Friday, February 20, 2004
A new "proof" of God's existence?
In Love, Power and Justice: the Dynamics of Authentic Morality, as well as in several earlier works, Dr. William S. Hatcher outlines a simple logical proof for the existence of God, an accomplishment made possible, he said, by reexamining a classic proof of God offered by the great Muslim philosopher Avicenna (ibn Sina, 980-1037) and applying to it some new logical tools derived from recent developments in mathematics.
"Up until the modern period, the logic that was used in philosophy was Aristotelean logic, which is the logic of attributes," said Dr. Hatcher in a recent interview. "In the late 19th century, however, there was an explosion of logical and mathematical ideas and discoveries." Among these new ideas is the logic of relationships.
"The use of Aristotelean logic in the many previous proofs of God is a major limitation," he said. "You can't really prove God logically with just the logic of attributes. If you try, you end up with the ontological proof, which is not really convincing."
"The logic of relations, I feel, is the single greatest intellectual advance in the history of humankind," Dr. Hatcher added. "To give an example: the whole field of computers is based on the logic of relationships."
By applying the logic of relations, Dr. Hatcher has been able to update Avicenna's proof, which is in some ways itself based on Aristole's "first cause" argument. The updated proof, Dr. Hatcher says, is now something a modern logician would find incontrovertibly true, given its three assumptions, which are:
1) Everything in the universe is either preceded by a cause or else contains within itself a sufficient reason for its existence.
2) For every system or composite phenomenon, any cause for the system is also a cause for every part of the system. (Every material thing, except possibly the elementary particles of quantum physics, is composite.)
3) The existence of a whole system cannot precede the existence of its components (or, he writes, "the constitution of a whole obviously supposes and depends upon the prior or simultaneous existence of its components.")
The proof applies modern rules of logic to these three assumptions, which Dr. Hatcher says are nothing more than obvious formulations of the scientific method. The reasoning can be summarized as follows: First, no composite phenomenon can be self-caused, because of the second and third assumptions. Second, since the entire universe is composite, it cannot be self-caused. It must be caused by something else, according to the first assumption.
Further reasoning proves that this something else "is a unique, non-composite, uncaused universal cause and thus the cause of everything that exists - and that is God," Dr. Hatcher said. "Moreover, granted the three premises, the denial of which would lead in each case to a highly unreasonable proposition, the entire proof is as incontrovertible as one plus one equals two."
In particular, humans have the positive qualities of consciousness, intelligence, feelings, and will. Moreover, although each human soul has these qualities to a specific, finite, and limited degree, there is no limit to the degree that these qualities can exist generally in human beings. (For example, no matter how intelligent a given human being may be, it is possible for another human to be more intelligent.) Since God is the unique cause of every human being, God must have these positive qualities (and undoubtedly others) to a degree greater than every limited (finite) degree, thus to an unlimited (infinite) degree. Hence, God is infinitely conscious, infinitely knowing, infinitely loving, and infinitely willing (all-powerful). In fact, since God is the only Being whose existence is absolute (i.e., uncaused), God has these qualities to an absolute degree.
Thus, the logical answer to the question "what is God's nature?" is to say that "God is like us except for possessing none of our limitations and all of our positive qualities to an infinite degree." Of course we cannot really imagine what it means to possess such qualities as consciousness or will to an infinite degree, but the refinement principle does nevertheless gives us at least a minimal, purely logical notion of God's nature.
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