In Defense of Rationalist Epistemology

Below is a compilation of material I have written up in various contexts in my theology and philosophy classes defending a rationalist (or broad empiricist) over against an empiricist (or narrow empiricist) epistemology.  (For those more familiar with the theological meanings of these terms than the philosophical ones, I am using the words in a more philosophical sense.  Basically, the difference has to do with whether or not the logical analysis of concepts is a source of knowledge in addition to more direct sense experience.)  See here and here for more on this subject.

"How can the analysis of concepts give us categorical/universal knowledge of reality?"

Our concepts are derived from our observations and constitute the very foundation of all our ideas.  Reality itself is a concept derived from our observations.  So when we examine concepts to see what belongs to their essences, we can make universal/categorical claims regarding them.  For example, we can know that all cats are mammals (even cats we will never have particular experiential contact with), because the essential definition of a “cat” involves being a mammal.  If it isn’t a mammal, it isn’t a cat by definition.  Or a “triangle,” by definition, has three sides.  If a shape doesn’t have three sides, it’s not a triangle.  So we can know that all triangles everywhere will always have three sides.  Or we can look at the concept of “being” and see that it excludes “non-being” as part of its essential definition.  Therefore, we can know that all beings will exist and not not-exist, and they will be what they are and not what they are not.  This is the law of non-contradiction, which is the basic essence of logic, and so we can know that all reality is logical in nature.

"How would you respond to the objection that, when we analyze concepts, we are really only learning about things in our minds and not things in the real world?"

The distinction between our concepts and “the real world” is an illusory one, because reality itself is a concept derived from our observations/experience.  So when we talk about “reality,” or “real things,” or “the real world,” or whatever other synonyms we want to use, we are bound to the concept of reality.  It is that concept that we are talking about.  To wonder if “the real world” matches our fundamental concept of reality is like wondering if there are red things out there somewhere which aren’t red.  It’s meaningless gibberish.  There are lots of things about reality that we don’t know, but we do know that reality will be like reality.

"According to you, what was Kant’s fundamental error?"

Kant’s fundamental error was that he made an illusory distinction between “the real world” and the concept of reality, thus binding himself to the erroneous impression that all our knowledge relating to our concepts has nothing to do with “the real world” outside of our concepts.  This mistake bound him to the very skepticism he was hoping to escape.

"Rationalistic arguments are nothing more than an analysis of concepts in our minds, without checking that analysis against the real world as encountered in the empirical data, and so they are nothing but word games or mind games and tell us nothing about reality.”

There is a fundamental difference between “playing word games” and making a logical analysis of concepts.  Here’s a good example of a word game:

A. No cat has eight tails.
B. One cat has one more tail than no cat.
C. Therefore, one cat has nine tails.

This argument is obviously fallacious.  It does indeed play games with words.  It uses equivocation—that is, it changes the meaning of words in the middle of the argument so as to reach a fallacious conclusion.

But what I am doing in my arguments for God is something fundamentally different.  I am examining concepts derived from experience and exploring their logical implications.  It might be objected that concepts are not the same as objective facts in the world, and so the examination of concepts is nothing other than examining things that aren’t real.  But this objection fails to grasp what concepts really are.  They are categorizations based in our experience, and so long as we are using words that relate to concepts and have definite meaning, we are bound to the meaning of the concepts and words we make use of.

For example, if someone asks whether or not an infinite past is possible, well, this question refers to words and concepts, like “infinite” and “past."  These words have definite meanings.  Without such definite meanings, language is impossible.  It turns out that the essential idea of “infinite” includes within it the idea of “untraversability."  That is, an infinite cannot be “got through."  That’s just part of its meaning, like “having three sides” is part of the definition of “triangle."  And “past” refers to “that part of time that has already happened, that has already been got through.”  So the concepts of “infinite” and “past” are inherently contradictory.  These two concepts inherently exclude each other.  Does that mean that an infinite past cannot exist?  Yes, because “existence” is also a concept.  “Reality,” “being,” existing thing,” etc., are all synonyms of the same basic concept, and it has definite meaning.  For one thing, inherent in the idea of “being” is that it excludes “non-being."  Every particular claim of being inherently excludes its opposite.  So “red," for example, excludes “non-red," “up” excludes “down," “can fly” excludes “can’t fly," etc.  To use language with meaning, our propositions must exclude their opposites.  So logic—A is not non-A and therefore excludes non-A—is an essential component of “being," and so contradictions cannot “exist."

This is not a word game.  This is simply to use words meaningfully and to not equivocate in our ideas and arguments.  Sure, we can redefine words if we want to.  You are free to redefine “infinite” to mean “pickle” if you want to.  But you’d better make that clear to others if you want to have a productive conversation, because that’s not what it usually means.  It is not a word game to hold people to the meanings inherent in their own words and concepts.  If someone wants to consider the possibility of an infinite past, they have to deal with the fact that “infinite past” is a contradiction.  If they want to assert that contradictions can exist, they have to deal with the fact that “being” excludes “non-being” and that therefore “contradiction” is incompatible with “existence."  If someone wants to assert that there may be small, red, reptilian, egg-laying kangaroos in the Andromeda Galaxy, they have to face the fact that “small, red, reptilian, egg-laying” excludes “kangaroo," and therefore their proposition is meaningless and absurd.  If someone wants to assert the existence of four-sided triangles at the heart of the planet Mars, they will have to deal with the reality that “four-sided” and “triangle” exclude each other and that therefore a “four-sided triangle” is meaningless gibberish and can’t exist.  If they wish to keep on using these concepts, they are necessarily bound to their essential meanings.

Ironically, it is the empiricist who feels himself unbound to the meanings of his own words and concepts whose argumentation most resembles the “word game” example I gave above.  It is not I, who insist that we remember what we mean by “infinite” and “past” when we discuss the possibility of an infinite past, but the empiricist who feels free to ignore the inherent meanings of his own words and ideas and to draw conclusions based on ignoring these meanings, who is committing the “word game” fallacy of equivocation.

Therefore, logical argumentation rooted in analysis of concepts is a perfectly valid way of learning about “reality”—which is also a concept.  So arguments of this type cannot simply be dismissed on the grounds that they are not sufficiently “empirical” in nature.  The argument, “It is inherent in the nature of a triangle that it has three sides, and therefore all triangles have three sides wherever they may be found” is a different sort of argument from “sea turtles lay eggs because I’ve seen them doing it," but both are valid, and the former argument cannot be rejected merely on the ground that it is not the latter sort of argument.  I have just as much right—that is, no right at all—to dismiss empirical arguments merely on the grounds that they aren’t “abstract” or “rationalistic” enough.

In fact, the validity of empirical argumentation depends on the validity of rationalistic argumentation.  If we cannot make universal, categorical claims—even something so basic as “A always excludes non-A”—based on logical analysis of concepts, then no empirical claim could ever have any foundation or even any meaning.  Every proposition is only valid to the extent that it excludes its opposite.  If “There is an apple on the table” does not exclude “There is not an apple on the table” (assuming we’re not equivocating on the meaning of the words), then it has no meaning at all and therefore can establish no knowledge.  But you can’t prove the universal validity of logic empirically (that is, by simply observing it with your senses).  Rather, logic is a precondition for even being able to derive any knowledge from one’s senses or to form any propositions rooted in the evidence of one’s senses.  So if you reject the rationalistic method of reasoning as invalid, you must, to be consistent, reject all claims whatsoever as ungrounded and meaningless.  To put it bluntly, the empiricist's epistemology, to the extent that there is any validity in it at all, is parasitical upon rationalism.  And when the empiricist rejects rationalist epistemology, he rejects any possibility of any validity in his empirical claims.

"I understand where you are coming from when you say that it seems obvious that, by definition, you can’t get something from nothing.  But, still, I don’t see how we can know, without empirical confirmation, whether our idea of nothing corresponds with reality.  We might think that 'nothing' implies certain things, but reality often surprises us, and we have to correct our concepts and definitions in response to new things we learn through empirical investigation.  For example, perhaps you have seen many cats, and you reasonably come to the conclusion that ‘cat’ involves the idea of ‘having fur.’  But then, after many years, you encounter your first hairless cat, and you have to adjust your definition to accommodate your new empirical experience.  It would be unreasonable to say that it is impossible that there could ever be a hairless cat simply because you’ve decided to define the word 'cat' in a certain way based on your limited experience.  Our ideas are always provisional and could be corrected by further evidence.  We can never claim anything as an absolute.  And therefore, when it comes to matters of ultimate reality outside the realm of our experience, an appropriate recognition of our epistemic limitations demands that we be agnostic."

I certainly agree that we can learn new things about reality.  And I agree that we might sometimes adjust the use of our terminology to better accommodate reality when we have learned something new about it.  The example of the hairless cat is a good one, potentially (though I’m not sure if there are any cats that are literally completely hairless, strictly speaking).  If you didn’t know about hairless cats before, you might have included in your definition of a cat the idea of “having hair.”  Using this definition, a hairless cat is not a cat.  But in official taxonomy, hairless cats are classified as real cats because they are the same species, the same branch of the evolutionary tree as it were, even though they have been bred to be unusual in the matter of hair.  It makes more taxonomic sense to classify hairless cats as cats rather than exclude them simply because of this unusual trait.  Of course, words and labels are a human invention, and we can categorize things however we like, so long as we don’t misrepresent what we are categorizing.  If we wanted to exclude hairless cats from the cat family and call them by some other name, we could.  It wouldn’t be objectively wrong, simply less taxonomically convenient and efficient.

In some cases, such as when labeling empirical creatures that we don’t necessarily know everything about, we might find it useful to shift our definitions from time to time in light of new information that causes us to revise our taxonomies to make them more efficient.  This is not likely to happen with things we know through-and-through - such as, for example, a triangle.  We’re not going to learn something new about triangles in the future that will cause us to want to reclassify them in some other way.  A triangle, unlike a cat, is a pure, abstract concept which we know thoroughly, so we will not have occasion to find some new kind of unknown triangle, as can be the case with animals we are continually learning more about.

But in either case, none of this has any effect on the validity of the rationalist epistemology.  Rationalism does not deny the fact that we can learn more about the world through empirical means, nor does it deny that sometimes it makes sense to revise our categories and definitions in order to better accommodate what we know.  We can do these things, but what we can’t do is ignore or forget the meaning of a word or a concept at a particular given time while we are using it.  Although we can change the meanings of our words, at any given time our words have particular meanings, and we are bound to the meanings of our words when we are using them unless we will be speaking utter gibberish.  Sometimes a definition can be open-ended to some degree.  (“Reptiles are cold-blooded, at least all the ones we’ve come across so far.”)  Sometimes exceptions can be built into a definition.  (“Mammals give birth to live young, except for duck-billed platypuses.”)  But still, while we are using a word, we are bound to its current meaning.  The fact is that the word and concept of reality (and all its synonyms), as it is used by people in general, includes in it essentially the idea of the exclusion of non-being.  If something exists, it doesn’t not exist.  If something has certain characteristics, it does not not have those characteristics, and it does not have other characteristics that exclude those characteristics.  (“Thngs are what they are and they aren’t what they aren’t,” as I like to put it.)  All of that is clearly included in the concept of reality as the word is ordinarily used.  And that is the law of non-contradiction, or logic.  So reality, by definition, is logical.  And that’s all we need to be able to make metaphysical arguments such as those commonly used in arguments for the existence of God.  So rationalism, and its usefulness in learning important facts about reality, is established.

Perhaps someone will say, “I want to give a different meaning to the concept of reality.”  Well, OK, but just make it clear how you are defining the term.  And don’t expect to win an argument simply by redefining words.  That’s the fallacy of equivocation.  For example, if you and I are arguing about whether or not there is an apple on the table, and, in the middle of the argument, you suddenly change the meaning of “apple” to have the meaning usually assigned to the word “mug,” and then you declare that there is an apple on the table because there is a mug on the table, you have not really proved your case.  You’ve cheated by redefining the word in the middle of the argument.  Similarly, if you want to redefine reality to mean something different from how pretty much everyone else uses it, fine, but make it clear what your new definition is, and realize that your new definition is probably going to be irrelevant to the conversation at hand which is about reality in the ordinary sense.  I claim that all reality is logical, using reality in the ordinary sense.  If you say, “Well, I’m defining ‘reality’ to mean ‘something that both exists and doesn’t exist at the same time and in the same way,’ and in that definition, reality is not logical,” you’re right, reality in your definition is not logical.  But reality in your definition also doesn’t exist in the ordinary sense of that word, because, in the ordinary meaning of exist, to exist includes not not existing.  So everything that we see around us that exists in the ordinary sense of that word isn’t reality in your new definition.  So your new definition is irrelevant to my claim that all reality (in the ordinary sense) is logical, just like redefining “apple” to mean “mug” doesn’t help at all in the argument about whether or not there is an apple (in the ordinary sense) on the table.

As I’ve mentioned in class, to talk about the difference between empiricism and rationalism, I like to use the analogy of receiving a package in the mail.  The empiricists are like a person who receives a package but doesn’t open it, content with just receiving it.  The rationalists are like a person who opens the package and explores its content.  We gain our concepts from our observations of reality, and then we learn more about reality by unpacking those concepts and their logical implications.  That’s how rationalism works.  Empiricism’s failure to unpack concepts to learn more is why empiricism is an impoverished epistemology that misses the most important things about the real world.

Published on the feast of St. Mary Magdalene.

The Heart of Reality

“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it but because by it, I see everything else.”

~ C. S. Lewis

The heart of the Christian worldview exhibits the light of its own truth.  Whether we apprehend it on a more intuitive level or in the form of explicitly-articulated arguments, the Christian worldview testifies to us of its truth by providing us with the key that unlocks the door of reality.  It tells us the truth about ourselves and our world, cutting through the confusion, the errors, and the incompleteness of alternative viewpoints.  To describe it is thus to exhibit both its beauty and its truthfulness.

The heart of Christianity is that God exists.  Matter and energy, time and space, are not the ultimate reality.  The story of history is not, as Macbeth put it, "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."  There is a Person at the back of all things.  Consciousness, and everything that goes along with that--awareness, wisdom, love, relationship, values, purpose--is the stuff of ultimate reality. It is not simply a by-product of mindless processes of matter and energy.

There is only one God, one Supreme Being from whom all things come.  This accounts for the unity of reality.  There is a oneness to all things.  All things are bound together and interdependent - like pieces of a puzzle.  Puzzle pieces fit together to make a puzzle because they come from a common source and a single vision.  Likewise, reality is one and interconnected because all of it flows from one common and unified Supreme Reality.  If there were only multiple, independent gods or original causes with no common source in one Supreme Being, or if God was himself disunified and divided into independent pieces lacking a common source, there would be no explanation for the unity of reality or source from which that unity could have arisen.

God is also a Trinity.  There is one God, and that one God exists in three Persons.  Each Person is a distinct, but full, manifestation of the single Divine Essence.  For an analogy, I like to think of a website.  There is an original version of each website that exists on a server computer somewhere.  Then that server “serves” the website to different computers, so that the same website exists on multiple computers.  It's one website, but multiple manifestations of that same website.  Each manifestation is distinct from the others, but they are all manifestations of the same site.  Similarly, there is one Divine Being, but that Divine Being manifests himself in three distinct Persons.  God the Father begets the Son, sharing with him his very Being, and the Holy Spirit is a third instantiation of the single Divine Essence who proceeds from the Father and from the Son and from their relationship.  (In my website analogy, the Holy Spirit might be analogous to the website as it exists flowing through the air or through the wires between computers, going from one computer to another.)  This is important because one of the essential characteristics of personhood is relationship.  Relationship, love, community--these are not mere accidental by-products of the universe; they are at the very heart of what reality is all about.  God is not just a Person; he is a Community.

Everything that exists that is not God was made by God, and the entire story of the universe is meant to reflect and exhibit God's glorious perfections, his supreme beauty.  We humans are made in God's image.  On a lesser scale, we reflect God's nature--his life, his consciousness, his reason, his love, his relationality.  Because we exist by sharing in the Supreme Good, we too have value.  Human life, and indeed all life, has value and dignity which we ought to respect.  Morality, too, is not simply a by-product of an amoral universe.  It is part of the fundamental essence of reality.  God's values constitute an objective standard of morality.  Moral goodness is not something we pursue simply because we are programmed to do so by our genes, while it has no meaning in any more ultimate sense.  Treating people with respect and love, treating all things with respect and love, and loving God above all else, really matters objectively and ultimately.

We were created to share in, to reflect, and to enjoy God's beauty, the beauty of the Supreme Good.  That's the purpose of life.  At the very heart of reality is the loving, joy-filled Community of the Trinity where the three Persons bask in the full enjoyment of all Good.  The goodness of this world--all the beauty, all the things we enjoy and that delight us--are derived from God and point back to him.  Our destiny, if we follow it and don't reject it, is to enjoy what God has made and to "follow the bread crumbs," as it were, of joy as they lead us back to the fount of all good, God himself.  We all know from experience that this world is but a foretaste of joy.  It is full of appetizing delight, but it never satisfies.  This is not because the universe is ultimately meaningless and we've simply evolved a taste for joy that can never be satisfied.  It is because this world comes from a Higher Realm and we are meant to follow its sign-posts to finally arrive there in the end.

The Christian faith teaches us that evil and suffering are a very real part of our world--something else we know only too well from personal experience.  The very idea of evil is meaningless unless there is true goodness.  Because God exists and we sense that intuitively, we are also aware of how far short our world falls when it comes to goodness.  The world is full of horrible acts of wickedness and terrible suffering.  Christianity does not sidestep this or trivialize it.  In the Christian worldview, God dives down fully into the world of our experience, thus validating it while at the same time linking it to something more.  Our world, while reflecting God, also contrasts with him.  Our weakness, ignorance, foolishness, ugliness, wickedness, and suffering contrast with God's strength, knowledge, wisdom, beauty, goodness, and joy.  Only God possesses Life and Joy in himself.  Our world can only get these things from God.  And the Christian faith teaches us that our world has rebelled against God, declaring independence from him and trying to strike out on its own, with the result that we have brought infinite calamity down upon ourselves.  We do not have the resources to save ourselves.  But God has come down into our world.  The Second Person of the Trinty, God the Son, has taken upon himself a human nature, so that his Divine Person is expressed now not only through a divine nature but through a human nature as well.  He has embraced our weakness, ignorance, foolishness, ugliness, wickedness, and suffering.  Rather than remaining aloof from us and our condition, he has come right down into it fully, but because he is God he has also brought with him the only thing that can save us--the power of the Divine Life.  He has bridged the gap between God and the world.  He has absorbed our evil while not being destroyed by it, and he has overcome our evil with his own infinite goodness.

This is why the cross is the central image of Christianity.  Notice the depth of profundity in this.  Some views of the world recognize the Supreme Good, but they fail to take seriously the reality of evil.  I sometimes call these "playground religions," because they sidestep the horrors of the world and try to make out that everything is really OK.  They do not speak to the darkness we all know so well.  Other views embrace the horrors of evil, but they become mired in despair and nihilism, abandoning hope of a Supreme Good that can provide the ultimate context for evil and promise its eventual overthrow and the redemption of the world.  Christianity embraces both sides and maintains the proper balance.  The cross exhibits this fully.  There we have a man whose feet and hands are nailed to wooden beams.  He hangs there, suffering and dying in agony, a victim of the wickedness and cruelty of the world.  He cries out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"  God himself suffers and dies an agonizing death at the hands of the evil of this world.  The cross is thus a sign and validation of the reality of evil and the full horror of it.  And yet the Scriptures tells us that this scene, with Jesus dying on the cross, was planned by the Sovereign and Good God from all eternity as the lynchpin to the fulfillment of his good plan for all history.  On the cross, by absorbing all our evil, he brings that evil in contact with the Supreme Good, and the end result is that Goodness overcomes and obliterates the evil.  Jesus does not give way to despair.  He does not fall into sin and reject God.  He dies, but in dying he destroys death.  In embracing evil, by facing it and not sidestepping it, he defeats it, and three days later he rises from the dead, conqueror of sin and death and hell.  He ascends into heaven, completing the circle.  He who came down from heaven into our world goes back up into heaven.  But he brings back up more than he brought down.  He has bound us to himself.  He remains fully God and fully human forever.  In his ascension, he brings our nature up with him, filling us with his Divine Life.  The Holy Spirit, who flows between the Father and the Son eternally, flows down to us and brings us up into the Divine Life and Love, and we are adopted as children of God.  Our evil overcome, we become heirs of God, destined, unless we refuse it, to share in the eternal celebration that is God's own inner life.  Only in Christianity are both sides of the equation affirmed and properly balanced--evil is acknowledged and accepted for all that it is, and yet it is put in its place as subservient to the Ultimate Good, giving way to that Good in the end.  The cross is a symbol of the power and reality of evil, but also a symbol of its defeat and the ultimate triumph of Goodness.  Whenever we see a cross on the outside of a church, in a church building, in the homes of the faithful, or anywhere, we see the sign of a faith that tells us the full truth about ourselves, leaving out nothing.  The whole story of all we are is there.  As the Church, we are the official witnesses of God in this world, bringing the message that unlocks the door of reality to all people, calling them to take up their crosses and follow Christ to eternal life, suffering and dying and rising with him, rejecting evil and putting it to death and turning to God to live out his life and goodness.

Deep within all of us, whether we recognize it or not explicitly, we know that consciousness, love, relationship, and joy are a deeper part of reality than mere mindless matter and energy and physical laws.  We know that there is a point to all of this, that reality is a story with a purpose that is unfolding.  We know that life and happiness matter, and that we ought to seek the good of ourselves and others and hate and oppose cruelty and wickedness and suffering, and that we ought to love the Supreme Good above all else, because goodness is not merely a by-product of a mindless and amoral universe but is at the heart of what reality is all about.  We know that there is great evil in this world, and that that evil is not merely out there but runs through our own hearts as well.  We know that we need to get back to the source of life and goodness, and that that source is outside of us, outside of our world, and we don't have the resources within ourselves to fulfill our longings for goodness or to fix the brokenness of our world.  We have to go back to the Source of all Being, the Supreme source of Goodness, to fill and replenish what we lack.  We know that if we are to be saved, and if any meaning is to come out of all of this, it must come from goodness overcoming evil--not sidestepping it, or ignoring it, or trivializing it, or succumbing to it, but facing it head-on, embracing it, and overcoming it.  There must be a bridge that can link us to the Supreme Good, and only the Supreme Good himself can build that bridge.  We can see in the cross the fulfillment of all that we know deep down, at the most fundamental level of our being.  And that is why we know, or can know, that Christianity really is God's message to us, God's coming to us, and that therefore it is true.

For more on our intuitions about morality and why they require God, see here and here.  For a short case for Christianity that makes use of explicit philosophical arguments, see here.  For a fuller case for Christianity, see here.  For a short case for Catholicism more specifically, see here.

Published, appropriately, on the Feast of the Transfiguration.

Why Christianity? - A Brief, Philosophical Case

Below is a very basic philosophical case for the Christian worldview.  It tracks the main line of reasoning I use (though developed in much more detail) in my book, Why Christianity is True.

God Exists: The First Cause

There must be an Ultimate Reality, a Supreme Being that is the ground of all being.  This Being must be self-existent – that is, it must not have derived its existence from any other source.  This must be so because an unending chain of causality is absurd.  There are two sorts of being one might have – contingent being and self-existent being.  Contingent being is being that has characteristics that require us to say it is derived from a logically prior source.  Self-existent being is being that is not derived from any logically prior source, but is itself an ultimate foundation of being.  All contingent beings must be traced ultimately to self-existent being.  Every contingent being must be traced back to a logically prior source, so if all being is contingent, then all being must be derived from a logically prior source, which means that we will have an infinite chain of causes with no beginning, and this is logically absurd because it would mean that we have no ultimate explanation for anything.  To use a picturesque analogy, imagine a stack of books.  We want to say that the book on the top of the stack is held up by the book underneath it.  But what is holding up that book?  The book underneath it.  But what is holding up that book?  What if we imagine that the book stack is infinite, and that every book in the stack is being held up by a book underneath it?  The problem with this is that none of the books are able to explain how the whole stack is held up, because none of the books have the power to hold up anything themselves.  So we end up with no explanation, no accounting for why the stack of books is held up.  Here's another picture:  Imagine a group of people standing in a line.  Bob, one of the persons in the line, borrows a marker from Steve, the person in front of him in line.  He thanks Steve for the marker, but Steve replies that, actually, he borrowed the marker from a person in front of him in the line, Dave.  Dave says that he, too, has borrowed the marker from another person in front of him, Sarah.  Sarah tells Bob that, in fact, the line of people is infinite, and that all the people in the line are marker-borrowers, none of them are marker owners.  They've all, down to the last person, borrowed the marker from the person in front of them.  The problem with this, of course, is that if they are all marker-borrowers, there is no explanation, no accounting, for how anyone has a marker at all.  Similarly, if we say that all reality is contingent – derived from a logically prior source – we end up with no explanation, no accounting, for reality at all.  We end up with everything coming ultimately from nothing, which is logically absurd, for nothing can come from nothing.  Therefore, there must be a First Cause, a self-existent being at the back of all reality, the ultimate ground and cause of all being, which is a being-owner and not a being-borrower.

But why can't we get something from nothing?  Because nothing, being nothing, does nothing and can produce nothing, by definition.

But isn't the very idea of a First Cause, a self-existent being, itself an example of something coming from nothing?  No, because the First Cause doesn't get its being from nothing.  It doesn't get its being from something, either.  It doesn't get its being at all; it simply has its being.  That's the very idea of a self-existent First Cause.  It is to say that the very foundation of all things is a foundational being from which all else is derived.  There is nothing illogical about this idea in the way that there is something illogical about the idea of an infinite regress of being or of being coming from nothing.  In fact, as we’ve seen, not only is the idea of a self-existent First Cause not illogical, it is required by logic because all alternatives are illogical.

(“But how do we know that reality is logical?”, someone might ask.  We know this because logic is essential to the definition of being.  Logic is ultimately nothing other than the “law of non-contradiction” - that is, the idea that “A is not non-A,” or “Whatever is, it is what it is and isn't what it isn't.”  But this is clearly a part of the very idea of being, for, by definition, being excludes non-being, and any positive characteristic of being – like “redness” – excludes its opposite – like “non-redness”.  To talk about being that doesn't exclude non-being, or to talk about some positive characteristic as if it doesn't exclude its opposite, is just meaningless gibberish.  “But how do you know your concepts and definitions apply to reality as it really is?”, someone might then ask.  Well, we must remember that when we are using words, we cannot forget the meanings of the words we are using.  Our words have definitions, and these definitions express particular concepts.  Reality itself is a concept.  You cannot get beyond concepts while you are still using words with definitions.  Our words reflect our concepts, and our concepts are nothing other than our formulations of our observations of reality.  Therefore, to analyze a concept and to find that something is incompatible with it is to find out something about reality itself.  If you want to talk about a reality beyond the concept of reality, a being beyond the concept of being, you will quickly find, if you pay attention, that you are speaking meaningless gibberish.  To talk about a reality beyond the concept of reality is simply to try to talk about a part of reality that doesn't fit within the very definition of “reality.”  But to say that something doesn't fit into the definition of “reality” is just to say that it is not real – that it is not a part of reality.  So to talk about the way things really are beyond all definitions is just to use words without meaning, to speak nonsense.  So when we observe our words and our concepts to imply something or to exclude something – like being excludes non-being or red excludes non-red – we are learning something about reality itself.  From this we know that knowledge of reality can be gained not only from the direct observation of objects by our senses, but also by logical reflection on the concepts that we derive from reality.)

The space-time world we live in cannot be Ultimate Reality, because it has the marks of contingency – that is, again, the marks of being derived from a logically prior source as opposed to being self-existent.  One of those marks is time.  Our universe comes to us in a temporal sequence, moment by moment.  It consists of a past flowing into a present flowing into a future.  Time is essential to our universe, because it is evident that all the characteristics of the world around us necessarily imply a past narrative; we cannot make sense of them without such a narrative.  Time is a contingent property because every moment in time begins, and since it begins, it must derive its existence from that which came before it.  It cannot be a First Cause, because it has come into being and thus has received being which it previously didn't have.  Therefore, the space-time universe cannot be the First Cause, the Ultimate Reality.  To imagine the space-time universe as the Ultimate Reality, we would have to imagine that its time-series is infinite – that is, we would have to imagine that every moment in history has been brought into being and is therefore explained by a previous moment in history, for otherwise we would have a first moment coming from nothing (which we know is absurd).  To say that the time-series of our universe is infinite would be to say that the past is infinite, that it's always been going on and had no beginning, no first moment.  But this is absurd.  It is absurd because it provides no ultimate explanation for being, as we saw earlier.  It is also absurd because if the past was infinite, it would have taken, literally, an infinite amount of time for the universe to reach this present moment.  But this is absurd, for, by definition, one cannot traverse (get through) an infinite amount of time.  If I began to count to infinity right now, when would I finish?  Never, because you cannot ever complete an infinite series by the addition of one piece at a time.  So if the past was infinite, we could never have arrived at this present moment.  And yet here we are.

If the space-time universe cannot be the Ultimate Reality, the First Cause, because time is a part of its nature (among other reasons, such as those discussed below), then we know that the true First Cause must be outside of time.  That is, temporal experience must not be a part of its nature.  It must be timeless.

God Exists: Single and Simple

The First Cause—the ultimate, self-existent reality—must be single and simple.  That is, there must be only one First Cause, and it must be without parts or pieces.  Why?  There are a number of ways of showing why this must be the case.

If there were multiple First Causes, each of them would be completely independent from each other, since none of them could be derived from any of the others (being First Causes).  Nor could any of them be derived from anything else (again, being First Causes).  But if they were completely independent, there would be no explanation for how they all fit together as parts of a larger whole.  If there were multiple First Causes, they would exist in a larger context, a larger fabric, which would include all of them.  But none of them, and indeed none of the pieces of that fabric, could explain the fabric as a whole and the mutual inter-dependence of the parts as they make up the larger whole.  We can illustrate the problem here partly by an analogy:  Imagine you walked throughout the world picking up random puzzle pieces and putting them in a bag.  When you got home, you put all the pieces together and were surprised to find they all fit together to make a coherent picture.  This is, of course, absurd, for, since all the pieces were independent of each other, there is no explanation for the larger pattern they are all a part of.  Similarly, if Ultimate Reality consisted of multiple beings or multiple parts, there would be no explanation for the coherence and inter-dependence of the whole.  In fact, it would be even worse than the situation with the puzzle pieces, because at least the puzzle pieces, by being parts of the same world, are similar to each other in that they are all made of matter, all share the same laws of logic and physics, all are made by humans to fit into some puzzle, etc.  But the multiple beings or parts of Ultimate Reality would literally have nothing in common, for they would be completely independent.

Anytime you have pieces making up a larger whole, those pieces are essentially defined at least in part by their relationship to the rest of the whole.  Their part-of-a-larger-whole-ness is an aspect of their essential definition.  But beings who are supposed to be completely independent of each other, all being First Causes, could not at the same time be defined essentially by their relationship to each other, as inter-connected parts of a larger whole, for this would make them dependent on each other and the larger whole for their very essence and definition.  So, Ultimate Reality must be single and simple.

To put this another way:  When we have an entity made up of multiple parts, what we really have are multiple entities connected to each other – in fact, an infinite number of them, as divisible objects are infinitely divisible (see below).  None of the entities present can explain or account for the other entities present or for the fabric that connects them together and makes them parts of a coherent whole.  Since a divisible entity is nothing other than a collection of parts, the only way to explain the fabric, the whole, in which these parts exist is to trace the parts back to a more ultimate reality from which the parts are all derived.  (Think of individual pages in an animator's book.  The pages altogether, flipped through quickly, create an animated story, but none of the individual pages themselves explain or account for the overall story.  To explain this, we must trace all the individual pages back to a single source – in this case, the mind of the narrator who has the story in mind and creates the pages based on this idea.)  But if we say that a divisible object with multiple parts is the ultimate reality, the First Cause, we cannot explain its parts by tracing them back to a more ultimate reality, and so we are left with no way to account for the whole in which the parts exist.  Nothing in the divisible entity itself explains that whole, and since it is not derived from any more ultimate unifying source, nothing explains the whole.

Another argument:  When you have a reality made up of multiple parts, those parts exist in different places from each other, and so you have a fabric of reality that is extended and has dimension – in other words, it has length, height, width, etc.  Such a reality is also divisible – that is, it is made up of parts that can be distinguished from each other.  But it turns out that an extended, divisible reality can only exist within a limited viewpoint.  Picture a tree.  It is an extended reality with parts.  It has a top, a bottom, a left side, a right side.  It has multiple leaves in different places, etc.  In order to have an object like that, the parts must be in different places relative to a grid, an X-Y axis.  (Draw a picture of a tree, and then draw an X-Y axis on the picture to have a visual version of what I am talking about.)  But, if you consider it, you will see that the central point on such an X-Y axis is actually the center-point in the perspective of the one viewing the tree.  If you try to remove the perspective of the one viewing, you lose the grid; and when you lose the grid, you lose the tree, for the tree as an extended, divisible object with parts can exist only on such a grid.  Its very nature implies such a grid.  So the very essence of an extended, divisible object like a tree is necessarily bound up with the viewpoint of a perceiver.  Remove the perceiver, and you remove the thing perceived.  And the viewpoint must be that of a limited perceiver – that is, a perceiver whose viewpoint is limited to one particular vantage point in the midst of a potentially infinite number of other vantage points.  The perceiver has to be looking from one particular location among other possible locations, so that the different parts of the tree are in different places relative to the specific location of the perceiver.  If we imagine an unlimited perceiver – one whose viewpoint is not limited to a particular location, but whose view would include the whole of reality from all vantage points, such a viewpoint would have no grid, for there would be no specific location relative to which different parts of the perceived objects could be in different places on the grid.  In such an unlimited viewpoint, all of reality would appear as a single, undivided whole.  A limited viewpoint can only be derived (by adding limitation) from an unlimited viewpoint (just as a part can only be derived from a whole—without a whole, the concept of a part has no meaning), and so our conclusion, then, must be that extended, divisible reality must be derived from a more ultimate state of reality that is single and simple. 

Related to the previous argument, we can also observe that there are certain paradoxes – certain logical anomalies – in reality which can only be solved if we recognize that space-time, extended, divisible reality is derived from a more ultimate, single, simple reality.  These paradoxes have to do with places where we run into the idea of infinity.  For example, consider a table.  How divisible is the table?  I'm not asking how practically divisible the table is – that is, how much one could use tools to actually physically divide it – but I am asking how theoretically divisible it is – that is, if we distinguish all its parts, how many parts does it ultimately have?  I can divide the table in half and get two parts.  I can divide both of those parts again and get four parts.  I can divide those parts again and get eight parts.  And so on.  There is no theoretical stopping point.  Every time I divide the parts, I end up with parts that can be further divided.  So we have to say that the table is infinitely divisible, which would imply that it is made up ultimately of an infinite number of parts or pieces that are infinitely small.  But there is a problem here, because an infinitely small piece of matter would have no size, would take up no space, and thus, no matter how many of such parts we have, we will not be able to make a table that has a particular size and which takes up space.  So it would seem that the table must be infinitely divisible, and it would seem at the same time that the table cannot be infinitely divisible.  We have a logical problem to solve.  The only way to solve it is to recognize that the table, as an extended object, only exists relative to a limited perceiver (as discussed in the previous paragraph).  If we recognize that, we can say that the table is potentially infinitely divisible because there is no theoretical stopping point for division, but at the same time we can say that the table is only actually finitely divided, because no limited (finite) perceiver actually ever perceives an infinite number of divisions.  The infinite potential divisibility is thus never infinitely actualized.  There is no logical problem with a potential infinite, but only with an actual infinite, and so our logical paradox is solved.  Apart from recognizing that the extended, divisible table is derived from a more ultimate, single, simple reality, we are stuck with unsolvable logical absurdity.

God Exists: Consciousness

The single, simple First Cause must be a conscious being, because consciousness is irreducible – that is, it cannot be derived from non-consciousness.  The irreducibility of consciousness is evident upon observation.  If we imagine ourselves to start out with material that is something other than consciousness, we cannot produce consciousness from such material.  To do so, we would have to get something from nothing.  The law of causality (“You cannot get something from nothing”) implies that everything that comes from something else must be explainable in terms of the ingredients it came from and the interactions between those ingredients.  But if we have nothing but bits of non-conscious matter, able to engage in non-conscious activity by means of non-conscious energy, we will never be able to produce consciousness from such ingredients no matter what we do with them.  We can put them together in ever-so-complicated patterns.  We can add more and more pieces.  We can move them about and bump them into each other.  But all we will ever have, logically, is simply larger or more complicated constructions of non-conscious matter.  (To make an analogy, if all we have are red legos, no matter how we arrange them, put them together, no matter how many we add or how complicated the structures or formations we make from them, whatever we end up with will only be red.  It will not be green, because the color green cannot be derived from or explained by our available ingredients.)  Therefore, consciousness cannot be derived from non-consciousness.  If consciousness ever arises (as it obviously has, since all we ever actually directly perceive are the impressions upon our own consciousnesses), it must be traced back to a conscious source.  Therefore, the First Cause, the ultimate origin and source of all things, must be a conscious being.

We have now proved that all of reality must be derived from a single, simple, conscious First Cause.  As St. Thomas Aquinas would say at this point, “and this all men call God.”  Therefore, God exists.

God Exists: Some Logical Consequences

If God exists, certain things logically follow.  If God exists, there will be a Trinity.  This is because God, being conscious and perceiving everything, will have a perfect image (that is, a perfect idea, for God is beyond space and time and so has no physical, dimensional image) of himself.  By having a perfect image of himself, he will become both subject and object, viewer and viewed, perceiver and perceived, lover and beloved (for God, being the fullness of all being, must be the fullness of all goodness, and so must be infinitely beautiful and beloved of himself).  God's self-reflexive act of producing an image of himself causes the Divine Essence to exist in two distinct subsistences – that is, there will be two distinct manifestations of the one, single, simple Divine Being.  There will be one Supreme Being, and that Supreme Being will exist in two subsistences that have a relationship with each other.  And their relationship will produce yet a third subsistence of the same Divine Being, for between the perceiver and the perceived there is the act of perception; between the lover and the beloved there is the act of loving.  There is the communication of the Divine Essence from the image-producer to the image.  And this Divine Being in act who connects the other two subsistences, being himself yet another manifestation of the Divine Being, will possess that Divine Essence just as fully as the other two.  So we have one Divine Being existing in three subsistences.  Each subsistence is distinct from the others in terms of his relation to the others, but there is no division in the one Divine Being.  The subsistences are distinct by their relationship to each other in virtue of God's self-reflexive act of viewing and loving himself, not by virtue of being pieces or percentages of the Divine Being (which, being single and simple, can have no pieces).  Each subsistence is a full manifestation of the entire single Divine Being, so each subsistence is fully God.  God is a Tri-Unity.

If God exists, then there is an objective moral law.  Morality is about goodness and badness.  It is about values and the priorities of values.  If God exists, then there is a supreme viewpoint that defines what reality is really, ultimately like.  Whatever that viewpoint finds pleasant or desirable will be objectively good.  Whatever that viewpoint finds unpleasant or undesirable will be objectively evil.

The Divine Being must love himself supremely, for he is the fullness of Being.  He cannot be dissatisfied with himself, because then he would have to have an image of how he would like things to be distinct from (and not derived from or an aspect of) how they actually are, and this would imply duality and divisibility in the Divine viewpoint, which is impossible.  Since God loves himself fully, he must hate that which is the opposite or absence of himself, which would be non-being.  (Non-being is the implied notional opposite of Being, and thus an aspect of the awareness the Supreme Being has of himself involves the awareness of the idea of this notional opposite.)  The space-time universe is derived from, created by, the Divine Being.  It differs from the Divine Being in that it is limited.  God possesses in himself the fullness of reality, but the space-time universe is nothing in comparison, for each being in it is only a point in a potentially infinite (but actually finite – see earlier discussion) grid.  Thus, finite, limited reality is a manifestation of Being that is infinitely inferior in being (and thus in value) to God.  Inasmuch as Being is manifested in the space-time universe, it is lovely to God, for he loves the image of himself.  But insofar as our finite reality is a manifestation of lack and limitation, it is different from the Divine Being and manifests characteristics that are hateful to God.  While God is infinitely (completely, fully) satisfying, the space-time universe is ultimately unsatisfying.  While God is infinitely (completely, fully) powerful, the space-time universe is weak.  While God is infinitely good, the space-time universe has fallen into evil.  Misery is both a natural and a moral consequence of evil.  The natural consequence of the loss of God is the loss of happiness, and the very idea of that which is hateful being rewarded with happiness is itself hateful to a Being who loves goodness and therefore could never be willed by that Being.  There is no hope for the space-time universe and the beings in it to ultimately avoid evil and misery and to attain ultimately to goodness and happiness unless they derive these things from God, the only one who ultimately owns them.

So the space-time universe and the beings within it, without God's help, will end up in total evil and misery in a condition hateful to God.  But God does not only contrast in his fullness with space-time reality in its emptiness; he is also the filler of all.  He fills non-being with being.  If God is to save space-time creatures and fill them with himself, he must take upon himself their emptiness – their limitations, their evil, their misery.  He must absorb all of this into himself, face it, and endure it.  And then he must overcome it all, destroying the emptiness by enduring it and filling it up with his own fullness.  To use an analogy, imagine a pitcher full of water filling an empty cup.  The pitcher must take on the emptiness of the cup in order to fill the cup up with water.  After it does this, the pitcher has less water in it than it had before, corresponding to the lack of water the cup had previously.  And this is where the analogy breaks down, for when God takes upon himself our emptiness and fills us with his fullness, he loses nothing ultimately.  His fullness is so full, and our emptiness so small in comparison, that he can absorb it without ultimate harm or loss, while we gain his fullness.  While he must endure our emptiness, absorb it into himself, and overcome it, his victory, unlike the pitcher's, is complete. 

Christianity is the True Religion

The reason Christianity is the true religion is because, of all the philosophies and religions existing in the world, it is the only one which gets reality fundamentally right.  All others fail by fundamental error or at least by fundamental incompleteness.

Christianity teaches that there is one God, absolute, single, and simple.  It teaches that this God exists in a Trinity of three subsistences (Persons), each of whom bear the whole of the Divine Being and who are distinct only in terms of their relationships to each other.  The Father begets the Son, who is the fullness of his Being and his perfect Image.  The Holy Spirit is the third Person of the Trinity who proceeds from the Father and the Son, the manifestation of the love and the relationship between the Father and the Son.  Christianity teaches that God created the space-time universe, which has being but which is not divine and is infinitely inferior to God.  The creation has fallen into decay and emptiness.  Humankind has fallen into a state of moral evil (sin) by rebellion against God, and God's objective moral law decrees destruction and misery for humans due to sin.  But God has provided salvation for humanity by doing for us what we cannot do for ourselves.  The Second Person of the Trinity – God the Son – has taken upon himself our limitations by acquiring a human nature.  God has become man while remaining fully God.  That human is Jesus Christ.  Christ took upon himself the sins and miseries of the world.  He suffered, died, and was buried, thus absorbing into himself all our weaknesses, lacks, sinfulness, and misery.  On the third day he rose again from the dead, the conqueror of sin, death, and hell, and has ascended to the Father.  Through his death and his resurrection, he has attained eternal salvation for the human race, and all those who trust in him to the end are redeemed and filled with the fullness of God.  God sends to them his Holy Spirit, the Third Person of the Trinity, who fills them with the Divine Life and makes them adopted children of God, sharing by grace in the Sonship of the Son, purified and made holy and beautiful to God, and destined to enjoy the fullness of the life of God forever in the Beatific Vision.

If all this sounds familiar, it should, for it is the very nature of reality we proved in our previous arguments.  Christianity gets all this right.  All other religions fail to do so (although they often have a good deal of truth mixed in).  Some worldviews, like Atheism, deny the existence of God and thus fall into absurdity from the very beginning.  Others, like Agnosticism, fail by failing to realize all that can indeed be known, as we have shown by our arguments above.  Other religions, like paganism, Jainism, and Shinto, deny or fail to teach an ultimate, single, simple reality, and so fail in the same way Atheism does.  Other religions, like Hinduism and Buddhism and Taoism, teach an Ultimate, single Reality, but they fail to clarify whether that Supreme Being is fully conscious.  They fail to point out his Trinitarian nature.  They treat the world as an illusion, as almost a day-dream of the Divine Being rather than a conscious creation.  They hold that what goes on down here is ultimately unimportant, and that our salvation lies in simply learning to ignore and forget about this world and focus instead on union with the Ultimate Reality.  They fail to recognize that our salvation can only come from God's help and grace, as he actively takes upon himself our emptiness and our sin and fills us with his fullness and goodness.  The way to salvation is not by ignoring this fallen, empty reality but by God's dealing with that reality and confronting it with his fullness.  The pitcher does not fill the cup simply by trying to convince the cup to forget that it is a cup and to focus on the importance of the pitcher, but by taking on the emptiness of the cup and filling the cup with its fullness.  Religions like Judaism and Islam believe in a fully conscious, single, simple Creator God, and in this they do well.  But they fail to recognize his Trinitarian nature.  And they fail to recognize the full implications of our emptiness and sin.  They tell us to save ourselves by obedience to God, but they fail to recognize that we cannot be saved unless God unites himself with us, takes upon himself our limitations and failures, conquers these, and thus breaks the barrier and fills us with his Divine life and righteousness.

In the world, there are many philosophies and many religions.  Some claim to have been invented or discovered by humans, others to have been revealed by God or the gods or some form of Ultimate Reality.  But among all of these, Christianity stands unique as the only one to provide the key that unlocks for us the true nature of reality, to reveal reality to us in all its crucial aspects.  Thus, Christianity's claim to be the true divine revelation stands vindicated, as it is clear that God has associated the revelation of himself inseparably with the Christian religion.  In Christ, God has reached out to the human race and brought to us the knowledge of himself, the knowledge of ourselves, and the way of salvation.

For why Catholicism more specifically is true, see here.

Published on the feast of St. Camillus de Lellis.

ADDENDUM 8/6/20:  See here for a more intuitive case for Christianity.

ADDENDUM 2/5/23:  In my Apologetics class, I make use of another layout of the basic argument for God and for Christianity in the form of a series of points I want to emphasize in class.  I have pasted it below.  "George" refers to my Catholic role-play character, George Stewart.  (I role-play different characters with different worldviews in class as a way of aiding engagement in the arguments.)

1. Rationalism, as George defines the word, refers to the position that holds that knowledge is gained not only through the senses and direct internal reflection, but also through the logical analysis of concepts.

2. George holds that philosophical arguments (by which he means non-empirical arguments rooted in the logical analysis of concepts) can give us true knowledge of objective reality.  Our experience of the world provides the basis for our concepts or ideas (for example, our experience with cats in the world provides the foundation for our concept of a “cat”).  These concepts/ideas have certain essential characteristics that give them definite meaning (for example, the concept of a “cat” necessarily involves things like “walks on four legs,” “gives birth to live young,” “is a mammal,” etc.).  So we can gain knowledge about cats by examining the essential characteristics involved in the concept of “cat.”  We can even have universal knowledge beyond the limits of our empirical experience.  For example, if it is essential to the definition of a “cat” that it be a mammal, then we know that wherever cats exist, even if they exist in distant galaxies beyond the reach of our empirical investigation, they will be mammals.  It is even easier to see the validity of this method of knowing when we are dealing with very simple concepts with clearer essences.  For example, by definition, a “triangle” has three sides.  If something doesn’t have three sides, then by definition it is not a triangle.  Therefore, we can know that wherever triangles exist, even if they are beyond the reach of our empirical experience, they will certainly have three sides.

3. There are two fundamental categories of “being.”  In other words, there are two basic kinds of beings that can exist.  (And by “being” here we mean not just living things but “all things that exist.”)  The two basic kinds of beings are “contingent” beings and “self-existent” beings.  A contingent being is a being that depends on something else for its existence.  It gets its existence from something outside of itself.  (For example, I am a contingent being because I got my existence from my parents.)  A “self-existent” being is a being that does not depend on anything else for its existence.  It simply has its existence; it doesn’t get its existence from anything outside of itself.  The classical theistic concept of God is an example of a self-existent being, since God did not get his existence from anything else and is not dependent on anything else for his existence.  His existence is simply a rock-bottom foundational reality, not dependent on any deeper level of reality from which it comes.

4. George holds that all beings cannot be contingent because then there would be no ultimate explanation for anything.  If everything that exists is dependent on something else for its existence, then there is no final source for existence, so we have all things ultimately coming from nothing at all.  Picture a circle of people with a marker.  They are all passing the marker back and forth to each other.  None of them is the owner of the marker; they’ve all borrowed the marker from each other.  If this circle of people were all that existed, there would be no explanation for where the marker came from.  If they are all marker-borrowers, there is no one from whom the marker was originally borrowed, and so the marker has come from nothing ultimately.  If you imagine an infinitely long row of marker-borrowers, each person in the row borrowing the marker from the person on his left side, this still will not solve the problem, because there would still be no marker-owner from which the marker was originally borrowed.  A marker-borrower cannot ultimately explain where the marker came from.  Similarly, a contingent being cannot explain where being came from.  A reality full of nothing but contingent beings would be a world with no ultimate explanation for where existence came from.  There must be a self-existent being who is an owner and not a borrower of being in order to avoid being coming from nothing.

5. George holds that we cannot get something from nothing because “nothing,” by definition, has nothing to give and can do nothing.  For example, if you ask me where I got my marker, and I say, “from nothing,” this will not provide an adequate explanation for where my marker came from, for nothing, being nothing, cannot produce a marker or give one to me.

6. George calls the self-existent being that is the ultimate foundation and explanation for all that exists the “First Cause” because it itself is the cause or source of everything else but is not itself caused by or derived from anything else.  He holds that the First Cause must be timeless–or be outside of time, or not have time as a part of its experience–because time is a contingent property.  That is, to be in time is to be a contingent being.  If you are in time, you have a past history, and so every moment of your existence has come into being and has to be explained by whatever existed before it in the timeline.  So your existence is made up of a series of moments which are all contingent.  A being like that must be traced back ultimately to a being which is outside of time and so could be self-existent.

7. George argues that the First Cause must be single and simple–that is, that there can only be one First Cause and that it cannot be divisible into parts–because if something has parts, those parts are pieces of a larger reality and have to be explained by whatever is the source of that larger reality.  Imagine a puzzle.  A puzzle is made up of pieces.  None of the individual pieces explain the other pieces or the larger puzzle they are all a part of, nor do they even explain themselves as pieces of the larger whole.  In order to explain the puzzle, we have to refer back to the puzzle-maker–the one who designed the puzzle and created the pieces.  Only the puzzle-maker can explain the larger whole that all the pieces are parts of.  So the highest reality from which all things come cannot have parts; it must be single and simple.  Anything that is divisible into parts will have to be traced back to a more ultimate single and simple reality that can explain its parts and the unity of those parts.

Related to this, George points out that all pieces of a larger whole are defined in relation to each other.  A puzzle-piece, for example, cannot be understood without reference to the other pieces of the puzzle and to the puzzle as a whole.  “Being part of a larger puzzle” is part of the definition of a puzzle-piece.  But a First Cause, by definition, cannot be defined in reference to anything else outside of itself, because, being a self-existent being and not contingent, it is not dependent on anything outside of itself.  It does not get its existence from anything else, and so, being completely self-sufficient, it would be defined only in relation to itself and not to anything else.

Another argument George makes is that whenever you have multiple objects, or an object made up of multiple parts, those parts are all in different places only relative to some observer, some particular point of view.  For example, I look out on the classroom and see multiple desks.  Those desks are in different places relative to where I am standing and looking out from.  My viewpoint creates a grid on which the desks are in different places.  If you remove the particular viewpoint from which things are being observed, you lose the grid and so lose the reality of multiple things existing in extended space.  This means that multiplicity and divisibility exist only in connection to limited, particular points of view.  If we imagine reality as it exists outside of a limited point of view–from the perspective of an unlimited point of view, a point of view which would see all reality in a complete view–there would be no multiplicity or divisibility, but only one single and simple essence, for there would be no limited or particular vantage-point from which some things would be more distant than others, some more to the left or to the right, etc.  Therefore, ultimate reality–or the First Cause–is single and simple, and all multiple and divisible reality is limited and contingent, derived from a more ultimate and unlimited state of reality.

8. George argues that the First Cause would have to be a conscious being–that is, a being which has 1st-person experience–because consciousness cannot be derived from non-consciousness.  If you start out with non-conscious stuff, or mind-independent matter (MIM), no matter what you do with that stuff–put it together into complex patterns, cause the pieces of it to interact with each other and affect each other, etc.--it will never be anything more than arrangements of MIM.  You cannot get something in the product that is not explainable in terms of the ingredients and the relationships between the ingredients, for that is to get something from nothing.  If all we have starting out is MIM and non-conscious MIM interactions, then no matter how large or complex we make those interactions, they will not become something fundamentally different from what was there before.  Just as if I start out with red marbles, no matter what I do with them–build large and complex structures out of them, cause them to bump into each other or move each other around in complex ways, etc.--I will never end up with anything other than red marbles receiving and causing red-marble-type effects.  So, since consciousness exists in this world, the First Cause, from which this world comes, must itself possess consciousness and be a conscious being.

George also argues that the very concept of a “material object” or a “physical object” is derived ultimately from consciousness.  Physical characteristics–texture, color, taste, size, position, length, shape, etc.--are nothing other than experiences had in the 1st-person conscious experience of beings.  If you remove everything from the concept of a material object–say, a chair–that exists only by means of being experienced by a mind, you will remove every characteristic of the chair altogether and have nothing left.  So consciousness is the fundamental reality, and physical objects and effects are simply modes of conscious experience.  Therefore, the First Cause, which is the ultimate reality and the source of all other reality, must be a conscious being.  At this point in his argument, George feels that the First Cause can be called God.

9. If God exists, there will be an objective moral law–that is, an objective standard defining “good” and “bad.”  This is because God’s viewpoint defines and is identical to objective reality, for he is the source and ultimate context of all reality.  By contrast, our subjective viewpoint is distinct from and can be in conflict with objective reality.  (We call that “being wrong.”)  Therefore, whatever God views as “good” will be good objectively, and whatever God views as “bad” will be bad objectively.

10. God must be omnibenevolent–that is, he must love the happiness of beings in general and hate the suffering of beings in general–because he, being all-knowing and experiencing all things in reality, would have an absolute foundation for empathy.  It is not possible to delight in the suffering of any being if one experiences the pain of that being, nor is it possible to be indifferent to the happiness of any being if one experiences that happiness.

11. God is infinitely more valuable than his creation.  This is because he is the Supreme Being, the one who is identical to objective and ultimate reality.  We are infinitesimal beings by comparison, our experience and viewpoint being a mere point in a universe that extends out from us with potential infinity in all directions, with a potentially infinite number of other possible particular vantage points.  Although we exist in our own sphere, we are nothing in comparison to God, and all we have is derived from him as well.  Since God’s being is the complete and sufficient source of happiness, and we are nothing in comparison to him and without him, he is infinitely more important than we are.  We have value in our own sphere, and we can be greatly valuable to God insofar as our existence contributes to his plans and purposes, but we are valueness in comparison to God and without God.  (Note:  In salvation through Christ, we are raised up and given a value infinitely above our natural worth, for we are made partakers of the infinitely-valuable divine life itself.)

12. “Moral evil” is evil of the will, as opposed to “natural evil,” which is something bad outside of a will.  If I hate what I should love and love what I should hate and so choose something of lesser value over something of greater value–for example, I choose the value of eating a cheeseburger over the value of respecting human life–this is an example of moral evil.  If a tornado knocks down a house, this is an example of natural evil, for no evil will is involved.  Since all value comes from God and is defined in relation to his objective moral law, all moral evil is ultimately against God.  An act of moral evil is ultimately an act of rejecting God and choosing to put our happiness in something else.  We choose to treat ourselves as if we are God and thus the definer of good and evil and so attempt to oust God from his place, going our own way instead of God’s way.  Since God is the Supreme Good–the source of all happiness and so a being of complete or unlimited value–to reject him is to commit an act which deserves and attains the consequence of complete and utter misery.  So moral evil, in its nature, tends towards misery.

(Note:  We can distinguish between what Catholic theologians call “mortal” and “venial” sin.  Mortal sin is an act like that described above.  It is an act of the will which involves a rejection of God as the Supreme Good.  Venial sin is also a kind of rejection of God, but it is one that does not come up to a full and definitive act of the will.  It is a kind of limited inconsistency within a person who still chooses God as their Supreme Good.  I still choose God overall, but there are smaller pockets or areas of inconsistency in my life where I am not living consistently with what supreme love to God should imply.  For an analogy, think of getting an infection.  By its nature, all infection tends towards death.  Some infection actually causes death because it affects the vital organs of life, while other infection does not actually cause death because it does not affect vital organs.  Similarly, all sin involves a kind of rejection of God and so tends towards misery, but some [“mortal sin”] leads to complete misery because it involves the will’s fundamental rejection of God, while other sin [“venial sin”] does not lead to complete misery because it is a limited or partial inconsistency in the will rather than a fundamental rejection of God.)

The fact that moral evil leads to misery is bad news for us because all goodness comes from God.  We have no goodness of our own and can only receive it as a gift from God, for we are completely contingent and dependent upon God.  Without his sharing his own goodness with us, we are doomed to fall into moral evil (even “mortal sin”) and suffer the infinite consequences.  And we can see the reality of this fact empirically all around us as we look at all the moral evils that are committed by us and by others in this world.

13. Only God can save us from ultimate misery and bring us to ultimate happiness.  This is because, as we saw above in #12, God is the source of all goodness and therefore all happiness, and without him there is no goodness or happiness.  If we contingent beings are to receive happiness, therefore, it can only be by means of God uniting himself to us, absorbing onto himself our limitations and our evil and misery and filling us with his divine life, goodness, and happiness.

14.  George’s fundamental argument for Christianity is that it is the only worldview which gives us a complete and accurate picture of the fundamental nature of reality.  All other worldviews–whether they claim to be some kind of supernatural revelation or simply human philosophies–fail either by fundamental inaccuracy or at least by fundamental incompleteness.  Only Christianity gives us a reality where there exists one God, a Trinity, who is the Creator of all other beings and the source of an objective moral law.  Only Christianity teaches that all happiness comes from God, that we are made for God and to be happy in God, but that, left to ourselves, we have fallen into a condition of sin and misery, and that we are doomed to complete misery (hell) unless God saves us.  He has done so by means of God the Son–the Second Person of the Trinity–coming into this world and taking upon himself a human nature in addition to his divine nature.  Absorbing our limitations, he also absorbed our sins and sufferings upon himself, dying on the cross.  But, being divine, he was able to overcome sin and death.  He rose from the dead on the third day, becoming the source of eternal salvation as he fills us with his own divine life, goodness, and happiness.  Since Christianity, which claims to be a revelation from God, is the only worldview existing in the world which gets reality fundamentally right, the world is clearly set up in such a way as to associate Christianity with God’s fundamental revelation of himself and his truth to us.  Since God is ultimate reality and knows and loves himself supremely, and therefore he created the world as an extension of the manifestation and enjoyment of his own perfections, the world which comes from him will reflect his actual nature and not be designed to exhibit that which is false.  But if Christianity is not a revelation from God, then the world has been set up in such a way as to associate the revelation of God and his fundamental truth with falsehood, which is something God would not do, and so we can be sure that we are warranted to accept Christianity as an authentic divine revelation and therefore as true.