claim that the very content of this postulation gives it objective certainty is to employ yet again the ontological argument, and Kung has rightly dismissed this too (pp. 533, 535).

If we delete this unsound final step, Kung’s argument turns essentially upon the confirming of a hypothesis, and in particular upon the relative confirmation of the god-hypothesis as against that of an objective natural world (including human beings) which has no further ground or support or goal. As for the explanation of the appearance of nihilism, the god-hypothesis is in exactly the same position as its naturalistic rival. The one says that though there is a god, this god is not obvious, and “uncertain reality” is not this god, that is, is not its own primal ground, support, or goal; the other says simply that there is no such primal ground, support, or goal. In either case the lack of any obvious primal ground leaves room for nihilism. The two rival hypotheses are equal also in their explanations of the appearance of meaninglessness in human life. But though they are equally able to explain the appearance of nihilism, the god-hypothesis is the less economical. Its merits, if any, must be due to the other aspect, to its allegedly providing reality with a ground, support, and goal, and man with an objectively valid aim. But Kung has said nothing to explain how the god-hypothesis is supposed to do this. Indeed, the Demea-like indeterminacy of his account of God would make it hard for him to do so. But what he hints at is, in fact, a set of suggestions which we have already explicitly stated and examined, especially in Swinburne’s inductive versions of the cosmological and design arguments, in Leslie’s extreme axiarchism. To avoid assuming “the groundlessness and instability of reality as a whole,” Kung suggests that it may be reasonable to assume “a cause of all causes”; and to avoid assuming the meaninglessness and aimlessness of reality as a whole it may be reasonable to assume “an end of ends” (pp. 534–535), or again “a God who will bring to perfection the world and man” (p. 657). “Believing in God as Finisher of the world means coolly and realistically—and even more, without succumbing to the violent benefactors of the people—to work for a better future, a better society, in peace, freedom and justice, and at the same time to know without illusions that this can always only be sought but never completely realized by man” (p. 659).

But the explanations at which Kung hints are completely undermined by the criticisms we have given of the specific arguments in Chapters 5, 6, 7, 8, and 13. As I have said, we have no empirical basis, in a knowledge of direct, unmediated, fulfilments of will, from which we might extrapolate to anything like Swinburne’s personal explanation as a way of using a god to explain the world or its details. Nor, correspondingly, do we have any empirical basis for the axiarchist’s suggestion that value as such may be intrinsically creative. Nor, again, could we find any ultimately plausible account of how moral values might rest upon or be created or sustained by a god. Still less do we need anything like a god to counter the supposed threat of aimlessness. Men are themselves purposive beings. In their own nature they unavoidably pursue aims and goals; they do not need these to be given them from outside. To be sure, their purposes are limited, specific, and above all conflicting: diverse strivings do not automatically resolve themselves into any grand harmonious everlasting Purpose. That is why there is a real and continuing task of inventing norms and principles through which we can achieve some rough approximation to harmony or at least contain within tolerable limits the inescapable conflicts of purpose.[15] We can welcome Kung’s realistic appreciation of this task and his readiness to take part in it. But neither participation in this task, nor the generalization of William James’s “precursive faith” which we may need to bring to it, depends in any way on a belief in “God as Finisher”; rather, their reasonability arises directly out of a human appreciation of the human situation, as Kung’s own argument shows. Nor are the difficult details of this task made any easier by postulating any sort of god.

If the specific suggestions of personal explanation, creative value, and the various forms of the moral argument fail, we are left with the postulation of a god as merely that which somehow supplies a ground, support, or goal for reality. But to postulate an entity as that which does something gives us no real additional explanation. If we say, for example, that reality is supported because there is something that supports it, the alleged explanation merely repeats what was to be explained; at best, we have a place-holder for a real explanation. Moreover, even if this god-hypothesis did somehow explain the world or moral values or human purposes, we should face again the familiar objection: Why is this (uncertain) god not as much in need of further explanation or support as “uncertain reality”? To say that God is introduced by definition as that which explains itself, that which terminates the regress of explanation, is again empty and useless; but any attempt to explain and justify the claim that he has such a special status leads us, as we have seen, to the concept which underlies the ontological proof….

Kung’s strategy, as we have seen, is to incorporate the question of the existence of a god within the wider question of how modern man is to meet the challenge of nihilism, and to suggest that the latter can be solved only by a decision in favour of an affirmative answer to the former. But this is wrong. Ironically, he has himself supplied all the materials for showing that the challenge of both intellectual and moral or practical nihilism can be met in purely human terms, by what Kung calls a “fundamental trust” which is reasonable in its own right—that is, equivalently, by a fallibilist empiricism on the intellectual side and on the practical side by the invention of value. The further postulation of a god, even as indeterminate and mysterious a god as Kung’s, is a gratuitous addition to this solution, an attempted underpinning which is as needless as it is incomprehensible.

(b) The Balance of Probabilities

We can now bring together the many different arguments for theism which we have discussed, and consider their combined effect. But some of them cannot be combined with one another. The thesis that there is a Berkeleian god is so different from any view that adds a god, either immanent or transcendent (or both immanent and transcendent, like Kung’s), to the ordinary material or spatiotemporal world, that arguments for the one cannot assist those for the other. There is a similar discrepancy between Swinburne’s (or Cleanthes’) explicitly personal god and the creative value proposed by extreme axiarchism, though Kung’s god is perhaps so medially placed between these that he could share some arguments with each of them. Moreover, the ontological argument, in all its forms, has been shown to be simply unsound; it can contribute no weight at all to the case for theism. On the contrary, its failure does, as Kant said, though not exactly in the way that Kant thought, undermine the various forms of cosmological argument: even if the concept of a being whose essence includes existence is admissible, such a being would not exist in all logically possible worlds, and its existence in the actual world would not be a priori certain or self-explanatory; it would not terminate the regress of explanation. But there is at least one interesting and important possibility of consilience, namely that which would bring together (1) reported miracles, (2) inductive versions of the design and consciousness arguments, picking out as “marks of design” both the fact that there are causal regularities at all and the fact that the fundamental natural laws and physical constants are such as to make possible the development of life and consciousness, (3) an inductive version of the cosmological argument, seeking an answer to the question “Why is there any world at all?” (4) the suggestion that there are objective moral values whose occurrence likewise calls for further explanation, and (5) the suggestion that some kinds of religious experience can be best understood as direct awareness of something supernatural. These various considerations might be held jointly to support the hypothesis that there is a personal or quasi-personal god.

In evaluating this possibility, we must note how in principle a hypothesis can be supported by the consilience of different considerations, each of which, on its own, leaves the balance of probabilities against that hypothesis.