FLAW 4: Premise 12 is entirely unclear. How does invoking the spark of the divine explain the existence of consciousness? It is the Fallacy of Using One Mystery to Explain Another.
COMMENT: Premise 11 is also dubious, because our capacity to suffer is far in excess of what it would take to make moral choices possible. This will be discussed in connection with The Argument from Suffering, #25, below.
13. The Argument from the Improbable Self
I exist in all my particularity and contingency: not as a generic example of personhood, not as any old member of Homo sapiens, but as that unique conscious entity that I know as me.
I can step outside myself and view my own contingent particularity with astonishment.
This astonishment reveals that there must be something that accounts for why, of all the particular things that I could have been, I am just this-namely, me (from 1 and 2).
Nothing within the world can account for why I am just this, since the laws of the world are generic: they can explain why certain kinds of things come to be, even (let’s assume) why human beings with conscious brains come to be. But nothing in the world can explain why one of those human beings should be me.
Only something outside the world, who cares about me, can therefore account for why I am just this (from 4).
God is the only thing outside the world who cares about each and every one of us.
God exists.
FLAW: Premise 5 is a blatant example of the Fallacy of Using One Mystery to Explain Another. Granted that the problem boggles the mind, but waving one’s hands in the direction of God is no solution. It gives us no sense of how God can account for why I am this thing and not another.
COMMENT: In one way, this argument is reminiscent of the Anthropic Principle. There are a vast number of people who could have been born. One’s own parents alone could have given birth to a vast number of alternatives to oneself. Granted, one gropes for a reason for why it was, against these terrific odds, that oneself came to be born. But there may be no reason; it just happened. By the time you ask this question, you already are existing in a world in which you were born. Another analogy: The odds that the phone company would have given you your exact number (if you could have wished for exactly that number beforehand) are minuscule. But it had to give you some number, so asking after the fact why it should be that number is silly. Likewise, the child your parents conceived had to be someone. Now that you’re born, it’s no mystery why it should be you; you’re the one asking the question.
14. The Argument from Survival After Death
There is empirical evidence that people survive after death: patients who flat-line during medical emergencies report an experience of floating over their bodies and seeing glimpses of a passage to another world, and can accurately report what happened around their bodies while they were dead to the world.
A person’s consciousness can survive after the death of his or her body (from 1).
Survival after death entails the existence of an immaterial soul.
The immaterial soul exists (from 2 and 3).
If an immaterial soul exists, then God must exist (from Premise 12 in The Argument from the Hard Problem of Consciousness).
God exists.
FLAW: Premise 5 is vulnerable to the same criticisms that were leveled against Premise 12 in The Argument from the Hard Problem of Consciousness. Existence after death no more implies God’s existence than our existence before death does.
COMMENT: Many, of course, would dispute Premise 1. The experiences of people near death, such as auras and out-of-body experiences, could be hallucinations resulting from oxygen deprivation in the brain. In addition, miraculous resurrections after total brain death, and accurate reports of conversations and events that took place while the brain was not functioning, have never been scientifically documented, and are informal, secondhand examples of testimony of miracles. They are thus vulnerable to the same flaws pointed out in The Argument from Miracles. But the argument is fatally flawed even if Premise 1 is granted.
15. The Argument from the Inconceivability of Personal Annihilation
I cannot conceive of my own annihilation: as soon as I start to think about what it would be like not to exist, I am thinking, which implies that I would exist (as in Descartes’s Cogito ergo sum), which implies that I would not be thinking about what it is like not to exist.
My annihilation is inconceivable (from 1).
What cannot be conceived, cannot be.
I cannot be annihilated (from 2 and 3).
I survive after my death (from 4).
The argument now proceeds as in The Argument from Survival After Death, only substituting “I” for “people,” until we get to:
God exists.
FLAW 1: Premise 2 confuses psychological inconceivability with logical inconceivability. The sense in which I can’t conceive of my own annihilation is like the sense in which I can’t conceive that those whom I love may betray me-a failure of the imagination, not an impossible state of affairs. Thus Premise 2 ought to read “My annihilation is inconceivable to me,” which is a fact about what my brain can conceive, not a fact about what exists.
FLAW 2: Same as Flaw 3 from The Argument from the Survival of Death.
COMMENT: Though logically unsound, this is among the most powerful psychological impulses to believe in a soul, and an afterlife, and God. It genuinely is difficult-not to speak of disheartening-to conceive of oneself not existing!
16. The Argument from Moral Truth
There exist objective moral truths. (Slavery and torture and genocide are not just distasteful to us, but are actually wrong.)
These objective moral truths are not grounded in the way the world is but, rather, in the way the world ought to be. (Consider: should white supremacists succeed, taking over the world and eliminating all who don’t meet their criteria for being existence-worthy, their ideology still would be morally wrong. It would be true, in this hideous counterfactual, that the world ought not to be the way that they have made it.)
The world itself-the way it is, the laws of science that explain why it is that way-cannot account for the way the world ought to be.
The only way to account for morality is that God established morality (from 2 and 3).
God exists.
FLAW 1: The major flaw of this argument is revealed in a powerful argument that Plato made famous in the Euthyphro. Reference to God does not help in the least to ground the objective truth of morality. The question is, why did God choose the moral rules he did? Did he have a reason justifying his choice that, say, giving alms to the poor is good, whereas genocide is wrong? Either he had a good reason or he didn’t. If he did, then his reasons, whatever they are, can provide the grounding for moral truths for us, and God himself is redundant. And if he didn’t have a good reason, then his choices are arbitrary-he could just as easily have gone the other way, making charity bad and genocide good-and we would have no reason to take his choices seriously. According to the Euthyphro argument, then, The Argument from Moral Truth is another example of the Fallacy of Passing the Buck. The hard work of moral philosophy consists in grounding morality in some version of the Golden Rule: that I cannot be committed to my own interests’ mattering in a way that yours do not just because I am me and you are not.