Belief or Unbelief: The Mystery of God in the Light of Reason

By Joseph Ramos

There are two tragedies in life: to live life believing God exists, and finding this to be an illusion, and to live life believing God does not exist, but finding that God does exist. Nonbelievers readily concede that belief in God is the more hopeful cosmovision, but the issue is if, in fact, this belief corresponds to reality. But can anything new be said on the issue of God's existence?
Rather than arguing deductively, as is typical in philosophy, Belief or Unbelief innovates by following an inductive approach, as is typical in science, where it infers the existence of God as more reasonable in the light of philosophic considerations and the findings of modern science. Inferential arguments sacrifice rigor and definitive conclusions, but rather aim at arriving at the likelier conclusion.
Belief or Unbelief concludes that belief in God is not only a more hopeful cosmovision than unbelief, but that it is also the more reasonable inference. It is addressed to intellectually curious and open-minded lay persons, believers and nonbelievers, courageous enough to reexamine their basic convictions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Release date: Dec 29, 2023
• ISBN: 9798385205479

Joseph Ramos

Joseph Ramos is professor emeritus and former dean at the School of Economics and Business of the University of Chile. He is a New Yorker, granted honorary Chilean citizenship in 2002. He was chosen by his peers as Economist of the Year 2001. He has published eight books and over fifty journal articles. The Spanish version of this book was published in 2022, now in its third printing in Chile.

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Belief or Unbelief

The Mystery of God in the Light of Reason

Joseph Ramos

Belief or Unbelief

The Mystery of God in the Light of Reason

Copyright ©

2023

Joseph Ramos. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers,

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Table of Contents

Title Page

Acknowledgements

Preface

Introduction (A Road Map of the Argument)

Chapter 1. Is Agnosticism the Only Honest Position?

Part 1: Inadequacies of the Naturalist/Materialist Cosmovision13

Chapter 2. Signs of Spirit: Subjective Consciousness, the I

Chapter 3. Signs of Spirit: Free Will

Appendix 3.1 - How free will might operate.

Chapter 4. Signs of Spirit: Rationality and Understanding

Appendix 4.1 - Additional Critiques of evolutionary epistemology

Part II: Positive Arguments in Favor of the Option of Belief

Chapter 5. A The Cosmlogical Argument after the Big Bang

Chapter 6. A Modern Teleological Argument

Appendix 6.1 - Additional signs of guided evolution

Appendix 6.2 - Conjectures on Guided evolution

Appendix 6.3 - Additional anthropic coincidences134

Chapter 7: An Axiological Argument

Third Part: Complementary Issues and Conclusion

Chapter 8: The Great Doubt: The Problem of Evil

Appendix 8.1 - Our (apparent) insignificance

Chapter 9: The God of Believers

Chapter 10: Conclusion: What Rules the Universe, Intelligibility or the Absurd?

Bibliography

To my agnostic friends, especially Andres,

Javier, the two Jorges, and Oscar

Doubt is the price to be paid

for the gift of the intellect.

This is a translation by Michael Fleet of a minimally revised version of the Spanish edition published by the Editorial House Planeta in Chile in

2022

Acknowledgements

Many people have helped in the writing of this book. I should mention first the encouragement, the commentaries, the critiques (brutal at times but always affectionate), and the suggestions of the following readers, some of them believers, others atheists or agnostics. Thanks to them, I have had to spell out further or reformulate arguments, cut out parts to which I was unduly attached and that distracted from the main line of the argument, and, at times, eliminate assertions that were either dubious or plainly mistaken. Although my efforts were not always up to their demands, their comments undoubtedly brought out the best in me. Accordingly, I wish to express my heartfelt gratitude to Jorge Acevedo, Juan Eduardo Carreño, Francisco Claro, Jorge Costadoat, Alvaro Covarrubias, Hernán Echaurren, Silvia Eyzaguirre, Alvaro Fischer, Michael Fleet, Maria Isabel Flisfisch, Joaquin Garcia-Huidobro, Martin Hopenhayn, Oscar Landerretche, Andres Gomez Lobo, Jorge Katz, Isabel Jordán, Jorge Mardones, Sergio Micco, Javier Nuñez, Juan Ochagavia, Rodrigo Pablo, Jorge Rivera, Francisco Araujo Santos, Agustin Squella, Pablo Stephens, Eduardo Silva, Blas Tomic, and Rafael Vicuña.

I am particularly grateful to the agnostic friends I have had in my life. Their doubts have helped me to refine and sharpen my beliefs. Above all, I wish to thank my father, José Abad Ramos. It was his agnosticism, before any of the others, that first led me to question my faith and to take it more seriously. Finally, I wish to thank my daughters Rocio and Barbara, my son-in-law Pablo, and most especially my wife Gloria Baeza. They have had to put up with my virtually monothematic conversations for the last two years (albeit buffered somewhat by the pandemic).

AMDG

Santiago, Chile 2022

Preface

(A Confession)

On first hearing that I was writing a book on the existence of God, the typical reaction of friends was to remark half-jokingly, You must be kidding! What Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Hume, Kant, and so many others failed to resolve, you are going to settle? Evidently not. I am at most an amateur philosopher, taking on an issue far from my professional expertise and academic work. Yet I do hope the reader will find that I have moved the discussion a bit closer to resolution. Yes, fools rush in where angels dare to tread!

Few will doubt the issue’s importance. Yet all must wonder if anything new can be said concerning the existence of God. The book forswears certainty, not much of a cost given the history of the discussion of this issue. Rather, it innovates by following an inductive approach typical of the sciences rather than the deductive method typical of philosophy. It thus compares the relative explanatory power of theism and atheism in the light of the philosophic and scientific evidence available. I will conclude not that theism is true but that it is more consistent with the evidence and requires fewer arbitrary assumptions than the alternative hypothesis of atheism. If my argument is sound, theism is not only the more hopeful hypothesis, a point which most atheists readily concede, but it also is more reasonable than atheism. To be sure few people ground their belief (or unbelief) on reason alone. But I do wish to argue that belief stands on a strong rational footing, stronger certainly than unbelief; it is not just a matter of faith, feelings, or opinion.

Other critics might question the issue’s relevance at this time, when the churches’ failure to address sexual abuse, and their effort to cover it up, monopolize our attention and test our faith. Yes, sadly, this is all too true. But an even more serious challenge, in my view, is that the very existence of God, the foundation of all religions, is today being questioned. The so-called New Atheists

¹

have taken atheism out of the classrooms and lecture halls and into the public arena to evangelize public opinion generally. This book is also a response to that challenge.

The fact is that the existence of God is not just an issue for philosophers but for the public at large as well. For it touches on many, if not all, the important existential questions of life, such as, Where does the universe come from? Where are we going? What is the meaning of life and of the universe itself? What values should govern our lives if we are to flourish and be fulfilled? I doubt that there are many of us who have not grappled with such questions at some point in our lives. After some reflection, generally in late adolescence or during one’s college or university days, most of us decided either to reaffirm or to abandon the beliefs and lessons we learned at home. We made judgments and arrived at conclusions, tentatively at first, which, for better or worse, have ended up orienting the rest of our lives. For most of us, these initial conclusions were tinged with doubts, doubts that some have ignored, without looking back, while others have continued to grapple with them, driven by a thirst and restlessness intrinsic to human nature. I believe that many are still open to rethinking their views. This book is addressed primarily to them, restless lay persons, be they believers or not, with the spirit of adventure and courage required to take another look at these questions.

The book is written by a person relatively well-read in philosophy and science, who hopes that his arguments are not too dissonant with the best works in these disciplines. As to be expected on a work on this subject, most of its ideas come from others, especially from philosophers and scientists who work at the interface between science and religion. My contributions, if any, lie in its comparative analysis and inductive approach, in the form in which I have selected and structured the arguments, and in new twists that I have provided to classical arguments in the light of modern science. It has the additional merit of assembling in a single volume arguments that are normally found scattered among many books, each one dedicated to but one of these issues. It does so, inevitably, at the expense of reduced rigor, for it presents these ideas in simplified form, with the pros and cons that any simplification entails, hopefully making them understandable to the educated layperson. For that purpose, I have dared to write it. Obviously, I am not going to settle questions brilliant minds have failed to resolve over the course of history. But I do hope that by the end of the book the reader will concur that I have moved the debate a bit closer to resolution. In any case I am encouraged by the example of many of the New Atheists who have been trying to do much the same, they too, in many cases, without the required philosophic expertise.

As mentioned earlier, this book is dedicated to all my agnostic friends. Their questions have forced me, as a believer, to dig deeper into the question of God’s existence; they have enabled me to refine, sharpen, and enrich my beliefs. The agnostic who had the greatest influence on my life was my father. He became an agnostic while in college in Puerto Rico, when he couldn’t reconcile Darwin’s theory of evolution with a literal reading of Genesis (his mother was a Protestant, a rarity in Puerto Rico in that era). Until his conversion, at fifty-six, he was an open-minded, not a dogmatic, agnostic, and he remained open-minded and undogmatic after his conversion.

From early on in my childhood, he and I engaged in philosophical conversations and discussions. He never took advantage of his greater knowledge to impose his views; instead, he offered both his arguments and his own doubts in language easy for a boy, and later a young man, to understand. That someone as knowledgeable as my father, and a person I loved and admired, did not believe in God, awakened in me an interest in philosophical concerns.

Here are two examples. When I was still in grammar school, and around twelve years old, I remember thinking on my way to school one day that something had to have existed from eternity, for nothing can come from nothing. I wondered if the universe could be that something that had always existed, as, in fact, most non-believers of that era thought. For at the time, only a few laypersons knew about the Big Bang. But I reasoned that if the universe had always existed, it would have reached a state of equilibrium by now. But since it was still in disequilibrium, in constant flux, it could not be eternal. I concluded, therefore, that something other than the universe had to have existed from all eternity. Seventy years later, I continue to believe that in my reflections was an intuition that is as valid today as it was then. In the fifth chapter, I try to convert this intuition into a modern, scientific rendition of a cosmological argument for God’s existence.

During this same period, I reflected on life and death, wondering, for example, how a cadaver differed from the live body it had been only a few seconds earlier. Both were identical in virtually all ways except that one was dead while the other was alive. Today, I would not dare base an argument for the existence of a soul on such an intuition alone, but such reflections do indicate that at an early age I was looking at the world with quizzical and reflective eyes. I was not taking things for granted, as they appeared to be, but wondering how they came to be, about their ultimate causes.

To be sure, speaking of God has its limitations. Indeed, the very Bible tells us that no one has ever seen God. And how could it be otherwise? God is radically different from any of the other beings we know, contingent beings whose existence depends on others, who could either be or not be, who have no intrinsic reason for existing. Moreover, we know God only indirectly, by God’s effects, not God’s essence.

²

The Bible says, for example, that Moses did not see God face to face but only from behind. The arguments for God’s existence are precisely that—indirect glances.

³

They start from the known universe and conclude the existence of a necessary being, who transcends all that is known, as the foundation on which the existence of contingent things rests.

I will draw on such moments of awe, certain flashes of wonder that we all experience, and will argue that these can serve as windows to God, through which, for an instant, we intuit something beyond what is directly given, that points to a transcendent being. I suspect this was what Kant was alluding to when he spoke of being mesmerized by the starry night sky above and the moral law within me. Of course, these intuitions should not be taken as incorrigibly true but must be analyzed critically. But they can serve as points of departure of solid arguments for transcendence.

I am convinced that we all have had experiences of awe such as these. Some of us are dumbstruck by the fact that there is such a thing as life, others by the fact that the DNA of a single cell contains a master plan that produces first a well-formed baby and later a mature adult; many are literally stunned by the gratuitous and inexplicable beauty of twilight, others by the discovery that the power of one’s conscience can overcome the pull of self-interest, a capacity that clearly sets human beings apart from other creatures. This book reflects my conviction that our contact with God is rooted in experiences of awe like these that carry us toward, if not into, transcendence.

Thanks to my father, I received the gift of metaphysical wonder with a penchant for reason. For example, I have never failed to be astonished by the fact that something exists, anything, rather than nothing at all. How and why do you, me, trees, animals, electrons, protons, neutrons, quarks, photons, the very universe itself—how and why do any of these exist? Upon reflection one realizes how incredible it is that any of these things exist, as none of them had to exist necessarily. Nothingness requires no explanation, as there is literally nothing to be explained; it is be expected. But if something does exist, the question arises: why does it exist, if it does not have to? How did the universe spring into existence from nothingness—or does it just happen to exist from all eternity? That existence is simply a brute fact, as most atheists think, strikes me as much too facile and implausible. I am awestruck by the sheer fact of existence rather than nothingness. Reflections such as these produce a click in my mind, a flash of awe and wonder that point me to God, the necessary being that cannot not exist. I will return to this in chapter 5.

There are many for whom this conception of God as the necessary being does not say very much. Described as such, God seems impersonal, distant, and cold. Such a God is not the one in whom most Jews, Christians, and Muslims believe. Theirs is an ever-present, compassionate, and merciful God who cares deeply about them. I readily admit that the God that this book presents is more the God of the philosophers, a God to whom one has access by way of reason, not the God to whom ordinary believers pray and approach by means of faith. Distant as it is, I am nonetheless passionately drawn to this God of the philosophers, for it is an access to him born of metaphysical awe and deepened by reason. Thus, it grounds the God of faith in man’s highest faculty, his reason. The bulk of my argument will take off from similar experiences of wonder, and draw out their metaphysical implications.

Once the God issue took hold of me, it never let go; it never ceased to fascinate and concern me. As a teenager, I went to Regis High School, the best Jesuit high school in New York City, a parochial version of Bronx School of Science or Stuyvesant

⁴

and tuition-free at that. The Jesuits taught me the importance of reason and debate. I often challenged my teachers and at graduation was known as the class atheist, although I never really doubted this conviction. That changed, however, when I entered Columbia College. It was said at the time that Columbia was a Protestant university (it was founded by Anglicans before U.S. independence) in which atheists (presumably, most of the professors) taught Catholicism (the better part of Western civilization) to Jews (close to half of its student body). It was there that I was taken out of my Catholic bubble and came face to face with diversity. There I was forced, reluctantly, to question my beliefs. My fellow students did it for me in frequent and lengthy bull sessions in the student dorms. Perhaps because of my innate stubbornness, perhaps because of grace from above, my beliefs grew stronger from this prolonged baptism of fire. Columbia helped me take my faith seriously, and to realize that one’s convictions are truly tested in praxis, and not just through abstract reasoning. And because of this I began to explore various options of apostolic social work. But that is a subject for a different book.

My point is that from early on in my life, I have been concerned with existential issues—where we come from, where we are going, and in what does human flourishing and fulfillment consist. Because I believe that such concerns are not unique to me, but rather reflect a deeply imbedded human longing for transcendence, I decided to write this book.

The culture or cultures today dominant in the Western world seem poor to me in this respect. Their focus on the immediate leave little room for transcendence, and in this way have numbed the human capacity for deep reflection. Unlike previous eras, in which religious faith could be sensed and seen wherever one went, God has been shunted to the margins of today’s cultures. For many, God arouses not so much rejection as indifference. Indeed, I suspect that part of today’s collective cynicism, lack of social cohesion and sense of community, and even its political polarization, arises from the fact that many people and our cultures have lost touch with transcendence.

Hence, it is more necessary than ever, I think, for believers to engage in dialogue with today’s cultures, to sensitize and make them more open to transcendence. But to do this we must use the methods and tools of reason and science, the final arbiters of truth in modern society (although clearly undervalued in postmodernist circles). This book is my contribution to that dialogue. It synthesizes the readings, notes, and reflections of at least the last twenty years, ever since I began to study these issues more systematically.

⁵

A word or two about my method of argumentation. There are people who still think it possible to arrive at fundamental philosophical conclusions rigorously. Frankly, I am skeptical, at least with respect to fundamental existential issues. In any case, I have not been able to do so. Rigorous arguments tend to be deductions derived strictly from their premises. But in my experience, very few premises enjoy universal acceptance, and even fewer when one is dealing with the existence of God. Accordingly, my method of argument will not be deductive, as is typical in philosophy, where one attempts to arrive rigorously at definitive conclusions; rather, it will follow an inductive approach, as is typical of science, where one infers the most plausible or reasonable conclusion on the basis of the available philosophical and scientific evidence.

⁶

In this it innovates, though not uniquely.

⁷

So, this work will be much like that of a detective who tries to show that the best explanation of a crime is the one most consistent with most of the facts and therefore capable of identifying the culprit. Thus, I will not try to reach the absolute certainty of a logical or mathematical deduction but will infer that theism is more reasonable than atheism in light of the available evidence. But inductive arguments only lead to probable conclusions, for new evidence may appear that strengthens or weakens one’s conclusion. For this reason, the case will never be closed definitively (which has been true with the issue of God across centuries).

My analysis centers on the interface between science and religion, that is, it is based on a rereading of several classical arguments for the existence of God in the light of modern science.

⁸

I hope this provides a new, indeed provocative jolt and sparkle to these arguments. In any case, it will help readers become familiar with a literature that might otherwise remain inaccessible to them.

As I mentioned, we can only approach God in a very imperfect way, as we only know God through his creation. But since God transcends his creation, it is not possible to know God’s essence directly. Except for mystics, it is only possible to know God indirectly or by analogy. The following example may help to clarify the difference between knowing by analogy and knowing essentially. If I were a being in a world of two dimensions, for example, a plane extending in length and width but without depth, it would be hard for me to imagine a world with three dimensions, however analogous this third dimension may be to the other two. A sphere, for example, in a three-dimensional world will appear in my two-dimensional world as a point (if the sphere rests on a point along the plane), a circle (if the sphere is crossing the plane), and nothing at all (if the sphere and the plane do not touch one another at all). Hence, it would be impossible for me, a two-dimensional being, to really understand what an object of three dimensions was, even if I were to understand that the third dimension is analogous to the other two.

⁹

The same thing happens with God. We can understand that a necessary being might really exist without really comprehending that being’s essence, since the only beings we really know are contingent, that is, beings which depend on other things to exist. So contingent beings exist in some but not all possible worlds, as that’s what makes them contingent; this is different from God, who exists in all possible worlds because God is a necessary being that cannot not exist.

Finally, as I have said, my reasoning, even if persuasive, would only reach the God of the philosophers, that necessary and transcendent being that cannot not exist. But though a necessary being does not do justice to the ever-caring and transcendent God of most believers, it does provide an important step in grounding the God of believers, and this is my objective.

God, of course, needs no defending. God can take care of himself. But if I am right, non-believers do not know what they are missing by not believing in God. God does not need us; it is we who need God.

1

. I refer to the so-called Four Horsemen of the New Atheism: Richard Dawkins (The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design and The God Delusion); Daniel Dennett (Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon); Sam Harris (Letter to a Christian Nation), and Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything). Of course, there were many modern atheists before these new atheists. Among the most prominent are J. L. Mackie (The Miracle of Theism); Michael Martin (Atheism, A Philosophical Justification); and Anthony Flew (God and Philosophy), before his conversion to theism. Theists, of course, have hardly remained quiet. Among their responses I will mention but three: Alvin Plantinga (Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion and Naturalism); Keith Ward (Why There is Almost Certainly a God: Doubting Dawkins); and John Lennox, (God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?) As far as I know, there have been fewer attempts at a response in